Delta Blues

by Carolyn Haines

  “I’m rarely outfoxed, only a handful of times in twenty millennia. And I get jacked by a two-bit dead hooker and a guitar-slinging fool.” Nick shook his head in wonderment. His red eyes flashed fire at me. “You’re one of the lucky ones, boy. You actually got a second chance. Don’t fuck it up, or you’ll see me again.”

  Ignoring the apparition of my mother, Nick dissipated in a flash of smoke, flame and raucous laughter. “Don’t take any wooden nickels, Kidd.” And then he was gone.

  I turned back to the apparition. “What happens now … Mama?”

  Sadie began to fade, but a real mother’s loving smile lingered to the last.

  “You live life the best way you can, Son. You hear me?” And then she was gone.

  I lay down on the bed, cradling Lil. Was this all a dream, or had it really happened?

  My ribs throbbed. And while it hurt, the pain served to remind me that I’d received a gift. If only in my heart.

  I had finally come home.

  15 Run Don’t Run

  Mary Saums

  THE REPLAY’S ALWAYS THE SAME. An old man, skinny dude, hugs the corner of a building ahead. He steps from darkness into the low light of a closed store’s window. He carries a brown bag. His tweed hat and suit jacket shine from wear. His stiff shuffle does not hurry, does not lag.

  His eyes lie. They’re good at it. At his age, it comes natural. They stare straight ahead, do not blink. They pretend not to see me, that everything is fine, that there’s no hurry, that he sees nothing. I understood this part but not the whole lie, hidden well by a master but so obvious to me now.

  Traffic stills in the memory of it as his soft footsteps fade in the distance behind me. A long beat of thicker quiet hangs in the night, a hesitation, just before a click, ahead and to my left. I see an arm in slow motion coming out straight from behind a car, the swivel to point and squeeze, the barrel flash, the hit like a grizzly knocking me down and sitting on my chest, suffocating, pressing me into asphalt like it was water, great claws ripping into my heart, drowning me, pushing a lost memory to the surface. Then cold, then darkness. I thought I was gone.

  I came back gradually to lights and sounds. Not the light of heaven or songs of angels welcoming me to my reward. Painful fluorescents overhead stung my eyes. Sirens and ambulance shrieks. Yelling, car horns, garbage trucks. Chicago.

  Louder and closer was the fool yammering of my partner, Detective George Ehrman, talking about the good food in the cafeteria, for Christ sakes, about how he’d been at the hospital every minute he wasn’t on duty. At this, my eyes adjusted enough to see that the nurse standing on the other side of my bed was white. She came into focus as she leaned closer. Young, pretty. Her expression, eyes widening, lips tightening with patience, confirmed what George said, that he’d been a constant annoyance.

  My mouth must have twitched. She smiled back at me and said, “You’re at Saint Joseph, Mr. Crosby. You’re going to be fine. Rest.”

  Even then, as early as that, the plan was in my head. Every word George spoke, going on about how lucky I was, how the bullet grazed a rib, nothing else, about the time he got shot and his life passed before his eyes. All of it made things clearer, more sure in my mind.

  “Like a reel of film,” he said. “Everybody I ever knew, special days, days when nothing happened, all 3-D and in color, the whole thing. You know the weird part? This feeling, like God was telling me everything was all right. No fire and brimstone over not going to confession. I’d had a good life. No regrets. I was ready to go. Anything like that happen to you?”

  I managed to croak out a few words. “No, man. Nothing like that.”

  He talked nonstop. I pushed my thoughts away for later. I convinced him to go home, that I was fine.

  The hospital noises in the hall became more familiar and more hushed. I slept hard and woke up in the dark. The nurse came in to change the IV bag. Then I was left alone in the quiet to consider.

  When I thought I was about to die, there was no movie. No feeling that it was all good, that I could go into the great beyond happy. George had no regrets. Regrets were about all I had. They hit me as I lay in that hospital bed like a second bullet. The force slapped my insides awake, like my soul had been in hibernation. I saw the whole of my life in one strange scene from thirteen years earlier.

  I was eighteen, just out of high school, with a bus ticket out of Mississippi in my pocket. I had cousins living in Chicago who said they could get me a job and I could stay with them until I was on my feet. I told my father the night before I was going to leave. He didn’t have much to say.

  The next morning before I went to the station, I walked down to the riverbank to tell him good-bye. He hung out there every day with a bunch of other old sots who pretended to fish. I stood next to him a while, neither of us saying anything, just watching the corks bob in the water, before he told his buddies.

  “My boy here is leaving,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder. A couple of the fishermen turned and said, “That right?” and, “Whereabouts you going?”

  I said, “Chicago,” and while some made friendly comments, one old man turned toward me in his ratty lawn chair and fixed me with a hard stare.

  “Lots of dust up there. Lots of wind. And a whole lotta concrete.” He moved his fishing pole to his left hand and reached down with his right. His fingers dug into the ground and came up with a ball of red and black sod. “It’s a cold, cold place.” He looked up and held his hand out toward me. “This is who you are, young son. Don’t forget.”

  Crazy old drunk, I thought. And I did forget. The city’s excitement pulled me in from the minute I stepped off the bus.

  Two years later, I was a rookie in the police department. Got married but it didn’t last. I loved my job. Thought it would be enough. It wasn’t. Earlier brushes with death in the line of duty had not deterred me. This time, I realized I was not immortal. Even my love of the city was about gone. As I lay in the hospital, that bony fist of dirt, the pungent smell of fish and the river and the past kept rising up before me.

  The day I was released from the hospital, George waited outside the exit doors when the attendant rolled my wheelchair to the curb. A good breeze from the lake pushed us along to his car. Jackhammers in the parking lot made it hard to hear each other. We drove past a construction site where the high keen of cutting metal sliced through the air. I looked up to rusted trestles. The El screeched by me one last time.

  A DIFFERENT METAL-ON-METAL SCRATCHING twanged in the breeze and blew into my car on the way to the river. It was the healing kind, a sweet sound that made me grin as I drove through the countryside. It moved and slid around, sorrowful and jubilant, went through my chest and wrapped around me like it was part of the sunlight, or maybe the midday heat was making it wave up out of the fields before it floated down and out over the Pearl River.

  I’d settled into small town life again. I took a sandwich every day for lunch and drove out past Jester Dupree’s land to hear him playing slide on one of his guitars he made from scraps. Neither he nor his house could be seen from the main road. It made no difference. His improvisations carried for miles here where the terrain was flat. The locals could picture him easily. Didn’t need to see him to know he was sitting under his tree, didn’t need to see the big hands, gnarled from old age and six or seven decades of farm work, that somehow became young again when he played.

  That particular day, six years after I left Chicago, he wasn’t in top form. He kept starting and stopping and missing notes. The tunes sounded like he was aggravated with himself or that his mind was on something else. Didn’t matter to me. His playing eased the job I had to do. After I had my lunch, I’d be on my way down the road to serve a warrant.

  I’d joined the sheriff’s department when I came back to Mississippi, still in Allmon County where I was raised. Now I lived in Solley, the county seat. A few years later when the old sheriff died, I filled in and then got the job in the next election.

  When
the music stopped, I sat a little longer at the picnic table in the shade. I picked up my trash, got in the patrol car and drove east about a mile to a rental house on the water.

  I wasn’t looking forward to confronting the man I came to see. As much as I hated the thought, Terrell Long was here in Mississippi because of me.

  I knew Terrell in Chicago. Not friends. I busted him for peddling dope a dozen or more times from a juvvy on up. He was the kind of kid who lied every time he opened his mouth. Was known to cheat people who helped him. Fought and argued for no reason.

  In spite of these things, Terrell had a certain charm that made me want to believe he had potential. He was still a screw-up, still had a mean streak when he got drunk, but he was one who might make something of himself one day, legally, if he could just get his shit together and grow up.

  I hadn’t given him a thought in years when he showed up in Solley at my office. There he was, in the middle of August, wearing a yellow polyester shirt and yellow plaid pants and sweating like a hog. I watched him through the window, stretching out of the car, looking as out of place as an alien from Mars. He appraised the surrounding buildings with a disapproving eye before doing a city strut down the sidewalk and into the building.

  He leaned into the frame of my office door, fanned himself with a thin-brimmed summer hat, smiling like he’d hit the lottery.

  “Well, well. Sheriff. How bout that.” He was a man now, probably twenty-seven if I figured right, but still looked like an undernourished kid.

  “Terrell. You’re a long way from home.”

  “On vacation. Actually, I’m on my way to New Orleans. Got a new place down there. Thought I’d take a side trip to see your domain.” He looked around the walls, nodding. “Nice. Looks like you’re staying. Hard to believe.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “Oh, you know me. I always keep up with people.”

  We walked outside together. He wiped a handkerchief across his brow and put his hat on. He said he had gone straight. I didn’t ask for specifics. I tried to ignore the hint of worry in the back of my mind. I wished him luck.

  When I saw him walking downtown two days later, I knew he hadn’t changed. Can’t say I was altogether surprised. He said he liked it here, enough to maybe buy a place nearby. Said he decided to stay in town a while to check things out.

  The next day, I got a phone call from my ex-partner, George, in Chicago.

  “Let me guess,” I said before he told me his reason for calling. “Terrell Long is in trouble and you think he might be headed my way.”

  A pause. “You’ve seen him.”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s worse than that. He’s playing Little Eddie.”

  I spun my chair around, put my legs up on the desk, leaned back and rubbed my eyes. Little Eddie Burton, son of Big Eddie and heir to his drug, numbers and prostitution empire, got his MBA and joined the family business, one that grew considerably as Little Eddie was given more control. This wasn’t totally due to his business skills. He showed early talent in areas usually reserved for the old man’s lieutenants. He got a quick reputation for being as ruthless and intimidating as the best of them. He was linked to a dozen or more murders in the Chicago area. We never got a conviction on him. Too slick.

  I had a hard time believing George. “How is this possible? Terrell’s never been anything but small-time.”

  “All I know for sure,” George said, “is Little Eddie’s pissed enough to come for Terrell himself. The word inside is that he and two of his goons left this morning. They know he’s there. So be careful, my friend.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, George.”

  After I hung up, I wished I had asked how they knew he was in town. Had Terrell called Little Eddie from here? More likely, Terrell got drunk and talked too much about his plans before he left.

  I tried to warn him. I drove out to the rental house where he was staying. He wasn’t there. I went back after work, and again around nine that night. I stopped in at the local clubs and asked around.

  When he wasn’t at Brace’s, the last one, I thought, hoped he’d left town already. He might be in New Orleans by now. With any luck, Little Eddie and his boys might skip Solley altogether. I sat at the bar and ordered a beer.

  “That’s right. Sit down and relax,” Charlie Brace said. “They’re gonna start the next set in a minute.” Charlie always hired good musicians on the weekends. He used to be a bandleader himself in the old days, booking gigs and playing bass in jazz and blues bands around the South. He sure had some stories.

  He told me a little about the band there that night, pointed to the stage and said, “You see the drummer? His great-grand-daddy gave me my first job. He was a strange bird. Always had the best working for him though. Said he never hired a man just because he was a good player, but he had to walk right, too. Wouldn’t decide on him until after the audition and had time to watch him walk away. It’s true. I saw him do it many a time.”

  “You mean, like, to see if they were drunks?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I don’t think so. He never would say what he was looking for. Just said he could see who they were. He was a smart guy. Had big crowds everywhere we went. Smart, but a little strange. Eccentric, I guess you’d say.”

  I stayed until the band finished their last number. Early next morning, I had a meeting at the courthouse and didn’t get back to my office until about ten o’clock. A woman was inside waiting on me. She had a black eye and bruises on her arms. She filed a report claiming Terrell Long was the man who hit her. I made a few calls before getting the warrant, but I believed her. This was the business I dreaded, what brought me out past Jester’s land that day, to bring Terrell to jail.

  This time, his car was parked in the drive. I glanced inside it, saw nothing unusual, on the way to the porch. The screen door was closed but the wooden one stood open. Through the screen, I saw an overturned chair in the front room.

  I knocked and called his name. Nothing. I stepped inside, saw a broken vase on the floor, walked through, checking rooms, all trashed. In the kitchen, red splatters, surely blood, dotted the sink and counter.

  I went out the back door, circled and came back to his car. That’s when I noticed the tracks of a heavier, wider vehicle. It pulled in and backed out after Terrell came home. From over the fields, I heard Jester’s guitar again, the tune moving in a disjointed raggedy way, like he was distracted again.

  Or somebody was with him.

  Jester had seen a lot in his years but he was still a shy man. People made him nervous. He could play at Brace’s with the other old-timers, but that was because he got lost in their company and what they played. One-on-one, he messed up.

  I ran to my vehicle and got the dispatcher on the line as I drove. A few minutes later, I turned onto the dirt drive to Jester’s house. About a half-mile up, I passed a windbreak of a double row of pines set into an upward slope. Just beyond that, his house came into view. My heart sank upon seeing a new four-wheel drive SUV, parked in the grass and pointed outward toward the main road, as if for a quick getaway.

  The one-story farmhouse had a tin roof and wide front porch. Makeshift tables scattered around the side yard held all sorts of machine parts, with lawn mowers and other household appliances in various states of repair. Behind them, the barn and sheds looked as weathered as if they’d stood there a hundred years.

  Jester looked about that old himself. He wore overalls and a t-shirt like he always did. He sat in a cane-back chair in his usual spot, in the front yard under an oak that gave a wide ring of shade. Next to him, he’d set up a work table full of small tools, wire and bits of metal. A bucket of ice, a spit can and a smooth-coated mutt sat nearby on the ground. A primitive replica of a National guitar leaned against the table.

  It was a work of art. Not just the homemade guitar, the whole picture. The lines of history in Jester’s face alone told their own story. The surroundings told another, of contrasts between the peace o
f an old man and his home and the threat leaning toward him, a well-groomed man in fine clothes, smiling, all innocence. I watched him as I approached, watched him set the wire cutters he held down on the table and then turn his palms upward as if he had nothing to hide.

  “Afternoon, Sheriff,” Jester said. I crossed to him, shook his hand. Little Eddie either didn’t recognize me or pretended he didn’t. His smile dimmed a fraction when I held my hand out to him as well, but he took it. Two broad-backed henchmen walked toward us from the side yard. They looked like feds out of their element, wearing jackets on a hot day out in the sticks of Mississippi. After a look from their boss, they smiled like gargoyles and stepped farther away from the shorter, slimmer guy with a bloodied lip who walked between them.

  “Sorry to interrupt while you have company,” I said.

  “They’re not company,” Jester said. “Strangers. Real estate people.”

  Little Eddie and his gargoyles grinned wider.

  “I didn’t realize you were thinking about selling,” I said. Through this exchange, Terrell’s expression brightened more and more. He knew I knew Little Eddie. Which made me Terrell’s savior. From what mess he’d made, I wasn’t certain, but I could make a fair guess.

  “I’m not. They just think they can outfox an old man and take his land for nothing like I ain’t got any sense.”

  “Whoa, now, Mr. Dupree,” Little Eddie said. “That is not the case. I’m here to do the opposite. I like your place for myself, not for resale or making money off you. I got plenty of money. What I want is for you to afford to live wherever you want in luxury. An old brother such as yourself deserves that after all you’ve been through. Think about it. If you could live anywhere, anywhere at all, where would you go?”

  Jester looked up into the oak branches. “I used to want to live in the mountains. There was a TV show about Colorado. I went out there. It was beautiful, in its own way. I rode all over. But it was empty. Like a shell. Pretty colors. No soul. My place suits me better. Good fishing right here. Ain’t that right, Sheriff?” He picked up his guitar again and started plinking around.