Bone Music (22 page)

September 1952

Robert Johnson never got back to the Mountain. He never got farther than the West Memphis train station, in fact — he climbed off the bus from Memphis just as the southbound train was getting in, and before he got from the ticket counter to the train the whole damn station went thick with hoodoo, and Robert Johnson turned around to see the deadmen climbing off the train — hundreds of them. Hoodoo Doctors, Kings, Ma Rainey, even ordinary bluesmen, every solitary one of them from up and down the Mississippi valley — all of them all of them climbing off the southbound train.

Robert Johnson wandered away from the ticket window, staring at the hoodoo men, watching them intently to try to understand. . . .

Wandered down the platform, still staring, as dozens of Hoodoo Doctors hurried past him.

John Henry was the last one off the last car of the train. He was carrying his own bags, acting like anybody, anybody alive or dead anybody at all, and you’d never know he was the wellspring of ten thousand legends, but Robert Johnson knew him.

He could never forget that man. Never. He knew the sight of him as well as he knew the shadow of his own heart.

The great King saw Robert Johnson, too. He nodded to him as he climbed down the train steps, and greeted him when he got close.

“Let me carry that,” Robert Johnson said, because it was a burden he knew he had to share.

The great King shook his head. “I carry for myself,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask no one to tote for me.”

Robert Johnson nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “Of course.”

Ma Rainey spoke up from somewhere behind him.

“You know it is,” she said. “Just like the Bible’s right.”

“Blind Willie give you the song?” the great King said.

Robert Johnson nodded. “He did,” he said. Somewhere deep inside him he wondered how the King knew he’d gone to see Blind Willie, but deeper still he knew the reason why: the King was in his heart, and Robert Johnson in the King’s, and there’s a natural sort of knowledge that goes with that kind of sharing.

“Good,” the King said. “I knew I could count on you.”

And then he started down the platform, hurrying toward a place and a destiny Robert Johnson couldn’t imagine. When he was gone thirty yards he turned back to face Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey, and called to them.

“Come on,” he said. “Ain’t no time to waste.”

And then he turned to start away so quickly Robert Johnson had to run to stay with him.

The deadman Elvis got quiet after Dan figured out who he was. He straightened out his shirt and folded his arms and sat there in the chair glowering at Dan for the longest time, and after a while Dan realized that he wasn’t going to say another word. So he left the deadman sitting in the hotel-room chair and went to the bathroom for his shower.

Took a long damn while to get clean. He wasn’t as deep-down filthy as the deadman had been, but he was dirtier than he’d ever been before.

That happens to men who ride the rails by boxcar — the land gets into them, and they have to scrub and scrub if they ever want to get it out.

He never did get completely clean, but he got close enough — clean enough not to stink in polite company. When he was done he put on the clothes he’d found at the secondhand store and left the bathroom wondering if the derelict would still be there.

He was, of course.

When Dan got out of the bathroom he found the deadman sitting on the edge of the hotel bed. In his arms he held the dream guitar — the magic hammer that the Lady brought to Dan as he slept in the boxcar two nights before.

The deadman looked up at Dan as Dan approached him.

“Hell of an instrument,” he said.

He picked at the strings with his cold, dry hands.

“It is,” Dan said.

“I always loved it,” the deadman said.

Dan nodded. “I can see why,” he said. “She had me bring that for you, didn’t she?”

The deadman shook his head. “No, no — she took it from me years and years ago. It’s been a long time since I’ve held it.”

He was picking “Love Me Tender,” and Dan half expected him to croon, but he didn’t, thank God. Bad enough he had to play a song like that on the great King’s guitar; Dan knew he couldn’t bear to hear him sing as well.

“Play something real,” Dan said. “Play — I don’t know. — Play ‘Jailhouse Rock.’ Play something boogie-woogie.”

The deadman’s hands went slack, and his shoulders sagged; he looked up at Dan with an expression — like someone had hit him, or worse. “Damn you,” he said. “Damn your eyes.”

And then he took hold of that guitar like he meant it, and he began to sing.

Sing!

And God that man could boogie-woogie, even if half the songs he ever sang were things that made him sound like some third-rate Bing Crosby from the sticks. He played “Jailhouse Rock” like a man who understood what boogie-woogie meant, and like he’d lived a wear-you-down life to show him what it was all about, and the beat consumed the hotel room with its syncopated rhythm, and God God God that man could sing, he sang like when he was alive but deeper and truer and with the grace and vision that come to those who’ve been to Hell and clawed their way back into the light of day; he sang the song like jail was Hell and his eternity, and the song was his life and his passport and his manumission, and before he was done Dan knew in his heart every solitary fact about the damnation of Elvis Presley, no matter if he could not articulate a word of it.

When the room was quiet Dan said, “That’s why they call you King.”

But the deadman shook his head. “No,” he said, “I seen the King. I heard him play his truest song that night on the bluff over Memphis. And I seen him lately, too — I seen his ghost at the Lake of Fire, where the shore meets Hell near the delta of the River Styx. And even if he’s only a ghost too faint to kiss a fire, he’s still the King. On my finest day I’ll never hold a candle to him.”

Part of Dan wanted to allow as that was so, because it was. But another part wanted to argue with it, because he’d heard the song, and he knew the deadman had a terrible bright gift, and just that moment he thought that the man was King because he was born to be, and not just because he’d stole the great King’s hammer.

“You got your licks,” Dan said. “I heard you. You can make that hammer ring.”

The deadman shrugged. Let the guitar fall onto the bed beside him; got up and started for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

It was hours before Dan saw him again.

September 1952

When they got to the station’s parking lot there was a car waiting to drive the King away. At first Robert Johnson didn’t realize that he was supposed to ride there with him — when they got to the car he stepped back and watched as first Ma Rainey and then the King climbed into the back seat, and then he closed the door for them and waved to wish them well.

Such a silly man, that Robert Johnson. He was so confused and so reluctant to face the fate that waited for him that he didn’t even realize why the King had found him, and what he was supposed to do, and how critical he was to the great song above the river.

But that was Robert Johnson for you, in that short but righteous second life of his: he was a man so meek and unassuming that he never guessed the measure of his destiny.

As Robert Johnson waved the great King rolled down his window and called to him.

“Robert Johnson,” he said, “you ain’t getting done with this that easy,” and then he laughed. “You take the shotgun seat — ride up front with Furry Lewis.”

Robert Johnson blinked and blinked, trying to find himself in the confusion of his circumstance.

“Shotgun. . . ?” he asked, and as he spoke that word he saw a shotgun in his mind’s eye. And as he saw it red deamonous hands grabbed that rifle by its stock and trigger, cocked the gun, and blew them all to kingdom come.

As Robert Johnson began to understand the vision and his circumstance and destiny, and maybe that moment if he’d turned and run he could have saved himself from the fate that waited for him.

And maybe not.

Because even if his circumstances and his nature damned him as certainly as they possibly could, it would not have saved him to turn tail and run. For cowardice is damnable, and the pits in Hell reserved for cowards are crueler and more inescapable than all the others taken as a whole.

Furry Lewis drove them up the Memphis ridge and through the forest just below it; along the hard road less traveled by until they passed Blind Willie’s shack, and beyond that to a clearing near the high point over Memphis.

They were the last to get there, damn near — but that was just as well, all in all, since it meant the food was already cooking.

Lots and lots of food, and good company, too — because the singing that night started in the way it always does, with barbecue and pot-luck food and jugs of good corn liquor — special stuff made carefully to keep it free from spirit liquor and the awful fate of deadmen.

Some people call gatherings like that one hoe-downs, and some of them call them barbecues or jubilees or parties. If you go far enough afield the music changes and the people say carnival or festival, but the reason for the celebration never changes. The food and the drink and the company are all a part of a ritual that’s older than the continent, and dearer, too. The music is the natural end of it — not so much a fragment as it is the solvent that disintegrates the night.

It dissolved that night entirely. Some nights it changed forever, in a way.

The deadman came back to Dan’s hotel room at three-thirty in the morning. He didn’t bother to knock, and he didn’t need to use a key to get in, no matter how Dan had locked the door and switched the deadbolt home.

Dan sat bolt upright when he heard the door open. He opened his eyes to see the deadman standing in the darkness, silhouetted against the streetlight streaming through the open door.

“We can leave when you’re ready,” the deadman said.

He’d cast away his rags and dressed himself in a white silk suit — coat, vest, shirt and jacket brilliant and shimmering the color of pearls. Dan couldn’t imagine where he’d found clothes like that here in the hard slums of Detroit.

Dan tried to rub the sleep from his eyes.

“Leave for where?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”

The deadman turned to glance out the open door; as he did his face caught in the chiaroscuro, and Dan saw that he was frowning.

“The Lady sent you for me,” he said. “She didn’t tell you why?”

“No,” Dan told him. “She didn’t even tell me who you were.”

The deadman nodded.

“We’re going down the river,” he said. “I found a boat today.”

When Dan heard him say “the river” he heard “the Mississippi,” but he was wrong.

“But the river is so far from here,” he said. “You can’t get a boat there from Detroit, can you?”

The deadman laughed, and his laugh was a thing that chilled Dan to the bone, no matter how there was no malice in it. “The river’s everywhere,” he said. “If you know how to sail, you can find it any time you want.”

And Dan thought, That’s wrong, that’s wrong, you can’t get onto the Mississippi unless you’re sailing on a river in the Mississippi basin, and he was right, as far as that goes, excepting that there are canals here and there and if you know how to work them you can get a boat a lot of places people never realize. But he was wrong, too, because the deadman wasn’t talking about the Mississippi.

He was talking about the River Styx, and what he said was true: the river is the soul of every stream, and its current is our destiny, waiting for the day when we will sail.

“Give me a minute,” Dan said. “I’ve got to get my boots on.”

His shoes, his ragged slacks; Dan looked around the hotel room to see if there was anything else he needed to gather before he left that place behind. Filthy clothes — too dirty to clean, let alone to carry with them.

And the guitar, leaning against the wall beside the nightstand.

They couldn’t leave the guitar — though there was a part of Dan’s heart that wanted to leave that instrument behind and never look at it again.

Dan lifted it with both hands and held it out for the deadman to take.

“Don’t look at me,” the deadman said. “I died to get away from that thing. You’ve got to carry it now.”

Dan pulled the guitar strap over his shoulder.

And followed the deadman out onto the hard streets of Detroit in the small hours of the morning.

Past prostitutes and drunkards; past a gang of weird-eyed teenage boys howling oaths at one another as their leaders contemplated murder; past a knoll where eight police cars were gathered, face to face to face, and patrolmen sat idly on the hoods of their cars, sipping coffee and smoking fat cigars as they whispered fearfully to one another; through six blocks of dockyard buildings so abandoned Dan thought he’d lived to see the last days of the world; down to the riverside, and here there was a boat.

It wasn’t a special-looking boat or anything like that, but the deadman must’ve paid a pretty penny for it all the same. Boats don’t come cheap, after all, and though that boat was a small one it wasn’t the smallest size by far. It had two bunks and a closet down below the deck, and sailboats with bunks and pantries are yacht-toys for the idle rich.

“I don’t know how to sail,” Dan said. “I won’t be much help.”

The deadman shrugged.

“Damnation isn’t hard to find,” he said. “All rivers run to it. The current will drag us there sooner or later — and then the boat will find its own way.”

Dan didn’t like the sound of that, but he didn’t want to argue. He followed the deadman onto the boat and sat in the spot where the deadman told him to. He didn’t object when the deadman unlashed the ropes that held them to the dock and pushed them away from the shore, and he didn’t say how much it frightened him when a south wind blew suddenly from nowhere to fill their sails and theirs alone.

It pushed them north, toward Lake Huron, which is wider than an inland sea. Before the night was done they were on water away away from everywhere, on water that could be anyplace because there was no land in sight, only the water and the sky and here and there a gull that found the air above them and hovered there, glaring at them with hard red eyes that spoke volumes that no ordinary bird could ever say.

In the morning the wind went hot and bitter, sulfury, and Dan knew they’d left the world behind. Now they came upon an outlet from the inland sea, a river where the current drained away from them, and that current drew them down no matter how the wind went still.

That was when Dan finally asked the question whose answer he didn’t want to know. “Where are we?” he asked.

The deadman smiled. “We’re on the river,” he said. “You know that.”

That was true, no matter whether Dan wanted to admit it to himself or not.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Explain yourself.”

The deadman laughed.

“We’re on the River Styx,” he said. “We’re sailing past damnation, and there before us lies the Lake of Fire.”

And he laughed and laughed.

“You’re shitting me,” Dan said. “We’re heading toward the Mississippi, right?”

The deadman shook his head, still laughing.

“We’re not,” he said. “This river is the Styx.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The deadman stopped laughing. Shrugged.

“Believe it or don’t,” he said. “You can see it for yourself, any time you want.”

“Huh?”

“Look into the water,” the deadman said. “The bottom’s thick with those who tried to rob the ferryman.”

Dan didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see what he knew was waiting for him, waiting in the water —

But he couldn’t stop himself.

He looked over the edge of the boat, and saw them, hundreds and thousands of them, dead and lifeless on the bottom of the river but writhing in the agony of their damnation, wide eyes pleading with him, arms outstretched as they begged for succor, lips moving silently as each of them begged him for their freedom. Some of them had coins, and others only outstretched palms, and when Dan looked at them he knew he had to help —

“We’ve got to save them,” Dan said. “We’ve got to help them find their way ashore.”

Deadman Elvis shrugged. “You can try,” he said. “It won’t do them any good.”

Dan wanted to scream. “How can you say that? Don’t you have any compassion?”

The deadman sighed and shook his head.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” he asked. “Everybody tries to save them. Of course they do! Who could stand to see another man so damned and helpless without offering a hand?”

“Make sense,” Dan said. “You contradict yourself.”

“No,” the deadman said, “I don’t.”

“I swear you do,” Dan said. “You’re heartless.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

The deadman trimmed the sail. “I can moor here, if you want. You can throw them a rope, and try to help them come ashore. I tried it once — I did. The first time I was here.”

“You did?”

“Of course I did! What do you think I am, an animal?”

“What happened?”

The deadman sighed again. “The same thing that always happens. They tried to drag me down and force me to replace them.”

“But why?”

“Because they think their damnation is a fate somebody put on them, and they figure they can get out of it if they give it to somebody else. But they’re wrong. The ones they drag down there always get away, just like I did, and the ones who try to do the drowning never find their way ashore — just like they never did when they tried to drown me.”

Dan didn’t say anything right away. Part of him knew that the deadman was right, because he’d seen the self-defeat in the eyes of the damned below him. But another part, maybe the biggest part, could never walk away from folks so terribly in need.

“You want me to moor the boat?”

Dan nodded.

The deadman shrugged, shifted the sail until the wind began to push them ashore. “It’s your funeral,” he said.

“You’re wrong,” Dan said. “You’re just wrong, that’s all.”

“If you say so,” dead Elvis said, laughing. “You know how they get there? It happens when they try to rob the ferryman. It’s not like they say about him, you know. He takes folks across whether they got the coin to pay him or they don’t. The ones that got the money, they pay him, and the ones that don’t, he takes them over and they owe him. If they can pay later, then they do, but it ain’t like the ferryman has got a collection agency. Hell, he even takes the ones who got the coin but lie to him they don’t. What’s he care? It ain’t like he hasn’t got enough.

“But for some people, that just ain’t enough. They get out in the middle of the river, and there’s that purse hanging from the ferryman’s belt, and they just can’t help themselves — they try to take it from him, because they figure this is Hell and they’re all damned and what does it matter?

“But they’re wrong. So wrong! When they try to take his purse the ferryman disappears for them, and his boat goes, too, and there they are in the middle of the river with nothing to hold them dry. And down they go. It isn’t anybody else who damns them; it’s them what damns themselves. If any of them ever repented, the Love of God would whisk them away in a moment, but no, no, the damned never repent, hell no, they got their pride, and even if they gave it up they’d still think they’d done the only reasonable thing under their circumstance. Same thing with them trying to get out — no matter how you try to save them, the things they do will damn them all over again. They’ll try to damn you, too, but it never works that way.”

“You’re wrong,” Dan said. “You’re blaming the victims for their own fate.”

Elvis shook his head. “Not this time, I’m not.”

The bow of the sailboat brushed against the shore, and Elvis threw a line ashore to the firmament of damnation. It struck a withered ash tree, and wrapped around its trunk.

“I’ll show you,” Dan said. “I swear I will.”

“Be careful,” Elvis told him. “False oaths pave a quick road to damnation.”

Dan stepped over the edge of the boat, onto the shore. “I’m already here,” Dan said. “What’ve I got to be afraid of?”

Elvis grinned. “Be careful or you’ll find out.”

Dan huffed at him. “Toss me a rope,” he said.

Elvis shook his head. “I won’t,” he said. “I never gave nobody the rope to hang himself. I ain’t going to do that now, either.”

“Well, to hell with you, then,” Dan said. He leaned over the edge of the boat, spotted a coil of rope on the deck; grabbed it and stepped back ashore.

Walked a few yards downstream; held one end of the rope firm as he tossed the line to the damned throng in the river.

The response was immediate and dramatic — there was a pull on the line so strong and sudden that the first jerk like to drag Dan off his feet.

But Dan was stronger than that. He wasn’t any saint, but there was too much virtue in his heart for the first sudden tug of damnation to pull him off his feet.

The first tug didn’t drag Dan down, and the second and the third didn’t, either. But the fourth time the line drew taut it moved harder and faster than any attraction had ever come to Dan; and his strength, his weight, his inertia, and his character were nothing before it.

The damned ones pulled Dan Alvarez into the River Styx and drowned him in their venom and their hate. When he was down they planted his steadfast form in the muddy river bottom and climbed him like a ladder to the surface of damnation.

But it didn’t work, just as the deadman said it wouldn’t; and every time the damned ones clawed their way to the surface, the surface rose above them, and every time they flailed through it the bottom drew them down again.

Then things got crazy as the damned fought among themselves, crowding one another away as each of them tried to press the other out of the way so she could have Dan to herself — and now Dan floated to the surface like a bloated corpse.

He tried to swim ashore, but when he tried to move his muscles refused him. He was paralyzed, he realized, and probably as damned as the ferry-thieves bickering down there on the murky bottom —

And then someone grabbed him by the collar and began to drag him ashore.

At first Dan thought it was the deadman come to save him from the fate he’d already once tried to warn Dan away from, but no, no, it was a woman, Dan saw, a beautiful frail girl who lifted him from the water, onto the damned shore; turned him over, dragged him away from the water, and began to force the water from his lungs.

“You’re sick, Dan Alvarez,” she said. “Your sins have festered down inside your spirit.”

Now she placed her lips on his, to draw more water from him; and when the water was all gone she breathed into him, forcing air to fill his lungs. Dan felt — strange. Sensually aroused, almost, but in a way that only seemed erotic.

This is what it’s like to be in love, he thought. And maybe that was right, or maybe it was just desire obscuring his imagination.

She breathed into him three times, each breath more intense and dearer than the next, and then Dan felt his paralysis give way.

“What did you do?” he asked, reaching up to touch her cheek. As he touched her he realized that he had no business touching her, that no matter how he felt they weren’t lovers and there was no intimacy between them, no love but the love we each have for the ones we see in need. He pulled away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean —”

She shook her head, and took his hand, and pressed it back against her cheek. “Hush,” she said.

And that was all the words between them.