by James Sallis
Sun goin’ down, dark night gon’ catch me here.
Said sun goin’ down, mmmmm night gon’ catch me here.
Don’t have no woman, love and feel my care.
Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, mmmm
Those last mmmm’s on the two-bar turnaround: E, E-7th, A-7th, B-7th.
I’d learned a lot about the blues from Buster Robinson.
I’d learned a lot from Buster, period.
He’d cut a couple dozen sides for Bluebird and Vocalion in the early forties when they were called race records and sold at grocery stores for a nickel apiece, and they’d done all right. But then Buster got in a fight over a woman at a rent party he was playing, the other guy got dead, and Buster went up for a stretch at Parch-man. And by the time he got out, musical tastes (he told me) had just plumb left him behind.
For the past thirty-six years Buster had worked as a barbeque cook up in Fort Worth, at a take-out joint off Rosedale near the hospitals there, an old Spur station with pumps still standing out front. Then the folk revival came along. Some enterprising college kid from back East decided he might not be dead after all, as everybody assumed, and somehow had managed to track him down. Buster didn’t even have a guitar, hadn’t played one in over twenty years. So the kid and his friends chipped in and bought him one. Then one Saturday they all came over to Buster’s place, put a bottle of Grandad and a tape recorder on the kitchen table, and let the recorder run for the next hour while Buster played, sang, got mildly drunk (“cause I’s a Christian man now, you see”) and talked about old times.
The kids pressed it just the way they recorded it and it sold like Coke.
But orders kept coming in, and Kid and Friends weren’t prepared, financially or by temperament, to tack into this new wind. They wound up selling all rights to BlueStrain. Strain (as everybody called it) had had remarkable success issuing live-recorded jazz on a label previously known for classical recordings. The recovering beats and MBAs who ran BlueStrain were convinced that Buster Robinson was a shoo-in as the next Mississippi John Hurt.
It took them about two months to decide that what money they were going to make off B.R., they’d already made. The new pressing didn’t sell. Everyone who wanted it had it. And no one came to the live concerts in Boston, Philly, Gary, Des Moines, Cleveland, Memphis.
So BlueStrain cut Buster loose.
Sometime I live in de city,
Sometimes I live in town.
Sometime I takes a great notion
To jump into de river an’ drown.
“In-to-the” a perfect suspended triplet.
The teenage hooker peered out from the crow’s nest of her solitude, saw land heaving up nowhere in sight, and ordered another boilermaker. Outer Limits with its monster-of-the-week, animal, vegetable, mineral, appeared onscreen.
How I met Buster is a story in itself, I guess.
I’d been working collections freelance at a straight percentage. I was big enough and looked mean enough to get most people’s attention, which was all it really took. And after a while I started getting something else: a reputation. I saddled it, rode it, never put it up wet. But a reputation cuts both ways. Recently I’d had to step on a couple of guys feeling their balls and not about to be told what to do by no jive-ass nigger. One of them got hurt kind of bad. I went to see him on a ward at Mercy afterward but he didn’t have much to say to me. Fuck you, as I recall, being pretty much it.
Boudleaux & Associates was turning a lot of work my way those days. B&A operated out of a sweltering, unpainted cinderblock office on South Broad across from McDonald’s and the Courthouse and consisted of a P.I named Frankie DeNoux who lived off Jim’s fried chicken. All the years I knew him, I never saw him eat anything else. Always a cardboard tray of breasts and thighs on the desk, grease spreading out from its base onto various legal documents, invoices, paperback spy novels, check ledgers; always a cooler of Jax to wash it down. Undrunk coffee forever burning to sludge on the hotplate alongside.
Frankie weighed a hundred pounds in eight-pound shoes. Despite his diet and the fact that he never saw sunlight and hadn’t so much as walked around the block in forty years, he was fit and trim and probably could have picked up the office and carried it down the street on his shoulder. He was already three times my age and, I was sure, would outlive me. “Don’t matter what jew eat, what jew do or don’t do,” he said frequently. “’S all genetics.” He pronounced it gene-etics.
“Want some chicken?” he asked one day when I dropped by to see if he had anything for me. Collections, papers that needed serving, whatever. Jobs were getting scarce. People had suddenly stopped acting like they had money they didn’t have, and my own strictly-cash economics showed the wear.
Frankie picked up the greasy carton and held it out.
I shook my head. “No, sir. But thank you.”
He redocked it.
You didn’t often find a white man offering to eat after a black one those days, even in New Orleans.
It made me remember my father and me back in Arkansas ordering breakfast through a window to the kitchen of Nick’s (where the cooks were all black, the customers all white) and eating it on the steps of the railroad roundhouse by the levee at five A.M. It was godawful cold, forty degrees maybe, with wind shouldering in off the river. My father’s breath, when he spoke to me of the life I could expect there, plumed out and mixed with the steam rising off grits and eggs.
“You sure?” Frankie said, r drawn out, New Orleans-style, to wuh.
“Yes, sir.” My own r carefully sounded.
“Don’t know what you’re missing.”
He fingered a drumstick out of the tray. Bit into it, rotated, bit again. Put the bone with its cap of browned gristle back.
“Best dam’ food ’n the world.”
“You’ve got something for me, Mr. Frankie?”
“Sure I do.” Shu-wuh. “I ever not had something for you?”
“So: what? I have to guess? That it?”
He grinned. “Two hundred a week.”
“Okay. You got my attention.”
“First week guaranteed, possible re-up for two more. Could be a lot longer.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Man called, tells me he needs a bodyguard. Says he’s heard good things about B&A, the service we provide, wonders if I might know someone could do the job.”
“And it just happens you did.”
“Yep.”
“Me.”
“You.” He picked a wing out of the carton, pulled off the skin and ate that, then nibbled away till bone was again glistening.
“I wouldn’t even know how to start.”
“What’s to know? You walk him aroun’. Swing your dick, give anyone the eye gets too close, pick up your money.”
I could probably do that.
“You know an easier way to bank a few hundred?”
I didn’t know any other way at all.
That first client was a local city councilman being groomed for national elections. Though he sat high on public-opinion polls, grievous differences between him and his wife’s family persisted. For one thing, that was where his money came from, and her old Creole family grieved at seeing Greatgranddaddy’s wad used to nurture unseemly liberal causes. Neither were they sympathetic to the mistress who’d been his student in Poly Sci at Loyola or the one who lived over Gladfellows Lounge with its neon martini glass (where she worked) on St. Charles.
Threats had been voiced, more serious ones implied.
Councilman Fontenot, as it turned out, made one of those clear choices he was always talking about in campaign speeches and took the Hollywood high road: true love over career. Two weeks after I joined the troupe he jumped ship and moved in with his coed.
Fontenot had a passion for old black music and young white women. Two or three nights a week, myself in tow and doing my best to look suitably dangerous, he’d tour the Negro clubs along Dryades and Louisiana. He especially liked listening to Buster.
Eventually there was no reprieve from it, I had to get back to work. Off and on I’d still drop by clubs where Buster was playing, as I did that autumn night, but it was never the same. When’s it ever the same once you’ve left?
The night I told Buster I wouldn’t be around anymore, we got so drunk that toward morning he fell out of his chair and smashed the big Gibson twelve-string he’d just bought. I woke up hours later on the levee, with my legs in the water. I remember raising my head and looking at them just kind of bobbing about down there in the wake from ferries and tugs, bobbing along with the candy wrappers, paper cups and other flotsam that had collected around them.
Chapter Three
“LEWIS. BEEN A WHILE.” He was wiping his head and neck with a dish towel as he nodded. A quick, shallow nod you could miss if you weren’t ready for it. “Been a long while.” The barkeep slipped a tumbler of jug wine, three ice cubes, onto the bar in front of him. Buster nodded at him, too. “I’m in danger or what, get you out this time a night?”
“We may all be.”
“Not less you done turned white, Lewis. Have to tell you, I always thought you might have that in you.” He laughed.
“Yeah, well. It’s hard enough being a black man in this town now, B.R. Way things are going, it could soon get a lot harder.”
He looked at me a moment. “See your point. Crazy gon’ always make room for more of the same.” He slapped the towel across a shoulder. “But damn it’s good to see you, boy.”
“You too.”
“And looking good. That jacket silk?”
“Better be, what I gave for it”
“Stayin’ busy, I hope.”
“Rent gets paid. Most of the time, anyway.”
“And Miss Verne?”
“She’s fine.”
“She is for sho’. That’s a stone fact.” He sipped wine. “Whoo-ee. Raccoon must of pissed in the cask that year. Let’s go find us a place.”
I followed him to one of the booths at the back. Maybe half the upholstery and stuffing was still hanging on. Some kind of plastic film had been put up in the window there, each pane a different color, gold, bottle green, purple, a stained-glass effect. Now the film had baked dry and started chipping away at the edges.
“So who you think this is? Got to be a brother.”
I shrugged. “Not my business.”
“Not yet, anyway. Like you say.” He sipped wine again, drew his lips tight against his teeth.
A man about my age wearing a baseball cap, jeans and dashiki came in off the street and stood by the door peering into the darkness. Moments later, he stood by our booth.
“You Robinson?”
Again that quick, shallow nod.
“Ellie ain’t goan be here tonight like she prob’ly tole you. Fact is, she ain’t goan ever see you no more a-tall.”
Buster drank off an inch of wine. Set the glass back on the table, in the same ring it had left. Smiled.
“Woman’ll do what she’s called to, boy. Cain’t you or no one else on God’s earth keep her from it.”
The young man held up a knife. It had started out as a butcher knife. The handle had been replaced with tape and both sides worked down to a fine edge. It looked cold, dark, deadly.
“Then I just might haf to fix things so you won’t haf a int’rest no longer. Fix yo’ things. You hear me, ol’ man?”
I eased around the curve of the table and stood, hands out in front of me, fingers spread.
“Hey. Be cool, brother. You have a name?”
His eyes swung momentarily to me, then back to B.R.
“He knows.”
“But I don’t.”
He thought about that. “Cornell.”
“Okay, Cornell. Just be cool. Whatever the problem is, we can talk about it. You look like a smart man to me, someone might know his way around. Just put the knife away, okay? Let’s keep it simple.”
“You stay out of it, man.”
“Can’t do that,” I told him.
The edge in my voice brought his eyes back to me.
Moments ticked by. Threw themselves over that edge.
“Who the fuck are you? Whatchu doin’ here?”
“Passing time with an old friend. Not looking for trouble. Neither is he. My name’s Lew Griffin.”
“Griffin … I heard once about a Lew Griffin. Came round to my grandparents to collect on some furniture they took on payments—”
“My job, Cornell.”
“—and wound up giving them money enough for two months. You wouldn’t be that Lew Griffin?”
“They seemed like good people.” Though damn if I remembered them.
“Yeah. Raised me and three sisters, no help from anyone, never a complaint. And they was already in their sixties.”
He looked back at me.
“They gone now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Things just ain’t ever as easy as they seem, are they?”
“Not usually:”
“Lot better if they were.”
“Maybe someday they will be.”
Cornell’s eyes went back and forth.
“That ol’ man goan leave my woman alone?”
“I’m sure he will, now he knows how you feel.”
“Need to hear him say it.”
B.R. shrugged.
Further moments plunged off the edge.
“Well,” Cornell said. “Guess I do owe you one, Lew Griffin, rememberin’ my grandparents and all. Don’t owe that nigger nothing, though. ’Cept pure hurt, he ever think ’bout messin’ with my Ellie again.”
Cornell turned away as though to leave. If it was only subterfuge from the first, or if suddenly he gave in to impulse, buckled under to the tug and tumble of his emotions, I’ll never know. But he wheeled back around. His knife slashed through the space where moments ago my throat had been.
I had watched his center of gravity start to shift, muscles begin bunching, and was already rolling away clockwise when he turned. Now I rode my own momentum full circle. Dropped to a squat as I went on around, drove clasped hands against his right knee.
I felt something in there snap as he went down hard. Only ligaments, I hoped.
I reached up and took the knife. When I stood, Buster grinned at me.
“What’s a lonely ol’ man like me to do? She’s so sweet, Lew.”
“Sweet.”
“Pure as sugar cane.” He finished off his tumbler of wine and got up. “Back on the horse. Anything you specially want to hear, Lew?”
“ ‘Black Snake Moan’ might be appropriate.”
Buster rejoined his guitar. Somehow he never looked quite right without it; you had a sense of missing body parts. Dampening the A string with the heel of his hand while hammering at it with his thumb, he started a vamp on the top strings, all pulloffs and bends.
Mmmmmm, mama what’s the matter now.
Someone beside me said: “Buy you a drink?”
She wore a denim skirt, wool sweater, Levi jacket. Her hair was shorter than in her picture. Light brown, with a lot of red.
“Figure you could probably use one.”
“Okay.”
We went over and sat at the bar. The barkeep slid a bottled Lowenbrau, glass inverted over it, in front of me. I thanked both of them.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
So we sat there, me with my beer, her with her Scotch on the rocks, Buster singing about going back to Florida where you gotta plow or you gotta hoe. “Someone coming to take care of th
e boy?” I asked the barkeep. He shrugged. But eventually a Charity ambulance pulled up out front and two fat white guys came in to fetch him.
The woman sat watching them. When they were gone she held up two fingers and the barkeep brought another round. She picked hers up, sniffed at it, swirled it around the squat glass and put it down without drinking.
“Ever hear of O’Carolan?”
I shook my head.
“He was a minstrel, I guess. A wandering musician. Wrote a lot of music for Irish harp. Supposedly on his deathbed he asked for a glass of whiskey, saying ‘It’d be a terrible thing if two such good friends were to part without a final kiss.’ ”
She turned toward me on her stool and held out a hand.
“You’re Lew Griffin. I—”
“Yes, m’am. I know who you are.”
Her face appeared three days a week atop a Times-Picayune column. Mostly light humor about how difficult life was for uptown white women. You know: finding the right caterer, when to wear white shoes, getting the kids off to camp. But every so often she got her teeth into something real. And when she did, the city’s blood, the bottomless despair and pain running in it, squeezed out around her words.
“I spend a lot of time sitting in bars all over the city drinking too much cheap Scotch and bourbon, or in restaurants drinking coffee I don’t want, talking to people some, but mostly listening to them. Past months, your name’s come up in some oddly disparate places.”
Oddly disparate. People who grow up on State Street or Versailles and go to Sophie Newcomb talk like that.
“First I heard about this guy who used to come around collecting for a shyster furniture-and-appliance outfit over on Magazine. He’d wind up telling people how to get out from under—even give them money for payments sometimes. A young Negro, they said. Big, wiry. Almost always wore a black suit. Shirt and tie.
“Then, in a different neighborhood, I’d hear how this same man walked into a French Quarter bar looking for someone who’d jumped bail and walked back out with his man, leaving behind, on the floor, a couple of hard customers with broken arms and cracked ribs.”
She picked up her drink and took a long draw off it. Lowered her eyelids in respect as the taste took hold.
