The Sharpshooter Blues

by Lewis Nordan

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

ALA Notable Book; Mississippi Arts and Letters Fiction Award. Lewis Nordan's remarkable third novel, THE SHARPSHOOTER BLUES, is in part a meditation on America's love affair with blue-steel barrels and soft-tip bullets, and in part a look at the violence and loss that ensue when the guns come out to play one day in a small town. Just as his award-winning WOF WHISTLE illuminated the complexity of racism, Nordan's new novel shines the brilliant flash of gunfire on love--between fathers and sons, between husbands and wives, between gay lovers, and between friends. At its heart is Hydro Raney, a boy who's never grown up, a boy who wouldn't hurt a soul. In THE SHARPSHOOTER BLUES, Nordan once again makes us laugh; then our helpless laughter turns first into weeping and then into wonder. "A comedy at least half as divine--and dark--as Dante's own . . . a flat-out tour de force."--Lee K. Abbott, Miami Herald; "This is not just a good book, this is a marvelous book."-The Village Voice.

Release date: January 10, 1995

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 299

Sample

“From the outset, it is an indefatigable sense of humor, the laughter at the heart of things, that, as much as anything else, marks Nordan’s fiction as distinctly his own … [along with] a dazzling orchestration of the living American lingo, the deepest music of our language.… The Sharpshooter Blues [is] his finest work so far.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“He may specialize in sweet, funny, and horrible, but those essential qualities are so inextricably bound—like the Delta and dust, like the river and mud—that he continually throws our tear ducts out of gear and our funny bones out of joint at the same time.”

—The Commercial Appeal, Memphis

“It’s the kind of thing that very few writers could pull off—the kind of thing that lifts Nordan’s fiction from its swampy Southern terrain and transforms it, magically, into capital-L American Literature.”

—The Independent Weekly, Durham, N.C.

“A comedy at least half as divine—and dark—as Dante’s own, The Sharpshooter Blues is a flat-out tour de force.… What he alone brings to the page is the courage to use nothing less than black powder prose.”

—The Miami Herald

“A triumph of language, empathy, and humor over circumstance, violence, and even death.”

—Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh

“Nordan exposes something new and wholly unexpected in his characters—a seemingly boundless capacity for love and acceptance.… This is not just a good book, this is a marvelous book.

—Voice Literary Supplement

“In Lewis Nordan’s fictional universe, tragedy, buffoonery, and old-fashioned lyricism find startling common ground. The result … a story that reads by turns stomach-wrenching, tender, and uproariously funny.”

—St. Petersburg Times

“Moving … outrageous. People shoot watermelons and refrigerators in The Sharpshooter Blues. They do it to relax; they do it to prove who they are. But most of all, they do it to prove they are real.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“The portrayal—without the slightest bit of sentimentality—of human beings who have every right to give up on life but who, with a few notable exceptions, not only find a way to live, but also discover within themselves the grace to help someone else.”

—The Orlando Sentinel

“Characters so vivid that you can almost see their faces.”

—Library Journal

“But what is it? A shoot’em-up? A Western? Son Thomas picking the lowdown, funky Delta blues from the grave? A mystery novel? The title suggests all of that, but it’s not quite any of it because it is more.… Land: basic and august. Holy.… Human beings. All kinds.… Fathers love sons and sons love fathers. Wives love husbands and husbands love wives. Gays and straights. Love. Nothing sacred, off-limits. All holy.”

—Nashville Banner

The island where Mr. Raney had his fishcamp was a strip of high ground far out in a strange bayou, the vast, unbounded backwaters of many lakes and rivers; from underground, somewhere, salt water, brackish at least, mineral salts, filled up the swamp and broadened it far across the Delta. The water seemed limitless, everywhere, even to a boy who grew up on the island; it was a black mirror, colored by the tannic acid that seeped into it from the knees of cypress trees.

Beavers had felled the trees, a few trees anyway, sweetgum and tupelo, and built dams and houses as big as igloos, or tepees; and they swam in and out, the size of collies.

Turkey buzzards floated above the swamp like prayers and admired their own reflections in the water. Blue herons and cranes and snowy egrets stood on long legs and ate snakes and minnows in the shallows. Cottonmouth moccasins hung in the willow branches, turtles sat on the logs, alligators lounged in their big nests, which smelled of sugarcane and sorghum and rice and fish. Rats the size of yellow dogs clung to the bark of trees by their toenails and yapped like puppies and then dropped into the water and held their noses up above the flood and swam to high ground where they sat and howled at the moon by night.

Somehow dolphins, porpoises, whatever they were, had made their way up here to the Delta, to this vast water, all the way from the Gulf of Mexico—who knows how, or why, up rivers and canals, to this inland sea—and they swam and bred and gave birth and fed upon the million carp and mullet and the other bony fish that populated the swamp. Minerals in the fresh water made it somehow fit habitation for these sea creatures, no one understood quite how. Scientists were forever arriving here from Jackson and Biloxi, with water-testing equipment; maybe they knew.

Mr. Raney named the porpoises—Sister Woman, and Renford, and Lamar, and St. Elmo—and could recognize them, and call each by its name, even at night, six feet long some of them, with a million sharp teeth and a naughty grin. Often when he floated past in the boat and watched their playful wheeling, in and out among the cypress knees, he called out to them, “Lamar, we are all alone in the world!” or “Renford, cork is an export product of India!”

The echo of his voice across the wide water of the bayou was like a heartbreaking song, a music of the swamp.

Hydro said, one time, many times, “Do they understand what you tell them?”

Mr. Raney said, each time, “Nobody knows.”

Sometimes they had this exchange, father and son, but not tonight. Tonight the bloody deaths of the boy and girl at the William Tell Grocery occupied their minds, the two of them.

Hydro was quiet, quiet in the front of the boat. He thought it might be a good idea to jump in the water and drown, he was not sure why. He sat in the bow of the little boat like a mermaid carved out of wood in the prow of a sailing vessel, eyes forward and watchful of the sea.

The waters were wide, they stretched far out across the Delta. In some places the deep-water trenches were bottomless, or seemed so; and nearly a hundred years ago, ironclad vessels floated here, warships of the Confederate and Union navies. Men died in the swamp for reasons that must have seemed good at the time, and women waited for them in vain, and children grew up without daddies. People said these deep-water trenches were caused by an earthquake, a long time ago, but nobody knew for sure when, and nobody knew for sure if it was true, it could have been. The scientists from Jackson, maybe they knew.

In the front of the boat, Hydro thought of what it would be like to slip over the side, into the black water, through the looking glass. He imagined that he could breathe there and be happy, swimming among the bluegills, laughing with St. Elmo, his smiling face. He believed he might find the boy and the girl there, beneath the surface, the lovely children, alive again, and that they would love him and speak to him of Texas and tortillas and love and Dinty Moore. They might be happy there, underwater, the three of them together, his head might be a normal size, no longer large, he might be smart, with no atrophy of the brain, they might not call him names. This was the deep water that he imagined, the excellent world on the other side of the mirror of the lake.

At times the surface of the water broke, though, and Hydro saw a little face, wet whiskers shining in the moon-light. Here and there muskrats swam and dived and surfaced, smiling like rich children in the blue water of the Leflore city swimming pool, beneath the diving board, beneath the lifeguard stand where a bronze young man sat with a steel whistle on a lanyard around his neck, above the benches where Hydro had been allowed to sit and watch but never to dress in a swimsuit or to swim, it was so dangerous, his daddy would have worried about him.

In these swampy places, these wide shallows, a man in chest-waders might walk long distances, twenty-five miles, without ever stepping in over his head. Sometimes scientists did do this, walked so far, men from Jackson, looking for an ancient flock of buzzards that lived there, far back in the woods, trying to take their pictures.

Hydro would not look to the back of the boat at his daddy. He did not look right or left, only straight ahead into the dark swamp. He wished his daddy would fall out into the water and drown. He imagined this, hoped for it, so that finally everything would be lost, there would be no more waiting.

He looked above him, for parrots, whatever they were, wild birds, of jungle colors, red heads and curved yellow beaks and long green tails, seen nowhere else in Mississippi, not even on the Gulf of Mexico, that sailed through the skies at morning, and cried out in African-sounding voices. He saw only the moon, only the stars above. There were no parrots tonight, no jungle birds. Were there ever, had he ever really seen parrots, had he ever loved anyone, even his daddy?

In the deepest swamp, where now the boat pushed on, outwards, towards the island, wild monkeys leaped from tree to tree, and rested in the shade and nibbled upon the tender leaves and the beards of Spanish moss. Hydro looked up in the treetops and saw them there, asleep beneath the big moon, little families with daddies and little child-monkeys, and even mamas who loved them. Somebody said these monkeys came from a pair of tame creatures, pets, who escaped from a one-man band, long ago.

Except for the fishcamp on Raney’s Island, there were no houses anywhere nearby. Mr. Roy, once a week, delivered mail, in a flat-bottomed motor launch, and sometimes stayed talking with Mr. Raney too late to be confident he could find his way back to the mainland without getting lost in the dark, or hitting a stob and shearing a pin in the launch’s propeller, and so he spent those nights in the camp, telling old stories until late at night, and ate fried fish for breakfast, with hushpuppies and catsup and Tabasco sauce, and then he motored out across the wide water, towards Arrow Catcher, until he saw the Roebuck bridge and the flagpole down at the post office.

Mr. Roy was handsome enough to go to Hollywood, everybody said so, and it was true. He could easily break into show business, if he decided to. He wore his uniform wherever he went, gray slacks and white shirt with patches, and billed cap, even on Sundays when he went to church, even when he and Mrs. Roy went out to a café, a supper club they called it, and ate and drank bonded whiskey over ice, and sometimes mixed it with a Coke or Seven-Up, on a Saturday night. Mrs. Roy said she could never resist a man in uniform and she didn’t see no reason to start resisting now. This was a joke they shared and they always laughed together, and always, always seemed to be in love.

When Mr. Roy pushed off in the morning, after he had delivered the mail and told the old stories and spent the night, like the story about the snake he thought he killed with a flashlight but it turned out to be his own arm, gone to sleep and he beat it to a bloody pulp, Mr. Raney would be standing on the dock, ready to say goodbye. He might wave to Mr. Roy as the launch pulled out.

Mr. Raney might say, “Bring me out some wanted posters next time. Them with the pitchers on them. My boy likes to look at them ones with the pitchers.”

Hydro would be standing on the dock waving goodbye, too.

Mr. Roy might say, “Hydro, what you need with a wanted poster?”

Hydro said, “I don’t know.”

Mr. Roy said, “You don’t know.”

Mr. Raney said, “He plays a game. He plays like the men in the pitchers are folks he knows. He makes up stories about them. He plays like the women are his mama.”

Mr. Roy said, “Well, ain’t that nice.”

Hydro said, “That ain’t all, though.”

Mr. Roy said, “It ain’t?”

Hydro said, “I might catch me one of them desperate criminals.”

Mr. Roy said, “You might catch you a desperate criminal?”

Hydro said, “I might.”

Mr. Roy said, “What you going to do with a desperate criminal when you catch him?”

Hydro said, “I might turn him in. I might get me a reward. I might get us a new mama.”

Mr. Roy said, “Get you a new mama! Oo la la!”

Mr. Raney said, “Don’t tease the boy, Mr. Roy.”

Mr. Roy said, “Well, wanted posters can be educational, I grant you that. Very educational, sure now. You can learn a-plenty from a wanted poster, sure can. Wanted posters can be as good as school. I always said so. And, well, I don’t know, they might help you meet people, too, interesting people, somebody you might want to, I don’t know, invite home and make her your mama. I’m trying to take you serious, Hydro, but I ain’t altogether sure how you mean that about a new mama.”

Hydro said, “I was just pretending. I was just telling a story. You can go oo la la, if you want to.”

Mr. Roy said, “Well, and it’s a good one, too. A fine story. A reward, a new mama, off a wanted poster. That truly is a good one, Hydro. You had me going there for a minute. You had me fooled. Oo la la.”

Hydro said, “It might be true.”

Mr. Roy said, “Well, that’s a fact, it might be. I ain’t ruling that out neither, I ain’t ruling nothing out. It could be true.”

Mr. Raney said, “Don’t tease the boy.”

Mr. Roy said, “What else can I do, Raney? I’m doing the best I can, talking about wanted posters.”

There was not much other traffic in the deep bayou, not tonight, under the starlight, not ever.

Mr. Raney called out to Hydro over the rattle of the engine: “Look yonder.”

He was pointing at a big tree, with construction materials up in the top of it.

Hydro didn’t look back, didn’t look side to side. He knew what his daddy was pointing to. He always pointed to it. The tree house, what was left of it, a three-story tree house, that still had a dinette set sitting up on the top layer of plywood.

A long time ago, when Hydro was just a baby boy, a family lived there, in that tree house, an elaborate construction of plywood and ropes and pulleys and corrugated metal and trapdoors, away out here in the swamp, only a few miles from the camp. A man and his wife and their three children, white folks, lived in it. His daddy said they did, Hydro guessed it was true, he never did meet none of them.

They fished and they trapped water birds and gathered dock and wild onions and poke salad and parboiled it and ate it and didn’t get diarrhea, they was used to it, not like normal folks like Hydro and his daddy. Wild vegetables would have sent Mr. Raney to the slopjar and kept him there a week, if he just boiled and ate them, right out of the swamp. They poached electricity, the tree house family, from the hot wires that passed through the trees to light Mr. Raney’s place. It was dangerous but they did it, and it worked too, they burned lights, Mr. Raney paid the extra nickels and dimes it cost him on the monthly bill.

On the weekends, Mr. Roy delivered the Sunday newspaper to them, and in the evening the man and his wife, wearing overalls, sat up in the trees in overstuffed chairs, reading Alley Oop and Little Orphan Annie and The Katzenjammer Kids and listening to Amos ’n’ Andy on the radio. One of the children kept a pet, a dog or a cat, nobody remembered which. It was rumored that they ate monkey meat, their long-tailed neighbors who lived nearby, in the trees, which some people thought was cannibal behavior, a scandal they said, a crime and a shame, a long, long time ago, probably not even true, nobody knew for sure, it might just be a story, like so much else in the world.

Hydro one time said, “How do they go doodies?”

Mr. Raney said, “Well, pretty much the same as anybody else, would be my guess.”

Tonight Hydro would have liked to have asked again, but he didn’t intend to give his daddy the satisfaction. He knew they went doodies like everybody else—how did they get it down out of the tree?

They were gone now, the tree people, and only the tree house remained, fragments of it. Nobody knew the whole story. Hydro said he never saw them, he couldn’t remember.

His daddy said, “Sure you can.”

He said, “I don’t.”

Sometimes a game warden motored out, too, once or twice a year. He checked Mr. Raney’s licenses, renewed them when necessary. He brought saltlicks for the deer on the island. He usually stayed a day and a night and brought along a casting rod and a Lucky 13 and got some fishing done.

Once, in an unusual winter, cold as the North Pole, the swamp froze solid, ice as far as you could see, and the game warden drove his Jeep all the way out to the island, across the ice, and let Hydro shoot his pistol. Everybody in Arrow Catcher remembered that day and talked about it for a long time.

Mostly Mr. Raney and Hydro spent their days alone. They didn’t get much company, so far out, like they was. Hydro liked to be sung to, love songs mainly, so they did that, a lot of tunes from the olden days, especially “Let These Red Lips Kiss Your Blues Away,” but also a couple of new songs by Elvis Presley, “Blue Moon over Kentucky” and “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again.”

Hydro said, “How can the moon be blue?”

Mr. Raney said, “Nobody knows.”

Hydro said, “What is Kentucky?”

Mr. Raney said, “Nobody knows that neither.”

Hydro said, “They don’t? Nobody knows what Kentucky is? It’s a state, that’s what I heard.”

Mr. Raney said, “Hush up, if you want me to sing you any more songs.”

Or Mr. Raney told Hydro about the olden days, when he was a boy and there were many families of tree people, and still a few wild Indians who tamed the looseherds, and rode wild ponies without no saddles and carried bows and arrows across their backs, and when all the sidewalks were made of wood, and about the time when wild bison roamed the Delta, even out on Runnymede plantation.

Hydro said, “Daddy, was you a real cowboy?”

Mr. Raney said, “Well—”

Hydro said, “It’s just a story, ain’t it? Just for fun.”

Mr. Raney said, “Well—”

Sometimes Hydro thought he made the stories up; other times, when a small herd of swamp elves clattered out of the cane and disappeared in a flash into the deep bayou, he didn’t know, he thought maybe there were looseherds of wild horses and herds of buffalo, not so long ago, and maybe a wild Indian or two, the stories might be true.

Mr. Raney tried to teach him many things, gentleness for one, and to talk about how it felt to hear people make fun of his big head, and not to be too scared of the fire whistle when it blew, and not to chase cars when they went into Arrow Catcher, and to identify fish, by color and shape and fin and gill, bream and crappie and bass and buffalo and carp and a fish his father called a chinquapin, after the trees they nested near, and to understand tail, and how it made Mr. Raney love Hydro’s mama even more, when she was alive and they once in a while knocked off a piece in the afternoon, just for fun.

Each evening Mr. Raney iced down a cargo of fish, which he pulled up in wide nets from the swamp and threw a heavy tarpaulin over them while they were still flopping, and fired up the little Evinrude and hauled the fish into Arrow Catcher in his boat and sold them for pennies on a low pier alongside the Roebuck bridge and then baled ice water out of the boat with a rusty lard bucket, before setting out across the bayou, on the way back home.

This night, though, the night that Hydro killed the two lovely children after confession at William Tell, shot them square between the eyes like a sharpshooter in a circus sideshow, Hydro and his daddy did not call to the dolphins, did not speak of fish or love or the looseherds or gentleness or Kentucky or the wild buffalo. For the first time in a long time, Mr. Raney just didn’t know what to say. He did not know what to say.

The island came into sight, a light on the pier, and another up in the main house. Mr. Raney cut off the Evinrude and let the boat drift in to the dock. It made a small sound like ka-chunk, wood against wood, when it struck there.

Hydro stood up in the bow and took the length of hemp rope that was tied to a steel ring and looped it around a piling and pulled them in tight and cinched the rope up against the post so the stern could swing around. Water lapped up against the boat and made the sound of waves against wood.

Mr. Raney said, “You go on and get out first.”

So Hydro got out, stepped up on the dock and steadied himself.

Hydro looked back over his shoulder in his daddy’s direction, but he didn’t seem to see his daddy.

Mr. Raney said, “I’m fine, jess fine, no help wanted, thank you, thank you very much.”

Hydro turned away.

Mr. Raney started to climb up out of the boat.

Hydro walked on ahead, towards the house.

His daddy said, “Well, you go on to bed, honey. You’re tired. You just go right ahead on. I’ll finish up down here.”

Hydro kept on walking.

His daddy said, “You go on to bed, son, you’re tired.”

While his daddy was down at the dock, securing the boat for the night, Hydro climbed up the ladder and crawled up through the trapdoor that led into their house. He came out on the upper porch, where he stood for a moment and listened. He heard jungle sounds across the swamp, the gators calling like old cows, a parrot somewhere far off, the final nighttime chatter of a sleepless family of monkeys. Nothing told him the secret that might save him from this pain.

He passed through the kitchen, with the huge old Chambers range, where his daddy baked peach pies and fried fish, and with the two refrigerators, one full of bullet holes. A cypress tree grew up through the kitchen, and the roof was open above him where the great silver-trunked tree spread upwards, out into the summer air, and stretched its limbs and leaves like a canopy above him. During the long hard Delta rains, in April and September, the rain fell into the house and the floor was slick here for a month at a time and had to be mopped each day.

Down below, he heard the paddle and the little anchor make their familiar sounds, as his daddy secured the boat. For the first time in his life, he did not want his daddy to sing him to sleep. He thought of taking the boat out alone, in the dark middle. . .