It Takes a Worried Man

Burying the Blues

At two o’clock, Hugh found Spider Lammamoor on the porch of his house in the projects over on Dowling Street. Spider wore a green cotton shirt, unbuttoned to the waist, jeans with no belt, and no shoes. His skin, scarred, etched with wrinkles, was the deep dark color of balsam.

His slender fingers gripped a malt liquor can. Now and then he brought it slowly to his lips. “Been doin’ me some thinkin’,” he said. Hugh locked his Chevy Nova by the curb, then walked to the jagged porch. “Takes a long sit.” Spider lifted the can. “And half a dozen quarts of this-here oil.”

“You’re way ahead of me,” Hugh said, setting down a paper sack from which he pulled a six-pack of Colt 45s. “I brought these for you, but — ”

“Good. They’ll find a use.” Spider reached inside his shirt and scratched his belly, just below the stark outline of his ribs. Hugh brushed a fly from his face. Cicadas made a crazy racket in the trees.

“Thinking about what?” Hugh said.

“This weekend.”

“You ready?”

Spider had been Houston’s finest blues drummer, but two years ago he’d simply quit. Hugh had talked him into performing again with a group of young musicians at the city’s annual Juneteenth Celebration.

“I’m ready, but the world’s changed, man.”

“How? What’s eating you?”

“Listen. Listen.” Still clutching the beer can in his hand, Spider pointed past the trees, whose fingered leaves curled in the heat, toward a long series of identical row houses behind them. Oak shadows waved across their bricks, a jigsaw of rich and shifting light. On one of the walls, someone had painted muscular black arms, chained at the wrists.

Hugh heard children laughing, cars backfiring and chugging on the Loop, just north of here. He shrugged. He wondered how many malt liquors Spider had downed already.

Then Spider nudged his shoulder. “There it is,” he said. “Hear it?”

A muffled throb from somewhere in the houses. Then an angry, rhythmic voice. “The boom box?”

“Yeah. Rappin’ shit. Kids today, man, they pissed off and mean. Listen to that wham wham wham all the time ’stead of the old tunes. Ain’t no place for me here. Not no more.”

“That’s not true,” Hugh said.

“My day has come and gone.”

“You wait and see this weekend. More people than ever love the blues.” He offered Spider a cigarette. Hugh didn’t smoke but he always carted a carton of Camels over here. Usually, Spider relaxed after the first few drags.

“White folks, you mean. Tourists. Comin’ to hear the natives.”

“It’s not just whites.”

“Then why you here, talkin’ to me? It’s history, right, what-all you slick professors study? Blues be history now, ready for the library or the museum. This weekend, we gonna be damned old dinosaur bones up on that stage. ‘These motherfuckers played the blues. Listen close. This is what it sounded like.’”

Hugh laughed, and popped open a Colt 45. He’d first heard Spider six years ago at the Crackerbarrel Lounge, a zydeco dance hall. That night, old black men in straw cowboy hats whirled teenage girls around a raised wooden platform. On stage, a man with an aluminum washboard strapped to his chest set the pace; Spider nailed down a “chanky-chank” beat. “Happy New Year!” yelled the accordion player, though it was the middle of July. Hugh fell in love with the music then and there. It made him feel he could start over, every minute, with a fresh chance at romance and fortune.

One night about two years ago, near the end of his marriage, his soon-to-be-ex, Paula, had burst into his study, twirling her skirt, revealing a happy length of thigh, and called him a “stuffy old fart.”

Later, at loose ends after his divorce, he’d decided she had a point: he needed changes in his life. New challenges. He’d gotten bored teaching intro history at the downtown junior college, writing articles on land grants, treaties, ancient Texas wars. Torts and reforms. Legislative agendas.

Then one day, listening to his car radio, he thought of Spider Lam-mamoor, and a light went on in his head. A history of the Houston blues. Like the great musicologist Alan Lomax, who’d gone to the Mississippi Delta in the early 1940s to record Muddy Waters on his farm, Hugh could catalog and help salvage a fine folk tradition.

It was full of risks — a white man using the blues to enter black culture, but Hugh, a native Houstonian, familiar with most of its neighborhoods, was sure he could avoid the pitfalls and tensions of such a project.

He went to the Crackerbarrel Lounge, asked around, but Spider had retired. He talked to the club’s owner three consecutive nights, swallowing half a dozen pitchers of foam masquerading as beer, and finally got an address.

He was lucky. Spider loved to talk. If Hugh kept him pumped with smokes and juice, the lanky old stickman would spin every tale he knew.

Already, Hugh had produced two long articles about KCOH, Houston’s only all-black radio station, now defunct. In the forties and fifties, it broadcast live from Emancipation Park, Shady’s Playhouse, Club Ebony, and the El Dorado. The DJs — King Bee, Daddy Deepthroat, Mister El Toro — had played dangerous, hip-grinding tunes white folks called “race records.” The term “rhythm and blues” hadn’t been coined yet.

In the past two years, Hugh had spent whole afternoons at the public library, flipping through photos of old neighborhoods. In crackling, sepia tones, black Houston hung her head (in the shape of stooping brown magnolias), tapped her feet (the splat of withered peaches pelting heat-blasted ground), leaped into dance (the swirl of a Cadillac fin in the sun).

This was “Mama Houston”—Spider’s phrase — loud and sweaty, sexy as a stripper, breathing hot and fast so her kids would shuck their shirts. Mama Houston, drunk on dewberries, ripe green apples, dizzy on her own delicious poisons — car exhaust, shit and ash and rust. She doesn’t always know what’s best for her kids, but she loves them all, smothers us all, Hugh thought, in her large and steamy arms.

Eighteen months ago, in their first session, Spider had told him about the dark days, in 1945, when J. C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, had banned recording on the grounds that jukeboxes would put his union out of business.

“Damn near killed the city blues, man,” Spider had said. “Didn’t get shit, playin’ live. Needed those contracts, eb’n though the record man cain’t be trusted.”

A few months ago, Hugh asked him why he’d retired.

Spider scratched his belly. “We’s playin’ one night down on Scott Street, middle of the summer, real hot, you know. Fight busted out. Fellow shot me in the shoulder.” He raised his right arm, gingerly, a long broken wing. “Kinda put a kink in my flamacue.”

Hugh pressed him: was he unable to play now? No. Spider asked for a second cigarette, another sip of beer. The wound had healed all right. It was just a matter of confidence.

Night after night, then, Hugh had driven him to some of the fancy new clubs in the Heights, where middle-class kids, both black and white, were trying to keep the old riffs alive. Once they recognized the old bluesman, they fawned over Spider, listened, rapt, as Hugh did, to his stories of the past. Finally, Hugh had persuaded Spider to take the stage again with some of this fresh new blood.

Spider handpicked four mates: piano, bass, lead, and rhythm guitars. The band had been rehearsing in a warehouse maintained by the physical plant over at the junior college.

Now, today, Spider seemed ready to mothball his cymbals again.

“You’ll knock ’em dead. I guarantee it,” Hugh said, coughing. The beer had gotten warm.

“They laughin’ at me.”

“Who?”

A white Ford Mustang — ’67, ’68—with mag wheels and tinted gold windows cruised the street, bass and drums ratcheting out of its speakers. It paused by Hugh’s red Nova, then lurched away.

“These young punks with they high-topped sneakers and they back-ass-ward baseball caps, that’s who. Rappers. I’m a old coot to them. What I don’t want to be,” he opened another can, “is a Tom.”

Hugh raised his face into a sharp, blistering breeze. Sweat soaked his shirt. Tar glistened in the streets, frying in the sun. “What do you mean?”

“I mean — I’m astin’ you, now — is the blues become part of the white man’s fashion? College kids with they scholarships and Daddy’s business cards in they suits — it’s hip for them to go slummin’ now in the blues joints? That why you talkin’ to me? Why you want me up on stage? Uncle Tom tappin’ out a beat to please the next young masters?”

“Whoa.” Hugh stood, wiping dirt from the seat of his pants. A siren wobbled in the distance. “Where are you getting this? Who’ve you been talking to? I thought we were friends.”

“So did I.” Spider scratched his ear with a pull tab.

“Well then, we are, right? Spider, I love what you do. Period. It has nothing to do with black and white. I mean, the music does, of course. I respect its rhythmical roots in the African — ” He caught himself. He was sounding like a history prof. A stuffy old fart. “I’ll back off if that’s what you want, I’ll — ”

“No no no.” Spider struck a match and lit a Camel. “It’s just, some of the young guys in the band, they see more whites than brothers in the clubs, you know, and they wonder what’s going on. And I look around here.” He nodded at a couple of boys across the street in baggy yellow shorts, sleek white basketball shoes. They were laughing, slapping hands. Silver chains bounced around their necks. They glanced warily, stonily, at Hugh. “These kids, to them the blues is Lawrence Fuckin’ Welk. I ast ’em ’bout music, it’s gangsta this, gangsta that. I’m just a no-account old fool.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” Hugh said. He crumpled his empty can. “But the blues is going to be around, Spider, long after you and I and those kids are gone, you know it?”

Spider grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, I hear that.”

“All right, man. So. I’ll stop by Friday?”

“Okey-doke. Bring me some smokes, awright?”

The Mustang circled the street again, a mighty orgasm shuddering in its speakers. Hugh kept his eyes on the ground, walking back to his car. The cruiser squealed away, swerving wildly past the projects, and the shackled black fists.

On his way back to school, Hugh considered Spider’s questions. Folklorists and historians — many of them white — had taken an urgent interest in the blues, following Alan Lomax’s example. Many leading blues players, nationwide, were dying or dead. It was true too that music was a fluid, culturally sensitive activity, changing with the times, and fewer and fewer kids seemed drawn to tradition. But it was a long way from all this to “Uncle Tom.”

He touched his radio button. “What’s wrong with bigamy?” someone asked: a call-in show. On another station, a youthful, grating DJ argued that Led Zeppelin was the greatest flowering of musical genius the Western world had ever witnessed.

Finally, he found Black Magic, an independent, unlicensed broadcast from somewhere in the city’s Fifth Ward projects. Repeatedly, the police had tried to jam it or yank the show off the air, but the operator — who identified himself only as “Black Magic That Comes in the Night”—eluded them. The story had been in all the papers. The people in the Fifth Ward — poor blacks, mostly — hid and protected the man. At first, he’d come on the air to read renters’ complaints and to demand better city housing for the poor. Soon he’d expanded his format, broadcasting police radio calls, accusing the cops of brutality and racism. Between his editorial comments, he played local rappers.

The signal was weak. “You got the Black Magic here, Freedom Radio, we’ll be checking in on the pig-line soon, see what caveboy up to. The occupying army of the fat white race comin’ to kidnap our fine young men. Oink. Oink oink. Any pigs out there? I know you be listenin’, pigs.”

The radio crackled. Another voice came on. “You better believe we’re listening.”

“We got us one! Got us a pig!” Black Magic said. “Say, Porky, tell me this: why you occupying my neighborhood?”

“It’s my job. Your listeners need to know that.”

“What job?”

“To serve and protect.”

“Protect who, Caveboy?”

“The citizens of Houston.”

“The denizens of Houston? Tell you what, Mr. Pig, you crawl outta your cave, we might have us something to talk about.”

Hugh laughed. He’d love to find the man and bring him to his classroom. A quick lesson in American culture. One of his favorite exercises on the first day of each term was to ask his students, many of whom were internationals, to draw a world map. The students were always shocked to find they’d each placed their home — Venezuela, Italy, the Ivory Coast — in the center. None of the worlds looked alike, even remotely. Listening to Black Magic now, he figured few of Houston’s neighborhoods looked alike any more.

Black Magic played the Geto Boys: “I like bitches, all kinda bitches, / to take off my shirt and pull down my britches.”

You’re fine, Hugh thought. Just be careful with Spider. Be honest and always respectful. He wasn’t exploiting the man. It was important to trace the history of this music. If Lomax hadn’t dragged his tape recorder under the willows, into the swamps, through hellish swarms of bugs, the world might never have heard “Dust My Broom,” and that would have been a tragedy for the world.

Last summer, Hugh had gone hunting Robert Johnson’s famous crossroads in the Mississippi Delta. He’d been dismayed to find a Sonic Drive-In, a KFC, a Church’s Chicken, and a Fuel Mart blighting the mythic corner. No Satan, just the devils of fast commerce. Everything good got lost if someone didn’t bother to save it.

On a dirt sidewalk, now, dozens of young black men milled in loose circles in front of a boxing gym. At a stoplight, Hugh watched them feint and jab at the air. A boom box pulsed with a steady sexual rhythm, the same ebb and flow as birdsong and insect trills in the trees. Down the street, an old man tugged at the steel bars on a liquor store’s bright purple windows. A scent of tar mingled with something else — a faint dead-animal smell, wafting from Mama Houston’s narrow alleys. The light turned green. Somewhere, a train clattered. As Hugh moved his foot off the brake, a thin boy, toothless, shirtless, slick with sweat, gave him the finger and laughed.

Back in his office, Hugh checked his “to do” list. Write a test for his freshman class, a mix of nationalities with basic reading and writing problems (the college budget didn’t allow for separate English-as-a-second-language courses). And he had to call Paula, set a time to visit the girls this summer. She’d moved back to New Orleans, where her parents lived, after the divorce.

He punched the number and settled in his chair. From his tiny window he saw Firebirds, Darts, and Gremlins rush the freeway down the hill from the campus, past the main entrance and the “Marion Junior College” sign. A few miles away, Life-Flite emergency helicopters circled the glass spires of the medical center.

Elissa answered on the fourth ring. Paula had taught her telephone etiquette; she was solemn and reserved until she recognized her daddy’s voice, then she shouted, “Jane has stinky underwear!” and he heard both girls laugh.

Mama was next door borrowing flour for dinner, Elissa said. Hugh tried to ask about her summer plans but she was manic with energy. He heard Jane running around the kitchen; Elissa giggled and bumped the receiver on the wall. He gave up. “Tell your mother I called, will you?”

“Daddy, are you coming to see us?” Elissa asked.

“Later this summer, sweetheart. Give your sister a kiss for me.”

“Ewww!”

Despite a strong showing last night against the Mets, the Astros had blown a doubleheader today. He clicked his car radio off. Damned Astros. They couldn’t hit their way out of a paper bag.

At a stoplight, a big, freckled fireman strolled into the intersection waving a black rubber boot, soliciting money for a city fund-raiser. Hugh lowered his window — a surge of hot air — and stuffed a dollar into the boot.

He lived in Montrose, one of Houston’s oldest — and when he’d first moved there in the early eighties, cheapest — neighborhoods. Before the AIDS epidemic, a realtor once told him, the area had been mostly gay, with an inflated reputation for debauchery. In fact, it was largely peaceful, tastefully landscaped and kept. Street people slept in alleys behind the 7-Elevens, but this was increasingly true all over the city. On Hugh’s block, the five or six people who stowed rags, blankets, and bags in back of the Dumpsters were friendly but withdrawn, embarrassed when asking for change.

Now, as he parked his car, he noticed an old woman in a sweater — despite the heat — that was unraveling like a tumbleweed’s spirals. Face as dark and tough as the fireman’s boot. She shuffled around the block.

Maple leaves flapped like oily rags on branches stretched across the street. Cicadas whirred, loud rotary blades, in the highest limbs.

Hugh’s apartment was small, with large windows and wooden floors. The chairs and couch were strictly Kmart. Since the split with Paula — two and a half years ago now? had it really been that long? — he hadn’t bothered to buy anything valuable or permanent. Paula had kept all the good stuff.

He showered and shaved. Not bad, old man, not bad for forty-three, he told his steamy face in the mirror. No bald spot yet (he needed a haircut). He was mostly trim and handsome. At least his daughters had said so, when he’d seen them last Christmas.

A Siamese cat family had recently moved into a space beneath the pyracantha bushes behind his kitchen window. The mother had borne two litters; Hugh had counted eight kittens last time he’d looked. He peeked at them now: burrowing lumps. He left two plastic plates of food for the cats, and a bowl of water. He wondered if he bothered with the kittens to assuage his helplessness over his daughters. A way of burying his blues.

His stomach growled — he’d skipped lunch to meet Spider. He put a turkey potpie in the oven, then called Paula. She was curt. “I’ve got plans in both July and August,” she said. “I just don’t know when it would be possible for you to come, Hugh.”

“What kind of plans?”

“Hawaii with my folks. And another trip with a friend.”

“So I’ll babysit the girls while you’re gone.”

“I want to take them with me. They’re six and eight now, old enough to appreciate travel.”

He argued with her a while longer, getting nowhere. “I’m telling you, make me part of your plans, Paula. I am going to see them this summer, okay?”

He sat in the dark with a bad taste in his mouth, trying to recall the days before bitterness had scoured even their briefest exchanges, when they had actually liked each other. It was surprisingly easy to remember liking Paula. Uninhibited, funny, she’d been overwhelmingly vibrant when he’d first met her through a mutual friend. Sexy, certainly, but open and warm too, in a way that made him trust her. How had that changed?

Elissa’s birth had seemed to make her sullen. “I’m penned at home all day, in a minefield of spit-up and poop. You get to come back in the evening when she’s already been Pampered and fed, and play the daddy-clown, make her laugh and get all excited — too excited, Hugh — right before bed,” she used to say. “It isn’t fair.”

So let the games begin — and Paula played fiercely, chasing every advantage marriage and motherhood had, in her view, denied her. Jane’s birth made things worse. Paula insisted on a part-time job, just to get out of the house, insisted on her own set of friends, her own interests, separate from Hugh’s. He didn’t mind, even encouraged her independence at first — parenting could be numbing, he’d discovered, if you found no other outlets — but the more she pursued her new path, the more pinched she became in her dealings with him. The sex remained urgent, blissful, and absorbing, but he became aware, gradually, that she was using it to short-circuit his arguments, his criticisms, his dissatisfactions with their arrangements. Eventually, making love came to seem a wrestling match — how reliably these damned old clichés proved true! — a contest he wanted both to win and to lose.

Finally, Paula ended things, announcing her intention to divorce him and demand custody of the girls.

He picked at his turkey potpie now, threw it away. He found his Son Seals tape, a bit of the old Chicago blues. A nightly ritual in his solitude. He closed his eyes and imagined himself in the bottomlands of the Mississippi River, sharing a bottle of rotgut with the ghost of Robert Johnson, learning to slide a pocketknife across the A string and hold it forever, a sweetly agonizing, cricket vibrato.

As Son hummed above a snappy backbeat, rapping like a wronged old haint, Hugh recited to himself Johnson’s famous tale, which every blues aficionado knew by heart: “If you want to learn how to play, you go to the crossroad. Be sure to get there a little ‘fore twelve o’clock at night. You have your guitar and be playing a piece sitting there by yourself. A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it. Then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s how I learned to play anything I want.”

And that’s where Hugh had decided to plunge back into dating: standing by Highway 61, where it hugged the gnarly, grassy border of U.S. 49 (in the middle of the day, alas, with dozens of other tourists), making a pact, not with the devil but with himself. “You can do anything you want,” he said aloud softly, and as soon as he formed the words, he knew he was ready to start seeing women again. He didn’t know why, but then and there, in the cradle of the blues, the pounding misery of his life with and without Paula fell from him like a tossed-off winter coat.

Now he surrendered to Son’s Delta rhythms. They were quickened and honed by the grit and steel of Chicago, where so many blues players had drifted when machines roared in and ate up the Deep South’s cotton fields. But they hadn’t all drifted away, Hugh thought, smiling, remembering Spider. Tomorrow, he’d hear about Saturday’s show.

Son knifed a note into space, spearing Hugh, and hurled him back to the bottomlands, the rich alluvial soil, the source of all the songs.

Friday wasn’t a teaching day for him; he spent the morning grading essays on the Battle of San Jacinto. The best paper, from one of his favorite students in the advanced class, was about Santa Anna’s life after he’d surrendered to Sam Houston. In his old age, the former general had been exiled from Mexico and settled on Staten Island, where he introduced chewing gum to North America. According to Hugh’s student, Santa Anna gave a hunk of chicle, the rubbery dried sap from sapodilla trees in southern Mexico, to Thomas Adams, who turned it into “Adams’ New York Gum No. 1.”

The fluorescent light above Hugh’s desk began to fizzle and flicker. Though a little sunshine came from his window, it wasn’t enough to work by in the small corner office. He played with the switch. The light continued to blink, as though a small hand were opening and closing in front of it.

He called maintenance. They couldn’t get to it until late next week. He finished reading the paper in the noisy, muted light. He’d been distracted already, all morning: he’d been thinking of calling Alice Richards and asking her to Spider’s Juneteenth show. Alice worked in the Affirmative Action Office, and they’d dated a couple of times, hit it off pretty well, though they’d never gotten more intimate than a swift good-night kiss. Hugh found her enormously attractive, but she was stiff, overly zealous in her work. A thwarted crusader. She’d told him once, discussing a sexual-harassment case she’d overseen, “It’s my job to be an advocate for the innocent, which, on this campus — and in most other places, I promise you — are young women.” Hugh felt she often confused advocacy with her own anger at men, the source of which he didn’t know her well enough to trace. “When I first came to Marion, three years ago, I imagined no one could be nobler than people who teach in junior colleges,” she’d said the night they first went out. “Clearly, they don’t gravitate here for the money, right? They’ll never have the prestige of their big-shot cousins in the major universities. They’re just teachers. Servants of knowledge.”

“And you’ve learned since —?” he’d asked.

“I’ve learned since that pettiness, lust — all the nasties — are every bit as prevalent here as in the bigger arenas. Maybe even more so, since the rewards in a place like Marion are so small.” She’d laughed, ruefully. They were dining at the Warwick, which advertised itself as the Southwest’s “most rewarding hotel.” It was nice, but Hugh found it a little tacky too. The bar was decorated with plush velvet chairs with tiny egg-shaped backs, gaudy golden chandeliers, smoky wall mirrors, and copies of classical statues of nearly naked women. Houston’s idea of Refined Taste.

The hotel was located near Rice University and Hermann Park, and was surrounded by long, beautiful rows of live oaks and cottonwoods. Limousines circled a tall, colorful fountain near its entrance. The Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum were both just down the block; after show openings, Houston’s culture-birds liked to be seen sipping champagne at the Warwick wearing strapless Halston gowns or Brooks Brothers suits. In the piano bar that night, Hugh had overheard an exchange between a couple of transplanted New Yorkers. “I just adore living among the Texans,” the first woman said. “They’re such primitive sophisticates.”

“What do you mean?” her friend asked.

“I mean they don’t know what a blintz is, but if they did, darling, they’d love it.”

He’d never felt at ease in this part of town, except on the golf course at Hermann Park. He didn’t play often — sometimes after class on Monday afternoons he’d drop by, looking for pick-up rounds. Hermann was a public course, cheap, catering mostly to old black men and retirees. Its clubhouse served the best hamburgers in town.

The remaining area around Hermann Park — the hotel, the university, the med center, the elaborate brick homes — was too rich for Hugh’s blood. But Alice had suggested the Warwick and she’d appeared right at home there. He wasn’t sure she’d be comfortable at the Juneteenth Festival. But loosening her up seemed a sexy challenge. He loved to watch her cross her legs, to hear the hiss of her hose. Slow. In control. Just like Paula.

His office light crackled, winked, winked again.

Santa Anna never saw a profit from his gum. After being granted political amnesty and returning to Mexico, he died bitterly, in poverty and neglect.

The light went out entirely. Hugh paused. In the near-dark, he punched Alice’s number.

Every three hundred blocks or so, the city’s cigarette ads changed. In the Heights, the billboards showed a young white couple smoking and laughing on a sailboat. On Dowling Street, near downtown, a black couple lay on a hill, smoking and laughing. In the barrios, Chicano workers in a shower of welding sparks smoked and sweated and laughed.

“Black Magic here, tellin’ you whitey up to no good — out to put our fine young men in chains! A hundred years or more we’ve lived and sweated here, in the heart of whitey’s city, and still he don’t know us! Steal our music, steal our eats, even steal our party. Juneteenth, a Holy Day for our grandfolks — God bless it, hallowed be His name — the day Texas slaves learnt they was free. Now the pigs want to shove in and steal a profit off our past, our prayers, our good times. Cain’t see us ‘less we wearin’ their fuckin’ chains. Thurgood Marshall, James Nabrit, Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland — proud black history here in the Bayou City. We ain’t invisible. Don’t let whitey tell you no different. What do we got to do? Burn his lies! His pig-tongued talk! Brothers, sisters, next time you see whitey sniffing ‘round our broken-hearted ‘hoods, you dog him, you bite him, you ride his moony old pig-ass. You drive him the hell out!”

Static swallowed Black Magic’s voice. Hugh punched buttons until he found an R&B station. Junior Wells and “The Vietnam Blues.” He knew the tune, the lyrics a funny variation on the standard blues line “Woke up this mornin’, found my baby gone.” “Gonna wake up one mornin’,” Junior sang, “find yourself gone.”

At home, he parked his car then walked around the building to check on the kittens. The tiniest one was dead. Hugh sagged. He couldn’t tell what had happened. Perhaps it had suffocated in the crush of its brothers and sisters as they’d snuggled at night for warmth. Or perhaps its little lungs couldn’t take the city’s good intentions, the mosquito spray spread nightly by big white sanitation trucks.

He placed the kitten inside a nearby Dumpster, in a napkin-nest next to some Chinese take-out boxes. The rest of the kittens seemed fine. Now that he’d started feeding them, Hugh felt responsible for them. He set two plates of Purina Cat Chow in a tangle of English ivy, below the pyracantha bushes that protected them from predators.

On the sidewalk in front of his apartment building, two teenage girls in cutoffs and tank tops strolled past, discussing tattoos. “I just got a butterfly on my boob,” one said. She had blond hair and a pair of broken front teeth. “Looks like it’s perching on my nipple.”

“Did it hurt?” her friend asked.

“Hell yes, it hurt.”

Hugh nodded hi to them. He felt delighted that the city worked at all, when the odds were clearly against it.

On the corner, the girls bumped into the neighborhood bag lady — the one in the tumbleweed sweater — who’d come shuffling, blunt as a fullback, around a closed dry-cleaning store. Even in ninety-degree heat she wore the sweater, an orange coat, a thick wool cap, and a pair of cotton gloves. She carried half a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts sacks stuffed with Colonel Sanders boxes. Hugh had seen her digging for fruit rinds or vegetable scraps in heaps of steaming trash. He scratched his head. Had he hidden the kitten well enough in the Dumpster?

When she collided with the girls, she toppled backwards and lost control of her sacks, which scattered at her feet (flopping in rubber galoshes). Her boxes popped open. Out spilled dozens of cicada shells, brittle husks that scritched across the street.

The girls screamed, then giggled and ran. The old woman tried to stand. Hugh dropped his cat food bag, ran over, and offered her a hand. “Are you all right?” he asked.

She squinted at him. “Better get that rabbit outta your nose,” she grumbled.

Sometimes, Hugh had heard her early in the mornings, before he was fully awake, shouting nonsense at herself. “I will,” he said. He helped her up.

A roach skittered across one of her sacks. “I own the goddam sky,” she said. “Did you know I own the goddam sky?”

“Yes, and you’re a wonderful caretaker,” Hugh said.

She grinned. Black gums, no teeth.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

She smacked her dry, white lips. Skin-crusts trickled like toast crumbs from her mouth.

Hugh gave her five dollars. “Get yourself a hamburger or something, okay?”

“You bet,” she said. She smelled of rotten leaves. “You bet I will.”

An Aztec god on pinched black velvet. A Lone Star ad. Purple piñatas swayed above sweating green bottles of beer, on a counter by a March of Dimes jar. A young waitress snatched the bottles, shoved them onto a tray, and danced across the room to a salsa beat pulsating from a flashing yellow jukebox.

Hugh hadn’t tried this place in a while, though the restaurant was only six blocks from his apartment. Right after the divorce, he’d eaten out every night, usually here. It was handy and cheap.

At home tonight, in his fridge, he’d found only a couple of chicken pot-pies. Chicken didn’t appeal to him this evening — especially after smelling the bag lady’s boxes, the stale, fried odor of weeks-old grease.

Paula had been sour and surly on the phone. He’d called again, hoping to pin her down on a date for his visit. “I told you I have plans. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient for you, Hugh. Please don’t start with me. Not tonight.”

“What am I starting?” he’d said.

The days when he’d been a brand-new, slightly stunned bachelor seemed to have spun back around, like history’s repeated mistakes. Exhaustion; no food in the house; ex-wife belligerence; befuddlement and sorrow.

So he’d thought of Chimichanga for supper.

The waitresses were all new, young and sexy in their long, colorful skirts, but the cook, a tough old hound named Carlos, recognized Hugh. “Hey, Professor! Long time no see!”

Hugh smiled. Carlos and the previous waitresses used to kid him for grading papers — “Got your homework tonight?”—or scribbling notes with a frozen margarita to lubricate his thoughts.

Now, in the spirit of old times, he pulled a pen and pad from his pocket. Spider, he wrote. Trace roots.

All afternoon, partly to take his mind off his girls, and his nervousness over the weekend plans he’d made with Alice, he’d been figuring: one way to avoid exploiting Spider was to push beyond a pure academic reckoning of facts and dates; to tell the man’s story fully, with dignity and respect, granting him perpetual life on the page. To do that, Hugh realized, he’d have to know his subject much better than he did.

In one of their earliest conversations, Spider had told him, “My mama used to say we descended from slaves what come from the old Anansi tribe back in Africa somewheres. Don’t know much about ’em, ’cept they worshipped this god named Spider. Long arms, face like a hairy ol’ tarantula’s. He’s a storyteller, Mama said, always remindin’ people how they’s made from the vines of the trees, the wretched mud of the earth, stuff like that. Weavin’ pretty tales like webs.”

“Why did she tell you all this? Do you remember?” Hugh had asked. “I mean, what was the occasion?”

Spider had laughed. “Mama says she named me for him, and it fits, I guess, ‘cause now I’m a storyteller, right, layin’ down the news, witnessin’ for my people.”

Spider called stories “go-alongs,” “happenings,” or “hoo-raws.” Hugh knew he needed to know more about the blues’ affinities with African storytelling traditions. Was the triple-beat rhythm so common in the songs related to the natural syntax of Anansi speech? Drums — from the snare’s high tones to the bullying bellow of the tom-toms — mimicked the human voice’s full range.

But more than African griot, Hugh heard in Spider’s “news” the chuffing of a plow through fertile Texas dirt, the shouts and melodic rags of field hands. Lullabies, spirituals, the cadences of longing — a centuries-old ache for escape, for a mighty dash to freedom.

A waitress brought him a chili relleno and a cold Carta Blanca. At a nearby table, two Cajun men — Hugh could tell from the stew of “hick” and French in their talk — argued over crawfish, how best to eat them. “Naw, main,” one said to his friend, curling his fingers around his lips, “you gots to suck they little haids, like iss!”

Hugh went back to his notes. Spider was born on the Navasota River, northwest of Houston, an area still sumptuous with Cherokee and rich Spanish blood, as well as the spilled blood of former slaves. Whenever Hugh looked at Spider — the coppery, aqualine nose, the heavy brow — he saw Indian ancestry, though Spider never acknowledged any mixing in his family. From previous studies, Hugh knew that most whites and blacks with Texas roots prior to 1880 had Native American forebears.

When he had first talked to Spider, he’d hoped to get to know the man, learn about the blues. Simple goals. But the longer he worked on the project, the more he felt it was impossible to know anyone simply.

Driving by Spider on the street, it would be easy to dismiss him with a contemptuous glance — an old black man lounging on his porch, sipping malt liquor in the middle of the day. But when you began to look, you found yourself in the core of the Big Thicket, on the banks of the “Navasot” River, in the midst of a heady “go-along.”

What seemed simple on the surface soon became a vital hodgepodge of Indian tricksters and African gods (Papa Legba, the guardian of the crossroads — did Robert Johnson know these tales? — waiting in the moonlight, demanding sacrifice from weary travelers); oral stories and coded drumbeats; field songs, electric guitars; country and city; money, sex, jukebox politics.

You could spend a lifetime chatting with Spider, and still not know the man.

Hugh sipped his beer. Through the restaurant’s back door, which opened onto a small gravel parking lot, he saw a young Mexican in an apron lighting a cigarette for a woman in knee-high boots and a short blue skirt. Her long legs reminded him of Alice. Another man in an apron carried a food tray across the lot to a small wooden shed out back. He knocked on the door. It opened just a crack; a needle of light sliced into the night, and he passed the tray in.

In his days as a regular here, Hugh had seen this ritual many times. He’d always assumed illegals lived in the shed, sleeping, eating, gathering strength before dispersing through the secret arteries of Houston, then on to who-knows-where. Carlos seemed the type who would feed folks in need. Generous. Nonjudgmental. Faithful to his people.

The city had a million hidden “hoo-raws.”

“How’s your food, Professor?” Carlos stood beside Hugh’s table, wiping his hands on a dishtowel the color of corn.

Hugh almost asked about the shed, but didn’t. He felt as he often did with Spider, vaguely uneasy about poking his nose where it might not belong. A perpetual outsider: the historian’s curse. “Hot and spicy.”

Carlos laughed and slapped his back. “That’s what we like to hear! Another beer?”

“Thanks.” Soon, a trip to the Navasota River, Hugh thought. Maybe he could even talk Spider into accompanying him, showing him the house where the bluesman was born, the backwoods juke joints Spider had played as a kid.

The Cajuns rose and paid their tab. The taller of the pair wore a yellow sport coat and bright red socks. His companion, a stubby man in a dark pullover sweater, plucked a toothpick from a plastic dispenser next to the cash register. On his way out, he accidentally bumped a table near the front door, spilling a pitcher of slushy margaritas. The trio at the table, two men and a woman, shouted in surprise, and jumped up to avoid getting wet. The stubby man apologized; Carlos wiped the puddle with a rag. By now, the trio was laughing, ordering more drinks.

Hugh warmed; he loved this place, its homeliness, its ease, its laid-back patrons. It was the kind of place Paula called “dirty.” He couldn’t picture Alice sitting here either.

“Take it easy, Professor,” Carlos said when Hugh paid the bill. On the wall behind him, the Aztec god shook a golden spear at the skies. Hugh had parked out back, by the shed. As he unlocked his door, he saw curtains rustle in the shed’s grimy window. Briefly, a child’s dark forehead was visible, and eyes just above the sill — a swift, frightened glance. Then nothing.

Outside his apartment building, in the parking lot, he saw the bag lady angling, headfirst, into the Dumpster. He stepped out of his car and locked it. “Hey!” he shouted.

The old woman continued to dig.

“Hey! I put a dead animal in there! It’s not healthy! Come out.”

“Animal?” She turned. A napkin, limp with catsup, stuck to the arm of her loosely threaded sweater.

“What did you do with the money I gave you?”

She plucked the paper from her sleeve, and licked the catsup.

Hugh pulled another dollar from his wallet. “Go eat. Please. They have burritos and popovers at the 7-Eleven down the street. Cold sandwiches.”

She snatched the bill.

As he watched her tow her sacks to the curb, he wondered who she was, what had happened that she’d wound up here. In which feverish crease of Mama Houston’s lap would she spend the night?

Hugh spent Saturday afternoon on a driving range near Hermann Park, hoping to exhaust his nervous energy swinging a club before his date with Alice. Should he make a move tonight, ask her to stay over? He’d gone out with several women since his divorce but hadn’t slept with any of them and felt out of practice, both the asking and the doing. And he wasn’t sure he and Alice were right for each other.

At the 270-yard marker, a man without a shirt steered a tiny John Deere, snatching balls with a long metal pole and dropping them into a barrel on a cart attached to the tractor’s rear. For protection, he wore over his head a wire basket, the kind that held a dozen balls, which you paid for at the range’s entrance.

At a nearby tee box, an old black man cursed his driver. He sent a polka-dotted ball past a dog in the field, well short of the tractor. “I hope you die,” he threatened his club.

The man on the tractor shooed the dog with his pole.

“About 40 percent of the money I spend in any given week,” said a woman on a radio call-in show, blaring from the clubhouse, “I spend unhappily.” The angry golfer snapped his driver on his knee. Hugh felt more keyed-up than ever.

That night, he took Alice to a little Chinese place on Richmond Street — nothing fancy, but slightly more elegant than Chimichanga. Mr. Chen, the restaurant owner, knew only a few phrases in English. “Hello. How are you? I think it is going to rain.”

“We’ll start with some egg rolls and a pot of hot tea,” Hugh said.

“Very good. Thank you. Nice to see you.”

Alice wore vanilla-colored slacks and a yellow blouse with red buttons. She’d pulled her hair back and tied it with a white ribbon. Simple. Gorgeous. She smiled.

Mr. Chen arrived with two tumblers of iced tea sprigged with mint leaves.

“Excuse me, we asked for hot tea.”

“Very good. It is certain to rain.”

Alice wanted sweet-and-sour soup, Kung Pao chicken, stir-fried shrimp.

“Today we have only pork,” said Mr. Chen. “Nice to see you. Enjoy your table forever.”

Hugh unfolded his napkin and plunged in, asking Alice why an attractive woman like her was unattached. On their first couple of dates — she’d seemed so aloof! — they’d talked about the college, the city, avoiding personal topics.

“I was with a man for five years — it ended just last summer,” she said after a pause. “He decided — discovered — he was gay.” She laughed unconvincingly, flashing pretty teeth. “Ironic, right? Me, an Affirmative Action advocate, fighting sexual discrimination on all fronts … when he told me, I wanted to kill him and every gay man I could think of. For weeks, I had Elton John nightmares. Shotguns and bloody knives, and all to the tune of ‘Rocket Man.’”

Mr. Chen set a steaming bowl of pork and bamboo shoots on their table. “Nice to see you,” he said. Goldfish swam in a big blue tank by the door. The fish looked like wontons floating in meager soup. A group of fine-suited men — Hugh took them for lawyers — arrived and requested the best table, by a window.

The pork smelled like peppermint.

“So now you’re pissed at all men, right?” Hugh said, trying to make a joke, to rescue the evening from its shaky start.

“No, I don’t hate men,” Alice said. “I just don’t like them very much.” She didn’t smile or laugh. Getting close to her would be as tough, Hugh worried, spearing a bamboo finger, as communicating smoothly with Mr. Chen.

They spent the rest of the dinner in near-silence. Then Hugh drove them downtown. A plastic Budweiser bottle, tall as a grain silo, fastened by guy wires to the ground, towered over Emancipation Park near the corner of Wheeler and Dowling. Radio stations gave away T-shirts, posters, cassette tapes.

Hugh bought two cups of cold beer. “Did you know Dowling Street was named for an Irish barkeep — Dick Dowling — who helped the Confederate Army win the battle of Sabine Pass?” He was fidgety, talking too much, relying on his “stuffy” old history to get him through the evening. So far, Alice didn’t seem bored. She’d even said she liked Mr. Chen’s. “He lured a bunch of Yankee boats into a nasty port, knowing they’d run aground on an oyster reef.”

Alice came from Eugene, Oregon, and had lived in Texas only two years. “I’m having a little trouble with this ‘Juneteenth’ thing. Explain it to me again,” she said.

Hugh handed her a napkin. “Okay. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. But it wasn’t until June 19, two years later, when a Union general defeated Rebel holdouts in Galveston, that slaves here — about 300,000 of them — learned the truth.”

“All that time? They were free and didn’t know it?”

“Yep. For over a hundred years after that, families celebrated the day informally. In ’79, it became an official Texas holiday.”

“Hm.”

“Something wrong? You haven’t even touched your beer.”

A man bumped them, sucking a flask of MD 20/20. The back of his T-shirt said, “Black By Popular Demand.” He raised the flask in the air, shouted, “Hallelujah!” and stumbled into a crowd that was beginning to flank the music stage. A pretty young woman with twin baby girls in her arms danced to the beat of her Walkman. The girls’ smiles sent a pang through Hugh’s tight chest.

“It’s awful to admit this, because it’s part of my job to protect civil rights and stuff” Alice whispered, “but I’ve never been around this many black people. In Oregon, there just aren’t that many — ”

“Scared?”

“A little Yeah.”

Maybe five hundred people had come to see the fireworks and to listen to the blues, only a handful of whom were white. “No need to be,” Hugh said. “This is a night of joy.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Juneteenth? Sure. Come on. Let me introduce you to my friend Spider.”

They cut through a gap in an orange mesh fence to reach the backstage platform. Graffiti curled across a splintered picnic table behind a bank of lights: “We are one world of tempted humanity,” “Shit,” “Piss,” “Fuck.”

Spider was guzzling a Lone Star longneck, perched on a metal garbage can next to an ice chest. He wore a straw fedora, shades, and a light pink cotton shirt. A pair of drumsticks was jammed into his back jeans pocket.

At his feet lay a wrinkled newspaper, headlines smeared by water, beer, and mud: “Pentagon Officials Say … apes.”

“Looking good,” Hugh said.

Spider raised his arm. “Feel like a bar of iron, man.”

“Just nail down the beat.” Hugh offered him a Camel.

“Yeah,” said the bass player, a young white college student. “Use your feet.”

“Say, baby, what up?” Spider said to Alice.

She blushed.

“Can’t wait to hear you. We’ll be out front,” Hugh said.

“Break a leg,” Alice said hesitantly.

“Mm-hmm.” Spider looked her up and down. “Rather feel me a nice, firm leg, know what I mean?”

She brought her hand to her throat, started to force a laugh, then turned abruptly and stalked past the picnic table and the lights.

“What I say?” Spider asked. “Sen-si-tive. She royalty or somethin’?”

“Good luck,” Hugh said hastily, then ran, catching Alice at the rip in the mesh. “Hey?”

“I know. I know what you’re going to say. Relax, right? This isn’t the campus.”

“He didn’t mean anything by it.”

“This is just a good-time party. Sexual harassment isn’t sexual harassment here.”

Hugh’s jitters returned. What was he doing with this woman? Spider was right. She was sensitive. Arch, like Paula. He’d seen it in her from the first. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. That’s just Spider. He goofs around a lot.”

“By the way, Hugh, they never mean anything by it.”

“Okay. We’ll listen to one song then go, if you like.”

She smiled, took a big breath. “No. No, I don’t mind staying. It’s just. I’m a little nervous, like I said. I’ll settle down.”

“Sure?”

“I’m sure.”

They wove through the crowd, staying as close to the stage as they could. Each time they cut a path through chatting folks, three or four men followed closely on their heels. Hugh caught only a glimpse of them — baggy shorts and L.A. Lakers shirts — and cursed himself for tensing up. Alice’s fears were contagious.

“Do you ever worry that you’re barging into a world that isn’t really yours?” she asked him now.

“Sure. I worry about it all the time.”

“How do you reconcile yourself?”

“Respect,” he said. “I just try to treat everybody with respect.”

She nodded.

Finally, he found a cool, dry spot about fifteen feet from the amplifiers. He took off his windbreaker and spread it on the ground for Alice.

A radio DJ — Hugh recognized the voice but not the man — took the stage, in front of Spider’s sparkling black drums. “Freedom!” he shouted. The crowd chanted the word. “Friends, we’re here tonight to remind ourselves how steadfast and resilient is the African-American heart! For centuries, it has endured untold indignities — ”

“Tell it!”

“—tragedies — ”

“Say it, brother!”

“—shame — ”

“Amen!”

“—and emerged triumphant!”

A jubilant chorus. Alice gripped Hugh’s hand.

“We must never forget: the price of Liberty is eternal vigilance!”

Applause like small-arms fire, rapid and distinct.

“Now. You ready for some blues?”

“Bring it on, bring it!”

“Welcome back, then, a Houston legend: Spider Lammamoor!”

Spider appeared from the wings, tipping his hat. Then he raised his beer in a triumphant communal salute.

The bass player started a three-chord stutter-step; Spider followed with a kickbeat. His arms and legs snapped crisply through syncopated bends and slides, through gospel and blues, rockabilly chit-chat and steaming, old-time swing. He walked the bass down double-stops and burning, bold glissandos: Look here, like that, ah-ha!

The smells of barbecued chicken and buttery corn on the cob mingled with the sizzle of hot dogs in the city’s humid air.

The grass smelled of moisture and fertile roots, webby leaves.

The young men in Lakers shirts edged forward, right behind a family next to Hugh. He snuggled closer to Alice and tightened his hold on her hand.

Spider swung the band into a pseudo-waltz with a ragged gospel top. Mournfully, he croaked into a mike, “Shoo-fly in a windstorm …”

Hugh laughed. He told Alice he’d been reading WPA-era slave narratives in the Houston Public Library one day, and had come upon the story of Jeremiah Harris, an ex-slave. Harris had said fighting slavery was “like a shoo-fly in a windstorm. Peoples so tiny and the Man so huge.” Later, Hugh had repeated Harris’s phrases for Spider, and Spider had cherished them as if they were biblical wisdom.

“Shoo, shoo, shoo-fly ….” he wailed now into the silver mike.

Between sets, Hugh led Alice backstage again. Spider was reminiscing about his old cronies: Nathan Abshire, Big Maceo, One-Hand Sam. The younger musicians listened raptly. “Sam be pickin’ with his right hand, spoonin’ down that snap-bean gumbo with his left. Good Condition Boy, Sam, drank hisself to deaf right here on Dowling Street. Couldn’t make him live, no matter what we done …”

Hugh squeezed Spider’s arms. “Didn’t I tell you, man, the blues is alive and well? You sounded great. And the crowd’s eating it up.”

“Feelin’ purty good,” Spider said, popping open another longneck. “I gotta thank you, Hugh, talkin’ me back into this-here devil’s hoo-doo.”

“It’s where you belong, Spider.”

“Very nice,” Alice mumbled, teetering close to Hugh. “Thank you for the show.”

“Any time, Missy.”

Hugh felt her flinch, pressed against his back, but she just smiled. She whispered to him that the amplifiers had given her a bit of a headache, she was enjoying herself, really she was, but could they possibly —

“Sure,” Hugh said, nervous once more at the prospect of being alone with her, with nothing to distract them from the fact that here they were together. He turned again to Spider. “Gotta run.”

Spider grinned at Alice. “Yeah, I see.”

“So I’ll drop by Monday?”

“Bring me some smokes, awright?”

“All right. See you then. You’re the best, Spider.”

Hugh strolled Alice back through the park, past the giant plastic beer bottle, the hot dog stands, mothers and fathers and children, cotton candy. On the street, kids ran in packs past parked cars, excited by the music. No breeze. The air was hot. Crickets and echoes of songs. A television flickered through someone’s rusty screen door; a tricycle lay on its side in the yard.

Fireworks burst above oaks and dry pines, shading Alice’s face, first pink then yellow and green. Hugh realized, again, how beautiful she was, but this time her loveliness didn’t please him, or scorch him with prickling delight; this time he experienced solid panic. Her beauty demanded something of him. He’d asked her out several times. He’d shown an interest. And she didn’t like men very much.

He unlocked his Nova’s passenger door. As Alice was about to step inside, brakes squealed in the street. Over the grinding insistence of a hip-hop tune, a gruff voice demanded, “What you wont here, white boy?”

Hugh looked up to see the Lakers shirts — four of them — hanging out the windows of a sleek white Mustang.

“Motherfucker confused. He think he a brother, Deke.”

Alice shook against Hugh’s shoulder. He recognized the car: the cruiser from Spider’s neighborhood, the one that had circled the block while Hugh sat with Spider on his porch. He thought of snatching a golf club from his trunk, wielding it like a bat.

“It just like Black Magic say. Comin’ down here, listen our music, eat our food, dance our gig. On’iest thing he couldn’t do, Deke, was find him some nigger pussy, see, so he stuck with that pale piece of shit.”

Gently, Hugh moved Alice into the car and locked her door. He arranged his keys into spikes between his fingers and came around slowly to the driver’s side, where the Mustang idled. Respect, he thought. “We’re just leaving,” he said.

“Damn straight, motherfucker.”

The one called Deke dropped a malt liquor bottle onto the pavement at Hugh’s feet. It shattered with an ugly pop. “Stay out our ‘hood, you hear me, white boy? You occupyin’ days is through.”

“Hugh,” Alice whispered when he slipped behind the wheel. “Hugh, what do we do?”

“It’s all right.” He turned the key and inched cautiously away from the curb. The Mustang followed. Another malt liquor bottle sailed into the street, ahead of Hugh’s car. He swerved to miss the flying shards. He checked his rearview. Cigarettes flared behind the cruiser’s tinted windows.

Heavy traffic. Barking horns. Flashing fireworks. Hugh twisted down back streets in black neighborhoods, past a Latino block, through intersections where the city’s old grid pattern slid beneath the new. Garbage pails. Peeling billboards. The rattling drones of air-conditioners.

Shoo-fly in a windstorm.

In a Trinidadian barrio, in the northwest part of town, a small Juneteenth celebration was just getting under way. Salsa music kicked out of two oversized stereo speakers in the back of a Dodge pickup. Twenty or thirty girls danced in the street, wearing black and yellow Danskins, ankle bracelets, umbrella-shaped sombreros. Sweating and sexy in the heat.

Hugh didn’t see the Lakers. “Tell you what we’ll do. We’ll park the car over here, then lose ourselves in this crowd for half an hour until we’re absolutely certain those guys are gone. Then I’ll get us home.”

Alice looked around. “You’re sure this is a safe neighborhood?”

“Don’t worry.”

Confetti sprinkled the air. Children wrapped themselves in streamers. A tall, copper-colored woman beat her buttocks with a bottle as she danced to the music from the pickup. Nearly nude kids skipped around a laughing man curled like a corpse in a giant cardboard box.

Hugh kept a careful watch.

Under British rule, generations of Trinidadians had been forced into slavery in the cane fields or on large sugar plantations, he explained to Alice. At carnival time they carried whips and chains and painted their faces with flour, to parody their white masters. “A kind of play-revolution to head off the real one.”

“The real ones are still just a hair-trigger away, aren’t they?”

“I’m sorry. I had no idea we’d run into trouble. It’s just a handful of folks, I think, who can’t get beyond — ”

“You go along, thinking everything’s all right, that the country’s getting better…”

Hugh heard the ideologue again, the thwarted crusader stirring inside her, and he tried to change the subject. “Would you like another drink?”

“We don’t have the faintest idea what our culture is really like, do we?” she went on. “We’re stumbling around with blinders on our eyes.”

Behind her, a young man in a Ronald Reagan mask bounced on a car hood. His shirt said, “Suck My Dick.” A woman sashayed past Hugh wearing a hula skirt and a cowboy hat. “Happy Juneteenth,” she said and patted his ass.

Alice was on the verge of tears. He didn’t know why, beyond attraction — or an apology for exposing her to the dangers of the night — but he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips, perhaps as a preemptive strike to block the moral lesson she was sure to deliver.

She looked startled. She blushed, then smiled.

“Am I over the line?” Hugh asked.

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“I don’t know, Alice.”

“Maybe we should — ”

“Yes.”

They walked back to his car, holding hands. Shy as schoolkids. A Roman candle, splitting smoke in the sky, illuminated an old man pawing through a Dumpster. Hugh remembered he’d forgotten to leave food for the kittens. He wondered about the bag lady on this lovely, disruptive night.

No sign of the Mustang. He drove past the junior college, over to Montrose. In front of his place he killed the engine and shut off his lights. A water sprinkler chrred in the dark. A dog barked.

“Alice, I’m — ”

“Shhh.”

Her mouth was more expressive than Paula’s, pressing and tentative all at once, exploring and waiting to be explored. Soothing, erotic, a bold surprise — imagine if she liked men! Paula had always been a nervous, furtive kisser, even when she and Hugh had plenty of private time together, away from the girls.

“Would you like to come in?” he said.

She nodded.

Stale, dusty air. Right away he opened a kitchen window and switched on a ceiling fan. “Wine?”

“Just a touch.”

An uncorked bottle of chardonnay sat in the fridge, next to three soggy tomatoes and a plate of leftovers. Broccoli-cheese casserole. The Cling Wrap floated, loose, around the dish; a putrid tang infested the room. “Whoa,” Hugh said, stepping back. “Sorry. Living alone, you know …” He scraped the food into a trash bag then set the plate in the sink, a little too hard. It chipped.

He handed her a glass of wine and pulled her gently down the hall. In his bedroom, he opened another window. He set their glasses on the night table and began to unbutton her blouse. The V of her collarbone moved sleekly inside her flesh. Angles veered surprisingly into soft planes, pockets of heat into which his hands fit, exactly.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.

As he filled her, she seemed to fill him back, gently, but thoroughly, with a spreading warmth just at the edge of his awareness.

He stayed excited even after he’d come, moaning above her, sweating lightly, dampening her belly and breasts. His body felt less like his own than like an extension of hers, fluttering, charged by their motion together.

From a neighbor’s yard, wind chimes sang like laughter through his open window. Then something else. A wailing. Alice stirred. “What’s that?”

Hugh listened closely. “Oh. Oh, it’s a bag lady.” He rubbed his face. “Poor woman. She hangs around the Dumpsters here and talks to herself.”

“Sad.”

“Sorry. I’ll close the window — ”

“No. No, stay here.” She tightened her grip on his back and buried her face in his shoulder. Her sudden, apparent need brought tears to his eyes.

By her head, Hugh noticed a glass skunk he’d owned for years, wobbling on the night table next to the wine glasses. Paula had given him the skunk after a weekend tryst in Galveston, nearly ten years ago, before they were married. They’d gone crabbing that Saturday, using chicken necks as bait to entice the crabs, who’d scrambled over green and purple pebbles onto blistering sand, and into Paula’s net. He’d seen the skunk in a gift shop on the Strand. It had made him laugh — its big eyes and its pompadour — and she’d bought it for him when he wasn’t looking. She surprised him with it in their beachside motel room. It danced on the bed’s headboard while they made love, a salty breeze riffling the gold curtains around their sliding-glass door, the crabs clattering in a plastic bucket in the bathtub, crammed with chipped, dirty ice.

He missed Paula only intermittently now, though he’d grieved steadily the first year she’d moved back to the Big Easy. Even then, it wasn’t Paula he missed so much as the girls, the reassuring habits they’d established together — cleaning and cooking and gardening. He supposed, now, he hadn’t loved her as much as he’d loved the notion of building a nest and settling in.

But watching the skunk wobble, holding Alice, recalling Paula’s naked body, he felt a pang. He wouldn’t want Paula back, but of all the people on the planet, only Paula knew certain things about him: the way he’d cried the night he’d found a dead bluejay in the yard, one steamy August; his delight when he’d first tasted cilantro at a picnic, just the two of them, on a baseball diamond near Rice; the way he’d laughed when he’d spotted the skunk in the gift shop. Inconsequential moments, hut if not for his memory — and Paula’s — no one could say they had occurred at all.

“Hugh?” Alice whispered.

The bag lady wailed.

He could feel his own heartbeat. And hers. Here. Now. He kissed Alice fiercely.

His best moves were his father-moves: ice cream treats in the middle of the day, an unexpected raise in the girls’ weekly allowance. Granting — or withholding — praise, depending on the girls’ achievements. Once, when Elissa had managed all As in school, his praise had been extravagant. On the other hand, the day Jane shaved the hind legs of a neighbor’s schnauzer with her mother’s electric razor — an impressive achievement, no matter how you viewed it — he thought it best to keep his pride in her ingenuity a secret.

He was his finest self with the girls. With Paula he had been defensive, protective of his time (she could always make his successes seem small — talk about withholding!). When they’d separated, and he’d accepted seeing his daughters only every few months, he hadn’t thought he’d miss much — what could happen in such a short time? But from the start he’d been stunned by the speed of their shifts. He’d drop them off in the fall, and by winter they’d be new creatures altogether. One loose tooth had turned into a gaping chasm in an aching mouth; throbbing joints had stretched into an extra half-inch of height.

Who would they be this summer?

At 9:30 Sunday morning he punched Paula’s number. It was his regular time to speak to the girls. Around dawn, Alice had asked him to take her home. He had hoped for a leisurely breakfast with her. She’d sworn she’d had a good time last night, but she had a lot to do before Monday … yes, yes, of course he could call her. Her stiffness had returned. Self-consciousness after sex, fear of daylight, something. Unable to kid her out of it, he hadn’t tried to talk her into staying.

Now, Jane was saying into the phone, “Daddy, I’m going to be in a play at school.”

“That’s great, baby. Is it a singing play?”

“No.”

“Is it a dress-up play?”

“Daddy. All plays are dress-up plays.”

“I guess so.”

Elissa had learned to play “chest.”

“Chest?”

“You know, kings and queens and pawns?”

“That’s wonderful, honey. How’d you learn?”

“I know how to play, Daddy. I just know, okay?”

“Okay, darling.”

He made no headway with Paula, and after hanging up he felt lonely. He thought of phoning Alice, but calling so quickly would make him seem desperate and pathetic. Was he desperate and pathetic? Still, how could he — or she? — deny how good the sex had been, good enough to feel rare and important?

At a Weingarten’s he bought a New York Times and some orange juice; he went home and made himself some scrambled eggs. Reagan denied the United States was fighting a war in Nicaragua. Hugh dropped the front page in disgust and picked up another section. An article in “Living Arts” said Memphis Minnie, an early blues singer “whose howling, rhythmic calls rose out of the gritty Mississippi Delta cotton fields in the 1920s,” had finally gotten a grave marker in the cemetery at New Hope Baptist Church in Walls, Mississippi, just off Highway 61. When she’d died in ‘73, the “music industry had passed her by, as had any profits from her work,” and she’d been laid in a pauper’s grave. Now, a handful of blues fans — all white — had established a memorial fund to recognize several long-forgotten Southern musicians. Hugh longed to see the Delta again, to hear the old howls. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if he could take the girls there?

Outside his kitchen window the kittens romped under the bushes. He heard their loud purrs. He was nearly out of cat food. Now, while he had the day free (except for grading tests, and he could tell already that most of the class had tanked), now might be a good time to check the animal shelter he’d passed last December, when he’d taken the girls to Hobby Airport. He remembered seeing it, and all week he’d been meaning to check it out, to see if it would be a good home for the kittens.

So he did the dishes, then drove out Curry Road. Porno shops, massage parlors, gun stores. Jesus, he’d always hated this part of town, the rent-by-month apartments for cut-rate merchants moving God-knows-what through the Hobby terminal. He was always depressed driving the girls out here to fly home to their mother, and the setting itself saddened him even more. The area reeked of the middle man: the buildings, bland and cheap, as temporary and indifferent as their occupants. Fast food, fast lives, instant entertainment. On the grassy median, a large brown dog lay dead, hit by a car, no doubt. Hugh turned, past a “Five-Minute Wedding Chapel” next to “Nelda’s Super-Hair.” A “Militia Supplies” shop anchored a commercial strip next to a liquor store and three cramped pawnshops. Pickups with Confederate flag stickers circled the lot.

At a gravelly intersection he saw a faded wooden sign; the words were illegible, but maybe it marked the shelter’s path. He couldn’t quite remember where it was. He turned. Sweat stung his eyes. The air smelled of pine and tar from the streets, of rust and filth and waste. He braked hard. The road had ended abruptly. Grit flooded the car, through his window. He felt the heat of the breeze like a light, persistent burn.

In a weedy field in front of him, a bulldozer bashed the roof of a car. The operator tugged the levers, raising the shovel’s arm, then brought it crashing down on the brown and white Toyota. The car lurched; glass exploded from its windshield. No one else was around.

Who was this idiot? A city worker? Why was he destroying an automobile in the middle of a sleazy neighborhood, on the hottest day of the summer? Hugh wanted to yell at him. He stuck his head out the window, and saw, in his side mirror, a bright white building behind him, shaped like a mini-Astrodome.

He kicked his car into reverse, raising umbrellas of dust. The bulldozer beat on the Toyota.

A small sign above the door identified the place as the animal shelter.

Inside, it smelled like a hospital — not antiseptic, exactly; medicinal, full of sickness. The odors seared Hugh’s nose. Wet fur, foul breath, and something else. He sniffed. Of course. A trace of gas. Right away, he knew it had been a mistake to come. How could he have thought of bringing the kittens here?

He lied to the woman at the front desk and said he was searching for a lost cat — he had to offer some excuse now that he was here. She said he could check the back cages. Animals were kept for a couple of weeks before “we have to put them to sleep.” She led him to a massive metal door with a square glass pane in its center. When the woman tugged the handle, a gust of heat emerged from the hall. Hugh thanked her, then stepped into the suffocating broil.

Floor-to-ceiling black wire cages lined either side of the room. Runnels gouged the red-painted floor. A clear liquid ran through the grooves, smelling faintly like pesticide.

The barking and wailing deafened him. An emaciated German shepherd rushed its cage, gnashed its teeth at him. He fell against the opposite wall and felt a hot wind at his ankles; two toy poodles snapped at his heels. Frayed red ribbons dangled, dirty, from their necks. A large yellow dog lay in a cage by itself. It lifted its head, a rheumy old man.

By the far wall, cats, crowded in cages. A noisy spin-cycle of motion. Hugh hurried out, dizzy — so many “hoo-raws” in the city, even among the animals! — muttering vague excuses to the woman at the desk.

Outside, the bulldozer pummeled the car.

Rap music rattled Dowling Street’s brightly lit projects. He got lucky with Spider. The wiry old drummer was perched on his stoop sucking wine from a jam jar. Hugh killed his engine. “Join you?” he called from the curb. All evening, he’d driven around, feeling helpless: unable to connect with his girls, to reach most of his students (the tests were worse than he’d thought), to help the kittens or the old woman who sometimes shared their bushes.

“Didn’t ’spect you till tomorrow. What brings you?” Spider said. “Bad news? Usually bad news brings a fella ‘round when no one ’specting him.”

“No, not really. Nothing terrible, at least. I’m just a little … unsettled tonight.”

“Hell, I been unsettled since kickin’ down my poor old mama’s womb.” He handed Hugh the wine bottle. The stuff was murky. “I’ll get you a glass.”

Crickets wheedled in the grass. The smell of gin and barbecued chicken tumbled over Hugh from a dim window above Spider’s porch. Down the block, where the shackled black hands peeled on the rough brick wall, a broken police tape flapped like kite string from a tree.

“Had a drive-by earlier this evening,” Spider explained, back with a glass. Hugh poured himself a finger. “Twelve-year-old boy, nicked in the arm.”

Hugh watched the streets for the Mustang.

“Why someone want to eighty-six a twelve-year-old boy?”

“The other night, some fellows chased me away from the park,” Hugh said. “Seems to be a high degree of territoriality around here.”

“Brothers protecting they turf, you mean? Yeah. Black Magic’s got ’em all stirred up.”

“Who is he?”

“Who is he really, I don’t know. Just some brother with a microphone. But folks see him as a guardian fuckin’ angel. Defendin’ our occupied streets.”

“Occupied by whites?”

“White money, for sure. Shit, Hugh, let’s not do this tonight, awright man? I’m feelin’ good ‘bout the weekend. I’m obliged to you for nudgin’ me back on stage. Let’s leave it at that. Fair ’nuff?”

“Fair enough. You sounded great. I loved the ‘Shoo-fly’ song.”

“Standard blues juke, nothin’ much, C to C sharp.”

“Sort of non-chordal overall, though? With a 2/4 bar?”

“You learnin’! Ride cymbal keepin’ the beat, leavin’ the bass drum free to bust some chops. Let me ast you, man. Somethin’ you tol’ me while ago. Slaves used to live right here? On Dowling Street? Tha’s on the level?”

“Right here.” The wine tasted like lighter fluid.

Spider nodded. “Reason I ast, sometimes I think I can hear ’em. You know? In my head, in the music. Like them old chains just won’t let go. They be talkin’ to me. ‘Spider, man, spin out our hoo-raw. Don’t let it die.’”

“You’re a storyteller,” Hugh said. “You said it yourself, once.”

“Yeah. Tellin’ stories like carryin’ people’s spirits ‘round inside you.”

Someone screamed down the street. Hugh jumped, then realized the noise had been kids playing. He kept an eye on the intersections at either end of the block. “These old spirits, Spider … it’s something I wanted to talk to you about. You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to see where you were born. See the first joints you played.”

“In the Thicket, you mean?”

“Exactly. I’ve been thinking, it’d be great if I could write your personal history — because it parallels the music’s path, from rural to urban, right, from cotton fields to backroom speakeasies — ”

“I don’t think you should go there, man. Not on your own. Back in them woods, it’s still — how you put it? — ’territorial.’”

“Will you take me, then?”

“When you want to go?”

“Anytime. Now. This week.”

“Shoot!”

“I’m talking a day, maybe two …”

“Mm-hmm. Tell me, this unsettlement you feelin’. It have somethin’ to do with Little Miss Queenie you brung to the Juneteenth party?”

“No, well … sure. A little. And with my classes, I guess, my ex, my girls I don’t know, I feel like getting away. Turning my mind to something else.”

“Turn your ass to gettin’ killed, you go clompin’ ‘round certain hollers in that Thicket. Tell you what, I cain’t take you this week. Since Sat’day, we had offers to play ‘most ever’ night. Mr. Gino’s Lounge. The Club Success. Etta’s. C. Davis Bar-B-Q. And the beauty part is, these black joints. The real thing. Ain’t none of this white slummin’ goin on. No offense, Hugh. But you know what I mean.”

Hugh swallowed the last of his wine. “Lord.” Esophagus-burn. “Listen, if I go looking around those woods, and I come back with questions, will you answer them?”

Spider held out his hand. Hugh shook it.

“Meantime, you better get straight wit’ your womens,” Spider said. “And watch your skinny ass.”

“I hear you, man.” The wine had left him gasping. “I sure do hear you.”

On Monday his students were noisy, eager to see their grades, secretly thrilled (like wild ponies) by the threatening weather outside. The classroom was muggy, smelling of chalk and damp cotton clothing. Hugh set the test folder on the seminar table. About a quarter of the class had failed. Basic world history. He passed out the exams and waited quietly while the students read their results. Much shifting, creaking of chairs. The Asians rolled their eyes in pleasure or disappointment; the Latins straightened vainly or sank; the Arabs showed nothing.

Thunder slammed the building’s walls.

With this particular class, he had never used his world map exercise. There hadn’t been time — the summer term was short. Now, with so many of them fretting over their tests, he figured they could use a distraction. “Okay, everybody, tomorrow morning we’ll start drilling again, and I expect you all to be prepared. But for now, I’d like you to get out a blank sheet of paper, and draw me a map of the planet.”

They questioned him, gave him squirrelly looks, but eventually put their exams away and settled down to work. A few moved their pens with fluency and joy, others seemed to fight the simple tools, wristbones rigid on the table. Some became absorbed in their labor, others struggled, tongues wagging.

When they finished, and Hugh asked them to compare their efforts, they were astonished — as he knew they would be — at how different their drawings were.

Africa front and center.

Saudi Arabia at the core.

Lima, Peru — Earth’s navel.

“So,” Hugh said. “Will the real world please stand up?”

They didn’t understand this phrase. “Never mind,” he said. “What does this teach us?”

They agreed that a person’s image of the planet depended on his or her home culture, that national and regional biases blind us to others’ conceptions of the truth.

“And we all have individual biases as well,” Hugh added. “I’ve learned that most of us can’t see our culture — the basic set of assumptions that shapes our strongest beliefs — any more than a fish can see the bowl it’s swimming in.”

“My teacher.” Karim, a young Tunisian, waved his hand. “I think maybe it means something more.”

“Yes?” Hugh smiled at him. Karim was one of the best students, naturally friendly and charming.

“I think maybe it means …” He worked his mouth around the clumsy sounds he wanted to express, as if anything he said — as if language itself — would be woefully inadequate. “The world? She is, perhaps, unknowable.”

Back in his office after class, Hugh tried to phone Alice but her secretary said she’d called in that morning. Hugh tried her at home but got only her machine. Was she sick or had Saturday night upset her so much she’d taken to hiding out? He heard Spider again: sen-si-tive. “I hope you’re okay,” he said into the receiver. “Please call me. I’d like to see you again. I believe, next time, we can find a safe part of town. Promise.”

But already, in mind-drifting moments, he’d been planning a trip to the Thicket. As he’d told Spider, Saturday had strengthened his desire to see Spider’s roots, to prove to himself he could enter the world of the blues, and not be chased away. Yes, yes, why not … but first, he thought, he had to fix his own backyard.

His light flickered and went out. He punched Paula’s number, but the girls were staying with a friend. She said he’d have to call them back. He didn’t feel like arguing, just now, about his visit, so he hung up. He called and left a message with the department secretary, saying he’d be gone the next two days. Personal business. His students were taken care of — they had their next assignment. He drove home, packed his toothbrush and a change of clothes. He left two plates of cat food in the bushes. The kittens stared at him suspiciously. He checked his watch. Good. The restaurant would just be opening for supper. A quick bite — quick, before he changed his mind — then he’d hit the road.

Virgin of Guadalupe candles washed Chimichanga in thick, eggy light. Hugh dipped a tortilla chip into a mulcahete brimming with green salsa. For several minutes now he’d watched cooks step furtively through the restaurant’s back door with trays of steaming beans and rice. Through a window lined with white lightbulbs (shaped like laughing skulls) he saw them cross the parking lot, tap on the wooden shed out back, and hand in the food.

A waitress arrived with chili rellenos, tacos al carbon. A baleful waltz poured from the jukebox speakers.

He washed his hands, tried Alice’s number from the pay phone near the bathrooms. Still no answer. As he stood there gripping the receiver he overheard a cook, in the kitchen’s plastic-bead doorway, tell Carlos, “New group tonight. Two families.”

“Where from?”

“Michoacán.”

“We clear enough room?”

“I sent Billy to Kmart for three more sleeping bags.”

This was Hugh’s chance. He stepped forward. The cook frowned, then vanished into the kitchen.

“Carlos?” Hugh said.

“Professor!” He had a wide smile, with dimples and big yellow teeth. “What can I do you for? How’s your food?”

“Wonderful, as always. Listen, can I ask you something? I don’t mean to pry into your business, but — ”

“Oh my. Sounds serious.” Carlos grinned.

“The shed out back? The trays?”

His face darkened. “What trays?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not … I’ve just been thinking, if you were feeding folks, immigrants or something — ”

Carlos shook his head.

“The thing is, there’s a homeless woman around the corner, near my apartment. She sleeps behind a Dumpster. I give her money for food, but I don’t think she eats well. She’s a little funny in the head. I just thought …” He shrugged.

Flamenco guitar. Shouts, glass-scrapes, a hissing of steam in the kitchen.

Carlos rubbed his chin, examined Hugh’s face. Finally, he touched Hugh’s shoulder and motioned him close. “If you can get her to come around after dark. Do you think you can do that?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try.” It would have to wait until he returned from the Thicket. Another day. What was a day like for the woman? How hard was it to survive twenty-four hours?

“I deny everything, of course. But maybe she can get a little rice. Some beans.”

“Thank you. Thank you. I knew you were a good man,” Hugh said.

“A bad businessman.” He laughed. “I remember where I come from, that’s all. A sense of obligation, you know?”

“Yes.”

“You take care of yourself, Professor, all right?”

Hugh finished his meal. Through the skull-lined window he saw an old beige station wagon stop in the parking lot. Carlos and two of the cooks opened its doors. Dark children stumbled out, wrapped in blankets. Skinny men in chewed straw hats, women clutching cloth bundles. They huddled on the black and slippery gravel. Then they scurried into the shed.

“Pigs be comin’ for me, folks, so we on the move tonight, somewhere in the city. Smoked me outta my home. You be next, brothers. Bastards won’t rest till they confiscate all the black property in town. Mark me. Sendin’ dope and guns into our ‘hoods so they got an excuse to invade …”

Hugh fiddled with the fine-tune. “They right behind me, brothers! You hear that gunfire? I’m broadcastin’ now on foot, somewheres in the projecks. Bustin’ down doors, grabbin’ up women and childerns. We all know they lookin’ for me. Want to shut down the Truth. But I ain’t goin’ quiet into their lily-white night …”

Up ahead, on the freeway, a car backfired. Hugh jumped.

Now, only silence where Black Magic usually screamed defiance. The fine-tune didn’t help this time. The hollow sound depressed him.

Well.

What did he used to tell the girls when they worried at night? If there’s a creepy shadow on the wall, don’t dive under your covers. Look at it. Study it. Or walk right up to it until you learn it’s nothing to fear. Daddy, are you coming to see us?

He set his cruise control and headed for the Thicket.

It could have been Mississippi, the rich, alluvial furrows of the Delta where Robert Johnson met the Devil and the roots of the blues grew wild. But this was Texas. Algier Alexander with his field-holler bellow, his prison and farm labor laments; Blind Willie Johnson slurring hellfire, scraping a pocketknife across rain-rusted strings; Black Ace, Manee Lipscomb, with their echoes of vaquero guitar — it was high time Hugh came here to witness their fertile soil.

Around one A.M., he stopped at the Trail’s End Motel in Paley, the only place open for miles. The old woman at the registration desk had a stiff-washrag face. She gummed a Winston beneath a crackling yellow light, and told him, “We’ll go for days, weeks, even months here ‘thout seeing someone from the city …”

“That right?” Hugh said, signing his name and his license plate number on a faded index card.

In his room, by the dim light of a lamp with cigarette burns on its ripped brown shade, and the blue pulsing of a soft-porn movie on TV — its only clear channel — Hugh read his transcripts of interviews with Spider, memorizing place-names and directions so he could find key spots tomorrow. A woman in the next room sang, over and over, “Hey hey, we’re the Monkees.”

He made notes on Houston’s black protests — upsets, Spider called them. The race riot of 1917, when black soldiers from Camp Logan, a military outpost in the city, marched through white subdivisions, firing their rifles, enflamed by racist police. The “Dowling Street Shootout” in the 1970s, when cops killed the leader of a black militant group called the People’s Party II, sparking violence and looting.

Hugh was curious to know if these incidents had been mythologized in neighborhood songs, and if they’d been set to familiar melodies passed from one generation to the next. Could he find a direct connection between the music here in the Thicket and recent urban verses, between the mournful rhythms of cotton picking and the angrier beat of Houston’s streets? Such a link could give his work an exciting new turn.

After an hour, he reached over, turned out the light. He thought of trying Alice once more. No, not this late. She’d think he was crazy. Hell, she probably already figured he was nuts.

The next morning, armed with his notes, he set out. When he left the motel, his car was the only one in the lot, though he was getting an early start. The sky was velvet green patched with purple clouds. The ground smelled rank and moist. His arms and legs felt light.

“Friends, the Devil owns several hundred acres in southeast Texas. Yessir, he’s the biggest jefe in these-here parts, and if he offers you any property — a pretty riverside home, a blooming garden — take my word for it, don’t be tempted to buy. No sir. The mortgage is more than you can afford. And believe me, friends, he knows how to ruin a garden.”

Hugh turned off the radio, still mourning Black Magic’s absence. The sky grew stranger, as though a child had shaded it wrong in her coloring book. Wind jiggled the pines. I own the goddam sky. He passed a sign for “Rattlesnakes. Free. Two Miles”—passed the Green Frog Café, long abandoned, with a sign out front, “We Never Close” and another, “No Credit.”

Farther down the road a hand-lettered poster nailed to a tree said, “Catfish Bate.” A hoot owl moaned from a tree. He passed another ad, this one for a palm reader — a big red arrow in a knot of dying willows: “Yer Footur Awates.”

He checked a rough map he’d drawn based on Spider’s recollections of distinctive junctions. It appeared he should take a left on the gravel path up ahead, through a dark stand of oaks. At a crossroads to his right he noticed a country store. Fresh-cut wood. A blue plastic tarp lay crumpled in the grass. He thought of stopping and asking directions, but decided to trust his map.

The gravel petered out, turning to dirt and twisted ivy. The sky dimmed further as the foliage thickened; not too far into the Thicket, day became night, and he had to use his headlights. About a quarter of a mile later, he emerged onto thin pavement. He expected to see the Navasota River: instead, rows and dewy rows of strawberry fields. Latino workers crouched in the greenery, croker sacks slack across their backs. Hugh thought of Chimichanga, of the shed out back, and wondered if any of these folks had passed through there.

In a few days, all this sweat and labor would be transformed into glistening, sweetly packaged produce (with an elf or a smiling green giant on the labels) in the bins of Houston’s stores, like gifts plucked from the air.

Barbed-wire fences, tall as two-story houses, surrounded a state pen nearby, a brand-new facility next to a waste dump and a closed public school. Trash and crime, Hugh thought, Texas’s biggest growth industries. Here’s where Mama Houston sends her naughty kids.

Heart of them old devil blues.

Looking around, he recalled the WPA slave narratives he’d read in Houston’s library: “Mother and Father both had kind masters who never whipped them but looked after them good and give them a good home in return for the work they did for them.”

The soil was redder here than it was near Paley. The river had to be close. Spider had once mentioned an icehouse, “Used to be a old tavern, been there for ages, folks said Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett stopped to rest there when it b’longed to the Texas Infantry — anyways, when I’s a kid, my old man used to drink there with his friends after a full day sharecroppin’. He’d toggle me along and tell me to play out back while he and his buddies traded hoo-raws. I remember, I found a whole bunch of Indian arrowheads in the dirt there, and little animal bones.”

Hugh knew if he could pinpoint this place he’d have it made. From there, he could find the shack where Spider was born, and what was left of Spider’s earliest juke joints.

A cantaloupe field angled off to the west. “Tasted like the Savior’s sweet blood,” Spider once said of the fruit. According to the map, there ought to be a sawmill here, and the rusted remains of a cotton gin. Hugh turned his Nova around and poked along a dirt road embroidered with scorched blackberry brambles. He heard a rhythmic chanting. Closer now. Field hands belting out a work tune? A gospel chorus?

He stopped the car, grabbed his notebook and a portable cassette recorder off the warm plastic seat, and pushed his way through the brambles, slicing his arms on the thorns. A wooden sign stopped him short. “Keep Out,” it said. A crude red swastika dripped down rusty nails. Crew-cut men in combat fatigues marched in formation fingering elaborate guns, bellowing, “Fuck the niggers, fuck the spies, make them suck our hard, white dicks!”

Hugh, clammy, crouched in the bushes, looking for the quickest way back to his car. A clattering spurt. He hit the ground. He felt dirt ring his lips like margarita salt. When he glanced up, he saw the men laughing, slapping hands. Pinewood targets — crude triangles nailed to trees — swayed, torn, in scattered smoke-swales. The air smelled singed.

Voices. Foul cigars. Two men, strolling. Hugh ducked.

“—planes leaving regular now out of Mena, Arkansas. I got a buddy, making drops just inside Honduras. He can get us on. Three, four runs a week. Damn good pay.”

“AK-47s?”

“Ordnance one way, poppy coming back.”

“Where to?”

“Houston, Chi-town, L.A. Diming it to inner-city niggers, raising money for the ops. Plan of exquisite beauty.”

“Wires cross, our asses covered?”

“Nope. Deniability, all the way up. That’s the risk we take. What say, pard?”

“I’ll think on it. Hell, what’d I tell Shirl?”

“Shit, Rusty, with the scratch you’d make, you could set her up in a nice little house in Houston. Curtains in the kitchen. A rosy, air-freshened john.” They laughed. “She don’t have to know what’s propping up her sweet American Dream.”

“She wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

“Right. Another lovely plan.”

When they moved away, Hugh scrambled backwards, out of the bushes. He wriggled down a broad slope and turned for his car.

Six goons had it circled. Goons with guns. Right away they spotted him. “There!” one yelled.

He squelched his impulse to run, fearing they’d shoot him in the back.

“Who are you? State your name!”

“Me?”

“Name, asshole!”

“Hugh Campbell.”

One man snatched the notebook from his hands. “Goddam it, are you a reporter? What are you doing here?”

“No no.” Hugh thought quickly. “I’m a birdwatcher. Chasing a rare … bird.”

The fellow smelled of greasepaint — brilliant emerald face. Neck a rare flank steak. “Give me your wallet.” The others closed ranks around him. Hugh noticed a welter of burns, some large, on faces, arms, hands.

Insects popped like Bingo balls in the fields. The men studied his credit cards. “You better be who you say you are,” the first one told him finally, waving his driver’s license. “What did you see?”

“Nothing, I … nothing. Really.”

Stale sweat. Beery breath. “Go back to the city, you hear? We kilt all the birds.”

They dropped his cards, his notebook and recorder on the ground. When he bent to pick them up, they kicked dirt in his eyes. “Get out of here!” the first fellow screamed.

As he fishtailed down the road, they peppered the air with lead.

Oaks gave way to willows, willows to chalky hardscrabble. Wind flung grit against his car.

In the thirties and forties, Alan Lomax, hitching through Mississippi to record rural folk tunes, was harassed for shaking black men’s hands in public, or calling them “mister.” One night on Beale Street, talking gospel with some harp players, he was startled by drawn pistols and a policeman’s twitchy flashlight.

So. Jim Crow was alive and well — and armed — in the Thicket too.

Past a rolling burdock-ridge Hugh glimpsed, for the first time today, swelling blue water, muscled ripples, worn-smooth stones. The Navasota. He’d found it. He’d found it!

Around a bend, smoke huffed from the brick chimney of an unpainted shack. A cardboard sign on the door advertised — simply, elegantly — “Hot Meat.” Two black kids, a boy and a girl, played on the porch. Hugh glanced at his map. He wasn’t sure after all. He’d ask directions inside.

At least this felt like the blues, not a Nazi rally.

A spicy-sweet sausage smell hung like a net in the trees. Up close, Hugh saw that the children were playing with half-dead crawfish. The girl’s dress was muddy and torn. The boy had messed his drawers. Hugh could smell it. Milky, dried oats crusted their mouths. No answer when he offered hello.

Inside, a big man and two women stared at him. He maneuvered around barrels and broken fruit crates to reach the front counter. His steps shook the walls. Somewhere, chicken sizzled.

“Howdy,” Hugh said.

The man nodded slightly. It occurred to Hugh they might think he was a militia mutt.

Carefully, he unfolded his map. “I’m looking for — ”

“Know nothin’,” said the man.

“I think I’m — ”

“Nothin’ ‘bout it.”

The women disappeared behind a thin green curtain.

“I see,” Hugh said. “Old juke joint, closed now? ‘The Honey Pot’? Near here?”

The man crossed his arms, resting his elbows on his belly.

“I just want to see it, that’s all.”

The only movement was a horsefly, dancing on rotting peaches in a bin.

Hugh stuffed the map in his pocket. “Is there somewhere I can get gas, then?”

‘“Bout six miles south.” The man pointed.

Back outside, Hugh saw the little boy pull the head off his crawfish.

A burned-out school bus sunk in an ivy-crush. A slender wooden cross, wrapped in roses.

He’d found the filling station. Another silent man.

The rest of the day he circled, reversed, tracked, and backtracked. The Thicket was aptly named.

The sky became a kaleidoscope, churning fury — by sundown, thick as taffy, purple and black, it filled the tops of the trees. Needling rain.

“Fuck it,” Hugh said, disgusted with himself, tossing his map out the window. It caught in the wind and skittered like a ghost through scissor-like leaves on the ground.

How could he have been so stupid?

Last year’s trip to the Delta, with its dreary fast-food joints, should have taught him that blues culture no longer existed. Spider was right.

And of course it never had been as romantic as in his fantasies. Slavery, for God’s sake. Sharecropping.

His cheeks burned. In spite of all his notes, his interviews and articles, he didn’t know a damn thing. How could he hope to know another race of people? It was hard enough to know Paula and Alice. His little girls. Himself.

He found a main road to the interstate. He didn’t want to think any more. He was starving. Up ahead he saw a truck stop, a glary all-night restaurant.

Before ordering, he asked the cashier to exchange several bills for a pocketful of change. He ducked into a smudgy phone booth by the kitchen. Lord, he was tired.

Alice had left a message at his home: “Hugh, hi. Sorry I’ve been so hard to reach. I was a little under the weather.” He was surprised how much her voice warmed his skin. “No. That’s not true.” He stiffened his spine. “The truth is, Saturday felt … too fast, somehow, I guess. I’m sorry. I needed time to think about what happened. Not just the sex”—this last word she whispered — “but the park, your world, what interests you.” Ah. So she did think he was crazy. “But I’ve been thinking about you, Hugh.” Yes? “I’d like to see you again too, if you haven’t lost all patience with me. So, I don’t know, I don’t know … give me a call, okay? I’ll be back at work tomorrow.”

He smiled, cradled the receiver in his hands, brought it to his lips. He thought of his little glass skunk.

He fed the phone another clutch of coins, then punched Paula’s number. She answered right away.

“Hi. How’s everybody?” he asked.

“Oh God, what a week it’s going to be,” Paula said.

Her flustery tone depressed him right away. So much cooler than Alice, even when Alice was at her stiffest. “Can I speak to the girls?”

“Sure. Sure, hold on.”

Elissa. “Hi, Daddy.”

“How you doing, cookie?” Sweetness, home, he thought.

“Daddy, you know my friend Holly?”

“Yes?”

“She’s very vain.”

“Really?” He’d never heard her use this word. It was an adult word, complex and layered, and it sounded both funny and frightening in her voice.

“Today while we were playing? She wouldn’t take off her sweater, even though she was getting really hot.”

“I see. Was it windy where you were? It was a terrible afternoon, wasn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. You want to talk to Jane now?” Clearly, for Elissa, Holly had been the day’s major business. There was nothing left to discuss.

Hugh wished the college ran half as efficiently as this.

“Daddy!” Jane said.

“How are you, pumpkin?”

“I bumped my arm on the door. I’m much more better now.”

“Good.”

“But I cried a little this morning.”

“I’m so sorry. Have you been practicing your play?”

“Sort of Some of the girls won’t learn their lines.”

“Hm. Can you be the director, then, and tell them how important it is to be prepared?”

“I guess.”

“You’d be really good at it.”

“Okay!”

“Okay, then. Sleep well tonight, honey. I love you. Kiss your sister for me.”

“Ewww!”

Dizzy with hunger now, he found a corner booth, ordered a chicken-fried steak and sweetened iced tea. Truckers sat at a counter slurping coffee. “Don’t know what it’s like, west of N’awlins,” one said. “I heard around midafternoon they had gale-force winds, some debris on the highway. Maybe they’ve cleared it by now.”

“Just have to head that way, I s’pose, take my chances.”

Hugh thought of calling Paula back, warning her to shut her windows tight. But he’d just piss her off. There was only so much he could do for his girls from a distance.

When his steak arrived, it was drowned in steaming white gravy. Comfort food.

His daughters’ voices had anchored him back in his world. He missed his bed. He missed Alice.

He must have dozed. Next thing he knew, his plate was gone, the ice had melted in his glass, and the check lay in a dribble of water on the table. The waitress, pale, with a scribbled nametag, “Sally,” grinned at him. “Didn’t know whether to shake you, partner, or let you be. Finally figured you needed your beauty rest.”

“Yes.” He rubbed his face. His skin was flaky and dry. “I guess I did.”

“Get you anything else tonight?”

“That’ll do it.” He handed her a ten.

He stood for a while in the parking lot, letting the air wake him up. The sky couldn’t make up its mind. The wind had calmed some, but still tossed twigs across the road: a sound like aspirin spilling from a bottle. In his car, Hugh tried the radio. Slushy static. Silence, an absence that made him realize he probably wouldn’t see much of Spider any more, now that Spider was tired of white folks “slummin.” Well. He’d helped the man recover his music. That was something, at least.

Hugh switched on his lights, caught a glimpse of an owl just to the left of the road. Yawning, blinking, unsettled, he wound on back to Mama Houston. If he didn’t make it home too late tonight — he rolled down his window to smell the “goddam sky”—he could guide the old woman to Carlos’s shed behind the restaurant.