Bubba Sez Howdy
Hadn’t been to HowdYYall bar since last Sunday’s visit to the Masonic cemetery. Now Friday, and I am possessed with this feeling I should go. Hmm, Feel, no, too quiet a word! Somehow, I know that I need to visit Doc Hasting’s dark corner where bottles go in but never come out. So, I hop in Brunhilde, hit the halogens, and mosey.
HowdyYYall is the usual Friday night busy with paychecks being liquefied while I, between jobs, have only a couple of lonely Jeffersons. Oh hell, whatever, enough for a couple of Jack Daniel shots and Lone Star chasers. New bartender Marie is popping tops and pouring shots when, and this is totally strange, time seems to stop for everyone but her. She turns and looks at me standing just inside the batwings and smiles. Then one of those witch green eyes winks. I stand stunned until she turns away and the bar comes back to life.
I shake it off. Must be some sort of PTSD from the boneyard visit. Start making my way through the crowd towards Doc’s dark corner and still feel strange though it is the same strange I’d felt before when I found myself in a corral surrounded by cantankerous Longhorns. I was caretaker of these half-ton beasts, and we were all going to the Houston Astrodome for Rodeo. They had their six-foot horn span, and I had my new white show hat with sparkling white rhinestones set in a black hat band. Just for mean fun, a tricky Texas wind whipped it right into the corral dirt. Those cows gave the glittering hat its own space and kinda looked at me saying, “Come and get it, Cowboy.”
I did and I’m here now sitting with Doc waiting for drinks when strange follows strange: Marie comes from behind the bar and over to the table. She lays down Doc’s drinks and then, empty handed, looks at me.
“Howdy Bubba, you boys have been busy chatting with the aliens.”
That was weird, how’d she know, unless Doc had told her, but I doubted that. We’d kept our silence. You can talk Texas weird which means you’re normal, but this was weird weird and if you talk weird weird you must be weird.
“Bubba,” sez Doc, “say hello to the famous Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen of New Orleans in an earlier manifestation. Dignitaries from many nations turned to her for advice. The Andromeda aliens have brought her back and she’s volunteered to be your bartender.”
I had turned to look at Doc and now I turned back to Marie. In her right hand was a shot glass full to the brim with a dark swirling liquid. I looked into green eyes sparkling brighter than rhinestones in a noonday Texas sun when I hear a low sultry voice, “Chère, this drink’s on me.”
“Doc,” I say, “her lips didn’t move and she told me to drink whatever that is.”
Doc looks at me, “You trust me don’t you Bubba?”
“Yeah Doc, I’d ride the river with you anytime.”
“Then take Marie up on her offer. She’s our friend and we don’t want to insult her.”
Pondered that, and concluding that insulting a Voodoo Queen was a lot more dangerous than a corral full of longhorns, I down the shot.
Time freezes again but I can move so I look around. I am in the Big Thicket, at least I think it is the Big Thicket, but something isn’t right.
No sound, just silence under a big sun hanging in a clear sky. Sweat beads were forming and running down my face. I wipe my eyes and look around. Everything seems smaller and darker with no green to be seen. Walking over to a bramble, I feel a branch stem and have it snap in my hand.
Stumbling, I looked down to see ground cracks descending into darkness.
By now I am sweating rivers and not sure how much more of this I can take. Give me a desert before you give me this. Just when I am cashing in my chips, I find myself back in the bar with a concerned Doc looking at me,
“You’re sweating.”
“You reckon, really, you reckon!” Looking at Marie with nothing to lose, me having already died, I blurt. “What the hell did you do to me?’
She looked at me and in a sad voice, “Showed you what will be.”
That got me. No more Big Thicket, no more Texas. Knew things had been getting funny. Recent droughts had forced cattlemen to sell off large portions of their stock at a loss. Wildlife was dying from thirst with their dehydrated carcasses celebrated by circling buzzards. Occasionally, that missing water was delivered somewhere where it wasn’t needed, like in a Houston flood. But, overall, things were getting drier and, I reckon, deadlier.
Now I really needed a drink. Where they came from, I don’t know, but Marie laid down two shots of familiar brown Jack and a Lone Star chaser.
“There’s still hope, Bubba.”
“Where Marie?”
“Close by. Drink up,” and with that she went back behind the bar.