Delta Blues Read online

  Fit to bust as he was about Lena’s career, it’d be mean to tell him she’d turn into Dwaynetta again when her new purse with secret pockets had a nice heft. Lena was his dream. Dwaynetta had other plans.

  “Chicago?” I said. “But I ain’t sung a lick in front of anybody, yet. What if nobody comes to hear me?”

  “Oh, they will. I was just thinking out loud.”

  “Well, quit for five seconds. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  From under the pillow, I took out the box camera I bought with the money he’d left to pay the chink dressmaker. I’d told her Tom forgot, that he’d bring the money to her tomorrow afternoon. We’d be miles across the state line before then.

  “Where do you want to take my picture for them handbills? By the window for the light?”

  Tom raked his fingers through what hair he had left. “Where the—Lena, honey, snapshots are for scrapbooks. And the film has to be mailed off for developing.”

  To Rochester, New York, the man at the store said. Bona fide pictures were too flimsy. The exposed cartridge was all the stopper I’d need for Tom Vance Hickam’s jug.

  He went on, “At dinner last night with Marcus Woollsey—didn’t you hear me say he’s a professional photographer? A printer he works with can run off the handbills before we leave in the morning.”

  “I ain’t deaf.” I plopped down on the bed, hunch-mouthed and sniffly. “But with all the money you’re spending on me, I thought I might could save some on my picture.”

  He hugged my shoulders and gave me his hanky. “I appreciate that, I really do. I’m a far cry from wealthy, but Mother left me several—Listen, why don’t you powder your nose and leave the finances to me, okay? Marcus should be here any minute.”

  On the way to the washroom, I switched on the cathedral radio on the dresser. Tom let Marcus in a tick before an announcer started the farm-to-market report. Neither Tom nor his Nancy-boy heard the washroom door open a crack and the camera clicking away.

  Seeing them two steal kisses and pet had me tasting my lunch a second time.

  “BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAINS” was sung frequent at hobo camps. Nigh on as popular was “The Stuff Called Money.” Big Bill said he’d wrote it. Whether he did or didn’t, it was catchy, and I must’ve strummed it once too often for Tom. We was drivin’ through a cotton field ocean when he ripped Daddy’s mandolin out’n my hands and slung it as far as it’d fly.

  I told him he ought be glad I’d set my heart on a DeSoto Touring Car a couple months back. If we was still puttering along in his Model T, that mandolin woulda busted on the window post and throwed splinters at his eyes.

  It ain’t my fault that where we have to be tomorrow is nearly always too far away to stay put of a night. Or that Mrs. Hickam left her funny-turned son barely enough to pay expenses and buy a dandy new automobile.

  A songbird needs her rest, don’t she? A midget couldn’t stretch out in his flivver’s front seat. And Tom groused every time the drowsies come over me and he had to wrestle clothes, soda pop-records, and handbill boxes with his bootleg and my medicine hid at the bottom from the back to the front.

  The DeSoto’s rear floorboard holds our claptrap with room to spare. Under his breath, Tom calls the cloud-soft back seat, Lena’s Crib, like I’m Memphis Minnie turnin’ tricks between shows.

  Hell with him. The top down and wind a-howl is like deckin’ a highballin’ rattler again. And I will be shortly—to a place that ain’t never heard of winter nor Miss Lena Byrd.

  My purse is nigh goose plump and Tom’s mood went from scared spitless to hateful after he tore apart the Model T searching for my film cartridge. Him and Marcus ain’t the only pictures on it. He won’t find it in the DeSoto, neither.

  Almost plain sight is magical for foolin’ the eye. Why, a week or more passed after I sung at Colonel Highfalutin’s house party in Vicksburg before Tom saw my paste jewelry was real silver and diamonds. He wouldn’t have then, if I hadn’t decided to wear Mrs. Highfalutin’s bracelet, too.

  “Hurry up, Lena.”

  God, gimme a dollar for every time he’s said that and I’ll be shed of him in a blink.

  “I am hurryin’.” Like I ever dawdle changing from the radio station dress into a singing gown behind a blanket. Then again, it’s a blessing Tom’s girly, what with me stripping half-nekkid in front of him three, maybe four times a day.

  When I was decent, he folded the blanket and fetched my medicine. A bar-dog in New Orleans put me onto sloe gin to soothe my throat. It surely does, as long as doses is took regular.

  “That’s plenty,” Tom said, as cross as a gut-shot bear.

  I swung away from him. “One more swaller.” Or two.

  He snatched the fruit jar and screwed on the lid. “Later. I can’t have you forgetting the lyrics like you did in Meridian. People here in Jackson know them better than you do.”

  “Oh yeah?” I slashed on lipstick in the DeSoto’s side mirror. “Why don’t they sing to each other and save me the trouble?”

  “Because they’ve paid three dollars apiece to hear the lovely Lena Byrd, Blues Songbird Extraordinaire.” His thumb swiped hard at a lipstick swoop ‘neath my lip. “Not counting what she’ll steal in her gloves.”

  I ran the brush through my hair, then threw it on the seat. “You don’t like it? Shove off, then. I can hire a driver for a coupla bucks a day and all the pleasurin’ he can give.”

  Tom chuckled low and mean. “And the first place he’d take you is the local sheriff’s office.”

  “It ain’t me that writ laws against queers.” I patted his cheek. “You’ll get your film, by and by. I promised, didn’t I?”

  “No. I wouldn’t believe you if you had.” He lit a cigarette and crushed the empty box. “Do I have to beg for a coupla bucks before we go in?”

  “You should, mean-tempered as you’re gettin’.” I gave him the five-dollar bill folded in my powder compact. Sweeter’n hack-leberry gin, I said, “Is that enough, hon?”

  He took my elbow rough to escort me into the dance club. The air was gray-green with smoke and bootleg fumes. People brayed like mules—too loud to think, much less hear the house band. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Tom drove in circles to the same dim-lit, rackety, sweat-smelly building every night for months on end.

  Then and there, I knew Jackson was Lena Byrd’s last performance. Dwaynetta’d had all the singing and smiling and do this and go there she could stomach. She’d stash Lena’s stake and live cheap and happy off milking Tom and Marcus Woollsey for a hundred now and then.

  ‘Til Tom said in my ear, “What’s the matter with you?” I didn’t know I’d stopped dead-bang, a yard short of the stage. “Nothin’. Fetch me a drink, then stand back. Ol’ Lena’s gonna sing her fool heart out, tonight.”

  A packed house is apt to set fists and bottles to flying. Tonight folks listened, clapped, whistled like sixty, whilst I belted and crooned every shade of blues and red-hots betwixt. Mr. Talent Scout Hickam says an encore’s one song extra. Well, I did “Blue Delta Blues” twice over, and still they hollered for more.

  Tom was pulling me outside, when I thought I heard, “Dwaynetta!”

  A handbill waved. “Dway-netta, wait!” A woman elbowed through the crowd behind me. Her face was flushed splotchy and mouse-hair a fright.

  I caught the alley’s steel door before it whanged shut and locked. “Mary Sarah?”

  She bowled into me, jabbering like a magpie. “I knew that was you.” She squinted at Tom. “I asked him, back in Helena, and he said he’d never heard of Dwaynetta Comstock. But the longer I studied on the handbill picture, the surer I was he’d lied.”

  Tom flinched. “Sorry. Honest mistake.”

  Uh-huh. We’d took rooms in Helena, after he said he was too drunk to drive on to Arkansas City. Locked eyeballs with somebody was more like it. So did I, and mine was almost as strappin’ handsome as the one with Mary Sarah.

  Tom planted a shoe on the DeSoto’s bumper and fired up
a coffin nail. The fresh box was already two-thirds empty. “Every town we’re in, a sister tugs my coat, or a cousin, or your long-lost uncle Bob.”

  Mary Sarah wiped snot on the sleeve of a ratty gray sweater. A brown skirt hung halfway to her bony ankles. She was four years older than me and always was plainer than boiled rice. What this husband of hers, Vic Pelagiano, ever seen in her, I couldn’t divine.

  From the up-and-down Vic gave me, he didn’t rightly recall himself. He doffed a fedora and drawled, “Pleasure to meet you, Miss Byrd, Mr. Hickam.” A lazy grin crooked at a corner. “You should’ve heard the wife yap about her baby sister singing on the radio.”

  “Ha! You didn’t believe me, either, didja.”

  Her snivelin’ sure hadn’t changed. Time was, when scarcely a day passed lest she whined the same exact thing to Mama. Daddy’d kiboshed her nonsense, before I was knee-high to a cedar stump.

  “I let you drag me to Jackson,” Vic said. “Didn’t I?” It came out gruff, but who could blame him? “Give any thought to how stupid I’d have felt if you’d been wrong?”

  All of a whoosh, I knew her and Tom lashed together with baling wire wouldn’t make a backbone. Vic winked, like he’d read my mind.

  “I hate to break up the family reunion,” Tom said, “but Lena and I have to scoot on up the road.” Damned if he didn’t light another cigarette off the butt of the first.

  “You do?” Mary Sarah’s fingers pecked her sweater. “But we rode the bus all day to see you, and I thought we’d find us an eatin’ house, have a good visit, then stay—”

  She glanced at Tom, then at the ground. “I bought one-way tickets. Didn’t know how long we’d be here, and—”

  “Quit your blubbering, for crissake,” Vic said. “We’ll buy two more at the bus depot.”

  “Can’t, and you know it. The man at the front door wanted six dollars to let us inside. You drank the last two I had.”

  Vic grabbed her arm. “Will you shut the hell up?” She cringed, like he’d boxed her ear. “I apologize, y’all. I don’t know what gets into her sometimes. Y’all go on, now, and—”

  “No!” She yanked free of him. “You can’t just leave me here, Dwaynetta. You just can’t.”

  I should’ve laughed. Could’ve spit between her close-set eyes. “Like you left me? At the cabin?”

  She jerked, liked I’d slapped her. “I sent a letter home, soon as I had three pennies for a stamp. You was already gone. Where, nobody knew.”

  A-carse she’d say that, after I’d made my own way for close onto three years. I’d bet my diamond earbobs, Vic quit warming Mrs. Prissy Do-Right’s sheets on their honeymoon. Hot blood ain’t satisfied easy, nor for long.

  “Would you excuse us, please?” Tom waved me toward the front of the DeSoto. I knew what he’d say before his mouth flapped. “We have to be in Memphis tomorrow. Give the poor woman money for bus fare and let’s go.”

  “What? All she come for was a hand-out. Well, she ain’t getting it from me.”

  “She’s your sister.”

  I wrapped the chain handle around my purse. “Yeah, and if I wasn’t Lena Byrd, she wouldn’t give two hoots about me.” My nerves were cracklin’ for my medicine. “You feel so all-powered sorry for her, you give her the money.”

  His face sneered up ugly. “I would, if I had any.”

  “Ain’t my fault you wasted it on smokes and whiskey.”

  “Nothing is ever your fault, is it, Dwaynetta.”

  Mary Sarah scurried up, teary eyed and holding her arm. “You’re bound for Memphis?”

  Eavesdropper. Vic shoulda boxed her ear. Both of ‘em.

  Tom said, “We have a meeting with a producer and engineer from Columbia Records tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Well, Helena and Memphis are real close to one another,” she whined. “Twenty-some miles off Route 49 would get us—”

  “East and clear across the Mississippi.” Vic sidled close enough to gander down my dress. He must’ve liked what he saw, for his voice quivered, when he said, “Not everybody’s as dumb as you are, Mary Sarah. Mr. Hickam knows full well, Highway 55 runs due north from Jackson.”

  Soft as a whisper, his hand caressed my bottom. “But I’d spell you drivin’ the long way, if you don’t mind to share this fine motorcar.”

  A sneaky-quick touch of my own had my mouth waterin’.

  “Fine with me,” Tom said, “if it is with Lena.”

  I could scarcely nod for thinking how the Desoto’s back seat was pitch-dark of a night. I’d make Tom give over his pocket flask, so’s Vic and me could have us a drink, relax, and get to knowing each other real good.

  THE RATHSKELLER in St. Louis was reputed to be the best restaurant in the city. Clay-tiled floors and three-quarter walls dividing the dining rooms kept the noise level as constant as the delectable aromas wafting about.

  The creased, Jackson Daily News clipping on the tablecloth was a single column wide and under three inches long. A small-point headline read: SONGBYRD DEAD AT 23.

  Nearly a month had elapsed since the tragic automobile accident on Route 49. A faulty tire was blamed for the DeSoto veering off the road and crashing into a field-rock corner post. The gasoline tank exploded either on impact or shortly thereafter.

  The occupants were burned beyond recognition. The vehicle’s license tag and information provided by a Jackson dance club owner aided the county coroner in identifying the deceased as Miss Lena Byrd, 23, an up-and-coming blues singer reportedly from Arkansas, and her business manager, Thomas Vance Hickam, 48, of Elgin, Illinois.

  “I’m late, I know, and I’m sorry.” Mary Sarah Comstock Pelagiano hastily seated herself. “I wasn’t sure you’d be here at all.” A faint, musty odor escaped the coat falling over the back of her chair. After tonight, her clothes needn’t be bought secondhand.

  Her hair was bleached blonde and professionally cut. She still shunned cosmetics, including lipstick, but her eyes no longer resembled an animal’s trapped out of season.

  She told me that Vic Pelagiano had beaten her like her father did and took every nickel she’d earned from two jobs to his none. She’d understood, though, that beatings don’t necessarily bruise or break bone. That tie had bound us when we met in Helena by accident or fate, and talked, commiserated, then conspired.

  “I can’t stay long.” She chafed her hands. “You know, to eat or anything.”

  “Coffee?”

  She hesitated. “Sure. Why not?”

  “So, how do you like St. Louis?”

  “It’s all right.” She shrugged. “Colder and bigger than Helena. I got me a job right off, and a little bitty apartment close by on—well, close to here. You?”

  “I’m catching a train for Florida in a little while. I can give you an address—”

  “No, don’t.” Pink circles formed at her cheeks. “I mean, there’s no need of it, is there?” Her eyes slanted at the clipping. They skittered as she read, then rose to mine. “It still don’t seem real.”

  “Pretend it was a bad dream. You’ll sleep better if you do.”

  The Rathskeller’s ashtrays were as deep as soup bowls. A match ignited the clipping. Mary Sarah gasped and reared back in her chair. The reminder of torching the DeSoto was unintentional. She’d assumed the fire was necessary to rid herself of a vicious, whoremonger of a husband.

  Technically, cyanide in the pocket flask and in Lena’s sloe gin accomplished that. Any second thoughts Mary Sarah might have had evaporated when she saw her husband fucking her sister in the back seat.

  “Off in the head” is how she’d described her younger sister. She believed Dwaynetta suffocated their mother while Mary Sarah went for the doctor. House calls were free, if the patient was beyond treatment.

  Terrified of her sister, Mary Sarah ran for her life. The letter she’d mailed to Winslow wasn’t to Dwaynetta, but to the authorities, accusing her of matricide. Seeing Lena Byrd’s picture on the handbill proved God didn’t answer vengeful prayers.
/>   God helps those who help themselves. Spawn like Lena and Vic were nothing, if not predictable.

  After the accident, discreet inquiries to the coroner and sheriff’s office confirmed the car and contents were charred to ashes. The intense heat alone would have destroyed any film, even if protected by a cartridge.

  The waiter brought Mary Sarah’s coffee and refilled mine.

  “What about you, Tom? Do you sleep through the night?”

  My cup clattered in the saucer. For a second, I’d have sworn it was Lena mocking me. Fear smoldered in my gut that I’d traded one blackmailer for another.

  I opened my suit coat. My train ticket to Los Angeles was in the name of T.V. Hicks, KNX’s new, night owl announcer. I pulled out the envelope behind it and slid it across the tablecloth. The cash in Lena’s purse had amounted to slightly over two thousand dollars—minus the hundred Mary Sarah and I split that night.

  I’d gambled a pay-off would shut her mouth, until our rendezvous. If her guilty conscience won out, I’d need that two grand to leave the country in a hurry. Damned generous to give her a dime, considering how much Lena extorted from me.

  My chair screeched across the clay tiles. “Put that under your pillow. I wouldn’t trust a bank, yet.”

  “You’re leavin’? Just like that?”

  I flipped a silver half-dollar on the table. “Like I said, hon. I’ve got a train to catch.”

  10 Death at the Crossroads

  Michael Lister

  “GET YOU GUYS ANYTHING ELSE?” Maria asked.

  Lefty, Sid, and RD shook their heads.

  “Lap dance,” Jerry said.

  Maria jerked her head toward him, her straight blonde hair whipping around to smack the clear complexion of her flawless face.

  “What’d I tell you? No ordering off menu. If you think your old heart can stand it, you can get one in about an hour over at Tan Fannies.”

  Mid-afternoon on a Tuesday at Junior’s, the lunch crowd, such as it was, long since returned to work, Maria’s boys still in the large U-shaped booth in the corner, table cleared, only their coffee cups remaining.