Oh Bubba, Where Art Thou? (Bubba the Monster Hunter Book 26) Read online

  “But she’s getting better?”

  “Yeah, she’s getting better. She’ll probably be okay.”

  “So what are we doing here? Is there something I need to shoot?” I looked around, but most of what I saw was country people milling around, talking to their neighbors, looking at the stuff on the cake table, pouring a little something out of a flask into a styrofoam cup of soda—normal stuff.

  “You ain’t got it yet, boy? You ain’t supposed to shoot nothing tonight. You are just supposed to watch. Watch, and learn, and maybe enjoy a little good picking.” He waved over to the end of the building where the band was tuning up.

  A man stepped up to the microphone in the middle of the band and tapped it a couple times. People quieted down and he leaned forward. “I’d like to thank y’all for showing up today and tonight. We really appreciate how our community comes together to help one another, and there ain’t no better way to do that than with music. We appreciate Clyde and the boys coming out here to play this benefit square dance for us, and don’t forget to come back next month when we’ll actually pay them!” The crowd laughed and clapped, and a round little man with a mandolin balanced on his belly sketched a little bow.

  I turned to Hank. “These boys are playing for free?”

  He nodded. “Yep. It’s a tradition in these parts. These ol’ boys will play a benefit dance whenever anybody needs help. They’ve done it when somebody in the community has cancer, somebody’s house burns down, somebody’s got too many medical bills for one reason or another—any time people need help out here, folks rally around the fire department and help out. They do just like they did today. They hold a turkey shoot and cook stew in the morning, then have a square dance at night. Then about two weeks later, they have what they call a makeup concert, where the band gets to keep all the door, instead of just a piece like a normal event. That way they get paid back for playing for free.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good system, long as people come back to the makeup dances,” I said, nodding.

  The man at the mic went on. “Now y’all all know why we’re here. Bonnie and Wayne just had a little girl, and she was real early. She didn’t weigh but about two-and-a-half pounds when she was born, and she’s been in intensive care up in Charlotte ever since then. She’s doing real good, and Bonnie just told me she oughta be home in a few more weeks, but y’all know how expensive it is to go in the hospital, so we’re here to come up with some money to help these folks out with their expenses.

  “We’ve got a lot of cake walks and raffles for later on tonight, but for right now, let’s get some dancing going on!” He waved a hand back at the men behind him, and walked off the “stage,” really just a big piece of carpet somebody laid down at the front of the room.

  The little mandolin man stepped forward and spoke into the mic. “Hey y’all. How’s everybody doing tonight?”

  The crowd cheered and clapped, and the man grinned back at them from under a big floppy hat with buttons and pins all over it. “Good, good. Well, we’re the Back Creek Boys, now let’s get it going.”

  Then he tore into that mandolin and whooped it like it owed him money. He kicked off an old bluegrass classic, “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” and he tore it down. His fingers moved like lightning, and people were tapping toes and clapping along, and before you knew it, a brown-haired girl got out in the middle of the floor and started clogging. She didn’t have any fancy shoes, just feet that had to move. A half-dozen other folks got out there dancing with her, and by the time a bald man with a western shirt and a bolo tie stepped up and called the first square dance, that tin building was full of people all grinning and dancing and just generally having a good time.

  Over all of it, sitting by the door collecting money and welcoming people, that white-haired woman with the blue eyes smiled as she looked out at the crowd. She reached over and hugged the little brown-haired girl beside her, and with her other hand patted the red-haired woman on the leg.

  I stood there for a long time, just watching this community step forward and take care of their own. After an hour or so, Hank put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Time to go,” he said. “You’ve seen what you needed to see.”

  “How is she now?” I asked.

  “Which one?”

  “The baby? Did the baby turn out okay?”

  “Well, why don’t we go find out?” Hank asked right back. He waved his hand, and that glowy circle appeared in the air again.

  “Why can’t anybody in my life just take a damn bus?” I asked as I followed the Ghost of Music Past through the magical circle to our next destination.

  6

  We stepped through the glowy thing into what I immediately recognized as my kind of place—a bar. Well, maybe not a bar exactly, but someplace that served beer, and that was close enough for me. I started walking toward my own version of an oak-topped polished nirvana with taps reading out chapter and verse of the Holy Scriptures of Stella Artois, Sweetwater 420, OMB Copper, Miller Lite, and even a throwback to the original First Place Beer—Pabst Blue Ribbon. I was hauling ass toward those taps like a dying man using up his last dregs of energy to get to an oasis in the desert, but of course Hank got in front of me and cut me off.

  “You know you can’t drink, right?” He looked at me like I was stupid. I might be ignorant in a lot of ways, but I’m not stupid.

  “I know there’s beer, and there’s me, and if there’s one person in the history of music that I wouldn’t expect to lecture me on the evils of drink, it’d be Hank damn Williams. Well, and Jimi Hendrix. And Janis. And probably Jim Morrison. I reckon Keith Richards, too. Shit, I reckon there ain’t nobody except maybe Amy Grant or Steven Curtis Chapman that I would expect to tell me not to drink. So what’s your damn problem?”

  He kept looking at me like I was stupid. I was starting to get hot, I’ll admit. Then he answered me, and I realized that maybe I am just a little bit stupid some days. “We ain’t really here, jackass. We’re outside the events that we’re observing; we can’t participate.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Now just stand here and watch.”

  So I did. I watched as the bar—really an old movie theatre with all the seats ripped out and a stage built at one end—started to fill up with people. It was a nice place; the concession area was bigger than most, and it held the bar that was determined to sit there and tease me, half a dozen cafe tables with them tall chairs that can’t make up their minds whether they’re chairs or barstools, a bunch of band poster with autographs scribbled all over them, and twenty or thirty people wandering around greeting each other and hugging, or shaking hands and slapping backs.

  I looked through the open door into the theatre, just to see what folks were working with in this joint, and was pleasantly surprised. The walls had a fresh coat of deep purple paint on ‘em with acoustical paneling spaced out all over to break up the sound in the room. The movie seats were gone, but there were chairs arranged in rows in front of the stage, which was a little thing, about twenty feet on a side with stacks of speakers on the floor beside it and two racks of lights overhead.

  A bluegrass band was setting up on the stage. Not the same band from the last vision, this one was a group of young folks, maybe just out of college, with scruffy beards and ironic t-shirts. But they handled their instruments with care and took time to tune their shit, which was more than I can say for a bunch of people I’ve seen recently.

  I heard a noise behind me and turned as Hank cleared his throat.

  “Everybody’s got allergy problems lately. I don’t understand it,” I said.

  Hank gestured over to the door, where a gorgeous little blonde girl walked in with an equally attractive brunette and a forty-ish redhead who was obviously their mother, just judging by the way she never took her eyes off her girls, unless it was to look around and make sure nobody was going to mess with her girls. A short blonde woman in her forties walked beside her, and every o
nce in a while they’d lean close to each other and laugh like old best friends. Something about the woman tickled in my head, but it was the brunette that I recognized right off.

  “Hey!” I exclaimed. “I know that girl. She was the one running the cash box at the square dance with that older woman.”

  “Yep,” Hank confirmed. “That’s her, and the old woman was her granny. That woman was a force of damn nature, let me tell you. We got into it one time about six months ago over whether or not I was allowed to play guitar on Sunday. She told me right damn quick that Sunday was the Lord’s day, and there wasn’t to be no music played. I reminded her that we were in Heaven, and since we were in the Lord’s living room, practically, it was probably alright. She didn’t agree with me and told me so in no uncertain terms.”

  I chuckled, thinking back to the sharp blue eyes I’d seen looking over that cash box. “Heh heh. What did you do?”

  “I put my damn guitar away. I ain’t no idiot. I’m dead and in Heaven, unless I’m carting morons around through time, I can give her one day a week.”

  “So what’s up with this chick?”

  “It’s not the brunette you’re here to see, it’s the little sister,” Hank said, pointing at the blonde.

  I looked back at the girl he indicated, a tiny little thing who looked to be in her early twenties, if that. She had angel-blonde hair halfway down her back, and a pale green t-shirt paired with one of those big swirly hippie skirts that kids wear at the music festivals. The skirt was light purple with some blue stripes, and I could see her Granny’s blue eyes sparkle from halfway across the room.

  “Looks like she turned out alright. Last time we heard anything about her, she was in the NICU,” I said.

  “Yep,” Hank replied. “She got better, and she got bigger. She’ll always be a little girl, but she’s healthy now.”

  “So what am I here to see, Hank?”

  “Keep watching,” the specter said.

  I did, and I watched the girl walk over to one of the tables with her mother, sister, and the friend. They sat down for a few minutes to talk, then all of a sudden, I could hear the girl’s voice just like I was standing next to her.

  “I know that guy,” she said. “We went to school together. I’m gonna go talk to him.” Without another word or a backward glance, she hopped down off her little chair/stool thing and walked across the lobby to where a boy maybe a year or two older than her stood talking to a friend of his. She walked right up to him and started talking, and I could see from across the room that he was instantly crazy about her. The second he turned to her, the band started up with a cover of “Blue Sky” by the Allman Brothers, forcing them to lean in close to one another to talk. Neither one of them seemed bothered by this.

  “They knew each other, huh?” I asked Hank.

  “Yeah, he might have noticed her once or twice in passing.”

  “Looks like he did a lot of noticing her,” I replied.

  “Yeah, but it took her half a dozen years to notice anybody noticing. Now shut up and pay attention.”

  I turned back to the pair, but as I turned my head, the room spun around and everything changed. All of a sudden I was standing in a big room with fifty or sixty people in suits sitting in folding chairs arranged with one aisle down the middle.

  The same boy stood at the front of the room, his hair pulled back in a ponytail, looking sharp in a tuxedo, standing next to a fat guy dressed all in black, also sporting a ponytail. They both smiled as they looked at me, and I waved a little before I realized they were looking past me.

  I turned around, and the girl from the concert started down a flight of stairs into the room with a string trio playing “Falling Slowly” by The Frames as she walked. I watched her descend the steps, looking even more beautiful in a long white dress with her blonde curls piled high on her head. Looking around at the crowd, I saw the redheaded mom sitting front and center, with a gaggle of happy family members around her.

  The little blonde woman walked down the aisle, and almost walked right through me, but I stepped aside at the last minute. Okay, Hank might have pulled me aside, but I got out of the way regardless. We stood there watching the pair look at each other with eyes full of love while their family and friends drank it all in, then watched for a little while longer while they all danced and drank the night away. Just as Hank turned and opened up his glowing hole in the air again, I heard the familiar sounds of “Rolling in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.”

  I followed Hank through the circle back to the studio, wincing at the loud “POP” in the air as he closed the portal to yesterday.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said once we were back in Muscle Shoals in what I assumed was my normal time. “Music was a part of this little girl’s whole life, from the minute she was born to the day she got married. Dude, music is a part of most everybody’s life like that. Hell, I can remember the first time I got up in front of the church and sang in the children’s choir.”

  “Shit, son, how big were you when you were a kid? The congregation must have thought somebody was bringing a ringer into the kiddy choir!”

  “I was a big kid, yeah. Let it go,” I grumbled. I stomped across the studio and sat down in a chair. There was an old flat-top Gibson leaning on a stand next to me. I picked it up and strummed out a rough chord, turning the knobs on the head of the guitar to bring it back in tune. The steel strings felt hard under my fingertips, but I managed a couple quick chords before putting it down.

  “You ain’t never gonna be no Clapton, son, but that don’t mean you can’t pick a little,” Hank said, smiling at me.

  “I ain’t played in years, man,” I replied, thinking back on the day I shut my guitar case for good, when I finally decided my Mama wasn’t coming home again.

  “That don’t mean nothing. It’s like anything else. The callouses might fade away, but your hands’ll remember where they’re supposed to go.”

  “I reckon.” I reached over and stroked the neck of the guitar. “This is a pretty one. I’ve always liked blue guitars.”

  “Yeah, me too. I used to want one back in the day. Never got around to getting one. My old Martin always did just fine by me.”

  “I think Neil Young has that guitar now,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s got one of mine. He plays real good,” the ghost said. He looked at me, really looked at me, and said, “I don’t know if you can do this, son. I don’t know if we even got time to show you everything you need to know to do this, but I know I done my part, and now it’s time for me to go.”

  He walked over, shook my hand, then he turned away. He didn’t wave his hand for a glowing circle in the air, didn’t leave to some great chorus of angels singing “Jambalaya,” he just opened the door to the studio and walked out. I sat there, staring at the great man’s back as he walked down that long hallway. After a minute or two of walking down a seemingly never-ending hallway, he just vanished into the mist. I stood up, walked across the room, and just about had a damn heart attack when I turned back around.

  Standing in front of me, resplendent in purple crushed velvet, huge brown eyes staring up at me from underneath a purple top hat covered in purple fur, was the Purple One himself—Prince.

  7

  I stood there, staring at the diminutive man in head-to-toe purple long past the point of awkward. He didn’t say anything, just waved his hand in the air, opening up a portal of his own, this one bathed in lavender light. He gestured for the opening, and I stepped forward, then paused.

  “Just to clarify, you’re the Ghost of Music Present, right?”

  “Yes.” The voice was just like I imagined it, soft, almost to the point of being delicate, but precise.

  He looked up at me. “You coming, or are you just going to stand there gaping at me all night?”

  I ducked my head a little and stepped through the hole in midair. There was no sensation of travel, no flashing lights as I passed through the wormhole, I just lifted one foot from Alabama, and put it
down again somewhere else.

  I didn’t know exactly where I was in the world, but I knew exactly where I was, nonetheless. The smell of lemon-scented cleanser is universal to hospitals, and the confused moaning from behind some of the doors lining the tiled hallway told me in seconds that I was in a nursing home, and not one of the high-rent ones where everybody smiles in all the pictures and orders filet mignon for dinner from room service.

  This was a run-down, squeaky floors and overworked nurses kind of facility. The lights overhead flickered a little, but I couldn’t tell if that was from disrepair or the fact that a ghost and an astral-projected giant redneck just teleported into the middle of the building. That’s the kind of thing that will blow a fuse or two if you’re not careful.

  I looked down at The Purple One. “Where we headed, boss?”

  Again with the no talking thing, he just walked off down the hall, the heels of his purple patent leather alligator skin boots click-clicking across the tile. I shrugged and followed. What else was I gonna do? He stopped outside a room about two-thirds of the way down the hall on the right and gestured for me to go in. I looked at the closed door for a second, then just took a deep breath and stepped through it.

  It’s a weird feeling the first time you walk through a closed door. I’d been thrown through a few, and even ran through a couple, but passing through a solid door without opening it and without violence involved was a new experience for me. I didn’t feel anything, but I saw the inside of the pieces of wood as they passed through me, or I passed through them, or whatever. It was pretty damn strange, and that’s coming from a fella who counts a Georgia snake-man as a friend.