Free Nighthawk Blues by Peter Guralnick Page A

You know you shouldn’t be taking this kind of chance. And you’re just counting on the fact that if anything happens I’m gonna be right there to pick up the pieces. Well, goddammit, you’re right, I am going to be there. But it’s not for you, you old buzzard. It’s for me. You wouldn’t even say a word of thanks. You can’t even imagine what this is costing me.” Visions of his office, in far-off Harvard Square, desolate, phone disconnected, covered with cobwebs, condemned, all danced in his head. “You’re a selfish old man, and you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself.”
    Hawk stared at him disgustedly and spit. The gob landed approximately half an inch from Jerry’s left foot. Then Hawk lifted himself out of the car, awkward, heavy, foul-smelling, a legend in his time, and stood practically toe-to-toe with his manager. “What you want from me, boy?” he said angrily, not even looking at Jerry. “Ain’t you through sucking on your mama’s titty?” With that he plodded off toward the men’s room, his shoulders slumping, his left leg dragging, the attendant running after him. “Let my manager take care of it,” Hawk rumbled without even turning around. A small victory, Jerry thought, as he gave the man a twenty-dollar bill and asked him to check under the hood of both cars.
    They were still out in the country when it started to get dark. Jerry wondered if they were just going to keep going straight through the night when he realized that the old heap in front of him had slowed to a virtual halt and that Hawk was peering over the wheel with more than his usual intentness. Behind them traffic had backed up for what seemed like miles, and the driver next in line behind Jerry started honking impatiently. Jerry shrugged without any hope of sparing himself embarrassment. He didn’t know if this was Hawk’s way of getting back or if the old man was simply oblivious to the chorus of horns which had started up.
    Hawk turned off on a dirt path that didn’t even deserve to be called a road, between a closed-down gas station and a boarded-up old clapboard house. Jerry hesitated slightly before following him, wondering for an absurd moment if Hawk might still be capable of springing some kind of improbable trap. The road, if it was a road, had obviously not been used in years, and to say that it was full of potholes would be giving it credit for an initial intention which it scarcely seemed to possess. Jerry lurched along behind the old black-and-tan Ford, for what seemed like miles in a time span that could have been hours, following the curve of the road overgrown with bushes until finally they came to what looked like a long-ago-abandoned dump, a clutter of rusting metal objects, rotting lace-up boots, tin cans, broken glass, a pile of brush, and a muddy stagnant pool of water. Beside it ran a rusted railroad track whose bed had become a garden of weeds, with half the ties twisted and broken and all the orangy color of rust. Off to one side was a railroad car, open to the elements, its door long since disappeared. Jerry watched in disbelief as Hawk climbed out of the car and with both hands scooped up some of the brackish water, tilting his head back and letting out a long sigh of appreciation as if it were fresh spring water that he was drinking. He splashed some on his face and then went to work gathering together the few sticks that were lying about, throwing on the remnants of what once must have been a chair, squatting down and coaxing a fire from this unlikely collection of combustibles. At last it caught and Hawk hunched over it for a few minutes, rubbing his hands in front of the fire until he was evidendy warm, then hoisted himself up and swung back to the car, rummaging around without apparent success, then at last seeming to find what he was looking for. Jerry just waited—for what, he wasn’t sure. There they were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by ghosts of a past he had never