The Hanged Man's Song

who did the blackface.”
    “That’s what I say,” said Marvel.
    John, the radical, said, “He was a college kid when he did it and it was a joke. And he doesn’t have anything to do with race. He had to do with missiles. There are a thousand guys we’d be better off without, before him.”
    “So you get who you can,” Marvel said.
    “Fuckin’ commie,” John said, shaking his head. “It’s not right and it’s not fair and we’ve got to start worrying about that.”
    “You’re getting old and conservative,” Marvel said. “Your hair is gonna turn white and woolly and you’ll go on one of those religious shows and start talking about Jesus.”
    “Not fair,” John said. He did sound a little like a preacher; and he had a point.
    >>> WHILE LuEllen and Marvel went off and caught up with each other, I showed John the FBI files on Thomas Baird, Bobby’s caretaker. John read them carefully, then made calls to two different people in Jackson. One of them knew Baird—knew who he was, anyway—but didn’t know anything of substance. He volunteered to ask around, but John declined the offer.
    “I think we should go down and see him,” John said. “Tonight. Right now.” He looked at his watch. “If we go now, he’ll probably still be awake when we get there.”
    >>> THERE was more talk, and I took the time to do a few laps of the town park. At seven o’clock, we stopped at the E-Z Way for cheap premium gas and headed for Jackson, leaving LuEllen and Marvel with the kids. We talked about Bobby a bit, then about a sculpture series that John was working on.
    John said that he had talked to a local woman, a quilter, about learning to quilt. “There’s something I can’t quite get with sculpture,” he said. “I need something that’s more . . . narrative, I guess. If I did it in 3-D, I’d need a sculpture garden.”
    “So why don’t you learn to paint? Once you can see what you want to do, the techniques aren’t that hard.”
    “Bullshit. I know about techniques, I’ve watched yours change. How long did it take before you got control? I remember that piece you did, that Sturgeon Rip Number 1. You couldn’t of done that when I first knew you.”
    We talk like that, can’t help ourselves. We’d get intent on our work, and start laughing and chattering along, and then the whole Bobby topic would come up, and we’d go all glum again. Even with that, the time went quickly. Before we’d finished talking about the art stuff, we were nosing into Jackson. One good thing: we were under a cloud deck, but we hadn’t caught up with the rain.
    >>> THOMAS BAIRD lived in the left half of a duplex that might have been built as part of a low-income housing project: low-rent modern design, crappy materials, a lot of bright contrastingpainted-plywood panels. Sidewalks already beginning to crumble. A light showed in the front-room window, and John said, “I’ll go. I’ll wave you in.”
    We didn’t argue about it: the neighborhood was black and so was John. As he was getting out of the car, I said, “Don’t touch anything with your fingertips. If you do, wipe it.”
    I went around the block. When I came by the first time, he ignored me: he was talking to somebody behind a door. When I came by the second time, he was standing on the porch, and he waved me into a puddle that marked a parking strip.
    >>> ON THE porch, John said, “He’s got our names.”
    “What?”
    “I told him my name was John and he asked me if I knew a Mr. Kidd.”
    “Oh, Jesus.” I put my hands to my forehead: this was not good. An outsider knew who we were. What else did he know?
    “Come on in,” John said. He pulled open the door and we stepped inside, John in the lead. A black guy, probably forty years old, was standing in the middle of a small, tidy living room. There was no television, but there were a dozen or so old-fashioned mahogany-cased radios, RCAs and Motorolas and other names I didn’t recognize, that must have come from the thirties and forties. They were all polished and neatly kept, and one showed glowing lights behind a wide glass face. Radios with tubes, for Christ’s sake. The place smelled of furniture polish.
    John was saying, “Mr. Baird, this is Kidd.”
    Baird looked at me doubtfully, then said to John, “He’s a white man.”
    John looked at me carefully. “No shit? I just thought he was passing.”
    Baird looked at me for a moment—my hair’s not quite blond—and then laughed,