Around one A.M., he stopped at the Trail’s End Motel in Paley, the only place open for miles. The old woman at the registration desk had a stiff-washrag face. She gummed a Winston beneath a crackling yellow light, and told him, “We’ll go for days, weeks, even months here ‘thout seeing someone from the city …”
“That right?” Hugh said, signing his name and his license plate number on a faded index card.
In his room, by the dim light of a lamp with cigarette burns on its ripped brown shade, and the blue pulsing of a soft-porn movie on TV — its only clear channel — Hugh read his transcripts of interviews with Spider, memorizing place-names and directions so he could find key spots tomorrow. A woman in the next room sang, over and over, “Hey hey, we’re the Monkees.”
He made notes on Houston’s black protests — upsets, Spider called them. The race riot of 1917, when black soldiers from Camp Logan, a military outpost in the city, marched through white subdivisions, firing their rifles, enflamed by racist police. The “Dowling Street Shootout” in the 1970s, when cops killed the leader of a black militant group called the People’s Party II, sparking violence and looting.
Hugh was curious to know if these incidents had been mythologized in neighborhood songs, and if they’d been set to familiar melodies passed from one generation to the next. Could he find a direct connection between the music here in the Thicket and recent urban verses, between the mournful rhythms of cotton picking and the angrier beat of Houston’s streets? Such a link could give his work an exciting new turn.
After an hour, he reached over, turned out the light. He thought of trying Alice once more. No, not this late. She’d think he was crazy. Hell, she probably already figured he was nuts.
The next morning, armed with his notes, he set out. When he left the motel, his car was the only one in the lot, though he was getting an early start. The sky was velvet green patched with purple clouds. The ground smelled rank and moist. His arms and legs felt light.
“Friends, the Devil owns several hundred acres in southeast Texas. Yessir, he’s the biggest jefe in these-here parts, and if he offers you any property — a pretty riverside home, a blooming garden — take my word for it, don’t be tempted to buy. No sir. The mortgage is more than you can afford. And believe me, friends, he knows how to ruin a garden.”
Hugh turned off the radio, still mourning Black Magic’s absence. The sky grew stranger, as though a child had shaded it wrong in her coloring book. Wind jiggled the pines. I own the goddam sky. He passed a sign for “Rattlesnakes. Free. Two Miles”—passed the Green Frog Café, long abandoned, with a sign out front, “We Never Close” and another, “No Credit.”
Farther down the road a hand-lettered poster nailed to a tree said, “Catfish Bate.” A hoot owl moaned from a tree. He passed another ad, this one for a palm reader — a big red arrow in a knot of dying willows: “Yer Footur Awates.”
He checked a rough map he’d drawn based on Spider’s recollections of distinctive junctions. It appeared he should take a left on the gravel path up ahead, through a dark stand of oaks. At a crossroads to his right he noticed a country store. Fresh-cut wood. A blue plastic tarp lay crumpled in the grass. He thought of stopping and asking directions, but decided to trust his map.
The gravel petered out, turning to dirt and twisted ivy. The sky dimmed further as the foliage thickened; not too far into the Thicket, day became night, and he had to use his headlights. About a quarter of a mile later, he emerged onto thin pavement. He expected to see the Navasota River: instead, rows and dewy rows of strawberry fields. Latino workers crouched in the greenery, croker sacks slack across their backs. Hugh thought of Chimichanga, of the shed out back, and wondered if any of these folks had passed through there.
In a few days, all this sweat and labor would be transformed into glistening, sweetly packaged produce (with an elf or a smiling green giant on the labels) in the bins of Houston’s stores, like gifts plucked from the air.
Barbed-wire fences, tall as two-story houses, surrounded a state pen nearby, a brand-new facility next to a waste dump and a closed public school. Trash and crime, Hugh thought, Texas’s biggest growth industries. Here’s where Mama Houston sends her naughty kids.
Heart of them old devil blues.
Looking around, he recalled the WPA slave narratives he’d read in Houston’s library: “Mother and Father both had kind masters who never whipped them but looked after them good and give them a good home in return for the work they did for them.”
The soil was redder here than it was near Paley. The river had to be close. Spider had once mentioned an icehouse, “Used to be a old tavern, been there for ages, folks said Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett stopped to rest there when it b’longed to the Texas Infantry — anyways, when I’s a kid, my old man used to drink there with his friends after a full day sharecroppin’. He’d toggle me along and tell me to play out back while he and his buddies traded hoo-raws. I remember, I found a whole bunch of Indian arrowheads in the dirt there, and little animal bones.”
Hugh knew if he could pinpoint this place he’d have it made. From there, he could find the shack where Spider was born, and what was left of Spider’s earliest juke joints.
A cantaloupe field angled off to the west. “Tasted like the Savior’s sweet blood,” Spider once said of the fruit. According to the map, there ought to be a sawmill here, and the rusted remains of a cotton gin. Hugh turned his Nova around and poked along a dirt road embroidered with scorched blackberry brambles. He heard a rhythmic chanting. Closer now. Field hands belting out a work tune? A gospel chorus?
He stopped the car, grabbed his notebook and a portable cassette recorder off the warm plastic seat, and pushed his way through the brambles, slicing his arms on the thorns. A wooden sign stopped him short. “Keep Out,” it said. A crude red swastika dripped down rusty nails. Crew-cut men in combat fatigues marched in formation fingering elaborate guns, bellowing, “Fuck the niggers, fuck the spies, make them suck our hard, white dicks!”
Hugh, clammy, crouched in the bushes, looking for the quickest way back to his car. A clattering spurt. He hit the ground. He felt dirt ring his lips like margarita salt. When he glanced up, he saw the men laughing, slapping hands. Pinewood targets — crude triangles nailed to trees — swayed, torn, in scattered smoke-swales. The air smelled singed.
Voices. Foul cigars. Two men, strolling. Hugh ducked.
“—planes leaving regular now out of Mena, Arkansas. I got a buddy, making drops just inside Honduras. He can get us on. Three, four runs a week. Damn good pay.”
“AK-47s?”
“Ordnance one way, poppy coming back.”
“Where to?”
“Houston, Chi-town, L.A. Diming it to inner-city niggers, raising money for the ops. Plan of exquisite beauty.”
“Wires cross, our asses covered?”
“Nope. Deniability, all the way up. That’s the risk we take. What say, pard?”
“I’ll think on it. Hell, what’d I tell Shirl?”
“Shit, Rusty, with the scratch you’d make, you could set her up in a nice little house in Houston. Curtains in the kitchen. A rosy, air-freshened john.” They laughed. “She don’t have to know what’s propping up her sweet American Dream.”
“She wouldn’t believe it anyway.”
“Right. Another lovely plan.”
When they moved away, Hugh scrambled backwards, out of the bushes. He wriggled down a broad slope and turned for his car.