Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (22 page)

“And he was right.”

The old man nodded. “I see,” he said. “You came out here looking for answers.”

“Of goddamn course I did.”

“You being able to look through a crack in the window doesn’t mean it makes any sense. It may never make sense. And if you can accept that, maybe you can make sense of it.”

I gaped at him.

“Listen,” he said. “Let me tell you a little bit more about the Boogie House.”

“Okay,” I said. “Great.”

“The men who ran that place thought they was charmed. One of them had a gun pulled on him down in Savannah, just for being black and in the wrong place, and when the white boy wanted to kill him pulled that trigger, it didn’t do nothing but click.”

“It just clicked.”

“Misfire. Now, it happens that young black man had a charm he got from an old folk healer down there, not even minutes before.”

“Sounds like magic to me,” I said sarcastically.

The old man waggled a finger at me. “They say that old woman still strolls herself around town, even today. It’s been seventy-five, eighty years since this happened.”

“Could be a weird coincidence.”

“Right. Baby born covered in hair don’t make werewolves real,” he replied. “Some people got a little something extra when the cards was dealt. Others got a little bit over the span of a lifetime. But ain’t just anybody can pick up a doll and start sticking pins in it.”

“I see,” I said.

“Anyway, that old boy - but of course he was young back then - thought he’d hit something big. He’d always been a believer in all that but never took up fate on it. That night, with the white boy and the gun, convinced him.”

“How’d he end up in the Junction?”

“The other’n was a whorehopper, and he knocked up a white woman - daughter of a major politician down that way - so they fled up here. Had cousins selling radiator booze by the five-gallon bucket. Those didn’t get poisoned were coming back for a second bucket every once in awhile.”

“My daddy’s family was a bunch of bootleggers,” I said.

“Ah, so he might not be all bad,” the old man said. “Either way, them two boys, they used his money to put up four walls, and they charged a nickel per head that first year, back when it was just a shack with a plywood stage.”

“My mama said Blind Willie McTell played there.” This was how I’d gotten around to asking him about the blues man from before.

He shrugged. “Might be so. Might be one of them things just got passed around because it could. He spent some time up in Milledgeville, I reckon, but I ain’t never heard a him coming down this way. On his way back down to Savannah, or Statesboro. Could be. You believe it?”

“I’ll believe just about anything these days,” I replied.

I had actually grown interested in this story, even if it was bringing me no closer to Emmitt Laveau’s killer. If the owners of the Boogie House practiced any kind of hoodoo, maybe that’s what was giving off the mystical vibes.

And my mother; well, I had no way of knowing that was true or not. I had something wrong with me. Might as well have been some gift from her.

It’d be one of the only things I got from her.

“Well, you’d be best to keep a skeptical heart, my boy, because you don’t want to become one of them fools believes everything, from flying saucers to whatever. So, the two best friends filling the black folks with liquor. They made a good living that first year, but that was because they was too afraid to expand. It was a bad time, you know, to be black.”

“Has been for a long time,” Deuce said.

“It’s gettin’ better,” the old man replied.

“How come the whites didn’t try to shut it down that first year?” I asked.

“Didn’t know about it. People kept a general hush going. You give some people who ain’t never had nothing a little something, and they’re liable to crush it, but these people didn’t.”

“Were you one of them?” The old man was old enough, it seemed.

“Not that first year,” he said. “I didn’t come in until later. When things got worse. Secrets get out. Most white girls, they were too afraid to come on out that way. Some of them wanted to, and they had secret boyfriends, but none of them dared step a foot out there, at first.”

“But inevitably someone does.” It made me think of my mother, who had made a less significant but nevertheless controversial choice to run around with a black man behind my father’s back.

“And that girl didn’t keep her midnight liaisons to herself. Which, you can imagine, ended up drawing white men with shotguns out to the Boogie House. Became a cycle. People figured they’d best reach out and appease them white fellas, and so they’d end up paying in various ways. Sometimes it was money, and other times, it was...other things.”

“Did anybody ever get killed out there?”

The question seemed to sting him, because he reacted physically. It could have been a fly or a gnat getting to close to his face, but I don’t think it was. He had been looking at the neck of his guitar, but he turned to look at me head on, just then.

“There were a few incidents.” His mouth flipped, and he frowned bitterly. “Difference between an accident and an incident is that one ain’t planned, and the other is an accident. There were beatings, and some died, but nobody was going to listen to people selling liquor and playing music the white folks didn’t approve of.”

“Why didn’t they just shut the place down outright? I’m sure they didn’t have proper permits, or a liquor license.”

More than a few eyes turned in my direction on that one, Deuce’s included.

“I mean, if they had all that power, and they hated what you were doing, why didn’t they just force them to shutter the place?”

“That question got asked, but I’ll put it to you like this: A bully doesn’t want the kid with glasses to take them off. He wants that kid to keep wearing them to school. Maybe the bully hits him on this particular day, and maybe he doesn’t, but he always wants the option of having somebody to bloody up.”

“I see,” I said. I could have brought up something about the kid with glasses standing up to the bully, but this was 1940s or 1950s Georgia.
South
Georgia. No such thing was going to happen. Them even having a place to go to like the Boogie House was a rebellion, of sorts.

“I reckon maybe it had a charm to it, too,” he said, continuing. “Some men tried to set a fiery cocktail to it back in ‘65, must have been early in March, after that pretty white girl was shot in the head down in Selma. Emboldened the Klan types. Some fools showed up - drunk as Cooter Brown - trying to light their bottle of moonshine on fire so they could throw it. One fella, the most backwards peckerwood you’ve ever laid your eyes on, waved a pistol around like it wasn’t load, which of course meant it was.”

I turned to Deuce. “Do you know any of these men?” He shook his head. They’d be old, but there was a chance they’d still be alive. And if a man was alive and living in Lumber Junction, Deuce knew him. It was just the man he was. He knew people. That was his thing.

“The old boy got his jar of hooch lit, and he threw it, but it didn’t quite go the way he thought. People were screaming already, because they thought they were going to be shot or set on fire, but that’s not what happened. The bottle busted on the sidewall, and some of it burnt, but the flame trailed back through the vapors - or something - and put a hurting on that boy. He didn’t hardly have time to blink before he was up in flames. He and the others.”

I could picture this happening, and something told me it wasn’t just my brain calculating how people of this era would look. There was something quite real about the vision.

“They burned real slow, but nobody let them go up completely. They tossed jackets and whatever else they had lying around to put them poor bastards out.” He chuckled. “Most of ‘em would have said they wouldn’t piss on them white boys to put out a fire no more’n an hour beforehand, but here they were, ruining their going-out clothes on some peckerwood Klan members. Matter of fact, one of them said, as he was dusting the soot off his jacket, that he couldn’t get the white off of it. Everybody busted out laughing, but I reckon there was some truth in that as well.”

“How did it catch the whole lot of them?” I asked.

“People disagree about what they saw,” he said. “Some said they were too caught up in the moment to be able to tell what really happened, so they figured the fire jumped from one person to another, but I can tell you it didn’t. It attacked that one boy, the one holding the gun. He was the one ended up getting it worse, even if he wasn’t intending on hurting anybody.”

“And what did the police have to say about it?”

The old man just peered curiously at me. I wasn’t surprised. In my mind, I saw them dragging bodies into the woods, digging holes deep enough for them to never be found again. Then I saw them - all of them - arguing about how to keep everyone quiet.

Guess there needn’t be a disagreement about it, if them boys were never found.

“So that’s why I wouldn’t know any of them,” I said. I caught flickers of old, tattered images in that moment, memories from other people’s minds, like pictures tossed in a fireplace.

“They didn’t make it through the night,” the old man said. “I bet they’re still buried out in the woods near that juke joint, if I had to guess.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You ain’t got to. Truth don’t mind skepticism.”

“But aren’t there rules?” I asked. “I feel like I’m seeing things right now. I even think I see a younger version of you.”

“Tell you what,” said the old man, “you find the logic of your situation, you go out and do some math and figure out what in the hell ties everything together in a little bow, you come back and give it to me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“The world is messy, and everything in it is messy. Life is a damned broken mirror, the shards scattered all over the floor. You might be able to paste some of them together, but there’s always going to be little bitty pieces sliding under the furniture, or too small to see, and then you’ll never be able to pull it all together. What you got to say about that?”

I was stumped. “I agree. Life can’t be tied up like that. And memories, well.”

“The only way you find answers is to keep looking. You expected to come out here and have me hand everything to you. I’ve told you more than once, it don’t work that way. You will get one little clue here and one little clue there, but you will never jump on the one answer.”

“So you’re not going to try to preach some message to me now?” I asked.

“The time of the preacher man is long gone, and only the echo of anything meaningful he said can even be heard anymore.”

“Grandpa, you shouldn’t be talking like that,” a beautiful, curly-headed girl said.

“I’m just telling the truth, and it must hurt you because you’d tell a lie if you were in my place.” He smiled wickedly, but that seemed to shut his granddaughter up - if that was, in fact, his granddaughter. He turned to me, and he said, “You don’t care none about some dead white boys, though, do you? It’s the owners you want to know about.”

“That’s right,” I said. I wasn’t entirely sure if that was the truth, but I thought it might lead me somewhere true. “I want to know what happened to them, why they disappeared. How they disappeared.”

“Word is, they was going to get a southern send-off, and I think you know what that means for black men, so they kicked on out of town before they could receive it.”

“But that isn’t what happened,” I said. “If it’s that easy to make a few white boys disappear, then for a couple of mystic strangers, it’s got to be even easier.”

He nodded and pushed his lips out and hummed. “I reckon everybody was surprised to go out there and find all the lights out and the doors closed.”

“Did no one look for them?”

“They didn’t have no family up this way - none that wasn’t in jail, I don’t think - so it was just the people going out there and drinking that cared about them two men, so it wasn’t long before they were forgotten.”

I shook my head. “That’s a shame.”

“Oh, people tried to reopen the place a few times. Kicked the doors open and tried to get the lights and sound going, but it was different.”

“There was a pall hanging over it, knowing they had disappeared?”

“Hell no. The equipment wouldn’t work right. The lights flickered, and there was some strange things that we didn’t want to think about happening out there.”

“Like supernatural things.”

“It felt like dancing on the dirt of a freshly-dug grave,” he said, “and couldn’t nobody stomach that. Plus, the charm seemed like it had been taken off that place, because that’s when the white folks started trying to shut it down, started making a big mess of a little old bar for blacks.”

“And do you ever think of those men?”

“Don’t have to. I hear them in my head all the time. It’s the way regret goes, son. You live long enough, and all the things you wish you had done - or had done differently - start to whisper to you in ways you find hard to deal with.”

There was a good, long, awkward pause after that. Finally, he said, “I think it’s time you go. They get restless when they can’t play for however long they want.”