Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  They were talking about him. They were acting as if he wasn’t even there. “We gonna have to carry that boy home,” Hawk laughed. “I don’t know what’s got into him.”

  “Roosevelt, will you just leave him be?”

  “Are you all right?” said Lori, giggling, as he seated himself unsteadily.

  “I just wish you would all leave me alone,” he said, mustering one last attempt at dignity.

  Now that the dance floor was clear, a number of people noticed Hawk for the first time and there started to be a steady procession over to the table. It was like old home week, as Hawk greeted each one in turn with “How you been? How you doing, man?” extending his hand, never rising from his seat, accepting their well-wishes with a deference that let everyone know he was only taking it as his due.

  “Hey, you met Little Mose yet?” said one of the men whom Jerry thought he recognized from earlier times. Hawk shook his head. “Hey, man, that ain’t right. That boy dying to meet you. Just a minute. Let me go get him.”

  A few minutes later he brought back Mose, who, far from giving the impression that he was dying to meet the older man, appeared sullen and a little resentful to have been dragged to the table. Despite the heat he was wearing a floor-length coat and smoking a thin cigar, while a lithe young woman with long curly hair that appeared to be her own clung to his arm. Up close Mose looked even more bored and worldly-wise than he did on stage, his hooded eyes giving a slightly sardonic edge to a smooth-skinned face which could have been anywhere between twenty and fifty, so effective was its owner in masking any trace of emotion, in warding off any betrayal of commitment from its somewhat pinched features.

  “I knew your daddy,” Hawk said at last, after a silence that seemed as if it might go on all night.

  “I never did,” said Mose.

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t. Your mama must have taken you away when you was three, four years old.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Never been back:?”

  “Come back one time, after my first record was out.” Hawk nodded. “I didn’t have no gig. Just wanted to see where I was from. Roots!” he spat out with a harsh little laugh. “That’s what everyone be talking about, ain’t it? I come down here, Mr. Charlie say, Bend over, boy, I’ll show you your roots.”

  “You ain’t lying neither,” said Hawk. He stared at the younger man, but Mose said nothing else. His companion drummed her painted fingernails on his shoulder.

  “This here’s my manager,” Hawk said. “Mr. Jerry Lip-schitz.” Jerry half rose and reached across the table to shake hands. He barely felt the grip of Mose’s limp fingers. “And I’m sure you’ve heard of Lori Peebles.”

  “Oh yeah?” For a moment a look of interest penetrated the impervious features. “Yeah, I seen you once, I think we might’ve played on the same bill—”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t remember—”

  “Oh yeah, it was a big benefit thing up in Chicago. For Reverend Jesse, you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Out at the baseball park?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, that was beautiful,” said Lori.

  “That’s right.”

  “I just got back from Europe, you know,” said Hawk. “Them European cats just eat up all this kind of shit. You ever been over there yourself?”

  “No, man, I been planning to make it over one of these days. I mean, I been asked, but the way I figure it, I gotta get -paid, you know what I’m talking about? What I want to go over there for if I ain’t gonna get paid?”

  “That’s right. That’s right. Ain’t no sense in going just for the glory. You should talk to this boy here about setting you up a tour. He knows all them big-time cats.”

  “Yeah, maybe I have my manager talk to him.”

  Jerry looked from one to the other, like a spectator at a Ping-Pong match.

  “The people go crazy when they find out who your kinfolks are.

  “Oh yeah?” said Mose, half interested. “You think so, man?”

  “Shit, to them 01’ Man Mose is like a fucking god.”

  The young man laughed a short tight laugh. “To my mama he was like the devil hisself. I never even knowed my grandaddy was a musician till I started hanging around the clubs—you know, trying to be a bad boy. Up till then the only place I sung was in the choir. But when my mama seen I had my mind set on singing my music, that’s when she said, Well, I guess it’s in your blood, ain’t nothing I can do about it. She didn’t want to have nothing to do with me, but I promised I’d buy her a home someday, I’m still gonna do it, man, that day still gonna come.”

  “Sure it is,” said Hawk. “You say hello to your mama from me the next time you see her, y’hear? Tell her I didn’t even know she was still up there, else I would have looked her up myself.”

  Mose appeared to be embarrassed, as if he had been lulled into making a revelation. “Oh yeah, sure. Mama still stay in touch with down home. Practically her whole congregation from down home.”

  “Yeah,” said Hawk. “That’s right.”

  The bass player was getting the rest of the band together on the bandstand. “Well, look like I gotta be getting back to work,” said Mose without any hint of emotion in his voice. “You take care of yourself, hear?” He clapped Hawk on the back. “Nice meeting you folks,” he said with an entertainer’s broad grin and a little wink besides. He walked off with his girl, their arms loosely entwined.

  Hawk looked after them. “I couldn’t remember his mama’s name,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “You remember his mama, baby?”

  “Now how could I remember his mama—”

  “Oh yeah, shoot, you wasn’t even bom yet when she left home. She was a little bitty thing, meek and mild, never could figure how she got mixed up with his daddy. His daddy worse than OJ’ Man Mose, and now he’s the third. She-it.” He put his arm around Little Bo. “Well, that’s all right, we beat ’em anyway with just a old man and a little boy—”

  “I ain’t no little boy.” “Well, sure you ain’t.”

  Jerry kept on drinking. The music all blended together. You don’t miss your water, he heard, until your well run dry. It’s hard, but it’s fair, I’m in love with my best friend’s girl. Don’t make your children pay for your mistakes. Try a little tenderness. All undeniable home truths. All somehow hitting home tonight. He looked over to Hawk for guidance, but Hawk was seemingly preoccupied, nodding in time to the music, a benign, almost dreamy smile on his face.

  “You think this guy’s any good?” he said thickly to Lori.

  “Ssh,” she said, touching his hand.

  Then he was dancing with the overweight waitress again, babbling on about something, he didn’t know what and he didn’t know why. “You know, I likes talking to you,” she said. “I don’t understand a word you saying, but I likes hearing your voice saying it.” Jerry supposed he should take that as a compliment.

  Some time during the set Little Mose shushed the band. “I want to introduce someone we got out there here in the audience tonight,” he said into the microphone. “A great singer, a fine entertainer, we had the pleasure of working with her once in Chicago, Miss Lori Peebles, let’s give her a nice welcome, y’all, a great singer and a beautiful lady. Well, she come in with her manager here tonight just to catch our act. We got another old friend of ours in her party, I’m sure y’all remember him, the Screamin’ Nighthawk. Yeah, stand up, Hawk, and take a bow. Come on, man, stand up.”

  The drummer played a roll, and Hawk stood up, leaning heavily on the table, glaring out into the darkness, thinking only he knew what thoughts. He sat down again, and Mattie took his hand. “I knowed his grandhthex” said Hawk, “for the lying sonofabitch he was.”

  “Hush,” said Mattie. “Hush.”

  I TIRED. And I sick. And I old. Ain’t nothing for it, ain’t no cure ever been invented. It seem so different sometime, and yet it ain’t no different at all. They was eight of us all told, with Sister�
��s kids and Pigpen and Mama and Daddy before he left. And we all work in the fields. I can remember Daddy showing me how to pick that cotton, say start at the bottom, son, move up like this, that way you don’t miss nothing, see all the bolls as you move up. When I was a kid, I just wanted to pick five hundred pounds, thought that was what make a man, I heard tell some cat pick a thousand pounds, just a story, man I thought that was really something. See, back then that’s what I thought that song “John Henry” all about. Foolishness. Didn’t realize then there wasn’t no way you could beat that steam drill down, that steam drill gonna kill you sure, just like it kill John Henry. Well, early on I made up my mind, said, It ain’t gonna kill me. Just like the words of the song. It kill John Henry, but it won’t kill me.

  Man, we come out of the fields at the end of the day, come home to that little tar-paper shack, wind just whistle right through them walls was so thin, wasn’t nothing else to do but sing. What the fuck else were you gonna do? Watch television? Didn’t know nothing about little girls—leastaways not till I was ten, eleven years old. So we get together on the porch, sing them old songs, till we sick of ’em. Then on Saturday afternoons we go to the picnics sometimes—everybody go way back in the woods, bring chicken and that good smoked ham and the bands be playing, you could hear them fife-and-drum sets for miles, man, let everybody know what was going on. Sometimes they have a ballgame out in one of them big old muddy fields, stumps sticking up, and ball ain’t gonna roll nowhere, you get a home run if they lose it in the high grass. Didn’t have no gloves back in them days neither, and the ball all wound around with yam that turn black. I can remember Daddy ranging all over that outfield, oh he was a good country ballplayer, and Mama shouting out at him, C’mon, Will, don’t nothing get by my Will. And that ball go sailing out over the fielders’ heads, and Daddy run like the wind and pull that little black thing down, just pull it in so nice and gentle like it go slap against his palm. And afterwards the wimmins all gets together and talks about their husbands and their kids, and trade stories, and the mens all throwing dice and getting hot and drinking corn and trading stories, too. And the git-tar pickers just keeps on playing, whether folkses is dancing or not, if one get tired there’s always another to take his place, sitting so close they could practically breathe for each other, and the sound go ringing out, carry in the night air. Seem like things was never gonna change to a kid, but they did. Daddy didn’t stay with Mama, niggers didn’t stay with cotton, even the white man didn’t stay with what he knowed then. I just wish Mama and Daddy could have seed me now. …

  THEY TRIED to dissuade him. Jerry did everything but hold him down. It wasn’t the proper time, it wasn’t the proper place, let him at least wait until he had his own guitar, until he was feeling better and got his strength back. But it was like talking to a wall. After all their entreaties Hawk stood up, tapped Litde Bo on the shoulder, and looking to neither left nor right lurched heavily to the stage, which was presently unoccupied.

  At first the bass player tried to stop them. “Hey, man, you can’t use that ax,” he started to say, as Hawk clumsily strapped on an electric guitar and Little Bo picked up Mose’s Stratocaster and fiddled uncertainly with the amplifier dials. Hawk just glared at the musician, who stroked his barbershop mustache and at last looked over to Mose for guidance.

  “Hey, man, it’s cool,” said Mose, who looked as if he had gotten high between sets. “Sure, let the old man have his chance, maybe they like him better than they like us.”

  Hawk touched the strings tentatively. The sound seemed to jump from the Fender amp, and Mose laughed harshly. Bo looked small and frightened on stage but never took his eyes off his father and drew a chair up next to him. Hawk adjusted the mike, and Lori took Jerry’s hand.

  “It’ll probably be all right,” said Jerry uncertainly.

  “That damned old fool,” said Mattie, her eyes filling up with tears. “What he have to go and make a damned fool of himself for?”

  “It’ll be all right,” said Jerry, thinking if only they could get through the next half hour, if he could simply project ahead, shoot forward in time, and know how it all came out—why did things always have to complicate themselves, unnecessarily, so that what you had prepared yourself for was altered or erased and you just wished yourself back at a point you had never been happy with to start off with? That was how it had been with Lori and him—if he just could have accepted what he had, if he had just been able to peek ahead at the future and comprehend the risk, if he only knew now that Hawk would simply survive—

  “Hey, I love you,” he said out loud and was immediately chagrined—why chagrined, that was what he felt, wasn’t it? Lori squeezed his hand. Did it mean anything? There was no telling.

  “Ladies and gentlemens,” Hawk announced, “I’d like your attention please. Our first number that we gonna sing for you, the very first number that I ever recorded—”

  Jerry panicked. There was something wrong. He wasn’t playing some genteel college—was he forgetting where he was? I have stripped him of his protective coloration, Jerry thought, like a damned ecologist.

  Then Hawk struck a chord, Little Bo fell in manfully behind him, and his voice filled the room, made bigger somehow by the unrelenting hum of conversation, the rising tide of good times and better expectations.

  I’m a screamiri nighthawk, baby,

  And I don’t want you to deny my name …

  Jerry was uplifted all over again by the sound of his voice, amazed at the thrill he still felt at its majesty and presence, but he didn’t dare to look around. When he did, they were dancing! It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t anything, he knew. It was just in the normal order of things, but they were dancing! Hawk finished the first number, and with no preamble launched into the next.

  Went to the gypsy, get my fortune done

  Gypsy say, Hawk, you sure need some

  Well, must I holler, or must I … shake ’em on down …

  One after another they ran down the old songs, the strain evidently telling on Hawk, for his face was pouring sweat. Bo studied his father intently, hunched over the Stratocaster’s elongated neck, doing his best to follow the irregular patterns of the music, his knees so close to Hawk’s they were practically locked.

  Jerry took Mattie’s hand. “You see, there wasn’t anything to worry about,” he said, as much to reassure himself as to reassure her. He hadn’t robbed Hawk of anything, or, if he had, he had scrupulously replaced it with something else. The world was changing, dammit. Even the Sunset Cafe had seen demonstrable changes which Jerry had done nothing to bring about. He was no grave-robber! Lori looked at him peculiarly. He hadn’t spoken, had he? “It’s not so bad, is it?” he said again. But Mattie didn’t look convinced. Her lips were pursed tight as she watched father and son, old man and little boy, struggling to recapture a pastor was it to prevent the present from becoming past? Stemming the tide? Plugging the leak? Jerry’s head was spinning. Hawk and Rabbit Turner, Mattie’s father. Hawk and 01’ Man Mose. History was repeating itself, but history was obliterated, and Hawk alone remained to tell the tale.

  “I’m drunk,” Jerry said to Lori.

  “I know.”

  “You want to dance?”

  “You’d probably just fall down.”

  Jerry giggled. Shit. He loved her. “I know.” He reached for her, but she was holding Mattie’s hand, saying something. Hawk was stomping his feet and inviting everyone to “Play with Your Poodle.”

  “Hey,” said a voice beside him. He looked up, and it was Little Mose. A hand was extended, a soft contemptuous handshake, didn’t mean anything one way or another, why should it? “Old man ain’t bad,” said Mose. Jerry shook his head, as if to clear it. “I mean, he can get down. Shit, will you look at them niggers jump.” He laughed and immediately broke off, whether because he had revealed himself to a stranger or was ashamed of the emotion he really felt. “You folks doing anything after the show?” he said, looking only at Lori, who seemed scarc
ely aware of his presence. “Reason I ask, we having a little party back at the motel, get some folks together, relax, and I promise you, looks like we’re going to have a good time.” His thin lips formed a smile.

  Lori looked at Jerry. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. I’m kind of tired.”

  “We got some good shit, mama,” said Mose meaningfully.

  Jerry, half asleep, was snapped into wakefulness. Could Mose have heard something about Lori? he wondered. Was the word out on her all over? She loved spades, she was strung out on—what? He tried to steady his gaze and stare into Mose’s hard little eyes, but he could read nothing in the other’s expression.

  “No, I don’t think so. Not really.”

  “I understand we got mutual acquaintances,” said Mose even more meaningfully.

  Was it his imagination, or had Mose suddenly taken on a more sinister cast? Lori seemed agitated. As if to further disturb him, she turned her face away from his inquiring gaze. “Why don’t you and Mattie just, uh, dance?” she said. “I’ll be all right. Really.”

  He wasn’t going to move, he wasn’t going to leave this table, but Mattie took his hand and he followed docilely. He had never been much good at defending Lori from anything anyway.

  Well, I rolled and I tumbled

  I cried the whole night long …

  Hawk and Little Bo were going at it fast and furious. The music speeded up, even as the good times got better and everyone was lifted higher and higher.

  “You think she’ll be all right?” he said thickly to Mattie.

  “What you talking about?” said Mattie indignantly. “That gal always going to be all right. When you going to make up your mind to that? The minute you start to trust her, you know that when she gonna come home.”

  “What?” He was not sure he had understood what she meant, or even heard. What did she know of him and Lori?

  When I woke up this morning

  All I had was gone.