Читать книгу The Yazoo Blues - John Pritchard - Страница 10

Sumbich, you won’t believe this, but somebody’ll walk clear across the street just to come up to me and say, “Junior Ray, you ass’ole, why do you have to use so gotdam much profanity in that book you wrote about us?”

I look at that coksukka hard with my right eye, and I tell ’im: Listen, goat-dik, I didn’t write the sumbich, I talked it, but the fukkin fact is God invented cusswords. He invented them sumbiches just like He invented everything else—I mean, if you believe in God—and I don’t—but I’m just saying, if you’re one of those cobuptheass pekkaheds that always wants to let folks know you got to go to church on Sunday and sing all them draggy-ass songs in praise of a fukkin figment of your or somebody else’s gotdam imagination, then you don’t have no choice but to agree with what I just said: namely, that Godalmighty, Hissef, invented cussin’.

Plus, you have to agree, too, that if what you’re singing all them hymns to needs all that dumbass praise, your ass is in more fukkin trouble that just the possibility of goin’ to Hell—which I have no doubt is probably somewhere over across the river in Arkansas.

I tell ’ose sumbiches to look at it thissa way: If God is God and He’s perfect, then He can’t make no mistakes. Plus, if he’s tee-totally-ass good to the bone, then He can’t do nothin’ bad—or I guess I ought to say wouldn do nothin’ bad, because otherwise you’d be strappin’ Him down, puttin’ limits on His power, so to speak, and of course, bein’ God, He’s about as un-fukkin-limited as you can get. Otherwise I can’t see no sense in Him wantn the job.

So, whenever a sumbich comes up to me and starts in about my gotdam profanity, I just use philosophy on his ass and tell him he can go fuk a truck tire.

I coulda been a preacher. And, even though it ain’t no longer Bible days, if I had my way, I’d put special cussin’ books in the Holy Bible. I’d add those sumbiches, and right off the bat I’d have The Book of First Befukatheez. Then, naturally, I’d have to th’ow in a follow-up and call it The Book of Second Befukatheez. And both of them would come right after The Hoodoo Hex of Saint Damyoass and The List of Saint Pisstofus. I’d slap ’ose muthafukkas right up at the front of the whole deal.

Some smart-mouthed sumbich said there weren’t no saints as such in that part of the Bible. Fukkim. There will be in mine. I ain’t waitn around for Jesus and nem to come up with the gotdam saints. Besides, can’t nobody understand half the shit in the damn thing nohow. First Befukatheez, though, would be clear. It’d open right up with, “Holy Shit! Behold!” Then it would go on and get better from there.

Just like you, I expect, I have heard plenty of Bible talk and know how they said things back yonder, stuff like: “Lo, what cometh up the roadeth, muthafukka?” and other such old-timey googah. It wouldn be hard to make any of it sound bible-y, just like the names of the new books themse’ves: Befukatheez I & II. You can’t hardly tell the difference in the way that sounds and what’s in the original Bible. Specially in the one them fukkin Cath’lics uses. Oh Hell-o Bill, I seen it! Miss Helena Ferry’s sister Peekie showed it to me. She’d done been a lot of things, but by then she had decided to be a Cath’lic and thought I might want to consider joinin’ up myse’f. I told her, “No, ma’am, thank you,” and I said I hated church worse’n I hated niggas and bankers—but I didn’t mention planters cause she was one of em—and I guess, because she was, she give me a sharp look and said, Now, Junior Ray, you mussn speak like that about our darkies,” even though she knew sure as shootn-sherry I didn’t have none.

But now they was one wild-ass book in the front part of that Cath’lic Bible she showed me that stuck out in my mind. It was called the Wisdom of Sirach, Son of Jesus. Kiss my ass. If there wuddn no saints in that part of the Bible, there sure as shit wuddn no Jesus neither. So how’d that sumbich get in there? That’s why I say if them Cath’lic muthafukkas can do it, I guess I could too. Plus, I do like the way the names of my new books sound, and for all I know that’s how the whole thing was wrote up in the first place. I can just hear all them old scribes and Pharisees and fukkin apostles settin’ around sayin’, “Hey, muthafukka, what about us callin’ thissun Abbadisticus?”

“Fuk yeah, Mozayuh,” anothern’d say, “And let’s line that coksukka up between the Song of Shazamoab and the gotdam Letter of St. Boogaloo to the Baptists!”

“Suiteth the shiteth outta me-ith, sumbich,” the first one might answer, and that’s how it all coulda went—all the way up to and be-fukkin-YOND the Chevrolation of Saint Cleatus the Frogburp.

I expect I might have to put some thought on what else to include. I can hear a preacher right now, drummin’ up the spirit and getn into it, sayin’, “Now, brothers and sisters, please open your floppy-ass Bibles to First Befukatheez, chapter 4, verse 6:

“And the Lord did have pity on the po’ sumbich who had tore up his life beyond recog-fukkin-NITION, and the Lord sent-eth forth His angels to flap down and give the miserable muthafukka a gotdam bath and a bottle of Mad-dog 20-20, so he—the aforesaid muthafukka—could get through another day of his knee-walkin’, dirt-likkin’ life up and down Highway 61 as well as on the nasty-ass streets of Meffis, especially after he’d done gambled away all his money at the casinos, and had drank up and pissed away every last no-count gumbo acre of buckshot bean-land his granddaddy left him until he, the dikhed in question, flat fukkin didn’t have nothin’ to say for his sorry sef but half a lung, a lump of charcoal for a liver, a pulse, and a twenty-year-old piece-a-junk-ass Cutlass Supreme.”

But, like I say, anytime some of these sumbiches around here get all righteous and green-p’simmon-lipped—I’m talkin’ about whenever these muthafukkas jump all over my ass about “the language” in my fukkin books AND about me bringing up the sheep screwin’ and all—I just look at em and say, “You little diklikkers, yawl woulda done it with rats if they’da been tall enough.” Or, I’d add, if they’da been majorettes. Bygod, you can hear em howl all the way to Itta Bena.

Anyway, I expect even old God Hissef couldn’t do nothin’ to suit sumneez sumbiches.

But, hot-da-um! Majorettes. I didn’t never love football, but I sure as Shubuta[1] wanted me one nem majorettes.

Back when I was in Mhoon County High School, for a while, the dumbass little football team was called the Mallards; though, later when all the greenheads was just about shot out, some of the men in the town—the Boosters—wanted to switch and call the team the Gadwalls, but them lesser ducks didn’t pass the taste-test one bit, so it wuddn long before the team said to fuk that noise and went back to callin’ theyse’ves, once again, the Mhoon County Mallards.

However, when all them planters begun to use chemicals to keep the Johnson grass from growing between the rows, some sumbiches on the St. Leo Junior-ass Chamber of fukkin Commerce piped up and said they wanted to call the football team the Herbicides. That didn’t catch on neither, and so they stuck with the ducks. I remember thinkin’ to myse’f at the time: Well, hell, what’s the matter with callin’ em the Hoe Hands? I didn’t say nothin’ about it because hoe hands, black or white, was about to get just about as scarce as mallards was; plus, very few of them little diklikkers that suited up on the high school football team had ever knowed anything about choppin’ cotton. Not all of em, but a lot of em, was just a buncha townfukkas and one way or another was hooked into them planters.

Finally, though, later on in the 1960s, the niggas come in and took over the public school, and the whites, natchaly, went off and built their own prissy-ass school, which they decided to refer to as a academy, so now if you want to know the truth, I don’t know what none of em call their gotdam teams. Fukkum. I don’t keep up with it. Plus, I don’t know what a bug-bumpin’ academy is, unless it’s to make them chillun talk right, walk right, and don’t ast no questions.

Anyway, a lotta these old goat-pokers want me to use words nice people uses and would want to read—to other fukkin nice people I guess—but my question is what do nice people say when they want to call somebody a muthafukka or a coksukka, or even just a plain old sumbich?

I sure as hell don’t know. I ain’t growed up around no nice people—I try not to hang around with none, and if there are any out there somewhere, they can kiss my four-wheeler. Fuk them sumbiches. They ain’t as nice as they think they are nohow.

Oh, I know them planters is supposed to be nice people. Double-fuk them coksukkas, and the gotdam bankers too. Some of the lawyers is all right, though. I’ll give their ass a slide.

The long and the short of it is I like cussin’. And I like listening to it as much as I like doin’ it. Shoot, I wouldn mind having me one nem CDs with nothin’ but cussin’ on it—so I could stick it in the stereo and play it, and I’d just set there and relax.

Some nem sumbiches—out in California, I think—has CDs of birds fartin’, fish jumpin’, and leaves falling, or the sound of waves, like in the GuffaMexico, which I am about to get to, and they play em at night to go to sleep by. But I—me, personally—I’d be happy layin’ there in the dark with the window unit on just listening to some muthafukka cuss—real soft, of course, I guess you might even say gentle—in one nem Skyway-Hotel-Peabody, uptown radio-announcer voices?[2]

Or I can see puttin’ a cussin’ CD on my alarm clock thing: “Good morning, sumbich. It’s time to drag your mean-old worthless ass outta the bed, and go fix some gotdam eggs.”

There has been a lot of yip yap about me having had Shaw’s notebooks and, now, also about me having a good bit of the stuff Mad Owens wrote during the time he was pussywhipped by Money Scatters and afterwards when he tried to lose hissef in the GuffaMexico, way-off down there on the fukkin Mississippi Guffcoast, out at the ass-fukkin-end of just about ever’thin’, on Horn-gotdam-Island.

Bygod, next to Arkansas—and to the Yazoo Pass, in the Mississippi Delta, back in 1863—that place was as close to Hell itse’f as a sumbich like me would ever want to get.

People say, “Junior Ray ain’t got no business havin’ nothin’ to do with litter-ture. I just say fukkum. I am a historian—and that’s what this book, right here, is about—so I don’t see why me havin’ that other crap around—like Mad’s poems and the book he wrote down there at Horn Island on the beach, in the fukkin sand[3]—is so unusual.

If a sumbich is a historian, that’s part of what it takes to be one. Besides that, in Mad’s case, he knew I would hold on to all the stuff he handed over to me and that I would not let nobody fuk with it unless he give me the word. And in this case he give the word to me and to McKinney, who has already introduced herself to you and who thinks as much of Mad Owens as I do.

McKinney Lake is my fa-fukkin-cilitator—or whatever you want to call it. The publisher decided we’d call her that because this book ain’t really an actual re-search interview like the first book was, with young Mr. Brainsong who wanted to find out about the Delta and get hold of Leland Shaw’s notebooks. He didn’t want to do it no more, so McKinney agreed to help me while I talk the book. For one thing she’s from here and knows damn near as much as I do about the place. Plus I’ve knowed her since we was both pretty young and went to Mhoon County Consolidated. If all women was like McKinney, there wouldn be no problems in the fukkin world. Plus, people would think a whole lot better of women in general. You’ll see what I mean directly.

Anyway, I got all of Mad’s litter-ture in the closet under the stairs wrapped up in my waders, right where I kept Leland Shaw’s notebooks. I don’t wear the waders no more, cause I don’t go walkin’ out th’oo the sloughs, like I used to, to hunt ducks. If I want a duck, I know a dozen muthafukkas that’d be glad to get rid of some they’ve got, which they shot mostly in Arkansas, just so they could make more room in their freezer for other things, like okra . . . and their special chili, which nine times out of ten is made with squirrels and raccoons.

Wouldn nothin’ surprise your ass down here—they was a nigga one time who made hot-tamales, like you’ll find in all ’eez Delta towns, and, Oh Hell-o Bill, people couldn stop talkin’ about how dee-fukkin-licious them hot-tamales was. Well, the sumbich was makin’ em outta mink meat.

He was trappin’ the mink, like a lotta sumbiches did in those days, right on the west edge of town all down along the Sugar Ditch and selling the hides to old Fess Bright who’d ride the train to Meffis and sell em to a dealer on South Main. Fess was white of course.

I found it all out one time when I knocked on the hot-tamale nigga’s door to ast him if he knew who kilt another nigga the week before in the alley behind the Palace Thee-ater. And that’s when I saw what he was usin’ and knew what it was cause I seen the skins and the heads as well.

I never said one word about it. And I wuddn gon’ fuk up the deal he had goin’ with Fess. It coulda gotten complicated. He gimme the name of the sumbich that stabbed Bob Irwin’s top tractor driver, and I figured me not sayin’ nothin’ about him usin’ mink meat from the side of what was at the time the town’s sewage ditch was one way he and I could continue to have a workin’ relationship, which, as you know, in law enforcement, is real fukkin important. Plus, I had free hot-tamales anytime I wanted em.

Speakin’ of cookin’, after that first book that I done with young Mr. Brainsong II, it wuddn long before I noticed that books that has recipes in em do pretty well because women seem to go for em. So I decided to th’ow in two or three of my all-time personal favorites,[4] just in case. I had McKinney put the first one of em at the end of this chapter.

But now, back to the ducks. Fuk wadin’ around in a swamp waitin’ for those little skimmers to decide to fly over on their way to the South Pole or wherever it is nature tells em to go—plus I don’t think very many of em has flew over Mhoon County since the day Voyd pulled out a thing he ordered from a catalog, put it in his mouth, and said he was gon’ show me his “feeding call.”

Whatever that little sumbich told them ducks they was gon’ have for breakfast must have changed their mind forever about settin’ their formerly unsuspectin’ duck-butts down in Mhoon County. Well, that and the fact it’s been so hot and dry.

I used to get a kick out of watchin’ nem good-tastin’ little gliders come into the slough on a cold-ass morning, just at first light, when the water was froze over. They couldn tell it was solid, so when they landed on the ice, they’d go “Whump” and skid a few feet. I promise you those little “scofers” actually looked surprised, if you can imagine what a surprised duck might look like when the sumbich discovers things ain’t what they was quacked-up to be. That’s a joke, sumbich. But the ducks slidin’ in like that wuddn. They really did it.

Even though they ain’t none much no more around St. Leo, ducks is still serious business down here. People have the impression they’s all these rich-ass doctors out there somewhere—mostly in a lot of landowners’ dreams—and the idea is that when these doctors ain’t busy as a coonass eatn crawdads, they’re killin’ ducks.

It’s like, “Oh, doctor, please he’p my ass!”

“Sorry, son, you look exactly like a duck to me, Blam.” And then of course the dumb muthafukka’s family gets the bill. That’s another joke.

Anyway, McKinney loves the you-know-what outta Mad’s poems. Personally, I think poetry is fulla shit—but, I don’t think McKinney is, so if she likes Mad’s poems, then I know there’s something to the sumbiches, because, as I have indicated, McKinney ain’t just any lillo gal—or wuddn, when she was a gal—plus, she lived a long time up the country in New York City at a place called The Barbizon, whatever the fuk that was.

Even though I never saw much need of travelin’ anyplace, I do think it’s good for some people. And I have to admit, I did ’sperience some things when I went down to the GuffaMexico to visit Mad on that datgum island that I wouldna come up on no where else: like water you can’t see across, jellyfish, and stingarees. I would say pelicans, too, but we got them muthafukkas hanging out around the catfish ponds here in the county, along with the gotdam water turkeys.[5] Although, as somebody pointed out, our pelicans up here is white, and down there they’s a good many brown ones. But as far as I’m concerned a fukkin pelican is a pelican; I don’t give a shit what race he is.

Speakin’ of that, I know there’s a lot of people that call me a racist. Fukkum. I ain’t. I’m just a sumbich that uses the kind of words people don’t like to hear because the words ain’t long and wiggly they way they want em to be. I mean, I don’t have anything especially against most Pekkawoods, Niggas, Greasers, Chinamens, Jews, A-rabs, Eye-fukkin-talians, and them gotdam Cath’lics, nor boy nor girl Queers, neither. Anybody that knows me, knows me damn well and maybe better than I know myself. Yet I do admit I have said some hard things about Planters and Bankers. But, them, and all the rest of those sumbiches I just mentioned—every fukkin one of em—I reckon they can take care of themse’vs without frettin’ over the likes of me. And if they can’t . . . then can’t nothin’ in this world ever help em.

Okra Winfrey

Take a pound and a half of fresh—or frozen—okra, whole or cut-up, along with lots of white and/or yellow onions and canned whole tomatoes, which you can mush up as you go along. Add some chopped, tender, white celery shoots from the inside of the stalk, but th’ow away the leaves.

Dump it all into a big-ass skillet with a little olive oil—not too much because there’s gon’ be a lot of juice from the stuff you’ve already th’owed in there—then cook it for a good while, stirring it around every now and then. Add a lot of garlic. Use the powder.

Later, after it cooks down, and when you feel like it, add two pounds of fresh, peeled shrimp, and some nice big scallops. You can use frozen crawfish meat. But be sure the crawdads are Americans and not those gotdam Chinese-ass muthafukkas. You can’t tell what them sumbiches might be! Plus, if you want to, you can use chicken, but I wouldn because it’s too fukkin ordinary, and you’ll want to avoid that.

Mix it all up, and let it simmer on low heat—and even though it duddn take a lot of time to cook shrimp, make sure the shrimp gets down in there and rubs up against the other stuff for at least fifteen minutes, after which, cut the fire down and keep everything simmering, with a top not on all the way (so some of the steam can get out), for a fairly long time, maybe an hour or two—or more—on real low-ass heat. And don’t mess with it.

Then cut off the stove, unload the whole thing on top of some of that unpolished brown rice from Arkansas, and eat it—with, of course, salt and cayenne or, you know, salt and . . . Crystal Pepper Sauce.

[1] A small town in southeast Mississippi, definitely not in the Delta.

[2] In the Upper Delta, during the 1940s and ’50s, people listened late at night to their radios, and heard an announcer from one of Memphis’s principal stations say something like: “And now from the Skyway Ballroom High Atop Hotel Peabody, we bring you Les Brown and his Band of Renown.”

[3] Mad wrote it out on something else first.

[4] This is one of Junior Ray’s greatest fictions. He has never cooked up anything in his life except in his imagination, and the reader is advised to proceed with caution.

[5] Cormorants.