He punched the number and settled in his chair. From his tiny window he saw Firebirds, Darts, and Gremlins rush the freeway down the hill from the campus, past the main entrance and the “Marion Junior College” sign. A few miles away, Life-Flite emergency helicopters circled the glass spires of the medical center.
Elissa answered on the fourth ring. Paula had taught her telephone etiquette; she was solemn and reserved until she recognized her daddy’s voice, then she shouted, “Jane has stinky underwear!” and he heard both girls laugh.
Mama was next door borrowing flour for dinner, Elissa said. Hugh tried to ask about her summer plans but she was manic with energy. He heard Jane running around the kitchen; Elissa giggled and bumped the receiver on the wall. He gave up. “Tell your mother I called, will you?”
“Daddy, are you coming to see us?” Elissa asked.
“Later this summer, sweetheart. Give your sister a kiss for me.”
“Ewww!”
Despite a strong showing last night against the Mets, the Astros had blown a doubleheader today. He clicked his car radio off. Damned Astros. They couldn’t hit their way out of a paper bag.
At a stoplight, a big, freckled fireman strolled into the intersection waving a black rubber boot, soliciting money for a city fund-raiser. Hugh lowered his window — a surge of hot air — and stuffed a dollar into the boot.
He lived in Montrose, one of Houston’s oldest — and when he’d first moved there in the early eighties, cheapest — neighborhoods. Before the AIDS epidemic, a realtor once told him, the area had been mostly gay, with an inflated reputation for debauchery. In fact, it was largely peaceful, tastefully landscaped and kept. Street people slept in alleys behind the 7-Elevens, but this was increasingly true all over the city. On Hugh’s block, the five or six people who stowed rags, blankets, and bags in back of the Dumpsters were friendly but withdrawn, embarrassed when asking for change.
Now, as he parked his car, he noticed an old woman in a sweater — despite the heat — that was unraveling like a tumbleweed’s spirals. Face as dark and tough as the fireman’s boot. She shuffled around the block.
Maple leaves flapped like oily rags on branches stretched across the street. Cicadas whirred, loud rotary blades, in the highest limbs.
Hugh’s apartment was small, with large windows and wooden floors. The chairs and couch were strictly Kmart. Since the split with Paula — two and a half years ago now? had it really been that long? — he hadn’t bothered to buy anything valuable or permanent. Paula had kept all the good stuff.
He showered and shaved. Not bad, old man, not bad for forty-three, he told his steamy face in the mirror. No bald spot yet (he needed a haircut). He was mostly trim and handsome. At least his daughters had said so, when he’d seen them last Christmas.
A Siamese cat family had recently moved into a space beneath the pyracantha bushes behind his kitchen window. The mother had borne two litters; Hugh had counted eight kittens last time he’d looked. He peeked at them now: burrowing lumps. He left two plastic plates of food for the cats, and a bowl of water. He wondered if he bothered with the kittens to assuage his helplessness over his daughters. A way of burying his blues.
His stomach growled — he’d skipped lunch to meet Spider. He put a turkey potpie in the oven, then called Paula. She was curt. “I’ve got plans in both July and August,” she said. “I just don’t know when it would be possible for you to come, Hugh.”
“What kind of plans?”
“Hawaii with my folks. And another trip with a friend.”
“So I’ll babysit the girls while you’re gone.”
“I want to take them with me. They’re six and eight now, old enough to appreciate travel.”
He argued with her a while longer, getting nowhere. “I’m telling you, make me part of your plans, Paula. I am going to see them this summer, okay?”
He sat in the dark with a bad taste in his mouth, trying to recall the days before bitterness had scoured even their briefest exchanges, when they had actually liked each other. It was surprisingly easy to remember liking Paula. Uninhibited, funny, she’d been overwhelmingly vibrant when he’d first met her through a mutual friend. Sexy, certainly, but open and warm too, in a way that made him trust her. How had that changed?
Elissa’s birth had seemed to make her sullen. “I’m penned at home all day, in a minefield of spit-up and poop. You get to come back in the evening when she’s already been Pampered and fed, and play the daddy-clown, make her laugh and get all excited — too excited, Hugh — right before bed,” she used to say. “It isn’t fair.”
So let the games begin — and Paula played fiercely, chasing every advantage marriage and motherhood had, in her view, denied her. Jane’s birth made things worse. Paula insisted on a part-time job, just to get out of the house, insisted on her own set of friends, her own interests, separate from Hugh’s. He didn’t mind, even encouraged her independence at first — parenting could be numbing, he’d discovered, if you found no other outlets — but the more she pursued her new path, the more pinched she became in her dealings with him. The sex remained urgent, blissful, and absorbing, but he became aware, gradually, that she was using it to short-circuit his arguments, his criticisms, his dissatisfactions with their arrangements. Eventually, making love came to seem a wrestling match — how reliably these damned old clichés proved true! — a contest he wanted both to win and to lose.
Finally, Paula ended things, announcing her intention to divorce him and demand custody of the girls.
He picked at his turkey potpie now, threw it away. He found his Son Seals tape, a bit of the old Chicago blues. A nightly ritual in his solitude. He closed his eyes and imagined himself in the bottomlands of the Mississippi River, sharing a bottle of rotgut with the ghost of Robert Johnson, learning to slide a pocketknife across the A string and hold it forever, a sweetly agonizing, cricket vibrato.
As Son hummed above a snappy backbeat, rapping like a wronged old haint, Hugh recited to himself Johnson’s famous tale, which every blues aficionado knew by heart: “If you want to learn how to play, you go to the crossroad. Be sure to get there a little ‘fore twelve o’clock at night. You have your guitar and be playing a piece sitting there by yourself. A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it. Then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s how I learned to play anything I want.”
And that’s where Hugh had decided to plunge back into dating: standing by Highway 61, where it hugged the gnarly, grassy border of U.S. 49 (in the middle of the day, alas, with dozens of other tourists), making a pact, not with the devil but with himself. “You can do anything you want,” he said aloud softly, and as soon as he formed the words, he knew he was ready to start seeing women again. He didn’t know why, but then and there, in the cradle of the blues, the pounding misery of his life with and without Paula fell from him like a tossed-off winter coat.
Now he surrendered to Son’s Delta rhythms. They were quickened and honed by the grit and steel of Chicago, where so many blues players had drifted when machines roared in and ate up the Deep South’s cotton fields. But they hadn’t all drifted away, Hugh thought, smiling, remembering Spider. Tomorrow, he’d hear about Saturday’s show.
Son knifed a note into space, spearing Hugh, and hurled him back to the bottomlands, the rich alluvial soil, the source of all the songs.
Friday wasn’t a teaching day for him; he spent the morning grading essays on the Battle of San Jacinto. The best paper, from one of his favorite students in the advanced class, was about Santa Anna’s life after he’d surrendered to Sam Houston. In his old age, the former general had been exiled from Mexico and settled on Staten Island, where he introduced chewing gum to North America. According to Hugh’s student, Santa Anna gave a hunk of chicle, the rubbery dried sap from sapodilla trees in southern Mexico, to Thomas Adams, who turned it into “Adams’ New York Gum No. 1.”