“I’ve learned since that pettiness, lust—all the nasties—are every bit as prevalent here as in the bigger arenas. Maybe even more so, since the rewards in a place like Marion are so small.” She’d laughed, ruefully. They were dining at the Warwick, which advertised itself as the Southwest’s “most rewarding hotel.” It was nice, but Hugh found it a little tacky too. The bar was decorated with plush velvet chairs with tiny egg-shaped backs, gaudy golden chandeliers, smoky wall mirrors, and copies of classical statues of nearly naked women. Houston’s idea of Refined Taste.
The hotel was located near Rice University and Hermann Park, and was surrounded by long, beautiful rows of live oaks and cottonwoods. Limousines circled a tall, colorful fountain near its entrance. The Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum were both just down the block; after show openings, Houston’s culture-birds liked to be seen sipping champagne at the Warwick wearing strapless Halston gowns or Brooks Brothers suits. In the piano bar that night, Hugh had overheard an exchange between a couple of transplanted New Yorkers. “I just adore living among the Texans,” the first woman said. “They’re such primitive sophisticates.”
“What do you mean?” her friend asked.
“I mean they don’t know what a blintz is, but if they did, darling, they’d love it.”
He’d never felt at ease in this part of town, except on the golf course at Hermann Park. He didn’t play often—sometimes after class on Monday afternoons he’d drop by, looking for pick-up rounds. Hermann was a public course, cheap, catering mostly to old black men and retirees. Its clubhouse served the best hamburgers in town.
The remaining area around Hermann Park—the hotel, the university, the med center, the elaborate brick homes—was too rich for Hugh’s blood. But Alice had suggested the Warwick and she’d appeared right at home there. He wasn’t sure she’d be comfortable at the Juneteenth Festival. But loosening her up seemed a sexy challenge. He loved to watch her cross her legs, to hear the hiss of her hose. Slow. In control. Just like Paula.
His office light crackled, winked, winked again.
Santa Anna never saw a profit from his gum. After being granted political amnesty and returning to Mexico, he died bitterly, in poverty and neglect.
The light went out entirely. Hugh paused. In the near-dark, he punched Alice’s number.
4.
Every three hundred blocks or so, the city’s cigarette ads changed. In the Heights, the billboards showed a young white couple smoking and laughing on a sailboat. On Dowling Street, near downtown, a black couple lay on a hill, smoking and laughing. In the barrios, Chicano workers in a shower of welding sparks smoked and sweated and laughed.
“Black Magic here, tellin’ you whitey up to no good—out to put our fine young men in chains! A hundred years or more we’ve lived and sweated here, in the heart of whitey’s city, and still he don’t know us! Steal our music, steal our eats, even steal our party. Juneteenth, a Holy Day for our grandfolks—God bless it, hallowed be His name—the day Texas slaves learnt they was free. Now the pigs want to shove in and steal a profit off our past, our prayers, our good times. Cain’t see us ‘less we wearin’ their fuckin’ chains. Thurgood Marshall, James Nabrit, Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland—proud black history here in the Bayou City. We ain’t invisible. Don’t let whitey tell you no different. What do we got to do? Burn his lies! His pig-tongued talk! Brothers, sisters, next time you see whitey sniffing ‘round our broken-hearted ‘hoods, you dog him, you bite him, you ride his moony old pig-ass. You drive him the hell out!”
Static swallowed Black Magic’s voice. Hugh punched buttons until he found an R&B station. Junior Wells and “The Vietnam Blues.” He knew the tune, the lyrics a funny variation on the standard blues line “Woke up this mornin’, found my baby gone.” “Gonna wake up one mornin’,” Junior sang, “find yourself gone.”
At home, he parked his car then walked around the building to check on the kittens. The tiniest one was dead. Hugh sagged. He couldn’t tell what had happened. Perhaps it had suffocated in the crush of its brothers and sisters as they’d snuggled at night for warmth. Or perhaps its little lungs couldn’t take the city’s good intentions, the mosquito spray spread nightly by big white sanitation trucks.
He placed the kitten inside a nearby Dumpster, in a napkin-nest next to some Chinese take-out boxes. The rest of the kittens seemed fine. Now that he’d started feeding them, Hugh felt responsible for them. He set two plates of Purina Cat Chow in a tangle of English ivy, below the pyracantha bushes that protected them from predators.
On the sidewalk in front of his apartment building, two teenage girls in cutoffs and tank tops strolled past, discussing tattoos. “I just got a butterfly on my boob,” one said. She had blond hair and a pair of broken front teeth. “Looks like it’s perching on my nipple.”
“Did it hurt?” her friend asked.
“Hell yes, it hurt.”
Hugh nodded hi to them. He felt delighted that the city worked at all, when the odds were clearly against it.
On the corner, the girls bumped into the neighborhood bag lady—the one in the tumbleweed sweater—who’d come shuffling, blunt as a fullback, around a closed dry-cleaning store. Even in ninety-degree heat she wore the sweater, an orange coat, a thick wool cap, and a pair of cotton gloves. She carried half a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts sacks stuffed with Colonel Sanders boxes. Hugh had seen her digging for fruit rinds or vegetable scraps in heaps of steaming trash. He scratched his head. Had he hidden the kitten well enough in the Dumpster?
When she collided with the girls, she toppled backwards and lost control of her sacks, which scattered at her feet (flopping in rubber galoshes). Her boxes popped open. Out spilled dozens of cicada shells, brittle husks that scritched across the street.
The girls screamed, then giggled and ran. The old woman tried to stand. Hugh dropped his cat food bag, ran over, and offered her a hand. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She squinted at him. “Better get that rabbit outta your nose,” she grumbled.
Sometimes, Hugh had heard her early in the mornings, before he was fully awake, shouting nonsense at herself. “I will,” he said. He helped her up.
A roach skittered across one of her sacks. “I own the goddam sky,” she said. “Did you know I own the goddam sky?”
“Yes, and you’re a wonderful caretaker,” Hugh said.
She grinned. Black gums, no teeth.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
She smacked her dry, white lips. Skin-crusts trickled like toast crumbs from her mouth.
Hugh gave her five dollars. “Get yourself a hamburger or something, okay?”
“You bet,” she said. She smelled of rotten leaves. “You bet I will.”
5.
An Aztec god on pinched black velvet. A Lone Star ad. Purple piñatas swayed above sweating green bottles of beer, on a counter by a March of Dimes jar. A young waitress snatched the bottles, shoved them onto a tray, and danced across the room to a salsa beat pulsating from a flashing yellow jukebox.
Hugh hadn’t tried this place in a while, though the restaurant was only six blocks from his apartment. Right after the divorce, he’d eaten out every night, usually here. It was handy and cheap.
At home tonight, in his fridge, he’d found only a couple of chicken pot-pies. Chicken didn’t appeal to him this evening—especially after smelling the bag lady’s boxes, the stale, fried odor of weeks-old grease.
Paula had been sour and surly on the phone. He’d called again, hoping to pin her down on a date for his visit. “I told you I have plans. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient for you, Hugh. Please don’t start with me. Not tonight.”
“What am I starting?” he’d said.
The days when he’d been a brand-new, slightly stunned bachelor seemed to have spun back around, like history’s repeated mistakes. Exhaustion; no food in the house; ex-wife belligerence; befuddlement and sorrow.
So he’d thought of Chimichanga for supper.
Hugh smiled. Carlos and the previous waitresses used to kid him for grading papers—“Got your homework tonight?”—or scribbling notes with a frozen margarita to lubricate his thoughts.
Now, in the spirit of old times, he pulled a pen and pad from his pocket. Spider, he wrote. Trace roots.
All afternoon, partly to take his mind off his girls, and his nervousness over the weekend plans he’d made with Alice, he’d been figuring: one way to avoid exploiting Spider was to push beyond a pure academic reckoning of facts and dates; to tell the man’s story fully, with dignity and respect, granting him perpetual life on the page. To do that, Hugh realized, he’d have to know his subject much better than he did.
In one of their earliest conversations, Spider had told him, “My mama used to say we descended from slaves what come from the old Anansi tribe back in Africa somewheres. Don’t know much about ’em, ’cept they worshipped this god named Spider. Long arms, face like a hairy ol’ tarantula’s. He’s a storyteller, Mama said, always remindin’ people how they’s made from the vines of the trees, the wretched mud of the earth, stuff like that. Weavin’ pretty tales like webs.”
“Why did she tell you all this? Do you remember?” Hugh had asked. “I mean, what was the occasion?”
Spider had laughed. “Mama says she named me for him, and it fits, I guess, ‘cause now I’m a storyteller, right, layin’ down the news, witnessin’ for my people.”
Spider called stories “go-alongs,” “happenings,” or “hoo-raws.” Hugh knew he needed to know more about the blues’ affinities with African storytelling traditions. Was the triple-beat rhythm so common in the songs related to the natural syntax of Anansi speech? Drums—from the snare’s high tones to the bullying bellow of the tom-toms—mimicked the human voice’s full range.
But more than African griot, Hugh heard in Spider’s “news” the chuffing of a plow through fertile Texas dirt, the shouts and melodic rags of field hands. Lullabies, spirituals, the cadences of longing—a centuries-old ache for escape, for a mighty dash to freedom.
A waitress brought him a chili relleno and a cold Carta Blanca. At a nearby table, two Cajun men—Hugh could tell from the stew of “hick” and French in their talk—argued over crawfish, how best to eat them. “Naw, main,” one said to his friend, curling his fingers around his lips, “you gots to suck they little haids, like iss!”
Hugh went back to his notes. Spider was born on the Navasota River, northwest of Houston, an area still sumptuous with Cherokee and rich Spanish blood, as well as the spilled blood of former slaves. Whenever Hugh looked at Spider—the coppery, aqualine nose, the heavy brow—he saw Indian ancestry, though Spider never acknowledged any mixing in his family. From previous studies, Hugh knew that most whites and blacks with Texas roots prior to 1880 had Native American forebears.
When he had first talked to Spider, he’d hoped to get to know the man, learn about the blues. Simple goals. But the longer he worked on the project, the more he felt it was impossible to know anyone simply.
Driving by Spider on the street, it would be easy to dismiss him with a contemptuous glance—an old black man lounging on his porch, sipping malt liquor in the middle of the day. But when you began to look, you found yourself in the core of the Big Thicket, on the banks of the “Navasot” River, in the midst of a heady “go-along.”
What seemed simple on the surface soon became a vital hodgepodge of Indian tricksters and African gods (Papa Legba, the guardian of the crossroads—did Robert Johnson know these tales?—waiting in the moonlight, demanding sacrifice from weary travelers); oral stories and coded drumbeats; field songs, electric guitars; country and city; money, sex, jukebox politics.
You could spend a lifetime chatting with Spider, and still not know the man.
Hugh sipped his beer. Through the restaurant’s back door, which opened onto a small gravel parking lot, he saw a young Mexican in an apron lighting a cigarette for a woman in knee-high boots and a short blue skirt. Her long legs reminded him of Alice. Another man in an apron carried a food tray across the lot to a small wooden shed out back. He knocked on the door. It opened just a crack; a needle of light sliced into the night, and he passed the tray in.
In his days as a regular here, Hugh had seen this ritual many times. He’d always assumed illegals lived in the shed, sleeping, eating, gathering strength before dispersing through the secret arteries of Houston, then on to who-knows-where. Carlos seemed the type who would feed folks in need. Generous. Nonjudgmental. Faithful to his people.
The city had a million hidden “hoo-raws.”
“How’s your food, Professor?” Carlos stood beside Hugh’s table, wiping his hands on a dishtowel the color of corn.
Hugh almost asked about the shed, but didn’t. He felt as he often did with Spider, vaguely uneasy about poking his nose where it might not belong. A perpetual outsider: the historian’s curse. “Hot and spicy.”
Carlos laughed and slapped his back. “That’s what we like to hear! Another beer?”
“Thanks.” Soon, a trip to the Navasota River, Hugh thought. Maybe he could even talk Spider into accompanying him, showing him the house where the bluesman was born, the backwoods juke joints Spider had played as a kid.
The Cajuns rose and paid their tab. The taller of the pair wore a yellow sport coat and bright red socks. His companion, a stubby man in a dark pullover sweater, plucked a toothpick from a plastic dispenser next to the cash register. On his way out, he accidentally bumped a table near the front door, spilling a pitcher of slushy margaritas. The trio at the table, two men and a woman, shouted in surprise, and jumped up to avoid getting wet. The stubby man apologized; Carlos wiped the puddle with a rag. By now, the trio was laughing, ordering more drinks.
Hugh warmed; he loved this place, its homeliness, its ease, its laid-back patrons. It was the kind of place Paula called “dirty.” He couldn’t picture Alice sitting here either.
“Take it easy, Professor,” Carlos said when Hugh paid the bill. On the wall behind him, the Aztec god shook a golden spear at the skies. Hugh had parked out back, by the shed. As he unlocked his door, he saw curtains rustle in the shed’s grimy window. Briefly, a child’s dark forehead was visible, and eyes just above the sill—a swift, frightened glance. Then nothing.
Outside his apartment building, in the parking lot, he saw the bag lady angling, headfirst, into the Dumpster. He stepped out of his car and locked it. “Hey!” he shouted.
The old woman continued to dig.
“Hey! I put a dead animal in there! It’s not healthy! Come out.”
“Animal?” She turned. A napkin, limp with catsup, stuck to the arm of her loosely threaded sweater.
“What did you do with the money I gave you?”
She plucked the paper from her sleeve, and licked the catsup.
Hugh pulled another dollar from his wallet. “Go eat. Please. They have burritos and popovers at the 7-Eleven down the street. Cold sandwiches.”
She snatched the bill.
As he watched her tow her sacks to the curb, he wondered who she was, what had happened that she’d wound up here. In which feverish crease of Mama Houston’s lap would she spend the night?
6.
Hugh spent Saturday afternoon on a driving range near Hermann Park, hoping to exhaust his nervous energy swinging a club before his date with Alice. Should he make a move tonight, ask her to stay over? He’d gone out with several women since his divorce but hadn’t slept with any of them and felt out of practice, both the asking and the doing. And he wasn’t sure he and Alice were right for each other.
At the 270-yard marker, a man without a shirt steered a tiny John Deere, snatching balls with a long metal pole and dropping them into a barrel on a cart attached to the tractor’s rear. For protection, he wore over his head a wire basket, the kin
d that held a dozen balls, which you paid for at the range’s entrance.
At a nearby tee box, an old black man cursed his driver. He sent a polka-dotted ball past a dog in the field, well short of the tractor. “I hope you die,” he threatened his club.
The man on the tractor shooed the dog with his pole.
“About 40 percent of the money I spend in any given week,” said a woman on a radio call-in show, blaring from the clubhouse, “I spend unhappily.” The angry golfer snapped his driver on his knee. Hugh felt more keyed-up than ever.
That night, he took Alice to a little Chinese place on Richmond Street—nothing fancy, but slightly more elegant than Chimichanga. Mr. Chen, the restaurant owner, knew only a few phrases in English. “Hello. How are you? I think it is going to rain.”
“We’ll start with some egg rolls and a pot of hot tea,” Hugh said.
“Very good. Thank you. Nice to see you.”
Alice wore vanilla-colored slacks and a yellow blouse with red buttons. She’d pulled her hair back and tied it with a white ribbon. Simple. Gorgeous. She smiled.
Mr. Chen arrived with two tumblers of iced tea sprigged with mint leaves.
“Excuse me, we asked for hot tea.”
“Very good. It is certain to rain.”
Alice wanted sweet-and-sour soup, Kung Pao chicken, stir-fried shrimp.
“Today we have only pork,” said Mr. Chen. “Nice to see you. Enjoy your table forever.”
Hugh unfolded his napkin and plunged in, asking Alice why an attractive woman like her was unattached. On their first couple of dates—she’d seemed so aloof!—they’d talked about the college, the city, avoiding personal topics.
“I was with a man for five years—it ended just last summer,” she said after a pause. “He decided—discovered—he was gay.” She laughed unconvincingly, flashing pretty teeth. “Ironic, right? Me, an Affirmative Action advocate, fighting sexual discrimination on all fronts … when he told me, I wanted to kill him and every gay man I could think of. For weeks, I had Elton John nightmares. Shotguns and bloody knives, and all to the tune of ‘Rocket Man.’”
It Takes a Worried Man Page 18