By Noel K Hannan
I thought I’d seen it all, man. I mean, I’ve sat in the neon lit heart of a warship as big as a fucking Caribbean island and lobbed cruise missiles down Iraqi chimneys like I was playing fucking DOOM. Never really did think I was killing anybody, never saw the footage of that orphanage or crippled kids home or whatever the fuck it was that we were supposed to have aced, until after the tickertape parade and the realisation that I’d brought something back from the Persian Gulf other than a medal and some bitchin’ camcorder footage from the launch deck. Muscle wasting in my right shoulder, I reckon it was the cocktail of stuff they jabbed us with right before we deployed. Navy docs say otherwise so I’m invalided out of the service. Goodbye Uncle Sam, hello welfare checks.
Yeah, I’d thought I’d seen it all. Saw a guy get blown by a twelve year old boy in a barber’s shop in Bangkok. Tilted back in his chair, barber asks him does he want extras, he says sure, why not, I’m on shore leave. Thinks some cute assed little mama-san is doing the business under his robe, living out his Daddy’s Nam fantasy, kid comes out grinning with the sailor’s jizz all over his face. Never saw a guy move so fast in all my life. Cornered him later, after a few beers, confessed it was the best blow job he’d ever had. Go figure. There ain’t no justice in the world.
In the same shitty city, I killed a guy in a bar brawl. Never meant to do it, I ain’t no murderer, but he came at me with a shiv, a little sharpened screwdriver, and I took it off him and stuck it in his kidneys. Never forget the look of surprise on his face. Blood swamping the dirty floor of the bar like a churn full of red milk had been kicked over. So much blood…. Never served time for that one, was back on ship and steaming for the Philippines before the guy was cold. Figure they don’t bother too much about murdered thieves in Bangkok. But I’ll never forget his face.
So I’ve killed Iraqi orphans and a Thai mugger and I’ve trod a path that has fetched me up here, on the Atlantic coast, near the Louisiana-Florida state line. Don’t even know what I’m doing here, with five dollars in my pocket and an old Alice pack on my good shoulder, still stained with spray-painted desert cam. I grew up in northern Maine, so I guess I’m almost as far from home as I can be while still in the lower 48. Not that there’s much to go home for. So I’m here at some godforsaken crossroads in the bayou, with some vague idea of going to New Orleans and catching some jazz or maybe one of those funky funerals, when a truck pulls up alongside me. I’m not even hitching, just standing there watching the sun dripping down over the cypress trees. Window gets wound down.
Not a place to be after dark, sailor. Wanna ride?
Female voice jolts me. Young female voice. Suddenly aware it has been at least three days since I shaved or brushed my teeth. I look like a bum, she must be tough or crazy or a thrill seeker. Doesn’t the deep south have more serial killers per head of population than anywhere else in the world? Or is that just a myth? Don’t know. I can’t tell myth from fact anymore, it’s been a long time since I considered myself a citizen of this country, spent the last ten years like some mercenary viking, travelling the world on my own private war-island with its avenging hawks and mighty reach. Recent events give me a reckless edge I suppose I’ve always suppressed but hey, I’m a man, she’s a woman, how dangerous could this be? Sure, the graveyard’s full of guys who thought the same way. I open the door to her truck, and climb in.
Man, she’s an angel. I don’t mean she’s pretty, which she is – she’s fucking beautiful. Nordic blonde, soft features like a teenager. Nor do I mean that I’d like to fuck her – which I do, don’t get me wrong. What I mean is, she’s an angel. Fucking feathery wings tucked in behind her driver’s seat, that can’t be comfortable. Smile like a thermonuclear test. Yeah, I seen one of them too. So, this is how it ends. Wonder how I bit the big one. Did someone shoot me or run me over. Did I just peg out with a massive coronary out here in the swamp? Shame I can’t remember it. Morbid curiosity.
I have a job for you, she says, as I squeeze my Alice pack into the space between the seats. Truck accelerates like a space shuttle, manga speed lines come up out of the bayou.
Well, I thought I’d seen it all. Always time for one last new experience. Shame I’m dead.
Turns out I’m not. Or maybe I am, and this is Heaven, or Heaven’s interstate, and Angel is lying.
Angel is wearing cutoff jeans and a bra top. No tits but a body to worship. That sort of tawny, honey coloured skin that makes you stare at an exposed elbow for minutes on end, mouth hanging open like a fool. Angel tells me, I’ve been chosen. Yeah, for what? A job. I don’t need a job. I’m a disabled itinerant wandering ex-sailor. You don’t give jobs to people like that. They just sort of hang around in the background of life, like unpaid extras in a movie. Ah, but this is a very special job. A witness. A witness? I haven’t seen nothing, I say.
She turns to me and makes full eye contact for the first time. Dark, she is, and golden eyed. Her feathers ruffle. I wonder about the dynamics of flight, remember reading about how a person would need a back as broad as a Buick to support the muscles needed for human flight. She’s so slim, fragile, perfect.
You have seen things, she says. Now, you will witness something no one has ever seen before. And that will be your job. To witness.
Why? I ask as we speed along into the growing dawn, heading deeper into the speedlined bayou. But she doesn’t answer. I think it’s because she doesn’t know.
Come up fast on some little chicken-shack ranch in the middle of nowhere. Angel spins us to a halt in an empty dusty lot out front, as if she’s auditioning for “Dukes of Hazard”. Yeah, I guess she does kind of remind me of Bo.
This is where you get out, Sailor, she says. I step from the truck, turn around, planning to say something cool and clever, you know, like Kurt Russell or Clint might say, but she’s gone, in a squeal of tyres and dirt, and I’m left alone in a dusty lot with the sun beating down. A glance at my watch – it’s only 7am. Heat like the inside of an oven. Give me Maine winters any day.
It’s so quiet. Hear birds in the bayou, soft chirps and beeps. Then a single note, rough, metallic. Thrum. And again. Thrum. Know that sound anywhere. Deep chord on an electric guitar. Man is playing the blues. Seems little else to do but go inside.
Man, the blues. I’ve heard nothing on this planet that can compare to an ancient coloured man with a steel guitar. A good bluesman south of the Mississippi delta got the whole world of love and pain and birth and death wrapped up in six strings, twelve bars. You don’t like the blues man, you ain’t got no soul. Don’t deserve one, neither. Blues is life.
It’s like a siren call. No way I can stay outside, got to answer that call. Push the door aside, step on in.
It’s a bar, of course. Empty but for a few stained tables, scattered chairs. Sweltering heat, two fans in the ceiling turning lazy circles, doing nothing but stirring up the soup-thick air. Shirt instantly sticks to me. Little stage in the corner, coloured man – surprise surprise – on a three-legged stool, battered old Les Paul on his lap. Staring into space, absorbed in his blues. Not singing, just playing.
There’s two guys at the bar. One with his back to the stage, which is pretty fucking rude when there’s only four people in the room, hunkered down over a half bottle of JD. Biker type, long greasy hair, goatee, leathers. Makes me look respectable. Smoking a cigar and blowing heart shaped rings. Neat trick. Second guy is propped on the brass bar rail that runs the length of the room, watching the bluesman. Hippy looking, skinny dude with a colourful plaid shirt, flared jeans and sandals. Long hair but freshly washed. As I coolly take in both the hippy turns to look at me. See his piercing blue eyes even in the hot smoky gloom.
Our witness is here, he says. Sit down.
Voice seductive. I would do anything this guy tells me to. Fucking anything. Scary thought. I move into the room, beneath one of the fans, sit down at one of the stained tables. On the table is a Bud, ice cold, moisture condensing on the long neck. I can tell it’s a Bud even though the label actually reads Drink Me in the familiar typeface. I do as I’m told. It tastes good, like Bud always does.
Then we can start, says the biker, without turning around. Voice like tyres crunching gravel. Four words make my stomach knot. Go on, old man. Give it your best shot. Still doesn’t turn from his JD.
The music stops. The old man lays down his guitar and walks slowly over to me, stooped and stiff. As he gets closer I see how old he is, I can add ten years on my first estimate. He takes a seat opposite me, spreads his hands on the table. Old and gnarled, like a bird’s claws. Years and years of chafing on metal strings, maybe a lifetime of manual work too. See it all lined in his face and neck like a roadmap of his life, each branching path leaving its mark.
So you’re the witness, he says, and lets out a short laugh that makes his thin shoulders shake. You like the blues, son?
I say, sure I do. Everyone likes the blues. I take a long draw from the Bud and offer him the long neck. He declines. So, what is it I’m to witness?
The old man casts a glance at the guys at the bar. The biker still has his back to us, the hippy watches us patiently.
It’s my last night, he says. My last night on Earth. Come morning I’m gone, no matter what. Seems I have a choice which way I go, up or down. Done a real bad thing once, killed a woman after I forced myself on her. Never done no time for it neither. Then I done a real good thing, risked my neck saving my buddies in Vietnam. So the gent upstairs and the other fella’ve been arguing about who I belong to now my bones don’t hold me up no more. So they’re gonna let me play one last time, and if it’s a good one I get to go upstairs, and if I fuck it up, down I go. That’s about all there is to it.
Name’s Francois Dubois, old man says.
Cajun? I ask.
No, Haitian.
Haiti. Mojo bad place. Called in for fuel on the way home from Desert Storm, some marines snuck ashore and got in a little local trouble. All come back to the ship, but two months later, all are dead. Suicides, road accidents, senseless murders. Mucho lobo voodoo, Haiti. No shit.
I eye the guys at the bar. They don’t look much like who the old man says they are, but what did I expect, fluffy clouds, horns, tails? They look like you and me. That’s their trick.
Old man rises from the chair, returns to the stage, bones clicking like a snare drum counting him in.
So the old man’s going to play for his life. Least the biker can do is turn around. I nearly tell the arrogant bastard, then I realise who I’m going to fuck with. Not a good idea.
Old man
limbers up, few random chords, scattered riffs. Silence for a second as he looks up, rheumy eyes meeting the
hippy’s steely blue. Blues explosion.
Born in a cornfield, on the eve of Judgement Day
Cursed as a child, mama and papa taken
away
Guns and ropes, chased down by the KKK
Injustice and greed, now my life is fading away
Voodoo blues, it’s all I’ve got left to say
Voodoo blues, don’t take my life away
Man, his blues were sweet. Voice raised on unfiltered cigarettes, automobile exhausts and bourbon, fingers moving on the fretboard and across the pickups like it was a part of his own body, or maybe that of a beautiful woman. The man is going upstairs, as I am his witness. He tears through another two verses and choruses. Even the biker turns around. It was in the bag. He wraps up his set, last chords ringing in my ears, and props his guitar to one side.
Well, he says, I guess that was it.
Hippy turns to me and says, You can go now.
What? No,no, I must know. What happens? Which way does he go?
Biker laughs. You’ve seen enough, he says. You don’t need to see any more.
But I must know! What happens to him? Does he go up or down? Nature gets the better of me and I lunge for the bar, intending to grab the biker, shake him I into telling me what happens next. As my hands reach him he laughs in my face and everything vanishes. I mean, fucking everything. Bar, biker, hippy, bluesman, shack, everything tears away through a plughole in the sky, leaving me on my knees in the bayou, sun beating down, taste of beer in my mouth, empty bottle on the ground in front of me. Don’t shit me, don’t tell me this was a hallucination? No, I don’t have that kind of imagination, that kind of quality.
Echo of
laughter in my head. Voice of the
hippy, You shit me Jesus, trick gets ‘em every time.
Truck pulls up alongside. Angel in the driving seat, minus her wings. Still looks good to me, still don’t understand why she picks up bums.
Get in, she says.
I do. Maybe this time I’ll get some answers.
She puts her foot down. No manga speed lines, heading for the coast.
Maybe, maybe I’ll find my answers there.
(My guess is he headed south. You know who has all the best tunes.)
FIN