The Adventures of Slim & Howdy by Bill Fitzhugh, Kix Brooks, Ronnie Dunn Read Free Book Online Page A

seventy or eighty.” He held up the Viper RX-650. “What’s the point in having a radar detector if you—”
    “Look,” Slim said. “When it’s your turn, you can drive backwards at a hundred’n ten for all I care. But right now, I’m driving.”
    Howdy threw up his hands and tried to keep his mouth shut. Problem was, he had pretty definite opinions about the proper way to steer, accelerate, brake, pass, and signal. It took only about twenty miles for Howdy to discover that Slim shared not a single one of these opinions, and it damn near drove both of them crazy.
    Howdy kept leaning over to look at the speedometer, telling Slim he could probably get away with eight over the speed limit instead of just the five he was doing and that he didn’t need to keep four full car lengths between the truck and whoever got in front of them. “That just invites people to pass you,” Howdy said. “And then they get in that space you left and then you have to back off some more and next thing you know, hell, we’re going backwards.”
    “Nobody asked you,” Slim said.
    Howdy held up a hand. “Just trying to help.” He got quiet for a couple of miles before he resumed his suggestions about when to pass and how to tell if another driver was going to make a turn without benefit of a signal. “It’s all about their body language,” Howdy explained. “That slight glance to the mirror as they decelerate but
before
you see any brake lights. And keep your eyes on their hands, they’ll reposition ’em on the wheel—”
    “I tell you what,” Slim interrupted. “When we get to Fort Worth, you can open a damn driving school. Until then, I’d appreciate it if you’d just . . . shut . . . up.”
    Howdy was surprised by the depth of Slim’s ingratitude and insulted by his disinclination to embrace all of his observations and suggestions. It got his blood up to the point he was tempted to compare Slim’s driving skills to those of his own beloved grandmother who was eighty-three, half-blind, and timid to begin with, but, being the accommodating soul that he was and not wanting to get off on a bad foot, Howdy just pulled out his lyric pad and started working on rhyming the name Tony.
    Slim observed the technique out of the corner of his eye. Howdy would kind of look up at the roof of the cab and mumble possibilities. “Bony . . . phony . . . pony . . . macaroni.” Then he’d get quiet for a few minutes before trying something else. “Crystal . . . distal . . .-distal? That’s a medical term or something, innit?”
    Slim just gave him a slow sideways glance like he couldn’t believe how long it was taking him to find the word.
    Finally, Howdy blurted it out, “Pistol!” He wrote that down. “Hell, yeah. Crystal with the pistol.” Like he was the first one to think of it. For the next half hour, Howdy kept his nose stuck in that notebook, working on the narrative line for “The Ballad of Black Tony.”
    Slim, meanwhile, seemed lost in thought, as if considering one of the great truths. When Howdy finally closed his notebook, Slim said, “I been thinking.”
    “Never hurts,” Howdy replied.
    “I guess you’re about half right.”
    Howdy smiled, glad to see Slim had finally come to his senses. “Hell, I’m completely right and you know it.” He grabbed the radar detector and slapped it on the dash, said, “Now we’re talking. Let’s make some time.”
    Slim shook his head. “I’m talking about what you said earlier, that I must have a plan of some sort to be in the music business.”
    “Oh, yeah, well I just had a feeling—”
    “But that’s not why I drove across Texas,” Slim said. “That Martin belonged to my dad. It means a lot to me.”
    “Well, okay.” Howdy was momentarily at a loss on how to respond to Slim’s sudden willingness to share personal information. But once he gathered his thoughts, he said, “Good to know that family’s important to you. Says a lot about a man, I think.” He