“Yessir?” Ezekiel looked at me sorta curious like, and nodded his head so slight I wondered if he’d done it at all. “What you need with me, boss?”
“I wanted you to meet your new neighbor. This here’s John, and you ain’t gone believe this, but he used to be a big man in the jook joints in the Delta. Writing songs and playing that dimestore git fiddle.”
Ezekiel looked at me and said, “Yessir, I know John’s songs.” And I could tell he meant more than hearing them.
“Yes, John mighta been famous and saved enough whore money to buy him a decent instrument if he hadn’t up and got hisself killed. Yes, John used to be one high-rolling nigger, but you ain’t so high now, are you John?”
I stared at the li’l peckerwood and spit out: “High enough to see where I’m going, Ole Massa.”
I heard Ezekiel suck in his breath. The devil looked away from me real casual and back to Ezekiel, like we was chatting on a veranda someplace.
“Well, Ezekiel, this has been a nice long break for you, but I reckon you ought to get on back to work now. Looks like your mule’s done got loose.” He cackled and speeded up the car. Ezekiel and I both walked a few more steps and stopped. We watched the back of the Terraplane getting smaller, and then I turned to watch his face from the side. I han’t seen that look on any of my people since Mississippi.
I said, “Man, why do you all take this shit?”
He wiped his forehead with his wrist and adjusted his hat. “Why do you?” he asked. “Why do you, John?” He was looking at me strange, and when he said my name it was like a one-word sentence all its own.
I shrugged. “I’m just seeing how things are. It’s my first day.”
“Your first day will be the same as all the others, then. That sure is the story with me. How come you called him Ole Massa just now?”
“Don’t know. Just to get a rise out of him, I reckon.”
Away off down the road, the Terraplane had stopped, engine still running, and the little cracker was yelling. “John! You best catch up, John. You wouldn’t want me to leave you wandering in the dark, now would you?”
I started walking, not in any gracious hurry though, and Ezekiel paced me. “I asked ’cause it put me in mind of the old stories. You remember those stories, don’t you? About Ole Massa and his slave by name of John? And how they played tricks on each other all the time?”
“Meemaw used to tell such when I was a youngun. What about it?”
He was trotting to keep up with me now, but I wan’t even looking his way. “And there’s older stories than that, even. Stories about High John the Conqueror. The one who could—”
“Get on back to your mule,” I said. “I think the sun has done touched you.”
“—the one who could set his people free,” Ezekiel said, grabbing my shoulder and swinging me around. He stared into my face like a man looking for something he’s dropped and has got to find.
“John!” the devil cried.
We stood there in the sun, me and Ezekiel, and then something went out of his eyes, and he let go and walked back across the ditch and trudged after the mule without a word.
I caught up to the Terraplane just in time for it to roll off again. I saw how it was, all right.
A ways up the road, a couple of younguns was fishing off the right side of a plank bridge, and the devil announced he would stop to see had they caught anything, and if they had, to take it for his supper. He slid out of the Terraplane, with it still running, and the dogs fell out after him, a-hoping for a snack, I reckon. When the devil got hunkered down good over there with the younguns, facing the swift-running branch, I sidled up the driver’s side of the car, eased my guitar into the back seat, eased myself into the front seat, yanked the thing into gear and drove off. As I went past I saw three round O’s—a youngun and the devil and a youngun again.
It was a pure pleasure to sit down, and the breeze coming through the windows felt good too. I commenced to get even more of a breeze going, on that long, straightaway road. I just could hear the devil holler back behind:
“John! Get your handkerchief-headed, free-school Negro ass back here with my auto-MO-bile! Johhhhnnn!”
“Here I come, old hoss,” I said, and I jerked the wheel and slewed that car around and barreled off back toward the bridge. The younguns and the dogs was ahead of the devil in figuring things out. The younguns scrambled up a tree as quick as squirrels, and the dogs went loping into a ditch, but the devil was all preoccupied, doing a salty jump and cussing me for a dadblasted blagstagging liver-lipped stormbuzzard, jigging around right there in the middle of the bridge, and he was still cussing when I drove full tilt onto that bridge and he did not cuss any less when he jumped clean out from under his hat and he may even have stepped it up some when he went over the side. I heard a ker-plunk like a big rock chunked into a pond just as I swerved to bust the hat with a front tire and then I was off the bridge and racing back the way we’d come, and that hat mashed in the road behind me like a possum.
I knew something simply awful was going to happen, but man! I slapped the dashboard and kissed my hand and slicked it back across my hair and said aloud, “Lightly, slightly, and politely.” And I meant that thing. But my next move was to whip that razor out of my sock, flip it open and lay it on the seat beside me, just in case.
I came up the road fast, and from way off I saw Ezekiel and the mule planted in the middle of his field like rocks. As they got bigger I saw both their heads had been turned my way the whole time, like they’d started looking before I even came over the hill. When I got level with them I stopped, engine running, and leaned on the horn until Ezekiel roused himself and walked over. The mule followed behind, like a yard dog, without being cussed or hauled or whipped. I must have been a sight. Ezekiel shook his head the whole way. “Oh, John,” he said. “Oh, my goodness. Oh, John.”
“Jump in, brother,” I said. “Let Ole Massa plow this field his own damn self.”
Ezekiel rubbed his hands along the chrome on the side of the car, swiping up and down and up and down. I was scared he’d burn himself. “Oh, John.” He kept shaking his head. “John tricks Ole Massa again. High John the Conqueror rides the Terraplane to glory.”
“Quit that, now. You worry me.”
“John, those songs you wrote been keeping us going down here. Did you know that?”
“I ’preciate it.”
“But lemme ask you, John. Lemme ask you something before you ride off. How come you wrote all those songs about hellhounds and the devil and such? How come you was so sure you’d be coming down here when you died?”
I fidgeted and looked in the mirror at the road behind. “Man, I don’t know. Couldn’t imagine nothing else. Not for me, anyway.”
Ezekiel laughed once, loud, boom, like a shotgun going off.
“Don’t be doing that, man. I about jumped out of my britches. Come on and let’s go.”
He shook his head again. “Maybe you knew you was needed down here, John. Maybe you knew we was singing, and telling stories, and waiting.” He stepped back into the dirt. “This is your ride, John. But I’ll make sure everybody knows what you done. I’ll tell ’em that things has changed in Beluthahatchie.” He looked off down the road. “You’d best get on. Shoot—maybe you can find some jook joint and have some fun afore he catches up to you.”
“Maybe so, brother, maybe so.”
I han’t gone two miles afore I got that bad old crawly feeling. I looked over to the passengers’ side of the car and saw it was all spattered with blood, the leather and the carpet and the chrome on the door, and both those mangy hound dogs was sprawled across the front seat wallowing in it, both licking my razor like it was something good, and that’s where the blood was coming from, welling up from the blade with each pass of their tongues. Time I caught sight of the dogs, they both lifted their heads and went to howling. It wan’t no howl like any dog should howl. It was more like a couple of panthers in the night.