Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery

by T. Blake Braddy

  I stabbed one pork chop with my fork and knifed into it. It was tender and juicy and fried to perfection. I chewed with relish, trying not to think of my run-in with the Castellaws. "Of course you did, but adversity's a sweet milk.”

  She smiled. "You should have studied English. Instead, you became a truck driver or a wannabe soldier or some such thing."

  "Don't forget cop."

  I poured a touch of A1 on my plated and sopped it up with a fatty bite of pork. The batter mixed well with the tang of the steak sauce.

  "And yet you had potential to be the first college graduate in your family. Your mother should have gone to college. I taught her too, you know."

  "Really?" It wasn’t surprise I was actually experiencing - Mrs. Sidley had taught nearly every LJHS graduate in the last several decades - but rather I felt like she wanted to tell me something so I pretended not to know it.

  Mrs. Sidley drank from her sweet tea and took care to place the base of the glass back on the water ring on the table. She said, "Real smart girl. Loved to read. And articulate as all get out. Back in those days, it was like pulling teeth to get my girls to talk about books in class. They would always preface what they were saying by implying they were probably wrong. But not your mother. She would come right out and say what she thought. She was an absolute delight, and you were just like her. Not afraid to speak your mind. Very brave for a boy in an English class."

  "Thank you. I only wish I could have seen that side of her."

  She smiled wistfully. "I know you do. My mother died when I was young, too, and every day the picture of her in my mind grows fuzzier. Only a few pictures remain, and with time her features have grown indistinct. It’s like somebody is deliberately distorting them in my memory."

  "I think that’s a shame."

  "Well, yes, I suppose so. But it isn't the memory of the way she looks that sticks with me. Something binds a mother to her children, and all these years, I have never lost my link with her. I think about her all the time, and it's never anything specific. I just think about her, and that speaks to a part of my, well, soul, that nothing else can satisfy. That's what you should try to take with you, Rolson."

  I mixed a spoonful of potatoes and corn and lifted them to my mouth. I chewed and swallowed and said, "I've been looking for that feeling my whole life, ever since she died, but it's not there."

  "Maybe there's something interfering with it."

  "Maybe," I said. I imagined the kind of static that might keep someone’s life force - or soul or whatever - from communicating with someone in the living world.

  She sat there for a moment. "Well, reckon I better be heading on. This novel won't finish itself."

  As she packed up her book, something occurred to me. "When did you retire, Mrs. Sidley?"

  "Last year," she said, smiling. "They had to drag me, kicking and screaming, out of that school building. I suppose it was the right thing, though I still have a mind like a sharp weapon."

  "Do you ever remember going to a dinner at the Brickmeyer place?"

  "Several. Couldn't quite stand them myself, but they do know how to throw a party."

  "How about one-"

  "Where Emmitt Laveau went? Yeah, there was a banquet for teachers that year, but Emmitt probably shouldn't have been invited."

  "Why not?" I asked. I started cutting into my second pork chop.

  Mrs. Sidley paused, choosing her words carefully. "Don't get me wrong, I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but Emmitt wasn't exactly the best teacher. He loved the kids, and he tried very hard, but I think he was a drug user. Sometimes I could smell it on him."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Honey, I was a teacher for nearly forty-five years. I can smell marijuana when the kids even think about smoking it. Besides, he was an artisty type. Teaching was his fall-back profession. He didn't see himself doing it for the rest of his life. He didn't think the kids could tell the difference, but they could. They always can."

  "What else do you remember about that night?"

  "I remember Mr. Laveau and someone else talking quite a bit. In fact, they stood around and chatted the whole night away."

  "Do you remember who it was?"

  "Gosh, no. Not for the life of me. There was white wine there that night, and I only drink once or twice a year. When I do let it rip, however, I can never remember much the next day. Is that all, Rolson?"

  "I think so, but if you can remember anything else from that night, please don't hesitate to call me. It seems as though I’m trying to recapture some of the courage you saw in me in high school."

  She leaned forward, sliding the strap of her purse over her shoulder, and said in a low tone, "Other people around this town may look down on you for what you're doing, but I'm personally thrilled. Your mother would be proud of you. Please continue to do what you think is right."

  "Thank you, Mrs. Sidley."

  She was beaming. "And be careful about that lawyer of yours. Clements. I never did care for him. He's done a lot of good for the black community here recently, but something tells me it's to make up for being such a horse's ass about race relations years ago."

  "I will."

  "He defended your daddy. Do you remember that?"

  "I do."

  "Something about the way he operated in that case struck me the wrong way. The man deserved his conviction, no doubt about that, but I don't think he got a fair defense from that old snake. Clements, I think, made some major mistakes in the courtroom. Anyway, nice to see you, Rolson."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  With that, she got up, patted me on the shoulder, and walked out. You couldn't tell that she was a day over fifty-five, even if she was pushing seventy. I returned to my food and ate in silence.

  By the time I got to the end of the meal, the steak sauce, corn, and what remained of the mashed potatoes had bled into one another, and I ate it as if it were a single dish. It was starchy, sweet, and tangy, and I couldn't believe how full I was afterward. All that remained on the plate were the pork chop bones. I asked for a to-go cup of sweet tea and drank it on the way home.

  * * *

  Quarter past nine, a car pulled up in the driveway, and I was at the door with my pistol before the lights went off. It was about goddamn time somebody came to do me in; I almost thought the monsters in the world had forgotten about me.

  Vanessa was lying on the couch, and though the TV was on, she wasn’t watching it. Her eyes were glazed over and she was shivering, so I knew she was probably going through one hell of a withdrawal episode.

  She didn’t even sit up.

  I peeked through the blinds and sighed.

  Turns out, it was just Deuce, and as he got out and approached the house, I went out in the front yard, sliding my piece in the back of my pants. I still couldn’t meet his eyes. I’d made a clear error this afternoon.

  “Get in,” he said tonelessly.

  I hesitated, looking for the right kind of question to ask him, but he had nary a single ounce of care for that kind of nonsense in him, at that particular moment. “Get in before I put you in,” he said, “and you don’t want that.”

  I turned back to the house and saw the ghostly expression on Vanessa’s face. She looked curious but simultaneously disinterested. She’d told me that meth addicts often get a bad case of the downs when they’re coming off the stuff, that they can’t be happy for much of anything, and it was evident the way she was looking at me from the doorway.

  I hadn’t said goodbye, and a part of me felt that absence. But, like everything else, I just squeezed it into something manageable and pushed it to a place marked “later.” I’d get whatever was happening with her sorted out as soon as this was over with.

  She’d understand. She’d have to. Fuck, who knew what she was even thinking. Or if she was thinking about anything but her own recover.

  That’s why I had to put those thoughts away.

  On the road, Deuce didn’t talk much. We got to where we were going,
and I started to understand. All this time, I had been looking in the wrong places for answers.

  He drove down a winding dirt road, the kind over which old, mangled trees had grown, giving the appearance of hands plunging down toward the car. It looked as though they might snatch us off the road and into darkness, never to be seen again.

  As we drew closer, a light expanded in the distance, and when we passed through an old gate, I saw it was a fire. We stopped and got out, and the reason for this excursion became clearer.

  It was a drum circle, of sorts, but with guitars instead of bongos. People of all ages were there. A man just to the right of the fire played his Dobro like it was an extension of his hand, and clearly he was the one the crowd was watching.

  Of course, he played the guitar the way you’d imagine he would, and all of the things that could be said about a guitar player could be said about this man. It wasn’t that he was good; it was that he was flawless. Everything he did, from chord changes to phrases, was flawless, and he never so much as glanced at the fretboard as he played.

  No, his eyes were fixed on me.

  We wandered over, and I watched the old man slide his way through some decades-old tragedy. He didn’t play for a long time, but he also didn’t stop immediately, but when he did, it felt like exactly the right moment. It was something that could have been seen as a parlor trick if it weren’t such a genuine gesture.

  Deuce flicked his eyes at me, and I searched for something to say. “When did you pick up the guitar?” I blurted at the man, a question one step shy of Can you play Crossroad Blues?

  “The blues ain’t just something you pick up,” he said. He smiled, knowing perhaps that what he was saying about the blues was the sort of thing anyone who ever talked about the blues said. “Won my first guitar in a poker match when I was sixteen years old, ain’t let go of it since. This thing done seen two wives and a child buried, not counting all the friends come and gone in that time.”

  I knew what needed to be asked but couldn’t quite find the way of getting the words out. They hung in the part of the mind that controls pride. In front of these people, all of the odd, personal experiences seemed like melodramatic extensions of a distressed mind.

  The ones who had stopped playing had not resumed their previous conversations but were instead staring at me, at us, perhaps waiting for me to stop talking so they could recommence playing.

  It was difficult to ignore them, but I tried. I closed my eyes to give myself the right amount of courage, but all I saw was the face of a dead man.

  “My dreams, they’ve been giving me fits lately, and I want to know why,” I said. I opened my eyes, and what I saw was a man who knew - really knew - what I was talking about. Whatever I was experiencing, he had seen in some form or another.

  “Dreams, they put a frame on reality,” said the old man, “but they ain’t reality. Just like a picture ain’t reality. It’s a moment from reality, but it’s just a little thing, just an itty-bitty fragment of the whole thing. And you, I suppose, been looking for answers in your dreams.”

  He smiled a toothless grin. His eyes were old and dim, but he saw my distress. I glanced over at Deuce. “I didn’t tell him anything,” he said. “This is his thing, man. He’s been freaking out black people with it for years.”

  “I’ve been doing some seeking, yeah,” I said. “But it has been for a purpose. And I was told it was the way for me to find what I’m looking for.”

  “So long as you remember,” he said, “and you can’t always remember your dreams. Who knows how long you’ve been looking for something you haven’t found.”

  “Just ask him the question, man,” Deuce said. “You nearly flipped out today, and I didn’t bring you here to learn how to play slide guitar, so just out with it.”

  I gulped. “How did I come to see things the way that I do?” There was a too-long pause for my comfort, and I felt the eyes of all the musicians surrounding me, so I kept talking. “I mean, it can’t just be hallucinations. It can’t be I’m haunted? Or is that it? Is it something in between?”

  Other members of the group smiled, but it didn’t feel as though they were judging me. They seemed to be smiling out of a shared knowledge. Seeing all these people, I felt something I couldn’t quite explain to people. It was the way I felt three beers into a night that led to me walking around The Boogie House, and I was experiencing it while stone sober.

  “Well, now,” the old man said, smacking his lips, “It ain’t like turning on a light switch and seeing what was hiding in the dark. You remind me of an old feller I used to know, used to come up here and play guitar on occasion. Fella from Statesboro. Or was it Savannah?”

  I thought maybe I knew the answer but considered it too much of a coincidence to believe. He was talking about a little-known blues musician, whose talents had been best exemplified in the works of those he influenced, leaving his voice a kind of ghost in the walls of the industry.

  “Can I assume you played that guitar in the Boogie House?”

  Even saying the name of the place in that man’s presence sent chills through me. Here was a man who had experienced all of the worst the South had to hand out, and for some reason the Boogie House itself seemed to embody all of the evil of southern racism.

  But he didn’t let it shake him. He smiled, and though it was etched with lines deeper than I am old, he still managed to keep the corners of his mouth turned up.

  “Whoa, that place, it hasn’t been on most people’s lips in decades, and in the last week you make it a household name again. You know what the people, what they’re saying about you?”

  “That I’m crazy as a shithouse rat. That I’m stirring up problems to get a paycheck from Leland Brickmeyer. They think I want hush money to pay off my lawyer and get a light sentence on my DUI charge.”

  “And you do not want these things?”

  Everyone’s eyes shifted from him to me. I felt my blood tingling in my veins, the hair standing up on my neck.

  “I just want to solve that young man’s murder.”

  “You care about that boy?”

  I thought about that question. “I want justice done, yeah.”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  Again with the eyes. I tried not to feel them on me, and I turned to Deuce, maybe to give him a bit of what I was feeling, but he, too, was staring at me and so I flinched.

  So I answered the question truthfully. “I want the dreams to stop. I want to stop seeing things that aren’t there. I want people to leave me alone.”

  “But that is not all of it, either.”

  “No, I want to know how I came to see these damned visions in the first place.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  “I’ve always had weird dreams,” I replied. Up to now, I had not really thought about why. The only good reason, I’d sort of told myself, was that I was involved in a strange coincidence. But I guess that wasn’t good enough, nor was it the truth. “But...not like these. Not ones that felt so real.”

  “There ain’t no Indians buried round here. Ain’t nothing in the soil or the air that made you start talking to the dead in your dreams, either. No, what you got you got honest.”

  Even before I’d met Uncle K or slammed into Janita Laveau, my mother came to visit me. Those dreams, too, gave off a sense of connection with the waking world, but I had shrugged them off for years. Maybe it was her.

  Or maybe it was someone else. Denial is a strong state-of-being.

  “The man I met recently-”

  “The old coot who plays with dirt and spices, yes,” the old man said. His smile had turned somewhat vicious. “He has laid on thick with the rootwork and the potions and whatnot, eh? Sounds just like the charlatan bastard.”

  “It seemed to have worked on me,” I said.

  “He never stepped one foot inside the Boogie House. What do you think he knows about what’s out there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.
/>
  “That place does have a power, young man,” he replied, “but it doesn’t have to do with magic. All the power in that place comes from the people who struggled to keep the boards from falling over. If there’s something haunted about that place, it has to do with the way it just up and died. We’re all to blame, all of us who let it go to hell like that.”

  “Maybe the, um, magic left it, and it has only returned because of...what happened.”

  “That may be the truth, and it’d be a sad thing for a white man to breathe life into an old black juke joint.” He appeared genuinely pained by this admission, and I nodded in agreement. “But, then again, race ain’t never been simple down here, now has it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I hate to tell you that sometimes people get a dose of something they didn’t want, and it stays with them until it’s run its course. You see, my guitar, I carry it around, but I’d bet it’s brought me as much torment as it has fortune, but I can’t let it go, no more than you can let go of the thoughts in your head. You just accept things are the way they are, and you don’t worry about what’s on the other side of the line. You’ll know when it comes your time to know. For now, you focus on what’s on this side of the line. If it wasn’t important to pay attention to what you’ve been seeing, you wouldn’t have seen it.”

  With that, he began plucking a familiar blues rhythm, and the others joined in. Deuce tapped me on the elbow, like he thought we should get out of there, but I ripped free of him. All of the old man’s acolytes stopped playing, and the old man himself jangled out a few more notes, but he couldn’t keep the charade up for long.

  “I did not come here for some mystical cold reading,” I said. “I am here because I can see ghosts - actual ghosts - dancing in the Boogie House, can feel the disappointment they felt when it closed down. Something in me gives me that power, and I want to know where it comes from, who gave it to me.”

  His eyes pushed me back a few steps. He never lost his calm, but now there was a coldness in his eyes. “And if it was that easy, son, I’d’ve told you right off. You don’t listen, do you? You talk. Okay, I’m telling you to listen now.”