Jesus Out to Sea

“I won’t, I promise,” I said, and wondered what we were fixing to get into.

I soon found out. Kitty Lamar Rochon’s voice could make the devil join the Baptist Church. When she and Eddy Ray did a number together, the dancers stopped and gathered around the bandstand as if angels had descended into their midst. It didn’t take long for Eddy Ray to develop a very strong attraction for the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City. No, that doesn’t describe it. It was more like he’d been run over by a train. So how do you tell your best friend he’s been suckered and poleaxed by the town pump? Nope, “town pump” isn’t the right term, either.

There was a chain of whorehouses that ran all the way along the Texas and Louisiana coast, all of them run by two Italian crime families that operated out of Galveston and New Orleans. How does a girl as pretty as Kitty Lamar end up in a cathouse? Believe it or not, most of the girls in those places were good-looking, some of them even beautiful. It was the times. Poor people didn’t always have the choices they got today. Don’t ask me how I know about this stuff, either.

So I didn’t say diddly-squat to Eddy Ray. But, man, was it eating my lunch. For example, one week after Johnny Ace capped himself (or had somebody do it for him), we were blowing down the road in Eddy Ray’s ’49 Hudson, headed toward our next gig, a town up in Arkansas that was so small it was located between two Burma Shave signs. Kitty Lamar was lying down in the backseat, airing her bare feet, with the toenails painted red, out the window. She was popping bubble gum and reading a book on, get this, French existentialism, and commenting on it while she turned the pages. Then out of nowhere she lowered her book and said, “I wish you’d stop giving me them strange looks, R.B.”

“Excuse me,” I said.

“What’s with you two?” Eddy Ray said, one hand on the wheel, a deck of Lucky Strikes wrapped in the sleeve of his T-shirt.

The previous night at the motel I’d heard her talking on the phone to the Greaser. It was obvious to me Kitty Lamar and the Greaser had known each other for some time and I’m talking about in the biblical sense. Eddy Ray had evidently decided to let bygones be bygones, but in my opinion she kept doing things that were highly suspicious. For example again, she loved fried oysters and catfish po’boy sandwiches. Then we’d be playing a gig around Memphis and she wouldn’t touch a fish or shrimp or oyster dinner with a dung fork. Why is this significant? The Greaser was notorious for not allowing his punch of the day to eat anything that smelled of fish. Is that sick or what?

“Why don’t we stop at that seafood joint up the road yonder and tank down a few deep-fried catfish sandwiches?” I said. “I know Kitty Lamar would dearly appreciate one.”

She gave me a look that would scald the paint off a battleship.

“It doesn’t matter to me one way or another, because I don’t eat seafood this far inland,” she said, her nose pointed in her book.

“Why is that, Kitty Lamar?” I asked, turning around in the seat, my face full of interest.

“Because that’s how you get ptomaine poison. Most people who went past the eighth grade know that. Have you ever applied for a public library card, R.B.? When we get back to Houston, I’ll show you how to fill out the form.”

“Am I the only sane person in this car?” Eddy Ray said.

On Saturday night we played a ramshackle dance hall in the Arkansas Delta, just west of the Mississippi Bridge. Snow was blowing and Christmas lights were strung all over the outside of the building, so that the place glowed like a colored jewel inside the darkness. The tables and bar and dance floor were crowded with people who belie

ved the live country music shows from Shreveport, Nashville, and Wheeling, West Virginia, represented a world of magic and celebrity and wealth that was hardly imaginable to them. Probably everybody in our band had grown up chopping cotton and picking ticks off themselves in a sluice of well water from a windmill pump, but onstage, here in the Delta, or a hundred places like it, we were sprinkled with stardust and maybe even immortality.

You know the secret to being a rockabilly or country music celebrity? It’s not just the sequins on your clothes and the needle-nosed, mirror-shined boots. Your music has to be full of sorrow, I mean just like the blood-flecked, broken body of Jesus on the Cross. When people go to the Assembly of God Church and look up at that Cross, the pain they see there isn’t in Jesus’ body, it’s in their own lives. I’m talking about droughts, dust storms, mine blowouts, black lung disease, or pulling cotton bolls or breaking corn till the tips of their fingers bleed. I went to school with kids who wore clothes sewn from Purina feed sacks. Eddy Ray was one of them. What I’m trying to say is we come from a class of people who think of misery as a given. They just want somebody who’s had a degree of success to treat them with respect.

We’d all been in the dumps since Johnny died, me more than anybody, although I couldn’t tell you exactly why. It was like our innocence had died with him. In fact, I felt sick thinking about it. I’d look over at the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City and hear that peckerwood accent, which sounded like somebody pulling a strand of baling wire through a tiny hole in a tin can, and I’d flat want to lie down on the highway and let a hog truck run over my head. A group of Yankees by the name of Bill Haley and the Comets were calling themselves the founders of rock ’n’ roll and we were playing towns where families in need of excitement drove out on the highway to look at the new Coca-Cola billboard. And Johnny was dead, maybe not by his own hand, and his friends had gotten a whole lot of gone between him and them.

But that night in the Arkansas Delta, with the dancers shaking the whole building, it was like we were young again, unmarked by death, and the earth was green and so was the country and wonderful things were about to happen for all of us. We didn’t take a break for two hours. When Eddy Ray ripped out Albert Ammons’s “Swanee River Boogie” on the piano, the place went zonk. Then we kicked it up into E-major overdrive with Hank’s “Lovesick Blues” and Red Foley’s “Tennessee Saturday Night,” Eddy Ray and Kitty Lamar sharing the vocals. I got to admit it, the voices of those two could have started a new religion.

The snow stopped and a big brown moon came up over the hills, just as Guess Who walked in. You got it. The Greaser himself, along with Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee, all three of them decked out in sport coats, two-tone shoes, and slacks with knife-edged creases, their open-neck print shirts crisp and right out of the box. They sat at a front-row table and ordered long-neck beers and French-fried potatoes cooked in chicken fat. In less than two minutes half the women in the place were jiggling and turning around in their chairs like they’d just been fed horse laxative.

“What’s he doing here?” Eddy Ray said.

Duh, I thought. But all I said was, “He’s probably just tagging along with Jerry Lee and Carl. Sure is a nice night, isn’t it?”

Then Kitty Lamar came back from the ladies’ can and said, her eyes full of pure blue innocence, as though she had no idea the Greaser was going to be there: “Look, all the fellows from Sun Records are here. Are you gonna introduce them, Eddy Ray?”

Eddy Ray looked through the side window at the moon. The hills were sparkling with snow, the sky black and bursting with stars. “I haven’t given real thought to it,” he said. “Maybe you should introduce them, Kitty Lamar. Maybe you could sing a duet. Or maybe even do a three-or a foursome.”

“How’d you like to get your face slapped?” she replied, chewing gum, rolling her eyes.

Eddy Ray pulled the mike loose from the stand, kicking a lot of dirty electronic feedback into the speaker system, like fingernails raking down a blackboard. His cheeks were flushed with color that had the irregular shape of fire, his eyes dark in a way I had not seen them before. He asked Carl and Jerry Lee and the Greaser to stand up, then he paused, as though he couldn’t find the proper words to say. The whole joint was as quiet as a church house. I could feel sweat breaking on my forehead, because I knew the pain Eddy Ray was experiencing, and I knew the memories from the war that lived in his dreams, and I’d always believed part of him died in that prisoner-of-war camp south of the Yalu. I believed Eddy Ray carried a stone bruise in his heart, and if he felt he had been betrayed by the people he loved, he was capable of doing bad things, maybe not to others, but certainly to Eddy Ray. It wasn’t coincidence that he and Johnny Ace had been pals.

The floor lights on the stage were wrapped with amber and yellow cellophane, but they seemed to burn red circles into my eyes. Jerry Lee and Carl were starting to look uncomfortable and the crowd was, too, like something really embarrassing was about to happen.

“Say something!” Kitty Lamar whispered.

But Eddy Ray just kept staring at the Greaser, like he was seeing his past or himself or maybe our whole generation before we went to war.

The Greaser glanced sideways, scratched at a place under one eye, then started to sit down.

“These guys are not only great musicians,” Eddy Ray began, “they’re three of the best guys I ever knew. It’s an honor to have them here tonight. It’s an honor to be their friend. They make me proud to be an American.”