the wheel is when we’re touring, and usually then on the interstate where I can do the least harm.
Absently, my hand touches the copy of Blues Today. I wonder what Habib would say if I showed him the polls. Among his celebrity photos on the wall, Ben’s is prominent, above Harvey Korman and just below the good son on Dallas. That favorite customer business sure can seem real. The man cuts at least a couple hundred off every purchase I’ve seen Ben make. Because he loves Ben’s music? Or because Ben’s driven so many cars off this lot, always paid Habib in cash? (“Mississippi John Hurt carry Diner’s Club?” Ben once asked me.) I can’t be certain of anyone’s motives anymore. When you spend so much time being someone you’re not, you suspect everyone’s got a con. And you lie waiting for the tipoff that tells what the hustle is.
“Deal then,” Ben says abruptly, his trembling left hand extended—he never shakes with his “picking fingers.” Habib stands, forces Ben’s hand into a soul shake. “My man,” he says. Then he turns to me for a high five. I wipe my palm on my sleeve to oblige him. “Be back with the keys.”
Ben starts counting bills on the desk. Fourteen hundreds form a pile he taps together like cards. “And you’re quiet, why?” he says, his voice without clear emotion. For a few seconds I don’t reply, staring at the enormous American flag and shaking my head. I already know his retort to my belief that the polls indicate our music matters most to fans, not the act we put on. I know he’d tell me something like, “But we got to look the part of bluesmen just to make them hear.” No point in even bringing it up. Besides, I hear Habib shaking the keys. He hands them to Ben as he spots the bills on his desk. “Don’t you want to take it for a test drive?”
“Oh, I trusts you,” Ben says, unfolding himself from the chair but not quite reaching his full height—six one on his Mississippi driver’s license, though most would swear he’s no taller than five ten. One reviewer called him, “the venerable and diminutive heir to such luminaries as Son House and Charley Patton.” Now he nurses a phantom ailment near his spine with his hand. “But I’m gon get behind that wheel in a hurry.” He smiles at Habib first, then me, sharpening his eyebrows in a way that says, “You’re on your own.”
“What about the title and such?” Habib says.
“Sam can handle the paper,” Ben says, shuffling away. At the rate he’s moving, he’ll arrive at the car about nightfall.
“So,” Mr. Habib says, putting the papers in an envelope. “Where are you headed on the tour?”
The AC cuts out. Habib’s just chit-chatting, still my heart thuds and catches in my chest, as it always does when Ben’s not dominating the room. I’m sure he designed this particular moment into as much a test as the earlier experiment with the cabs, only now he’s determining how well I can handle myself alone. I lay my tongue on the floor of my mouth, move my lips only slightly. “Las Vegas foist,” I say. “Then purty reg’lar.”
“That’s strange,” Habib says. “Don’t you usually start in Portland?”
I nod and tug at my collar, which chafes the back of my neck. It is strange, us playing Vegas, but most of the time, on tour, I just follow Ben’s lead. He’s been on the road so long, I’ve got to trust the direction he’s taking us.
“Still, Las Vegas,” Habib says. “That should be a splendid time.” He shakes a slim finger at me. “But keep an eye on your money, Sam. Country folk like yourself often wind up in tears at the roulette table”
“Will do, Mr. Ha-bib,” I say, knowing good and well how to pronounce his surname, having attended high school with Mickey and David Habib. He hands me an envelope containing the papers and we walk out of the office to the lot, where Ben’s at the wheel of the Brougham, coffee-colored like the one Chuck Berry sings of in “Nadine.” It lacks fins but is longer than a city block, with a vinyl top and a hood ornament bigger than an awards plaque. Ben beams like an aged Sambo, honks the horn two notes. When I show Ben the paperwork, he feigns a lot of blinking as he pulls his chin with his hand. In “Where I’ll Die,” he sings, “I never stayed long in no schoolroom, never learned no ABC’s,” a lyric which assures people like Habib of Ben’s illiteracy. “Look all right?” he says. “We let Mr. Mabry take care the rest.”
“As a manager should,” Habib says. “Give him my best, will you?”
Ben and I nod. Habib walks around to the driver’s side, gives Ben another soul shake. “You’ll outlive us all, my friend,” he says. “Don’t run off with a showgirl.” Then he turns to me, his face darkening. “Brother Ben doesn’t seem so well this time. He needs you.”
I nod again, amused at his concern for Ben, and his well wishing of Wilton Mabry, a man he believes he’s never met. I also feel talked out after my ten or twelve words.
Habib tosses his arm over my shoulder. “This is some great nation, is it not?” he shouts. “Men like us, we’ve made for ourselves a new day.”
Oh well. I slump, prepare to hear again the midnight escape from Teheran. The whole story sounds suspiciously like the plot of a movie I once saw, and Habib’s role gets more heroic with each telling. Always he has to leave someone behind, a cousin, a favorite uncle, last time his wife’s deaf grandmother. Ben and I could share some equally harrowing sagas: of Ben’s wife, Martha, dying suddenly and mysteriously after fifteen years of marriage or of my dad’s fatal heart attack when I was three. Only those aren’t Brother Ben and Silent Sam’s stories. They belong to Wilton Mabry and Peter Owens. Now, though, as Habib’s eyes close for the journey back to his departed homeland, a wrecker with a convertible Thunderbird honks its horn. “Next year,” Habib says, thumping my back, then following the wrecker to the garage, waving. I glance at the price of the Caddy on the window. 2400 dollars. I shake my head as I get in the car, whose wood grain control panel dazzles. I sink into the plush bucket seats and brush my fingers against the pile carpeting. After shutting the door, I say, “How?”
Ben interrupts. “He made a killing on those Hollywood boys. Plus, he always takes care of his favorite customer. Especially when he feels sorry for me.” He fakes a cough, as dry as the desert Habib claims he left behind.
I keep shaking my head as he eases the car onto the street. It’s as if he knew what I was about to say, which isn’t that strange a phenomenon, I must confess. For the Last True Delta Bluesman not only has the ability to outduel the slickest used-car dealer in the West, he’s able to read minds and foretell the future. What else do you expect from a man who in “Call Me Your Lovin’ Man” claims he’s the seventh son of a seventh son?
•••
Wardrobe next. And though the kind of swap meet rags we want are available in every neighborhood with an African American population above ten percent, Ben always depends on the stores along Crenshaw to provide the tackiest and ugliest. Today’s expedition to the two-for-a-dollar bin yields an armful of shirts quite popular circa 1975. Ben singles out for me a long-sleeved, iridescent number. “Looks like the color of motor oil,” he says, laughing his everyday laugh, not the stylized one he employs on stage: “Gon get up in the morning, huh-huh.” I meander toward the jackets and suits, wondering on what occasions did the former owner wear this leisure suit the color of mustard. It’s in my size, though: 42 Regular. Meanwhile, Ben’s more efficient. Along with a dozen shirts, he selects for us six pairs of polyester flares, guaranteed to rise up and show off the opaque, ribbed socks we favor. He drapes some suits over his arm and grabs a pair of black, ankle high boots with roach-killing toes and zippers on the side that’ll fit both of us—I wear an eleven, Ben a ten-and-a-half.
Spot a brother my age—twenty-seven—dressed
