Bone Music

by Alan Rodgers

  He didn’t like it. Not one bit.

  As Dan passed the water tower the trainyard opened out into a wicked slum — a city built of paint-peeling wooden houses and run-down brick-face stores and uncertain structures falling in on their foundations. Even in the cloudless-bright summer morning there was a dankness about the place, a night-quiet foreboding that hung above the city, promising collapse.

  When he’d gone a few blocks Dan began to think he should turn back, find himself another train, and hobo south to find a more inviting city. A few blocks after that he was sure he should turn back, and twice he stopped and turned around — and hesitated. And thought of the Lady, and remembered what she needed from him. And turned back around to walk deeper and deeper into the crumbling city.

  Three miles from the trainyard Dan Alvarez saw the Lady standing in the shadows of a dead-end alley, beckoning to him. Dan didn’t hesitate an instant. He ran to her, ran to throw himself before her, promise her his service, beg her for her mercy.

  But she disappeared again before he reached her.

  And where she’d stood a vagabond lay death-still and wheezing half-covered with garbage from the overturned barrel beside him.

  “Man,” Dan Alvarez said. “Oh man.”

  He knew what the Lady meant him to do. Of course he knew! It was as obvious as obvious gets — no matter how disgusting it was.

  Too damn gross. Too damn gross to think about, let alone to do.

  “Mister?” Dan called to the bum. “You’ve got to wake up, mister.”

  The drunk didn’t answer. Didn’t even stir. He was too far gone — drugged or drunk or deep asleep or something, Dan didn’t want to know, didn’t even want to think about it.

  He stooped, leaned in close to whisper into the man’s ear.

  “Mister!”

  But that didn’t wake the man, no more than shouting at him had. Dan put his hands on the man’s shoulders and shook him, but that didn’t wake him either.

  “Damn. Damn damn damn.”

  Is he dead? Dan wondered. Why would she send me after a dead man?

  He couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Unless she meant him to take the body to a morgue?

  No, he wasn’t dead, couldn’t be dead — there, listen, he was wheezing again. Dead men don’t wheeze, do they?

  Dan knew they didn’t, knew they couldn’t possibly. But he didn’t find the knowledge reassuring.

  He put his hands under the man’s shoulders, lifted his stinking vomitous body to carry him over his shoulder.

  Damn!

  And carried him out of the shadowy alley, into the day.

  In the light of day with the clean summer breeze carrying away the stink, Dan noticed how cold the body was, as if it really were the body of a dead man. And he was so light, too — he was a full-grown man, and not a young one, either, but he weighed no heavier than a child on Dan’s shoulder.

  Maybe he is dead, Dan thought — and then the vagabond began to mumble half-intelligibly.

  What was he saying? Dan could almost make out the words — almost, not quite, and he said “What’s that?” but the derelict didn’t answer. The moment he heard Dan speak to him the man went silent.

  Dan carried the man four blocks before he spotted the dive hotel. It was a broke-down sleazy motel place with a big sign out front that said this was the Dew Tell Motel, and God that place was gross, but if they hadn’t been so gross they never would have let Dan check in with that stinking vomitous drunk man weighing on his shoulder.

  But they were what they were, and they took Dan’s money, and he thanked God for them.

  Dan hauled the drunk across the parking lot to his room, room 5C. It wasn’t clean in there, but it was lots cleaner than Dan or the vagabond, so he carried the man straight into the bathroom and set him in the tub instead of setting him on the bed.

  Took the guitar off his other shoulder, and set it carefully in the back corner of the closet. Closed the closet door to hide the guitar, and went back to the bathroom to look at the derelict.

  He’s filthy, Dan thought. I’ve got to clean him, give him a shave, get some clean clothes on him.

  The drunk farted loudly, and his gas made an emphatic, almost derisive sound against the tub. It almost made Dan think he was responding to Dan’s thoughts.

  “Fart all you want,” Dan said. “I’m going to clean you up. If I’ve got to have anything to do with you, I’m going to get rid of that damned stink.”

  He went to the tub, lifted the man’s slack body, and undressed him. He was even lighter and colder than he’d seemed when Dan had carried him — so cold and empty that if he wasn’t dead he was seriously ill, and maybe Dan ought to get him to the hospital. . . .

  . . . .shit-smeared shorts; skin everywhere crusted with flaky scunge. . . .

  Well, maybe he had to get the man to a doctor. But first he was going to get him clean enough to touch. Dan tossed the last of the man’s clothes onto the bathroom floor and turned on the hot water tap; pushed the faucet upward to engage the shower head.

  Stepped away and let the streaming water begin to wash the vagabond clean.

  It didn’t go very fast. Some of that crud was so thick it’d take hours for the water to wear it away.

  He glanced at the pile of filth-encrusted clothes, trying to figure out how he was going to get them clean. And realized there was just no way. Even if he’d had a laundry to wash them in, they were so filthy that he could wash them over and over a dozen times and the things would still show stains, and maybe they’d just fall apart. He’s going to need new clothes, Dan thought. He looked at his own shirt and slacks, which were ragged and filthy from the fire in his apartment, from the run through burning Los Angeles, from the days-long journey by boxcar. I need clothes, too. There was a rummage store a couple blocks back — he remembered passing it just a few moments after he’d carried the derelict out of the alley. But I can’t leave him here, can I?

  The derelict lay unconscious in the tub, oblivious to Dan, to the steamy water streaming down on him, oblivious to the world.

  He isn’t going anywhere, Dan thought. And he was right, too.

  But even so he hurried. Out the motel-room door; across the sun-warm blacktop of the motel parking lot; a block and a half down the street to the secondhand store.

  He found shirts and shorts in the rag bin — they were stained and tattered, but cheap as they could be, because the store sold rags by the pound. Slacks were harder, because he had to guess the derelict’s size more carefully — he spent a couple minutes looking through the stacks of work pants before he realized there was no way he could guess a 37” 29” from a 35” 30”. And gave up, and grabbed a pair that looked more-or-less right and a pair of suspenders to make the difference work.

  Carried the clothes to the counter, still rushing, grabbed a couple of disposable razors from a bin beside the register. As he worried about the passed-out bum soaking in the water, and what if he drowned?, and Dan knew he had to hurry. . . .

  Until he got to the counter and saw the old woman.

  There was something remarkable about that woman. Something — divine. Oh, you couldn’t see it by the way she looked. When Dan first saw her he thought she was a bag lady like a thousand other bag ladies he’d seen across the years — filthy, old, and worn; eyes that glittered crazy like she’d missed her medication three days running; there was a tiny drop of spittle leaking out the left corner of her mouth.

  But no matter what he saw when he looked at her, when Dan stood before her at the counter he could feel the same majesty and grace he felt when the Santa came to him.

  He set his purchases on the counter before her with the same supplication that a worshiper offers up a sacrifice, and waited for her to respond.

  But she didn’t
respond. She stood at the counter staring at him, weighing him as the Santa had weighed him.

  After a while she smiled at him, and Dan thought he would cry.

  “You’re an angel, aren’t you?” Dan asked.

  He knew the truth before she even began to answer him: he could see through to her heart, no matter how she looked at first. It didn’t matter that she wore the strangest smile on her worn and filthy face; that her skin was blotched and mottled with sickly-looking blemishes; that there were wide dark gaps in her mouth where three teeth should have been.

  Nothing could disguise her from him. Not even the stinking, filthy overcoat, six months out of season.

  “If you need those things, Dan Alvarez,” the angel said, “they’re yours. Go with God. Follow your heart.”

  And then Dan stood alone in an empty, abandoned shop. All the secondhand store goods were gone, and the windows were boarded over, and if it weren’t for the door ripped half off its hinges Dan never would have got himself out of that place.

  When he got back to the hotel room Dan Alvarez found the tub clogged with grit. There was filthy water spilling out all over the bathroom floor, and if it hadn’t been for the extra drain in the center of the floor there would have been an awful mess to mop.

  But there was a drain, and the floor wasn’t any problem, not really. The real problem was the vagabond — he was bobbing around in the water like a drowned man when Dan got to him, and the water was up over his face sometimes and sometimes not, and he’d took a lot of water down his lungs, to judge the way he coughed when Dan pulled him up out of the water.

  So much water down his lungs. Coughing and coughing it up as Dan pounded on his back. But the coughing didn’t seem to wake him, and the pounding didn’t either, and Dan began to think the poor sot would’ve drowned without even noticing he was about to die, and then he thought ha ha what if he’s already dead, you can’t drown ‘em when they’re already dead, and he almost started to laugh at that till he realized there was something very wrong, something very very wrong. Because the guy just coughed up more water than anyone could breathe in and survive, and what the hell was going on?

  What the hell?

  Crazy, all of it was crazy. Dan couldn’t make any sense of it. How could anybody. . . ?

  Dan couldn’t figure. There wasn’t any way to figure, and no point trying when the business at hand was so awful — the filth, the matted hair everywhere on his body, and Dan pulled three big clots of filth away from the drain but the tub still clogged again.

  Cleared the drain again, got the soap and a washcloth, and began to try to scrub the derelict clean.

  Hard, disgusting work. Damn near hopeless work, but Dan kept at it, and slowly, slowly the derelict came clean.

  Soaped down the man’s hair, rinsed it, soaped and rinsed it again. Pushed it back, out of the way; grabbed one of the disposable razors from the place he’d left it by the sink.

  Soaped the face and scraped away the bristly beard, bit by bit by bit.

  When he was halfway done shaving the man, he had an awful laugh.

  He looks like Elvis, Dan thought. Imagine that! Like something from the headlines on a supermarket tabloid, I Found Elvis — Miracle in Detroit, and Dan had another laugh. What a joke, I Found Elvis. Ha ha.

  Scraping and scraping with the razor, and two, maybe three times Dan thought he cut the man, but he never bled. When he was done Dan soaped and cleaned the man’s face one final time, then turned off the water and let the tub drain. When it was empty he patted the man dry with a towel, lifted him out of the tub, and carried him to the chair on the far side of the hotel room.

  He did his best to dress the man. But it wasn’t easy — he was all slack and wobbly, and putting clothes on him was like trying to shovel air into a sack.

  Shirt over his head; shorts, slacks —

  And something in all that pushing and pulling must’ve shaken the man more than half-drowning in the tub, because suddenly his eyes were open.

  “What they hell you trying to do to me?” the man asked.

  And Dan gasped.

  “I said, ‘What you doing?’”

  And gasped again.

  “Huh? What are you, some kind of a pervert?”

  “Just getting you dressed, that’s all.”

  Because Dan knew that voice, and he could never ever ever mistake it.

  “You ought to show a little respect.”

  The voice was Elvis’s voice, and no matter how impossible that was — no matter how Elvis was twenty years and more dead and buried on the grounds of his Graceland mansion, it was Elvis and no other who spoke to Dan.

  “Elvis. . . ?”

  The man’s eyes brightened for a moment — and then suddenly his expression became querulous and uncertain.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “What do you want?”

  Dan blinked. “I don’t want nothing,” he said. “I just found you passed out in an alley, that’s all. I figured I ought to help.”

  “I bet you want to help,” the deadman said. He snorted derisively. “You and everybody else.”

  Memphis, Tennessee - Robert Johnson

  September 1952

  Robert Johnson never got back to the Mountain. He never got farther than the West Memphis train station, in fact — he climbed off the bus from Memphis just as the southbound train was getting in, and before he got from the ticket counter to the train the whole damn station went thick with hoodoo, and Robert Johnson turned around to see the deadmen climbing off the train — hundreds of them. Hoodoo Doctors, Kings, Ma Rainey, even ordinary bluesmen, every solitary one of them from up and down the Mississippi valley — all of them all of them climbing off the southbound train.

  Robert Johnson wandered away from the ticket window, staring at the hoodoo men, watching them intently to try to understand. . . .

  Wandered down the platform, still staring, as dozens of Hoodoo Doctors hurried past him.

  John Henry was the last one off the last car of the train. He was carrying his own bags, acting like anybody, anybody alive or dead anybody at all, and you’d never know he was the wellspring of ten thousand legends, but Robert Johnson knew him.

  He could never forget that man. Never. He knew the sight of him as well as he knew the shadow of his own heart.

  The great King saw Robert Johnson, too. He nodded to him as he climbed down the train steps, and greeted him when he got close.

  “Let me carry that,” Robert Johnson said, because it was a burden he knew he had to share.

  The great King shook his head. “I carry for myself,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask no one to tote for me.”

  Robert Johnson nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “Of course.”

  Ma Rainey spoke up from somewhere behind him.

  “You know it is,” she said. “Just like the Bible’s right.”

  “Blind Willie give you the song?” the great King said.

  Robert Johnson nodded. “He did,” he said. Somewhere deep inside him he wondered how the King knew he’d gone to see Blind Willie, but deeper still he knew the reason why: the King was in his heart, and Robert Johnson in the King’s, and there’s a natural sort of knowledge that goes with that kind of sharing.

  “Good,” the King said. “I knew I could count on you.”

  And then he started down the platform, hurrying toward a place and a destiny Robert Johnson couldn’t imagine. When he was gone thirty yards he turned back to face Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey, and called to them.

  “Come on,” he said. “Ain’t no time to waste.”

  And then he turned to start away so quickly Robert Johnson had to run to stay with him.

  Detroit, Michigan - The Present

  The deadman Elvis got quiet after Dan figured out who he was. He straigh
tened out his shirt and folded his arms and sat there in the chair glowering at Dan for the longest time, and after a while Dan realized that he wasn’t going to say another word. So he left the deadman sitting in the hotel-room chair and went to the bathroom for his shower.

  Took a long damn while to get clean. He wasn’t as deep-down filthy as the deadman had been, but he was dirtier than he’d ever been before.

  That happens to men who ride the rails by boxcar — the land gets into them, and they have to scrub and scrub if they ever want to get it out.

  He never did get completely clean, but he got close enough — clean enough not to stink in polite company. When he was done he put on the clothes he’d found at the secondhand store and left the bathroom wondering if the derelict would still be there.

  He was, of course.

  When Dan got out of the bathroom he found the deadman sitting on the edge of the hotel bed. In his arms he held the dream guitar — the magic hammer that the Lady brought to Dan as he slept in the boxcar two nights before.

  The deadman looked up at Dan as Dan approached him.

  “Hell of an instrument,” he said.

  He picked at the strings with his cold, dry hands.

  “It is,” Dan said.

  “I always loved it,” the deadman said.

  Dan nodded. “I can see why,” he said. “She had me bring that for you, didn’t she?”

  The deadman shook his head. “No, no — she took it from me years and years ago. It’s been a long time since I’ve held it.”

  He was picking “Love Me Tender,” and Dan half expected him to croon, but he didn’t, thank God. Bad enough he had to play a song like that on the great King’s guitar; Dan knew he couldn’t bear to hear him sing as well.

  “Play something real,” Dan said. “Play — I don’t know. — Play ‘Jailhouse Rock.’ Play something boogie-woogie.”

  The deadman’s hands went slack, and his shoulders sagged; he looked up at Dan with an expression — like someone had hit him, or worse. “Damn you,” he said. “Damn your eyes.”