In his dreams, he fights back, screaming wildly, sometimes running out of the apartment and into the hall-way before he wakes. His mother makes him a charm to wear around his neck, a charm that smells of asafoetida and has a black-cat bone in it, but it doesn’t keep the dreams away. His mother says he gets it from his father, who also has bad nightmares from time to time.
One day the other boys are pushing him around in the toilets. The air is blue with tobacco smoke. The boy has been bounced into the walls a few times and is being held in a headlock by one football lineman while another waves a pair of shears and threatens to cut his hair.
“I’d stop that if I were you.” The voice comes from a newcomer, a big kid with a Yankee accent and the thick neck of an athlete. He’s got a big jaw and a look that seems a little puzzling and unbalanced, as if his eyes are pointing in slightly different directions. His name is Schmidt and he’s just transferred here from Detroit.
“You cut his hair,” Schmidt says, “you better cut mine, too.”
The big kids drop the boy and stand aside and mumble. The boy straightens his clothes and tries to thank Schmidt for intervening.
“Call me Leon,” the big boy says.
The boy and Leon become friends. Leon plays guitar a little and sings, and the two of them go together to a party. Leon sings a Woody Guthrie song, and the boy plays accompaniment. Then the boy turns all the lights off, so he won’t get self-conscious, and sings an Eddie Arnold tune, “Won’t You Tell Me, Molly Darling.” All the party noise stops as the other kids listen. The boy finishes the tune.
“Your turn,” he says to Leon.
“Brother,” Leon says, “no way I’m gonna follow that.”
The boy sings all night, with Leon strumming accompaniment and singing harmony. The darkness is very friendly. The other kids listen in silence except for their applause.
Maybe, he thinks, this is what Heaven is like.
* * *
Leon is an orphan. His father died in a strike against Henry Ford just after he was born, and he’d moved South after his mother married again, this time to a truck driver whose outfit was based in Memphis.
Hearing the story of Leon’s father dying after a beating by Ford strikebreakers, the boy hears an echo of his grandfather’s voice: Boss don’t have no mercy on a workingman.
Leon is always reading. The boy never had a friend who read before. The authors seem very intimidating, with names like Strachey and Hilferding and Sternberg.
“You heard Nat Dee yet?” Leon asks. He turns his radio to WDIA. He has to turn up the volume because WDIA broadcasts at only two hundred and fifty watts.
The voice the boy hears is colored and talks so fast the boy can barely make out the words. He’s announcing a song by Bukka White, recorded in Parchman Prison in Mississippi.
Parchman Prison, the boy thinks.
Nat Dee’s voice is a little difficult, but the boy understands the music very well.
* * *
The singer launches himself at the microphone stand like it’s his worst enemy. He knocks it down and straddles it, grabbing it near the top as if he’s wringing its neck. He wears a pink see-through blouse and a blazing pink suit with black velvet trim. His eyes are made ghostly with mascara and heavy green eye shadow. He’s playing the Gator Bowl in front of fourteen thousand people.
The second he appeared, a strange sound went up, a weird keening that sent hairs crawling on the necks of half the men in the audience. The sound of thousands of young girls working themselves into a frenzy.
The sound sometimes makes it difficult for the singer to hear his band, but he can always turn and see them solid behind him, Leon mimicking the Scotty Moore guitar arrangements from the records, Bill Black slapping bass, and drummer D.J. laying down the solid beat that the singer’s music thrives on.
The singer has finally wrung the mike stand into submission. He rears back perilously far, right on the edge of balance, and he hops forward with little thrusts of his polished heels, holding the mike stand up above his head like a jazzman wailing sax. He thrusts his pelvis right at the audience, and the long rubber tube he’s stuck down his pants in front is perfectly outlined by the taut fabric.
The eerie sound that rises from the audience goes up in intensity, in volume. State police in front of the stage are flinging little girls back as they try to rush forward. All over the South, people are denouncing his act as obscene.
Incredibly, the singer is only one of the half-dozen opening acts for Hank Snow. But some of the other performers, the Davis Sisters and the Wilburn Brothers, complain that they can’t follow him onstage, so he was given the coveted slot just before the intermission.
After the recess, the headliners Slim Whitman and Hank Snow will step onstage and try to restore the program to some kind of order. Some nights they have their work cut out for them.
The singer still has nightmares every night. Satnin persuaded him to hire his cousins, Gene and Junior Smith, to sleep in the same room with him and keep him from injuring himself.
When the singer finishes his act, he’s soaked in sweat. He grins into the mike, tosses his head to clear his long hair from his eyes, speaks to the audience. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” he says. Then he gives a wink. “Girls,” he promises, “I’ll see you backstage.”
The screaming doubles in volume. The singer waves good-bye and starts to head off, and then out of the slant of his eye, he sees the line of state cops go down before an avalanche of little girls as if they were made of cardboard.
The singer runs for it, his terrified band at his heels. He dives down into the tunnels under the Gator Bowl, where the concrete echoes his pursuers’ shrill screams. The flimsy door to his dressing room doesn’t keep them out for a second. His cousins Gene and Junior Smith go down fighting. The terrified singer leaps onto the shower stall, and even there, one frantic girl in white gloves and crinolines manages to tear off one of his shoes. The singer stares at her in fascination, at the desperate, inhuman glitter in her eyes as she snatches her trophy, and he wonders what kind of beast he’s liberated in her, what it is that’s just exploded out of all the restraining apparel, the girdle and nylons and starched underskirts.
He doesn’t know quite what it is, but he knows he likes it.
Eventually reinforcements arrive and the girls are driven out. The dressing room looks as if it has been through a hurricane. Junior Smith, a veteran of Korea, appears as if he’s just relived Porkchop Hill. The singer limps on one shoe and one pink sock as he surveys the damage.
Leon wanders in, clutching his guitar. The band’s first impulse had been to protect their instruments rather than their singer.
“I wouldn’t make no more promises to them girls,” Leon says. He talks more Southern every day.
Hank Snow arrives with a bottle of Dr Pepper in his hand. One of his business associates is with him, a bald fat man who carries an elephant-headed cane.
“I never seen nothing like it,” Snow says. “Boy, you’re gonna go far in this business if your fans don’t kill you first.”
“Junior,” the singer says, “see if you can find me a pair of shoes, okay?”
“Sure, boss,” Junior says.
Hank Snow points to the fat man. “I’d like to introduce a friend of mine—he manages Hank Snow Productions for me. Colonel Tom Parker.”
The Colonel has a powerful blue gaze and a grip of iron. He looks at the singer in a way that makes him feel uncomfortable—it’s the same look the little girl gave him, like he wants more than anyone can say, more than the singer can ever give. “I’ve been hearing a lot about you,” the Colonel says. “Maybe you and me can do some business.”
* * *
Colonel Parker does the singer a lot of good. He straightens out the tangled mess of the singer’s management, puts him under exclusive contract, gets his records played north of the Mason-Dixon line, and gets a big advance from RCA that lets the singer buy his Satnin a Cadillac. Then he buys several mo
re for himself and his band.
“I want to look good for this car,” Satnin says. “I’m going to lose some weight.”
Suddenly the singer is supporting his whole family. His Daddy quits his job and never takes another. Gene and Junior work for him. His Grandmother is living with his parents. Sometimes he thinks about it and gets a little scared.
But mostly he doesn’t have much time to think. He and his band are on tour constantly, mostly across the South, their nights spent speeding from one engagement to another in a long line of Cadillacs, each one a different color and fronted by a half ton of solid chrome. Sometimes the cops stop him, but it’s only for autographs.
“That Colonel, he’s a snake-oil salesman for sure,” Leon says. He’s sitting in the shotgun seat while the singer drives across Georgia at three in the morning. “You better keep an eye on him.”
“Ain’t gonna let him cheat me,” the singer says. The speedometer reads a hundred twenty-five. He laughs. “He sure is good with that hypnotism thing he does. Did you see Gene on his hands and knees, barking like a dog?”
Leon gazes at him significantly. “Do me a big favor. Don’t ever let him hypnotize you.”
The singer gives him a startled look, then jerks his attention back to the road. “Can’t hypnotize me any way,” he says, thinking of the power of the Colonel’s ice-blue eyes.
“Don’t let him try. He’s done you a lot of good, okay. But that’s just business. He doesn’t own you.”
“He’s gonna get me a screen test with Hal Wallis.”
“That’s good. But don’t let the Colonel or Wallis or any of those tell you what to do. You know best.”
“Okay.”
“You pick your music. You work out the arrangements. You need to insist on that, because these other people—” Leon waves a hand as if pulling difficult ideas out of the air. “You’ve got the magic, okay? They don’t even know what the magic is. They’re just bosses, and they’ll use you for every dollar you can give them.”
“Boss don’t have no mercy on a workingman,” the singer says.
Leon favors him with a smile. “That’s right, big man. And don’t you forget it.”
* * *
The singer buys the big white house out on Highway 51, the place called Graceland. Because he’s on the road so much, he doesn’t spend a lot of time there. His parents live out back and install a chicken coop and a hog pen so they have something to do.
On the road, he’s learned that he likes the night. He visits the South’s little sin towns, Phenix City or Norfolk or Bossier City, cruising for girls he can take back to his cheap motel rooms.
When he’s home in Memphis, there’s no place he can go at night—Beale Street is still for colored people. So he has the state cops close off a piece of highway for motorcycle racing. He dresses up in his leathers, with his little peaked cap, and cranks his panhead Harley to well over a hundred. He does incredibly dangerous stunts at high speed—standing up on the foot pegs with his hands outstretched, away from the handlebars; reaching out to hold hands with the guy he’s racing with. He’s a hairbreadth from death or injury the whole time.
He thinks about the kids in school who called him a sissy, and snarls. When he’s wound up the Harley and is howling down the road with the huge engine vibrating between his legs, he knows that the cry of wind in his ears is really his brother’s voice, calling him home.
* * *
“What is this business?” the singer demands. “Some old burlesque comic? An Irish tenor? Performing midgets?”
“The Heidelberg Troupe of Performing Midgets.” The Colonel grins around his cigar. “Great act. Know ’em from my carny days.”
“Carny days?” Leon asks. “What’re you trying to do, turn us into a freak show?”
The Colonel scowls at Leon. He knows who’s put the singer up to this. “Why should we hire a rock act to open?” he says. “It costs money to hire Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins, and all they do is imitations of our boy anyway. We can get the vaudeville acts a lot cheaper—hell, they’re happy to have the work.”
“They’ll make me look ridiculous,” the singer says. His blond hair is dyed black for the movies he’s making for Hal Wallis. He wants badly to be the next James Dean, but the critics compare him to Sonny Tufts.
The Colonel chomps down on his cigar again. “Gotta have opening acts,” he says. “Since nobody’s gonna pay attention to ’em anyway, we might as well have the cheap ones. More money for the rest of us that way.”
“That was something—” the singer begins. He casts an uneasy look toward Leon, then turns back to the Colonel. “We had an idea. Why do we need opening acts at all?”
Puzzlement enters the Colonel’s blue eyes. “Gotta have ‘em,” he says. “The marks’ll feel cheated ‘less they get their money’s worth. And you gotta have an intermission between the opening acts and the main show so you can sell drinks and programs and souvenirs.”
“So we’ll give them their money’s worth without an opening act,” Leon says. “We’ll just play two sets’ worth of music with an intermission in between.” He looks at the singer. “The big man’s willing.”
“Hell, yes,” the singer says.
“Save all the money you’d waste on those opening acts,” Leon says. “And you don’t have to pay good money to ship a dozen midgets around the country, either.”
The Colonel considers this. He looks at the singer. “You’re really willin’ to do this?”
The singer shrugs. “Sure. I like being onstage.”
“You’ll have to do more than the five or six songs you do now.”
“Plenty of songs out there.”
The Colonel’s eyes glitter. Everyone knows he gets kickbacks from writers who offer their songs to the singer. He nods slowly.
“Okay,” he says. “This sure seems worth a thought.”
And then his eyes move to Leon and turn cold.
Someday there’s going to be an accounting.
* * *
The story in Billboard says that the singer has cut a special deal with the Army, that when he’s drafted, he’s going into Special Services and entertain the troops. It says he won’t even have to cut his hair.
It’s an absolute lie. The singer has an understanding with his draft board, that’s true, but it’s only that he should get some advance notice if he’s going to be called up.
He hasn’t even had his physical yet.
“Where is this coming from?” the singer demands.
Leon thinks for a moment. “This is Billboard, not some fan magazine. They must have got the story from somewhere.”
“Who could have told them such a thing?”
Leon looks like he wants to say something but decides not to. The singer has enough on his mind.
Satnin is grieved and ailing. She’s turning yellow with jaundice and nobody knows why. Her weight keeps going up in spite of the dozens of diet pills she takes every day. When her boy isn’t with her, she stays drunk all the time. The thought of her mortality makes the singer frantic with anxiety.
The story about the draft keeps getting bigger. When the singer goes on tour, reporters ask him about the Army all the time. He can’t figure out what’s getting them so stirred up.
He keeps in touch with Memphis by phone. And when Satnin goes into a hospital, he cancels the tour and is on the next train.
She rallies a bit when she sees her boy. But within twenty-four hours, she fails and dies.
The next sound that comes from her hospital room is even more eerie than the sound of the singer’s massed fans. Hospital personnel and bystanders stop, listen in rising horror, then flee.
The family is keening over Satnin. It’s an Appalachian custom, and the good burghers of Memphis have never heard such a thing. The singer’s powerful voice rises, dominates the rest of his family, his wails of grief echoing down the corridor. Waiting outside, Leon can feel the hairs rise on his neck. It’s the most terrifying thing he’s ever hear
d.
The funeral takes place in the big house on Highway 51. It’s a circus. The gates are open, and strangers wander around the house and grounds and take things. The Colonel tries to keep order, but nobody listens to him. Reporters take the best seats at the service and snap pictures of everything.
The singer is frantic and crazed with grief. He keeps dragging people over to admire Satnin in her coffin. He spends hours talking to the corpse in some language of his own. Leon calls for a doctor to give him a sedative, but the doctor can’t make it through the mass of people waiting outside the gates. The crowds are so huge that the state police have to close the highway.
At the funeral, the singer throws himself into the grave and demands to be buried with his Mamma. His friends have to drag him away.
Unbelievably, a reporter chooses this moment to ask the singer about the Army. The singer stares in disbelief.
“Ain’t gonna go in no Army!” he shouts, and then his friends pull him away to his limousine. The doctor finally arrives and puts him to sleep.
The next day, there are headlines.
* * *
“We ain’t at war,” the singer says. “Why does anyone care about the damn Army anyway? Why cain’t they leave a man alone?”
It’s two days since the funeral, and the singer has spent the intervening time in a drugged stupor. He sits in a huge velour-covered chair in a room swathed in red velvet. Newspapers open to their screaming headlines surround his chair.
“Somebody’s planting these stories,” Leon tells him. “We all know that. And if you think about it, you know who it’s got to be.”
The singer just stares at him with drug-dulled eyes.
“The Colonel,” Leon says. “It’s got to be the Colonel.”
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 86
