The Tape

    It felt like a buzzard was trapped in his side trying to chewing his way out. It’d been 15 years since his last drink when he went down to the State Liquor Agency using a 9-iron as a cane to get a bottle of Old Crow. He chugged enough to get the buzzard settled, hobbled home to the Winnebago and got back in bed. Thoughts started falling down on him. Thoughts he’d rather not have, about the girls, the gigs, all the bad things he’d done. He was too tired to fight them, figured it was time for reckoning. He thought about the boy. 
    He pulled himself outta the bunk and started rifling through the closet, the drawers, looking for the Cue and Review. He found it in the old shoebox full of tapes in the closet and got the guitar down from the overhead. He lifted his leg up to perch the guitar and the pain pierced his side. He winced and took a drink. The pain dulled and he sat down in the booth and strummed the guitar. The strings were rusty. They woulda sliced anybody else but they didn’t do much to him except leave a blue grime on the callouses at the end of his fingers. He tongued the grim. It tasted like an old penny.
    He pressed play on the recorder. A live recording of a song written by Buck Chipps called “Death Valley Rose” came tinkling out. He swished some Old Crow and listened for a minute. From the peddle-steel he guessed it was Mason-Dixon, a group he played with out of Winslow. Blalock was a helluva peddle-steel player. A flashy guitar fill burst outta nowhere. Starchy Johnston. What an asshole. Starchy always played like an asshole, all over everybody else. Course that’s what people went for.
    He popped the tape out, threw it back on the heap in the box. He leaned over and groaned and sifted through till he found a blank tape. He fed it into the deck and checked to make sure there was nothing on it. Everything hurt. Every little movement. He wanted to get back in bed and just go to sleep. He gulped some more Crow and put the guitar on his knee. He pressed “Play” and “Record”. The counter began to roll off the seconds.
    He didn’t have a name for the song, but he’d been playing it for nearly 40 years. It’d been with him longer than probably anything else in his life. He used to play it around the boy when he was young, wondered if he remembered it. He’d recorded it before, a lot of times, but the recordings all lost themselves somehow. That’d always been the way. Ever since he was a kid he’d been streamlined. The wind took everything that wasn’t tattooed onto his flesh. He’d lived in the Chieftain for the last five years but most everything else he kept like the breath in his lungs, taking it in and released it again without a thought.
    As he played he found himself surprised that, for maybe the first time since he was a 15 year old rookie studio player, he had some nerves. The voice in his head was walking along criticizing every note as he played it. The strings were thick and dead with rust, rattling clumsily against his fingers. He stuttered on a few phrases and reversed some of the arpeggios. It’d been along time since he last played, but after a few go rounds the song began to lift off. 
    He rewound it to listen. The pain bit hard into his side. He guzzled the rest of the Old Crow and the empty bottle toppled as he set it on the table. There was a large hiss of space in the recording. The way the tiny microphone sucked up the sound gave the guitar had a bright, twinkly sheen like a purse of coins dumped down a well. A truck wooshed by. The notes wobbled slightly between pitches like waves over hot blacktop. As the chorus climbed a gray cloud began to swell over his vision. He’d written dozens of verses and melodies for the song but none of them were any good so he hadn’t spoken or hummed or sung. There was nothing on the tape of himself save the ghosts of his fingers walking over the strings.
    He started to feeling dizzy, thought he might get sick. He stood from the booth, wobbling slightly, not quite able to keep his balance. He stumbled to the back and collapsed on the bed.
    8 or 10 years back Trace told him the boy’d snuck in her room and got his old guitar out from under the bed. Said it was taller than he was, he was playing it like a standup bass. The boy cried when she pawned it. She had to pawn it. He was proud as hell to find some of his own blood pumping through the boy’s heart. You can’t get rid of it. He knew that. Once it mixes in there you can’t get it out again.
    He could hear the tape faintly as it kept running. The last vibrations of the song dwindled. The tape kept playing, the counter clicking off the seconds, as it ran in silence.