The bass was next, fumbling at his strings like he was sorting soggy spaghetti. Worse and worse. The xy-lophonist—Sam still hadn’t recovered from that— joined in. Or rather, he started playing. What he played bore no relationship—rhythmically, melod-icaUy, harmonically—to the bass or drummer. Sam was ready to go, but he’d only started the beer. He shut out the disaster on stage and tried to concentrate on the music in the bubbles.
The lead guitar shuffled up to the single mike. There was one sad spotlight, which might have been a big flashlight on a string. He had a face like polished sandstone, full of lines that shouldn’t have appeared there for another forty years yet. Straight black hair cut off at thin, bony shoulders was caught up in a single rawhide headband. He wore faded blue jeans, faded from heavy use and not modish bleaching, a stained flannel shirt, and boots whose leather had merged forever with caked earth and gray clay.
A colorless, tired, dead personality, washed up at the age of twenty-four, maybe twenty-five.
Only in the eyes, something. Eyes, pieces of fine old obsidian… and Gorgon’s hair for fingers.
178
Wolfstroker
It didn’t take a song, or even a stanza for Sam Parker to know. Those long young-old fingers came down and gentled on the strings, the left hand rose and curled vinelike about the top. A finger moved, touched the electric guitar, which made a sound. Near the back of the room a girl moaned.
~ His name was Willie Whitehorse, and he played like a god.