It Takes a Worried Man

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Damn near killed the city blues, man,” Spider had said. “Didn’t get shit, playin’ live. Needed those contracts, eb’n though the record man cain’t be trusted.”

  A few months ago, Hugh asked him why he’d retired.

  Spider scratched his belly. “We’s playin’ one night down on Scott Street, middle of the summer, real hot, you know. Fight busted out. Fellow shot me in the shoulder.” He raised his right arm, gingerly, a long broken wing. “Kinda put a kink in my flamacue.”

  Hugh pressed him: was he unable to play now? No. Spider asked for a second cigarette, another sip of beer. The wound had healed all right. It was just a matter of confidence.

  Night after night, then, Hugh had driven him to some of the fancy new clubs in the Heights, where middle-class kids, both black and white, were trying to keep the old riffs alive. Once they recognized the old bluesman, they fawned over Spider, listened, rapt, as Hugh did, to his stories of the past. Finally, Hugh had persuaded Spider to take the stage again with some of this fresh new blood.

  Spider handpicked four mates: piano, bass, lead, and rhythm guitars. The band had been rehearsing in a warehouse maintained by the physical plant over at the junior college.

  Now, today, Spider seemed ready to mothball his cymbals again.

  “You’ll knock ’em dead. I guarantee it,” Hugh said, coughing. The beer had gotten warm.

  “They laughin’ at me.”

  “Who?”

  A white Ford Mustang—’67, ’68—with mag wheels and tinted gold windows cruised the street, bass and drums ratcheting out of its speakers. It paused by Hugh’s red Nova, then lurched away.

  “These young punks with they high-topped sneakers and they back-ass-ward baseball caps, that’s who. Rappers. I’m a old coot to them. What I don’t want to be,” he opened another can, “is a Tom.”

  Hugh raised his face into a sharp, blistering breeze. Sweat soaked his shirt. Tar glistened in the streets, frying in the sun. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—I’m astin’ you, now—is the blues become part of the white man’s fashion? College kids with they scholarships and Daddy’s business cards in they suits—it’s hip for them to go slummin’ now in the blues joints? That why you talkin’ to me? Why you want me up on stage? Uncle Tom tappin’ out a beat to please the next young masters?”

  “Whoa.” Hugh stood, wiping dirt from the seat of his pants. A siren wobbled in the distance. “Where are you getting this? Who’ve you been talking to? I thought we were friends.”

  “So did I.” Spider scratched his ear with a pull tab.

  “Well then, we are, right? Spider, I love what you do. Period. It has nothing to do with black and white. I mean, the music does, of course. I respect its rhythmical roots in the African—” He caught himself. He was sounding like a history prof. A stuffy old fart. “I’ll back off if that’s what you want, I’ll—”

  “No no no.” Spider struck a match and lit a Camel. “It’s just, some of the young guys in the band, they see more whites than brothers in the clubs, you know, and they wonder what’s going on. And I look around here.” He nodded at a couple of boys across the street in baggy yellow shorts, sleek white basketball shoes. They were laughing, slapping hands. Silver chains bounced around their necks. They glanced warily, stonily, at Hugh. “These kids, to them the blues is Lawrence Fuckin’ Welk. I ast ’em ’bout music, it’s gangsta this, gangsta that. I’m just a no-account old fool.”

  “Well, that makes two of us,” Hugh said. He crumpled his empty can. “But the blues is going to be around, Spider, long after you and I and those kids are gone, you know it?”

  Spider grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, I hear that.”

  “All right, man. So. I’ll stop by Friday?”

  “Okey-doke. Bring me some smokes, awright?”

  The Mustang circled the street again, a mighty orgasm shuddering in its speakers. Hugh kept his eyes on the ground, walking back to his car. The cruiser squealed away, swerving wildly past the projects, and the shackled black fists.

  On his way back to school, Hugh considered Spider’s questions. Folklorists and historians—many of them white—had taken an urgent interest in the blues, following Alan Lomax’s example. Many leading blues players, nationwide, were dying or dead. It was true too that music was a fluid, culturally sensitive activity, changing with the times, and fewer and fewer kids seemed drawn to tradition. But it was a long way from all this to “Uncle Tom.”

  He touched his radio button. “What’s wrong with bigamy?” someone asked: a call-in show. On another station, a youthful, grating DJ argued that Led Zeppelin was the greatest flowering of musical genius the Western world had ever witnessed.

  Finally, he found Black Magic, an independent, unlicensed broadcast from somewhere in the city’s Fifth Ward projects. Repeatedly, the police had tried to jam it or yank the show off the air, but the operator—who identified himself only as “Black Magic That Comes in the Night”—eluded them. The story had been in all the papers. The people in the Fifth Ward—poor blacks, mostly—hid and protected the man. At first, he’d come on the air to read renters’ complaints and to demand better city housing for the poor. Soon he’d expanded his format, broadcasting police radio calls, accusing the cops of brutality and racism. Between his editorial comments, he played local rappers.

  The signal was weak. “You got the Black Magic here, Freedom Radio, we’ll be checking in on the pig-line soon, see what caveboy up to. The occupying army of the fat white race comin’ to kidnap our fine young men. Oink. Oink oink. Any pigs out there? I know you be listenin’, pigs.”

  The radio crackled. Another voice came on. “You better believe we’re listening.”

  “We got us one! Got us a pig!” Black Magic said. “Say, Porky, tell me this: why you occupying my neighborhood?”

  “It’s my job. Your listeners need to know that.”

  “What job?”

  “To serve and protect.”

  “Protect who, Caveboy?”

  “The citizens of Houston.”

  “The denizens of Houston? Tell you what, Mr. Pig, you crawl outta your cave, we might have us something to talk about.”

  Hugh laughed. He’d love to find the man and bring him to his classroom. A quick lesson in American culture. One of his favorite exercises on the first day of each term was to ask his students, many of whom were internationals, to draw a world map. The students were always shocked to find they’d each placed their home—Venezuela, Italy, the Ivory Coast—in the center. None of the worlds looked alike, even remotely. Listening to Black Magic now, he figured few of Houston’s neighborhoods looked alike any more.

  Black Magic played the Geto Boys: “I like bitches, all kinda bitches, / to take off my shirt and pull down my britches.”

  You’re fine, Hugh thought. Just be careful with Spider. Be honest and always respectful. He wasn’t exploiting the man. It was important to trace the history of this music. If Lomax hadn’t dragged his tape recorder under the willows, into the swamps, through hellish swarms of bugs, the world might never have heard “Dust My Broom,” and that would have been a tragedy for the world.

  Last summer, Hugh had gone hunting Robert Johnson’s famous crossroads in the Mississippi Delta. He’d been dismayed to find a Sonic Drive-In, a KFC, a Church’s Chicken, and a Fuel Mart blighting the mythic corner. No Satan, just the devils of fast commerce. Everything good got lost if someone didn’t bother to save it.

  On a dirt sidewalk, now, dozens of young black men milled in loose circles in front of a boxing gym. At a stoplight, Hugh watched them feint and jab at the air. A boom box pulsed with a steady sexual rhythm, the same ebb and flow as birdsong and insect trills in the trees. Down the street, an old man tugged at the steel bars on a liquor store’s bright purple windows. A scent of tar mingled with something else—a faint dead-animal smell, wafting from Mama Houston’s narrow alleys. The light turned green. Somewhere, a train clattered. As Hugh moved his foot off the brake, a thin boy, tooth
less, shirtless, slick with sweat, gave him the finger and laughed.

  Back in his office, Hugh checked his “to do” list. Write a test for his freshman class, a mix of nationalities with basic reading and writing problems (the college budget didn’t allow for separate English-as-a-second-language courses). And he had to call Paula, set a time to visit the girls this summer. She’d moved back to New Orleans, where her parents lived, after the divorce.

  He punched the number and settled in his chair. From his tiny window he saw Firebirds, Darts, and Gremlins rush the freeway down the hill from the campus, past the main entrance and the “Marion Junior College” sign. A few miles away, Life-Flite emergency helicopters circled the glass spires of the medical center.

  Elissa answered on the fourth ring. Paula had taught her telephone etiquette; she was solemn and reserved until she recognized her daddy’s voice, then she shouted, “Jane has stinky underwear!” and he heard both girls laugh.

  Mama was next door borrowing flour for dinner, Elissa said. Hugh tried to ask about her summer plans but she was manic with energy. He heard Jane running around the kitchen; Elissa giggled and bumped the receiver on the wall. He gave up. “Tell your mother I called, will you?”

  “Daddy, are you coming to see us?” Elissa asked.

  “Later this summer, sweetheart. Give your sister a kiss for me.”

  “Ewww!”

  2.

  Despite a strong showing last night against the Mets, the Astros had blown a doubleheader today. He clicked his car radio off. Damned Astros. They couldn’t hit their way out of a paper bag.

  At a stoplight, a big, freckled fireman strolled into the intersection waving a black rubber boot, soliciting money for a city fund-raiser. Hugh lowered his window—a surge of hot air—and stuffed a dollar into the boot.

  He lived in Montrose, one of Houston’s oldest—and when he’d first moved there in the early eighties, cheapest—neighborhoods. Before the AIDS epidemic, a realtor once told him, the area had been mostly gay, with an inflated reputation for debauchery. In fact, it was largely peaceful, tastefully landscaped and kept. Street people slept in alleys behind the 7-Elevens, but this was increasingly true all over the city. On Hugh’s block, the five or six people who stowed rags, blankets, and bags in back of the Dumpsters were friendly but withdrawn, embarrassed when asking for change.

  Now, as he parked his car, he noticed an old woman in a sweater—despite the heat—that was unraveling like a tumbleweed’s spirals. Face as dark and tough as the fireman’s boot. She shuffled around the block.

  Maple leaves flapped like oily rags on branches stretched across the street. Cicadas whirred, loud rotary blades, in the highest limbs.

  Hugh’s apartment was small, with large windows and wooden floors. The chairs and couch were strictly Kmart. Since the split with Paula—two and a half years ago now? had it really been that long?—he hadn’t bothered to buy anything valuable or permanent. Paula had kept all the good stuff.

  He showered and shaved. Not bad, old man, not bad for forty-three, he told his steamy face in the mirror. No bald spot yet (he needed a haircut). He was mostly trim and handsome. At least his daughters had said so, when he’d seen them last Christmas.

  A Siamese cat family had recently moved into a space beneath the pyracantha bushes behind his kitchen window. The mother had borne two litters; Hugh had counted eight kittens last time he’d looked. He peeked at them now: burrowing lumps. He left two plastic plates of food for the cats, and a bowl of water. He wondered if he bothered with the kittens to assuage his helplessness over his daughters. A way of burying his blues.

  His stomach growled—he’d skipped lunch to meet Spider. He put a turkey potpie in the oven, then called Paula. She was curt. “I’ve got plans in both July and August,” she said. “I just don’t know when it would be possible for you to come, Hugh.”

  “What kind of plans?”

  “Hawaii with my folks. And another trip with a friend.”

  “So I’ll babysit the girls while you’re gone.”

  “I want to take them with me. They’re six and eight now, old enough to appreciate travel.”

  He argued with her a while longer, getting nowhere. “I’m telling you, make me part of your plans, Paula. I am going to see them this summer, okay?”

  He sat in the dark with a bad taste in his mouth, trying to recall the days before bitterness had scoured even their briefest exchanges, when they had actually liked each other. It was surprisingly easy to remember liking Paula. Uninhibited, funny, she’d been overwhelmingly vibrant when he’d first met her through a mutual friend. Sexy, certainly, but open and warm too, in a way that made him trust her. How had that changed?

  Elissa’s birth had seemed to make her sullen. “I’m penned at home all day, in a minefield of spit-up and poop. You get to come back in the evening when she’s already been Pampered and fed, and play the daddy-clown, make her laugh and get all excited—too excited, Hugh—right before bed,” she used to say. “It isn’t fair.”

  So let the games begin—and Paula played fiercely, chasing every advantage marriage and motherhood had, in her view, denied her. Jane’s birth made things worse. Paula insisted on a part-time job, just to get out of the house, insisted on her own set of friends, her own interests, separate from Hugh’s. He didn’t mind, even encouraged her independence at first—parenting could be numbing, he’d discovered, if you found no other outlets—but the more she pursued her new path, the more pinched she became in her dealings with him. The sex remained urgent, blissful, and absorbing, but he became aware, gradually, that she was using it to short-circuit his arguments, his criticisms, his dissatisfactions with their arrangements. Eventually, making love came to seem a wrestling match—how reliably these damned old clichés proved true!—a contest he wanted both to win and to lose.

  Finally, Paula ended things, announcing her intention to divorce him and demand custody of the girls.

  He picked at his turkey potpie now, threw it away. He found his Son Seals tape, a bit of the old Chicago blues. A nightly ritual in his solitude. He closed his eyes and imagined himself in the bottomlands of the Mississippi River, sharing a bottle of rotgut with the ghost of Robert Johnson, learning to slide a pocketknife across the A string and hold it forever, a sweetly agonizing, cricket vibrato.

  As Son hummed above a snappy backbeat, rapping like a wronged old haint, Hugh recited to himself Johnson’s famous tale, which every blues aficionado knew by heart: “If you want to learn how to play, you go to the crossroad. Be sure to get there a little ‘fore twelve o’clock at night. You have your guitar and be playing a piece sitting there by yourself. A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it. Then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s how I learned to play anything I want.”

  And that’s where Hugh had decided to plunge back into dating: standing by Highway 61, where it hugged the gnarly, grassy border of U.S. 49 (in the middle of the day, alas, with dozens of other tourists), making a pact, not with the devil but with himself. “You can do anything you want,” he said aloud softly, and as soon as he formed the words, he knew he was ready to start seeing women again. He didn’t know why, but then and there, in the cradle of the blues, the pounding misery of his life with and without Paula fell from him like a tossed-off winter coat.

  Now he surrendered to Son’s Delta rhythms. They were quickened and honed by the grit and steel of Chicago, where so many blues players had drifted when machines roared in and ate up the Deep South’s cotton fields. But they hadn’t all drifted away, Hugh thought, smiling, remembering Spider. Tomorrow, he’d hear about Saturday’s show.

  Son knifed a note into space, spearing Hugh, and hurled him back to the bottomlands, the rich alluvial soil, the source of all the songs.

  3.

  Friday wasn’t a teaching day for him; he spent the morning grading essays on the Battle of San Jacinto. The best paper, from one of his favorite students in the advanced class, wa
s about Santa Anna’s life after he’d surrendered to Sam Houston. In his old age, the former general had been exiled from Mexico and settled on Staten Island, where he introduced chewing gum to North America. According to Hugh’s student, Santa Anna gave a hunk of chicle, the rubbery dried sap from sapodilla trees in southern Mexico, to Thomas Adams, who turned it into “Adams’ New York Gum No. 1.”

  The fluorescent light above Hugh’s desk began to fizzle and flicker. Though a little sunshine came from his window, it wasn’t enough to work by in the small corner office. He played with the switch. The light continued to blink, as though a small hand were opening and closing in front of it.

  He called maintenance. They couldn’t get to it until late next week. He finished reading the paper in the noisy, muted light. He’d been distracted already, all morning: he’d been thinking of calling Alice Richards and asking her to Spider’s Juneteenth show. Alice worked in the Affirmative Action Office, and they’d dated a couple of times, hit it off pretty well, though they’d never gotten more intimate than a swift good-night kiss. Hugh found her enormously attractive, but she was stiff, overly zealous in her work. A thwarted crusader. She’d told him once, discussing a sexual-harassment case she’d overseen, “It’s my job to be an advocate for the innocent, which, on this campus—and in most other places, I promise you—are young women.” Hugh felt she often confused advocacy with her own anger at men, the source of which he didn’t know her well enough to trace. “When I first came to Marion, three years ago, I imagined no one could be nobler than people who teach in junior colleges,” she’d said the night they first went out. “Clearly, they don’t gravitate here for the money, right? They’ll never have the prestige of their big-shot cousins in the major universities. They’re just teachers. Servants of knowledge.”

  “And you’ve learned since—?” he’d asked.