You Want It Darker: Hellhound on My Trail

Black Books 63, 65, 67 (7/12/08, 3/25/09, 9/29/09)

I knew what I was in for when I began the excavation of more than three decades of scattered words, and I can’t deny that the fear of reliving some of my most harrowing years was a big reason why I avoided this project for so long.

In the middle of my life I experienced a series of losses—dad, bookstore, dog, job, marriage—that led to a long period of what I recognized even at the time was madness. A great deal of erratic behavior and irrational decisions followed, and as a consequence of that behavior and those decisions I endured two different stints in locked psychiatric wards. Throughout it all I kept spitting out words every night, leaning into my lifelong belief that if I had a pen and some paper I could write my way through—and out of—anything the world threw at me.

Shortly after this period of unrelenting darkness, Alec Soth came along and saved my life.

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For so many years now there’s been a guitar gathering dust in a corner of my apartment, a ghost that no longer moves, no longer speaks, no longer sings. Recently, as I’ve been wandering in the foothills of sleep, I’ve encountered an old blind man sent to observe me, apparently, as part of some kind of celestial training. This apprentice angel or ghost or whatever he is sat in my green chair, playing the shit out of my guitar. The songs he played were agonizing, anguished blues, steeped in damnation. I was sure he intended these songs to be cautionary tales, but they were so dark and harrowing that they only made me feel more miserable, more damned. The man was dressed like a typically malnourished tenant farmer, and he was so possessed, seemed so thrilled to have his huge hands on a guitar again, that he was utterly oblivious to my presence.

I had been reading in bed when I heard the sounds of the guitar out in the dark living room. When I went to investigate, the old bluesman was illuminated by some outside light source. I suppose it’s possible he was somehow lit from within. Outside the windows it was raining so hard I couldn’t see the trees on the boulevard, and the room was frequently and spectacularly strobed by occasional bursts of lightning. I didn’t recognize any of the songs he played, but had the distinct impression that the lyrics were incorporating incidents from not just my life, but from the raw materials of my psyche. Perhaps, I thought, these were not cautionary tales at all, but a strict recriminative accounting of my many sins.

This interpretation was given further credence when the man/angel/ghost finally looked up, took notice of me, and snarled, “Scram, motherfucker.” He then made no move to stop or save me as I opened the front door, stepped out into the deluge, and was swept away by the wind, driving rain, and rising water.

Eventually I found myself alone in a place that was clearly outside this world, from which I watched as the bluesman, toting my guitar and accompanied by my dog, hobbled along a lonely road in the moonlight, following the slow procession of a plain wooden coffin being carried by a handful of my former friends.

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I believe there will soon be dusty angels, the ragged sorts that once upon a time fished Twoey Daugherty from the cistern after the testosterone monsters killed him and painted his face with automobile primer. Because he wore makeup, they said, and liked boys.

Right around the time that Twoey was killed I ate too much drugs and saw a burning angel in the corn, way out in the fields along Toke Road and writhing like one of them tube thingies outside of Deke Usem’s car dealership.

Twoey was a tweaker, but he had a little girl, Ella, who lived with her grandma and he also had a dog, Cornelius, who he loved and who used to go everywhere with him. After the dusty angels pulled Twoey out of that cistern down near Lyle, Cornelius went to live with Ella and her grandmother, and that dog was everything to Ella, everything that neither of her parents had ever been, and Cornelius didn’t smoke and play solitaire all day and talk so much about God like her grandma did.

It was her grandma who first told Ella about the dusty angels and the hobo ghosts. The distinction: the dusty angels was just sad, decent men did a lot of dumb shit in this world but who ain’t never really hurt nobody and wasn’t none too bright, and because they’d been baptized they let ‘em into Heaven and sent ‘em out to deal with the people Ella’s grandma called ‘dead meat.’ The hobo ghosts wasn’t ready for Heaven or bad enough for hell, so they had to stumble around putting a scare into humans that was lost but nothin’ but simple and confused.

I told Ella I was sorry about her daddy, but she was under her grandma’s porch with Cornelius and she was drinking a strawberry soda pop through a straw.

“My grandma says Twoey’s a hobo ghost now,” she said. I swear, that little gal looked just like that cartoon character who went around with Sluggo. Her grandma dressed her up just like that, little red bow and everything.

When I told the grandma about that burning angel in the corn, she give me a plastic baggy and said, “You go out there right this minute and bring some of them angel ashes in this baggy and I’ll make up my own mind about what it is you seen.”

I did just what she told me, or tried to, but I walked all over that damn field and though that angel I’d seen was burning something fierce, I never found no signs of no fire or no ashes at all. And when I went back to the old woman, showed her that empty baggy, and told her I couldn’t find nothin’, she said, “You simpleminded son of a bitch. I knew it. That wasn’t no burning angel. That was a real-deal angel, down here on some more important business than dragging Twoey out of that cistern. Might have looked like it was burning, but what you seen was just God’s sacred light.”

“But that angel was burning,” I said. “I seen it with my own eyes. It was squirming and thrashing around just like a burning man I seen in a war movie.”

“You need to get right with God,” the old woman said. “That angel was dancin’.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why was the angel dancin’?”

She threw up her arms and shouted so loud that Ella and Cornelius come scramblin’ out from under the porch.

“Because that angel was victorious! That angel was finally goin’ home to Jesus!”

“So that angel didn’t have nothin’ to do with Twoey?”

“Oh, Lord, boy,” she said, and chortled. “That didn’t have a damn thing in the world to do with that no-account boy of mine. Poor Twoey’s a hobo ghost now. He gonna be out there wanderin’ them roads a long, long time.”

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One day a man went out into his backyard and began to dig. He was soon enough joined by his dogs. After a time the man grew tired and put aside his shovel, but the dogs went right on digging. They were tireless diggers, and as the afternoon went along they were joined in their digging by a number of neighborhood dogs, attracted by the project.

By nightfall the dogs had dug a very deep hole, a hole big enough to bury a grand piano. The man thought it would be a shame to waste such a truly magnificent hole. He stood at the edge of the hole and stared down into it until the whole thing started to feel like fate to him. His body was beat to shit from so much digging—he’d been digging in one way or another most of his life, and neither his body nor his brain worked the way they once had.

The man went in and sat at his kitchen table for several hours, mulling things over, occasionally going to the window to admire the splendid hole sitting out there expectantly in the moonlight. He went down into his basement and dug out and loaded the old pawn shop pistol he had bought many years ago and had never used.

He went back out to the backyard, raised the gun to his temple, whistled for his dogs, and then took one step over the edge of the hole as he pulled the trigger.

The dogs paced all night around that hole—some came from as far away as the afterlife—alternately barking and peering down into the darkness that now contained the body of the man. They kept up their vigil all night long, and when a neighbor eventually summoned the police, it was just like the stories you sometimes hear: The dogs would let no one approach the darkness of the hole. It was a thing they were good at, one of the many things they were good at.

A crowd gathered to watch the dogs protect the hole that now held the man, and the hole that he no longer was. Seeing it from a great distance, the man regarded it as the best sendoff he could possibly have hoped for.

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Charley Patton shall not be moved. He gon’ buy himself a hammock, gon’ stretch it underneath a tree so when the branches bend the leaves may fall on him. He don’ want no sugar in his tea. Lord, every minute he’s in a curl, jus’ like a rattlesnake. His babe got a heart like a piece of railroad steel. He say, ‘Listen at that guitar! You understand it? Ain’t that pretty?’ He say, ‘Jeedle up, heedle up, deedle um bo!’ Charley gon’ move to Alabama, get a handful of gimme, a mouthful of much obliged. He’ll be your monkey, baby, but he sure won’t be your dog. He say, ‘Good lord send the sunshine, devil he send the rain.’ He say, ‘When your way gets dark, baby, hang your lights up high.’ He’s worried now, baby, but he won’t be worried long. He’s got hungry men, Lordy, all aroun’ his bed, and he wish somebody would kill those black moans dead. He’s way up river now, rollin’ like a log, and he’s goin’ where the Southern cross the dog. He don’t mind losin’ money, believes in a real good time. He say, ‘Hey! Hey!’ And when it’s real dark, honey, you’ll see him all by himself. He don’ wanna be worried and bothered with nobody else. He love to fuss an’ fight, Lordy, get sloppy drunk off bottle an’ ball, an’ walk the streets all night. He a po’ ol’ boy a long way from home. He goin’ away, baby, don’ you wanna go too? He wants you to throw your arms around him, like a circle ‘round the moon. All he wants is a plumb good way. He been travelin’, travelin’ all his life. He loves his stuff, babe, he wants it good and hot. Lordy, Lordy, he wonders something stiff. Lord, he knows his time ain’t long. He knows somebody is callin’ him. All he wanted in this lifetime was a spoonful. He goin’ away to a world unknown. He been ‘buked and he been scorn’. He been talked about sure as you born. He know, he know. Charley Patton, he know: High water everywhere.