Nighthawk Blues (2 page)

“Look, gentlemen, something’s come up.” He sensed the consternation at the other end. Did they think he was getting smart? Did they think he was getting cute in his old age? What was there to get cute about? Lori hadn’t really made any money for the company, 120,000 units on her last album, sure, but what was that compared to her potential? And there was no way she could live up to her potential if she wouldn’t guarantee a minimum of personal appearances, if she wouldn’t promise to follow up the next album with a full-blown personal tour. And that she wouldn’t do under any circumstances. She insisted on seeing her music as art, not commerce, making the records the way she wanted, when she wanted, and with whom she wanted. He’d be lucky if he could get front money of $50,000 for re-signing, and this was for an artist who everyone agreed could be a monster. Which was the only reason they still wanted to hang onto her. They didn’t want to let him go, but he was firm. Who knew? Maybe this would jack up the price another $25,000.

“Yeah?” he said, jabbing the button on the phone console.

Hawk’s voice sounded whispery and far away. The familiar hoarse rasp was barely audible.

“Something happened, boss.”

Jerry was annoyed. What the fuck did he have to call him boss for? He knew how it irritated him. It made him look like an asshole. He supposed that was why Hawk did it. Hawk thought he was an asshole. After all he had done for Hawk, practically lifting him out of the gutter—well, out of the Sunset Cafe in Yola, Mississippi, which wasn’t far from it. A ludicrous fate for this man who was virtually a legend in his own time, a source, an inspiration, an unreconstructed—Jerry was embarrassed at the rhetorical flourishes even his imagination conjured up after all the similar flights of fancy he had served to the world, both before and after meeting their subject—genius. “Nigger,” Hawk corrected him in mournful, dolorous tones. “You know, boss, I ain’t nobody’s angel child, just another nigger baby trying to get along in the world.”

“An accident,” said the voice on the line. “We just about made Indianapolis.”

Jerry began to get worried. Maybe he shouldn’t have sent them out alone. Three septuagenarians in one of Hawk’s interchangeable twenty-year-old piles of junk on wheels. The Blues Express, his idea—they should be playing Notre Dame tonight.

“What kind of an accident?” Jerry’s voice rose in concern.

“How many kinds of accidents is there? Ain’t never heard of a good accident myself. Wheatstraw gone.”

“Wheatstraw’s dead?”

“Yeah, that simpleminded fool done gone to his reward. He couldn’t hardly talk, but he could play.”

Jerry thought he must have come in in the middle of some bizarre joke. “He’s not dead?”

“Went flying right through the fucking windshield. I saw him. Man, I know. He looked like some big bird just about to take off. I say, Hey there, motherfucker, you think you can fly, so that’s what you mean when you sing about that old flying crow?” Jerry thought he must be losing his mind. Was Hawk chuckling softly under his breath? “He didn’t never do nobody no harm, he were just simpleminded from a kid on up. I told you, man, I didn’t never want to do this tour. Didn’t want to be no blues legend.”

Little beads of sweat stood out on Jerry’s forehead. Wheat-straw dead. Hawk was right, it was his fault. Hawk hadn’t wanted it. Hawk hadn’t wanted the tour in the first place. But Jerry had seen it as the opportunity for one last payday. In the ten years that he and Hawk had been associated, trends and styles had several times changed, and the wave of nostalgia which had unearthed the great blues singers in their sixties and seventies had now passed on to something else, bookings were fewer and farther between, and old black men were no longer fashionable on campus. Jerry didn’t tell Hawk any of this, but he had conceived of this tour as a kind of farewell appearance on campuses across the country and promoted it as such. Three old black men. The Screamin’ Nighthawk. Alex Wheatstraw. T&O “Teenochie” Slim, the piano player.

“How about Slim?”

Hawk mumbled something.

“What?”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with Mr. T&O Slim that a gag in the mouth wouldn’t cure. Man, what you send me out with that sorry-ass motherfucker for? Always getting fucked up by them pretty young things. Oh, Mr. Slim, would you teach me how to tickle them ivories? Tell me about the time Mr. Lester Melrose brung you up to Chicago so’s you could make your classic sides with Big Bill and Tampa. Tampa, shit, can’t even tie his own shoelaces, and Slim couldn’t never keep his yap shut, dawn to dusk, drunk or sober, whether he knowed what he was talking about or not, he always be shooting off about something—”

Oh shit. Oh shit. He was going to have to go out to Indianapolis, he knew he was, he was going to have to straighten out this whole mess—

“Well, look, how do you feel? Do you think you can hang on for a little while? I’m kind of tied up here right now, but I can catch a plane later tonight or tomorrow morning.”

The voice on the other end audibly weakened. “Well, you know, boss, I ain’t doing all that good, really, but I’m sure I’ll be fine. Why don’t you just stay where you are, I don’t require nothing, ain’t no need to call Mattie, I don’t suppose. They say it must have been some kind of shock, but I’m coming along real good now. Won’t be no time, boss, before I can get around on my own, you know.”

Jerry had visions of old black men reproaching him in his sleep. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his responsibility. “Look, I’ll be out,” he said. “You just tell the doctors or whoever that I’ll be out, I’ll straighten it all out—”

There was only a satisfied silence at the other end.

He hurried to get ready, called the airport, shaved around his beard and drooping mustache, observing himself all the while with soft self-pitying brown eyes. He packed a light suitcase, called back
CBS,
and then explained to Stephie what was going on. He gave her careful instructions to close the office at five, put the phone on answering service, and not bother to show up until he got in touch with her in a few days. He called the wire services and tried to think of anything else there was to do, and when he couldn’t then he made the call.

She was in New Orleans for no good reason. She had gone down there with her bass player, who was black, fifty-two years old, a junkie, a physical wreck, and had played with every prominent New Orleans musician for the last forty years. By sheer chance he got her after only a couple of calls at some old jazzman’s house. He didn’t have to explain, he knew he wouldn’t; that quality of passionate intensity that seemed so at odds with her flat self-conscious speech patterns came into play almost before he got the words out. It was the same quality that transformed her singing voice into a graceful, soaring, instinctive instrument that seemingly had little to do with plan or intention. Was there anything she could do? She’d fly out right away. She would, of course, pay for Wheatstraw’s funeral, at least help out, she insisted, when he mumbled that wasn’t necessary. Here were some numbers where she could be reached. How was Hawk? Jerry answered all the questions slowly, patiently, all the while seething inside. There was never a word, of course, not a single word, about her discoverer and mentor—how he was, how he was bearing up under the strain, how terrible it must be for him. She was, after all, his discovery; if she had the talent he was the only one with the willingness to advance it, to promote it, to indulge it, to put up with her absurd middle-class guilt, the lack of necessity behind her art. Her public should give him a medal, they honestly should, because without him—oh, it was absurd on the face of it, he was just distorting the reality. It was Hawk, not Jerry, who had first heard that something in her voice, it was Lori herself who had sought and captured Sid’s attention. Still, if it hadn’t been for him, she might still be in ethnomusicology getting her Ph.D. somewhere, playing timid botdeneck behind some decrepit old bluesman the local Blues Appreciation Society had brought to town, beautiful, deferential, effacing herself and her talent. Her pictures surrounded him mockingly, each click of the camera undeniably capturing some aspect of her appeal but somehow leaving the inner self untouched. Her eyes calm, still, playful, her lips pursed in an oddly self-satisfied smile, her blond hair whipped around her face no doubt by one of those vigorous blushing denials, elusive, teasing, inviting, sensual, the whole obscured by each of the parts, the whole somehow untranslatable—

He knew now what he should have done. He should have hidden her talent from her, he should have denied it when others spotted it, never even hinted that it might exist. But that hadn’t been an option. That had never been an option. She would have realized, someone else would have told her, and then he would have lost her anyway. He hung up the phone bitterly. “What do you say?” he said to himself, not for the first time. “What do you say?”

At the airport he was as confused as ever by the dizzying rush, the isolating busde. They were just thousands of strangers gathered under one roof. And yet somehow, as he always did, as he always would, of course, he got through. On the plane he ordered a double Scotch and then another, setded back, sailed into the sunset, and closed his eyes for a brief troubled dream before the rude shock of landing jarred him awake. At the claims area he hung around waiting for his bag, eyeing the black porters, black taxi drivers, black maintenance men, middle-aged and elderly, any one of whom for all he knew might be another Screamin’ Nighthawk, another castoff from another life who might be sought out and lionized by a community of whose existence he could be only dimly aware, while he was himself insignificant and anonymous within his own community. God help him.

At the hospital they gave him a hard time, because it was after visiting hours. It didn’t seem to make much difference that he had come all this way, nor were they interested in who the Screamin’ Nighthawk was. What they were interested in, of course, was who was going to pay the bill. Indianapolis had enough indigents of its own, thank you, said the admitting nurse, taking down the scanty information that Jerry was able to provide—born December 27, 1902, 1900, 1899? Given name: T.R. Jefferson. Social security number? Jerry almost wished he had brought clippings, but it wouldn’t have meant shit. Name. Rank. Serial number. Date of birth. Mother’s maiden name. Father’s occupation. Maybe these people had it right. Maybe that was all that counted, these statistics, facts, an orderly life’s progression, the very factors whose absence had made it so impossible to locate Hawk for a period of nearly twenty years.

At last he cornered a young, mustached doctor. Briefly he explained the situation. The doctor introduced him to another doctor, portly, middle-aged, his white hospital gown wrinkled and stained. The old man led him to the elevator, which was stuck somewhere between the fifth and sixth floors, explaining between emphysematous puffs just what had happened and what was likely to happen. It was just as Hawk had said. An automobile accident, Wheatstraw like a big black crow sailing through the windshield. Teenochie had escaped unharmed. Teenochie in fact had escaped altogether, vanishing into the early-morning squalor of Indianapolis, where no doubt he had a friend, knew a woman, was acquainted with a bar where thirty-five years before he had passed through and no doubt thirty-five years hence he would expect to pass through again. And what about Hawk?

“Mr., uh, Jefferson is doing about as well as can be expected,” said the doctor as the elevator doors finally opened and a stretcher with a covered-up body on it was wheeled out. “He is, after all, not a young man. He’s subjected his body to a considerable amount of abuse. From what he says, I gather he must be in his seventies, he has sustained a number of coronary attacks already—”

Jerry expressed surprise.

“Oh yes, there’s no doubt about that. There’s some evidence of ventricular damage, cholesterol level is high, blood sugar is elevated, too, and of course he suffered a small shock.”

“Shock?” Jerry remembered Hawk saying something like this, but he thought Hawk said it had been quite a
shock.

“Yes. Mr. Jefferson suffered a slight shock, a cerebral incident—in fact that’s probably what caused the accident, though it’s difficult to be sure. For a period of time he lost control of his functions, which is not uncommon, and until a short while ago he was unable to move his left side—”

“You mean he’s paralyzed?”

“The feeling seems to be coming back. I’m quite sure he’ll have nearly full use in no time. With the proper therapy we’ll probably even get him back to strumming on the guitar. But, of course, there can be no question of his continuing as an entertainer. The shock should be taken as a warning, really. The effects will probably wear off, but it’s a signal, it can’t be ignored. The next one could leave him paralyzed or worse—and there’s bound to be a next one, unless he radically changes the way he lives. I don’t know how much of this Mr. Jefferson can take in, but I hope you can appreciate the seriousness of his condition. There can’t be any thought of performing. His diet, medication, drinking will all have to be strictly regulated.” He paused, stared openly into Jerry’s eyes, as if he doubted that Jerry was even listening to what he was saying.

Jerry glared back at him. He could have been a doctor, he supposed. Except he hadn’t wanted to be a doctor. Cold-hearted motherfuckers—he might have made his parents happy.

“Do you think he’ll be all right?” said Jerry miserably.

“Well, frankly, I just don’t know,” said the doctor. “It’s always hard to tell with this kind of case. You know, these people really don’t take very good care of themselves.”

He shrugged, and for a moment Jerry bristled once again with the kind of indignation he rarely felt these days.
Take in … these people!
Hawk had never been a lush—what did these assholes mean? Didn’t they realize they were in the presence of a great American poet, proud spokesman for a proud people who had had to reinvent language and experience for themselves as strangers in a strange land? His heart wasn’t in it, though. His heart hadn’t been in it for a long time. Let the chickens come home to roost, let everyone suffer under his own self-perpetuating delusions.