“Scared?”
“A little Yeah.”
Maybe five hundred people had come to see the fireworks and to listen to the blues, only a handful of whom were white. “No need to be,” Hugh said. “This is a night of joy.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Juneteenth? Sure. Come on. Let me introduce you to my friend Spider.”
They cut through a gap in an orange mesh fence to reach the backstage platform. Graffiti curled across a splintered picnic table behind a bank of lights: “We are one world of tempted humanity,” “Shit,” “Piss,” “Fuck.”
Spider was guzzling a Lone Star longneck, perched on a metal garbage can next to an ice chest. He wore a straw fedora, shades, and a light pink cotton shirt. A pair of drumsticks was jammed into his back jeans pocket.
At his feet lay a wrinkled newspaper, headlines smeared by water, beer, and mud: “Pentagon Officials Say … apes.”
“Looking good,” Hugh said.
Spider raised his arm. “Feel like a bar of iron, man.”
“Just nail down the beat.” Hugh offered him a Camel.
“Yeah,” said the bass player, a young white college student. “Use your feet.”
“Say, baby, what up?” Spider said to Alice.
She blushed.
“Can’t wait to hear you. We’ll be out front,” Hugh said.
“Break a leg,” Alice said hesitantly.
“Mm-hmm.” Spider looked her up and down. “Rather feel me a nice, firm leg, know what I mean?”
She brought her hand to her throat, started to force a laugh, then turned abruptly and stalked past the picnic table and the lights.
“What I say?” Spider asked. “Sen-si-tive. She royalty or somethin’?”
“Good luck,” Hugh said hastily, then ran, catching Alice at the rip in the mesh. “Hey?”
“I know. I know what you’re going to say. Relax, right? This isn’t the campus.”
“He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“This is just a good-time party. Sexual harassment isn’t sexual harassment here.”
Hugh’s jitters returned. What was he doing with this woman? Spider was right. She was sensitive. Arch, like Paula. He’d seen it in her from the first. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. That’s just Spider. He goofs around a lot.”
“By the way, Hugh, they never mean anything by it.”
“Okay. We’ll listen to one song then go, if you like.”
She smiled, took a big breath. “No. No, I don’t mind staying. It’s just. I’m a little nervous, like I said. I’ll settle down.”
“Sure?”
“I’m sure.”
They wove through the crowd, staying as close to the stage as they could. Each time they cut a path through chatting folks, three or four men followed closely on their heels. Hugh caught only a glimpse of them — baggy shorts and L.A. Lakers shirts — and cursed himself for tensing up. Alice’s fears were contagious.
“Do you ever worry that you’re barging into a world that isn’t really yours?” she asked him now.
“Sure. I worry about it all the time.”
“How do you reconcile yourself?”
“Respect,” he said. “I just try to treat everybody with respect.”
She nodded.
Finally, he found a cool, dry spot about fifteen feet from the amplifiers. He took off his windbreaker and spread it on the ground for Alice.
A radio DJ — Hugh recognized the voice but not the man — took the stage, in front of Spider’s sparkling black drums. “Freedom!” he shouted. The crowd chanted the word. “Friends, we’re here tonight to remind ourselves how steadfast and resilient is the African-American heart! For centuries, it has endured untold indignities — ”
“Tell it!”
“—tragedies — ”
“Say it, brother!”
“—shame — ”
“Amen!”
“—and emerged triumphant!”
A jubilant chorus. Alice gripped Hugh’s hand.
“We must never forget: the price of Liberty is eternal vigilance!”
Applause like small-arms fire, rapid and distinct.
“Now. You ready for some blues?”
“Bring it on, bring it!”
“Welcome back, then, a Houston legend: Spider Lammamoor!”
Spider appeared from the wings, tipping his hat. Then he raised his beer in a triumphant communal salute.
The bass player started a three-chord stutter-step; Spider followed with a kickbeat. His arms and legs snapped crisply through syncopated bends and slides, through gospel and blues, rockabilly chit-chat and steaming, old-time swing. He walked the bass down double-stops and burning, bold glissandos: Look here, like that, ah-ha!
The smells of barbecued chicken and buttery corn on the cob mingled with the sizzle of hot dogs in the city’s humid air.
The grass smelled of moisture and fertile roots, webby leaves.
The young men in Lakers shirts edged forward, right behind a family next to Hugh. He snuggled closer to Alice and tightened his hold on her hand.
Spider swung the band into a pseudo-waltz with a ragged gospel top. Mournfully, he croaked into a mike, “Shoo-fly in a windstorm …”
Hugh laughed. He told Alice he’d been reading WPA-era slave narratives in the Houston Public Library one day, and had come upon the story of Jeremiah Harris, an ex-slave. Harris had said fighting slavery was “like a shoo-fly in a windstorm. Peoples so tiny and the Man so huge.” Later, Hugh had repeated Harris’s phrases for Spider, and Spider had cherished them as if they were biblical wisdom.
“Shoo, shoo, shoo-fly ….” he wailed now into the silver mike.
Between sets, Hugh led Alice backstage again. Spider was reminiscing about his old cronies: Nathan Abshire, Big Maceo, One-Hand Sam. The younger musicians listened raptly. “Sam be pickin’ with his right hand, spoonin’ down that snap-bean gumbo with his left. Good Condition Boy, Sam, drank hisself to deaf right here on Dowling Street. Couldn’t make him live, no matter what we done …”
Hugh squeezed Spider’s arms. “Didn’t I tell you, man, the blues is alive and well? You sounded great. And the crowd’s eating it up.”
“Feelin’ purty good,” Spider said, popping open another longneck. “I gotta thank you, Hugh, talkin’ me back into this-here devil’s hoo-doo.”
“It’s where you belong, Spider.”
“Very nice,” Alice mumbled, teetering close to Hugh. “Thank you for the show.”
“Any time, Missy.”
Hugh felt her flinch, pressed against his back, but she just smiled. She whispered to him that the amplifiers had given her a bit of a headache, she was enjoying herself, really she was, but could they possibly —
“Sure,” Hugh said, nervous once more at the prospect of being alone with her, with nothing to distract them from the fact that here they were together. He turned again to Spider. “Gotta run.”
Spider grinned at Alice. “Yeah, I see.”
“So I’ll drop by Monday?”
“Bring me some smokes, awright?”
“All right. See you then. You’re the best, Spider.”
Hugh strolled Alice back through the park, past the giant plastic beer bottle, the hot dog stands, mothers and fathers and children, cotton candy. On the street, kids ran in packs past parked cars, excited by the music. No breeze. The air was hot. Crickets and echoes of songs. A television flickered through someone’s rusty screen door; a tricycle lay on its side in the yard.