Black Hornet Read Free

just the way they recorded it and it sold like Coke.
    But orders kept coming in, and Kid and Friends weren’t prepared, financially or by temperament, to tack into this new wind. They wound up selling all rights to BlueStrain. Strain (as everybody called it) had had remarkable success issuing live-recorded jazz on a label previously known for classical recordings. The recovering beats and MBAs who ran BlueStrain were convinced that Buster Robinson was a shoo-in as the next Mississippi John Hurt.
    It took them about two months to decide that what money they were going to make off B.R., they’d already made. The new pressing didn’t sell. Everyone who wanted it had it. And no one came to the live concerts in Boston, Philly, Gary, Des Moines, Cleveland, Memphis.
    So BlueStrain cut Buster loose.
Sometime I live in de city,
Sometimes I live in town.
Sometime I takes a great notion
To jump into de river an’ drown.
    “In-to-the” a perfect suspended triplet.
    The teenage hooker peered out from the crow’s nest of her solitude, saw land heaving up nowhere in sight, and ordered another boilermaker. Outer Limits with its monster-of-the-week, animal, vegetable, mineral, appeared onscreen.
    How I met Buster is a story in itself, I guess.
    I’d been working collections freelance at a straight percentage. I was big enough and looked mean enough to get most people’s attention, which was all it really took. And after a while I started getting something else: a reputation. I saddled it, rode it, never put it up wet. But a reputation cuts both ways. Recently I’d had to step on a couple of guys feeling their balls and not about to be told what to do by no jive-ass nigger. One of them got hurt kind of bad. I went to see him on a ward at Mercy afterward but he didn’t have much to say to me. Fuck you, as I recall, being pretty much it.
    Boudleaux & Associates was turning a lot of work my way those days. B&A operated out of a sweltering, unpainted cinderblock office on South Broad across from McDonald’s and the Courthouse and consisted of a P.I named Frankie DeNoux who lived off Jim’s fried chicken. All the years I knew him, I never saw him eat anything else. Always a cardboard tray of breasts and thighs on the desk, grease spreading out from its base onto various legal documents, invoices, paperback spy novels, check ledgers; always a cooler of Jax to wash it down. Undrunk coffee forever burning to sludge on the hotplate alongside.
    Frankie weighed a hundred pounds in eight-pound shoes. Despite his diet and the fact that he never saw sunlight and hadn’t so much as walked around the block in forty years, he was fit and trim and probably could have picked up the office and carried it down the street on his shoulder. He was already three times my age and, I was sure, would outlive me. “Don’t matter what jew eat, what jew do or don’t do,” he said frequently. “’S all genetics.” He pronounced it gene-etics.
    “Want some chicken?” he asked one day when I dropped by to see if he had anything for me. Collections, papers that needed serving, whatever. Jobs were getting scarce. People had suddenly stopped acting like they had money they didn’t have, and my own strictly-cash economics showed the wear.
    Frankie picked up the greasy carton and held it out.
    I shook my head. “No, sir. But thank you.”
    He redocked it.
    You didn’t often find a white man offering to eat after a black one those days, even in New Orleans.
    It made me remember my father and me back in Arkansas ordering breakfast through a window to the kitchen of Nick’s (where the cooks were all black, the customers all white) and eating it on the steps of the railroad roundhouse by the levee at five A.M. It was godawful cold, forty degrees maybe, with wind shouldering in off the river. My father’s breath, when he spoke to me of the life I could expect there, plumed out and mixed with the steam rising off grits and eggs.
    “You sure?” Frankie said, r