“Now let’s see who can play the guitar here,” Tony said.
We went up on the foredeck and sat in front of the cabin, backs against the wall, with Tony’s workshoes and his wife’s sandals wedged against the green plank that ran around the edge of the entrance into the forepeak.
“Who wants a beer?”
“I do,” Bob said. “I don’t know about the rest of you.”
“Ladies first,” Tony said.
“Thank you, sweetheart — no,” Sandy said. “I don’t need one. You go on.”
While Tony opened up a bottle for himself, I lifted my guitar case lid, while Ron — the neck up against the violet sky — slid the canvas cover down from his Gibson.
Ron and I sang “Trouble in Mind” and “The Midnight Special.” Then I played an instrumental medley of “Buckdancer’s Choice” and “Railroad Bill” that sent me all up and down the neck of my Martin and drew applause from four of my audience of four and a half.
“I think the baby must like that,” Tony said. “She’s being so good.”
His wife looked down into the blanket. “She’s asleep, honey. That’s why she’s so quiet.”
“Let’s do something we can all sing,” I suggested. So we sang “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Then we sang “Dark as a Dungeon,” which Tony didn’t know the words to. But Sandy did. By the time we finished, though, he was coming in heartily on the chorus — though (like Bob) when he sang out, he had a tendency to go wildly off key.
But nobody minded.
“Sing that one you did for me yesterday,” Ron said, dropping his fingers across his Gibson’s silk-and-steel to silence them. “I really want to learn this one. …”
So I sang Fred Neil’s “Blues on the Ceiling.”
Everybody really liked it.
“Chip can sing the dirty blues, too,” Bob said, from where he perched on the edge of the forepeak entrance, his forearms on his knees, his beer bottle hanging like a giant pencil from the fingers of both hands.
“Now, hey,” Tony said. “That sounds like some fun.”
“And these are real dirty!” Bob grinned.
“Yeah,” I said, “some of those get a little raunchy. Maybe this isn’t the time for — ”
There was a general protest. “Oh, no. … Go on. … Sure, let’s hear.”
“Well,” I said. “There’s ‘The Chicago Blues.’…”
“Oh, I know that one!” Sandy cried. “Go on, please! That’s fun. Sing that one!”
“Well,” I said. “Okay — ”
In the version of the “Chicago Blues” I knew, there were no four letter words; but its level of suggestiveness more than made up for it. I’d gotten two verses of it from a Library of Congress archival recording. Two others — as well as a couple of verse fragments — I’d appropriated from one of the Lomax anthologies. And Marilyn had arranged the fragments and spliced them together around a handful of transitional couplets she’d written on her own — for a version I’d sung back in the Village, which had been taken over by any number of other Village singers. And I’d watched the crafted lines of the most conscientious of poets lose their authorial signature, absorbed back into folk tradition.
Over the thumping eight-bar blues, I sang:
On the dock, somebody walked by — stood for a moment, smiled, shook his head (I could just see his head over the rail), and walked on.
Ron popped the top off a second beer bottle, then looked around because the “pop” seemed so loud.
Tony’s wife joggled the baby as if she were momentarily afraid it might wake.
During the syncopations, the water whispered against the pilings, the hull.
The verses and the irregular chorus with its arbitrary repeats rang out over the deck. A trapezoid of light from the cabin window above us caught Ron’s frayed knee at one corner and, at the opposite, Sandy’s sandaled foot.
I looked around at grinning Bob and smiling Ron. Then I saw between them the worried look on Sandy’s face. She was bundling her baby closer.
Once in summer camp, stretched out on my bed with the colored pages propped on the iron foot, I’d read a comic about a guy who could become invisible by making himself stand so still that the vibrations between his molecules slowed, till finally the electrons ceased to circle their atoms. From then on the light passed right through him and he became completely and ideally transparent. Though I didn’t see him, Tony must have been in a state very near it that night.
There hadn’t been any word between them, but he was sitting beside Sandy, his arm around her shoulder. What stiffenings, rigidities, or other bodily signals communicated it to her, I can’t know. But now Sandy got her feet under her, while Tony pushed her up. As she passed before me, with a small, frightened look back over her shoulder, I saw her face move from shadow to light to shadow. Her eyes were averted. Her face looked simply very concentrated. And in an outraged rush of sandals and workshoes on the deck between us, both were gone.
Ron was the first one to say: “Huh …?”
Bob put his hands on his knees, looked around, and said: “Well, what was that about?”
I just felt chills prickle my back while my stomach constricted in front of them.
Ron began: “I didn’t think you sang anything all that — ”
And stopped at the scramble of workshoes back up by the cabin. Tony lurched around the corner, planted himself in front of me, bent down, and whispered: “I don’t know if that’s what they sing when they have a good time up in New York! But we sure as hell don’t do it that way down here!”
He took a breath, stood up, looked around, bent to snatch up the remaining six-pack, and stalked off around the cabin again.
Yes, I’d thought for a moment I might get punched; and I’d lost my breath before it. “Oh, Jesus …” I said.
Bob was indignant. “Well, how do you like that?”
Ron was bewildered. “That was a surprise. I didn’t think they were gonna feel that way — ”