Bob Strother

“Blind Billy’s Bayou” first appeared in moonShine review, volume 6, issue 1, 2010
Copyright © 2010 Bob Strother

Memphis, Summer of 1952

Blind Billy leaned back on the canvas-topped folding stool and rested his shoulders against the rough brick marking the mouth of the alley. Then he slipped off his battered fedora and let the late afternoon sun warm the furrows of his face. His mind wandered, as it often did lately, to a faded photo­graph taped to the dresser mirror in his bedroom. It showed a pretty black woman in her early twenties, one arm around a small, smiling boy perched on her cocked hip. She stood on a dock, somewhere on the bayou. Tall cypress trees rose high over the water, their fine tree branches spreading like filigree against a sun hanging low over the horizon.
       A coin clinked in the tin cup at his feet and ended his reverie.
       “Afternoon, Billy,” a man said.
       Billy doffed the fedora again, leaned forward, and his fingers automatically strummed a chord on the guitar he’d owned since he was in his teens. “Thank you, suh,” he said, using a thumb­nail to pick out the first few notes to a blues song. But the man had already started away. Most did. Hardly anyone actually stopped long enough to hear him play.
       Blind Billy wasn’t really blind, but he wore the dark glasses anyway. They went with his character, and at age seventy-six, he guessed it wasn’t much of a lie, since he truly didn’t see all that well. He lived two blocks away, down the alley and across the street in an area spotted with tar-paper shacks and scraggly yards, clotheslines bowing under the weight of diapers, yellowed underwear, and sheets thin enough to see right through.
       His spot at the alley, though, wasn’t so bad. It was an easy walk from his house and got considerable foot traffic. If his cup was as much as half full at the end of the day, he’d usually have enough for a mess of greens from the grocery across the street and a fresh bottle of wine from the liquor store. It wasn’t the bayou, of course, but then again, he hadn’t been on the water since he was four or five years old. He figured the things he remembered there weren’t nearly as good as he’d built them up to be over the years.
       Billy opened his guitar case and retrieved the bottle of cheap wine he’d ensconced there and kept wrapped in a paper sack. He held the bottle up to the light, noting the level of the burgundy-colored liquid, then took a couple of sips and checked the level again. He set the bottle down by his feet and, as he straightened up, heard a noise behind him in the alley.
       “Who’s there?” Billy said, back in character. He tilted his face up and craned his neck as if he might sniff out the intruder.
       A young black boy, maybe eleven years old, ambled out into the sunlight. Rail-thin and knobby-jointed, he looked as if he’d been assembled from Tinker Toys. Threadbare overalls hung loosely on his bony body, the cuffs rolled up to just above the ankles. “What kind a guitar’s that?’ the boy asked.
       Billy’s right hand stroked the circle of chromed steel under the strings. Small, teardrop-shaped openings spread out from the circle’s center, like the petals of a flower. “It’s a resonator guitar.” He strummed a couple of chords. “Some folks call it a slide.” He strummed again. “And some call it a bottleneck.”
       “A bottleneck?” the boy asked. “Why they call it that?”
       Billy dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cylinder of brown glass that had been cut from the neck of a beer bottle and sanded smooth on the bottom. He slipped it over the ring finger of his left hand and touched it to the guitar strings above the frets. As he thumbed one of the bass strings, he moved the glass tenderly over the neck of the guitar, the pitch of the note warbling high and low as Billy slid the glass up and down.
       “You got to be gentle with it,” Billy said, “soft as a butterfly’s kiss.”
       When the boy leaned in for a closer look, Billy saw that one of his eyes was clouded over, the creamy-yellow of clabbered milk. “What happened to your eye?” he asked.
       The boy tilted his head to one side and squinted into the sun. “My daddy threw me off the porch when I was a baby. I been half-blind ever since.”
       “Mmm-mmm,” Billy said. “That’s too bad.”
       “I can get by, I reckon. How’d you know about my eye? Ain’t you blind?”
       The question gave Billy pause. Letting people think he was blind so he might profit from it was something he had just kind of slipped into over time. To perpetuate the myth now, in the face of this child who was truly half-blind, seemed to him like taunting God. “Mostly,” he said, then, softening the lie up a little, “I can see a tad, right close up.” He began to play a song called “Bad Luck Blues,” using the bottleneck to make the guitar sound like it was crying.
       A man and a woman came out of the grocery, waited for a few cars to pass, and crossed the street. The man fished in his pocket and dropped a dime in Billy’s cup. “How’s the stake coming, Billy?”
       Billy stopped playing and said, “Got a ways to go yet, kind sir—quite a ways.”
       “Don’t worry,” the man said, “you’ll get there.” Then he and his wife continued down the street.
       “You gonna buy a steak?” the boy asked.
       “Not that kind of steak,” Billy said, noting the hungry look in the boy’s eye. “I’m tryin’ to get me up enough money for a bus ticket to Louisiana, where I was born. It’s warmer on the bayou, and you can hear the birds sing and smell the fish spawning in the spring. It’s the one thing I want most in what’s left of my life, and the very thing I’m least likely to get.”
       “Would you play me a song on that guitar?”
       Billy chuckled and took a swallow of his wine. “You got any money?”
       “No, sir.”
       “I reckon you’ll just have to owe me, then.” Billy went through a couple of chords, working the frets and the bottleneck at the same time, making the old guitar talk. He hummed along for a minute, then, in a low growl that sounded like distant thunder, he began to sing: You say you’re gettin’ old, Lord, older every day; you say you’re gettin’ older, but you shouldn’t feel that way …
       The boy sat down on the sidewalk at the mouth of the alley, leaned back against the brick, and pulled his knees up almost to his chin. He sat there listening with his eyes closed while Billy played song after song. Once or twice, Billy thought maybe the boy had gone to sleep, but then he’d nod his head or tap a foot in time with the music, and Billy just kept on strumming, sipping the wine, and singing until the bottle was empty.
       When Billy stopped, the boy opened his eyes and said, “That was powerful good, Mister Billy. Will you play some more tomorrow?”
       “I surely will, Lord willing.” While Billy emptied out the change from his cup and counted it, the boy got up and started across the street. Billy watched from behind his glasses as the boy sidled up to one of the grocer’s outside fruit bins, pocketed a shiny red apple, and re-crossed the roadway.
       “See you tomorrow,” the boy said as he entered the alley.
       “Uh-huh.” Billy finished packing up and headed down to the liquor store on the corner. As he walked, he said to himself, “Boy looked like he hadn’t eaten in a week. I guess as sins go, that’s a right pardonable one.”

～

The boy showed up every afternoon for the next four days, and Billy played for him every day, one song after another, and sipped along on his wine. When the sun was getting close to the rooftops, the boy would ask, “How much longer, Mister Billy?”
       Billy would check the level in his bottle, and say, “I got enough for one or two more songs, maybe three.” And then, when the bottle was empty, Billy would slip the old guitar back into its case and start for the corner.
       And every afternoon, the boy would snitch another piece of fruit.
       They talked some in between songs, and Billy told him how he’d come to Memphis with his mother years before, when she was a singer with a blues band and hoped to make big money. But then she’d taken sick, and Billy, who’d learned to play guitar almost before he could walk, had found work with some colored bands along Beale Street. When that played out, he’d done all kinds of jobs. Then he’d gotten old, and lived in a rented shack, and played for coins on the sidewalk.
       The boy’s name was Levi. He’d come to Memphis from Arkansas, along with his mother, and had moved in with his aunt in the same neighborhood where Billy lived. The mother was looking for work, without much success, and during the day the boy was left on his own.
       On the fifth day, when they had finished and Billy was folding up his stool, he heard a shout from across the street.
       “Hey! Come back here, you little thief!”
       He looked up to see the boy running pell-mell toward the alley with the red-faced grocer in pursuit. As the pair whizzed by him, Billy dropped the stool and shouted, “Wait! Wait! I’ll pay for that.” But his words were drowned out by the grocer’s continuing shouts and the staccato sounds of shoe leather slapping the concrete floor of the narrow passageway.
       Billy ran, too, down the alley as fast as he could muster, his breath coming hard and his heart rattling inside his chest like a snare drum. The narrow window of light marking the far end of the alley—what had seemed such an easy walk that morning—now appeared to be a million miles away. He was feeling dizzy and had stopped to steady himself on one of the brick walls when he heard the awful screech of tires and a loud thump that he knew he’d never get out of his head.
       Struggling to the mouth of the alley, he saw the boy lying in the street. His spindly arms and legs were splayed out like a discarded rag doll, blood trickled from his mouth and ears, and his one good eye stared unblinking into the sun. A small crowd had already begun to form, and he heard one of the onlookers say, “It wasn’t your fault, sir. The boy came out of nowhere. I saw it all.”
       Billy stumbled onto the street, a mixture of tears and sweat filling his eyes and streaming down his cheeks from under the dark glasses. He placed one trembling hand on the fender of a ’49 Chevy stopped in the roadway, its shiny grillwork dented and spattered with blood. “Levi?” he whispered. “I should’ve helped you, boy. I should’ve …” Then Billy’s chest heaved, and he experienced a pain so intense he thought he might well explode. He dropped forward to his knees, put a hand out to further break his fall, and the bottleneck—he’d forgotten it was still on his finger—shattered on the concrete. Hands were on him then, turning him over onto his back, and he heard a voice say, “Why, it’s Blind Billy.” He heard an ambulance siren, too, wailing in the distance and sounding a little like the old resonator. Then he heard nothing at all.

～

The afternoon sun hung just below the tops of the tallest cypresses, and the shafts of light that broke through the foliage set the sleepy waters of the bayou on fire. Snowy egrets dotted the trees like magnolia blossoms, and wisps of moss hung from the branches like the tattered sails of Spanish galleons.
            Billy sat on the dock, leaning against a piling, strumming his guitar, and listening to the sounds of bream breaking the water’s surface to feed on mayflies. He still had the fedora and the sunglasses, but, in keeping with the warmer weather, he wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his feet were bare below his trouser cuffs. He was trying out a new song, one he’d played around with for years but had never gotten around to finishing.
            “Hey there, Mister Billy.”
            Billy looked up. It was the boy, come to hear him play. He’d filled out a bit, didn’t look quite so knobby, and his eyes were both as clear as window panes. The boy strolled down the planked walkway of the dock, pausing occasionally to skip stones across the top of the water.
            “Afternoon, Levi.”
            The boy settled on the dock and let his bare feet dip into the bayou.
            Billy bent to check the bottle of red wine at his side, more out of habit than of need. Seemed no matter how much he drank now, the bottle never got below half-full. He took a long swallow and let the liquid warm his insides. Then he took the old brown bottleneck from his shirt pocket and set it gently against the strings. He strummed a chord, slid the bottleneck, and the sound soared up into the bright, clean air like a hawk on the wing.
            The boy grinned and asked, “How long you be playin’ today?”
            Billy watched the sun bringing down a red sky to sink off the edge of the ocean. Then his own grin widened to match that of his young companion. “How long you got, boy?”