Jesus Out to Sea, Page 3

  The Village

  I had thirty guys strung out on the trail in the dark. It sounded like a traveling junkyard. I stopped them at the river, told the translator, Look, we got a problem here, two more klicks we’re in Pinkville South, know what I’m saying? We go in, make our statement, then boogie on back across the river, the beer is five hours colder, and we let the dudes from Amnesty International count up the score. In and out, that’s the rhythm. None of our people get hurt, even the volunteers we took out of the last ville don’t need to walk through any toe-poppers.

  I’m talking to guys here who think the manual of arms is a Nicaraguan baseball player.

  Look, ace, you got to understand, I didn’t target the ville, it targeted itself. They were giving food to the people who were killing us. We warned them, we warned the American priest running the orphanage. Nobody listened. I didn’t have no grief with the Mennonite broad. I saw her in the city once, I tipped my hat to her. I admired her. She was a homely little Dutch wisp of a thing working in a shit-hole most people wouldn’t take time to spit on. The trouble came from a couple of liaison guys, officers who spent some time at a special school for greasers at Benning. Listen, chief, I was an adviser, got me? I didn’t get paid for interfering. You see these guys walk a dude into a tin shed that’s got a metal bed frame in it, they close the door behind them, you’ll hear the sounds way out in the jungle and pretend it’s just monkeys shrieking.

  Ellos! they’d yell when we came into the ville, and then try to hide. That was our name. As far as these poor bastards knew, I could have been Pancho Villa or Stonewall Jackson. Look, it got out of control. We were supposed to set up a perimeter, search for weapons, take one guy out in particular, this labor organizer, one object lesson, that’s all, they used to call it a Christmas tree, a few ornaments hanging off the branches in the morning, you with me? But the guy runs inside the church and the priest starts yelling at our people out on the steps, and pop pop pop, what was I supposed to do, man? Suddenly I got a feeding frenzy on my hands.

  You got to look at the overview to see my problem. It’s in a cup of mountains, with nobody to see what’s going on. That can be a big temptation. In the center of the ville is this stucco church with three little bell towers on it. The priest looks like a pool of black paint poured down the steps. The streets run off in all directions, like spokes on a wheel, and the guys who did the priest are scared and start popping anybody in sight. Before I know it, they’re down all the spokes, deep in the ville, the circus tent’s on fire, and I’m one fucking guy.

  Geese and chickens are exploding out of the yards, pigs squealing, women screaming, people getting pulled into the street by their hair. She comes around a corner, like she’s walking against a wind, and it takes everything in her to keep walking toward the sounds that make most people cover their ears and hide. I ain’t ever going to forget the look in her face, she had these ice-blue eyes and hair like white corn silk and blood on her blouse, like it was thrown from an ink pen, but she saw it all, man, just like that whole street and the dead people in it zoomed right through her eyes onto a piece of film. The problem got made right there.

  I pushed her hard. She had bones like a bird, you could hold her up against a candle and count them with your finger, I bet, and her face was a little pale triangle and I knew why she was a religious woman and I shoved her again. “This is an accident. It’s ending now. You haul your butt out of here, Dutchie,” I said.

  I squeezed her arm, twisted her in the other direction, scraped her against the wall, and saw the pain jump in her face. But they’re hard to handle when they’re light; they don’t have any weight you can use against them. She pulled out of my hands, slipped past me, even cut me with her nails so she could keep looking at the things she wasn’t supposed to see, that were going to mess all of us up. Her lips moved but I couldn’t understand the words, the air between the buildings was sliced with muzzle flashes, like red scratches against the dark, and you could see empty shell casings shuddering across the lamplight in the windows. Then I heard the blades on the Huey before I felt the downdraft wash over us, and I watched it set down in a field at the end of this stone street and the two officers from the special school at Benning waiting for me, their cigars glowing inside the door, and I didn’t have any doubt how it was going to go.

  They said it in Spanish, then in English. Then in Spanish and English together. “It is sad, truly. But this one from Holland is communista. She is also very serio, with friends in the left-wing press. Entiende, Señor Pogue?”

  It wasn’t a new kind of gig. You throw a dozen bodies out at high altitudes. Sometimes they come right through a roof. Maybe it saves lives down the line. But she was alive when they brought her on board. Look, chief, I wasn’t controlling any of it. My choices were I finish the mission, clean up these guys’ shit, and not think about what’s down below—because the sun was over the ridges now and you could see the tile roof of the church and the body of the labor organizer hanging against the wall and Indians running around like an ants’ nest that’s been stepped on—or stay behind and wait for some seriously pissed-off rebels to come back into the ville and see what we’d done.

  Two guys tried to lift her up and throw her out, but she fought with them. So they started hitting her, both of them, then kicking her with their boots. I couldn’t take it, man. It was like somebody opened a furnace door next to my head. This stuff had to end. She knew it, too, she saw it in my eyes even before I picked her up by her shoulders, almost like I was saving her, her hands resting on my cheeks, all the while staring into my eyes, even while I was carrying her to the door, even when she was framed against the sky, like she was inside a painting, her hair whipping in the wind, her face jerking back toward the valley floor and what was waiting for her, no stopping any of it now, chief, and I could see white lines in her scalp and taste the dryness and fear on her breath, but her lips were moving again while I squeezed her arms tighter and moved her farther out into a place where nobody had to make decisions anymore, her eyes like holes full of blue sky, and this time I didn’t need to hear the words, I could read them on her mouth, they hung there in front of me even while the wind tore her out of my hands and she became just a speck racing toward the earth: You must change your way.

  The Night Johnny Ace Died

  He and Big Mama Thornton were taking a break backstage when it happened. The dance floor was covered with Mexican and black people, a big haze of cigarette and reefer smoke floating over their heads in the spotlights. White people were up in the balcony, mostly low-rider badasses wearing pegged drapes and needle-nose stomps and girls who could do the dirty bop and manage to look bored while they put your flopper on autopilot. Then we heard it, one shot, pow, like a small firecracker. Johnny’s dressing-room door was partly opened and I swear I saw blood fly across the wall, just before people started running in all directions.

  Everyone said he had been showing off with a .22, spinning the cylinder, snapping the hammer on what should have been an empty chamber. But R&B and rock ’n’ roll could be a dirty business back then, get my drift? Most of the musicians, white and black, were right out of the cotton field or the Assembly of God Church. The promoters and the record company executives were not. Guess whose names always ended up on the song credits, regardless of who wrote the song?

  But no matter how you cut it, on Christmas night, 1954, Johnny Ace joined the Hallelujah Chorus and Eddy Ray Holland and I lost our chance to be the rockabillies who integrated R&B. Johnny had promised to let our band back him when he sang “Pledging My Love” that night. In those days Houston wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of the civil rights movement. We might have gotten lynched, but it would have been worth it. Listen to “Pledging My Love” sometime and tell me you wouldn’t chuck your box in the suburbs and push your boss off a roof to be seventeen and hanging out at the drive-in again.

  Nineteen fifty-four was the same year we met the kid from Mississippi Eddy Ray used to call the Gre
aser, because that boogie haircut of his looked like it had been hosed down with 3-in-One oil. But teenage girls went apeshit when the Greaser came onstage at the Louisiana Hayride, screaming their heads off, throwing their panties at him, crushing the roof of his Caddy to get into his hotel window, tearing out each other’s hair over one of his socks. I even felt sorry for him. When they got finished with him, he usually looked like he’d been shot out of a cannon.

  “I think the guy is a spastic. It’s not an act,” Eddy Ray said.

  “Johnny Ray wears a hearing aid onstage. Fats Domino’s mother probably thought she gave birth to a bowling ball,” I said. “Jerry Lee looks like somebody slammed a door on his head. The Greaser played on Beale Street with Furry Lewis and Ike Turner. Give the guy some credit.”

  “Shut up, R.B.,” Eddy Ray said.

  I didn’t argue. I knew Eddy Ray didn’t carry grudges or envy people. Things just weren’t going well for our band, that’s all. The beer-joint circuit was full of guys like us, most of them talented and not in it for the money, either. On average the total pay wasn’t more than fifty bucks a gig. The whole band usually traveled and slept in a couple of cars with the drums in the trunk and the other instruments roped on top. We lived on Vienna sausage, saltine crackers, and Royal Crown Colas, and brushed our teeth and took our baths in gas station lavatories.

  The big difference with our group was Eddy Ray. He played boogie-woogie and blues piano and a Martin acoustic guitar and could make oilfield workers wipe their eyes when he sang “The Wild Side of Life.”

  Girls dug him, too. He had a profile like the statues of those Greek heroes, with the same kind of flat chest and stomach muscles that looked like rolls of quarters and smooth skin that had never been tattooed. Not many people knew that Eddy Ray still heard bugles blowing in the hills south of the Yalu River. I was at the Chosin Reservoir, too, but Eddy Ray got grabbed and spent over two years at a prisoner-of-war camp in a place called No Name Valley. He always said four hundred of our soldiers got moved up into Red China, where they were used in medical experiments. I could tell when he was thinking about it because the skin around his left eye would twitch like a bumblebee was fixing to light on it.

  So why would a stand-up guy like Eddy Ray be bothered by a kid from Tupelo, Mississippi?

  Remember when I mentioned the gals who could start your flopper flipping around in your slacks like it has a brain of its own? This one’s nickname was the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City. She had gold hair, cherry lipstick, and blue eyes that could look straight up into yours like you were the only guy on the planet. When Eddy Ray and I first saw her, six months before we were supposed to have our breakthrough moment with Johnny Ace, she was singing at a roadhouse called Buster’s in Vinton, Louisiana. Outside, the heat had started to go out of the day, and through the screens we could see a lake and beyond it a red sun shining through a grove of live oak trees. We were at the bar, drinking long-necked Jax and eating crab burgers, a big-bladed window fan blowing cool in our faces, but Eddy Ray couldn’t concentrate on the fine evening and the good food and the coldness of the beer. His attention was fixed on the girl at the microphone and the way her purple cowboy shirt puffed and dented and changed colors in the breeze from the floor fan, the way she closed her eyes when she opened her mouth to sing, like she was offering up a prayer.

  “What a voice. I’m going to ask her over,” he said.

  “I think I’ve seen her before, Eddy Ray,” I said.

  “Where?”

  I looked at his expression, the sincerity in it, and wanted to kick myself. “At the Piggly Wiggly in Beaumont,” I said.

  “Thanks for passing that on, R.B.”

  He invited her to have a beer with us during her break. She didn’t drink beer, she said. She drank gin fizzes. And she drank more of them in fifteen minutes than I ever saw anyone consume in my life. I thought we were going to get hit with a bar bill that would bankrupt us for the next month. But it all went on her tab, which told me she had a special relationship with the owner. When Eddy Ray went to the can, she smiled sweetly and asked, “You got some reason for staring at me, R.B.? I know you from somewhere?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t think so,” I replied, my face as blank as a shingle.

  “If you got a haircut and tucked in your shirt and pulled up your britches, you’d be right handsome. But don’t stare at people. It’s impolite.”

  “I won’t, I promise,” I said, and wondered what we were fixing to get into.

  I soon found out. Kitty Lamar Rochon’s voice could make the devil join the Baptist Church. When she and Eddy Ray did a number together, the dancers stopped and gathered around the bandstand as if angels had descended into their midst. It didn’t take long for Eddy Ray to develop a very strong attraction for the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City. No, that doesn’t describe it. It was more like he’d been run over by a train. So how do you tell your best friend he’s been suckered and poleaxed by the town pump? Nope, “town pump” isn’t the right term, either.

  There was a chain of whorehouses that ran all the way along the Texas and Louisiana coast, all of them run by two Italian crime families that operated out of Galveston and New Orleans. How does a girl as pretty as Kitty Lamar end up in a cathouse? Believe it or not, most of the girls in those places were good-looking, some of them even beautiful. It was the times. Poor people didn’t always have the choices they got today. Don’t ask me how I know about this stuff, either.

  So I didn’t say diddly-squat to Eddy Ray. But, man, was it eating my lunch. For example, one week after Johnny Ace capped himself (or had somebody do it for him), we were blowing down the road in Eddy Ray’s ’49 Hudson, headed toward our next gig, a town up in Arkansas that was so small it was located between two Burma Shave signs. Kitty Lamar was lying down in the backseat, airing her bare feet, with the toenails painted red, out the window. She was popping bubble gum and reading a book on, get this, French existentialism, and commenting on it while she turned the pages. Then out of nowhere she lowered her book and said, “I wish you’d stop giving me them strange looks, R.B.”

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “What’s with you two?” Eddy Ray said, one hand on the wheel, a deck of Lucky Strikes wrapped in the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  The previous night at the motel I’d heard her talking on the phone to the Greaser. It was obvious to me Kitty Lamar and the Greaser had known each other for some time and I’m talking about in the biblical sense. Eddy Ray had evidently decided to let bygones be bygones, but in my opinion she kept doing things that were highly suspicious. For example again, she loved fried oysters and catfish po’boy sandwiches. Then we’d be playing a gig around Memphis and she wouldn’t touch a fish or shrimp or oyster dinner with a dung fork. Why is this significant? The Greaser was notorious for not allowing his punch of the day to eat anything that smelled of fish. Is that sick or what?

  “Why don’t we stop at that seafood joint up the road yonder and tank down a few deep-fried catfish sandwiches?” I said. “I know Kitty Lamar would dearly appreciate one.”

  She gave me a look that would scald the paint off a battleship.

  “It doesn’t matter to me one way or another, because I don’t eat seafood this far inland,” she said, her nose pointed in her book.

  “Why is that, Kitty Lamar?” I asked, turning around in the seat, my face full of interest.

  “Because that’s how you get ptomaine poison. Most people who went past the eighth grade know that. Have you ever applied for a public library card, R.B.? When we get back to Houston, I’ll show you how to fill out the form.”

  “Am I the only sane person in this car?” Eddy Ray said.

  On Saturday night we played a ramshackle dance hall in the Arkansas Delta, just west of the Mississippi Bridge. Snow was blowing and Christmas lights were strung all over the outside of the building, so that the place glowed like a colored jewel inside the darkness. The tables and bar and dance floor were crowded with people who belie
ved the live country music shows from Shreveport, Nashville, and Wheeling, West Virginia, represented a world of magic and celebrity and wealth that was hardly imaginable to them. Probably everybody in our band had grown up chopping cotton and picking ticks off themselves in a sluice of well water from a windmill pump, but onstage, here in the Delta, or a hundred places like it, we were sprinkled with stardust and maybe even immortality.

  You know the secret to being a rockabilly or country music celebrity? It’s not just the sequins on your clothes and the needle-nosed, mirror-shined boots. Your music has to be full of sorrow, I mean just like the blood-flecked, broken body of Jesus on the Cross. When people go to the Assembly of God Church and look up at that Cross, the pain they see there isn’t in Jesus’ body, it’s in their own lives. I’m talking about droughts, dust storms, mine blowouts, black lung disease, or pulling cotton bolls or breaking corn till the tips of their fingers bleed. I went to school with kids who wore clothes sewn from Purina feed sacks. Eddy Ray was one of them. What I’m trying to say is we come from a class of people who think of misery as a given. They just want somebody who’s had a degree of success to treat them with respect.

  We’d all been in the dumps since Johnny died, me more than anybody, although I couldn’t tell you exactly why. It was like our innocence had died with him. In fact, I felt sick thinking about it. I’d look over at the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City and hear that peckerwood accent, which sounded like somebody pulling a strand of baling wire through a tiny hole in a tin can, and I’d flat want to lie down on the highway and let a hog truck run over my head. A group of Yankees by the name of Bill Haley and the Comets were calling themselves the founders of rock ’n’ roll and we were playing towns where families in need of excitement drove out on the highway to look at the new Coca-Cola billboard. And Johnny was dead, maybe not by his own hand, and his friends had gotten a whole lot of gone between him and them.