“How’d you know he’s dead?”
“Bobby Lee Cook told me a while back. Said Clyde finally done and shot hisself.”
“How’d he know?”
“Bobby Lee Cook, man. He ran Clyde’s label, Bluff City.”
I remembered Loretta mentioning his name.
Everything was wet in the back alley. Trash. Chicken bones. Somewhere in the distance a child screamed, and then starting laughing.
“Goddamn! What the fuck was that?”
I peered beyond a high fence, but could only see endless rows of dilapidated houses occasionally shining with yellow bug lights.
“Man, that scared the cat shit out of me,” Cleve said, with a touch of anger in his voice. He laughed and held on to his chest in a Fred G. Sanford move. “Dude, you said you write about music?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you find me?”
“You know Tad Pierson?”
“Yep.”
“He’s the one.”
“Well, listen,” Cleve said. “Me and the fellas in there are puttin’ out a CD in a few months. You got a card or somethin’?”
I handed him one embossed with the Tulane logo, not bothering to tell him I was a researcher and did little reviewing. “What was he like?”
“Oh, that was like another lifetime ago,” Cleve said and sighed, playing with the loose ends of his long, greasy hair. “I don’t know. Man kept to himself. For most of the time I knew him, he wouldn’t say shit. He’d play cards alone in the back of his tour bus or make these weird little drawings of heaven and hell. Real strange. The devil he drew was always a good-lookin’ woman… I guess the only time I saw him come alive was when his manager or handler or whatever would put a suit on him and push him out on that stage. He never had that holy rollin’ kind of thing like Otis or Sam and Dave, and that’s probably why he wasn’t a big star. But just for pure singin’, man could sing clear as a church bell. Makes the hair raise on the back of my neck to think about it.”
I finished the cigarette and ground it under my boot. The front of my T-shirt was soaked in sweat and the cold wind began to make me shiver. Cleve kept on sucking on the joint until it burned his fingers and he dropped it to the wet ground.
“So what happened to him?”
“Everything got crazy for us when Eddie died,” he said. “We were changin’, the music was gettin’ rougher. No one wanted to hear “When a Man Loves a Woman.” People wanted to hear “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” About that time, Clyde gone and got this new manager, just a kid, really, who didn’t know how to handle his problems. I mean Clyde had always been crazy, but after his wife and Eddie died and all those rumors started…”
“What rumors?”
“That the baby was Eddie’s. You know she was pregnant when she got killed?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Clyde just kind of split. You know in these slivers. You had happy Clyde, sad Clyde, mean Clyde, all in about five minutes. We couldn’t deal with it anymore and he was gettin’ freaky on stage, too.”
“How?”
“Forgettin’ words. Talkin’ to himself. You name it, brother.”
“Did you know his wife?”
“Lord, I was never too much into black women. But if you talk to Tate, that country ass will tell you another story. But me, not that I was prejudiced or nothin’, it just didn’t appeal to me. But Mary – wow. She had this beautiful dark skin and these wide almond-shaped eyes and these legs never did end. I still don’t know how Clyde got her. When he wasn’t on stage he was just plain weird. She treated him like he was a little boy or somethin’. Like this one time we were playin’ this hotel in Montgomery. Clyde just started cryin’. We were all havin’ a good time listening to this football game on the radio and drinkin’ vodka martinis, ’cause we thought we were pretty hip in our mohair suits and all. But Clyde all of sudden has these tears fallin’. His face wasn’t messed up and he wasn’t makin’ a sound. It was just the eyes. Man was carryin’ some dark things.”
Cleve shook his head, used a guitar pick to scratch his bearded chin. You could tell he was back in 1968. He was in his twenties, the women were dancing with loose hips, and he was living in the center of a cultural explosion.
“You see him much after you guys split?”
“I haven’t seen Clyde James since ‘seventy-three,” he said, staring down the long stretch of alley. His eyes closed for a moment and then opened as if waking from a lengthy nap. “But you know what? Whatever I do, I’ll always just be Clyde James’s guitar player. Only played with him for a couple years. Be on my tombstone, though.” He nodded to the back door of Wild Bill’s. “You hear those cymbals?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Bill doesn’t go for long breaks.”
I asked him for his number in case I had more questions. I was already thinking about my nice, warm bed at the Peabody and maybe getting up early enough to have breakfast at the Arcade. “Go talk to Cook,” Cleve said.
“You know where to find him?”
“Hope you like eggrolls and pussy.”
I looked at him.
“Find the Golden Lotus down by the airport and you’ll understand just fine, my brother.”
Chapter 6
Off Highway 7 near Oxford, Mississippi, Abby MacDonald stared at the house that once held her entire world. Seemed like another lifetime ago when she lived there with her parents. The old house was one-story, broad and white, with a tin roof and wraparound porch. On the corner by the driveway, a wooden swing hung from metal chains. Her mother’s plants and flowers – that had withered and died since late summer – lay by the front door.
Behind the house stood the stables, but the horses had already been taken away. She guessed that her cousin Maggie had picked them up. Their dogs Hank and Merle, too. She remembered what the cop had said about Merle finding them. How he stayed at their side. Whimpering.
From the shoulder of the two-lane, she could just make out the crumbling plywood of her old playhouse in the magnolia tree. A knotted rope hung loose below.
She wished she could climb through its twisted branches, through the white, fragrant flowers, and into the safety of a world she’d created for herself. Up there, she never had any worries. True evil never existed. Only the sweet voice of her mother calling her to dinner, making her leave tins full of mud pies and discarded toys.
Her scarred knees and broad grins were all gone now.
She pulled the keys from the old F150’s ignition and took a deep breath. It was about 5:00 A.M.. Loose traffic blew past her on the way to Holly Springs and Memphis as she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. A weak, predawn light crept around her.
Dark circles rimmed her brown eyes. Her curly blond hair was limp and dirty and her face flat – washed of any color. Any life. Twenty-two years old and already tired of living.
Maybe it was that she was tired of being on the run. For the past two months, she’d existed in a hazy fog in roadside motels and truck stops. No one knew where she’d disappeared. She only wanted to be left alone and for the pain to stop. The days had passed with bottles of cheap wine and a blur of blacktop and scattered yellow median lines.
Being anonymous could be reassuring.
Abby gritted her teeth and got out of her car, a black duffel bag in her hand. The silence was almost too much. Each step she took on her lawn, as she looped to the back of the huge house, was pain.
She remembered how proud her father had been when he’d bought the place back in the late ‘eighties. Always told people he’d renovated it. But, really, he’d just paid the contractor to make some adjustments. There was a large skylight in the kitchen where he cooked his spicy Cajun food, and a sunken room he’d added that he called his theater where he made her watch John Wayne movies on a big-screen television. Big bowl of popcorn, Cokes in those small green bottles.
Never let her just watch the film, always talked about patriotism and true grit.
Seemed like she always wanted to be out with her friends, cruising the Square, or trying to sneak into frat parties. But now she’d give her life just to watch one of those faded, hokey movies with him. The smell of his cheap aftershave. His silly laugh.