Freshwater Road (30 page)

Matt turned into a gravel parking lot. They walked into a cinderblock
building with no sign. She followed Matt, feeling Ed's eyes on her back
the whole way.

Celeste adjusted to the dim light, saw the cinder block walls painted glossy
strawberry red, then spotted the aging jukebox sitting like a live band waiting to play a downbeat. There was a garish confusion of chromium-braced
chairs featuring assorted orange, pink, sky blue, and milky turquoise plastic
cushions and seat backs. The chairs surrounded kitchen-sized Formicatopped tables arranged near a small dance floor marked off by black and
white oversized linoleum squares.

A freckly, beige-brown man stepped from behind the bar, smiling.
"Hey, now. Ha' y'all during?" He wore a short-sleeved white shirt with a
dark cowboy tie and a holstered gun on a belt.

"All right now." Ed shook both of the man's hands at the same time.
Matt followed. Celeste nodded and beelined for the jukebox-she hadn't
heard a note of music except church music and freedom songs for weeks.
She scanned the selections. Rhythm and blues and deep blues. No Frank
Sinatra here, no Dinah Washington, either. Wilamena would turn on her
high heels and stride out the door. Shuck might handle it for a while,
but he'd grow restless with all that deep blues. She'd left her book-bag
and change purse in the backseat of the car. Ed Jolivette brought her two
quarters and she pushed buttons until her finger hurt. "Gypsy Woman"
flowed into her like an elixir, smooth and knowing, the words like her own
personal anthem now. She walked to the bar with Curtis Mayfield's high
sweet voice filling her ears and the backbeat releasing her hips, her head
moving from side to side, her lips falling right into the words.

"Otis, this is Celeste Tyree, working with us for the summer." Matt
barely glanced at her, then drank from a huge tumbler of ice water.

"Otis Gilliam. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Tyree." He
shoved a glass of water in her direction over his homemade bar, nodding
his head.

Celeste sat on a barstool. "Mr. Gilliam."

"Oh, now, you call me Otis." He grinned. "Please, call me Otis, anytime, anywhere."

Celeste drank the water and eyed Otis's pistol. This must be the bucket
of blood the old people talked about a long time ago. Then she remembered
Sophie Lewis's father and how he sat on his front porch with a shotgun to
protect his house. There was something coming into clarity here and it
wasn't what it was supposed to be. Real men wear guns. Nonviolence had a
boundary, a limit. Ah, yes, she thought, if a man had something he wanted
to protect, without question he'd better be armed. Would nonviolence ever
get them where they needed to go?

"Man, you better give us something real to drink. I know you got some
gin back there even if you did make it in your bathtub." Matt's hand slid
his water glass back across the bar. "I need a real drink."

"Cain't. 'Gainst the law." Otis gave Matt a serious look, winked at
Celeste.

At the Royal Gardens, the long bar mirror and the mood lights reflected an assortment of liquors and ingredients that looked like a festival
of alcohol, labels from Ireland, Kentucky, Canada, France. Shuck joked
that his good stuff would kill a typical street wino. There wasn't a single
bottle on the home-style dining room buffet behind Otis. What kind of
bar was this?

Ed stood. "If the white man don't get you, the black man surely will.
Let's go." He had a stony unreadable look on his face.

Celeste looked at Ed and Matt like they'd lost their minds, hoped this
routine would soon end. She didn't move from her barstool.

"You let the young lady put money in the box and you gon leave before
her records finish playing? You ain't got no manners. Neither one of you."
Otis folded his arms across his chest.

"Thank you, Otis." Chuck Jackson swept her into "Any Day Now," the
big bass drum vibrating right through her. She was just about as happy as
she'd been in weeks.

Matt stood. "You the one. Break out the gin and tonic. We know you paying off that sheriff. This young lady been in Pineyville for weeks. Ain't seen a
drink, a television, even heard a radio. You know what that place is like."

"Pineyville? Lord, have Mercy. That's a shame. Sending a fine young
woman like this to that godforsaken town? Y'all crazy. And Sheriff Trotter
down there giving everybody hives. Oh, she need a real drink all right.
Probably need two or three. Do it for her. Not for you two knot heads." Otis
looked directly in her eyes, all robust charm. "What would you like, Miss?"
He gave a little half bow. "Pineyville? You shoulda told 'em no."

"She's bad. She can handle it." Matt sucked air.

"Gin and tonic with lots of ice." Her mouth watered even as she laughed.
She heard the joking seriousness of what he said. Part of it must have been
his usual ritual and part of it real sympathy for her being stuck out there in
Pineyville with a sheriff no Negro person had a kind word for. She didn't
want to think about not being here in this red cinderblock place with its
homemade bar and real jukebox blaring. It was a heavenly interlude and not
a bible in sight. And it was cool. Too soon she'd be back in Pineyville.

Otis reached under the bar and pulled out a bottle of gin and made
three tall gin and tonics. The icy glass breathed onto her face like a chill
wind off a frozen lake.

Matt and Ed sat again and took healthy swigs of their drinks.

Otis gave her the sideways look. "Where you from, Miss Tyree?"

She sipped. "Detroit. Please, call me Celeste." The tonic was too sweet,
like every cold drink she'd had in Mississippi.

"I knew you wadn't from 'round here," Otis said, satisfied.

"My daddy owns a bar, too." She gulped now, wished she could take a
thermos of the stuff back to Freshwater Road. Pralines from Sophie Lewis,
gin and tonics from Otis. If she borrowed right, maybe she could make it
through the summer.

"Got me a ally." Otis slapped the handle of his gun. "This young lady
knows how hard it is to keep a bunch of wild Negroes patted down." He
swaggered, nodding to her, teaching. "Now, this Miss'sippi's dry. Good
business for someone like me." He reared back, adjusted his gun belt. Otis
Gilliam was a saloon-keeper like in the old wild west of the movies.

"Yeah, it's been good to my daddy." The way she said daddy, she knew,
made men want to have daughters when they notoriously wanted sons. She
drank her gin and tonic. "Dry?"

"Like during Prohibition." Ed said. His body kept time gently to the
music.

She glanced at the door. "If it's dry, what are we doing sitting here
drinking?"

"I told you, he pays off the Sheriff." Matt said. "Hey, man, when's the
next payment due?

Otis deadpanned his face toward her. "I'm gon' ignore him. You see, you
can't just walk in a bar anywhere in Miss'sippi. Oh no. Not in Miss'sippi."
He dropped the second syllable. "You out there in the boondocks. Ain't
nowheres to get a drink out there." He made it sound like it was miles away,
out west somewhere, in another state across plains and mountains. "Les'
you in somebody's shack drinking out a jar, dipping out a crock. You in a
different country here."

"Come to Louisiana. Got enough liquor there for everybody." Ed swilled
his gin and tonic and pushed his glass forward.

Celeste searched through the too-sweet tonic for the gin. "You got any
lemon or lime?"

"Girl, where you think you at?" Otis chided her and got a shriveled
lemon out of his kitchen model refrigerator. "'Course I got lemon." He cut
it into paper-thin slices and put them on a small white plate.

Celeste put one slice in her glass and started eating another, her head
bopping slightly to the beat. The tart lemon tasted clean, cut the sweetness
of her drink. She chewed the rind. Otis stared at her. "They not feeding
you out there?"

"Damn, girl." Matt's head moved side to side to the bumping rhythm.
"Maybe we should've gone by Short Sixth Street to feed you."

"Don't want to get scurvy." She laughed at herself going through the
slices like they were candy-coated. She hadn't had an orange or a lemon in
weeks. "What's Short Sixth Street?"

Ed caught her in the mirror, his face seeing her and turning from her at
the same time. "Just a street. There's a black restaurant over there."

He said "black" like Ramona. A restaurant Negro people could sit in.
She hadn't been in one since Jackson.

"See them chairs?" Otis waved his hand towards the jangle of chairs.
"I bet you come in here, took a look, and thought I had to be crazy." He
waited for her answer.

"I sure wondered about them." She played along. "Didn't know if I was coming to get a drink or to get my hair done on somebody's back porch in
Black Bottom."

"What you know about some Black Bottom?" Total disbelief on Otis's
face, his head going backwards a few inches from its normal position.

"I know where it used to be." She'd heard all about Paradise Valley,
Black Bottom, and Hastings Street-the old Negro section of Detroit,
on the East Side. Shuck had certainly warned against her and Billy even
thinking about going over there. He knew teenagers came up with wild
notions, testy things to do to just to prove they could.

"You don't know nothing about no Black Bottom." Otis talked to her
like a parent might.

"I bet if you come to Detroit, I could take you over there." Celeste
wiggled her head and smiled, proud she knew something that he thought
she shouldn't know.

"Yo' daddy would take me. Not you. Anyway, already been. When it was
the jumpingest place on earth. Been some of everywhere." Otis wiped their
water rings from the bar. He was a countrified Shuck. Shuck always talked
about the Flame Show Bar and Dinah Washington. She felt comfortable,
spinning on her stool to face Matt. "I played `Kansas City' just for you."
The gin was creeping into her brain, and her tongue began a thick and lazy
flop in her mouth.

"Can't wait." Matt looked at her in the bar mirror, sizing her up all over
again. Ed eyed the multicolored chairs, said dryly, "They're different all
right." Celeste wondered if he'd even heard the intervening conversation.

"You can't talk. You from New Orleans. Whole place is different. Rats
big as cats running around, and dead bodies floating in the cemeteries."
Otis leaned against the bar with his two hands. Celeste wondered if the
whole thing might not topple over. Maybe New Orleans wasn't such a
good-time place after all. Rats and dead bodies floating?

Ed laughed. "Only when it rains."

When Jerry Butler sang "For Your Precious Love," Celeste sat there,
elbow to elbow with Ed Jolivette, hoping he'd ask her to dance. He didn't.
The song sank into her in a a downpour of need, the husky voice as dark
and strong as Ed's face. She dropped her head; she didn't want him to catch
her eyes in the mirror, afraid she couldn't hide her desire to be close to him.
She was afraid she might put her head on the shoulder of a man she'd met
two hours before. She wanted the record to play again.

"And it rains all the damn time. Now, you, you from Detroit. A real
big-city girl." Otis folded his arms across his chest again as if to say New
Orleans didn't qualify and spoke in a tight-lipped, high-toned manner,
the handle of his gun ready as a carpenter's tool, waiting to be swung into
action. "Bet you never seen a Negro out his mind on corn?"

"Nope." Celeste went along at first confusing corn with corn on the cob,
not getting it, then it focused in her mind: corn liquor.

Otis smiled, showing the two gold incisors in his mouth. "Lot of Negroes round here can't 'ford to drink bottled whiskey, so they get near
drunk on corn then come through here for they nightcap." He'd gone
back to his normal speaking. "Corn make you crazy. Laughin' one minute,
tearing up the place the next. That's why I got them chairs. Cheap."

"No telling what's in that stuff." Ed's face went serious.

Matt laughed. "Aw, Otis, you know you like those chairs. You probably
got the same thing in your living room. You probably got a barrel of corn
back there, too."

Otis laughed big. "I do not." He slapped the bar with his beefy, freckled
hand. "That's what I mean, Ed. See, you can have a conversation with Ed.
You can't do nothing with that Negro." He nodded over to Matt. "How
a Negro gon go pay they hard-won money for something to drink, and
you don't even know what's in it, and you know the man selling it just as
soon see you dead as standing there?" Otis filled the space behind the bar.
"See, Negroes, even after all that's gone on, they still trust the white man
too much. Not me. I never let 'em see my back. But you can't tell Negroes
nothing. They keep drinking that corn."

"Probably peed in it." Matt examined his gin and tonic, holding his
glass up to the light. "Wooweee, Otis, this gin's kinda yellow."