Nighthawk Blues (27 page)

It was all pretty standard, Jerry thought, as Little Mose segued into “In the Midnight Hour”—the band, the showmanship, the entertainer’s calculation—but he had the crowd in the palm of his hand, as they answered his “Good Gods!” and “Tell the truths” with their own “That’s right,” “I hear you,” and “Tell me about it.” “Have mercies” with their own deep-throated murmurs of assent.

He supposed the singer must be in his mid-thirties, though it was hard to tell from the smooth-skinned, light-brown face, the squint of his close-set eyes, and the sardonic, slightly amused cast to the features, which effectively distanced performer from performance, making it impossible to gauge just what were the singer’s own emotions. The next song evidently was one of his own, to which he applied the full treatment, falling to his knees, grasping at the hand of a lady in the front row, milking his audience for everything it was worth.

“He’s not bad, is he?” said Lori. “You ever hear of him before?”

Jerry shook his head and signaled to the waitress for more drinks. His face was bathed in perspiration, as if he were the one who was getting the workout.

“I guess he must be on some little Chicago label?” said Lori. “You think Hawk knew about him?”

Jerry shook his head again. He was watching Hawk, who was staring intently at the stage, never taking his eyes off the singer—what was he seeing? Jerry wondered. Was it Ol’ Man Mose he saw, reliving memory, or did he see something altogether different through artist’s eyes?

Hawk caught him looking. “What you think of all this foolishness?” that big voice boomed out. “All this jumping around and carrying on and all that shit. Seem like just a lot of jive to me. Course I don’t know.”

“Kind of loud,” said Lori, shouting into Hawk’s ear.

Hawk grunted, as Little Mose screamed and launched into an impassioned version of “I Feel Good.” “Too much noise,” Hawk pronounced. “Course I don’t mind, but that’s where he making his mistake.” He poked Scooter in the ribs. “See, out in the country we used to listen to the crickets, think they was making some kind of song. Once you get used to this kind of racket, you ain’t never gonna hear them crickets no more.”

Scooter nodded, and Jerry gulped down his drink. He supposed maybe it was true. Hawk wasn’t talking about hearing loss, he was talking about something else. And yet he had himself amplified his guitar so he could be heard above the din in the joints where he played. Lori touched his elbow, as if to say go easy, but tonight he really didn’t care, he didn’t give a shit if he got drunk or not. He signaled for more.

“Hey look,” he heard Hawk’s voice boom out, “that gal ain’t wearing no underdrawers.” Jerry looked disbelievingly in the direction that Hawk was pointing, and sure enough there was a young girl in a saffron-colored dress scrunched down on the floor and wearing no underpants at all.

He looked away embarrassed and caught Lori looking at him and reddened. “I’m not wearing any underdrawers either,” he thought she whispered in his ear, but it was hard to hear and besides she was wearing jeans.

An old man with spiky white hair came over and asked Mat-tie to dance. She smiled and got up, placing her hand decorously on his shoulder, but by the time she got out on the floor she was shaking her ass in his face and doing the bump just like anyone else. Jerry had scarcely had time to adjust to that when a mountainous woman with a black Medusa wig piled high on top of her head came over and asked if he would like to dance.

“Oh, no, really,” he said demurely, thinking if she ever sat on him he would be crushed.

“Oh, come on,” said Lori.

“Sure. Come on, sugar,” said the woman in a small, sweet voice. “You know, you only live once!”

Jerry was still shaking his head as Lori pushed him up from the table, and before he knew it he was out on the dance floor himself, carrying himself stiffly in response to the fat woman’s graceful swoops and dips. “My name’s Claudia,” said his partner.

“Jerry,” he said, intoxicated with her graceful movements, the smell of the dance floor, and the blue haze of cigarette smoke.

“Well, gotta get back to work, Jerry,” she said at the end of the number, jingling the waitress’ change apron that he had failed to notice earlier.

“You want to dance?” he said to Lori.

Little Mose was singing “Here I Am (Come and Take Me),” and Lori folded herself into his arms. He sniffed her hair —he could have gulped her down. “You know, I forget sometimes—” he started to say.

“You forget a lot. You know, you’re drunk.”

“No, I mean, I forget how much fun—”

“You think Hawk’s gonna be all right?”

“Hawk? No, I mean you and me—”

“You think he’s going to be all right?”

When they got back to the table, Hawk was remonstrating with Mattie about something. “Now the boy don’t have to go home. His sister can take care of the baby.” Mattie started to get up from her seat, and Hawk put his hand on her shoulder.

“I don’t want to hear no more of that,” he said angrily.

Scooter asked if he could have another Coke, and Jerry gulped down his own drink, so he could join him.

“I never knowed that boy to be such a serious drinker,” said Hawk to Lori, eyeing Jerry with surprise.

The singer was doing another one of his originals, a kind of disco ballad with a long spoken rap that concluded, “Be true to your dream, or your dream won’t be true to you.” Jerry snorted. He had never heard such shit before in his life. How was your
dream
going to betray you? Be true to your dream, and your dream will be true to you? He laughed out loud and turned to Hawk, but Hawk was preoccupied with a bunch of people who had come over to say hello. He turned to Lori to see if she might like to dance again, but she was dancing with the same woolly-headed old man who had been dancing with Mattie before. Like himself, Jerry noticed with some triumph, she was tight and constricted in her movements, for all her apparent spontaneity she seemed stiff and self-conscious in her response to the old man’s lithe and courtly steps. They said you could tell a lot about a girl from the way she danced. They said you could tell how a girl fucked from the way she danced.

“What do you think?” he said to Little Bo.

“It’s kind of old-fashioned,” said Scooter shortly.

“Hunh!” laughed Hawk.

The rising level of conversation, the clink of glasses and bustling clatter of tables being cleared, pretty girls lifting up their arms in celebration of
—nothing—

Jerry wanted to ask Hawk if this was the way it was in the old days, if this was the way it had been. Did everybody fall into bed at the end of the night, did everybody fuck in the end? He thought some sociologist should take a poll. A poll with your pole.

“You like to dance?” said a voice close by. Looking up, he saw that it was the heavy-set waitress, Claudia, again.

“You think you can get me a drink when we’re done?”

“You don’t need no more to drink, sugar,” she said shyly.

“Goddammit,” Jerry exploded. “Everybody’s telling me what I need, and what I don’t need. Why doesn’t everybody just leave me alone?” It seemed as if for a moment the music stopped and every eye in the hot, crowded room was on him. He thought he heard murmurs of disapproval—but, of course, that was ridiculous. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know, I don’t know why I—”

Claudia’s feet moved with a delicacy and swiftness surprising in so large a woman, as she executed intricate little steps that made Jerry feel as if
he
were fat and clumsy. “Don’t worry about it, sugar,” she said kindly and put her hand on his shoulder as a slow number started up and gathered him in to her. He felt crushed against her bosom, wishing he could lose himself in the generous folds of flesh. Looking over, he saw Lori dancing with Scooter and Mattie sipping decorously on her drink. His head was buzzing, the music filled his brain, driving out any stray thoughts he might have had, he clung to Claudia for dear life. He was drunk. She patted his back understandingly. “Thanks, sugar. Gotta get back to work.”

Just then the band went into its riff, the bass player grabbed the mike and declared, “Now let’s hear it. Let’s hear it for Moses Edward, Little Mose and the Bros. Put your hands together, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to let the man
hear
it. Well, right now, ladies and gents, we gonna take five to stay alive, we might take ten, my friend, but we’ll be back again. Any re-questses, you just let us know and we do our best to satisfy you. We
always
do our best, and we always satisfy—you know we do, sugar, that’s right. So y’all be sure and stick around, don’t be a clown and put us down or be a square and walk out and go somewhere. There’s plenty more where this come from, y’hear?” Looking bored, the band finished out their number and put their instruments down. The horn player and keyboard man lit up cigarettes. Jerry stood out on the dance floor until it was practically deserted and only then stumbled back to the table.

They were talking about him. They were acting as if he wasn’t even there. “We gonna have to carry that boy home,” Hawk laughed. “I don’t know what’s got into him.”

“Roosevelt, will you just leave him be?”

“Are you all right?” said Lori, giggling, as he seated himself unsteadily.

“I just wish you would all leave me alone,” he said, mustering one last attempt at dignity.

Now that the dance floor was clear, a number of people noticed Hawk for the first time and there started to be a steady procession over to the table. It was like old home week, as Hawk greeted each one in turn with “How you been? How you doing, man?” extending his hand, never rising from his seat, accepting their well-wishes with a deference that let everyone know he was only taking it as his due.

“Hey, you met Little Mose yet?” said one of the men whom Jerry thought he recognized from earlier times. Hawk shook his head. “Hey, man, that ain’t right. That boy dying to meet you. Just a minute. Let me go get him.”

A few minutes later he brought back Mose, who, far from giving the impression that he was dying to meet the older man, appeared sullen and a little resentful to have been dragged to the table. Despite the heat he was wearing a floor-length coat and smoking a thin cigar, while a lithe young woman with long curly hair that appeared to be her own clung to his arm. Up close Mose looked even more bored and worldly-wise than he did on stage, his hooded eyes giving a slightly sardonic edge to a smooth-skinned face which could have been anywhere between twenty and fifty, so effective was its owner in masking any trace of emotion, in warding off any betrayal of commitment from its somewhat pinched features.

“I knew your daddy,” Hawk said at last, after a silence that seemed as if it might go on all night.

“I never did,” said Mose.

“No, I guess you wouldn’t. Your mama must have taken you away when you was three, four years old.”

“That’s right.”

“Never been back:?”

“Come back one time, after my first record was out.” Hawk nodded. “I didn’t have no gig. Just wanted to see where I was from. Roots!” he spat out with a harsh little laugh. “That’s what everyone be talking about, ain’t it? I come down here, Mr. Charlie say, Bend over, boy, I’ll show you your roots.”

“You ain’t lying neither,” said Hawk. He stared at the younger man, but Mose said nothing else. His companion drummed her painted fingernails on his shoulder.

“This here’s my manager,” Hawk said. “Mr. Jerry Lip-schitz.” Jerry half rose and reached across the table to shake hands. He barely felt the grip of Mose’s limp fingers. “And I’m sure you’ve heard of Lori Peebles.”

“Oh yeah?” For a moment a look of interest penetrated the impervious features. “Yeah, I seen you once, I think we might’ve played on the same bill—”

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember—”

“Oh yeah, it was a big benefit thing up in Chicago. For Reverend Jesse, you know what I’m talking about?”

“Out at the baseball park?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, that was beautiful,” said Lori.

“That’s right.”

“I just got back from Europe, you know,” said Hawk. “Them European cats just eat up all this kind of shit. You ever been over there yourself?”

“No, man, I been planning to make it over one of these days. I mean, I been
asked,
but the way I figure it, I gotta get
-paid,
you know what I’m talking about? What I want to go over there for if I ain’t gonna get paid?”

“That’s right. That’s right. Ain’t no sense in going just for the glory. You should talk to this boy here about setting you up a tour. He knows all them big-time cats.”

“Yeah, maybe I have my manager talk to him.”

Jerry looked from one to the other, like a spectator at a Ping-Pong match.

“The people go crazy when they find out who your kinfolks are.

“Oh yeah?” said Mose, half interested. “You think so, man?”

“Shit, to them 01’ Man Mose is like a fucking god.”

The young man laughed a short tight laugh. “To my mama he was like the devil hisself. I never even knowed my grandaddy was a musician till I started hanging around the clubs—you know, trying to be a bad boy. Up till then the only place I sung was in the choir. But when my mama seen I had my mind set on singing
my
music, that’s when she said, Well, I guess it’s in your blood, ain’t nothing I can do about it. She didn’t want to have nothing to do with me, but I promised I’d buy her a home someday, I’m still gonna do it, man, that day still gonna come.”

“Sure it is,” said Hawk. “You say hello to your mama from me the next time you see her, y’hear? Tell her I didn’t even know she was still up there, else I would have looked her up myself.”

Mose appeared to be embarrassed, as if he had been lulled into making a revelation. “Oh yeah, sure. Mama still stay in touch with down home. Practically her whole congregation from down home.”

“Yeah,” said Hawk. “That’s right.”

The bass player was
getting
the rest of
the
band together
on the bandstand. “Well, look like I gotta be getting back to
work,” said Mose without any hint of emotion in his voice. “You take care of yourself, hear?” He clapped Hawk on the back. “Nice meeting you folks,” he said with an entertainer’s broad grin and a little wink besides. He walked
off
with his girl, their arms loosely entwined.