Jesus Out to Sea

by James Lee Burke

  But that night in the Arkansas Delta, with the dancers shaking the whole building, it was like we were young again, unmarked by death, and the earth was green and so was the country and wonderful things were about to happen for all of us. We didn’t take a break for two hours. When Eddy Ray ripped out Albert Ammons’s “Swanee River Boogie” on the piano, the place went zonk. Then we kicked it up into E-major overdrive with Hank’s “Lovesick Blues” and Red Foley’s “Tennessee Saturday Night,” Eddy Ray and Kitty Lamar sharing the vocals. I got to admit it, the voices of those two could have started a new religion.

  The snow stopped and a big brown moon came up over the hills, just as Guess Who walked in. You got it. The Greaser himself, along with Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee, all three of them decked out in sport coats, two-tone shoes, and slacks with knife-edged creases, their open-neck print shirts crisp and right out of the box. They sat at a front-row table and ordered long-neck beers and French-fried potatoes cooked in chicken fat. In less than two minutes half the women in the place were jiggling and turning around in their chairs like they’d just been fed horse laxative.

  “What’s he doing here?” Eddy Ray said.

  Duh, I thought. But all I said was, “He’s probably just tagging along with Jerry Lee and Carl. Sure is a nice night, isn’t it?”

  Then Kitty Lamar came back from the ladies’ can and said, her eyes full of pure blue innocence, as though she had no idea the Greaser was going to be there: “Look, all the fellows from Sun Records are here. Are you gonna introduce them, Eddy Ray?”

  Eddy Ray looked through the side window at the moon. The hills were sparkling with snow, the sky black and bursting with stars. “I haven’t given real thought to it,” he said. “Maybe you should introduce them, Kitty Lamar. Maybe you could sing a duet. Or maybe even do a three-or a foursome.”

  “How’d you like to get your face slapped?” she replied, chewing gum, rolling her eyes.

  Eddy Ray pulled the mike loose from the stand, kicking a lot of dirty electronic feedback into the speaker system, like fingernails raking down a blackboard. His cheeks were flushed with color that had the irregular shape of fire, his eyes dark in a way I had not seen them before. He asked Carl and Jerry Lee and the Greaser to stand up, then he paused, as though he couldn’t find the proper words to say. The whole joint was as quiet as a church house. I could feel sweat breaking on my forehead, because I knew the pain Eddy Ray was experiencing, and I knew the memories from the war that lived in his dreams, and I’d always believed part of him died in that prisoner-of-war camp south of the Yalu. I believed Eddy Ray carried a stone bruise in his heart, and if he felt he had been betrayed by the people he loved, he was capable of doing bad things, maybe not to others, but certainly to Eddy Ray. It wasn’t coincidence that he and Johnny Ace had been pals.

  The floor lights on the stage were wrapped with amber and yellow cellophane, but they seemed to burn red circles into my eyes. Jerry Lee and Carl were starting to look uncomfortable and the crowd was, too, like something really embarrassing was about to happen.

  “Say something!” Kitty Lamar whispered.

  But Eddy Ray just kept staring at the Greaser, like he was seeing his past or himself or maybe our whole generation before we went to war.

  The Greaser glanced sideways, scratched at a place under one eye, then started to sit down.

  “These guys are not only great musicians,” Eddy Ray began, “they’re three of the best guys I ever knew. It’s an honor to have them here tonight. It’s an honor to be their friend. They make me proud to be an American.”

  I thought the yelling and table-pounding from the crowd was going to blow the glass out of the windows.

  The rest of the night should have been wonderful. It wasn’t. Not for me, at least. In my lifetime I guess I’ve known every kind of person there is—brig rats, pimps, drug pushers, disk jockeys on the take, promoters who split for Vegas with the cashbox, and, my favorite bunch, scrubbed-down ministers who preach Jesus on Sunday and Wednesday night and the rest of the week screw teenage girls in their congregations. But none of them can hold a candle to a friend who stabs you in the back. That kind of person not only steals your faith in your fellow human beings, he makes you resent yourself.

  We had taken a break about 11:30 p.m., figuring to do one more set before we called it a night, and I hadn’t seen the Greaser in the last hour or so. I glanced out the back window at a gazebo that was perched up on a little hill above a picnic area. I couldn’t believe what I saw.

  Silhouetted against the moon, the Greaser and Kitty Lamar were both standing inside the gazebo, the Greaser bending down toward her so their foreheads were almost touching, her ta-tas standing up inside her cowboy shirt like the upturned noses on a pair of puppy dogs. I felt sick inside. No, that doesn’t describe it. I wanted to tear the Greaser apart and personally drive Kitty Lamar down to the bus depot and throw her and her puppy dogs on the first westbound headed for Big D and all points south.

  But that would have been easy compared to what I knew I had to do. I’d kept my silence ever since we’d first met Kitty Lamar at the roadhouse in Vinton. Now I was the guy who’d have to drive the nail through Eddy Ray’s heart. Or at least that was what I told myself.

  I waited until he and I were alone, at breakfast, the next day, in a restaurant with big windows that looked out on the Mississippi River. Eddy Ray was fanging down a plate of fried eggs, ham, grits, and toast and jam, hammering ketchup all over it, his face rested and happy.

  “I got to tell you something,” I said.

  “It’s not necessary. Eat up.”

  “You don’t even know what I was gonna say.”

  “You’re worried about the Greaser. I had a talk with him last night. Kitty Lamar and him are just friends.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “You got a hearing problem?”

  I stared out the window at a tug pushing a long barge piled with shale. The barge had gotten loose and was scraping against the pilings of the bridge. The port side had tipped upward against a piling and gray mounds of shale were sliding through the starboard deck rail, sinking as rapidly as concrete in the current.

  “I saw her about five years back in a Port Arthur cathouse,” I said. Eddy Ray studied the barge out on the river, chewing his food, his hair freshly barbered, razor-edged on the neck. “What were you doing there?”

  “I got a few character defects myself. Least I don’t go around claiming to be something I’m not,” I said.

  “Kitty Lamar already told me about it. So quit fretting your mind and your bowels over other people’s business. I swear, R.B., I think you own stock in an aspirin company.”

  “I’ve heard her talking to him on the phone, Eddy Ray. They’re taking you over the hurdles. I saw them in the gazebo last night, too. They looked like Siamese twins joined at the forehead.”

  This time he couldn’t slip the punch and I saw the light go out of his eyes. He cut a small piece of ham and put it in his mouth. “I guess that puts a different twist on it,” he said.

  I hated myself for what I had just done.

  Could it get worse? When we got back to the motel, the desk clerk told Eddy Ray to call the long-distance operator.

  “Nobody answered the phone in my room?” Eddy Ray said.

  “No, sir,” the clerk said.

  Kitty Lamar was supposed to have met us in the diner but hadn’t shown up. Evidently she hadn’t hung around the room, either. Eddy Ray got the callback operator on the line and she connected him with our agent in Houston, a guy who for biblical example had probably modeled his life on Pontius Pilate’s.

  The agency had booked us in a half-dozen places in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, but as of that morning all our dates were canceled.

  “What gives, Leon?” Eddy Ray said into the receiver. He was standing by the bed, puffing on a Lucky Strike while he listened, his back curved like a question mark. “Investigation? Into what? Listen to me, Leon, we didn’t see an
ything, we don’t know anything, we didn’t do anything. I’ve got a total of thirty-seven dollars and forty cents to get us back to Houston. The air is showing through my tires. Are you listen—”

  The line went dead. Eddy Ray removed the receiver from his ear, stared at it, and replaced it in the telephone cradle. “Do you have to be bald-headed to get a Fuller Brush route?” he said.

  “Leon sold us out for another band?” I said.

  “He says some Houston cops want to question us about Johnny’s death.”

  “Why us?”

  “They wonder if we saw a certain guy in Johnny’s dressing room.” Then Eddy Ray mentioned the name of a notorious promoter in the music business, a Mobbed-up guy who operated on both sides of the color line and scared both black and white people cross-eyed.

  I felt my mouth go dry, my stomach constrict, the kind of feeling I used to get when I’d hear the first sounds of small-arms fire, like strings of Chinese firecrackers popping. “We’ll go to California. You know what they say, ‘Nobody dies in Santa Barbara.’ How far is Needles from Santa Barbara?”

  But it wasn’t funny. We’d had it and we both knew it.

  The music business was corrupt back then. Disk jockeys took payola and people who got to the top were either humps for the Mafia or signed deals that left them with chump change. A black guy in Jennings, Louisiana, put out an R&B record that sold a million copies and netted him twenty-five dollars. Even the Greaser paid his manager fifty-one percent of his earnings.

  When you got in trouble with the wrong people, you took up bottleneck guitar on a street corner or punched out your eyes and joined the Five Blind Boys. In our case, the wrong people was Cool Daddy Hopkins, a six-foot-six mulatto who wore three-piece suits, a yellow fedora, and popped matches on his thumbnail to light his Picayune cigarettes. He not only carried a nickel-plated, pearl-handled derringer, he shot and killed a white man in Mississippi with it and wasn’t lynched or even prosecuted.

  Northerners always thought the South was segregated. Wrong. Money was money, sex was sex, music was music, and color didn’t have squat to do with any of it. Some people said Johnny Ace might have gotten in Cool Daddy’s face one too many times. I didn’t know if that was true or not. But when we got back from our gig in Arkansas, the Houston cops questioned us about Johnny and his relationship with Cool Daddy. Our names ended up on the front page of two Houston newspapers. In the world of R&B and rockabilly music, we had become the certifiable stink on shit.

  Kitty Lamar and Eddy Ray had called it quits, even though you could tell neither one wanted to let go of the other. I wanted to blame the Greaser for busting them up, but I couldn’t forget the fact it was me who told Eddy Ray that Kitty Lamar was probably bumping uglies behind his back.

  That’s what I did for the guy who had carried me three hundred yards across a corrugated rice paddy while bullets from Chinese burp guns popped snow around his bootlaces.

  We played at a carnival up in Conroe and at a dance in Bandera and didn’t clear enough to cover gas and hamburgers and the tire we blew out on a cattle guard. The boys in the band started to drift off, one by one, and join other groups. I couldn’t blame them. We’d been jinxed six ways from breakfast ever since Johnny had died. Finally, Eddy Ray and I admitted defeat ourselves and got jobs as roughnecks on a drilling rig outside Galveston.

  He wrote one song he called “The Oil Driller’s Lament.” We recorded it on a 45 rpm that cost us four dollars in a recording booth on the old Galveston amusement pier, with Eddy Ray singing and me backing him up on harmonica and Dobro. This is how it went:

  Ten days on, five days off,

  I guess my blood is crude oil now,

  Don’t give your heart to a gin-fizz kitty

  From the back streets of Texas City,

  ’Cause you won’t ever lose

  Them mean ole roughnecking blues.

  It was a song about faded love and betrayal and honky-tonk angels and rolling down lost highways that led to jail, despair, and death. Some of the lyrics in it even scared me. It was sunset when we made the recording, and the sky was green, the breakers sliding through the pilings under the pier, the air smelling of salt and fried shrimp and raindrops that made rings in the swells. A lot of country singers fake the sadness in their songs, but when Eddy Ray sang this one, it was real and it broke my heart.

  “What you studying on?” he asked.

  “I messed you up with Kitty Lamar,” I said.

  He spun our four-dollar recording on his index finger, his face handsome and composed in the wind off the Gulf. “Kitty Lamar loved another guy. It ain’t her fault. That’s the way love is. It picks you, you don’t pick it,” he said.

  The sun was the dull red color of heated iron when it first comes out of the forge. I could feel the pier creak with the incoming tide and smell the salty bitterness of dried fish blood in the boards. I watched the sun setting on the horizon and the thunderheads gathering in the south, and I felt like the era we lived in and had always taken for granted was ending, but I couldn’t explain why.

  “Hey, you and me whipped the Chinese army, R.B. They just haven’t figured that out yet,” he said. “There’s worse things than being an oil-drilling man. I’m extremely copacetic on this.”

  I mentioned to you that we were jinxed six ways from breakfast? The next morning, with no blowout preventer on the wellhead, our drill bit punched into a pay sand at a depth where nobody expected to find oil. The pipe geysered out of the hole under thousands of pounds of pressure, clanging like a freight train through the superstructure. Then a spark jumped off a steel surface, and a torrent of flaming gas and oil ballooned through the derrick and melted the whole rig as though the spars were made of licorice.

  Eddy Ray and I sat on the deck of a rescue boat, our hair singed, our clothes peppered with burn holes, and watched the fire boil under the water.

  “Does Cool Daddy Hopkins still have his office in the Fifth Ward?” he said.

  Houston’s black district was its own universe. It was even patrolled by black cops, although the department gave them only dilapidated squad cars, usually with big dents in them, to drive around in. There were bars and barbecue joints and shoeshine stands on almost every street corner. You could hear music from radios, jukeboxes, church houses, old black guys jamming under an oak tree. Dig this. In the black district there were no record stores. Both 78 and 45 rpm records were always sold at beauty and barbershops. The owners hung loudspeakers outside their business to advertise whatever new records had just come in, so all day long the street was filled with the sounds of Gate-mouth Brown, Laverne Baker, and the Platters.

  Cool Daddy Hopkins had his office in the back of a barbershop, where he sat in front of a big fan, a chili dog covered with melted cheese and a bottle of Mexican beer on his desk. Cool Daddy had gold skin with moles on it that looked like drops of mud that had been splashed on him from a passing car. His coat and vest hung on the back of a chair, along with a .32 derringer stuffed in a shoulder holster. His silk shirt was the color of tin, pools of sweat looped under his pits.

  He kept eating, sipping from his beer, his eyes never blinking while he listened to what Eddy Ray had to say. “So you think I’m the guy keeping you off the circuit?” he said.

  “I’m not here to make accusations. I’m just laying it out for you, Cool Daddy. Johnny was my friend, but I don’t know what happened in that dressing room,” Eddy Ray said. “We told the cops that. Now we’re telling you. We’re eighty-sixed and shit-canned all over the South.”

  “Sorry to hear that. But life’s a bitch, then you die, right?” Cool Daddy said. He reached into a cooler by his foot and slipped a beer out of ice that had been pounded and crushed in a cloth bag with a rolling pin. He made a ring with his thumb and index finger and wiped the ice off the bottle onto the floor. There were a couple of glasses turned top-down on a shelf above his head. I thought he was going to offer us a beer to split. Instead, he cracked off the cap with a bottle opener
and drank from the neck.

  “Johnny and me was both in the United States Navy, ammunition loaders, can you dig that?” he said. “You know who was loading right next to me? Harry Belafonte. That’s no jive, man.”

  But Eddy Ray wasn’t listening. “Our agent says he doesn’t want trouble with you. So if you’re not the problem, why is Leon telling us that?” Eddy Ray said.

  The sunlight through the window seemed to grow warmer, more harsh, in spite of the fan, the air suddenly close and full of dust particles and the smell of hair tonic from the shop up front. “’Cause Leon is like most crackers. If he ain’t got a colored man to blame for his grief, he got to look in the mirror and put it on his own sorry-ass self.”

  Eddy Ray leaned forward in his chair and stuck an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth, fishing in his jeans for a match. His hair was uncut, wet and combed straight back, curly on the back of his neck. “Give us another R&B gig.”

  “The train went through the station and you ain’t caught it, man. Wish it’d been different, but it ain’t,” Cool Daddy said.

  Eddy Ray found a book of matches but lost his concentration and put them away. He took the Lucky Strike out of his mouth and brushed at his nose with the back of his wrist. “I’ll put it another way. If you cain’t see your way to hep us, just stay the hell out of our sandbox,” he said.

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” Cool Daddy replied, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

  “Get what?”

  “I ain’t the power in this game. Who you think screwed you on the circuit, boy? Who got that kind of power?”

  Eddy Ray’s eyes blinked, but not in time to hide the glow of recognition in them.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Cool Daddy said. “The word is your lady friend been bad-mouthing you with certain people at Sun Record Company. The word is they don’t like you, motherfucker, particularly a certain boy from Mis-’sippi don’t like you.”