As smoke from the last Roman candle clears, and we stand to leave the baseball field, I almost ask Clay, “How about we go fishing next week, you and me? We haven’t been out for a while.”
But next week is impossible. Ever again is impossible.
People make choices in life. Choices with consequences.
Sermon of the day.
As he lifts his sleeping daughter, I feel the impulse to shake him, hard, by the shoulders. Irrational. I want to ask him, Why did you do this to me? Why didn’t you pay more attention to your wife? Why did you put me in the painful position of having to steal her from you?
This was no accident.
One day, on a fishing trip north of Houston, when I was first getting to know him, he admitted to me that Sharon seemed restless. “I don’t think we were ever really in love,” he said. “No lightning bolts, you know? No great romance. It’s just that we liked each other, we were solid together, and when we met, we were both ready to settle down and have a child.”
Now I think: Why did he tell me this, that day?
Why did he spring this on me?
If only we’d both been better at small talk. If only we’d both known sports, the way men in America—even failures like my father—are supposed to.
If only I hadn’t taken my mother’s advice, and worked so strenuously at chipping away my shyness.
In his car, on our way to the cemetery to lay my father to rest, Grandfather Darnell handed me a shoebox. We’d arranged to sell most of Dad’s things, including the Cutlass and the house. I’d taken a couple of paintings—generic landscapes, lovely and lush, all I had space for in the dorm. The rest we’d give to Goodwill. Mom kept a chest of drawers and a trunk they’d purchased together. Grandfather asked to have back the china he’d bought them as a wedding gift, to use at church socials. The shoebox was mine.
In it I discovered cufflinks, blank notepads, a couple of tubes of paint and a brush, a ring, and a watch. Handling them was like strolling through a discount aisle at Duffy’s, toying with all the goodies. I picked up the watch. It gleamed in cold sunlight slanting through the car’s front windshield. It wasn’t the watch from my father’s old story. I knew that. This was a newer piece, unremarkable. “Grandfather,” I said, “how much did you pay for the watch Dad lost—you know, the night of the movie fire?”
He answered right away. “Twenty-three fifty, a pretty penny back then. I should have known better than to trust that boy with something so fine.”
It didn’t shock me that he recalled the precise value after all this time. I don’t know why I asked him the question, except to marvel at the depth of abuse being heaped on my father that day.
He noticed, then, the burn spot on my wrist, egg-shaped, the color of custard. “Careless this morning with the kettle?”
“Yes sir.”
He nodded. “Your mother told me. You’re not a daydreamer, are you, son?”
“No sir.”
“Your father.” He poked a finger at me. “He was dreaming that day in the movie house, drawing his silly pictures, and look what came of that.”
I wanted to shout, “It was only a watch!”
“God’s grace, nothing less—it’s the only thing that kept Sheriff Stevenson from pressing charges.”
Thank the wind, I thought. “For burning the theater?” I said.
He waved his hand. “Oh, the building didn’t matter. It was about to fall down anyway. The problem was Old Lady Jones.”
I remembered the name from long ago. “Who?”
He clucked, bitterly. “You’ve never heard this part of the story, have you?”
“No sir.”
“The family agreed not to talk about it. We all wanted Ray to move on.” His lips tightened. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“Who was she?” I said.
“Sophie Jones. Indigent. Her family had busted up—laziness and liquor. Let that be a lesson, hm? We all knew her, everyone in town. Gave her money and food.”
The car bumped over ruts in the road.
“She had a room at the poor farm, up near Lawton, but she liked to sleep in town, in the library or the theater. Better heating. Sheriff’d always chase her out. For years, the movie house had a broken back door. Wouldn’t always lock. That’s how she came to be there the night of the fire.”
“What happened to her?” I asked, already guessing the answer.
“Trapped in her seat—probably drunk, more than a little crazy, that’s usually the way she was. Took a couple of days to identify the body. No family to claim her. No one, really, to mourn her passing. God had put her out of her misery. That’s what I told Sheriff Stevenson when I talked to him on Ray’s behalf. Ray was just a boy, it was an accident, I said—foolish, yes, he shouldn’t have been smoking or drawing—but not malicious. Finally, Stevenson agreed and dropped the whole thing.”
I tried to remember my father’s version of the story: the jacket, the scarf, the woman’s shoes in the ashes. I could only imagine, now, a child’s shoe—the slipper of Kathy Smithers, the garage mechanic’s daughter, hit by lightning, sleek, pink, crackling with red electric sparks. The fire in Earth’s belly, fire from the sky, snuffing all our worldly failures.
“Ray could never leave it behind him,” my grandfather said. “I told him, ‘Turn to God. There’s your salvation.’ He wouldn’t do it. Hard-headed kid.”
No. Instead he’d turned to my mother—to the promise of romance; that too (as he might have put it) had gone up in smoke.
“Twenty-three fifty,” my grandfather said. “A beautiful piece of work.”
I put the lid on the box.
“So. Your mother tells me you’re attending Southern Methodist in the fall,” he said.
“Yes sir.”
He looked at me, eagerly. “It pleases me to hear you’ve chosen a church-based university.” I’d picked the school so I could stay in Dallas with some of my friends.
He stared at the wrought-iron cemetery arch as our car slid under it. Rusty angels embraced at its peak. “Are you considering the ministry, by any chance?”
The question, unexpected, stumped me. My faith had never been rock-hard (Dad had seen to that). I hadn’t prayed in years.
“Do you remember, we talked about this once when you were younger?”
“Yes sir.”
“Have you given it any more thought?”
“Well …” I had an urge to leap from the car. “Maybe,” I said, hoping this would finish our discussion.
“It would honor me to see you follow my path, Kelly.”
I nodded.
“If you were to … well, I needn’t dwell on it. Let’s just say it would go a long way toward easing my disappointment. You’d be doing the family proud. What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your mother and I want you to be a success, son. You know that, don’t you? Not just in worldly terms. In matters of the soul. Do you understand?”
I said I did. I nearly blurted, “Success? Can I have your Duffy’s charge card?” He patted my knee.
The gravesite appeared to me humiliatingly small. A sand trap Dad would never pitch out of. “Goodbye, you old duffer,” I whispered, and dropped a rose onto the casket.
Three months later, my mother married her politician. “If elected governor,” he promised reporters the day he announced his candidacy, “I’ll see to it that every man, woman, and child in Oklahoma has comprehensive health care. And to put my money where my mouth is, I’ve already donated twenty thousand dollars for a new obstetrics wing of Sacred Heart Hospital.”
Mom’s touch. A good one.
He’d flown B-29s in the Second World War. His patriotism virtually guaranteed him the election. A success; a mover and shaker; not a man hounded by “moral lassitude” or lost in the rubble of doubt. No wistful, blind romance for Mom. She’d made a prudent choice this time, no apologies.
“‘God’s grace’?” she said to me at the wedding reception, at a lull in the festi
vities, when I told her Grandfather Darnell’s story about Dad. She was winded from dancing, and we were both standing by the punch bowl. “It wasn’t God’s grace got your dad off the hook when he burned that place down. It was my daddy’s money.”
I poured myself a drink. Someone had spiked the punch and I was feeling wobbly. “I thought he didn’t know you then,” I said. “I thought he met you afterwards, in the hospital.”
“That’s right.” She waved at one of her sisters. “But my father knew everyone in the state of Oklahoma. He understood that’s how you get ahead in business. And he made a point of knowing clerics, like your Grandfather Darnell. Quickest way into a community, he used to say, is through its preachers. So Grandfather Darnell knew who to call when he needed help.”
“What did he do, your dad?” I spilled some punch on my pants.
“Paid off the theater owners and Sheriff Stevenson so they’d keep it quiet about Old Lady Jones. In return, Grandfather Darnell began lobbying the town fathers, trying to get a Duffy’s store there. It took ten years or more, but it finally paid off, as Daddy knew it would. He was a patient man.”
Her new husband was toasting his best man now. Each word clear, precise. Correct.
“No wonder Dad felt hemmed in by the Kellys,” I said.
“They got him out of a jam.”
“Yeah, and they never let him forget it.”
The band started up again. “May I have this dance, son? You look charming tonight. You could be a real lady-killer, if you’d give yourself half a chance. Confidence, eh?” She slipped her hand into mine. I stood stiffly. “Kelly,” she said. “Please be happy for me. You and me. We both deserve to be happy for a change.”
“I’m happy,” I said. I knew I sounded angry.
“Just because I’m with John now, don’t he shy. If you ever need to talk—”
“Right,” I said, and led her, decisively, onto the dance floor.
Headlights sweep centerfield. Dust and smoke flitter in the air. Through the haze I can’t see the golfers on the driving range, but I hear them cackling over muffed shots.
Sharon waves at me. Clay carries Cassie to their car. “Thanks for joining us,” he tells me. “It was good to see you.”
A mother calls to her child.
“You too,” I say, feeling shy again—shyer than I’ve felt in years—awful, uncertain. My knees are weak.
“Give us a call.”
“I will.”
I catch Sharon’s eye—she’s trying not to cry—then walk away, and keep walking, into a life that will never be the same again.
One night, about a month after Mom’s wedding, after my last business class of the day, I went to a cheap movie on campus: a grisly horror show. All the dead men in the world had come back to life.
In one small town, corpses converged on a shopping center. A man in fatigues, the movie’s hero, positioned himself on the roof of a furniture store with an automatic rifle. Down below, the creatures broke a plateglass window. One of them bit, with remarkable, cool efficiency, into a saleslady’s sexy bare shoulder.
“Shit, man,” said a bubba beside me, a no-neck freshman, frightened but trying not to show it. “Don’t mess with the dead, eh?”
“No choice,” I said, rubbing my arm.
“What’s that?”
“The dead will always be with us. And that, friend, is the sermon for the night, amen.”
He looked at me, puzzled, a little angry (“Smart-ass,” he whispered), and left me alone after that.
I spent the rest of the film watching the upper-righthand corner of the screen: there, my father once told me, the white circles appear that signal the projectionist it’s time to switch reels. Swirling, pale, they looked like ripples in a river. The student running the show was a klutz. He panicked. Twice, the film broke. We had a lot of delays. Toward the end, the transitions smoothed out, a bittersweet comfort, though everyone around me seemed nervous, and the movie itself was sad.
Burying the Blues
1.
At two o’clock, Hugh found Spider Lammamoor on the porch of his house in the projects over on Dowling Street. Spider wore a green cotton shirt, unbuttoned to the waist, jeans with no belt, and no shoes. His skin, scarred, etched with wrinkles, was the deep dark color of balsam.
His slender fingers gripped a malt liquor can. Now and then he brought it slowly to his lips. “Been doin’ me some thinkin’,” he said. Hugh locked his Chevy Nova by the curb, then walked to the jagged porch. “Takes a long sit.” Spider lifted the can. “And half a dozen quarts of this-here oil.”
“You’re way ahead of me,” Hugh said, setting down a paper sack from which he pulled a six-pack of Colt 45s. “I brought these for you, but—”
“Good. They’ll find a use.” Spider reached inside his shirt and scratched his belly, just below the stark outline of his ribs. Hugh brushed a fly from his face. Cicadas made a crazy racket in the trees.
“Thinking about what?” Hugh said.
“This weekend.”
“You ready?”
Spider had been Houston’s finest blues drummer, but two years ago he’d simply quit. Hugh had talked him into performing again with a group of young musicians at the city’s annual Juneteenth Celebration.
“I’m ready, but the world’s changed, man.”
“How? What’s eating you?”
“Listen. Listen.” Still clutching the beer can in his hand, Spider pointed past the trees, whose fingered leaves curled in the heat, toward a long series of identical row houses behind them. Oak shadows waved across their bricks, a jigsaw of rich and shifting light. On one of the walls, someone had painted muscular black arms, chained at the wrists.
Hugh heard children laughing, cars backfiring and chugging on the Loop, just north of here. He shrugged. He wondered how many malt liquors Spider had downed already.
Then Spider nudged his shoulder. “There it is,” he said. “Hear it?”
A muffled throb from somewhere in the houses. Then an angry, rhythmic voice. “The boom box?”
“Yeah. Rappin’ shit. Kids today, man, they pissed off and mean. Listen to that wham wham wham all the time ’stead of the old tunes. Ain’t no place for me here. Not no more.”
“That’s not true,” Hugh said.
“My day has come and gone.”
“You wait and see this weekend. More people than ever love the blues.” He offered Spider a cigarette. Hugh didn’t smoke but he always carted a carton of Camels over here. Usually, Spider relaxed after the first few drags.
“White folks, you mean. Tourists. Comin’ to hear the natives.”
“It’s not just whites.”
“Then why you here, talkin’ to me? It’s history, right, what-all you slick professors study? Blues be history now, ready for the library or the museum. This weekend, we gonna be damned old dinosaur bones up on that stage. ‘These motherfuckers played the blues. Listen close. This is what it sounded like.’”
Hugh laughed, and popped open a Colt 45. He’d first heard Spider six years ago at the Crackerbarrel Lounge, a zydeco dance hall. That night, old black men in straw cowboy hats whirled teenage girls around a raised wooden platform. On stage, a man with an aluminum washboard strapped to his chest set the pace; Spider nailed down a “chanky-chank” beat. “Happy New Year!” yelled the accordion player, though it was the middle of July. Hugh fell in love with the music then and there. It made him feel he could start over, every minute, with a fresh chance at romance and fortune.
One night about two years ago, near the end of his marriage, his soon-to-be-ex, Paula, had burst into his study, twirling her skirt, revealing a happy length of thigh, and called him a “stuffy old fart.”
Later, at loose ends after his divorce, he’d decided she had a point: he needed changes in his life. New challenges. He’d gotten bored teaching intro history at the downtown junior college, writing articles on land grants, treaties, ancient Texas wars. Torts and reforms. Legislative agendas.
It was full of risks—a white man using the blues to enter black culture, but Hugh, a native Houstonian, familiar with most of its neighborhoods, was sure he could avoid the pitfalls and tensions of such a project.
He went to the Crackerbarrel Lounge, asked around, but Spider had retired. He talked to the club’s owner three consecutive nights, swallowing half a dozen pitchers of foam masquerading as beer, and finally got an address.
He was lucky. Spider loved to talk. If Hugh kept him pumped with smokes and juice, the lanky old stickman would spin every tale he knew.
Already, Hugh had produced two long articles about KCOH, Houston’s only all-black radio station, now defunct. In the forties and fifties, it broadcast live from Emancipation Park, Shady’s Playhouse, Club Ebony, and the El Dorado. The DJs—King Bee, Daddy Deepthroat, Mister El Toro—had played dangerous, hip-grinding tunes white folks called “race records.” The term “rhythm and blues” hadn’t been coined yet.
In the past two years, Hugh had spent whole afternoons at the public library, flipping through photos of old neighborhoods. In crackling, sepia tones, black Houston hung her head (in the shape of stooping brown magnolias), tapped her feet (the splat of withered peaches pelting heat-blasted ground), leaped into dance (the swirl of a Cadillac fin in the sun).
This was “Mama Houston”—Spider’s phrase—loud and sweaty, sexy as a stripper, breathing hot and fast so her kids would shuck their shirts. Mama Houston, drunk on dewberries, ripe green apples, dizzy on her own delicious poisons—car exhaust, shit and ash and rust. She doesn’t always know what’s best for her kids, but she loves them all, smothers us all, Hugh thought, in her large and steamy arms.
Eighteen months ago, in their first session, Spider had told him about the dark days, in 1945, when J. C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, had banned recording on the grounds that jukeboxes would put his union out of business.
It Takes a Worried Man Page 16