XIV

For Christmas that year my parents gave me a ’63 Corvair that my uncle had taken in trade on his lot. In this Ralph Nader—condemned chariot—bidding farewell to my folks, little Jimmy, Aunt Colleen and Nana Keane—I set out a few days later for Jackson, Mississippi. My plan was to visit Will in Memphis and then follow the river south through the Delta to Jackson, there to scour the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for further clues about the alleged slave uprising at Bear Track.

Three hours short of Memphis I pulled off the interstate and made my way to Franklin, Tennessee, site of one of the bloodiest battles of what was still known in these parts as “the war.” The man who would have been my great-great uncle died there. In the years since, the postcard-perfect Victorian town had spread over much of the battlefield, and I stopped at a gas station to ask directions. The attendant asked, “You one of them reenactors?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Reenactors. Those folks dress up in uniforms, do the battle. There was a big one here a few years back—must have been five thousand of ’em, blue and gray, camped out in the field there, drinking and carrying on. Next day they acted out the battle, realistic as hell, carrying the colors, marching up against each other firing their muskets, falling over like fainting goats. It was a hell of a thing to see.”

After I disclaimed any such affiliation, he directed me to Carnton, an antebellum mansion where four Confederate generals had been laid out on the porch, and where thousands of lesser rank lay buried. As we do in such places, I tried to conjure up from the serene landscape some mystical sense of connection to the hallowed bloody past, but I couldn’t feel anything except a vague reverence until, on my way out of town, I encountered a young soldier in the olive-drab uniform of the U.S. Army standing beside his car at the pump next to mine. Inside the Pontiac a fat girl in a white dress was dabbing her eyes with a dirty handkerchief. He was about my age, nineteen or twenty, crewcut and skinny, with a thin face that seemed to be all pimples and bones. Young as he was, his face had a wizened quality; it was easy to imagine him in a daguerreotype, leaning on his musket, a member of the doomed Army of Tennessee.

He suddenly looked up at me, nodded and said, “How you doing?”

All I could manage was to blush and mutter some pleasantry—suddenly ashamed of the educational deferment which would keep me out of Vietnam while boys like him went in my place. According to Nana Keane, a Boston banker had bought an exemption from service in 1861 and sent my great-great uncle as a substitute to be killed here in Franklin. For all I knew the descendants of that banker were known to me from school. And I couldn’t help wondering if this boy would be so friendly if he knew he was my substitute.

If this were another kind of story, the protagonist’s life would be forever changed by this political epiphany—Saint Paul dashed from his horse. But for most of us these moments of clarity fade as quickly as the flash of a camera, recollected, if at all, as a faded picture in the album of memory. The young soldier dutifully paid the attendant and drove away to his fate as I proceeded toward mine.

Dusk was falling on New Year’s Eve as I arrived in Memphis. I succeeded without much difficulty in finding the Peabody Hotel, one of the more prominent features of the Memphis skyline, but there was no answer to my calls in the Savage suite.

I think it was Faulkner—usually a safe bet in these matters—who said the Mississippi Delta originated in the lobby of the Peabody. Certainly no one would have mistaken this for the Boston Ritz-Carlton, or for the Plaza in New York. That curious and beguiling southern blend of ease and formality were in the air—that rhythm oscillating between languor and hysteria. The lobby was thronged with revelers in evening dress. Sitting in a leather chair, I watched an elderly couple step from the elevator. In a tuxedo which looked as if it had been handed down through half-a-dozen generations and might dissolve into dust at any moment, the man bowed gallantly from the waist to a pair of women getting into the elevator. When the women had passed, his silver-haired spouse assisted him in regaining his upright posture. Young women in ball gowns wafted about the two-story lobby, while their male counterparts lurked in corners, conspiring and breaking out into sudden fits of suppressed hilarity. These young swains applauded as a tiny man in livery marched the ducks from the fountain in the center of the lobby across the floor and into the elevator en route to a pen on the hotel roof. The ducks were the descendants of a batch of live decoys—or so Cordell Savage once told me—which had been dumped into the fountain one afternoon by a band of liquored-up hunters fresh from the duck blind who wanted to continue drinking at the hotel bar.

After I grew tired of sitting, I orbited the lobby, looking in the shop windows and seeing only myself in the glass, a ridiculous figure pretending to be occupied while the festive couples swirled past, too busy to notice. Finally I took to the streets, which seemed desolate. Beale Street, the scene of Will’s initiation into the blues, was being sanitized and demolished. Only after lingering over a dinner of ribs in a tacky restaurant catering to tourists did I return to my vigil at the Peabody.

I tried the house phone every fifteen minutes, and finally claimed a stool in the bar, sorely tempted to press on with my trip and say to hell with Will. I was tired of living on Will Savage time, being always the one left waiting and wondering whether he would show. And I was tired of being alone again on New Year’s Eve, that most melancholy of holidays. I had a terrible premonition of a solitary life, of dinners on TV trays and odd-smelling, transient rooms. Something was wrong with me; I was afflicted with a terrible self-consciousness which seemed to set me apart, doomed forever to be a spectator at the ball, watching the dancers from the sidelines. I tried not to inquire too closely into the sources of my alienation, but sometimes, as on this particular evening, it was impossible to resist the pressure of self-knowledge. I tried to divert myself rereading Binnie Pilcher’s diary:

Looking up from my drink, I found myself being studied by a woman with a shock of vivid red hair two stools away.

“Whatsa matter, honey? All alone on New Year’s Eve?” Her drawl was pronounced, her eyes animated with a quick and predatory curiosity that seemed at odds with the torpid voice. I was not good at judging the age of women older than myself, but I guessed her to be about thirty. Her skin was fair and freckled, and her eyes had tiny sun wrinkles; she seemed far too pretty to be talking to me, except that this was the South, whose natives were known to talk to strangers for no particular reason.

“Actually, I’m waiting for someone,” I explained, as she slid across to the stool beside me.

“Aren’t we all, honey? Aren’t we all?” Her name was Janie Thompson, and she was from a town called Indianola in the Delta. “I come up here with a friend for a little New Year’s festivity but he got a little too festive right off the bat, and here I am—all dressed up an’ no place to glow.” She shrugged her shoulder and grinned at me impishly. “So allow me to buy you a drink.” Waving to the bartender, she pointed at our glasses.

When she leaned forward to squeeze my hand I was treated to a glimpse of the freckled valley of her cleavage and the lacy scalloped edge of her brassiere. “Did you see that sign out in the lobby—now appearing in the something or other room, Lash LaRue?” she said. “I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes—Lash LaRue, that old lariat thrower. I used to watch him on the TV when I was about this tall.” She lowered her hand to the vicinity of my knee. “I always had a little crush on ole Lash. Well, I’m on my way to the bar but then I see this sign and so off I go to see the great man. And there he was signing autographs, in the flesh, more or less, looking like they pickled him and put him up. So when it’s my turn I say, ‘How’s it going Lash, what you been up to?’ And he says—get this—he says, ‘Well, ever since they shot President Kennedy I been spending a lot of time on Mars. The streets are cleaner up there.’ At first I think he’s pulling my leg but then I look in his eyes and see he’s serious. Crazy as a betsy bug. Lash LaRue.” With that she drained half the drink the bartender set before her. “Where you-all from,” she asked.

“I go to school in New Haven,” I said.

“I like college boys,” she said. As a Yale man I found her enthusiasm for male academia rather too broad based, but so pronounced was Janie Thompson’s affability that I suspected she was also in favor of many other categories of male. “I guess your little friend isn’t going to show, is she?”

“It’s not a she,” I said.

“Oh. Well, different strokes for different buckaroos.”

“No, it’s not … That’s not it,” I stammered. “I’m waiting for an old friend from prep school.”

“Well, hell,” she said, “what’s this old buddy of yours called. We all know everybody down here.”

“Will Savage,” I said, supposing that he and Janie traveled in very different circles.

“Will?” she exclaimed. “He’s practically a legend in these parts. My daddy used to raise hell with his daddy. They used to fly their little planes up and down the Delta and over to Nashville, just going to parties. They were wild.” She pronounced the adjective with an emphasis that suggested she was something of an authority on rash behavior. “You’ve heard the story about how he shot his own daddy.”

Stunned, I shook my head. “You mean Cordell?”

“Well, they ruled it accidental, but Cordell’s daddy was a mean drunk, and some say he took a hand to Cordell’s mama one too many times.”

I questioned her further about this alleged patricide, but she’d told what she knew and seemed to feel that it was an old story, and not particularly an unusual one in her experience.

“So how is old Will? I haven’t seen him in aeons. He sure did cause a hell of a fuss marrying that colored girl. What’s she like, anyway? Is he really in love with her?”

We drank and talked about Will, four scotch-and-waters’ worth. Finally the bartender turned up the volume on the television set as Guy Lombardo counted down the minutes to the not-a-moment-too-soon New Year of 1970, and not long after the stroke of twelve my companion was kissing me, probing remote crannies of my mouth with her tongue.

Only moments later, it seemed, we were kissing in the elevator on the way up to her room. She held her finger to her lips as she turned the key in the door, then dragged me over to the bed.

With a drunken fluency and much help from my new friend, I squirmed out of my clothes and assisted her out of hers while managing to keep my tongue in her mouth—as if I believed that the whole process would surely grind to a halt the moment contact was broken. I couldn’t believe it was finally happening, though my excitement was adulterated by a nagging fear about my performance. When she broke free of our lip lock and kissed her way down my chest and belly, I lay back, rigid with astonishment and anxiety. In a sense, it was, indeed, too good to be true. It’s hard to say who was more surprised when I came a moment later.

“Hey,” she said, raising her head from between my legs. “That was supposed to be the warm-up, not the main event.”

I mumbled some kind of apology.

“You wouldn’t by any chance be a virgin, would you?” she said brightly, sliding up to face me, a new and—to me—embarrassing tang on her breath.

“Sort of,” I said.

She laughed. “Seems like either you are or you aren’t. That’s okay. I don’t mind. We can try again.”

Like a schoolboy, I asked if I could go to the bathroom, desperate for a moment alone to compose myself.

“Sure,” she said. “If you gotta go you gotta go.”

I was just inside the door when I heard her whisper something cautionary, though I couldn’t make out the words.

The bathroom light revealed a young man in a tuxedo sprawled in the bathtub. Pausing just long enough to verify this seeming hallucination, and recover the use of my limbs, I turned off the light and retreated.

“Don’t go, that’s just Lance,” Janie said, as I searched in the dark for my clothes. Frankly, I couldn’t see how these two clauses fit in the same sentence.

“I’ve got to meet Will,” I said.

She tugged at my arm in the dark. “You still owe me one,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. At that moment, I felt that my sexual career had ended about the same time it had begun.

Remembering my manners, I thanked her as I was leaving.

Out in the lobby I dialed Will’s suite again, and then, as a last-ditch measure, his office. Just as I was about to hang up someone answered. I asked for Will, but the din on the other end was so great that I doubt he heard me. I listened to the music and the competing voices of a party for some minutes before giving up. Replacing the receiver, I felt stunningly sober.

Will’s office and studio was a short walk from the hotel, in a derelict part of town, an old limestone hulk just off the river. Gargoyles grinned down from the portico and from the elaborately incised rooftop cornice. The mullioned windows were pulsing with music from within. Two white men of menacing demeanor stood on the sidewalk, passing a joint. “I’m looking for Will,” I explained. Nobody said anything, but there was just enough room to slide through the door without violating anyone’s space. Downstairs, a logo stenciled on the glass identified the offices of Savage Management & Cement Mixer Music.

Behind the first door I opened I surprised a couple making love on a desk, or rather they surprised me; the woman turned and grinned at me through the cascading ropy strands of her partner’s greasy hair while he went on about his business. It seemed a night designed to put me off sex forever.

A door opened behind me, unleashing a blast of sound. Stubblefield stuck his head into the lobby, reconnoitering. “Keane,” he said, as if he had seen me the day before. Even as a hippie he looked preppie; his utterly limp, straw-colored hair was reminiscent of much-washed chinos, and his self-contained, slightly smug expression suggested that anything that you might think of doing had already been achieved by his ancestors. I followed him down a hallway into an open studio, where five or six musicians were jamming and dozens of bodies churned in a choppy sea of strobed light.

Finding nothing to moor myself to, I was grateful when a skinny white girl with a blond Afro suddenly held out a joint. I took a quick hit and attached myself gratefully to her group.

“When my pop died Will said I’d see him on the other side,” the girl said. “He’s so spiritual. It’s incredible. He died himself on the operating table that time after he got stabbed—you know that scar on his face, from when what’s his name, the blues guy, cut him?”

She looked vaguely around the room as if the alleged perpetrator might still be among us, knife dripping. “What was I saying? Oh, right, Will said he was lifted up out of his body and looked down on the earth and saw that it was just, like, a phase, you know, our physical existence on this planet.” She sucked in on the joint which I had returned to her.

“That’s cool,” said a fat guy with a long matted beard. “He was telling me this story about the Monterey Pop Festival in ’67,” he said, taking the roach from the girl.

“Who was?”

“Who was what?”

“Telling you what you just said about Monterey.”

“It was Will, like I said. It’s like, Hendrix got in from playing with King Curtis at four in the morning and he walked into his bedroom, and he saw this cat in bed with his old lady. He went and got his pistol, stood over the bed, cocked it and turned on the light. He’s just about to shoot but then he says to himself, ‘Damn, that’s Otis. Shit, I can’t kill Otis, man.’ ”

“That is so outrageous. Was Will there?”

“I don’t know, man. Maybe.”

“But what does that have to do with reincarnation?”

“I don’t know. I thought we were talking about Will.”

“Where is Will,” I asked.

No one seemed to know, though they assured me he was around. I left this group to free-associate amongst themselves and strolled around, trying to assume a casual, funky gait, feeling conspicuous in my crewneck sweater as a topless woman with small, asymmetrical breasts danced past me.

Spotting Lester Holmes conferring with two white girls, I sidled over and reminded him that we’d met. He regarded me for a moment with mild irritation, then sloped off without saying a word.

“Will says Lester could be the biggest thing since Ray Charles,” said one of the girls, to no one in particular, “except he’s lazy and won’t travel more than a few hours from Memphis.”

People kept saying that Elvis was going to come by; if he did, I missed him. But in fact I was surrounded by people who were much cooler than Elvis, though few of their names were familiar to me at the time. Some years later in New York, when we were both sitting up late over a bottle of cognac, I asked Taleesha to run down the guest list that night.

Among those she recalled being present were Duck Dunn and Don Nix, along with another founding member of the Mar-Keys, Steve Cropper, who became famous as a producer and studio guitar wizard for Otis Redding and others at Stax. Also Jim Dickinson and Jimmy Crosthswait. Alex Chilton, who at the age of sixteen was the lead singer of the Box Tops and later played with Big Star and Panther Burns. Bowlegs Miller. And Bukka White—who supposedly stabbed Will—whose 1940 Vocalion sessions helped define the Delta blues. The great Sleepy John Estes even brought his guitar; Will paid for his funeral when he died in poverty some years later. Hound Dog Taylor, from Chicago. Chips Moman, the producer and songwriter, and fellow Alabaman Dan Penn, with whom he wrote “Do Right Woman.” Issac Hayes, of imminent “Shaft” fame. The guitarist John Fahey, who found Skip James, long presumed dead, on a plantation in the midsixties. Jerry Phillips, son of Sam, of Sun Studios.

Fresh from his appearance at the Peabody, Lash LaRue made a big splash with the Memphis hipsters—the cowboy from outer space. William Eggleston, the photographer, arrived in a hearse equipped with an oxygen tank, accompanied by the writer Stanley Booth. I remember seeing Eggleston, an anomalous, razor-thin figure in an elegant black suit, dripping anomie and looking askance at the hippies.

Wading blindly through these legends-in-the-making, I spotted Stubblefield leaning against a wall watching the proceedings with stoned intensity.

“Will around,” I asked.

“Somewhere. How’s Yale,” he asked, drawing forth a long earnest answer from me before I realized that he couldn’t care less, that he was stoned out of his mind. “My old man went there and so did his old man,” he said, as if to drive home the point that I needn’t have bothered to yammer away about it.

“So what do you do for Will,” I asked, with what I hoped was a discernible measure of contempt for all mere functionaries, subordinates and flunkies.

I thought he hadn’t heard me, but finally he turned to me and said, “I ball all the chicks is what I do.”

Finding no niche for myself in this bacchanal, I explored the edges until I found Taleesha in an office, curled up in a beanbag chair, improbably reading Samuelson’s Economics.

“Hey, Patrick,” she said, looking up and grinning, scrambling to free herself from the grip of the chair. “Oh, shit! We were supposed to meet you, weren’t we? God, I’m sorry. Living with Will I start to get on his schedule, which is no schedule at all. Anyway, it’s good to see you”—she shook her head—“in this zoo.”

I hadn’t seen her since the fire, and I was happy to discover that my residual guilt—about not having been there to prevent it—seemed to dissolve in her presence. I gave her a hug. “Happy New Year.”

“Have you seen Will yet,” she asked.

“I haven’t been so blessed.”

“He’s doing his Buddhist Rasputin thing tonight. Come on, let’s find him.”

We took the stairs to the basement, where a red sign glowed above a door: RECORDING! DO NOT ENTER WHEN LIGHT IS ON. Taleesha pushed on through. Dressed entirely in black, Will was sitting astride a stool in front of the console of a mixing board, one hand on the board, a huge joint in the other. Jessie Petit sat in the corner reading a newspaper.

“Play that last track again,” Will said to the middle-aged man sitting beside him.

“Will, it’s Patrick,” Taleesha announced.

Turning slowly, Will registered me with a complacent look. Making a minute adjustment on the board, he stood up and held his arms open. I walked awkwardly into his fleshy embrace.

“Dink Stover, I presume.”

“I went to the hotel,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep the frustration out of my voice.

Will nodded, as if misdirection were all part of a larger plan. “It’s good to see you, Patrick,” he said. He offered me the roach, which I accepted. “You gotta hear this,” he said. “This is cooking.”

Later, after listening over and over to various takes of the latest song Will was producing, we were in the car and Will was driving very fast the wrong way down a one-way street. Taleesha was trying to convince Will that this was a bad idea, particularly since his license had been suspended recently for similar behavior. Besides, she said, Jessie was supposed to be Will’s driver. But if Will heard her, he gave no indication.

Dozing intermittently in the backseat, I awoke when the car stopped, blue light flashing in the rear window.

“Everybody be cool,” Will said, stepping out of the car. I waited with Taleesha and Jessie, none of us daring to speak. I had more than enough time to wonder what kind of controlled substances might be in the car with us, to consider the charged racial climate of the South, to contemplate how a felony conviction would look on my law school applications.

Finally Will returned, slipped into the driver’s seat and eased the car into gear.

“What’d you say,” I asked as we pulled away.

“We talked some politics,” he said. “Each contest calls forth its own tactics. You follow your chi. Sometimes you thrust, sometimes you yield.”

“Sometimes,” Taleesha said, “you just confuse the living shit out of everybody.”

“And mostly, you just pay the motherfuckers off,” said Jessie.

Back at Will’s hotel suite, shortly after dawn, I seem to remember Taleesha screaming at Will and slapping him, but I may have been dreaming.

Waking up in the Savage suite, a sprawling set of grand, tatty rooms atop the Peabody, I stepped over several bodies in the living room. Crippled with hangover, I went back to sleep for several hours. When I woke next, it was to the sound of Taleesha’s voice.

“Get the fuck out of here, everybody,” she screamed. “I mean it, get out!” When I finally emerged from my chamber, Taleesha was alone, sipping coffee in a kimono.

“I can’t even remember the last time Will and I were alone,” she said.

“I can leave,” I said, “if this isn’t a good time.”

“Not you, Patrick.” She sighed. “Hey, what do you want? I’ll call down for room service.”

That afternoon I watched football while Taleesha mastered economics. She explained she’d started taking classes that fall at Memphis State. Although the big windows looked out over the city to the east and the Mississippi and Arkansas to the west, the rooms had been customized and day-proofed to Will’s womblike specifications so that it was perpetually twilight within. The dark Persian carpets and the upholstery were speckled with burns. I sprawled on a fusty-smelling couch with a vicious headache, sucking down Cokes and tomato juice.

Will appeared about four, wafting into the room in a dark blue kimono. “Happy new decade, my friends. Any signs of the dawning of the new era?”

“There was a big old bodhisattva here looking for you earlier,” Taleesha remarked, “but he got tired of waiting.”

When I saw the red welt on Will’s face I remembered the argument I’d heard in my early morning stupor.

“Are we doing something today,” Taleesha asked. “I mean what’s left of today? If any damn thing’s dawning out there we’d never know it in here. We’re just like fucking movie stars,” she remarked to me. “We can’t go out in public. And even if we could, Will’s too busy playing tycoon.”

As if to illustrate the point, Jessie Petit came and spent a half hour closeted with Will, who then talked for an hour on the phone, tending to his growing empire while we two students studied. Finally Taleesha, beckoning me to come along, walked into the parlor where Will was conducting his business and ripped the phone cord out of the wall.

“Goddamnit, Taleesha.” He threw the useless receiver on the table.

She looked over her shoulder at him with defiant, haughty mien as she disappeared down the hall and, after a moment, he followed. Back in the living room, I closed my book and stared at a football game in which I had absolutely no interest. At halftime, I went to my bedroom, ostensibly to get a book—or so I made a point of telling myself. It now seems comical that I would fabricate an excuse solely for my own benefit, even as I crept along the carpeted hallway in stocking feet toward their door, stopping just outside to listen to their syncopated grunting. Leaning close to the crack I had a narrow, vertical but no less startling view of brown and white flesh intertwined, rising and falling on the crimson spread.

I determined that she was on top, her breasts hanging pendulously above his hair-stippled white chest. This seemed a fabulous inversion to me, as marvelously perverse as the juxtaposition of skin colors. Even more fantastic—Will’s arms were stretched back behind him—his wrists bound and fastened to something just out of the picture. To this day I don’t quite know how to interpret this partial composition, or whether to trust my memory, but I now understand all too well that you can never predict the geometry of appetite, or know for certain what secret passions may roil within the breast of even your best friend. Certainly the wife of my murdered colleague Felson must be pondering such matters at this very moment … Felson in his ill-fitting suits and his devotion to the driest regions of the Law …

That evening Will went to the studio for a few hours. At eleven Taleesha and I were sitting on the floor of the living room picking at a room-service dinner.

“So, what’s happening with your singing career,” I asked Taleesha, whose mood had brightened considerably once she reappeared from the bedroom.

She laughed. “My singing career’s mainly a fantasy of Will’s—kind of a Josephine Baker/Ronnie Spector deal. I just got tired of it. Singing and dancing used to be the only way up, the only door open. I want to get my B.A. Then I’d like to do something … original. Something a black girl isn’t supposed to do.”

“You already did that,” Will said, standing in the doorway, “when you married me.”

“And look what a good idea that turned out to be.”

Will bowed theatrically.

“Irony isn’t Will’s strong suit—is it honey?”

The tension between them had disappeared, and they suddenly seemed as carefree as they had been that first day in New York. While he was still in a good mood I told Will that I was planning to stop at Bear Track the next day to pay my respects to his parents. “You don’t need my permission, man.” He smiled. “My sympathy, maybe.”

“Plus a heavy-duty suit of armor,” Taleesha said.

“A garlic necklace,” Will suggested, grinning at his wife.

“And a sharp wooden stake,” she added, walking over and kissing him, a kiss which was to continue on and off for the better part of the next hour, until I finally took the hint and retreated to my solitary bed.