The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard

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СКАЧАТЬ want to know the truth, had been hipped on that subject ever since I could remember and who was the one way back yonder that got the high school to make us all sign a gotdam loyalty oath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      He didn’t blink or mumble a fukkin word, and he didn’t look at me, neither. But when I passed him and he was about a foot behind me, СКАЧАТЬ