Bone Music (16 page)

An hour after noon Robert Johnson finally had got rid of his chill, and by then the woodstove had dried their boots. Peetie Wheatstraw said, “The day ain’t getting no younger,” and the other men both allowed as it was so.

“I’m ready,” Robert Johnson said. He held out his hand to Charlie Patton once again, and this time the King took it.

“I’m glad I know you, Robert Johnson,” he said. “God bless you, and see you on your way.”

“I know He will,” Robert Johnson told him as he put on his coat. “His hand guides us all.”

Charlie Patton nodded. He patted Robert Johnson on the back as he saw him to the door.

Outside the door was the Eye of the World, still hanging in the sky above the river, watching Robert Johnson.

Timeless - The King

When he was young the King who was a slave took God from his masters and came to know Him as no slaver ever could, and he Loved Him and worshiped Him so well that the white man took a lesson. (Anyone who cares to know just what that lesson was should compare the practice of worship in the rural South with the ministries back in England. The men who came from Africa taught their masters powerful lessons, and in the end their wisdom flourishes everywhere it reaches.)

Later, the story says, he grew as crude and rough as any man. In those years he was just a man — a man like men everywhere, who lived his life and cursed his lot and made the best of a hard life of toil and frustration. Some say he repented just before he died in 1912, but others say he was too proud to repent. These people say he went to Hell, but Hell could not contain him — they say he stood before the inviolable door that leads out to the world, and he sang.

Sang so true and powerful and intense that the door could not deny him, and opened up to set him free.

Others say he survived the contest with the engine, and lived three more years before dying at a party on Juneteenth — they say he sang that night as he sat dying before the Juneteenth bonfire, and he sang so true and powerful and intense that he never even noticed that he died, and the Devil could not touch him. By the time the night was over, they say, Hell had forgot it owned him.

But there’s no disagreement about the blues. The great king went to Hell after he died, and when he’d seen the Devil he walked up out of Hell into the world, and as he came he brought the blues back with him.

He brought hoodoo with him, too, but wary people don’t tell that part out loud.

The Present

Lisa and her mama got to Tennessee three and a half days after they left New York. It hadn’t been an eventful trip to that point — not really. The only weird part of all of it from the time they left Mama Estrella’s bedside at the hospital to the time they got to Johnson City was the hitchhiker. And even if she looked weird with her big watery eyes and funny ears, she didn’t do anything weird. Just hitched a ride in Pennsylvania, got out the car at the first rest stop.

Mama got all tired-looking after the hitchhiker left. She said, “I need coffee.” Ten minutes later she pulled off the highway on the outskirts of Johnson City.

Half a mile later they were pulling into the parking lot of the place with the big
Krispy Kreme Donuts
sign.

“Donuts, Mama!” Lisa said. “Can I have donuts?”

“I’m just stopping for coffee, Lisa. It’s too early for donuts, don’t you think?”

“Mama! I want donuts, mama!”

Mama sighed. “All right, Lisa. All right. Just one.”

“I want lots of donuts, Mama.”

“We’ll see. Come along.”

There were three blind men in the donut shop. Lisa hardly noticed them at first. Of course she hardly noticed them! Mama was buying donuts at the counter, and then they were sitting at their table, eating those airy-cremey donuts unlike anything Lisa’d ever had in all her years in Spanish Harlem. And how could a girl like Lisa notice three old men sitting around a table when there were donuts to be eaten?

Well, there was no way, of course. No way at all.

But then the donuts were gone, and time went on forever as Mama sipped from her great tumbler of coffee. And Lisa got so bored.

Wouldn’t anybody?

She watched the cars go by out on the road until she got so sick of seeing them. She watched the donut ladies tidying the store front, wiping the counters and bringing out new donuts; she counted strip-mall stores along the road through Johnson City; she looked at the round and woody Appalachian mountains that hung above the city.

And then she saw the old men.

They were dirty old men, wrinkly smelly vagabonds dressed in worn-out clothes and black taped-together glasses. They were blind men, she realized, and two of them were white and one of them was black, and there were guitar cases resting at their feet.

I know those men! Lisa thought, and she remembered the blind men in her dream, and she felt she knew their names but she couldn’t remember.

She pushed out of her seat and crossed the room to look at them more closely. Mama didn’t even notice — she was too busy with her coffee.

“I know you,” Lisa said.

And of course she did: everybody who’s ever heard the song knows these men when she sees them. For they are the Blind Lords of the Piedmont, and their nature is implicit in the contour of the land.

The black man turned and smiled at her. He seemed to recognize her, but of course he couldn’t see.

“And we know you, Lisa Henderson,” he said. He reached out to her, and for a moment Lisa thought he would take her in his filthy vagabond arms, but he didn’t. He didn’t touch her at all, in fact.

Instead he gave her a gift.

“What is it?” Lisa asked, taking the gift from the vagabond’s palm. It looked like a whistle — but different. Lisa had never seen a whistle anything like it.

“It’s an instrument,” the black vagabond said. “A kazoo — the simplest instrument there is. You hum in it. It makes a sound you’ll want to hear.”

“I don’t understand,” Lisa said. “Why are you giving this to me?”

“You’ll need it,” the vagabond said. “God speed you on your way.”

“Lisa. . . ? Where are you, child?”

Lisa looked over her shoulder to see her mother. “Right here, Mama. Talking to the men.”

“There you are! What men? What’re you talking about, girl?”

“Right here, Mama,” Lisa said, and she gestured at the three blind vagabonds —

But they were gone.

There were no vagabonds.

There was no one in the store at all, in fact — no one but Lisa and her mama and two donut ladies scurrying back and forth behind the counter.

“No one, Mama,” Lisa said. “I’m just playing a game, that’s all.”

For the longest time Lisa really thought that was so — she thought she’d imagined the blind men like a daydream that picked up where the dream three nights ago left off.

And then in the car as Mama drove the car back onto the highway, Lisa looked down into her hand.

And saw the kazoo, waiting to teach her secrets that she did not want to know
.

The Present

Dan Alvarez heard her before he saw her, but he knew that she was there for a long time before she made a sound. She had that kind of presence — thick and palpable, electric as a thunderstorm about to break. It was late July, and Dan Alvarez lay in his bed awake and uneasy, as unable to sleep as he’d been every night for months.

Three big gusts of wind pressed against the window across the room, rattling the panes, the edges of the frame. It would rain soon, Dan thought — that was why he felt the storm about to happen. That was all it was.

Dan Alvarez almost managed to believe it, too.

His life was always like that, he thought: he was a storm waiting to happen, never breaking loose. Any day now, any damn day real soon one or another of the half-dozen bands he played with would take off, and he’d have a career, a real honest-to-God rock ‘n’ roll legend career and tell the bar gigs and the temp agencies to put it where none of them would ever see it again.

Of course he felt the tension in the air — he was a tension waiting to happen, a legend waiting to be told.

Like hell.

Even in his worst moments Dan knew better — no matter how he wanted to believe, he knew too damn well that it just wasn’t so. He wasn’t going anywhere, and every day that went by he had a little less heart for bashing his head against the walls that surrounded him.

And then it finally came: a great flash of lightning so bright like the sun suddenly come to earth beside him — that close, so close that thunder burst right with it. No delay, not even a beat. Like it hit a block away, maybe closer.

He rolled over onto his side. Pulled the blanket tight.

And heard the scratching tapping at his window pane.

Someone was out there in the thunder and the rain. Someone who wanted his attention.

Who the hell. . . ?

But he didn’t want to know who it was. He was scared out of his mind, and if he’d had the nerve he would have pushed away the blankets and run for his life — but he didn’t have the nerve, didn’t have any nerve at all too scared to move to speak to look who the hell in the storm it was thundering out there.

Too damned scared to move, let alone run.

Too scared to look, too, but his eyes opened in spite of themselves.

And that was how he first saw her: watching him through the glass.

Our Lady of Sorrows, Santa Barbara.

It didn’t matter that he’d never seen her before. He’d known her all his life. Seen her shrines and grottoes outside dozens of houses back home in Union City; smelled the potion that bore her name hot summer afternoons when his mother came from the botanica; shivered when he saw the painting of her in the bar where wrinkled superstitious Cuban grandfathers smoked fat cigars as they sipped at their cervezas.

Santa Barbara: the virgin with the burning sword, blood-hungry and terrible.

Dan Alvarez sat on the edge of his bed, shivering with fear. He wanted to run. Wanted to look away from the Santa. And if he couldn’t run or look away he wanted to ask her why she’d come for him. She meant to kill him — he knew that. Couldn’t help knowing! Look at her, so beautiful and angry in the flickering chiaroscuro light from her burning sword — look at her! Blood-red eyes, long soft coils of black hair piled high and cascading from her head; skin white as ash. Whiter than any living thing ever ought to be. Dan saw her and knew she was all terror of the dark distilled and made tangible; knew she was the wrath of the Lord set out upon the world to do his bidding — or worse!

She wants me to let her in.

But he knew he didn’t dare.

I’ve got to open the window.

Because she was his fate, come to him. Come for him. There was no way he could avoid or delay what she had for him — only deny it, and denying the inevitable wasn’t a thing Dan ever managed to do.

When he finally stood and crossed the room, it was as involuntary, as unconscious as when he’d opened his eyes.

Just like a fate, he thought.

“Santa,” he said when the window was open. “I live to serve you.” He felt stupid to say those words — like some guajiro hick in a story of his grandfather’s. And he wasn’t any damned hick! He was American, an honest to God rock ‘n’ roll American boy with talent nobody ever bothered to abuse, and the day was going to come really soon when they’d all regret they’d missed their opportunity!

They were, Dan swore they were.

The Santa smiled. When she spoke her voice was a whisper through the open window, throaty and hungry as desire. “I hear,” she said. “I have come.”

“Why are you here for me, Virgin?” Dan Alvarez tried to keep the fear out of his voice, but it wasn’t any use. “I know I am unworthy.”

The Santa ignored his question. She reached through the window to touch his face, and for a moment it was a tender gesture that cast a warm light on Dan’s life — fulfilled him, made him whole enough to die happy and content. And then the touch changed. Not so dramatically that anybody watching would have noticed, but Dan felt it, and there was no way she could have touched him like that without meaning to. Her fingers pressed hard against him, hard as though she were trying to probe the bone of his skull right through his skin. Maybe that was the point, he thought; maybe she pressed him the way a butcher probes a sow he means to buy to slaughter.

Maybe.

Dan tried to protest. “Santa —” he said, but she waved to silence him before he could say another word.

“Do you accept me?” she asked.

He didn’t understand, but he knew in his heart that he didn’t dare say anything but yes.

“I do, Santa.”

And all hell of thunder broke loose above him — lightning struck the roof, shattering the building’s wood frame. Sundering the roof and walls; setting the sundered bits afire.