The Last of the Savages (5 page)

I turned around in my chair as she took up a position between the table and the sideboard. The performance was excruciating. That she was skillful did nothing to lessen the embarrassment I felt for her. On the other hand, it was a relief to have license to stare at her; seeing her engaged in this lumpish dance humanized her in my eyes.

Thoroughly unaware of my tortured attitude, she marched in place, twirled and threw her baton, cartwheeled across the carpet, tossed her hair like a brilliant yellow banner and finally landed in a split, the long scissors of her bare legs glinting on the faded Tabriz. We all clapped, even Mrs. Savage; her husband whistled through his teeth. Cheryl bowed and resumed her seat, glistening beneath a fine sheen of perspiration like some freshly rinsed fruit.

Two hours later we were skirting the southern edge of Memphis in the Cadillac, Will driving like a crazy man, running stop signs, a beer clenched between his thighs. A terrifying driver, he seemed to feel obliged to tempt fate every time he got behind the wheel. Later in life he would have a driver, which is the only reason he’s alive today.

After dinner he had changed into black jeans, a black turtleneck and pointed black boots. He then opened a locked drawer in his desk, from which he extracted another paper bag filled with wadded-up currency—singles, fives, tens and twenties. “I’ve got more, about ten thousand buried out back,” he said, stuffing bills into his pockets, “and way more than that down in Mississippi.”

“From what?”

“You’ll see.”

In the car, Will talked of Cheryl and her virtues while I clutched the dashboard in preparation for disaster. “Man, can you believe Elbridge,” Will asked in a tone of stunned admiration. “Lucky bastard.”

We finally came to rest in front of a squat cinder-block bunker on a block of derelict frame houses. A brilliant mural in pink and black depicted flamingos—as stylized as the totem animals of a cave painting—high stepping to the notes of a stick-figure band. The sign over the door identified the place as
THE HOT SPOTTE
. A huge black man in an electric-blue sharkskin suit guarded the door. After a moment he recognized Will, who shook his hand and shouted a greeting above the din.

Inside, the establishment seemed to be on fire. From what I could see through the thick smoke, the bar was lined with black men in hats who looked us over skeptically. Two couples danced to the music from the jukebox; after three months as Will’s roommate, I recognized the voice of Jackie Wilson.

I’d never seen the inside of a bar before; if I’d been suddenly, inexplicably transported to the Elks Lodge in Des Moines, Iowa, I would have felt a frisson of exotic danger. But this was like standing on the thundering lip of Victoria Falls, teetering above the steamy abyss. The walls were covered in red shag carpet, and the patrons were dressed with a meticulous flamboyance that made me feel distinctly underdressed. Will had disappeared. I tried to find a posture that would seem natural and fixed my attention on a tiny stage where three musicians were setting up their equipment. Painted on the bass drum was the legend
LESTER HOLMES & THE SOULFULS
. When Will finally returned, he was holding two beers and a ratty cigarette. He handed me one of the beers and lit the cigarette as a fourth man with tight glistening curls and a sequined jacket hopped up on the stage to scattered applause.

Will handed me the cigarette. When I reminded him I didn’t smoke he shouted, “It’s grass.” Had I been anywhere else I would have declined, or argued, but instead I inhaled the weedy smoke, perhaps sensing that it might make me feel less out of place, eager for any ritual that would ease my profound discomfort.

“Lester’s going to be as big as James Brown if I have anything to say about it,” Will shouted. I nodded vigorously as if this were my firm conviction, too, and took another drag; minutes passed, it seemed, before I suddenly examined the statement and found it improbable. Then in another moment it seemed the most reasonable assertion in the world, and when Lester began to play I decided he was indeed the greatest
singer and guitar player I’d ever heard. The music entered my body and took over my heartbeat and respiration. I felt as if I were somehow participating in its creation, sensed that every brain stem in the room was synchronized to this powerful rhythm, all of us part of a single nervous system. Lester and the band were the nucleus, and we were all orbiting electrons.

“Lester’s drawing blood from that guitar,” Will said, accenting the first syllable in the Deep South manner. The audience talked back, exhorting him to
Say it
and
Sing it.
I found it hard to take my eyes off him, his sinuous moves inducing a kind of hypnotic rapture. A woman bobbing in front of the stage kept calling out, “Ride my alley, Lester.”

Between songs, another fan called out, “You fast, Lester.”

“Lightning would be faster,” he growled into the mike, “ ’cept it zags.”

I’ve always been a highly self-conscious person, but that night was one of the few times in my life I experienced a warm dissolution into a pool of collective consciousness; it provided me with a sympathetic point of reference for the strange fervor that’s driven Will for thirty years, and has enabled me to see the continuity in his quest from juke joints to private-jet debauches, from shooting galleries to Zen monasteries. Briefly, I think, I got it. Somehow connected to everything, I felt liberated from the narrow box of my own small existence. And if the exhilaration of that moment faded with the night, I can recall the force of it still. It was like the rocket transport of sex, like emerging from Plato’s cave into the brilliant sunlight of life itself.

Suddenly we were helping the band load equipment into an ancient pickup truck. Then quite naturally we found ourselves in the front room of a small frame house. Just like that. I thought this a wonderful way to move around the planet, eliding and deleting the boring intervals of transport, zapping from one high point to the next. When I later tried to explain this feeling to Will he nodded approvingly, holding his hair back from his face as he did so: “You segue from one hit to the next, without commercial interruption.”

I was straining to hear Lester’s bass player above the din: “I use to play spiritual,” he shouted, “but I had to quit. You can’t play the blues on Saturday night and go to church Sunday and sing God’s music. You gots to
be pure. Your heart gots to be pure. The preacher he say to me—‘I know what you was doing last night and it ain’ right. You got to do one or t’other.’ So now I jes’ play these nasty old blues.”

The new venue was not nearly large enough to contain all of us, though it did, as if its plywood and tar-paper skin were infinitely elastic. Everyone danced to the music from the record player, including several small children and a white-haired relic with gold teeth. The floor throbbed beneath our feet, rough planks showing between odd sheets of brown speckled linoleum. If anyone thought I looked ridiculous they were polite enough to keep it to themselves.

The women made a show of fighting one another to dance with us. Will graciously declined these invitations. He did not dance, he just swayed. For all his apparent ease, and his intoxication, he maintained a habitual remoteness. Spending much of his life among black people, he preserved his dignity and possibly his life by never pretending to be anything but a white man. He seemed to belong, but not by virtue of aping the behavior of the local populace, nor of a moist heartiness. I was just the opposite, slapping backs and attempting to reproduce the moves of those around me. A few hours before I’d been sucking up to the plantation owner and studying his manners; now I wanted to have soul. Set me down on the street with a one-legged man, Will once said of me, and I’ll be limping inside of a block.

Under the benign influence of cannabis, I felt I could do no wrong, and the funky, foreign smell of all those bodies packed together seemed a powerful intoxicant in itself. I’d been dancing with a girl named Belinda, who kept ignoring the tall interloper with a keloid scar across his chin who tried to claim her after the first dance. Refusing to look at me, he tugged on her shoulder and hissed until she finally slapped his hand away and told him to leave her alone. When the tempo dropped with the opening notes of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” I reached out to embrace my partner for a slow dance. She grabbed me and pressed me into the soft wilderness of her breasts while thrusting the hard ridge of her pelvis into mine.

When I was suddenly, violently dislodged from this refuge, I could not understand by what agency, until I saw the skinny, shiny-faced man
with one hand wrapped around Belindas neck and the other pointing a knife at me. He said, “How you like to get stuck, white boy?”

Even before I had time to be afraid Lester Holmes had grabbed him from behind and shaken the knife from his hand. “This boy’s a guest in my house,” he said, cuffing the attacker with an open hand. “He don’t know nothing. Just a dumb little shit. If you can’t hold on to your woman, that ain’t no doing of his.”

“I ain’t his woman,” shouted Belinda, who had retreated out of reach. Returning to the fray, she reached over and punched the captive in the face.

Lester escorted the man out and the music resumed, but without me. If I’d felt like a dreamily detached spectator at my own near evisceration a moment before, I was now scared straight. I saw Will standing in the corner, conferring languidly with Ronald, Lester’s bass player. As I approached, Will tipped his beer bottle illustratively at me. “These Yankees come down here, Ronald, don’t know how to behave themselves, messing around with some other cat’s woman, getting in knife fights and all.”

The bass player smiled broadly, nodding his head up and down. And I was stung, because it occurred to me that Will possibly had more in common with this Negro musician twice his age than he did with me. Though I’d just been forced to acknowledge that I was a white boy in a room full of coloreds, I’d thought I had at least one natural ally in the room. Now I was not so sure. Maybe I was all alone. Maybe Will didn’t even like me. Maybe no one could ever understand anyone else, all of us trapped forever alone in our own hard skulls …

I was stoned, my addled and unfamiliar mind making sharp turns, unnatural leaps. Seeing my distress, Will punched my shoulder. “We just might make a hipster out of you yet.”

“So why aren’t you dancing?” I said, wanting to question his own credentials.

“I don’t dance,” he said emphatically, the way a Baptist might declare that he didn’t drink.

“That’s true,” Ronald agreed. “He don’t.” His tone seemed to indicate that he regarded this as an impressive if bizarre achievement.

“I
might
dance,” Will said. He stroked his hair away from his forehead
thoughtfully. “If that little girl over there in the door would dance with me, I just might.”

Ronald laughed mirthlessly through his nose. “Shit, boy. You ought’er just said Ann-Margret. Fact, you got a way better shot at her. That’s Lester’s niece Taleesha. Lester don’t let nobody near her. A little princess, that girl. Her daddy’s a big nigger in town, own a couple funeral parlors. And her mama was Lula James, the blues singer.”

“No shit?” Will’s interest was if anything redoubled. “Whatever happened to her?”

“Tha’s a good question. She done married this funeral parlor gentleman, and he made her give up the music, get respectable you might say. Well, she had a baby, that you’re looking at right now, and a couple more, but I guess she couldn’t stay respectable and finally she just up and left and ain’t nobody seen her from that day to this.”

I’d noticed the girl in question, slouched against the wall, looking on but not partaking of the festivities, perhaps the only person in the place besides Will who hadn’t danced. I couldn’t judge her age. Though she was at least my height she had the awkward posture and the uncertain gestures of a brand-new adolescent, of someone unused to new limbs. Her elongated and delicate features seemed suggestive of ancient Egypt. Motionless, she was a serene statue presiding over the Dionysian frenzy. Then, thrusting a sharp elbow into the air, she stuck a finger in her nose and probed, finally removing it to inspect her findings. Observing this secret bit of grooming from across the room, Will and Ronald hooted with laughter.

Looking back, I think it was this memory that in later years gave me the confidence to live up to Taleesha’s assumption that I was an elder statesman, immune from the violent tides of blood and passion, though she was only a few months younger, and somehow always made me feel a little like a foolish boy.

“How old is she,” Will asked.

“Old enough to nasty,” I said with the false bravado of a virgin.

“I done told you, man, Lester don’t let nobody mess with his niece, man.”

“We’ll just see about that,” said Will, staring intently. And I realized
then that he was extremely stoned. With Will, it was hard to tell; for all the massive quantities of stimulants and depressants he ingested, you had to know the signs: long pauses and ellipses, and, in this case, a certain glazed concentration. Suddenly the girl looked our way. She rose out of her slouch, stiffening as if for battle, and sneered at us before turning away.

A body detached itself from the rhythmic mass and crashed into me. The man apologized profusely, exhibiting the thorough and decorous contrition of the happy drunk. I was exhausted and eager to leave. “If you’re gonna ask then ask her already.”

Ronald smiled, showing an irregular row of brown teeth. “I got a dollar says no way.”

“I’ll take it,” said Will. He finished his beer, stroked his hair back with both hands and started over with a determined stride that carried just the hint of a waddle. Years later, when he became very large, I realized he had finally grown into that walk—the confident fleshy march of a man on whom cars and planes and bankers wait—as if his body had known all along its eventual shape.

The girl stiffened and seemed to grow taller and sterner and older as he said whatever he was saying. At one point she spoke. I was just about to turn my attention elsewhere when she slapped him. It was so quick and unexpected I wondered if I’d imagined it. Will stood there, nodding his head. Then he bowed slightly from the waist and retreated.