Odette had said she was sorry and pointed out that her mother’s habit of regularly popping in with two such unlikely companions as Aunt Marjorie and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt could lead a reasonable person to assume that the world of the dead was a small one. Mama had remained surly, but she’d eventually accepted Odette’s apology.
Odette’s mother had provided some information about El from the old days, including his real name, Marcus Henry. He and Miss Ruth had been several years younger than she was, so she hadn’t known him well. Aunt Marjorie, who’d visited the Pink Slipper daily, would be the person to ask about El, Mama had said. But Aunt Marjorie and Eleanor Roosevelt had shared a bottle of corn liquor that morning, and the two of them had carried on a friendly slap-boxing match outside the gazebo the entire time Odette and her mother talked. Odette had hoped to chat with Aunt Marjorie about El, only as soon as the boxing match was over, her aunt had run off. Mama and Mrs. Roosevelt, fox stole waving in the breeze, had followed her.
James arrived in the kitchen just as she placed his dinner on the table. He sat down as she filled the cats’ bowls in the corner of the room and then prepared her own plate. As Odette passed his chair on her way to her place at the kitchen table, James reached out and wrapped his arm around her waist.
He said, “Seeing you with all those cats reminded me of that time with Ramsey back when we were kids. Man, you tore his butt up. I bet he still remembers it.”
Odette said, “I hope he does.”
When James released her, she sat down across from him. Before taking the first bite, Odette said, “Things will get better soon.”
“Everything is just fine,” James said.
She sliced into her chicken and tried to recall the last time he had told her a lie.
CHAPTER 17
The door of room 426 was just slightly ajar when Barbara Jean approached. She tapped three times and received no answer. When a quiet “Hello” elicited no response, she entered. The room was dark, and El wasn’t in his bed. She saw the open guitar case lying across one of the two visitors’ chairs and then heard a sweet, meandering tune.
El sat in the far corner of the room with his chair angled toward a large window with its curtains drawn partially open. Taking no notice of Barbara Jean, he strummed. His gaze traveled back and forth from a pair of crutches leaning against the arm of his chair to the aluminum walker that stood directly in front of him, enclosing him like a cage. He wore a tattered red wool sweater with unraveling cuffs over his hospital gown. He also wore his newly fitted prosthesis. Continuing nearly to his knee, the high-tech appendage completed his foot and attached to his shin.
She said, “Hi, El. It’s good to see you out of bed.”
He stopped playing in mid-phrase, and his head jerked upward in surprise. “Hey, Barbara Jean,” he said.
She set a vase of fresh flowers beside the wilting arrangement on his side table. “How’s it going with the prosthesis?”
“I took a few steps this morning.”
She waited for him to say more, but he went back to studying the crutches and the walker again as if they were new to him. She said, “Every step is a good one. Pretty soon you’ll be walking just fine.”
She sat on the corner of his bed and adjusted her tweed Chanel dress to cover her knees. She said, “I heard about what happened after Clarice’s recital. Are you okay?”
“I guess I caused enough of a ruckus that everybody ’round here is talkin’ about me.”
“No, they’re used to folks getting upset. Everybody who works here understands that people getting overwrought is part of the job. It’s just that you’ve been such a mellow guy since you got here that you surprised them. Anyway, I didn’t hear about it from anyone at the hospital. I heard about it from my friend Odette. She’s married to James.”
“I see,” El said. “Now you know that I’m the worst father there ever was. My son hates me.”
“Odette told me that James forgave you.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said. But I was lookin’ in his eyes.”
Odette had told Barbara Jean that James pretty much wanted El dead. But Barbara Jean had decided before she’d knocked on El’s hospital room door that she wouldn’t be sharing that.
She had thought a lot about El since discovering that he was James’s father. She had lain awake for two nights wondering how she could go on being his friend. Finally, she’d decided she had to believe that, with time, faith, and patience, people changed. Otherwise, what had five years of AA meetings meant? This man had changed. No matter what he had once done, the El Walker she’d talked and laughed with over the past two and a half weeks wasn’t a man who hurt people, not anymore.
She said, “James is a good man. He doesn’t want you or anybody else dead. He’s probably just in shock. I’m pretty sure he never thought he’d see you again.”
El said, “I shouldn’t be here. This town ain’t never done me anything but bad.”
She stood and walked to El. She came close enough to him that the tips of her sleek tan high-heeled pumps were nearly even with the neon-green tennis balls attached to the legs of his walker. “I told you that I used to drink, but I never told you how bad it got. I nearly ruined everything good in my life when I was drinking—my marriage, my friendships, everything. I piled up enough regrets to last three or four lifetimes. It’s a miracle I didn’t kill myself or accidentally kill somebody else.
“I go to AA meetings at least once a week to keep from sliding back into all that. Every time I’m there, I hear a story like mine, or worse. What I’ve learned is that anyone can change, no matter what they’ve done. And everybody deserves forgiveness.”
“Pretty girl, you’re wrong about that. There are some things you can’t ask anybody to forgive.”
“Then you ask God to forgive you and you forgive yourself.” She placed one of her finely manicured hands just below the faded needle marks on his exposed arm. “Taking responsibility for the things you did when addiction had a hold on you doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself forever.”
“Did you ever get so messed up that you lifted a razor in the air and brought it down on your child’s face?”
For just a second, Barbara Jean pictured her son, Adam, whose angelic face she’d last seen in a coffin when he was just eight years old. The vision of a glinting blade swinging toward his smooth cheek caused her to wince involuntarily.
“I didn’t think so,” El said. The furrows of his forehead compressed and his crow’s-feet deepened as he shut his eyes tight. She could tell that an old movie he’d seen thousands of times was playing again behind his eyelids.
El said, “You know, it’s not the memory of the blood or the scar on James’s face that comes to me at night. It’s the way he reached for me after I cut him.
“See, James was my baby more than Ruthie’s, really. His mother worked all day, so I spent more time with him than she did. I went crazy that night ’cause Ruthie hid my stash. She’d done it before and gotten me to clean up for a few weeks. That night, I lost my mind, though. I just wanted to scare her. At least I think that’s all I would have done. I don’t know the truth anymore, if I ever did.
“What I know for sure is that I had to get my heroin, and I thought wavin’ the razor at Ruthie would get it for me. All of a sudden, James was there between us and the razor was sliding across his face. As soon as he was cut, he put his arms out for me to hold him because that’s what he always did when he was hurt.”
El lifted his guitar and cradled it in his arms. One hand gently held the body of the instrument, and he tenderly cupped the other over the tuning pegs. “I snatched him up and put my hand over the cut to stop the blood. He wasn’t even crying at first. But Ruthie screamed, and then we were all screaming. She grabbed James from me and ran out the door with him. The way I picture it, he was callin’ out, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ when she carried him away. But I can’t tell the true memory from the nightmare anymore.
“You can
say all you want about forgiveness and folks changin’, but I know I’m no better now than I was back then. I’m just older and slower.”
“I don’t know what kind of man you used to be, but you’ve been good to me and you were a friend to Loretta.”
“No, I wasn’t. I’d like to lie to you and say I was always your mama’s friend, but I got no lies left in me today. I didn’t do right by Loretta.”
“No man ever did,” Barbara Jean said. She sat on the edge of the bed again. “I can guess what might have gone on between you and Loretta.”
“You don’t know the half.”
“Maybe not, but I know you’ve done right by me.” She looked out the window and watched cars climb the hill toward town. Ballard House stood at the crest of that hill. The weather vane of the mansion she owned but rarely stepped inside anymore was visible from where she sat. She said, “I’ve got all the things Loretta said would make me happy, but I’ve never really felt that way. I used to think it was because my mother was a drunk. Then I thought I was sad because I was a drunk, too. But when you started showing me those pictures and told me how Loretta was sad even before she started drinking, both of us made a little more sense to me. Now I know it was in my blood.”
El said, “If there’s one thing a blues man is good for, it’s letting you know you’re screwed from birth.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. You did a good thing for me, and I’ll always be grateful.” Barbara Jean adjusted the hem of her dress again and then played with the clasp of her purse. “I’ve been thinking. You told me once that you could have steady work in Europe. I’m a wealthy woman. I’d be glad to help you get wherever you want to go, once you’re out of here. We could call it payment for all the pictures you let me copy. They’ve been valuable to me.”
El said, “You’re a generous woman. Loretta would be proud of you.”
Barbara Jean laughed. “Maybe, if she wasn’t too busy stealing from me.”
“Loretta would try to take her cut, all right. But she’d be proud, too,” El said. “I appreciate the offer, but I don’t need it. Forrest dropped by yesterday and paid me for a gig he knows I’ll never perform. He even threw in a bonus, called it ‘overtime from 1949.’ I tell you, that man’s conversion from sinner to saint must be for real. Only the Lord could loosen that cheap bastard’s grip on his wallet.”
Barbara Jean stood and returned to El’s side. “If you change your mind and decide you want some help, my offer stands.” She squeezed El’s shoulder. “I’ll come by to see you tomorrow. Maybe you can play some music for me. I’d love to hear you sing again.”
El gave out a grunt that Barbara Jean chose to hear as a yes. She waved good-bye to him from the door of his room, but his attention was focused on the guitar cradled in his lap.
CHAPTER 18
In the fall of 1976, El sang at Forrest Payne’s second wedding. Forrest’s bride, just nineteen years old, had been a dancer at the club. She was pretty, but she was worldly beyond her years and had a hot temper. Everyone—except Forrest—saw the end coming long before the vows were spoken. A small fortune was wagered on the date by which the marriage would fall apart and whether or not there would be police intervention. (The union lasted five years, four of them mostly peaceful. Half a dozen policemen were on hand to witness the climactic scene. Marjorie won all the money.)
Just as he would decades later, Forrest set El up with free lodging for the three days he’d be in Plainview for the wedding. El figured that if he stepped outside only to perform at the ceremony, he could slip in and out of town quickly and anonymously. Most of the wedding guests were too young to remember him from his days as Marcus Henry. He would stay in Plainview long enough to play Forrest’s good-luck song, and then he’d catch a ride south the next night with one of his bandmates for two weeks of gigs in Texas.
In the excitement of his nuptials, Forrest forgot to bring the envelope containing El’s pay to the wedding service. So El settled into a shadowy corner at the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club the afternoon after the wedding and waited for Forrest to deliver what was due. By way of apology, Forrest had told the bartender to give El all the free drinks he wanted at the bar that day, and El intended to make ample use of Forrest’s conciliatory gesture and be fully fortified for traveling by the time his drummer friend pulled into the parking lot outside.
Each time the door to the club opened, El glanced over to see if it was Forrest entering. Around three o’clock, a figure who was as broad across the shoulders as Forrest but a foot shorter swaggered in. Clad in overalls with a nameplate on the breast pocket that read simply, “M,” Marjorie Davis tipped her cap at the doorman and strode for the bar. She walked behind the counter, squeezed past the bartender, and pulled an unlabeled glass jug from the liquor shelf. Marjorie tugged the cork from the jug and poured cloudy liquid the color of weak iced tea into a beer mug. After filling the mug, she corked the bottle and placed it back on the shelf. Then she slid past the bartender again, came around the other side of the bar, and sat down next to El.
His first instinct was to stand up and run. Marjorie had that effect on people. Just the sound of her coarse voice, which brought to mind the creaking of rusty nails being pried from boards and the bass rumble that came from the settling foundations of old houses, made him feel as if he had just been caught at something and was about to receive his punishment.
El had changed quite a bit since the last night Marjorie had seen him, one of the many Plainview nights he longed to erase from his memory. He was two decades older. He had a thick beard now and a new name to go with it. She didn’t glance his way as she dropped her cap onto the bar top and then sipped a brew with a harsh, paint thinner odor that assaulted the air around her.
She doesn’t recognize me. He relaxed as Marjorie looked straight ahead.
Then Marjorie rumbled, “Good to see you. I like the beard.”
He took a deep breath and released it slowly to calm his nerves. Hoping that his voice wouldn’t squeak as if he were thirteen years old, he said, “Good to see you, too. I like your haircut. It suits you.”
She ran her hand over her head, which was now shaved down to the scalp. “Thanks much, Marcus. No, that’s not right, is it? You go by El Walker now.”
“Yeah, most folks call me El these days. I guess I’ll always be Marcus Henry here, though.” He smirked. “That’s why I haven’t been back.”
“Whatever you want to call yourself, I’m glad you’re here. Maybe we’ll start havin’ some good music up in here for a change. It’s truly sad what passes for blues singin’ these days.”
“I’m only here till tonight. I’m just waitin’ for Forrest and havin’ a few drinks.” He drained his glass and signaled to the bartender to bring another. To himself mostly, he said, “Don’t wanna stick around too long. This town has always been bad luck for me.”
“I can see how you might look at it that way.” She pulled a cigar from the breast pocket of her overalls. She struck a match against the rough wood along the edge of the bar and, with a series of loud sucking sounds, lit a stogie that smelled almost as bad as her liquor. “Listen, I feel bad about the stuff I said to you the last time I saw you. I should have minded my own business, but I was so mad I couldn’t help myself. I was always fond of Ruth, and that boy of yours was such a sweet little thing. Still, it wasn’t my place to tell you that you weren’t welcome here. You built more of the Pink Slipper than anybody.”
“Hell, you probably saved my life. I can think of half a dozen men and twice as many women who would gladly have stabbed me in the heart if I’d tried comin’ back to the club after what I did to James. I would have deserved it.”
“Maybe, maybe not. All I can say for sure is that nobody has made music like you and Lily and the band since y’all went away.”
“I appreciate that.” El lifted his refreshed glass of whiskey and the two of them clinked a toast.
Marjorie noticed the ring of El’s possessions�
�his guitar, amplifier, and two suitcases—stacked against the wall behind him. “All that yours?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m staying at one of the little houses down the road that Forrest rents out to the girls. I didn’t want to leave my stuff there unguarded.”
Marjorie said, “Wise move. I’m friends with most of the girls, but I wouldn’t trust a single one of ’em near anything that can be pawned.”
She waved her cigar toward the suitcase in which El kept his sheet music. It was covered with stickers and decals he had picked up at music festivals and assorted train and bus stations over the years. “You’ve been gettin’ around, I see.”
“Stay still too long and you starve.”
Marjorie read locations from the stickers: “Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, London. Looks like you’ve done all right. Just don’t forget about your home. A lot of folks around here would be happy to have you stay and make music for a while, especially me. After all, you and me are kin now.”
“What?”
“Yeah, you know Odette’s my niece, right?”
“Who’s Odette?”
“She’s my sister Dora’s daughter.”
“I remember Dora, but what’s her daughter got to do with me?”
“Odette married James. Didn’t you know that? They got a baby and another on the way.”
“Well, I’m be damned,” El said. “How long have they been married?”
“Oh, five, six years now.”
“Happy?”
“I think so,” Marjorie said. She snickered and added, “It wouldn’t be like Odette to keep it to herself if she wasn’t.”
The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues Page 13