It must have been around one in the morning, which means that I had been in his room about four hours. Until Hat explained the “gunshots,” I had forgotten that it was Halloween night, and I told him this as I turned away from the window.
“I never forget about Halloween,” Hat said. “If I can, I stay home on Halloween. Don’t want to be out on the street, that night.”
He had already given me proof that he was superstitious, and as he spoke he glanced almost nervously around the room, as if looking for sinister presences.
“You’d feel in danger?” I asked.
He rolled gin around in his mouth and looked at me as he had in the alley behind the club, taking note of qualities I myself did not yet perceive. This did not feel at all judgmental. The nervousness I thought I had seen had disappeared, and his manner seemed marginally more concentrated than earlier in the evening. He swallowed the gin and for a couple of seconds looked at me without speaking.
“No,” he finally said. “Not exactly. But I wouldn’t feel safe, either.”
I sat with my pen half an inch from the page of my notebook, uncertain whether or not to write this down.
“I’m from Mississippi, you know.”
I nodded.
“Funny things happen down there. Back when I was a little kid, it was a whole different world. Know what I mean?”
“I can guess,” I said.
He nodded. “Sometimes people disappeared. They’d be gone. All kinds of stuff used to happen, stuff you wouldn’t even believe in now. I met a witch-lady once who could put curses on you, make you go blind and crazy. Another time, I saw a mean, murdering son of a bitch named Eddie Grimes die and come back to life—he got shot to death at a dance we were playing, he was dead, and a woman went down and whispered to him, and Eddie Grimes stood right back up on his feet. The man who shot him took off double-quick and he must have kept on going, because we never saw him after that.”
“Did you start playing again?” I asked, taking notes as fast as I could.
“We never stopped,” Hat said. “You let the people deal with what’s going on, but you gotta keep on playing.”
“Did you live in the country?” I asked, thinking that all of this sounded like Dogpatch—witches and walking dead men.
He shook his head. “I was brought up in town, Woodland, Mississippi. On the river. Where we lived was called Darktown, you know, but most of Woodland was white, with nice houses and all. Lots of our people did the cooking and washing in the big houses on Miller’s Hill, that kind of work. In fact, we lived in a pretty nice house, for Darktown— the band always did well, and my father had a couple of other jobs on top of that. He was a good piano player, mainly, but he could play any kind of instrument. And he was a big, strong guy, nice-looking, real light-complected, so he was called Red, which was what that meant in those days. People respected him.”
Another long, rattling burst of explosions came from Eighth Avenue. I wanted to ask him again about leaving his father’s band, but Hat once more gave his little room a quick inspection, swallowed another mouthful of gin, and went on talking.
“We even went out trick or treating on Halloween, you know, like the white kids. I guess our people didn’t do that everywhere, but we did. Naturally, we stuck to our neighborhood, and probably we got a lot less than the kids from Miller’s Hill, but they didn’t have anything up there that tasted as good as the apples and candy we brought home in our bags. Around us, people made instead of bought, and that’s the difference.” He smiled at either the memory or the unexpected sentimentality he had just revealed—for a moment, he looked both lost in time and uneasy with himself for having said too much. “Or maybe I just remember it that way, you know? Anyhow, we used to raise some hell, too. You were supposed to raise hell, on Halloween.”
“You went out with your brothers?” I asked.
“No, no, they were—” He flipped his hand in the air, dismissing whatever it was that his brothers had been. “I was always apart, you dig? Me, I was always into my own little things. I was that way right from the beginning. I play like that—never play like anyone else, don’t even play like myself. You gotta find new places for yourself, or else nothing’s happening, isn’t that right? Don’t want to be a repeater pencil.” He saluted this declaration with another swallow of gin. “Back in those days, I used to go out with a boy named Rodney Sparks—we called him Dee, short for Demon, ’cause Dee Sparks would do anything that came into his head. That boy was the bravest little bastard I ever knew. He’d wrassle a mad dog. And the reason was, Dee was the preacher’s boy. If you happen to be the preacher’s boy, seems like you gotta prove every way you can that you’re no Buster Brown, you know? So I hung with Dee, because I wasn’t any Buster Brown, either. This is when we were eleven, around then—the time when you talk about girls, you know, but you still aren’t too sure what that’s about. You don’t know what anything’s about, to tell the truth. You along for the ride, you trying to pack in as much fun as possible. So Dee was my right hand, and when I went out on Halloween in Woodland, I went out with him.”
He rolled his eyes toward the window and said, “Yeah.” An expression I could not read at all took over his face. By the standards of ordinary people, Hat almost always looked detached, even impassive, tuned to some private wavelength, and this sense of detachment had intensified. I thought he was changing mental gears, dismissing his childhood, and opened my mouth to ask him about Grant Kilbert. But he raised his glass to his mouth again and rolled his eyes back to me, and the quality of his gaze told me to keep quiet.
“I didn’t know it,” he said, “but I was getting ready to stop being a little boy. To stop believing in little boy things and start seeing like a grown-up. I guess that’s part of what I liked about Dee Sparks—he seemed like he was a lot more grown-up than I was, shows you what my head was like. The age we were, this would have been the last time we went out on Halloween to get apples and candy. From then on, we would have gone out mainly to raise hell. Scare the shit out of the little kids. But the way it turned out, it was the last time we ever went out on Halloween.”
He finished off the gin in his glass and reached down to pick the bottle off the floor and pour another few inches into the tumbler. “Here I am, sitting in this room. There’s my horn over there. Here’s this bottle. You know what I’m saying?”
I didn’t. I had no idea what he was saying. The hint of fatality clung to his earlier statement, and for a second I thought he was going to say that he was here but Dee Sparks was nowhere because Dee Sparks had died in Woodland, Mississippi, at the age of eleven on Halloween night. Hat was looking at me with a steady curiosity which compelled a response. “What happened?” I asked.