Highway 61 Resurfaced (v5)

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “What thing?” Buddy sounded skeptical, like it wasn’t the first time he’d heard Earl make such a claim.

  Earl held up a finger and waited for something only he could hear. Suddenly he pointed at the jukebox and said, “That thing right there. I’s doing that ‘fore Jimmy Reed even thought about bein’ born.” He nodded. “Sho was.”

  Buddy kinda laughed and shook his head. “How long we known each other?”

  “Couple lifetimes.”

  “That’s a truth. We seen some things too. Been places, showed ’em how to play a reel. Won a little money playin’ skin.”

  “That’s right,” Earl said with a happy drunk’s chuckle. “We the last of the good men.”

  “That’s a truth too,” Buddy said. “And you know, is almos’ ova.”

  “What’s that?”

  “All this.” Buddy gestured back and forth between them. “Peoples like us.” He waved his hand around the room. “Places like this. Is just about done.” He had a wistful tone in his voice. “But we did all right, considerin’.”

  Earl saw the faraway look in his friend’s eyes and said, “What’s got you goin’ on?” He got a surprised look on his face. “Wha’ choo doing here in the first place?” Like it had just occurred to him that he hadn’t seen Buddy for two years before he walked into the Starlighter’s Lounge and bought a round of beers.

  Buddy said, “Ohhh, this ‘n’ that.”

  “You lyin’,” Earl said. “You know you ain’t evva get up outta bed ’less somebody’s payin’, so I know ‘this ’n’ that’ ain’t brought you here.” He leaned on the table, concerned for his old friend. He said, “Buddy, you sick?”

  He put his hand on his chest. “It’s my lungs.”

  “You dyin’?”

  “I’m tryin’ to live,” Buddy said. “That’s why I come to see you, tell you ’bout Clarence.”

  A look of grim hope crossed Earl’s face and he took a drink before he said, “He finally pass?”

  Buddy shook his head.

  “No?” Earl unconsciously reached for the string that hung around his neck. His fingers followed it down to a small sack of red flannel, his conjure bag. “He excape?”

  “He got out,” Buddy said. “Done his time. Big Walter figure he’s gone come home.”

  Earl’s concern for Buddy dried up all the sudden. The anger returned and he said, “So? What that gotta do with me?”

  “Same thing it got to do with me and Willie. I’m tryin’ to figure out what we gone do.”

  Earl sat back and threw a palm at Buddy. “I ain’t gone do a goddamn thing.”

  “You just gone sit here’n wait for him to come for you?”

  “I can takes care of myself.”

  “How?” He reached over and thumped Earl’s conjure bag. “You gone make a hand with grave dirt and rusty nails? You think that’s gone do?” Buddy shook his head. “I’m tellin’ you, I gots a bad feeling.” He pointed at Earl. “You gone need something mo’ pow’ful’n that.”

  12

  AFTER RICK LOOKED at her driver’s license for a moment, Lollie said, “Satisfied?”

  He nodded and slipped the check into his coat pocket before returning her license.

  “Great.” She sat back and put her feet on his desk. “So what’s our next move?”

  He leaned sideways to see around her size eights. He smiled and said, “Excuse me?”

  Lollie shrugged like it was a no-brainer. “I’m unemployed,” she said. “Two heads and all that, right?”

  Rick made an ambiguous noise, then stuck his lower lip out and, nodding, said, “I usually work alone.”

  “Yeah, but if you got in a fight or something, you’d get the shit kicked out of you and my five hundred bucks would be down the drain.” She held her hands out as if she’d proved her point. “I’m just protecting my investment.”

  Rick smiled at her jab and pointed to the monitor on his desk. “Most of the work’s done on that,” he said. “And I don’t care how fast the processor is, believe me, I can beat up any computer you got.” The truth was, Rick already knew he wanted Lollie’s help. He just didn’t want to let on too quick. She’d certainly be useful if something needed to be done at night when he was on the air, and maybe she’d teach him a few karate moves along the way. On top of that, she was single and attractive. He’d never had a relationship with a woman who could beat him up and he found the prospect oddly exciting. And, while he knew he shouldn’t be thinking of a client in that way, well, it was too late to change. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled the case file. He said, “Okay. Here’s where we are.”

  Lollie said she’d never heard of the Blind, Crippled, and Crazy sessions. “My grandfather didn’t talk much about what he did in the old days,” she said. “You think these tapes have something to do with his death?”

  “I wasn’t sure at first,” Rick said. “For a while I thought there might be a serial killer out to kill old blues producers who had, uhhh, well, let’s say, who had written some tricky contracts.”

  “You mean they were crooked.”

  “It was just a theory.” He looked at Lollie. “No offense intended.”

  She waved it off. “None taken.”

  “I assumed it was something your grandfather and Lamar Suggs had in common.”

  “They knew each other a long time,” Lollie said. “I suspect they had a lot in common besides the tapes.”

  “I’m sure that’s true.” Rick nodded. “But when I realized the last thing Suggs tried to say was ‘BCC,’ as in Blind, Crippled, and Crazy, I figured it had to be about the tapes.”

  “So they must be valuable.”

  “If they exist they’re certainly worth something, but I suspect there’d be a lot of litigation about who owns the master tapes and who has the publishing rights, who was under contract to whom when they were made, and things like that. It’s hard to imagine they’d be worth killing for, knowing all the legal headaches they come with.”

  “Especially considering the legal headaches that come with committing murder.”

  “True,” Rick said. “At the end of the day, the only ones making any money’ll be the lawyers.”

  “Maybe whoever did it doesn’t know about the legal headaches.”

  “Or they don’t care.”

  “Or they’re lawyers.”

  “Ewww, talk about your worst-case scenario.” Rick shivered theatrically and said, “Lawyers who kill.”

  “Maybe there’s something else about the tapes.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I don’t know.” She shrugged. “That’s why you make the big bucks.”

  They talked for a while, trying to figure out who the faux Lollie might be. “I’d guess she’s five or ten years younger than you,” Rick said. “Looked, acted, and sounded like she was from money.”

  Lollie gave him a funny look. “What do I look, act, and sound like?”

  “More like you work for a living. This other one didn’t seem like the employed type. She obviously knew you existed, so she either did some research or she knows your family.”

  “But if she knew how to do research, she probably wouldn’t have hired you.”

  “Unless she also wanted me as her alibi,” Rick said. “Maybe she’s somebody you knew when you were a kid.” He pointed at Lollie. “Did you grow up in Belzoni?”

  She shook her head. “Greenwood until I was about fifteen,” she said. “Then we moved to Memphis.” Her mom was from Batesville and had met her dad at Mississippi State. She was a homemaker and he sold agricultural supplies and equipment.

  Rick told her to talk to her parents, see if they remembered Tucker talking about anybody from the old days. “Meanwhile, now that I’ve got legal names for Buddy Cotton and the others, maybe I can track one of them down.” Rick looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ve got to get down to the station.” He walked Lollie out to her car. “You driving back to Jackson tonight?”

  She shook
her head. “Staying here with a friend.”

  “Okay, meet me here in the morning and we’ll go see Beau Tillman.” He opened the door for her and said, “By the way, do you like cats?”

  CLARENCE STOOD IN front of the mirror and smoothed the front of his new suit. Dark blue coat and pants, a crisp white shirt, bold tie, and the finest alligator shoes. He looked like a million bucks, maybe two, like one of those Wall Street hotshots he’d seen in the newspaper being perp-walked into court with his thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer.

  Later Clarence walked up Capitol Street just to see the looks people gave him. Like he was someone they ought to know and respect, like maybe he was a judge or a councilman or someone who’d been on television. People looked him in the eye and gave him a nod of respect, like they would with someone who could do them a favor if circumstances required. Clothes do make the man, he thought.

  He caught a taxi in front of the Old Capitol Museum and asked to be taken to a car dealership. He didn’t need a new car, probably couldn’t get one. He didn’t have any credit and wasn’t about to explain why he hadn’t been employed in fifty years. So he looked at the used cars. They looked just fine anyway.

  There wasn’t much haggling. Clarence gave the man five hundred in cash and drove off the lot in a 1978 Monte Carlo with a 133,000 miles on it. It had a sun-faded maroon body and a white landau roof that was blistered and peeling. The visors sagged and the steering column was loose, but other than burning a little oil, the car ran fine.

  He drove back downtown, then over to Lynch Street, and turned on the road where he was supposed to. There were some guys hanging on the corner by the liquor store his friend had told him about. Lots of do-rags and posturing. Clarence pulled to the curb and rolled down the window. One of the toughs leaned on the car with a sneer and said, “Yo, wha’ choo want here?”

  “Lee sent me.”

  The tough guy was all attitude and Clarence knew there was no point in getting into it with him. The guy needed to feel bigger, fine. Clarence would just put up with his shit until he got what he came for. But he wondered what it was that had so many people acting like they were some bad-ass street gang rapper gonna bust a cap in yo’ head for looking at him the wrong way. It wasn’t like it used to be when you might shoot a man you caught with your woman or if he wouldn’t pay his gambling debt. Now it was like sport, everybody acting like they deserved respect whether they’d earned it or not. The thing that made the least sense to Clarence was why black men were killing one another at wholesale rates when, compared to the Mississippi he’d grown up in, they lived in a world of opportunity. Well, maybe there was something he didn’t know. Maybe it made sense somehow.

  “Oh, so you Clarence, huh?”

  Clarence gave a short nod and said, “Who’re you?”

  “You don’t need to know my name, brutha.” He said the “brutha” with contempt. “You just need to give me the two hundred dollars.”

  Clarence shook his head. “Lee said a hundred.”

  “Markets fluck-chate, nigga. It’s two hundred, ’less you just after one bullet.” He smiled and pulled back his shirt to show off the gun in his waistband. “So whassup?”

  “Where is it?”

  “That’s what I keep asking. Where’s the money?”

  They went back and forth like this until money changed hands and Clarence followed the guy into an alley. He opened the trunk of his car and gave Clarence an old Remington .280 with the serial number burned off. “Where’d this come from?”

  Tough guy said, “The fuck do you care? Dumb-ass white folks leave they huntin’ shit in cabinets with glass fronts. We steal it, they make they puffed-up insurance claims. It’s what we call a syma-lotic relationship. It’s the circle of life, muthafucka. Hakuna Matata and all that shit.” Clarence pulled back the bolt. The gun was empty. Tough guy pulled a cartridge clip from his pocket and held it out. When Clarence reached for it, the guy pulled it back and said, “I don’t wanna see you slapping this in there before you leave. We don’t need no wild-west show out here.”

  Clarence met his eyes and stared for a moment before putting the gun in the trunk. Then he got in and started the Monte Carlo.

  Tough guy said, “So, what, you gonna go hunt you some deer?”

  Clarence put the car in gear and said, “The fuck do you care?”

  “HE’S GOT A weird-looking face,” Lollie said. “Like his eyes are set too far apart.”

  “I know,” Rick said. “And his ears are all out of proportion, but I love him anyway.”

  “Sure, you’re his dad. I’m just saying, it’s an unusual face. I didn’t say it was hard to love.”

  Rick, Lollie, and Crusty were driving to Leland, Mississippi. Crusty was submitting to Lollie’s examination and the unkind comments with as much patience as you’d expect from a cat with a sinus infection. When she let him go, he jumped onto the back of the seat and began pacing back and forth behind their heads. “What’re you going to do with him when we get there?”

  “He stays in the truck,” Rick said. “Guard kitty. He mostly just lies on the dashboard in the sun. But it’s deceptive, see? He’s actually ready to spring into action and attack anyone who tries to steal the vehicle.”

  “Attacks with what, snot?”

  “It’s remarkably effective. The Pentagon’s looking into potential military applications.”

  Lollie smiled. She liked Rick’s sense of humor. She felt Crusty behind her, nuzzling her head and playing with her hair. “Aww,” she said. “Look at—Ow!”

  Rick looked. “What happened?”

  “He bit me!” Lollie felt for blood. “He bit my head.”

  “Yeah, he does that every now and then.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  They reached Leland a little earlier than they’d expected, crossing the bridge over Deer Creek and pulling over at the park, where they all got out to stretch. After a moment, Lollie said, “Hey, did you know Jim Henson was from Mississippi?”

  “The Muppet guy?”

  “Yeah,” Lollie said, reading from a roadside plaque. “Says he was born in Greenville but spent a lot of time down in that creek playing with his boyhood pal Kermit Scott.”

  Rick mused on that briefly before suggesting that Crusty might have been a good Muppet. Just as he said this, Crusty took off after a gray squirrel. He raced up an ash tree unaware that the squirrel had circled the trunk and was now taunting him from thirty feet up a neighboring pine. By the time they got Crusty down from the tree, it was time to go meet Beau Tillman.

  He lived in a neighborhood that dated back to the 1950s. Low-slung redbrick homes set on a pleasant garden-club street with shady trees and competitively kept lawns. They passed a house with a “Yard of the Week” sign out in front and turned into the next driveway as they’d been instructed.

  Beau Tillman greeted them at the front door. He was in his mid-sixties, with owlish eyebrows that seemed permanently arched and a round belly that kept him from buttoning the suit vest he wore. He took them into his living room, where he had a pitcher of sweet tea and a dish of cheese straws waiting on the table along with some scrapbooks and files of magazine and newspaper clippings. As he handed Lollie a glass of tea, he said, “I remember meeting your grandfather once. Seemed like a nice man. I was very sorry to hear about what happened.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said. “We’re kind of hoping you might know something that’ll help us figure out who did it.”

  “So I gathered.”

  After they all sat down, Rick said, “My guess is that it has to do with the fabled tapes. Smitty said you know everybody who might know anything about it.”

  Beau proudly picked up one of the scrapbooks and said, “Well, I had my club for a while, and anybody in the blues who was still alive passed through at one point or another.” He flipped through the scrapbook looking for something. “Of course, I was just a kid when those guys played together that night we’re talking about. That was 1953.” He
found the photo he was looking for and showed it to his guests. It was Tillman, several decades earlier, still wearing the suit vest, but buttoned. He was standing in front of a small building with a sign out front that said “Beau Diddlies.” “By the time I opened my place in 1968, that whole thing was local legend. You’d hear people who weren’t even born yet swearing they’d been there that night.” Beau took a handful of cheese straws and popped them in his mouth two at a time. “Anyway, after Smitty called and told me what you were after, I talked to some of the local old-timers about it, but it’s getting harder to separate the truth from the fiction, older they get.”

  Rick set the scrapbook down on the table. “Smitty said there are a lot of renditions. Does one strike you as most likely?”

  “Well,” Beau said, “let me give you background on all this.” He flipped through the scrapbook until he reached a page with several photos of musicians posing with their guitars. Beau indicated who was who as he spoke. “Now Buddy Cotton, Earl Tate, and Willie Jefferson had all been playin’ around the Delta for years. They were startin’ to establish names for themselves and getting out of the shadows of players like Elmore James and Willie Dixon and all that. Anyway, this scout for Paramount Records offered them a contract to record together. Now this was after the Depression, when Paramount had reopened, right? They’d been real big in the twenties, with prewar players like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charlie Patton.” He shifted in his seat before he said, “Now, Paramount was owned by the Wisconsin Chair Company.”

  “Wait a minute,” Lollie said. “Paramount like the film studio?”

  “No connection,” Beau said. “See, the Wisconsin Chair Company was making cabinets for Edison phonograph players and figured it would make sense to produce records to sell in the stores along with the players. So they built a recording facility up in Grafton, Wisconsin, where they made the cabinets. And that’s where Cotton, Tate, and Jefferson were supposed to go record. But before they went up there, they met here in Leland to play and make some money during one of the big skin balls that was going on.”