Dirty South

I parked on a gravel road and walked with a couple dogs trailing me. JoJo walked by my side whistling a little Muddy Waters song. The porch had been screened in, the front door hanging loose by its hinges. Wood shavings littered the buckled floor. Two pinewood coffins. New and fresh smelling. The sound of a television inside. Canned TV laughter.

“What’s he watchin’?”

We heard the familiar Love Boat theme song.

“Always liked that woman who ran the cruise,” JoJo said.

“Julie McCoy.”

“Yeah, she looked like a nice lady.”

“She liked the cocaine,” I said.

JoJo nodded. He wasn’t thrilled about Julie’s coke problems.

The door opened after a knock. An old black man strapping himself into a pair of overalls eyed us. He fixed up the strap on his shoulder. His left eye twitched. “You the man lookin’ for me?”

“You Tip-Top?” JoJo asked.

He nodded.

“This man don’t want to do you no harm,” JoJo said. “Wants to know about you and Sonny Boy.”

Tip-Top looked at JoJo. “I know you,” he said.

“I know.” JoJo walked off the porch and began to play fetch with a few of the dogs. I asked the man if he would mind sitting on the porch and letting me record him for a project I was working on about Sonny Boy. I told him I was a professor at Tulane University and was working with the University of Mississippi about the great harp player.

“Sonny Boy was a motherfucker who stole my whiskey and my women and once took a piss in my boot. I spent half my life tryin’ to forget about the Goat. Now you leave me be. Got work to do.”

He slammed his door and I heard the canned laughter of Love Boat.

JoJo kept playing with the dogs. He kept his eyes on one in particular, rubbing the dog’s head. She was of questionable breeding, somewhere a German shepherd in the mix, with long drooping ears and a curved tail.

“Look at her,” he said. “She ain’t no more than a pup. Smart. Look at her watchin’ me.”

JoJo walked back to the truck and grabbed some chicken from the sandwich he hadn’t finished. He fed the dog. “I don’t like people who don’t take care of their dogs. Show they’re evil. I know you tryin’ to find this man ’cause he got some stories about Sonny Boy. But he evil if he let a fine dog like this get all skin and bones.”

I heard a screen door slam behind the old shotgun house. I followed a dusty trail behind it and saw Tip-Top working a planer on top of a casket. A life-size dummy – some kind of stuffed black suit with a face made out of wood – watched from a lounge chair nearby.

I walked over to Tip-Top, moving my hand to the back of the dummy’s head. I wanted to do Señor Wences or even the Parkay margarine ad. “Friend of Charlie McCarthy?”

“Don’t know no Charlie.”

“Listen, man,” I said. “Give me twenty minutes. Heard you were with Sonny Boy at his last gig in Tutwiler. Something happened with a bottle of gin.”

“He threw it at me.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

“Why do you want to know these things?”

“I write about the blues.”

He kept planing. A steady thump, thump.

“The world don’t make no sense,” he said. “The blues is dead.”

“I don’t think so.”

Thump, thump.

“JoJo brought some whiskey,” I said.

He stopped planing.

Thirty minutes later, he was drunk, had told the story, and JoJo had bought the dog from him for five dollars. JoJo liked to joke but didn’t joke with Tip-Top. When he was through making the deal, he found some rope to put around the dog’s neck and waited for me by the old truck that my friends called the Gray Ghost.

“We was in this church,” Tip-Top said. “Down where he buried now. And it was still a church then. And he sat in there all night askin’ God to let him die. He walked outside in this thunderstorm. I was too drunk to move and he kept cursin’ God.”

I wrote down some notes. Asked a few more questions. It was the story I needed to finish the piece.

“They pay you for doin’ this?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t seem like an honest living.”

“It’s not,” I said. “Thanks.”

JoJo loaded up the new dog in the truck and she curled into a seat behind us, yawning. “We need to get her some water down the road.”

“What you gonna call her?” I asked.

“Don’t matter to me,” JoJo said. “It’s your dog.”

“No way.”

“You need a dog,” he said. “Every man needs a dog.”

“Where’s she gonna piss in New Orleans?”

“There are a few trees,” JoJo said, watching the yellow lines of the blacktop heading back to Clarksdale. “Can’t you stay till Monday?”

“Got to head on back.”

We passed through a couple of small towns and stopped at a Texaco station for Annie’s water. We decided on Annie because of the old song “Work with Me, Annie.” But I told JoJo it was more like the song “Polk Salad Annie.” This dog was straight Delta mutt, could probably eat a cottonmouth and make the alligators seem tame.

When we reached the crossroads at 49 and 61, I looked over at the big metal sculpture someone had erected to the history of the blues. Metal guitars and road signs. I knew there wasn’t any real crossroads and it was a nice gimmick to bring folks in. But it made me think about something Tip-Top had said.