Читать книгу The Yazoo Blues - John Pritchard - Страница 11

Personal time?! What the fuk do you mean personal time? All time is personal,” I told that dumb muthafukka. Course, he’s my supervisor, and I ought not to talk to him thatta way, but the silly sumbich went to some kind of management school up the country, in Pennsylvania, I think, and it gave him a fukked-up sense of reality. He believes there are several kinds of time: personal time, company time, sick time, and vacation time. Oh, yeah, and down time. What an ass’ole.

Like everybody else that come here with these casinos, he’s a Yankee, and those sumbiches NEVER know what time it is. And yet that’s all they think about. They’re down-to-the-minute kind of people. The trouble is they handle time like it was a handful of chips—stackin’ it up, countin’ it out, and tryin’ to save some. They don’t realize time ain’t in no danger and that it’s them that’s runnin’ out and that they, themse’ves, is only a moment, kind of like a raindrop.

My supervisor’s young, but I don’t think any amount of time, personal or otherwise, is going to improve him. Also, he’s one nem fly fishermen, if you know what I mean. But I don’t hold that against him too much. I don’t give a damn if he cornholes armadillos as long as he lets me take off when I need to, within reason naturally. All in all he’s not a bad guy, just a little silly.

The thing is I’ve got to go over to Sledge. You remember I’ve told you about my girlfriend over there. Anyway, she’s having a big do for her daughters and her grandchildren, and she especially wants me there, so I can talk to her oldest daughter’s middle boy about a career in law enforcement. She says she thinks he’s got what it takes and that he’s a lot like me. I didn’t touch that.

But I will say one thing: Being in law enforcement most of my life taught me a shit pot of a lot about what’s what. I guess I seen just about everything you could think of and then some you couldn, like the man with the snake up his ass.

That situation come about late one summer night out on the Cut-Off[1] when Voyd and me was patrollin’ that part of the county, and we heard there was a party out there. Other’n we just wanted to make sure hadn’t nothin’ got out of hand, we didn’t particularly think much about it because bunches of Meffis folks had parties out there all the fukkin time, and this was long before there was any casinos.

Anyway, just as we topped the levee there at the Tippen place, here come the biggest, fattest sumbich you ever saw, nekkid as a porkchop, his hands clawin’ at the air in front of him, runnin’ up the levee on the road from the other side straight-ass into the headlights of the patrol car. I slammed on the brakes, cause I thought that coksukka was gonna dent up the grill, and I didn’t want no more of that kind of shit to deal with that month. But, he swerved off to his left and come hollerin’ like a muthafukka by Voyd on the passenger side.

“Gotdam,” said Voyd.

“Gotdam,” I said back. “We better turn around and see what the hell’s the matter with that sumbich.”

We woulda radioed for some help, but in those days there wuddn nobody to radio to but us—well, we could’ve called up the highway patrolman on the phone, but there wuddn no phones, neither, where we was. Plus, Voyd and me was on his shit list for a number of reasons, and he said if we called him one more time, he was gon’ tell Sheriff Holston we didn’t know our butts from a soupbowl and get us fired. Well, get me fired—hell, Voyd was basically just ridin’ with me and, even though he’d been made a constable, wuddn, like me, a real full-time deputy on the county payroll.

So we knew we had to handle the situation ourselves. But, you know, there’s just something about a six-foot nekkid fat man runnin’ around in the dark out in the middle of nowhere that turns your blood to Kool-Aid, especially when we saw he had a snake up his ass—we never did get to the bottom of that. That’s a joke, muthafukka. Well, it is and it iddn.

Anyhow, there we was. And there he was, with a live snake wavin’ out of his butt. So I said, “Go apprehend the suspect, Voyd.”

It didn’t make no difference that Voyd wuddn a real deputy. There wuddn nobody out there that time of night on the levee in the fukkin dark except him and me and that huge sumbich runnin’ up the road with the tail of a big snake whippin’ thissa way and that around his backside, either tryin’ to crawl in or crawl out; we couldn tell which. Plus, when we run up on this sumbich, or vice versa, we never did make it ’cross the levee to check whether there was any kind of party over there.

“Go appre-fukkin-hend him yourse’f,” Voyd said. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere near that coksukka—what kinda suspect is he anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“If he turns sideways,” said Voyd, “maybe we can shoot the gotdam thing.”

And I said, “Voyd, you couldn hit your own dick with a brickbat, much less a gotdam snake flappin’ around outta somebody else’s butt, and I ain’t gettin’ nowhere near him neither.”

“Well, I don’t reckon we can just go home and not do nothin’,” Voyd more or less suggested.

“No, we gotta do somethin’,” I said. But right then I couldn for the life of me come up with what that might be, so Voyd and I just followed along behind the nekkid fat fellow with the snake stuck up his T-hiney, a-wavin’ back and forth like he had a long-ass tail.

Fortunately, the sumbich stayed on the gravel and didn’t cut out across no fields. It looked to me like he was goin’ to run hollerin’ and carryin’ on, jibber-jabberin’ all the way back to St. Leo—which would have been an award-winning achievement that, for him or, I guess, for most other three-hunnuhd-pound white men dancin’ around in their birthday suits with snakes in their ass, I could not bring myself to feel overly optimistic about.

The truth is I was kind of hoping he might just die with a heart attack, and then Voyd and me coulda come out the next day and discovered him. Maybe by that time the snake woulda been gone.

Also, the snake wuddn no skinny blue racer. We decided it was a king snake—which was the good part, though it don’t speak well for that type of snake. Yet it was good for the suspect because, as you know, king snakes ain’t poisonous. But Holy Shit it seemed like the thing was big-around as a Mason jar and longer than Burl Ives’s belt, at least a third of which was hidin’ up inside that goggle-eyed sumbich who was busy tryin’ to outrun hissef, the snake, and his own ass-end after twelve o’clock at night on a country road. Speakin’ as a law-enforcement professional, I don’t know who had the most to worry about, him or the rep-tile.

I wouldna never thought, at the time, things would turn out okay in the end—that’s a joke, too; wait a minute, I got to burp—but they did.

Finally the nekkid fat man reached around and grabbed the snake and pulled it out of his ass. He stood there in the headlights of the patrol car for a second or two holdin’ the po’ snake up in the air in front of him while he was still screamin’ and sayin’ words neither Voyd nor me could understand, and then he th’owed the thing off into a bean field. Voyd said, “Thank you Jesus,” and I said, “Fuk yeah.” But I spect the snake was more relieved than me and Voyd was.

We crammed the terrified Meffis sumbich in the back seat, and hauled his ass on in to the little hospital there in St. Leo. The next day, Doc McCandliss said he ain’t never seen anything like it. He said the fellow had some “rips” in his rectum, and that if Voyd and me hadn’t told him what had happened, he’da thought the sumbich had been captured by the Turkish army, whatever the fuk that means. Doc McCandliss further stated it took a long time to calm the man down, but that after he did stop shakin’ and started makin’ some sense, the sumbich swore to Doc that he did not know how the snake got up his butt.

He was a Meffis fellow, natchaly, and claimed he had gone to sleep on a couch outchonda at his trailer, which was up on pilings like a buncha them others there by the Cut-Off, cause the water can rise awful high in the spring, and that before he lay down on the sofa-bed he had done took hissef a nice hot shower, and he thought he’d just lay there on top of the sheets and look at the TV for a while. But, because it was already late when he got to the Cut-Off from up in Meffis, and even though it was warm that night but not especially humid, he said he didn’t want to crank up the air conditioning till he really had to, and he thought he could catch a breeze comin’ through the screens. It seemed like a pretty good idea to him; plus, he was glad at last to be down there beside the peaceful waters of the Mississippi River Cut-Off outside St. Leo and not still up in the city with all the noise and dangerous robbin’ and rapin’ and carjackin’ and senseless-ass killin’ in addition to all the other everyday crappage that goes on there.

Anyway, he told Doc he went sound to sleep and was dreamin’ he had done found the love of his life. Doc says the fellow did not go into no detail about what that was, but that, after layin’ there for a while, the sumbich said he begun to wake up a little and to feel like somethin’ wuddn right, and it was at that point he discovered he had a snake up his butt.

After that, he said he didn’t remember a whole lot until Voyd and me picked him up in the patrol car. I believe the sumbich. I wouldna wanted to remember none of it neither. And now, he said to Doc, he seriously thought he might want to sell his trailer and not never come back down to the Cut-Off or anywhere in the whole fukkin Delta no more as long as he lived. And I wouldn neither if a snake had crawled up my ass.

Over the years I’ve thought about this more’n once, and, frankly, when you take into consideration where he was and what things are like down here, there ain’t no need not to give him credit for what all he said. You know, you get in them woods over there across the levee, and anything might happen to you. I don’t care if you are up in a trailer on twelve-foot pilings. I wouldn doubt nothin’ nobody said about stuff over in there. And even though now some of them woods is all done up like Lost-fukkin-Vegas, the real reality behind the bright lights is that them casinos are gamblin’ with somethin’ a lot wilder than a king snake on a couch; those muthafukkas is shootin’ craps with the Mississippi River.

That reminds me they was another time, way back before that, when Sheriff Holston telephoned and woke my ass up one morning about first light, on December 22nd, 1964.

Now, right here, hold your potatoes, and don’t fuk with me. I aint forgot about gettin’ to the part about how I became a historian and come to know all about the Yankee blue-suits’ Yazoo Pass Expedition, but there’s still some more important background information concerning my life in law enforcement that I have to tell you about before I can get to the real, old-timey historical part. Which is where I’m headed.

I guess what you don’t know—cause you’re not a historian—is that background is what is—it’s the onliest thing that is definitely set and done while the rest ain’t nothin’ more’n pure-dee speculation, or hope, or wish, and such diddlyass crap as that. But the past is it, sumbich. It’s the fukkin frontier. It ain’t what was, it’s what am. And without it, you and me and every page in this book wouldn be nothin’ but a blank.

So when I answered the phone, Sheriff Holston said: “Junior Ray, meet me out at Slab Town quick as you can.” Then he hung up. Sumpn bout it give me one nem feelings like you get when some muthafukka in a movie is hangin’ by his fingers off a window ledge on a tall building or if you was settin’ in a bathtub and some sumbich dumped a bucket full of fishin’ worms on you.

I called Voyd—this was not long before he got to be a constable, but technically, I guess you could say from a common law standpoint, he was almost as official a law officer as I was, but not quite. Anyway, I picked him up in his yard and seen Sunflower peekin’ out the window. She’d done pushed the shade to the side, and I just barely made her out. But I spied her. And I knew she was sayin’, “Junior Ray, you gotdam muthafukka,” under her bad-ass-big-thinga-bobbakew-before-she-went-to-bed breath.

I can’t help it, but I always think about Sunflower and the crap she’s pulled on Voyd like the time he didn’t know where she was until a deputy up in Meffis called his house and told him Sunflower was in jail for bein’ “intoxicated in a public place.” The public place turned out to be a lover’s lane out on the east outskirts of the city, where she was settin’ in the back seat of a brand-new used Lincoln Mark VIII with a Meffis Cadillac salesman, who I guess was givin’ her a test drive.

It was after dark, and a Shelby County sheriff’s officer come up on em and shined his light inside the vehicle. And there they was, both of em, her and the salesman, bolt upright and ram-rod straight, drunker’n jaybirds eatin’ hackberries, and it wuddn just that neither of em could walk a straight line—what it was was that Sunflower had both her legs jammed down in just one leg of her Capri pants.

Po’ ol’ Voyd. I truly do feel sorry for the sumbich. Hell, he’s my friend.

Anyhow, we scratched off with the blue and red lights blappin’, hit 61, and drove south and then, not far below the bridge at Broke Pot Mound, we turned straight east toward what folks called Slab Town, which was not no town at all, just one lillo country store built on a slab—instead of up off the ground like most things down here are—and another slab, with nothin’ built on it, right next to the store, both of em facin’ a gravel road that runs east and west, from Askew to where it hit the levee at Yookaloosa[2] Brake, and vice-versa. Of course, there wuddn much at Askew neither, and even today there ain’t nothing to see a-tall when you get to the levee. Shoot, the gravel don’t even go up onto the levee, the whole thing just turns into a rutty little dirt road at the base of it, from which, if it ain’t too wet, you can go up on top of the levee and ride north till you come to Austin or south till you get to a blacktop road that’ll take you back to 61 by way of Dundee. Either way, you ain’t been nowhere.

But at Slab Town, there wuddn but about six houses and an old caboose fixed up to be a fukkin Sunday school. The houses, if you wanted to call em houses, was strung out along the north and south sides of the gravel road, goin’ east, between the piss-ant store and the caboose, which wuddn no more’n three-tenths of a mile total.

Now, don’t get me wrong. These raggedy sumbiches livin’ out there wuddn no niggas. They was white.

Anyway, Voyd and me come roarin’ up and seen Sheriff Holston’s big-ass Ford parked on the side of the road on the other end of the bridge, with his lights all goin’ so there we all was, out in the middle of nowhere with our lights and all, makin’ quite a sight. And Voyd and me still didn’t know what we come there for. But as we slid on up beside Sheriff Holston’s official vehicle, we knew something was mighty wrong.

“What the fuk!” Voyd said. And when we got out of the patrol car and walked up to where Sheriff Holston was standin’ in the middle of the gravel, we got the picture: There wuddn no Slab Town there.

Over in a little field knee-high in dry grass and cuckaburrs, across from where the store had been, we seen Preacher Flickett. He lived in St. Leo and was one nem Piscob’ls. Anyway, he was standin’ in the weeds with his face turned up toward the sky and his arms helt up like he was fixin’ to catch something.

“He’s not going anywhere, Junior Ray,” Sheriff Holston said, “but why don’t you walk out there and see if the minister would like to come on over here and rest for a while inside your patrol car.” I done what the sheriff ast me to, and Reverend Flickett didn say a word or do nothin’ impolite whatsoever. He just walked beside me back to the car. Voyd, who was standin’ there by it, lookin’ like he’d been hit in the head with a REA[3] light pole, blinked two or three times, closed his mouth, and opened the back door. Brother Flickett got in, and that was all there was to it.

The long and the short of it was that the Shepherd had blowed up his flock and had wiped out the whole so-called town. He done it with dynamite, which it turns out he had collected over a period of time from one planter’s commissary here and from another’s pickup there. It was a wonder he didn’t blow hissef up months before that night.

What it was, he had been goin’ out in the county to some of the wilder places and preachin’ and teachin’ his Piscob’l shit, which I am told is mostly sort of quiet and dignified and not rockin’ and rollin’ like what some of them other stump-jumpin’, Bible-thumpin’, more holy-rollerish sumbiches would th’ow out back then to them beat-down po’ whites who lived half-out in the middle of the gotdam woods and who musta thought, somehow, their pitiful-ass souls had a chance of goin’ somewhere besides Hell—which, frankly, compared with how they lived, woulda looked like a stroke of good luck and mighta seemed no worse than a day choppin’ cotton.

It was the same with Elvis. He thought that house of his was a mansion. It ain’t. It’s just a house.

Anyway, Reverend Flickett, the Piscob’l sumbich, felt like he wuddn gettin’ nowhere with the clientele. He’d tell em they better shape up, and they’d just set there and yawn. But then he seen the light, even if they didn’t. He was gon’ have to scare the shit out of em to get em to take his Piscob’l ass seriously, even though, somebody said, he didn’t really want none of them cootie-bit muthafukkas ever to decide to join up and become Piscob’ls. And the more he tried to do the right thing but, you might say, with the wrong objective in mind, the more confused that pitiful muthafukka become. Personally, I’ll lay money he meant well, but you know yoursef, whenever anybody says some sumbich “tried to do the right thing,” it normally means he was dumber’n shit and had fukked up real bad.

The story come out bit by bit. He had begun to tell those transplanted hillbilly muthafukkas that the end of the gotdam world was comin’, and just to th’ow em into high gear, the sumbich put a date on it: December 22nd, 1964.

So the coksukka kept on warnin’ em: “The world is goin’ to end—on December the twenty-second in this the year of Our Lord, nineteen hunnuhd and sixty-fukkin-four!” And then, the word was, even though the Reverend Flickett was a Piscob’l, he neverthe-fukkin-less tried his hand at shoutin’, and they say the sumbich would drill his beady eyes into them pekkawoods and holler, “Repent! You sorry sonzabitches!”

People all said that for a Piscob’l, he was more like a Baptist. The Baptists, natchaly, said, “Bullshit,” that he wuddn no such a thing. Personally I don’t give a fishfuk. I’m just tellin’ you what happened and what I heard.

Anyhow, apparently late—late—in the middle of the night, the one that was gonna come up the morning of December 22nd, 19 and 64—he got a coil of electrical wire, some blasting caps, and all the dynamite he had collected and hid away underneath the Piscob’l Church in St. Leo, and very syste-fukkin-matically made nine bundles of nine sticks each. He later told the doctor at the state insane asylum down at Whitfield he called em his “Triple Trinities.” After he stuck the blasting caps in em, he attached thirty-five to forty-foot wires. Then, in the dark, without no lights, he drove slowly down the gravel road, stoppin’ in front of each lillo shotgun, where he’d dismount and ever so tippy-toe cast one nem bundles of dynamite up underneath the house, leavin’ one end of the long wire next to the road—or off in the ditch beside it. And since the store was built on a slab—instead of up off the ground like the houses was—he couldn th’ow nothin’ under it, so he broke the glass in the front door and lobbed the package inside; after the blast there was gotdam baloney and potted meat and and vy-eena sausages and them real red, strung-together weenies all strowed out fifty fukkin yards in ever’ direction.

Anyway, when he had done th’owed the dynamite inside the store, he drove back down the road and hooked all the wires from the bundles to one long-ass, main wire, one end of which, when he had drove off far enough, he looped around the negative pole on his car battery.

I don’t know if he waited a little bit and thought about it or what, because I don’t know when he got finished puttin’ everything together, but about the time the first feelark[4] farted or the first goose honked, Pastor Flickett, you might say, completed the circuit, and the world ended sho-nuff then and there for Slab Town.

I heard the boom way-ass up where I was in St. Leo, but I was so sleepy I didn’t pay it no mind. I thought it was a freight train pickin’ up cars off the side track.

Dundee Hamlin not only heard the boom, he seen the flash. The way he told it he’d been up all night wonderin’ what was goin’ to happen to his “way of life” if it was ever a nigga on the Ole Miss football team. I guess, if the sumbich had a mind left, which he don’t, he’d know now. He’s in a nursin’ home down in Clarksdale. I seen him about a year ago. He looked like a little piece of paper.

Anyway the thing rattled Dundee’s windows and shook his wife’s teacups around, so he phoned up Sheriff Holston, and you know the rest.

I know, though, to Dundee Hamlin, the loss of Slab Town wuddn nowhere near as bad as the possibility there’d ever be niggas on the Ole Miss football team.

Of course, they was thirty-three people kilt—eighteen of em children of one size or another—and seven dogs, plus a barrow hog that happened to be inside one of the houses so he wouldn get stole. It was a fukkin mess.

But I’ll say one thing about that Piscob’l preacher. You could go to the bank on what he might tell you. Plus, it’s a funny thing—after the story of all that come out in court, nobody at all, not even the kin of the Slab Town dead, wanted to put him in the gas chamber. Seemed like everybody just got to thinkin’ about other things, so they sent his ass off to the crazy house at Whitfield, and, unless he died, I guess he’s there to this very fukkin day, standin’ in the grass with his eyes on Heaven and his arms helt up like he’s gon’ catch something. Maybe he will.

And in all of it, didn’t nobody even once think the niggas had done it even though there was one family of niggas just a little bit north of what was the store, livin’ in a dogtrot that didn’t get blowed up, on a turnrow runnin’ alongside a little bye-oh.[5] Didn’t nobody—nobody at all—think niggas had kilt all them unfortunate muthafukkas. And I can see why, too. A nigga wouldn do something like that. The thing about niggas is, they may be niggas, but they ain’t crazy like white people. You can pretty much always trust a nigga not never to do something like blow up a row of houses on a gravel road, but you can’t ever be sure about a white man, and if you’ve got one that believes in virgin births, risin’ from the dead, and God punishin’ two nekkid people for wantn an education, you need to watch his ass ever’ minute of the day.

Another thing about niggas is them sumbiches’ll agree with you all fukkin day long, with a gotdam endless-ass string of sho-dos, awhn-haws, and ay-mens, and then not go out and do a thing about none of it. In one way, I guess, them sumbiches have become experts on how to manage a white man, not that you’re gon’ find a whole lot of white men who’ll agree with that, but it’s still the gospel fukkin truth.

Niggas. I’ve tried to figure it out, but so far I ain’t come up with nothin’. What is it, I ast myse’f, that makes them so different? And no matter how hard I try to think it out I don’t never get nowhere at all.

For instance, I can’t name nothin’ they do that we don’t. They knock up their girl friends, we knock up ours. They shoot craps and kill each other, and we do, too. When we was little, we played baseball, and so did them sumbiches. Hell, we played it together. I can’t think of one thing they do or did that we don’t do or didn’t—except maybe two things, and one is that they are better at singin’ and don’t look like they’ve been dead a week when they do it, like we do, and the other thing is, and I can vouch for this, they didn’t fuk as many barnyard animals as we did. Or possibly do.

Now, them white-ass Baptist muthafukkas’ll talk to you all day long about how God is love and that’s why he kilt Jesus, just to show how much He loves ever’ body, and them whites’ll get all misty-eyed about bein’ saved and how they’re filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit and all—and also how it’s better to give than to take-the-money-and-run kin’a shit, and after they’re thoo, you’ll find out them sumbiches hate ever’ thin’ that walks and don’t talk like them.

Before the truth had got out, Miss Ellen Fremedon and her brother Granville swore it was the Communists that blowed up Slab Town. So did the president of the Rotary Club, Lofty Thawtts, who, if you want to know the truth, had been hipped on that subject ever since I could remember and who was the one way back yonder that got the high school to make us all sign a gotdam loyalty oath.

I recall I swore I hadn’t never been a member of the W.E.B. Du Bois Boys Club. I was damn sure of that. And I still don’t know what the fuk it was.

Miss Ellen Fremedon, though, and her brother Granville was definitely a couple’a cases. They was twins, and they lived together down south of Clayton. And here’s the funny thing: Granville was a little bitty fukka, skinny as a willow switch, but he could eat like a fukkin Massey-Harris combine gobblin’ up a bean field.

People talked all the time about how Miss Ellen would fix him whole chickens and whole pies and whole cakes, and Granville would down them muthafukkas like they was peanuts; yet, he never gained a pound. Doctor Austin once said Granville was an “anomaly.” I never knew what Doc meant by that, but Granville was a white man, and I don’t think there was no foreigners in the family.

It was something to see that skinny sumbich eat. I seen him scarf down a en-tire turkey once—plus all the dressing and the candied yams and a whole bunch of mince-meat pies, all of which was enough, somebody said—and I believe it—to feed two Ole Miss guards and a tackle.

As far as I know he didn’t even sneak a poot after that. But later, maybe ten years later, Miss Ellen’s housemaid found him dead, settin’ at the dinner table with his arms down to his side and a whole sirloin steak hangin’ out of his mouth just like he’d swallowed all of a beaver except for the tail. He had apparently picked the thing up in both hands, chomped down on one end of it, and blowed a blood vessel at the same time. If that is the case, I hate to think of what’s gon’ happen to me.

Anyhow, at first there was some talk about the communists and how none of em believed in God and such. Then, wouldn you know it, when it come out a preacher done it, didn’t nobody want to believe that. And it took a while for that to take, so to speak.

But when it did, most people was certain it had to be the Piscob’l fellow because, unlike the rest of the churches in St. Leo that crowded in so many fukkin people of a Sunday that it just about butt-sprung the walls, them Piscob’ls only had about twenty-five sumbiches who went to their church, which was just a lillo thing settin’ back up under some white oaks on a side street in the middle of town.

Plus, as everybody said, too, them Piscob’ls drunk real wine when they had their “Lord’s Supper,” unlike the fukkin Cath’lics which I hear drinks blood with theirs. It’s no wonder those few pope-ass sumbiches didn’t even have a church in all of Mhoon County and had to go outta town ever’ Sunday if they wanted to endure settin’ in one. They looked Cath’lic, too, if you know what I mean.

Well, that’s the kind of stuff you deal with in law enforcement. I just wish there was more of it.

A minute ago I mentioned old Lofty Thawtts. Lofty was one of these men that always seemed like one thing but was really not like anything you could ever imagine. For instance, there he was, back yonder, the president of the St. Leo Rotary Club, a position obviously in which a sumbich is supposed to have a lot of fukkin sense. But hang on, Sloopy. Lofty had his house and his land and his fukkin car and ever’thin’ else insured by a company that called itself a Christian insurance company—The Resurrection Insurance Group, I think it was. Anyhow, years and years later, it come out that not a crow-fartin’ thing he ever put in a claim for was honored because the Group told him, no matter what he filed for—theft of his pickup, a grease fire in his kitchen, some sumbich in a house across the road from his woods gon’ sue Lofty’s ass because a bullet from Lofty’s brother-in-law’s thirty-ought-six went through the neighbor’s bedroom wall and into the pecky-cypress-paneled den where it kilt the cat sleepin’ on top of the color TV—no matter what it was, them sumbiches up in Chicago, at The Resurrection Insurance Group, told him wuddn none of it covered cause it was all a act’a God. And, Lofty, that dumb-ass old Jesus-bit sumbich, just shuffled his feet and said, “Yassuh.”

But the most Loftiest thing of all was what I learned from Mr. Reitoff the CPA down at Spaniard’s Point. Lofty got in trouble with the government for cheatin’ on his taxes. Mr. Reitoff had to come up to the courthouse with Lofty and talk to some serious looking muthafukkas from the IRS, and they spent a long-ass time in the big room the Board of Supervisors uses when they meet.

I don’t suppose Mr. Reitoff woulda told personal stuff about Lofty to just anybody. But me, bein’ a’ officer of the law and all—for some reason people just seem to tell me whatever’s in their heads—I guess Mr. Reitoff felt like it was okay to say sumpn. He was maddern a wet cat too when he said it. Anyway, he died some years ago.

Plus, too, like Jesus, he was a Jew. However, I have to tell you, with all these preachers and people around here that are waitn for old Jesus’s Second Comin’, I guaran-damn-tee you a whole helluva lot of em would rather look up in the sky and see Mr. Reitoff floatin’ down to save em.

Anyhow, we was outside the City Barber Shop, and he said, “Junior Ray, I told Lofty not to do what he did, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t go right straight out and do it, and I had already done up his taxes and had signed my name on the form!”

“Well,” I said, “whatever it was, he sho made you mad.” I really wanted to say, “What’d the old fuk-bump do?” But I figured Mr. Reitoff was just about to come out with it anyway. And he did.

“Junior Ray,” he said, “I’ll swear and be damned if I’ve ever had to deal with anything like this in all my professional life! It was a case of double fraud, pure and simple, and because of the position he put me in, I’ll never know why I even tried to help him after he was caught.” Mr. Reitoff went on to say that Lofty tried to “deduct” what he’d been spendin’ up there in Meffis on those old whores at the King Cotton Hotel fore they tore it down and, after that, in the Out-n-Inn Minit Motel over on Brooks Road. Old Lofty wrote it all in under “Medical Expenses” and said it was for his “mental health.” Hell, it’s a wonder the old sumbich didn’t catch hissef some germs big as a gotdam lizard.

It was easy to see Mr. Reitoff’s point’a view and why he was upset. Yet, I could see Lofty’s side of it, too. The thing is, knowin’ the world as I do, it ought not to surprise no one that there’s whores walkin’ up and down Brooks Road or anyplace else, but it sho oughta surprise a sumbich, if he got a good look at em, that anybody would ever go buy anything from em. Anyhow, as much of a dikhed as I always thought Lofty was, I felt sorry for the po’ bastard, cause there he was livin’ all alone and all and gettin’ old, and pretendin’ to be sucha upstandin’ muthafukka. It had to be hard on him.

He was lucky, though, that Mr. Reitoff talked to the I-R-S’s. They let Lofty off with a warnin’ that if he ever tried anything like that again, they was gon’ see that he went down to the federal pen at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, and I think that scared the shit out of him, especially the part about goin’ to Alabama, which is funny because all his life he’d been worried about goin’ to Hell.

His peabrain grandson went to college down at Wetland State outside of Rollin’ Fork and near bout got th’owed out cause they caught him drunk one night on the new football field tryin’ to mow the astro-turf.

Things go where they go, and it don’t never stop, does it?

I ran into Lofty a while back. I’da thought the sumbich’d been dead by now. He’s got to be up in his nineties, or over a hunnuhd, hell, I don’t know. Anyway, when I come up on him, I said, “How yew, Lofty?”

He didn’t blink or mumble a fukkin word, and he didn’t look at me, neither. But when I passed him and he was about a foot behind me, I heard him say: “My stool is firm again.”

And I thought, damn, for ol’ Lofty, dead’d be a step up.

[1] An artificial ox-bow in the river created by the U.S. Corps of Engineers in 1942, with TNT.

[2] Choctaw/Chickasaw: yuka (slave) + loosa (black) = Black Slave Brake.

[3] FDR’s Rural Electrification Authority, which finally brought electricity to the Delta in 1935.

[4] field lark

[5] bayou, bayous.