Delta Blues Read online

  “‘Zat right?” Wade was holding his briefcase against his chest like a shield.

  Travis tapped a finger to the side of his head. “Says he’s a con-jur doctor, you know? Makes charms and hands.”

  Wade peered over the top of his briefcase. “Hands?”

  “Yeah, talismans, amulets, things like that. There’s people swear he’s cured ‘em of stuff. And, hell, who knows. World’s full of strange things.”

  They stopped at the steps leading to the porch. Charlie called out, “Hey, Earl? It’s Charlie Clanton. Came out to talk about them tapes.”

  There was no response. But after a moment the door creaked open and Earl stepped out, all red-rimmed eyes and bitter scowl. His face was an angry mug shot. He wore a long Prince Albert coat and a stove-pipe hat, cocked all acey-deucy. He looked into the darkness beyond the men, like there might be something dangerous behind them and he said, “You come in but you gone have to wait til I’m done making this hand.”

  They followed Earl into his murky shack and sat down on a couple of mismatched chairs and a milk crate. Fear was creeping in on Wade as he looked around. The shack was overflowing with clay jars and tin cans and odd little boxes filled with bird wings and the jaws of small mammals. There were ashes and powders of things burned on red-hot metal, dirt from the graves of the old and wicked, congealed blood from pig-eating sows, patches of red flannel, and all the other ingredients necessary to bring about everything from love to sorrow to death.

  Earl sat at his table and dropped some snakeroot into an old Silver Crest lard tin, then he set it over a candle and added a pinch of sand-burr. After that he dropped in a broken black cat bone and two rusty coffin nails. As the smoke rose from the tin, Earl closed his eyes and said, “Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen, hen! Canga bafio te! Canga li!”

  He breathed the smoke and began to tremble and jerk. Then he turned and looked directly at Wade, a crazy look in his eyes. “I been marked,” he said as his jaw began to wobble. “I’m a blue-gummed nigger could kill you with one bite!”

  In the flickering candle’s glow Wade nodded like a frightened child. He had no doubt it was true. He was halfway hiding behind his briefcase now, just hoping the voodoo was almost over so they could get down to business and get the hell out of this dark little shack and the crazy man with the Judas eye.

  After a moment, Earl seemed to return to his own mind and body. He stood and went to one of the shelves behind him where he took down a handmade box lined with flannel. Charlie and Wade looked at Travis, who nodded his affirmation that it was the box containing the tapes.

  Earl said, “That Mr. Fontaine is coming with his contract tomorrow night. I s’pose you gone try to talk me outta takin’ his deal?”

  “You got us all wrong,” Charlie said, pulling a pen and a document from inside his coat. “We got a new offer.” He laid it on the table in front of Earl, the pen off to the side. “We knew we had to sweeten the deal, show you we’re serious.”

  “Whatchoo mean, sweeten it?”

  Charlie reached for the briefcase and Wade just about threw it to him. Charlie popped the latches and set the open case on the table facing Earl.

  AN HOUR LATER, they were back at the Starlighter’s Lounge, drinking gin and having a laugh about the whole thing. The handmade box with the tapes sat in the middle of the table.

  Wade rapped his knuckles on the box and said, “What’d I tell you?”

  “Bird in the hand,” Charlie said, tilting his glass at Wade. “You sure know your stuff.”

  “That’s right,” Wade replied. “You see how quick he signed that contract?”

  Travis sucked on his cigarette and said, “He did move pretty fast once he saw that cash.”

  Wade opened the box and looked at the dusty reels of tape. “How long before they get these out as a record?”

  Charlie started to explain the process of mastering and printing albums and how the distribution would work. After a minute, Travis got up to go chase after some woman he’d had his eye on. He said, “Charlie, I’ll catch up with you later.” He pointed at the box. “Make a copy of those before you ship ‘em off.” He shook hands with Wade, then followed the woman out the door.

  Charlie poured two more glasses and set the bottle on top of the box. “Wade, you wanna go listen to our investment? I got a friend with a tape machine, probably let us use it, we bring him some of this gin.”

  “Good idea,” Wade said.

  “All right then.” Charlie stood up. “I’m going to the men’s, then we’ll go hear what all the hoopla’s been about all these years.” He pointed at Wade, then the box. “Don’t run off.”

  Wade draped an arm over the box. “I’ll be waitin’ right here.”

  He sat there for good while, drinking and considering all the ways he was going to spend his money. He was drunk enough that he didn’t care how long Charlie had been gone. Didn’t even think about it, just leaned on that box and waved his empty glass to get a refill.

  By the time he started to wonder what had happened, Charlie and Travis were miles away, pulling down a dirt drive onto somebody’s farm, right past a mailbox with “Woolfolk” painted on the side. There was a car parked out front. Earl Tate got out with the briefcase and greeted Charlie. As he handed it over, Earl chuckled and said, “Bird in the hand.” Charlie laughed too.

  WADE FINISHED HIS DRINK and looked around the bar. He started to get a funny feeling, so he picked up that box and went to the men’s room.

  Charlie walked up the steps to the farmhouse, knocked on the door. “Uncle Tucker?”

  The men’s room was as empty as the sudden feeling in the pit of Wade’s stomach. He ran out to the parking lot but Charlie’s car was gone. He looked all around and there was nothing but cotton as far as the eye could see.

  6 Big Midnight Special

  James Lee Burke

  YOU KNOW HOW SUMMERTIME IS down South. It comes to you in the smell of watermelons and distant rain and the smell of cotton poison and schools of catfish that have gotten dammed up in a pond that’s about to be drained. It comes to you in a lick of wet light on razor wire at sunup. You try to hold on to the coolness of the night, but by noon you’ll be standing inside your own shadow, hoeing out long rows of soybeans, a gunbull on horseback gazing at you from behind his shades in the turnaround, his silhouette a black cutout against the sun.

  At night, way down inside my sleep, I dream of a white horse running in a field under a sky full of thunderheads. The tattoos wrapped around my forearms like blue flags aren’t there for ornamentation. That big white horse pounding across the field makes a sound just like a heart pumping, one that’s about to burst.

  In the camp, the cleanup details work til noon, then the rest of the weekend is free. The electric chair is in that flat-topped off-white building down by the river. It’s called the Red Hat House because during the 1930s trouble-makers who were put on the levee gang and forced to wear stripes and straw hats that were painted red got thrown in there at night, most of them still stinking from a ten-hour day pushing wheel-barrows loaded with dirt and broken bricks double-time under a boiling sun. The boys who stacked their time on the Red Hat gang went out Christians—that is, if they went out at all, because a bunch of them are still under the levee.

  The two iron sweat boxes that were set in concrete on Camp A were bulldozed out about ten years ago, around 1953. I knew a guy who spent twenty-two days inside one of them, standing up, in the middle of summer, his knees and tailbone jammed up against the sides whenever he collapsed. They say his body was molded to the box when the prison doctor made the hacks take him out.

  Leadbelly was in Camp A. That’s where prison legend says he busted that big Stella twelve-string over a guy’s head. But I never believed that story. Not many people here understood Leadbelly, and some of them made up stories about him that would make him understandable, like them—predictable and uncomfortable with their secret knowledge about themselves when they looked in the mirror.

&nbs
p; Wiley Boone walks out of the haze on the yard, his skin running with sweat, his shirt wadded up and hanging out of his back pocket, the weight sets and high fence and silvery rolls of razor wire at his back. He has a perfect body, hard all over, his chest flat-plated, his green pin-striped britches hanging so low they expose his pubic hair.

  “You still trying to pick ‘The Wild Side of Life’?” he asks.

  “Working on it,” I say.

  “It’s only taken you, what, ten goddamn years?”

  “More like twelve,” I say, smiling up at him from the steps to my “dorm,” resting my big-belly J-50 Gibson across my thigh.

  “Jody wants to match the two of us in the three-rounders up in the Block.”

  I lean sideways so I can see past Wiley at the group out by the weight sets. There’s only one chair on the yard, and Jody Prejean is sitting in it, cleaning his nails with a toothpick, blowing the detritus off the tips of his fingers. Jody has the natural good looks of an attractive woman but should not be confused with one. I mean he’s no queer himself. Actually he has the lean face and deep-set dark eyes of a poet or a visionary or a man who can read your thoughts. Jody is a man of all seasons.

  “Tell Jody I’m too old. Tell him I’m on my third jolt. Tell him I didn’t come back here to take dives or beat up on tomato cans.” I say all this with a smile on my face, squinting up at Wiley against the glare.

  “You calling me a tomato can?”

  “A bleeder is a bleeder. Don’t take it personal. I had over fifty stitches put in my eyebrows. That’s how come my eyes look like a Chinaman’s.”

  “I’ll do you a favor, Arlen. I’ll tell Jody you’ll be over to talk with him. I’ll tell him you weren’t a smart-ass. I’ll tell him you appreciate somebody looking out for your interests.”

  I form an E chord at the top of the Gibson’s neck and start back in on “The Wild Side of Life,” running the opening notes up the treble strings.

  When I look back up, Wiley is still standing there. There are a series of dates tattooed along each of his lats. No one knows what they represent. Wiley is doing back-to-back nickels for assault-and-battery and breaking-and-entering.

  “Jimmy Heap cut the original song. Nobody knows that. Most people only know the Hank Thompson version,” I say.

  Wiley stares down at me, his hands opening and closing by his sides, unsure if he’s being insulted again. “Version of what?”

  “The Wild Side of Life, “you moron, I think, but I keep my silence. Saying my thoughts out loud is a disease I’ve got and no amount of grief or 12-step meetings seems to cure it.

  “Wiley?”

  “What?” he says.

  “Chugging pud for Jody will either put you on the stroll or in a grave at Point Lookout. Jody goes through his own crew like potato chips. Ask for lockup if you got to. Just get away from him.”

  “One of the colored boys ladling peas owes me a big favor. Don’t be surprised if you get something extra in your food tonight,” he says. He walks back to the weight sets, pulling his shirt loose from his back pocket, popping the dust and sweat off his back with it. There’s already a swish to his hips, double nickels or not.

  THE BOYS WITH SERIOUS PROBLEMS are called big stripes. They stay up in the Block, in twenty-three-hour lockdown, along with the snitches who are in there for their own protection. Jody Prejean doesn’t qualify as a big stripe. He’s intelligent and has the manners of a dapper businessman, the kind of guy who runs a beer distributorship or a vending machine company. His clothes are pressed by his favorite punk; another punk shampoos and clips his hair once a week. His cowboy boots get picked up at his bunk every night. Before sunup they’re back under his bunk, their tips spit-shined into mirrors.

  His two-deck bunk is in a board-plank alcove, down by the cage-wire that separates us from the night screw who reads paperback westerns at a table under a naked light bulb until sunup. On the wall above Jody’s bunk is a hand-brocaded tapestry that reads: “Every knee to me shall bend.” I lean against Jody’s doorjamb and look at nothing in particular. Jody is sitting on the edge of his bunk, playing chess with a stack of bread dough from Shreveport named Butterbean Simmons. Butterbean talks with a lisp and is always powdered with sunburn. He has spent most of his life in children’s shelters and reformatories. When he was nineteen, his grandmother tried to whip him with a switch. Butterbean threw a refrigerator on top of her, then tossed her and the refrigerator down a staircase.

  It takes Jody a long time to look up from his game. His dark hair is sun-bleached on the tips and wet-combed on his neck. His cheeks are slightly sunken, his skin as pale as a consumptive’s. “Want something, Arlen?” he says.

  How do you survive in jail? You don’t show fear, but you don’t ever pretend you’re something you’re not. “I do my own time, Jody. I don’t spit in anybody’s soup.”

  “Know what Arlen is talking about?” Jody asks Butterbean.

  Butterbean grins good-naturedly, his eyes disappearing into slits. “I think so,” he replies.

  “So tell me,” Jody says.

  “I ain’t sure,” Butterbean says.

  Jody laughs under his breath, his eyes on me, like only he and I are on the same intellectual plane. “Sit down. Here, next to me. Come on, I won’t hurt you,” he says. “You were a club fighter, Arlen. You’ll add a lot of class to the card.”

  “No thanks.”

  “I can sweeten the pot. A touch of China white, maybe. I can make it happen.”

  “I’m staying clean this time.”

  “We’re all pulling for you on that. Where’s your guitar?”

  “In the cage.”

  “A Gibson, that’s one of them good ones, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t mess with me, Jody.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. Your move, Butterbean,” he says.

  I BUTCHER CHICKENS AND LIVESTOCK with a colored half-trusty by the name of Hogman. He has bristles on his head instead of hair, and eyes like lumps of coal. They contain neither heat nor joy, and have the lifeless quality of fuel that’s been used up in a fire. His forearms are scrolled with scars like flattened gray worms from old knife beefs. He owns a mariachi twelve-string guitar, and wraps banjo strings on the treble pegs because he says they give his music “shine.” Some days he works in the kitchen and delivers rice and red beans and water cans to the crews in the fields. While we’re chopping up meat on a big wood block that provides the only color inside the gloom where we work, he sings a song he wrote on the backs of his eyelids when he was still a young stiff and did three days in the sweat box for sassing a hack:

  My Bayou Caney woman run off wit’ a downtown man,

  She left my heart is in a paper bag at the bottom of our garbage can.

  But I ain’t grieving ‘cause she headed down the road,

  I just don’t understand why she had to take my V-8 Ford.

  “You’re a jewel, Hogman,” I say.

  “Lot of womens tell me that,” he replies. “Was you really at Guadalcanal?”

  “Yeah, I was sixteen. I was at Iwo in ‘45.”

  “You got wounded in the war?”

  “Not a scratch.”

  “Then how come you put junk in your arm?”

  “It’s medicine, no different than people going to a drug store.” I try to hold my eyes on his, but I can’t do it. Like many lifers, Hogman enjoys a strange kind of freedom; he’s already lost everything he ever had, so no one has power over him. That means he doesn’t have to be polite when somebody tries to jerk his crank and sell the kind of doodah in here that passes for philosophy.

  “You was struck by lightning, though? That’s how you got that white streak in your hair and the quiver in your voice.”

  “That’s what my folks said. I don’t remember much of it. I was playing baseball, with spikes on, and the grass was wet from the rain. Everything lit up, then I was on the ground and my spikes were blown off my feet, and my socks were smoking.”

  “Know what you are
, Arlen? A purist. That’s another word for hardhead. You t’ink you can go your own way, wrap yourself in your own space, listen to your own riffs. Jody Prejean has got your name on the corkboard for the t’ree-rounders.”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “Jody put your name up there on the fight card. You going against Wiley Boone. You cain’t tell a man like Jody to kiss your ass and just walk away.”

  “Jody is a gas bag,” I say, feeling the words clot in my windpipe.

  “He’ll break your thumbs. He’ll get somebody to pour Drano down your t’roat. You can ax for segregation up in the Block, but he’s got two guys over there can race by your cell and light you up. Jody can walk t’rew walls.”

  “So screw him,” I say.

  “See, that make you be a purist. Playing the same songs over and over again. You got your own church and you the only cat in it. The world ain’t got no place for people like you, Arlen. Not even in here. Your kind is out yonder, under the levee, their mout’s stopped with dirt.”

  Hogman slams his cleaver down on a slab of pig meat, cracking through bone and sinew, covering us both with a viscous pink mist.

  FOR SUPPER THIS EVENING we had rice and greens and fried fish. The warden’s wife is a Christian woman and teaches Bible lessons up in the Block and oversees the kitchens throughout the prison farm. Sometimes through my window I see her walking on the levee with other women. Their dresses are like gossamer, and the shapes of their bodies are backlit against a red sun. The grass on the levee is deep green and ankle-high, and the wind blowing off the Mississippi channels through it at sunset. The sky is piled with yellow and purple clouds, like great curds of smoke rising from a chemical fire. Far across the water are flooded gum and willow trees, bending in the wind, small waves capping against their trunks, marking the place where the world of free people begins. The ladies sometimes clasp hands and study the sunset. I suspect they’re praying or performing a benediction of some kind. I wonder if in their innocence they ever think of the rib cages and skulls buried beneath their feet.