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'Didn't you say you played with Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys?' I asked.
'What about hit?'
'Did you ever have any connection with jazz or blues musicians?'
'Son, I like you. I really do. But a conversation with you is like trying to teach someone the recipe for ice water.'
'I'm afraid I'm not following you.'
'That's the point. You never do.'
'I'll try to listen carefully, sir, if you can be patient with me.'
'Music's one club. Hit's like belonging to the church. Hit don't matter which room you're in, long as you're in the building. You with me?'
'You know some jazz musicians?'
'I'll have a go at hit from a different angle,' he said. 'I used to record gospel at Sam Phillip's studio in Memphis. You know who else recorded in that same studio? Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Lee Swaggert. You want me to go on?'
'I think Will Buchalter has some kind of involvement with historical jazz or blues. But I don't know what it is.'
The phone was silent.
'Reverend?'
'Why didn't you spit hit out?'
This time I didn't answer. His voice had changed when he spoke again.
'I won't interrupt you or insult you again,' he said.
I recounted the most recent late-night phone call, with Beiderbecke's 'In a Mist' playing in the background; Buchalter's knowledge of early Benny Goodman and the proper way to handle old seventy-eights; the Bunk Johnson record that someone had left playing on my phonograph.
'You impress me, son. You know,' Oswald Flat said.
Again, I was silent.
'An evil man cain't love music,' he said. 'He's interested in hit for some other reason.'
'I think you're right.'
'There's a band plays on Royal Street. I mean, out in the street, when the cops put the barricades up and close off the traffic. They got a piano on a truck, a Chinese kid playing harmonica, some horns, a colored, I mean a black, man on slide guitar. The black man comes to my church sometimes. But he don't live in New Orleans. He's in Morgan City.'
'Yes?'
'If I call and see if he's home, can you meet me there in a couple of hours?'
'I think you'd better clarify yourself.'
'That's all you get. Holler till your face looks like an eggplant.'
&n
bsp; 'This is part of a police investigation, Reverend. You don't write the rules.'
'He's been in the penitentiary. He won't talk to you unless I'm there. You want my he'p or not?'
The black man's name was Jesse Viator, and he lived in a dented green trailer set up on concrete blocks thirty feet from the bayou's edge. He had only three teeth in his mouth, and they protruded from his gums like the hooked teeth in the mouth of a barracuda. We sat on old movie theater seats that he had propped up on railroad ties in his small, tidy backyard. A shrimp boat passed with its lights on, and near the far bank swallows were swooping above an oil barge that had rusted into a flooded shell.
