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Micah got up early one morning looking like something that had crawled out of the jungles in The Legend of Greystoke. It was the primal scream of some awful sounding something that had done the trick; little else might have accomplished this at so early an hour.
Typical morning on Stradley Mountain.
Its funny how, in that half awake, half sleep state, dreams can spill over into reality there for an instant. My gosh, Micah found himself thinking, realizing that it had all been some weird, nostalgic dream; Smoky’s 18-Wheeler, the thick air of the Texas juke-joint from the night before, the 1952 Vincent Black Lightning parked out front. Bottle after bottle of Butch Coolidge’s “Urban Elixir”, mountain brewed and bottled illegally in empty one gallon jugs, strewn about the back seat of the old 1970 Citroen, and the sunburst Telecaster tossed in there along with a roll of cash from a week of gigs that had left his throat feeling like sandpaper, his gut swimming in alcoholic bliss.
This might have been any given weeknight of some unsung Southern hero and his Country-Western legacy. Though his mind’s eye, it had somehow drifted here and settled (along with the dust blowing across the evening streets) for just long enough to allow a glimpse of something tragic, and all the while beautiful, in a redneck sort of way.
It dawned on him that it hadn’t been a wild cat or a Hodag screaming outside his window that woke him this morning; looking down, he could see the string of missed calls on his cell phone, all but one of them from “Duck”. Alias Dakota. Alias Smoky Wydell, king of the highways.
Band Practice?
“You have one new message,” the android gal on the voicemail said kindly, followed by Smoky’s nasally baritone. “Hank, getcher ass up, we gotta be in Greenville by noon,” he barked.
Oh yeah, Hank. Alias… well, you get the idea.
“Besides, Trasher says revenuers might be onto Butch again. This town ain’t gonna be a great place for him to be in about two hours.”
Micah got up, had a swallow of the water on the nightstand. Cody, alias Butch Coolidge, was probably still downstairs, passed out behind the drum set. The witness protection program had done them well since that debacle in Mobile, Alabama, but now it seemed the cards had been dealt face up. The new outfit, this time disguised as a rock band alias “Blackhook”, would be hitting the road soon… late as usual, with about a half a gallon of gas and hopefully enough country twinge to make it to the next gig.
Micah, alias Hank… alias whatever else, followed the cool water with a swig of Tequilla, and pulled his boots on. Blackhook, he reassured himself, had all the “country” this band, or any band for that matter, would ever need.
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