The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  They all wore black suits and ties. The curtain was pulled and they went straight into the first number, Muddy Waters’ ‘I Be’s Troubled.’ Hubert’s voice was low down deep when he sang that he’d never be satisfied. In front of them, the audience sat in unmatched side chairs pulled up to wobbling, squared-off tables covered in Schlitz bottles and half-empty rocks glasses. People smoked and tapped their feet and closed their eyes and swayed. Behind the band, the cracks in the brick wall crumbled a little with each stomp of the foot, tap of the keys, beat of the bass drum. A sign hung from twine and paperclips. It read, in black paint on white butcher’s paper: Happy Halloween. There was a neon Budweiser sign in the window and a clock behind the bar, nothing else. Up above, exposed conduit snaked the ceiling and waterpipes were wrapped in towels.

  White folks had taken to coming to shows here and elsewhere on the West Side, and it was unusual for Chicky to be the only one in the place. That night there were two white men, sitting front and center, looking too sober and clean cut for anybody’s liking.

  Before the break, Chicky let loose a solo. He bent notes hard and laid on the vibrato. Tongue-blocking it like nobody else could, he stood, rocking at the waist like a metronome. He never sat when he played, always held that microphone in his cupped hand so that the sound assaulted the ears, amplified. He got exercise up there, jumping around and flexing to keep himself young.

  When folks thought he had finished, Chicky began to sing into his harmonica, all throat wobble, filtered and loud. ‘Well, lovers is you right?’ he sang. ‘Oh, yes we right. Bluefield women read and write, Keystone women bite and fight.’ No one, not the native Chicagoans or the migrants up from the Delta, knew what the hell this all meant, but they clapped anyway.

  As the band went to break, Hubert introduced his bandmates. When he said, ‘And on harp, Mr Chicky Gold,’ one of the white men bent to the other and whispered something. Chicky noticed.

  He took his suitcase with him to the bathroom.

  He never came back out.

  It turned out that they weren’t really there for him. Hubert was a draft dodger, evading those Far East orders to Korea. An overly ambitious F.B.I. agent had asked his police officer buddy to accompany him to the Stuck Pig that night on a tip that Hubert would be performing. The F.B.I. agent had gotten a warrant from the judge to arrest the young singer, and he aimed to do so. While Chicky listened from the bathroom, they cuffed Hubert for his non-patriotism and asked the other two, ‘Where’s that Chicky Gold gone to?’ That was all he needed to climb out the window.

  What the cop friend had whispered before the break was that the name ‘Chicky Gold’ rang a bell. That before he’d moved north for work, he’d spent some time in West Virginia, mining coal. That a man had used that name as an alias, a man who’d been involved in a Bolshevik plot of some sort against those who might make a little money in this life. It was all a little unclear to the cop, but he gave the F.B.I. man his take on things. ‘That harmonica man is a fugitive from way back. He came out of hiding, then disappeared again a few years ago.’

  The next morning, Chicky was on the ten a.m. train bound for St Louis.

  As Chicky had discovered for himself upon re-entering civilization, the telephone was a truly magnificent invention. Between Halloween and Christmas of 1952, it was used near to death by lawmen in Chicago, calling up other lawmen in West Virginia. There weren’t many energetic folks around from the mine wars of the 1920s, but those who were around got hot under the collar. Especially the Crews brothers. And Sheriff Frank Dallara. This Chicky Gold, this one-time Trenchmouth Taggart, murderer in cold blood, had resurfaced to bury his mama, then disappeared again. Now, more than five years later, according to the F.B.I., he was a bluesman in Chicago. But his apartment had come up empty. He was running again.

  There were men who aimed to catch him, and they had the latest phones and guns.

  So it was that Chicky Gold went west, and on a special Christmas Eve show at the Cosmopolitan Club in St Louis, sat in with the house band, The Sir John Trio. Sir John was his old piano man Johnnie Johnston, who was doing well enough. But not well enough to quit his job at the steel mill. That night, his sax player had the flu, so another newcomer was sitting in. The replacement was named Chuck Berry, and he had his own kind of hillbilly flair. Chicky was drawn to it, and the two traded solos on stage as eagerly as they traded flasks of whiskey behind it.

  They played an improvised duet involving the exchange of shouts: ‘Chicky!’ ‘Chucky!’ ‘Now Chicky!’ ‘Now Chucky!’ and so on, the crowd roaring in between. It was big city, hillbilly, holy hell blues, and nobody who saw it forgot.

  Chicky had no idea that Chuck Berry was to be the first of two famous music men he’d meet in a week’s time. One was on his way up. The other, his way out.

  When the same jar-headed F.B.I. man showed up in the crowd during the final number of the night, he had Warren Crews in tow. Warren Crews had aged, but the look in his eyes was the same as it had been that day playing Mumblety Peg. There was hate there.

  Chicky was on the run again. In the parking lot, he slashed the F.B.I. man’s tires. He said to his friend, for the third time in six years, ‘Be good, Johnnie,’ and, in the middle of a blackout, did something he said he never would again. He got inside an automobile, the Cadillac Series 62 convertible Chuck Berry had on loan.

  The smell of the law and the sight of Warren Crews had gotten Chicky thinking on the past again, and he had to double up on the drink to keep from busting. But he was fifty years old, and his liver was giving out. The binge he started with Chuck nearly broke him.

  He rode in a car and blacked out for three straight days.

  When he woke up on December 29th, Chuck Berry was nowhere to be found. Chicky was alone on the cheap linoleum floor of an illegal bar in the back of an abandoned barn. He tried to lift his head. His face stuck to the linoleum. When he pulled it free, it was quickly evident that his own dried blood was the adhesive. His mouth throbbed.

  When he put his fingers to it, he winced. The gums were ragged, swollen like they’d never been before. The gold was gone. Arly’s words came back to him. ‘They’ll pry em out of your head for pawn.’

  Four top, four bottom, all pulled with the pliers now sitting in the corner wearing the steely crimson fingerprints of a cold-blooded unknown man. Chicky retched twice. There was nothing left to come up. He’d let go all a man could and still live. It was everywhere around him. Blood, vomit. Whoever had done it had left his black wool overcoat hung on a nail in the wall. The suitcase was gone. The seven harmonicas, including his daddy’s Marine Band. All gone. But across the room, broken open, its contents still there, was the little lockbox. The Widow’s saved newspaper stories. Nobody had need to steal stories. They were still his to carry.

  Looking at the room, all he could surmise was that he’d been poisoned, finally, by the drink. Poisoned enough to lose three days and sleep through a tooth extraction. He tried to get up but couldn’t. A fever was on him. He pulled at his clothes to let the winter air on his skin.

  Then he did something he had never before done.

  Lord, he prayed to himself, shivering hot. Get me through this one and I won’t take another drink.

  He lay there, burning, unable to lift his head. He watched the dried blood and vomit swirl in patterns on the linoleum next to his face. All went red. Glowing red. Then nothing.

  When he was able to get up, Chicky washed up in a creek, gargled over those gums though it nearly killed him to do it. The wool coat they’d left him kept the winter wind out of his bones and he clutched the lockbox as if frozen. He saw a sign on the road, and his best guess was that he’d somehow ended up near Cape Girardeau, Missouri. He hopped and rode an empty freight car east. It wasn’t long before he hit the Kentucky line.

  By the time he got into southern West Virginia in the predawn morning of December 31st, 1952, all Chicky Gold wanted in this world was a drink of liquor for his pain. He jumped off the slow moving
freighter, hit the deck hard, and scrambled back up. He ran in earnest to the only place he could think of where a fugitive might procure the strongest shine known to man.

  It was ridiculous to think that a jar of the Widow’s moonshine could still be inside Mary Blood’s hollowed out tombstone after all those years, but he dug down just the same. He found the chute and the canister, opened it. He’d never felt the kind of relief that swept his bloodstream when he saw that canning jar, its murky contents sloshing. But before he unscrewed the lid to swallow, he saw himself, as if from above, on his knees in the sloped Methodist cemetery, digging in the dirt of the dead. It seemed then that he’d always been digging. Digging holes to bury clay marbles and Indian Head pennies. Climbing up hills and digging out holes to hide away from the world. Digging holes to shit into. Digging up the dead. Now he dug again, and if he drank what was unearthed, he’d no doubt die himself. On top of it all, he’d made a promise to a God he wasn’t sure could hear.

  Chicky slipped the full jar into his coat pocket and ran for the railyard.

  As the hours passed on that New Year’s Eve, and as the rain turned to sleet, Chicky’s thatched home in the high hills above Bluefield called to him. It struck him that he’d lived there almost a quarter century of his life, alone, and off the booze. He’d thought he was sipping it all that time, from the magic flask, but he’d found out different. There was no magic in life. Only crazy.

  Robbed of his teeth and damn near his life, he knew that crazy and alone on a mountain was better than what was left for him down there. More running. The past catching up.

  At half past ten, he stood out back of a service station in the dark, pacing. He had freight-hopped to the outskirts of Bluefield by then. His plan had been to make a trade with the attendant inside, moonshine for provisions. But the more he paced, the more he became paranoid that the attendant would recognize his face, call out the F.B.I. For all he knew he could have been in the papers again.

  Out front, a baby blue, rag top Cadillac pulled up to the pumps. The driver, no older than eighteen, stepped out and stretched. His breath turned to condensation in the cold air. He looked at the tall, thin man seated in the back. ‘You want somethin to eat, Mr Williams?’ he said.

  ‘No. Just want to get some sleep.’ The man stepped out. His cheeks were sunken and he wore a center-dent, white felt Stetson. He stretched as his driver had done. The cowbell on the station door jingled as the boy went inside.

  Chicky watched the tall man. He estimated the fellow couldn’t weigh more than 130 pounds soaking wet. There was something familiar about him. Without knowing why, Chicky approached.

  Each sized up the other, hunched a few feet apart to keep dry under the overhang. ‘Evenin,’ Mr Williams said, nodding.

  Chicky nodded back. His gold teeth gone, he was re-perfecting the art of silence, of hiding his mouth like he’d done for so many years as a child.

  ‘You look worse than I feel, Mister.’ The accent was deep south. Alabama.

  Chicky didn’t answer. He looked in the back of the car, the guitar propped on the seat.

  The attendant came out and starting pumping gas one-handed. With the other, he drank an RC Cola. Chicky watched him and felt his stomach lurch. If he didn’t eat, he’d be sick. If he ate, he’d be sick.

  Mr Williams stepped around his Cadillac and stuffed his hands in his pants pockets. He breathed in and looked at the hills surrounding them. ‘Pretty country,’ he said. The attendant didn’t respond. He finished filling up and went inside.

  The boy emerged with two sandwiches, chips, and two RCs. When he tried to give one to Mr Williams, the man stood still, then took it and looked at it. ‘Let’s go,’ the boy said. He got in the car.

  Before he climbed into the backseat, Mr Williams handed Chicky the sandwich. Pimiento cheese. ‘You look like you could use this more ’n I could,’ he said.

  Chicky took it. He knew it was the last food he’d eat for a while that he hadn’t trapped or picked off a bush. ‘Here,’ he said, without opening his mouth much. He pulled the last existing jar of the Widow’s mule-kick from his coat pocket and handed it to the man. They nodded goodbye and went their ways, one to a mountaintop, the other to sip and sleep and never wake up again.

  As he climbed, revelers welcomed in the New Year with drink and dance. None of them knew he was to be taken, again, by the wilderness. And Chicky Gold did not know that down below, in a week’s time, he’d met both the man who’d kill the blues for rock’n roll, and the man who’d kill himself with corn liquor, taking country music, real country music, with him.

  Chicky Gold didn’t even have a harmonica to blow. No gun, no knife, and no liquor. He had a pimiento cheese sandwich and the clothes on his back. He had newspaper stories.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Wide Vision Running

  It was to be a bad winter. Signs foretold it. Beavers built lodges with twice the logs and the screech owls cried like a woman. August had been foggy. Tree bark grew thicker on the north side of a tree, wild onions had six layers, and acorns came in double cropped. So, Chicky Gold gathered all of the acorns he could. Alongside the drying parts and pelts of opossum and raccoon and black-tailed jackrabbits, he stockpiled chicory root and spruce needles and wild onion bulbs. Two decades in the woods as a relatively young man had taught him some of this, but his second go-round had taught him more. He’d come to the wilderness with nothing this time, and he’d made it through. New Year’s Day 1958 was three months away, and if he made it through the winter, he’d have spent five more years of his life alone on a mountaintop.

  He awoke to an October sunrise, curled like a baby, on the side of a trail. He’d been night tracking a cougar until two a.m. Most folks thought mountain cats weren’t in these hills, but Chicky knew the track to be genuine. The Widow had shown him one as a boy. Four paws, retracted claws, and a three-split pad. Tracking a cougar could fool a regular man into thinking the animal walked on two feet – when it picked up its front paw, the back one came forward and landed smack in the front’s impression. A single register of its path.

  Chicky could smell the cat’s scent piles from a quarter mile off. He had ground to cover, and he traveled light despite winter moving in. He’d converted his Bostonian shoes into moccasins when the soles ran out, replacing the bottoms with tanned animal hide. He’d used the old favorite raccoon penis bone as needle, rabbit sinew as thread. In this way he was able to fashion clothes for all seasons from what he killed.

  His hair had grown long and his beard reached his chest. Both were gray.

  He found the cougar’s freshest scent pile and relieved his own bladder on top of it. Then he was back to fast-tracking, wide-open running. He unfocused his eyes so that he had peripheral and wide-reaching sight. He landed silently on the outside balls of his feet and rolled inward. He became the cat he tracked.

  Twenty yards from the edge of a mountain stream, where clearing met with thick woods, Chicky ceased his stalk to wait. To ambush. He knew the area, knew that he was less than a half mile from the mountain bald where Clarence Dickason and Rose Kozma had made their home. He’d passed the spot on his way back up five years prior, and even then the place had been deserted for some time. It was in ruin. The outhouse had caved in under a tree limb. He’d never find out what became of Clarence or Rose, and often he wondered about little Albert, and especially little Zizi. At weak moments, out there alone, he longed to hold the baby. To soothe her.

  From his crouch behind a tulip poplar, he saw the cat. Its shoulder muscles rolled and piggybacked each other as it walked diagonal. When it bent to drink at the water’s edge, it stopped and Chicky watched those ears move independent of one another, forward, back, sideways, listening for him. When its tongue touched water, he stood, feet planted. Keeping his spear close to his body, he drew back slow and let go fast. The animal heard the short range intruder and turned. Cat-backed and claws out, it jumped from the creek’s edge and howled. The spear had missed and now the man faced the
animal. For a moment, he wanted to howl back, to hiss and yowl like he had as a boy when Fred Dallara kissed Clarissa. But he watched the cat instead. After several seconds of the standoff, it ran.

  He’d not mastered the spear like other weapons. The sinew and hide slingshot he’d made easily knocked foxes and raccoons silly. He had the bones and pelts and full belly to prove that he’d never forgotten the slingshot lessons Frank Dallara had given him. And the four bait-stick deadfall traps he moved once a week and reset had harvested squirrels and rabbits to keep him fed through winter. But when streams froze over and his trident spear could catch no fish, when the cold moved in so bad that he holed up inside his hut for days at a time, he wished he could figure out how to get the big game without a gun. Once, he’d dropped on top of an eight-point buck from a hickory tree branch, stabbed away at the animal’s throat with a flint-rock knife while it tried to buck him off. But this had been a slow, awful kill. He’d dry-preserved it, eaten from the deer for months, but he never hunted that way again.

  The cougar had escaped him for two years running.

  That night, he used his bow drill to make a fire. When he’d done his sit-ups, jumping jacks, and push-ups, he ate. When he’d eaten, he boiled the inner bark scrapings of an oak tree in water. It cooled some, and he swashed it over his emptied gums and spit. It dulled the pain. So did the spruce needle tea and chicory root coffee he made over the fire. He had rituals. He had drinks to nullify his aching mind and body. It wasn’t whiskey, but he’d promised God that he’d not sip that drink again, and he aimed to keep his promise.

  He’d never prayed again in the years since that morning on the Missouri linoleum. He mostly kept his body busy to stay out of his own head. Fishing, trapping, hunting, picking root, these things could fill a man’s days. Nights were when he got himself in trouble. Memories came at night.