Taft

IT WAS VERY MUCH like a hangover, but the dry, luckless kind that didn’t follow any wild night of drinking. It was a hangover from not sleeping, from worrying about a cut near the eye but not in the eye, which led to bigger worries I didn’t have names for. I lay on top of the covers all night with my clothes on until the room got slowly lighter. I stayed in bed, watching the clock while people went to work and came home for lunch and the woman in the apartment next door turned her soap opera on, which was always my sign that it was time to get up. Before long I was thinking I should head back to the bar. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and wondered if I should take a shower and change. It didn’t much seem like a next day, but I decided to clean up all the same, more in hopes it would make me feel better than any notion about what I ought to do. By this time I was feeling doubly bad, bad about Franklin and bad about not having slept. It wasn’t so many years before that I could stay up for nights on end and then fall into a dead sleep on some strange sofa in some strange living room. I would have stayed at home, let things at work take care of themselves, if I thought for a minute that I’d have any better luck sleeping.

Muddy’s opened for business a little before noon every day, but I rarely saw the place then. The day manager was a man named Eugene, who went and got the money out of the bank and put it in the cash register. He took the chairs off the tabletops and put them on the floor and served lunch with his own set of waitresses. The deal was that we would switch off, nights and days, but it turned out Eugene didn’t like staying up. When I started coming in earlier, he started leaving earlier, until we developed the fine art of always missing each other, until I stopped thinking about him altogether.

So when I came into the bar it was more or less running itself, which it seemed to do just fine. If you felt like you had a hangover to begin with, a bar was as good a place to be as any. The few people who were there at two o’clock looked about like me. They weren’t making any noise. They were finally getting around to coffee and maybe a quiet shot beside it. They kept their eyes down, not because they were shamed that here it was, only Thursday but because they felt like keeping things private. I turned the music off, and then went to sit at the kitchen end of the bar, having a coffee myself, not pretending to read the newspaper in front of me. I was working hard to not think about anything.

Cyndi was no fool, or if she was she at least knew when to stay out of somebody’s way. She swept up the floor without my having to tell her and when she filled my coffee cup she didn’t look at me directly. She acted like she was a waitress and I was any customer who’d come through, and that made me think she knew how to do her job. Cyndi was in the bar more than anybody else except me. She started working off the clock, just for tips, when I told her I wouldn’t pay overtime. At first I thought she must need the money like crazy, but it had to be more than that. She was trying to keep busy. As I watched her wipe down the bar, it occurred to me that I saw more of Cyndi than I did any other person. I saw her more than any woman I ever slept with, more than my son, and what worried me was that maybe she saw me more than anybody too. On top of everything else I started worrying about Cyndi.

“The hell with this,” I said, and pushed off of my stool.

“What?” Cyndi said.

“I’m going out.”

“Sure,” she said, nodding a little.

“You think you can manage things all right while I’m gone,” I said, not as a question, more to be ugly since I was suddenly feeling sentimental.

“I expect so.” She looked at me with a limited amount of patience, tapping a pencil against the bar. I took my jacket off the hook next to the door and hurried out into the cold before I said anything else.

What I wanted was a drink and one of the few rules I had in the world was not to drink in the bar you worked in. This came years ago, when I was still playing and the house was always more than willing to stand you a tab that would wind up coming out of your pay. After two sets it was perfectly possible for a man to have drunk up his split of the whole night’s work without even knowing it; pretty girls coming up to the stage with trays of drinks, always Jack Daniel’s or something other than well to make the money go faster. Some nights I just broke even. I knew plenty of guys who were handed a bill by the time it was all over. It was always best to take your business where they weren’t naturally inclined to cheat you. I decided not to change my ways even when I was the one running things. It wasn’t good to drink in front of the people who worked for you. It was no good coming to think of that long, lit-up bar as your personal liquor cabinet. Never pour yourself a drink from the working side of a bar, that was a safe rule of thumb.

There was not one kind word to be said about Memphis that day. The pavement was the color of the sky, which was the color of the grass, which was the color of the Mississippi. It was all the same, no matter which way you were looking. The wetness in the air that made it painful to breathe some days in August was still there in February, but it was bitter now and it got up underneath your shirt and froze next to your skin.

Up on the corner was a boy named Eddie who was doing flips even though there was nobody around. In the summer and on some winter weekends when it turned warm, Eddie could have the street so packed the cops had to move through and break things up for traffic. He must have been eight, nine even, though that’s hard to believe. He was a little guy, small as Franklin was at six. He made his living and his father’s living by doing backflips and walkovers and all sorts of no-hand things that involved him tossing himself up in the air so fast and so often that I got sick to my stomach just watching him. There were plenty of little boys who tumbled to make money off of crowds, but none of them could stand with Eddie. He was something of a little genius when it came to making people hold their breath.

“Hey there, Eddie,” I said as I walked up towards him. “What’re you doing out here in the cold? Get yourself inside, son. There’s nobody coming down here.” I saw his father tucked just inside the doorway of a bank. He wasn’t much older than me, but he looked hard hit. He was sitting in an aluminum lawn chair with strips of green fabric crisscrossed to make a seat and back. I nodded to him and he made a little movement with his head that didn’t count for anything.

“Give me a buck and I’ll go inside,” Eddie said.

“You’ve got more money than God,” I told him. “You’ve got enough to buy Vegas three times. I’ve seen what sort of hat you’re passing.”

Eddie smiled a little. At heart, there was something shy about him, despite his talk. I reached into my pocket and peeled off two dollars. He took the money and threw himself up and backwards and down. His feet went all the way over his head and then landed in the precise same spot he started from. It bothered me because I’d given him that money so he wouldn’t jump, so I wouldn’t have to worry about him missing his mark and cracking his head all over the sidewalk. The way I saw it there were two types of people who gave Eddie money: those who did it to make him start and those who did it to make him stop.

“Two o’clock in the afternoon,” I said, and leaned in to show his father my watch. “That’s when boys are in school.”

His father stood up slowly and folded his chair. As soon as he was up Eddie moved on ahead of him and together, but not together, they headed up the hill in the general direction of the Peabody.

I got myself out of the cold and took my seat at the bar of the Rum Boogie Cafe. I was thinking about catching up with them and taking Eddie’s father by the throat, stretching his head off his neck an extra inch or so and slamming him hard into something brick. Stupid bastard. I closed my eyes and savored the feeling of real violence. It was something I’d given up a long time ago. There were still plain fistfights when I was young. Now everybody over the age of ten seemed to be in possession of a gun. You couldn’t hit a guy the way you used to because you never knew what he might have waiting for you in his back pocket. Not that those fistfights alone didn’t kill plenty of people, but at least then there was a chance. You give somebody a gun and there isn’t a whole lot of chance to it anymore. I thought about it until the subject started to turn my stomach. I was ready for a drink.

The bartender appeared from the other side of the world and was no one I knew. He was a college white boy. Big bulky arms and a square face, the kind that college girls liked. It was a mean kind of face. My never having seen him before could only mean he was new.

He put a cocktail napkin on the bar in front of me with a little bit of a slap and he just looked at me, not angry and not friendly. There was no wasting time with “What’ll it be, buddy?” and maybe that was fine. He and I both knew why I’d come. What I couldn’t figure was what he was in such a hurry about. The bar was dead. This one, the one I left, these bars were sleeping babies.

I ordered my drink with water on account of the hour. When he told me what it would be (and it was a quarter more than the same drink costs you down the street), I told the college boy I’d run a tab. That didn’t suit him. He said they didn’t run tabs. He made the mistake of thinking that just because he was new, I was new too. I reached into my wallet and paid him, even told him he could keep the healthy tip. I didn’t give him the news, that I have a very long memory and one day he’d be looking for a job. The memory I inherited from Marion. You don’t spend all those years with a woman without learning something.

“You slumming?” said a voice behind me. I turned around and there stood a woman I knew perfectly well. She came into Muddy’s all the time. I’d shot pool with her. I’d stood her a drink when she was low. Goddamned if I could think of her name. I guess my memory didn’t extend to the names of women.

“Man’s got to get out of the house every now and then.” I tilted my drink towards her some and she gave the smallest nod of her head. “Again,” I said to college boy, who believed that all blacks in Memphis knew one another and now was just that much surer. She backed onto a barstool, leaving one high-heeled foot on the floor. It gave her an uncomfortable look, like she might be taking off any second. College boy put her drink down and had the good sense not to mention that I should pay for it right away.

“I didn’t know you ever left Muddy’s,” she said. “I heard tell you had a cot set up in the back.” She was all smiles, this one, shiny teeth, shiny lipstick. I wondered what she was so cheerful about in the middle of the day.

“Ugly rumors,” I said. “And I thought you had some loyalty. I didn’t know this was where my good customers went.”

“Following you,” she said. And right there I heard everything I needed to know. Her intentions were so clear that there hardly seemed to be any point in going through with the drinks, sitting there on our stools making bad conversation. It was as good as over. We’d had our drinks and left, done it and gotten up. I had driven her back to where her car was parked. It had to be around there somewhere. As much as I was pleased, I felt tired, the way you will when you’ve seen it through to the end the minute it starts.

I tried to think of something I could ask her that would stretch the time out a little. I couldn’t ask her what she was doing in a bar in the middle of the day since I was there too. I couldn’t ask her what she did for work, or God help me, what her name was, because there was no doubt she had told me before.

“That’s a pretty ring,” I said, pointing to a little band of diamonds and some blue stones around her finger. She had nice hands, nice nails. I liked that.

“Wedding ring,” she said, and took a sip off the drink I’d bought her.

I nodded slowly and she put that same pretty hand on my thigh, just midway up, and left it there.

I paid off college boy and helped this woman on with her jacket. We walked out onto Beale Street not long after three o’clock on one of the uglier days in memory.

Of course there had been women. But truly, things had been screwed up on account of my spending so much time going after somebody I wound up not loving who wound up not loving me. I knew the same thing had happened to Marion. We were careful not to get too mixed up in anything else in case we got it all worked out. Or maybe we were tired. The kind of love I’d had in my life was very much the kind I was getting ready for that afternoon. She was quiet and didn’t ask where we were going. She took a pale green box of cigarettes out of her purse and cracked the car window before she lit one, which was thoughtful even though I wouldn’t have minded if she hadn’t. I went Elvis Presley Boulevard instead of the interstate just to slow things down a little. I didn’t live but about two miles past Graceland, but I took pride in the fact that I’d never been there.

“This is it,” I said when we got inside. My apartment stayed clean because I was never there, so I didn’t have to worry about bringing a guest home. Every time I walked in it reminded me of some motel room in some city years ago where I’d come with a band.

“You got a kid?” she said, picking up the picture of Franklin on top of the television. “I didn’t know that. He looks like you.”

I took the picture out of her hand and looked at it for a minute, trying to see if what she said was true. Then I put it back on the little strip of TV that wasn’t dusty and I kissed her, as sweetly and kindly as I was able. I didn’t feel like talking, especially about Franklin. I wanted to make her feel like I was too overwhelmed with her to say anything.

She was maybe skinnier than I would have liked. After it was done she just stayed on top of me, taking shallow little breaths, and I could see a dark shadow under each of her ribs. I brushed her back with the flat of my hand and she pressed her face into the side of my neck and I wondered why it was that such a thing could make a person feel lonely. You would think two people on top of each other couldn’t feel this way for love or money.

“I like you,” she said.

“Yeah?”

She nodded. I felt it against my neck. “I’ve always liked you.”

She was good about getting dressed. She understood I had to get back to work and, clearly, she had someplace to be herself. I drove her back into town. She told me where her car was and I managed to get a spot right next to it. When I started to get out to open her door she put her hand on my sleeve and I thought, Here it comes.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said in a kind way. “I can get there just fine.”

“You’ll be coming back down to the bar,” I said.

She nodded. “Sure, sure. Nothing changes.”

I gave her a kiss. Nice woman, had her head together, kept things straight. She opened the door and had one foot out, but then she turned around and looked at me.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said, but she didn’t go anywhere.

Maybe for a half a second I was flustered, but then I caught myself. I leaned over and kissed her and she kissed me back. “Okay,” she said, and picked up her purse from the floor. She was hoping there was going to be something more, something better, and at that moment she’d figured out that she wasn’t going to get it. “Okay.”

I stayed and watched her get inside her car and drive away. It was all spoiled now. She was sad when she left and that ruins everything. I felt the weight of every name Marion had ever called me. I was that man.

I was going to head straight back to the bar, but I got out of the car instead and walked down the steep hill to the river. There was no point to it, but there hadn’t been any point in anything I’d done so far. The Mississippi was better-looking on a day like this than it was in the summer. For one thing, the cold kept it from really smelling the way it will, and for another the general lack of light made the water look a nearly blue shade of gray instead of the regular brown. All along this stretch the paddleboats were docked, party boats made up to look like fancy cakes that take the tourists down to nowhere, turn around and bring them back. It was better in the winter. People didn’t like to come down to the water when it was cold. They kept their power boats locked up in rented garages. It just looked like a river now, with plenty of room for working barges to get through. Marion didn’t like me taking Franklin anywhere near the Mississippi. She thought it was nothing more than a flowing child killer. But Franklin liked it. I’d bring him here on the days we came down to the bar, so he was already swearing not to tell about all sorts of things anyway. Boys like rivers and bars. Boys always like the Mississippi. When he was little I used to tell him it was his river, the river Frank, and he believed me. Kids have no idea what it means to own something at that age. I would say that it was good of him, letting all those boats on his river, and he’d nod his head. Even later, when he’d caught on to things, he would still call it the river Frank.

I stayed long enough to get good and cold and half get the woman out of my mind. Then I headed back and drove my car into the alley behind the bar. Almost five o’clock and not a thing had been done all day.

Inside, the girl in the puffy jacket was sitting on a barstool drinking a Coke. She didn’t have her hat on, but I could see the top of the pom-pom sticking out of her pocket. I had forgotten about her altogether, even though I’d spent half the night thinking of her. And even though it hadn’t been what you’d call a redeeming day, it warmed me to see her sitting there. The way her face looked when she saw it was me, all bright and relieved, it warmed me.

“You’re the new waitress,” I said, like I wasn’t sure.

“Fay,” she said.

“Fay. Right. And you’ve been sitting here all this time waiting on me.”

“You didn’t say when I should come in. You just said before happy hour was all. I wasn’t sure.”

Her face wasn’t exactly as I had fixed it in my mind. It was paler in real life and not quite as fine. I wanted to ask her again how old she was, now that I’d seen her in her stocking cap, but I didn’t figure she’d tell me the truth.

“Did Cyndi show you around?”

The girl shook her head.

“Cyndi,” I called down to the end of the bar. “Didn’t you show her anything for Christ’s sake?”

“Show who?” she said, not getting up from her barstool. She held my gaze dead on and then went back to reading a magazine.

“She’s not from around here,” I said to the girl in the jacket. “She just has an ugly mouth on her. She won’t give you any trouble.”

“I’m not from around here either,” she said. “I behave just fine.”

I nodded. She had a point if you thought about it that way. “You said yesterday you were from out of town.” I didn’t want to seem like I had too much time on my hands, that nobody around here worked, but like I said, it was our quiet time of the year. I sat down on the stool next to hers, which I meant to be the sign that I wanted to hear the rest of it, but she didn’t catch that. “Where’re you from?”

“East Tennessee,” she said. “Coalfield, outside of Oak Ridge. Nobody would know Coalfield.”

I could see it then. She had a kind of hillbilly look. The straight hair that was trying to be brown but wasn’t really, the pale, pale skin that you could nearly see through. I shook my head. “Nope.”

“That’s why I say east. Nobody in Memphis has ever been to east Tennessee before.”

I told her I had. Knoxville, Oak Ridge, Jefferson City. That was one ambitious band I had been in for a while. We thought touring was going to be our answer. It was a long time ago.

“Well,” she said quietly, “you’re the first one, then.”

As a state, Tennessee was nearly as screwed up as Texas, in that a man’s allegiance wasn’t to the whole state, just that little part he came from. People got stuck in the mountains. But in Memphis there’s a river running through the middle of things. It takes people out, brings other ones in. That’s why mountain people keep to themselves and delta people make love in alleyways. That’s why there were boys like Eddie doing flips out in the street. In Memphis people pay money to see Eddie, but if he tried it in Oak Ridge I imagine they’d bundle him up and take him inside. When Memphis people went east they were likely to be run out of town. They got loud drunk. They slept with women they didn’t intend to marry. But you put somebody from the east down in Memphis, it wasn’t likely that anyone would notice.

“So how’d you manage to come out here?” I said. I thought it was a fair question, seeing as how she so clearly would prefer to be home.

“Accident,” she said, and then folded her lips into her mouth and bit them in a dreamy way.

I showed her around the place. I showed her whatever came to mind. I told her things she wouldn’t have to know. I took her back behind the bar even though she’d probably never pour drinks. I showed her where the fuse box was, where we kept the bags of syrup for the Coke machine. I showed her the big cans of nuts and the five-gallon jars of maraschino cherries, which she seemed especially to like. I took the lid off and gave her a few and she chewed on them slowly while I talked. We went through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

“Bring the plates back here,” I said. “Put the glasses in the rack. You run it through the washer yourself if there’s nobody back here. Mr. Tipton washes dishes on weekends and during the week in the summer.”

She nodded, listening, taking it in. It wasn’t so much to remember. It was just that she seemed intent on not having to ask me anything. The more I watched her, the more I started to think this girl had never had a job before. But what were you going to do? Call the references, see where she’s been? Leave that for the FBI. Besides, I didn’t have any of those forms when she came in. I figured anybody who paid that much attention to what I was saying about where to stack dishes was going to be a good worker.

It was her face, though, more than the lack of jobs, that troubled me. It was a tricky face as far as age was concerned. One minute I thought she was twenty, but when I caught her from another angle she had high school written all over her. There’s nothing illegal about it, as long as she’s not drinking. I knew for sure she was at least seventeen.

I was showing her where the aprons were when the back door opened up and Rose came in. Rose was the cook, and for as long as she’d worked at Muddy’s the only time I’d seen her go in or out the front door was the day I hired her. She went out back to the alley to smoke her cigarettes. Rose thought that nobody knew she smoked, though it didn’t make any sense since nobody would have cared.

“Rose, this is Fay. Fay’s going to be waiting tables.”

Fay stuck out her hand. It was so little, short nails and no rings. Rose gave a bit of a start, but she shook and said hello.

“Rose is always trying to turn us into a real restaurant,” I said to both of them. “She’s always slipping something fancy on the menu.”

Rose shrugged. Then the three of us sort of looked at each other and I thought what a nightmare it would be to serve out your life with two such quiet women.

“Well, I’ll take her back out front,” I said. “Let you work.” But Rose had already wandered off towards the walk-in. I doubted she’d even heard me.

“She’s not from around here either,” I said to Fay when we were out of the kitchen, thinking that it might make her feel more at home. I didn’t know where Rose was from. She told me she’d worked in a boarding school in the north, that she knew how to make a lot of things for a lot of people, but I never checked that one out either.

The crowd was picking up a little for happy hour and I needed to get behind the bar. I turned Fay over to Cyndi, who was none too pleased.