When she collided with the girls, she toppled backwards and lost control of her sacks, which scattered at her feet (flopping in rubber galoshes). Her boxes popped open. Out spilled dozens of cicada shells, brittle husks that scritched across the street.
The girls screamed, then giggled and ran. The old woman tried to stand. Hugh dropped his cat food bag, ran over, and offered her a hand. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She squinted at him. “Better get that rabbit outta your nose,” she grumbled.
Sometimes, Hugh had heard her early in the mornings, before he was fully awake, shouting nonsense at herself. “I will,” he said. He helped her up.
A roach skittered across one of her sacks. “I own the goddam sky,” she said. “Did you know I own the goddam sky?”
“Yes, and you’re a wonderful caretaker,” Hugh said.
She grinned. Black gums, no teeth.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
She smacked her dry, white lips. Skin-crusts trickled like toast crumbs from her mouth.
Hugh gave her five dollars. “Get yourself a hamburger or something, okay?”
“You bet,” she said. She smelled of rotten leaves. “You bet I will.”
An Aztec god on pinched black velvet. A Lone Star ad. Purple piñatas swayed above sweating green bottles of beer, on a counter by a March of Dimes jar. A young waitress snatched the bottles, shoved them onto a tray, and danced across the room to a salsa beat pulsating from a flashing yellow jukebox.
Hugh hadn’t tried this place in a while, though the restaurant was only six blocks from his apartment. Right after the divorce, he’d eaten out every night, usually here. It was handy and cheap.
At home tonight, in his fridge, he’d found only a couple of chicken pot-pies. Chicken didn’t appeal to him this evening — especially after smelling the bag lady’s boxes, the stale, fried odor of weeks-old grease.
Paula had been sour and surly on the phone. He’d called again, hoping to pin her down on a date for his visit. “I told you I have plans. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient for you, Hugh. Please don’t start with me. Not tonight.”
“What am I starting?” he’d said.
The days when he’d been a brand-new, slightly stunned bachelor seemed to have spun back around, like history’s repeated mistakes. Exhaustion; no food in the house; ex-wife belligerence; befuddlement and sorrow.
So he’d thought of Chimichanga for supper.
The waitresses were all new, young and sexy in their long, colorful skirts, but the cook, a tough old hound named Carlos, recognized Hugh. “Hey, Professor! Long time no see!”
Hugh smiled. Carlos and the previous waitresses used to kid him for grading papers — “Got your homework tonight?”—or scribbling notes with a frozen margarita to lubricate his thoughts.
Now, in the spirit of old times, he pulled a pen and pad from his pocket. Spider, he wrote. Trace roots.
All afternoon, partly to take his mind off his girls, and his nervousness over the weekend plans he’d made with Alice, he’d been figuring: one way to avoid exploiting Spider was to push beyond a pure academic reckoning of facts and dates; to tell the man’s story fully, with dignity and respect, granting him perpetual life on the page. To do that, Hugh realized, he’d have to know his subject much better than he did.
In one of their earliest conversations, Spider had told him, “My mama used to say we descended from slaves what come from the old Anansi tribe back in Africa somewheres. Don’t know much about ’em, ’cept they worshipped this god named Spider. Long arms, face like a hairy ol’ tarantula’s. He’s a storyteller, Mama said, always remindin’ people how they’s made from the vines of the trees, the wretched mud of the earth, stuff like that. Weavin’ pretty tales like webs.”
“Why did she tell you all this? Do you remember?” Hugh had asked. “I mean, what was the occasion?”
Spider had laughed. “Mama says she named me for him, and it fits, I guess, ‘cause now I’m a storyteller, right, layin’ down the news, witnessin’ for my people.”
Spider called stories “go-alongs,” “happenings,” or “hoo-raws.” Hugh knew he needed to know more about the blues’ affinities with African storytelling traditions. Was the triple-beat rhythm so common in the songs related to the natural syntax of Anansi speech? Drums — from the snare’s high tones to the bullying bellow of the tom-toms — mimicked the human voice’s full range.
But more than African griot, Hugh heard in Spider’s “news” the chuffing of a plow through fertile Texas dirt, the shouts and melodic rags of field hands. Lullabies, spirituals, the cadences of longing — a centuries-old ache for escape, for a mighty dash to freedom.
A waitress brought him a chili relleno and a cold Carta Blanca. At a nearby table, two Cajun men — Hugh could tell from the stew of “hick” and French in their talk — argued over crawfish, how best to eat them. “Naw, main,” one said to his friend, curling his fingers around his lips, “you gots to suck they little haids, like iss!”
Hugh went back to his notes. Spider was born on the Navasota River, northwest of Houston, an area still sumptuous with Cherokee and rich Spanish blood, as well as the spilled blood of former slaves. Whenever Hugh looked at Spider — the coppery, aqualine nose, the heavy brow — he saw Indian ancestry, though Spider never acknowledged any mixing in his family. From previous studies, Hugh knew that most whites and blacks with Texas roots prior to 1880 had Native American forebears.
When he had first talked to Spider, he’d hoped to get to know the man, learn about the blues. Simple goals. But the longer he worked on the project, the more he felt it was impossible to know anyone simply.
Driving by Spider on the street, it would be easy to dismiss him with a contemptuous glance — an old black man lounging on his porch, sipping malt liquor in the middle of the day. But when you began to look, you found yourself in the core of the Big Thicket, on the banks of the “Navasot” River, in the midst of a heady “go-along.”
What seemed simple on the surface soon became a vital hodgepodge of Indian tricksters and African gods (Papa Legba, the guardian of the crossroads — did Robert Johnson know these tales? — waiting in the moonlight, demanding sacrifice from weary travelers); oral stories and coded drumbeats; field songs, electric guitars; country and city; money, sex, jukebox politics.
You could spend a lifetime chatting with Spider, and still not know the man.
Hugh sipped his beer. Through the restaurant’s back door, which opened onto a small gravel parking lot, he saw a young Mexican in an apron lighting a cigarette for a woman in knee-high boots and a short blue skirt. Her long legs reminded him of Alice. Another man in an apron carried a food tray across the lot to a small wooden shed out back. He knocked on the door. It opened just a crack; a needle of light sliced into the night, and he passed the tray in.
In his days as a regular here, Hugh had seen this ritual many times. He’d always assumed illegals lived in the shed, sleeping, eating, gathering strength before dispersing through the secret arteries of Houston, then on to who-knows-where. Carlos seemed the type who would feed folks in need. Generous. Nonjudgmental. Faithful to his people.
The city had a million hidden “hoo-raws.”
“How’s your food, Professor?” Carlos stood beside Hugh’s table, wiping his hands on a dishtowel the color of corn.
Hugh almost asked about the shed, but didn’t. He felt as he often did with Spider, vaguely uneasy about poking his nose where it might not belong. A perpetual outsider: the historian’s curse. “Hot and spicy.”