The Blues Run Red
“Whiskey and wimmen’ just about done wreck my life…” — John Lee Hooker
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The following is based on a true story.
Cocked. Locked. Firing pin striking primer ejected round.
Three thunderclaps from the feral, metallic, death machine struck his long, ebony body in the buttock, kidney, and spleen as he thrusted like a bull on fire into the busty redhead on the big brass bed.
Hell hath no fury… as three more rounds struck the wall, emptying the second-hand Saturday night special she held in her hands quivering with an otherwordly rage.
“You cheatin’ bastard!” she shrieked, beating him with the butt of the .22.
“Who is this little whore?”, as she drug him by the ear out the door of the fleabag, pay-by-the-hour motel somewhere in the painted desert.
The bluesman mustered every cell and iota of his diminishing strength to slap the fresh rounds his wife was reloading into the .22 as the long, lean redhead flew to the bathroom like a hellbound succubus, slamming the rickety wooden door behind her.
The rounds seemed to hit the concrete floor under him in slow motion, clinking like his wife’s baroque jewelry, just one of the things he hated about that controlling hell hound.
That’s when they both heard the banshee wails of local law enforcement approaching rapidly.
He seethed with an unutterable rage and adrenaline as the callused, bloodied hands of the guitarist reached for his wife’s tiny neck, squeezing with all the power he could muster.
“You shot me, you bitch!”
Suddenly the banshee wails were surrounding the feuding couple. Local deputies with their service pistols drawn, yelling “drop it!”
“Dat wil’ horse went off peaceably,” the now-grayed and gifted picker told me in between licks on his semi-hardbody guitar on the sun-parched street corner in a wind-swept desert town told me as two buzzards circled overhead.
“Surprised the hell outta me. She got 60 years. Attempted murder. And I got these,” he said, propping the guitar against a streetlight, standing and lifting his shirt to show me two entrance wounds on different…
