by Thomas Cobb
Back in the motel room, he unpacks, bringing most of the gear in from the van. Sitting on the bed with the television on, he brushes his white hat, working out the stains, then patting it with a cheese-cloth sack filled with chalk dust. He works on his white boots with liquid polish. The heels are getting worn, and there is a small tear near the right toe. He takes a little bottle of white glue and works it into the split with the end of a match. The boots cost him three hundred and fifty dollars two years ago. How many pairs of boots has he bought and worn out in his career?
He is eighteen years old. It is Louisville, Kentucky, one of the first days of spring. He has his first job, playing guitar for Eldon Morton, who has his own radio show out of Louisville and travels with his band every Friday, Saturday and Sunday to Jeffersontown and Okalona, Radcliff, Eminence, La Grange, Bardstown and Campbellville, and sometimes north into Illinois and Indiana, to Salem and Madison, Crothersville and Versailles. Bad has missed World War II, but he has a job playing for those who did not.
He is looking at his toes. They are in the first pair of pointed-toe cowboy boots he has ever worn. The boots are inside the fluoroscope machine in the middle of the shoe store. He doesn’t believe those green bones are his. He is being tricked. His father warned him that people in Louisville would try to trick any boy from a place like Judah, Indiana.
He moves his toes, and inside the pointed shadows of the boots, luminous green sausages move. That makes the trick more remarkable. He moves his toes again, then, alternately, his feet. The green bones move, then the outlines of the boots. It seems that this has some connection to him. He fakes a movement with his right foot, then moves his left. In the machine, the right foot starts to move, hesitates, then the left one goes. He is trying to think of another, trickier move to confuse the machine when the salesman pulls him back and looks in the machine himself.
“They look a little tight,” the salesman says. “How do they feel?”
“Fine, they feel fine.”
“I guess they’ll loosen with time.” The salesman steps back from the machine with a smile.
Bad leans forward to look at the screen again. The green bones are pointed at the ends, but his toes are round. He has discovered proof of the trick. He realizes that people are laughing at him.
“What are you looking at in there, boy?”
“Maybe they got one of those strip-tease films running in that thing.”
He looks up. Ed and Wade, who have brought him here to buy his band boots, are watching him with amusement.
“If that’s it, I reckon I better have me a look,” Ed says. “Eldon wants us to take care of this boy. We don’t want him to get his head turned before he plays his first job.” He walks over to the machine and takes a look.
“Nope. Ain’t nothing in there but a whole mess of toes. But holy crimminy, Wade, this boy’s feet are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside.”
Out in the sunlight, he walks between the two men, who talk about weather and women in towns he has never heard of. He is still walking awkwardly, feeling the pull of the muscle across his shin as he walks with his toes pinched together. Walking is harder because he imagines the green bones inside his toes, glowing and scrunching as he walks. He is aware of his feet, and their movement, and in them, the bones that seem to have a separate movement of their own.
He considers calling Suzi, to tell her why her check is late. He unpacks his guitar instead and begins unstringing it. When the strings are off, he takes a bottle of polish and a cloth and rubs until he brings the luster up. Then he takes a pad of steel wool and gently works over the pickups, taking off stray spots of rust. With this done, he begins to put on new Dean Markley strings, winding each up with a plastic winder until the string nears pitch. Then he begins tightening by hand.
He brings each string up to pitch, checking it by ear. One by one, he bends the strings up, then down, to take the stiffness out, to stretch them as far as they will go. Then he retunes. When the guitar is back in tune, he moves quickly through a song he heard on the radio on the way in. It has a nice tight hook built on two note bends, and a bottom that most of the bands he gets saddled with could handle. It is a straight one, five, four, with only a couple of quick shifts to catch someone up. He doesn’t remember the name of the song or the artist, but maybe he could do it as an instrumental. He can rebuild the melody.
From the outside of the bar he hears it. He stops and listens. Someone is playing piano, delicate triplet runs with the right hand over a steady rolling bass. The drummer is working behind the piano with brushes. He thinks of Smiley Robbins, who left him in—what, ’63, ’64? He pushes on the door and walks in, expecting to see old Smiley just sitting behind the piano, tinkering.
“Boys. Boys. He’s here.” The music stops and a man almost as tall as Bad walks forward. “Mr. Blake. Welcome. I’m Rocky Parker, and this is Sureshot.” The big man runs through the introductions. Bad nods to each name until he gets to the last. “This here’s Wesley Barnes, our piano player.”
“I was listening outside.” Bad shakes hands with each of the band members, coming to the piano player last. “It sounds real good. Real good.” Jesus. It has been years since he has had a good piano player to work with.
Rehearsal goes slowly. Bad keeps stopping to ask if they know songs that aren’t on the play list. Songs he played years before keep tumbling back to mind. Often enough the band knows them. The ones they don’t, they fake pretty well. The bass is a little weak, but the drums and guitars are solid, and the piano player is a New Mexico miracle.
The band is the house band from a bar across town, which has been brought in to back him for the three nights he is in Santa Fe. Rocky Parker is an electrician. The drummer works at Montgomery Ward, and the piano player has his own tax service.
It is best to stick with the play list for tonight, Bad decides, but tomorrow afternoon they can work on some of the other stuff they have played today. Getting away from the play list will be like a vacation.
It can’t be done, Rocky Parker tells him. They all have jobs. They have taken the afternoon off today, but they won’t be able to do that again. After the show, Bad suggests. They can get together after the show for a few hours and work out some other numbers. That can’t be done, either. The bar doesn’t close until two. Rocky has to get up at six. The others work early, too. They can fake the songs they know, but they can’t work out anything after this afternoon.
Bad wants to go back to the motel room and get some sleep before showtime, but he wants away from the play list, too. He is tired and hot, but he strips off his shirt and they run through five numbers three times each, until Bad figures that they are close enough for New Mexico. The band is solid, but much of the slack is being taken up by the piano player, who senses exactly what is going on and stays right with Bad. By six o’clock they have an emended play list that doesn’t overjoy Bad but is the most interesting work he has done in months.
After rehearsal, he seeks out the piano player. “You’re pretty good. You work before?”
Wesley Barnes is a little fat man, balding and sweating almost as much as Bad. “When I was a kid. A little. I just do this for fun. I’ve been playing with these guys for a couple of years now. Just weekends. Just for fun and a couple of extra dollars.”
“You’re good. It’s real nice to run into someone on the road who really is good. It’s going to be a pleasure.”
“Thanks. Mr. Blake, can I ask you a favor?”
“Bad, buddy, Bad. What can I do for you?”
“You see, I have this niece. And, well, she’s a writer. She’s trying to be a writer. She writes for this newspaper here. I mean, it’s not The New York Times or anything. Anyway, she’d like to do an interview with you. You know, write an article about you for the paper.”
Holy Hannah, an interview. Bad has not done one for years. The ones he has done he has hated when he saw them. But damn, he has a piano player who really knows how to play.
“Well, hell yes. You send your little niece around. I’ll be glad to help her out.”
He is fresh from the shower, wrapped in a towel. He cracks the door to vent the shower steam and sits down to a room-service steak.
“Mr. Blake?”
He looks up. In the doorway is a woman with streaked brown hair and glasses. She is wearing a denim shirt and jeans. She looks to be in her early thirties. He is almost naked.
“I’ve come at a bad time.”
Instinctively, he starts to stand. Then he sits again. “Who the hell are you?”
“Jean Craddock. The Sun Scene. Wesley Barnes’s niece. I’ve come for an interview. This is a bad time.”
“No. Yes. Shit. I’m having dinner. I just got out of the shower.”
“I’ll come back. When’s a good time?”
“Hell. I don’t know. Just wait outside for a minute. Let me get dressed.”
When she leaves, he pushes the steak away and grabs for his clothes. In the bathroom he dresses quickly, trying to put his shirt and pants on at the same time. His hair is wet and combed back. He looks bald. He pushes it forward with his hand and tries to button his shirt at the same time. What the hell is he hurrying for? He is wearing his suit pants, electric blue with the lightning stripe down the leg. He has left his socks and boots in the other room. His feet look white and dead.
In the other room, there are dirty clothes and sheet music strewn all over. He pulls on one sock and hops on one foot to a pile of clothes. He bundles these up and throws them into the bathtub. He sits down to pull on the other sock. He straightens the cover on the bed. There is a wet spot where he was sitting in his towel. He straightens up the sheet music, pulls on his boots and goes to the door.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I should have called. I was working another story not too far from here. I swung by on my way.”
“Come in.” He looks closely at her. She is older than he first thought, mid-thirties, maybe older. Her brown hair is streaked with gray and drawn into a ponytail. Behind the big glasses there are lines at the corners of her eyes. She is wearing little or no makeup, and her mouth is drawn into a tight smile that may be restrained friendliness or a smirk. She is an attractive woman. She has a tape recorder in her left hand and a camera over her shoulder. “No pictures,” he tells her. “You want some steak? A potato?”
“No. How about later?”
“Which?”
“Pictures.”
“Roll?”
“On stage?”
“Be all right. Mind if I eat?”
She sits across the room and sets the tape recorder on the dresser. When she crosses her legs, he sees her boots are heavy and well scuffed. His are thick with white polish. He cuts a piece of steak, puts it in his mouth and nods.
She bites her lip. “Let’s see. You always dress for dinner?”
The chewed steak catches and lodges in his throat.
“Sorry. I’m sorry. Let me see. Where are you from?”
“When?”
“When?”
“Yeah, when. I’m from Houston, Texas, now. Before that I was from a bunch of other places.”
“Originally.”
“Judah, Indiana.”
“Judy?”
“Judah. J-U-D-A-H. Folks say it Judy. I never knew why. Everyone does. I was born there. ’Bout fifty-six years ago, if that’s the next question.”
“Not anymore. What did you do there?”
“Grew up. Sort of. I left when I was seventeen. Before that I went to school. I hunted and fished. I ran around. I played some baseball. I played guitar and sang.”
“How’d you learn music?”
“Yeah. Well, that. I don’t rightly know. I just did. One day my daddy brought home an old Washburn steel-string. Someone had given it to him, or he won it off him. Or probably traded him something for it. Daddy’d trade damned near anything. Man lived to trade stuff. Stuff he’d never use in his whole damned life. That guitar. He couldn’t play a lick on it. I just started fooling with it. We had a wind-up Victrola and a Philco radio, other things he had traded for. I’d just listen and try to play. Every once in a while, I’d do something right. I just sort of learned.”
“You taught yourself.”
“More or less. There was an old woman in church who played the piano. Miss Verna Taylor. She helped me some. Told me the names of notes, taught me what chords were, got me to read a little music, told me some theory. Later, when I was already playing, Leon Grady taught me a lot. That’s when I was in Louisville. He took me to Chicago once, taught me to listen to the blues. That taught me a whole bunch.”
“Who’d you listen to?”
“Oh, a bunch of people you’ve probably never heard of—Lulubelle and Scotty, Bradley Kincaid, Clayton McMitchum and the Georgia Wildcats. You ever hear of any of them? I didn’t figure. How about Red Foley? Gene Autry, Roy Acuff? Yeah. I listened to them, too. I listened to everything.”
“You learned to sing listening to them.”
“Not exactly. I learned to sing in church. Everybody sang. We were Southern Baptists. I learned I could sing church songs all I wanted. If I sang radio songs around the house, my momma would hush me up. But I figured out I could walk around singing church songs all day long, loud as I could, and she’d let me be. I could sing loud enough to drown out my brother and sisters. I was the loudest damn thing in Judah, Indiana, but I was righteous loud, so it was O.K. with Momma.”
He fishes the Jack Daniel’s out of his pack. “Drink?”
She shakes her head.
“You don’t mind if I do?”
“Of course not.”
He fills a plastic glass with ice, and then fills in with the whiskey.
“Singing is all you’ve ever done?”
“I started when I was seventeen, and I’ve been at it ever since. When I was a kid I had to hoe the garden and haul the washtub for the laundry, feed the chickens, that sort of thing. I figured that was enough of working. I didn’t care much for it.”
“What about your father?”
“He worked. I never figured he liked it much. Worked in the limestone quarry when there was work. When there wasn’t, he did whatever needed doing. He worked hard. It never got him shit. You’ll pardon the expression.”
“I’ve heard it before. You never wanted to do anything else?”
“I wanted to play baseball for a while. I was pretty good at it. I thought for a while maybe I could be a musician and a baseball player at the same time. You know, sing on the radio during the winter and at night after the games were over. Then a couple of the kids learned how to throw curve balls. I decided to stick to the guitar. The damned thing stayed where it was supposed to.”
“I guess it’s lucky for us you never learned to hit curves.”
“Lucky for me anyway. Don’t get me wrong.” He motions around the room. “This ain’t no picnic most of the time, but I’m still doing it. A couple of years ago, my brother called me from Muncie, Indiana. He’s got a car lot there. He wanted me to go in partners with him. He had it all worked out. I’d go on the television and tell all the good folks to come on down and buy one of Bad’s good used cars. Hell, if I’d played baseball, I’d probably have ended up doing something like that. It’s one thing to be a jerk behind a guitar, but God, to be a jerk in front of a beat-up Buick—hard to be a bigger jerk than that. You always want to be a writer?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”
“You good at it?”
“Pretty good.”
“You ever done anything else?”
“I was a secretary for a while. Before that I was married.”
“Raising babies and all.”
“Raising a husband and a construction business. I wasn’t any good at it and I gave up.”
“The construction business or the husband?”
“The husband. I was damned good at construction. I knew more about it than he did.”
“I was never very good at b
eing a husband. I tried it a number of times. I always gave up, too.”
“You’re sort of famous for that, too, aren’t you?”
“There are some stories. They’ve been written before.”
“I’d like to hear them from you.”
“Oh hell, darlin’, we don’t have enough time to do my marriages.”
“Five, is that right?”
“Four, actually.”
“And one of your wives moved out in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t know if it was the middle of the night or the middle of the day, but she moved out. That’s the one you want to hear, right?”
“Yeah, I would.”
“O.K. That was Marge, my second wife. It was nineteen sixty-five, in Nashville. I was drinking pretty hard in those days.” He looks down at his glass. “Not like this. Hard drinking. Benders. Rolling benders. I’d start one night in Nashville and then I’d take off, through Tennessee, into Kentucky, or Missouri, down to Georgia. Once I ended up in Pennsylvania. Anyway, I’d go for about a week, sometimes longer, once or twice three weeks. And I wouldn’t come home until I was flat busted. More than once I left town in a Cadillac and rode home in a Greyhound bus that I’d wired home to get the money to buy the ticket for. I’d trade a Cadillac for drinks, or just give it to someone I met.
“This went on for quite a while. She did all the usual things to get me to stop. I went to AA and to shrinks. She cried, she pleaded, she threw stuff, and she threatened to leave. And I’d straighten out for a while, but before too long I’d be drinking again, and then I’d just take off.
“Finally, I came home from one. I’d been gone a couple of weeks, I guess. I drove on home. I’d managed to hang on to the car that time, and I drove into our driveway, and it looked wrong. There was a kid’s bike out there. I had a four-year-old, too young for that bike, and there was a strange dog. But none of that bothered me. I didn’t think anything of it. And I walked in the front door, ready for whatever was coming, the fit, the crying, the cold shoulder. Anyway, everything was wrong. All the furniture was wrong. Nothing looked the way it was supposed to. And I just stood there, looking, trying to figure what in hell had happened. Had she got all new furniture, did I make a wrong turn and wind up in the wrong house? And the next thing I know, there is some strange woman standing in the hallway screaming. And she kept screaming.
