Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents Read online

  “See, Jack and me, we’d been playing the Village — that’s Greenwich Village — and all the coffeehouses in the Northeast for about three years, but we were doing traditional stuff, Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger, the Limeliters, nothing original.”

  The girl doesn’t look old enough to know any of them. Barely old enough to drink, but beautiful. She has skin the color of a sunburst Les Paul, but her delicate nose shows there’s some white blood in her too, maybe a while back. All the groupies are doing the big-poufy-hair thing now, but she’s cut hers short so it frames her face; eyes like lumps of coal on their way to becoming diamonds. She looks so natural and real that something in me wants to cry.

  “Until Dylan,” she says again. Her voice sounds a little too deep to be coming from her slight frame under that white silk blouse. She’s hung her corduroy jacket in the closet and rolled up her sleeves like she’s ready to play some serious poker and wants us to know she doesn’t have to cheat.

  “Yeah,” Bish says. “He showed us we could write our own songs and still be legit. Authentic, you know?”

  He tries to untie her shoelaces, but she pulls her feet away. Her flirty-playful eyes tell him to keep talking.

  “So we wrote a few things of our own. The first ones were pretty bad, but we started to get a feel for it.”

  Actually, I got a feel for it. Bish sang lead, so people thought he wrote them. What the hell — my name was on them, so I could live with it.

  That was until the pigs busted me with a nickel bag in Georgia. Drugs, Deep South, 1964, you do the math. They tossed me in a cell with half a dozen other guys, some of them inbred, most of them black, all of them drooling for a piece of the college kid. Bish wouldn’t go my bail until I signed over the rights to the songs, and I knew that one way or another, I was going to get screwed. I still feel a little twinge when one of those songs pops up on an oldies station.

  “ ‘Rainbow Girl,’ ” the girl says. Shonna Lee, her name is, just a hint of drawl she hasn’t quite buried. “And ‘Quicksilver Romance.’ ”

  “You’ve studied up on me, haven’t you, missy?” Next to hers, his drawl sounds fake. Well, we both grew up in New England and met at Columbia. But it’s his bluesman image.

  He’s got hold of her foot now, getting the lace untied, and she’s not struggling. He pulls her sneaker off and I hear a knock on the door.

  The room-service guy rolls in a cart with enough stuff to feed a platoon: sweating silver bucket with a magnum of Moët, a fifth of Jim Beam Black, a cut-glass bowl overflowing with apples, cherries, lemons, oranges, strawberries, melon balls, and sliced pineapple on crushed ice. Plates, silverware, fancy pastries, sliced cheese, whipped cream, a big urn of coffee with one of those little burners under it to keep it warm. Enough napkins to clean up a serious food fight. I slip him a twenty and lock the door behind him again.

  By the time I get back to the main event, Shonna Lee’s sneakers are under the coffee table and Bish is massaging one little brown foot in his big white hands. She sags back against the cushions, her whole face softening like a kitten’s and the notebook sliding out of her fingers, but the questions keep on coming.

  “Why did you switch from folk to blues?” Her voice shakes just a tad when Bish finds that spot on the sole of her foot. For a second, he looks like he wants to suck her toes, one at a time, and I can’t blame him. Even with her clothes on, she’s the kind of girl who makes hit songs shoot out of your pencil.

  “The blues is the truth,” he tells her. “You can’t go wrong with the truth.”

  It’s the first flat-out lie he’s told her, and I know that from here on, he’s going to pick up speed. He’s told the story before.

  “In early ’65, we heard the Blues Project play in the Village, and the crowd went crazy for what they were laying down. Old Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but reworked into rock. I’d always loved the stuff, but we didn’t think anyone would buy it.”

  Shonna Lee moves a little closer and lets him run his hands up her calves.

  I loved Bo Carter, Blind Blake, and Robert Johnson, and I’d been saying blues was our ticket for over a year by then, but Bish didn’t want to know from nothing until Dylan had the Butterfield Blues Band back him with electric instruments at Newport. Their LP came out and knocked everyone on their ass, and Bish finally heard what I’d been telling him.

  Shonna Lee’s eyes move over to me like she’s heard the whole riff already.

  Bish gives her a smile so sticky I expect her to wipe her face. “Then the Stones and the Animals and the Yardbirds started shipping it back to us. I knew there was a fast train coming in and we had to jump on board before it left the station without us.”

  I go to the cart and sink my teeth into an apple before I scream.

  “I’d never played an electric guitar before, and it took Jack a while to persuade me to give it a try. See, I loved Muddy and Elmore James and the others, but I really felt like the acoustic country blues was in my blood.”

  My apple tastes like wax.

  “My soul, more like.”

  His eyes are starting to glow and I wonder how much longer before he suggests they take this into the bedroom. We’ve been on the road off and on for twenty years now, and he’s still the best there is, and she’s one of the perks. In twenty more years, when he’s turning into a lounge act or an oldies tour, she’ll be able to tell her kids that she banged Bishop Underwood.

  Damned if I know why that bothers me.

  I break the seal on the bourbon and pour three fingers neat. I hardly taste it before I pour three more.

  Then the girl’s next to me, stacking melon and strawberries on a plate, squirting a little blob of whipped cream beside them. Two more buttons on her blouse are open now. Barefoot, she’s still fairly tall and I’m still fairly not, so I get a good look before I straighten up and we look at each other eye to eye.

  She pours two flutes of champagne and dumps a handful of ice into a glass and drowns that in the bourbon, clear up to the rim. Bish watches her walk back to him with everything on a tray, real slow, like honey dripping off a table. When I swallow, Jim Beam burns in my throat.

  She and Bish clink flutes, then he drains his. Hers goes on the end table, and I’m not sure any of it even wet her lips.

  “So you got a Les Paul,” she says. “Any reason you chose that particular guitar?”

  “Well, I was playing a Gibson acoustic, an old Hummingbird. It’s in the other room, as a matter of fact. I still write songs on it.”

  Yeah, I catch myself thinking, and muskrats really do ramble.

  “Maybe you can show me later,” she says. This time, her voice doesn’t seem to reach her eyes.

  “I’d love to.” He lets her slide a strawberry into his mouth and plays with it before he takes a swallow of the bourbon. “Anyway, I liked the neck on that Gibson, so I figured it’d be easier to move to an electric guitar if I was already used to the feel of it.”

  There was more to it than that, of course. I had a Martin D-45, loved it like my mother, beautiful sound, but by then I’d signed over my rights, so he was making the royalties and I was just the sideman, which meant that when “we” decided to go electric, it was my guitar that went. I don’t even know what that beauty would be worth now, thirty years later. We’ve got enough money for me to buy a busload of them, but it wouldn’t be the same.

  “I tried a Gibson hollow-body first,” he tells her. “But they feed back when you crank up the amplifier. Then I found a Les Paul.”

  Right. He heard Clapton playing one on that John Mayall LP and gave it a shot.

  “What is it about that guitar you like so much?” The girl feeds him another strawberry. There’s a look in her eyes, like before the night’s over, she’s going to ask him to cut his hair and wrestle a lion. She sees me raise my glass of bourbon again and shakes her head, just a little.

  “Oh, the feel, the tone. I’ve had it so long, it’s like an old friend; it just fits in under my rib cage and I
feel like I’m not alone. And it’s got that great sustain, you can hit a note and hold it forever, warm and soulful, like a woman crying on a rainy night.”

  That’s one of my lines too. From “Pain of Loss.” It went platinum in ’74 and I got diddly for it. He’s still collecting royalties, seven million dollars from that LP so far.

  The girl refills his bourbon so surface tension is all that keeps it from spilling over her fingers. She sits back on the couch, but this time she tucks her feet under her.

  “Tell me about ‘Hot Sugar Blues.’ ”

  Bish loses his rhythm for just a beat before he picks up the glass. “That song was the little pebble that started the avalanche. Sold two million copies and convinced the record company to let me cut a whole album of my own stuff.”

  Of our own stuff, you bastard.

  “I’ve heard stories that you stole that song.”

  It gets so quiet I can hear water running in the pipes and the traffic nine floors below us.

  “What you saying, missy?” His drawl is broad enough to paint a double yellow line down the middle of it. “I wrote the words, I wrote the music, I sang it.”

  Well, he sang it anyway. Shonna Lee looks like she’s two verses ahead of him.

  “Someone took you to court. Claimed he wrote that song and you cheated him out of the money.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Bish takes a long swallow of bourbon and I feel my hand put my own glass back on the cart. It’s like I’m not even there in the room with them anymore.

  “Everyone talks about that. But they don’t remember the rest of it. We went to court and the judge threw out the case in ten minutes flat. Some old coot trying to make money off me. Well, we sent him packing.”

  “An old black musician,” Shonna Lee says. “Mattix? Something like that?”

  “Some broken-down drunk in Mississippi. Claimed he wrote the song and played it for me, and I took it up north and made the record without his permission. Tried to sue me, but I had the music in a safe-deposit box, dated before he’d had anything.”

  “Hot Sugar Blues” is the only hit he’s had that I didn’t write. We were in some little jerkwater town, still doing those Kingston Trio covers, and this guy followed us up on the bandstand and blew us off the stage. Deak Mattix. Best guitar player I ever heard, better than Charley Patton, Reverend Gary Davis, or Mississippi John Hurt, and he sang this song while Bish and I sat there with our chins down around our knees.

  “See,” I’d said to him, “this is why we ought to be doing the blues.”

  We bought the guy a few drinks, made him play the song again. Then a couple more drinks and play the song one more time. By then, Bish had watched his hands enough to figure out those weird changes. Actually, they weren’t weird, he just had the guitar tuned to A-minor so the voicings were different. That night in our motel room, he wrote it down and mailed it to himself at our apartment in East Orange. When we got back, that’s when he traded my Martin for his first Gibson electric.

  The song came out three months later, and Deak Mattix sued. Well, try to find a jury in Mississippi in 1966 that’s going to believe a black guy. Bish and I flew down there with exhibit A. The judge opened that sealed envelope, looked at the papers inside, and gave the poor bastard thirty seconds to get his ass out of the courtroom.

  We flew back to New York the next morning.

  “Deacon Mattix,” Shonna Lee says. “He killed himself a few days later. His wife found him hanging from a beam in the basement.”

  “I heard that,” Bish says.

  “Left her and a couple of little kids.”

  I’d told Bish he should send the woman some money, but he said it would look like he really was guilty and trying to buy them off. As soon as I could scrape something together, I sent it to them with a letter saying how sorry I was. Never got an answer.

  “ ‘Hot Sugar Blues,’ ” she says. “You ever eaten hot sugar, Mr. Underwood?”

  The way he looks at her now, I want to kill him.

  She raises her eyebrows. “You interested?”

  Before he can say anything, she’s back at the cart, digging through the sugar packets and the whipped cream and the strawberries.

  “Pour the man more bourbon, will you, Jack?” she asks. “This always tastes better with a little chaser.”

  She finds her jacket in the closet while I refill Bishop’s glass. When I hand it over, I can feel the heat pumping off him like a midnight freight. The girl comes back to the table holding a little envelope.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Some of my secret herbs and spices.” She gives me a smile that would stun a snake. “Old family recipe, just for special occasions. This feels like a special occasion, doesn’t it?”

  She empties the envelope into her hand, mixes the contents with the sugar in a highball glass, and puts it over that little flame that’s been keeping the coffee hot.

  “We need to melt the sugar,” she says. “Just like the song, you know.”

  She adds a little bourbon and uses a strawberry to muddle everything together. When I can see it bubbling and steam rising, she breaks a cupcake in half, pours the mixture over it, and takes the plate over to Bishop. She gets down on her knees in front of him, and his smile glows like toxic waste.

  “This is best if you take it all in one gulp, sugar. It’s got a little bit of an after burn, but the bourbon makes it all better.”

  “What is this?” Bish asks.

  “It’s something my mama showed me. It’ll keep you going for a good long stretch. If you get my meaning.”

  She offers him the cupcake on the plate. “One nice big bite. It’s going to be hot, so you have to swallow it right down. Then chase it.”

  He takes the cake and looks at her. She winks like Delilah probably winked at Samson.

  “Go for it, sugar. One time, just for me.”

  The cake disappears into his mouth, and she’s already bringing up the glass and tilting it between his lips. He swallows and coughs a little before he sits back on the couch.

  “Whoa,” he croaks. “Hot.”

  “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” She squeezes his hand with the glass in it. “But it’s going to be so good in a little while.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking too, honey.”

  She stands up and looks at me, still over by the cart, most of the bourbon gone, and a lot of the fruit and champagne. She turns back to Bish.

  “You like any of the young players out there now?” she asks. “Anyone coming up who can really play the blues?”

  “There’s a kid out of Texas.” Bish taps his chest like he’s got a big belch stuck in there. “Stevie Ray Vaughan. I saw him in Houston a couple of years ago. Heard that he’s cutting an album now.”

  He tries to swallow again and she pours him another glass of Jim Beam.

  “Funny,” she says. “Blues is black music, but now only white guys seem to play it.”

  “Lots of black singers don’t like blues now,” I say. “They say it reminds them of slavery. And they think it’s too country.”

  Bish rattles the ice in his glass. “Yeah. They’re into rap now ’cause it’s more modern. City music.”

  Shonna Lee offers him a cherry.

  “Modern, my ass,” he goes on. “It’s a fad. A year from now, everyone will have figured out it’s crap and it’ll go away.”

  “I don’t know if anything ever really goes away,” she says. “I think maybe it all just goes underground until the time is right again.”

  “Sure.” Bish chases the cherry and grimaces. “Like Santa Claus comes every year.”

  “Have you heard of a guy named Robert Cray? He’s black.” Shonna Lee watches Bish drink, and the bourbon seems to burn him all the way down like the melted sugar did.

  “I’ve heard the name. Haven’t heard him play, though. You like him?”

  “He’s not as hot as you, but he’s got a sweet sound.”

  She looks at him like she’s just d
ecided not to trade in the station wagon for the fancy sports car after all. She threads her arm into the sleeve of her corduroy jacket and turns to me. I can feel her eyes from across the room.

  “Jack.” She sweeps her sneakers from under the coffee table and slides them onto her feet in one flowing motion. “It’s getting awfully late. Would you care to walk me home?”

  “What?” Bishop’s voice rises, and it catches a little at the end. He’s still holding the empty glass. “No way, honey, you’re not leaving.”

  “Yes, sugar,” she says. “I am. Thank you for the interview. I’ll send you a copy when I get it written. And maybe I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  I’m reaching for what’s left of the bourbon, but she grabs my wrist.

  “What the hell?” Bish slams his hand on the table, and I hear the highball glass crack.

  “Oh, sugar, did you hurt yourself ?” She moves over and grabs his hand. “You better take care of that cut.”

  She steers him into the bathroom, closes the door behind him, and smiles at me.

  “I still need you to walk me home, Jack.”

  I’m too amazed to do more than nod. I put my arm around her waist and she leans her head against my shoulder while I walk her two doors down the hall to my own room. Her hair smells so good I almost drop the key trying to unlock my door.

  The next few hours could be a dozen songs I’m never going to write, and she’s still lying beside me when morning creeps through the curtains. I look at the clock while she’s in the shower and wonder how I’m going to give her cab fare home without looking like the jerk of the universe. And if I’m still going to have a job when Bish sees me again.

  Shonna Lee comes out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and drops her towel on the bed like we’ve been together forever. She gives me a kiss and takes her time putting her clothes back on.