Delta Blues

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Delta Blues Page 24

by Carolyn Haines


  “And that’s why Bartholomew went after Akers?”

  I nodded. “I tried to get the gun away from him, but it went off.”

  “Twice?”

  “That’s right. Then Buddy dropped the gun. Kendricks tried to tackle Buddy, but some of the men from the club grabbed him. Then you police got there, and the ambulance. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  Finally Johnson consulted his notes. “One thing confuses me. Kendricks may have been across the room when Bartholomew pulled out the gun, but like you said, somebody screamed, so he looked over. According to him, Buddy aimed the gun at his own forehead. He was planning to commit suicide, not murder.”

  I tried not to change position or my tone of voice. “It would take an awfully self-centered man to kill himself right in public that way.”

  “It seems to me that it takes a self-centered man to be so focused on his music that he didn’t realize his wife was that unhappy.”

  I didn’t respond.

  Johnson said, “Kendricks told me that it was you who pushed the gun toward Akers, and that Buddy was trying to get the gun away from you when it went off the second time, not the other way around.”

  “What does Buddy say?”

  “He says he doesn’t mind doing the time—he said that a lot of good bluesmen have done a stretch or two behind bars.”

  “That sounds like Buddy.” He’d probably milk any jail time he got for the rest of his career.

  “He also said Akers got what was coming to him.”

  “I think he’s right about that. Don’t you?”

  Johnson tried to stare me down, but I had no problem meeting his eyes, and finally he relented. “I guess I do. As for what Kendricks saw …”

  “I’m not a cop, but the first thing any investigator learns is that people lie.”

  “Oh yeah, people lie all the time,” he said wryly. “Funny thing, a gun going off twice in a crowded place like that, and nobody got hit. Both bullets went straight down into the floor.”

  “I guess we were lucky.”

  “I don’t know if Akers feels that way. The doctor tells me he might not ever get his hearing back, what with one shot going off so close to his right ear and the other one next to his left ear.”

  “It must have hurt, too. After the shots, Akers grabbed his head and started screaming, and when he realized he couldn’t hear himself, he screamed even louder.”

  “Didn’t you mention that you’ve investigated claims about hearing loss?”

  “I might have. I’ve had a couple of cases like that. Most people don’t realize how fragile hearing can be.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Even if Akers’ hearing does come back, he’ll probably never hear as well as he did before. I doubt he’ll ever be able to enjoy music the same way.”

  I may not know much about the blues, but I do know how to make a man feel bad.

  14 Kidd Diamond

  Daniel Martine

  WHEN THE BLUES COME OVER YOU they can smack you down like a bitch slap from a tidal wave, or they can creep under your skin like a nasty chigger laying its larvae. Both conspire to break you down, and both eventually will make you bleed. I guess that’s what the Blues is all about … making us bleed. If that’s the case, and I believe it is, down to the unfathomable, murky depths of my sinner’s soul, then at the age of sixty-two, I’m about bled white.

  Kidd Diamond is my name. Playing and living the Blues has always been my game, but not my only pursuit. And yes, that’s the real name given to me at birth by a woman who was no mother and who abandoned me at age ten as cavalierly as she disposed of the many used condoms I saw carelessly strewn about on the floor next to her bed nearly every morning. Addled by drugs, wasting away and spent as only a twenty-something year old heroin-addicted hooker can be, Sadie Diamond went to the store one dreary Clarksdale morning to get some cigarettes and a pint bottle of Ten High to start her day. She never came back. You could say that was the day I received my first bitch slap from the Blues. The first of many.

  And now, all these years later, here I am, back in the Delta, sitting in a dark, lonely hotel room listening to an apocalyptic thunderstorm raging outside and drinking steadily from a bottle of Maker’s Mark, trying desperately to get drunk while waiting for a knock on the door I know is coming. I was finally back home in Clarksdale, Mississippi, staying at the infamous Riverside Hotel less than a mile from where Robert Johnson had allegedly made his pact with the devil at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49. What the hell was I doing here? Why had I come back to the town of my birth? Why indeed? Well, that’s what you’re here to find out, I expect. It’s the Blues we’re talking about, after all.

  Years of despair, self-recrimination and self-loathing, even through all my successes, had precluded me from coming home. Perhaps it was that very despair that made me the artist I had become, and still was, in the eyes of my loyal fans. They were my cocoon, my insulation against the guilt that had driven me from my childhood home of Clarksdale.

  And yet, here I sat, trying desperately to get drunk, waiting for destiny to knock on my door, almost paralyzed by a sense of foreboding, a familiar dread that had followed me for decades. The trepidation was so palpable it crawled under my skin. Like damn chiggers.

  To my horror, I realized what it was. For the first time in decades, I sensed my mother’s presence. The sensation felt real, and unbearably sad.

  I stared at my favorite guitar, reliving some of the glory days on the road playing my sweet, petite “Diamond Lil.” In between bouts of rampant melancholia and still feeling my mother’s presence, I watched Lil, illuminated by an occasional flash of lightning, as she lay peaceably in the plush confines of an open guitar case on the bed. My baby was a 1966 hollow-body Rickenbacker 335 model with two pickups, a vibrato bar I manipulated as expertly as a pimp does his whores, and a fingerboard that fit me like I was born to it.

  Discontinued as a model in 1978, making her all the more precious to me, Lil was all dressed up, ready to thrill, in Fireglow yellow to red hues. She was a damn sight prettier than most of the women I’d slept with in my time and a hell of a lot more forgiving. I’d played many guitars throughout my career, but I always came home to Diamond Lil. No other guitar so profoundly personified the bonding and love I felt when playing the blues. She was as familiar to me as a former lover’s body, where every crevice, contour and secret lay exposed and revealed under my loving, heated stroking. And there were secrets. Just at that moment, however, she looked more like a body in repose in a coffin. A body I recognized. It was Sadie Diamond, my mother, the woman who abandoned me like a junkyard dog.

  That thought struck terror in my heart and I looked down the barrel of the shot glass in my trembling hands. I swallowed the whiskey, savoring its comforting heat as it scalded a path to the pit of my stomach. When I looked up again, Lil was no longer visible in the guitar case. Instead, a specter stared back at me from the case, now a coffin. It was, indeed, my mother. Her eyes bored into me, and instead of the drug and alcohol glaze I remember, they were filled with a despondency so unexpected it brought tears to my eyes.

  Shocked into breathlessness, I dropped the shot glass on the floor and broke out in a cold, clammy sweat—the kind that plasters your shirt to the skin and sends a jolt of icy, incomprehensible fear surging from deep in your gut all the way up your throat to the ends of your hair follicles, causing them to feel as if they were on fire. Fire and ice, the twin demons of true fear, like Blues on steroids. I was freezing and burning all at once as the specter that seemed to be my mother stared at me, unmoving. Unsmiling.

  I fought to avert my eyes from what I suspected was a demon from Hell. Finally I tore my gaze away. Shaking my head fiercely to make the apparition dissipate, I reached for the half empty Maker’s Mark. If I couldn’t shake this thing off, I reasoned, maybe I could drink it away. I had no more than poured another shot when the specter began to sing.

  That’s right, I said “sin
g.” I was struck by a long buried memory of my mother’s arms and the warmth of her body as she rocked me and sang. Beneath the words was the sound of her softly lilting voice, insistent. “Kidd … Kidd … Judgment is due.

  I’m—”

  But the melody line and the timbre of the voice changed, and I thought … not this song, which I knew as intimately as my own social security number. It was a lyric any Blues lover would recognize, an ancient lament writ modern in the pain-wracked, soul-searing lexicon familiar to former slaves and bluesmen of the post-bellum South.

  “I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving

  Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail

  Mmm, blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail

  And the day keeps on remindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail

  Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.”

  “Hellhound On My Trail” was the name of the lament, an original Robert Johnson composition. I was chilled to the marrow to hear Sadie’s voice wailing in the distinctive, plaintive yet sinister style that was the hallmark of Johnson’s vocals. That the lyrics’ sentiments so completely matched my current mood and situation mattered not at all. I only wanted it to end.

  Now. And forever.

  I was hearing my personal history, all the pain, the anger, the sorrow and all those opportunities and people I’d lost in this lifetime and would never get back contained in this one song. And yet, when it ended, no matter how it ended, I understood that my life, as it had been, would also be at an end.

  I was caught in a place no man should find himself and I had no choice. I was right where I was supposed to be with my fate signed, sealed and ready to be delivered with C.O.D. branded on my soul. My hellhound had tracked me down to this hotel room in Clarksdale. Setting the stage for … for what? I didn’t know for sure, but in my life up to now, I’d always been a betting man, come hell or high water.

  This time I was laying odds I wasn’t about to hit a gut-shot straight on the river. Whatever hand was coming my way, it would be what I deserved. No more, no less.

  A thunderous knock shook the door. The room was icy cold, and Sadie was gone.

  The knock came again. Here he was at last, the devil come to claim his due.

  A jagged bolt of electric blue lightning lit the sky so close to the window it initiated a flash-bulb burst inside my room. The next flash, staggered after a peal of thunder that sounded as if it had exploded on the pavement just across the street, again lit up the room. This time I caught the tableau in the Windex-streaked mirror of an old beat-up, worn pinewood bureau set against the far wall.

  I barely recognized the desolate face that returned my stare, eerily back-lit in the vaporous glow of a bluish-gray haze. Every time lightning flashed, the same scene appeared in the mirror. Time all but stopped. I was the sole subject of this morbid, otherworldly photographic exercise, and I had become hypnotized by the lightning. I even fancied I heard an audience somewhere in the ether applauding me wildly after ripping off a long-forgotten, blazing guitar solo.

  The knock came again.

  Not thunderous, as before, but a typical, ordinary knock. The very ordinariness of the lightly insistent rapping brought me back to reality, a sinking, icy feeling gripping my bowels. The fucker was here.

  I had a vision of me on my knees, begging for my eternal life from the likes of Beelzebub—and broke out into laughter. I couldn’t help it, that visual was too rife with absurdity. Can you imagine it? Me, Kidd Diamond, master fornicator, liar and thief, bastard child of a two-bit hooker, and … worse, asking the Devil for a break. It was beyond absurdity. It was fucking ridiculous.

  The knocking became more insistent as I sank to the floor huffing and coughing with breathy laughter.

  A voice I recognized, a nether-worldly voice that dripped with the malevolence and finality of impending doom, lasered through my consciousness. The self-mocking laughter died in my constricted throat.

  He was here, come to claim me as his rightful, legal possession. At that moment I realized with a gut-wrenching pang of regret and Johnny-come-lately remorse, I did not want to belong to Satan for all eternity. No matter what blood promises I’d made to him so many years ago when I was just a scruffy, poor, orphaned young black man from the Delta with my only meaningful possession a stolen 1966 hollow-body Red Rickenbacker 335 guitar strapped across my back.

  “Kidd,” the voice of doom said through the door.

  I rose up from the floor, my heart pounding the Anvil Chorus. He knew I was in the room.

  “Kidd, open up. It’s your old friend Nick Belial. Remember me?”

  I couldn’t help it. Whether it was a leftover reaction from my laughing jag or from pure terror, or more likely both, I had to suppress a giggle. I’d thought about this moment a hundred times a day for over forty years. Of course I remembered who in hell he was.

  I found my voice. “Hey, Nick. Hang on, I’ll be right there.”

  I got myself together and hurried to the bureau mirror to check my frazzled appearance.

  I gave a passing thought to uttering a prayer for deliverance, yet, I had no reason to believe God was in a mood to grant the likes of me anything more than outright scorn. Maybe He’d even laugh his ass off at my impertinence. I was the worst kind of sinner. And totally in line with my hard-shell Southern Baptist upraising, I figured God to be a vengeful, wrathful being. The God of hellfire and eternal damnation, the very phrase with which my long-dead, preachy, pushy Grandmama, Miz Lorna Mae Diamond, would harangue her daughter, Sadie. I naturally figured the Man was full of contempt and righteous anger for the moral bottom feeders of this worst of all possible worlds.

  I didn’t look to Him for any favors.

  I was deliberating on this thought when the door busted wide open, as if a great wind had unhinged it. A crackling, overpowering blast of hot air swept into the room, rousting a pile of newspapers and music magazines from the desk to the floor. My guitar case snapped shut like a river turtle’s jaws, and every drawer in that ancient pinewood bureau burst forth from its berth and clattered noisily, my clothes and underwear tumbling out and blowing every which way. The curtains on the windows violently flapped up into a horizontal position as the windows slammed shut. The gust blew me backwards onto the bed where I fell over my guitar case, which jammed painfully into my ribs.

  Nick’s rather dramatic entrance was punctuated by a tympanic peal of rolling thunder in a basso profundo register. He stood, silhouetted in the frame of the ruined doorjamb, backlit by an accompanying phosphorescent burst of red-tinged lightning that crashed behind him in the hallway.

  “Well, well. Kidd Diamond. Long time, no see, partner. How’s it hangin’?”

  Not a very original greeting, but then again, the Devil was a knockoff of an angel. I didn’t expect originality from a counterfeit.

  Once my heart stopped pounding and my breathing dropped back to normal, I looked him over. He’d radically changed his appearance in the four decades since last I’d seen him.

  Our first meeting he’d been dressed as primly as a preacher. Young I may have been at the time, but I was not a complete fool. I knew him for who and what he was, not who he professed to be in his Southern Baptist clerical garb and sporting a head of fried, lye-straightened hair of the period you could only get in a “conk parlor.”

  Of course, I was green and dumb enough to cut a deal with the devil.

  The second time we met, the meeting that sealed the deal, he’d been dressed more like I expected the devil to look—a flashy black pimp in an ankle-length white fur coat and garish purple felt pork pie hat with a green feather stuck in it and perched jauntily on a fluffy, well-picked Afro.

  I guess Nick thought that type of inner-city persona would appeal to my sense of blackness. In fact, I hated that shuck-and-jive shit that most of my seventies friends and acquaintances would lay on me. But Nick dazzled me with visions of the success I could be if I signed what he eu
phemistically called his “deal memo.” It sure as hell was a contract, and one I signed with my own blood.

  One thing you could say for Nick, devil or not, he kept up with what was fashionable. He was as tall as I remembered, somewhere around six feet nine or ten. Lean, but muscular. His huge head, shaved bald, sported the patented Air Jordan look. Heavy gold hoop earrings hung on his lobes, and on his chin was a hip, up-to-the-minute style of goatee known as the “Johnny Boy.”

  Nick looked dapper in an exquisitely tailored dark, pinstriped single-breasted suit with high Edwardian lapels. Underneath, an immaculate white shirt was set off by a thickly knotted silver silk tie that matched the pinstripes on his suit. A pair of ruby cufflinks tied it all together.

  His shoes were actually a pair of black Spanish-looking designer boots of soft, pliable leather. I was afraid to speculate on the source of that skin.

  “What do you think, Kidd? I look good, don’t I?”

  My first thought was that Nick looked like the epítome of a successful modern day NBA basketball player. And he did look pretty damned good. For a demon from hell.

  Nick performed a slow pirouette so I could admire his sartorial splendor. When he turned his back I noticed a tattoo on his head just above his neckline. GOD IS DEAD!

  Nick finished his mini-runway exhibition with a flourish and a deep bow. He looked at me expectantly, a shit-eating Cheshire grin as big as Toledo on his face. Okay, I decided, I’ll play your cat and mouse game, you bastard.

  “You’re looking natty dread, Nick. Real GQ! Nice moves, too. The Memphis Grizzlies oughta sign you up. They could use a power forward with your, uh, charisma and game.”

 

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