Delta Blues Page 9

  My J-50 Gibson has a mahogany back and sides and a spruce soundboard.

  The bass notes rumble through the soundboard like apples tumbling down a chute, and at the same time you can hear every touch of the plectrum on the treble strings. The older the J-50 gets, the deeper its resonance. Floyd Tillman signed my soundboard in a Beaumont beer joint. Brownie McGhee and Furry Lewis and Ike Turner signed it in Memphis. Texas Ruby and Curley Fox signed it at Cook’s Hoedown in Houston. Leon McAuliffe signed it under the stars at an outdoor dance on the Indian reservation in the Winding Stairs Mountains of East Oklahoma.

  My only problem is it takes me ten years minimum to get a piece down right. I started working on Hank Snow’s “Movin’ On” in 1950. Eleven years later I saw him play. Know how he created that special sound and rhythm that nobody can imitate? His rhythm guitarist used conventional tuning and stayed in C sharp. But Hank tuned his strings way down, then put a capo on the first fret and did all his runs in D sharp. Is that weird or what? What the rest of the band was playing in was beyond me. The point is Hank broke all the rules and, like the guy who wrote “The Wild Side of Life,” created one of the greatest country songs ever written.

  My bunk is military tuck, my snacks or “scarf” and my cigarette papers and my can of Bugler tobacco and my cigarette-rolling machine and my magazines all squared away on my shelf. The big window fan at the end of the building keeps our dorm cool until morning. After a shower and supper and a change into clean state blues, I like to sit on my bunk and play my Gibson. Nobody bothers me, except maybe to ask for a particular song. If you’re a “solid” con, nobody usually bothers your stuff. But a musical instrument in here can be a temptation. Just before lights go out at nine o’clock, I always give my Gibson to the night screw, who locks it in the cage with him, along with the soda pop and candy bars and potato chips and Fritos for the canteen.

  Tonight is different.

  “Cain’t do it no more, Arlen,” he says. He has a narrow face and sun-browned arms that are pocked with cancerous skin tissue. One of his eyes is slightly lower than the other, which makes you think you’re looking at separate people.

  “That kind of jams me up, boss,” I say.

  “It ain’t coincidence you’re down on the ‘bitch, boy. If you followed a few rules, maybe that wouldn’t be the case.”

  “Don’t do this to me, Cap.”

  “Don’t degrade yourself. You’re con-wise and a smart man, Arlen. Adjust, that’s the key. You hearing me on this?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Jody got to you, you lying bastard, a voice inside me says.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Not a thing, boss,” I reply, lowering my eyes, folding my arms across my chest.

  “By the way, you’re not working in the slaughter house no more. At bell count tomorrow morning, you’re on the truck.”

  AT SUNRISE I wrap my Gibson in a blanket, fold down the ends along the back and the soundboard, and tie twine around the nut, the base of the neck, and across the sound hole. I put my Gibson under my bunk and look at it for a long time, then go in for breakfast. We have grits, sausage, white bread, and black coffee, but it’s hard for me to eat. Just before bell count on the yard, I look at my Gibson one more time. The morning is already hot, the wind down, clouds of gnats and mosquitoes rising from the willow trees along the river. Three U.S. Army surplus trucks clang across a cattle guard and turn into the yard. In the distance I can see the mounted gunbulls in the corn and soybean and sweet potato fields waiting on our arrival, the water cans set in the shadows of the gum trees, the sun coming up hard, like a molten ball lifted with tongs from a furnace. Some of the gunbulls are actually trusty inmates. They have to serve the time of any guy who escapes while under their charge.

  At noon I see Butterbean Simmons hoeing in the row next to me, eyeballing me sideways, his long-sleeve shirt buttoned at the wrists and throat, his armpits looped with sweat. “The money is on Wiley in the three-rounder,” he says. “I’m betting on you, though. You’ll rip him up.”

  The soil is loamy, cinnamon-colored, and smells of pesticide and night damp. “Tell Jody he touches my box, we take everything to a higher level,” I reply, my hoe rising and falling in front of me, notching weeds out of the row.

  “Man, I’m trying to be your friend.”

  My oldest enemy is my anger. It seems to have no origins and blooms in my chest and sends a rush of bile into my throat. “Lose the guise, ‘Bean, and while you’re at it, get the fuck away from me.”

  The night screw had said I went down on the ‘bitch, as in “habitual,” as in three jolts in the same state. When you carry the ‘bitch with you into a parole hearing, there’s a good chance you’re not even going out max time; there’s a good chance you’re going to stack eternity in the inmate cemetery at Point Lookout. Why am I working on my third jolt? I’d like to say it’s skag. But my dreams aren’t just about white horses pounding across a field under a blue-black sky forked with lightning. My dreams tell me about the other people who live inside my skin, people who have done things that don’t seem connected to the man I think I am.

  By quitting time, I’m wired to the eyes. After we offload from the trucks, everyone bursts into the dorm, kicking off work shoes, stripping off their clothes, heading for the shower with towels and bars of soap. I head for my bunk.

  My Gibson is still there, but not under it, on it, like a wrapped mummy stretched out on the sheet. I put it back under my bunk, undress, and go into the shower. Wiley Boone stands under one of the pipes, a stream of cold water dividing on his scalp, his body running with soap, braiding in a stream off his phallus.

  “Who moved my box, Wiley?” I ask.

  “Guys cleaning up? The count screw?” he replies. “Maybe it was an earthquake. Yeah, that’s probably it.”

  “You’re planning to lay down in the three-rounder, aren’t you?”

  “I’m gonna hand you your ass is what I’m gonna do,” he says.

  “Wrong. I’m going to hold you up. And while I’m holding you up, I’m going to cut you to pieces. Then I’m going to foul you. In the balls, so hard your eyes are going to pop out. So you’re going to lose every way possible, Wiley. When you figure all that out, go tell it to Jody.”

  “You got swastika tats on your arms, Arlen. Hope nobody wants their ink back. You ever have to give your ink back? Thinking about it makes my pecker shrivel up.”

  The night screw said I was con-wise and smart. After trying to bluff Jody by going at him through Wiley, I had to conclude that the IQ standards in here are pretty low.

  BUT I’D SCREWED UP. When you’re inside, you never let other people know what you’re thinking. You don’t argue, you don’t contend, you don’t let your body language show you’re on to another guy’s schemes. You wrap yourself in a tight ball and do your time. I’d been a club fighter. Our owner took us from town to town and told us when to stand up and when to lie down. That’s how it works, no different than professional wrestling. I’d shot off my mouth to Wiley and tipped him to what I’ll do if Jody tries to make me fight by stealing my guitar. That was dumb.

  Just before lights-out, I go into Jody’s alcove. He’s wearing pajamas instead of skivvies, eating a bowl of blackberry pie and cream with a spoon. “You won’t have any trouble with me. I’ll be on the card and I’ll make it come out any way you want,” I say. My eyes seem to go in and out of focus when I hear my words outside of myself.

  “I’ll give it some thought,” Jody says. “A man disrespects me, he puts me in an embarrassing position, even guys I admire, guys such as yourself.”

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “Wish you hadn’t created this problem for us. You told Wiley I was gonna put him on the stroll? Why’d you do that, Arlen?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  He glances up at the tapestry on the wall, the one that says “Every knee to me shall bend.”

  TUESDAY THE SUN IS A YELLOW FLAME inside the bright sheen of hu
midity that glistens on the fields and trees. The gunbulls try to find shade for themselves and their horses under the water oaks, but there is precious little of it when the sun climbs straight up in the sky. The air is breathless, and blowflies and gnats torment their horses’ eyes and legs. A white guy nicknamed Toad because of the moles on his face collapses at the end of my row and lies in a heap between the soybean plants. It’s the second time he has fallen out. A gunbull tells three colored guys to pick Toad up and lay him on a red-ant hill out in the gum trees. Toad is either a good actor or he’s had sunstroke, because he lies there five minutes before the captain tells the colored guys to put him in the back of the truck.

  I hear Butterbean thudding his hoe in the row next to me, his breath wheezing in his chest, sweat dripping off the end of his nose. He wears a straw hat with the brim slanted downward to create shade on his face and neck. “I didn’t have nothing to do with it, Arlen,” he says.

  “With what?” I say.

  “It.”

  Then I know the price I’m about to pay for going against Jody. In my mind’s eye I see a trusty from the kitchen walking through the unlocked door of the night screw’s cage, the dorm empty, his flat-soled, copper-eyelet prison work shoes echoing down the two rows of bunk beds. I feel the sun boring through the top of my head, my ears filling with the sound of wind inside a conch shell, my lips forming an unspoken word, like a wet bubble on my lips.

  I feel the hoe handle slip from my palms, as though the force of gravity has suddenly become stronger than my hands. I hear the creak of leather behind me, a mounted hack straightening himself in the saddle, pushing himself up in the stirrups. “You gonna fall out on me, Arlen?” he says.

  “No sir, boss.”

  “Then what the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Got to go to the dorm.”

  “You sick?”

  “Got to protect my box, boss.”

  “Pick up your tool, boy. Don’t hurt yourself worsen you already have.”

  When I drop off the back of the truck that evening, I watch everyone else rush inside for showers and supper. I walk up the wood steps into the building and cross through the night screw’s cage, wiping the sweat and dirt off my chest with my balled-up shirt. The dorm is almost totally quiet, everybody’s eyes sliding off my face as I walk toward my bunk. One guy coughs; a couple of other guys head for the showers, walking naked past me, their eyes averted, flip-flops slapping the floor.

  I get down on one knee and pull my guitar from under my bunk. It’s still wrapped in the blanket I tied around its neck and belly, but the twine sags and the lines and shape of the blanket are no longer taut. Inside, I can hear the rattle of wood. The contours of my Gibson now feel like the broken body of a child. I untie the twine from the nut and the bottom of the neck and the belly and peel back the folds of the blanket. The mahogany back and sides and the spruce soundboard have been splintered into kindling; the bridge has torn loose from the soundboard, and the strings are coiled up on themselves and look like a rat’s nest. The neck is broken; the exposed wood, framed by the dark exterior finish, makes me think of bone that has turned yellow inside the earth.

  I sit on the side of my bunk and take my Bugler tobacco can and my cigarette papers and my rolling machine off my shelf and start building a cigarette. No one in the dorm speaks. Gradually they file into the shower, some of them looking back at me, the night screw watching them, then shifting his eyes in my direction. “Better eat up, boy,” he says.

  “Give mine to the cat, boss,” I reply.

  “Say that again.”

  “Don’t pay me no mind, Cap. I ain’t no trouble,” I say.

  A FEW DECKS of Camels or Red Dots (Lucky Strikes) will buy you any kind of shank you want: a pie-wedge of tin or a long shard of window glass wired and taped tightly inside a chunk of broom handle; a toothbrush heated by a cigarette lighter and reshaped around a razor blade; a sharpened nail or the guts of a ballpoint pen mounted on a shoe-polish applicator. Cell house shakedowns probably don’t discover a third of the inventory.

  Molotov cocktails are a different matter. The ingredients are harder to get, and gasoline smells like gasoline, no matter where you hide it. But a guy up in the Block who works in the heavy equipment shed knows how to stash his product where his customer can find it and the hacks can’t. It’s a package deal and his product never fails: a Mason jar of gas, Tide detergent, and paraffin shaved into crumbs on a carrot grater. He even tapes a cotton ignition pad on the cap so all you have to do is wet it down, touch a flame to it, and heave it at your target. There’s no way to get the detergent and the hot paraffin off the skin. I don’t like to think about it. Ever hear the sound of somebody who’s been caught inside a flamethrower? It’s just like a mewing kitten’s. They don’t scream; they just mew inside the heat. You hear it for a long time in your sleep. You hear it sometimes when you’re awake, too.

  Jody comes to my bunk after supper. Some of his crew trail in after him, lighting smokes, staring around the dorm like they’re not part of the conversation but lapping it up like dogs licking a blood spore. “You’re starting to get a little rank, Arlen. You’re not gonna take a shower?” Jody says.

  “I’ll get to it directly. Maybe in the next few days,” I reply.

  “Some of the guys think you ought to do it now.”

  “I think you’re probably right. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.”

  I stub out my cigarette in my butt can and blow the smoke straight out in front of me, not looking at him, the pieces of my destroyed Gibson folded next to me inside my blanket. I pull the corners of the blanket together and tie them in a knot, creating a large sack. I can hear the strings and the broken wood clatter together when I lift the sack and slide it under my bunk.

  “My box is still with me, Jody,” I say. “So is the music of all the people who signed their names on it. Busting it up doesn’t change anything.”

  “You’re as piss-poor at lying as you are playing the guitar, Arlen.”

  “I was at Iwo,” I say, grinning up at him.

  “So what?” he says.

  Truth is, I don’t rightly know myself. I strip naked in front of Jody and his crew and watch them step back from my stink. Then I walk into the shower, turn on the cold water full blast, and lean my forehead against the cinder blocks, my eyes tightly shut.

  WEASEL COMBS is a runner and jigger, or lookout man, for a guy up in the Block who takes grapevine orders and provides free home delivery. Our crew is working a soybean field up by the front of the farm, not far from the main gate and the adjacent compound where the free people live. At noon the flatbed truck from the kitchen arrives, and Hogman and Weasel drop off the bed onto the ground and uncap the stainless steel caldron that contains our red beans and rice. A dented water can full of Kool-Aid sits next to it. Weasel is an alcoholic check writer who always has a startled look on his face, like somebody just slammed a door on his head.

  “How about an extra piece of cornbread, Arlen?” he says.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I say.

  “I got that magazine you wanted. It’s in the cab. I’ll bring it to you when I get finished here.” His eyes stare brightly into mine. His denim shirt is unbuttoned all the way down his chest. His ribs are stenciled against his skin, his waist so narrow his pants are falling off. A big square of salve-stained gauze is taped over an infected burn on his stomach.

  “I could use some reading material. Thanks for bringing that, Weasel,” I reply.

  We eat in a grove of gum and persimmon trees, the sky growing black overhead. Down below the road that traverses the prison farm I can see the clapboard, tin-roofed houses of the free people inside the fence, clothes popping on the wash lines, a colored inmate breaking corn in a washtub for the wife of the head gunbull, kids playing on a swing set, no different than a back-of-town poor-white neighborhood anywhere in the South. The irony is the free people do almost the same kind of time we do, marked by the farm in ways they don’t re
cognize in themselves.

  The hack at the gate sits in a wicker-bottom chair inside a square of hot shade provided by the small shack where he has a desk and a telephone. He’s over seventy and has been riding herd on convicts since he was a teenager. Legend has it that during the 1930s he and his brother would get drunk on corn liquor in the middle of the afternoon, take a nap, then pick out a colored inmate and tell him to start running. People would hear a couple of shots inside the wind, and another sack of fertilizer would go into the levee. His teeth are gone and his skin dotted with liver spots. There’s not a town in Mississippi or Louisiana he can retire to, lest one of his old charges finds him and does things to him no one does to an elderly man.

  I can hear thunder in the south. The wind comes up and trowels great clouds of dust out of the fields, and I feel a solitary raindrop sting my face. Weasel squats down in front of me, his mouth twisted like a knife wound. A copy of Sports Illustrated is rolled in his palm. “There’s a real interesting article here you ought to read,” he says, peeling back the pages with his thumb. “‘Bout boxing and all and some of the shitheads who have spoiled the game.” He slips a beautifully fashioned wood-handled shank out of his bandage and folds the magazine pages around it. He lowers his voice. “It’s hooked on the tip. You want to hear that punk squeal, put it into his guts three times, then bust it off inside. He’ll drown in his own blood.”

  When the truck drives off, Hogman is looking at me from the back of the flatbed, his legs hanging in the dust, his eyes filled with a sad knowledge about the world that is of no value to him and that no one else cares to hear about.

  THE WIND KEEPS GUSTING HARD all afternoon, and lightning ripples silently through the thunderheads, sometimes making a creaking sound, like the sky cannot support its own weight. The air is cool and smells of fish roe and wet leaves and freshly plowed earth and swamp water that is netted with algae and is seldom exposed to full light. The air smells of a tropical jungle on a Pacific island and a foxhole you chop from volcanic soil with an entrenching tool. It smells of the fecund darkness that lies under the grass and mushrooms that can bloom overnight on a freshly dug grave. Again, I feel the gravitational pull of the earth under me, and I have no doubt the voices that whisper in the grass are whispering to me.