Only the Wicked Page 21

  “Why can’t I have a few words with the senator? He’s not infirm from the accident, is he? I know he was looking into the Creel matter and the Citizens League involvement in his frameup. I know too he was talking with Wallace Burchett’s daughter.”

  “You’ve been listening to fanciful stories from ex-newspaper editors known to get their best stories out of a bottle of Early Times. I didn’t tell Todd McClendon anything, and I’m damn sure not telling you anything, either.” She stood under his nose, her chin and head thrust upward. If she’d been a fox, she’d have gone for his throat. He wasn’t too sure she still might not.

  “I’ll be around, Mrs. Bodar; there’re still a few people who might enjoy my company. Might even turn up those missing pages from Sharon Aikens’ diary.” He knew neither he nor Grant wouldn’t, let alone that the pages would be of little significance, but would they mean anything to her or her husband? “Be seeing you.”

  Monk’s heavy-soled shoes made clunking sounds as he made for the door. He could feel her stare x-raying into his spine and he wondered if she could will its too-fragile connection of bone and tissue to sever. Outside, clouds had gathered and the air was wet with the anticipation of rain. He looked back at drawn curtains in the upper window. If there was somebody peeping around them, he couldn’t detect anybody.

  He got into his rented Dodge pickup and drove back onto 61, heading north. He stopped once at a roadside café, and had a meal of oxtails and green beans cooked with fatback. Monk got back to Clarksdale ahead of a new threat of rain. He decided to take a look at the Delta Blues Museum. Originally, the museum had for twenty years been housed in the Carnegie Public Library. The street in front of the library had been renamed John Lee Hooker Lane in honor of the great bluesman. But the museum had been moved to larger, more spacious headquarters in the converted freight depot a little over a year ago—the same station Spears had tags from back when it functioned. The refurbished station was now part of what was called Blues Alley. There was a concrete stage out in back, and local acts performed there, and at the Do Drop Inn in next door Shelby.

  Clarksdale had originally been a lumber camp in the late 1880s. Later, it had also been the residence of playwright Tennessee Williams. And it was said that he modeled Blanche in his famous Streetcar Named Desire on Blanche, the daughter of the town’s founder, John Clark. In the 1920s, the town became known as “little New York” due to the presence of men who’d made their money as railroad barons. These days, though, Clarksdale had the distinction of being one of the poorest cities in the poorest state in the nation. In the summer of 1999, President Clinton had stopped in town on his four-day poverty tour to draw attention to its plight. Yet Clarksdale was rich in blues history.

  There were large painted depictions of blues musicians who had been born in and around Clarksdale and other parts of the Delta, including the R&B singer Sam Cooke who, along with Son House and Ike Turner, had come from Clarksdale itself. There was a large rendering of Hooker handling his guitar like it was a pick axe just finishing a long day of digging trenches; a moaning B.B. King, and a sly Howlin’ Wolf. Off to one side there was a life-sized mannequin of Muddy Waters in a white suit and a crisp Panama. Over the left shoulder of the blues man’s dummy was a photograph of the fake Muddy and the live ZZ Top in their bearded days.

  He paid particular attention to the material on Charlie Patton. There was a shot of a two-story cotton gin with lettering on its side. The script read from the top: Dockery farms, and centered under that EST. 1895. The next line down was Will Dockery, l865-I936 and Joe Rice Dockery, Owner. The plantation still existed, located on Highway 8 between Cleveland and Ruleville. It was there that Patton, born in Edwards, Mississippi, would lift the blues from merely juke music—played up until then, as far as whites were concerned, by interchangeable black men—and stamp it with his individual style.

  Patton learned how to play the guitar from Earl Harris and Henry Sloan, and somewhere around the age of seventeen, or it may have been a little later, he was already getting a following. Patton and Sloan lived on the plantation, their families share-croppers, though Patton’s father would eventually own his own plot near Dockery.

  Charlie Patton had attended several grades of school, but trying his hand at the starvation box was preferable to scratching out a living chopping cotton or clerking. His father, Bill Patton, was a big man, a lay preacher, and was not so inclined to see things as his son saw them. He discouraged young Charlie from spreading the Devil’s music with thunderous lectures, and sometimes with the switch. This repressive hand on Charlie might have also been because the older Patton had harbored doubts in being his son’s biological father. Charlie looked much like his mother, herself Indian, white, and black. Their appearances, Bill, dark and big, and Charlie, light and wiry, had spawned rumors in and around Dockery that didn’t subside. And as he got older, Charlie Patton embellished those whispered conversations.

  If WC Handy was the father of the blues, Patton was the godfather of the Delta blues. He incorporated Ragtime, hillbilly and folk into his brand of the blues, and some sixty years before Hendrix, was known to play the guitar between his legs and behind his back.

  Monk conjectured if it was Natchez or Chickasaw that was part of Patton’s roots. He stood looking down at what was apparendy the only extant photo of the progenitor who influenced Robert Johnson, Son House and so many others. A man who died relatively young at forty-five, or was it fifty-two?—his birth date wasn’t a certainty—of a heart condition. Other stories claimed what killed Patton was a knifing and still others a poisoning. The poisoning story may have been inspired by Robert Johnson’s death, because old Johnson had been done in by a jealous husband.

  Could that have been the cause of Kennesaw’s death? If Spears was messing around with his cousin’s wife, and his cousin was known to tip out himself, had some son or daughter he sired finally found him and exacted a revenge for him wronging the child’s mother? Given the history of the blues and its practitioners, the notion might not be that far-fetched.

  He pushed the new theory to one corner of his brain, and concentrated on Patton’s photograph. He had protruding ears, light-colored straight hair and, it seemed, tawny-colored skin. There was a studious schoolboy look to him reinforced by the bow tie he wore in the picture. That image belied what Monk knew of Patton’s wicked ways.

  Like many an archetypal blues man, or blues woman such as Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton, Patton had a reputation for sin and folly. Son House was quoted as saying the singer and writer of songs such as “Mean Cat Blues” and “Prayer of Death” was “a bad plantation nigger.” He would beat his eight or so wives regularly, on the off occasion when he was not idle. Patton, Son House went on, “would lie about his love for any female listener, and was tight with his money. His only daughter, China Lu, disavowed him.”

  Patton survived getting his throat cut a year or so before he died, though it did effect his singing a might. Patton’s voice on those scratchy records was a belly-to-the-ground stalking growl filled with menace and raw whiskey. He played slide and would use syncopation and beat rhythms on the back of his guitar as part of his performances. Like his father, he did some jack-leg preaching, but only, it was noted, to entice women into his arms. Though not a physically big man, his deaths-head voice bellowed up from some depth in an earth soaked with slave sweat and the Red Man’s lament. His songs told of incarceration in “High Sheriff Blues,” and travel in “Stone Pony Blues.” Patton drank and screwed and played, and dodged the law by dint of a power he may or may not have been fully aware of. He had etched his place in the cultural history of a state and country where it was only many decades after his death that his contributions to this most peculiar of American music forms had been acknowledged.

  “Not too many ask about the ‘Killin’ Blues’ anymore.” The young white woman proprietor behind the counter in the Delta Museum arranged some harmonicas for sale in a glass case. “I guess it’s been three years now sin
ce some fellas from Boston came down here with a supposed letter from one of Patton’s kinfolk that they claimed provided clues to this mythical lost recording.” She straightened up, “Like if it was around, we wouldn’t have been looking for the album ourselves. If Robert Johnson’s thirtieth song, or a wax cylinder of Buddy Bolden playing coronet existed, someone would have found it by now.”

  Monk smiled. “How do you think the rumor got started?”

  “This is the Delta, mister, we full up of spook stories and whispers among the willows and oaks. And God knows, it ain’t like Mississippi has a virgin past, am I right?”

  “Yes, that’s so.”

  “Try this,” she went on, “Patton was known to rework his songs from time to time. He was an innovator, always trying out some new twist as he traveled around, sometimes just steps ahead of some woman he’d taken advantage of, naturally. Anyway, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if one night he’s playing some barn dance and retools one of his songs, or makes up something on the spot and calls it the ‘Killin’ Blues.’ Maybe he even sang it in several more towns; hell, for all I know it could have been a hot request number.”

  “Yeah, I could see that happening,” Monk agreed. “People start talking about it after he died, and the story gets changed after time.”

  “See?”

  He bought some blues maps, a baseball hat with the museum’s logo on it and thanked the young woman. A chill had swept in across Clarksdale, and the clouds once again looked heavy with moisture. By the time he got back to his motel, the rain had started again and was coming down in a steady drum. Monk got to his room. There was a neatly handwritten note from the manager on the panel again. She’d taken down two numbers for him. The first was to his mother’s house. The other was a local exchange. He sat on the bed and dialed the latter number.

  “Merit Foundation,” the recorded honeysuckle of a voice on tape fluttered. It asked him to leave a message.

  “This is Ivan Monk returning Mr. Tigbee’s call.” He hung up and called his mother, but also got a machine. He checked his watch. It was past nine in L.A, where were Grant and his mother? A brief horror gripped his heart and he prayed a heathen’s prayer they weren’t out somewhere on anything that might be construed as a date. He called Kodama. She’d been reading her notes from a current trial involving millions of dollars in land rights out in the Mojave Desert.

  “I miss you when I don’t see you, baby.”

  “Ain’t that the truth? What you got on?”

  “I better not tell you, or where my other hand is right now. It wouldn’t pay getting either of us too excited,” Monk rasped.

  They bantered for awhile then he asked her, “You talk to Dex or my mom today?”

  “No, is there something I should be worried about?”

  “Oh, nothing like that, I tried to reach them, but no one was there.”

  “Your mom’s probably at work, and Dex no doubt tagged along or is out with one of his troglodyte retired cop pals.”

  “He ain’t got too many of those guys left,” he remarked pointedly.

  The two talked a little more about his progress, or what passed for it, until Kodama began to drift off. “Well, how should I take you yawning in my ear?”

  “I’m so comfortable with you, Ivan, the sound of your voice is soothing. Its deepness wraps around me, and I wish you were here next to me.”

  “So do I, Jill. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “You’d better.”

  Monk cradled the handset and got off the bed. Keyed up, and wanting to be doing something, he put on his jean jacket, and trudged over to the Tornado Lounge and Game Parlor. Encamped there, he had a can of beer and smoked a cheap cigar, the rain patting the windows in steady beats.

  Chapter 19

  “Goodnight, sweetheart.”

  “Goodnight, Mama.”

  Lindsey Allen kissed her son Jarred on the cheek. Her daughter Sharon had fallen asleep on the couch as the family watched Toy Story 2 on tape for the third time. Across from Jarred’s bed the girl lay sleeping, snoring lightly.

  Soon, she reasoned, she and her husband Terry would have to reconfigure the room upstairs so Sharon could have her own space. It wouldn’t do to have a preteen boy and girl sharing the same digs. What would child welfare think, she mused, going back into the living room downstairs.

  “You have a seminar on Saturday, right?” Her husband was sitting in the big club chair leafing through a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle.

  “Just ’til one, I can pick them up from swimming.” She crossed in front of him, touching his leg as she did so. Lindsey Allen straightened and stacked items on the glass-topped coffee table in an effort to occupy her mind.

  Her husband peered at her. “I got it out of the closet; it’s on the dining room table.”

  She gave him a kiss. “Thanks.”

  In the dining room, she pushed in the dimmer switch, turning the overhead light up all the way. The dinner table had been cleared of the dishes, and a week’s worth of opened envelopes and magazines had been stacked on a Japanese tea cart in the corner. Allen opened the large cardboard box containing her sister’s photographs, letters and diaries her husband had placed on the table. Also inside the box were the trophies her mother had kept when Sharon was a sprinter in high school.

  In her hand was a photo taken when she couldn’t have been more than four or five. The family had gone to the Grand Canyon, and had taken a donkey tour of part of the big hole. There she was, making faces at the camera, a goofball cowboy hat on her head, sitting in front of Sharon on the same burro. Her older sister’s arms were around her, and she was squinting into the sun.

  Bookending them were her parents, her father tall and lean in the saddle like one of those bronc busters on that old rerun show, Gunsmoke. Her mother looked uneasy on her mount, but her hands were relaxed, loose on reins entwined in her strong fingers.

  She spent some time smiling at the snapshots of her big sister and her at the beach, the time she broke her arm or Sharon dressed up pretty for the prom. Lindsey Allen had those quiet moments of dread, as her own children began to sprout, realizing they had already formed their own ideas and interpretations of life independent of her or their father. You could see that individual thinking on her sister’s face in the Grand Canyon photo.

  Yet she knew, going back upstairs, holding onto several of her sister’s diaries, psyches were made up of various components glommed from those who influenced us, positively and negatively. At certain stages of development we might consciously use the same phrases as a teacher we liked, or sit in a chair and cross our legs the way our mother did. But she also was sure there were some things one couldn’t explain through social science.

  She had seen characteristics in Sharon, her sister, that had been replicated in Sharon, her daughter. And the two had never met, at least on a physical plane.

  It’s not like she was a nut for that kind of mystical claptrap, although she did read a self-help or business motivational book occasionally. And there was a new book she’d been considering buying, The Shackle of Dreams, by one of those gurus of inner peace, a woman whose name she couldn’t remember at the moment. A couple of people in the office had been raving about this woman’s book and her tapes.

  She got undressed, put on her night slip, brushed her teeth and gargled. In bed, she carefully read through the dairy Sharon kept when she’d been in Mississippi. Lindsey Allen couldn’t remember the last time she’d read the dairy, but guessed it must have been when she’d been in college. Sharon’s infatuation with Ava was evident in her writings. Her script was in blue pen, a feminine handwriting replete with large circles for dots over her I’s.

  Her sister recounted various activities of the Creel campaign, and her impressions of the then young revolutionary’s reactions to the racist attacks in the press and by the business community. She also told of an incident where Creel stood down four whites who had cut the three of them off—Sharon, him and Ava—on a str
eet in Memphis. Sharon observed in her diary that Creel seemed full of himself, but he was also brave and driven to make something better for black people; and that he knew he’d never be elected mayor, but the campaign served to highlight the enforced division between white and black voters in a South being dragged and brow-beaten to change.

  There were several long and convoluted passages describing the relationship between Ava and Creel that only a nineteen-year-old girl from a proper home, yet hinting at her horniness, could produce. Lindsey Allen plumbed the writing for evidence that her sister was or wasn’t a virgin, but there seemed to be no definitive writing on that personal aspect. She fingered the section where the missing pages had been torn out of the book. The time period in the book stopped two days before she was murdered.

  The last full page recounted a long staff meeting where Creel shouted at Ava that maybe she ought to take her pale little dilettante ass back to mommy and daddy. What happened immediately after that outburst, if her sister had written about it, was now gone. The supposition could work toward his guilt, or she supposed his innocence since Creel’s side would no doubt maintain the people who slaughtered the girls removed the pages to further incriminate him.

  “Find out anytiiing new?” her husband asked her, settling in bed beside her.

  “I got to know my sister again,” she said fondly.

  Good,” her husband said, kissing her and rubbing a hand in the small of her back. “But nothing about, well, you know.”

  Inspired by her journalistic archeology, and the answers that might be there, Lindsey Allen catalogued the material in her head. “She does mention she and Ava were out one night in Memphis’ Pinch section and got to talking to two apparently prim young college men. What had prompted her to write about it was one was black, the other white. The black one was from out of state, Ohio, she wrote, ‘cause she overheard him talking about the Buckeyes with someone at the bar. The white one was a Mississippi boy.’”