wanting to step out there even though it scared the hell out of you and you knew it was the devil or something even worse at the wheel. Tell me you didn’t feel something like that.”
I couldn’t. So I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and sweated, the sound of that music still shaking down deep in my bones, boiling my blood.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I’ll do it, but you got to give me a photograph of Tootie, if you got one, and the record so you don’t play it no more.”
She studied me a moment. “I hate that thing,” she said, nodding at the record in my hands, “but somehow I feel attached to it. Like getting rid of it is getting rid of a piece of me.”
“That’s the deal.”
“All right,” she said, “take it, but take it now.”
MOTORING ALONG BY MYSELF IN THE CHEVY, THE MOON HIGH AND BRIGHT, all I could think of was that music, or whatever that sound was. It was stuck in my head like an ax. I had the record on the seat beside me, had Tootie’s note and envelope, the photograph Alma May had given me.
Part of me wanted to drive back to Alma May and tell her no, and never mind. Here’s the record back. But another part of me, the dumb part, wanted to know where and how and why that record had been made. Curiosity, it just about gets us all.
Where I live is a rickety third-floor walk-up. It’s got the stairs on the outside, and they stop at each landing. I lived at the very top.
I tried not to rest my hand too heavy on the rail as I climbed, because it was about to come off. I unlocked my door and turned on the light and watched the roaches run for cover.
I put the record down, got a cold one out of the icebox. Well, actually it was a plug-in. A refrigerator. But I’d grown up with iceboxes, so calling it that was hard to break. I picked up the record again and took a seat.
Sitting in my old armchair with the stuffing leaking out like a busted cotton sack, holding the record again, looking at the dirty brown sleeve, I noticed the grooves were dark and scabby looking, like something had gotten poured in there and had dried tight. I tried to determine if that had something to do with that crazy sound. Could something in the grooves make that kind of noise? Didn’t seem likely.
I thought about putting the record on, listening to it again, but I couldn’t stomach the thought. The fact that I held it in my hand made me uncomfortable. It was like holding a bomb about to go off.
I had thought of it like a snake once. Alma May had thought of it like a hit-and-run car driven by the devil. And now I had thought of it like a bomb. That was some kind of feeling coming from a grooved-up circle of wax.
EARLY NEXT MORNING, WITH THE .45 IN THE GLOVE BOX, A RAZOR IN MY coat pocket, and the record up front on the seat beside me, I tooled out toward Dallas, and the Hotel Champion.
I got into Big D around noon, stopped at a café on the outskirts where there was colored, and went in where a big fat mama with a pretty face and a body that smelled real good made me a hamburger and sat and flirted with me all the while I ate it. That’s all right. I like women, and I like them to flirt. They quit doing that, I might as well lay down and die.
While we was flirting, I asked her about the Hotel Champion, if she knew where it was. I had the street number, of course, but I needed tighter directions.
“Oh, yeah, honey, I know where it is, and you don’t want to stay there. It’s deep in the colored section, and not the good part, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, and it don’t matter you brown as a walnut yourself. There’s folks down there will cut you and put your blood in a paper cup and mix it with whiskey and drink it. You too good- looking to get all cut up and such. There’s better places to stay on the far other side.”
I let her give me a few hotel names, like I might actually stay at one or the other, but I got the address for the Champion, paid up, giving her a good tip, and left out of there.
The part of town where the Hotel Champion was, was just as nasty as the lady had said. There were people hanging around on the streets, and leaning into corners, and there was trash everywhere. It wasn’t exactly a place that fostered a lot of pride.
I found the Hotel Champion and parked out front. There was a couple fellas on the street eyeing my car. One was skinny. One was big. They were dressed up with nice hats and shoes, just like they had jobs. But if they did, they wouldn’t have been standing around in the middle of the day eyeing my Chevy.
I pulled the .45 out of the glove box and stuck it in my pants, at the small of my back. My coat would cover it just right.
I got out and gave the hotel the gander. It was nice looking if you were blind in one eye and couldn’t see out the other.
There wasn’t any doorman, and the door was hanging on a hinge. Inside I saw a dusty stairway to my left, a scarred door to my right.
There was a desk in front of me. It had a glass hooked to it that went to the ceiling. There was a little hole in it low down on the counter that had a wooden stop behind it. There were flyspecks on the glass, and there was a man behind the glass, perched on a stool, like a frog on a lily pad. He was fat and colored and his hair had blue blanket wool in it. I didn’t take it for decoration. He was just a nasty son of a bitch.
I could smell him when he moved the wooden stop. A stink like armpits and nasty underwear and rotting teeth. I could smell old cooking smells floating in from somewhere in back: boiled pigs’ feet and pigs’ tails that might have been good about the time the pig lost them, but now all that was left was a rancid stink. There was also a reek like cat piss.
I said, “Hey, man, I’m looking for somebody.”
“You want a woman, you got to bring your own,” the man said. “But I can give you a number or two. Course, I ain’t guaranteeing anything about them being clean.”
“Naw. I’m looking for somebody was staying here. His name is Tootie Johnson.”
“I don’t know no Tootie Johnson.”
That was the same story Alma May had got.
“Well, all right, you know this fella?” I pulled out the photograph and pressed it against the glass.
“Well, he might look like someone got a room here. We don’t sign in and we don’t exchange names much.”
“No? A class place like this.”
“I said he might look like someone I seen,” he said. “I didn’t say he definitely did.”
“You fishing for money?”
“Fishing ain’t very certain,” he said.
I sighed and put the photograph back inside my coat and got out my wallet and took out a five-dollar bill.
Frog Man saw himself as some kind of greasy high roller. “That’s it? Five dollars for prime information?”
I made a slow and careful show of putting my five back in my wallet. “Then you don’t get nothing,” I said.
He leaned back on his stool and put his stubby fingers together and let them lay on his round belly. “And you don’t get nothing neither, jackass.”
I went to the door on my right and turned the knob. Locked. I stepped back and kicked it so hard I felt the jar all the way to the top of my head. The door flew back on its hinges, slammed into the wall. It sounded like someone firing a shot.
I went on through and behind the desk, grabbed Frog Man by the shirt, and slapped him hard enough he fell off the stool. I kicked him in the leg and he yelled. I picked up the stool and hit him with it across the chest, then threw the stool through a doorway that led into a kitchen. I heard something break in there and a cat made a screeching sound.
“I get mad easy,” I said.
“Hell, I see that,” he said, and held up a hand for protection. “Take it easy, man. You done hurt me.”
“That was the plan.”
The look in his eyes made me feel sorry for him. I also felt like an asshole. But that wouldn’t keep me from hitting him again if he didn’t answer my question. When I get perturbed, I’m not reasonable.
