Down These Strange Streets by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois Page A

to time, us sipping.
    I said, “You sure you can’t just walk away?”
    I was avoiding the real question for some reason. Like, what in hell is that thing, and what is going on? Maybe I was afraid of the answer.
    “You saw that thing. I can walk away, all right. And I can run. But wherever I go, it’ll find me. So, at some point, I got to face it. Sometimes I make that same record sound with my guitar, give the record a rest. Thing I fear most is the record wearing out.”
    I gestured at the notebooks on the floor. “What is all that?”
    “My notes. My writings. I come here to write some lyrics, some new blues songs.”
    “Those aren’t lyrics, those are notes.”
    “I know,” he said.
    “You don’t have a music education. You just play.”
    “Because of the record, I can read music, and I can write things that don’t make any sense to me unless it’s when I’m writing them, when I’m listening to that music. All those marks, they are musical notes, and the other marks are other kinds of notes, notes for sounds that I couldn’t make until a few days back. I didn’t even know those sounds were possible. But now, my head is full of the sounds and those marks and all manner of things, and the only way I can rest is to write them down. I wrote on the wall ’cause I thought the marks, the notes themselves, might hold that thing back and I could run. Didn’t work.”
    “None of this makes any sense to me,” I said.
    “All right,” Tootie said. “This is the best I can explain something that’s got no explanation. I had some blues boys tell me they once come to this place on the south side called Cross Road Records. It’s a little record shop where the streets cross. It’s got all manner of things in it, and it’s got this big colored guy with a big white smile and bloodshot eyes that works the joint. They said they’d seen the place, poked their heads in, and even heard Robert Johnson’s sounds coming from a player on the counter. There was a big man sitting behind the counter, and he waved them in, but the place didn’t seem right, they said, so they didn’t go in.
    “But, you know me. That sounded like just the place I wanted to go. So, I went. It’s where South Street crosses a street called Way South.
    “I go in there, and I’m the only one in the store. There’s records everywhere, in boxes, lying on tables. Some got labels, some don’t. I’m looking, trying to figure out how you told about anything, and this big fella with the smile comes over to me and starts to talk. He had breath like an unwiped butt, and his face didn’t seem so much like black skin as it did black rock.
    “He said, ‘I know what you’re looking for.’ He reached in a box and pulled out a record didn’t have no label on it. Thing was, that whole box didn’t have labels. I think he’s just messing with me, trying to make a sale. I’m ready to go, ’cause he’s starting to make my skin crawl. Way he moves ain’t natural, you know. It’s like he’s got something wrong with his feet, but he’s still able to move, and quick-like. Like he does it between the times you blink your eyes.
    “He goes over and puts that record on a player, and it starts up, and it was Robert Johnson. I swear, it was him. Wasn’t no one could play like him. It was him. And here’s the thing. It wasn’t a song I’d ever heard by him. And I thought I’d heard all the music he’d put on wax.”
    Tootie sipped at his coffee. He looked at the wall a moment, and then changed the player again.
    I said, “Swap out spots, and I’ll change it. You sip and talk. Tell me all of it.”
    We did that, and Tootie continued.
    “Well, one thing comes to another, and he starts talking me up good, and I finally I ask him how much for the record. He looks at me, and he says, ‘For you, all you got to give me is a little blue soul. And when you come back, you got to buy something with a bit more of it till it’s all gone and I got