And I couldn’t.
When I sang, Katy sidled right on up next to me. I could smell her skin, her hair. As much as I wanted to look at her and smile I couldn’t, not after what she’d been through. She was tougher than that, and I knew it. But when all was said and done, I couldn’t help but feel bookended by the two people in this world I’d let down the most.
So I put it into my singing. I let the guitar hang in front of me, the hot buzz of deaf pickups vibrating in the speakers. And I put my heart into my words. Blood came out of me, instead of saliva and breath. Because I wanted Danicka Prochazka here with me tonight. I wanted to take all this back to Lula, Mississippi, and figure this shit out once and for all. I screamed into the mic.
“Been down on my knees, woman, since I met you, you made me believe all your lies were true…”
Something in Simoneaux’s playing changed. It felt like he encouraged me with his backbeat.
So I let myself get caught up in the moment. “I’m out of your bed, got you out of my head, and now you’re coming for my brother instead!”
The people on the floor slowed, shaken from their groove by my change in tactics. But if Simoneaux didn’t like the way things were going, he never once let on. I figured I learned a thing or two in my time with Katy and her family looking after me. First thing— shit only works when you believe it will work.
“God damn, woman, I miss those eyes, even if I can’t be sure they weren’t lies.”
Second thing was, for shit to work, you had to kill a little bit of yourself. You had to say goodbye to a little bit of your soul every time you dipped a toe on the other side. And that’s why Katy stayed away from all that. She said every time you went over there, part of you stayed. I realized right then and there that she disowned the magic because she wanted to leave me with something.
I knew now I had to return the favor.
I cradled my Tele’s neck with my left hand, trying to find the notes with the slide before I played them. And I tried to think of words. I tried to think of a way to bring this to an end. Tried to consider what Pauly needed, and what Katy needed.
I sang, “It didn’t work out, girl, but you couldn’t let it be, and I got what you want right here, but you’ll have to fight your way through me!”
Screams from my amp flooded the room, my strings humming like six serpents in parallel—six copperheads with the taste of their last meal on their tongues. And I stopped thinking about what I should play and the notes poured out of me, making me wonder if it wasn’t a side effect of my own little trip to the crossroads the other day. My head fell from side to side with the tempo, which had picked up a few beats per minute since the intro. Katy and Pauly were hanging right in there with me and Simoneaux even if I couldn’t hear them for all the noise I made. I wanted to smile, but I knew better. So I danced instead. I let my shoulders fall and enjoyed the music we were making for once. I didn’t worry about critics and new songs and how we sounded. I made music for the sake of making music and I felt fine.
In the back of the room Duane pulled on his cigarette and smiled. He had his long legs crossed casually in front of him.
I turned around and held up a finger. “One more time through and we’re done,” I said as I fell back into the chords.
Simoneaux blew through a flurry of beats and fluttered taps, a drum solo that he drew out to cheers and howls. I smiled because I couldn’t do anything else. It made me feel silly to think I’d outshine Simoneaux in his own joint. And I happily deferred.
The folks on the floor ate it up clapping and toasting Simoneaux with whatever they were drinking. Andre pointed at us.
I couldn’t hear the question, exactly, but I knew what he asked. “Yeah, man,” I said into the mic, “I’ll have another.”
Pauly waved off another drink.
I wiped my forehead on my sleeve.
Somebody shouted a request from the floor. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.”
An old man said, “Goin’ Down South.”
I turned around to look at Simoneaux, who wasn’t smiling.
“What’s wrong, man?” I said, still trying to catch my breath.
He set he sticks down and cupped a hand to his ear.
By now the people on the floor simmered and listened too.
“What’s wrong?” I said, twisting my Tele’s volume knob all the way down.
Katy put her finger to her lips.
Pauly went over to the window as a blast of trumpets shook the walls. As my ears rang I thought for sure it was thunder. People drifted from their tables and the dance floor to the other windows. Somebody pulled the blinds up. Simoneaux left the stage, and went over to the front door. He snapped the deadbolt.
A woman wailed, pulling at her hair with exaggerated anguish. At once the people closest to the windows scrambled past the bar toward the storeroom and back door. The rest followed without pushing each other, although a table got knocked over, spilling drinks to the floor. Somebody left a purse. A man left a jacket and porkpie hat.
Deliberate horns and a steady bass drum made their way up the road, slowly, like a city street sweeper. My mind struggled to find a melody, but the notes weren’t coming fast enough. Simoneaux backed over to the bar and plopped himself down on a stool, facing the door. “Ain’t nothing good coming in this second line.”
I stepped over to the window and pulled the heavy blinds. Outside, a man wearing a top hat and tails and bright white shoes shuffled up the street. He wore white gloves on his hands, and carried a miniature wooden casket in the crook of his left arm. A white paint that reflected oddly in the glow of streetlights covered his face. Draped over his shoulder he wore a sash embroidered in white flowers and ribbons and gold beads that sparkled like baby stars bunched together in the night sky. For every step forward he took one to the right and one to the left. He didn’t smile or even blink. He led the way with his right elbow cocked high, arhythmically jerking back and forth, up and down, in time with only every fourth or fifth beat.
“What is it?” Pauly asked.
“Don’t know. Hang back with Rachael and Chloey.”
Katy stood next to me, watching, her hand clasping mine.
From out of the darkness I saw the band—a few loose rows of men in white shirts with back ties and cylindrical black caps with short visors like the marching band wore back in high school. The trees on both sides of the street shook like a storm was blowing in.
Simoneaux said, “Ain’t no beans ever burned because nobody stared at ’em long enough.”
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“Means get out of that window.”
But I couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
The musicians wore sunglasses and white gloves and walked in the same side-to-side shuffle as the parade’s Grand Marshal. They blew so hard I could almost see the notes spilling forth into the night. Rows of brass—trumpets, trombones, and tubas—blew young green leaves from their limbs. The falling debris cast twirling shadows as they drifted past the orange sodium vapor lights.
The drum corps followed on their heels, tapping out a slow rhythm that crawled into my head like a king snake. The windows rattled with each thunderous downbeat. Ice clinked in glasses. The ride cymbal on Simoneaux’s kit hissed with the residual energy of the percussion. And the leaves that had fallen onto the ground blew ahead of the band on each beat, like a sonic broom pushed them all down the street.
A second line had formed behind the musicians. Folks carrying umbrellas decorated with ribbons and flowers and the name of the deceased spelled out in beads and sequins even though I couldn’t read it for the way they were being spun and flipped. The second line consisted of large, dark men in black suits stoically carrying straw hats balanced on their right hands. Women in red and gold dresses wearing white gloves slithered between the men, dancing with their knees high. Some hiked their dresses up to their hips as they bent low and shook their chests. Some wore feathers in their hair. Some had their faces covered with whi
te grease paint. Every three or four beats everybody in the group synched up so their elbows cocked at precisely the same moment. And after the moment passed, they reverted to chaos.
Jamie and Ben stood at the far window with Rachael and Chloey. Katy pulled me away from my vantage to join them. Pauly backed toward the bar and waited with Andre and Calvin.
A horse-drawn hearse came next. White horses huffed steam into the chilly night. The large, black wheels that bore the dark, lacquered carriage wound around slowly. Lilies fell from the top, littering the street with little splashes of white here and there, like a stray blizzard had passed through. A large oval window reflected the red and blue neon from Simoneaux’s signs. When it passed, I saw the interior had been filled with white lilies. The coach’s drivers each wore a black sash with white lettering. On each of the drivers’ sashes, the name could be read easily.
“Pauly.”
Katy put her hand over her mouth.
Pauly, thankfully, didn’t see. He didn’t have to.
“That’s it, I hope.” I let the blind fall, but not close completely.
The silence that accompanied the procession’s passing seemed to confirm it. But I knew better than to believe my ears. Katy drifted back over to the stage and sat down. “Preston,” she said. “Get away from the window.”
Rachael sat with her. Ben tucked his pistol back into his belt. Jamie sat down and fanned himself with a napkin.
I held up my hand. A pair of headlights made a left onto the street from the far end of the block. As much as I didn’t want to say it, I owed it to them to say it, so that they knew what I knew. “Here she comes.”
Her little silver car drifted to a stop in the middle of the street. She slammed the door when she got out, and took a second to brush the wrinkles out of the front of her grey dress. An amber amulet that matched her eyes hung from a thin silver chain around her neck.
When she rounded the front of the car the room got hot and I found it hard to get a breath. She stepped onto the sidewalk and a boom like an explosion from the destruction of a skyscraper rattled the windows. We all turned as a spray of glass from Simoneaux’s bottle trees peppered the front of his building. Shards flew at the window, forcing tiny spider webs of cracks to form. Fragments stuck to the wooden railings that lead down to the sidewalk. The slivers of glass looked like sapphires in the orange glow of the street lights.
She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew the smoke out as she sang. “Pauly, pretty Pauly, do you think I’m a fool?”
It sounded like her take on the traditional song, with the lyrics changed to suit her current needs. I think she used the song as a way to take a jab at me.
“Pauly, pretty Pauly, do you think I’m a fool? You make me a promise, then I have to chase after you.”
I couldn’t look at him. Even if it was only to tell him I’d make this right, no matter what the cost. He wouldn’t buy it anyway. Not after all this.
She pulled a pint of something golden out of a brown paper bag. Like Irish whiskey, except for the way it reflected the streetlight. It glowed, as if illuminated from something inside, like molten gold. “My mind was to love you, ’til the end of my days. My mind was to love you, ’til the end of my days, but you’ve broken my heart so I’m changing my ways.”
She heaved the bottle to the ground where it exploded into a feast of golden light that burned through the blinds and walls. The blast turned night into an amber sunrise falling onto a sandy beach. It reminded me of all those filmstrips of the Trinity test site. The light penetrated even with my eyes closed and my arms across my face. The light filled my head, kept me from telling myself everything would be okay.
Thunder accompanied the light. Loud booms that rattled the windows and walls. Never-ending booms that shook the floor. Bottles fell off the shelves and shattered. Simoneaux’s cymbals crashed and crashed and crashed until they finally fell over. Tables toppled. Wood splintered as the walls wobbled. Panes of glass popped out of already cracked windows. I found Katy and pushed her to the ground and fell on top of her to protect her from falling ceiling vents and light fixtures.
Windows burst out of their frames as the angles in the walls and floor changed. The roof rose and fell with a tremendous crash three times. Each time the space between the wall and the ceiling grew. Two feet. Then three. Before it fell the last time I saw low-hanging stars over the river.
When it all came to an abrupt halt nobody said anything. The juke joint had lost all its right angles. The only light came from the back of the house—emergency lighting from the storeroom. Outside, the streetlights slowly came back to life as night returned. I looked out of the window. The car was gone.
My ears rang like after wearing headphones with the volume at ten, and my hearing came back slowly. Katy’s lips moved, but I could not hear, so I shushed her.
I heard Ben first. He asked if everybody was okay, but seemed to be mostly concerned with Simoneaux. Everybody regrouped at the bar.
“Preston,” Jamie said. “What’d you do to get Old Scratch so riled up this time? She wants to hurt you bad, so she’s going to make darn sure she hurts everybody around you worse.”
I couldn’t answer. But I didn’t have to. Simoneaux spoke up.
“That ain’t the devil. Evil, sure, but not the devil.”
Jamie said, “How do you know that?”
Simoneaux said, “All the powder and spells this afternoon… devil would’ve walked right through that, that’s how I know. We got lucky tonight.”
“And tomorrow night?” Katy asked.
“I’d imagine tomorrow night ain’t going to be the same as this one.”
CHAPTER Eight
Walk the line, get a spine.
I know I’m wearing mine.
Yeah, I’ll toe the line.
Step up, punk, step the fuck up and get cut up.
Knife fight, life flight.
’Bout time the boy gets it right.
“Drinking Class Hero” Music and Lyrics by Preston Black
The clean-up sapped us of what Dani couldn’t.
Fear and tension wormed its way into my head during her visit to the bar last night. But stacking tables and chairs, sweeping up busted bottles, boarding up the broken windows, and restacking cans on Simoneaux’s storeroom shelves sucked the life and hope from us. Nobody spoke to each other. Maybe everybody felt like coming through all that unscathed was a win, and knew there was no need to analyze a win.
After we finished most of the clean-up, Andre put up Rachael and Jamie at his place. Chloey joined Katy and me on the floor in the back room. Katy snuggled up in the middle, like a cat, and spent a lot of time talking to Chloey before they fell asleep—long after I was ready to sleep. But I liked hearing the tone of Katy’s voice when she talked to her little sister. The inflection changed, like everything Chloey said became instantly more interesting than anything I’d ever said. Guess they talked like girls talk, but it made me feel like Katy couldn’t get everything she needed from me.
But Chloey, in her own little way, did a lot to help me understand Katy. The overprotective little sister act showed me how Chloey and Rachael perceived Katy as some sort of fragile little China doll, somebody who lived her life on the verge of cracking, which wasn’t at all what I saw in Katy. Chloey had told me stories of how Katy, being the oldest, would have to run into Muttley’s or the VFW to find her old man if he ran off on another drunken binge. And Katy always had to be the one to run across the fields to get Jamie or Levon when her old man beat on her mom. Katy never talked much about these things with me. She didn’t have to.
They slept, tangled in blankets like they’d both spent the longest part of the night still fighting something. But they fell asleep long before I did even though the wind howled and dogs barked all night long. And I smiled as I watched over them. After all the noise Dani’d created, it made me very happy to see them both at peace. They deserved it.
Just before the sun came up I drifted out to
the bar. A cool breeze blew in through the gaps in Simoneaux’s busted windows. I walked over to take a peek at the street. The leaves that blew around in lazy circles were the only sign that things had been so crazy here last night. Dim lights above the bar shone down on Simoneaux’s incomplete rows of glass bottles. Being unable to figure out if I’d stayed up too late or had gotten up too early made it difficult to figure out what I should be drinking. Besides, I knew I wasn’t alone. So I spoke up. “Want anything?”
“Brandy Alexander? Unless that’s going to put you out.” He wore a floppy tan driving cap and a suit that matched. I think he wore something like that on The Dick Cavett Show with Yoko.
“What’s in that? Besides brandy?”
“Crème de cacao. But I’m starting to feel as if it’s going to be a bother.”
“There’s no—”
“Make it a Scotch and Coke then. I’ll pretend I’m twenty-two.” He waved his long finger when he said it.
I mixed it with one part Scotch and one part Coke. I figured it didn’t matter, since he was either a figment of my imagination or a ghost.
He said, “You’ve had a bit of an evening.”
“Yeah, man.” I poured myself a little Baileys. “Stuff got out of control. Thank God nobody got hurt.”
“Do you suppose God really had anything to do with it?” He looked deeply into his drink and swirled it around the bottom of his glass.
“No, man. It’s just something to say.”
“Well, you’ve got to talk to someone, I suppose. I know an auntie isn’t the same as a mum. Band mates aren’t brothers.”
“No, and I got along fine without all the above—”
The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3) Page 23
