"If you hire that one," says Betty Rae to me, "You are just asking for a riot."

There are a number of ways, having been married to her some twenty odd years, that I can tell that Betty Rae is full of shit.  One of the foremost of these ways is when she does not refer to someone by their name, but by calling them 'that one'.  I so much as tell her so.

"Fine," says she to me.  "You built this place, so I reckon you got the right to tear it down."

True enough that I built this place.  It says Henry's right out there on the sign, with the light-up lights going all around it.  And it says the same on the chalk board on the inside that's supposed to say what the specials are even though alls we ever have is barbeque.  I wouldn't want to se it torn down since it took most of what I got off the G.I. Bill to build it in the first place. 

And it's true enough as well that there just might be a riot.  One thing about little towns like this, least as what they say, is we don't have no big-city problems.  We don't have no gangs or mobsters or civil rights people running around, no protests or suchlike.  But we have riots.  We have occasion to see a passel of drunk boys get torn up and start howling around like they was wolfmans and it was a full moon on payday.  They will wreck a place just as soon as look at it and they they will pile into their Chevys and drive down the highway a stretch and do it again, and if that ain't a riot I don't know what one is.  The thing about riots is this:  it gets to be one by the police showing up for it and the papers writing about it.  Otherwise it's just a bunch of rowdy boys doing what rowdy boys do.  In a big city you can't escape it because there's so many papers and so many police, but round here there is just a handful of police who don't want anyone thinking that we have big city problems, and there is only one newpaperman, who doesn't want his property values to go down because he  writes about some riot.

Where he's played before, there have been riots.  Always they've blamed it on him, and always they're going to blame it on him.  I have seen him before, and heard him, and I know why. 

He's an Indian, one of the mean firebreathing ones from the far west part of the state, the one place we ain't chased them out of yet.  Snarling country types, the kind city people think of when they think of us.  When I seen him he was wearing a black shirt with pearl buttons, all big town flash.  Long fingers, like snakes on fire, that's what lets him play like he do:  all the good ones have long fingers.  His, what do they call them, them boxes, them speakers that make the guitars so loud, all his got holes punched in them.  His brother plays with him, a bigger drunk I never seen, short and stout and laughing, with that red-brown skin he looks like a glass of beer himself:  his brother says, he pokes them holes in them with a pencil, because he likes the sound it makes after they're poked.  Another thing is:  he lost a lung in the war.  Not my war, the one in Korea:  he took a Chinaman's bullet right through his trunk and now there's one lung in him.  The docs told him he couldn't sing no more after that, especially with how much he draws down them cigarettes, and mostly he don't.  But there are times up there on the stage when he'll open up his mouth and a sound will come out, it ain't singin' as such as it is a howl like a bad wolf, shot through with huingry, trying to find the rest of its pack.  There's something evil about that sound.

And in particular there is this song.  This is the one song he plays when he's really wanting to tear it up, when there's been so many bottles throwed at the chicken wire that they drag against your boots when you walk:  he turns the guitar up real high and does these little runs, damned if I know what they are called, I never had no more sense for the music than I did for cyphering and here I am running a business and booking musicians, but it sounds like a chicken pecking at its feed.  It makes them all go crazy.  But then if there is a riot, they all gonna say it's his fault?  Hell, all that boy wants to do is play music.  He burns up when he's on that stage, the way I seen holiness preachers do.  He doesn't make all them boys drunk.  He doesn't make them rowdy and mean.  He just keeps playing while they bathe him in glass, with a hole in his lung and half the boys in the crowd yelling out, calling him scalp hunter.  Not since the way have I seen nobody act like that.

So, knowing what I know, and seeing what I seen, the last think I ought to do is to tell him and his crazy tribe of Indians to get all got up in them leather jackets and them pegged-up pants and them cigarettes behind their ears, and come on down to Henry's and fill up on barbeque for nothing, and then climb up on stage and do what they do, without even no chicken wire?  Maybe there's something in my throath, somewhere back of my heart, that gets all filled up with hot every time I hear him play.  But I built this place my own self, and it would be a fool that lets that go.

"Go ahead and hire that one," says Betty Rae to me.  Having heard her tell me to go ahead and do many a dumb-ass thing over the last many years, and having more often than not gone ahead and done them much to the detriment of my bank account, social standing and reputation though curiously not my marriage, I know I ought take this warning seriously.  "Go ahead and let him tear your place down."

I think I will.  I think I am inclined to do that very thing.

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