“Intoxication eliminates the distance,” Will said, “between us and the heavenly bodies.”
“Like Cheryl Dobbs,” I suggested. More than actually feeling this, I was performing for Will.
He seemed not to have heard me. “If you get high enough, you can touch them.”
“God, I’d love to touch her heavenly orbs,” I said, finding myself hilarious.
But Will was on his own planet. “You have to leave intellect behind,” he said. “That’s what soul’s about—pure feeling. It’s about freeing your slave.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“About being drunk.” Suddenly he stood up. “Look, I’ll show you.” Pointing at a stand of trees behind the house, he announced that we would run through it as fast as we could. He let out a big, night-splitting rebel yell and I whooped back as we sprinted for the dark curtain of the trees. I had no doubt I could pass this test. With this warm spirit in my belly and the cool air on my face, there was nothing in the world I couldn’t do. I ran as fast as I could through the wood, effortlessly dodging the massed dark trunks that hurtled harmlessly past, Will locked in step beside me, charmed against collision. I was invincible—until I cut left and Will veered right and together we tumbled to rest side by side in the damp leaves, gasping for breath.
“See?” Will said. “You have to trust your instincts.”
I considered this, still exhilarated. Then suddenly Will said, “Would you let a guy suck your dick for a thousand dollars?”
“Hell no,” I said.
“How about ten thousand?”
“No way.”
“Would you let a girl?”
“Are you kidding?”
“But let’s say if you closed your eyes. If it feels good when a girl does it, why wouldn’t it when a guy does it?”
“Because.” I wasn’t comfortable with this line of speculation. “I don’t know.”
“But what if nobody would know?”
“I’d know. What are you—a homo?”
“I’m just saying—it’s just this fucking … convention. We’re all trapped in what we’re supposed to think.”
“Would you?”
“Maybe not. It’s strange everybody thinks it’s so terrible, is all.”
“It just is,” I said. “By definition.”
Suddenly he stood up and brushed off the leaves. “More champagne for the Olympians.”
After another bottle of Moët we each made a resolution to get laid in the New Year, and later I threw up in the wastebasket I’d been prescient enough to place beside my bed.
The next day we watched the Rose Bowl and manfully compared notes on champagne hangovers, which we decided, in our extensive experience, were the worst except maybe for gin.
On Saturday evening we drove to Clarksdale to hear Lester Holmes. My heart sank when I saw the windowless shed hard up against the railroad tracks. A knot of black men slouched around the door like languid sentries, passing a joint among themselves.
“You white boys must be lost,” one of them muttered as we approached.
“We’re here for Lester,” Will said confidently.
“That right?”
Reluctantly they shifted positions so we could enter. At first I could hardly see anything inside, though I was acutely aware of being seen. The voices fell below the music coming from the jukebox glowing at the far end. Dark faces took shape in the gloom. I nearly tripped over what appeared to be a V-8 engine sitting in the middle of the dirt floor. A single light shone on the stage, which was empty save for some amps and drums. We found Lester sitting in a corner with two female admirers.
“You following me,” he asked, as Will pulled two folding chairs up to the wire-spool table.
“How else I’m gonna learn?” said Will, talking the talk.
“You got that right,” Lester said. The women laughed appreciatively. “Ladies, this here’s my protégé, White Boy Willie. He wants me to teach him all the shit that I know, but I tell him, some things, you either got it or you don’t.”
“You got that right, Lester,” said one of the women.
“He sure do.”
“I tell him—‘Hey, some shit a white boy can’t never get.’ ”
“That the truth.”
“Wants to know my secrets with the ladies. But the thing is, I’m just a natural-born lover, is all.”
The women greeted this announcement with derision.
“But I might could give him a few pointers.”
“I’d be much obliged,” Will said.
“The thing is, I gotta go play. You boys just watch and could be you learn a thing or two. Sometimes you want speed and sometimes you want to go real slow.”
Will bought beers from the cooler that served as the bar, while I scrupulously studied a sign taped to the wall beside it: IF YOU WANT TO ACT LIKE A FOOL, DO LIKE YOU DID IN SCHOOL. SAY YOU GOT A STOMY ACK AND GET A EXCOUSE. THIS IS A FUN PLACE.
We sat with the women, who shouted at the stage. Suddenly I knew, viscerally, that what Will had told me once was true—the music was all about sex. Not necessarily the words, although that was sometimes true—but the rhythm and the feeling, the ebb and flow and destination. I was amazed. Now, I felt, I had the key. Will probably always had it. As the set progressed, he was leaning closer and closer to the girl beside him. When I glanced away from the stage a few minutes later, I found that the two of them were gone.
The other woman looked at me and smiled. “You wanna dance?”
“No thanks.”
“Come on, honey,” she said, standing up and tugging on my arm. Suddenly I realized that everyone in the room was watching, and it would have taken a substantial application of physical resistance to refuse the offer, dearly as I wished to. My apprehension only increased when the couples who’d been dancing seemed to disperse at a signal, as if they didn’t want to be seen with us, or else wanted to watch from a safe distance. I was hoping for a slow song. We were alone out there when the band kicked into a fast, upbeat number.
Trying to mimic the gestures of my companion, I briefly felt I was doing all right. I recalled my dancing triumphs with Belinda a few weeks before, at Lester’s house. For a moment I nearly lost myself in the rhythm. But as my partner’s movements became increasingly complicated, my own tenuous confidence faltered, until finally I began to suspect she was deliberately making a spectacle of me. I persisted gamely, no longer following her lead, increasingly aware of the laughter from the tables around us. When at long last the song finally ended, my partner collapsed into the arms of a friend, incapacitated with mirth, while I was accosted with a chorus of hoots and jeers. As I slunk toward the table, my face burning, Lester announced over his mike, “Damn, that hurt to look at. I’m talking ugly here now.”
In the car heading back to Bear Track, Will thrust his hand at me from the driver’s seat. “Hey, man. Smell my finger.”
“Watch where you’re going,” I said. When he continued to stab his finger at me I slapped his hand away, causing him to swerve off the road onto the shoulder before he regained control.
“What’s your fucking problem?” he shouted.
“My problem? I don’t have a fucking problem.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Yeah?” I yelled. “I wouldn’t have touched that girl with a stick.”
“That’s cause you’re a fag.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you.”
Ah, yes—those were the days when this seemed like a crushing and eloquent rejoinder.
We drove home in silence and went to bed without speaking. I was mad at Will for so many reasons I could hardly begin to sort them out, not least because I blamed him for my humiliation, but I wasn’t about to tell him that, since I didn’t want him to know about what had happened in his absence. When he had finally returned to the table I was sitting with two friendly young bloods who had hit me up for three beers apiece and a pint of gin.
M
y anger dissipated in the night; I awoke at dawn in a state of frantic anxiety, fearing that I had permanently damaged our friendship. When Will finally emerged from his room three hours later I apologized for my outburst.
“That’s okay,” he said, with a shrug. “We were drunk.”
I’m not sure this explanation exactly covered the case, but I was happy enough to pretend that it did. In the middle of the night I had realized that Will had become my best, and practically my only, friend.
Will announced over breakfast that he was driving back toward Clarksdale to attend church. Was this a matter of penance for the previous night’s activities? I’d been subject to compulsory Sunday Mass up until the moment I left home for prep school, where I shunned the stigma of the special van that took Catholics into town. I couldn’t imagine voluntarily driving half an hour to sit inside a church, which, by Will’s standards, could only be regarded as deeply uncool.
“There’s this choir I want to check out,” he said bashfully, or so it seemed to me. “You ever heard any gospel music?” Sensing my doubt, he said, “Man, you think rock and rollers have groupies—gospel singers get more pussy than anybody on the planet.”
This was a side of the religious vocation I’d never considered. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Kid you not,” he said.
He told me I was welcome to stay at Bear Track, and I think he would have preferred me to, but I was eager to repair any damage that had been done to our friendship the night before, and I was curious to experience this cocktail of sacred and profane. In the car he expounded further. “What the musicians call soul, the colored ministers call the Holy Ghost. But it’s basically the same thing.”
A white box made out of aluminum siding, the church stood on cinder blocks in a field on the outskirts of the town. The hand-painted sign outside said ALL WELCOME; I was more surprised than I should have been, when we entered the service which was already in progress, to find that we were the only white people in attendance. There was a palpable tear in the fabric of the congregation as we tried to slip in quietly. The minister paused at his lectern as an usher rose and escorted us to the front pew, where we were seated as honored guests.
“I don’t know about you but I been thinking,” said the minister, a powerful balding patriarch with graying temples.
“Tell it,” called a voice from the back.
“I hear people complaining all up and down about the heaviness of they load.”
“That’s right,” shouted a fat woman in our pew.
“I’m thinking God’s been too good to me for me to be complaining.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Go to somebody’s house, they complaining ’bout this and that.”
“Say it. That’s right.”
“Any old body can be religious in church. But it’s what you do in your house. It’s what the friends see and it’s what the neighbors see. That’s where your religion gonna show and tell. When you feeling things is bad, stop a minute. Don’t let the situation dictate to you. Enlarge the place of your tent and your habitation brothers and sisters. You got to get to a place of not letting your barrenness dictate to you. Lengthen thy cords and enlarge thy habitation. You got to break forth. The more you break forth the more you get a crop that breaks forth. So when you want to break through what do you do?”
“You break forth,” a dozen voices responded. “Praise the Lord.”
The minister surveyed the congregation and nodded approvingly. “The more excited you get the more God gonna give you an excited crop. The more you act reserved is the more you gonna get a reserved crop. The more all fire excited you are the more it gonna break forth to the left and to the right. Where’s it gonna break forth?”
“To the left and the right.”
“All around you brothers and sisters. Now the devil, he want us dignified. He don’t want us excited. He don’t want us filled with the Holy Ghost. If we complain in the house we gonna get a crop that’s a complaint. As long as we just sit here and complain that’s all we gonna get is a failure of crop. The more we praise God the more crop we gonna get in the house of God. It’s gonna break forth in my church and it’s gonna break forth in my home and when I go to my home I’m not gonna go complaining and when I go home it’s gonna break forth in my home.”
The woman beside me was crying beneath her white veil; looking around I could see tears on other cheeks. I’d never heard a sermon delivered with such conviction—except perhaps when Father Ryan was railing against sex—nor had I heard a congregation talk back like this one did. Beside me, Will was less animated than anyone in the church, and yet he seemed utterly rapt.
“The Lord know you too well. And the devil he know you gonna go home and turn on the radio and you got to tell him he don’t know you. I want you-all to keep praising God when you go home today and tomorrow and the next day and all the days of your life. Brothers and sisters, let me hear you say ‘Amen.’ ”
The congregation crowned the sermon with a chorus of amens, and then the choir rose to sing, the voices washing over us like surf. Along with the others I started clapping. A sweet, powerful voice persistently soared above the rest, and eventually I recognized the tall, elegant girl it belonged to as Lester Holmes’s niece. I nudged Will quizzically but he refused to look at me. The volume swelled as those around me joined the singing. Will stood stock-still as the congregation bobbed and swayed around him.
When we were driving home I asked him what was the point of attending that kind of church if you were just going to stand there like a pillar of salt. When he didn’t answer I said, “Was this about the girl? Is that why we went?”
“I think she’s got a future as a singer,” Will finally said.
“Have you been talking to her?”
“Colored folks, when they say, ‘You been talking to her?’—they mean, ‘Have you been fucking her?’ They say, ‘I ain’t been talking to her. No way.’ ”
I wasn’t going to let him dodge my question with this nugget of anthropology, but then I saw his expression. I saw, to my amazement, that he was in love. Far from enraptured, though, he looked ill, like a man who has just been given the opportunity to confess to a terrible crime.
That afternoon and evening we drove up and down Route 1, along the river, “looking for music,” as Will put it. Will would turn off the main road and cruise slowly down the side streets, stopping whenever he saw a cluster of lounging black men. Then, after chatting about the weather and the crops, he would ask whether they knew any musicians. Climbing back in the car, where I was happy to sit reading, he’d scribble in a spiral notebook. Finally at one little town we stopped in front of a boarded-up storefront from which we could hear the muffled wail of the blues, PLAYBOY LOUNGE was painted in crude letters over the door. As we watched, a man staggered out of the place, blinking in the low sunlight, and fumbled with a pack of cigarettes.
“You coming,” Will asked.
“Someone has to notify your next of kin.” I’d had my fill of juke joints for the moment.
I locked the doors behind him and tried to concentrate on my French, but I kept wondering what I would do if Will didn’t come out. Actually, at that time—’66—Will was fairly safe, beneficiary of a feudal system which was, despite recent challenges, still in place. After nearly an hour, he emerged in a state of high excitement, having learned that one of his blues heroes was living nearby. “He was recorded by Alan Lomax back in the forties,” he explained. “Everybody just figured he was dead.”
As the evening drew on we drove out into the middle of a cotton field, stopping in front of a tiny unpainted shack on cinder blocks. A wizened old black woman in a dirty pink dress answered the door. Between her accent and her thorough lack of teeth I couldn’t make out a word she said, but I gathered from Will’s responses that she didn’t know where her husband was.
“Damn,” he said. “Says he’s on a drunk and she hasn’t seen him in three days. I can’t believe he’
s been living not ten miles from Bear Track all these years.” Will’s eyes glittered with a sense of quest, like a collector in pursuit of a rare piece of porcelain. He proposed that we conduct a town-to-town, juke-to-juke search for the missing singer, but I persuaded him to drop me off at Bear Track first. As the sun disappeared over the levee, Will dropped me at the house and set off into the cool Mississippi night.
VII
The firm is in a quiet uproar. This morning’s tabloids are shrill with lurid details of Felson’s murder. The motel where his body was found murdered was a notorious haunt of homosexual prostitutes, and Felson was apparently a regular patron. A variety of gay pornography and sexual paraphernalia had been discovered in the room, which explained several of the questions the detectives lobbed at me when they came to my office. A few hours after they left, I was brooding about the whole sorry business when I remembered something I could have told them. One morning—it must have been six or seven years ago—I rode up in the elevator with Felson and noticed that he had a black eye. And then, a few months ago, when he was working on a trust for one of my clients, he came in with a bruised and puffy face, which he explained as the result of a mugging outside his apartment building. I don’t know, I suppose it doesn’t matter now. But I wonder, Didn’t his family notice anything? Didn’t they wonder?
My wife, Stacey, is on the board of the Metropolitan, and opera has become a regular feature of our evenings. Last night was Carmen. Naturally, the plight of lust-addled Don José led me to thoughts of Felson. How did he manage? Where did he find the time? I hardly have the time for my weekly squash game, and I try to devote weekends to my girls.
My attention drifting momentarily back to the opera, I found myself entranced by a song in which Micaëla, Don José’s childhood sweetheart, prays to heaven for protection: Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante … and some quality in the voice and inflection of the soprano reminded me of Taleesha’s gospel performance all those years ago in that Mississippi church. My God, could it really be almost thirty years ago now?