If Jack's in Love (8 page)

I walked up to where the street met the two-lane.

I came back. When I passed her house I prayed, “Myra, Myra.”

I wanted to see if she would hear my voice. I fingered the ring. I watched the windows of her house.

I headed home and got in bed. But I couldn't sleep. The excitement was too portentous. I picked up my discarded shorts from the floor and slipped into them. The ring was in the pocket, and I wanted to sleep with it next to my thigh.

POP GREW UP LISTENING to mountain music. He used to sing me a song by Merle Travis called “Kinfolks in Carolina” and I would think, “That's me, I got kinfolks in Carolina.” But we rarely visited them, and they seemed about as fantastic as the Beverly Hillbillies. Pop had outgrown his mountain culture and he didn't enjoy going back. His people were hard-shell Baptists who never approved of his youthful carryings-on. They hadn't accepted Mom either, because when Pop took her to meet them she told them she didn't believe in God.

I wanted to know more about Pop's wild years. It made him heroic, that he had once been bad. My brother told me that during the war, when Pop was overseas, he had carried on with a French gal. My daddy with a French gal, that seemed so exotic. But it was a secret I wasn't allowed to let Mom in on. Before he was packed off to Europe, when he was stationed in Alabama, Pop had begun listening to blues, and after the war he taught himself to play some harmonica. He had a small record collection, Slim Harpo, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, but somehow in the midst of those drinking and gambling and cheating (maybe) years he'd lost his precious 78s. Those were the days of the great blues labels, King and Chess and Excello. Pop still got mad when he thought about what he'd let slip away.

Some evenings he'd come in our room and groove along with what we were playing on the stereo. The records in the house belonged to my brother, who could afford to buy them because of the dough he made as a bag boy at the Safeway store; but mainly he bought inexpensive 45s rather than albums: garage band hits, British invasion singles. Later his taste in music changed and he began coming home with soul, funk and psychedelic music, which Pop didn't like that much.

One evening Pop went to a seafood shack at the edge of our neighborhood (a year later it was torn down and replaced by a 7-Eleven) and saw Snead sitting at an adjacent table. Snead was a fixture in the neighborhood, a big black man whom people would hire to paint their houses and rake their yards and haul off their garbage. He had five children—the one in the middle was my age—and he lived in a two-story wooden house behind the seafood shack where Sneads had been since the Civil War. If aristocracy is determined by the number of years a family has survived in one place, then the Sneads had everyone beat. There had been two Snead houses originally, until one branch sold out to the developers. Our Sneads, the descendants of those who remained, were the sole black family in El Dorado Hills; but they lived far enough on the fringes for everyone to regard the neighborhood as appropriately segregated.

The two men fell to talking, one topic led to another, and soon the subject of music came up. Quickly they grew emotional. Snead shouted, “Yeah, man, dig it!” Pop hollered out Big Bill Broonzy's name and Snead brought up Son House; and finally one of them intoned the hallowed, the sacrosanct, the august and most high name of Sonny Boy Williamson. Tears poured forth, and next thing you know, Pop had run home to fetch his harmonica.

He headed to Snead's and Snead broke out his electric guitar and they jammed until three in the morning, with Mrs. Snead watching from behind her horn-rimmed glasses. After Pop left she warned Snead nothing good ever come of associating with white folks and later Snead told Pop what she said. But it was cool. The neighbors had no way of knowing what was happening in a Negro's house on the fringes. It was the next week, when Pop brought Snead to the Witcher house (an infant was sleeping in Snead's house and they didn't want to wake him), that the controversy began.

At first it wasn't all that obvious what was going on. The weather was cool and Pop and Snead were still jamming indoors. True, Snead's pickup was parked outside the house, but it might have been he was inside painting or doing some plumbing, unless anyone paused to wonder how it was that low-class people like the Witchers could afford to hire a black man to do their chores. But maybe no one did. People in comfortable circumstances imagine their own comfort is universal.

Then the weather grew warm and Pop and Snead hauled lawn chairs out to the front yard. There they would perch with a cooler between them while they played the blues on balmy nights and the neighbors cruised past, appalled. Frankly, up to the time Snead came around I hadn't exactly thought of Pop as an advocate for civil rights. Not that he was a bigot: he wasn't, and considering where he came from, that was quite an achievement. It's just I never got the impression he cared one way or the other. He was too busy not paying the bills and scrounging for work. Then one day Mom raised concerns about what the neighbors might think if Snead kept coming to the house, and that's when Pop took a stand.

“Let 'em think what they want, they don't like us anyway.”

He was having fun, maybe more fun than he'd had in years. Snead and Pop sounded right good together, if you like homemade blues. And soon it got to be something more than music. Something else was happening. Maybe it was because Pop was as much an outsider as Snead, even though he never had to ride at the back of a bus. I once heard Snead tell Pop, “It's what they do to your head, that's how it works. It's when they don't have to tell you you don't have rights 'cause you don't think you do nohow.” Whenever they got tired of jamming, they'd set their instruments aside and begin to speak about life, money, philosophy. In the early hours of the morning they'd be out in the yard speaking in deep voices, with their cigarettes glowing among the lightning bugs. I could hear them through my window when I woke up in the dark.

A white T-shirt and blue jeans was Snead's uniform. I never saw him in anything else, and he always kept a cigarette between his lips, to the point I wondered if it was the same one all the time. It never seemed to burn down, and I never saw him take it away. It hung on his lips even when he played the guitar. He used to bring his records over and Pop would fetch Stan's stereo player and we'd sit in the living room listening to Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. Snead's blackness would fill the room. Ashes from his cigarette would fall on the rug, giving Mom a fit. The way he squinted over his smoke caused monstrous wrinkles to appear on his face. I had seen him crunch beer cans in his fist. He looked mean, but he was nice enough.

One evening when he was over and I was still awake, I asked him about Gladstein.

It happened that Snead, with the well-known Snead practicality, had bought himself an industrial buffer, and some of the stores in the shopping center had contracted with him to wax their floors. He had a regular gig cleaning Gladstein's shop on Saturday afternoons: waxing, buffing, squeaking a wiper along the window. I used to pass the shop when Snead was inside swinging his buffer: Gladstein would be behind the counter, straddling the three-legged stool and giving him an earful.

“You know Mr. Gladstein, don't you?” I said.

Snead squinted over his smoke. “Mojo Man.”

“Mojo Man,” I repeated.

“You know the song.”

I guess he meant “Got My Mojo Working.” We had just listened to it. But what was it supposed to mean? Had Gladstein gone to Louisiana and got himself a mojo hand?

Pop was grinning, trying to figure Snead out.

“Cat's got magic,” Snead said.

“Gladstein does?”

“Keeps dogs in his back room. I have to clean their shit up, smells like a goddamn kennel.”

“What kind of magic does he do?”

“Listen to me, little Witcher, I don't go poking my nose into what shouldn't be poked into. See no evil, dig? I stay clear of jive like that.”

That's all he said. It was frustrating as hell.

“You mean he has magic rings?” I said.

“What?” Snead gave me a look. “It's past your bedtime, little Witcher.”

He turned to Pop. “Cat's got diamonds in the store, rings and shit. Some of 'em worth more than five thousand dollars.”

“Think so?” Pop said.

“Diamonds as big as the Ritz,” Snead said.

“He can really get five thousand for a ring?”

“You know, most of it's cheap-ass costume jewelry. He keeps the expensive stuff in the back. He's got a safe back there you'd have to dynamite to break into.”

Pop didn't say anything. He looked at Snead, thinking things over.

When Pop started thinking, he could burn a hole right through you. He didn't even realize he was doing it. Now he picked up his harmonica and brought it to his mouth with his eyes still on Snead. He began to blow a tune and Snead strummed along.

TO TRY OUT Gladstein's magic ring I needed Myra. But it was summer vacation, which meant she could be anywhere. For a few days I hung out at the Ben Franklin hoping she might pass the plate-glass window on an errand for her mom. I was tempted to consult Gladstein, but he had ordered me not to return until I had kissed her. Going to her door and ringing the bell was out of the question. Nor would it be a good idea to pass the Coghill porch, where Myra reigned jointly with the beauties who lived there. She would find it mortifying to be greeted by a Witcher in the presence of Coghills.

Another possibility was to frequent the small wooded area behind Dickie Pudding's house, where I might waylay her if she passed. I took to the woods, and immediately Dickie spotted me through the glass in his storm door. He called my name and came up to join me.

“What are you doing?”

I was squatting beside a bush with a copy of
Death Be Not Proud
in my hand.

“Sitting here,” I told him.

“No lie,” he said. Of the neighborhood kids Dickie was the shortest in my age bracket. His parents made him take tap dance lessons and enter competitions, which had earned him the reputation for being a mama's boy. Bullies were forever collaring him and forcing him to dance.

“I'm thinking things over,” I explained.

“What things?”

“Just things.”

Dickie sat beside me. It was a Saturday; his father was home from work and we saw him through the trees gathering together a hose as a preface to washing his car. Mr. Pudding shaded his eyes—pointlessly, since the sun was behind a cloud—and peered in our direction. Then he broke into a grin and came towards us. I found this extremely irritating. I wanted Myra, not the Puddings. Of course, I was on their property, so I guess they had a right to be there.

“Little Witcher!” Mr. Pudding shouted.

“Hi Mr. Pudding,” I said.

“How are things at Witcher House?”

“Fine.”

Mischief hunkered deep in his eyes. Mr. Pudding had tight, wavy hair, a dark complexion and a Roman nose, ethnic traits in our part of the world. In spite of such swarthiness he vaunted a proud Anglo-Saxon heritage. One day not long before, he had left the house and ventured into Southside, where he'd signed up with the KKK. This was a secret Dickie confided in me after I swore on a stack of Bibles not to tell (a speech act without any real authority, since multiple copies of the Good Book were not readily available). Mr. Pudding had a pleasant face and beady eyes; he coached a failing Little League team; he listened to music that had banjos in it. And yet the Puddings were deemed respectable because they'd added an extension to the rear of their house.

“I see Snead's been visiting your folks lately,” Mr. Pudding observed.

There, I thought, it's out. People are already talking.

I didn't say anything.

“What are they doing, singing the blues?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Ain't nothing wrong with singing the blues. Kind of like Charley Pride,” he added, although I couldn't follow the reasoning. “Don't you think they should be doing that someplace else, though? There's a time and place for everything, your father should know that.”

Dickie was averting his eyes.

“Pop does what he wants to do,” I said.

“Well, you should bring it up with him, tell him what I said.”

My pop could kick your ass into the next county, I was thinking. But I didn't say it. Mr. Pudding was one of the few men in the neighborhood willing to acknowledge Pop. Sad as it sounds, he was one of the good guys.

“I don't think he'd listen to me,” I said.

“Why not, aren't you the brains of Lee Elementary?”

My grades were the subject of frequent comment in the neighborhood. That a Witcher should make the honor roll was an anomaly in social logic. My brother certainly never made the grades. In fact, because of his legacy my teachers (Mrs. Carter aside) hated me even before they knew me.

I reminded Mr. Pudding that we were starting junior high in the fall and that Lee Elementary was irrelevant. He nodded absentmindedly, already thinking about something else.

“Snead's not such a bad colored fellow,” he allowed. “The Sneads aren't bad people.”

“No sir.”

“But don't you think Snead of all people would know better?”

“Better than what?”

“Than to come in here if it's not for work.”

I shrugged. It was none of my business. I decided that would be my policy when dealing with the Snead scandal. And there was sure to be trouble. The amiability of Mr. Pudding's face had been replaced by tight lines formed by so many disciplined years in the wilderness of the dialectic of white supremacy.