by test
Eddie Clyde said, "He was a nig?"
"He was on a riverboat playing lead trumpet for Fate Marabel's band," said Crawford. "He saw me walk up to the side of the boat in my floating shoes and stopped playing to give me a hand up. We become friends right away, and after he got off work, we went to his place to smoke a reefer."
"You mean a joint," said Eddie Clyde. "You went to his place to smoke a joint." From the side of his mouth he said, "That's what happened to him. Too much weed."
Crawford hefted the red cabbage in the palm of one hand like it was Louis Armstrong, and in the other he held the overripe cantaloupe like it was him. The cabbage spoke in a rich, red voice, thick with ripe leaves: "Crawford, where did you find this stuff? It's the best I've ever smoked."
"Kentucky," said the cantaloupe. "Across the river from Missouri in the swamplands of Bullard County."
"I feel so good," said the cabbage, "that I could play a song about this Kentucky reefer."
"Play on," said the cantaloupe.
Crawford got serious. He set the cantaloupe and the cabbage side by side up on the edge of the dock right next to my foot. He folded his arms and bowed his head. "Y'all ever heard the cry of a blue heron in the fog over a smooth lake? When you're not expecting it? Louis's first note hit me like that. And the second. On to the last. You just couldn't get used to it. It was a song about Bullard County hemp, I could tell that, but it made you sad and happy at the same time with something big that filled the room.
"Do you think Louis Armstrong allowed me, Crawford Keys, to accompany him with my lowly harmonica?"
"Nah," said Eddie, the rest of us silent.
"Wrong," said Crawford. "You'd have to know Louis. He never heard his playing like other people did, he didn't know that in his lungs and lips was a power that knocked you in the back of the knees. So I joined in here and there
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where it felt like there was a gap and Louis needed a break, trying to get across my feelings about the land from which this weed was harvested. When we reached a stopping point on "Kentucky Reefer," we just sat there without talking and Louis filled the silence by humming in that deep growl of his. I went to the crapper, and Louis started playing again, something big and grand and sad, a funeral march for a king, I thought, long shivering notes that made me think of bad times, like that flood I saw, and the Great War overseas, which I couldn't do anything about."
"How come you didn't fight in the war and save the day, Crawford?" asked Eddie. I wanted to say shut up, Eddie, and let the man tell the story, because it was a new one we hadn't heard and Wayne was getting restless at the garage door rope. But I didn't say anything and neither did Crawford. He cleared his throat and went on with the story.
"Louis hit a short high Cee like he'd seen a good-looking woman sashay past the window and the impact of that note made me drop the roll of tissue into the toilet. It was a small roll and in my mind I thought it would cooperate and travel right through the system. No such luck. I had to use Louis's plunger. It made that squish squash splash sound I'm sure you all know, and it got me to thinking as I worked it in a sort of rhythm about how people played music on combs and pots and pans and other things made for something else. I got to wondering what in tarnation could be done with a plunger. I come out of the can with it, having washed it off good, and told Louis to play with the thing over the bell of his trumpet, just to see how it would sound. Well, he laid the horn across his lap and liked to fell out of his chair he laughed so hard. But when he run out of laughter he tried that plunger, his eyes cocked sideways and smiling at me, then rounding out and glassing over as the sound he made surprised him.
"He asked me to go along with him to play in Fate Marabel's band on the riverboat, but I knew my calling was not music. I was just a middling harmonica player and not really suited for the kind of music Louis was inventing. But Louis wouldn't let me say no, he was so grateful for the plunger idea. He insisted we go down to the docks and talk to Fate Marabel that night. I can hear Fate now. 'You want what? This boy who pulled up alongside us in floating shoes, you want him in my band? He plays what? Harmonica? Shit,' he said to Louis, 'you stick to blowing that horn and let me worry about the band.'
"'Look here what he invented,' said Louis, playing a few notes with the plunger.
"Fate Marabel grabbed the plunger by the handle and threw it out in the middle of the river. 'Have a little more respect for yourself,' he said to Louis and walked away.
"'At least you can get a ride back to Kentucky with us,' said Louis. 'We're
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going up that way tomorrow.' But I said no, I wouldn't ride on a man's boat who insulted Louis Armstrong. Not long after, Louis formed his own band and started making history. Y'all know how I got back home?"
"No," we said.
"I tied a rope to the back rail of Fate's boat and in my inflatable shoes did what y'all call water-skiing back to Kentucky. No charge. Yes sir, those were good times, back in 1918," said Crawford, staring at our knees.
"How old are you, Crawford?" asked Eddie Clyde, squatting so that Crawford had to look at his face, then away at the trash heaped around his feet to count the years of his life.
"Because you got to be at least a hundred if you was a grown man in 1918," said Eddie. Crawford's mouth moved as he stared at his reflection in the black puddle where Wayne's dust floated.
"Another thing," said Eddie. "Are you sure they had indoor crappers back then?" Eddie stood, then reared back and looked around at us and back at Crawford. "And if they didn't have toilets, then they wouldn't have plungers either. Now, don't tell me you invented the commode because I know damn well that ain't true. You wouldn't be standing here every Tuesday begging food if you did."
And Eddie hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and stared down at Crawford Keys as if he'd poked a hole in his inflatable shoes. Crawford didn't look insulted or ashamed, he just stared between Eddie Clyde's legs still thinking of New Orleans and Louis Armstrong, I thought. But no, he was watching Wayne walk toward him with some old hamburger wrapped in bloody butcher paper. Crawford took it from him and set it next to the red cabbage and the cantaloupe, and appeared about to start another story.
"You go on home now, Crawford," said Wayne, his voice soft and scratchy. "These boys got to stock the shelves."
Wayne had a silver watch for his twenty years, but he was still only night manager, really just another stocker, and nothing important like dairy or frozen foods. He stocked the smallest, messiest, most back-breaking aisle in the storesugar and flour. Twenty years of sugar and flour. It was hard on him, but he never complained. He hardly ever changed expression, and we respected that, along with his age, so when he told Crawford to go away, nobody argued. Wayne stood at the edge of the dock a little to the side of Eddie and watched Crawford walk up the loading ramp with the cantaloupe, which was him, and the red cabbage, which was Louis Armstrong, and the hamburger, which would spoil if he didn't hurry up and get home to cook it.
Everybody was real quiet watching Wayne watch Crawford. Until Eddie raised his leg and farted long and loose and loud as the air brakes on a diesel. Wayne had to walk away before Crawford was out of sight. I backed up a couple of steps myself and ran right into the stockcart with the smoothest ride in the store, the one Eddie had written his name on. I had to grab the handle to keep
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from falling backwards over it. Eddie turned, ran over to me, and hit me on the arm much harder than his hello punch.
"Get away from my cart," he said.
I ended up with the cart that had a wheel missing. Loaded it with two cases of toilet paper, two cases of paper towels, and a case of Kleenexa high, light load that I had to look around to steer straight. Not like everybody in the store couldn't hear me coming in the crippled cart that bumped and clanged with every revolution. As I turned down the back aisle Wayne was pushing his super-heavy load with his old man's body all stretched out. Not watching well enough, I ran up on h
is heel just as he slowed down to turn onto the sugar aisle.
"Sorry Wayne," I said. He had his shoe off and his sock pulled down and he was rubbing his heel. The back of his leg was blue-white and hairless. He squinted up at me like I was shining a flashlight in his eyes.
"All right," he said and strained to get his big load rolling.
"Wayne," I said. "You know Crawford pretty well?"
He stopped pushing and stood behind his cart. "You reckon he still gets high," I asked, "an old man like that?" I waited a little longer for him to answer this time.
"I know he gets hungry," said Wayne, so quiet I could barely hear him. He took a twenty-pound sack of flour in his arms, squatted, and plopped it onto the bottom shelf. White dust rose and flurried all around him, the biggest particles settling on his bald head, his eyebrows, and the small hairs of his arms. I coughed and moved past him to my aisle.
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Wayne quit working at ten o'clock when the store closed. Eddie held the door open for him and said, "Stay out of trouble, Wayne," then he turned the dead bolt with his key and we were locked in the store. We worked a half hour, then Eddie got on the loudspeaker in the office and said, "All stockers to the back-room. Break Time!"
I finished stocking a forty-eight-count box of Tissue Boutiques and could hear Eddie talking through the metal doors that led to the back: "'Let me drive, Eddie, let me drive,' she kept saying."
I pushed open the doors and there he was, up on a six-foot-high pallet of Blue Lake Green Beans, everybody else lounging here and there listening to him. He forked crab meat from a can and drank from a two-liter bottle of root beer. "And I drove farther and farther out in the county," he said, "lower and lower down toward the big river, the Ohio, just listening to her beg, you know, and thinking. We were sipping pure grain and grape juice and feeling the car cut through the thick swamp, nothing but the headlights in front of us, the sweet purr of my motor trailing behind us. And she kept saying, 'Lemme drive, lemme drive.' So I looked over at her sitting so nice with her knees together and
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her feet crossed, and I said, 'Take off your underpants,' and she smacked me on the arm with the back of her hand and said, 'Eddie,' the way they do to sound innocent.
"'Take 'em off,' I told her, 'and you can drive.' Sure enough, she raised her little behind and scooted them out from under her. Then she held them up in front of me on one finger, just a little wisp of fabric, you know, and said, 'Let me drive now?'
"I looked her up and down again, my girlfriend, and she had her legs back together and her hands crossed on her lap. 'Take off your shirt,' I said, 'and you can drive.' Well, she pouted then and said it was cold. I was quiet, just waiting, and sipping from the grain, as I listened to the click of her buttons and the silk shirt coming out of her skirt and off her back and then the sound of her hands rubbing the backs of her arms. 'Stop the car,' she said. 'You're gonna let me drive now,' and she looked so cute just in her little bra and skirt that I almost let her.
"'No,' I said, 'we got to get just a little further.'
"'Where to?' she asked.
"And I looked at her and she saw what I meant and turned her head toward the swamp. 'You don't love me,' she said. We were quiet until we were almost to the Ohio and I heard the snap of her bra and the rustling sound of her wiggling out of her skirt. 'There,' she said, so close I could smell the grain on her breath. 'I'm ready to drive now.'
"I didn't even look at her. We started up the hill at the Cairo Bridge, that old narrow thing you don't want to meet anybody on, especially at night. And I took my foot off the gas and coasted, listening to the girders pass above us, slower and slower until we'd stopped smack in the middle of it, right above the wide dark Ohio. I put it in park, turned off the motor and the lights, and waited until the headlights of a diesel showed coming from the Missouri side.
"'You drive,' I said, dropping the keys between her legs and sliding over into the back seat. She leaned forward and pressed her nose against the windshield and started saying real low, 'Here comes a truck, here comes a truck.' And I said 'Slide over and start the car like you been begging to.' As the truck got closer its headlights turned her hair golden and she started beating on the dash and screaming, 'I can't move! I can't move!' I just laughed and sat there admiring the straightness of her naked back."
We all stood there waiting as Eddie spooned a load of crabmeat into his mouth and chased it with root beer. "Let's get back to work," he said, "I got a date tonight." And in that way he left us in the middle of the Cairo Bridge with a diesel coming right at us, his paralyzed girlfriend in the front seat with the keys.
All the other stockers wadded up their candy wrappers and crushed the aluminum cans they were drinking from on the way back to their aisles. I stood
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up and said, "Hey . . ." looking right at Eddie, and everybody stopped and turned around. "Did she get you off the bridge or not?"
He walked up to me with an amazed look and stood so close I could smell the crab meat on his breath and see the blackheads on either side of his nose. "Did you ask me if my girlfriend got me off?" His eyes got big with anger. I stiffened myself for the shove I knew would follow and wondered what was behind me. A soft pallet of paper towels, I hoped, and not the iron pallet jack or a piece of jagged glass that Wayne had missed in his sweeping. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the others watching, and figured I had to at least reply to his question. I tried to steady my voice.
"I meant, did she drive the car off the bridge."
"Nah," said Eddie Clyde. "Crawford Keys come along in his floating shoes, did a chin-up to the bridge and stopped the truck with his bare hands." He stepped back and looked around and everybody laughed. "I got me some that night," Eddie added, "but old Crawford didn't. He's like you. He's never had any.'' The laughter got louder.
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After midnight Eddie locked the doors and we walked to our cars. He had moved his Firebird from the side parking lot to the front of the store, right next to the plate glass window between two yellow stripes. In a few years, if he wanted it, he'd be assistant manager, on salary. A few years after that, manager, then who knew what rewards awaited him.
I wondered what Crawford was doing. If he sat on his front porch in the moonlight and listened to the train whistle while he spooned out the soft ripe cantaloupe. Or whether he played his harmonica and thought about his old friend Louis Armstrong. Or whether he smoked a joint and stared out over the landfill thinking hard to make up new inventions to tell us about. I wished he wouldn't come to the store next week. I'd pick out a pound of fresh hamburger, a big can of pork and beans, some potato salad from the dell and fresh buns from the bakery and tell Eddie Clyde I was going home sick. And I'd drive out to Crawford's shack for a cookout. Maybe he'd show me the floating shoes and let me try them out, but I wouldn't insist on it.
Eddie's motor caught and rumbled and I felt the low nose of the Firebird inching toward my back. When I whirled around, Eddie was holding his hand out the window. I stepped forward swinging my open palm toward his, and he squealed his tires and was gone to his girlfriend's house, leaving me there with a handful of nothing.
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Carl's Outside
by Brad Watson
I was out on the front porch when the phone began to ring. A pink sunset was spreading in the sky and I didn't want to leave it. But Lanny was busy with supper so I went inside and answered the phone.
A Mr. Secrist from Carl's school introduced himself.
"Is anything wrong?" I said.
"Well we've been a little worried about Carl," Mr. Secrist said. "He hasn't been himself." He paused. I didn't say anything. ''He's been getting into fights, falling asleep in class. Nothing we haven't been able to handle, you know, but it's not like Carl."
There was an awkward pause. Then Mr. Secrist went on.
