Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  “He says you took his wallet.”

  Teenochie stared at him shrewdly, as if to determine whether this was surmise or accusation. “Yeah, I got his wallet, sure,” he said with some reflection. “You know, man, I was holding it for safekeeping. Hawk, he don’t trust no doctors.”

  “Yeah, well, he wants it back.”

  “Oh sure, sure, man, I mean I ain’t got it on me—”

  Jerry just stared at him balefully. “I mean, I could get it, no problem.” He reached into his jacket pocket and drew out a fat bulging purse of cracked leather, a relic of God knew how many years and miles ago. “It slipped my mind, man,” Slim said sheepishly. “Well, I guess it’s about time for me to get back to work.” Teenochie rubbed his hands together briskly, as if to restore the circulation.

  Jerry glanced at the wallet. “Is all the money there?”

  Teenochie clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back and forth nervously. From his great height he looked to Jerry like a giant bird of prey. “Well, I had expenses. But naturally I only took what I won off him.”

  “What you won?”

  “In pitty-pat.”

  Jerry just wanted to get out of here. “How much did you win?”

  A broad smile crossed Teenochie’s face; he knew he had him beat. “One hundred and twenty-four dollars.”

  Jerry nodded. He would replace the money himself. It wasn’t worth the argument.

  “Now you give some thought to that little proposition we discussed,” Teenochie called after him, as Jerry made his way to the door. From the outside he could hear the sounds of Teenochie’s piano and then his strong shouting voice. He made his way carefully along rutted streets thick with menace until he came to a lighted intersection and miraculously found a cab.

  Back in his hotel he replaced the money. With what he had added, there was more than $1,500 in the wallet. Hawk didn’t believe in checks—they were nothing but pieces of paper, he said—and he didn’t believe in banks either. He was, as Teenochie said correctly, a stubborn-ass old man. Everything that he owned, everything that he was or had been, the whole story of his life, was in that wallet. Booking agents long since dead, recording contracts he had signed in the ’30s, royalty statements for $0.98, $1.24, from Victor, Columbia, Decca Records. A faded handbill that showed Hawk as a young man with just the date and the venue to be filled in. The priceless memorabilia of a lifetime—Hawk didn’t see it that way, undoubtedly. Still, the money was an irrelevance, even Hawk recognized that; if there had been no money at all, he still would have fought Slim to the death for what was in that wallet.

  It contained in addition to the foregoing: business cards, yellowed clippings, publicity stills, scattered reviews, telephone numbers, several well-worn passports, scrawled-out addresses, copyright notices, an occasional telegram or letter. It was the sum of something—a life well spent? A life that was spent. Nothing odd about that. The only odd thing about it, Jerry thought, was that Hawk couldn’t read. Not a word. He was not only functionally but totally (with the exception of being able to sign his name) illiterate.

  “How did you get into the army, then?” Jerry asked him one night. Hawk responded with a wave of his hand. He had been in the army for nearly four years during the war and right after, even traveled to Japan with a quartermaster unit attached to the Ninety-third Infantry, never ceasing to sing and play his battered guitar. Hawk himself must have been in his forties then, but that didn’t seem to matter either. Jerry had learned he could be whatever age he chose to be with no birth certificate to contradict him. It was hard to imagine him entertaining for his boss, Colonel Shaw, but Hawk claimed it was no different from playing for Honey Man. “Singing ’You Are My Sunshine,’ ’Sunny Side of the Street,’ all that kind of racket. Didn’t mean nothing to me; that was what they wanted to hear. Matter of fact, it just about give me a nervous breakdown, but I didn’t care nothing about that neither.”

  Well, Hawk had negotiated the army just as he had negotiated his sixty years of cross-country travels, Jerry supposed, somehow or other managing to cope with a system which could never have imagined it might have to contend with Hawk someday. For sixty years—well, probably forty years since he had purchased his first flivver, before that it was just a matter of walking, hitchhiking, or riding the rails—Hawk had been engaged in a succession of never-ending journeys, crisscrossing the country endless times without ever once gaining the benefit of a legally acquired driver’s license—or one acquired in any other way, for that matter.

  Because he couldn’t read the road-signs he had never, so far as Jerry knew, ventured on to any of the newer interstates but instead clung to the old back-country roads that headed plunk for the middle of every little town that had grown up on the highway. “There’s an old co’thouse on the corner,” he would say, describing a turnoff that had to be made in St. Joseph, Missouri. Or he would identify a landmark in Modesto, California, as a used-car lot which had disappeared fifteen years ago and long since been replaced by a McDonald’s. It was a never-ending source of wonder to Jerry, but he always managed to get where he was going, whether by instinct, telepathy, or some deep-seated race memory which preceded his present corporeal existence and would live on long after the flesh had decayed.

  Perhaps it was the same causation which enabled Hawk to riffle through his wallet and always come up with just the paper or document he was looking for. A review, a contract, a letter from overseas, somehow Hawk always produced it. Then he would have to have someone read it to him, of course, and after savoring the memory or words of praise or just the fact that someone had taken the trouble to put down on paper what he knew without question to be his natural due, he would return it carefully to his wallet, not necessarily to the same place but always to some appropriate niche.

  For the last few years Jerry had been working to get Hawk a valid driver’s license in any state that would have him. He had even gotten Hawk enrolled in a Senior Citizen’s Remedial Reading Enrichment Course when Hawk had settled down for a few months one spring in Chicago. Hawk had no patience with any of it, though. The alphabet meant nothing to him. “Ain’t nothing but a bunch of ignorant old fools anyway,” he complained to Jerry. So Jerry finally gave up and tried political influence, but he could never get Hawk to stay still long enough to establish a place of residence anywhere his political influence might extend. Once Jerry had tried to school Hawk himself, but he had quickly given it up as an impossible task, for Hawk—who could spend hours patching up an antique exhaust with baling wire, then see the whole thing fall apart a hundred yards up the street, and roll back under the car again with scarcely a murmur of complaint—would practically explode with frustration within moments of confronting these useless abstractions.

  When Jerry thought of Hawk, he always had two images. One was of that big bulky form bearing down angrily upon him, furious over some imagined slight or insult or imposition upon his time or attention. The other image was of Hawk teaching Lori how to play the guitar, answering the questions of some innocent fan, usually female, with the same gentleness and patience that he showed working on one of his jalopies or patching together that homemade wreck of a guitar, which, Jerry suspected, was held together with little more than Scotch tape at this point. Everything that Hawk owned was ready to fall apart, and yet it all had a stability and permanence to it—nothing had changed since Jerry first met Hawk more than ten years ago—that made Jerry feel as if it would go on forever. Until this, Jerry thought, removing his clothes, not even able to remember anymore where the day had begun. He turned out the light, feeling weary in every bone of his body and reminded once again that he was not the one who was cut out for traveling. Then he fell into a fitful sleep.

  WHEN HE got to the hospital in the morning, Hawk already had a visitor. He was sitting up in bed, leaning on one elbow, conversing in unintelligible grunts confirmed by vigorous nods of the head. The visitor was a frail-looking, white-haired old lady whose expression seemed to be fixed in a k
ind and understanding smile and who was dressed as if she had just come from church. She wore rhinestone-studded glasses which glinted merrily when she tilted her head, a pink pillbox hat, and a worn gray suit that hung loosely on her body. Though she and Hawk maintained their animated conversation, even close up Jerry still couldn’t make out a word of it. Hawk nodded curtly at him when he handed back the wallet. His color was still bad, but he looked better than he had the day before. Jerry stood uncomfortably to one side, not sure if he was supposed to politely ignore this colloquy, as discretion dictated, or step right in and introduce himself. Either way he knew Hawk would find fault.

  Finally the woman stood up to go. “Now you remember what I tole you,” said Hawk in a voice that was closer to his booming rasp than the hoarse whisper in which he had conversed yesterday.

  The woman nodded. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said as she edged past Jerry, smiling with grandmotherly tenderness all the while.

  “You seen Slim,” Hawk said flatly.

  Jerry nodded. Hawk patted the wallet, not even looking at it but picking through it with gnarled black fingers which touched the cracked leather as if they were greeting a long-lost friend. “He know he better keep his distance.”

  Jerry stared at the man in the hospital bed, the Screamin’ Nighthawk, and for the first time felt sorry for him. Why should Teenochie fear this weak, helpless old man? “Boy from the newspaper come by to see if he could do an interview. I ask him, You gonna pay me what I usually get? He say, How much is that? I told him he better talk to my manager.” Hawk chortled to himself.

  “You didn’t feel like talking?” said Jerry for want of anything better to say.

  “I didn’t feel like talking for nothing,” Hawk hissed meaningfully. “What I want to do that for? I done talked enough for free. Make some poor sucker rich off my words. Shoot. When you gonna get that book on me, make us some money? I give you enough of that old-time shit can’t nobody else remember nothing about and don’t nobody care, you could’ve written three books by now. Shit, you probably just waiting for me to kick, so you can cash in all the chips.”

  Jerry shook his head, murmuring denials. Lori had transcribed the many painful hours of interviews. For three years he had carried the book around in his head. He didn’t see any better way to sell it now than he had then. No one cared about this old man’s memories anymore. When they were riding the crest of the blues wave, Rolling Stone had expressed interest in excerpting a chapter, but he had not been quick enough and they had not been serious enough, and now it was San Francisco and Summers of Love they were nostalgic for.

  “Hey, we gotta go see about getting you out of this hospital bed,” he said unconvincingly to Hawk.

  Hawk smiled a strangely twisted smile. “I be out of here before you wish it,” he said cryptically.

  “Is there anything I can get for you?”

  “Yeah,” said Hawk, laughing. “Get me a young woman. I got me a old woman already.”

  SHIT, it ain’t like he thinks it is. It ain’t like none of them imagine. They think it was all hard times and suffering, they think you lived like some kind of animal, like some kind of beast of burden that sleeped in the fields. Shoot, it wasn’t nothing like that, we had good times, man, good times. Oh man, the way they got it, must have been born with a whiskey bottle in your hand instead of sucking on the titty like everybody else. Just imagination—what do they know? I think it’d disappoint ’em if I told them the truth. I didn’t touch whiskey till I was sixteen years old, three years after I was first married, after I taken Mattie away from 01’ Man Mose that they got on record, they call him the Father of the Mississippi Bottleneck Style, shoot he wasn’t nothing but a mean old drunk, used to beat up on a young wife, left her with marks she couldn’t never erase, across them titties, her thighs was pretty well striped, too. Wasn’t nothing but a thirteen-year-old kid, but I was growed. Working in the fields beside her so she could support that raggedy-ass funky-butt old nigger, he couldn’t have been no more than thirty-five back then, but I thought he was as old as the hills, couldn’t never imagine that I’d make it up in age that way myself. That nigger had it soft, just lay up in the bed all day, stay out all night long playing them old country reels and eagle rocks—people’d slow drag to them and buzzard lope and turkey trot, it used to be a regular mess when you get out on the dance floor, dirt packed tight as your fist, Mose’s big feet stomping away, she-it. Now they say to me, these young suckers, Well, you musta been right at the cat’s feet, picking up them pointers, learning all them techniques, growing up like you did on the same plantation as Ol’ Man Mose. Oh man, it musta been your lucky day. It was my lucky day all right, but ain’t nothing to do with that motherfucker’s music. Well, you know, I may have gone to the balls, but it was just to make sure that lying old man was occupied for the evening. Then I snuck back across the field, just as fast as I can, couldn’t hardly wait to get in the door before I got my britches undone. And Mattie, the first Mattie, she was a delicate little thing, high yaller, nice skin, nice hair, people couldn’t understand what she be doing with a coal-black nigger like me, man she was all over me hugging and kissing and squeezing, sometimes we couldn’t wait to get in the bed. When he come home the next morning, you could hear him coming across the fields, most of the time he so drunk he got someone bearing him up. A lot of times he come home with his guitar cracked in two. Sometimes he have less money than what he started with. If he drunk enough he just fall on the bed. But sometimes he come home mean. That was why she start pestering at me to take her away. I was just a little bitty kid scared to do anything without Mr. Charlie’s say-so. I was living at home then, my stepfather pushed me just the oncet, and I wouldn’t stand for that, I stood up to him and Mama, she say, You leave him be, Cholly. You leave him be. And we went to the country frolics and picnics, from the time I was a little bitty kid, and everybody was just so nice. Just country people laughing and joking and having a good time, didn’t know who was president and didn’t care, never heard nothing about the condition the country was in, just drinking that corn and eating that country ham and sweet potatoes, and Miz McAlister sent over some of her canned goods and peach pie. And the little girls, little pickaninnies, looking so nice and neat with their hair all done up in pigtails. I wonder how many little pickaninnies got their cherry popped in the bushes while the fiddle music was playing. And Mose, him standing up there in front of all them people and singing about “So cold in China, birds can’t hardly sing”—that was his song, sure was, even though he never recorded it. And at that time—I mean before Mattie, and even then afterwards, shit I got to be honest, no sense fooling yourself—I just naturally fell in love with that man and his whole style of guitar playing. Oh yeah, Mose a motherfucker all right, but ooh-wee could he sing. When he open up, I mean when he rare back and really let go, you could hear him, that sound must have carried for miles across the fields, people be hearing that sound for miles around and they wonder what is that old lonesome ghost come messing around my house? Charm the birds right out of the trees—you think there is any birds in China? She-it. My manager say, Someday you can go over there and find out. It probably just a fable like all them old-time sayings. Wasn’t nobody back in those days got much beyond his own home town. Plowing. Partying. Courting. Raising a family. Just Ol’ Man Mose, and he was a big man because of it. But I were thinking about Mattie, wasn’t I? Mattie, the first Mattie, tightest pussy I ever had. She didn’t care which way you did it, it was all equal to her. It was great for a kid just starting out. May be dead now, may be feeble, just two old people, we’s past it now. What? Who’s that? Come on, quit your foolishness, man. What you thinking about? It’s the medicine that they give you. You know you ain’t done yet. Are you still here, man? Shoot, I thought you gone a long time ago. But you know it’s hard when you get to be seventy-seven years old. It gets hard, man, just to be making it. …

  WHEN JERRY CAME BACK in the afternoon, Hawk was sitting up in bed,
soundlessly fingering his guitar. How it had suddenly materialized Jerry didn’t know, but he could imagine the fuss that Hawk must have kicked up to obtain it. The other men in the room scarcely paid any attention, occasionally lifting their heads from one comatose study or another. Sitting beside Hawk was the same woman who had been there in the morning.

  “I see you got your guitar,” said Jerry. Hawk’s forehead knit intently.

  “He couldn’t live without that guitar,” said the woman in a voice that most resembled a croak. She nodded sociably at Jerry. “That’s the truth. I know.”

  Jerry in his turn nodded. “Where’d you find it?” he said, trying not to stare at Hawk’s fingers as they clumsily struggled with the strings. His left hand, his chording hand, was still virtually immobile, he could barely clench and unclench the fingers, as he struggled vainly to make a chord.