My apple tastes like wax.
“My soul, more like.”
His eyes are starting to glow and I wonder how much longer before he suggests they take this into the bedroom. We’ve been on the road off and on for twenty years now, and he’s still the best there is, and she’s one of the perks. In twenty more years, when he’s turning into a lounge act or an oldies tour, she’ll be able to tell her kids that she banged Bishop Underwood.
Damned if I know why that bothers me.
I break the seal on the bourbon and pour three fingers neat. I hardly taste it before I pour three more.
Then the girl’s next to me, stacking melon and strawberries on a plate, squirting a little blob of whipped cream beside them. Two more buttons on her blouse are open now. Barefoot, she’s still fairly tall and I’m still fairly not, so I get a good look before I straighten up and we look at each other eye to eye.
She pours two flutes of champagne and dumps a handful of ice into a glass and drowns that in the bourbon, clear up to the rim. Bish watches her walk back to him with everything on a tray, real slow, like honey dripping off a table. When I swallow, Jim Beam burns in my throat.
She and Bish clink flutes, then he drains his. Hers goes on the end table, and I’m not sure any of it even wet her lips.
“So you got a Les Paul,” she says. “Any reason you chose that particular guitar?”
“Well, I was playing a Gibson acoustic, an old Hummingbird. It’s in the other room, as a matter of fact. I still write songs on it.”
“Maybe you can show me later,” she says. This time, her voice doesn’t seem to reach her eyes.
“I’d love to.” He lets her slide a strawberry into his mouth and plays with it before he takes a swallow of the bourbon. “Anyway, I liked the neck on that Gibson, so I figured it’d be easier to move to an electric guitar if I was already used to the feel of it.”
There was more to it than that, of course. I had a Martin D-45, loved it like my mother, beautiful sound, but by then I’d signed over my rights, so he was making the royalties and I was just the sideman, which meant that when “we” decided to go electric, it was my guitar that went. I don’t even know what that beauty would be worth now, thirty years later. We’ve got enough money for me to buy a busload of them, but it wouldn’t be the same.
“I tried a Gibson hollow-body first,” he tells her. “But they feed back when you crank up the amplifier. Then I found a Les Paul.”
Right. He heard Clapton playing one on that John Mayall LP and gave it a shot.
“What is it about that guitar you like so much?” The girl feeds him another strawberry. There’s a look in her eyes, like before the night’s over, she’s going to ask him to cut his hair and wrestle a lion. She sees me raise my glass of bourbon again and shakes her head, just a little.
“Oh, the feel, the tone. I’ve had it so long, it’s like an old friend; it just fits in under my rib cage and I feel like I’m not alone. And it’s got that great sustain, you can hit a note and hold it forever, warm and soulful, like a woman crying on a rainy night.”
That’s one of my lines too. From “Pain of Loss.” It went platinum in ’74 and I got diddly for it. He’s still collecting royalties, seven million dollars from that LP so far.
The girl refills his bourbon so surface tension is all that keeps it from spilling over her fingers. She sits back on the couch, but this time she tucks her feet under her.
“Tell me about ‘Hot Sugar Blues.’ ”
Bish loses his rhythm for just a beat before he picks up the glass. “That song was the little pebble that started the avalanche. Sold two million copies and convinced the record company to let me cut a whole album of my own stuff.”
“I’ve heard stories that you stole that song.”
It gets so quiet I can hear water running in the pipes and the traffic nine floors below us.
“What you saying, missy?” His drawl is broad enough to paint a double yellow line down the middle of it. “I wrote the words, I wrote the music, I sang it.”
Well, he sang it anyway. Shonna Lee looks like she’s two verses ahead of him.
“Someone took you to court. Claimed he wrote that song and you cheated him out of the money.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Bish takes a long swallow of bourbon and I feel my hand put my own glass back on the cart. It’s like I’m not even there in the room with them anymore.
“Everyone talks about that. But they don’t remember the rest of it. We went to court and the judge threw out the case in ten minutes flat. Some old coot trying to make money off me. Well, we sent him packing.”
“An old black musician,” Shonna Lee says. “Mattix? Something like that?”
“Some broken-down drunk in Mississippi. Claimed he wrote the song and played it for me, and I took it up north and made the record without his permission. Tried to sue me, but I had the music in a safe-deposit box, dated before he’d had anything.”
“Hot Sugar Blues” is the only hit he’s had that I didn’t write. We were in some little jerkwater town, still doing those Kingston Trio covers, and this guy followed us up on the bandstand and blew us off the stage. Deak Mattix. Best guitar player I ever heard, better than Charley Patton, Reverend Gary Davis, or Mississippi John Hurt, and he sang this song while Bish and I sat there with our chins down around our knees.
“See,” I’d said to him, “this is why we ought to be doing the blues.”
We bought the guy a few drinks, made him play the song again. Then a couple more drinks and play the song one more time. By then, Bish had watched his hands enough to figure out those weird changes. Actually, they weren’t weird, he just had the guitar tuned to A-minor so the voicings were different. That night in our motel room, he wrote it down and mailed it to himself at our apartment in East Orange. When we got back, that’s when he traded my Martin for his first Gibson electric.
The song came out three months later, and Deak Mattix sued. Well, try to find a jury in Mississippi in 1966 that’s going to believe a black guy. Bish and I flew down there with exhibit A. The judge opened that sealed envelope, looked at the papers inside, and gave the poor bastard thirty seconds to get his ass out of the courtroom.
We flew back to New York the next morning.
“Deacon Mattix,” Shonna Lee says. “He killed himself a few days later. His wife found him hanging from a beam in the basement.”
“I heard that,” Bish says.
“Left her and a couple of little kids.”
I’d told Bish he should send the woman some money, but he said it would look like he really was guilty and trying to buy them off. As soon as I could scrape something together, I sent it to them with a letter saying how sorry I was. Never got an answer.
“ ‘Hot Sugar Blues,’ ” she says. “You ever eaten hot sugar, Mr. Underwood?”
The way he looks at her now, I want to kill him.
She raises her eyebrows. “You interested?”
Before he can say anything, she’s back at the cart, digging through the sugar packets and the whipped cream and the strawberries.
“Pour the man more bourbon, will you, Jack?” she asks. “This always tastes better with a little chaser.”
She finds her jacket in the closet while I refill Bishop’s glass. When I hand it over, I can feel the heat pumping off him like a midnight freight. The girl comes back to the table holding a little envelope.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Some of my secret herbs and spices.” She gives me a smile that would stun a snake. “Old family recipe, just for special occasions. This feels like a special occasion, doesn’t it?”
She empties the envelope into her hand, mixes the contents with the sugar in a highball glass, and puts it over that little flame that’s been keeping the coffee hot.
“We need to melt the sugar,” she says. “Just like the song, you know.”
She adds a little bourbon and uses a strawberry to muddle everything together. When I can see it bubbling and steam rising, she breaks a cupcake in half, pours the mixture over it, and takes the plate over to Bishop. She
