Crossroad Blues

Here, below the fold, is my contribution to International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.

It's the story that I wrote in response to the call for submissions for The Horns of Elfland, edited by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, and Donald G. Keller. After sitting on it for a long time, they passed on it, and I never got around to shopping it anywhere else.

Time has passed this story by. The landscape of the Mississippi Delta has been transformed by the casinos of Tunica, which was nothing but a tiny dot on the map when I wrote it. The story deals reasonably well with the issue of cultural appropriation, but I am extremely embarassed to admit that a key character is a Magical Negro.

I hope you enjoy it anyway.

Crossroad Blues

Even in the middle of the night it was too hot. The air was still and humid. Sweat plastered Dave Lane's shirt to his torso and his hair to his forehead. He was tired and frustrated. He wanted to be home, or to be in New Orleans, or maybe Daytona Beach. He wanted to be spending Spring Break anywhere but here: sitting on the ground at a deserted intersection in Nowhere, Mississippi, miles from the nearest comfortable bed. His car had a flat tire, and the batteries had died in the only flashlight they had. They weren't going anywhere until morning.

Rob Owens, Dave's roommate, sat beside him, tuning his guitar, picking strings and twiddling the tuning pegs. This whole trip was Rob's idea, for Rob's benefit. Rob the musician, the stone crazy blues hound, had wanted to drive south through the Mississippi Delta to hear, and maybe learn, authentic Delta blues. But to do that, he needed a car, Dave's car. He had sold Dave on the trip as being both fun and a profound musical experience. So far, it had been neither. Dave did the work (like trying to change a tire in the dark), and all Rob did was play his guitar and give him grief. Dave was just Rob's beast of burden.

Rob strummed a chord, and seemed to be satisfied with it. "I hope you realize just how seriously cool this is," he said.

"No, I don't," Dave said dryly. "How cool is it?"

"Think of it! Here I am playing my guitar at a Delta crossroads at midnight. According to the legend, the Devil's supposed to come by and teach me killer licks in exchange for my soul. The blues experience doesn't get any more authentic than this."

"Is that so? Maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be then."

Rob didn't answer, but began to play Eric Clapton's famous riff for his cover of "Crossroads" in the key of A. He sang the song, thin and unconvincing at first, the night's open air swallowing the sound of his voice. As he worked through the verses of Robert Johnson's song, though, he seemed to be taken by their understated terror. The anxiety that infected his voice made it stronger and surer, for he now sang the fearful words with conviction. He played his guitar without ornament, simply picking out the riff on the bass strings while he sang.

Rob's music was the reason Dave submitted to his pack saddle. Music mattered to Dave, a lot. Until he moved in with Rob, though, it had never occurred to him that music was something that ordinary people could make for themselves. He still had difficulty believing that people who made music were ordinary. Rob amazed Dave with his guitar every bit as much as he irritated him with his self-centered arrogance. Rob was a good player, but he was also, in Dave's mind, unbelievably casual about it. Frequently, while studying, Rob would read and play his guitar at the same time. If Dave hadn't seen that almost every day, he would have thought it was impossible.

Rob finished the song with a flourish, strumming four hard E7 chords and resolving with a final strummed A7. He took and let out a deep breath, and then was silent.

"I like that," Dave said. "You played that very well."

"You think so?" said Rob, shyly. "I wasn't doing anything fancy at all."

"No, but you were doing it right. Simple can be good." Dave took a breath before speaking. It was time to tell Rob what was on his mind. "Rob?" he said.

"Yeah?"

"This trip has been a washout. What do you say about packing it in tomorrow and just heading down to New Orleans to have some fun? You know, seeing Bourbon Street, eating good food, partying, having a good time."

"What do you mean, a washout? What about West Helena tonight? The music there was terrific, just what we're looking for. The genuine article."

"Yeah, right," Dave said, "the genuine article. I swear, the guys in that bar were going to kill us. They sure 'nough didn't want no white boys in their place," he said in an imitation of local dialect. Then he spoke normally: "And I didn't think the music was so hot. If that's what we were looking for, then we were better off looking for it back in Memphis."

"Memphis! Christ! Beale Street was nothing but a big tourist trap. The music there wasn't a lick better than anything we can hear back home. And I don't even want to think about Graceland. Anyway, I was kind of hoping we would stop in Greenville. There's supposed to be a great blues scene there."

"Forget it! I've had it with this 'In Search of the Blues' thing! It just isn't working. We can't connect with anybody, nobody wants to talk to us. They just plain hated us in West Helena tonight. Do you really think we'll get a better reception in Greenville? Do you really want to keep beating your head against this wall, over and over and over again? Look at where it's got us: stuck here for the night!"

"Is that my fault?" Rob said. "I didn't drive the car over the junk in the road; it wasn't my flashlight in the trunk with dying batteries; and I wasn't the one who lost the nuts for the wheel in the dark."

Dave sat for a moment, just breathing. What Rob had said wasn't fair and wasn't the point. Rob was his better in a verbal duel, however. He had better withdraw from the field before he lost too much. "Sorry, Rob," he said, "I'm just tired and fed up. I'd probably feel different if we could sleep in the motel tonight."

"Yeah, well, I know what you mean. I'd rather sleep in a bed, even one of those hard things at the motel, than on a car seat. Listen, I'm sorry you feel that way. We don't have to stop in Greenville. I was just saying that I wished we could, that's all. But, hey, let's make the best of what we've got, okay?" He didn't wait for Dave's answer, but brushed a slow D-major arpeggio on his guitar, and started in on the Rolling Stones' arrangement of "Love in Vain." He must have been affected by the conversation, for he stumbled through the chord changes, and his voice wavered uncertainly. The song had none of the power the previous one had; it seemed to drown in the background of chirping crickets.

Dave was dumbfounded. Retreating under attack from superior forces, he had won. Or had he? Perhaps instead his resistance was a convenient excuse for Rob to give up without showing his own disappointment with the trip.

While Rob sang, Dave thought he heard a crunch of gravel. Was it an animal, a dog or a rabbit, maybe, scrambling on the road's shoulder? The song ended. Dave could hear regular crunches, footsteps, coming from the road to the east.

"Sshh. Someone's coming," he whispered. Although he tried to be quiet, his sibilants hissed loudly, advertising their presence.

"Well, now," said the approaching stranger. "You folks don't need to stop the music on account of me, now. I's just passing through." It was a man's voice, a gravelly tenor.

Dave held his breath, too unsettled to speak. Rob was silent also. The stranger walked up to them and halted.

"Well, good evening to you," he said. "Fine night to be out, ain't it?"

"Good evening," Rob said, quietly and hesitantly, as if he weren't sure he meant it.

"I love it like this," the stranger went on. "Sky crystal clear, stars all lit up like Saturday night in town, and no moon to drown 'em out. Course I like moonlight, too. Full moon's best of all, that's when you can go out and carry on and have yourself a good time. But no moon's almost as good as full moon."

Dave was uncertain about the situation. The stranger could be anybody, he could be dangerous. Then again, he could just be some guy walking home in the middle of the night. He was no doubt as puzzled by the two of them as they were by him. They should play it cool. The stars were hard, brilliant points of light, many-colored, dancing in the hot night sky. "It is beautiful," he said.

"Sure is," said the stranger. He turned to Rob. "So don't just sit there, play something. A night like this is worth making music for."

"I'm really not that good," Rob said, affecting modesty.

"That don't matter one little bit! Play what you can play, don't be bashful." He sat down on the roadside, next to Dave.

Rob was still for a moment, probably thinking what to play. Then he started by plucking his open low E string with his thumb, a straight rhythmic pulse. Keeping the pulse going, he added a simple two-bar figure on the high strings as a melody. The figure repeated, and repeated again in A, and so on, through the traditional twelve bar blues pattern. It was a piece Dave knew well; Rob played it all the time. It had no singing, no words, just the fingerpicked guitar. In the second verse, Rob answered the call of the original figure with a response of double-stopped triplets up the neck, like a Chuck Berry solo, while keeping the bass steadily pulsing. He elaborated the figure into a melody line that was its own response in the third verse. The tension eased some in the fourth verse as Rob simply comped through it, but the fifth verse brought the melody line back and brought it to a climax. Rob finished with a verse of the original figure, without ornament.

The stranger clapped his hands loudly. "Yes!" he said. "You say you're not very good, well, you're good enough for me! I like that!"

"Thank you," Rob said, shyly. "I made that up myself."

Dave remembered why the two of them were travelling: to hear the real country blues. "Do you play guitar?" he asked the stranger.

"Well, I pick a little bit, now and then."

"How about you playing something for us, then," Dave said.

"Why, certainly, certainly, it's only fair after all," the stranger said. "You play for me, and I play for you. A fair exchange."

There was a moment or two of silence. Nobody moved. "I'll need your guitar if I'm to play anything," the stranger said.

"Umm, I don't want --" Rob said uneasily, "-- I mean, I'm not making any deal, you know?"

Dave stifled a laugh. Did he really think the stranger was the Devil?

The stranger stifled nothing. He snorted, then inhaled and chuckled. He drew another breath, and laughed, and again, louder and louder with each breath. He doubled over, and his laughter became a wheeze. He began to cough. He sat up again, and coughed in earnest, and hawked and spat a gob of phlegm into the road. "That's a good one," he said. "That's a really good one."

"Are you all right?" Dave asked.

"Oh, don't worry 'bout me, It would take a lot more than a joke to do me in, believe me." He took a deep breath and let it out. "He comes out to the crossroads in the middle of the night and plays his guitar, and then he says, 'I ain't making no deal.' That's the best joke I've heard in days. Weeks." He took something out of a pocket -- a handkerchief? -- and mopped his face with it. "All right, son, no deals. But I can't make no music unless you hand your guitar over."

Rob slipped the strap over his head, and passed the guitar over Dave to the stranger. The man held it on his knee and plucked each string in succession. "That's no good," he said. "You got to tune it to a chord, you know, that's the best way." He fiddled with the pegs in the headstock, drastically retuning the guitar. While he twisted the pegs, he spoke. "Every so often we gets folk from up north coming through, you know, college kids, coming 'round these parts. They come looking for the blues, the gen-u-wine country blues." Was he talking about them? Dave thought. They had said hardly anything about themselves. How did he know?

He got the strings close to tune making the fine adjustments to bring them into true with each other. "Looking for the blues," he said. "Damn' fools! What they gonna do with the blues when they find them, did you ever wonder?" He strummed the strings; a G chord hung in the air. "You see, the blues ain't the music; the blues is the worst old feeling a body can have. You don't go looking for 'em, not if you got any smarts at all. The blues come looking for you; and if you're lucky, you ain't home when they come knocking at your door."

He dug in his pocket for a moment and pulled something out. Dave couldn't see what it was in the dark. The stranger held the object in his left hand at the neck of the guitar. He plucked the strings. The guitar moaned eerily. Whatever the object was, the stranger was using it as a slide.

The stranger played a slow shuffle rhythm on the bass strings and slid up and down the high strings well up the neck. The resulting sound was a wavering wail, one that sounded to Dave like it carried all the sorrows in the world. Then the slide was silent, leaving just the pulse of the bass strings. The stranger sang a wordless, gravelly moan, matching the guitar's anguish. The guitar answered with its wail. The stranger moaned again, and again the slide answered.

The stranger sang words, but in dialect so heavy that Dave couldn't make them out. It didn't matter, he didn't have to understand them to know what they were about: loss and misery and misfortune; a life that was a broken promise from beginning to end; a father who was never home except once and a while, drunk and mean; a woman who, when offered love, returned cruelty and scorn; and a train rolling along its tracks, blowing its whistle like a lost soul.

The music ended. Dave opened his eyes with a start. Had he been asleep? Or had he just been caught in the spell of the stranger's music? Rob stirred beside him.

"Here, it's your turn," the stranger said to Dave. "Play something."

"I don't play," Dave said. "I just listen." He spoke quietly, spooked by the stranger's music.

But the stranger thrust the guitar into Dave's lap. "Your buddy played, and I played. It's your turn. Just make some noise." He chuckled. "Your buddy said, no deals. You want to keep things even between us, don't you?" He chuckled again, wickedly.

Dave held the guitar, his left thigh fitting into the concave curve of the lower bout, his left hand wrapped around the bottom of the neck by the headstock. He was embarrassed, and frightened. He was half-convinced that the stranger really was the Devil of blues legend. His other half told him how ridiculous it was to think that. He scraped his right thumb along the strings. The sound was muted by his left hand fingers on the strings.

"Here, use this," the stranger said. He handed Dave the slide. "It goes over your ring finger." It was a short, hollow cylinder, about three inches long. Dave slipped it on. It felt odd. It wasn't made of metal or glass, like most slides he'd seen, but some other material. A prickly wave of gooseflesh coursed down his body. For no good reason, he was sure that the slide was made out of human bone.

He lay the slide on his finger across the strings on the neck. He strummed again with his thumb, and this time a chord rang out. The slide tightened around his finger, or so it felt to him. Alarmed, he shook it. The chord wavered and shimmered, wailing like when the stranger had played. The slide loosened its grip a little.

It was guiding his hand! Not actually moving it, he had to do that himself, and could override and move where he wanted to. But its gentle squeezing somehow served as its way of telling Dave where it wanted to be and how it wanted to be moved.

The resulting music was nothing special. Dave just strummed across the strings four beats to the bar while the slide led him through weepy, creepy chord changes in a twelve-bar pattern. After two choruses, the slide decided it was time to stop.

Dave was shaking. This was frightening, it was unreal. This didn't happen. Maybe he was dreaming. He tried to wake up by opening his eyes. But they were already open.

"Hey, Dave, that wasn't bad at all," said Rob, "especially not for a first try. I keep telling him he should learn to play," he said to the stranger, "but he doesn't listen." If he had ever said that, Dave couldn't remember it. Truth was sometimes less important to Rob, it seemed, than appearances.

"Well, your friend's right, you really ought to learn to play," the stranger said to Dave. "Say, my man, you want to keep that slide? If you want it, it's yours."

The image of a ballerina appeared in Dave's mind, pirouetting endlessly across a dance floor, en pointe in red shoes. "No deals?" he said.

"Sorry. Maybe I should take it back. If you kept it though, you'd become a damn' fine musician."

A damned fine musician: That was just what Dave was afraid of. "Like I said, I just listen." He slipped the slide off his finger and handed it back to the stranger.

The stranger put it back in his pocket. "No deals, no deals," he said. "There ain't nobody making no deals tonight. So if you aren't here to deal, just what are you doing here?"

"We were driving through, and my car had a flat tire," Dave said. "It's just a few yards down the road there." He waved his arm in the direction of the car. "We couldn't put the spare on because the batteries ran out in my flashlight. The nuts from the wheel got lost in the dark."

The stranger stood up. "That's no problem at all, unless you let it be one," he said. "How 'bout if I lend you a hand." He chuckled. "No deals, just a friendly helping hand."

"I'm not going to turn that down," Dave said. He stood up also, as did Rob. Dave handed Rob the guitar. Rob slung it once more over his shoulder.

The three of them walked back to the car. Dave could see in the gloom the white line at the shoulder of the road, and the shadowy presence of the Datsun.

"Now, where's that light?" the stranger said. Dave found it by the bare wheel and handed it to him.

The stranger switched it on. The bulb glowed a dim red and went out. He muttered something beneath his breath. He shook the flashlight with one hand and slapped it into his other palm. The light came on brightly, whitely, with the impact. "Here," he said. "That's all it takes, sometimes." Dave saw the stranger clearly for the first time in the light, from the waist down. He was wearing blue jean overalls. He was thick without being fat, with strong-looking arms and hands. His skin was dark brown, except for pale palms. He handed the light back to Dave.

"Shit!" said Rob. "We could have done that! Dave, why didn't you think of that?"

"We wouldn't have wound up meeting our friend here, would we?" He spoke to the stranger. "Thanks." He swung the light around, looking for the lost nuts. There they were, in plain sight, just underneath the car, below the naked hub. Dave stooped down and picked them up, putting them in his shirt pocket with the others.

"Well, I've got places to go," said the stranger. "I'll be on my way. Thanks for the music."

"Thank you for yours," said Rob.

"And thanks for your help with the light," said Dave.

"Don't mention it. But I have a word of advice for you before I go."

"Yeah?" said Dave.

"You say you just listen, well you listen to what I say real good: Every choice's got a price. Many folks would say that you made a wise choice, but you still got to pay for it. I said you should learn to play. I meant it. There's things inside you that are gonna claw their way out of you, unless you can let 'em out easy. Learn yourself the guitar. Like I said, you don't go looking for the blues. They're gonna come looking for you, and they're gonna find you. When they do, you damn' well better be ready for them. Good night." He turned around and walked away into the darkness.

When the sound of his footsteps had faded below the background of the crickets, Dave spoke. "I guess I should learn to play the guitar," he said. "I don't know if I can."

"Really, it's easy, Dave, if you take the time to do it. You've got an ear, you'd be great."

This was the first word of encouragement about making music Rob had ever given him. The idea that he could learn to play had probably been as foreign to Rob as it was to himself. He sighed. "Well, I'm not going to learn anything before I've had a good night's sleep," Dave said. "Come here and hold the light for me."

They got the spare tire on in no time. When the jack had been lowered and the flat tire put away in the trunk, the light went out once more. No amount of shaking or slapping could make it come on again.