“We did,” I said.
“What happened to it?”
I shrugged. “It quit goin’.”
“It did, didn’t it? Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.”
“Sometimes I wish a lot of things,” I said.
She leaned back in the seat and opened her purse and got out a cigarette and lit it, then rolled down the window. She remembered I didn’t like cigarette smoke. I never had got on the tobacco. It took your wind and it stunk and it made your breath bad too. I hated when it got in my clothes.
“You’re the only one I could tell this to,” she said. “The only one that would listen to me and not think I been with the needle in my arm. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“Sure, baby, I know.”
“I sound to you like I been bad?”
“Naw. You sound all right. I mean, you’re talkin’ a little odd, but not like you’re out of your head.”
“Drunk?”
“Nope. Just like you had a bad dream and want to tell someone.”
“That’s closer,” she said. “That ain’t it, but that’s much closer than any needle or whiskey or wine.”
Alma May’s place is on the outskirts of town. It’s the one thing she got out of life that ain’t bad. It’s not a mansion. It’s small, but its tight and bright in the daylight, all painted up a canary yellow color with deep blue trim. It didn’t look bad in the moonlight.
Alma May didn’t work with a pimp. She didn’t need one. She was well-known around town. She had her clientele. They were all safe, she told me once. About a third of them were white folks from on the other side of the tracks, up there in the proper part of Tyler Town. What she had besides them was a dead mother and a runaway father, and a brother, Tootie, who liked to travel around, play blues, and suck that bottle. He was always needing something, and Alma May, in spite of her own demons, had always managed to make sure he got it.
That was another reason me and her had to split the sheets. That brother of hers was a grown-ass man, and he lived with his mother and let her tote his water. When the mama died, he sort of went to pieces. Alma May took the mama’s part over, keeping Tootie in whiskey and biscuits, even bought him a guitar. He lived off her whoring money, and it didn’t bother him none. I didn’t like him. But I will say this. That boy could play the blues.
When we were inside her house, she unpinned her hat from her hair and sailed it across the room and into a chair.
She said, “You want a drink?”
“I ain’t gonna say no, long as it ain’t too weak, and be sure to put it in a dirty glass.”
She smiled. I watched from the living room doorway as she went and got a bottle out from under the kitchen sink, showing me how tight that dress fit across her bottom when she bent over. She pulled some glasses off a shelf, poured and brought me a stiff one. We drank a little of it, still standing, leaning against the door frame between living room and kitchen. We finally sat on the couch. She sat on the far end, just to make sure I remembered why we were there. She said, “It’s Tootie.”
I swigged down the drink real quick, said, “I’m gone.”
As I went by the couch, she grabbed my hand. “Don’t be that way, baby.”
“Now I’m baby,” I said.
“Hear me out, honey. Please. You don’t owe me, but can you pretend you do?”
“Hell,” I said, and went and sat down on the couch.
She moved, said, “I want you to listen.”
“All right,” I said.
“First off, I can’t pay you. Except maybe in trade.”
“Not that way,” I said. “You and me, we do this, it ain’t trade. Call it a favor.”
I do a little detective stuff now and then for folks I know, folks that recommended me to others. I don’t have a license. Black people couldn’t get a license to shit broken glass in this town. But I was pretty good at what I did. I learned it the hard way. And not all of it was legal. I guess I’m a kind of private eye. Only I’m really private. I’m so private I might be more of a secret eye.
“Best thing to do is listen to this,” she said. “It cuts back on some explanation.”
There was a little record player on a table by the window, a stack of records. She went over and opened the player box and turned it on. The record she wanted was already on it. She lifted up the needle and set it right, stepped back, and looked at me.
She was oh so fine. I looked at her and thought maybe I should have stuck with her, brother or no brother. She could melt butter from ten feet away, way she looked.
And then the music started to play.
IT WAS TOOTIE’S VOICE. I RECOGNIZED THAT RIGHT AWAY. I HAD HEARD HIM plenty. Like I said, he wasn’t much as a person, willing to do anything so he could lay back and play that guitar, slide a pocket knife along the strings to squeal out just the right sound, but he was good at the blues; of that, there ain’t no denying.
His voice was high and lonesome, and the way he played that guitar, it was hard to imagine how he could get the sounds out of it he got.
“You brought me over here to listen to records?” I said.
She shook her head. She lifted up the needle, stopped the record, and took it off. She had another in a little paper cover, and she took it out and put it on, dropped the needle down.
“Now listen to this.”
First lick or two, I could tell right off it was Tootie, but then there came a kind of turn in the music, where it got so strange the hair on the back of my neck stood up. And then Tootie started to sing, and the hair on the back of my hands and arms stood up. The air in the room got thick and the lights got dim, and shadows crawled out of the corners and sat on the couch with me. I ain’t kidding about that part. The room was suddenly full of them, and I could hear what sounded like a bird, trapped at the ceiling, fluttering fast and hard, looking for a way out.
Then the music changed again, and it was like I had been dropped down a well, and it was a long drop, and then it was like those shadows were folding around me in a wash of dirty water. The room stunk of something foul. The guitar no longer sounded like a guitar, and Tootie’s voice was no longer like a voice. It was like someone dragging a razor over concrete while trying to yodel with a throat full of glass. There was something inside the music; something that squished and scuttled and honked and raved, something unsettling, like a snake in a satin glove.
“Cut it off,” I said.
But Alma May had already done it.
She said, “That’s as far as I’ve ever let it go. It’s all I can do to move to cut it off. It feels like it’s getting more powerful the more it plays. I don’t want to hear the rest of it. I don’t know if I can take it. How can that be, Richard? How can that be with just sounds?”
I was actually feeling weak, like I’d just come back from a bout with the flu and someone had beat my ass. I said, “More powerful? How do you mean?”
“Ain’t that what you think? Ain’t that how it sounds? Like it’s getting stronger?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“And the room—”
“The shadows?” I said. “I didn’t just imagine it?”
“No,” she said. “Only every time I’ve heard it, it’s been a little different. The notes get darker, the guitar licks, they cut something inside me, and each time it’s something different and something deeper. I don’t know if it makes me feel good or it makes me feel bad, but it sure makes me feel.”
“Yeah,” I said, because I couldn’t find anything else to say.
“Tootie sent me that record. He sent a note that said: Play it when you have to. That’s what it said. That’s all it said. What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know, but I got to wonder why Tootie would send it to you in the first place. Why would he want you to hear something makes you almost sick . . . And how in hell could he do that, make that kind of sound, I mean?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Someday, I’m gonna play it all the way through.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said.
“Why?”