by John Lawton
‘An’ what are you goin’ to do now?’
This was not a question I’d anticipated. She had not asked me why I had been looking for Gus. She had not even asked me my name.
‘I don’t know,’ I lied.
‘You must have had a reason to want to talk to Gus. You one o’ them reporters?’
Ah, the easy option. Not to have to mention Mel. Not to have to explain the vague if not spurious nature of my occupation.
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘An’ you was goin’ ter come here, knock at my sister’s front door and ask Marcellus how come he killt . . . goddam, how many did you say it was now?’
‘A hundred and thirty-four.’
‘A hundred an’ thirty-four, a hundred an’ thirty-four ole men, women an’ kids. You was just gonna knock on the door and say, “Howdy, Gus, you don’t know me but I hear you killt hundred an’ thirty-four Vietnamese”?’
What had I been going to do? Had I even thought it through? I had walked up to a shanty house in shantytown, a lone white idiot, knocked on the man’s front door, knowing what I knew, ready to say what for fuck’s sake? What daydream of decency had led me to think I could cross the tracks in any other sense but the physical, cocooned in my rental, windshielded off from the world? What had my old man said, ‘We never done nothin’ to them’? And I had replied, ‘But what have we done for them?’ And this, this paying of my dues, those years in the Movement, they bought me rights, bought me immunity? Good God, was I crazy too?
I was floundering. What was the point in stumbling around for the answer. It wasn’t blowing in the wind.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘You don’t know. But you a re-porter, ain’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘So sooner or later it will all come out? Everythin’?’
Head up now, back straight, her hands spread wide on the everythin’. I fumbled.
‘It could. I mean. Most of it will. No. I’m sure it will. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Let it out. Let it bleed. It’s a massacre. Who could ever expect somethin’ like that to stay secret?’
It seemed to me to be the direct echo of words I had said to Mouse only a couple of days before. I had meant every word of them. Why did I find it so hard to believe that Claudia Arquette meant every word? Why should I have found rage and denial more acceptable than what I now faced? Why? Because I kidded myself I was a former journalist, a working private eye, that, the little guy’s death notwithstanding, I was an impartial seeker of the truth and I would not believe in my own agenda except to be forced to recognize it in the distorting mirror of her own. I had stepped into a foreign country when I crossed the tracks, I’d known that. Claudia Arquette was the foreigner, that much ought to have been logical. What wasn’t was the sense of a conspiracy between us. A massacre shared. A bloody, messy secret that we would race one another to lance like a swollen boil.
She led me outside. There was the merest breeze to wrap itself around me. Sitting in a tin hut at the end of July had not been much different from taking a Turkish bath. I emerged soaked in my own sweat, my hair plastered to my scalp, my shirt clinging to my chest. Claudia Arquette looked cool in her black, sleeveless dress, cool in the face of multiple murder. I had never met someone so seemingly calm and angry at the same time. Unless, of course, it was Althea Harris Burke. But, then, I hadn’t seen Althea in six years.
‘Y’know,’ Claudia said to me. ‘Gus was like a diver come up too fast. He got a bad case of the bends. We weren’t expectin’ him. He just turned up one day last year sayin’ how he’d been discharged. Messalina wasn’t even suspicious. She’d gotten her boy back. And that was all that mattered to her. But when Gus started acting crazy I took a look at his papers, expecting the worst—like a medically unfit or a dishonorable. I was wrong. They said “honorable discharge.”’
‘They would,’ I said.
‘After what you done told me in there . . . why?’
My rental was where I’d left it. Both side windows and the rear windshield smashed. I swept the glass shards from the driver’s seat. Claudia Arquette said, ‘That’ll cost you.’ This whole trip would cost me. I’d known that from the day Nate Truegood had me pulled into the 5th to tell me Mel was dead.
‘Don’t come back,’ were the last words Miss Arquette spoke to me.
§
I slipped the shift into drive and headed for the tracks, felt the suspension jolt as I crossed the line. A couple of blocks on I looked in the rear-view mirror to see if I was being followed. I was, but not by the Gore Brothers. These guys were white. Two white guys in suits. Another, large tan car, same model as the one before. And if I had not been tired and stupid that fact might have told me something. Was a long time before it did. Only thing I managed to figure out was that I probably had lost them in Chicago, and that they’d found me again in New York, and had someone pick me up as I got into Jackson. Whoever they were. I’d not seen a sign of them around the Gore house, but then I hadn’t been looking. But maybe two white guys in suits had thought better of something I’d no choice about—maybe they hadn’t crossed the tracks. Maybe they just sat at the frontier and waited for me to re-emerge from a foreign country.
I drove back to the hotel. They were trying to be subtle about it, a car, sometimes two, between us, but it was definitely the same model of car I’d seen in Chicago, only now with Mississippi plates. Did they think I was stupid or something? I was.
There was no reason to stick around Jackson. I could just check out, but with the suits out front watching it required a little ingenuity. Up in my room I put on my spare clothes, three shirts, two pairs of Levi’s, stuffed clean socks and underwear into my pockets. I’d seen this in an old Marx Brothers movie. How to skip out of a hotel without paying—wear everything and abandon your suitcase. I had every intention of paying, but I couldn’t be seen carrying a case of any kind.
I waddled to the front desk, pockets bulging, feeling I must look like a New York street bum, swathed in everything he owned, suffering stinking heat some of the time in preference to the threat of cold anytime. I checked out, paid in cash and asked if I could leave my bag with them. No problem. The guy hefted it over, stuffed full of hotel towels to give it the right feel, and thought little of it.
‘I’ll be back,’ I lied.
I made it to the car sweating like a pig and hoping for two things—that they’d neither of them seen Harpo’s performance in Room Service, and that they’d stay together and follow me rather than split up.
I drove into downtown Jackson, cruised around with them sitting close behind, until I found what I was looking for—a department store with three or four entrances. I parked out front, left the keys in the ignition. If they got out and looked they might well think I was careless, but they might also conclude I was coming back and think better of the over-exposure of following me in on foot.
I didn’t look back. I walked quickly through cosmetics and women’s clothing, straight out the back and hailed a cab.
‘Where to?’
‘You know a used car lot?’
‘If I know one I know ten. Which one you want?’
‘Pick one a couple of miles out of town.’
The driver looked puzzled by this, twisted his lip and made a face, but did what I asked. I kept looking through the rear window, and I saw no one following. I could imagine the scenario. They’d sit there for maybe ten or twenty minutes, then one of them would case the store, while the other watched the car, then they’d give up and drive back to the hotel. If they were smart they’d ask immediately if I’d checked out, if they were dumb they’d do it only around midnight when it was pretty well obvious I wasn’t coming back.
About fifteen minutes later the cab pulled up in front of a set of chain-link gates, behind which a German shepherd ju
mped and barked. The driver got out and yelled.
‘Orvis! Brung yew a customer.’
I saw Orvis emerge from a portahut. A fat, grubby, unshaven old white guy in baggy pants and an undershirt.
‘That you, Chester?’
Chester didn’t answer the man. He looked at me and said, ‘I gots to go now.’
I got the hint and tipped him a sawbuck for his trouble.
Orvis yanked on the dog’s chain and pulled the gate open just enough for me to squeeze through. He gave me the once-over.
‘Son, you a mite overdressed for the weather. Fact, you drippin’ like a lathered up horse.’
But this time I was out of lies. I just shrugged and followed. Orvis shuffled a few paces, stopped and looked me over again.’
‘Y’ain’t sick, are you?’
‘No, I’m fine. Just a little warm.’
He shuffled on muttering, ‘Three shirts in summer. My, my. Still. S’a free country. Now, what kind o’ car you lookin’ fer?’
I looked at the towering piles of wrecks, stack upon stack as far as the eye could see, all rust and shattered glass. Wondered if he actually had a car that ran.
‘Cheap would be good,’ I said.
Paying bills in cash was a good way to avoid being traced, but it ran through folding money too quick for me to get profligate.
Orvis scratched his balls.
‘Cheap. Ev’body wants cheap.’ Another good scratch. ‘But y’can have cheap if you don’t mind old.’
‘How old?’
‘Nineteen hunnerd and fo’ty nine.’
‘Just so long as it goes.’
He led off behind another stack of Detroit rust.
‘Oh she goes right enough.’
And he pointed at a ’49 Buick Roadmaster. A black-bodied, white-wheeled, twenty-year-old classic convertible.
‘Sit in. Fire ’er up.’
I sat in the driver’s seat. The springs were OK. Just as well I’d no idea how far I might be going next. I turned the engine over. A few farts and grunts at startup, but then a fairly satisfying engine turn-over once it came to life.
‘How much?’
‘Hundred.’
‘How much for cash?’
‘I don’t deal no other way but cash.’
I talked him down to eighty-five.
Back in his portahut he took the money and said, ‘Ain’t no radio o’ course.’
And I was curious to know where this was leading.
‘But I got one o’ them eight-track gadgets. I could let you have it for twenty. Came out of one of the wrecks. Some kid got killt out on the highway. I could fit it in a couple of minutes. Hell, I’ll even throw in the tapes the kid left in the car.’
I bought it. Like I said, I’d no idea how far I was going. Soon found out. I gave him the twenty and an extra ten. Said I had a couple of phone calls I had to make, and he left me to it.
I stripped off a couple of layers, breathed in the reek of my own sweat and called the rental company out at the airport. Told them where they could pick up the powder blue nightmare.
The guy said, ‘We charge for pickups.’
I said, ‘You have my card number, bill me.’
‘We will,’ he said.
I didn’t tell him about the windows and the rear screen. It’d all show up on my American Express bill I’d no doubt. Then I made the call that really mattered.
‘Mouse?’
‘Johnnie? Where are you, man?’
‘Mississippi. Look, I don’t have much time. You said you were in touch with another of the Nine. I need to know who.’
‘What? Why? You were going to talk to Gus.’
What was the point in mincing words? Hit the man.
‘Gus is dead.’
The line went quiet. I let Mouse work his way through it, listening to his breathing. Then he said ‘How?’, soft and tearful, and I told him.
At last he said, ‘Why not stop now, Johnnie?’
‘Can’t do that, Mouse. Wish I could, but I can’t.’
‘So what you want?’
‘An address. You said you heard from one of the others from time to time.’
‘That would be Notley. I don’t have an address for Notley.’
‘I thought you knew where he was?’
‘Rumor man. That’s all I hear—rumors.’
‘So what is the rumor?’
‘Moondog.’
Moondog? This was not good news. I’d heard of the Moondogs. I’d even come within six feet of them. They were a bunch of out-of-it acid crazies from Arizona—‘We are the people our parents warned us against’. They spent most of their time holed up in a ghost town they’d reclaimed in the Chiricahua mountains, over to Mexico way. Every so often they emerged on what they called ‘mind-expanding gung-fu forays into the streets of straight’. That’s where I’d come across them. Some of those streets of straight had been in Chicago. Rubin and his Yippies had shown up with the pig they’d christened Pigasus, and were hell bent on nominating him for president. How do you top that? No problem for a Moondog. You show up—all thirty of you—bare-ass nekkid, with Commanche headdresses and warpaint, igniting your farts with cigarette lighters and just daring anyone else to outcrazy you. The cops didn’t even bother to lock ’em up. They bundled them all into a school bus, drove to a thrift store, fitted them out in cast-offs and dumped them over the state line into Indiana. The way I heard it, the cops told ’em they’d shoot on sight if they ever set foot in Chicago again. But—I had to be sure.
‘You mean Notley’s joined the Moondogs? Is that what you’ve heard?’
‘No, man. What I’ve heard is Notley is Moondog.’
Oh shit.
§
I headed south, decided to cross the river at Natchez. There were closer bridges, but I figured however good the head start it would pay to avoid the obvious. I was a few miles into Louisiana, before I got bored enough with road to want to look at what I’d bought. I had a thousand-mile drive ahead of me to Arizona. What crap had a dead teenager willed me to pass the time? I flipped open the glove compartment.
Buffalo Springfield.
Streetfightin’ stuff. Could I bear to listen to Stephen Stills singing ‘For What It’s Worth’?
Bob Dylan’s second album, Freewheelin’.
Nostalgic stuff. Always liked the album.
Big Brother and the Holding Company, Cheap Thrills.
Loud stuff.
The Velvet Underground and Nico.
Decadent stuff. Waitin’ for my man.
Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends.
Who was I to be different?
Two Sly Stone albums, including the new one, Stand.
So far, so good.
The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only In It For The Money.
An acquired taste. OK. Maybe I could acquire it.
Rotary Connection. Who? Never heard of ’em.
Another Dylan, John Wesley Harding.
Lyrically baffling to the point where I had begun to wonder if the songs meant anything, but, all the same, compelling stuff.
Janis Ian, For All The Seasons Of Your Mind.
Pay Dirt. I loved Janis Ian. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad trip after all. The kid had taste and he’d left me over twenty tapes, worth more than the player. God knows, they might even have been worth more than the car. I stuck Buffalo Springfield in the slot and settled down to cruise. I’d done this so often, but it had never felt like this before. I was beginning to feel dogged by death. I was beginning to feel like the angel of death. The body count was mounting. Mouse had a point. Why not stop now? The more blacktop slipped between the wheels, the further I was from Mississippi, the better I felt. N
ot happier, just better. I’d been right all along. Never should have gone back—but here I was heading back to Arizona. It was years since I’d been in Arizona. Nineteen years. Nineteen years since Billy upped and left.
I crossed into Texas in darkness. I’d driven all evening—the breadth of Louisiana. Over six hours—I dared not push the engine on that gas-guzzling monster, but I’d seen no sign of a tail in the rear-view, so a few miles over the Texas line, just outside of Jasper, I pulled off the road at the first cheap motel, checked in, and wished for dreamless sleep. Don’t know why I felt I could sleep in Texas, why I would be safer than in Louisiana. Is the homing instinct vestigial even in the most lost of lost boys?
§
I’d not been on the road more than a couple of hours the next morning, ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’ blasting out on the eight-track, when, I caught sight of a motorcycle cop in the rear-view. In those days—what? three or four years before the first oil crisis—you could drive across Texas with your foot on the floor. I wasn’t. I didn’t think the old car could hold up going much more than fifty-five, and I doubted I’d been doing much more than forty-five, though I was certainly burning a little oil. But the cop put on his siren, overtook me all the same and pulled up his Harley Electra Glide thirty feet in front of me. I flicked off Sly Stone and sat tight. He strode towards me, sunlight glinting off mirrored sunglasses, like the cop who stops Janet Leigh in Psycho, one hand conveniently on his hip, close to what was certain to be a butt-side holster. It has always been my instinct to get out and stand. It seems like bad manners to stay put, but that’s what they want, and they have ever been prone to misinterpret the move, especially if a man my size stands up in front of a shorter cop.
He leaned over the door. Looked at me.
‘Git out,’ he said.
I git. Waited for the run-through of the clichés. ‘Assume the position.’ ‘Spread ’em.’ Billy-club in the kidneys. ‘We know how to handle hippies in Texas, boy.’ Never happened. He left me standing, walked round the car, and came back to me by the open door.
