by Guran, Paula
“We did,” I said.
“What happened to it?”
I shrugged. “It quit goin’.”
“It did, didn’t it? Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.”
“Sometimes I wish a lot of things,” I said.
She leaned back in the seat and opened her purse and got out a cigarette and lit it, then rolled down the window. She remembered I didn’t like cigarette smoke. I never had got on the tobacco. It took your wind and it stunk and it made your breath bad too. I hated when it got in my clothes.
“You’re the only one I could tell this to,” she said. “The only one that would listen to me and not think I been with the needle in my arm. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“Sure, baby, I know.”
“I sound to you like I been bad?”
“Naw. You sound all right. I mean, you’re talkin’ a little odd, but not like you’re out of your head.”
“Drunk?”
“Nope. Just like you had a bad dream and want to tell someone.”
“That’s closer,” she said. “That ain’t it, but that’s much closer than any needle or whisky or wine.”
Alma May’s place is on the outskirts of town. It’s the one thing she got out of life that ain’t bad. It’s not a mansion. It’s small, but it’s tight and bright in the daylight, all painted up canary yellow color with deep blue trim. It didn’t look bad in the moonlight.
Alma May didn’t work with a pimp. She didn’t need one. She was well known around town. She had her clientele. They were all safe, she told me once. About a third of them were white folks from on the other side of the tracks, up there in the proper part of Tyler Town. What she had besides them was a dead mother and a runaway father, and a brother, Tootie, who liked to travel around, play blues, and suck that bottle. He was always needing something, and Alma May, in spite of her own demons, had always managed to make sure he got it.
That was another reason me and her had to split the sheets. That brother of hers was a grown-ass man, and he lived with his mother and let her tote his water. When the mama died, he sort of went to pieces. Alma May took mama’s part over, keeping Tootie in whisky and biscuits, even bought him a guitar. He lived off her whoring money, and it didn’t bother him none. I didn’t like him. But I will say this. That boy could play the blues.
When we were inside her house, she unpinned her hat from her hair and sailed it across the room and into a chair.
She said, “You want a drink?”
“I ain’t gonna say no, long as it ain’t too weak, and be sure to put it in a dirty glass.”
She smiled. I watched from the living room doorway as she went and got a bottle out from under the kitchen sink, showing me how tight that dress fit across her bottom when she bent over. She pulled some glasses off a shelf, come back with a stiff one. We drank a little of it, still standing, leaning against the door frame between living room and kitchen. We finally sat on the couch. She sat on the far end, just to make sure I remembered why we were there. She said, “It’s Tootie.”
I swigged down the drink real quick, said, “I’m gone.”
As I went by the couch, she grabbed my hand. “Don’t be that way, baby.”
“Now I’m baby,” I said.
“Here me out, honey. Please. You don’t owe me, but can you pretend you do?”
“Hell,” I said and went and sat down on the couch.
She moved, said, “I want you to listen.”
“All right,” I said.
“First off, I can’t pay you. Except maybe in trade.”
“Not that way,” I said. “You and me, we do this, it ain’t trade. Call it a favor.”
I do a little detective stuff now and then for folks I knew, folks that recommended me to others. I don’t have a license. Black people couldn’t get a license to shit broken glass in this town. But I was pretty good at what I did. I learned it the hard way. And not all of it was legal. I guess I’m a kind of private eye. Only I’m really private. I’m so private I might be more of a secret eye.
“Best thing to do is listen to this,” she said. “It cuts back on some explanation.”
There was a little record player on a table by the window, a stack of records. She went over and opened the player box and turned it on. The record she wanted was already on it. She lifted up the needle and set it right, stepped back and looked at me.
She was oh so fine. I looked at her and thought maybe I should have stuck with her, brother or no brother. She could melt butter from ten feet away, way she looked.
And then the music started to play.
It was Tootie’s voice. I recognized that right away. I had heard him plenty. Like I said, he wasn’t much as a person, willing to do anything so he could lay back and play that guitar, slide a pocket knife along the strings to squeal out just the right sound, but he was good at the blues, of that, there ain’t no denying.
His voice was high and lonesome, and the way he played that guitar, it was hard to imagine how he could get the sounds out of it he got.
“You brought me over here to listen to records?” I said.
She shook her head. She lifted up the needle, stopped the record, and took it off. She had another in a little paper cover, and she took it out and put it on, dropped the needle down.
“Now listen to this.”
First lick or two, I could tell right off it was Tootie, but then there came a kind of turn in the music, where it got so strange the hair on the back of my neck stood up. And then Tootie started to sing, and the hair on the back of my hands and arms stood up. The air in the room got thick and the lights got dim, and shadows come out of the corners and sat on the couch with me. I ain’t kidding about that part. The room was suddenly full of them, and I could hear what sounded like a bird, trapped at the ceiling, fluttering fast and hard, looking for a way out.
Then the music changed again, and it was like I had been dropped down a well, and it was a long drop, and then it was like those shadows were folding around me in a wash of dirty water. The room stunk of something foul. The guitar no longer sounded like a guitar, and Tootie’s voice was no longer like a voice. It was like someone dragging a razor over concrete while trying to yodel with a throat full of glass. There was something inside the music; something that squished and scuttled and honked and raved, something unsettling, like a snake in a satin glove.
“Cut it off,” I said.
But Alma May had already done it.
She said, “That’s as far as I’ve ever let it go. It’s all I can do to move to cut it off. It feels like it’s getting more powerful the more it plays. I don’t want to hear the rest of it. I don’t know if I can take it. How can that be, Richard? How can that be with just sounds?”
I was actually feeling weak, like I’d just come back from a bout with the flu and someone had beat my ass. I said, “More powerful? How do you mean?”
“Ain’t that what you think? Ain’t that how it sounds? Like it’s getting stronger?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“And the room—“
“The shadows?” I said. “I didn’t just imagine it?”
“No,” she said, “Only every time I’ve heard it, it’s been a little different. The notes get darker, the guitar licks, they cut something inside me, and each time it’s something different and something deeper. I don’t know if it makes me feel good or it makes me feel bad, but it sure makes me feel.”
“Yeah,” I said, because I couldn’t find anything else to say.
“Tootie sent me that record. He sent a note that said: Play it when you have to. That’s what it said. That’s all it said. What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know, but I got to wonder why Tootie would send it to you in the first place. Why would he want you to hear something makes you almost sick . . . And how in hell could he do that, make that kind of sound, I mean?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Someday, I’m gonna play it all the way through.”
�
�I wouldn’t,” I said.
“Why?”
“You heard it. I figure it only gets worse. I don’t understand it, but I know I don’t like it.”
“Yeah,” she said, putting the record back in the paper sheath. “I know. But it’s so strange. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“And I don’t want to hear anything like it again.”
“Still, you have to wonder.”
“What I wonder is what I was wondering before. Why would he send this shit to you?”
“I think he’s proud of it. There’s nothing like it. It’s . . . original.”
“I’ll give it that,” I said. “So, what do you want with me?”
“I want you to find Tootie.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think he’s right. I think he needs help. I mean, this . . . It makes me think he’s somewhere he shouldn’t be.”
“But yet, you want to play it all the way through,” I said.
“What I know is I don’t like that. I don’t like Tootie being associated with it, and I don’t know why. Richard, I want you to find him.”
“Where did the record come from?”
She got the sheaf and brought it to me. I could see through the little doughnut in the sheath where the label on the record ought to be. Nothing but disk. The package itself was like wrapping paper you put meat in. It was stained.
“I think he paid some place to let him record,” I said. “Question is, what place? You have an address where this came from?”
“I do.” She went and got a large manila envelope and brought it to me. “It came in this.”
I looked at the writing on the front. It had as a return address, The Hotel Champion. She showed me the note. It was on a piece of really cheap stationery that said The Hotel Champion and had a phone number and an address in Dallas. The stationery looked old and it was sun faded.
“I called them,” she said, “but they didn’t know anything about him. They had never heard of him. I could go look myself, but . . . I’m a little afraid. Besides, you know, I got clients, and I got to make the house payment.”
I didn’t like hearing about that, knowing what kind of clients she meant, and how she was going to make that money. I said, “All right. What you want me to do?”
“Find him.”
“And then what?”
“Bring him home.”
“And if he don’t want to come back?”
“I’ve seen you work, bring him home to me. Just don’t lose that temper of yours.”
I turned the record around and around in my hands. I said, “I’ll go take a look. I won’t promise anything more than that. He wants to come, I’ll bring him back. He doesn’t, I might be inclined to break his leg and bring him back. You know I don’t like him.”
“I know. But don’t hurt him.”
“If he comes easy, I’ll do that. If he doesn’t, I’ll let him stay, come back and tell you where he is and how he is. How about that?’
“That’s good enough,” she said. “Find out what this is all about. It’s got me scared, Richard.”
“It’s just bad sounds,” I said. “Tootie was probably high on something when he recorded it, thought it was good at the time, sent it to you because he thought he was the coolest thing since Robert Johnson.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. But I figure when he got over his hop, he probably didn’t even remember he mailed it.”
“Don’t try and tell me you’ve heard anything like this. That listening to it didn’t make you feel like your skin was gonna pull off your bones, that some part of it made you want to dip in the dark and learn to like it. Tell me it wasn’t like that? Tell me it wasn’t like walking out in front of a car and the headlights in your face, and you just wanting to step out there even though it scared hell out of you and you knew it was the devil or something even worse at the wheel. Tell me you didn’t feel something like that.”
I couldn’t. So I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and sweated, the sound of that music still shaking down deep in my bones, boiling my blood.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I’ll do it, but you got to give me a photograph of Tootie, if you got one, and the record so you don’t play it no more.”
She studied me a moment. “I hate that thing,” she said, nodding at the record in my hands, “but somehow I feel attached to it. Like getting rid of it is getting rid of a piece of me.”
“That’s the deal.”
“All right,” she said, “take it, but take it now.”
Motoring along by myself in the Chevy, the moon high and bright, all I could think of was that music, or whatever that sound was. It was stuck in my head like an ax. I had the record on the seat beside me, had Tootie’s note and envelope, the photograph Alma May had given me.
Part of me wanted to drive back to Alma May and tell her no, and never mind. Here’s the record back. But another part of me, the dumb part, wanted to know where and how and why that record had been made. Curiosity, it just about gets us all.
Where I live is a rickety third floor walk up. It’s got the stairs on the outside, and they stop at each landing. I was at the very top.
I tried not to rest my hand too heavy on the rail as I climbed, because it was about to come off. I unlocked my door and turned on the light and watched the roaches run for cover.
I put the record down, got a cold one out of the ice box. Well, actually it was a plug in. A refrigerator. But I’d grown up with ice boxes, so calling it that was hard to break. I picked up the record again and took a seat.
Sitting in my old arm chair with the stuffings leaking out like a busted cotton sack, holding the record again, looking at the dirty brown sheave, I noticed the grooves were dark and scabby looking, like something had gotten poured in there and had dried tight. I tried to determine if that had something to do with that crazy sound. Could something in the grooves make that kind of noise? Didn’t seem likely.
I thought about putting the record on, listening to it again, but I couldn’t stomach the thought. The fact that I held it in my hand made me uncomfortable. It was like holding a bomb about to go off.
I had thought of it like a snake once. Alma May had thought of it like a hit and run car driven by the devil. And now I had thought of it like a bomb. That was some kind of feeling coming from a grooved up circle of wax.
Early next morning, with the .45 in the glove box, a razor in my coat pocket, and the record up front on the seat beside me, I tooled out toward Dallas, and the Hotel Champion.
I got into Big D around noon, stopped at a café on the outskirts where there was colored, and went in where a big fat mama with a pretty face and a body that smelled real good, made me a hamburger and sat and flirted with me all the while I ate it. That’s all right. I like women, and I like them to flirt. They quit doing that, I might as well lay down and die.
While we was flirting, I asked her about the Hotel Champion, if she knew where it was. I had the street number of course, but I needed tighter directions.
“Oh, yeah, honey, I know where it is, and you don’t want to stay there. It’s deep in the colored section, and not the good part, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, and it don’t matter you brown as a walnut yourself. There’s folks down there will cut you and put your blood in a paper cup and mix it with whisky and drink it. You too good looking to get all cut up and such. There’s better places to stay on the far other side.”
I let her give me a few hotel names, like I might actually stay at one or the other, but I got the address for the Champion, paid up, giving her a good tip, and left out of there.
The part of town where the Hotel Champion was, was just as nasty as the lady had said. There were people hanging around on the streets, and leaning into corners, and there was trash everywhere. It wasn’t exactly a place that fostered a lot of pride.
I found the Hotel Champion and parked out front. There was a couple fellas on the street eyeing my c
ar. One was skinny. One was big. They were dressed up with nice hats and shoes, just like they had jobs. But if they did, they wouldn’t have been standing around in the middle of the day eyeing my Chevy.
I pulled the .45 out of the glove box and stuck it in my pants, at the small of my back. My coat would cover it just right.
I got out and gave the hotel the gander. It was nice looking if you were blind in one eye and couldn’t see out the other.
There wasn’t any doorman, and the door was hanging on a hinge. Inside I saw a dusty stairway to my left, a scarred door to my right.
There was a desk in front of me. It had a glass hooked to it that went to the ceiling. There was a little hole in it low down on the counter that had a wooden stop behind it. There were fly specks on the glass, and there was a man behind the glass, perched on a stool, like a frog on a lily pad. He was fat and colored and his hair had blue blanket wool in it. I didn’t take it for decoration. He was just a nasty son-of-a-bitch.
I could smell him when he moved the wooden stop. A stink like armpits and nasty underwear and rotting teeth. Floating in from somewhere in back, I could smell old cooking smells, boiled pigs feet and pigs tails that might have been good about the time the pig lost them, but now all that was left was a rancid stink. There was also a reek like cat piss.
I said, “Hey, man, I’m looking for somebody.”
“You want a woman, you got to bring your own,” the man said, “But I can give you a number or two. Course, I ain’t guaranteeing anything about them being clean.”
“Naw. I’m looking for somebody was staying here. His name is Tootie Johnson.”
“I don’t know no Tootie Johnson.”
That was the same story Alma May had got.
“Well, all right, you know this fella?” I pulled out the photograph and pressed it against the glass.
“Well, he might look like someone got a room here. We don’t sign in and we don’t exchange names much.”
“No? A class place like this.”
“I said he might look like someone I seen,” he said. “I didn’t say he definitely did.”
“You fishing for money?”
“Fishing ain’t very certain,” he said.