It Takes a Worried Man

by Tracy Daugherty

  Virgin of Guadalupe candles washed Chimichanga in thick, eggy light. Hugh dipped a tortilla chip into a mulcahete brimming with green salsa. For several minutes now he’d watched cooks step furtively through the restaurant’s back door with trays of steaming beans and rice. Through a window lined with white lightbulbs (shaped like laughing skulls) he saw them cross the parking lot, tap on the wooden shed out back, and hand in the food.

  A waitress arrived with chili rellenos, tacos al carbon. A baleful waltz poured from the jukebox speakers.

  He washed his hands, tried Alice’s number from the pay phone near the bathrooms. Still no answer. As he stood there gripping the receiver he overheard a cook, in the kitchen’s plastic-bead doorway, tell Carlos, “New group tonight. Two families.”

  “Where from?”

  “Michoacán.”

  “We clear enough room?”

  “I sent Billy to Kmart for three more sleeping bags.”

  This was Hugh’s chance. He stepped forward. The cook frowned, then vanished into the kitchen.

  “Carlos?” Hugh said.

  “Professor!” He had a wide smile, with dimples and big yellow teeth. “What can I do you for? How’s your food?”

  “Wonderful, as always. Listen, can I ask you something? I don’t mean to pry into your business, but—”

  “Oh my. Sounds serious.” Carlos grinned.

  “The shed out back? The trays?”

  His face darkened. “What trays?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not … I’ve just been thinking, if you were feeding folks, immigrants or something—”

  Carlos shook his head.

  “The thing is, there’s a homeless woman around the corner, near my apartment. She sleeps behind a Dumpster. I give her money for food, but I don’t think she eats well. She’s a little funny in the head. I just thought …” He shrugged.

  Flamenco guitar. Shouts, glass-scrapes, a hissing of steam in the kitchen.

  Carlos rubbed his chin, examined Hugh’s face. Finally, he touched Hugh’s shoulder and motioned him close. “If you can get her to come around after dark. Do you think you can do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll try.” It would have to wait until he returned from the Thicket. Another day. What was a day like for the woman? How hard was it to survive twenty-four hours?

  “I deny everything, of course. But maybe she can get a little rice. Some beans.”

  “Thank you. Thank you. I knew you were a good man,” Hugh said.

  “A bad businessman.” He laughed. “I remember where I come from, that’s all. A sense of obligation, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “You take care of yourself, Professor, all right?”

  Hugh finished his meal. Through the skull-lined window he saw an old beige station wagon stop in the parking lot. Carlos and two of the cooks opened its doors. Dark children stumbled out, wrapped in blankets. Skinny men in chewed straw hats, women clutching cloth bundles. They huddled on the black and slippery gravel. Then they scurried into the shed.

  10.

  “Pigs be comin’ for me, folks, so we on the move tonight, somewhere in the city. Smoked me outta my home. You be next, brothers. Bastards won’t rest till they confiscate all the black property in town. Mark me. Sendin’ dope and guns into our ‘hoods so they got an excuse to invade …”

  Hugh fiddled with the fine-tune. “They right behind me, brothers! You hear that gunfire? I’m broadcastin’ now on foot, somewheres in the projecks. Bustin’ down doors, grabbin’ up women and childerns. We all know they lookin’ for me. Want to shut down the Truth. But I ain’t goin’ quiet into their lily-white night …”

  Up ahead, on the freeway, a car backfired. Hugh jumped.

  Now, only silence where Black Magic usually screamed defiance. The fine-tune didn’t help this time. The hollow sound depressed him.

  Well.

  What did he used to tell the girls when they worried at night? If there’s a creepy shadow on the wall, don’t dive under your covers. Look at it. Study it. Or walk right up to it until you learn it’s nothing to fear. Daddy, are you coming to see us?

  He set his cruise control and headed for the Thicket.

  11.

  It could have been Mississippi, the rich, alluvial furrows of the Delta where Robert Johnson met the Devil and the roots of the blues grew wild. But this was Texas. Algier Alexander with his field-holler bellow, his prison and farm labor laments; Blind Willie Johnson slurring hellfire, scraping a pocketknife across rain-rusted strings; Black Ace, Manee Lipscomb, with their echoes of vaquero guitar—it was high time Hugh came here to witness their fertile soil.

  Around one A.M., he stopped at the Trail’s End Motel in Paley, the only place open for miles. The old woman at the registration desk had a stiff-washrag face. She gummed a Winston beneath a crackling yellow light, and told him, “We’ll go for days, weeks, even months here ‘thout seeing someone from the city …”

  “That right?” Hugh said, signing his name and his license plate number on a faded index card.

  In his room, by the dim light of a lamp with cigarette burns on its ripped brown shade, and the blue pulsing of a soft-porn movie on TV—its only clear channel—Hugh read his transcripts of interviews with Spider, memorizing place-names and directions so he could find key spots tomorrow. A woman in the next room sang, over and over, “Hey hey, we’re the Monkees.”

  He made notes on Houston’s black protests—upsets, Spider called them. The race riot of 1917, when black soldiers from Camp Logan, a military outpost in the city, marched through white subdivisions, firing their rifles, enflamed by racist police. The “Dowling Street Shootout” in the 1970s, when cops killed the leader of a black militant group called the People’s Party II, sparking violence and looting.

  Hugh was curious to know if these incidents had been mythologized in neighborhood songs, and if they’d been set to familiar melodies passed from one generation to the next. Could he find a direct connection between the music here in the Thicket and recent urban verses, between the mournful rhythms of cotton picking and the angrier beat of Houston’s streets? Such a link could give his work an exciting new turn.

  After an hour, he reached over, turned out the light. He thought of trying Alice once more. No, not this late. She’d think he was crazy. Hell, she probably already figured he was nuts.

  The next morning, armed with his notes, he set out. When he left the motel, his car was the only one in the lot, though he was getting an early start. The sky was velvet green patched with purple clouds. The ground smelled rank and moist. His arms and legs felt light.

  “Friends, the Devil owns several hundred acres in southeast Texas. Yessir, he’s the biggest jefe in these-here parts, and if he offers you any property—a pretty riverside home, a blooming garden—take my word for it, don’t be tempted to buy. No sir. The mortgage is more than you can afford. And believe me, friends, he knows how to ruin a garden.”

  Hugh turned off the radio, still mourning Black Magic’s absence. The sky grew stranger, as though a child had shaded it wrong in her coloring book. Wind jiggled the pines. I own the goddam sky. He passed a sign for “Rattlesnakes. Free. Two Miles”—passed the Green Frog Café, long abandoned, with a sign out front, “We Never Close” and another, “No Credit.”

  Farther down the road a hand-lettered poster nailed to a tree said, “Catfish Bate.” A hoot owl moaned from a tree. He passed another ad, this one for a palm reader—a big red arrow in a knot of dying willows: “Yer Footur Awates.”

  He checked a rough map he’d drawn based on Spider’s recollections of distinctive junctions. It appeared he should take a left on the gravel path up ahead, through a dark stand of oaks. At a crossroads to his right he noticed a country store. Fresh-cut wood. A blue plastic tarp lay crumpled in the grass. He thought of stopping and asking directions, but decided to trust his map.

  The gravel petered out, turning to dirt and twisted ivy. The sky dimmed further as the foliage thickened; not
too far into the Thicket, day became night, and he had to use his headlights. About a quarter of a mile later, he emerged onto thin pavement. He expected to see the Navasota River: instead, rows and dewy rows of strawberry fields. Latino workers crouched in the greenery, croker sacks slack across their backs. Hugh thought of Chimichanga, of the shed out back, and wondered if any of these folks had passed through there.

  In a few days, all this sweat and labor would be transformed into glistening, sweetly packaged produce (with an elf or a smiling green giant on the labels) in the bins of Houston’s stores, like gifts plucked from the air.

  Barbed-wire fences, tall as two-story houses, surrounded a state pen nearby, a brand-new facility next to a waste dump and a closed public school. Trash and crime, Hugh thought, Texas’s biggest growth industries. Here’s where Mama Houston sends her naughty kids.

  Heart of them old devil blues.

  Looking around, he recalled the WPA slave narratives he’d read in Houston’s library: “Mother and Father both had kind masters who never whipped them but looked after them good and give them a good home in return for the work they did for them.”

  The soil was redder here than it was near Paley. The river had to be close. Spider had once mentioned an icehouse, “Used to be a old tavern, been there for ages, folks said Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett stopped to rest there when it b’longed to the Texas Infantry—anyways, when I’s a kid, my old man used to drink there with his friends after a full day sharecroppin’. He’d toggle me along and tell me to play out back while he and his buddies traded hoo-raws. I remember, I found a whole bunch of Indian arrowheads in the dirt there, and little animal bones.”

  Hugh knew if he could pinpoint this place he’d have it made. From there, he could find the shack where Spider was born, and what was left of Spider’s earliest juke joints.

  A cantaloupe field angled off to the west. “Tasted like the Savior’s sweet blood,” Spider once said of the fruit. According to the map, there ought to be a sawmill here, and the rusted remains of a cotton gin. Hugh turned his Nova around and poked along a dirt road embroidered with scorched blackberry brambles. He heard a rhythmic chanting. Closer now. Field hands belting out a work tune? A gospel chorus?

  He stopped the car, grabbed his notebook and a portable cassette recorder off the warm plastic seat, and pushed his way through the brambles, slicing his arms on the thorns. A wooden sign stopped him short. “Keep Out,” it said. A crude red swastika dripped down rusty nails. Crew-cut men in combat fatigues marched in formation fingering elaborate guns, bellowing, “Fuck the niggers, fuck the spies, make them suck our hard, white dicks!”

  Hugh, clammy, crouched in the bushes, looking for the quickest way back to his car. A clattering spurt. He hit the ground. He felt dirt ring his lips like margarita salt. When he glanced up, he saw the men laughing, slapping hands. Pinewood targets—crude triangles nailed to trees—swayed, torn, in scattered smoke-swales. The air smelled singed.

  Voices. Foul cigars. Two men, strolling. Hugh ducked.

  “—planes leaving regular now out of Mena, Arkansas. I got a buddy, making drops just inside Honduras. He can get us on. Three, four runs a week. Damn good pay.”

  “AK-47s?”

  “Ordnance one way, poppy coming back.”

  “Where to?”

  “Houston, Chi-town, L.A. Diming it to inner-city niggers, raising money for the ops. Plan of exquisite beauty.”

  “Wires cross, our asses covered?”

  “Nope. Deniability, all the way up. That’s the risk we take. What say, pard?”

  “I’ll think on it. Hell, what’d I tell Shirl?”

  “Shit, Rusty, with the scratch you’d make, you could set her up in a nice little house in Houston. Curtains in the kitchen. A rosy, air-freshened john.” They laughed. “She don’t have to know what’s propping up her sweet American Dream.”

  “She wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

  “Right. Another lovely plan.”

  When they moved away, Hugh scrambled backwards, out of the bushes. He wriggled down a broad slope and turned for his car.

  Six goons had it circled. Goons with guns. Right away they spotted him. “There!” one yelled.

  He squelched his impulse to run, fearing they’d shoot him in the back.

  “Who are you? State your name!”

  “Me?”

  “Name, asshole!”

  “Hugh Campbell.”

  One man snatched the notebook from his hands. “Goddam it, are you a reporter? What are you doing here?”

  “No no.” Hugh thought quickly. “I’m a birdwatcher. Chasing a rare … bird.”

  The fellow smelled of greasepaint—brilliant emerald face. Neck a rare flank steak. “Give me your wallet.” The others closed ranks around him. Hugh noticed a welter of burns, some large, on faces, arms, hands.

  Insects popped like Bingo balls in the fields. The men studied his credit cards. “You better be who you say you are,” the first one told him finally, waving his driver’s license. “What did you see?”

  “Nothing, I … nothing. Really.”

  Stale sweat. Beery breath. “Go back to the city, you hear? We kilt all the birds.”

  They dropped his cards, his notebook and recorder on the ground. When he bent to pick them up, they kicked dirt in his eyes. “Get out of here!” the first fellow screamed.

  As he fishtailed down the road, they peppered the air with lead.

  Oaks gave way to willows, willows to chalky hardscrabble. Wind flung grit against his car.

  In the thirties and forties, Alan Lomax, hitching through Mississippi to record rural folk tunes, was harassed for shaking black men’s hands in public, or calling them “mister.” One night on Beale Street, talking gospel with some harp players, he was startled by drawn pistols and a policeman’s twitchy flashlight.

  So. Jim Crow was alive and well—and armed—in the Thicket too.

  Past a rolling burdock-ridge Hugh glimpsed, for the first time today, swelling blue water, muscled ripples, worn-smooth stones. The Navasota. He’d found it. He’d found it!

  Around a bend, smoke huffed from the brick chimney of an unpainted shack. A cardboard sign on the door advertised—simply, elegantly—“Hot Meat.” Two black kids, a boy and a girl, played on the porch. Hugh glanced at his map. He wasn’t sure after all. He’d ask directions inside.

  At least this felt like the blues, not a Nazi rally.

  A spicy-sweet sausage smell hung like a net in the trees. Up close, Hugh saw that the children were playing with half-dead crawfish. The girl’s dress was muddy and torn. The boy had messed his drawers. Hugh could smell it. Milky, dried oats crusted their mouths. No answer when he offered hello.

  Inside, a big man and two women stared at him. He maneuvered around barrels and broken fruit crates to reach the front counter. His steps shook the walls. Somewhere, chicken sizzled.

  “Howdy,” Hugh said.

  The man nodded slightly. It occurred to Hugh they might think he was a militia mutt.

  Carefully, he unfolded his map. “I’m looking for—”

  “Know nothin’,” said the man.

  “I think I’m—”

  “Nothin’ ‘bout it.”

  The women disappeared behind a thin green curtain.

  “I see,” Hugh said. “Old juke joint, closed now? ‘The Honey Pot’? Near here?”

  The man crossed his arms, resting his elbows on his belly.

  “I just want to see it, that’s all.”

  The only movement was a horsefly, dancing on rotting peaches in a bin.

  Hugh stuffed the map in his pocket. “Is there somewhere I can get gas, then?”

  ‘“Bout six miles south.” The man pointed.

  Back outside, Hugh saw the little boy pull the head off his crawfish.

  A burned-out school bus sunk in an ivy-crush. A slender wooden cross, wrapped in roses.

  He’d found the filling station. Another silent man.

  T
he rest of the day he circled, reversed, tracked, and backtracked. The Thicket was aptly named.

  The sky became a kaleidoscope, churning fury—by sundown, thick as taffy, purple and black, it filled the tops of the trees. Needling rain.

  “Fuck it,” Hugh said, disgusted with himself, tossing his map out the window. It caught in the wind and skittered like a ghost through scissor-like leaves on the ground.

  How could he have been so stupid?

  Last year’s trip to the Delta, with its dreary fast-food joints, should have taught him that blues culture no longer existed. Spider was right.

  And of course it never had been as romantic as in his fantasies. Slavery, for God’s sake. Sharecropping.

  His cheeks burned. In spite of all his notes, his interviews and articles, he didn’t know a damn thing. How could he hope to know another race of people? It was hard enough to know Paula and Alice. His little girls. Himself.

  He found a main road to the interstate. He didn’t want to think any more. He was starving. Up ahead he saw a truck stop, a glary all-night restaurant.

  Before ordering, he asked the cashier to exchange several bills for a pocketful of change. He ducked into a smudgy phone booth by the kitchen. Lord, he was tired.

  Alice had left a message at his home: “Hugh, hi. Sorry I’ve been so hard to reach. I was a little under the weather.” He was surprised how much her voice warmed his skin. “No. That’s not true.” He stiffened his spine. “The truth is, Saturday felt … too fast, somehow, I guess. I’m sorry. I needed time to think about what happened. Not just the sex”—this last word she whispered—“but the park, your world, what interests you.” Ah. So she did think he was crazy. “But I’ve been thinking about you, Hugh.” Yes? “I’d like to see you again too, if you haven’t lost all patience with me. So, I don’t know, I don’t know … give me a call, okay? I’ll be back at work tomorrow.”

  He smiled, cradled the receiver in his hands, brought it to his lips. He thought of his little glass skunk.

  He fed the phone another clutch of coins, then punched Paula’s number. She answered right away.