When Mockingbird Jackson was young, there were steam engines that used to screech by every Sunday evening after supper. Grandaddy would boost the boy up onto his shoulders and together they would go down to the embankment, waving hallos at the unseen conductors behind the controls. Mockingbird always promised himself he would find out where they were going to when he got a little older, and by God he did. No field labor or cotton-picking for little Willie; he rode the rails to the great cities, guitar in one hand and Grandaddy’s fedora in the other. Some folks might have called it living hand to mouth; Mockingbird just called it living.
It’s been a good life, if not an easy one—he’s seen friends strung up in the trees like strange fruit and come close to joining them on more than one occasion—but Mockingbird Jackson is a wily old dog, and so he’s survived. These days, when the rheumatism creeps into his crooked fingers and makes them too god-damned clumsy to even fret out “Turkey in the Straw,” he wonders if his cleverness has been a blessing or a curse. The street corner is no place for an elderly rover, but he has no other place to go.
As his ability begins to give out, so does his audience. The younger players regard him the same as they do the derelict buildings that cluster around the city center, relics of an age they neither understand nor really care about. They learn what they can from him—Mockingbird Jackson has made a name for himself that not even these young cockerels can ignore—but don’t hang around for long, once the teaching’s taught and the secret learned. More and more Mockingbird finds himself alone, his only companions Mister Gibson and the esteemed Mister J. Daniels, Esquire.
Soon there’s not even enough cash jingling in Mockingbird’s pockets to bribe old Jack to stick around. The man-built canyons of the city seem too tall, too empty. Rivers of asphalt and exhaust fumes run through their channels. He takes a job as a parking lot attendant, but it feels like it’s killing his spirit even as it keeps his belly fed. In the sweltering guardhouse each night Mockingbird finds himself dreaming of green pines and cool red clay between his toes. The woods of his childhood grow behind his closed eyelids, shrivel down to nothing when he wakes, and spring back up again as soon as his head hits the pallet. Sometimes he almost thinks he can smell them, dead leaves and rotten wood and, far off, the sweet wet-dirt reek of a creek.
And then one fine fall morning the bosses come in to find the toll-booth abandoned, pallet, guitar, and old man vanished into thin air. On the back of a yellowing ticket is a simple message, scrawled almost illegibly in ballpoint blue:
“Gone home. Keep the check.”
There’s more surprise at the fact that Mockingbird can write than there is regarding his sudden disappearance. They keep the check, regardless.
There isn’t much left of Grandaddy’s house. The roof’s long since caved in and the porch is listing dangerously; goatweed makes a jungle of the chicken coop, and the front stoop is littered with garbage. Somebody dumped a sofa in the back yard, and it hovers at the corner of Mockingbird’s vision like a battered old ghost, pale in the moonlight. He doesn’t linger here for long. Truth be told, Mockingbird isn’t especially sure why the hell he’s come back here in the first place. An old man’s fancy, he figures, or maybe just the desire to see a much-loved place before the good Lord calls him home.
Either way, he’s regretting the decision now. Nothing’s the same as it once was. Half the god-damned woods he remembers from his boyhood have been clear-cut, his grandaddy’s shotgun shack looks like ha’nts should be peeking out the busted windows, and everyone Mockingbird Jackson has ever known or loved is sleeping in the burying ground up north-ways, Mama and Grandaddy and even Henrietta, God rest her soul. Sometimes Mockingbird wishes he’d stuck around for that girl.
The memories finally get to be too much. Mockingbird wipes his face with a callused hand and leaves the little clearing, venturing further into what’s left of the forest. He’s feeling fey and flighty tonight, and more than anything he wants to see the stretch of track he and his grandaddy used to wave at the passing trains from. Something deep down inside is telling him it’ll probably be the last time, and Mockingbird has never been one to ignore the little voices that niggle and nag.
Now, if anybody had asked, Mockingbird Jackson would’ve sworn to Jesus and all the saints that he knew that little thicket like the back of his knuckles. Even in its current ruined state he figured he could find the old trail down to the tracks, his memory of the place is so damned strong. Ten minutes in, though, he’s so mixed up and muddled it’s a wonder he can tell heads up from ass down; the trees all look the same, and all the forks seem to lead to nowhere, and he’s sure he’s passed that rotten log with the toadstools at least three different times. The path isn’t where it’s supposed to be. If Mockingbird were a superstitious man (and he is), he’d figure the woods were playing a joke on him.
Or something in them, anyways.
When he comes out above a high creekbank, Mockingbird’s suspicions become flat-out certainty. There’s never been a creek running through these woods before, not in his time, not in his grandaddy’s. The fact that one has sprung up like this—and it’s not just a little trickle, either; the stream’s cut a shelving cleft in the clay a good nine, ten feet deep – tells him more is at work here than time and a codger’s confused head. Mockingbird glances up at the trees that surround him. The night remains silent and still, the creek’s chatter laughing up at him from its bed.
How long he follows that stream’s course through the brush Mockingbird can’t say. It winds between blackberry brambles and down old ditches and across trails he presumes were made by deer. At one point it undercuts a rusted barbed-wire fence, erected by Lord knows who long enough ago that the stiff metal has grown three inches into the oak it leans against. There’s a coyote carcass strung up on it too, desiccated to the point where not even a smell is left. Hunters stuck it there, maybe, although Mockingbird finds himself wondering what kind of hunters would be chasing game in a forest as tricky as this one. He climbs through the fence and moves onward.
Don’t let the sun set on you here, Coyote, he finds himself thinking. A crazy laugh bubbles up in his throat. It emerges sounding almost like a sob, ditch-strangled before it can climb out halfway.
The pines ahead seem to thin out and stop abruptly in a line too straight to be natural-made. Sure enough, when Mockingbird gets there he’s more than a little relieved to see the familiar hump of a train embankment snaking through the night, rails glittering faintly like polished nickel. He settles his back against a tree-trunk—old men aren’t made for legging it up and down hill and hollow all hours of the damned evening, as Mockingbird is suddenly and painfully reminded—and commences to wait for the next freighter. You can hear them rattling along from a flat mile off, so even if Mockingbird falls asleep he figures he’ll feel it coming in time to hop aboard before it gets past.
Sleep grabs him by the collar before he can even get situated properly in his pine needle nest, Mockingbird’s head drooping until his chin rests atop his sunken chest. He loses himself in the pleasantries of dreams for a while until a train whistle rouses him back. At first he’s not sure that’s what woke him. Then he hears it again.
It sounds less like a steam whistle and more like a hundred hundred wounded animals, all screaming together in mortal pain. Deers with busted legs from cars, and cows falling down sinkholes, and rabbits shrieking in the jaws of the hound-pack—all Mockingbird Jackson can think of are things dying, destroyed, crushed. He wants to run back into the woods and hide,but his legs are stuck to the ground as solid as if they’ve grown roots. The wail goes on for what seems like forever and then peters out, fading slowly into nothing. A faint booming picks up in the distance, a rhythmic pounding like an old oil well still trying to pump.
On the edge of the darkness, far away but gaining, a blue light appears. It gets bigger and bigger until it seems roughly the size of the moon floating up in the sky. The ear-splitting animal squall busts the night wide open again. Then the train is on him, flashing by dazzlingly fast. The racket is deafening. Mockingbird realizes he’s screaming now too, but it’s so loud he doesn’t even know he’s doing it until his throat starts to ache from the effort.
It slows as it passes. Looking at a thing as big as that engine and its line of cars, you wouldn’t think it could pull to a halt so quick, but it does, wheels groaning and grating in protest at the strain. With a hiss of steam the locomotive stops in front of Mockingbird. The rails are still shivering slightly at its arrival, and so is he, knees knocking together no matter how he tries to make them quit. It’s not curiosity that holds him waiting—it’s fear, pure and simple. Mockingbird Jackson stands there unwillingly, not even wondering what’s gonna happen next. His brain only starts to register things again when the door to one of the cars drifts open with a creak that suggests it hasn’t been oiled since his mama’s mama was in diapers, back on the other side of the ocean.
Strange ideas begin percolating somewhere between Mockingbird’s head and heart. As they drip down into his consciousness, the shaking in his legs goes away, and so does the limb-freezing panic. What does an old man like him have to fear from a ghost train, anyways? Why should he be so all-fired scared of death? What’s the worst that’ll happen if he steps aboard – he’ll die and be done with this miserable world?
“What, and lose all this?” he mutters to himself, looking at his leathery hands, the patched black suit and worn-out traveling shoes.
Mockingbird Jackson steps into the carriage. He doesn’t look back, and feels no surprise at all when it shudders back into movement under his feet. The door slams shut behind him with a final-sounding thud.
The interior of the traincar is shabby, smells like the inside of a church, and seems to be inhabited only by shadows. That’s not to say they’re the ordinary kind of shadows – there’s nothing and nobody to cast shapes like these, and yet here they are, shuffling around on their own business—but the flicker-things don’t take any notice of Mockingbird, and he doesn’t bother them. He stumbles down the aisle like a ha’nt himself, suddenly not at all sure where he’s going or why the hell he set foot on this hoodooed coach in the first place. His mama always said suicide was a mortal sin, and climbing aboard what was obviously a death train was just as sure a method of suicide as squeezing the trigger. either he’ll be playing for nickels outside the Pearly Gates or shaking hands with the Devil himself right soon. He crosses his fingers for the former. Not that it matters to him too much, but he reckons Henrietta is strumming a harp and sporting a halo nowadays, and Mockingbird wouldn’t mind seeing her again.
There’s a feeling a body gets when being watched. If a word has been made up to describe it, it’s not in Mockingbird’s vocabulary, but he knows what it means anyway from long years of experience. All of a sudden the shivers are climbing up and down his back like cicadas on pine bark. Uneasiness and suspicion slow his stride. It’s the final thing the field mouse feels before the hawk swoops in for her supper; it’s the unseen force lurking at the bottom of the darkened staircase that makes the last person to bed speed up from a walk to a trot. Mockingbird glances around warily for the source of the stare—and he is being stared at, he’d bet his guitar and fedora both on it—but all the seats seem to be empty and disused. He’s just about to keep walking when a wheedling voice breaks the silence. The tone is as slick as bacon grease and as cunning as a carnival barker’s reel, the kind of persuasive, friendly chatter that might specialize in selling toothbrushes for hens to unwary Delta farmers.
“Sit and spare a bite to eat, brother? A soul gets awful hungry when he travels alone.”
The window booth behind Mockingbird was empty sixty seconds before. He knows there was nobody there, knows his eyes ain’t that bad, and yet when he turns on his heel there it sits, plain as day: a figure curled up on the cushions, watching him with barely contained amusement. Not a human, though, Lord no. A coyote, the biggest coyote Mockingbird’s ever seen. Everything that makes a coyote what it is seems to be magnified – the sense of sly intelligence, the pointed face, even the size of the thing. This is no ordinary wild, witless critter hitching a ride on down the line. This is the Trickster, given flesh and form. Mockingbird, being a kind of trickster himself, knows the face as soon as he lays eyes on it. He seems almost see-through in the gray half-light, ghostlike and quavery like heat mirage, but Mockingbird knows him, would know him if somebody poured hot lye in both eyes.
And because Willie ‘Mockingbird’ Jackson has seen many odd things in his life, a good deal of them this very evening, he slides himself into the seat across from the coyote without so much as a by-your-leave.
They share what little food Mockingbird has in his pockets – peanut brittle and rat cheese, the latter already going tallowy from riding in a warm place all night long. When it’s gone, Coyote smacks his lips in satisfaction, settles back into the moth-gnawed cushions with his brushy tail wrapped around his paws (all the world like an old bluetick hound curling up after begging scraps at a fish fry, Mockingbird thinks with the tiniest bit of amusement), and regards his companion amiably. Everybody likes to talk when they’ve got a full belly; that, as Mockingbird’s mama once said, is why God invented front porches. Coyote ghosts don’t seem to be much different.
“And what brings you along to this clackety old train, Mockingbird Jackson?” he says, in the tones of one who already knows the answer to the question.
“Hrmph. I should prob’ly be askin’ how the hell you know my name in the first place ‘fore I go answering any questions,” Mockingbird retorts. He’s surprised at his own boldness, even more so when he actually continues. “Why you here, anyways? Finally dead for good, now that nobody believes in you no more?”
The Coyote-thing laughs. Mockingbird’s spine erupts in gooseflesh immediately, like the echoing chorus of a call-and-response song. “Oh, everybody knows you, Mockingbird. Finest slide guitarist and moaner between Mesquite and Meridian, so says some. Or so they used to say, anyways. As for myself”—and here Coyote yawns, pink tongue uncurling like pulled taffy—”I had an unfortunate run-in with a pickup somewhere along Route 66, south of Tucumcari. Damned thing came outta nowhere, snapped me clean in half before I could get away. I’m not fullways dead, though. Every coyote is part of Coyote; this ain’t any worse than losing a whisker, or an eyelash.” He pulls himself up, somewhat pridefully. Mockingbird doesn’t have a clue what he’s rambling on about, but pretends to understand anyway. “I suppose you wouldn’t know that. Your people never were very interested in me. It was always Br’er Rabbit this, and Br’er Rabbit that … I never could stand the bastard myself. Back when the world was young he did me a bad turn on a buffalo hunt once, and I ain’t forgot it yet. You can’t trust folks like him, not a square inch.”
Having nothing much better to do, the old man and the spirit drink together. Mockingbird always has a bottle on him when he can afford it nowadays, and tonight is no exception. They drink, and they swap tall tales, and occasionally a secret or two even passes between them. Coyote tells Mockingbird the true story of Robert Johnson’s ending—it weren’t no Greyhound bus that demi-god caught by the highway side, but a train, a long, rattly, rusted shell of a train—and Mockingbird is appropriately awed by this information.
“Elegba and Anansi and even Brother Rabbit—them last two don’t get along all that well, seeing as how Rabbit stole a bunch of Anansi’s stories on the way over—they ain’t survived too good in this place, though some fare better than others.” Coyote ponders this fact with drunken gravity for a few moments before continuing on. “No, to my mind it’s the bluesmen who’ve become the real tricksters of the people. Through tales of your own misfortune and cleverness you make other folks feel fine—can you think of anything more tricksterish than that? You could walk up to ten different fellas on the street in Jackson and ask them who Eshu was and they’d look at you like you just sprouted antlers. However, you say the name of Robert Johnson (and believe me, it was a train, I was there), and they’ll tell you all about what went down at the crossroads that dark and lonesome night.”
It might be the alcohol talking—or it may just be the strangeness of their surroundings, who the hell knows for certain—but listening to Coyote, Mockingbird feels a wash of warm solidarity flow over him. They’re brothers-in-arms. Mockingbird’s scrawny chest puffs out with pride as his companion keeps sermonizing. He gets a crazy urge to leap to his feet and holler an amen.
“They’ve put bounties on our heads, you know. They’ve hunted us with horse and hound and deadfall, strung us up on fences and in the trees, accused us of things not even a timber wolf could manage in a single night. And do you know what effect all that has had, Mockingbird Jackson? All the rifles and pickups and hate and fear? We thrive! We’re still alive! Who else, then, but a trickster people could accomplish that?” He gloats, but the pride soon fades from his eyes.
“Still … You get to hankering for a change sometimes, y’know? So many worlds, so little time. I’m old, older’n you, even, and sometimes I get tired of being despised. They used to admire me too, Mockingbird. Children and young hunters were told my stories. Pretty girls were warned against bathing in certain streams, lest I come and steal their maidenhead.” The old dog sighs, suddenly seeming very far away.
Mockingbird gets the melancholy, too. The weight of the years falls back onto his bony shoulders like a fifty-pound sack of cotton. He hears a slow, guttural voice replying to Coyote. It takes him a minute to realize it’s his own.
“We’re all old, Coyote. You not the only one with a mess of troubles. When I was young, I been from Fannin Street to Bourbon, playin’ and drinkin’ and chasin’ the women and makin’ people laugh and dance and cry like babies. Now? Nobody really cares about the blues nowadays. Them young fools look at me, you know what they see? Old drunk, playing a beat-up old guitar. Everybody I ever loved is dead. The real blues is dead with ‘em, feels like. Sometimes …” He pauses. The quiet hangs in the air of the railcar like spanish moss, grey and gnarled. “… Sometimes I wished I could follow ‘long with them. That’s the only reason to be on this train, ain’t it? Sure as hell gettin’ my wish tonight, that’s for damned certain.”
Coyote’s eyes narrow into glittering slits. If Mockingbird were sober enough to notice, he’d know his companion’s brain was stirring something up in its murky bottoms, but he’s too lost in that low-down achin’ heart disease to see the look, or to care. All his caution’s been washed down the gutter with a healthy dose of sour mash.
“Say, Mockingbird. You got a ticket for this ride?”
“Eh?” Mockingbird blinks tiredly up at Coyote, confused and a little irritated.
“A ticket, old man, a ticket. Ain’t you proper dead? They won’t let you get off on the other end ‘less you got a stub to show ‘em. How’d you die, anyways? You haven’t rightly said yet, you know.”
When there’s no reply, Coyote nods to himself, knowingly. Maybe he’s known all along. Maybe all of this was his planning.
“The living can’t just take this train like that, Mockingbird Jackson. You ain’t died, you got no business being here, much as I hate to say it. When the conductor sees your live ass sittin’ there he’ll kick you off somewhere ‘long the line quick as you can blink, unless…well.” Coyote grins ingratiatingly, snake oil and a hundred lies glinting off his teeth. “I guess if you wanted we could strike some kind of deal. Maybe. I want somethin’ new and you want a ticket to the end of the line, yeah?”
“Coyote, the hell you yappin’ about?”
The coyote-smile gets bigger by a fraction of an inch.
“Just listen and see, friend. Listen and see.”
Not long after midnight, at a depot on a stretch of the railway line so weed-shot it was almost invisible, an old hobo swore he saw a train slow and stop. It was like no passenger train he’d ever clapped eyes on before—the headlight shone blue, and there were no identifying marks to tell him where it hailed from or where it was going—and while he lay in the underbrush watching, a young man got out. His suit was black, his fedora was blacker still, and his skin was darkest of all, such a dense, shining ebony it seemed to soak up the moonlight that fell on it. The only things not dark about him were his teeth—he was smiling as he climbed off the train, a dazzlingly white crocodile’s grin—and his eyes, a liquid amber that gave off a light of their own as he strode down the steps into the night. He passed a scant three feet away from the hobo’s hiding place, a battered old Gibson slung over one shoulder, and though he was young and handsome and cheerful-looking enough, something about him (maybe it was the eyes, or the smile, or both) put such a fear into the old train-hopper he didn’t move from that ditch until birds were chirping in the trees and the sun was starting to light the eastern sky.
The hobo thought he’d seen old Lucifer, and said as much to everybody he knew. All up and down the Delta the story passed, and others joined it, tales of a handsome, slippery man with eyes like liquid gold, an insatiable lust for pretty girls, and a mastery of the slide that was unheard of in those latter days. He never stayed in one place for long, disappearing with the darkest hours of the night, and those who tried following (several angry husbands and an irate daddy or three took a notion to, for whatever reason) came back confused and frightened. The roads twisted behind him, they said, and shadowy beasts with pointed muzzles and pointed teeth criss-crossed the lanes, guarding the path he walked. Next day the stranger would be spotted five hundred miles distant, in another juke joint in some other state with a woman on each lean arm and a bottle of whiskey in his free hand.
If anybody had been alive from the old times they might have noticed he bore a remarkable resemblance to Mockingbird Jackson, back when he was young and good-looking and held the fickle heart of the Delta in the palm of his hand. They might’ve noticed, and then again they might not have, depending on the stranger’s mood. The only sure thing known about him was that chaos and mischief sprang up wherever he played, which seemed to please the man greatly. He never stopped picking, and he never stopped grinning that tricky grin, not even when the songs were as sad and full of lonesomeness as a train whistle after midnight.
When people sometimes worked up the courage to ask him why he smiled like that, so sly and so secret, the answer was always the same:
“Because every bluesman got a little bit of the trickster in him, just as sure as all tricksters got the blues.”
And maybe that’s true.
Maybe.