Nighthawk Blues (7 page)

“You know you’re just feeling sorry for yourself,” she said softly.

“I’m not,” said Jerry. “I am. But it’s not because of what you think. It’s not because of me. It’s not because of what’s happening
inside
of me. It’s because of what’s actually happening—that’s what’s shitty. Ah, I don’t know, you’re probably right.” He said this last with a tooth-grating effort. Then he told her about Teenochie and what he had observed of Bertha Johnson, and they had a good laugh. She promised to come up in a day, two days at the most, he didn’t believe a word of it. And be sure to tell Hawk that she would be there, and she expected to pick some guitar with him, he would like that, he had
always
liked Lori and Lori alone. By the time they finished the conversation Jerry had almost forgotten what a fool he had made of himself tonight. That was for Lori to remember.

II

DOWN IN THE FLOOD

W
HEN HE
got to the hospital in the morning, Hawk was gone. He walked into the ward carrying a cup of melting cherry vanilla ice cream, which he had gone to some trouble to get at ten A.M. The first thing he noticed was the empty bed.

For a moment he experienced panic. Tears started to form. He looked wildly to right and left, as the grizzled old men stared at him, and a nurse, matter-of-factly emptying a bedpan, eyed him with cool contempt. Then he thought, no, Hawk couldn’t be dead, Hawk wouldn’t give his enemies the satisfaction, and, armed with this momentary reassurance, he asked the nurse if she knew where Mr. Jefferson was. Perhaps he had been taken somewhere for tests? She was a sullen-looking black girl with hair fanned out in a dark aureole. Hawk probably would have joked with her, made fun of her hair, coaxed a smile from her, sung her a song. She said she didn’t know anything about any Mr. Jefferson, she was just on duty herself, go ask the floor supervisor at the nurses’ station. He did that, and she knew just as little.

He was becoming increasingly concerned and, perhaps to mask his concern to himself, increasingly indignant. “Well, I mean he couldn’t just vanish into thin air. Someone must know what’s happened to him.” They tried to calm him down. He checked with the young resident who had introduced him to the older doctor, but Hawk had been there when he made his rounds early that morning.

“Sleeping with one eye open,” the doctor said. “I took a reading, gave him a shot, he muttered something and went back to sleep. He couldn’t get very far in his condition. He’s probably somewhere wandering around the corridors looking for the John.”

But he wasn’t anywhere in the corridors. Nor in the men’s rooms. Nor in the ladies’ rooms (at Jerry’s insistence they checked). Finally they found a maintenance man, idly pushing a broom, who claimed he had seen Hawk. He was a black man with a pencil-thin gray mustache, and his green janitor’s uniform hung loosely on him.

“Oh sure. Hawk,” he said good-naturedly with a wave. “I knowed him the moment I seed him. I seen him play when I was a kid. I would’ve knowed him anywhere. Course he wasn’t walking so good. But I imagine that’s just the whiskey or some such. And he still got that same old big guitar. And same old heap parked outside. Course it couldn’t have been the same, least I don’t think it could, but one just like it anyway. Don’t know how Hawk gets them to run, he must talk to ’em or something. Ain’t seen Miz Johnson neither in quite some time, man you wouldn’t believe what them two sounded like down home.”

Jerry nodded. The doctor was speechless with rage. “You mean you just watched them drive off?”

“He told me he was
discharged
,” said the old man in an indignant voice.

“At seven o’clock in the morning?”

“What I know about these things?” said the old man, fooling with his broom.

I should have known better, Jerry thought to himself as he walked rapidly down the long hallway, listening to the young doctor’s lecture on the risk he was taking, the guilt he must feel, the hospital’s freedom from legal or moral responsibility in this matter. He didn’t stop jabbering until Jerry signed the release form and paid the bill. “You ever hear Hawk sing?” Jerry said to the young resident. The other man shook his head. “Well, then, you don’t know anything, motherfucker.”

He felt pretty good about that, but that was all he felt good about as he checked out of the hotel, thinking, wasn’t it just like Hawk to do something like this, knowing that Jerry would be obliged to follow him, knowing that it would just make things harder on Jerry, doing it perhaps only to get his own back at this pimp dressed up in philanthropist’s cloth, who had persuaded an old man to forsake a comfortable life-style merely to satisfy the world and give it one last glimpse of a so-called great art form. Great art, my ass. All it was was bile.

Not in any particular hurry, Jerry ate in the hotel coffee shop and rented a car at the Avis desk. He knew now where Hawk would be going. He didn’t have to worry about finding him.

Whenever he was in trouble, Hawk liked to say, he always headed for Highway 61. 61 twisted in and out through all the little towns between St. Louis and the Delta and on up to Illinois. It wasn’t the fastest way to get anywhere, but it was the way Hawk knew best, it was the road he had traveled with Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams, and Sonny Boy Williamson (the first Sonny Boy Williamson) and Stump Porter, the midget piano player, and it was one of the ways Jerry had found him in Yola in the first place. “Highway 61 rolls right by my door,” he had sung in the 1936 version of the song. “Get home this time, ain’t gonna be rambling round no more.” So he would be heading for St. Louis, which for Hawk was the center of the universe. From there you could head east, west, north, south, but St. Louis was the hub. Yola was his destination, Jerry knew, and St. Louis was where he would be pointing for.

Jerry finally spotted him a little outside of Terre Haute, an old two-tone Ford—’53, ’54-just chugging along, hugging the middle of the road. Blue puffs of smoke billowed from the exhaust, and through the rear window you could see a solitary figure hunched forward, a Stetson clamped on its head, hands clenched tightly on the wheel. Jerry hung back for miles, watching nervously in his rearview mirror as cars, pickups, even a tractor edged out, leaned on their horns, and flew by. Hawk never noticed a thing. He kept up a steady twenty-five miles per hour, didn’t so much as glance at the gesticulating drivers who passed him, and never looked in the rearview mirror for the simple reason that there was no rearview mirror. Nonetheless Jerry felt sure that Hawk knew that Jerry was following him. When Hawk finally pulled into a filling station, he gave the attendant brusque directions and limped over to the men’s room without even giving Jerry a backward glance. That confirmed it as far as Jerry was concerned. He had his own tank filled, had the oil checked, the windshield washed, the battery checked, talked with the attendant about the misfortunes of the country (inflation, unemployment, lazy niggers), selected a stale candy bar from the automatic dispensing machine, while waiting for Hawk to emerge from the men’s room. At last Hawk did, and he shuffled to the gas pump, his pants undone, his fly half-zipped. He gave the attendant the washroom key and brushed past Jerry without a word. After several fumbling attempts, he placed the key in the ignition and tried it a couple of times, coaxing spluttering, choking sounds from the engine until at last, against all probability, it actually caught. They watched the car chug off down the road. “Damn,” said the service-station man to himself, and Jerry was forced to agree.

Jerry stayed behind him for the rest of the day. Through four more stops, at each of which he got two dollars’ worth of gas, at the last of which he purchased three quarts of oil. At the second stop Jerry went back to the restroom himself. “Hey, look, Hawk, come on, this is crazy,” he said through the open window, then watched it slam down and counted twenty minutes before Hawk finally emerged as disheveled as when he had gone in.

“You better get out of my way, boss,” muttered Hawk, after he had paid the attendant from his nickel-plated change belt, which he unlocked with a key he wore tied around his neck.

“Aw, come on, Hawk, this doesn’t make any—”

“I’m warning you,” Hawk said in a low growl and flung the door open, just as Jerry managed to jump free.

At the third service station they had a restroom which could accommodate more than one person at a time, and Jerry urinated with relief, as Hawk locked himself in behind the saloon-type door. Underneath the door Jerry could see Hawk’s pants lying deflated on the floor. “Look, Hawk, I understand what you’re doing, I really do. I mean, I agree with you, I think you ought to go home, rest up, take it easy. There wasn’t any reason to stick around that place. But you’ve got to understand, you’re still a sick man. I mean, you can’t just ignore the fact that you’ve been seriously ill. Look, why don’t you just ride with me. I’ll get you down to Yola, I’ll get you down there a lot faster than you’re going to make it yourself, we’ll get you to a doctor, and we’ll just see what happens, take it from there.” Hawk farted and grunted with about equal force. The smell drove Jerry out.

At the next stop the black man in the red greasemonkey’s suit seemed to recognize Hawk. He greeted him with a big wave as Hawk rolled up and laughed as the car shook for a good minute and a half after the ignition was shut off. Hawk slowly got out and hobbled over to the gas pump, resting on the right front fender and slapping hands with the shaven-headed man, who was grinning from ear to ear. Jerry stayed in the car while the men conversed, waiting to purchase gas himself. His tank was practically on empty, since he had passed up a purchase at the last station, not realizing that Hawk would go this long between stops. Hawk brought four dollars’ worth this time, and he used the men’s room only briefly, but Jerry couldn’t seem to get the attendant’s eye. Some kids drove up, and he filled their tank. A lady got a dime stuck in the pay phone, and the man went to see about that. For five or ten minutes he looked around under the hood of Hawk’s car, doing God knows what. Then he busied himself with straightening out maps and bringing the calendar up to date in the glassed-in office. Finally Jerry could stand it no longer and leaned on the horn. The man barely glanced at him. “Ain’t got no time now, ain’t got no time,” he said dismissively, as Hawk emerged from the station, and they laughed and chatted some more. Only after he had sent him on his way with a wave and a slap on the hood of the car did he finally acknowledge Jerry’s presence.

“You do sell gas here, don’t you?” said Jerry sarcastically. The man laughed.

“What do you want?” he said. Jerry asked him to fill it up with high-test. “Ain’t got no high-test. Just ran out.”

Jerry stared at him in disbelief. His head hurt. He was tired of nursemaiding, he was tired of Hawk, he was tired of all this shit.

“What are you talking about?” he exploded. “You expect me to believe this shit?”

The man shrugged. “Suit yourself, mister.”

Jerry watched Hawk’s dust. He looked down at the gas gauge and calculated that there had to be a gas station up the road somewhere. He switched on the ignition.

“Now you better stop bothering this man,” said the attendant in a quiet voice.

Jerry looked up. The man was smiling, but his smile was chilly. “You got no call to be harassing this man. He ain’t broke no laws. He ain’t never did nobody no harm. Why don’t you turn around and go back where you come from?”

Jerry felt like crying. “But I’m a friend of Hawk’s,” he vainly protested.

The man regarded him with scorn. “You ain’t no friend of Hawk’s,” he said. “Hawk told me who you was. You ain’t no friend of his. Now why can’t you leave that old man alone? You gotta squeeze the last dollar out of him, you ain’t got enough already—”

Jerry threw up his hands helplessly. To go without sleep. To put himself out for this ungrateful old man. To subject himself to abuse on top of everything else from this shaven-headed guardian. He was tempted right then and there to abandon the whole thing, to let Hawk go home and die any way he liked. Why not? In the end it would come to the same thing. No matter what he did there was no way he could influence Hawk’s course of action. And Hawk, he was sure, would seek out an audience as long as there was breath in his body. But it had gone too far, he was in too deep to back out now. Somehow he felt his and Hawk’s fates were forever linked, at least until one of them kicked. He waved to the attendant and moved on out into the passing stream.

At the last stop he confronted Hawk directly. He jumped out of his car and blocked the driver’s door before Hawk even had a chance to get out. “Come on, Hawk,” he pleaded, as the young kid with floppy blond hair gaped at them. “You know I’m gonna keep on following you no matter what you do. You know, in a way I think you’re counting on that. You’re not so stupid,” Jerry said, and thinking about it made him even angrier. “I think you’re just taking advantage of me. You know you’re sick. You know you shouldn’t be taking this kind of chance. And you’re just counting on the fact that if anything happens I’m gonna be right there to pick up the pieces. Well, goddammit, you’re right, I am going to be there. But it’s not for you, you old buzzard. It’s for me. You wouldn’t even say a word of thanks. You can’t even imagine what this is costing me.” Visions of his office, in far-off Harvard Square, desolate, phone disconnected, covered with cobwebs, condemned, all danced in his head. “You’re a selfish old man, and you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself.”

Hawk stared at him disgustedly and spit. The gob landed approximately half an inch from Jerry’s left foot. Then Hawk lifted himself out of the car, awkward, heavy, foul-smelling, a legend in his time, and stood practically toe-to-toe with his manager. “What you want from me, boy?” he said angrily, not even looking at Jerry. “Ain’t you through sucking on your mama’s titty?” With that he plodded off toward the men’s room, his shoulders slumping, his left leg dragging, the attendant running after him. “Let my manager take care of it,” Hawk rumbled without even turning around. A small victory, Jerry thought, as he gave the man a twenty-dollar bill and asked him to check under the hood of both cars.