They come around with this here van, okay, and I seen a mess of folks get in thisyer van, but don’t none of em come back. Now they asked me to go, and I heard them saying they take folks off to do some wonderful job somewheres, but I said to myself, What kinda job it is you don’t come back from? He nodded as if Eddie had already offered the correct answer. Death, that’s the only job a nigger don’t never come home from. They prolly out there making some nigger-flesh dog food. Maybe I’m paranoid, or it’s a exaggeration, but something’s going on.
Eddie had heard or read the story about the man who goes to hell to get his wife back and eventually does bring her home, and even though he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it—school probably—or the details of the story, he believed that you could go to hell and bring people back safely.
Where do they come get people?
Just up the road a piece. Northwood Manor, near the Clayton’s supermarket.
Take me there.
The beggar refused, and as soon as he refused, Eddie snatched the undrunk bottle of yellow liquor away from him and moved backward, holding it above his head as if he might dash it against the concrete. This aroused a fit of shouting and cursing and then coughing from the older man, who looked wildly at the bottle as if it were his child. He rose to a standing position and lumbered toward the bottle with an arm outstretched as Eddie played a vicious game of keep-away around his intoxicated body. When they seemed to become aware of the game’s endlessness, the fact that Eddie would never give him the bottle and he could never capture it, the ridiculousness of the standoff became apparent, and neither of them could hold his laughter. Even though Eddie hated him and figured the feeling was mutual, the man then agreed to take Eddie to the last location where he’d seen the Death Van.
I reckon it ain’t that far, the bum said. It took a while, but Eddie managed to thumb a ride for them from a pickup, throwing the bike into the bed of the truck.
They called him Tuckahoe Joe, the bum explained to Eddie and the driver, or just Tuckahoe, or Tuck, because he had grown up in a place called Tuckahoe and because his real name was a girl’s name that a lot of men in his family had cursed each other with, so he went by the nickname instead.
I started using it when I played out, he said. Music, that is. I used to play blues music. You know what that is?
Eddie nodded, though he felt the stab at his intelligence.
Now I just live the fucking blues, Tuck muttered. Played bass guitar for a very popular fella called Willie “Mad Dog” Walker. For years. You heard a him? He’s T-Bone Walker Jr.’s second grandnephew. Or that’s what he used to say, anyway. “Only Got Myself to Blame”—you know that song? That’s him, anyway, his one big hit.
Tuckahoe sang a little but Eddie didn’t recognize the tune. Old folks’ music, he thought. Dead folks’ music. Tuckahoe told them that the band had toured the East Coast and then come to Houston by public transportation alone. They would take the bus or the train from one city to the next and then walk or hitchhike when there wasn’t enough of a connection. As if to verify his tale, he listed every city he had passed through on the way and how to hook up from one system to the next.
When you get to Houston, though, he said, you can go to Dallas or Austin or San Antonio, but between them and El Paso it’s all desert, so the band had to stop. Originally we stopped in Austin. Austin’s like a pitcher plant. Well, it was for me. You know what that is? A pitcher plant? It’s a plant that eat flies, like a Venus flytrap, but it catches them by having a sweet sweet pool of sugariness inside, down at the bottom, and slippery walls, so that when the fly land on the damn thing, he slip on down in there and drown in happiness. Come to think of it, New Orleans even more like that, but it’ll kill you faster. Anyhow, he said, tipping the first bottle vertically above his head to get the last taste of nectar, I’m still drowning in happiness.
The driver made a horrified face as Tuck drank, but said nothing.
Tuck looked at the label before placing the bottle between his feet and uncapping the second.
The driver took a deep breath.
The closer they got to their destination, the more Tuck’s monologue sagged and melted. He also had a hard time remembering exactly where he’d seen the Death Van. Facts contradicted one another; Tuckahoe was in Virginia at first, then in New York, names ballooned with improbability—We opened for the Rolling Stones in Memphis the night MLK got shot, he said—until finally the narrative exploded and the plastic masks fell off his accomplishments. Eddie tried to believe his stories out of sympathy, as he could sense the extremity of Tuck’s abandonment, but at the same time Tuck had become gradually more repulsive to Eddie during the ride and had widened the gap between himself and Eddie, not to mention the driver, in what was perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy of loneliness. Eddie worried that he’d arrived at another dead end, with another disoriented person whose addiction made his mind too foggy to recall anything.
But only a few minutes later, Tuck got a flash of insight and suddenly demanded that their ride let them out a few yards away from the parking lot of a Party Fool, closed but still brightly lit. With the chain store’s harlequin mascot looming above on the roof, governing their every move with his scepter, they disembarked. The driver helped Eddie lift the bike out of the truck. Tuck removed the second, half-empty forty from its paper bag, chugging as he advised Eddie about how the drivers of the Death Van operated.
They’re picking on the people that’s the most out of it, he said. That’s what it seem to me. I don’t know how you going to get them interested as just a little boy. They only after the worst of the hookers, the junkies, and the alkies, y’see, people rocked out they mind. Hey, maybe they selling Negro skeletons to Baylor for research. After that Tuskegee shit, anything could happen.
They waited for an hour and fifteen minutes, until a navy blue minibus slowed to a stop twenty yards ahead of them with the smoothness of a panther, then everything went silent for a moment, until the next car passed a couple of minutes later.