and drank from the neck.
“Johnny and me was both in the United States Navy, ammunition loaders, can you dig that?” he said. “You know who was loading right next to me? Harry Belafonte. That’s no jive, man.”
But Eddy Ray wasn’t listening. “Our agent says he doesn’t want trouble with you. So if you’re not the problem, why is Leon telling us that?” Eddy Ray said.
The sunlight through the window seemed to grow warmer, more harsh, in spite of the fan, the air suddenly close and full of dust particles and the smell of hair tonic from the shop up front. “’Cause Leon is like most crackers. If he ain’t got a colored man to blame for his grief, he got to look in the mirror and put it on his own sorry-ass self.”
Eddy Ray leaned forward in his chair and stuck an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth, fishing in his jeans for a match. His hair was uncut, wet and combed straight back, curly on the back of his neck. “Give us another R&B gig.”
“The train went through the station and you ain’t caught it, man. Wish it’d been different, but it ain’t,” Cool Daddy said.
Eddy Ray found a book of matches but lost his concentration and put them away. He took the Lucky Strike out of his mouth and brushed at his nose with the back of his wrist. “I’ll put it another way. If you cain’t see your way to hep us, just stay the hell out of our sandbox,” he said.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” Cool Daddy replied, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Get what?”
“I ain’t the power in this game. Who you think screwed you on the circuit, boy? Who got that kind of power?”
Eddy Ray’s eyes blinked, but not in time to hide the glow of recognition in them.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Cool Daddy said. “The word is your lady friend been bad-mouthing you with certain people at Sun Record Company. The word is they don’t like you, motherfucker, particularly a certain boy from Mis-’sippi don’t like you.”
Cool Daddy pinched his temples, like he was struggling not to hurt the feelings of dumb white people such as ourselves. “Let me strap it on you, boy. I thought maybe she was leaking info about me to the cops, so I had a detective get ahold of her phone records.” Then he mentioned the name of a powerful man he said Kitty Lamar had phoned repeatedly at Sun Records. “I don’t know what you done to her, but I think she fixed yo’ ass good.”
The only sound in the room was the vibration of the electric fan. Eddy Ray’s eyes looked like brown pools that someone had filled with black silt.
“He was lying,” I said when we were outside.
“You’re the one who told me Kitty Lamar was a Judas. You cain’t have it both ways, R.B.”
“I’m going out west,” I said.
We were in traffic, headed toward Eddy Ray’s house in the Heights section of North Houston, oak trees sweeping by us on wide boulevards, where termite-eaten nineteenth-century houses with wide galleries sat gray and hot-looking in the shade. I couldn’t believe what I’d just said and the implication it had for my friendship with Eddy Ray. He finally lit the cigarette he’d been fiddling with since Cool Daddy’s office.
“Am I invited?” he asked.
“Nobody can help you, Eddy Ray. You don’t think you should have survived the war and I think you’re aiming to take both of us down.”
“Sorry to hear you say that.” He flipped the dead paper match into the traffic.
I got out of the Hudson at the red light and went into the first bar I could find. Lone Star and Jax beer might seem like poor solace for busted careers and lost friendships, but I figured if I drank enough of it, it would have to count for something. And that’s exactly what I did, full-tilt, for the next six months.
I also spent some time in the Houston City Jail for my third arrest as a public drunk. I picked watermelons in the Rio Grande Valley and rode a freight train west and cut lettuce in El Centro. I played Dobro for tips in bars on East Fifth Street in Los Angeles, followed the wheat harvest all the way to Saskatoon, and ended up on Larimer Street in Denver, where I met Cisco Houston and played as a guest on his syndicated radio show, right before he got blacklisted.
I saw the country from the bottom side up. I may have married a three-hundred-pound Indian woman on the Southern Ute Reservation, but I can’t be sure, because by the time I sobered up from all the peyote buttons I’d eaten, I was in an uncoupled boxcar full of terrified illegal farm-workers, roaring at eighty miles an hour down Raton Pass into New Mexico. And that’s what led to me to one of those moments in life when you finally figure out there are no answers to the big mysteries, like why the innocent suffer, why there’s disease and war, and all that kind of stuff. I also figured out that what we call our destiny is usually determined by two or three casual decisions which on the surface seem about as important as spitting your gum through a sewer grate.
The sky was still black and sprinkled with stars when I crawled off the boxcar at the bottom of the grade in Raton. Then the sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire countryside looked soaked in blood, the arroyos deep in shadow, the cones of dead volcanoes stark and biscuit-colored against the sky. I could smell pinion trees, wet sage, woodsmoke, cattle in the pastures, and creek water that had melted from snow. I could smell the way the country probably was when it was only a dream in the mind of God.
I found a bar by the railway tracks but didn’t go in. Instead, I walked down to a café built out of stucco, networked with heat cracks, where a bunch of Mexican gandy walkers were eating breakfast. I had one dollar and seven cents in my pocket, enough to order scrambled eggs, a pork sausage patty, fried spuds, and coffee, and to leave a dime tip.
While I sipped coffee, I thumbed through a three-day-old copy of an Albuquerque newspaper. On an inside page was a story about none other than the Greaser. I had read enough stories about the Greaser’s career to last me a lifetime, but in the third paragraph was a statement that was like a thumbtack in the eye. According to the reporter, the Greaser had left Sun Records at least a year ago and had signed a managerial deal with a guy who used to be a carnival barker.
“You okay, hon?” the waitress said to me. She was a big redheaded woman with upper arms like cured hams, and perfume you could probably smell all the way to Flagstaff.
“Me? I’m fine. Except for the fact I’m probably the dumbest sonofabitch who ever walked into your café,” I said.
“No, that was my ex-husband. There’s some showers for truck drivers in back. It’s on the house,” she said. She winked at me. “Hang around, cowboy.”