The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  The truth is that we West Virginians will never be ruled by one religion or another. We are calm pew sitters, tongue-talking snake handlers, rapture-awaiting born-agains, and ear-to-the-Pope chest crossers. We are all shades of black, tan, and white. We come from Scotland and Ireland, Hungary and Sicily. We come from Africa by way of Georgia. And if our own fine senator tells us not to vote for a Catholic, we might just remember that he still conversates cordially with men who wear hoods over their faces and show us just how ugly humans can be. West Virginians elected John Kennedy president of the United States of America, and a man to be reckoned with such as him, well, we reckon he’ll do right by us.

  A.C. stayed at a tall, fancy hotel in Times Square, along with Jim and Dorothea. It was important to him that they both be there, as he felt they were just as responsible for the story as he.

  On the day of the Pulitzer awards luncheon, Jim and Dorothea accepted the morning ride offered by the editor of the New York Times. He was taking them by the Times offices for a tour before heading to Columbia for the awards luncheon. A.C. had said no thanks at dinner the night before. ‘I’d just as soon walk,’ he said. On his way to the university, he almost took off the new pair of shoes he’d bought for the occasion. He almost walked barefoot through Manhattan. Blisters were coming on. His new suit and tie were black, like the ones he’d worn as Chicky Gold the Harmonica Man in Chicago. And he felt a little like Chicky again as he crossed 110th Street. Harlem reminded him a little of the West Side spots he’d played in Chicago, and when he walked past an underground club on Amsterdam, he stopped and stared. He nearly went inside. It was 11:30 a.m. The thought of the university a few blocks away, and all those intellectuals with too many forks, it was almost enough for a change of plans. From inside the little dark club came the smell of corn liquor, soaked in from the night before and oozing out through pores. It no doubt covered the floor in sticky glory in there. It was on the shoe soles of whoever it was inside, tapping and blowing that harmonica in the key of G.

  He’d tried not to think of the harmonica since Missouri. But he’d heard things here and there about Chuck Berry, rock and roll. The little of the music he’d heard, he did not care for. But that morning in Harlem, outside that club, his mouth watered and threatened to pry loose his new, properly fitted dentures.

  A.C. made it to the luncheon. He was seated at a table with the president of the university, and he sipped good coffee and smoked and was cordial to everyone who congratulated him. To each, he introduced Jim Comstock and Dorothea, being sure to mention each time, ‘She taught me how to type.’

  The big check was much appreciated.

  One man stood out from the rest that day. He was a staff writer at the New Yorker named Joseph Mitchell. Originally from tobacco country in Robeson County, North Carolina, his accent comforted A.C. somehow inside that room. A.C. had read a copy of a story he’d written in the forties called ‘Professor Seagull.’ Comstock had given it to him as homework, and it was some of the finest writing A.C. had ever read. He told Mitchell so that day.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Mitchell said, looking away. He had a friendly face and a genuine smile. ‘I’ve actually been a subscriber to your weekly for some time, and would say the same about your work.’

  ‘Well, I thank you,’ A.C. said. They both looked down at their coffees, sloshed the stuff around.

  ‘In fact,’ Mitchell said. ‘And I hope this isn’t too presumptuous, but if I may bend your ear?’

  ‘Shoot,’ A.C. told him.

  ‘Well, I’ve been re-reading all of what you’ve written in the last couple years, and after a visit back home recently, and a light bulb idea of sorts, I spoke with my editor about the possibility of a job for you at the New Yorker…should you be interested.’ He smiled, lit a cigarette.

  ‘Is that right?’ A.C. said. ‘Well.’ He couldn’t think of what to say. The sound of the harmonica from inside the club on Amsterdam echoed in his head. His coffee suddenly smelled like whiskey. ‘Truth is, Mr Mitchell, I could probably set up camp in New York City for a while.’ He almost swayed while he spoke. The words came out before he’d thought on them. ‘I could bang away at it. But at some point, I suspect I’d go crazy from the discovery nobody in this room can speak to.’ He didn’t elaborate.

  ‘Discovery? How do you mean?’ Mitchell laughed nervously.

  ‘Well, I think you know if you consider real hard. Those stories you and I write about people, their places. Far as I can tell, we get em about as real as they can be in ink on paper. Follow?’

  ‘I think I do.’

  Somebody dropped a glass on the floor. The hum of conversation was deafening. ‘But every real story loses a little of its truth as soon as you type it. And as soon as somebody reads it, it loses a little more. And then, important folks call it special, give it an award. They write stories about your story, and it loses more of its initial truth. You follow?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ It was the best and the worst conversation Mitchell had ever had at a luncheon.

  ‘So,’ A.C. went on. ‘At some point, you got to say to hell with it and hang up your typewriter. I’m not saying I’m there yet, but if I move to New York, I’ll sure be a hell of a lot closer in a hurry.’ He finished the rest of his coffee in an unsophisticated gulp and put the cup down hard on a bus tray next to them. Then he leaned in close to Mitchell, whispered in his ear. ‘All this around us,’ he said, ‘it ain’t real. And as much as we try to find the real and put it down on paper, it can’t be done. There ain’t no real when it comes to writing.’ He stepped back and smiled at the other man, who wore a look of confusion.

  A.C. lit a Chesterfield, inhaled deep and laughed as he blew it out of his noseholes and mouth simultaneously. He fought the urge to spit out his teeth. ‘But you come about as close as anybody, I reckon,’ he said. He shook Mitchell’s hand and excused himself for the men’s room. Expensive coffee had a way of going right through.

  A.C. thought for a short while on Joseph Mitchell’s offer. It was easier to consider once back in Richwood, with all the talk about the F.B.I. upping their investigation of vote-selling in the primary, of mafia connections. There was talk that an agent was coming to interview A.C. He knew what this meant. Background checks. Digging for dirt. It wouldn’t be long before the fellow who chased him from Chicago to St Louis would get wind, maybe even Dallara and the Crews boys.

  He went to the bank and cashed his big check.

  On a glorious June morning in 1961, Jim Comstock went upstairs when A.C. didn’t show for work. The door to the apartment was wide open.

  There was some rent money, plus more, on the bed in an envelope. The sheets were tucked and smoothed out, almost as if they’d been ironed. The window was open and the place smelled like Ajax. There was no note of any kind. No written word to explain where the man had gone to or why. Comstock had some idea. He’d been forming it for two years, as he was a man adept at figuring folks, their pasts. But he didn’t think any about it that particular morning. He sat on the thin little mattress and sighed. He stared at the Underwood on the kitchen table, its scuffed off marks of measure and the forever stuck-down margin release key. He almost cried a little when he thought of lunch at Ritzy Rae’s without his friend, of going downstairs to tell Dorothea the inevitable had come to be. But he just sighed again instead. He thought of how he might word a goodbye column to A.C. Gilbert. Then, he thought otherwise. He’d not attempt such a feat, for it was impossible to capture some things in life.

  BOOK THREE

  1989-1993

  If the truth was known, we’re all freaks together.

  —Jane Barnell

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Tri-State Dump

  Zizi and the Kozmanauts were an old-time bluegrass gospel band. Four piece. Dale Price on stand up bass, Everett Harrah on banjo, Flunky Cy Ray on drums, and on vocals and theremin, the beautiful Zizi Kozma-Townsend. The band was to have reached their pinnacle of stardom as the headliners of a con
cert on Saturday, May 29th, 1993. All of their friends and family would be there for support. It was to be a magical evening.

  Zizi Kozma had first played the theremin at age twelve when her older brother Albert sent off to a hobby magazine for one and built it. In 1968, when Albert was twenty-five years old, he was killed in Vietnam. Zizi was in the Ph.D. program in Music Education at West Virginia University. A virtuoso on the cello who still played the theremin at parties. She was married to a young history professor by the name of Sam Townsend who would later publish a book on the disaster at Buffalo Creek. After Albert’s funeral, Sam and Zizi disappeared. There was much abuse of drugs and alcohol. They were among those who dropped out of a world that seemed to them to be ending. They ended up on a hippie commune of sorts near Berkeley Springs. In 1974, Al Townsend was born to them. A big boy. Healthy. His mother had given up the psychedelics and the drink to carry him. His father followed suit.

  On a warm fall night in 1975, the theremin hooked into a generator belonging to a heroin-dealing biker from New Jersey, Zizi played and sang simultaneously. The communers swayed in the mountain marijuana haze. She did a song she’d grown up with, ‘All that Thrills my Soul is Jesus,’ then an oddly morose version of ‘Put a Little Love in Your Heart’ by Jackie DeShannon. She matched her soprano-high voice with the melody of the theremin, controlled by the movement through air of those delicate cellist hands. In the crowd gathered, there was an older man who’d wandered in from the hills that afternoon. He called himself only ‘Ace.’ When he heard the vibrato sound of that instrument, that voice, he nearly fell down. It was what he’d heard so many times before. Under the ether in Bluefield, in the hallway at WHIS, and outside the ABC store after Cynthia died. He’d finally tracked that sound.

  When Zizi finished, he approached her. ‘Zizi Kozma?’ he’d said. She nodded. ‘Daughter of Clarence Dickason and Rose Kozma?’ She nodded again. He smiled. Didn’t have his false teeth in. ‘I used to hold you when you had the colic.’

  From that night forward, he held little Al, another screaming child. And, like his mother before him, the boy would only quiet in the evening hours if he was placed into the still-strong arms of a man who’d walked in from the woods.

  Sam Townsend was a good man whose white family had not approved of him marrying a mixed breed woman. He was an amateur carpenter as well as a doctor of American history. He loved his wife, and he’d built a beautiful, cherrywood housing for her refurbished Wurlitzer theremin as a wedding present. For four years on the commune, he appreciated the help Ace brought with him, in spirit and in work. The old man, 75 by then, still did his push-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks daily. He could swing a splitter axe with the best of them, and once, when a Baltimore hippie tripping on acid had tried to touch young Al in an improper fashion, Ace knocked him on his tailbone with one right cross. Sam especially appreciated Ace’s help raising little Al, who was a spirited boy, much like a young Trenchmouth Taggart.

  And one night over sassafras tea, when Ace revealed to Zizi and Sam his identity as Trenchmouth Taggart, Sam became enamored of the old man. He’d studied a little about the rotten-toothed sharpshooter, his struggle. Most in Sam’s profession thought Taggart was a myth for empowering the underdogs among us, but Sam had always believed. His father had been a miner in Marion County.

  They were sworn to secrecy.

  So it was that in 1979, when the Townsends re-entered society, they took old Ace with them. They settled in Huntington, in the Tri-State valley, where Sam took a professor job at Marshall University and Zizi gave music lessons. Ace had occupied the garage apartment ever since, and he spent his days watching television, reading the paper, teaching young Al how to box and be a man, and playing the occasional harmonica with Zizi and the Kozmanauts at revivals and picnics.

  A man named David Pace over at the Huntington Advertiser paid Ace a hundred dollars a week, under the table, to write the Police Blotter. Pace was the one who’d later dig a little in the obituary archives at Ace’s request, inform him of the 1964 prison death of a man named Arly Scott Jr. Ace dug himself to find the 1932 burial date of one Mittie Ann Taggart, criminally insane inmate of the Home for Incurables. He went to visit the grave site, but never made it past the front entrance, where he spat and turned around and walked away.

  It was in 1984, the same year he got his dog Yellow, that Louise Dallara showed up at a Kozmanauts revival concert at Beech Fork State Park. She was 61 years old, married to a 70-year-old mandolin player named Larry. They still lived in Mingo County, Williamson. Larry was a former coal miner whose first wife and two children had been killed at Buffalo Creek. Since then, he’d held first the post of president of the West Virginia Black Lung Association, then director of the War on Poverty program, and finally vice president of Save Our Mountains. The latter position he still held, and he and Louise played concerts in front of bulldozers and landmovers, doing what they could to slow down strip mining. That, and the newest thing, mountain top removal.

  When Louise saw Ace on stage playing that harmonica with his nose, she knew who he was. In a sea of Pentecostal folks lining up to get baptized in Beech Fork Lake, she walked up to him and said, ‘West Virginia Shine Guzzlers, WHIS Bluefield, Saturday night.’ They hugged and laughed, but when he asked after her mother, Louise looked down at her feet. Clarissa had died in 1971, a year after Fred.

  Now there were two more, Louise and Larry Blevins, who knew Ace’s true identity as Trenchmouth Taggart, as Chicky Gold. And in 1988, when Larry bought a house down the street from them in Huntington so he and Louise could recruit college students for the anti-surface mining movement, Ace told them all some more. Around the dinner table, Albert having excused himself, Ace told Sam, Zizi, Louise, and Larry about his days as A.C. Gilbert. About President Kennedy and the Pulitzer Prize. He brought out the newspaper clippings to prove all of it. ‘My Lord, Ace,’ Sam said. ‘You ought to make this known. You’re famous. You ought to write a letter to Governor Caperton. He’ll champion a man like you, give you a pardon on all that back in Mingo.’

  Ace had looked at Sam then like he’d better shut his mouth. At 86, the old man could still put a fear in others, still had that presence, that muscle and quick tendon of a younger man. Sam had looked down at his food. Ace said, ‘So anyhow. I trust all of you to keep this to yourselves. I just couldn’t hold it shut up no more. Not now that we all ended up here together, dumped in the tri-state.’ He spoke on the mystery of fate, of past friends and family finding themselves together again. Of old time music’s power to heal. When Ace talked liked this, as when he talked of tracking and trapping and surviving on nothing in the winter-coated wilderness, folks generally listened.

  Ace walked into the garage with a chrome measuring tape in his hand. ‘Wingspan,’ he said. The older he got, the less words he used.

  Albert lifted his arms, straight out from his sides. Behind him, Ace pulled the tape and locked it shut. It was getting to be so he almost couldn’t reach anymore. It was 68 and a half inches all the way across. ‘Twenty-six, thereabouts,’ Ace said. ‘Going to start calling you Stretch.’

  The boy put his arms down. He was six feet even at fifteen years of age. But he was bone and muscle. 128 pounds. In his nine years of public school, he’d passed for white and black and neither and both, but at fifteen in the West Virginia summertime, he was black. Ace looked at the words on the back of his T-shirt. Boogie Down Productions: Criminal Minded. There was a picture of the rappers and their pistols. Ace flicked Albert in the back of the neck – his signal to straighten up posture. Albert stuck his chest out, his behind in. ‘What do you know about criminal minded?’ Ace said.

  ‘Huh?’ Albert sat down on the milk carton and started wrapping his hands.

  ‘Your shirt.’

  ‘It’s music, Grandpa.’ He’d always called him this.

  ‘That ain’t music.

  ‘You going to tell me what is now?’

  ‘Don’t sass.’ The old man walked to the workbench an
d picked up the punch mitts. He put his fingers in the holes. The hands had started shaking a little in the last year, but only in the middle of the day. Every time, it was a reminder of coming off the drink, a feat he’d never reneged on. Ace smacked the flat, split fronts of the mitts together. This meant Albert needed to hurry up and wrap. Get up and punch. He did.

  When the boy was twelve, long since used to throwing punches, Ace had started surprising Albert with love taps to the cheekbone and chin. Zizi had seen it from the kitchen window. She came out, said, ‘Ace, I don’t remember there being anything about you hitting him in this training regimen you spoke to me about.’

  ‘That’s just a love tap, Z. The mitts is padded.’

  ‘It’s just a love tap, Mom,’ the boy had said. Ace had liked that about him. That, and how when they woods-walked he never complained about being thirsty or his feet hurting or how they had to sometimes sit and not move for an hour at a time.

  In the summer of 1989, they didn’t go for walks in the woods any longer. Albert was fifteen. They lived on 12th Street near the viaduct, close enough to his friends over between Hal Greer and 20th Street that the days of woods walking with Grandpa were over. It had whittled down to boxing, three times a week if he was lucky. Albert’s days meant basketball at the Lewis Center, his nights meant hanging out on porches. But only until 9:30, when Sam waited for him on his own front porch.

  Ace knew from working the Police Blotter that on some of those other porches where Albert hung out, someone might have cocaine in his pocket, cooked and baggied, fresh down from Detroit City. And if someone had that in his pocket, he probably had a pistol too. It was what confounded Ace most. These boys were as different as different could be from T.T. Stinky. They had drugs and he had moonshine. They were black and he was white. They were city and he was country. But, when it came to guns, they were all the same. There wasn’t anything in this world better than a gun for a boy trying to be a man.