I got the hell out of Tupelo. I drove day and night, stopping only for pee breaks and lunches on the run, all the way from Tupelo, Mississippi, to New York, New York. I carried with me a dream of freedom and fame and fortune, and voices from the past chased after me, nipping at my heels like pesky puppy dogs. To get away from them, I had to drive faster, work faster, live faster. I had to be somebody new: Red Warner, the manic genius, the wild and woolly beatnik from the South. I vowed to grab Baghdad on the Hudson by the balls and make it take notice.

Bah! For the first year or so, I existed in dull anonymity, a comatose fisherman adrift in a concrete sea, casting a wide net and hauling in nothing but the shattered shells of dreams. My home was a four-by-eight cubicle on the third floor of the Bleecker Hotel. The Bleecker was a prison where you paid for your cell. Mercifully, it has since been put out of its misery. There was no lobby, but only a tiny foyer with an elevator on the right and a locked door on the left coated with peeling forest green paint (who knows what goes on behind the green door?), and a counter, behind which the man took your money and handed you your mail (what mail?). The elevator was a cage. It went to the third floor, no higher; the upper floors were condemned. The cage opened to a bare hall. At the end of the hall were a bathroom with dirty urinals and a metal shower stall and once white, now stained and graffitoed walls. The whole floor shared this bathroom.

In my room, there was a cast iron bed and a nightstand. No chair. No dresser. A pole for hanging clothes. The transom over the door was open and paint-stuck forever in that position. The window was barred, with missing glass. The view out that window was a courtyard. Once, perhaps, it had been landscaped. Perhaps there had been tables or benches. Now it was a garbage heap. The tenants all slung their trash out their windows.

In the winter I stuffed a Salvation Army field jacket into the broken window to keep snow from blowing in. I slept in my clothes under a scratchy, green Army blanket. I ate in the soup line on 13th Street. Occasionally I picked up jobs from the day labor pool in a basement shop on MacDougal.

Sometimes I didn’t make it back to my room at night but would ride the subways until dawn. The trains were warm, and I liked their drumbeat sound. I was alone and scared, and I detested myself. Sometimes I’d head down to Christopher Street and hang out in the bars.

Days and days and dazed days, I walked the streets of Manhattan with Tupelo still in my mind, down around Wall Street, up through Chinatown and SoHo, the East Village, across to the Bowery and up to Washington Square, peeping in shop windows, yakking with the drunks and junkies and whores on the streets, sleeping in the grass in Washington Square Park. Once I saw some wacko walking around talking to himself, one of the hundreds that you hardly ever notice, and I started hollering at him, and he started hollering at me, and our voices bounced back and forth over the heads of the old Ukrainian gentlemen who played their endless games in the park at Houston and First Avenue. A whacked-out, off-key jazz improvisation of strident shouts. The whacko shouted at his gods and demons, and I shouted at mine, talking back to Josh Culpepper’s oily elocution and Hoss Williams’ taunting “Noth Yew! Noth Yew!” and the mumbling voices of all those good old boys and mild-mannered matrons who had crowded the courtroom and salivated for just-ice to quench their thirst, and the holier-than-thou boom of Brother Barnes warning ’bout hellfire and damnation.

Oh, mister preacher man and all y’all self-righteous mothers, don’t you know that our God is a loving god? Don’t you know He loves them po’ niggahs and dirty white trash and perverts and sickos mo’ than anybody! Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Oh Lord, I wish you’d strike ‘em all dead!

The Southern Baptists didn’t believe in purgatory, but somewhere along the line I picked up on the concept, and it made sense to me. I sought my own purgatory. I wanted to bottom out, to indulge in my most depraved fantasies. I dressed myself in metaphorical hair suits and flagellated myself mercilessly, believing that miraculously, through all that, I could cleanse my soul and come face to face with God and transcend this grimy world.

And I thought about Cassie. What would she think if she saw me? Would she even recognize me, or had I transformed myself like a werewolf prowling the night and slinking into hiding in the glare of day. She was in New York. She didn’t know where I was, but I knew where she was. She worked at a restaurant near Washington Square and sometimes danced in off-off Broadway shows. Her apartment was a small studio above Ye Waverly Inn at 16 Bank Street. I saw the nameplate over the buzzer: C. Warner, printed in that delicate hand of hers. I stood at the door many a time, staring at her name, imagining her upstairs, practicing her dance steps on the hardwood floor. But I couldn’t bring myself to push the buzzer.

And the famous artist who had come from the South to take New York by storm could not paint. How could I? I had no money for paint or canvas, and even if I had, there was no space for painting in my little cubicle. I bought Crayola crayons and did thousands of little studies for paintings that I told myself I’d some day do in oil. I worked at them obsessively, with little joy.
Eventually I pulled myself together, got a job, found a bigger place to live, and started painting for real.

I wanted to paint New York as only I could see it, to capture the color of oxidized metal and the suffocating mass of aged brick and stone buildings with scarred and layered, graffitoed walls, to recreate the indefinable hue of the lights under the West Side Highway and the purple shadows they cast, to build skeins of paint like the layered grit of shopping bag ladies with their many coats, to find an abstract form that spoke of the faded, Army green aura of alcoholics sleeping on the sidewalks, ashen faces and dull, boozy-pink rims around whitened eyes.

I wanted to distill it to its essence, to symbolize it with a few simple shapes. I tried, I tried. If the devil had come along and offered to buy my soul for the price of making me the artist I wanted to be, I would have signed on the line in a Noo Yawk second, but there weren’t no devil except for the devil in my head, so I did the next best thing—I begged for money from home.

Papa Chuck came through like a champ. For six months, I lived off his generosity. I found a cheap loft. Yes, that was still possible then. I quit my job. I painted in a desperate fury, knowing that Papa Chuck’s support would not last forever.

Oh, painting can be an evil mistress. The thrill of it can be like good sex. When you finish a painting and you know you’ve done it right, and you stand back and look at it, you shout, “Yass, by jingo! Yass! I done done it right.” But it can also be like pulling teeth or yanking hair out by the roots or rolling in the gutter in a drunken stupor or beating yourself over the head with a hickory stick, because you’ve got to reach deep inside and wrench it out of your guts.

And the loneliness! Oh Sweet Jesus Christ! You are all alone in a drafty old loft and you sling paint with a concentration tuned so fine it hurts, and then you set your paint bucket down and you look around, and there is not a living soul to share that moment with, be that moment ecstasy or be it loathing. The battle is just between you and that goddamn stoic canvas. And suddenly you get this flash of memory from art school where the professors ripped everything to shreds with their caustic criticism, and you begin to wonder if you could even recognize a real painting if it kicked you in the chops.

That’s when you want to crawl into your mama’s lap and cry until the fear goes away. But you’re a big boy now, and you don’t really need your mama; you need a sweet woman’s caress. When I became so full of hurt and loss that I couldn’t stand it anymore, I sought solace in the only place I could get it with ease, in the bars on Christopher Street.

When I finally got in touch with Cassie, she was a lifesaver for me. I finally worked up the courage to ring her bell, and she invited me in as if she had been waiting for me. In a way, she had. She said, “I was wondering if you were going to ever come by.”

“I know. I guess I was ashamed of what I have become. I’m not too proud of myself these days.”

But she loved me and never judged me. She kept me from going completely out of my mind.

I finally hit on what I was after in my painting with my Hungry Frederick series. Hungry Frederick was a tall, stooped, taciturn black man who showed up on the soup line on 13th Street every day. I created a single, abstract shape to symbolize Hungry Frederick, a sloppy, angular wedge in dull, raw colors, with previous layers of paint showing through as on peeled billboards. Hungry Frederick was beaten by life, but huge and defiant and angry as hell. That was what I tried to convey in my paintings.

The paintings were abstract and minimalist in form, but not so clean and bright as minimalist paintings should be; they were harsh, sloppy, scratched, battered, layered. They were the abstract equivalent of beaten people whose spirit refused to die, the people that I, at least, always envisioned when I thought of Faulkner’s famous quote about the indomitable spirit of man.

***

Lord, there must be forty thousand artists in New York City. Maybe more. Eight million bodies in The Naked City. That’s what they used to say on the TV. Now there’s more like eleven million, and all but ten of them are painters, all scrambling for a gallery to peddle their work, with maybe half a hundred galleries that handle contemporary art, and each one handling no more than eight or ten artists.

Artists carry their work door to door. They send out slides. Seven thousand guys each forks over a twenty-dollar entry fee for a competitive show that chooses thirty painters. Talk about desperation! And they talk: What’s going to be hot next season? What’s going to be the next trend? Who do you know? Who do you blow? Scramble for connections. Get a hold of some grass, some coke; slip it to the right person.

Hell, I was no different. If the right opportunity came up, I might have done anything, no matter how depraved or unethical. But I didn’t have to. I made it on dumb luck.
I walked into Leo Garner’s Broome Street Gallery with half a dozen rolled-up canvasses under my arm. It was during a goddamn opening! There were people asshole to elbow, all sipping wine and puffing cigarettes and yack-yack-yacking. I’d bolstered myself with beer and some fine Colombian weed, and I brazened right in there, wearing my overalls and my patched shirt and my whole gol-durn Redneck Dean Moriarty persona. I flipped those paintings out on the floor right in front of Leo Garner and said, “I wanna see these right up there on the wall.”

Leo Garner looked at me with a bemused smile. He looked at the paintings. He looked at the people who had scrunched back to make room. He looked back at the paintings. He looked at the poor artist whose opening I was ruining. He looked back at me, and he said, “All right. I’ll give you a show. Come back and see me Monday afternoon. We’ll work it out. What’s your name, anyway, kid?”

“Thank you, sir. Thanks a heap. I can’t goddamn believe it.”

I was in shock. That sort of thing simply didn’t happen. In a daze I gathered up my canvases, folks staring at me gape-mouthed, and I walked out muttering, “I’ll be a double-damn hornswoggled motherfucker.”

When I talked to Leo the next week, he said, “You’ve got talent, son, but talent is only half of what it takes to be a successful artist. An artist today has got to be a media star, audacious, unique, and charismatic. When you busted into my opening and laid your paintings out… normally I would have thrown you out, but there was something about the way you did it, and there was something about those paintings. It’s always that indefinable something. Anyway, son, I think you can be a star.”

And I was. I became a star so fast, I was reeling from it. People invited me places. I never had to buy anything; folks were more than willing to give me anything I wanted: meals, clothes, booze, and sex. Cameras flashed everywhere I went. My mug was in all the magazines. I read about love affairs between me and people I didn’t even know. I was invited to lecture, to show, to appear all over the world. All expenses paid. My paintings were in museums, magazines, and textbooks. The funny thing was, hardly anybody ever bought my paintings. Two museums in ten years bought one each. One collector from New Orleans (I never even knew his name) bought most of what I sold.

For almost ten years, I was just about the most famous living artist in America, but I barely made enough money to live. Leo got tired of me, and the critics started cooling off. Cooling off? Hell, it looked like an ice age coming. My work began to change, and the critics didn’t like the changes. They started calling me a has-been whose undisciplined excesses were embarrassing and juvenile. That pissed me off. Wait ’till they see what Red Warner does next!

Time now expands and contracts. My life is a latex Halloween mask of some gleeful ghoul, twisted in the hands of a malicious child—me. I’m sitting in a green aluminum boat on the bayou, recuperating, a dirty bandage, warm beer, the taste of bile in my mouth. Confused memories. Brother Barnes in his black suit with his collar pinching his puffy, red neck, shouting, “Oh you vile generation of fornicators and blasphemers!” And I’m racing around the loft, swinging a butcher knife, and blood is gushing like gooey cadmium red squeezed from a tube, and the ceiling beams are swelling as if pumped with helium and they’re swirling and swirling in a slow motion pool of crimson and black. Now I’m flat on my back on the hardwood floor in Cassie’s Bank Street apartment, feeling like I’m crashing from some hideously bad acid trip, and she’s cradling me in her arms and she is saying, “I love you, Travis. I love you. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Cassie cradles me in her tender embrace, and the healing sway of the fishing boat on the bayou cradles me in its rock-a-by-baby rhythm, and gradually I sort out the past and put it behind me. I’m beginning to think that happiness is possible.

***

My last show at Leo’s gallery was a disaster. The first review to come out said:

The most disheartening thing a critic has to do is witness the total disintegration of a once great artist. The sheer madness of Red Warner’s latest work, now at the Broome Street Gallery, attests to both the greatness of Warner’s talent and its misuse.

With his well-known reputation for high living and unbridled debauchery, it is no wonder that Red Warner’s art has degenerated. He has mastered his technique but seemingly does not know what to do with it. Warner’s latest paintings are incoherent and void of design or purpose.

The rest of the so-called critics followed suit. I was dead as an artist in New York, and I knew it.

After that I went berserk. I only remember snatches of it. I got drunk, and I stayed drunk, and I went raving around town with Cassie at my heels, trying valiantly to hold me back, hanging on like a cowboy on a wild bull. I stormed into the gallery and slung a bucket of white enamel at one of my paintings. Some woman howled like a hyena and I said to her, right before I dashed out the door, “Now ain’t that just purty as a picture.”
I was high and I was flying and I was mad as hell, and my comings and goings were like debris in a tornado, all whirling and blowing and converging like the eye of the storm in a single moment and a single place: my loft. And Redneck Red Warner was the “I” of the storm.

Some two hundred or so idiots had crowded into my loft. God alone knows how they got there (I must have invited them). There were whores and pimps off the avenue and leather boys from the West Side bars, and a slew of artsy hangers-on, and some dame named Dianna who wore black lace undies and spike heels and nothing else. Couples were groping each other. Smoke was dense, and the smell of marijuana was pungent.

Something snapped in my mind. Suddenly I was standing on top of a table in the kitchen area, shouting, preaching. Paragraphs from the Book of Job in the Bible—words that I never remember reading—spumed from my mouth. I was standing in the pulpit, calling them sinners to repentance, shouting with a righteous rhythm, and providing the A-mens my own self.

“If in bed I say,”

“A-men!”

“When shall I arise?”

“When indeed, brother? When indeed? A-men.”

“Then the night drags on.”

“I am filled with restlessness…”

“Filled with it, filled with it!”

“Bless the Lord! Sweet baby Jesus.”

“I am filled with restlessness until the dawn.”

“Until the dawn. ‘Till that mammy lovin’ sun come peeking through.”

“A-men, brother Ben. ‘Taint much of a rooster but he loves his hen.”

“Take me home, sweet Jesus!”

“My flesh is clothed with worms and scabs; my skin crawls and festers.”

“Lawd have mercy!”

“My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they come to an end without hope. Remember that my life—my life, sweet Jesus—it is like the wind; I shall not see happiness again.”

I jumped off the table and grabbed a butcher knife from the counter and started weaving through the crowd, swinging the blade like a sword and screaming, “Scabs on humanity! Your days are numbered. Fornicators and liars, sucking off my fame and my talent.”

They were laughing uneasily. Who was this madman? Was this an act? Hell-fire, Jack, how could they know? I didn’t know.

I ripped my shirt off and flung it away. The idiots applauded. Some of them started ripping their shirts. Tattered garments in the air. I screamed, “I rend my garments! I’m a weird, wacko, washed up fool who can’t even put his queer shoulder to the wheel (borrowing from Ginsberg). I used to be a simple country boy from Mississippi, but my pecker got me in a mess of trouble.”

I whipped out my old tallywhacker right there in front of God and everybody, and commenced to prance around with it hanging loose like a sausage. Everybody laughed. I was a star once again. Still.

I said, “Looka dis muthuh! Looka heah! Look at dat old floppy thang. Oh, my brothers and sisters, you ain’t got no idea how much trouble a old floppy thang like that can cause.”

I was crazier than ever. I plopped my meat on the table and raised the knife high over my head and shouted, “If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out! If thy hand offend thee, cut it off!”

I stood still as a statue and smiled like a leering ghoul and waited while the tension built. Then I brought the knife down with a horrible crash.

Epilogue

A Final Word From Johnny Lewis

I haven’t seen Travis since I left him on the Mary Walker Bayou. Spending that time with Travis and Cassie was good. It was good to see the life they were living. And it was a relief to find out that his body was still intact — except for the missing fingers.

“Hell no, I didn’t cut my thing off,” he said to me, after I read his journal. “I ain’t that crazy. It was my stupid fingers got in the way. That’s what I cut off. I had no intention of hurting myself. It was all an act, but I was too stoned to pull it off. What’d I tell you happened to my fingers? That a gator got ‘em? Yass! Thass what I always tell the tourists.”

END

The same dumb little voice spoke the same impotent warning many other times: when I started hallucinating during the trial, during that frantic flight to New York, the first time I dropped acid…many times. And every time I said, Fine! That’s just fine and dandy.

Impending insanity is a great orgasmic release when you let yourself flow with it. That ought to be a quote from some famous psychiatrist.

What I would like to say about Man’s trial is that it was an excruciating ordeal. That’s what I’d like to say, ’cause it sounds so good, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was more like a dull toothache that refuses to go away. I endured it with a wandering mind and with flashes of that craziness that, as I said, was already beginning to seep in; then I ran away—and Tupelo followed me.

Oh, it was a freaking circus, all right. There should have been barkers in red-and-black plaid sports coats, standing between the columns at the courthouse, ugly barkers with greasy hair and yellow, gapped teeth, with “Mother” tattooed under a heart on their left shoulders and hula dancers on their right shoulders (although only Superman with his X-ray vision could have seen them under the coats).

Yessiree, they should have been there, and there should have been hot dog vendors and cotton candy stands, and out on Highway 78 there should have been signs painted on barn roofs, like the See Rock City signs, only they should have said: See the Nigger Squirm! Rape and Murder — Hear All the Gory Details!

That’s what the people came for.

They came from all around: from Pontotoc and Oxford and Water Valley, from Guntown and Aberdeen, from as far south as Starkville, farmers in pickup trucks with grain sacks tied to their bumpers, good old boys with kitschy do-dahs like plastic Jesuses and foam rubber dice and baby shoes dangling from rear-view mirrors; ladies with starched, white dresses that crinkled like paper when they sat down, pale ladies with paper fans in hand, daintily decorated fans adorned with farm scenes and pictures of Jesus walking on water and advertisements for Moore’s Funeral Home and Brother Bobo’s Hardware, fans that (thank the good Lord) would not be needed because the city had finally installed air conditioning in the court house (but, of course, Mabel Cook and a couple of other women would use theirs for appearance’s sake); teenage boys in outmoded outfits, jeans with rolled cuffs and T-shirts with rolled sleeves, crumpled Marlboro packs enveloped in that twist of sleeve at the shoulder; businessmen in cotton and polyester and seersucker suits, coatless, or with coats slung over their shoulders, ties loosened and collars open, sweat circled armpits; round, Negro women with umbrellas to protect them from the sun.

They came and they clustered and shuffled for seats, a legion of characters and types mixed like Campbell’s soup, with the blacks segregated into a shadowy, ashen-gray section in the back.

Into this human menagerie came I. Yes, I went in just like everybody else, but unlike everybody else—except, I guess, Man (and maybe Samuel Allison Littlejohn)—I didn’t want to be there. I walked through the smoky outer court and jostled bodies to make my way to the heavy double doors, and I sidled down the aisle muttering, “Excuse me,” and “Pardon,” and I took my seat on discomfort itself.

And I waited. Waited while feet shuffled and throats rasped themselves clear. Waited while sounds sounded and movements moved morbidly in a breathless burlesque of any awaiting crowd at any old dance or revival or funeral or any other such major event. Waited while feet stomped and scuffed and squeaked, while knuckles cracked and papers shuffled and slid, dresses crinkled, doors slammed, hinges squawked. Waited while whining, laughing, whispering, mumbling voices murmured an antiphon that could not even be called noise but just a lot of audible stuff.

Every person, every sound, every smell was as deadeningly familiar as the infernal hangnail I’d been gnawing on all day. I knew ‘em all, had known ‘em all my born days. I knew the kids, and I knew their daddies, and their daddies knew my daddy and his daddy and on and on for generations—only, of course, they didn’t know my real daddy, but only Papa Chuck. Well, yes, most of ‘em knew about my real daddy too. It’s that small-town knowing, everybody knowing everything about everybody. Even if there happened to be somebody there I didn’t know, they were all types that I knew only too damned well, and we were all in that soup together, boiling in an endless repetition of our present gyrations and pronouncements.

So I waited. My mind darted in desperate search for escape. I waited for the dreaded moment when I would be called to testify. I waited while jurors were sworn in, while officers Norman and McDonald (I finally remembered his name, the one who looked like Bud Abbott) told about finding Wanda’s violated body, while they described in detail how her skirt was rumpled and her genitals exposed—oh how deliciously they lingered over every detail—how I, me, that guy over there, Travis Earl Warner, had snuck a peek at her little, yellow bikini panty briefs only hours before her body was found, and how those now famous little, yellow bikini panty briefs were no longer on her body because they had been viciously ripped off by the perverted perpetrator of this horrendous crime.

I waited while they told of finding the Negro, Raymond Carver, who goes by the name Man, near the scene of the crime. I waited while Mabel Cook told what she had seen; waited while the trial droned on and on, while court recessed and reconvened, while the crowd thinned out and then built up again when time for the defense case drew near; waited while fingers combed unruly strands of hair and tugged at itchy collars, while fingers drummed on table tops and chair backs, while impatient, stubby fingers clawed sweaty bellies, while slim, elegant fingers tipped with ruby red nails flattened folds in dresses and tugged at bra straps and wrestled with bunched-up pantyhose elastic.

And I thought of fingers on my leg, heavy, hairy fingers forcing their way up to cup the cheeks of my buttocks, while the machine-like rush of slavish breath assaulted my ears. I remembered being excited and hating myself for being excited, and the voice screaming in my brain, “He’s a man, you fool! A man!” And I remembered Wanda on the stool at Danny’s, with her legs crossed and my fingers itching to insinuate themselves where hot-flesh thighs met, and that same voice sneered, “You’re heartless and cruel, Travis Earl Warner, and not worth killing.”

That was when I started to drift. Memory and imagination merged, and I still don’t know if what happened next was hallucination or vision or dream. I was staring at Sam Littlejohn. Flaccid as a water-filled balloon, his head was swaying like a buoy anchored in rolling waves. I saw his body swell up and float over the courtroom, with drops of his unsightly fat, like globules of paint, dripping on people in the room. He dripped on Mr. Preston’s waxed head, and old man Preston, retired from his job as principal at Tupelo High, wiped that glob of lard off his head and said, “You go straight back to your class, young man,” and I heard him say, “You spell principal with an A because your principal is your pal,” but he was no pal of mine.

Deflating, Sam descended into the wrinkles of Mabel Cook’s lap, and I saw all of us back in high school: Charlie and Hoss and I grabbed her and carried her into the boys’ shower in the gymnasium, and we ripped off her dress while she squirmed and screamed with a wail like the screech of brakes on a subway train, and there—under her dress—was nothing, no breasts, no nipples, no vagina, no hair, no navel, just orificeless skin like latex stretched head to toe and seamlessly sealed. Then I saw her, not in this fantastic transmogrification, but in her disgustingly dull normal state, sitting in a beauty parlor with her hair in curlers and her pudgy fingers dipped in a bowl of green liquid, and she’s saying, “Dishwashing liquid!” and the lady from the TV is saying “You’re soaking in it,” and a chorus of rosy-cheeked fat boys is shouting, “Gossip! We want gossip!” And Mabel says, “I’ll tell you the story of a boy who never had a chance. His father was a drunk and a womanizer, and his mother was a loose woman and a nigger lover to boot, and his mother’s mother was a maid, and her husband was a bum, and even though the boy was taken into the king’s castle and raised as a prince, he never had a chance, ’cause blood will out.”

Then the cops were there, an army of cops aiming their guns at me, Norman and McDonald heading the phalanx, only they had turned into Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and the fat one was pointing at me where I scrunched in the corner like a spider trapped in the back of Page’s Market. Fat like lava flow oozed from his body, rolled on the floor like balls of mercury from a broken thermometer, mated with Sam Littlejohn’s fat globules already dancing on the floor, and began to creep toward my ankles. Like a search party marching through a mucky swamp, the cops and the judge and Man and Mabel Cook closed in on me, pointing fingers and chanting, “He ain’t none of Chuck Warner’s nohow.”

***

“Will Travis Earl Warner please approach the witness stand? Travis Earl Warner. Young man, will you please step forward?”

I shook myself out of my dream. I took the stand. I answered questions as best I could. Legions of faces faced me expectantly. Mama Janet was there, and Mama Marybelle, Papa Chuck and J.P. Brother Barnes was there, and Ray Prichard, and just about every teacher I’d ever had, even Mrs. Fields, whose art class I never went back to. Against the back wall slouched that skinny black man with the bright, yellow shirt, Jasmine.

Josh asked, “Is it true that you and the deceased had a fight, or an argument, in the parking lot at Danny’s?”

“No, we didn’t fight. We were playing.”

I could not focus my attention on his questions. Sam Littlejohn, sitting in front of me with his bloated body slumped like something melting, mesmerized me.

For a moment there was no one else in the courtroom, just Sam. Josh asked more and more questions. I guess I answered them somehow. I can’t recall.

Finally he asked the question everyone was waiting for: “After you finished talking to Raymond Carver and he walked away, which direction did he take?”

I said, “He took off that way. You know…” motioning vaguely with my hand.

“Could you please be more specific? Which way is that way?”

“Toward Crosstown.”

Hell-fire, Crosstown ain’t even a place. It ain’t like Shakerag or the Alley or even Highland Circle. Those places have personality. They deserve a name. Crosstown ain’t nothing but an intersection with a stupid arrow atop a pole that says Tupelo, First T.V.A. City.

I don’t know why I said Crosstown. Yes I do. I said it to save my lily-white, All-American-boy reputation.

There was nothing left but the summations. Man’s lawyer gave it his best, but it was useless. All he had on his side were the facts. Josh gave an impassioned speech loaded with black and white imagery: the black of night, Man’s black skin hidden in shadow from the white glare of the street light, Wanda’s pure, white skin on black pavement (even though it was actually light gray concrete). It’s a wonder the rednecks in the courthouse didn’t rush Man and lynch him on the spot.

He was sentenced to thirty years in the state pen.

Wanda’s picture was on the front page of the Daily Journal the next morning. It was a murky picture. She was lying on the ground. Dead. How could she be dead? This had to be some kind of horrible dream. The article said that she had been killed in an attempted rape. It had happened shortly after I had last seen her at Danny’s. Police found her body while cruising the Crosstown area following a reported disturbance at Danny’s Diner. A disturbance at Danny’s? Couldn’t be; I was there. The paper said a black man by the name of Raymond Carver was being held as a prime suspect.

Why had they arrested Man? Because his skin was dark. Because there was an invisible line that meandered through Tupelo, circumscribing areas as black and white. Man was picked up inside a white area minutes after Wanda was killed. If it had been twenty years earlier, they could have simply taken him out behind a barn somewhere and hung him from an oak limb and been shut of it. But in the 1960s, the authorities were expected to at least go through the motions of an investigation and a trial.

Josh Culpepper handled the investigation and the prosecution. He questioned me the day after, and again on many occasions leading up to the trial.

I had never liked Josh Culpepper. Never. He was slimy, conceited, a bully and a cheat, and an avowed racist. I never thought he was very smart, either, but I discovered during the course of the investigation that he was damned good at his job, despicable though that job was.

The first time he questioned me, he was very polite and apologetic. Every time he asked me about a particular detail, he said things like, “I know this probably doesn’t seem important, but you never know.” Or, “I know it probably seems like I’m grilling you, but I just don’t want to take any chances on missing something.”

He wanted to know everything about what I had seen, heard, or done that night. “Who was with you when you were inside talking to Wanda?”

“Sam Littlejohn.”

“Anybody else?”

“Nope. Just Danny. He served me a Coke, and then went back into the kitchen.”

“Did he leave the diner?”

“Who? Danny? No. I never saw him again after he went back to the kitchen.”

“What about Sam? Did he follow you when you left?”

“No, I don’t think so. Look, Wanda and I were… you know, kind of messing around. I wasn’t paying any attention to anyone else.”

He said, “What I’m going to ask you now may seem like something that’s none of my business, but please bear with me. So you and Wanda were kind of flirting. Messing around, as you put it. Well I know Wanda. I know that she’s—she was—a big-time prick-tease. I know this doesn’t seem nice, but I’ve got to ask it. The way I figure it, she was probably giving you a few well-planned squirrel shots. I’ve seen her do it with other guys, right there in Danny’s. That’s the way she operates. She likes to sit on one of those spinning stools and spread her legs and look at the lust on a guy’s face. Gives her a feeling of power, like she can reduce us all to slobbering maniacs. Thing is, she was naked under that little skirt. Right? And she let you see it all. Am I right or not?”

I knew that Josh Culpepper couldn’t keep up the nice act for long. I knew that the slime had to come out, and there it was. It did me good to say, “You’re wrong, Josh. She wasn’t naked under her skirt. She was wearing panties.”

“You saw ‘em, huh?”

“Yes, I saw them. What of it?” He even asked what color they were. He was starting to really bug me. What I didn’t realize was how neatly he had tricked me. He wanted to pin a rape charge on Man, but he had no proof that Wanda had been raped. The bit about the panties at least made rape plausible. If it could be proved that she was wearing panties before she was killed, and she wasn’t wearing them when her body was found, then it would be logical to assume the person who killed her would have been the one who removed her underwear. And now he had proof, courtesy of my own damned stupid mouth, that she was wearing panties of a particular color right before she was killed. It would be laughably simple for Josh Culpepper to plant a pair of yellow panties, preferably torn, in a bush somewhere between the crime scene and where Man was picked up. Or simply claim they found them in Man’s possession. Nobody could prove otherwise, and I sure as hell wouldn’t put it past Josh to pull a stunt like that.

I was surprised that when he asked about Man he didn’t push harder than he did. He seemed to take my word that Man had walked away in the direction of Shakerag, which would have taken him away from the crime scene.

The next time Josh questioned me, he took an entirely different tack, one that really shocked me. He told the truth about what he knew and asked me to lie. He offered reasons that were sincere, and he almost had me convinced. For the first time, I knew exactly what had happened and what I could expect to happen at the trial, depending on my testimony. At least I knew part of what could happen. Josh still had a few tricks in reserve.

What he explained to me was that when Wanda and I went outside, Sam followed us. Naturally, I didn’t notice. Sam was sometimes so taken for granted that he was invisible. For nearly two decades, he had been the member of the gang who was never really there, the athlete who never got off the bench. He simply wanted to belong. And he also probably longed for love and sex as much as any other man, even though we had always assumed he was somehow sexless. Wanda and I were playing sex games, and Sam wanted to play too.

When she ran away, it was Sam, not Man, who chased after her. When he caught up with her, she turned to greet him, thinking he was me. He grabbed her clumsily, and she fell to the sidewalk. Her head cracked against the curb. Death was instantaneous. Sam, confused and afraid, and maybe somehow thinking in that muddled mind of his that they were still playing, saw that her dress was bunched around her waist and that her panties were showing. He pulled them off. He told Josh all about it. He said, “I didn’t mean to hurt her. I didn’t know she was dead. I thought she was playing. I never saw a girl’s underpants before, and I never saw what was under them, neither. I just wanted to touch. Then I got scared and ran away.”

Josh said, “No one knows this, Travis. You and me and Sam. That’s it. Now, I know that the nigger we arrested didn’t do it, but Jesus, Travis, he’s just a nigger. The damage is already done. I can’t let it get out that I arrested the wrong man. ’Specially not a nigger. Them Civil Rights folks will have it all over Mississippi that I arrested him out of racist motives.

“To tell you the God-awful truth, I’ve already fucked this thing up so much that even if we convict him, he’ll beat it on an appeal. But that’s okay. You see? That’s really perfect. If we convict him, I’ll get the credit, and Sam will not have to worry about the truth coming out, and then the nigger will get out anyway. We won’t have to worry about an innocent man going to jail, and my reputation won’t be hurt ’cause most people will think he was really guilty and got set free by his liberal lawyers on a technicality. So you see, you’ve gotta help me. It’s the only way we can save Sam. All you got to do is say that what’s his name, Raymond Carver, took off after Wanda when he left you.”

It would have been tragic if Sam were charged with Wanda’s death. Surely they wouldn’t charge him with anything as severe as murder, but I imagined that he could be charged with something like involuntary manslaughter. At the very least, he would probably wind up being committed to the state insane asylum and probably never would get out. But I didn’t think that would happen, anyway. Even if he couldn’t convict Man, Josh would never divulge Sam’s secret. There was no way I was going to tell a falsehood in court for Josh Culpepper.

“You’ve got to,” Josh said. “Don’t you see, it’s much bigger than just a matter of your honor, telling the truth at all costs. We’ve got to save Sam. If he’s convicted, they’ll put him away for life. So what if he can call a lawyer and claim insanity? So maybe they put him in Whitfield for life instead of in the state pen? Do you know what they do to people in that fuckin’ hospital? Shit man, it’s worse than prison. Much worse. You gotta save Sam from that, Travis. You just gotta.”

I didn’t know what to do. I needed time to get my thoughts together, but Josh wouldn’t give me time to think. I should have talked to Papa Chuck and Mama Marybelle. God knows I had always gone to them before in a crisis, and I knew I could always count on them to help me figure out what to do, but for some reason I had this stubborn determination to handle this one on my own. Stupid, just stupid. That’s what it was.

When everything else failed, Josh threatened to tell the whole goddamn town that I was queer. “You think I don’t know. I saw you and Johnny going at it in Mrs. Speed’s bed that night Charlie had the big party after Elvis was at the fair. You saw me looking in the door. You just didn’t know it was me. Man, if I tell people around here about that, you’ll never be able to show your face in this town again. Is that what you want? Is saving that nigger’s hide worth all that?”

He said, “I don’t even have to prove it, you know. All I’ve got to do is plant the seed. Matter of fact, even if I didn’t know you were a damn fag, even if I hadn’t seen you and Johnny Lewis getting it on that time, even if you were straight as an arrow, I could start rumors and get certain people to say they know it for a fact. Once that happened, you’d be dead around here. Yo’ mama would be so ashamed, she couldn’t even show her face in public. You think about that.”

I tried to bluff him, saying that the people who really mattered to me would never believe it and I didn’t give a shit about the people who would believe it, but he had frightened me deeply. I knew that there was no way I could be sure about what I would say when they put me on the witness stand until that moment arrived.

Josh couldn’t have known how effective his threat was, but he came up with one more trick, just in case.

I fell apart after that. I was depressed, I was scared, I was confused. I started smoking heavily and drinking, and I couldn’t sleep. For days and days, I don’t know how many days. I was afraid to leave the house during the day and couldn’t stand to stay in my room after everyone went to sleep. I would sneak out late at night and wander the streets of Tupelo. I drove up to Memphis a few times and hung out in bars on Beale Street, where lonely insomniacs nursed their sorrows in isolation long after the bands had gone home for the night. Wherever I went, I felt like someone was following me.

One night in Memphis, I let a guy pick me up, a skinny young black man who wore mascara and lipstick. He said his name was Jasmine. I thought he was disgusting, and at the same time there was a strong attraction. If it was lurid or illicit, I was drawn to it. And nothing could be more lurid to the fine folk of Tupelo than a black drag queen. Maybe I figured that if I was going to be destroyed for my depravity, I might as well be really depraved. Or maybe I just wanted him. When it was over and I got back into my VW, I decided to drive off the bridge into the Mississippi River. But I couldn’t do it. I chickened out.

The next day, Josh Culpepper came to see me again. He said, “I need you to come with me. There’s someone you have to see.”

He drove me down to Shakerag and parked next to a restaurant called Lulu’s, and he walked me to a door and knocked. The man who answered Josh’s knock was Jasmine, the queen from the night before. Jasmine was all prettied up with green eye shadow and red lipstick. There was a purple glow to his high, ebony cheeks, and a crazed look in his eyes, eyes that darted like bugs on the surface of a pool. He wore a yellow, silk blouse with an open front that showed off his oily, hairless chest. It was like the blouse Wanda had worn that night.

Jasmine flung open his door at our knock and screeched, “Travis! Honey Buns! It’s so good to see you!”

I spun around and rushed out to the street, with Josh hot behind me. He grabbed me by the shirt collar. I started cursing him. I was shaking all over. My voice was trembling and shooting up to a screechy high register. “God damn you, Josh! You sneaky son of a bitch. How could you?”

We were standing in front of Lulu’s. Somewhere off in the distance, I heard the military rumble of a marching band. In front of me was Josh Culpepper. He was gripping my shirt collar and talking to me with his face inches from my face, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. It was as if another person who was not me took possession of my mind. Josh’s mouth was flapping, and his teeth were gnashing, and slobber sprayed from his lips, but all I could hear was marching music. A parade was heading our way. Black folks were positioning themselves along the edge of the street, and there we were, two crazy white men in the middle of Shakerag, screaming at each other.

The drumbeat grew louder. All of a sudden, the whole thing seemed ridiculous to me. All of a sudden, the only thing I cared about was the Carver High Marching Band, one hundred high-stepping Negroes. Here they come!

The drum major reared back so far that the tassels on top of his high hat brushed the pavement behind him. He blew two short blasts of his whistle and thrust his baton high in the air, and the band broke into “Tiger Rag.” Hold that tiger! Hoooold that tiger!

The band strutted by, with the drum major high-stepping and the saucy little majorettes switching their short skirts like happy puppydog tails, row after row of horns, then snare drums and bass drums, and finally the big tubas. Deliriously dancing kids trailed in their wake. I wrenched out of Josh’s grasp and ran out into the street and started jiving and strutting behind the band, a white caboose to a black train, twitching my butt to the pounding rhythm and waving my hands. I left Josh Culpepper standing in front of Lulu’s, wondering what the hell had come over me. At that point he probably figured I was too crazy to be put on a witness stand.

When I danced behind the Carver High School Marching Band, I felt really free for the first time in my life. It was also the first time I heard that tiny warning voice in my head say, You’re going crazy, Travis Earl Warner, and I said to myself, Fine! That’s just fine and dandy. See if I care.

I got out of Mississippi as soon as I could. Went to Memphis, to the Art Academy. As far as running away goes, that ain’t much. That’s a chicken-shit escape, like packing your bags and moving next door. Still and all, it was different. Memphis is a city, and the kids at the academy were sophisticated kids who had been around. At first I had a hard time fitting in, but I soon found the way.

What I did was this here: I developed my Redneck Dean Moriarty persona. I started speed rapping, mixing in a large dose of Negro preacher talk and hillbilly slang, slurring and drawling and getting that rolling rhythm going, like the preacher man calling them sinners to repentance, and I stirred that stew together with doubledeclutch jive talk straight out of Kerouac’s On The Road. Shee-it! I was on stage all the time.

At the Art Academy, we had heroes who were not athletes. Can you dig it? In Tupelo that would have been unheard of, but at the Art Academy we shared those heroes: Matisse and Picasso, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, Willem de Kooning — de Kooning was de King!

My God, what de Kooning did to my brain! At first I couldn’t get it. There was something in his painting that grabbed me and, at the same time, put me off. I kept coming back to his works, to let them enfold me in their awful grasp. And their grasp was like a torrid romance. The raw power! The daring! The rage and humor and even the lyricism! Those vicious, raw, vibrant paintings of women distorted almost beyond recognition, with grimacing mouths and bulbous, detached breasts, claw-like toes and fingers lost in a cacophony of great slashes of heavy paint and jagged shapes like shards of broken glass!

And Pollock! Oh Lord, to see a Jackson Pollock and let yourself fall into the vortex of his spaceless space until you taste the very viscosity of his marvelous skeins of paint! If only sex were half as good!

***

There was a time after I got my degree, a dead, lost summer spent back in Tupelo, trying to figure out what to do next. Heat like a wetted funeral shroud drained the lifeblood from the people until they shuffled around town in slow motion, looking like a dream sequence in a Fellini movie. I decided to go down to Danny’s Diner. Driving up Gloster toward Jackson in my VW bus, I could see cars in Danny’s parking lot. Under the wavering blue lights, they looked like beached whales. You could see the heat in the air. Groups of teenagers were lolling in the lot like wavering ferns in a fish tank, like those strange and monstrous goldfish that still swam lazily in that out-of-place pool in the lobby of Poppa Chuck’s bank.

Inside the diner, the only customers were Sam Littlejohn and Wanda Ramsey. Ol’ crazy Sam and sad and sexy little Wanda. The diner was brightly lit, with mirrors on the walls and lots of chrome. Behind the counter, looking like forgotten photos from somebody’s scrapbook, were: a purple and gold Tupelo Golden Wave pennant, an autographed photograph of Elvis Presley, a copy of a newspaper photo of John F. Kennedy’s assassination (the one with Jackie leaning out of the car), the cover of an Ole Miss football program with an action shot of Charlie Speed throwing a pass (also autographed), and a Barry Goldwater campaign poster with the printed legend: In your heart you know he’s right.

Fluorescent light reflecting off white, plastic tablecloths cast Sam and Wanda in cool, blue tones. He wore a dingy white shirt with a frayed collar. Gaps between buttons stood open like stretched tent canvas. His right leg jerked like a jackhammer, an unconscious, violent, nervous tic. Wanda had bleached her hair. It looked thin and dry. She wore a short skirt that pulled like elastic across her midriff, and a man’s yellow shirt, with the shirttails tied in a bow under her breasts. She had put on a little weight, but not enough to detract from that tantalizing body that had driven us all nuts back in high school. As a matter of fact, sitting down with her belly exposed, there was a little roll of fat creasing her belly right across her navel, and the word that popped into my mind was ripeness. Ripe for the plucking, juicy and full. I felt this crazy urge to slither my tongue along that crease. I pushed that thought out of mind and said hello to them and grabbed a bar stool, attempting to be polite, but distant.

I wanted them to see me as someone who had outgrown them, no longer the fun-loving kid from high school, but an artist, an intellectual, someone with more important things on his mind. I ordered a Coke and sipped on it while staring at the wall as if in deep thought. Stupid, I know, but I did things like that.

Wanda wasn’t buying my act. She started flirting with me, and we talked about old times, and we joked around. She kept moving, swiveling on her stool, crossing and uncrossing her legs, bending near to me to deliver punch lines in a stage whisper. With all of that moving around, she allowed me to see a lot of cleavage and a lot of thigh, and even glimpses of yellow panties. Must be Saturday, I thought. Yellow for Saturday. Boy, that goes back.

Wanda was trying to get me hot, and it was working. She was flashing thigh and exposing that yellow flag very purposefully. The only thing was, I couldn’t tell if she meant it or not, if she was trying to see if she could still get me aroused out of some kind of vanity, just to see if she could still do it. I couldn’t tell if she wanted me or just wanted me to want her, or if her whole, crazy sexy game was nothing more than a reflex action, going through the motions of what we had always done. All through high school we had flirted outrageously, but I never thought she ever meant more, and I was too loyal to Charlie to pursue more.

But now Charlie is dead and gone, senselessly killed in a stupid war that I so far had managed to avoid.

Wanda and I kept on flirting there in Danny’s, and after a while we went out to my VW bus and messed around a bit — nothing serious, a little playful petting. I didn’t know it at the time, but to Mabel Cook, who was watching from her porch across the street, it looked like we were fighting.

Playful petting escalated into something pretty heavy. The night air was wet and hot, and so were we. Take a wet towel and slap it over your head and sit in a sauna for an hour. That’s what it’s like in the summertime down South, and it doesn’t let up when the sun goes down. Before the invention of air conditioning, it’s a wonder anybody ever had sex down there, yet there we were getting all rabid and raunchy in a VW bus. Bodies sticky and glistening slick as molasses. Panting and sweating, we had to come up for air. I stuck my head out a window and glanced around, and I was struck again with the thought that the cars cruising the lot and the teenagers sitting on and leaning against them were like fish floundering in stagnant waters. The floundering fish were all kids younger than us. Most of them were acting out the same kind of mating rituals Wanda and I were engaged in.

Suddenly, what we were doing seemed meaningless. I was playing a ritualized mating game with a girl from high school days, and I wasn’t even particularly attracted to her. Well, yeah I was. I was far from immune to her obvious sexual attraction, but there was no personal connection. She was nothing to me but a memory and an object of my lust. What were we doing? Trying to bring back something that had never been there in the first place? Like a fish, I was hooked, and I wanted to get away.

Wanda didn’t notice. She kept teasing and flirting, and I kept vacillating between wanting her and wanting to get the hell away.

“Let’s get out for a while,” I said. “I’m melting in here.”

It was barely any cooler standing in the parking lot, but at least I could breathe. She asked me if I remembered how she and Charlie and Bitsy and I, and some of the other kids used to chase each other from Danny’s to Page’s Market, about ten blocks north on Gloster. Sure, I remembered. The payoff had been that if the guy caught the girl before she got to Page’s, he got to make out with her. How far it really went, of course, depended on the individual couple. I know I had done a lot of chasing, but I never got any payoff.

“Come on, Travis,” she challenged. “Let’s see if you can still run. Just for fun. For old time’s sake. Catch me or not, we’ll go to my apartment.”

Before I could answer, she started running toward Crosstown. She got half a block away and turned to shout, “Two blocks head start. Remember?”

Yeah, I remembered. That had been Charlie Speed’s standard challenge. He swore he could give anybody a two-block head start from Danny’s and catch them before they reached Page’s Market. He could do it, too. But Goddamn it all, Charlie was dead. Suddenly I realized what Wanda was doing. She was trying to bring him back through me. I had been his best friend, and she had loved him. This wasn’t right.

I thought about chasing her all right, to catch her and shake some sense into her and hold onto her and let her cry it out if that’s what she needed. But I got distracted. The unexpected appearance of Man (or Raymond Carver, as he now called himself) hoofing past Danny’s all by himself put Wanda out of my mind. The lily-white neighborhood of Danny’s Diner was not a safe place for a black man to be.

Man stopped to talk to me for a few minutes. I said, “Man, you’d better high-tail it away from here before some rednecks decide to use your head for a basketball.”

“Don’t I know it!” he said.

Only a few weeks before that, a black man had been beaten by a gang of whites a few blocks from where we were.

We talked for only a minute, two at the most, then he took off toward Shakerag, in a hurry to get away from whitey’s territory. I should have offered him a ride, but I just didn’t think about it. And I shouldn’t have let Wanda run off thinking I was going to chase after her. At the very least, I should have gotten into my bus and gone looking for her and given her a ride home.

There are so many ifs.

I’m a has-been hero, and I’ve got the clippings to prove it. What I wish more than anything else is that I could just be a simple fisherman down here on the bayous and purge myself of memory. Memory’s a son of a bitch.

My earliest memories are all about war, a house-of-mirrors collage of war stories that span years and are confused with movies and comic books. GI Joe and John Wayne. We fought the Japs and fought the Krauts and fought the Koreans, and we raised Old Glory on Iwo Jima and stormed the beaches at Omaha (Nebraska?) and remembered the Alamo and the Maine; and Babe Ruth and the Manassas Mauler could beat the daylights out of any old slanty-eyed Jap any day of the week, and God was on our side.

From the earliest time I knew, as well as I know that fish swim, that the duty of a man is to fight the enemy, to carry the ball across the goal, to love and protect women and children, and to never ever cry. I also knew that thou shalt not kill any but the avowed enemy and that no matter what, a man’s gotta worship Sweet Baby Jesus and never for a moment be weak like a woman.

A few lines scratched out, then:

God. God lived at the Calvary Baptist Church. CAL-VAR-EEE! Marching to Cal-var-eee! The shrine of the holy of holies. It was a fort, a monument, a place of silence and reverence and fear and awe, where they sang, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.” But there were no black children at Calvary Baptist. To find black children you had to cross Magazine Street and dart down the little path that led between Casey’s and Doc Littlejohn’s, and cross the railroad tracks, where you could walk the rails, pretending to be a tightrope walker in the circus (and if you fell off with bare feet, the cinders hurt like the Dickens). Across the tracks was the Alley. Man lived there. Man was my best friend for a little while.

I can remember old Brother Barnes scaring the shit out of me, preaching about the wrath of God. I didn’t even know what a wrath was, but whatever it was, I damned sure didn’t want any truck with it. I thought I saw it for sure when I was five years old. There was a terrible electric storm. Lightning flashed the sky an icy blue that was immediately crushed by blackness. Thunder rolled and crashed and cracked, and windows and doors rattled in their frames like castanets. I stood inside the screen door and taunted the storm, pretending to be a big, brave man. “Go on, you dumb old lightning,” I shouted. “Hit something. See if I care. You can’t hurt me. Why don’t you hit the church? Burn the church to the ground.” I dreaded Sunday school and got sick headaches every Sunday morning. Me and Mama Janet.

A few more lines scratched out, then:

Who cares what church or when? I’m not about to let anything as paltry as the facts fuck with my memories.

And he continued:

When the church did burn down, it wasn’t our church. It was First Baptist, about four blocks farther up Church Street. It wasn’t right after that, either. It couldn’t have been, because it was summer then, and it was snowing the night First Baptist burned to the ground.

We heard the fire trucks, and Papa Chuck shouted, “It’s a big one! Grab the kids! Let’s go!” When there was a fire in town, everybody went.

Black silhouettes scurried frantically against a backdrop of flame. There were cars and trucks, and two big fire engines with flashing lights. Heavily corded hoses stretched across the street in a jumble of black-booted feet in sheets of icy water. Flames stretched to a sky laden with heavy clouds of smoke that tumbled glowing embers of black wood and ash. On the fortress-like face of the church, a jagged wall dropped as if someone had pulled the bottom from under it, and a shower of sparks shot right at us.

I couldn’t stop shaking. My hands and feet were freezing. I started bawling, and Cassie squeezed my hand.

Mama Janet put her arm around me and said, “It can’t hurt us here. We’re safe.”

And Cassie said, “It’s okay, Travis. Jesus won’t let it hurt us.”

But it wasn’t the fire that scared me. It was the wrath of God. They didn’t know that I had caused that fire. They didn’t know it, but He knew.

***

When you’re a kid, you assign magical powers to certain moments that loom off in the future: moments like the first time you get to go to the swimming pool without your parents, or when you get to order real coffee in a restaurant instead of hot chocolate. Fifth grade was one of those magical times, because in fifth grade, you got to take art. There was a teacher, Mrs. Fields, who taught art one day a week. She was a large woman who wore a dark blue smock over her dress and pinned her hair on top of her head with a big rooster-tail comb that was all covered with rhinestones. She wore gold-rimmed glasses that hung like a necklace on a gold chain. She never peered through those glasses, but sometimes she perched them on the end of her nose and looked over them. Mostly they just dangled over bulbous breasts encased in yards of cotton and lace.

I waited forever for that first art class. When it finally arrived, I was so excited I ate my shirtsleeve. Mrs. Fields came in without saying a word. She marched from table to table and placed in front of each child a large sheet of paper, a mimeographed illustration of a wasp out of Colliers Encyclopedia, a sharpened H-B Eberhardt-Faber drawing pencil, and an art gum eraser. Even those names were magical. No plain old writing pencil, but an ART pencil and ART gum eraser!

“You shall each draw the wasp,” she declared. “Take your time and be very careful. If you make a mistake, that is what the eraser is for. Now let’s all get to work and we’ll see what good little artists we can be.”

It wasn’t exactly how I had pictured it. Well, what the heck. I went to it. Grabbed my pencil and sketched in the outline of the wasp’s body in one bold stroke. For the stripes I made an energetic, zigzag mark. Wispy lines formed the feelers, and staccato shading with the side of my own Eberhardt-Faber drawing pencil gave to the wings an illusion of flight. I finished in a few minutes, and to kill time until she gave us something else to do, I started flying my wasp, buzzing it and swooping it over my head and dive-bombing the kid in the next seat.

Mrs. Fields jerked my wasp away from me, glanced at it, and crumpled it in her hands and slammed another sheet of paper onto my desk. “Now start over,” she demanded, “And this time do it right.”

I couldn’t do it the way she wanted. My hands were shaking, and I was trying to hold back the tears. Suddenly I bolted. It was as if some powerful force were pushing me out of there. I dashed out the door, across the playground, under the bushes by the fence, over the fence to the football field, under the bleachers, out to the street. Surely someone was after me. They wouldn’t just let me go. I ran like crazy, darting between houses, jumping hedges, cutting through backyards, imagining I was a soldier on a secret mission far behind enemy lines.

There was the church! The perfect place to hide. Those strange basement windows that opened into a bricked-in recess below ground level. We always thought of them as dungeon windows. I dropped down to where the windows were and found one that was open enough to push it up and crawl into the basement room that was used as a childcare center during Sunday services.

Hiding in the church, I imagined I was hiding from a German patrol in an underground labyrinth, my freedom dependent upon my skill and daring. I’d never done anything so brave. Even Josh Culpepper wouldn’t break out of school and hide in the dungeon at Calvary Baptist Church.

I explored the church, all the secret places behind the pulpit, the choir room and the stairway that led up—to heaven, I imagined. Up there was where Brother Barnes baptized sinners. It was like a little swimming pool on a balcony perched majestically over the altar, glass fronted to waist height like saloon doors, and draped with heavy velvet curtains.

I couldn’t resist. I stripped buck-naked and went for a swim all alone in that heavenly pool. I was happily splashing in the pool when Brother Barnes stormed up the stairs and screamed at me that I would go straight to hell because I had profaned the house of God.

Mary Walker Bayou crawls through the mosquito beds of the Mississippi coast, bending around little towns with exotic names like Escatawpa and Gautier and Pascagoula. It flows into the Pascagoula River, which is vomited out into the Mississippi Sound with the outgoing tide and is sucked back into its own gullet when the tide rushes in. Hidden among canopies of hovering pine trees are fishing camps, typically run by retired couples.

It was to one of these camps that I went looking for Travis. I went alone, having first taken Jimmy back to New Orleans. He had work to do—impatient clients. And city boy that he was, he wasn’t about to go hang out with me at a fishing camp.

I drove along a narrow road paved with broken seashells and shaded by tall, scraggly, long leaf pines. The road turned out to be a cul-de-sac. A ramshackle whitewashed house sat at the end. Spaced around it, partially hidden by the trees, were seven or eight small cabins. The big house begged for a paint job. The screen porch was rusted. Behind the screen a small woman sat. She was quilting, a cascade of patchwork colors falling across her lap. I stepped out of my car onto pine straw and seashells and chalky earth. Pine cones littered the ground like spent grenades on a battlefield. I kicked one as I walked to the porch, halfway expecting it to explode, remembering games played as a child.

“Hi there,” the woman said. “You looking to do some fishing?”

“Well yes. I was thinking about it.” I didn’t know what to say, but somehow that seemed right. She didn’t recognize me, which was what I expected. Beautiful, earthy, dimly viewed behind the screen, dressed all in black with a fall of hair the color of storm clouds, there was an aura of mystery and sadness about her. No wonder her appearance in SoHo had caused such a stir among the rumor mongers. She had changed, but she was definitely Cassie. My heart was racing. I couldn’t untie my tongue to speak.

She said, “You need to see Travis if you want to fish. He’s down’t the docks. Right down that path.”

I swallowed air and nodded stupidly and walked in the direction she had pointed. A few shaky steps down a dirt path and I saw him. He was standing on the pier, shouting at an elderly couple who were paddling out into the bayou. “Y’all watch out for snakes now, ya hear. I killed a moccasin last week that was twenty foot long. Sis skinned him and made a belt out of his hide. That bugger had a head as big as my hand.”

Hearing me, he turned to wave with a meaty, red-splotched hand. That monstrous hand held into the glare of sunlight shocked me. It was like a gnarled cypress stump. At some point since I had seen him last, he had lost two of his fingers. He shoved that hand at me, waiting for me to shake it, looking right in my face with a gleeful twinkle in his eyes. I shook his hand and said, “You don’t know me, do you?”

“Nope. Can’t say as I do. Why? Should I?”

“Probably not.” Maybe I felt insulted that he didn’t recognize me. Maybe I wanted to see how long it would take. Travis was still playing games, pretending to be a country bumpkin. I decided to play along.

“My name is Lewis. I’m from New Orleans. City boy. Never been fishing in my life, but I’d like to learn.” I was proud of myself for thinking so quickly that Lewis could be either a first or last name. If Travis was going to play games I would too.

“Well hell, son, we kin take care of that. We’ll go out and catch ourselves a mess of shellcrackers.”

“What are shellcrackers?”

He laughed. Looked at me like he pitied my ignorance. He said, “Evidently, son, you don’t know shit from shinola ’bout fishing. Shellcrackers are the granddaddy of pan fish.”

“Do you mean bream?”

“They’s something like bream, but they ain’t. They’s the utmost hellacious fightingest fish you’ll ever get on the end of a line.”

We climbed into his boat. Travis sat on a swivel seat that was clamped to the bow. His weight forced my end of the boat out of the water. With a short paddle clutched in that gnarled hand, he silently eased us out into the bayou. The paddle slipped into the water without a splash, leaving a trail of circular ripples behind us. He didn’t talk but chain-smoked Chesterfield cigarettes, flicking the glowing butts in wide arcs into the still water when done. I remembered that he had smoked the same brand back in high school. He snitched them from Poppa Chuck. After silently rounding a few bends in the bayou, he eased us alongside a tree stump and dropped anchor. He rigged up a fly rod with a long, thin hook and a lead sinker that he crimped on with his teeth.

“Put-jew a worm on that hook and toss ‘er over them lily pads,” he said.
Nervously I tried to hook a squiggly worm.

“Naw, not like that. Shellcracker’ll slip your worm offen that hook without nary a budge. Looka here. You gotta skewer that sucker on like this,” putting the worm on the hook the way some men bunch up their socks to pull them on.

We cast out and settled back to wait. “Watch your cork real close,” he whispered. “Shellcrackers don’t bob ‘em up and down like bluegills. They ease ‘em under and run. You gotta watch for that, and when you see it, set your hook good and hard.”

“Set my hook?”

“Give ‘er a yank. There! Now!”
My float slipped under water and started moving laterally along the border of lily pads. I jerked on the rod, and my line flew up and slammed the side of the boat. Empty.

“I said give ‘er a yank, man.” Travis guffawed. “I didn’t say jerk ‘er guts out.”

The next time I hung onto one. My rod bent double.

“Hot damn! Reel ‘er in, son.”

Frantically I pulled on the line. It played from the reel like live spaghetti, like twine on a kite when it’s taking a nosedive. I was grabbing and pulling at that tangle of fly line, and the fish was tugging against me, and Travis was laughing and shouting, and before I knew it I was hefting a big, fat fish over the gunwale. It was ten inches long and as fat at Travis’s hand. He grinned and reached into his ice chest for a can of beer. Handing the beer to me, he said, “Beer don’t taste right ’til you get the smell of fish on your hands.”

Snapping the beer open, I lifted it for a well-deserved, hefty slug. That was when Travis said something that no one else could have said. I loved it. I sat on the aluminum seat in that little boat with my jaw dropped open in hilarious, stupefied joy and heard Red Warner say, “Don’t drink yet, son. You gotta savor the moment. It’s the virgin fish of the misty American morning. It’s the sacrificial moment. Did you know, son? Can you comprehend it and dig it in your All-American redneck soul, that you did not catch that fish without his knowing it and shouting a great big yes? Think about that, man. The ecological balance is a jazz rhapsody, and we’re disturbing it with discordant notes. It’s only by the grace of the gods that we’re allowed. Now drink that beer like Eucharist wine.”

The drawl was gone. His voice thundered ecstatically, tumbling like salmon over a waterfall. His shoulders jerked, and his massive but firm, belly heaved, and an almost malicious, boyish gleam radiated from his face. He was speed rapping like Neal Cassidy in all his beat splendor.

“That country drawl is a total fake,” I said, on the verge of saying, Don’t you know that I know who you are?

He shrugged and reached for another beer, gripping the can like an arthritic, with two fingers and a thumb, stubs of the missing fingers pointing skyward.

“What happened to your fingers?”

“Gator got ‘em. Used to wrestle ‘em when I was younger. That’s what they call sport around these parts.”

About then he hung onto a shellcracker and quit talking; then I got one, and for half an hour we pulled them in as fast as we could re-bait. Travis was jerking and cursing and spewing poetry and talking doubledeclutch, non-stop, beat jargon, and bounding and swiveling on that little seat that threatened to rip loose, shouting like a circus barker, “Whoo-wee! We done run into a veritable tribe of them mothers! It’s a shellcracker review. Count ‘em, boys, one hundred beautiful fishes. See ‘em wiggle, see ‘em turn; see ‘em flash they bellies in the sun. Whoo-hee!”

The boat was rocking. Waves rippled to either shore. Tears literally poured down my cheeks, and I was sloshing my beer all over the place. Fish, jerked hastily off hooks and tossed in the bottom of the boat, were jumping in a jumble of rods and boxes and cans that littered the boat, and Travis Earl Warner was jerking about so wildly that the boat nearly capsized.

Then, as quickly as the feeding frenzy had started, it stopped. I looked at Travis. He looked at me. I think I saw love in his eyes. I know I saw deep satisfaction. We were quiet for a while. Finally I said, “Goddamn it Travis, don’t you know that I know who you are? Don’t you know who I am?”

“Yes, Johnny. I know. It took me a while. You’ve changed. But I know.”

He stood up in that unsteady little boat and lurched toward me—and I thought for sure we’d be thrown into the bayou—and he gave me a big bear hug.

I stayed with Travis and Cassie for a week. We talked about old times, about Tupelo and about New York, but the things I was dying to find out he avoided. One day when we were standing on the bank talking, I said, “You know, Travis, I envied your popularity back in high school. I never had any real friends, other than you. The other guys, they just tolerated me. Barely. But you were different. Maybe we never talked about it, it wasn’t exactly the kind of manly thing teenagers brag about, but you were extremely sensitive, and you had an exceptional talent. I always knew that you were going to make it big some day. I wanted you to. I envied your talent, knowing I didn’t have any. I loved art more than anything, but I couldn’t draw at all. Somehow I was able to experience it through you. Maybe that’s why I followed your career so closely.”

Travis said, “Wow!” And I realized that even after a decade of almost legendary fame, he was still flabbergasted that anyone could look to him as a hero.

“Did you know that I own the largest collection of Red Warners in America?”

He didn’t even answer that. He just smiled at me quizzically, as if I were some kind of strange animal. I said, “I do. I bought three early paintings, and I bought out your last show.”

“Hell, the critics killed me on that one.”

“Yeah, but after you left New York they recanted. They put you in a class with de Kooning and Pollock now, and you don’t even know it. Do you miss it? The fame? The excitement?”

“No, I don’t miss any of that. That wasn’t me in New York. I don’t know who it was, but it sure as hell wasn’t me. Maybe this cockamamie fisherman ain’t really me either, but it’s a hell of a lot closer than anything I’ve found so far.”

I smiled at that. No other comment was called for. Travis said, “A fish don’t have to be nothing but a fish. He don’t even have to know what a fish is. But a man’s got to spend his whole blessed life trying to figure out what it means to be a man.”
He scooped up a flat rock and skimmed it across the bayou. It skipped six times, ricocheted off a piece of sheet metal on the other shore, and stuck like an arrow in the trunk of a pine tree. Travis jumped up, spun around, let out an Indian war cry, and said, “Fish ain’t nothing but a fish, but a goddamn man can sometimes do things you’d never believe.”

Later, back at the house, he handed me a notebook and said, “I think you ought to read this. There are things you’re dying to find out that are best answered here. It’s rough. Sketchy. But all the essentials are there. I wrote it when I was recuperating, when Cassie and I first came down here.”

I first heard about it on the morning news. I was in bed at home in my Garden District Apartment. Jimmy was beginning to wake up and nuzzling against me, purring the way he does in the morning. I had my cigarettes and a cup of coffee. With chicory (practically a requirement for living in New Orleans). I was propped on heavy bolsters, watching the morning news on Channel Four. My normal morning routine. The talking head of the Channel Four anchorman was displaying his usual sincere look, while bad drawings and uninspired headlines behind him let us know what he was talking about. A computer-generated likeness of Red Warner flashed on the screen behind him, along with the headline “Artist Vanishes.”

I smashed my cigarette in the ashtray and scooted closer to the set. The anchorman said, “Notorious abstract artist Red Warner apparently vanished last night, following a bizarre accident in his studio loft. Reports are sketchy and unconfirmed. The famous artist was said to have been despondent on the heels of bad reviews of his latest exhibition at the Broome Street Gallery. Friends said he had been drinking heavily. Last night the artist threw a party for over two hundred people. During the party he reportedly wielded a butcher knife and started swinging it wildly while quoting scripture in one of his famous evangelist parodies. Witnesses report that he began hacking at himself, blood splattered, and people ran out of the loft screaming. An unidentified woman stayed to nurse the injured artist. As of six o’clock this morning, New York City police report that Red Warner’s condition and whereabouts remain unknown. He did not check into a hospital. It is suspected that the so-called mystery woman took him to a private doctor and is keeping him hidden from the public. In other news, Creole frog legs are the latest hot item in French Quarter restaurants. Here’s Jane Curtis to tell us all about it…”

I was stunned. I don’t remember thinking anything for a long time. It was as if my mind simply switched itself off. It said, Oh no. We’re not going to deal with this shit. Not yet. I remember that I pushed my glasses against my nose until the pain of it shook me out of my stupor.

The next day Jimmy and I flew to New York. I spent a couple of days in the city reading about Red Warner and hanging out in SoHo bars where he was the main topic of conversation. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Playing detective, maybe. But I didn’t get anywhere. Nothing but rumors. There was one thing happening around the New York art scene that would have tickled Travis if he had been around to know about it. All the critics suddenly retracted their original reviews (with convoluted justifications). Some of them were magnanimous enough to admit they had been wrong. They said that Red Warner’s new paintings were such a radical departure from what they had come to expect of him that they had been too quick to condemn. All of a sudden the latest trend in art criticism was admitting, “I was wrong.”

Finally, I went to the Broome Street Gallery to see Red’s latest show. Being there! Standing in that gallery, my feet planted, my eyes locked on the paintings, a cigarette in my hand, conscious of my gestures as I smoked with a studied air! It was like being in some surrealistic scene out of a Fellini movie. That moment haunts me. I looked back on it and see it as a metaphor, or as multiple metaphors (mixed). It was crowded. People wandered in and out, talking, posing, gesturing. Peripheral vision of street action glimpsed through a window. Horns honking, people shouting, shoppers, gawkers, walkers, all like some kind of circus act.

I remembered something Cassie had said years ago about there being a marvelous circus somewhere and people sitting front row center and not even knowing it was there. And there I was, trying to watch the high wire act in the center ring and being distracted by animals ring-left and jugglers ring-right. The action swam around me. Fish in a tank. I was seaweed, my feet rooted to the floor of the tank, my head awash in the current. Outside, a Volvo pulled to the curb. My peripheral vision caught sight of a woman getting out of the car. She went into the New Cedars Bar. Consciously I paid no attention, but unconsciously something about her registered. Whatever it may have been about her that was trying to dig into my awareness was wiped out by the immediacy of the Red Warner paintings. Nothing else could take root in my brain.

The paintings were unlike anything I had ever before seen. I didn’t know what to make of them. At first glance they were like color field paintings, only rough and highly energetic, with frantic, all-over line work as in a Pollock. The surface was a dense field of scumbled, scratched, and layered paint, which was in some ways very much like typical Red Warner paintings from the past. The color and the paint application were the same, but there were recognizable figures, something he had never done. The figures weren’t exactly there on the surface. They emerged through the surface. Hints of figures, a line here, a shadow there: clues to hidden figures; and oh yes, fully-realized figures too, painted with loving care and then painted over with glazes that obliterated them, imprisoned figures that struggled to get out.

My initial reaction was, I think, disorientation, perhaps even revulsion. But as I stood there and took them in, the elements that had put me off at first glance became enticing. It was the same reaction I had experienced when first coming upon his earlier paintings.

As I stood there, my mind was worked on two or three levels simultaneously. On one level it was just me and those goddamned awe-full paintings locked in a stare-down; on another level I was aware of all the movement around me: other people milling about, in and out of the gallery, a trucker across the street loading paintings into his van; and on yet another level I was aware that the owner of the gallery, unseen, was watching me, trying to guess whether or not I was going to buy one of the paintings.

I bought them all. The whole damn show. It cost me seventy thousand dollars. It was either the wisest or the most foolhardy investment I’d ever made. At the time I had no idea which (still don’t). I only knew that I had to have them. Now, of course, each of those paintings is worth twice that.

The next day we rented a car and headed south. I let Jimmy do the driving. I didn’t want to go back to New Orleans, and I didn’t want to fly. I wanted to go to Tupelo. And I wanted to take it slow, give myself time to let it all bounce around in my head.

“There was something going on,” I told Jimmy. We had stopped for lunch at a truck stop in New Jersey. “I’m not sure what it was, but there was something going on outside the gallery when I was there. You know. Sometimes you catch something out of the corner of your eye, and you don’t pay any attention to it, but later you realize it was important and you should have paid attention. It was like that. There was a woman. She got out of a car and went into a shop, or maybe the bar. Yeah, it was the bar. She did go into the bar. I remember, because she was still there when I went in later, or she had just left and people in the bar were talking about her. Oh, I don’t know. Probably nothing. It’s just… for some reason it keeps gnawing at me.”

It was the next day, driving through the mountains near Knoxville, before I began to put the pieces together. I had seen the woman get out of her car and walk into the New Cedars. I can’t remember if it was before or after I went into the bar that the trucker pulled up and she let him into a building. Of course I had no way of knowing at the time, but it was Travis’s loft they were clearing out. She was the woman who had been at the party, the so-called mystery woman who had whisked him away. When I went into the bar after leaving the gallery, people in the bar were talking about her. They said things like “I’ll bet she’s the one.” But they were speaking in pronouns: she and him; they never used names, and I didn’t make the connection.

What an idiot I was! But then, how was I to know?

***

We pulled into Tupelo around noon on a Sunday afternoon. The streets looked more narrow and congested than I remembered. The people looked like people in New Orleans or anywhere else. Where were the familiar faces? I should have recognized somebody, even after twenty years. Tupelo wasn’t supposed to change, but it had. Magazine Street was nothing like I remembered. When we’d lived there, hardly anybody parked on the street. They all had garages, and most families had only one car. Now many of the old homes had been converted into apartments, and the curbs were congested with cars. The little house where I’d grown up had been made into a duplex—it hadn’t been big enough for a single family to start with—and I couldn’t even find the Warner House, which had been the biggest house on the street. It must have been torn down.

We headed downtown with the intention of stopping at Mike’s for lunch. But when we drove down Broadway, there was no Mike’s Restaurant.

We parked on Broadway and walked around town. And I did see a familiar face in a coffee shop on Main Street. It was Mabel Cook. She must have been well over eighty—maybe pushing a hundred, yet she didn’t look much older than I remembered. I introduced myself.

“I remember you, Johnny. You used to be a skinny little runt. How are you?”

“I guess I’ve put on a few pounds over the years.” I thought the extra weight looked good on me. “I’m doing well, thank you. How are you doing?”

“Not bad for an old biddy who should have been dead long since.”

We chatted for a few minutes. “Whatever happened to Mike’s?” I asked.

“Oh, Mike passed away about eight years ago. Just about everybody’s passed on. Mike’s son is still here, though. Remember him? Constance? He’s got his own restaurant. One of those fast food, fried chicken places. Calls it the Chicken Shack. Now isn’t that a silly name? But I hear the chicken’s pretty decent.”

“What about Chuck Warner? I assume he’s still around.”

“Of course, Chuck and Janet are still here. Only that wonderful old house of theirs on Magazine Street was torn down to make room for a parking lot. Shameful thing. The Warners live out by the airport now.”

“What about Marybelle and J.P.?”

“Oh, they’re in Oxford. J.P.’s a hotshot professor at Ole Miss. Marybelle still works for the Journal. She commutes. Seems to me like they could have stayed put and let him do the commuting.”

It was good talking to Mabel. It felt as if she were the first person I’d spoken to in ages who had feet planted on the ground.

I called Marybelle, and she invited us to spend the night at their home in Oxford. I tried to decline, but she insisted. We ate, we talked about old times, and of course we talked about Travis. “He’s all right,” she said. “Yes, they came here after leaving New York. Nobody knows where he is, and he asked me not to tell, but he’s fine. Don’t worry. Oh, you don’t know how I worried about that boy. Worried myself sick. When he first left here, he was in bad shape. He blamed himself for Man being convicted. I was afraid he was going to do something terrible to punish himself. In a way, I guess he did. Maybe his whole time in New York was a kind of self-inflicted purgatory. All that wild living! I’d read about him in the papers. It worried me to death. But he told me most of what the papers wrote was exaggerated. Anyway, he’s okay now. Cassie’s with him. She’ll see to it that he’s okay.”

Cassie! How obvious! Cassie was the woman who whisked him away, the woman who cleared out his studio. I sat right across the street and watched her, and it never dawned on me. I still pictured Cassie as the girl in high school we called Sis. And of course I never would have expected the premature gray hair. It dawned on me then that if I failed to recognize Cassie, she and Travis would be even less likely to recognize me. Twenty years older, beard and glasses, thirty (or so) extra pounds: I looked nothing at all like the Johnny Lewis they would remember.

“So where are they now?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Well, yes I do, but I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Not even me?”

“I’m sorry. I can write him, though. I bet’cha  if I wrote him he’d say it’s okay to tell you. I mean, after all, it’s not like you’re some snoopy reporter from the National Enquirer.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I understand.” I knew then that if I persisted I could get her to tell me where he was. She was dying to tell me, but by then I was in no hurry. I knew, somehow, that I would find him soon. Besides, even though I was still anxious, in some ways, I had started enjoying playing detective. I wanted to figure it out on my own.

While we were talking I kept eyeing an old copy of the Times Picayune poking out of a basket. I knew it would contain a needed clue. “Do you subscribe to the Picayune?” I asked.

“No. Travis left that here. I just never got around to tossing it out.”
“Good. I’d like to read it.”

I took that paper to bed with me, convinced that something in it would tell me where to find Travis. It told me, all right. It was laughably blatant. He had circled an ad in the classified section: Fishing camp for sale, Mary Walker Bayou…

We all graduated from Tupelo High in the spring of 1961, all but Sam Littlejohn, who had to repeat a year and eventually dropped out. Cassie graduated with top honors. After graduation, she went to New York to study dance. J.P. and Marybelle were married in June. Travis enrolled in the Memphis Art Academy in September. The year after that, he transferred to the University of Alabama, where he stayed for six years—the last two as a teaching assistant in the Master of Fine Arts program. We saw each other every now and then: when he came home for holidays, and once in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. And during all that time, there was never a repeat or any mention of what had happened at Charlie Speed’s house the night of the Elvis concert.

J.P. and Marybelle became active in the Civil Rights movement, which did not endear them to the community at large. Surprisingly, Mabel Cook, who usually loved any opportunity to berate just about anybody, defended them. “At least you’ve got to admire their courage,” she said. “They stand up for what they believe in. The rest of us run around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to fight off what we know damned good and well is right and inevitable.”

By the end of the sixties, the only people from our old gang who still lived in Tupelo were Josh Culpepper and Sam Littlejohn and Wanda Ramsey. Hoss Williams was sometimes around. Hoss married Bitsy, moved to Jackson, got divorced within a year, married another woman, moved to Oxford—which is practically a suburb of Tupelo, but don’t dare say that to anyone who goes to Ole Miss—became a hot-shot salesman, and coached his boys’ Little League teams.

Josh Culpepper got his law degree and came back home to become the youngest assistant District Attorney in the state. Sam dropped out of school and spent a few months, on two separate occasions, in the state mental hospital at Whitfield. Back in Tupelo, he got a job cleaning stables for a local man who raised show horses. Wanda spent a few years in Atlanta, where she tried to make it as an actress. She did a few TV commercials and some bit parts in local theater, and after a while she moved back home and never told anyone why she had given up her acting career. Man trouble, probably.

Charlie Speed went to Ole Miss on a football scholarship and then went to Vietnam and was killed in the war. They might as well have killed his mother, too. First she lost her husband in World War II, and then she lost her only son to Vietnam.

As for me, I got out of Tupelo as soon as I could, vowing never to return. I moved to New Orleans, got a business degree from Tulane, admitted to the draft board that I was gay (which kept me out of Vietnam, thank God), and went to work for an investment firm. I told myself that since I could never be an artist like Travis or a dancer like Cassie—I had no talents of any kind—I might as well spend my efforts on building a fortune, which I did. Along the way I also built an enviable art collection, which included a number of Red Warners.

The last time I saw Travis was during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It must have been 1965 or 1966. He was on the patio at Pat O’Brien’s, drinking a Hurricane. I joined him, and he introduced me to his companions. They were all grad students from Alabama. I had one drink with them, and then Travis and I took a walk through Jackson Square and Pirate’s Alley, a Mecca for hack artists who do pastel portraits and French Quarter street scenes. Travis was ecstatic. He shouted, “Hoo-whee! Looka there! Arteests!”

Tourists—the ones who were sober enough to notice—gaped at him and laughed out loud. I tried to shush him, but he was on a roll. “Shee-it, these guys are the real McCoy! They got them berets. They got them goatees! Oh Mister Artist Man….” He approached one who was doing pastel portraits for $10.

The guy sat on a fold-up stool in front of his easel. A wooden tray attached to the easel with c-clamps held piles of pastel sticks. On the easel was a drawing of a woman who appeared to have been lifted from the cover of a Cosmopolitan. His little area of the street was fenced off by a display of portraits propped up with folding metal stands. Most of them were portraits of celebrities such as Elvis and Bob Hope and John F. Kennedy. Beside the easel was a chair you could sit in to have your portrait done. I thought about him lugging all that stuff down the street.
Travis sat for his portrait. Sat? He plopped his butt on the stool and grinned his monkey grin and started scat singing and stomping his feet and drumming his hands on his thighs, singing out, “Doo-wop a dwap dop ah do me right Mister Artist Man!”

The artist gave up because Travis would not sit still. Travis said, “You got to catch my movement, my man. I’z the moving man, movin’ right along. Thass my essence and my being. Ee-rupting, kee-rupting, effervescent energy captured in glorious pastel! You can do it, man! Move that marvelous drawing hand!”

The artist said, “Forget it man. You’re crazy as a bed bug.”

“Why thankee anyway, Mister Artist Man. I’m obliged for the attempt.” He bowed and tipped a make-believe hat and was off at a trot, dancing along the street to the music in his head. I tagged along behind.

I had witnessed moments of his high-energy clowning back in high school. I remembered that he had fallen in love with Kerouac’s character — the one based on Neal Cassidy — and had tried to emulate his way of speed rapping. I also remembered that he had studied and tried to impersonate the speech patterns of black preachers at revival meetings, but this was the first time I ever witnessed the full-blown persona that he was later to become famous for. Frankly, I was embarrassed. I didn’t know what to do. Luckily, he dropped it. He suddenly grew calm and pensive. We were in the park. He stood still and looked me in the eye with a sad expression and said, “I worry about Sam Littlejohn. What’s going to become of Sam?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

Travis said, “Remember when he used to do the belly flop off the high board? He was scared shitless. He never let anybody know it, but he was scared. He did it because it was the one thing he could do that the rest of us could admire. I always felt guilty for goading him into it. I was always scared he’d hurt himself.”

Hearing Travis say that made me think of him in ways I never had before. I’d always thought of him as independent, a guy who never game a damn what other people thought about him. It was strange to discover he had been just like the rest of us back then, a bundle of insecurity, scared to death somebody might think he wasn’t so cool after all.

***

Wanda Ramsey was killed in the summer of 1967. I read about it in the Times Picayune. According to the article in the paper, her body was found in an alley beside Page’s Market next to a parked truck. Her skirt was bunched around her waist, and she was wearing nothing underneath. When I read about that, I couldn’t help but remember the night of the big party at Charlie Speed’s house and the big ruckus over what color her panties were. The police surmised that she had been raped. As near as I could tell, this assumption was based on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. If there was any medical evidence of rape, the paper failed to mention it. A black man identified as Raymond Carver was arrested and charged with rape and murder.

I knew who Raymond Carver was, of course. He was the man I had seen Travis talking to at the old Pirate Shack, the black man who had been his childhood friend, the kid whose friendship with Travis had been destroyed because of racism before we were even old enough to know what racism was, although we had lived with it and in it every day. Travis was also mentioned in the newspaper. He was a witness, not to the actual crime, but apparently to the whereabouts of the accused at the time.

I wanted to call the Warners and find out what was going on. I even thought about driving up to Tupelo. But there was a part of me that wanted nothing to do with Tupelo or anything that related to my past.

I followed the reports on Channel Four and in the Times Picayune. There wasn’t much information. It looked as if the police had arrested the first suspicious character they could lay hands on. They had no reason to suspect him except that he was black and he was there. Neighborhoods were still segregated, and it was highly unusual to find a black man in a white neighborhood late at night. Not only that, the police had a vested interest in being able to pin any rape of a white woman on a black man. It perpetuated a myth that needed to be fueled in order to maintain the status quo.

The alleged crime was first reported by Mabel Cook, who called the police around ten o’clock that night to report a disturbance at the diner across the street from her house. She saw a male and a female arguing in the parking lot. She said there was some pushing and shoving, then the female took off running toward Crosstown. She couldn’t identify the female, but when later asked if she fit the description of Wanda Ramsey, Mabel said that she did. The male was Travis; Mabel did recognize him. What happened next was confusing to her. Her phone rang and turning to answer it, she missed some of what was going on across the street. But she said there was another man talking to Travis and a third man joined them. And she said she could have been mistaken about that; the third man could have been at a distance; maybe it only looked from her vantage point that they were all together. At least one of the men followed after Wanda, this much Mabel was sure of, but she couldn’t tell which of the men it had been who followed after Wanda. One of the men, she said, was black. That was the extent of the eyewitness account. Apparently Travis could identify the black man as Raymond Carver and could say whether or not it was Carver who followed in the direction Wanda (assuming it really was Wanda) had gone.

To me it seemed awfully slim evidence for charges of rape and murder, but I had heard of cases being won on less—especially when race was an issue.

The trial opened less than a month after the crime was committed. J.P. reported the trial for the Tupelo Daily Journal, and the New Orleans papers picked up the story. His article was more literary than factual, full of metaphors for race relations. A beautiful read, but confusing. He said that all during the trial Sam Littlejohn sat in a seat directly behind the defense counsel and cried. Sam, who never really grew up, had always had a schoolboy crush on Wanda, as did most of the boys in school. Also like many of us, he had looked up to Josh Culpepper, begrudgingly. In his article, J.P. used Sam and Josh as literary devices, casting them as symbols for the town as a whole. Such a device was needed; the actual proceedings were pretty boring.

Man was convicted of the lesser charge of attempted rape and involuntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to thirty years in the state penitentiary at Parchman.

The day after the trial ended, Travis threw a few clothes and his paint and canvas into the trunk of his car and drove to New York. The next time elections rolled around in Lee County, Josh Culpepper won the D.A. post. Sometime later, Man won his appeal and was set free. I don’t think Travis ever knew that. Sam Littlejohn became more and more dysfunctional and eventually became a permanent resident at Whitfield. I heard about that later, from Marybelle.

Four years later, maybe five, I was reading Art News, and I spotted an ad for an exhibit at the Broome Street Gallery: “Four To Watch: James Streeter, Marlo Davis, Kim Kyo, Red Warner.” I didn’t know it was him, but the name registered. I watched for it when the reviews came out. (I had not started my collection at the time, but I had ideas about investing in art and dreamed of discovering the next Jasper Johns, so I had to keep up with the reviews; I subscribed to all the major art magazines, as well as the Sunday Times and the Village Voice.)

The next week’s Voice reviewed the Broome Street show. Randall Jarrett wrote the review. He called it an exhibition of emerging artists, a common euphemism for artists who have been busting ass for years, trying to get a tiny bit of recognition. He described Red Warner’s paintings as “the abstract equivalent of portraiture”—whatever that is. (I remember reading somewhere that all painting, abstraction included, is either landscape or portraiture, depending on whether the format is horizontal or vertical. But I had the feeling that Jarrett mean more than that.) He also mentioned that Red Warner was a Southerner, and called him “the wild man of SoHo”.

I was becoming a detective, putting together bits and pieces of art reviews to prove my suspicion (hope?) that Red Warner and Travis Earl Warner were one and the same. Same last name. Red hair. Southern-born wild man. I couldn’t find anything in writing to prove it, but in my heart I knew. (In Your Heart You Know He’s Right: the Goldwater poster that hung on the wall at Danny’s Diner. I bet it was still there, faded and
grease splattered, the night Wanda Ramsey was killed.)

I clipped Jarrett’s review and put it in my scrapbook, along with sports write-ups on Travis and the stories on Wanda, and the report of Charlie Speed’s death in Vietnam.

Three years went by before I saw anything else on Red Warner. Then he was suddenly all over the place. Art News, Art Forum, Arts, Art In America, they all ran feature articles on him. He was in the New York Times and the Village Voice. His name even appeared in gossip columns in Cosmo and Rolling Stone. The papers told us if he was seen at Max’s Kansas City or Club 57 or Warhol’s Factory. Suddenly he was a star. We read about his clothes and his sexual exploits and his comic shenanigans. We read that he partied all night and painted all day and that he loved to shock the hoity-toity by bringing prostitutes and drug addicts and other low-life characters to their parties.

I wondered what Marybelle thought of all this. I wondered if he was ever in contact with her. And what of Cassie? She was, I assumed, still in New York. Did she see Travis? I could picture her fretting over him, patiently waiting to pick up the pieces of him when he finally crashed. And crash he surely would. Nobody could sustain such a frantic life.

It seemed like he wanted to crash, like maybe he was pushing himself beyond all limits in an attempt to punish himself for what he might have done to Man, and maybe because he despised himself because he was afraid that he was homosexual. I imagined that simply because he had had one homosexual experience, forced upon him by yours truly, that he would seek out others in an attempt to discover for himself whether he was really gay or not, or maybe to punish himself in moments of despair. Or… or… oh, I don’t know. Perhaps I was projecting my own feelings onto him.

All I knew for sure was what I read, and I had sense enough to figure half of that was hype. But I knew Travis. He painted with burning concentration, and when he quit painting he had to escape. With Travis escape would be drugs, sex, wildness. This I knew about Travis Earl Warner: he was the kind of man who would go to orgies at night and confession the next morning, only he wasn’t Catholic, and probably wouldn’t go to confession anyway. Instead, he’d wallow in guilt, and go out and fuck some more to put it out of his mind, and then dive back into his painting. He could not allow himself a moment of quiet introspection. Every time a quiet moment managed to sneak up on him, Man would be there, accusing; the whole damned senior class from Tupelo High would be there, reminding him of the time he escorted me out of the dance; Brother Barnes would be there, preaching hellfire and brimstone; and Papa Chuck would be there as a perfect example of what a young boy from Mississippi could grow up to be. I’m sure that all of Tupelo followed him to New York. They were even in the paintings, abstracted and hidden under layers of scratched and scumbled paint.

I saw the paintings only in reproduction, and frankly I was perplexed. I wanted to like them, but I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. A typical Red Warner painting consisted of one or two simple shapes on a flat background, minimalist blobs painted with a sloppy, Abstract Expressionist application of Roplex, an acrylic medium. All I could see was a generally wedge-shaped form of some unnamable, murky color in a ground of some other unnamable, murky color. Of course I was willing to withhold judgment until I saw the real thing, not only because I was aware of the tremendous difference between small photographic reproductions and paintings, but because it was Travis.

When I finally went to a Red Warner exhibit and was confronted by his paintings, it was as if I were locked in a room with another man, a stranger, a man whose presence threatened me, scared me, made me want to run, a man who looked into my eyes and saw my soul. He was big and he was ugly, dirty, slovenly, as heavy as guilt. From the canvas, his eyes locked onto my eyes and I could not turn away. Slowly, doggedly, like a rising flood, his gaze revealed to my gaze the startling truth that his ugliness was a mask, a stereotypical ugly mask worn for protection. The man under the mask was beautiful, so beautiful that I could not help falling in love with him. What I saw in paint on canvas was Travis Earl Warner’s heart. What I also saw was myself. And I had the feeling that I was not the only person who experienced such a personal, emotional response to his work. Randall Jarrett had not been able to express it aptly—who could?—but now I knew what he meant when he called Travis’s work the abstract equivalent of portraiture.

I went back to the gallery three more times. After my third visit, I went back to my hotel room and called Leo Garner, the owner of the Broome Street Gallery. I didn’t want to talk to him in person, an unnecessary precaution probably, but I didn’t want to give him a chance to try to influence me. “This is Johnny Lewis,” I said into the phone. “I want to purchase Red Warner’s “Hungry Frederick.” I’ll send a cashier’s check tomorrow, along with instructions for shipping it to my warehouse in New Orleans.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s an excellent choice. We’ll have to hold the painting until this show is over, and until your check clears the bank. Is that agreeable with you?”

“Yes it is. You’ll have the check within the week, and I’ll expect shipment by the tenth of next month.”

Over the next decade I bought four more Red Warners.

Anticipation, alive and palpable like a covey of quail flushed by a hunting dog, fluttered over the town of Tupelo. Elvis Presley was coming to town, coming back home to perform at the Mississippi-Alabama State Fair and Dairy Show—at the fairgrounds anyway; the actual fair had come and gone back around Halloween. A week before the concert, J.P. finagled an interview with Elvis. He drove up to Memphis with Marybelle in the morning. After school that day, a sizable chunk of the senior class besieged the Warner house and set up camp in the front room, waiting for them to come back home. We wanted to know what Elvis had said.

“I’ll tell you one thing, and one thing only,” J.P. said. “If you want to hear more, you’ll have to wait for Sunday’s paper. The one thing I’ll tell you is this: Elvis said that when he lived here, the only way he could get into the fairgrounds was to climb over the fence behind Clayton’s Staff-O-Life. He never had the price of admission. Now they’re paying him ten thousand dollars to come sing a few songs.”

Travis cut me a look. I immediately knew what he had in mind, what he simply had to do, what he would surely talk me into doing with him. Sure enough, a week later I found myself on the loading platform behind the feed store, with Travis and Charlie Speed, climbing up the metal ladder on the side of a box car and jumping over the fence into a haystack in the fairgrounds. Would you believe it? I landed right smack in a cow turd.

That idiot Charlie started howling, “Johnny stepped in cow shit! Yah! Yah! Yah!”

“Shut up, Charlie!” Travis hissed. “You want us to get caught?”

We hurried around the big top, searching for a loose flap we could crawl under. Acrid dust rushed up my nostrils, making me sneeze. Pulling myself out of the sawdust and brushing my clothes, I hurried to catch up with Travis and Charlie, who were running around among the girders under the grandstand. Charlie suddenly stopped. I almost ran into him. He grabbed Travis’s arm and pointed upward, signaling us to shush, hardly managing to keep from laughing out loud himself. We looked up to see what he was pointing at. The underside of people, a worms-eye view of big legs and foreshortened figures. There was a woman standing above us. We could see right up her dress. We could see heavy legs with puckered and splotched skin and stockings and garter belts, and what I guess was a corset, and stained panties.

To me the sight was disgusting, but I guess Charlie thought it was sexy, and funny as all get-out. He was clutching himself around the middle to keep from laughing, and he was making disgusting gestures like he was jerking off. I supposed his obscene gesture was intended to indicate that the illicit view turned him on. Travis whispered, “You’re sick, man, really, really sick. Come on, let’s get in with the crowd before somebody spots us down here.”

We scuttled out from under the stands and merged with the crowd. We found empty seats on the top row. All around was a static of excited murmuring like bird wings beating the air. Wind whipped the tent top, intensifying the bird-wing illusion. A flock of raucous people, all talking about Elvis. A lady to the left of Travis said, “Elvis come into Danny’s this one time and had hisself a big ol’ ice cream cone. After he left, my Jennifer, she went right up and kissed the stool where he was sittin’. I swear she done it.”

“That’s terrible,” her companion said.

A man in front of her said, “I knowed him back in grammar school. He weren’t nothing but po’ white trash back then. We used to make fun of him. I’d come home from school and my mama, she’d say, ‘What happened at school today?’ and I’d say, ‘Aw nothin’. Elvis brung his gee-tar agin’. Like him playing that gee-tar was the dumbest thing in the world. Look at him now. Look at what playing that gee-tar got him.”

Everybody had an Elvis story. After all, this was Elvis’s hometown. A lot of these people had actually known him when he was a kid living out by where Mama Marybelle grew up in East Tupelo. But most of the stories they so proudly told were probably secondhand and only half true.
Charlie said, “Me and Hoss saw him once. We pulled up right alongside him at the red light at Gloster and Jackson. It was summertime, and we were both driving convertibles with our tops down. I was driving my Impala, and old Elvis was driving a big, white Caddie. Hoss, he hollered at him, ‘Hey, I know you! You’re…’ and he paused like he was trying to recall the name, and old Elvis, he just smiled real big, reared back behind the wheel of his Cadillac convertible like he owned the whole damned world. Then Hoss said, ‘You’re Carl Perkins!’“

Charlie laughed a regular knee-slapping laugh, and a woman on the next row shot him a quizzical look and said, “Who’s Carl Perkins?”

Travis spotted his mother in the crowd and waved at her. She was sitting with J.P.

Suddenly the lights were dimmed, and a single spotlight focused on a point mid-stage. The curtain rose. I could feel the electric shock of anticipation shoot through the crowd. The band started playing an introductory riff, playing the same refrain over and over, each chorus a tiny bit louder, each chorus a tiny bit faster. It went on and on and on and the huge tent was otherwise silent and everyone pitched forward on their seats and only the single spotlight broke the blackness. It lit a bare spot on the stage, a chalky, luminous spot of worn wood that shone like an old coin under water. Then Elvis walked out and stood in the spotlight. He reached for the microphone, pulled it to his mouth, sneered that famous lip-curled sneer of his, winked at the audience, opened his mouth, and the tent exploded with a blitzkrieg of screams and clapping and foot stomping.

Elvis sang, and thousands of voices screamed at him. I don’t think anybody in that tent actually heard his voice. You couldn’t even tell when the song ended, because the screams were so loud. Then he sang another song, and another. People were jumping up and down, and the seats were shaking, and the noise was a constant roar.

After about two hours of bedlam, Elvis simply stepped out of the spotlight and vanished. The band went into the same number they had started with. Nobody seemed to notice. They didn’t know what was happening on stage. They had come to scream and clap, and that’s what they were doing. An electrified voice began repeating a single phrase over and over: “Elvis has left the fairgrounds. Elvis has left the fairgrounds.” It was like someone trying to break into a dream.

Eventually the message was heard. Gradually, as if in a trance, everyone wandered out of the tent and across the sawdust trail to the main gate by Long’s Laundry. There they fanned out to get into cars that couldn’t move because of the congestion. We had come in Charlie’s car. We climbed in and sat, unable to pull out into traffic. Finally Charlie said, “To hell with it. Let’s hoof it. I’ll pick up the car tomorrow. It’s party time, boys!”

Charlie’s mother was out of town for the weekend. He had the house to himself. The word had flown around school all week: It was going to be one hell of a party, one of those where no one is actually invited, but damn near everyone shows up.

From the outside, Charlie’s house wasn’t much to look at. Not a tiny house like ours, but nowhere near as big as the Warner house either. Old, in need of a paint job. A profusion of flowerpots on the little front porch. Inside, it was something else. Simple. Elegant. You could tell that Charlie’s mother had impeccable taste but very little money. We stepped through an arched doorway into a small foyer, a welcome mat on the floor. An umbrella stand and coat rack. An Impressionist-style landscape on the wall. Another arched doorway led into a living room that was much more spacious than I expected. The floors were a worn but highly buffed hardwood. The area rug was probably homemade. No overhead lights; the room was softly lit by a pole lamp next to the couch and spotlights on prints that hung on the walls. These were frame-shop variety reproductions of landscapes by Degas and Monet.

For a little while I felt at peace in Charlie’s house. Then the party arrived. Hoss Williams and the Casey boys and Wanda and Bitsy and Sam Littlejohn, who immediately spilled a beer on Mrs. Speed’s rug, and some girls from the women’s college in Columbus, and Josh Culpepper, who always turned up where he wasn’t wanted. And others: some I vaguely knew, some I’d never seen before. In the unseasonably hot night, it was a witch’s brew of boys and girls all dolled up in men’s and women’s bodies, all thrown together in the cauldron of a small house on Green Street, all terribly, painfully, self-consciously aware of the hormones that raged in their young bodies. Guys trying to out-bravado each other, spewing beer and cussing and slapping each other on the back, every word-sneer-look laced with sexual innuendo, and rock and roll throbbed in the melee.
Charlie draped his arm around Wanda, his hand casually (innocently?) brushing her breast, a beer clutched in his other paw. He shouted, “Y’all know Wanda has different color panties for every day of the week!”

“Do not!”

“How do you know?” someone challenged.

“How ya think he knows?” someone else asked — a rhetorical question if ever there was one.

Everybody had something to say on the subject of Wanda Ramsey’s panties.

“You’re asking for it, Charlie.”

“What color is today?”

“Five bucks says it’s red!”

“Yellow. Gotta be yellow!”

“Let’s find out!”

Charlie clutched the waistband of Wanda’s pants. Grabbing his hand and glancing quickly at the gathered crowd with an expression that spoke of some kind of strange combination of panic and pleasure, Wanda said, “Don’t you dare!”

Charlie and Hoss grabbed her. She squealed, wrestled with them, slapped at Hoss. Hoss held her, and Charlie yanked her pants down to her knees. She was wearing pink panties.

“Assholes!” she shouted at everybody, slapping and laughing and pushing them away. It was all in fun, but I sensed that Wanda felt hurt and used, especially by Charlie, but didn’t want anybody to know how she felt.

Then Josh Culpepper was bragging about some pseudo-Klan-type organization he had recently joined. “You gotta be free, white and twenty-one,” he said. “Ain’t none of y’all old enough yet, but I figger you got your hearts in the right place.”

I was sitting next to Travis on the couch. We both heard Josh. “Who invited that guy anyway?” I asked.

Travis said, “Nobody invited him, man. When you go to a party like this it’s like going skinny-dipping at Blue Hole. You gotta figure you’re gonna bump into at least one asshole.”

Charlie had wandered over by us. He put in his two cents worth: “What I don’t understand is why everybody seems to think he’s such hot stuff.”

“He’s slick as snot, that’s for sure,” Travis said. “Got a lot of folks fooled. Hell, look at Sam. Josh used to beat him up all the time, and he still makes fun of him, but Sam thinks he’s cool.” Much older than any of us, Josh was in law school at Ole Miss, a school whose main purpose at the time was the training of attorneys who could defend the Southern Way of Life. We all figured Josh would have flunked out already if his old man hadn’t been slipping somebody some big money.

We heard Josh say, “We ain’t got anything against niggers. ‘Member what Brother Dave Gardner said on the Jack Paar show? He said, ‘I like Negroes; I think everybody ought to own one.’ Haw! Haw! Oooh! Naw, seriously. We probably care more about our colored people than most Yankees do. Treat ‘em better, too. What these civil rights people don’t understand is that they’re being used by the Commies. If them outside agitators would leave us be, we’d work out our race problems.”

It was getting late. Everybody was drunk. Somebody came running in and shouted, “The cops just raided the Chicken Shack!”

One of the Casey boys came stumbling up the hall from the bathroom with his pants tangled around his ankles. His skinny butt was covered with droopy boxer shorts. He reached the rug, flopped down to his knees and put his head on the edge of the couch and started snoring.
Somebody I didn’t know hollered at Travis, “Hey Travis!”

“What?”

“Noth yew! Noth Yew!”

Travis said, “What’s that you say? I can’t hear you. Didn’t your mama teach you not to talk with shit in your mouth?”

Everybody started laughing. All but Charlie and Wanda, who were cuddled together in an easy chair. Wanda was sleeping. Charlie’s eyes were closed, but his hand was moving, slowly caressing her shoulder.

If the party had begun as a great, boiling cauldron, it had slowed to a simmer. I grew drowsy but didn’t want to leave. Other people did leave, or they passed out, or wandered off to Charlie’s bedroom or the den in search of a place to sleep.

I watched Travis pull himself up from the couch and stagger down the hall. He propped himself against the bathroom door for a long time, then finally lurched into the bathroom. The whole house was now silent. Travis must have stayed in the bathroom for half an hour. I heard the toilet seat clap down; after a while the rush of running water. Eventually he came out. He stumbled across the hall and into Mrs. Speed’s bedroom. I sat on the couch, wanting very badly to go in there too. I had a hard time breathing. There was a sharp pain in my shoulder, and it felt like something was pushing on my chest. I rubbed my chest and was surprised at how bony it felt. I don’t guess I’d ever noticed before.

I slipped off my shoes and tiptoed down the hall, holding my shoes in my hands. In my mind I could see myself sneaking through the house like a parody of some inept thief. Thinking about it now, I see the animated cartoon character the Pink Panther. Pausing in the doorway, I could see Travis in the spilled light from the corner street lamp. The light oozed through Mrs. Speed’s chintz curtains and spread its subtle pattern across the floor and onto the bed and over Travis’s recumbent body. His clothes were in a pile on the floor. His stomach rose and fell in deep breaths. I realized after a while that I was trying to slow my rapid, shallow breath to match his more satisfying rhythm. As quietly as I could, so as not to attract the attention of anyone who might still be awake in the house, I pulled the bedroom door shut behind me and stood just inside the door watching Travis sleep. I watched him for the longest time, then quietly removed my clothes. Everything. Even my Jockey briefs. I carefully folded my clothes and placed them on a chair, and I eased down onto the bed.

Carefully avoiding any sudden moves, so as not to wake him, I squirmed into as comfortable a position as I could, and tried to fall asleep. But there was no denying my closeness to his naked body. There was no denying my lust. I wanted him. I wanted to squeeze those muscular legs as hard as I could. I wanted to press my face into his rippling belly, to feel his body hair against my lips. I was dying to grab him between the legs and feel him grow hard in my hand and nuzzle my cheek against the shaft and take it into my mouth. Yes, I had finally admitted to myself that I was gay, that there was something in me I couldn’t deny compelled me, despite my attempts to fight it, to seek out other men. But it scared me to death. In my mind, I could hear Hoss and Charlie, could hear their sniggering bravado. So often I’d heard them say it: If any man ever tries to touch my dick, I’ll kill the son of a bitch! Any guy that tries to do it with another guy ought to be locked up in a nut house. Any guy that blah blah blah… sicko scumbag queer. I could hear that word splattering in my mind like spume spat from the mouths of the righteous: Queer, queer, queer… the Bible calling it an abomination, Brother Barnes preaching against it, polite people are so repulsed by it that they can’t even mouth the words for it… and me knowing in that moment that queer was what I was and would always be. I could not resist. I didn’t even want to try and resist.

My hand was on his leg. I was afraid to move it. What if he woke up? What would I say? I could pretend I was asleep. Didn’t know what I was doing. Guy can’t be held responsible for what he does in his sleep—or for what he does when he’s drunk, for that matter. Bullshit. I was goddamn every bit responsible. Please God, why do I have to be this way? Please let him want it too.

I moved the hand an inch. Two inches. He never stirred. Maybe he wasn’t asleep. Maybe he did want it too. I moved my hand another inch. The back of my hand was resting against his scrotum. It felt hot. He moaned and stretched (in his sleep?) and resettled in the bed. Now my hand was on his penis, and still he seemed to be asleep. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t make a sound. But he was hard. Guys get hard in their sleep all the time. It didn’t mean a thing. He could wake up and catch me at it and beat the shit out of me. Worse yet, he could wake up and catch me at it and never speak to me again. Forever after he would look at me with disgust, and I would slither away like a worm.

The house was silent. An ever-so-tenuous breeze ruffled the curtains. It was probably two o’clock in the morning. Maybe even later. For at least twenty minutes (it seemed like an hour), neither of us moved. With agonizing care, still terrified that he’d wake up, I began rubbing my hand up and down the shaft. The throb of his heart pulsed in my palm. I laid my cheek against his thigh and inched upward. Finally I closed my mouth on him. He let me, still feigning sleep.

I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t hear anything, but it started to feel as if someone was watching us. As if suddenly awakening from a dream (and right in the middle of my first-ever love-making of all times, goddamn it) I realized that it was growing light outside the window and that someone was behind me in the doorway. Travis must have seen what I only felt. Violently he wrenched away from me and flung himself out of bed and threw on his clothes and rushed out of the room. I don’t think he was after whoever it was that had been spying on us. I think that person had run away before Travis even got a clear look at him. Travis was just running for his life.

By the time I got myself dressed, Travis was gone. Charlie and Wanda were still asleep in the living room when I hurried through. Hoss was on the floor with his head against the couch. Bitsy slept with one hand flopped over Hoss’s head. Sam Littlejohn was sitting up on the floor, his back against the wall. He, too, seemed to be sound asleep. I saw all of that in a glimpse. Nobody stirred when I ran through the living room. On the front porch, I almost tripped over Josh Culpepper, who had found a sleeping bag and curled up in it.

Keeping my distance, I followed Travis. He was already five or six blocks ahead of me. He walked to Magazine Street, but instead of turning up the walk to his house, he cut behind the Caseys’ and across the tracks. In a clearing about twenty yards into the woods there was a concrete slab, the foundation of what had once been a little house. Years ago we had called it the Pirate Shack. Back then there had been walls and part of a roof. Long since abandoned and rotting away, it had been the inspiration for many a fantasy adventure.

Travis sat on the old foundation and smoked. He never touched cigarettes during football season, but now that he was a senior and next year’s team was beginning spring practice, he smoked like a chimney—Chesterfields snitched from Papa Chuck.

He smoked a couple, grinding them into the earth when done, and made patterns in the dirt with his heel. He looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps. Someone parted the leaves of an oak tree and stepped into the clearing. It was a young black man from the Alley, apparently on his way to work. He stopped when he saw Travis, paused for a moment, and then called him by name—a rising inflection on the name, asking, “Travis, is that you?”

Travis stared at him and paused, then finally he said, “Man?”

“Uh huh, it’s me. ”’Cept I don’t go by that name no mo’. I’z Raymond. Raymond Carver.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Travis said, “I never knew your real name.”

“Me neither. Still don’t. But I goes by Raymond Carver now.”

“Well okay, Raymond. So howzabout you pulling up a tree or something and sit down and join me for a smoke.”

“Okay.”

He plopped down beside Travis and said, “Man, it’s been a long time.”

Travis laughed. He said, “I’m supposed to say that. I’m supposed to say, ‘Man it’s been a long time’.”

“Naw, you ‘posed to say, ‘Raymond it’s been a long time’.”

“That’s right, man—Ray-man.”

I felt stupid and perverse spying on them. I crept away and walked to Mike’s for a cup of coffee. J.P. and Marybelle were there. She had started working at the Journal, and breakfast at Mike’s had become a daily routine. On the stool next to J.P. sat that fat cop, Lieutenant Norman. J.P. was talking to him. He said, “What’s new in the world of crime, Fats?”

Norman said, “We shut down the Chicken Shack last night.”

“What did you do that for?” Turning away from the cop, he said good morning to me. Marybelle said, “Hi Johnny.”

“G’morning.”

“Have you seen Travis? He didn’t come home last night.”

“He’s okay. He stayed over at Charlie’s.”

The cop said, “What’d we do that for? Hell, man, they were selling booze. That’s illegal in this county, in case you didn’t know.”

“So why now? And why not some other bootlegger? They quit making their pay-offs? Or could it have something to do with the color of their skin?”

Norman blushed. “Hey man, it wadn’t nothing like that. Shit, they were selling T-shirts advertising the damn place. You can’t let a bootlegger advertise. That’s rubbing our noses in it.” As an afterthought he said, “Hey, don’t you go putting none of that in your goddamned newspaper.”

The phone rang at the Warner house. Marybelle answered it. “Hello.”

“Hi there. It’s me, J.P.”

“G’morning.”

“It’s Sunday. I didn’t know if I should call or not. I thought you might be a churchgoer.”

“Nope. Nobody in this house is big on going to church. I tried it for a while, but I had a falling out with the preacher and haven’t been back since.”

“Really? That sounds juicy. You’ll have to give me all the gory details. Meantime, I thought maybe if you weren’t doing anything, I’d drop by. Maybe we can take a ride out to the lake.”

“Yeah, sure. Sounds like fun.”

It was a brisk morning, but the sun would soon burn the chill away. Chuck and Travis were passing a football on the front lawn when J.P. pulled up. Marybelle was waiting on the porch. She was wearing a plaid skirt and a white blouse with a lightweight cardigan sweater tied loosely around her neck. As soon as J.P. parked, she ran to the curb and dashed around the car to hop in.

“What’s with the sweater?” he asked. “It’s not cold. Heck, I thought maybe we could take a dip in the lake.”

Chuck said, “I told you he was crazy.” And they were off.

Heading into the sun, J.P. lowered his visor. Marybelle draped her sweater over the back of the seat. There was little traffic. The only sound was the swish of tires against pavement. At the lake, a soft breeze set the hanging branches of a willow to dancing. Sunlight reflected off the rippled water. Dancing diamonds. J.P. parked in the shade of a large oak. They stepped out onto grass that was still wet with dew—wet in the shade, but toasted dry where the sun lay down patches of gold.

They walked to the water’s edge and sat on sun-toasted sand. It was warm to the touch at first but cooled quickly as they settled in. J.P. poked his fingers into the sand. It was wet below the surface. He pulled off his shoes and socks and wiggled his toes, edging them crablike into the lake. “Ooh, that feels great. You ought to try it.”

“All right, but if I get frostbite, you’ve got to pay Doc Littlejohn…. Ahh, not bad.”

“You know,” he said, “there was something you said that day you called me. Before we went to Chez Michael. You said the occasion for wearing your new evening gown was ruined, and you said you’d tell me about it sometime.”

“Yes, I will. But not now, please.”

“Okay. So tell me about your sparring match with the preacher.”

“There’s not much to tell. Like I said, I’m not much on going to church, but I tried it for a while, mostly for Travis’s sake. They roped me into teaching a Sunday School class. One Sunday, the lesson was supposed to be on temperance. I couldn’t teach temperance, not with Travis in the class. He knows we drink. I couldn’t get up in front of that class and teach that drinking is a sin when I don’t believe it. So I asked Brother Barnes to let someone else teach the class that Sunday. Well, he started preaching at me about the evils of alcohol. He said, ‘I’ll pray for you, Sister.’ Boy, that got my dander up. I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I let him have it right then and there. I said ‘I’ll pray for you too, you pompous, hypocritical so-and-so.’”

J.P. burst out laughing. Grabbed her hands and lifted them high over her head like a referee at a boxing match. “And the winner is…”

With that they went absolutely insane with laughter. She threw a fistful of sand on him, and he scooped up a glob of mud from the bottom of the lake and rubbed it in her hair. Tears of laughter streaked both of their faces. She pushed him backward; he stumbled and fell on his butt in the shallow water. She hiked her skirt above her knees, and holding it out like a little parachute, jumped on top of him. A fisherman about thirty yards out into the lake cranked his motor and high-tailed it to a quieter spot, while J.P. and Marybelle wrestled with one another in the lake. The fisherman’s boat was well out of sight (as if they cared) when he kissed her. It was a long kiss. with wet lips pressing firmly and dripping hands wrapped around soaked clothing, and neither of them had to lean over or stretch upward, because they were the same height.

***

Autumn announced itself with early morning chills and the pennant-waving hoopla of football games. The Golden Wave was in contention for the Big Eight Conference championship. They trounced their first three opponents. Travis played his defensive tackle position like some kind of possessed animal. Once he broke through the line and tackled the enemy quarterback and the halfback simultaneously as they were handing off. The sports writer at the Daily Journal said that Travis, almost single-handedly, was responsible for the fact that no opponent had scored a touchdown against the Golden Wave.

As the days grew colder, Travis became more and more ferocious on the field and more aloof at school. He disdained hanging out with the boys on weekends, staying home to draw instead. Cassie and I were usually nearby. Our presence never seemed to distract him. We would talk while Travis drew. There was an openness between the three of us that was unique. We could and did talk about everything—or almost everything. I felt at home in Travis’s room. I would imagine that we all lived together in some major city far away from Tupelo, that Travis was a famous artist, and I was his agent. Cassie, of course, would be a dancer.

Those idyllic days did not last for long.

In the Deep South, autumn is repeatedly interrupted by a false summer—right up until Christmas. It was one of those false summer days in November. Chuck was grilling hamburgers in the backyard. He and J.P. and Mama Marybelle and Mama Janet were on the patio. From where I sat with Cassie on the upstairs window sill, they looked like paper cut-out figures, an inky, purple-black on one side and gold on the other, depending on where they stood in relation to the amber-colored light bulb that dangled from an overhead wire. Their voices were carried upward by the evening breeze. Marybelle said, “Warm night and good company. Makes me bubble like champagne. I don’t know when I’ve felt like this.”

“Me either,” Janet said. “Must be something in the air.”

“It’s the changing season,” Chuck said. “Does it every time. Makes you feel young.”

Marybelle stood up and twirled around, her skirt billowing. “I feel like a teenager again! Travis and Cassie are old fuddy-duddies by comparison.”

I looked at Cassie to note her reaction. She was enthralled with the scene below. Didn’t notice me at all.

J.P. said, “If you really were sixteen again, what would you do right now?”

“I’d do this!” skipping to where he sat and plopping onto his lap, flinging her arms around his neck and nuzzling him.

Helium balloons of laughter floated up to Travis’s bedroom window, where we sat. Cassie turned to Travis, who was doing sit-ups on the floor. “They’re really having a great time out there.”

Travis grunted. He pulled his body up, with fingers locked behind his neck, and jerked to touch elbows to knees. A fine spray of sweat flew toward us. I could smell it, sweet and mildly pungent.

“Can you smell the hamburgers cooking?” Cassie asked.

“Nah.”

“Boy, I can. They smell great.”

“They sure do,” I put in.

We kept watching the scene below. Chuck said, “Marybelle, if you weren’t so busy trying to seduce J.P., I’d ask you to go inside and get us all some more beer.”

“Well I might as well do just that.” She hopped off J.P.’s lap. “This seduction thing’s not working too well anyway.”

To Mama Janet, but with no attempt to keep anyone else from hearing, she said, “Either he’s a perfect gentleman, or he’s terribly shy, or my charms are simply insufficient. He actually kissed me once — right on the lips, a real man-woman kind of kiss — but that was ages ago, a month or two anyway. Since then… well, there have been hotter romances.”

Spinning to face J.P., she admonished, “Why J.P., you’re actually blushing!”

Cassie swung her legs off the windowsill. “You’re missing a great show, Travis.”

“Hunnh! What?” He sat up with a great huff of breath and rolled his arms and neck to work out the kinks.

“I said you’re missing a great show. The folks are acting like teenagers. Mama Marybelle was sitting in J.P.’s lap and teasing the Dickens out of him. I’ve never seen her like this.”

“She’s in love, Sis. Whadda’ya think. Head over heels. Hell, grown-ups aren’t any different than us.”

He got up from the floor and squeezed in between us on the window sill. His naked upper body pressed against us, his sweat soaking into me, suddenly cool in the night air. I felt myself shudder and sensed my involuntary shudder run through Travis and into Cassie like an electrical charge. He put his arm around her, and she cuddled her head onto his shoulder. His other arm—naked, hard, smooth, hot—pressed against me, shoulder to elbow, like some great snake, coiled muscles at rest but ready to strike. His sweat dried and his body was a furnace. We were enveloped in his heat, drowsy with it.

Cassie said, “It’s funny, you know. They’re all right down there, only a few feet away, yet it seems they’re a million miles away.”

“Who?”

“Everybody. Whadda’ya mean who? Mama Janet. Chuck. All of them. It’s like they are actors on a stage, with heavy makeup and lavender-tinted footlights reflecting off their faces, and we’re sitting in box seats, far, far away, spying them through opera glasses.”

Travis stretched his arms and pressed against the window frame. His odor mingled with the aroma of beef cooking on the grill. I felt a little dizzy.

Cassie sighed, “I feel like I belong right here, precisely here in this window sill, like everything that’s ever happened in the whole world from the beginning of time was geared toward the end goal of placing each of us in the precise spot we’re in at this moment; yet, at the same time, I think I don’t belong here at all. I’m here for the moment, on loan, on a mission from somewhere else. I’m content for the moment to stay here and observe these people, these strange and wonderful people down there who belong to me but don’t. But I guess sooner or later I’ll have to leave, to search for the place where I really belong. Do you ever feel like that?”

I said, “Uh-huh.”

Travis said, “Yeah, sure. I guess. Maybe I’m not as dreamy as you, but if you mean do I feel like I don’t belong in Tupelo, you’re darn right.”

If Cassie was watching the people below as if from afar, I was even farther away, watching us watching them. She said, “I look down there, and I see our parents, and they seem so contented, but they are like laughing marionettes. I get the feeling that there is a great circus out there beyond horizons we’ve never crossed. It’s the most marvelous circus in the world, and I’ve just got to find it. They are contented because they not only don’t know about the circus, they couldn’t see it if… if….”

“If they had front row seats center ring,” Travis completed her thoughts for her.

“Yes! Yass!”

“I like the way you said that. Yass! There’s such great satisfaction in that. There’s this guy in a book I read. His name is Dean Moriarty. He’s always saying Yass! like that, like he was so damned wonderfully in touch with everything in the world, like he’d see things: colors, movement, patterns, common things that everybody else takes for granted, and it would all come together for him in some wild, fantastic improvisation, and it would be like… like it was just too stupendous for words. And then he’d shout out this great big Yass!”

“Cass! Travis! Hey, you guys!” It was Papa Chuck hollering from below. “It’s ready. Come and get it!”

We went downstairs. Travis said, “Race ya!” and we raced to the backyard as we often did, Travis heading out the front door and tearing around the garage, me darting straight through the kitchen. Of course I won. I always did. His route was twice the distance or more, but he always swore that one of these days he was going to beat me. We all helped our plates off the grill and sat around the picnic table. Just as we started to eat, a sudden and unexpected squall ran us inside. It came down fast and hard. Grabbing plates, we rushed into the house. We ate on the big dining room table, each of us in our own little puddle, dripping, laughing, chattering away, the music of our chattering and chomping and slurping almost drowned out by the violence of the rainstorm. Strobe of lightning. Crack of thunder. There’s nothing like a thunderstorm in the South—nothing so sudden or so ferocious. We used to call them electrical storms, because they nearly always put out the lights.

Chuck brought candles in and lit them in anticipation. And sure enough, in a moment there was the snap of blackness. Black, flash, after-image—the eerie, funny, romantic flicker and flash of light from pulsing candle flame and crackling slash of lightning. Everyone animated, joyful. Only Marybelle was quiet. She who had been so playful earlier had lapsed into a private reverie. I think I’m the only one who noticed.

Then she spoke:“Will I ever be anything but daddy’s little girl? The daddies keep changing, but I stay the same. I’ve got to do something.” I don’t think anyone said a word in response. I can’t remember, but it seems we were all too stunned. Her words made no sense, seemed to come from nowhere.

The thunder and lightning slackened, but the rain continued to beat down relentlessly. Marybelle’s monologue was voiced to no one in particular. It was as if she didn’t know we were there. I could see that Travis was embarrassed. Nobody knew what to say, so nobody said anything. Nobody save Marybelle.

“I’ve always been somebody’s plaything or somebody’s little girl or somebody’s mother. I have no identity aside from what I am to others, no self that’s just me. I’ve got a mind, but I’ve never been able to use it. I’d give anything if I could quit my job, but what else can I do? I’ve got a high school education and I’ve never been anything but a sales clerk. I’ve never even lived alone. God! Could I even take care of myself if I had to? I don’t know who I am or what I’m supposed to do. Supposed to do! It’s always what I’m supposed to do, what’s expected of me, never what I want. That big shot Ray Prichard tempting me with talk about going to fashion shows and working with designers. Hell, all he wants is to be my sugar daddy. You know what he tried to do in Memphis? Yeah, you can figure it out. He figured I owed it to him. He ordered me to buy new clothes to wear, and then he acted like I was in his debt, and we all know how I was supposed to pay off. He said he’d divorce his wife. The liar. I’m going to quit. I swear I am. I don’t know what else I can do, but I’ll find something.”

She scanned the table as if waking up and noticing there were people there. She perked up. “Hey, J.P.,” she said, “Do you think I could get a job at the newspaper?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. What can you do?”

“I can type. I could probably write. I made straight A’s in English. I can answer the phone and file and… hell, I can sweep the floor and carry out the trash.”

He said, “I have a feeling you could do anything you set your mind to.”

Chuck said, “Give it a shot.”

Proud of herself, she crossed her arms in front of her chest and nodded her head in a gesture of determination and said, “I’ll do it, by golly.”

Chuck said, “Good for you.”

“Yeah. Good for me. It’s time I took charge of my life, huh? Time I quit worrying about what’s expected and do what I want to do.” Then staring at J.P. with an I’m-gonna-get-you-sucker gleam in her eye, she said, “And as for you, Mister Jewel Pomeroy Hollingsworth, it’s high time you did something about this romance stuff. I’m tired of waiting for you to make a move.”

We started laughing. Travis choked on one of his monumental bites of hamburger. J.P. blushed so bright you could have seen his glow from Willis Heights. He was tongue-tied and he stammered, but he said the right thing. He said, “How ’bout we do something about it this summer, with a ring and a license and a lovely ceremony on the shores of Tombigbee?”

Marybelle shouted, “Yes! Yes!”

And Travis and Cassie and I all together shouted, “Yass!”

During all this, Travis managed to wolf down three hamburgers and two whole baked potatoes.