The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard

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СКАЧАТЬ outside St. Leo and not still up in the city with all the noise and dangerous robbin’ and rapin’ and carjackin’ and senseless-ass killin’ in addition to all the other everyday crappage that goes on there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      What it was, he had been goin’ out in the county to some of the wilder places and preachin’ and teachin’ his Piscob’l shit, which I am told is mostly sort of quiet and dignified СКАЧАТЬ