The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard
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on top of the color TV—no matter what it was, them sumbiches up in Chicago, at The Resurrection Insurance Group, told him wuddn none of it covered cause it was all a act’a God. And, Lofty, that dumb-ass old Jesus-bit sumbich, just shuffled his feet and said, “Yassuh.”
But the most Loftiest thing of all was what I learned from Mr. Reitoff the CPA down at Spaniard’s Point. Lofty got in trouble with the government for cheatin’ on his taxes. Mr. Reitoff had to come up to the courthouse with Lofty and talk to some serious looking muthafukkas from the IRS, and they spent a long-ass time in the big room the Board of Supervisors uses when they meet.
I don’t suppose Mr. Reitoff woulda told personal stuff about Lofty to just anybody. But me, bein’ a’ officer of the law and all—for some reason people just seem to tell me whatever’s in their heads—I guess Mr. Reitoff felt like it was okay to say sumpn. He was maddern a wet cat too when he said it. Anyway, he died some years ago.
Plus, too, like Jesus, he was a Jew. However, I have to tell you, with all these preachers and people around here that are waitn for old Jesus’s Second Comin’, I guaran-damn-tee you a whole helluva lot of em would rather look up in the sky and see Mr. Reitoff floatin’ down to save em.
Anyhow, we was outside the City Barber Shop, and he said, “Junior Ray, I told Lofty not to do what he did, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t go right straight out and do it, and I had already done up his taxes and had signed my name on the form!”
“Well,” I said, “whatever it was, he sho made you mad.” I really wanted to say, “What’d the old fuk-bump do?” But I figured Mr. Reitoff was just about to come out with it anyway. And he did.
“Junior Ray,” he said, “I’ll swear and be damned if I’ve ever had to deal with anything like this in all my professional life! It was a case of double fraud, pure and simple, and because of the position he put me in, I’ll never know why I even tried to help him after he was caught.” Mr. Reitoff went on to say that Lofty tried to “deduct” what he’d been spendin’ up there in Meffis on those old whores at the King Cotton Hotel fore they tore it down and, after that, in the Out-n-Inn Minit Motel over on Brooks Road. Old Lofty wrote it all in under “Medical Expenses” and said it was for his “mental health.” Hell, it’s a wonder the old sumbich didn’t catch hissef some germs big as a gotdam lizard.
It was easy to see Mr. Reitoff’s point’a view and why he was upset. Yet, I could see Lofty’s side of it, too. The thing is, knowin’ the world as I do, it ought not to surprise no one that there’s whores walkin’ up and down Brooks Road or anyplace else, but it sho oughta surprise a sumbich, if he got a good look at em, that anybody would ever go buy anything from em. Anyhow, as much of a dikhed as I always thought Lofty was, I felt sorry for the po’ bastard, cause there he was livin’ all alone and all and gettin’ old, and pretendin’ to be sucha upstandin’ muthafukka. It had to be hard on him.
He was lucky, though, that Mr. Reitoff talked to the I-R-S’s. They let Lofty off with a warnin’ that if he ever tried anything like that again, they was gon’ see that he went down to the federal pen at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, and I think that scared the shit out of him, especially the part about goin’ to Alabama, which is funny because all his life he’d been worried about goin’ to Hell.
His peabrain grandson went to college down at Wetland State outside of Rollin’ Fork and near bout got th’owed out cause they caught him drunk one night on the new football field tryin’ to mow the astro-turf.
Things go where they go, and it don’t never stop, does it?
I ran into Lofty a while back. I’da thought the sumbich’d been dead by now. He’s got to be up in his nineties, or over a hunnuhd, hell, I don’t know. Anyway, when I come up on him, I said, “How yew, Lofty?”
He didn’t blink or mumble a fukkin word, and he didn’t look at me, neither. But when I passed him and he was about a foot behind me, I heard him say: “My stool is firm again.”
And I thought, damn, for ol’ Lofty, dead’d be a step up.
[1] An artificial ox-bow in the river created by the U.S. Corps of Engineers in 1942, with TNT.
[2] Choctaw/Chickasaw: yuka (slave) + loosa (black) = Black Slave Brake.
[3] FDR’s Rural Electrification Authority, which finally brought electricity to the Delta in 1935.
[4] field lark
[5] bayou, bayous.
The Yellow Dog — Moon Lake — Sno-Cone — The Yazoo Pass Expedition — A Historian Is Born
I know you might think I’m lyin’, but I ain’t never been to no univers’ty or nothin’, yet I know one gotdam thing: Them tootie-frootie professors over at Ole Miss ain’t never seen a sumbich runnin’ around at night with a snake up his ass.
On the other hand, to give credit where credit is due, there is a chance some nem five-star Four-AitcH’ers down at Cow College in Starkville has. That’s because anything havin’ to do with farmin’ or with nature in general—and of course arithmetic—I’ll bet you those muthafukkas have seen it, or, if they ain’t, they sure as hell know about it. They are way more progressive, I guess you’d call it, than them hoddy-toddies over at Oxford. I’ll put my money on the Bulldogs[1] any day.
But you know how women are, over in Sledge or anywhere else. They think they know you, and they don’t know the gotdam half of it . . . and wouldn believe it if they did. I guess if a man growed up thinkin’ about brassieres and purses, he wouldn know much neither.
If you ask me, the only time a man and a woman are anywhere near in the same world is when they’re connected you know how. Their heads are probably still in two separate places, but their bellies ain’t. Hell, a whang is a whang, and a snatch is a snatch, and there ain’t no way you can dress em up to look like little philosophers.
Anyhow, Sledge is one nem little fallin’-down, broke-dick Delta towns over there along the Yellow Dog.[2] And ever’ time I go over there, I think about three things. One has something to do with the nature of all them little towns along the Dog; another is how there used to be more woods and now there ain’t hardly none; and the third thing I think about is the Coldwater River and the Yazoo Pass.
I guess I knew about what every other sumbich down there in the Delta knew about the Yazoo Pass and the Yankees: namely, not fukkin much, at least not till some years ago, when Voyd and me was down by Uncle Hinroo’s—which iddn what it used to be, which was a tonk, but now it’s a place where you can take your mama or where you’d go eat supper if you couldn get in Katherine’s—down on Moon Lake, and that ain’t got nothin’ to do with Mhoon County, because it’s a whole nother fukkin word entirely. Plus, Moon Lake ain’t even in Mhoon County. It’s south of Lula, in Coahoma County.
Course they say, back in the twenties, before my time, Uncle Hinroo’s was the Moon Lake Casino, and then it was the old Elks’ Club or vise-a-fukkin-versa, but in my day it was just a juke joint, and that was that. If you went there, you was real lucky if “Sno-Cone” Cohee didn’t beat your ass—for the same reason some other world-famous sumbich said he climbed a gotdam mountain: cause the sumbich was there.
But all that’s in the past, and Sno-Cone is