Free Devil Sent the Rain by Tom Piazza Page B

himself a fifth of whiskey ?”
    This, I began to sense, was some kind of test. Feeling my way, I said, “I tell you what . . . If you want to do the interview . . . I’ll bring you the fifth of whiskey myself . ”
    â€œ ALL -right,” he hollered, sounding hugely pleased. “ COME ’n’ see me . When you wanna come up?”
    I suggested a date in mid-November, and he said it would be fine. Then he said, “Listen . . . I gotta go. I got a black girl here tryin’ to talk to me. You know what . . . every white girl I ever went with, she got a home offa me. Now I’m gonna see about a black one and tell the others to kiss my ass . How does that sound to you?”
    I said it made sense, and he said, “Good. Call me closer to the time,” then he hung up and I sat at my desk, shaking my head. After that call I had a pang of misgiving about the whole idea, as if I might be getting myself into something I’d prefer to stay out of, but I was too curious to give up. Boy, I thought. Whatever you do, don’t forget that whiskey.
    Over the next month we talked two more times. The first time, he sounded sober and friendly, even asking me one or two questions about myself. He had a happy memory of New Orleans, where I live (“I played down there when Johnny Horton had his hit on ‘Battle of New Orleans.’ We played ‘Ocean of Diamonds’ and ‘Sophronie’ and tore his ass to pieces”), and we were able to set a date of November 20, a Wednesday, for me to come up, but there was only one hitch. What I had to do, he said, was call the weather report for Richmond, Indiana, that week and see what the temperature was going to be. If it was going to be in the thirties up there, it would be too cold to go coon hunting and I could come see him in Nashville. But if it was going to be in the forties or fifties, then I might as well stay home because he’d be in Indiana, hunting. I had no intention of calling the weather report in Indiana; I decided to just call Martin again a few days beforehand.
    On November 17, the Sunday before I was to go up, I called him to confirm, and he was the old Jimmy again; he grumbled, chafed (“Now, that’s how many days you’re taking up?”), but I finally got him to agree that I would drive up on Wednesday, we would visit on Thursday, and then we could take it from there. Thursday, right? Yep. Okay. See you then. Hang up.
    That’s it. I was going.
    The drive from New Orleans took ten hours. As soon as I arrived at the Holiday Inn in Hermitage that Wednesday night, I called Martin.
    â€œOh, hell,” he said, gloomily. “I was fixing to spend tomorrow rabbit hunting. But I guess I’ll spend it with you . . .” He sounded like a teenager forced to bring his kid brother along on a date. We agreed that I’d come over at ten in the morning; he gave me directions to his house, and that was it.
    Thursday dawned grey and raw; yellow leaves blew around the motel parking lot. I had breakfast and ran through some of the things I wanted to ask Martin, but I was already realizing that the questions I wanted to ask him weren’t really the point of this trip. Whatever I was looking for I probably wouldn’t find by asking him a bunch of questions. But it was a place to start, at least.
    His house, it turned out, was closer than I realized, and five minutes before ten a.m. I pulled up to the big iron gates he had described, at the foot of a long blacktop driveway leading up to a large, ochre-colored ranch house on several hilly acres of land. At the top of the driveway I could see a figure moving. I made my way up the driveway and parked in some mud off to the right, the only paved spots being taken up by a couple of vans and a long, midnight-blue stretch limousine, the rear license plate of which read KING JM . Across the lip of the limo’s trunk, yellow and