Everybody Pays (13 page)

GOIN’ DOWN SLOW

S
aturday night, there’s always a woman in a red dress. Looking over at me when my hands are down—harp in one hand, mike in the other.

I drop my hands when Big G takes a keyboard solo. Most people, their eyes go to the man with the front music. Junior does vocals, Melvin plays slide—they get most of the looks. They both play the crowd too, working them.

But when I solo, I get lost. My eyes are always closed. It’s not a stage thing—that’s the way it happens. So, if a woman’s looking at me when I don’t have my harp up and running, I know why.

But if the woman’s there with a man, I know better than to look back. Woman like that, the red dress is a signal. She’s a fire-starter. In the joints we play, it’d most likely be a knife, but a pistol’s always a possibility.

And even if her man walks off, you can’t be sure he won’t be back. Slick and quiet. And maybe your next drink will be the same kind that sent Robert Johnson off to pay that debt he ran up at the Crossroads.

But if that red dress is full of juice and there’s no man next to it, that’s another signal. And it ain’t “Stop!”

You have to play
hard
in these joints. I don’t mean loud—noise won’t get it. Hard
enough,
maybe that’s closer to it. Sometimes we get to play big places. Even a stadium once, behind a band with a label deal and all that. In big places, you don’t have to play hard. The people in the crowd make most of the sound themselves anyway. But in the clubs, you better bring it. Or they’ll take you right off the stage.

That’s the way I started. Tuesday nights at the Ice Pick. The house band opens up, one slot at a time, the way a flower opens, petal by petal. That’s to see if anyone wants to sit in. Like, the slide man, he’ll make a gesture, then take a seat off to the side. And anyone who thinks he can make steel sing, well, he can just step up and try and take the man’s place for that piece of time.

It was a long time before I was ready. Longer than I thought, actually. ’Cause, the first two times, I didn’t make it. It wasn’t like the people booed me or nothing. They don’t do that. What they do is . . . they talk. To themselves, I mean. Just go back to their conversations like they’re in an elevator.

They do that, you’re done.

The third time was the charm, like the people say. I just filled in behind at first. Then I put in a few figures. And when the leader stepped off and pointed at me, I made the crowd quiet right down. Most harp men, they can juke you to death, but they can’t go slow. The great ones—Jimmy Cotton, Butterfield, Musselwhite—they can go either way, of course. Sonny Boy, Little Walter—they could go wherever they wanted.

I always modeled myself after Blind Owl Wilson. I must have listened to him on “Goin’ Down Slow” a million times. I wanted to make people feel what I felt when I heard him. And that night, I got it right, bending the notes over slow and soft . . .
clean,
not cheating off the feedback from the mike.

After that, I sat in a lot with different bands until Junior picked me for permanent. I’ve been traveling with them ever since.

I can’t read music, but I can hear it perfect. I told Honeyboy, and he said it was okay—he said he wouldn’t trust no preacher that had to read his sermon from a script.

I’ll never be the king of anything. My ambition is to be one of the thousand great harp men. Not to be in no arguments, just to
be.
Like the blues. That’s one of the first things Honeyboy told me. “The blues is always going to be here. Like a convict run off from a chain gang who the Man never find. Oh, he have to lay low sometime—disco made the blues lay
real
low for a while back—but he always going be around. Always be running, though. Never be on top for long, but never be gone neither. Remember that part, son—never be on top to stay. Lotsa white boys, they made that mistake. The ones who come up in the late sixties—it was
good
then. College kids loved it. Record deals for everyone. Stadiums, TV, everything. Then the sheriff called to the hounds, and the blues had to get back in the woods. Those white boys, the ones who expected it to last forever, they stayed out in the open—and they got cut down. So what you got to remember is this one rule: They can’t hang you while you running.”

I never forgot that. But I don’t know what to do now. It was a Saturday night. It was a woman in a red dress. It was a man I didn’t know she had.

A young man. A white man. A rich man’s son who crossed the tracks one too many times.

Now he’s in the ground and I’m on the run.

I’ll be all right if I don’t go back to the clubs. I’m nobody . . . as long as I don’t pick up my harp again.

I wonder how long I can go without.

I wonder how long I can go.

for Peter

WORD PLAY

STEPPING STONE

I
t’s nine-forty-five. The bus is supposed to leave soon—the ten-fifteen to St. Louis—and Jasmine isn’t here yet.

I wonder if maybe she had trouble getting a cab, with all the rain coming down. Or maybe it was taking her longer than she thought to get to the money. I was thinking maybe even the cops . . . But then I stopped. It always makes my head hurt, trying to figure things out.

“Leave that to me, baby,” Jasmine always said. It was easier to do that. And that’s what I always did.

I never could have figured it out by myself. I mean, they keep a lot of cash in those gambling joints, everybody knows that. And everybody knows they have to move it out of there sometime. But only Jasmine could have figured out how they do it.

The first floor of the joint is for the wheels and the dice games and blackjack. Where you play against the house. The second floor has poker and pool. That’s where guys play against each other, and the house takes a piece.

Jasmine said it comes down to the same thing.

There’s girls on the third floor. Jasmine says, even if you walk out a winner, if you walk
up,
you’re going to go home with a lot less money.

That’s where Jasmine works, on the third floor. She’s a supervisor, she told me.

I was never there myself. Everything I know about the place is from Jasmine.

I met her by accident. I was drinking in this bar. I’m not a drunk. I was just looking for someone to talk to. A woman, that’s what I really wanted. Sometimes it works out pretty easy. Sometimes it don’t. I can never figure out why that is. So all I can do is go to the bar and see.

I don’t go much. ’Cause I don’t make much on my job. I mean, it’s not bad, moving furniture. Sometimes the people give the crew boss a tip. And sometimes he splits it with us too.

The first night I met Jasmine, I told her all about my job. She was the first woman who ever wanted to know about it. She asked me, going in people’s houses all the time, didn’t I ever see stuff worth stealing? I told her, sure, it happens all the time. But I would never take stuff.

She asked me why. And I had to think about it. I mean, everyone knows you’re not supposed to take stuff that isn’t yours, right?

And Jasmine told me I
was
right. But, she said, that was only true if the people worked for it. If the people stole it, then taking it from them, well, that wouldn’t be stealing—’cause the money and stuff, it was
already
stolen.

I didn’t understand it the first time she said it, but she didn’t get mad or make fun of me the way other people do sometimes. She was very nice, Jasmine. Very pretty too. I told her that, and she smiled.

Jasmine was my girlfriend after that. My secret girlfriend. She said it had to be that way, because she was married. Her husband was a jealous man.

I told her I could take care of her husband. I wasn’t afraid. And I wanted Jasmine for myself.

She said, no, that wouldn’t be smart. She said they would be getting a divorce soon, but she couldn’t get caught with another man before that, or her husband would get all the money.

I knew Jasmine liked money. She was always dressed fancy. And she had a beautiful car. I felt bad I didn’t have money so I could buy her things she wanted. But Jasmine said not to worry about it. We wouldn’t need any money once she got her divorce.

But then things went bad. Jasmine told me her husband found out about me. He knew everything about me: where I worked, where I lived, even. He knew I had been in prison too, she said.

I was scared for Jasmine. She told me she was more scared for me. Her husband had a real bad temper, and he had a lot of connections, too.

I couldn’t figure out what to do.

That’s when Jasmine told me about the vacuum tube. It’s this plastic tube that runs from the counting room of the club all the way up to the roof. That’s how they get the money out, Jasmine told me. There’s a little house on the roof. Not really a house, more like a shack. When you open the door to it, you’re on the stairs. There are six floors. But when they put the money in the tube, it gets sucked right up to the top.

There’s two pickups a night, Jasmine said. One at midnight, one at four in the morning. How they do it is, a guy comes from the
next
building. The roofs are all the same height. So he just jumps across—it’s only about three, four feet—makes the pickup, then goes back across into the other building. That way, nobody can rob them.

Jasmine said
every
pickup is over a hundred thousand dollars. On Friday and Saturday nights, it’s even more.

She said we could rob it. But they would all know it was her, and we’d have to run away together after.

We couldn’t take her car either, ’cause they all knew what it looked like, and the license number and everything.

The night she told me, Jasmine put on a blond wig. She looked so different. She asked me if I liked it. I said I really did. She kept it on all that night. And she told me she’d wear it when we ran away. Nobody would recognize her.

She said the money would be a stepping stone. We could start all over with it, just her and me. In another town, nobody would ever find us.

We went over it a hundred times. Maybe more. What I had to do is start from
three
buildings away. That part was easy. Jasmine had an apartment there. She rented it a while ago, just in case I would want to move in there, so we’d be close. But she hadn’t told me about it, ’cause she wanted it to be a surprise. So it was even better.

Anyway, all I had to do was step out the back window onto the fire escape and climb up to the roof. Then go across the buildings until I was on top of the right one. When the pickup man came across, I was supposed to wait. When he came out of the shack with the money, that’s when I was supposed to take him.

Jasmine got a gun for me. To show the pickup man and make him hand over the money. But don’t shoot, she said. No matter what. Don’t shoot unless you see cops. If you see cops, honey, you have to start blasting—that’s what she said.

But if I don’t shoot the guy, how am I going to keep him from running downstairs and telling everyone? I asked her.

She told me all the back windows of the building were blacked out. And the whole place was soundproofed. Then she looked at me real hard. I nodded. She looked at me some more. I told her I got it.

She didn’t ask me anything after that. I was proud, ’cause she knew I got it. She trusted me.

When the pickup man came across, I watched him close. He came out with the money, and I stepped out with the gun. He put his hands up. I told him to turn around. Then I took a running start and knocked him off the roof. I went back across the rooftops. It wasn’t hard, even with all the rain.

I left the money in the apartment Jasmine had, just like she said. That way, if I got stopped, I wouldn’t have it on me, and I would be okay.

I kept the pistol, though.

It’s after ten now, but I still don’t see her.

The speaker at the bus station was loud. I looked at the clock. Then I went outside to smoke a cigarette. That’s when I saw the cops. All around the place, a whole bunch of them.

One of them yelled something. I took out the pistol and did what Jasmine said.

for Marty Furman, CPA