The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3)

The Revelations of
Preston Black

By Jason Jack Miller

The MURDER
BALLADS AND WHISKEY SERIES

THE
DEVIL AND PRESTON BLACK

HELLBENDER

THE
REVELATIONS OF PRESTON BLACK

The
Revelations of Preston Black copyright © 2013 by Jason Jack Miller

Published
by Raw Dog Screaming Press

Bowie,
MD

First
Edition

Cover:
Brad Vetter, www.BradVetterDesigns.com

Book
Design: Jennifer Barnes

Printed
in the United States of America

ISBN:
978-1-935738-48-0

Library
of Congress Control Number: 2013940314

www.RawDogScreaming.com

This book is
for my mom, Sandra.

HOLDING HANDS WITH
THE DEVIL

Kill
Every Sparrow, Friday, March 15, 7:30, The Orpheum Theater, Bardstown Road,

Louisville
.

If
you skipped Foster the People’s show to sneak into the Bonnaroo Music and Arts
Festival’s ‘That Tent’ back in June, you know that Kill Every Sparrow is a raw
new talent that combines musical intricacy with atom bomb fury. And you
understand that their foray into the iTunes Top 100 this summer was no fluke,
making some wonder if the whispered stories they’ve heard about West Virginia’s
Katy Stefanic and Preston Black are true.

Kill Every Sparrow arrives in
Louisville hot off a series of summer festival appearances and a string of
sold-out East Coast club shows. But most fans know their story really starts
with the EP LIVE AT THE STINK released by Blacksnake Recordings back in May.
That night saw a bar band guitarist musically reborn as one half of this
indie/revivalist/punk duet during a show some eyewitnesses described as
“surreal.” The concert’s pivotal moment appears on the EP’s final track, the
eponymous “The Sad Ballad of Preston Black,” when the singer challenges the
devil with the line, “If I don’t have a soul to steal then we sure as hell
don’t have a deal.”

It’s a line he hasn’t sung since.

From the moment she walks across that
stage, you know Katy Stefanic is the kind of girl you could fall in love with.
Though romantically involved, but not married, the pair play off each other like
they have been attached at the hip for twenty years, instantaneously responding
to frequent and impulsive key and tempo changes. Call me jaded, but watching
Stefanic and Black work the aural space over the crowd mesmerizes me in a way
only more seasoned acts have been able to do nowadays. Except for the random,
“Marry me, Katy,” (or “Preston, call me,”) the crowd remained stone silent
during ballads and soft instrumentals. Even more curious was the way the
audience responded to the mix of old time throw-down melodies and punk-fast
tempos with fists in the air and good old-fashioned foot stomping. And when the
lights came up for the first encore the frenzied crowd responded like Joe
Strummer himself had decided to join them for a song or two.

I had a chance to talk to Stefanic and
Black after their show in D.C. last Saturday and asked them about their
relationship and how it affected their musical development. Preston sat
contentedly, letting his beloved do most of the talking.

With a wide smile, she folded her
hands over her knee and explained, “Sharing music with somebody is a lot like
sharing a bed. After a while you start to know when something’s building, when
things are going to sour, when the temperature’s going to change with a look.”

Preston added, “It’s like
yinz
and
y’all
. Same
language, just different ways of saying things. What the audience hears is
where we meet in the middle.”

When I ask Preston to talk about ‘the
song’ he gets quiet. After a thoughtful moment, he says, “You ever hear that
story about Zeppelin and the sharks? That supposedly didn’t happen either. I
think that night at The Stink served as a way—my way, at least—of being
resurrected into music. Basically a way for me to make the statement, ‘This is
what we’re going to do and this is how we’re going to do it.’ It’s like that.
Did I go down to the crossroads and make a deal with the devil?” He looks at
Katy, then adds, “Did Robert Johnson?”

I remind Preston that a reporter from
the Virginia Tech Collegiate Times quotes him as saying he, “…spent too much
time down at the crossroads…” and, “…the devil tried to get to him by hurting
his brother and killing his drummer, Stu…” in an interview from last October.

At that point Katy takes over.
“Preston said a lot of things while swept up in that early hype. Some of us
aren’t used to having everything we say recorded for posterity.”

When I mention that some of his fans
have bought into the whole ‘…freed himself from the devil’s clutches’ mythos
Preston regains his composure. He laughs and says, “The audience hears what it
hears.”

Tickets
for Friday’s show are available online or by calling The Orpheum Theater’s

box
office.

BODY
OF MISSING NORTH CAROLINA HIKER FOUND IN TENNESSEE RIVER

Huntsville
Times, Sunday, March 17

The
search for a missing Asheville, North Carolina hiker ended tragically Saturday
along the Tennessee River just north of Guntersville, Alabama.

Family members told the Marshall
County Sheriff’s Office that they had not heard from their daughter, Savannah
Trucks, since she called from a Rite Aid in East Ellijay, Georgia, before
beginning an Appalachian Trail through-hike from Springer Mountain in
mid-February. Her mother, Shirley Trucks, said that Savannah had been harassed
by a man and a woman in a white van while she waited for her ride to the
trailhead. Authorities began searching for Savannah on March 13 after she
missed a pre-arranged meeting with her family in Fontana Lake, North Carolina,
to resupply.

A pair of Albertville fishermen
notified authorities after spotting the victim in an arm of Guntersville Lake
near Buck’s Pocket State Park Saturday morning, where EMS personnel recovered
her body. The Sheriff’s Office spokesman said that an autopsy from the Marshall
County Coroner’s Office wouldn’t be ready for a few days, but he believed that
drowning did not cause her death, noting the presence of extensive bruising on
her forearms and wrists, which are consistent with a more violent crime.

“This is going to be a very, very
horrendous act. I am convinced of that after having observed the body. A young
lady’s death is always a terrible thing, but a young lady who dies under
extreme violence is the absolute worst,” he told reporters.

“She’s a very outgoing and a kind
individual,” Bill Trucks said from North Carolina before his daughter was
found. “She’s got a heart of gold.”

THE FIRST REVELATION OF
PRESTON BLACK

CHAPTER ONE

Raindrops
and fireflies, autumn lightning splashed across the sky,

While
down here it’s still July.

City’s
dark except for the cars, and high above I see the same stars

That we
wished on twenty years ago.

The
alarm clock is set, and even though it isn’t tomorrow yet.

I see
something I don’t want to forget,

And
stay up all night watching you.

“Anniversary
Song” Music and Lyrics by Katy Stefanic and Preston Black

Nobody
wants to fight. You’re stupid if you do. Or an asshole.

When you pull yourself up out of the
dirt the last thing you want to do is talk about it. You want to go home, clean
yourself up and have a drink or five. The drinking isn’t to loosen your lips.
It’s to knock you out, so you can go to bed without thinking about it.

If you’re good, or smart, you can let
weeks and months go by without ever discussing it. The people around you will
always know you got your ass handed to you, and if they love you they don’t
ever bring it up. Eventually, it stings a little less each time you drive by
the place where the ass-kicking happened. The blood stains come out of your
shirt. Then a year goes by, and you’re the only one who still remembers it. Which
is fine. Ain’t a thing wrong with it.

Then you’re rolling out of a new town,
feeling about as sad as rolling into a new town makes you happy. You come over
a bridge or through a tunnel and catch that first glimpse of a new skyline or
the first few notes of the local alt rock or college radio station and feel
like all the TV dinners and frat house basements were worth it. You know a new
city means possibilities, new food and new accents. Tamales in Austin and real
Carolina barbeque in Lexington. You bump into some of the coolest people you’ll
ever meet in Boulder, Colorado, and laugh, because you’d never even heard of
the place before July. Having a worldview shaped by one small town in
north-central West Virginia makes seeing places like Charlotte and Tempe feel
about as exciting as seeing Liverpool itself. You hadn’t taken a single picture
since that photography class back in high school and you just took that class
because you heard you could get high in the dark room. But since last summer
you’ve taken at least ten thousand because you don’t want to forget a single
second of this.

And coming into Louisville felt no
different. All morning we talked about fried pickles and burgoo and ribs, and
how good food could make you feel safe and warm, almost like being in your own
bed. Getting to share it with your two best friends—the woman that I loved and
my brother—made me wonder what I’d done to deserve it all. The only thing I
could think about as we loaded our gear and got ready to roll out was all the
stuff I wanted to see and do next time we came back.

And how that asshole reporter from
that shitty little alternative newspaper crapped all over everything bringing
that fucking devil thing back up.

Katy
leaned over the steering wheel. “We got problems.”

The protestors swarmed past the club’s
security guys to block the alley. The assorted men, women, and children looked
like the kind of people who spent a lot of time oppressing pleasure. The type
of people who’d protest a soldier’s funeral because somewhere down the line a
burning bush told them to. Mostly women wearing skirts down to their ankles and
long hair piled high on top of their heads. Women with faces that never even
wore smiles, let alone lipstick.

They shook their brightly colored
hand-painted signs at us.

DEATH PENALTY FOR WITCHES.

NOT BLESSED JUST CURSED.

DEAL WITH THE DEVIL? BURN IN
HELL
.

Before Katy could react I reached over
and locked her door. “Get ready to drive.”

But she fixated on a sign that said
GOD
HATES WITCHES
for
a long moment. Her lips parted, like she’d try to reason with each and every
one of them single-handedly given the chance. “Run them over, you mean?”

“Jesus, no, Katy. You want to end up
in a Kentucky state pen?” Pauly climbed out of the van’s sliding side door and
stomped his cigarette into the concrete. He leaned against the passenger-side
door and said, “Drive real slow and don’t stop until you hit the street.”

Four bikers wearing leather and club
colors spread themselves across the alley, trying to make themselves look bigger
in the van’s headlights. Katy flicked the high beams, forcing their tall
shadows onto the brick buildings on the other side of Bardstown Road. The
chains they wore shined in the halogen lamps, sparkling like disco balls.

“Shit, Katy,” I said. “Look.”

Tattooed across the bikers’ jawlines
and shaved heads were vertical rows of small squiggles. They looked like words,
disjointed verses in black ink. Warnings, curses, poetry… I couldn’t make them
out from this distance. The biker with his arms exposed had the same markings
there too—all the way down to his wrist. Like somebody had drawn all over him
with a black Sharpie.

I said, “You think I should call the
police?”

“You can give it a shot,” Pauly said,
“Just don’t leave me, okay?”

I said, “Where you going?”

“Roll your window up.” He slammed the
side door shut and disappeared into the darkness.

Katy drove her palm into the steering
wheel. The horn echoed off both sides of the narrow alley.

I didn’t even ask if they’d seen the
needle tracks covering the women’s hands. Tiny black and blue marks pocked the
skin from their elbows to their wrists. Like my dad had on his arms. “Fucking
hypocrite junkies,” I said.

As the van drifted ahead the
protestors screamed louder and shook their signs harder. Katy checked the door
locks again to make sure.

Women and children shouted, “
God
hates witches. You hate God
.” They locked arms, forming a wall between us and
the road. The chilly Kentucky air let their frosty breath hang over their heads
for a moment before being eaten up by the streetlights.

“Preston…who are these people?” She
rolled down her window like she wanted to have some kind of dialog with them.
The brakes squealed as she brought the van to a halt.

I rolled down my window a few inches
and yelled, “I don’t know what kind of issues you all are dealing with—”

One of the bikers stepped out of
formation and strode toward me like a cop at a traffic stop. He stood a head
taller than me and wore a sleeveless denim vest over a black T-shirt. He ran
his hand along his scalp. I half expected the black ink on his head to smudge.
The other bikers followed a few steps behind him. They stopped right in front
of the van and pounded the hood.

I jammed my hand under the seat and
grabbed the only thing I could find. A long plastic window scraper with a brush
along one side. I shook it at the biker and said, “What the fuck do you need?”

“Just a word, my friend,” he said as
he hooked a thumb into his belt. His other hand went to his back pocket. “Step
on out of the van so we can talk.”

“Well, send an email and get the hell
out of the way.”

“Hell is what I’m talking about.” His
Southern accent didn’t sound like anything I’d heard in Kentucky. Sounded more
like the kids in Austin. He took a small metal rod from his back pocket. “Jesus
died for your sins, you know? Least you could do is cut the blasphemy.”

“Last time I checked, I can believe
whatever I want. You got something you want to say to me? That’s your problem,
not mine. Now why don’t you move along?” Fear made my voice waver.

“Step out of the van.” With a snap of
his wrist the metal rod became a long metal bar. “Tell you what. Let’s talk
about the Lord for a spell and I’ll spare your fingers.”

“What are you doing, Katy? Just go,” I
yelled, waving her ahead. “I’m calling the cops because you got no right, man.
No right at all.”

Katy let the van drift forward as she
laid on the horn. A chorus of shouts rang through the protestors. A woman
screamed, “We got young ones here!”

I dug for my phone without ever once
taking my eyes off him. But instead of making eye contact, I stared at the
scrawl all over his bare skin, over his scalp and neck and cheeks and jaw.

Off to the left side of the van one of
the women screamed so loud I thought she’d been run over. The biker spun to
face the street, swinging the retractable baton out in front of him. The mob
jerked out of their trance in unison and retreated to Bardstown Road as two,
then three, then four of the women shielded their faces with their arms and
signs. My first reaction was to push Katy to the floor, but I caught movement
in the side view mirror and turned around.

Pauly emerged from the darkness behind
the van grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, working a stream of cold water from a
hose like a fireman putting out a house fire. Back and forth again and again,
mercilessly dousing their faces and clothes. Pauly’s very own Bible-thumper wet
T-shirt contest.

“Come get some, bitches.” Pauly
laughed and held the hose between his legs like he was pissing on them. I
hadn’t seen him laugh so much since we left Philly. “This one’s for Pipeline.”

“Go, Katy. Take your foot off the
brake and go.” I leaned over and hit the horn.

Some of the protestors shielded
themselves with their signs, wet poster board crumpled in their hands. The rest
dispersed, their unified chants broke down into a loud murmur of personalized
curses. The biker with the baton beat on the hood in an attempt to regain his
ground, but Katy nosed the van ahead like an old pro. The rest banged on the
side and tried rocking it, but we were already out on the street.

Pauly came around the back of the van
and walked beside the sliding door, still dousing the protestors.

“He’s going to get us killed,” Katy
said. “Get him in here.”

“Katy, watch the road. How’s it going
to look if you take out a little kid?”

“Preston!”

I turned as the biker swung his baton.
It hit the door with a loud crack that left a heavy dent. He’d meant to break
my arm or jaw. Definitely not a love tap.

“You self-righteous prick.” Pauly hit
him in the face with a blast from his hose. “I’m a fucking kill you!”

I said, “C’mon, Pauly. Get in,” as I
reached back to open the door behind me. I felt bad for squashing his fun. Like
I was the one who had to tell him he’d gotten too old for trick-or-treat or
whatever.

“This might be a good fucking gig
after all,” Pauly climbed onto the bench seat and slid the door shut, smiling
like he’d just won free Subway for a year. He turned to the crowd and flipped
them off with both hands. He waggled his fingers back and forth and said, “Fuck
off.”

Once Katy got out of the alley she hit
the gas. Two of the bikers followed on foot, banging the trailer with their
batons.

I turned to watch them fall behind us.
The women and kids huddled together, shivering in the chill. One man stood
calmly apart from the crowd. A young guy with a full beard and close-cropped
blond hair. He wore a fine grey jacket and vest with jeans and a white
button-down. He maintained eye contact with me until we got to the end of the
block. I’d seen him before, in Morgantown, from a distance. Like a ghost, or a
face in the crowd. It wasn’t only the way he looked. The way he dressed and
carried himself struck a chord of familiarity with me. He knew me, too.

“What do you think, Pres?” Pauly tried
to light a cigarette but his hands were shaking too bad. “Still got it?”

“Yeah, Pauly. You’re not going to tell
your sponsor about this, are you?” I watched the bearded guy until he faded
into the darkness.

“No way. What happens in the van in a
dark alley in Kentucky does not come back to the Mountain State with me.”

“You’re going to hell for that, you
know?” Katy said with a smile. She made a right turn on red and we passed the
front of the old theater. I watched it, trying to remember every single thing
that happened behind those doors before Katy built up even more speed.

Pauly said, “I know,” folded his hands
behind his head and lay down in the back seat.

“Nobody
on earth except for Katy Stefanic ever ate at a Waffle House because they
wanted to.” Pauly’s anger came out a little at a time, like bees from a hive on
a summer morning. “Don’t act like this happened accidentally either. The way I
see it, I’m driving, doing the sound, playing bass on a few songs, and playing
security with those Westboro Baptist wannabes. How am I not getting more of a
say in where we eat?”

“Don’t act like you cast a tiebreaker
with your one vote.” Katy tossed him the keys and bounded around the van. She
waited for me to slide out of the passenger seat. “And I drove tonight.”