Memphis Noir

by Laureen Cantwell

  She took the next-to-last sip and offered the last to him. He drank the sip—it was, he thought, a little like a sacrament, the way she drank—and then she kissed his lips for a taste of those last traces.

  They sat and watched the rain some more. It was a billowing sheet now, spread over the weary, spent body of land. Land was fast becoming memory; there was little more of it than the rise on which the small house sat, and beyond it only half-trees with limbs like arms trying like hell to swim their way out of the great muck. He tried but couldn’t remember it not raining, and then he did: the night they met, that night in Memphis, the bluff there. It didn’t rain that night. It didn’t rain that whole summer. There was only hot breath and sweat, smoke and neon. They danced as that blues band played “Ramblin’ on My Mind” and then “I Feel Like Going Home,” and she shouted, “Make up your damn mind, you!” then took the stage herself and sang “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” The way she sang it, dirge-slow, you’d have thought satisfaction had drowned that very day. She’d get that way. Moods would strike her down, and evil would gather around, a flock at her feet. Her better devils, she called them.

  But by night’s end, that night, anyway, she was leading a joyful clamor. Horn players materialized, and jugs were passed; satisfaction walked on water, that night in Memphis.

  * * *

  The stories they told about her—that she killed a woman, upstairs in a Memphis bar that once was a brothel, late of a Saturday. Killed her with a railroad spike, some said, though not how. No, it was poison, or pistol shot, kitchen knife, guitar string—there were as many versions as there were storytellers. They agreed about as much on the why, though the smart money had it that this slain woman, known as Cheatham’s woman—Beatrice was her name, though it died too, from disuse—had been, briefly, her lover, but that she’d gone running back on threat of death from Cheatham. “That’s the why,” they’d say, and someone would always ask, “Then why kill her and not him?” And were told, always, “Don’t you see? She found a way to do away with the both of them and only had to kill the one. Ain’t it like her to do twice the harm with half the work?”

  He’d heard the stories, versions of them, after he married her. He only said, and then only to himself, “Then why didn’t the police come? Why was she walking free and free to marry and no more haunted than she is?”

  And then, not even saying it to himself, not even thinking it, really, but knowing, somehow: It’s not like she’d deny it. She doesn’t lie. It’s her one virtue, even if she wields it like a vice. She’s incapable of telling a lie. It’s why I don’t ask.

  Anyway, it was a town for tales, Memphis. As for truth, well, it was murdered nightly and back the next morning, a little woozy, was all. The truth? Ah, you could get that however you wanted in Memphis, like you could get your pork shoulder chopped or pulled, your ribs wet or dry.

  Even so, he suggested they move to the country, and she said, “I reckon a woman with a new name could do with a fresh start altogether. Pack the bottles, husband.”

  * * *

  How they met and married, how that all happened:

  His work brought him to Memphis. He came to look for ghosts and found a live one. He was a folklorist, a university professor from “Up North,” which is to say, Kentucky. He collected old stories and songs, saw folk art and deep meaning in found items, in NuGrape bottle caps and broken plow handles and hand-lettered signs that spoke of Jesus, sorghum, tamales, and $2 covers. Splinters of crosses. Vials of dirt. An eleven-foot cotton sack said to have been dropped by Muddy Waters the day he walked off Stovall Plantation—the shroud of Clarksdale.

  Saturday night on the South Bluff. The air thick with the smell of summer heat and pig meat. Beer sold from a trailer and stronger stuff from behind a tree, buck a shot. That blues band in a tin-roofed gazebo, playing songs about homemade sin and juice-head women.

  He saw her from across the way, the big river to her back, talking to some woman’s man, swaying as she did, telling some long-legged tale and laughing—a cackle, really, that carried across the way and struck him so hard his knees buckled. He wondered if she could sing. Then she did, and that was it.

  So that night in Memphis, after the band and the dancing, when it was just the two of them on the bluff and the moon in the sky and the devil off somewhere, and God too, the both of them soused and near to sleep—that night, the first they met, he asked her to marry him.

  “Marry me, see if I care,” she said. “Marry the hell out of me.”

  Later, in some fit or funk, she’d accuse him of collecting her, a gone black woman of song. He’d say, “But I loved you. I love you still. You must have loved me too. Or else why—” and she’d just shrug and say, “Who was I, white boy, to deny you the one wild thing you’d done in your life?”

  2

  They sat on the porch and drank—it was moonshine now, her dead uncle’s handiwork. They passed the bottle, back and forth, back and forth, her taking swigs and him sips, until there was nothing left, only a drop, and she said her uncle told her that was a devil’s tear, that last drop, and never to drink it.

  “The devil’s tear,” he said.

  “I always figured that was the only thing could make the devil cry—the sight of a near-empty bottle. But my uncle, he said it all had to do with bad luck, you know.”

  “Yeah,” he said, sounding more like her by the sip, “I’d sure hate to break this winning streak we’ve got ourselves on.”

  She laughed one of those laughs of hers, not the cackle but another: husky with a deep bottom, a gallows laugh, a gutbucket number almost like the blues she sang the night they met, that night in Memphis, on the bluff there. It was as close as she came to singing, these days.

  “My granddaddy, one time he died,” she said. “I mean, one time he died and came back and told about it. That’s what he said. I don’t know if he really did die, but I do know he was gone a good while—I was there beside his bed, a girl, watching him, his dead eyes, his not breathing—and when he got back from wherever he went, he, by damn, had some fresh stories to tell. He told me them. He said he’d seen angels of the flesh and silver-winged hounds, and he’d seen the night sky peel away like old whorehouse wallpaper to reveal God on His golden throne, surrounded by a burgundy-robed choir singing ‘Sinner You Better Get Ready’ and ‘Get Right Church.’

  “He just told me, not the others. He waited for the others to leave the room. He said the others would think he’d gone full mad, lost what scraps were left of his mind. But me, he liked. He said I had a little of the devil in my eyes. That made me interesting to him, I think. Or anyway, I was a good audience. I was ten, something like that. I was a girl. Devil in my eyes—I’d been told it before, and I’d be told it again. I was told it all through my growing up, but all the rest, my mama, aunts, my sisters, this one boy I liked, they said it like just a little of the devil, a drop, a tear, was enough to taint whatever it touched. Like I had just a little of the devil in me, and just in my eyes, but I was lousy with him, still and all. Spoiled and ruined. Spoilt and ruint—how they said it.

  “Fine, I was evil, then. So I scared my sisters, which I liked doing, and I scared that one boy I liked, which bothered me at first, but I warmed to it. He would have robbed banks for me. Hell—churches. But my mother and aunts, they prayed for me, pitied me. I could hear them talking, late at night, wondering could I be saved? Like saying, would the devil let loose of this girl? And me, five, eight, ten, twelve years old, and hearing this.”

  He just waited until she started up again. He wanted to ask how wild she’d been, but he just looked at her. She knew, though.

  “I wasn’t that bad, really,” she went on. “Only a little. I was more contrary than anything. I was just working up to really bad, I guess. I didn’t mind what I was told. Ever. Just for sport. I didn’t care when they said they’d whip me. They whipped me until they were sore, and begged would I say the word so they could stop. But I wasn’t sorry. Hell no. And I’d disappear
at odd hours. I’d slip out at night, go nowhere but down to the creek. I’d sleep there. They’d ask where I was, and I’d say Hot Springs or out to the juke, or Memphis, looking for a man. They weren’t lies—I was there, in my head. Memphis was my favorite place to want to be. Heaven sounded like a sentence, and hell was just some place they made up to scare us all. But Memphis. Shit, Memphis was real. City upon the bluff, like in the Good Book, only not like that at all. That white stuff wasn’t salt, and the light was pure blue neon. Dreamed of that place. I mean, dreamed hard and woke up spent.

  “And then liquor came into it. I figured out if I poured out some of a bottle of my uncle’s hooch, they’d think I drank it. I hated to pour it out—that was the only sin I saw in it. And then I didn’t pour it out. I was twelve, something like that, when I started drinking. I’d been smoking for a year already. I lit up in church one day. I shouted Holy hell! when it ought to have been Hallelujah! That’s about the time they quit taking me to church, see.”

  “They pushed you to all that, your mama and aunts and the rest.”

  “They didn’t have to push hard, husband.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “And anyway, now it’s me, all me, full-grown, sitting here. A ruint black woman in the rain at the end of the world.”

  He stood to go inside, to gather their things. It was time. There was an old johnboat out back of the house, left by the previous owner. She said she wished it were a steamboat, white with a big, red paddlewheel and draped lights on the bow, couples dancing on the deck to a little combo playing the “Beale Street Mess Around.” She said she’d drink too much and put the make on Mark Twain. She sighed. She said, “But I’d settle for a rusted party barge and just a devil’s tear to drink, and you, my man, to put the make on,” and he said, “Well, it’s just a johnboat, but I guess we should at least be thankful for that much.”

  “Thankful,” she said back to him, as if it were rotting fruit at their feet.

  He turned to go inside, and she turned to watch the rain. It was pure noisy spite now. There was no reasoning with it; it would not respond to batons or wands. It did not fall from the sky but rather seemed to be flung from it. And she sang, for the first time in ages. She sang snatches of Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere.” She sang, “I was going to the hill country, but they got me barred.” And she sang Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks.” She sang, “Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good.”

  From inside the house he heard a sound like music, singing. He turned and listened but then went back to his gathering. He figured it to be the wind.

  When he reappeared in the doorway with a peach crate of their things, he said, “Well,” and she said, “Did you bring your Bible?”

  He just looked at her.

  “Because a Bible, they say, is handy in hard times, and particularly in a flood.”

  Still he just looked at her.

  She stood, took the crate from him, and set it to the side of them. She kissed his neck, draped her skinny, long arms over his shoulders, weightless as shirtsleeves. She kissed his lips. She pulled back and said, “What you do is, you put that Bible on the ground where you’re standing, and then you stand on it. A Bible’s a good inch thick, what with all those books inside it, all those plagues and prophets, and their scoldings, all those tall tales and God sightings, and the revelations, oh, and the lamentations, oh, and the miracles, oh, and Jesus Christ Himself, and Queen Esther too, and Thou shall not this and Thou shall not that, either, and the proverbs and the psalms and the odd parable, and some true stuff too, even, I guess. So, anyway, like I was saying, you stand on that Bible, a good inch thick. It won’t save you, like you’re taught it will,” and she kissed his forehead, “but it’ll buy you ten whole minutes from the rising water while you think of something better.” She stepped away, looked down at her bare feet and toes all there. “That’s what little I believe,” she said. “Lucky for me you believe enough for the both of us, huh?”

  But it was as if he hadn’t heard a word of it. He was grinning still, eyes shut since she kissed him. But when he came to—it was like coming to, like he’d been knocked out, blissfully dead, there for a moment—the grin had been washed away as if by the rain or blown off by the wind. Then the rain did stop. Finally. The rain had run out of ways to fall. And so now the sun shone on all the rain had wrought. The sun shone like some vengeful god, mean streaks on the memory of land.

  There was little left of the rise on which the small house sat, and those trees were up to their middle fingers in muck.

  “We’d best go.”

  “Yes.”

  They boarded the small boat and began to row. It was that or pray.

  3

  They rowed until they collapsed and then let the currents take them. They lay on their backs and listened to the river swish like choir robes at a funeral; they swayed to that burgundy sound. And they floated, a one-johnboat procession across the river of land. It looked about like land you could walk across, that river of land being the color of mud, dusk, and her skin.

  The sky was scarcely any color at all; gray would not have claimed it as kin. The sky was all plummet and regret. The sky rued the day.

  She closed her eyes and began to hum. He closed his and listened. She became, for him, that choir. The deep thud of her voice, the thrum of her hum.

  It was “I Got to Cross the River of Jordan” and “Creep Along, Moses” and “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.” He said, “They’re beautiful. Those songs.” And she said, “Furry Lewis sang about glory, but he sang about jellyroll too. They all did, those old blues singers. They sang about crossing the River Jordan, but they sang about getting in your wife’s drawers too. They sang about the Memphis strut and that Tennessee crawl. Sang about jive and knives. Sang those dirty blues and then turned around and cut a gospel record—piss off God and the devil, both. But shit, who am I, telling this to you, Professor White Boy?”

  “They were torn,” he said. “Conflicted.”

  He had written scholarly papers on the subject, old blues singers who sang smut on Saturday and every other night, and then shouted praises, come Sunday and some other mornings.

  “The hell,” she said. “Those ol’ boys were just selling records. And those church ladies, they got needs too.”

  He looked at her and smiled. The busthead talking, saying the damnedest things. She took a swig of her dead uncle’s shine and said, “You don’t know the half of what goes on up under those choir robes, husband.”

  4

  Somewhere in West Tennessee, on a day without a name under a cast-iron sky:

  “Will it be wicked when we get there?” he said.

  “If it’s not already, yes,” she said.

  5

  There came a newsboy on a skiff, waving the bulldog edition out of Memphis, shouting headlines.

  “Cheatham escaped! Baddest man in three states!”

  “What about the flood?”

  “Old news, ma.”

  “I ain’t your ma, boy.”

  “I ain’t your boy then. I sure as shit ain’t his.”

  She gave him the back of her hand and sneered. He shrugged and grinned.

  “What’s all that about Cheatham?” she asked.

  “Oh, baddest man in three states.”

  “I heard all that. What’s he supposed to have done?”

  “Bulldog edition run you a nickel.”

  “Play ball with me, boy.”

  “All right, all right, ma. He was in the pen, account of a murder he said he didn’t commit. Falsely tried and wrongly convicted’s what he said.”

  “What they all say.”

  “I ain’t saying either way, ma. I ain’t God or Judge Harsh. Just a newsboy on a skiff at the end of the world.”

  “Cheatham,” she said carefully, precisely, as if the word was a fish hook she was removing from her finger.

  “Yeah, see, ma. It’s like that, ain’t it? Jus
t sound guilty. Cheat ’um,” the newsboy said. “He knew it too. Stood up at his trial, said it was all on account of his name. Ha! And him, with a record long as my nevermind. But a man got to try. So he did. Said if his name was Work or Church or Goodpasture, something like that, they never woulda made him for it. He said it was a woman who did it. Said she killed her and then framed him. Said a woman killed his wife, all because . . .”

  “Because what?”

  “Got it all in the bulldog edition,” he said. “Got funnies in there too. Show me some coin or something else, big mama. I’ll show you my . . .”

  She looked at her husband to see what he was making of it all. But he was asleep, or acting it.

  “Well, that’s all real tragic there, boy,” she said. “But what about this flood? What’s that Memphis rag of yours say about that?”

  The newsboy unfolded the newspaper and held it at arm’s length from his face. He scanned it up and down.

  “Cheatham escaped!” he shouted. “Baddest man in three states!”

  6

  They made Memphis on a Sunday with a sky the color of bourbon-barrel char; the neon looked all the better against it.

  They made the South Bluff, welcomed there by an old man in a stovepipe hat who said, “There is no hell. There is, however, a Memphis, and it’s here the devil lives in relative pain and ease like any man.”

  “You him?” she asked.

  “Nah, devil’s up in the big house, playing cards with the mayor. Mayor already lost City Hall and Central Station and Nathan Bedford Forrest’s grave.”

  “There any word of what’s his name?”

  “You got to be more specific, ma’am. Boss Crump? The Reverend Green? Ol’ Chief Tishomingo of the Chickasaw Nation?” The man in the stovepipe hat smiled and tipped that hat, and from it a crow flew. He watched it climb the sky and then looked disappointedly into the dark of the hat, as to wonder why it was just the one.

  “You know who I mean. Cheatham, they call him.”

  “Oh, him. Well, you know.”