Authors: James Lee Burke

Half of Paradise (3 page)

BOOK: Half of Paradise

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“Mr. Hunnicut will see you now,” she said.

J.P. put out his hand-rolled cigarette under his shoe and placed the guitar back in its case. From the corner of his eye he watched the secretary sit down in her chair. Her skirt creased across the top of her thighs. He went into the audition room and saw a fat sweating man dressed in a white linen suit and candy-striped necktie sitting in a folding chair with a pitcher of ice water by his side. There were some other men standing around whom J.P. didn’t look at. The man in the linen suit filled his glass from the pitcher and swallowed two salt tablets.

“What do you do?” the man said.

“Play twelve-string guitar and sing,” J.P. answered. “I seen your ad in the paper about the talent show.”

“You know there’s an entrance fee of five dollars.”

“I give it to the secretary.”

“All right, go ahead. Sing.”

J.P. felt nervous. The other men were watching him. He thought they were smiling. He put the leather strap around his neck and began. He hit the wrong chords and his voice cracked. One of the men laughed.

“Shut up, Troy,” said Hunnicut, the sweating man in the white linen suit.

“I reckon I’m nervous,” J.P. said.

“Try it again,” Hunnicut said, bored.

Good morning, blues

Blues, how do you do?

I’m doing all right

Good morning, how are you?

When I got up this morning

Blues was walking round my bed

Yes, the blues walking round my bed

I went to eat my breakfast

The blues was all in my bread

I sent for you yesterday see me baby

Here you come a walking today

Yes, here you come a walking today

Got your mouth wide open

You don’t know what to say.

Hunnicut leaned his weight back in the wood chair and looked at him. He spit on the floor and took a drink of water.

Good morning, blues

Blues, how do you do?

I’m doing all right

Good morning, how are you?

J.P. finished and put his guitar back in its case.

“Do you write your own music?” Hunnicut said.

“That’s one of Leadbelly’s songs. I heard him once when he first got out of the pen.”

“Who’s Leadbelly?”

“He was in Angola. He’s the man that made a twelve-string guitar.”

“Here’s a card. It will get you in the door tonight,” Hunnicut said.

“Do I get my five dollars back?”

“No, you don’t get it back. Do you want to use one of the electric guitars tonight?”

“I don’t play on no electric guitar,” J.P. said. “It ruins the tone.”

“You got another suit besides that one?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. It looks fine.”

“Let him wear a pair of overalls,” one of the other men said.

“Don’t mind Troy,” Hunnicut said. “He’s got a mouth disease. It don’t know when to stay shut.”

Troy was a member of Hunnicut’s show. He was from back-of-town Memphis, and he had black marcelled hair, sideburns, a high oil-slick forehead, and gold plating around the edges of his teeth. His lean jaws worked slowly as he chewed a piece of gum. The man with him was named Seth. He was tall and he had coarse brown hair like straw, and his face was scarred from smallpox. The skin was deeply pockmarked and reddened, and there was a scent of whiskey on his breath.

“I got something for you to sign,” Hunnicut said. “This is just a talent show and you don’t get paid. If you win you appear on the Louisiana Jubilee, and then we’ll talk about a salary. Seth and Troy will be on the show tonight, but they’re not in the contest.”

He gave J.P. a release to sign. J.P. put his signature at the bottom in pencil in large awkward letters.

“What’s your full name?” Hunnicut said.

“That’s it.”

“Your initials stand for something, don’t they?”

“J.P. is my name, mister. I ain’t got no other.”

“Where are you from?” Troy, the man with the black marcelled hair, said.

“Up north of here by the Arkansas line.”

“All right, boy. You’re all set to go. We’ll see you this evening,” Hunnicut said.

J.P. picked up his guitar case and left the audition room.

“You figure he come to town on a mule?” Troy said.

“He’s going to do all right,” Hunnicut said.

“You ain’t going to let him win?”

“He’s the man.”

“He’s a hillbilly.”

“You want to know something? I’ll tell you why you’ll never be anything but a dime and nickel picker in somebody’s troupe. Because you got no idea of what it takes to get on top of the pile. You either got to know how to act like a hick and make the real hicks think you’re as stupid as they are, or if you’re a real hick you got to have somebody with brains enough behind you to make the other hicks think like you want them to. The way to make money from hicks is to sell them a hick. And that boy is just what they want.”

“He’s still got fertilizer on his shoes,” Troy said.

J.P. crossed the street and walked towards the hotel. He had rented a room without a bath in the older part of the business district. The hotel was an ugly three-story building with rusted fire escapes and one wall had been blackened by a fire. He took his key from the desk clerk and went upstairs.

The room had a musty odor to it. He turned on the ceiling fan and opened the window. He leaned on the sill and looked down into the street. He saw the cotton exchange and the sample bales wrapped in brown paper and partially torn open and stacked by the side entrance; there were drygoods stores, a Negro peddler selling fruit from a wagon, groups of men in overalls and seersucker suits who talked and chewed tobacco and spit over the curbing, women in cotton-print dresses looking through the store windows at the cheap machine-made merchandise, and the late afternoon sun beat down on the asphalt and filled the air with a hot, humid odor. A man who had his legs amputated at the knees sat propped against one of the buildings with a hat in his hand. There were several pencils in the hat. People passed him by without notice, some looked at him in curiosity, one woman dropped a coin into his hat. He sat on a board platform with small metal wheels underneath. He rolled himself along the sidewalk by pushing with his hands against the pavement. J.P. watched him disappear around the corner. He turned away from the window and lay down on the bed.

He took out his guitar and drew his thumb slowly across the strings. Sometimes he used a beer cap for a pick as the cotton field workers did who used to play guitar in the juke joints on the edge of town. He had first liked music as a small boy when he used to sit on the levee in the late evening down by the nigger graveyard and listen to the funeral marches and see the sweating faces in the glow of pine fagots and hear the music that seemed to tell the sorrow of an entire race.

He wanted to write a song. It would contain all the things he felt inside him. It would have the sadness he saw in the country around him, the feeling of the niggers singing in the fields, it would be like the songs they sang on the work gangs and in the Salvation Army camps, or like sitting on the back porch alone, watching the rain fall on the young cotton.

He went down the hall to bathe and dress. At six o’clock he left the hotel and walked to the city auditorium where the contest was being held. The stores had closed and there were few people on the street. He passed the movie house and saw the man with the amputated legs on his wood platform off to one side of the entrance holding his hat and pencils in his hand. The beggar smelled of wine and dried sweat. The buttons of his shirt were gone and his bony chest showed. The theater manager asked him to move farther down the street; he was in the way of the people who wanted to go to the show.

J.P. went to the back door of the auditorium and gave the doorman his card. It was crowded back stage. He saw Hunnicut and Troy talking in the wings.

“Evening,” he said.

“Hi boy, how’s it going?” Hunnicut said, then shouted at one of the prop men, “You got the lights out of place—over there, no, I said over there.” He turned back to J.P. and Troy. “I got to do everybody’s job for them. Go show him where to put the lights, Troy. I should fire the whole goddamn crew of them.”

“Where am I supposed to go?” J.P. said.

“Let’s get you another suit of clothes first.”

“My suit don’t have nothing to do with playing guitar.”

“Hey, Seth, get over here.”

Seth was talking with a short, well-formed brunette.

“Take him into Troy’s dressing room and find him some clothes,” Hunnicut said.

“You sure Troy don’t mind?”

“To hell with Troy. Get Winfield a suit that don’t look like a piece of canvas.”

They walked behind the sets to the dressing room. Seth took a gray sports suit from the closet and laid it over the chair. The pockmarks in his face showed more deeply in the artificial light of the room. He took a pint bottle out of his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap. He drank out of the bottle while J.P. dressed.

“You want a shot?” he said.

“Thanks. You reckon I got a chance tonight?”

“You’ll be all right.”

“I spent my last few dollars to come to town.”

“Virdo will give you a job. You’re real good on a twelve-string.”

“Who’s Virdo?” J.P. said.

“It’s Hunnicut’s first name, but he don’t like nobody to call him by it.”

“Is that girl you were with in the show?”

“Yeah. She sings some. Mostly she’s out there to give the farmers something to look at. I never could get no place with her. She gives it to Troy pretty steady. He can have it, though. She’s on the powder. Mainline stuff.”

“You know some girls around town?”

“Just whores.”

“I’m busted.”

“Get Hunnicut to give you an advance after the show and I’ll take you to a place.”

“I ain’t got the job yet.”

“You ain’t seen the other people that’s going to be out there. There’s one fellow that beats on a washboard while he plays the harmonica. You ain’t got to worry about the job.”

They left the dressing room and went back to stand in the wings. Troy was onstage with the band, waiting for the curtain to open. Seth smoked a cigarette, then went onstage and picked up his banjo and adjusted the microphone. He smiled out at the crowd as the curtain opened.

“A great big howdy, friends and neighbors,” he said. “This is Seth Milton. Tonight we’re going to have some of your favorite artists from the field of country and western music, along with some of the best in local talent. The contest is going to start directly, but first me and the boys is going to pick and sing some of your favorite tunes. This show is being put on by Mr. V. L. Hunnicut of the Louisiana Jubilee, who has encouraged so much young talent and brought some of the major stars of country music into the national spotlight. Also I want to tell you about the big one hundred page color picture book that we have on sale at the entrance. It contains one hundred actual color photographs of your favorite country singers, ready to cut out and put on the wall at home. This big color picture book is selling for the low figure of two dollars and fifty cents, and if you ain’t got the money on you, you can put in your order and it will be sent to you collect. The pages is in bright glossy color, and when you’re listening over the radio to your favorite country entertainer you can look up his picture in the bigprint table of contents and it’s just like he’s in the room with you.

“Now, I want you to meet somebody that many of you already know. He’s one of the best guitar pickers in the field, and he’s just put out two new records. Come on up here, brother Troy.”

J.P. stood in the wings and listened to Troy sing and the applause afterwards. Then the brunette came on and sang “I Want to Be in My Savior’s Arms,” and he looked at her short-cut hair and Irish peasant face and her abnormally large breasts. She had a slender waist, flat stomach, and wide hips. He thought about laying her, and then he thought about going to a whorehouse later in the evening with Seth. He hoped he could get the job and the advance on his salary. It had taken all his money to come to town and enter the show, and it had been three weeks since he had slept with a woman; if he lost the contest he would have to hitchhike back home, and it would be another month before he could afford Miss Sara’s house out in the country.

The band left the stage, and the contest started. The man with the harmonica and washboard went on first. He held the harmonica in his mouth with his lips and played while he beat out the rhythm on the metal ripples in the washboard with his knuckles.

Three others went on, and it was J.P.’s turn. He walked out on the stage from the wings with his guitar. The lights were hot in his face. The audience was a dark, indistinct mass behind the lights. He sang “Good-Night, Irene,” which had been Leadbelly’s theme song.