by Bryant, Tim
Ruthie Nell worked part-time as a writer at the little cross town rival, the Fort Worth Press, and I'd mentioned to him several times that she could probably get him a gig tossing that one instead. It would seem like throwing baby kittens in comparison, I said. He always brought up the difference in pay, but I'd remind him, he wasn't getting paid by the pound.
Alto came through the door, right on time, and found a glass of beer and his very own pig's knuckle waiting just for him.
There was a warehouse that opened up on the parking lot between the Star-Telegram headquarters and the Elk Club on Seventh Street, where the delivery people met up and prepped for their rounds. The warehouse was also where the cleaning supplies for the newspaper offices were stored.
Sometimes, the cleaning service would be finishing up their rounds just as Alto and the other route drivers showed up. On the early morning of the twenty-eighth, James Alto had just finished stocking his four-speed '49 Olds with papers, when Whitey came wandering in.
"I said somethin' to him about bein' late,” Alto said, "and he told me he wasn't workin' the weekend. He was just stoppin' by.”
"He have a baby with him?” I said.
"No,” he said, "it was him and an older white man.”
"You sure about that?” I said.
"Sure I'm sure," he said. "I came back by a few minutes later, and the man was helping him wrap up a present. I said something to 'em about Christmas gettin' close,” he said.
I'd heard it said that whenever you get one of those sudden fever-chill-running-up-your-spine feelings, it means that someone has just walked over your grave site. If that's so, someone lucked up on mine just as Alto described the Christmas present that would later show up at my door.
"Did Whitey look upset at all? Say anything to you?” Slant Face said.
"Whitey? No. Other man's the one that seemed upset, best I could tell.”
I asked him if he recognized the other man. He said no. I asked if he thought he might recognize him, if he saw him again. He said maybe, maybe not.
Assuming it was three o'clock in the morning, Whitey had been gone for almost six hours. And he hadn't gotten very far. Obviously, he'd spent a good deal of time doing something other than walking. Somewhere in those hours, two things had happened. He'd met up with a nervous looking white man and his baby had died. I wasn't sure which had happened first. Was the man involved, somehow, with the baby's death, or had Whitey met up with him afterwards?
Whitey had walked in anything but a straight line. That meant I was gonna have to try out every side road as I tracked him. I remembered Alvis Sr. calling those roads wander roads. As a kid, I'd mistakenly thought he said "wonder roads.” As in, "I wonder what's down that road.”
You can only follow a story to its conclusion if you're genuinely curious about what you'll find. I wasn't sure I really wanted to know what lay at the end of this wonder road. But I knew I wouldn't be able to rest until I did.
7
That evening, Slant Face and me were sitting at the bar in Fleck's. Special of the day was same special as every day. Three glasses of Night Train for a bone. I wasn't about to touch the stuff. I opted for a Jack Daniels, in place of my usual Jack and Dr Pepper. Fleck acted like, far as he knew, Dr Pepper was just some Mexican physician up at the Baylor School of Medicine. Meanwhile, Slant was embarrassing me to no end with his favored Scotch and milk.
Best thing about Whitey having that great big head of white hair, it made him stand out in a crowd. Stood out in a person's mind too. I didn't need to borrow the picture from Miss Vita's wall. I just had to go door to door, asking folks if they'd seen a cotton headed negro boy, on or about the night in question.
More upstanding you appeared, the less interest I had in you. I was looking for the people who would have been out and about in the witching hour, making their rounds when everyone else was home in bed. This meant crooks, drunks and the milkman.
I felt like a damn politician, and I must have looked like one too, because I had more doors slammed in my face than a firewood salesman in hell. It had taken two long days to hit anything resembling pay dirt. A blues guitar player named Leroy "Big Eyes” Palmer, who had just returned from a gig at the Zanzibar, said he was pretty sure he'd seen Whitey just as he rounded the curve to his home a mile or so outside of Stop Six.
"I thought he was a goddamn ghost, wannna know the truth,” he said.
Palmer had an permanent expression like he'd just seen a ghost. Some folks get nicknames like Shorty because they're really tall, or Tiny because they're big. Big Eyes didn't go for irony. He'd plainly got his because he had some big goddamn eyes.
I met up with him earlier that day on the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway, eating barbecue in front of a joint called the Pig Stand. It wasn't a sit down restaurant. People either got their food and took it with them or else, they sat out on the lot and ate from their automobiles. There was a big sign out front saying "Eat a Pig Sandwich," which sounded good enough, so I ordered a plate and joined Mr. Palmer on the tailgate of a red 1947 International pickup.
"Your truck?" I said.
"Oh, no sir," Big Eyes answered, "it belong to the man up front." It was only then that I noticed a white man licking his lips and watching me suspiciously from the cab of the truck.
I'd asked Big Eyes to tell me everything he could remember about meeting Whitey on that night.
"Mister, I don't know that man no how. Don't know a thing," he said. "It's like I told you. I slow down and see he got a little baby, I ask, do he need a ride somewhere, he say no, I say okay, and that's all she wrote."
"You positively sure he had a baby?” I said. "How do you know?”
Big Eyes said he hadn't see the baby at first, thought the boy was carrying a wine bottle or maybe a sack of groceries. It was only when pulled up alongside Whitey that he'd heard the crying.
"Didn't really sound like no kind of cryin.' More like somebody drownin' a cat or somethin' first,” he said. "Then I seen it was nothin' but a little bitty baby.”
"Wasn't in a box or anything then?” I said.
"Mister," he said, "it weren't no baby doll.”
"See anybody else out that night?” I said.
He ate a bite of sandwich and mulled over it over.
"Yeah,” he said. "Blind Cholly Macon.”
Blind Cholly Macon.
"I guess he didn't see anything,” I said.
I thanked Big Eyes for his time, nodded at the white fella in the truck, and went on my way.
"Well, you ain't a cop, I guess you must be motherfuckin' Sam Spade,” said some wise ass at the end of Fleck's rickety old bar. I was the only white man in there, and they were all mighty curious as to what I was doing there.
"Okay,” I said, trying to act like I didn't even notice any difference between us all. "You get up, it's early in the mornin,' and ya gotta take a whiz. Shuffle down the hall, rubbin' your eyes with your fists, an' go slippin' and slidin' into the loo like a drunk.”
At this part, I made sure to give the asshole at the end of the bar a hard glance.
"There's water all over the floor. Up to your ankles,” I said. "Turds floatin' too. What do you boys do?”
Half of 'em were pretending they weren't listening, hoping I'd go away and leave 'em to drink in peace.
"Ain't got no indoor commode," one said.
"You sure you know where you at?" said another.
"I'd turn around and go back to bed," said Fleck himself.
"You start shovelin,' don't you?" I said, ignoring the lot of them. "Gotta fix the place you piss in, that's for sure.”
One guy mumbled something about Fleck's toilet, and they all laughed.
"Can't shit in your nest,” somebody finally said.
"Damn right," I said. "But you know what? It still don't make you a plumber.”
We all sat there in a stupor. I wanted to think my words were sinking in, a lesson was being learned, but I wasn't even sure what I was trying to say anymore.
"What the hell does that have to do with any goddamn thing?” somebody said.
"What the man is saying, he ain't no goddamn detective,” said Fleck.
The old guy who wouldn't shit in his nest said, come to think of it, a milkman had told him a story just the other day about some negro boy walking through his neighborhood about three-thirty in the morning.
"White milk man?" I said.
"White as milk," he said to general laughter.
I sat there and wondered why a white milk man would mention such a thing to a negro that he didn't know.
"Why would a milk man be telling you such a thing?"
"Seemed like he thought I needed some kind of warning," he said. "And it was something to talk about while I was fixin' his carburetor."
"He say where it happened?” I said.
"Somewheres over in Vickery,” he said.
A black guy walking through Vickery Place at three-thirty in the morning would stick out kind of like a goiter on a prom queen.
Soon I was on my way to see Donnie Barlow the milkman.
Barlow proved to be the nervous type. Always fidgeting, twisting around like he was trying to rub out a different cigarette with each foot. Made me a wreck just watching him.
Barlow drove a milk route for Land of Pines, was taking his company truck to a little garage east of Vickery Place to have the carburetor stripped and rebuilt on the morning of November twenty-eighth. Four blocks from the garage, on Vickery Boulevard, he passed Whitey.
"Boy wanted to catch a ride over to Ninth Street," Barlow said, laughing. "I told him niggers couldn't ride in the truck. Wasn't my decision. Company policy. I never would have made it that far anyway, and I wasn't about to go into that part of town at three o'clock in the morning."
"He just walk off?" I said.
"I asked him why didn't he walk up to the bus route," Barlow said. "What I wanted to ask was what the hell he was doin,' walkin' around a place like this in the middle of the night.” Barlow looked at me funny and asked if the boy had committed some kind of crime.
"No, but looks like maybe somebody else has," I said and gave him a look back that said I wasn't crossing him off my list just yet.
I left him standing on the porch of his middle-class home in a neighborhood I'd never visited before. I started to tell him that a lawsuit had just given them niggers the legal right to segregate right onto the very street where we stood, but I figured he'd already heard as much. And if he hadn't, he would soon enough.
"One last question,” I said, standing at the Chummy. "You happen to recall if he was carrying anything?”
"Had some kind of case or something,” Barlow said. "I started to ask him what the hell was in it. A gun or somethin,' I 'bout imagine.”
Less than eight miles separated me where I stood from where Leroy "Big Eyes” Palmer had pulled up beside Whitey. But something had happened in between. Something that had ended one life and had changed at least one other. I wondered what Barlow's Whitey knew that Palmer's hadn't known. I wanted to think that, knowing he was now most likely carrying a dead baby, he was no longer looking for me. What could I have possibly done for either the baby or Whitey at that point?
Regardless, the baby had ended up at my hotel room door. Whitey had left Vickery Place still going in my direction, and within another hour, he would make it.
8
I asked everybody from James Alto to Big Rube, and nobody had heard of any song about the ice cold Nu Grape, although Alto claimed to have drank the stuff once or twice. I had taken down Lewis Freeman's name and address and promised him I would look into his situation. I wasn't sure that I actually would, because I wasn't sure how to even go about it. I started by asking everybody I knew if they remembered the song.
The reason I drove up to the old dry goods store, where I had sold all of those records years before, was twofold: I was naturally curious and, having been put back into contact with Miss Vita, maybe even a little nostalgic.
The old place was still in operation. In fact, it still looked, by and large, as it had done when I was young. One of the only differences: they no longer sold records. Another: I didn't recognize either of the folks behind the counter.
"Don't sell music anymore?" I said. I was four aisles away from the counter, which ran along the back side of the store as it always did, but everything seemed lower by a good foot or more, and I could see right across the top of everything to the old lady, who looked like the kind of person my mother would have played bridge with.
"We have some little guitars up front in the window," she said.
"No, I mean the little records."
"No, sir," she said. "We never did sell any of those here. You'd have to go uptown for that."
I didn't want to argue with her, but I did anyway.
"Yeah, you used to sell records right here." I pointed to the exact spot where the crates had stood, crammed full and usually running over. Now the space was filled with washing detergents and mops.
"Matter of fact, I used to sell records here. Least, I'd take 'em out of here and go sell 'em in the stores across town."
"Oh, you mean when it was a negro store."
"Still looks like it's the same store it always was to me," I said. "Other than you not sellin' records, that is."
At this point, I suppose the old man thought I was trying to get smart with his wife, so he stepped into the conversation.
"We haven't sold any records of any kind since we took over the place in forty-eight," he said and let a wad of snuff fly into an empty coffe can, dinging the bottom as if it was a period on the sentence and maybe the whole conversation.
"Okay," I said, "I just thought you might have the record I was looking for."
The old lady couldn't leave well enough alone.
"What record is it, you was looking for?" she said.
"Just a song about a good ol' ice cold Nu Grape," I said.
"Song about a what?" the old man said.
"An ice cold Nu Grape," I repeated.
He looked at me real hard for a good spell.
"You a salesman of some type?" he said. I guess he figured I must sell Nu Grape sodas and am looking for a back way to bring them around to a big sale.
"I'm in law enforcement," I said.
I thought this would shut them up. It shut up most of the folks I hung around with, because they didn't want to mess with the law. They knew better. These two didn't seem to know any such thing.
"You got a badge?" the old lady said.
Now the truth of the matter is, I had gotten a P.I. license when I left the Sheriff's Department, mostly as a way of showing Stub that I was serious about going it alone. Over the years, I had not kept up with it, though, and it had expired at some now-distant date. I had been asked for it so rarely that I'd finally quit even bothering to pack it.
"Undercover ops," I said, which was true enough that I could say it with some conviction. "We don't carry anything on us that would give us away."
"So if you're undercover, why would you just flat out admit it," she said. "That doesn't make sense at all."
"What say I just call up the Sheriff, have them send somebody out," the man said. "If you're who you say you are, nobody should have any trouble with that."
The store hadn't had a phone all those years ago. Of course, no one had phones back then. I didn't like the idea of them calling Stubblefield out to clear up matters, and I knew he wouldn't cotton to it either.
"I'll leave," I said, "you can tell me one thing. You got any clue what might of happened to the stock of records that was here before you took over the place?"
"Dock Price owned it, you'd have to ask him," the lady said. "But he sold it, inventory and all."
"Now get on," the old man said.
"One more question," I said. "Ever heard of a lady named Vita Calhoun?"
"We ain't never heard of your grape record and we don't know no Ouita Calhoun," the man said.
"That's a damn sh
ame," I said. "This old place was a good sight nicer to visit when it knew Miss Vita."
And I walked out, looking for something to write the name Dock Price down on. I'm terrible with names, unless it's someone I already know.
9
I hadn't come up with any new leads in the Whitey Calhoun case for two full days, and I was sitting around with James Alto when I finally decided it wouldn't hurt anything to find this Blind Cholly Macon guy. I'd heard that he was a damn fine guitar picker from two different people and was starting to get an itch to find out for myself. I didn't expect him to have much to offer on the Whitey Calhoun case.
We found Cholly living in a row of houses that looked like things rich white people might store their lawn mowers in, come winter. No electricity, no plumbing. There was a bone skinny woman and two sickly looking kids in there with him.
"Cholly,” I say. "I want to talk to you about a guy you might have run into a week or so back. Guy named Terrance Calhoun. They call him Whitey.”
Cholly twisted his face up and thought for a minute.
