Nighthawk Blues Read online

  Not in any particular hurry, Jerry ate in the hotel coffee shop and rented a car at the Avis desk. He knew now where Hawk would be going. He didn’t have to worry about finding him.

  Whenever he was in trouble, Hawk liked to say, he always headed for Highway 61. 61 twisted in and out through all the little towns between St. Louis and the Delta and on up to Illinois. It wasn’t the fastest way to get anywhere, but it was the way Hawk knew best, it was the road he had traveled with Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams, and Sonny Boy Williamson (the first Sonny Boy Williamson) and Stump Porter, the midget piano player, and it was one of the ways Jerry had found him in Yola in the first place. “Highway 61 rolls right by my door,” he had sung in the 1936 version of the song. “Get home this time, ain’t gonna be rambling round no more.” So he would be heading for St. Louis, which for Hawk was the center of the universe. From there you could head east, west, north, south, but St. Louis was the hub. Yola was his destination, Jerry knew, and St. Louis was where he would be pointing for.

  Jerry finally spotted him a little outside of Terre Haute, an old two-tone Ford—’53, ’54-just chugging along, hugging the middle of the road. Blue puffs of smoke billowed from the exhaust, and through the rear window you could see a solitary figure hunched forward, a Stetson clamped on its head, hands clenched tightly on the wheel. Jerry hung back for miles, watching nervously in his rearview mirror as cars, pickups, even a tractor edged out, leaned on their horns, and flew by. Hawk never noticed a thing. He kept up a steady twenty-five miles per hour, didn’t so much as glance at the gesticulating drivers who passed him, and never looked in the rearview mirror for the simple reason that there was no rearview mirror. Nonetheless Jerry felt sure that Hawk knew that Jerry was following him. When Hawk finally pulled into a filling station, he gave the attendant brusque directions and limped over to the men’s room without even giving Jerry a backward glance. That confirmed it as far as Jerry was concerned. He had his own tank filled, had the oil checked, the windshield washed, the battery checked, talked with the attendant about the misfortunes of the country (inflation, unemployment, lazy niggers), selected a stale candy bar from the automatic dispensing machine, while waiting for Hawk to emerge from the men’s room. At last Hawk did, and he shuffled to the gas pump, his pants undone, his fly half-zipped. He gave the attendant the washroom key and brushed past Jerry without a word. After several fumbling attempts, he placed the key in the ignition and tried it a couple of times, coaxing spluttering, choking sounds from the engine until at last, against all probability, it actually caught. They watched the car chug off down the road. “Damn,” said the service-station man to himself, and Jerry was forced to agree.

  Jerry stayed behind him for the rest of the day. Through four more stops, at each of which he got two dollars’ worth of gas, at the last of which he purchased three quarts of oil. At the second stop Jerry went back to the restroom himself. “Hey, look, Hawk, come on, this is crazy,” he said through the open window, then watched it slam down and counted twenty minutes before Hawk finally emerged as disheveled as when he had gone in.

  “You better get out of my way, boss,” muttered Hawk, after he had paid the attendant from his nickel-plated change belt, which he unlocked with a key he wore tied around his neck.

  “Aw, come on, Hawk, this doesn’t make any—”

  “I’m warning you,” Hawk said in a low growl and flung the door open, just as Jerry managed to jump free.

  At the third service station they had a restroom which could accommodate more than one person at a time, and Jerry urinated with relief, as Hawk locked himself in behind the saloon-type door. Underneath the door Jerry could see Hawk’s pants lying deflated on the floor. “Look, Hawk, I understand what you’re doing, I really do. I mean, I agree with you, I think you ought to go home, rest up, take it easy. There wasn’t any reason to stick around that place. But you’ve got to understand, you’re still a sick man. I mean, you can’t just ignore the fact that you’ve been seriously ill. Look, why don’t you just ride with me. I’ll get you down to Yola, I’ll get you down there a lot faster than you’re going to make it yourself, we’ll get you to a doctor, and we’ll just see what happens, take it from there.” Hawk farted and grunted with about equal force. The smell drove Jerry out.

  At the next stop the black man in the red greasemonkey’s suit seemed to recognize Hawk. He greeted him with a big wave as Hawk rolled up and laughed as the car shook for a good minute and a half after the ignition was shut off. Hawk slowly got out and hobbled over to the gas pump, resting on the right front fender and slapping hands with the shaven-headed man, who was grinning from ear to ear. Jerry stayed in the car while the men conversed, waiting to purchase gas himself. His tank was practically on empty, since he had passed up a purchase at the last station, not realizing that Hawk would go this long between stops. Hawk brought four dollars’ worth this time, and he used the men’s room only briefly, but Jerry couldn’t seem to get the attendant’s eye. Some kids drove up, and he filled their tank. A lady got a dime stuck in the pay phone, and the man went to see about that. For five or ten minutes he looked around under the hood of Hawk’s car, doing God knows what. Then he busied himself with straightening out maps and bringing the calendar up to date in the glassed-in office. Finally Jerry could stand it no longer and leaned on the horn. The man barely glanced at him. “Ain’t got no time now, ain’t got no time,” he said dismissively, as Hawk emerged from the station, and they laughed and chatted some more. Only after he had sent him on his way with a wave and a slap on the hood of the car did he finally acknowledge Jerry’s presence.

  “You do sell gas here, don’t you?” said Jerry sarcastically. The man laughed.

  “What do you want?” he said. Jerry asked him to fill it up with high-test. “Ain’t got no high-test. Just ran out.”

  Jerry stared at him in disbelief. His head hurt. He was tired of nursemaiding, he was tired of Hawk, he was tired of all this shit.

  “What are you talking about?” he exploded. “You expect me to believe this shit?”

  The man shrugged. “Suit yourself, mister.”

  Jerry watched Hawk’s dust. He looked down at the gas gauge and calculated that there had to be a gas station up the road somewhere. He switched on the ignition.

  “Now you better stop bothering this man,” said the attendant in a quiet voice.

  Jerry looked up. The man was smiling, but his smile was chilly. “You got no call to be harassing this man. He ain’t broke no laws. He ain’t never did nobody no harm. Why don’t you turn around and go back where you come from?”

  Jerry felt like crying. “But I’m a friend of Hawk’s,” he vainly protested.

  The man regarded him with scorn. “You ain’t no friend of Hawk’s,” he said. “Hawk told me who you was. You ain’t no friend of his. Now why can’t you leave that old man alone? You gotta squeeze the last dollar out of him, you ain’t got enough already—”

  Jerry threw up his hands helplessly. To go without sleep. To put himself out for this ungrateful old man. To subject himself to abuse on top of everything else from this shaven-headed guardian. He was tempted right then and there to abandon the whole thing, to let Hawk go home and die any way he liked. Why not? In the end it would come to the same thing. No matter what he did there was no way he could influence Hawk’s course of action. And Hawk, he was sure, would seek out an audience as long as there was breath in his body. But it had gone too far, he was in too deep to back out now. Somehow he felt his and Hawk’s fates were forever linked, at least until one of them kicked. He waved to the attendant and moved on out into the passing stream.

  At the last stop he confronted Hawk directly. He jumped out of his car and blocked the driver’s door before Hawk even had a chance to get out. “Come on, Hawk,” he pleaded, as the young kid with floppy blond hair gaped at them. “You know I’m gonna keep on following you no matter what you do. You know, in a way I think you’re counting on that. You’re not so stupid,” Jerry said,
and thinking about it made him even angrier. “I think you’re just taking advantage of me. You know you’re sick. You know you shouldn’t be taking this kind of chance. And you’re just counting on the fact that if anything happens I’m gonna be right there to pick up the pieces. Well, goddammit, you’re right, I am going to be there. But it’s not for you, you old buzzard. It’s for me. You wouldn’t even say a word of thanks. You can’t even imagine what this is costing me.” Visions of his office, in far-off Harvard Square, desolate, phone disconnected, covered with cobwebs, condemned, all danced in his head. “You’re a selfish old man, and you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself.”

  Hawk stared at him disgustedly and spit. The gob landed approximately half an inch from Jerry’s left foot. Then Hawk lifted himself out of the car, awkward, heavy, foul-smelling, a legend in his time, and stood practically toe-to-toe with his manager. “What you want from me, boy?” he said angrily, not even looking at Jerry. “Ain’t you through sucking on your mama’s titty?” With that he plodded off toward the men’s room, his shoulders slumping, his left leg dragging, the attendant running after him. “Let my manager take care of it,” Hawk rumbled without even turning around. A small victory, Jerry thought, as he gave the man a twenty-dollar bill and asked him to check under the hood of both cars.

  They were still out in the country when it started to get dark. Jerry wondered if they were just going to keep going straight through the night when he realized that the old heap in front of him had slowed to a virtual halt and that Hawk was peering over the wheel with more than his usual intentness. Behind them traffic had backed up for what seemed like miles, and the driver next in line behind Jerry started honking impatiently. Jerry shrugged without any hope of sparing himself embarrassment. He didn’t know if this was Hawk’s way of getting back or if the old man was simply oblivious to the chorus of horns which had started up.

  Hawk turned off on a dirt path that didn’t even deserve to be called a road, between a closed-down gas station and a boarded-up old clapboard house. Jerry hesitated slightly before following him, wondering for an absurd moment if Hawk might still be capable of springing some kind of improbable trap. The road, if it was a road, had obviously not been used in years, and to say that it was full of potholes would be giving it credit for an initial intention which it scarcely seemed to possess. Jerry lurched along behind the old black-and-tan Ford, for what seemed like miles in a time span that could have been hours, following the curve of the road overgrown with bushes until finally they came to what looked like a long-ago-abandoned dump, a clutter of rusting metal objects, rotting lace-up boots, tin cans, broken glass, a pile of brush, and a muddy stagnant pool of water. Beside it ran a rusted railroad track whose bed had become a garden of weeds, with half the ties twisted and broken and all the orangy color of rust. Off to one side was a railroad car, open to the elements, its door long since disappeared. Jerry watched in disbelief as Hawk climbed out of the car and with both hands scooped up some of the brackish water, tilting his head back and letting out a long sigh of appreciation as if it were fresh spring water that he was drinking. He splashed some on his face and then went to work gathering together the few sticks that were lying about, throwing on the remnants of what once must have been a chair, squatting down and coaxing a fire from this unlikely collection of combustibles. At last it caught and Hawk hunched over it for a few minutes, rubbing his hands in front of the fire until he was evidendy warm, then hoisted himself up and swung back to the car, rummaging around without apparent success, then at last seeming to find what he was looking for. Jerry just waited—for what, he wasn’t sure. There they were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by ghosts of a past he had never known, and he was waiting for an invitation! Hawk limped back to the fire, where he pulled a saucepan from under his coat and started in to work. Soon something was frying away, whatever it was the smell soon filled the air, and for all of his distaste, for the scene and Hawk’s presence in it, Jerry grew hungrier and hungrier as he watched the old man add ingredients to the sizzling repast. At last when it was ready Hawk removed the pan from the fire and set to work on his meal, patiently picking at it piece by piece, licking his fingers scrupulously as he finished each separate portion. Jerry kept thinking that he would start to feel some remorse, glance back, acknowledge his manager with a nod and indicate for him to come join him, but nothing of the sort happened, of course, Hawk never so much as gave him a tumble. When he was at last done, Hawk licked his lips loudly, trundled back and forth stoking the fire, put his cooking utensils back in the car, then disappeared into the low scrub that surrounded the clearing, only to reappear moments later with a long stick. He lowered himself again in front of the fire, pulled a jackknife from somewhere inside the recesses of his coat, and patiently began to whitde. Even after the sun had gone down and it was completely dark, he kept it up by the light of the fire, and even if Jerry hadn’t been able to see him hunched over his work he would still have known Hawk was there by the slow scraping of the knife, which was the only sound to be heard save for the occasional hooting of an owl or scurrying of a small animal or hiss of a truck’s airbrakes out on the highway. Once Hawk cleared his throat, and Jerry jumped.

  It began to get cold. Jerry shivered a little. He was tired. He was hungry. He would have humbled himself and asked Hawk for something to eat, but he knew Hawk didn’t count gestures for anything, if he had wanted to feed Jerry he would have done so, without Jerry having to ask or be bidden. And it wouldn’t mean anything to Hawk one way or another if Jerry were to admit error, since Hawk never doubted himself long enough anyway to need anyone else’s admission of guilt.

  At last Hawk seemed to grow tired. He stifled a few yawns. Then he carefully folded up the knife and encased it somewhere within his loosely fitting garments, picked up the stick, walked over to the edge of the clearing, and with some difficulty relieved himself. The door of his old car opened with a creak, he climbed over the front seat and lay down in the back. Jerry watched it all curiously, like a spectator at the movies, and looked at his digital watch. It read 8:45. It glowed in the dark. It probably emitted “safe” amounts of radioactivity. What was he doing here?

  At last after a suitable interval he got out of his car, crossed the clearing, and peered through Hawk’s window. Hawk’s eyes appeared to be open, but that didn’t prove anything. He claimed he always slept with his eyes open in case some sidewinder (like Jerry?) ever tried to creep up on him in the middle of the night. Jerry shivered. Well, he supposed it was all right. Hawk was breathing regularly. And he didn’t like to drive anywhere at night.

  Jerry went back to his car, switched on the ignition, after a number of backings and fillings managed a U-turn, and headed back toward the highway. Going out didn’t seem anywhere near as long as going in, with the car bottom scraping against branches and vegetation and the headlights scouring scrubby bushes. When he finally emerged onto the highway, Jerry carefully took note of landmarks, then joined the stream of traffic until he came to a truck-stop diner that looked passable. Inside there was loud talk, men were eating noisily, the jukebox blared country-and-western music, and the waitress wanted to talk about her eight-year-old son Kenny. The steak was tough, the coffee plentiful, you could hear the sound of cars whooshing by on the highway outside. Civilization. When he finally brought himself to look at his watch—after having his cup filled four times and exhausting every possible avenue of conversation with the waitress—it was after eleven, and he wearily decided that he had better get back. He had no trouble finding the road and traveled confidently now over the familiar terrain until his headlights finally came to rest on the abandoned boxcar on the far side of the clearing. Everything was as he had left it. Nothing had changed. Hawk’s car was still there, the fire barely flickered from time to time. He got out and threw a few sticks on the fire. From Hawk’s car he heard a phlegmy clearing of the throat and knew he would get no further greeting than that. Hawk appeared to be asleep anyway, tossing and t
urning and making sounds, remembering no doubt some half-forgotten moment of glory, like the time he played for the queen and sang her his “new tune”—only fifty years old—“Lizzie Can Shake It.” The papers had had a field day with that. Jerry tiptoed away from the car. But Hawk wasn’t asleep. And he wasn’t thinking of the queen either. His eyes were closed for once, but he was wide awake and alert in his thoughts. He didn’t sleep much anymore, hadn’t really slept well since his next-to-last wife Annie had died in ’62, he didn’t really know why. …

  WELL, TIMES CHANGE. People change. World keep changing—all the time. That’s what that boy don’t understand—what he want with me anyway? He done got all he could get out of me. More, if the truth be known. It ain’t like I’m his meal ticket, that cute little gal Lori, she the one that’s gonna pay the grocery bills. Cute as a button, that gal, and if you don’t hear what she putting down, then you don’t got ears, boy. Too many people in this world ain’t got ears, or eyes neither. They don’t see nothing the way it really is, just the way they think it should be. Don’t matter to ’em how a thing sounds, just whether you knowed ol’ Charley Patton or Blind Lemon Jefferson—Lemon, he was one of the nicest guys in the world, give you his last drop of whiskey if it come down to it, but he couldn’t sing worth a shit, didn’t have no tone—or else they want you to remember some song that your daddy sung ninety years ago on the cotton rows. She-it, they oughta just snap to it, the boy oughta just open up his eyes and live a little, ’stead of worrying everything to death like he do.