this year. Caught two of 'em breakin' in the place, killed two others 'cause he was fuckin' around with their wives and they caught on, and done killed two women. One of 'em 'cause she got mad Tiny was keepin' her husband down at the bar all hours of the night. She complained and words got tossed, then Tiny shot her. Called it self- defense. Can-tuck, he looked into it, but wasn't no one contradicted Tiny. Said she tried to kill him with a beer mug.'
'What about the other woman?'
'She was asleep in the driveway, and he backed over her.'
'She pass out there?'
'Yeah, right after Tiny hit her in the head with a Coke bottle.'
'Cantuck didn't do nothing?'
'He tried, but black folks, they keep things to themselves, and the white folks, they let 'em. But you can see the kind of guy Tiny is, and this Bobby Joe, he makes Tiny drink this beer with the cat shit in it.'
'Man, I don't think that'll catch on.'
'Tiny made sure it didn't. Next day, he got his shotgun, and he shot all them cats, and when he run out of shells he beat the rest of 'em to death. He wouldn't even hang a picture of a cat in his place now. That cat shit, it's always right there in the back of his throat.'
'I wasn't under the impression Florida was here to find out about his legacy. She was planning to write some kind of article on him.'
'Heard some of the guys say somethin' about that, but I don't know about it. She liked to hang over at the roadhouse, talk to people about Bobby Joe like he was some kind of star. She wanted to buy his guitar, music tapes, stuff like that. She had the money for it and she told anyone would listen to her she did. Them boys over there, they was tellin' her all that shit about how L.C. and Bobby Joe sold their souls to the devil at the crossroads and drank the devil's piss and such to play guitar, and she was eatin' it up.'
'I don't understand why she'd talk to just anyone about buying Soothe's stuff.'
''Cause she couldn't find none of L.C. s or Bobby Joe's stuff on her own, and his relatives didn't have nothin' of his, didn't want nothing to do with him. They were scared of him. Hell, he used to rape his own sister. They say a female dog run across the yard, he'd chase it down, fuck it and kill it. They wasn't no sorrier sonofabitch than Bobby Joe. He born bad, man. All that legacy stuff started 'cause Bobby Joe did a little playin' around Tyler, and someone on some magazine or paper or somethin' interviewed him, and he told all these stories about how he had L.C.'s stuff, and he talked that voodoo jive, said he had some unpublished songs L.C. had written out, and he had a couple songs on tape was recorded way back but never put on record.'
'Did he?'
'Not that I know of. Not that anyone I know knew of.'
'You're sayin' Florida was fishing?'
'And she was offering money for information. Lots of money. Them roadhouse lizards, about half of 'em ain't worth a shit. They'd tell her anything she want to hear they think they might make'm a dollar or get 'em some pussy. And it piss me off when anyone try to make somethin' special out of that nigger. He was sorry, just plain sorry. He meet that white boy at a roadhouse here. I seen 'em there. I was drinking a beer and watching 'em, and ole Bobby Joe had that white boy eating out his hand. Talkin' that music shit, playing like he some kind of jive nigger, and that ole white boy, he just shakin' his head like he was talkin' to some kind of god. He was talkin' to the devil, that's who he was talkin' to. They left together in that white boy's car, and wasn't more'n a couple hours after that, they found that peckerwood with his throat cut, hanging from a tree just off the highway, right by the goddamn road led up to Bobby Joe's house. Bobby Joe smart in one way, but in another he just a drunk field hand with a bad temper. He didn't think no farther than the length of his dick or the deep of his thirst. That's the way he was, and that's all there was to it.
'All that voodoo shit didn't do him no good when that Officer Reynolds show up. After ole Officer find out about that dead white boy, he went over to the roadhouse, asked around, and me and some others told him we'd seen Bobby Joe and the white boy together, seen 'em leave together, and when ole shitass Officer kick Bobby Joe's door off the hinges, there's that drunk fuck sittin' at the table with that peckerwood's watch and wallet, countin' the money. Bobby Joe tried to fight that big cop with his guitar, and Officer just tore that all to hell, then ole Officer stomped the stuffin' out Bobby Joe, opened that boy's mouth, made him bite the edge of the table, then slammed him in the back of the head with his forearm, knocked out all of his front teeth.'
'I believe that's police brutality.'
'Way the law works here. You don't fuck with the white law. 'Course, Bobby Joe had it comin'. Law or anyone couldn't have done nothin' to that jackass would have bothered me.'
'How do you know it happened like that?'
'Filipine told me.'
'Filipine?'
'That's what we call fella lives down the road here. His mama black, but his father was one of them Filipinos. He went with Officer to show him where Bobby Joe lived. He probably didn't have no choice but to go. Didn't want to go, ole Officer would have kicked his ass up around his ears.'
I thought about all that, realized suddenly why Florida had withdrawn her money from the bank. She was a woman with a plan. A bigger one than I had first thought. She saw herself not only as some sort of crusader, but as someone who was going to preserve a heritage, and maybe get some notoriety in the process. She had envisioned Bobby Joe as some kind of Robert Johnson. Magazine articles. A book. TV movies. That would be her approach. Florida was one ambitious rascal. She'd most likely given up her apartment with plans to live here, near her subject matter.
I heard a car splashing through the water outside and became, to put it mildly, tense.
Bacon got up, went to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked out. 'Doctor,' he said.
The doctor came in wet and old, bald-headed and grumpy. The black skin on his forehead was deeply wrinkled, the wrinkles sagged like worn-out Venetian blinds. The water beaded on his gray slicker like blisters on a rhino's hide. He had a bag in his hand, not a little black bag, but a big red plastic bag, as if he'd just come from shopping at
