by Ace Atkins
He took the bottle from her and sat back down. She felt around for a torn cloth chair and sat down too. The floors were wood and coated with a layer of dust as smooth as vanilla icing. "No, ma'am, I'm looking for a friend of mine. Do you remember talking to Dr. Baker?"
"Doctor? Ain't nothin' wrong with me."
"I mean professor. He talked to you about playing in Little Tommy's band."
She paused and cocked a shaky hand to her ear.
"He talked to you about Little Tommy," Nick said, yelling.
She looked at Nick again through inch-thick, black-framed glasses then quickly said, "Shore," she said, yelling back. "I remember Little Tommy. That motherfucka!"
"Yes ma'am. Do you remember talking to a man about Little Tommy recently?"
"He'd shake all around the stage playing his harmonica. Tellin' the band we couldn't keep up with 'im. I wanted to kick his skinny little ass. We all did. When he finally cut a record in Chicago, he jus' left us behind and didn't send us shit. And most of the songs we wrote. If he'd come back to Miss-sippi, he'd be dead."
"Yes ma'am. Has anyone asked you about Little Tommy recently?"
"Yeah, I tole him the same thing. If he sees Little Tommy, tell him Blind Lilah's gonna cut his balls off."
Nick coughed.
"Sorry. You ain't used to an old woman talkin' that way. Is ya?" She cocked her head. "Is ya? Well, I always lived in a man's world and could always outplay, outfight, and outcuss any one of 'em."
"Did you ever hear about a musician--well, I'm guessing he was a musician--that was an albino?"
"A what?"
"An albino. A black man that looked white."
"Now how the fuck am I spose to know what someone look like? Far's I know, you's purple."
"This is true," Nick said as he smiled.
"What?"
"I said, yes, ma'am."
"I tell you the same thing I done tole that other man come to see me las' week. Go see my son. He'll talk to you about blues all day. Hangs out with all the ole ones when he's not workin' cotton. He can tell you this and that about all the sonsabitches in Leflore County. Yeah, my son knows his shit 'bout blues."
"Where can I find him?"
Chapter 9
Mississippi Delta driving is about the white dots of cotton stretched forever flat like the tiny points of an impressionist painting. It's about the crooked crosses of wooden electric poles that edge the two-lane highway lined with farm-supply stores, barbecue joints, squat, cone-topped silos, and windowless, burned-out 1930s gas stations. It's the deep maroon of a rusted tin roof above a weathered clapboard shack and the skeleton of a sun-parched tree, dead rooted in stagnant water. Or fallen cotton caught in highway gravel.
The images were clear--caught in Nick's minds eye like a Technicolor stamp. It was good to be out of New Orleans, he thought, as he hit the beats of a Muddy Waters song on his steering wheel. He felt like a bear who'd just gotten his big ass kicked out of his cave. There wasn't a neon sign or strip joint in sight, not that he had a Baptist conscience toward naked women. Actually, he thought they could be quite therapeutic. But the latest therapy was just a distant memory.
His last girlfriend decided to marry a slick restaurateur with an uptown mansion. Kate Archer, a newspaper reporter for The Picayune, was the most complete woman he'd ever known. Nick spit out the window and grabbed a fresh piece of bubble gum out of the cup holder. When the brain locked too long, it was always best to change the channel.
He needed to focus on Baker's mind-set. The man had to have been thinking about details of Robert Johnson's life. New information would gain Baker instant fame on the lecture circuit, maybe books. Almost every blues history devoted almost an entire chapter to the legend. Nick had read so many he could recite the details like a twisted mantra.
Being in Mississippi, it wasn't hard to imagine Johnson rambling down these same highways. Cutting across railroad tracks and dirt roads with Johnny Shines or Honeyboy Edwards. Thumbing a ride deep into a muggy Mississippi night. Their stomachs grumbling from hunger. Rich mud caked to their shoes.
It had to be exciting to live in what Johnny Shines, a highly eloquent man, later recalled as an "exploratory world." Johnson traveled all over, to places like St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and New York, sometimes deciding to hop a train at a whistle's notice. His trademark was leaving a room without ever saying good-bye. Perhaps because permanence was seldom known by his family. His mother, Julia, was married to a wicker furniture maker in Hazlehurst named Charles Dodds. But a few years before Johnson was born, some prominent landowners ran Dodds out of town. He left Julia, a mistress, and several children behind.
Dodds started a new life in Memphis, where he lived under the name Spencer, and eventually sent for his mistress and some of the kids. Not Julia. Four years passed before she gave birth to Robert in 1911 by a field hand named Noah Johnson.
Julia worked migrant labor camps in the Delta to support the new baby and his sister. Back-breaking work. After a couple of hard years trying to make it on her own, she decided to go back to her husband. But by now Dodds had even more children with another wife and his mistress.
Julia was desperate and left her kids in Memphis anyway.
Nick wasn't sure how Johnson adjusted. But for a young child, about seven, it had to be tough. The mother leaves. New authority figure. And Johnson didn't exactly become the model stepson. After a few years, Dodds sent him back to his mother in Robinsonville.
Johnson didn't listen. Was troublesome.
When he rejoined his mother, she's also remarried to a man they called Dusty because of his dust-flying work ethic. The short, very dark-skinned man probably gave Johnson lessons on how to please the white bosses and become a good worker. For a while, Johnson went to school near the local plantation but dropped out. He blamed a bad eye.
Didn't really matter. Johnson wasn't interested in farming or an education.
He'd already found out how to string baling wire on the side of their house and pick out Leroy Carr's "How Long-How Long Blues." Soon he took up Jew's harp and harmonica and was sneaking out late at night to watch men like Charley Patton.
The blues was edging into his life.
It was a time of late-night jukes, whiskey, and women. Though that all stopped when he met a young girl who took his life into a big U-turn. As hard as it was for Nick to believe, Robert Johnson, the laid-back, arrogantly neat musician, started plowing behind a mule.
He'd married a young girl, all of sixteen, named Virginia Travis and settled down. He was a proud man when she became pregnant, once even getting on his brother-in-law for driving too fast. "Careful man," he'd said. "My wife's percolatin'."
The happiness didn't last, though. Virginia and the child died during labor. People blamed Johnson, because he was into what they thought was devil's music. Rather than fight it, Johnson cloaked himself in the stigma. It shrouded him, and perhaps even made people fear him in a weird way. Johnson wasn't a big man. He was small-boned with delicate hands and wavy hair. And back then, a bad mojo was better than a gun.
The superstitions remained. Mississippi was, in many ways, a time capsule. So much of the sameness that dominated America hadn't dawned on the Delta. Nick loved the region for it. That was the important thing about grabbing all the folklore before the strip malls and franchises leached the color from one of the last cultural frontiers.
Damn, it was important. Nick never fully understood blues until he started his fieldwork. Each time he returned to New Orleans loaded with more interviews and Delta stories, it all made even more sense, like a man who returns from Europe with a broader view of art and culture. There was something simple and Zen about going into the Delta with his Jeep loaded with a box of blank tapes, an old duffel bag, and a carton of cigarettes. There, the songs and lives from textbooks became real.
The blues got the railroad and levee camp workers through a life that was as bad as the serfs in medieval England. They gave roots to an internal rhythm
of the spirit that beat as steady as the human heart. Beyond the pretentiousness of Mozart and jazz, the blues was riding though the bullshit, grabbing the listeners by the balls and saying, "This is what it's all about." It was a baring of the soul that chafed a man's spirit raw, a deceitful woman, being broke, and a painful loneliness of a man living in sensory deprivation, cut off from sound and human contact.
That was what Johnson surely felt when he sang "Cross Road Blues."
Standin' at the crossroad, baby
risin' sun goin' down
Standin' at the crossroad, baby
risin' sun goin' down
I believe to my soul, now,
po' Bob is sinkin' down
No one was there for Johnson. Right there in that X of dirt roads waiting for something, anything, to happen. Nick could imagine a deep orange ball of sun sinking below the cotton and darkness sweeping over the Delta. Nick believed the crossroad was a destination for Johnson, who perhaps reached the best he thought he could ever be. He'd practiced until his fingers bled and gained admiration from his mentors.
Once you've reached the final crossroad, where do you go?
Maybe Johnson couldn't see beyond those clapboard shacks. In his world, there was nowhere else allowed. That reaching of the destination was a universal human dilemma.
Nick had sweated his ass off to become a professional athlete. He'd studied until his mind throbbed, and now what else was there? Were there no more goals? Nothing more to obtain? The stagnant feeling sat in his stomach like a jagged stone.
?
Darnell Rose's dusty Oldsmobile was parked next to a mound of rich upchurned soil that looked like a spilled chocolate ice cream scoop. Nick parked next to the car and waved to the form on a John Deere tractor as it plowed under a row of harvested cotton. After a few minutes, a sinewy black man asked what he wanted, above the sound of a chugging motor.
"Just need a second of your time," Nick said, shouting.
Darnell squinted at Nick from under a tightly scrunched baseball hat, turned off the motor, and hopped down onto the soil. He wore a faded flannel shirt cut off at the sleeves, showing biceps corded like hemp rope. He was tall with a lean frame and a gaunt face.
"My name's Travers. Your mother told me I could find you out here."
"My momma? What fer?"
"I'm looking for Michael Baker. You know him?"
He squinted at Nick again. Nick smiled and slacked his shoulders, so he wouldn't give the impression of being too aggressive. "I work with him in New Orleans."
"Yeah. He come to talk to me 'bout some blues players round here. Paid me hunnard dollars to give 'im a tour. Just was with 'im a few days and he left."
"You know he's missing?"
"Deputy Brown axed me when I seen 'im las," Darnell said. "But that's all I know. What chu lookin' for 'im for? Did he do somethin' wrong?"
"He's an arrogant bastard, but legally he's probably okay."
Darnell laughed, an obvious casualty of Baker's charm.
"Where'd you take him?" Nick asked.
"Jus' to some jukes. He was real interested in the ole-timers. Wrote down almost every word they said. Yeah, the man was doin' research for a project."
Darnell's mouth curved and he stared with vacant light in his eyes, like he wished Nick would get in his Jeep and leave him alone. He was lying.
"If I paid you, would you take me where you took him, so I can talk to the same people?"
"Sure, but it ain't gonna be till this weekend," Darnell said, tucking leather work gloves into his back pocket.
"I can double what he paid," Nick said.
"I appreciate that. But ain't nothin' open 'cept the Purple Heart tonight. We only went there once."
Across the highway, clapboard shacks intermingled with trailer homes. Faded wash hung on lines like old flags, not moving in the breezeless air.
"Did he ever say anything to you about an old, albino man?"
Darnell nodded.
"What?" Nick asked.
Darnell toed the loam with his work boot.
Nick reached into his wallet and handed him a fifty.
"Thought you said a hunnard?"
Nick sighed and handed him another fifty.
"Yeah, I took the professor to see the ole man. He's a crazy ole son of a bitch. Says a lot of weird things when he talks which ain't that much 'cause he don't like people. In fact, I don't even known his name. Everyone jes' call him Cracker."
Chapter 10
Nick drove back to the motel and slept for an hour. He'd tried to squeeze Darnell a little, get him to hint where Cracker lived, but it didn't work. He just kept on saying, "Talk to Deputy Brown." Yeah, right. The local cops would enjoy Nick's presence about as much as a mangy dog at a cocktail party. But Darnell did promise to take him to see Cracker tomorrow--said it took awhile to get back into the woods to the albino's shack. The old man was apparently a little Robinson Crusoe and a lot of Kurtz.
After Nick woke up, he showered and stretched. His legs ached from the long drive and the morning jog. Too much drinking and smoking had made him soft. He needed to limber up joints still damaged from years of football and numerous fights. Jesus, his joints felt like rusted hinges on an antique puppet. In his thirties with a sixty-year-old's body. He looked in the bathroom mirror at his mildewed reflection. His dark hair was going gray on the sides and down on his chin, where he hadn't shaved for the last few days. A recent girlfriend had told him that he was starting to resemble a pleasant old dog, meaning it as a compliment. .
His long fingers, slightly crooked from so many breaks, turned on the water. He had a sliver of scar tissue cut through his left eyebrow and thick lateral scars on both shoulders from a probing scope. He remembered how his shoulders felt during Saints training camp. Sometimes they ached so badly from the cracked cartilage he couldn't even raise a squirt bottle to his mouth. The trainers would shock them with electricity, rub them with heat creams, and wrap them in an Ace bandage almost every practice and game.
Just thinking of the pain made him grit his teeth. A lot of friends thought it took a lot of character to leave football the way he did. But he didn't walk away from a very bright future. His shoulders were pumped so full of cortisone that he couldn't feel his upper body.
The reason he knocked the coach down was simple: it just felt right. Nick's specialty was pass rushing. He was pretty good at it. He wasn't the biggest defensive lineman, but he was quick and could anticipate the snap and be in the backfield before the quarterback raised his arm. He could see the ball out of the corner of his eye and sense the count in a Zen-like way.
However, starting his third season, his coach had little use for him. Even on passing downs, Nick sat there on the sidelines and watched this pile-of-crap rookie get pummeled yards off the ball. The rookie was a lazy shit-bag, but to the coaches he was a big investment--someone they must develop. Screw that, Nick thought. You play who could get the freakin' job done. But game after game, he had to endure this pudgy dude's less-than-inspired play. The coaches kept on coddling the man for the future.
The only future the rookie worried about was thinking about new ways to fuck his stripper girlfriend and hold homemade porno movie parties for his friends.
That year was the toilet. Nick's move on the coach wasn't planned. In fact, he played a great deal of the third quarter that night, racking up two sacks while the rookie complained of some dirt in his eye. When the coach sent the bastard back in, Nick snapped. He tried to calm down, get some water, and look ahead, but the Superdome was a muffled blur around him. He could feel the heat in his face and the blood rushing in his ears as he drank a cup of water.
The coach, a freckle-faced, racist black man who thought the past-tense of the word "squeeze" was "squez," walked over and said, "Sit the fuck down, Travers. We got what we need from you."
Before Nick knew what he was doing, he gripped the man's neck with his sweat-soaked glove, hooked a foot behind the coach, and slammed him to the gr
ound. He took the ice-cold Gatorade bucket and dumped it on the man's head.
Nick didn't say a word. No catchy line. No ranting diatribe. Just ripped the tape off his wrists with his teeth and retreated to the dressing room. He got dressed, took a cab ride to JoJo's, where they all hated Nick's coach, and got loaded with a bunch of dockworkers who liked what he'd done to the bossman.
Nick snapped back from the memory and shut off the running water. Steam had obscured the mirror.
The window air conditioner hummed and groaned. Nick could hear the pat of water hitting the old carpet. He changed into a fresh chambray shirt and a pair of jeans. He slid on his boots and checked inside, where he stored his Tom Mix boot knife.
At the front desk, he asked where he could find a juke joint called the Purple Heart.
Chapter 11
The Purple Heart hummed with hard-driving music as Nick parked his Jeep between a pickup truck and a portable sign reading, Tonite Virginia Dare. Cold Beer. Shake your ass. The juke was a simple cinder-block building painted purple near a crossroad of Highway 49. Orange and yellow cardboard posters advertising the weekend's music wrapped nearby crooked telephone poles. His cowboy boots crunched on the ground all the way to a dented metal door with a sign above announcing, Where there is dancing, there is hope.
Inside, dozens of black faces didn't give him a glance. No mean stares in the smoky room. No phonograph skidding off the record. No switchblades flicking. Just a Little Walter song coming from the jukebox and a mass of folks dancing on a smooth concrete floor. Maybe there was hope after all.