by Alan Rodgers
When he was done Blind Willie thanked him, and invited him in to sit a spell.
Robert Johnson hesitated to accept that invitation. It was nearly dusk, and the great King’s call was still in his ear. But then Blind Willie said, “There’s something that I need to tell you, Robert Johnson,” and Robert Johnson knew he had to hear the word.
“All right, then,” he said, and he followed Blind Willie into the darkness of the shack.
Blind Willie poured two cups of sassafras tisane from the brew-pot on the stove, and carried them to the table. “There’s sugar in the covered bowl if you like it sweet,” he said, pointing at the bowl in the center of the table.
Robert Johnson thanked him, stirred in half a spoon of sugar, and sipped his brew as he sat back in his chair.
“The Lady came to me last night,” Blind Willie said. “In a dream she came and talked to me.”
Robert Johnson snorted. “I thought you were a man who didn’t go around talking to no Ladies,” he said.
Blind Willie cleared his throat. “She came to me,” he said. “I don’t go looking for her.”
“I always thought you didn’t have no truck with any Caribbean devils,” Robert Johnson said. He was partly sardonic when he asked that, but he meant the question, too. Blind Willie was a strictly righteous man.
“I saw her, and I bade her get away from me, devil, yes, yes I did. But then she knelt before me and began to pray. I heard her pray for forgiveness, Robert Johnson, and I know from the way she said that prayer that she’s prayed it every night for a million years. If a devil speak a prayer like that, his words surely would catch fire, or he would go to his redemption, one; and the cataclysm from either act is a thing no deadman could mistake. I looked at her again, and I could see she wasn’t just a fallen angel, but a repentant one. Repentance leaves a mark upon a body, Robert Johnson. You of all men ought to know about that.”
Robert Johnson shrugged. “I don’t see nothing when I look into the mirror. But if you tell me you can see it, I believe you.”
“When her prayer was done she got up off her knees and sang to me. Three songs, she sang — one of them was Judgment Day, and another was ‘The Ode to Joy.’ The third song was ‘When the Saints Come Marching In,’ but the words she sang were strange to me. I never heard no one sing those words before, and I swear to you, Robert Johnson, if I never hear those words again it won’t be a day too soon.
“She said those words were a calling, and when you sing them — you, Robert Johnson — you will call the tumult down upon the devils out of Hell.”
And then he said the words he didn’t dare to sing. I won’t recount them here for the same reason Blind Willie spoke them where he could have sang them. No one ever sings those words, no matter how clear they remember them — when bluesmen sing that version of the song they hum out the most important passages, or slap the syllables on their guitars, or hide them in cacophonies of music.
It isn’t Judgment Day, that song, but it’s powerful juju even so.
“She said you’d know when you had to sing,” Blind Willie said. “She told me other things, too, but I’ve got to face those things myself.”
Robert Johnson frowned. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me everything you know.”
Blind Willie looked away. He looked so sad, Robert Johnson thought — like a man in mourning for the loss of everything he loved.
“You need to tell me,” Robert Johnson said. “I need to know before I go to face the fire on the ridge.”
After a while Blind Willie looked up and allowed that Robert Johnson had a point. And he told him all of the most terrible things the Lady had divined to him — how the day was close upon them when Our Lady of Sorrows would descend into Hell to seize the inside of the Eye from the place it hung in the great receiving room of the Mansion called Defiance; how the Eye would fall to pieces when she lifted it — and if the hoodoo men and Robert Johnson didn’t sing to give her cover the demon horde would rend her limb from limb as they tried to storm the aperture between this world and the next.
How before her work was done Blind Willie, John Henry and all the Kings, all the hoodoo men and Robert Johnson, too — they all would face the hordes of Hell, and hold them with their song.
And then Blind Willie told him how each of them would pay a terrible price. When the song was done every solitary one who stood against the hordes of Hell of them would be gone, and there would be no deadmen in the Delta Kingdom.
And Robert Johnson would be dead and gone to Hell, no matter how he once had tasted the sweet wine that is redemption.
New Orleans, Louisiana - The Present
Lisa woke alone and confused in an alley in New Orleans’ French Quarter.
It was hours after midnight, so late that even the nightside streets were deserted — but Lisa was a world away from the nightside streets. The alley where she lay was surrounded by old wooden houses that had all but collapsed upon themselves, and as they crumbled the houses had filled the alley with rotting verminous debris. Lisa could feel it throbbing, thriving as she woke to push herself out of the filth and shake away the roaches that crawled upon her.
“Mama. . . ?” she called, but there was no one near enough to hear her. “Mama!” she screamed, but no one heard that, either. She hurried out of the alley, into the tourist streets where beggars slept oblivious along the sidewalks, calling and calling and screaming for her mother everywhere she went.
But no matter how she ran, the only ones who answered her were the bums who told her to be quiet.
Now she came to the docklands, and saw a great sign that said Welcome to the City of New Orleans. When she saw that she knew that something awful had carried her away, and that her mother was miles and miles from her, upstream on the river.
She walked more slowly after that, and she didn’t bother shouting. Because she realized something when she saw the river — she realized that she had to be calm, and walk as quiet as she could, or the awful things would find her when she couldn’t hear them come for her.
Maybe she was right, too. Lisa was right about a lot of things that day, and she regretted all of them.
Lisa followed the riverfront road south through the docklands. The Port of New Orleans was a dying enterprise, and Lisa saw it dying as she traveled south. Every block she went the docklands grew seedier and more abandoned, till finally a mile south of the French Quarter she realized she was walking in a ghost town. Here the docks and factories lay crumbling in ruins; even the river seemed to fester and boil as it ran along the ghost-town shore.
Somewhere along her way she made a turn to follow riverwise that only people who’ve been touched can make, and her way took her out of the mundane collapse of southeastern New Orleans, into a place where only the damned, the unlucky, and those with special gifts can go. Some people call that secret place the Devil’s Quarter of New Orleans, but wise people don’t call it anything at all.
Because the evil in that place knows when people speak of it, and it watches them quite closely.
Lisa had a sense about that — a sense, almost, of where she was. She thought, I should turn back, and she meant to do that. But then she heard a vague cacophony somewhere in the distance, and she followed it step by step by step into the east as the river bent south.
When Lisa came around the bend she saw the mansion, and the distant cacophony became an unsettling din, and she knew she’d found the fate that had carried her downriver to New Orleans.
And because she knew she’d found it, she faced it, no matter how it scared her worse than anything alive.
The mansion was a frightful old place, battered and abandoned-looking — but it wasn’t abandoned at all. Just the opposite, in fact: there were lights in all the windows, and when she got close enough to see the night-dark lawn Lisa saw that the mansion’s grounds were littered with the
unconscious bodies of drunken revelers. There was a party in that place, but it wasn’t a party that anyone with any sense would ever visit.
Unless they absolutely had to.
Unless something in their hearts told them there was a destiny inside that place that they could not avoid. Lisa knew that kind of destiny when she stood at the edge of the drive that led to the mansion. She knew she could turn and run away, and maybe if she did she could have a life, a good life and a decent life and maybe someday she could find her mother again and she and Mama could drive back north to Harlem and their life and Lisa could grow old enough for school, real school like where they really teach you something instead of chasing you out onto a tarmac where the retard boys could pick at you, yes, yes, Lisa knew what there was for her if she turned around and ran.
And a part of her wanted to run back to that, and try to make it good.
But the biggest truest most honest chamber in her heart told her that something terrible had caught her, long ago, and that she’d never be free of it until she faced it and conquered it, and that was destiny.
And Lisa met it.
She wound her way along the drive, stepping gingerly and around the drunken derelicts until she reached the mansion’s great front stoop. There by the door with the doorknob too far above her head to open, Lisa had one last moment of trepidation. She was only Lisa! She was only a baby! The world was too big for her, and too terrible, and she didn’t dare to face it —
And then she saw the open door at the far end of the stoop, and she knew she had to face her fate no matter what it was.
It wasn’t bad at first.
No one at the party in the mansion even noticed Lisa for the longest time — their drugs, their obsessions, their conversations absorbed those people too thoroughly for any of them to see a child walk among their knees. Lisa used her invisibility for all that it was worth — here she stood in the shadows near a coatroom and listened to three ladies whisper conspiratorially among themselves about the end of the world; and when that conversation faded she wandered deeper into the party where the men dressed freakishly and all the women seemed enchanted; and now she forgot herself entirely as she gawked at the red-eyed whisperer who looked partly like a woman and partly like a man — and felt every hair on her body stand on end as she realized that the people around her weren’t people at all. They were — things, outré things that somehow had that knack of seeming like people, and once she realized there was a difference to distinguish she saw that none of them were people, none of them at all anywhere in the mansion were alive, were human, were born of man and woman people —
That was when Lisa knew she had to leave. It didn’t matter what destiny there was for her inside that place; it didn’t matter if she didn’t have the nerve to face her fate; it didn’t matter if she had to spend all her living days trapped in a lie that bent over and over on herself, Lisa had to go now now now —
But there was no way to leave.
Because every door she found was closed and locked, and even if she’d had a key to open one Lisa wasn’t tall enough to reach the handle.
All of the doors were closed! All of them!
All of them but one.
And that was the door that led to the basement.
Lisa knew better than to go into that basement.
Of course she did! She could smell that awful smell that wafted out the door, that smell like sulfur-rotten eggs, and she could hear the faint and distant screams of agony every time she passed near it.
That basement was the worst place she could go. The worst place in the world, and maybe in the next world, too.
And then the freaky man-woman shouted, and Lisa whirled around to see him pointing at her, shouting and pointing and screaming for someone to grab that brat before she gets away, and Lisa knew she didn’t have a choice.
No choice at all.
She had to run or she was lost, and there was only one way to go.
Into the basement.
Into the underground and down down down.
Like Orpheus.
To Hell.
Somewhere in America - Traveling by Rail
The Present
Dan Alvarez cradled the dream guitar in his arms for the longest time — sat leaning against the boxcar wall, pressing silent chords against the frets, fingering the strings so carefully that he made no sound.
He was so careful not to make a sound. So careful! That guitar was a periapt — a charm like a talisman but large as life. It was the great King’s guitar; it was Elvis’s guitar. It was the music of the spheres made material and true. Dan Alvarez was a brave man, but he wasn’t brave enough to play that instrument alone.
After a long long while he fell asleep with the guitar still cradled in his arms. In his sleep he began to dream again, and now in his dreams he was a black hobo songster. In that dream it was half a century ago, and the blues were alive and thriving — not that awful crap you hear in city juke-joints but blues, vital and alive and as real as the fate that waits to welcome each of us to his grave. In that dream he hoboed from town to town across the countryside, making his meager livelihood with his sonorous guitar, and times were hard and folks were poor and Dan scarcely made it from one meal to the next, and if he didn’t know his licks so effing well he wouldn’t eat at all.
But he did eat, every day. And some days he ate damn well.
In his dream he pushed the plate away from him and pulled his guitar over his shoulder, and he sang. Before he realized what he was doing he began to play that periapt guitar.
The world shook as he picked its strings, and as it shook the Santa came to hear him.
When Dan Alvarez saw Our Lady of Sorrows the dream melted away to leave him back on the train rolling and rolling somewhere in America. On the train he was just nobody half-talent Dan Alvarez again — but even if he was just a would-be musician who made his living as a fry-cook at Denny’s, he sang the music of the world and played the chords that only the great ones master.
The Santa smiled on him, and Dan Alvarez supplicated himself before her. She was so beautiful, he thought. More beautiful than he could bear to see.
“Lady,” Dan Alvarez said, letting the guitar slide out of his hands, onto the boxcar floor, “Santa.”
The Lady smiled again, so beautiful. And now she pointed out the boxcar door — at the town lights that appeared on the horizon.
Dan knew what she meant. She wanted him to go to that place, wherever it was. That was the place she’d been prompting him all along — from the moment he’d first seen her outside his apartment window she’d been pushing him toward this place, this time, this moment.
Dan felt a sinking dread in the low part of his gut. He felt sweat beading up on his forehead despite the cool wind rushing through the open boxcar door.
“I’m afraid,” he said. “It scares me, Santa.”
The Santa watched him steadily, evenly; nothing in her expression shifted as Dan told her of his fear.
“I don’t want to go there, Lady,” Dan said.
But the Santa never heard him.
Because she was already gone.
The Devil’s Quarter of New Orleans
The Present
The scariest part of Lisa’s descent into Hell was the loneliness.
Loneliness.
The moment she set foot on the stairway the party and the noise disappeared behind her in a haze of damnable possibility. It was as quiet and as empty on that stair as it was in the corridor that led to the fountain and the Gates of Judgment at the reflecting pool before Heaven and Hell, and lonelier, too, because each time she’d been to that hall the Santa had held her hand.
But there was no Santa here. No one followed her away from the party; no one greeted her on the basement stair to Hell; no one spoke or sang or call
ed to her — until she reached the basement.
When Lisa rounded the last steps of the stairway she found Robert Johnson waiting in that basement anteroom of Hell. He sat in a folding chair on the far side of the room; a cheap tin lamp hung from the ceiling above him, shining on him like a spotlight. When he saw her he lifted his guitar onto his lap and began to caress its strings.
He was so beautiful, that Robert Johnson — his pretty pinstripe suit; his wide white-toothed smile so bright against that face as dark as pitch; his slender, nimble hands coaxing Grace from the strings of his guitar. He began to play, and his song was the most amazing thing — and the rhythm and just the whisper of a chance hiding in the melody, and Lisa stood listening transfixed agape, lost and away from everything she knew.
It didn’t matter anymore, she realized. It didn’t matter if this was Hell or New Orleans or a terrible memory from her first infancy; what mattered was the magic and the music and the whisper of a chance, and if that meant she had to follow Robert Johnson down to Hell, then that was what it meant, and even if Lisa was afraid she didn’t hesitate, not for a moment.
“Follow me down,” Robert Johnson sang, “Follow me down to Hell.”
And Lisa did.
Somewhere in America - Traveling by Rail
The Present
Dan Alvarez climbed out of the boxcar when the train came to a stop. It was dawn by then, but even in the daylight it took him a long while to figure out where he was. He kept expecting to be somewhere in the South — in Memphis, maybe, or even in New Orleans — but the farther he went the clearer it became that he was a long way from either of those places. The dirt was wrong, for one, and the odd trees in the rubble were all wrong for the South.
Then he saw the water tower at the far end of the rail yard, and there on the side of it was the word Detroit in big blocky letters.
Dan thought, Detroit? What on God’s earth would she want me to do in Detroit? But even as he thought it something in his gut began to guess her purpose.
