The Devil's Dream

by Lee Smith

  And for once, that night, Johnny just told the truth, fuck it, it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to get any off of Greer anyway, so what the hell. He told them about leaving home—although he left out the part about why—he told them about the freight trains and the oil fields, he told them about the army, where he met a huge black man named Rufus Main who played nigger blues on the guitar, with a lot of string pushing and choking, and how Rufus Main taught him all his licks and runs, real patient, niggers always act like they’ve got all the time in the world, which is one thing Johnny likes about them, he hates hyper little white dudes like the kind that run everything in this fucking country. He’ll take a big slow nigger anytime. He told them about the stolen cars, the petty theft, the bogus checks.

  “This is amazing,” the girl named Buffy or Muffy said, treading water.

  “Have you ever been married?” Greer asked him then, and Johnny said, “Yes,” which was true, in fact he might be married right now only he wasn’t sure if he was or not, it was some Tijuana thing, it might or might not be legal, there’s no way of knowing, and yes, he has a child. A boy he thinks, he’s never seen him, though. L.A. They live in L.A.

  Now at this point Greer got real serious; she went into some kind of a major dog-paddle and came over real close to Johnny, her hair floating out on the water like a giant lily pad. “How can you do that?” she asked, she was too fucking serious. “How can you treat them like that?”

  By “them” Johnny guessed she meant the boy and old bucktooth, big-ass Ruth. Ruth was a terrible mistake caused by too many margaritas, although it’s true that Johnny has always liked a woman with an overbite.

  Greer dog-paddled around him in a circle, it was a fucking water ballet. “How can you justify doing this?” she asked in a tight little bitch voice.

  Truth was, Ruth had been Johnny’s landlady, free rent at a time when he needed it, but she was a mean drunk, she came at him with a kitchen knife, with a hoe, with a teakettle full of boiling hot water. A fucking dangerous woman, hell could freeze over before he’d get tangled up with Ruth again. But Johnny had a feeling he’d said too much already, he didn’t want to get into it with these rich girls. He didn’t even mention Sandra, the first one, which was not enough of a marriage to count anyhow, some crazy kid thing.

  “Well?” Greer demanded, floating right in front of him.

  Johnny didn’t know what to say.

  “Men are shits,” he said finally.

  “This is amazing,” Muffy or Buffy said, after a little silence. Then she started swimming fast splashy laps like she was trying out for the Olympics, and while that was going on, Johnny grabbed Greer and pulled her over to him in the shallow end and kissed her hard, which she allowed, it seemed, but she did not kiss him back or put her arms around him. It was weird. It pissed him off.

  “What the fuck is the matter with you?” he asked her, his breath coming hard. “You brought me over here, didn’t you? You took off all your goddamn clothes, didn’t you? What did you expect, sugar? I’m a man, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  Greer was kneeling on the bottom of the shallow end of the pool, head and shoulders above the water, hair floating out, keeping her pretty body entirely to herself. She stared at Johnny with her big dark eyes. “I guess I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Johnny could tell she meant it, he could tell she was really sincere. The thing about rich girls was, when they were nice, they were so goddamn nice, but you couldn’t touch them, you couldn’t just fuck them if you felt like it and they didn’t, and this kind of a girl could break your heart.

  “Come here,” Greer said, and then she leaned forward in the water and Johnny leaned forward and she kissed him softly on the lips, a little kiss like a prayer. No tongue.

  Then she stood up, all white and beautiful with water running down off of her, and got some keys and opened up the poolhouse and went in and came back out with three big soft towels, the softest towels in the world. She brought some damn fine bourbon out too, and they all wrapped up in the towels and laid in the pool chairs sipping the bourbon and smoking dope, getting a little wrecked, until the sun came up. Then they got dressed and drove out to the Loveless Café in Greer’s car and ate breakfast. All in all, it was not such a bad night, even considering he didn’t get to fuck anybody.

  But the day after that, when he’d found out her last name finally by driving out there and getting it off the mailbox, and then called her up, it was nothing doing.

  Her damn friend answered.

  “Can I please speak to Greer?” he said.

  “Just a minute,” Buffy said like a little song, all insincere, and then there was some kind of a muffled conference going on; he could tell she had her hand over the phone. Then she came back on the line.

  “Who is this, please?” she said.

  “This is Johnny Raines,” he said. “You know, from the other night.”

  “Oh!” Muffy sounded giggly and flustered. “It’s Johnny Men-Are-Shits,” she said to Greer with her hand over the phone, but Johnny heard her. First he thought, Johnny Menarshitz, what kind of a goddamn Jew name is that? Then he got it.

  So when Greer finally came on the line, Johnny was damned if he’d say a word. He was Blackjack Johnny Raines, he would not be made light of.

  “Hello?” Greer said, sounding sweet. “Hello? Johnny?”

  “Fuck you, lady,” he said. “And your friend too.”

  He hung up on the bitch. College girls are a pain in the ass. But now, remembering it, he grins, driving right on through this goddamn college town until he hits a place out on the highway that looks more like his kind of a place. Square cinder-block building, trucks in the dirt lot outside, MAMA’S GOOD FOOD it says, well all right. God, he’s starved. Johnny parks but does not lock the Ford, fuck it.

  He goes in and it turns out to be a nigger joint, working men in dark green uniforms heading off to some plant, a couple nigger traveling men in flashy suits, some guys on a highway job, one little coal-black dude with glasses and a dark suit, looks like a fucking undertaker, niggers have to have undertakers too, they have to lay out their own kind. Probably that little dude has been up all night draining nigger blood out of somebody, some fat old woman, fixing her up so she can get blessed and hollered over.

  Two of the waitresses look like sisters, high-hipped friendly coffee-colored girls. Johnny likes this place. He orders eggs, ham, grits. When the food comes, it’s real good, but it’s funny how he’s not too hungry by then. His head still feels light but it’s something else; it’s like somebody else is singing him a song in his head. Johnny pulls the Daily Special sheet off the plastic menu, turns it over, and writes on the back:I’ve got a need

  I’ve got to feed

  The beast inside of me.

  Then he pays and leaves a big tip for the pretty waitress, courtesy of, what was her name? Sheila. Thanks to Sheila, and he writes two verses while the sun comes up as he drives across the flat fertile farmland between here and Monroe, with all of Louisiana laid out before him like the future. Way, way back, the black Oldsmobile keeps its distance, then disappears.

  He finishes the song in his motel room right before the show; it’s a Holiday Inn but a real dump. Lula made him go in his room to lay down. “You look like hell, honey,” Lula said; she ought to know. So Johnny lays down like she said, but sleep is fitful when it comes, scary and full of bad dreams, he can’t ever get quite to sleep. He wakes up in a sweat and finishes the song and eats some of the cheeseburger Lula left in there for him. By the time he has broken the seal on a new pint bottle of vodka and taken a pill or so, he’s feeling pretty good. He’s feeling right.

  There won’t be no stopping Blackjack Johnny tonight—everything will be so right. When you’re hot, you’re hot, and by God, you know it, and there ain’t nothing like it in the world. And after the show it’ll be just like a dream when that long-legged redhead comes up to him and says “Five-Card Stud” is her all-time favor
ite song. She smiles, she’s gorgeous, she’s got an overbite.

  “Honey, it just tickles me to death to hear you say that,” Johnny will tell her. “You know, I’ve been looking at you all night, in fact I couldn’t take my eyes offa you, honey. You look just like my baby sister,” Johnny will say.

  2

  Mrs. Gladys Rush

  People ask me all the time, “Gladys, didn’t it just gall you when Rose Annie Bailey ran off with Blackjack Johnny Raines and left your son, after all you had done for her over the years? After all the time you’d spent taking care of those grandchildren, so she could lay up in the bed? Now tell the truth—couldn’t you just kill her?”

  And my answer is yes and no.

  Yes because it liked to broke Buddy’s heart, of course. I was not sure if he would get over it or not.

  And no because Buddy did get over it, and he has got Tammy now, who is turning a profit in the ceramics shop and takes real good care of him and the kids in a way that Rose Annie did not.

  And no because after all, you can’t really blame Blackjack Johnny Raines (now this is nobody but little old Johnny Rainette, Virgie’s boy, that other’s his stage name, of course) for coming back here and doing what he done. He is a big star now, and everybody knows how stars act. You couldn’t expect him to have decent behavior anyway, because his genetics was terrible—why, look at his mamma! They say he won’t have hardly a thing to do with her now, and I for one don’t blame him. She is just trash. And as for Rose Annie, well, Rose Annie was dazzled, I reckon, and she’s always been soft in the head. So I was not as sorry as you might think to see her go. Buddy and the kids was my only concern all along, and they’re better off, as I said.

  But let me back up now, and start at the beginning, I mean the real beginning, which of course me and Buddy didn’t know a thing about until it all came out in the papers. But now everybody is saying it, that they have loved each other since a child. I reckon it’s true, too. Look here. This is the front-page story in the Enquirer, “Blackjack Johnny Steals His Queen of Hearts.” That’s them standing in front of the getaway car, that new Cadillac which was totaled when he wrecked it on the way into Nashville, speeding of course—Johnny Rainette never kept to a speed limit in his life. See, that’s them shielding their eyes from the cameras, Rose Annie looking a lot better than she’s got any right to under the circumstances. That’s his car crashed into the tree behind them. This happened along the Cumberland River on I-40 outside of Nashville, which is how come they were recognized, because it was Nashville. See, his record “The Beast Inside of Me” had just gotten into the Top Ten when this happened, and then naturally with all the publicity it shot right up to the top of the charts and stayed there, oh I don’t know, eight maybe ten months. It was a big hit.

  Now here’s a picture of Johnny holding it when it went gold, that’s his first gold record, and the album went gold too. See, here’s a picture of both of them holding up the album at the disc jockey convention. I think this was the first summer after she ran off with him. That’s Chet Atkins over there to the left, and I’m not sure who that is next to him.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Now this clipping here is also from back when it happened—“Childhood Lovebirds Coo Anew”—and this one is, too—“Written in the Stars,” which is real romantic the way it’s written. It’s from Parade magazine. See, they’ve even got an old picture of Rose Annie and Johnny in their little cowboy suits, singing with the Grassy Branch Girls.

  I was the one that gave Parade that photo, actually. See, I’ve got all these old scrapbooks over here, the Grassy Branch Girls, going right back to the thirties and the late twenties even. Get a load of that hat! Tampa always looked good in a hat. She had a way about her, all right. She had some real style. Now, the way they do it, so many of the stars dress up real country. The Minnie Pearl look, you might say, or the cowgirl outfit. But really, way back in the beginning, the Grassy Branch Girls and all the rest of them, too, such as the Stonemans and the Carters, they wore their Sunday best to record or perform, either one. Look at R.C.’s nice suit right here, for instance, look at his starched white collar. I always like a man in a suit, myself. Now here’s Lucie. Look at those dimples, all those curls. You can tell how sweet she was. I’m certainly glad she never lived to see Rose Annie act like this, I’ll tell you. It would have killed her.

  It has almost killed R.C. He’s always been kind of funny anyway, and since this, you don’t hardly ever see him. He just stays in the house. The first week or so after it happened, he wouldn’t come out at all, and hollered out the door at the reporters that if they took one step closer, he was going to shoot them. I believe he would have, too. He shot one feller’s tires out. Finally Pancake and Bill took turns keeping a watch down by the gate, sending folks away, until things died down some. Now they’ve put that big sign down there. NO TRESPASSING. Because, I’ll tell you, the Bailey farm has become a regular tourist attraction around here now. There’s not a day passes but two or three cars will pull up outside the gate and people get out and go to snapping pictures.

  They come by the ceramics shop too, but Tammy doesn’t mind, she’s always real nice about it. She says it’s good for business, which is true. What I think is, they ought to sell something in there that would be kind of like a souvenir, that folks could take back with them to wherever they came from, like for instance a plate with Johnny and Rose Annie’s picture on it, especially now since they’ve gotten married and they’ve got a new hit record and folks have started calling them “The King and Queen of Country Music.” I don’t know whether Buddy would like that or not, though. Sometimes he still acts sensitive about the whole thing, especially about the new record, which I believe he takes personally. I’m sure you’ve heard it. It’s that duet that goes:She used to be somebody’s sweetheart,

  She used to be somebody’s wife,

  She used to own

  A new brick home

  And a subdivision life.

  Ever since it was released, the people in the cars have started taking pictures of Buddy and Tammy’s house, up on the hill there. Buddy is not too crazy about this, but what I say is, Heck. If you can’t stop something, then you might as well cash in on it. A buck is a buck, I say. But I haven’t said it to Buddy yet. However, I do believe he’ll be fine when this song is not quite so popular. Right now you can’t turn on the radio without hearing it. I guess it’s one thing to have your wife leave you, and another thing to have to hear about it all day long on the radio.

  I’ll never forget the day she left!

  Buddy was at work, of course, like he is every day, and the first I caught on to anything at all being wrong was about three-fifteen that afternoon, when Sugar called me and asked would I take her to ballet. I was cleaning out the hall closet when she called. “Well, of course I will, Sugar,” I said, “but where’s your mamma?”

  “I don’t know,” Sugar said. “She’s not here.”

  “Well, where’s Buddy Junior?” I asked then, and Sugar said he’d stayed at school for play group. It was November 9, I’ll never forget it—five days before Buddy’s birthday! Some birthday present! Anyway, this meant that somebody would have to pick up Buddy Junior at school before long, too, then go back and get Sugar from ballet.

  The first thing I did was call down to the ceramics shop, thinking that maybe they’d gotten real busy and Rose Annie had just let the time slip away. You know she’s always been flighty.

  But Tammy said that Rose Annie had not been in that day.

  “Not at all?” I said.

  “Nope,” Tammy said. “I’ve been wondering where she was.”

  So I just threw on my car coat and took off, with a funny feeling in my stomach, I must say, although nothing quite as definite as downright ESP, which I have never actually experienced. I’m not sure why I was worried—things like this had happened plenty of times before, Rose Annie not being where she said she’d be. But when I got up there, I parked and
went in, instead of just honking for Sugar to come out. I thought I’d take a look around, to ease my mind. Sugar sat on the kitchen floor lacing up her shoes. She’s the prettiest child. It looked to me like not a thing had been touched in the kitchen since breakfast, in the way of cleaning up, I mean—dishes everywhere, a whole half-gallon of milk left out, cereal spilled on the floor. But this was not so unusual.

  “I’m ready, Mamaw,” Sugar said, standing up.

  “Just a minute,” I said. I walked down the hall and into the master bedroom, I’m not sure why. Sure enough, clothes were strewn everyplace from here to Kingdom Come. The dresser drawers were open, with clothes spilling out. The big walk-in closet door was open, too, and I could see from where I was that her side of the closet was almost empty. The king-size bed was unmade. I heard Sugar coming softly up the hall behind me, humming a little tune. I knew I didn’t want her to see this. So I backed out and closed the door behind me. Later we would find that Rose Annie had left every piece of jewelry that Buddy ever gave her piled up in a sad glittery pile in the middle of the bed, including her wedding ring. But I didn’t know that then.

  I turned around. “Let’s go, sweetheart.”

  But children are so smart, they never miss a trick. “What’s the matter?” Sugar said right away, she could see something wrong in my face.

  I kissed her on the top of her curly blond head. “Not a thing, Pumpkin,” I said. “Let’s go.” I drove to Cana like a robot. Then I sat in a state of shock in Miss Bound’s ballet class at the Masonic Lodge, watching those cute little girls bend and twirl like so many flowers, and trying to figure out how I would break the news to Buddy. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to. By the time I had picked up Buddy Junior and driven back over to Grassy Branch, Buddy already knew it. He was laid out in the middle of the floor when we got home.