Part Seven

Upon the album’s completion they celebrated at Venus in Lion Furs which smelled like Yves Saint Laurent and Avon Odyssey Perfume and flower-scented skin and cigarette smoke, and stale eggs and ass sweat.

He met a stripper named Penny-Dice Gaia, who was ten years his senior with long forest shaded hair and hazelnut eyes that trailed somewhere into her soul a mystical mountain and waterfall.

For twenty-five dollars she led him to a back-room.

He told her he was fixing to be a star of this world.

They unbuttoned her cut-off blue-jeans that hugged her thighs which revealed a tattoo of the Virgin Mary between her legs, golden halo and gold chiming out from her rose-tinted heart, incensed with Heaven’s willows, and she grabbed his hair and steered his face.

They drank and laughed and touched each other all night a song written forever against time, and were married early in the morning at Shamrock City Hall while it was still dark out, and by the time the sun struck light she was carrying his seed and was glowing with warm waves from beneath her skin.

The session violinist was named Billy Dale, or B.D. or Beady and when he was told the news after their honeymoon in Paradise, California, he said in disbelief, “No you didn’t. Gawddamn boy. You know where all that thing is been.”

Thomas poured Caldera brand hot sauce into his whiskey and sipped it all the way down and refilled the drink, and was smiling.

“Goddamn boy,” Beady kept saying, “You did not.”

“I sure did.”

Thomas and Penny-Dice bought a trailer in Leotie, Georgia and he inherited four of her sons each with a different father, as well as the one in her belly and he bought three hound dogs who had been trained to track anything with wings. Where they lived, at night at least three times a week the sirens screamed, and the dogs howled for the salvation of the criminal while he sat on his lawn chair with a cooler of beer on the duct-tape porch singing and playing the guitar.

He never took them hunting and kept their kennels as abandoned prison cells and used for outside sitting, and taught them how to sing, and had them sing on the title track of his next record, Angels Are a Country Song, and were on the cover too, a series of three water paintings by Virgil Day, one where a dog is chasing a flock of white ducks with their wings flapping across a creek on a winter day where another dog tracks down drops of blood left behind from the imprint of a snow angel, and the third one in Thomas’s lap with them smiling and staring at each other as though their souls were married many centuries ago and had traveled many miles to meet again.

The most successful track on the record was the steel pedaled and punk driven “November Hunt” with the chorus, “You shovel through my soul like I knew you would/And Jesus wants your heart ’cause it tastes so good.”

“When I wrote and recorded that,” he says during the podcast, “it took all of thirty-three minutes. Looking back, I think, my whole life, every single moment of it came down to those thirty-three minutes, and that was it. When I wrote it down and they turned on the mikes and I was singing, I saw my Spirit come from inside of me to outside of me. I saw my mama too. She was wearing smeared and old make-up. Her hair was very beautiful, always. There’s a lotta people claimed her to be a witch, some devil whore, living in the woods with different men. But she weren’t no witch. She was a angel. She had something from God that rang through her eyes. Wearing a white nightgown, and what my Spirit saw in those thirty-three minutes was my mama giving birth.”