“Yes sir, I sure do. I played at Moses Coldwater’s place tonight.”
“They pay you for that?”
Partner thought of the coins in his pocket. “A little,” he said. “Just a little.”
“Will you give it to me?”
Partner closed his eyes. He’d been planning on turning the money over to his wife, who was sick of his being gone all the time. The money, which they needed, would have helped reconcile Bessie to his frequent absences. “Yes, I will,” he said, loathing himself for his quick capitulation. But this man had alerted him to danger, and Partner realized he owed a debt.
“What else do you have?” the deep voice asked from the branches.
“All I got is me, my wife Bessie, and my guitar,” Partner said.
“Then we gots something to talk about,” his companion rumbled, and with a leap descended from the tree. The big man landed lightly on his feet with Partner’s guitar held by the handle on the case.
Partner made an involuntary gesture toward the guitar, but the man suddenly seemed larger than ever, as if he’d puffed up like a snake. Partner’s hand fell back to his side.
“Let’s keep walking,” the man said, and they went back to the road.
The stranger seemed to glide between the rows of cotton until he reached the rutted track. Partner stumbled and sweated behind him. The sound of the motor had retreated to a safe distance, and Partner could just see the taillights across the fields.
The two turned again to the east, Partner plodding behind the man. He tried to think of a good side to this strange night. The playing had gone well, better than ever. He had a deep longing to try his luck in Chicago, but after tonight’s scare, Partner didn’t have the courage to imagine he’d ever make it that far. He should forget Chicago, and concentrate on being grateful that he hadn’t gotten lynched or dragged behind the truck. Just being alive was a sweet relief. And since they were walking in the general direction of the house he shared with Bessie, he’d be home soon in her familiar presence. He respected her for the hard worker and fine cook she was. On this particular night, he longed for her more than he had in many previous months.
But before he could reach home, he had to pass through the crossroads.
Everyone knew what happened at crossroads—especially one like this, one with graves around it. Partner didn’t know anyone who remembered who was buried here, or why the graveyard was located out in the middle of nothing, but there were twelve headstones marking the earth. Theron Dale’s father had left the headstones standing and instructed one of his hands to clean away the weeds once or twice a year, which most men would not have done, in Partner’s estimation.
Partner began to shake as he realized he was no longer alone with the big man. A ragged woman sat on one of the tombstones. She was a white woman, but like no white woman he’d ever seen. Her dark hair was loose and long and tangled, and her dress was ripped and torn. Though her flesh shone through, Partner was not the least bit interested in seeing her body. In fact, he averted his eyes. He knew what happened to black men who looked at white women, though he was sure this was not a regular white woman.
“May,” the big black man said. He halted, so Partner did, too, though he couldn’t suppress a shudder. “You out tonight?”
“Yes, Baron,” she answered, in a voice that was somehow sharp and also cracked. “Me and Baby.” Baby stepped out of the high weeds, and Partner gasped in fear. Baby was a huge wolf. Folks didn’t see wolves much any more, though alligators might still be found in the bayous, and every now and then he’d heard a pain’ter scream in the night.
The strange white woman and the ominous black man—Baron, she’d called him—didn’t look at Partner when he made a strangled sound of fear, but Partner figured they’d stop him right quick if he tried to run.
“This man plays the blues,” Baron said.
“I heared him across the fields,” May said. She had a heavy accent, and was for sure some kind of foreigner. Her skeletal hand caressed the head of the wolf, whose eyes glowed when they looked at Partner. Those eyes were orange, a warm color, and yet to Partner they seemed cold and calculating, as if the wolf was wondering how a black man would taste. “What are you going to do with him?” she asked.
“I’m going to change his life,” Baron said. “I’ve started already.”
“Those men were supposed to kill him,” May said casually. “Why did you change everything?”
“His voice would be gone,” Baron said. “My people don’t have enough voices. I got to let him live.”
“But you changed more than his fate,” she said, and for the first time there was some fire in her voice. “Jimmy Bradley was bound to kill a man tonight. Theron won’t be able to stop him. The drink changes Jimmy Bradley. He’s one of mine.”
Baron shrugged. “It don’t have to be this man who dies, this man has a gift. Jimmy can kill someone else.”
She looked to the east, where the truck had gone. “Yes, he can,” she said, and her voice was distant, as if she wasn’t seeing the night-dark fields, but something entirely different. “Partner Washington, do you want to keep your life?”
Partner’s choices had always been simple, he realized, now that he was faced with a more complex problem. On the other hand, what could be simpler than choosing to die or choosing to live?
“Ma’am, you sayin’ someone else gone be killed?” he asked. “That Jimmy Bradley, he gone kill someone tonight?” He couldn’t believe he was daring to address her, but there was no other way to find out what she was offering.
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” Her accent was heavy, but he understood her clearly.
“Bessie?” he asked timidly.
After a moment, during which she again seemed to be looking through time instead of the night, the ragged white woman shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not Bessie.”
Reassured, Partner felt a surge of pride that his life was worth saving to this huge black man she called Baron—that his guitar playing and singing made him worthy of being saved, and he dreamed again of singing to men and women who knew something, men and women in big cities, not the rough farmhands and their ignorant women who’d listened to him tonight. That rush of pride made up Partner’s mind for him. “I want my life saved,” he said, his voice stronger.
The two people and the wolf looked at him steadily for what seemed to be a very long time.
“Well, then, it’s a bargain,” the ragged woman said, and across the moonlit fields came a terrible scream followed by the sound of laughter. She rose from the headstone and the wolf pressed his head against her legs, visible through the rips in her skirt. She came closer to Partner, her eyes black holes in the pallor of her face. “You may see the bad side of it before long, but again, you may not,” she told Partner. She turned to the big man. “Baron, good night to you, and happy hunting.”
The baron grinned at her. “And to you also, May,” he said, and he bowed in a courtly way. “I’m much obliged.”
“I know you are,” she said over her shoulder, as she went into the fields, carrying her own darkness with her. The wolf at her side looked over his shoulder, too, his orange eyes taking in Partner for one last malignant moment.
Baron faced Partner and extended the guitar case. “You take this, man,” he said. “You go home tonight, but tomorrow you leave for Chicago.”
“How will I get there?” Partner took the guitar with a rush of relief to have it back in his hand. “I got no money.”
Baron reached into his black coat and handed Partner more money than the blues man had made in six months. Some of this, of course, was Partner’s own pay from the jook, and Partner spared a second to wonder how much of it was from some other poor man’s pocket.
“Will I go with you?” Partner asked, putting the money away.
Baron made a sound that was almost a laugh. “I don’t think you’d like the way I travel,” he said. “You better catch you a train in Tunica.”
&n
bsp; “What do I do now?”
“Keep walkin’ home.” The Baron, as May had done, vanished into the tall cotton.
For a long time, Partner Washington stood at the crossroads, wondering if he’d lost his mind, wondering if he’d been dreaming, wondering if he’d been cursed by some witch woman. He knew down deep that the Baron and May were something other than human, though they’d been wearing human-looking bodies. When his knees stopped shaking, Partner began walking. He’d covered perhaps a mile when he found Isaiah Cleveland and his pumpkin pie woman lying by the side of the road covered in blood. Isaiah wouldn’t be blacking any more eyes, and no one would look at his glowing woman with anything but revulsion and pity.
Partner understood what he’d done and regret lanced the bubble of pride that encased him.
But there was nothing he could do now, he told himself. They were already dead and there was no bringing them back to life. Partner was horrified, but he was even more relieved to be alive, and no amount of guilt could change that relief to self-loathing.
Partner didn’t want anyone showing up at his door the next morning, either, so when he resumed his trek homeward he dragged the guitar case behind him to erase his tracks. When his muscles refused to do that any longer, he shuffled his feet. After half a mile, he left the road and picked his way through the fields very carefully, determined not to leave a clear path to his door.
Bessie deserved better than that.
His wife woke up when he came in the door.
“You do good tonight?” she mumbled.
“Yeah, they loved it,” he said, his voice as hushed as hers. “I made some money. I got to go work in the mornin’, I’ll leave it on the table.”
“Oh, good,” she said, already drifting off into sleep.
Since he knew he would be leaving her in the morning, he could only be thankful they didn’t have children. Partner was afraid that he would have abandoned children even as he was planning to abandon Bessie. She was a good woman who deserved better treatment, and he knew it; but he’d been offered a temptation he couldn’t resist.
He slept a little in the bed beside her, rolling down easily into the dip in the middle he’d shared with her for five years. But mostly Partner fluttered in and out of consciousness as he thought about what he had to do the next day, and the craving to be heard throbbed in his blood, warring with his guilt over his wife. Once, when he woke, he heard the rain falling, and he knew his tracks were washed away. He slept a little better after that.
The sun rose on a clear, hot day. Partner washed his face, put back on his only suit, and left some money on the bare plank table while Bessie still slept. He passed out his front door for the last time and walked to Tunica, the Sears guitar once again banging against his leg. He turned his face away from the south, where the bodies of Isaiah and his woman were surely still laying by the side of the road, and where the live oak surely still stood in the middle of the fields. He wondered, with a shudder, where the Baron and May and the wolf were. He figured no one could see them in daylight, and he wondered how they’d come to be the way they were, and how they’d appeared to him.
But in his excitement, he didn’t wonder too long.
He had enough money for the train trip to Chicago, and enough to support himself for a month after he got there. He spent that time walking around the city, at first aghast and amazed. But then the fever gripped him again, and he found the blues clubs. He showed up at one or the other with his guitar every night, until his face became known. He stuck around after hours to play with the musicians who didn’t want to go home. When they’d seen his worth, he got a chance to play on a stage.
After three years, Partner Washington became one of the greatest blues men in Chicago. He played every night, and women showed up at his door with smiles on their faces, ready to party. None of them were as good as Bessie, but he tried not to think about her, and after a while he succeeded very well. He still had nightmares about Isaiah and the pumpkin pie woman, but after a year or two, the awful memories faded.
From time to time, in some dive where the cigarette smoke hung thick in the air and the people were packed in like cotton in the boll, Partner would glimpse a pair of eyes in the crowd. He never stopped playing when he saw those gleaming eyes—nothing would make him do that—but he forced himself to look down at the floor so his gaze wouldn’t mesh with those eyes, either. He was afraid if he met that gaze full-on, something awful would happen to him … and he’d have a flash of two bodies, torn and bloody by the side of the road. He met some other black people who practiced a curious religion he’d never heard of and began to understand a little more about the Baron.
After a few years of playing around Chicago. Partner began travelling. He went to the big cities, and to the smaller cities, wherever there was a jook joint that would pay him. The pay got as good as it would get for a black blues man; enough to keep Partner in clothes and smokes and women, and the occasional evening of good eating and bad drinking … though Partner was never a big drinker, after he realized he saw those shining eyes more often if he was hitting the bottle.
Once, in Cincinnati, he glimpsed the Baron on the other side of the street. The tall dark man, his top hat set at a rakish angle, was talking to a skinny boy no more than eighteen. The boy carried a clarinet case, and he looked hungry . as hungry as Partner had once been.
But the Baron didn’t look Partner’s way, and Partner sure didn’t call out to him.
A week after that, while Partner was standing on the sidewalk in front of his hotel in New York City talking to a drummer everyone called the Greek, he caught a flutter of white out of the corner of his eye. Partner swiveled to get a better look, while the Greek made a curious sign with his hand. If he’d really glimpsed May, she’d whisked around the corner. He was relieved she hadn’t spoken to him. He didn’t know if she was a madwoman or a goddess, and he didn’t want to get close enough to find out.
“What’s that you did with your hand?” he asked the Greek.
“Sign against evil,” the olive-skinned drummer said. “My mama taught me.”
Partner almost asked the Greek what he had seen, but then, as if they’d agreed out loud, he and the drummer turned and went into the hotel.
The next night as Partner poured out his soul on the tiny stage of a dive in Harlem, he thought he saw May’s wolf tracking close to the walls. Partner shut his eyes and played on.
He couldn’t stop himself from realizing that they were getting bolder.
From that time on, he saw the frightening figures frequently.
He began to play and sing with his eyes shut. Instead of “Partner,” he was called “Shutter.” About a year after he became known as Shutter Washington, he had an unexpected conversation with two white men.
Most often, conversations with white men led to no good consequences. Now in his late thirties, Partner was adept in keeping to his world, and his world was black. Some white people, like the Greek, loved the blues; but Partner seldom spoke to those fans impressed enough to try to get to know him. As “Shutter,” he didn’t even have to see them.
These two white men wouldn’t go away without being seen, though. They stayed in the club after it emptied, and when Shutter was packing away his guitar (one much finer than the Sears instrument), he felt them approach like wild dogs sniffing around something tasty and easy to kill.
They introduced themselves as Jim and Nathan Lowe and said they owned a record company. Shutter nodded heavily. He’d heard of them. They’d recorded Screamin’ Odessa and James Gray, two other long-time blues performers and acquaintances of Shutter’s.
“I know who you are,” Shutter said. “You gentlemen want a drink?” He figured he might as well settle in, because this was a conversation that was going to take place sooner rather than later. This was the talk he’d been waiting for. Something in him jumped and wriggled with delight, but something else warned that he’d be damned if he’d show these men any hint of pleasure or excit
ement.
Both the Lowes agreed to a drink, and when they were sipping the whiskey he brought from the bar, Shutter said, “You want to talk to me, talk.”
“We want to record you,” Nathan said. “We think you’re a big influence on the blues, and we think you deserve to be recognized.”
Shutter felt the corners of his mouth turn down, as if he was considering what they were saying. “What you offering?” he asked, and after an hour of discussion the deal was hammered out.
No one he’d met in his travels knew who Shutter really was. They’d never known him as Ernest, or even Partner. They’d never known he worked in the fields once upon a time. After the white men left, there was no one Shutter could think of who would really appreciate the enormity of what he’d just been offered.
Of course, no one knew that he’d sacrificed the lives of two other people to get this chance, either.
Shutter made his record. He got to see the appreciation, the excitement, on the faces of the other musicians, on the faces of the men who worked in the recording studio. He got to work on his songs and make them sound good, and those songs would ensure he was remembered forever. He knew it, just as surely as he knew his run of luck would wind down soon.
Three weeks after his recording sessions, Shutter was walking home from a jook at three in the morning. He had his guitar with him, as he always did, and he almost dropped it when a tall man stepped out of an alley as Shutter passed.
Shutter jumped with fright, but then his startled eyes told him that despite the top hat, this was not the same man he’d talked to in the fields. This man had a broader face, was altogether bigger.
“What you want?” he asked. Tension made his voice hard and even.
“You know what I want,” the big man said. “It’s time to pay the bill for my services.”
“You didn’t talk about a bill when I last saw you, but you’re not the same man either,” Shutter said. He put the guitar down carefully in case he had to fight. He tried to pull his knife out of his pocket without the big man noticing.
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