Down These Strange Streets

by George R. R. Martin; Gardner Dozois

  Music may have charms to soothe the savage breast, but as the down-on-his-luck private eye in the gritty story that follows learns, it also has charms that can open doors—including doors to places where nobody ought to go.

  Prolific Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale has won the Edgar® Award, the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the American Mystery Award, the International Crime Writer’s Award, and eight Bram Stoker Awards. Although perhaps best known for horror/thrillers such as The Nightrunners, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Bottoms, The God of the Razor, and The Drive-In, he also writes the popular Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mystery series—Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, The Two- Bear Mambo, Bad Chili, Rumble Tumble, Captains Outrageous—as well as Western novels such as Texas Night Rider and Blooddance, and totally unclassifiable cross-genre novels such as Zeppelins West, The Magic Wagon, and Flaming London. His other novels include Dead in the West, The Big Blow, Sunset and Sawdust, Act of Love, Freezer Burn, Waltz of Shadows, The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, and Leather Maiden. He has also contributed novels to series such as Batman and Tarzan. His many short stories have been collected in By Bizarre Hands; Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back; The Shadows Kith and Kin; The Long Ones; Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy; Bestsellers Guaranteed; On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with the Dead Folks; Electric Gumbo; Writer of the Purple Rage; A Fist Full of Stories; Bumper Crop; The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent; For a Few Stories More; Mad Dog Summer: And Other Stories; The King and Other Stories; and High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. As editor, he has produced the anthologies The Best of the West, Retro Pulp Tales, Son of Retro Pulp Tales (with his son, Keith Lansdale), Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto), Dark at Heart: All New Tales of Dark Suspense (with his wife, Karen Lansdale), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners, and the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology Cross Plains Universe (with Scott A. Cupp). An anthology in tribute to Lansdale’s work is Lords of the Razor. His most recent books are a new collection, Deadman’s Road; an omnibus, Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal; and, as editor, a new anthology, Crucified Dreams. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.

  I WAS DOWN AT THE BLUE LIGHT JOINT THAT NIGHT, FINISHING OFF SOME ribs and listening to some blues, when in walked Alma May. She was looking good too. Had a dress on that fit her the way a dress ought to fit every woman in the world. She was wearing a little flat hat that leaned to one side, like an unbalanced plate on a waiter’s palm. The high heels she had on made her legs look tight and way all right.

  The light wasn’t all that good in the joint, which is one of its appeals. It sometimes helps a man or woman get along in a way the daylight wouldn’t stand, but I knew Alma May enough to know light didn’t matter. She’d look good wearing a sack and a paper hat.

  There was something about her face that showed me right off she was worried, that things weren’t right. She was glancing left and right, like she was in some big city trying to cross a busy street and not get hit by a car.

  I got my bottle of beer, left out from my table, and went over to her.

  Then I knew why she’d been looking around like that. She said, “I was looking for you, Richard.”

  “Say you were,” I said. “Well, you done found me.”

  The way she stared at me wiped the grin off my face.

  “Something wrong, Alma May?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I got to talk, though. Thought you’d be here, and I was wondering you might want to come by my place.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “All right.”

  “But don’t get no business in mind,” she said. “This isn’t like the old days. I need your help, and I need to know I can count on you.”

  “Well, I kind of like the kind of business we used to do, but all right, we’re friends. It’s cool.”

  “I hoped you’d say that.”

  “You got a car?” I said.

  She shook her head. “No. I had a friend drop me off.”

  I thought, Friend? Sure.

  “All right then,” I said, “let’s strut on out.”

  I GUESS YOU COULD SAY IT’S A SHAME ALMA MAY MAKES HER MONEY TURNING tricks, but when you’re the one paying for the tricks, and you are one of her satisfied customers, you feel different. Right then, anyway. Later, you feel guilty. Like maybe you done peed on the Mona Lisa. Cause that gal, she was one fine dark-skin woman who should have got better than a thousand rides and enough money to buy some eats and make some coffee in the morning. She deserved something good. Should have found and married a man with a steady job that could have done all right by her.

  But that hadn’t happened. Me and her had a bit of something once, and it wasn’t just business, money changing hands after she got me feeling good. No, it was more than that, but we couldn’t work it out. She was in the life and didn’t know how to get out. And as for deserving something better, that wasn’t me. What I had were a couple of nice suits, some two-tone shoes, a hat, and a gun—.45-caliber automatic, like they’d used in the war a few years back.

  Alma May got a little on the dope, too, and though she shook it, it had dropped her down deep. Way I figured, she wasn’t never climbing out of that hole, and it didn’t have nothing to do with dope now. What it had to do with was time. You get a window open now and again, and if you don’t crawl through it, it closes. I know. My window had closed some time back. It made me mad all the time.

  We were in my Chevy, a six-year-old car, a forty-eight model. I’d had it reworked a bit at a time: new tires, fresh windshield, nice seat covers, and so on. It was shiny and special.

  We were driving along, making good time on the highway, the lights racing over the cement, making the recent rain in the ruts shine like the knees of old dress pants.

  “What you need me for?” I asked.

  “It’s a little complicated,” she said.

  “Why me?”

  “I don’t know . . . You’ve always been good to me, and once we had a thing goin’.”

  “We did,” I said.

  “What happened to it?”

  I shrugged. “It quit goin’.”

  “It did, didn’t it? Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.”

  “Sometimes I wish a lot of things,” I said.

  She leaned back in the seat and opened her purse and got out a cigarette and lit it, then rolled down the window. She remembered I didn’t like cigarette smoke. I never had got on the tobacco. It took your wind and it stunk and it made your breath bad too. I hated when it got in my clothes.

  “You’re the only one I could tell this to,” she said. “The only one that would listen to me and not think I been with the needle in my arm. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Sure, baby, I know.”

  “I sound to you like I been bad?”

  “Naw. You sound all right. I mean, you’re talkin’ a little odd, but not like you’re out of your head.”

  “Drunk?”

  “Nope. Just like you had a bad dream and want to tell someone.”

  “That’s closer,” she said. “That ain’t it, but that’s much closer than any needle or whiskey or wine.”

  Alma May’s place is on the outskirts of town. It’s the one thing she got out of life that ain’t bad. It’s not a mansion. It’s small, but its tight and bright in the daylight, all painted up a canary yellow color with deep blue trim. It didn’t look bad in the moonlight.

  Alma May didn’t work with a pimp. She didn’t need one. She was well-known around town. She had her clientele. They were all safe, she told me once. About a third of them were white folks from on the other side of the tracks, up there in the proper part of Tyler Town. What she had besides them was a dead mother and a runaway father, and a brother, Tootie, who liked to travel around, play blues, and suck that bottle. He was always needing something, and Alma May, in spite of her own demons, had always managed to make sure he got it.

  That was another reason me a
nd her had to split the sheets. That brother of hers was a grown-ass man, and he lived with his mother and let her tote his water. When the mama died, he sort of went to pieces. Alma May took the mama’s part over, keeping Tootie in whiskey and biscuits, even bought him a guitar. He lived off her whoring money, and it didn’t bother him none. I didn’t like him. But I will say this. That boy could play the blues.

  When we were inside her house, she unpinned her hat from her hair and sailed it across the room and into a chair.

  She said, “You want a drink?”

  “I ain’t gonna say no, long as it ain’t too weak, and be sure to put it in a dirty glass.”

  She smiled. I watched from the living room doorway as she went and got a bottle out from under the kitchen sink, showing me how tight that dress fit across her bottom when she bent over. She pulled some glasses off a shelf, poured and brought me a stiff one. We drank a little of it, still standing, leaning against the door frame between living room and kitchen. We finally sat on the couch. She sat on the far end, just to make sure I remembered why we were there. She said, “It’s Tootie.”

  I swigged down the drink real quick, said, “I’m gone.”

  As I went by the couch, she grabbed my hand. “Don’t be that way, baby.”

  “Now I’m baby,” I said.

  “Hear me out, honey. Please. You don’t owe me, but can you pretend you do?”

  “Hell,” I said, and went and sat down on the couch.

  She moved, said, “I want you to listen.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “First off, I can’t pay you. Except maybe in trade.”

  “Not that way,” I said. “You and me, we do this, it ain’t trade. Call it a favor.”

  I do a little detective stuff now and then for folks I know, folks that recommended me to others. I don’t have a license. Black people couldn’t get a license to shit broken glass in this town. But I was pretty good at what I did. I learned it the hard way. And not all of it was legal. I guess I’m a kind of private eye. Only I’m really private. I’m so private I might be more of a secret eye.

  “Best thing to do is listen to this,” she said. “It cuts back on some explanation.”

  There was a little record player on a table by the window, a stack of records. She went over and opened the player box and turned it on. The record she wanted was already on it. She lifted up the needle and set it right, stepped back, and looked at me.

  She was oh so fine. I looked at her and thought maybe I should have stuck with her, brother or no brother. She could melt butter from ten feet away, way she looked.

  And then the music started to play.

  IT WAS TOOTIE’S VOICE. I RECOGNIZED THAT RIGHT AWAY. I HAD HEARD HIM plenty. Like I said, he wasn’t much as a person, willing to do anything so he could lay back and play that guitar, slide a pocket knife along the strings to squeal out just the right sound, but he was good at the blues; of that, there ain’t no denying.

  His voice was high and lonesome, and the way he played that guitar, it was hard to imagine how he could get the sounds out of it he got.

  “You brought me over here to listen to records?” I said.

  She shook her head. She lifted up the needle, stopped the record, and took it off. She had another in a little paper cover, and she took it out and put it on, dropped the needle down.

  “Now listen to this.”

  First lick or two, I could tell right off it was Tootie, but then there came a kind of turn in the music, where it got so strange the hair on the back of my neck stood up. And then Tootie started to sing, and the hair on the back of my hands and arms stood up. The air in the room got thick and the lights got dim, and shadows crawled out of the corners and sat on the couch with me. I ain’t kidding about that part. The room was suddenly full of them, and I could hear what sounded like a bird, trapped at the ceiling, fluttering fast and hard, looking for a way out.

  Then the music changed again, and it was like I had been dropped down a well, and it was a long drop, and then it was like those shadows were folding around me in a wash of dirty water. The room stunk of something foul. The guitar no longer sounded like a guitar, and Tootie’s voice was no longer like a voice. It was like someone dragging a razor over concrete while trying to yodel with a throat full of glass. There was something inside the music; something that squished and scuttled and honked and raved, something unsettling, like a snake in a satin glove.

  “Cut it off,” I said.

  But Alma May had already done it.

  She said, “That’s as far as I’ve ever let it go. It’s all I can do to move to cut it off. It feels like it’s getting more powerful the more it plays. I don’t want to hear the rest of it. I don’t know if I can take it. How can that be, Richard? How can that be with just sounds?”

  I was actually feeling weak, like I’d just come back from a bout with the flu and someone had beat my ass. I said, “More powerful? How do you mean?”

  “Ain’t that what you think? Ain’t that how it sounds? Like it’s getting stronger?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “And the room—”

  “The shadows?” I said. “I didn’t just imagine it?”

  “No,” she said. “Only every time I’ve heard it, it’s been a little different. The notes get darker, the guitar licks, they cut something inside me, and each time it’s something different and something deeper. I don’t know if it makes me feel good or it makes me feel bad, but it sure makes me feel.”

  “Yeah,” I said, because I couldn’t find anything else to say.

  “Tootie sent me that record. He sent a note that said: Play it when you have to. That’s what it said. That’s all it said. What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know, but I got to wonder why Tootie would send it to you in the first place. Why would he want you to hear something makes you almost sick . . . And how in hell could he do that, make that kind of sound, I mean?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Someday, I’m gonna play it all the way through.”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “You heard it. I figure it only gets worse. I don’t understand it, but I know I don’t like it.”

  “Yeah,” she said, putting the record back in the paper sheath. “I know. But it’s so strange. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  “And I don’t want to hear anything like it again.”

  “Still, you have to wonder.”

  “What I wonder is what I was wondering before. Why would he send this shit to you?”

  “I think he’s proud of it. There’s nothing like it. It’s . . . original.”

  “I’ll give it that,” I said. “So, what do you want with me?”

  “I want you to find Tootie.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think he’s right. I think he needs help. I mean, this . . . It makes me think he’s somewhere he shouldn’t be.”

  “But yet, you want to play it all the way through,” I said.

  “What I know is I don’t like that. I don’t like Tootie being associated with it, and I don’t know why. Richard, I want you to find him.”

  “Where did the record come from?”

  She got the sheaf and brought it to me. I could see through the little doughnut in the sheath where the label on the record ought to be. Nothing but disk. The package itself was like wrapping paper you put meat in. It was stained.

  I said, “I think he paid some place to let him record,” I said. “Question is, what place? You have an address where this came from?”

  “I do.” She went and got a large manila envelope and brought it to me. “It came in this.”

  I looked at the writing on the front. It had as a return address The Hotel Champion. She showed me the note. It was on a piece of really cheap stationery that said The Hotel Champion and had a phone number and an address in Dallas. The stationery looked old, and it was sun faded.

  “I called them,
” she said, “but they didn’t know anything about him. They had never heard of him. I could go look myself, but . . . I’m a little afraid. Besides, you know, I got clients, and I got to make the house payment.”

  I didn’t like hearing about that, knowing what kind of clients she meant, and how she was going to make that money. I said, “All right. What you want me to do?”

  “Find him.”

  “And then what?”

  “Bring him home.”

  “And if he don’t want to come back?”

  “I’ve seen you work, bring him home to me. Just don’t lose that temper of yours.”

  I turned the record around and around in my hands. I said, “I’ll go take a look. I won’t promise anything more than that. He wants to come, I’ll bring him back. He doesn’t, I might be inclined to break his leg and bring him back. You know I don’t like him.”

  “I know. But don’t hurt him.”

  “If he comes easy, I’ll do that. If he doesn’t, I’ll let him stay, come back and tell you where he is and how he is. How about that?”

  “That’s good enough,” she said. “Find out what this is all about. It’s got me scared, Richard.”

  “It’s just bad sounds,” I said. “Tootie was probably high on something when he recorded it, thought it was good at the time, sent it to you because he thought he was the coolest thing since Robert Johnson.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. But I figure when he got over his hop, he probably didn’t even remember he mailed it.”

  “Don’t try and tell me you’ve heard anything like this. That listening to it didn’t make you feel like your skin was gonna pull off your bones, that some part of it made you want to dip in the dark and learn to like it. Tell me it wasn’t like that. Tell me it wasn’t like walking out in front of a car and the headlights in your face, and you just wanting to step out there even though it scared the hell out of you and you knew it was the devil or something even worse at the wheel. Tell me you didn’t feel something like that.”

  I couldn’t. So I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and sweated, the sound of that music still shaking down deep in my bones, boiling my blood.