would mind sitting on the porch and letting me record him for a project I was working on about Sonny Boy. I told him I was a professor at Tulane University and was working with the University of Mississippi about the great harp player.
“Sonny Boy was a motherfucker who stole my whiskey and my women and once took a piss in my boot. I spent half my life tryin’ to forget about the Goat. Now you leave me be. Got work to do.”
He slammed his door and I heard the canned laughter of Love Boat.
JoJo kept playing with the dogs. He kept his eyes on one in particular, rubbing the dog’s head. She was of questionable breeding, somewhere a German shepherd in the mix, with long drooping ears and a curved tail.
“Look at her,” he said. “She ain’t no more than a pup. Smart. Look at her watchin’ me.”
JoJo walked back to the truck and grabbed some chicken from the sandwich he hadn’t finished. He fed the dog. “I don’t like people who don’t take care of their dogs. Show they’re evil. I know you tryin’ to find this man ’cause he got some stories about Sonny Boy. But he evil if he let a fine dog like this get all skin and bones.”
I heard a screen door slam behind the old shotgun house. I followed a dusty trail behind it and saw Tip-Top working a planer on top of a casket. A life-size dummy – some kind of stuffed black suit with a face made out of wood – watched from a lounge chair nearby.
I walked over to Tip-Top, moving my hand to the back of the dummy’s head. I wanted to do Senor Wences or even the Parkay margarine ad. “Friend of Charlie McCarthy?”
“Don’t know no Charlie.”
“Listen, man,” I said. “Give me twenty minutes. Heard you were with Sonny Boy at his last gig in Tutwiler. Something happened with a bottle of gin.”
“He threw it at me.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
“Why do you want to know these things?”
“I write about the blues.”
He kept planing. A steady thump, thump.
“The world don’t make no sense,” he said. “The blues is dead.”
“I don’t think so.”
Thump, thump.
“JoJo brought some whiskey,” I said.
He stopped planing.
Thirty minutes later, he was drunk, had told the story, and JoJo had bought the dog from him for five dollars. JoJo liked to joke but didn’t joke with Tip-Top. When he was through making the deal, he found some rope to put around the dog’s neck and waited for me by the old truck that my friends called the Gray Ghost.
“We was in this church,” Tip-Top said. “Down where he buried now. And it was still a church then. And he sat in there all night askin’ God to let him die. He walked outside in this thunderstorm. I was too drunk to move and he kept cursin’ God.”
I wrote down some notes. Asked a few more questions. It was the story I needed to finish the piece.
“They pay you for doin’ this?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t seem like an honest living.”
“It’s not,” I said. “Thanks.”
JoJo loaded up the new dog in the truck and she curled into a seat behind us, yawning. “We need to get her some water down the road.”
“What you gonna call her?” I asked.
“Don’t matter to me,” JoJo said. “It’s your dog.”
“No way.”
“You need a dog,” he said. “Every man needs a dog.”
“Where’s she gonna piss in New Orleans?”
“There are a few trees,” JoJo said, watching the yellow lines of the blacktop heading back to Clarksdale. “Can’t you stay till Monday?”
“Got to head on back.”
We passed through a couple of small towns and stopped at a Texaco station for Annie’s water. We decided on Annie because of the old song “Work with Me, Annie.” But I told JoJo it was more like the song “Polk Salad Annie.” This dog was straight Delta mutt, could probably eat a cottonmouth and make the alligators seem tame.
When we reached the crossroads at 49 and 61, I looked over at the big metal sculpture someone had erected to the history of the blues. Metal guitars and road signs. I knew there wasn’t any real crossroads and it was a nice gimmick to bring folks in. But it made me think about something Tip-Top had said.
“Is blues dead?”
JoJo thought about that as we headed down 49 and passed by the old Hopson plantation where JoJo had worked as a child. The old commissary was now some kind of bar. The sharecroppers’ shacks motel rooms to give tourists a feel for the old days.
The sun was gone. It was night. Only the headlights of the truck and Annie’s panting to keep us company.
“About the best I can say is it’s different,” he said. “Ain’t the same. Doesn’t mean the same.”
I saw his old profile in the dim light as we rounded onto the footbridge and country road to take us home.
1
Sirens ain’t nothin’ but ghosts. They reach out every damn night, red and blue, white spotlight flashin’ ’cross your eyes as you sleep on that concrete floor patterned in blood and dirt. You covered in a torn yellow blanket that once hid your dead mamma for weeks. In its touch, you see a bit of her cold ear and the edge of that face you tried not to imagine while you kept goin’ to school, cuttin’ her las’ ten dollars in a hundred ways at Rob’s Party Store down on Claiborne. You remember? Don’t you?
Back then, you hold your own in the Calliope yard, the ole CP-3, and find your only friends are a mean-ass pit bull you call Henry and a little rottweiler with short legs you name Midget. Your mamma stay alive to you for weeks underneath that blanket. Through it all, she stay like she is ’cause that room don’t have no heat and it’s February, like it is now, and her own family live on the other side of the project.
Y’all know Calliope – its own little galaxy in New Orleans. Findin’ your people on the other side is like shootin’ over to the moon. They long ago forgot about her. Don’t know you. Your daddy ain’t nothin’ but a word and the only future you see come from a box of Bally shoes you traded for two of your mamma’s rocks out in the yard. Henry and Midget backin’ you up like thugs in the rope-and-barbed-wire collars you made for them. A hundred windows covered in aluminum foil watchin’ you like eyes stand on the grassless ground.
You take those shoes down to some fancy-ass shoppin’ mall by the Quarter. The dollar you spend on a streetcar is the last green you have. Ten minutes later, that worn box of shoes you was gonna return for a hundred dollars – like that man said – is dumped out on the street along with your ole mongrel ass. But you don’t cry.
Why would you?
Don’t take that streetcar. You walk. All damned day. It’s a day from Calliope.
It’s dark when you get back. You remember. You thinkin’ about it all tonight with the sirens and the spotlights and them ghostful sounds.
It was Friday and Calliope was workin’ plenty down the cross streets. Strawberries’ heads bobbin’ in white men’s Lexuses and Hondas. Boys you once knew jacked up as hell, wide-eyed and watchin’ for drugheads to slow down and make that deal. Shit made out of flour and toilet water.
Room a hotbox when you crawl up the fire escape. Television on, playin’ BET and Aaliyah. She on a sailboat but dead. Like your mamma. You can smell Mamma now and you want to shake her awake, have her find people
