The next day we opened our gifts. She gave me an old Earl King record I’d wanted for years, a gunmetal cigarette lighter, a first edition of Franny and Zooey, and a framed picture of Tom Mix.
She loved the watch.
We returned to bed a few more times that day, only leaving the mattress for the kitchen and something to eat. It was one of the best Christmases I can remember.
They came around midnight, Sam still cradled in my arms asleep. Two cats were curled in balls at the foot of the bed. I could hear the sound of the engine and two doors closing while I carefully unentwined myself from Sam and peeked through her blinds. The car, a black sedan, was still running. Two men were at my front door with a crowbar.
I walked into the kitchen, pulled on my jeans, boots, and the Tulane sweatshirt. I inserted a clip into the Browning and pulled a black watch cap over my ears.
Before clanking down the steps to the street level, I called 911, reported a burglary and shooting at my address, and hung up.
Outside, it was cold enough to see my breath.
I could see someone seated in the back of the sedan smoking a cigarette. A tiny prick of orange light and then a smoky exhaling that clouded the windows. Without stopping, I bent at the waist and jogged behind the car. I opened the back door and climbed inside.
I was seated right next to Spencer Faircloth.
I’ll never understand why he came. He was far too smart to put himself anywhere near something as dirty as this. I’m pretty sure it was just ego. The gutless turd remark must have gotten to him.
I poked him in the ribs with my Browning.
“Spencer, you old dog.”
I reached over the driver’s seat and pulled the keys from the ignition while I kept the gun pointed at him. I then motioned him outside, found the key for the trunk, and pushed him in with the flat of my palm.
My face felt cold and wind-bitten when I smiled.
They had made a real mess of my turn-of-the-century door, which had scrolled patterns around the mail slot. Splintered wood and muddy boot tracks led up my side staircase.
This time I did not run. I crept.
But I had the advantage. I knew every weakness in that staircase. Each creak. Every loose board.
I heard crashes and thuds. They were throwing my shit all around. And they must have enjoyed making a mess because they were laughing the whole time.
At the top of the landing, I straightened my right arm and fired a slug into the shoulder of the black man with curly, greasy hair. As he spun, one of my old books flew out of his hands, pages fluttering like a wounded bird before it crashed to the floor.
The young preppy white guy I’d encountered twice wasn’t ready either. It took him a full four seconds before he tried to reach inside his raincoat. His eyes were wide with fear when I fired, hitting him in the thigh.
His gun slid along the floor, several feet away from him.
He was no bodyguard or the triggerman. He was just the guy fetching laundry and coffee for Faircloth.
But ole Billy Dee was the real deal.
I walked over to him, slowly. My boots clanking hard in my warehouse, the place where I slept, ate, and read.
The book he’d been tearing pages from was Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues. The dog-eared pages littered the floor around him, some misted with blood from the bullet’s impact.
He had his gun still in hand. A revolver.
“You’re not a blues fan, are you?”
He looked up at me and laughed.
“You remember that old man who you shot in the head?”
“Should have been you, motherfucker.”
“That old man could play ‘Blue Monday’ and break your heart.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe.”
With my gun pressed flat against his nose, I took his revolver.
“I’ll find you,” he said. “I promise you that.”
The police arrived a short time later, and with the coaxed testimony of Tom Cat, all three were charged with murder.
On New Year’s Eve, I played “Auld Lang Syne” on Fats’s tarnished sax and Loretta sang. Everyone made toasts and kissed while I placed the battered instrument in a dusty glass case, where it still remains today.
Sam came over, put an arm around my neck, and kissed me hard. I stood back and looked at Fats’s picture on top of the wooden case.
She kissed me again, and I turned away.
JoJo told me I did a “real nice job” playing harp that night and handed me another Dixie. Drunk, JoJo ambled up onstage and professed his love for his wife. She watched him and smiled, then gave him a kiss too.
I wish I could’ve kept the moment, everything the way it was right then. But that was the year I met Cracker and went looking for the lost recordings of Robert Johnson in the Mississippi Delta. And my life was never the same.
Pie Man
by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
(Originally published in 2012)
Central City
The Pie Man tells Baby that a man has got to grab his own future for his own self. The City of New Orleans pays good to work disaster cleanup and Baby would do well to cash in before all the money gets carted off. A lot more sensible, the Pie Man says, than running around punching on Spanish dudes. The Pie Man walks across the living room in his chef’s jacket. He plops down on the couch, making himself at home. The walls have been stripped naked to the studs. Baby doesn’t know which way his future is, but he’s damn sure it’s got nothing to do with scooping mold out of some abandoned school.
Baby sits at the plastic folding table in white briefs and a tank top, fingering the dry skin around his bulky, plastic ankle bracelet. He plucks a Vienna sausage from its tin and tosses the wiener in his mouth. Baby eyes the Pie Man. The Pie Man doesn’t seem to get that he has no claim on this place or anyone in it. Baby may be only fourteen, but this is his house. He’s the man here.
The Pie Man’s eyes are red. He kneads his face with both hands and looks around like he doesn’t remember why he’s there. Sauced out of his mind before noon. Probably spent the night with the winos back in Gert Town.
Baby’s mom doesn’t notice because she’s too busy flapping around the room like a hen with a case of colic. As she gathers her things for the day care center, she keeps clucking at him about making the right choices in life. Her standard rave.
She’s on Baby because a Latino day-jobber got jumped outside the package liquor last night, the latest in a string of black-on-brown beatdowns in retaliation for what happened to Baby’s boy, Chaney. Baby’s mom thinks Baby is part of the jump squad. He’s not. Yet. He doesn’t tell her this. If she and everyone else think he’s in on the attacks, it beats the alternative. Better to be feared than understood.
Baby’s mom checks her hair in a handheld mirror before placing it on the table he’s sitting at. It doubles as her dresser and the couch is her bed. Baby sleeps on the floor in his fleece blanket, wrapped up tight as a papoose. A portable stovetop makes the bathroom their kitchen. All their real stuff was destroyed in the flood from the levee breech after Hurricane Katrina passed nearly three years ago. They live in the front half of the house since the back is sealed off with blue tarp to keep the fungus odor out. It doesn’t work. Everything smells like old people’s feet to Baby.
Sanchez, the carpenter Baby used to gopher for, shot Chaney in cold blood, but the police called it self-defense — as if Chaney’s back had a chance against Sanchez’s .38. Baby’s mom called the Pie Man in to odd-job their General Pershing Street home three months ago because Sanchez and the rest of the Latinos are afraid to work in Baby’s neighborhood. She can’t afford a contractor with papers or real tools.