It had been Doc’s idea for them all to spend their last evening on the road in style. The money Nancy had set aside for the trip – the money Doc had taken from her house at the time of her detention – had hardly been touched. He’d paid for gas, meals and two nights at the Union Hotel and that was about it. Whatever was left once they reached Coffeeville, he’d give to Bob: money to cover the costs of his travel to and from Montreal and the hire of the tour bus.
‘I went to the toilet, Jack, and everything’s back to normal,’ Eric said.
‘Glad to hear it,’ Jack replied.
Eric turned to Doc. ‘Jack said yesterday that I was like a human gas ball, Doctor Gene, and that if you’d been smoking a cigarette near me the whole city of Nashville would have blown up.’
‘Did he now?’ Doc said. ‘Nothing like a bit of hyperbole is there, Jack?’
‘I call it as I see it, Doc. It’s a cross I carry.’
‘It’s a cross we all have to carry,’ Doc said. ‘What’s Nancy doing back there, Eric?’
‘She’s looking for people, sir. She says we’re missing someone.’
Nancy was always thinking someone was missing, but was never sure who. On each such occasion, Doc would explain to her that there had always been only the five of them and remind her who Bob, Jack and Eric were. She’d accept the explanation without protest, but unless distracted by another matter, would repeat her question within moments. It was a frustrating conversation for Doc, but even more so for Nancy – and Doc never failed to appreciate this.
‘Hey, Jack, take the map and get me to Union Street,’ Bob said. ‘We lookin’ for the Peabody Hotel.’
The parking space was there as promised and Bob, now expert in driving the bus, manoeuvred into the opening without trouble. They were greeted by hotel porters, who took hold of their luggage and led them to the reception desk. Doc paid for the three rooms they’d reserved with cash: he and Nancy would share one room, Jack and Eric another, and Bob would have a room to himself. While Doc filled out guest information, Jack went to the concierge’s desk and asked where he might find Darla Thomas.
‘Usually in that office right there,’ the concierge replied, ‘but I’m afraid she’s off duty this weekend and won’t be back until Tuesday morning.’
‘Is there any chance you could give me her home phone number?’ Jack asked. ‘We’re trying to find a friend of hers.’
‘I’m afraid it’s against hotel policy to give out information about employees, sir. Your best bet is to come back Tuesday morning. I can leave a message for her, if you’d like.’
‘Tell her I’m trying to find Susan Lawrence, will you? My name’s Jack Guravitch.’
‘No luck?’ Doc asked when Jack returned.
‘Nah, she’s off duty till Tuesday. I’ll have to come back with Eric then. I’ll hire a car tomorrow and follow you to Coffeeville and drive back Tuesday morning. I’ll need one for when I leave anyway. How far is Coffeeville from here?’
‘About a hundred miles,’ Doc said. ‘An hour-and-a-half’s drive.’
‘That’s manageable,’ Jack said. ‘What are the plans for this afternoon? Eric wants to see the river.’
‘Big plans,’ Bob said. ‘I ain’t tol’ you this, Gene, but I’ve got a surprise lined up fo’ you an’ Nance – an’ the boys’ll like it, too. Let’s dump the bags in the room an’ meet back in the lobby. It ain’t far, an’ we can ride the Main Street Trolley.’
‘What about the river?’ Jack asked.
‘We can see the Miss’ippi after,’ Bob said. ‘I hope he ain’t expectin’ nothin’ too special,’cos it ain’t: jus’ gallons o’ dirty brown water headin’ in the same direction – nothin’ romantic ’bout it.’
‘I don’t think he’s planning on writing a sonnet about the river. He just wants to see it.’
‘I don’t want to miss the ducks,’ Nancy said.
‘Ducks are splashin’ right there in the fountain, Nance.’
‘I’m not blind, you fool,’ Nancy snapped at Bob. ‘I want to see them march! Gene, find out what time they march, will you?’
Doc had no idea what Nancy was talking about, or why in fact there were ducks in the fountain in the first place. He returned to the reception desk and prepared himself for a look of non-comprehension when he asked the question. The receptionist, however, didn’t bat an eyelid: ‘Five o’clock prompt, sir,’ she said, ‘but you’ll need to be here before then if you want a seat.’
Doc reported back and Bob looked at his watch: ‘We got plenty o’ time,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a move.’
They walked to the elevator and Eric pressed the button. Bob’s room was on the fourth floor and the other two on the ninth. ‘Lobby in fifteen,’ Bob said, when he exited.
Doc and Nancy’s room and Jack and Eric’s room were on opposite sides of the same corridor close to the stairwell.
The following day, Doc ruminated, they would arrive in Coffeeville, and Brandon would arrive in Las Vegas. He could foresee no further problems.
7
Coffeeville
The Lorraine Motel
The five of them stood in the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street. When Martin Luther King had stood on its second floor balcony on April 4, 1968, a man by the name of James Earl Ray was kneeling on the floor of a second-storey bathroom in Bessie Brewer’s Rooming House looking at him through the scope of a deer rifle. At one minute past six, a single hollow point bullet blasted its way into King’s cheek and sent him to the very same Promised Land he’d been talking about the previous evening.
After the assassination the old motel went downhill at a pace, and was only saved from extinction when it was decided to turn the property into a museum dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Through artefacts, photographs, newspaper accounts and three-dimensional scenes, the National Civil Rights Museum told the story of Afro-Americans from the time of their arrival in the American colonies. It detailed the brutality of slavery and the injustices of the Jim Crow laws, highlighted the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Councils, and traced the key events of the civil rights struggle, culminating in the assassination of King.
The knowledge that the three elderly people he travelled with had once played a part in this struggle gave the visit an added poignancy for Jack. It was an experience that also left him feeling confused. Although he appreciated the biological necessity for any old person to have at one time in their lives been young, emotionally Jack had always struggled with the idea. In all the time he’d known his godfather, the man had been an adult; he was now an overweight tub of lard in his seventies. He associated Doc with sitting and chairs, for settling for things that worked rather than trying to change things for an idealistic better, and certainly not with activity.
Jack had known from his father that Doc had been active in the civil rights movement, but Doc had rarely mentioned it. All he’d ever told him was that he was embarrassed by the insignificance of his role, and that all he’d ever taken from the experience was the knowledge that he was a coward. Jack had learned more from talking to Bob than ever he had talking to his godfather: Doc saving Bob from a burning bus in Alabama and the two of them being thrown into jail in Mississippi. If he’d needed proof that such events had indeed happened, Bob was about to provide the evidence.
‘You never see’d it, did you?’ Bob said to Doc.
‘Seen what?’
‘C’mon, follow me.’
They’d already toured the exhibits and Eric was concerned they were about to do it all over again. ‘What about the river, Otis? I haven’t seen the Mississippi, yet.’
‘We got time. Jus’ need to show Doc an’ Nance somethin’.’
They followed Bob to a series of photographs taken during the time of the Freedom Rides, and Bob stopped in front of one taken outside the Union Bus Terminal in Montgomery, Alabama. ‘Now you see it?’ Bob asked.
‘See what?’ Doc asked.
‘Man,
you blind or somethin’?’
‘Not yet, but you’ll have to point it out to me.’
‘Sorry, Gene. Fo’got ’bout yo’ eyes, man.’ He then pointed to two figures in the photograph: side shots of a man and a woman. The man had his arms around the woman, shielding her from the missiles being thrown by an angry crowd. ‘That’s you an’ Nance, Gene. See it now?’
Doc looked at the images and waited for them to clarify. ‘Well, I’ll be damned. Hey, Nancy; come and look at this, will you. It’s you and me. How in God’s name did you know about this, Bob?’
‘I see’d it the first time I visited the place. I knew we was there when the photograph was taken, so I looked at it closely. If you wanna know the truth, Gene, I was lookin’ fo’ myself, but ’steada findin’ me I foun’ you two.’
Nancy stared at the photograph. ‘I don’t remember having any trouble in Nashville,’ she said. ‘Was this happening outside the hotel when we took Bob to the restaurant? I thought you said it had been desegregated.’
‘Nancy, this is the Union Bus Terminal in Montgomery, not the Union Hotel in Nashville. The photograph was taken fifty years ago. See how young we both look.’
‘I don’t know about you, but I look exactly the same. I look like that now, and to tell you the truth I’m not happy about all these niggers gawping at my photograph.’ She made a move to take the photograph from the wall and Bob had to restrain her.
‘Take your damned hands off me, you fucking nigger,’ she shouted. ‘Gene, tell him he’s fired. We’ll get someone else to drive the bus. I’m not having hired help touching me.’ She struggled to get free from his grasp and Bob was so shaken by her outburst that she almost succeeded. Jack came to his aid.
‘And you can get your hands off me too, Jew boy. You thought I didn’t know, didn’t you, but I’ve known all along. You don’t pull the wool over my eyes. Jews and niggers always stick together.’
People started to look in their direction, and Doc wondered if they’d have to manhandle Nancy out of the museum. It was Eric who came to the rescue. ‘Mrs Skidmore, will you take me to see the river please?’
Nancy’s manner changed almost immediately and the old Nancy returned to them. ‘Of course I will, honey. We can go now, if you like. She took his arm, and once outside the museum also took Bob’s. ‘Thank you, Bob. That was delightful. You’re always thinking of us, aren’t you? Isn’t he, Gene?’
‘That woman’s getting crazier by the day, Doc,’ Jack said, as the two of them walked behind the others. ‘One minute she’s snarling like a rabid dog and the next she’s meek as a lamb.’
‘I know it,’ Doc said, ‘but you can’t hold her responsible for the things she says as you would another person. You have to bear in mind that she grew up surrounded by prejudice and that, like it or not, prejudice is insidious. It seeps into your pores without you ever knowing it. Nancy fought bigotry her whole life, and for someone from her background that was no easy thing. The illness is pulling her apart, tearing down her defences. She’s back walking the Delta of her youth now, and unconsciously tapping into all the hatreds that used to pool there.’
‘How are you going to manage when it’s just the two of you?’
‘I’ll figure something out,’ Doc said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for some time now.’
Ducks
They arrived back in the hotel lobby shortly before 4:30 pm and found people already gathering for the extravaganza. Doc and Nancy managed to take two of the remaining front-row seats, and Eric sat cross-legged on the floor in front of them. Bob and Jack, neither of whom was particularly interested in watching the ducks, climbed to the second floor balcony and viewed the proceedings from there.
Shortly before 5 pm, a small flight of steps was placed at the base of the fountain and a roll of red carpet extended from its foot to the elevator door. A man, resplendent in red jacket and dark trousers, introduced himself as the Duckmaster and started to explain the origins of the pageantry the audience was about to witness.
Supposedly, a general manager of the Peabody in the 1930s called Frank returned to the hotel after a weekend shooting ducks in Arkansas with a friend called Chip. They sat in the lobby drinking bourbon that evening and decided to put some live duck decoys into the lobby’s travertine marble fountain. The hoot – or quack, as some described it – proved so popular with guests that, in 1940, it was formalised: the hotel appointed a Duckmaster and the ducks began to march. The only thing to have changed over the years was that the Duckmaster was now a black man.
‘Y’all ready to see ’em march?’ the Duckmaster asked. ‘Okay then, start the music!’
John Philip Sousa’s King Cotton March started to play and the Duckmaster strode to the fountain and marshalled the ducks down the steps and along the carpet to the elevator. The doors opened, the ducks walked in, the doors closed behind them and the music stopped. The audience burst into applause.
‘Don’t seem right, somehow,’ Bob said to Jack. ‘Martin Luther King gets his self shot, and fo’ what? So’s a black man can become a Duckmaster?’
Nancy and Eric had been thrilled to see the ducks march to the elevator and, along with the other hotel guests and tourists who’d come to see the procession, had lapped up the performance. Doc, however, had been overcome by tiredness and slept through it, his snores fortuitously masked by the noise of the ducks and the appreciative laughter of those gathered. Jack shook him awake.
‘Hey, Doc, we’re fixing to eat and then go down Beale Street. Wipe your chin and let’s go.’
‘The restaurant doesn’t open till six,’ Doc said. ‘Why don’t you go and make reservations?’
Jack did, and returned with the news that he, Doc and Bob would have to wear jackets: Chez Philippe required business casual attire. Doc grimaced, but handed Jack his room card and asked him to get his jacket; he’d stay and watch over Nancy and Eric.
They were the first to enter the restaurant and were shown to a corner table. Even before his eyesight had started to fail him, a bane of Doc’s life had been menus: they were too long, too complicated and never simple or straightforward. He’d resigned himself to ten minutes of torture when Bob spoke up. ‘I’m gonna have duck,’ he said, without even opening the menu.
‘That sounds like an idea,’ Doc said, and immediately closed the menu. ‘How about everyone else? Duck sound okay?’
‘Fine by me,’ Jack said. ‘Duck’s my favourite.’
‘What’s duck like?’ Eric asked. ‘I’ve never eaten duck before.’
‘Best damn bird you’ll ever taste,’ Bob said. ‘Goose comes close, but duck’s got the edge.’
‘I’ll have duck, too,’ Nancy said. ‘It used to be one of Dora’s specialities.’
‘Duck it is, then,’ Doc confirmed, and indicated to the waiter they were ready to order. ‘Duck all around,’ he said.
The waiter looked flummoxed. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have duck, sir,’ he said apologetically.
‘What you talkin’ ’bout, man? I just see’d five of ’em. All we’ll need is two at most.’
‘Those were the marching ducks, sir. It would be akin to cannibalism to serve them.’
‘How do you figure that?’ Doc asked him. ‘Are you saying we’re descended from ducks or something; that I’m a duck and you’re a duck? If you are, it’s the first I’ve ever heard of it. And this is the first French restaurant I’ve been in that doesn’t have duck on the menu.’
‘No, sir, of course I’m not. It’s just that the ducks are too much a part of the hotel’s brand. We haven’t served duck in the hotel since 1981. It would be like eating a family pet.’
‘You wouldn’ mind that, Jack, would you?’ Bob said to him. ‘I bet Bingo woulda tasted real good.’ Jack ignored the remark and re-opened the menu.
‘Oh fuck the damned duck!’ Nancy said. ‘Let’s go someplace else and eat barbecue.’
Everyone at the table looked at her in surprise and the waiter hovered uncertainly, unsure ho
w to react. It was Bob who laughed first, and then they all broke into laughter – though not the waiter.
‘Why are you laughing?’ Nancy asked. ‘What’s so goddamned funny?’
‘Yo’ language is what,’ Bob said. ‘We need to get you a breath fresh’ner ’fore we take you anyplace else, girl. Ha!’
They returned to the lobby and waited while Bob went to ask for the name of a good barbecue place. He purposely avoided the front desk and looked for one of the black bellboys. He saw one pushing a trolley of suitcases into the hotel and approached him. ‘Hey, kid, where’s the bes’ place to eat barbecue an’ listen to the Blues?’
‘Gutbucket Club on Beale Street, sir. Bes’ fo’ both.’
Bob thanked him and pushed a five-dollar bill into his hand.
They walked the two blocks to Beale Street and found the club without trouble. It was already crowded and, worryingly for Bob, all the wall tables were taken. Doc pointed to a table set on a raised dais three feet above the main eating area; it had a wooden rail on the nearside to prevent anyone from falling on to the table below it. ‘You won’t come to any harm there, Bob,’ he said.
They made their way to the table and Bob sat with his back to the rail. Doc ordered beers for the men, a small glass of white wine for Nancy and a Dr Pepper for Eric.
‘Wan’ me to order fo’ us all?’ Bob asked. ‘One thing I know ’bout is barbecue, an’ the bes’ barbecue is pork.’ They agreed that he should.
The food the waiter brought to the table was a mixture of hickory smoked ribs on a slab (dry-rub style), pulled pork, slaw, baked beans, potato salad and bread. It was served with the Gutbucket’s own brand of tangy barbecue sauce.
‘Will this make me go to the toilet like the Mexican food did, Jack?’ Eric asked.
‘No, you’ll be fine with this. It’ll help keep you regular, but no more than that.’
While they ate, they listened to an old bluesman called Blind Mississippi Johnson who played an open-tuned guitar with a metal slide on his small finger. A young man sat next to him, attentive and admiring, on hand for the eventuality that the old man might fall off his chair.
Last Bus to Coffeeville Page 42
