Lollie leaned forward, grabbed some cheese straws, and asked what that meant.
“Skin was a card game popular with black gamblers at the time. Sometimes called Georgia skin, but anyway, Leland was famous for these things, put this town on the map.”
“Why ‘skin ball’?”
“Well, skin was the game; I think ‘ball’ refers to how the game went on for days or weeks at a time. Professional black gamblers came from all over—Texas, Georgia, Florida—to play at these things. We’re talkin’ about Stiff Hand Harry and Fast Dealing Pete and a buncha those guys, famous. They’d arrive, literally, with a suitcase full of money. Of course, people were shooting craps and playing Florida flip too, but they were mostly playin’ the skin. There were weeks, and we’re talking about in the thirties, forties, fifties, right? There were weeks when it was said there was more money on the streets than there was in the Bank of Leland. Every fourth storefront was a blind tiger and there were games going inside every one of ’em.”
“Blind tiger being like a speakeasy?”
“Speakeasy, barrelhouse, bucket shop. I heard ’em called blind pigs in some places. You’d knock on the door and tell whoever was fronting the place that you wanted to pay to see the blind tiger you’d heard about. It was like a password sort of deal.”
Rick said, “1953? That’s what, twenty years after Prohibition was repealed?”
“Right, but Mississippi stayed legally dry until ′67, when they started puttin’ the local option on the ballot where towns and counties got to vote wet or dry.” Beau chuckled and said, “But hell, that didn’t stop anybody. It just let the local sheriff pad his annual income. The gamblers running the games had what they called a cut box, where a percentage of each pot went for the juke-joint owner who allowed the game to be in his club. The club owner meanwhile was selling hot tamales and illegal liquor to the gamblers and everybody else who’d come to dance and hear the music and whatnot. A percentage of the liquor money along with part of the cut from the gambling went to the sheriff, who allowed all the activity to go on as long as there wasn’t too much trouble.”
Lollie seemed amused. She said, “All that going on right here in little ole Mayberry.”
Beau laughed again and said, “Oh yeah, you wouldn’t know from visitin’ the Muppet museum, but this little town used to be the hottest spot there was between Memphis and New Orleans.” He opened the file and shuffled through it until he found an old article that he handed to Lollie. “This is from 1908. People were having so much fun here that a national magazine intent on promoting Prohibition called Leland ‘the Hellhole of the Delta.’ ” Beau pointed to the phrase in the article and shook his head. “The place was knee-deep in whiskey, cocaine, and gamblers at the turn of the century.” He winked at Lollie and said, “Course the Leland Chamber of Commerce prefers to tout it as the home of Kermit the frog, but back then …” Beau shook his head and let loose with a long, low whistle.
“So,” Rick said, “Buddy Cotton, Willie Jefferson, and Earl Tate met here before going on to Wisconsin. Were they all playing at the same club?”
“Not at first. Let’s see, Buddy Cotton started out at Ruby’s Nightspot, that was one of Ruby Edward’s places. She was a real smart lady, had several clubs around town. Earl Tate was either playing at the Key Hole Club or the Hole-in-the-Wall Club, depends on who’s telling the story. And Crippled Willie was over at Mr. Brown’s place, called the Roy Club. Anyway, around two that morning, Buddy, Willie, and Earl were supposed to meet up at a joint called the We-uns and You-uns Saloon where Pigfoot Morgan was playing.”
“Wait.” Rick looked up from making notes. “Pigfoot Morgan?”
“Guy from Drew, Mississippi, played a mean guitar, in E natural, according to those who heard him. You could hear the influence of Lightnin’ Slim in his playing, but he had his own style. Also had the best car of the bunch, a beat-up twelve-year-old Packard he’d won in a card game. He’d agreed to drive the others to Memphis, where they were supposed to catch a train on to Wisconsin for the Paramount session.”
“So the Blind, Crippled, and Crazy session was in Wisconsin?”
“Was supposed to be, but see, that’s just it. More’n a few people swear they saw Lamar Suggs with his Presto disc recorder at the We-uns and You-uns Saloon that night after Buddy, Willie, and Earl got there and played with Pigfoot. Others say Suggs got there too late and missed the show. And a couple witnesses said they saw Suggs and Pigfoot arguing in the parking lot and that Earl Tate had to physically drag Morgan away.”
“Okay, but then they’d have gone to Wisconsin and recorded there, right?”
“Sure, if Pigfoot hadn’t been arrested later that night for killing Hamp Doogan.”
“Who the hell’s Hamp Doogan?”
Beau chuckled and said, “Well, Hamp was what you might call a local …” He paused, looking for the right word. “… entrepreneur.” He winked at Rick. “He had a photography studio in town and he’d take his equipment out to the juke joints, especially during these skin balls, to take pictures to sell to the patrons. There were also rumors that he was the source for most of the cocaine in town.” Beau pointed at some of the photos in his scrapbook, black-and-white shots of musicians and people dancing and sweating underneath the low ceiling of a steamy juke joint. “I doubt these were made that particular night, but Doogan took all these pictures. I bought these from his estate. But they kept some too, so I know there’s more of his stuff out there. Stuff he bequeathed to people.”
“You know why Pigfoot killed Doogan?”
“Well, again, there’s lots of theories on that, but nobody seems to know for sure. The most popular theory revolves around cocaine. Pigfoot had a bad habit with the stuff, according to some of the stories, and Doogan ripped him off on a deal, and when he wouldn’t make good, Pigfoot killed him. There’s another story that it was over a woman, but you’d half expect that.”
“Pigfoot do time?”
“Well, let’s see,” Beau said, treating it like a difficult question. “Black man killed a white man in Mississippi in 1953. I’m ‘onna go out on a limb and say yeah, he did time. I s’pect he’s either still doing it or died tryin’.”
“You know his legal name?”
He shook his head. “Never heard him called anything but Pigfoot. I tried looking it up a few years ago, but the court records from that period all burned up back in the seventies.” Beau looked like he had an idea. “But you know what, maybe the sheriff’s arrest records are still around. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You remember who the sheriff was?”
“Well, let me think on that for a minute.” He shook his head. “Not sure. But I know who to call to find out. Hang on a second.” He grabbed his phone and punched in a number. “Hey, Duff, it’s Beau. Got a question. You know the name of the sheriff back in ′53?” He paused a moment, then said, “No, it was the one before ole Tommy Dupree. Yeah, that’s him, thanks.” Beau hung up the phone, looked at Rick, and said, “That woulda been Sheriff Henry LeFleur.”
13
CRAZY EARL TATE was a thoughtful man when he was sober. That’s why he drank. He didn’t like the things he had to think about. He fell down again and muttered, “Goddammit.” His bottle slipped out of his hand and he groped around in the weeds to get it back before all his gin spilled. He found a few empty beer cans and a crumpled cigarette pack before he found the bottle. He took a slash and just sat there, head slumped and legs making a wide V in front of him. “I jes take my ress a minute,” he said. All the insects that had fallen silent when Earl hit the ground were slowly coming back to life, a low hum at first, then returning to their full droning buzz.
After a moment Earl said, “Hell you gone do ’bout it?” He said it like a threat with a knife behind it, but there was nobody around to hear except the dead. He was just drunk and talking to the cicadas and mad that if somebody was watching, they might think he was sitting there feeling sorry for himself in the weeds, which he wasn�
�t. Wasn’t like he was about to start singing “Serves me right to suffer” or some such. Hell, he never much cared for John Lee Hooker anyway. Stole one of his best licks, or so Earl told everybody. “Seven-sided son of a bitch took that from me and I didn’t see a white nickel for it,” he’d said more than once.
Earl teetered as he sat there, but he didn’t fall over. After a minute he struggled to his feet and continued stumbling through the graveyard outside Tchula. You wouldn’t even call it a cemetery. There was no fence or gate to keep anybody out, and it was so overgrown Earl kept stumbling over the pitiful stone markers for the dead who didn’t have the means or the family to stick them in a hole somewhere a little more respectful of their condition. This is where Earl figured he’d end up. Lost in the weeds for eternity.
Like his wife, Claudie. She’d been in a car accident, but her injuries were treatable. Earl was working when it happened. His boss didn’t tell him about it until he got off. Somebody had carried her to a hospital, but nobody there would do anything for her. She lay unattended, on a gurney in the hallway, for twelve hours, bleeding inside. By the time Earl found her, she was gone. They told him there was nothing they could have done.
He didn’t have money for anything fancy, so he had to bury her out here without so much as a small stone to mark her place. He’d made a wooden cross, but that was long gone. All these years later, with weeds everywhere, he couldn’t tell where she was. “Claudie? I know you in here somewhere, baby,” he said, missing her. “You just ress.”
A little farther on, he paused to sit on the only tombstone in sight, like he was Ike Zinneman, waiting to teach Robert Johnson something new. He looked around and called out, “Where you at?” Earl squinted in the moonlight trying to find the fresh grave of that man he knew who had died suddenly of what the doctors called an emma-lism. He was going to get some dirt off the top to help make the hand he needed. Earl told Buddy he didn’t want to kill Clarence, said he’d rather make a hand to cause him to run, but the only way to do that was to scoop some dirt from Clarence’s own track, heel to toe, put it in a dried snail shell, plug it up with cotton, wet the edges with some whiskey, and bury it on the bank of a running creek with the mouth pointing downstream. But any old track was fifty years gone and Earl didn’t know where to find the tracks Clarence was making now. Figured next time he was close enough to do that, Clarence was going to kill him.
So he was gone to find that grave and get the freshly turned dirt. He was gone take it home, mix it with some bad vinegar, beef gall, and ground sassafras. He’d shake it up good and tell it what he wanted it to do, because in conjuring everything depends on intentions, and Earl’s were bad. Then he’d turn it upside down and bury it breast deep and be done with it.
And all because he didn’t have no good options. Like always. Earl hated the choices God had given him his whole life. Like the choice they got that night fifty years ago that had him out here looking for that fresh grave now. Like God had it in for Earl Tate from the minute he came into this world, all ill-shaped, and maybe even before. It’s why he never understood Blind Willie Johnson singing about how good God had been to him. Hard enough being born black in Texas in 1902, but why’d God have the child’s stepmama throw lye in that seven-year-old face and blind him just so she could get back at his daddy? That’s a funny way of looking at good, Earl thought. And people called him crazy.
THE OLDE RIVER Country Club was a crumbling relic with some fresh paint slapped on top to hold it together long enough for the last of those who cared. It was a dwindling diorama of days gone by, a place where past generations could hide from the present while squinting skeptically at the future through a cloud of unfiltered cigarette smoke, old-fashioneds, and the pink glow of roast-beef lamps. Even dressed up for a special celebration in honor of one of the club’s founding members, it had the feel of ruins from a culture that had flourished briefly, of which a few specimens remained, but which was quickly becoming extinct.
As children growing up in the 1980s, Cuffie LeFleur and all her cousins saw the place as an exotic destination of strange smells and fading photographs of grim-faced white men. As teenagers they came to see it as a hideous vestige of the bad taste embraced by their grandparents. Whatever sense of status or exclusivity had once obtained by passing through the deteriorating gates was long gone. Now it was little more than a day-care center for the old guard, clinging institutionally to the way it used to be.
Cuffie’s parents’ generation had come to prefer the golf courses built by the gaming corporations, while Cuffie and her peers embraced the soulless, electric, and antiseptic candy sideshows that were the casinos themselves.
But once a year the extended family gathered in the Antebellum Room to celebrate the birthday of Shelby LeFleur Jr., the oldest living LeFleur. Cuffie had been coming to the Olde River Country Club once or twice a year her whole life. She recognized some of the help, men and women who had worked there for decades. They recognized her too, and they knew hers was the last generation that would see places and people like this. This time, this place, this circumstance. As she walked through the old building, toward the celebration, Cuffie felt as if all these people were characters in a tragedy that was near the end of the last act.
She walked into the Antebellum Room and saw all the usual suspects. Lettie and Hannah LeFleur were huddled over drinks at the bar. As was typical, her father was on the opposite side of the room from her papaw Henry. Whatever grudge those two had been nurturing all her life was still in full bloom. More than once she’d seen Henry look at Monroe like he’d kill him if doing so didn’t cross some line. The spaces in between members of her immediate family were filled with aunts and uncles and first, second, and third cousins. And there, in the back of the room, was the guest of honor, stooped in his wheelchair. Shelby LeFleur Jr. looked like a man who’d been carrying a burden for too long. Old, and troubled by something in his past, he had the look of a man who hadn’t slept more than three or four hours a night for the past forty years.
Cuffie crossed to him, bent down, and said, “Happy birthday, Grandpa Shelby. You look great! I can’t believe you’re ninety-five. That’s so amazing!”
“Y’ain’t gotta yell,” he said to his lap. He was slumped in his chair and rarely bothered to lift his head. “Old don’t have to mean deaf.”
Cuffie smiled sweetly and kissed his sagging jowl. She looked at his elephantine ears and thought it was no wonder his hearing was okay. They were like satellite dishes. It was a marvel he could hear himself think, all the sounds those things must pick up, especially with the hearing aids. She gave him a pat on the arm and said, “You having a good birthday? Can I get you anything? I’m going over to the bar.” Cuffie was gone before he could answer any of the questions.
Grandpa Shelby shook his head in disgust. His own great-granddaughter. His own flesh and blood. He raised his head and looked at the lot of them. None of them cared. They were, all of them, just waiting for him to die so they could get a look at the will, in the hopes of getting another piece of the pie. He grunted and returned his gaze to his lap. Whatever happened to a proper show of respect for one’s elders? His father, Shelby Sr., would’ve disowned this whole bunch of ungrateful loiterers, each new generation more oblivious than the one before, neither knowing nor caring where they’d come from or how they had reached such a privileged position, let alone accepting the duties and responsibilities that came with it. Those big ears could hear them ordering that single-barrel bourbon and grousing about how none of them was making enough money farming and how the subsidies weren’t half what they ought to be. And have you seen my new Hummer?
They didn’t care about anything important. They’d developed an astonishing sense of entitlement. They’d grown increasingly lazy, unprincipled, and covetous. And for reasons he could never fathom, they seemed intent on trading the family’s heritage and values for the cheap, homogenized products everybody else was buying. He grunted again as he imagined their inevitabl
e descent into ruin. And he figured they deserved whatever they got.
AS THEY DROVE out of Leland, Rick asked if Lollie knew any LeFleurs. She said it would’ve been hard to grow up where she did and not know a handful. “It’s an old Delta family,” she said. “They’re all over. I think they still have a plantation somewhere. Why?”
“Smitty Chisholm said your grandfather was partner in a radio station with a couple of LeFleurs. I’ve got their names in my notes somewhere. If one of them was Henry, who also happened to be the sheriff at the time of Hamp Doogan’s murder, seems like he’d be worth talking to, if he’s still around.”
Lollie reached over and took the pen from Rick’s pocket. She started making notes on his pad. “Okay, Henry LeFleur. And you wanted to find the legal name for Pigfoot Morgan, right?”
“Yeah, can’t search the Mississippi correctional system with just a last name. I’ll call Smitty and see if he knows anybody else who might know.”
“Okay, and I’ll check with the sheriff’s department, see if they have records going that far back. And I might as well confirm that the trial transcripts were lost from Morgan’s trial. Who knows, maybe they’re on microfiche or something Mr. Tillman didn’t know about.” Lollie tapped the pen against her temple for a moment before she said, “What about Hamp Doogan? Any reason to talk to his family?”
“Nah, I don’t see how they’d have come into possession of the tapes if he died the night they were made.”
Highway 61 Resurfaced (v5) Page 13