Страница 6 из 141
“Quit that, now. You worry me.”
“John, those songs you wrote been keeping us going down here. Did you know that?”
“I ’preciate it.”
“But lemme ask you, John. Lemme ask you something before you ride off. How come you wrote all those songs about hellhounds and the devil and such? How come you was so sure you’d be coming down here when you died?”
I fidgeted and looked in the mirror at the road behind. “Man, I don’t know. Couldn’t imagine nothing else. Not for me, anyway.”
Ezekiel laughed once, loud, boom, like a shotgun going off.
“Don’t be doing that, man. I about jumped out of my britches. Come on and let’s go.”
He shook his head again. “Maybe you knew you was needed down here, John. Maybe you knew we was singing, and telling stories, and waiting.” He stepped back into the dirt. “This is your ride, John. But I’ll make sure everybody knows what you done. I’ll tell ’em that things has changed in Beluthahatchie.”
He looked off down the road. “You’d best get on. Shoot-maybe you can find some jook joint and have some fun afore he catches up to you.”
“Maybe so, brother, maybe so.”
I han’t gone two miles afore I got that bad old crawly feeling. I looked over to the passenger’s side of the car and saw it was all spattered with blood, the leather and the carpet and the chrome on the door, and both those mangy hound dogs was sprawled across the front seat wallowing in it, both licking my razor like it was something good, and that’s where the blood was coming from, welling up from the blade with each pass of their tongues. Time I caught sight of the dogs, they both lifted their heads and went to howling. It wan’t no howl like any dog should howl. It was more like a couple of panthers in the night.
“Hush up, you dogs!” I yelled. “Hush up, I say!”
One of the dogs kept on howling, but the other looked me in the eyes and gulped air, his jowls flapping, like he was fixing to bark, but instead of barking said:
“Hush yourself, nigger.”
When I looked back at the road, there wan’t no road, just a big thicket of bushes and trees a-coming at me. Then came a whole lot of screeching and scraping and banging, with me holding onto the wheel just to keep from flying out of the seat, and then the car went sideways and I heard an awful bang and a crack and then I didn’t know anything else. I just opened my eyes later, I don’t know how much later, and found me and my guitar lying on the shore of the Lake of the Dead.
I had heard tell of that dreadful place, but I never had expected to see it for myself. Preacher Dodds whispered to us younguns once or twice about it, and said you have to work awful hard and be awful mean to get there, and once you get there, there ain’t no coming back. “Don’t seek it, my children, don’t seek it,” he’d say.
As far as I could see, all along the edges of the water, was bones and carcasses and lumps that used to be animals-mules and horses and cows and coons and even little dried-up birds scattered like hickory chips, and some things lying away off that might have been animals and might not have been, oh Lord, I didn’t go to look. A couple of buzzards was strolling the edge of the water, not acting hungry nor vicious but just on a tour, I reckon. The sun was setting, but the water didn’t cast no shine at all. It had a dim and scummy look, so flat and still that you’d be tempted to try to walk across it, if any human could bear seeing what lay on the other side. “Don’t seek it, my children, don’t seek it.” I han’t sought it, but now the devil had sent me there, and all I knew to do was hold my guitar close to me and watch those buzzards a-picking and a-pecking and wait for it to get dark. And Lord, what would this place be like in the dark?
But the guitar did feel good up against me thataway, like it had stored up all the songs I ever wrote or sung to comfort me in a hard time. I thought about those field hands a-pointing my way, and about Ezekiel sweating along behind his mule, and the way he grabbed aholt of my shoulder and swung me around. And I remembered the new song I had been fooling with all day in my head while I was following that li’l peckerwood in the Terraplane.
“Well, boys,” I told the buzzards, “if the devil’s got some powers I reckon I got some, too. I didn’t expect to be playing no blues after I was dead. But I guess that’s all there is to play now. ’Sides, I’ve played worse places.”
I started humming and strumming, and then just to warm up I played “Rambling on My Mind” cause it was, and “Sweet Home Chicago” cause I figured I wouldn’t see that town no more, and “Terraplane Blues” on account of that damn car. Then I sang the song I had just made up that day.
I’m down in Beluthahatchie, baby,
Way out where the trains don’t run
Yes, I’m down in Beluthahatchie, baby,
Way out where the trains don’t run
Who’s go
Since your man he is dead and gone
My body’s all laid out mama
But my soul can’t get no rest
My body’s all laid out mama
But my soul can’t get no rest
Cause you’ll be sportin with another man
Lookin for some old Mr. Second Best
Plain folks got to walk the line
But the Devil he can up and ride
Folks like us we walk the line
But the Devil he can up and ride
And I won’t never have blues enough
Ooh, to keep that Devil satisfied.
When I was done it was black dark and the crickets was zinging and everything was changed.
“You can sure get around this country,” I said, “Just a-sitting on your ass.”
I was in a cane-back chair on the porch of a little wooden house, with bugs smacking into an oil lamp over my head. Just an old cropper place, sitting in the middle of a cotton field, but it had been spruced up some. Somebody had swept the yard clean, from what I could see of it, and on a post above the dipper was a couple of yellow flowers in a nailed-up Chase & Sanborn can.
When I looked back down at the yard, though, it wan’t clean anymore. There was words written in the dirt, big and scrawly like from someone dragging his foot.
DON’T GET A BIG HEAD JOHN
I’LL BE BACK
Sitting on my name was those two fat old hound dogs. “Get on with your damn stinking talking serves,” I yelled, and I shied a rock at them. It didn’t go near as far as I expected, just sorta plopped down into the dirt, but the hounds yawned and got up, snuffling each other, and waddled off into the dark.
I stood up and stretched and mumbled. But something was still shifting in the yard, just past where the light was. Didn’t sound like no dogs, though.
“Who that? Who that who got business with a wore-out dead man?”
Then they came up toward the porch a little closer where I could see. It was a whole mess of colored folks, men in overalls and women in aprons, gra