Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents

such force that it sliced, rather than cracked, his skull. A blow struck with the force of love, and pain, and decades of pent-up silence.

I hope whoever finds him will know what went into that blow.

And every day now, the tourists who gather around to see me play and bow and bob can witness the other consequence of that force. My polka renditions are a little tinny, a little off-key. The music just doesn’t sound the same now that the bell end of my trombone is bent so badly.

But the notes that come out are still haunting.

HOT SUGAR BLUES

BY STEVE LISKOW

Bish Underwood hasn’t told the girl on the couch a single lie yet, which is a very good sign. Of course, she’s only been here ten minutes.

Bish has just done three encores to top off a two-hour set in Trenton — our thirty-fifth concert in forty-one days — and he’s left them twitching in the aisles. The LP, which came out two days after we left home, has been in Billboard’s top five ever since, the last three weeks at number one. Bish is in full wind- down-at-the-end-of-the-tour mode, and he’s already ordered champagne and bourbon and fruit and ice and God knows what else from room service.

He’s ready to celebrate, and the girl looks like she can probably help him. The whole suite — 928, because it’s his lucky number — is thick with sweat and hormones.

But she insists that business comes first.

No, not like that. Bishop Underwood has six platinum LPs under his belt, so he never has to pay for it. But this chick’s a freelancer with the green light for an interview from Rolling Stone, and that means they talk on the couch before they talk on the pillows.

I want to go to bed with someone too, and plenty of women have slipped by security and are patrolling the halls ready to help me do just that, but I’m Bishop’s manager and he’s never been good at editing his mouth, so I don’t go away until this girl turns off her tape recorder and closes her notebook. What happens after that is her business.

“You were a folksinger first.” She’s done her homework. “Why did you switch to electric? Did Bob Dylan show you that was the way to go?”

“Sorta.” Bish has his feet on the coffee table and is trying to entice her closer, but she’s sitting at the far end of the couch, long legs in tight jeans, ending in scuffed sneakers mere inches from his right hand. Even dressed casual, she can put the groupies outside to shame. A blind man couldn’t miss what she’s got, and Bish is not blind, especially when it comes to women. He’s still wearing the white shirt and leather pants from the show, the debauched-preacher look. And he plays the blues like nobody else can since Michael Bloomfield died in that car last year.

“See, Jack and me, we’d been playing the Village — that’s Greenwich Village — and all the coffeehouses in the Northeast for about three years, but we were doing traditional stuff, Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger, the Limeliters, nothing original.”

The girl doesn’t look old enough to know any of them. Barely old enough to drink, but beautiful. She has skin the color of a sunburst Les Paul, but her delicate nose shows there’s some white blood in her too, maybe a while back. All the groupies are doing the big-poufy-hair thing now, but she’s cut hers short so it frames her face; eyes like lumps of coal on their way to becoming diamonds. She looks so natural and real that something in me wants to cry.

“Until Dylan,” she says again. Her voice sounds a little too deep to be coming from her slight frame under that white silk blouse. She’s hung her corduroy jacket in the closet and rolled up her sleeves like she’s ready to play some serious poker and wants us to know she doesn’t have to cheat.

“Yeah,” Bish says. “He showed us we could write our own songs and still be legit. Authentic, you know?”

He tries to untie her shoelaces, but she pulls her feet away. Her flirty-playful eyes tell him to keep talking.

“So we wrote a few things of our own. The first ones were pretty bad, but we started to get a feel for it.”

Actually, I got a feel for it. Bish sang lead, so people thought he wrote them. What the hell — my name was on them, so I could live with it.

That was until the pigs busted me with a nickel bag in Georgia. Drugs, Deep South, 1964, you do the math. They tossed me in a cell with half a dozen other guys, some of them inbred, most of them black, all of them drooling for a piece of the college kid. Bish wouldn’t go my bail until I signed over the rights to the songs, and I knew that one way or another, I was going to get screwed. I still feel a little twinge when one of those songs pops up on an oldies station.

“ ‘Rainbow Girl,’ ” the girl says. Shonna Lee, her name is, just a hint of drawl she hasn’t quite buried. “And ‘Quicksilver Romance.’ ”

“You’ve studied up on me, haven’t you, missy?” Next to hers, his drawl sounds fake. Well, we both grew up in New England and met at Columbia. But it’s his bluesman image.

He’s got hold of her foot now, getting the lace untied, and she’s not struggling. He pulls her sneaker off and I hear a knock on the door.

The room-service guy rolls in a cart with enough stuff to feed a platoon: sweating silver bucket with a magnum of Moet, a fifth of Jim Beam Black, a cut-glass bowl overflowing with apples, cherries, lemons, oranges, strawberries, melon balls, and sliced pineapple on crushed ice. Plates, silverware, fancy pastries, sliced cheese, whipped cream, a big urn of coffee with one of those little burners under it to keep it warm. Enough napkins to clean up a serious food fight. I slip him a twenty and lock the door behind him again.

By the time I get back to the main event, Shonna Lee’s sneakers are under the coffee table and Bish is massaging one little brown foot in his big white hands. She sags back against the cushions, her whole face softening like a kitten’s and the notebook sliding out of her fingers, but the questions keep on coming.

“Why did you switch from folk to blues?” Her voice shakes just a tad when Bish finds that spot on the sole of her foot. For a second, he looks like he wants to suck her toes, one at a time, and I can’t blame him. Even with her clothes on, she’s the kind of girl who makes hit songs shoot out of your pencil.

“The blues is the truth,” he tells her. “You can’t go wrong with the truth.”

It’s the first flat-out lie he’s told her, and I know that from here on, he’s going to pick up speed. He’s told the story before.

“In early ’65, we heard the Blues Project play in the Village, and the crowd went crazy for what they were laying down. Old Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but reworked into rock. I’d always loved the stuff, but we didn’t think anyone would buy it.”

Shonna Lee moves a little closer and lets him run his hands up her calves.

I loved Bo Carter, Blind Blake, and Robert Johnson, and I’d been saying blues was our ticket for over a year by then, but Bish didn’t want to know from nothing until Dylan had the Butterfield Blues Band back him with electric instruments at Newport. Their LP came out and knocked everyone on their ass, and Bish finally heard what I’d been telling him.

Shonna Lee’s eyes move over to me like she’s heard the whole riff already.

Bish gives her a smile so sticky I expect her to wipe her face. “Then the Stones and the Animals and the Yardbirds started shipping it back to us. I knew there was a fast train coming in and we had to jump on board before it left the station without us.”

I go to the cart and sink my teeth into an apple before I scream.

“I’d never played an electric guitar before, and it took Jack a while to persuade me to give it a try. See, I loved Muddy and Elmore James and the others, but I really felt like the acoustic country blues was in my blood.”