The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3) (9 page)

The peepers peeped so loud I couldn’t
focus on much else. I turned to make sure I had the traffic signal in my sight.
“Green means go.”

My feet sank into the wet turf as I
walked. It didn’t feel like earth beneath the roots because it took a long time
springing back after I lifted my foot. Out of the corner of my eye I saw
movement. A warm breeze tried to blow the weeds at the edge of the mud, but the
heavy wind contained more water than air. Toads crawled through the long grass
to escape the flood. I went to the top of the hill to escape them.

Blue and green bottles of all shapes
and sizes had been jammed over the limbs of the small dead tree at all kinds of
angles. Whiskey bottles and beer bottles and pill bottles reflected the distant
traffic lights like sad little galaxies. The yellow lights rising from the
swamp circled individual bottles for a second, like water around a drain,
before rising into the night.

Out in the forest I heard a twang, a
scratchy whine, an untuned guitar spitting out talkin’ blues. I followed the
sounds over an old wrought iron fence, jagged like broken glass, along a raised
ridge to an old barn. Like the road that had been built to always sit above the
flood. In the night’s half-light I saw part of the barn’s roof had collapsed.
At the far end of a scrubby field a row of white columns held up nothing.
Behind them sat the remnants of an old mansion. Dead kudzu covered everything.

A voice in the dark said, “Surprise,
surprise.”

My knees buckled and I tripped
backward. I heard movement. Steps working their way toward me.

“Another guitar player looking for
Robert Johnson’s ghost.”

My heart sped up like when I tasted
Jack Daniels for the first time. I steadied myself on the fence.

“If that ain’t the most unoriginal
thing I ever seen.”

A man walked out of the trees carrying
an old Gibson arch-top by its neck. He wore a faded denim jacket and a Houston
Astros ball cap. One with the old logo, like the one Nolan Ryan wore back in
the day. He smelled like cologne from a five-and dime. I had to say something
to convince myself I wasn’t terrified, but could only come up with, “You him?”

“You him?” he said, mocking me. He had
a long and narrow face, not like any pic of Robert Johnson I ever saw. “You
must not know shit. Don’t even matter which
him
you’re
referring to. Ask another stupid-ass question and see what kind of fool answer
you get.”

“Sorry, man. Just thought…” I tried to
shrink back into the darkness. Tried to disappear completely.

“There’s your problem—you just
thought. I know why you’re here, though. You got woes, right? Yeah, I’m sure
times is real hard for y’all. God bless you, son. I didn’t know.”

“Man…” His tone left me a little too
stunned to reply. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. “I hoped we could
talk.”

“We all got them hard times right?
Some of us even got it so bad we step on down to the crossroads to see if Old
Scratch is really going to show up and make everything better for a little song
and dance. I know all about it. That’s why I’m here.” He shook his head and
licked his lower lip as he stared into the fields. I almost thought he’d
finished, but he said, “He stole that story from me, you know. Look it up.
Robert Johnson don’t know shit about no crossroads hoodoo. Far as I know,
Robert Johnson wouldn’t know that li’l ole funny boy from a bullfrog.”

“Well, how could I know?” I crossed my
arms and took a step back. “I’m real sorry.”

“All everybody ever talks about is
Robert Johnson.” He stabbed the air with his finger when he talked. “But I’m
the only one you see hanging ’round here tonight. Yes sir, Tommy Johnson’s here
for all eternity because Tommy Johnson did the dirt. Meanwhile old Robert
Johnson gets to walk away with all them stories about him.”

“Well, Robert died at twenty-seven,
right?” I said, trying to throw a little optimism on the subject. “Poisoned, or
something?”

“Don’t matter. Everlasting life wasn’t
part of the deal, no sir. Not for this son of man anyhow. But then again, that
li’l ole funny boy ain’t one to play fair.”

“I said I was sorry, man.” This felt
like one of those moments when I had an opportunity to be proactive as long as
I stayed smart about it and kept control of the conversation’s tone. For the
most part trying to change fate hadn’t worked out well for me so far. Pauly
ended up with a limp and Stu ended up in a grave because I figured nobody’d
notice me trying to manipulate the future. But I knew of no cosmic law written
anywhere saying I couldn’t try again. After all, I survived. Adopting a more
forceful voice, I said, “I’m not here because my car won’t start. My girl
disappeared last night. Some fucking Bible-thumpers nabbed her at a truck stop
and I know I don’t have a lot of time to get her back. Like, I know these first
few days are crucial.”

My attitude pulled him out of his
faraway gaze.

“Ooh. So you do got it bad, then? How
you know she didn’t up and leave you?” he said without sarcasm. He set his
guitar on his knee and started to pick. “Coming home at midnight and your
girl’s home at one. Yeah, you creepin’ in at midnight, and you’re girl’s home
at one. You getting ready for some loving, and your girl, she just got done.”

“Look—”

He cut me off, practically spitting
out the words he said, “You want to know about chains? Then you got to be
chained. You got to feel that cold steel cut into your wrists and you got to
know how hope looks when it’s nothing but a tiny little light in the very pit
of your ever-loving soul. You want to sing about hounds? Then you got to know
how it feels when them hounds are breathing down your neck, and how a hound’d
rather die than beg off a trail. Ain’t a man on earth can call them dogs off.”

I turned and clenched a fist. Didn’t
know what else to do with my anger.

Resting his guitar on his toe, he
said, “You going to sing about loss? You got to lose something.”

“Lose something?” I exploded. “I lost
everything.”

He maintained his demeanor, which
frustrated me even more. “No. You ain’t never had nothing. No mama. No family.
Big difference between losing and never had. If you ain’t never had to pick a
sack of cotton then you ain’t ever going to know how many pounds it takes to
keep food in your baby brother’s belly. You may have been to hell and back, but
you ain’t been to hell and done stayed put there. Trust me, you sit down there
long enough, hurting and thinking on all those woes, thinking about the deal
you made with that li’l ole funny boy, then you come back knowing all about
them blues.”

I tried to find the whites of his
eyes, but he kept them shut. I wanted to see if he was taking a piss at my
expense or if he meant it. “How the fuck do you know what I got going on with
me?”

“I don’t know shit. But this son of a
man knows the blues. It’s like a spell on you and your heart hurts and your
head spins like a whirlybird falling from a tree.” He put his hand on my
shoulder. A peace offering. “I know if you don’t do something about it, you
going to fall down a path you never come back up from.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Give
up?”

“They say the good Lord sent sunshine
and the devil, well, he sent the rain. But that ain’t always the case. Back in
them olden days, relations between gods and folks like me and you was simple.”
He pulled me close and started talking real low, like he didn’t want anybody
else to hear. “But the church wants to control how you talk to the gods. Folks
forget that we didn’t need a priest for rituals. The church wanted us to forget
that we had the ways and means to communicate with them all by ourselves. Some
of my people though, they still doing things the old way. Same as some of your
people. Using methods that involve a little less church and a lot more getting
your hands dirty. My momma had an altar in the kitchen right next to the old
potbelly stove. She put on her hat and went to church every Sunday from the day
they baptized her to the day she died. But she didn’t need church to talk to
God. She talked whenever she’d make johnny cakes or cook up a pot of beans.
Sometime He even talk back.”

He took his hand from my shoulder and
stepped back. “You need help from the other side, all you got to do is ask.”

While he talked I found that little
light of hope that had been buried down deep in my soul. Like finding Katy had
just been a matter of asking the right questions, and I itched to get looking.
“I appreciate your time.”

By now I only half-listened. My mind
ran about a half-hour ahead of the rest of me. Had me in the car on my way back
to Alabama.

“Son,” he said, taking my wrist in his
dry hand. His skin felt smooth and warm. “You stopped listening right when I’m
about to get to telling you what you need to hear.”

I forced my attention back to him. At
this point everything distracted me.

“You talk to them gods yourself. You
didn’t have to ride all the way out here to learn that. Understand this, next
time you come out here, part of you ain’t coming back. And that’s why I’m here.
You got to know that playing with this kind of fire burns you every time.
Talking to Old Scratch in a bar or in bed’s a lot different than talking out
here. You come out here to do business—real business—and you got to understand
that, son. You stand out there on them crossroads like you was tonight and that
li’l ole funny boy’s going to take something you can’t live without. Then you
know a whole new kind of blues and it ain’t them talkin’ blues or them
travellin’ riverside blues. Them are the blues you don’t come back from. You’re
going to feel them chains and you’re going to feel them dogs breathing on your
neck.”

“Like those hellhounds I got on my
trail now?”

“Ain’t no hellhounds. It’s a gimmick,
son. That’s it. The li’l ole funny boy don’t work like that. Everybody’s got to
die a little sometime.” He sat against the fence, propped the guitar on his
knee and strummed. “The lucky ones die all at once. Don’t forget that. Some of
us die more than once. Some of us die a little every day. What’s left over is
who we really are. You’re going to have to die a little to get her back, you
know that, right? But you have to die before you can be born again anyway. We
can’t all be butterflies, you know. Picking and choosing our time.”

“Can I ask you something?” I shook his
hand and held it, trying to feel for a pulse. That his skin felt warmer than my
own confused me. “Please don’t be offended.”

“Just get on with it.”

“Well, are you real?” I took a deep
breath. “I mean you’re not dead, like John Lennon and Joe Strummer when they
talk to me.”

He laughed. “Ain’t no real or dead.
There’s alive or dead, then there’s real or imagined. You knew somebody exactly
like me though, a woman neither dead nor imagined. I can smell that fallen
angel all over you.”

“I understand.” I knew exactly who he
meant.

“Look it. You got something bigger
than a soul. You got potential and you got love. Keep your soul and give it
what it really wants.” He said, “And make sure you write it all down—everything
you hear and see, especially any visions you may have. That’s what a prophet
does.”

“Thank you.” I backed toward the
cemetery trying to remember as much of what he said as I possibly could. “I
mean it.”

“You got a lot of miles between you
and your girl. You better get moving along now. Don’t you come back without
that git box.”

Behind him I could see the sky getting
lighter to the east. A greyness where there had been a violet blackness
earlier. Like the wide South was flat enough to let a little early light creep
in from the Atlantic.

He said, “Don’t you stop ’til you get
back in that car, then get the hell out of here. Don’t linger out there on the
crossroads none either.”

Nodding, I turned and left. A chorus
of peepers and the lonely sound of a single untuned guitar played me out. In the
slight farther off, birds shook sleep out of their feathers with soft songs.
Waking up songs. Like being born again after a long night alone.

In the distance the traffic signal
flashed red to green to yellow over and over again. Counting out an excruciatingly
slow 4/4 tempo to help me pick my way through the tombstones.

The blue and green bottles on the
branches of the old graveyard tree shivered as the waxy morning light grew.
Trembling, as if an earthquake shook the whole thing.

I stopped to look.

They reflected the tiniest bit of
dawn, making it seem like each contained a small sphere of distilled morning. I
tapped one of the bottles. A faint globe of light bounced against the glass
like a fly against a dirty window.

In the grass all around me toads hopped
over each other, an exodus of amphibians pushing their way down the hill. I
stepped carefully, picking my way to the road, not wanting to step on any.
Faded Confederate flags drooped in fog.

The concrete strip that lead back to
the crossroads didn’t reflect any light at all. Like it’d been covered with
velvet since I last came through. The toads crawled and half-hopped toward the
road with great urgency.