by Gafford, Sam
Maya held out her hand. Lying on her palm were two black pills. I’d never seen anything so black. Each one had a large N on it in white.
“What are they?”
She waved her finger at me. “Uh-uh. No questions. Just take it.”
“I’m on medications. I can’t just take anything—”
Maya jumped off the couch. “Fuck it. I knew you weren’t the right one.”
I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward me.
“Give it to me.” I said. She put the pill between her teeth and leaned toward me. Our lips met and she pushed the pill into my mouth. I cold-swallowed it. She popped the other pill into her mouth and swallowed. I grabbed her ass and pushed her down on me. “Now we’ll see,” I whispered in her ear, “who’s doing the fucking.”
Time ceased to have any meaning. It was just a concept. A concept that I, in my ultimate power, was rejecting. I’d never taken drugs before in my life. I remembered all the things I’d read and heard about acid trips and highs, but this didn’t feel anything like that. It was like being in a dream but being fully awake.
I felt rather than saw Maya beside me. We were in the clearing but we were also in her apartment, limbs intertwined and thrusting. I was here but I was also there. My mind was split and I could move and function in both places at the same time. Off in the distance, something was coming for me.
In the here, I was looking in Maya’s face as her eyes rolled up inside her head.
In the there, she took my hand and beckoned me further to the other side of the clearing.
In the here, my hands were roughly rubbing her breasts as her veins became brighter and shone through her skin.
In the there, I stepped outside the opposite edge of the clearing and heard something coming closer.
In the here, Maya’s breath became short and ragged.
In the there, something moved toward me without moving.
In the here, she sang and chanted with the voice of something inhuman and outside.
In the there, something moved through the wood of the trees and shifted and ululated as it came forward like a mist.
In the here, I licked the sweat from between her breasts and tasted blood.
In the there, something crawled toward me and in its center was chaos.
In the here, Maya wept and laughed.
In the there, something opened my mind and stepped inside and I allowed it to.
In the here, my hands went to Maya’s back and I felt leathery wings.
In the there, the voice spoke to me and I finally understood what it meant.
In the here, I felt myself ripping Maya apart.
In the there, I knew my insignificance and saw its truth.
When I awoke, Maya was in pieces on the floor. A bloodstained butcher knife was in my hand. I looked at her and felt only envy. I took a shower, got dressed, and left. If anyone had heard anything, I didn’t notice it. In my pocket were about two dozen of the black pills.
Maya was right. I hadn’t really understood. I had been foolish and innocent in my blindness. What I had thought was insignificance hadn’t even begun to touch the truth. The chaos had shown me when it came into my mind. Nothing of man mattered. None of the history, none of the accomplishments, the wars, the heartbreak, none of it made any difference. The cosmos was awash with creatures whose footsteps eclipsed our civilizations in length and indifference. Laws, rules, and morality were mere trappings man clothed himself in while he desperately tried to convince himself that he mattered at all. Now I understood it all and what it truly meant to be insignificant. Nothing was important, which was liberating and damning all at the same time.
That’s what Lovecraft had meant. The ‘gods’ and ‘monsters’ were just window dressing, something for the ‘earth-centric’ minded ones to latch on to. When you finally understood it all, you knew that there was no reason for anything. There were no ‘gods’ waiting to reclaim the earth. There was only the universe, spiraling onward, unknowing, uncaring, indifferent to man, who puffed up his chest like a little puppy barking at a garbage truck.
When I got home, I moved a chair to face the front door. I got a large knife from the kitchen and sat down to wait for Ann. Time no longer had any hold on me. I sat in the chair, swallowed black pills, and waited. When I was finished with Ann, I’d get on the bus and go to work and show them how insignificant they were. I’d show everyone how insignificant they all were and make them look into my face and see and know that they had never been important, they had never mattered. None of it ever had.
Hellhounds on the Trail
On May 1st, 1941, Robert Easton walked into the Louisiana swamp. He never came out.
* * *
It was early in April 1941 when Alan Lomax summoned Robert Easton to his office at the Library of Congress. Easton had been there before, of course, as one of Lomax’s field recorders, but the assignments had gotten fewer lately and it had become impossible not to notice that most of the staff that remained were working on cataloguing and not out in the field where they should be. Not that Easton had been one of Lomax’s top agents anyway. Easton had a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and failing to show deference or respect on some subjects. Still, in many ways Easton was tenacious and had managed to get recordings of several musicians who had refused to cooperate before. His methods were sometimes questionable but usually effective.
But Easton had not expected to find the normally energetic and motivated Lomax to be so deflated. As usual, Lomax’s office was covered with papers and books and maps and records and aluminum and acetate discs. If there was an order to the chaos, only Lomax understood it.
“Sit down, Bob,” Lomax said with an unbelievable dourness. It was a warm spring day outside, but it felt like the middle of winter inside the office.
Easton waited patiently for Lomax to begin. The six-foot-tall man was only thirty-six years old but had done more to preserve America’s musical heritage than anyone ever had before. Because of Lomax, much that would have been lost to the mists of time had been preserved. But things were different now.
“The winds are changing, Bob,” Lomax said as he almost fell into his chair with a sigh.
Easton lit a cigarette and took a deep drag even as Lomax eyed him with disapproval. “What do you mean, Alan?”
Lomax turned half away from Easton and the cigarette smoke to look out the window. It was a good view with the Lincoln Memorial away in the distance.
“I’ve got friends in Congress who tell me that we will be losing our funding.”
Easton nodded. “I’m not surprised. I never could understand how you got politicians to fund this thing in the first place. How much longer do we have?”
Lomax stood up and stared out of the window. He put his hands in his pockets.
“A year at the most. In that time, we have to wrap up as much as possible. I’ve got most of the units working on the indexing and paperwork. They’ll have their hands full for most of that time. But . . . there are a few projects that I’ve been putting off that we’re going to finish while we still can.”
“You mean Son House?” Easton said excitedly. The legendary blues musician had been one of the great holes in Lomax’s collection. He’d gotten most of the greats like Johnson and Muddy Waters, but Son House had always escaped him. It was as if the man had vanished off the face of the earth.
Lomax turned around and faced Easton. “Yes, that’s one of them. We’ve finally got a few good leads on him and we will get him recorded if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Great! When do I leave?”
Lomax shook his head. “No, that’s not what I called you in for. I’m going after House myself and I’ll get him. I’ve got something else in mind for you.”
There was a file on the desk that looked older than all the others. Lomax picked it up and handed it to Easton, who casually leafed through it. There was a short, handwritten report along with a drawn map and an old picture of a small group
of black men sitting on the porch of a feed store.
“This is something I’ve been holding for a while now. I’ve never dared to send anyone else after it.”
“What is it?” Easton asked. Already Easton felt that he was being pawned off with a ‘lame duck’ case while Lomax chased his white whale.
“I made some notes. They’re in the file.”
Lomax sat down and looked at Easton. The intensity of his stare made Easton uneasy.
“This music was something I’d never heard before. I only heard a bit of it and that only briefly, but I’ve never been able to forget it. Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I can still hear it. I didn’t follow up on it then, but I want to now while we still have the chance. I wrote down what I remember as well as a contact name.”
Lomax stood up and signaled the end of the meeting. The two men shook hands, but as Easton opened the door to leave, Lomax added, “Bob, be careful of the contact.”
Easton smirked. “Why?”
“Because he spent the last five years in Parchman Farm.”
“What’s that? A cotton farm?”
Lomax scoffed. “Prison. He was in for nearly beating a man to death with his fists.”
* * *
That night, Easton looked over the file.
The few pages of handwritten notes he now knew were from Lomax. The map was a crude attempt at directions to something, although Easton couldn’t make much sense of it. The picture was meaningless.
Easton sat back and read Lomax’s report.
“It was back in 1935 when it happened. I was helping my father, who was the first to record the rural musicians. We were working mostly out of Mississippi then. One night, when I was standing outside a juke because it was too dangerous for me, a white man, to go inside, a black man came up to me.
“We started talking about the music. Robert Nighthawk was playing that night, and his music sounded wilder than usual. I could see a group of men standing nearby, watching us while they drank.
“‘Why you here, white boy?’ he asked me.
“‘I’m from the Library of Congress in Washington. I’m trying to record this music before it disappears. It’s for history. We want to preserve the music and the heritage.’
“‘I know that’s why your daddy’s here. Why are you here?’
“I smiled. ‘Because I like the music.’
“He laughed at that, and it made me feel a little better for my safety. I still didn’t dare to go inside the juke though.
“‘And I want to know where it comes from. It’s so primal. So . . . so primitive. There’s been nothing like it before.’
“He smiled. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘this ain’t nothing. You want some real music, you come to Louisiana sometime. We got music there that makes this sound like angels singing. Music like . . .’
“He started doing something which I hesitate to call singing. It was a mix of music and notes and grunts and animal songs. Its cadence was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and it seemed that he managed to create his own chorus. Some blues musicians can make one guitar sound like an orchestra. That’s what he was doing with his voice.
“At the sound, the men standing nearby became alarmed and one motioned to my new friend, who instantly stopped singing. He nodded acceptingly and turned back to me.
“Quietly, he said, ‘You wanna hear more, come find me at Reed’s Feed in Lockport off 308. Name’s Willie Brown.’”
“About a month later, I made a detour to Louisiana. When I found Reed’s Feed, I was told that Willie Brown had been arrested the week before for almost beating a man to death. Beyond that, I could learn nothing more. No one wanted to tell me anything about Brown or his music. On a whim, I took a picture of the feed store, always hoping to go back some day, but I never did. I have never found anything like that sound Willie Brown made outside that juke back in ’34.”
Easton looked at the photo again. There were three men standing on the porch in front of a store, whose sign could barely be deciphered as ‘Reed’s Feed.’ The men were all black and, from their look, very unhappy farmers. Two were older men, while one was probably in his mid-thirties. All were looking at the camera, and the picture taker, with obvious hatred and contempt. The more Easton stared, the more he thought that there was something behind the men, standing in the shadows, but he could not make it out. It was like a smudge in the photograph itself.
The map was Lomax’s rough drawing of the location of Reed’s Feed, with some road marks such as route numbers and arrows pointing to various towns. Easton had an uncomfortable feeling that the roads were probably all unpaved.
Easton was feeling more than ever that Lomax had sent him off on a wild goose chase. After all, he had no performer’s names, no lists of jukes, not even a sample of the music. But, he reasoned, he might be able to salvage something out of it. Easton had always felt that the collection was weak in Cajun music so maybe he would just make a token effort to find this ‘root music’ Lomax wanted and spend the rest of his time recording some zydeco. Besides, something about that photograph made him uneasy.
* * *
Three days later found Easton in Louisiana with his recording gear stowed safely in his car. The gear was heavy and cumbersome and, in truth, really needed two men to handle properly. But, as Easton well knew, one man could handle it if needed and if he had enough experience. It was best set up in a room somewhere, preferably a hotel room that could be adjusted for acoustics and furniture removed if necessary. There were times, however, when Easton had recorded performers in their own kitchens, but the quality was not the best. Recording in a juke, or an outside concert, was the worst and to be avoided if at all possible. There was a smaller unit that could be carried over the shoulder with a strap, but the microphone was limited in such cases so Easton preferred not to use it if he didn’t have to.
The beginning of his investigation was exactly as fruitless as Easton had expected. No one in New Orleans had admitted to knowing anything about Willie Brown (though many had snickered when asked), Reed’s Feed, or any music outside of zydeco. Easton had spent a few days recording some minor zydeco musicians, but even their music seemed uninspired and limp. Word spread quickly that a man from the Library of Congress was in the city looking to record musicians, and soon Easton was subjected to all manner of performers of various and dubious quality. There was even one very earnest young man who claimed loudly that he was Robert Johnson, but whose guitar playing was more akin to that of a cat screeching in heat.
One performer, noticing Easton’s lack of interest, boldly asked, “Just what the hell music you looking for, fella?”
Unsure, Easton shook his head and could only respond in a meek, timid voice, “I’ll know when I hear it.”
Several times Easton drove out alone along Route 308, looking for the elusive feed store, but could not find it. Lomax’s map was worse than useless. Whatever Lomax’s talents, mapmaking was not one of them. Easton could not remember a time when he’d been more frustrated. He had been ready to give up when he stopped at a Texaco station along the more populous Route 1 in Raceland. There, a young white boy who was trying his best to emulate Texaco’s famed ‘man with a star’ motto busily filled Easton’s gas tank and washed the car windows.
On a lark, Easton asked, “You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find ‘Reed’s Feed’ on 308, would you?”
The youth looked at him oddly.
“Why the hell would you want to go there?” he asked.
“I was told to look up an old friend there. Just where on 308 is it?”
The youth went back to washing the front window of the car, but his motions were less eager and accommodating. “Can’t be much of a friend if’n you don’t know where it is. Besides, it ain’t on 308. It’s on 306, but I wouldn’t recommend you go there either, mister.”
“Why’s that?” Easton asked. His irritation level was continuing to rise.
Finishing the window cleaning, the yo
uth with the name patch “Billy” sewn onto the nice new uniform put the gas hose back into the pump, even though the tank wasn’t full yet, and said, “Let’s just say you’re a little ‘pale’ for them folk. That’s $2.50, mister.”
Easton drove back up Route 90 toward New Orleans. Shortly after passing through the Dufrene Ponds, he spotted a small marker for Route 306 off the main road. It was easy to see how he’d missed it before, as it was virtually overgrown with vegetation from a hanging tree. Easton took a right and began driving down 306.
Almost instantly, it was as if Easton had taken a turn into another place and time. The road was poorly paved, with deep potholes and sections that had lost pavement altogether. The trees were lush and overgrown as if they had never known an axe or the intrusion of man. Occasionally, a dirt road would break off with a worn, beaten mailbox the only sign that something human lived down there. No houses were viewable from the road, and it felt as if Easton had been swallowed whole by Jonah’s whale.
The old Packard was beginning to protest against the bad road conditions when a turn opened into a clear space with a decrepit building flush against the forest on two sides. A few ancient Ford pickups were parked outside, and the sign above the door could barely be read as “Reed’s Feed.” A few men were sitting outside on the porch and eyed Easton angrily as he pulled in and parked.
Before he exited his car, Easton considered just driving away, but he had come this far. And, after all, he was just a researcher. Surely no one would feel a need to hurt a researcher, would they?
“Morning, folks,” Easton said as he walked cautiously up to the feed store. “I’m looking for a Willie Brown. Anyone know him?”
The stony faces broke out in laughter as they shook their heads and pointed.
“I don’t understand. What’s so funny?”
An older man from in back of the group moved forward. Between a big smile, he replied, “Son, looking for a man named Willie Brown in these parts is like looking for John Smith up in New York City. What you want him for?”
“I was sent here by Alan Lomax. We work for the Library of Congress and we’re recording rural musicians.”
