After Bathing at Baxters Read online

  One Tuesday night when trade was slack and the jukebox was blaring out Allman Brothers records over the empty tables, I met him in the parlour. He looked ghostly, a little out of place amid the solidity of Brackus’s cattleprod decor, the steerhorn wall fixtures and the giant bottles of Southern Comfort. There was a rumour going round, I later discovered, that one of the Pirates’ cheerleaders had spent the weekend in an abortion clinic at La Grange. But we talked about my job – I had just got Photomax, the big repro business, to give me their local franchise which meant driving round the country with a mobile photolab – and after a while I suggested that he ought to be playing more, go into a studio maybe and cut a record.

  ‘I could do worse.’ He didn’t seem offended at this piece of simpleton’s advice, which every bar-propper in Brackus’s had been offering him for the last year-and-a-half. ‘The old man wants me to get a job.’

  ‘What sort of a job?’

  ‘That depends. If I wrote down my qualifications you’d piss yourself. I was an English major. Subsidiaries in economics and art and design. Round here they want you to chop wood or work at the gas station carwash.’

  The way he said gas station made me think that old Brackus must have had a few words. ‘Maybe it doesn’t have to be chopping wood,’ I told him. ‘What did you specialise in on the art and design course?’

  ‘Christ. Ceramics. Expressionism. A little photography.’

  I offered him an assistant’s job in the lab there and then, which seemed to please him, and said I’d be in touch again after I’d spoken to the Photomax people. ‘Here’s hoping,’ he said, all lazy and wide-eyed, but as if he meant it.

  It took a week to get a decision out of Photomax about funding an assistant. In the meantime Barrett filled me in on the pool-table gossip from Brackus’s. ‘Let me tell you something, my man’ – Barrett always talked as if he were some wisecracking negro from an NBC cop serial – ‘the word on Scott Brackus isn’t good. Sure, Ruthie – the one with the tits and the snaggle teeth – had a hoover job over the weekend. Her pa was down to see me on Monday. Plus the old man finally got to lose his temper.’

  ‘The old man lost his temper with Scott?’

  ‘You got it’ – and here Barrett positively bridled, as if he were Huggy Bear sashaying around the set of Starsky and Hutch. ‘Happened in here, a couple of days ago. Rockin’ Dopsie was playing, you know, those zydeco boys from the bayou. The Cajun Twisters. Scott was hanging around with his guitar, the way he does for an encore, when old Joe jumps out from behind the bar and tells him to shift his ass away from the stage. Right there in front of the Twisters’ manager. You never saw anything like it.’

  ‘So what did Scott do?’

  ‘What would you do, my man?’

  I told Barrett about the job with the mobile photolab. ‘The South will rise,’ he said tolerantly (Barrett had tried and failed to get a job on Dixie magazine). ‘It’s a nice idea.’

  I was busy that week, ordering up film from the suppliers in Nashville and checking the insurance for the lab, but it wasn’t difficult to go on hearing about Scott. The local Kodak rep had been at Brackus’s the night old Joe delivered his grand remonstrance. Ruthie with the tits and the snaggle teeth made a brief, etiolated appearance at the Pirates’ midweek game. People in bars and at supermarket checkouts started to talk about ‘that mother’, and Scott became suddenly that most typical of Southern whipping boys, the privileged kid who goes wrong, the strapping six-footer with the wide smile who breaks his daddy’s heart. I saw him a couple of times down at the Stonewall, the gentlemen’s club where old Brackus had bought him life membership on his eighteenth birthday, and he had that sullen, companionless look of the person who can’t find anybody to accept his offers of drinks. Ruthie’s father was on the committee of the Stonewall.

  Then, when the letter of acceptance came from Photomax, he disappeared. Out East, people said, to see his sister, but Joe Brackus didn’t know and none of the bar-proppers at the Stonewall had heard. The Pirates played their Saturday night game against the Johnson City Rednecks, but there was no sign of him down by the coaches’ dug-out or swapping backchat with the Redneck supporters along by the burger stands. Midweek, the Atlanta Express were headlining at Brackus’s but you looked in vain across the smoky cavern to the bar, past the rows of Choctaw saw boys in their black donkey jackets, for the sight of Scott shouldering his way towards the stage with the Hofner clasped under his arm.

  As usual Barrett had the details. At the close of a discussion of the feature which he figured writing about the photolab he said shyly: ‘Looks as if Scott finally hit the big time, my man. Tuesday last week, down at the Winnebag. You never saw anything like it.’

  I shrugged. The Winnebag was a blues bar on the west side of Cook County which might have held thirty people. Barrett went on in that half sassy, half respectful way he had: ‘Sure, I was there, my man. You know the score at the Winnebag. Some Memphis brats down to get a taste of country living, half a dozen niggers hollering for “Dust My Broom”, and Scott gets up and does a couple of standards – “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”, “Tennessee Slide” – you get the idea? And it’s not the blues, but it’s kinda tuneful and since he’s a local boy and everybody remembers old Joe from way back people start clapping their asses off. Which could have been just fine, just fine, my man. A little novelty. A little colour. Yes sir. And it happens, it just so happens that there was a guy from Cherry Red’ – Cherry Red was the big Nashville country station – ‘up at the bar. Seersucker suit, fancy cane, you know the sort of stuff those candyasses wear when they’re out to impress the hicks. Looking at Scott with his tongue hanging down to his chin.’

  Barrett flicked me an inscrutable look – the sort of look he gave when the paper sent him to coyer an Odd Fellows convention at Lafayette.

  ‘And after that he lit out?’

  ‘And after that he lit out. Nashville. Memphis. One of the Cherry Red studios someplace. But take it from me, my man, you can kiss goodbye to your photolab assistant.’

  The crises of Joe Brackus’s commercial career had been flagposted by his ability to bury the hatchet. Even when the real estate company had bought him out from the gas station the old man hitched up his trousers, marched into the Stonewall and stood the company lawyers a four-course dinner. So a week later when Scott got back from Nashville there was a tab at the bar at Brackus’s and anyone who could claim the slightest acquaintance with the family was swarming after free beer. I saw him there one evening in the middle of a cloud of hangers-on: local guitarists who figured he might put a word in at Nashville, a flaxen-haired grandmother who had appeared at the Opry in 1957, a couple of the Pirates’ cheerleaders. He looked tired and flustered, but when he saw me he prised himself free from the grasp of Ruthie with the tits and the snaggle teeth and came loping over. I told him I’d heard the news.

  ‘It’s a break,’ he said, a touch sheepishly. ‘Too bad about the photolab, huh?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him. ‘Congratulations. What’s the deal with Cherry Red?’

  ‘The usual thing. A couple of weeks demoing. Some radio work – they got a majority stake in the two Nashville country stations. Maybe a billing at the Opry if I shape up.’

  ‘What does the old man think?’

  Scott grinned. ‘He’s on cloud nine. You know he used to play himself? Bluegrass. Kentucky stomp. I reckon I owed him this. You know,’ he went on, ‘I’ve had so many people tell me I’ve arrived that I might just start believing it.’

  The way he said arrived made me wish I hadn’t written the polite letter to Photomax.

  After that you couldn’t walk into a bar or diner without hearing about Scott. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been people like him before – after all, you could hardly throw a stone in Cook County without hitting a pedal steel guitarist or a guy who figured he could write lyrics for Willie Nelson – but somehow they had all faded away, to playing hotel residencies or copier salesmen’s conventions. Barre
tt’s favourite story was of a faded family act called the Country Cousins (‘Cook County’s Finest’) whom he had discovered playing in a motel outside Atlanta. The irony, according to Barrett, was that the Country Cousins had actually improved. Set against this catalogue of blighted hopes and thwarted ambition, Scott looked a success. There was the letter from Cherry Red. People remembered the talent contest, and the youthful Scott singing at kids’ parties and the boy scout barbecues of long ago. Even Barrett unbent sufficiently to write it up for the Cook County Sentinel and a second photograph of him, square-jawed and resolute, got taped to the wall of Brackus’s.

  Not long after the story appeared he was gone again, to Nashville, people said. Taking the photolab out round the county I used to look for mentions of him in the trade papers you found lying around the barbers’ shops or pinned to the walls of roadside diners. There was a paragraph or two, early on, listing him among the ‘New signings to Cherry Red’ but that was all. Somebody came back from Nashville and said they’d seen him on stage at one of the small talent clubs, along with some harmonica players and the Tallahassee Country Gospel Choir. Third on the bill. Old Joe Brackus stopped answering enquiries. People stopped asking.

  Maybe six months later I bumped into Barrett at the Stonewall, where he’d been taking the committee’s views on the new freeway. ‘Scott’s back,’ he said.

  ‘At Brackus’s?’

  ‘You got it, my man.’ And Barrett smiled that lazy, mischievous smile that made me think again of Antonio Fargas. ‘Prodigal son,’ he said.

  I stopped off at the bar a couple of nights later when the Dixie Stealers were headlining. It was one of those tense, sultry evenings you got occasionally at the end of summer when the crowd at Brackus’s got surly and the sawmill boys threw beer glasses at the microphones. I got there just as the Stealers were finishing their set (‘Sweet home Alabama’ sung to the accompaniment of lofted Confederate flags) but there was no sign of Scott on the stage or waiting, guitar slung under his arm, over by the PA stacks. At the bar I brushed past Barrett, who had his arm round a cheerleader and his tie yanked down into a low, pendulous knot on his chest.

  ‘You seen Scott?’

  Barrett jerked his finger back over the bar, pointing hard at the giant bottles of Southern Comfort and the henge of beer cans. When I saw Scott bending down over the beer pump, straightening up as old Joe snapped an order from the cash register, I realised that none of the carefully chosen phrases of welcome I’d rehearsed would do. The South will rise,’ Barrett said gleefully, loud enough for the bar to hear, and I stayed just long enough for Scott to catch sight of me, sidling off with that sad, resolute feeling you get head on with somebody else’s tragedy.

  II. La Grange

  Summer ’83 wasn’t a good time for the repro business. Kodak had a three-month strike at their warehouse at Dyersburg, there was a run on the world silver market that sent up the price of film, and what with the expense and the flaring heat which hung over the cornfields from dawn till sunset people stopped using their cameras so much. For a time I tried to ignore the disappearing orders and the shaking heads at the roadside pharmacies – I headed north into Kentucky, went to trade fairs in Lafayette offering bargain rates, thought about going into partnership with one of the local chemists, but then the drought set in, the dust swarmed up over the bumpy Cook County backroads, the drug-store windows were full of second-hand Leicas and Hasselblads and it was suddenly cheaper to stay at home. ‘When the punch comes, ride it,’ Barrett the journalist used to say, so I made the call to Photomax, put the mobile lab in storage and took the job at La Grange.

  It was one of those places you see very often in the South, which has outgrown its origins without ever letting go of them. The dirt farmer with a thousand acres and a contract with three flour mills who still has trouble signing his name; the small-town newscaster who makes it on to network TV and still says ‘y’all’ and ‘I guess’ when she comes home to visit her folks: such sights were common in Cook County. La Grange was the biggest track complex for a hundred miles, but they still kept on the old, slow-witted announcer who had been with them twenty years back when the site was opened and Howie Jasper, the owner, still took two days a week off to dodge the phone calls from the West Coast agents and the Ivy League track clubs and go duck-shooting in Johnson City marshes. ‘Just your average hillbilly with a wallet,’ Barrett used to say disparagingly, but the local TV station covered two meetings a month in the summer and the results got printed in the East Coast sports papers. In the early eighties Calvin Smith ran there at a charity meet and two reporters and a photographer arrived from Houston to write Howie Jasper up for Track and Field.

  After that things began to take off. He had plans for La Grange, Howie Jasper told us, in that shy, puzzled way that redeems its guile with transparency. Pretty soon he had the stadium turned into a limited company with investors in Jackson loaning him money for redevelopment. He took out the old cinder track and had a sports contractor from Memphis come and lay an all-weather surface. He put a roof on the rickety grandstand and sold concessions to the local burger salesmen and the McDonald’s franchises, finessed his way into sports sponsorship schemes that would bring in the big names from UCLA and the Santa Monica track club. And, most important of all, he signed the deal that made him Clyde Hopkins’s manager.

  I was busy the first couple of weeks at La Grange, sending out franchise forms to the Coke and Burger King reps, dealing with the contractors who were putting in the new electronic scoreboard, but it wasn’t difficult to find out about Clyde Hopkins. The bar-hall idlers and the local talent spotters who hung around the stadium of an evening taking drinks off Howie were already talking about him, this kid who still ran barefoot but could whip any college boy the West Coast cared to send down. Barrett, who turned up halfway through the third week to write him up for the Cook County Sentinel, filled me in on the details.

  ‘Sure, my man. All happened a month ago, down near Atalanta’ – Atalanta was the farming end of Cook County, seventy miles away – ‘when Howie decides he’ll checkout some of the local talent, you know, turn up at one of the high school meets with a stop-watch and see if anything takes his fancy. And it’s the usual thing – a few bullet-heads throwing the shot around, teenage high-jumpers thinking they’re Dwight Stones – and Howie’s on his way back to the car when up steps this kid in a windcheater and runs the hurdles in fourteen dead.’

  ‘That’s a state record.’

  ‘You got it, my man,’ Barrett said tolerantly. ‘Or would have been if they hadn’t been using a hand-timer. So Howie makes enquiries and finds out the kid’s seventeen years old, never run outside the county before. Real country bumpkin stuff. Howie asked him where his track shoes were and he says, he’d never gotten used to them: did all his running on grass.’ Barrett flicked his head towards the window, where his track-suited joggers laboured through the shimmering afternoon heat. ‘Lick anyone in this stadium, that’s for sure.

  ‘And another thing,’ Barrett said. ‘There’s a little part-time photography job going down at the Sentinel. Weddings, mayoral clam-bakes – you know the score. I put in a word.’

  There was a fortnight until the Sentinel started interviewing. In the mean time, repairing the stadium advertising hoardings from the top of a twenty-foot ladder or sitting in the office typing up CVs, I saw quite a lot of Clyde Hopkins. He came and sat in the admin block, while the secretaries made long-distance phone calls to Miami and Tampa Bay or talked about driving to Nashville for the weekend to see the Atlanta Dance Kings, and flicked through the back numbers of Dixie magazine. Other times he stayed out on the track running circuits or lining up the hurdles in files of six or eight and doing stepping exercises. The other runners, the lanky PT students who reckoned on making the state championships in Jackson, the burly National Guardsmen sweating to pass army medicals, offered him handshakes, tried to buy him beers in the stadium bar, but he kept out of their reach. He seemed remote, preoccupied, emb
arrassed by the way people called him ‘Lightnin’’ after the old blues singer, by Howie’s back-slapping and the posters billing him as the ‘Cook County Express’ which appeared in the barbers’ shops and on the motel display boards. But in early July he walked away from a field that included the state champion and a sweating two-hundred-pounder who had once come seventh in the US junior trials, and Howie talked about entering him for some of the West Coast college meets or getting him a track scholarship somewhere out East:

  Barrett got interested then, in his sideways-on, reporter’s way. At the close of a discussion of the photographer’s job, which it turned out was going oh ice until the end of the summer, he said, ‘Hear Howie’s been talking big about the Cook County Express. Track scholarships. The West Coast. Isn’t that right?’

  I nodded. ‘A pile of forms came in the office this morning.’

  ‘Uh huh. I heard.’ Barrett smiled in that mischievous way that lifted him a thousand miles north of Cook County and put him on a TV screen opposite Paul Michael Glaser. ‘Well, you can kiss your ass goodbye to that, my man. Sure, there’s plenty of track scholarships going for meathead hurdlers, and nobody’s going to mind an awful lot about your grade point average, but you have to be able to read and write. I talked to one of the Grange lawyers who stopped by the other day. Seems like the kid had to have that contract Howie made him sign explained to him clause by clause. You never saw anything like it.’