Crossroad Blues (The Nick Travers Novels)

by Ace Atkins

  "You mean Elvis?"

  "Yeah, Elvis. An ex-New Orleans Saint got outrun by a dead man."

  "Aha. You've been checking my background," Nick said, stretching his arm on a bench behind him.

  "Been real slow downtown. It was that or clip my toenails."

  "I'm flattered."

  An old Johnnie Taylor song pumped from the speakers, and no one spoke until a little black woman clacked in wearing a soiled apron and asked what they wanted. Brown ordered a vegetable plate and Nick got the fried chicken. It took some prompting for Cracker to ask for two pecan pies and a Coke.

  Except for them, the restaurant was empty. The front and back doors were open and a warm late-summer breeze washed over Nick's face. He could feel the sweat dry on his T-shirt. Late lazy Mississippi afternoon. A kind of comfortable silence passing over them. The greens weren't salty or soggy, and the cornbread was so thick that Nick drank three glasses of tea.

  "I-I cain't go home?" Cracker asked.

  "No, sir, but you gonna have it good," Brown said. "Nice motel room and some more good food like this."

  Cracker looked over at Nick as he spooned the pecan pie into his mouth until the brown muck ran down his chin.

  "That man Baker. The one that took your records?" Nick asked. "What'd he want to know?"

  Brown eyed Nick as he took a sip of tea.

  "He wanted to know all 'bout R.L.," Cracker said. "W-What the man like to eat, w-would he let people see his fingers when he recordin', did he eva play with a big fancy band."

  The questions were good ones. Johnson was known to be really paranoid about someone ripping off his style. Some have said he would turn his back if another musician was watching his finger movements too closely. And some have hinted Johnson played with a complete band when he visited New York City.

  Cracker frowned and his hands shook around the shiny metal fork.

  "And you didn't like that, all those questions?" Nick asked, trying to make eye contact, to see how the man responded. Watch his breathing to see if he was lying. Nick believed people who held their breath had something to hide.

  "People use that man up,' Cracker said, breathing real even. "S-Still usin' him."

  "I don't understand," Nick said.

  Cracker laughed and looked down at his empty plate. Through the crudely painted letters on the window, Nick stared at thick, coal-black clouds covering the sun.

  "I need to borrow your records," Nick said. He smiled, trying to calm the old man, make him know everything was all right. He'd make him understand that he wasn't going to take off like Baker and swipe the last of his collection. "If Robert Johnson did make these before he died, how come the record man you worked for never sold them? Could have made a lot of money."

  Cracker started rocking back and forth like a child and snorted his breath in and out of his nose. His lips worked over time around his gums. And when he put his hands to his face, the pie plate clattered to the floor, shattering into hard-edged chunks.

  "Cool it, Travers," Brown said. "I'll see what I can do about the records."

  "I need to hear what's on them. Could be songs no one knows about. Johnson never recorded in thirty-eight. His last session was fourteen months before he died."

  "Like I said, I'll see what I can do. Just stay the night. Besides, it's gonna become a shitstorm out there in a few minutes."

  The waitress walked out from the kitchen and saw the pie plate shattered on the floor. She looked at Cracker the way Nick had seen some people observe the baboons in the Audubon Zoo, and picked up the pieces.

  "So Baker ripped off Cracker and took off for Montego Bay. That's your theory?" Nick asked.

  "You got a better one?" Brown said.

  "Good reason."

  "Real valuable, huh?"

  "More than you know," Nick said. "Unreleased Johnson tracks would be priceless. Really, something too good to be true. I mean, it'd be like finding out Mozart had a few more symphonies stashed away. But it's impossible another recording session wasn't discovered in sixty years. Someone would've known; a producer, another musician. There was one story a teacher of mine heard from a guy in Memphis years ago, about some Johnson demos destroyed in a pool room fight."

  Brown looked at him from over the top of his tea glass.

  "It's nothing," Nick said. "Crazy professor in Oxford. He told us the story to demonstrate the unreliability of some sources."

  "What?"

  "He said the man called them the 'lost nine.' Said Johnson went back to Texas before he died and laid down some more songs. It was bullshit. Something we would all like to believe. A Lost Ark for researchers."

  Nick looked over at Cracker, who eyed him with a mean tenacity. His fierce eyes bore into Nick like he wanted to leap on him. Beat the crap out of a pushy white boy.

  "You all messin' with some powerful shit. Things need not be talked about," Cracker said, rocking away. "Big Earl wouldn't want it. No, sir. Big Earl wouldn't have it."

  "Who's he talkin' about?" Nick asked.

  "Big Earl Snooks," Brown said. "Slide guitar player, doesn't live around here anymore. I'm sure he's dead. Used to be a friend of Cracker's."

  "You guys want me to stay with you tonight?" Nick asked. "Help keep watch?"

  "Naw, another deputy is gonna trade with me after midnight. Besides, I crap bigger than Elvis Presley."

  Chapter 20

  Five hours later, Sweet Boy Floyd parked his truck behind a burned-out gas station on Highway 82, just a ways down from the Dixie Motel. The three of them had spent the day feeding off beef jerky, Yoo-Hoos, and Moon Pies. A pile of Mountain Dew cans and coffee cups littered the truck's floor as rain splattered the cab like an impatient man's fingers. A few minutes before, they'd seen the white dude peel off in his Jeep and the glow of red taillights disappear down the highway. Jesse knew it was time, and he was ready for it, as Floyd handed out three pairs of surgical gloves.

  "Awright, you two boys follow me, and when I say hit it, you hit that sweet spot like a black man and take no prisoners," Floyd said, with his eyes wide and his nostrils flared.

  Sweet, maybe this nigra wasn't bad after all. He liked this dude's attitude. Take no prisoners, hit and run. TCB. Just like the life lessons E learned in the army. Shit, he could do this. This was what Jesse Garon was all about. A damned real professional hit. No more bullshit killings of thirteen-year-old crack dealers for twenty bucks in Memphis.

  This was live and in concert. Damned '68 Comeback Special.

  "I got two fresh Glocks here," Floyd said. "Party favors for each of you young mens. All you got to do is hit that shit when I open the door and we gonna be just fine."

  As Floyd talked, his head bobbed and weaved like a spring-headed toy, kinda like it would pop off any minute.

  "How you gonna get 'em to open up, Sweet Boy?" Keith asked. "Hell, they ain't gonna fall for no room-service or maid-knockin'-on-the-door stuff. The sheriff's department will be on our ass before we get out the door."

  Floyd reached under his seat and pulled out a heavy, burnished crowbar. "I don't fuck with knockin'. I'll crack that bitch open in two seconds. And y'all best be ready."

  ?

  Cracker had never seen television. Heard of it. Had even seen the muted light patterns it made as it shone in the trailer homes around his woods. Always thought you needed one of them big satellite dishes to bring pictures in. But there it was: voices, faces, beautiful women who wore next to nothing, flouncing around.

  "What k-kind business is this?" Cracker asked. "It ain't right."

  "You want me to change the station?" Brown asked.

  "No. Dat's awright. Dey shore is pretty."

  "Cracker, you ever have a woman?"

  He smiled. Not many folks he would talk to, but Willie Brown was a good man. Willie was his friend. "There was a young girl I met when w-we was in Austin."

  "How many years ago?"

  "Nineteen hundred and thirty six. I do believe."

  All the flashing color
s were making Cracker a little sick. It was like his head was bein' crammed full of stuff he didn't need. He stood up and walked over to the bathroom, ran the water, and put one foot on the commode. He grabbed a hand towel to run under the cool water.

  The towel felt nice on his face. Yeah, made him feel calm. He coughed up a little phlegm and spit into the sink.

  Out the little cracked window he could see the yellow glow of a streetlamp shine on a field of kudzu. The weeds grew over a rusted car, vines twisted in and out of the broken windows. The streetlamp, the kudzu, and the rusted old car somehow made sense to Cracker, like that's the way it should be. Familiar.

  ?

  Bless a my soul. What's wrong with me. I'm itchin' like a man on a fuzzy tree. Jesse's breathing was comin' too quick, he thought. Right in through the nose and out through the mouth like his tae kwon do teacher taught him. Yeah, slow it down. Big daddy was gonna get it tonight. Make a fool of me once. Never twice.

  "You two boys ready?" Floyd asked as they gathered in the motel's parking lot.

  Keith and Jesse both nodded as rain filled their eyes.

  "Remember, like a black man. Ain't no time for no limp-dick muthafuckas."

  E wouldn't like all this bad language. He'd talk to Sweet Boy later. Jesse gripped the gun and followed to the motel's edge, where fat bugs played in dirty yellow lights.

  ?

  Cracker had his hand on the bathroom door when he heard the outside door splinter. Then there were two pops like fatback in a fryin' pan. Willie Brown yelled his name and then there were a couple more loud cracks.

  He moved his hand away from the knob and looked up at the narrow window. Just might could get out. He moved his toe onto the narrow edge of the bathtub, gripped the towel rack, and pulled his head up through the window.

  Cracker flipped out the opening and landed on his back. All the wind crushed out of him, and his eyes watered. He had to get out of here, couldn't trust nobody. Should've never come out of the woods. Should've just stayed there. He rolled to his stomach, got up, and hopped into the wet weeds--only place he could trust. Only good friend he had. The green could cover him like a warm blanket. Give him everything he ever needed.

  Another loud splinter came from the bathroom, and then the muffled voices of two men. He limped faster to the kudzu-covered car. Without another thought, he dove into the rich green leaves and crawled under the rusted belly. He tried to breathe real light. Just be the woods, feel the green. Come light, he'd go back to his home. Forget the blues. Forget the past. And keep away from anything about R.L. ever again.

  ?

  Floyd walked into the bathroom and came out cussin'.

  "I'll be a muthafuckin' monkey ass," Floyd said. "Ole man jumped out the window. Damn fool dove into some kudzu, like he's bein' sneaky or some shit. Knock that fool right in the head."

  "You get 'im," Jesse said. "Cain't you see my friend ain't right?"

  Floyd picked up a wooden crate and hoisted it into his big arms. He didn't even say a word about Keith, who was spitting blood onto the room's shag carpet. Shot once in the throat and once more in the stomach.

  "I'll get the ole man," Floyd said as he walked right past Jesse. He was almost out the door before he turned around. "You done good, boy. You shot that man before he could shoot me."

  Jesse looked at the twisted, bloody sheets wrapped around the nigra cop. Shot right in the head and in the heart. It was nice work. Momma would be proud.

  "Appreciate that," Jesse said, his ears ringing.

  Keith coughed up blood and wrapped his arms around Jesse's foot. Jesse looked down at his friend and began to cry, then looked back to Floyd.

  "He ain't gonna make it," Floyd said. "And I don't care for prison myself. Make me feel a little tight."

  Gut shot. That was the worst, or that's what the old Westerns said. Jesse knew what he had to do. He bent down, kissed his friend's head, and pressed the gun against Keith's temple. "See you on the flip side, brother."

  Chapter 21

  A little past midnight, Nick drove through an apparition-like fog. He and Virginia had decided to cut across Mississippi highways late that night on a simple premise from a drunken conversation. They were at Lusco's, where they drained twelve beers and ate two orders of chicken and two bowls of gumbo. As they dined inside the former 1930s grocery store, the conversation grew serious. Maybe it had something to do with the gravestone maker next door, the stamped tin ceiling, the weather, or the intimacy of the individual room partitioned with a shower curtain.

  Whatever the reason, he blurted out the inspiration for his thesis on the "The Two Sonny Boys: An Examination of Authenticity." He told her about this mural on the back of an abandoned building in Tutwiler. That there was a rendering of Sonny Boy, aka Rice Miller, rising from the grave near the spot where W.C. Handy waited for a train late one night and heard a blues called "Goin' Where the Southern Cross the Dog."

  Nick wasn't trying to be cool or play the wise professor or any of that horseshit. It'd had just come up naturally. He told her one night he'd driven from Oxford to see the place and was sitting there in that dead little town, when the blues began to make sense. He could almost feel the early part of the century in a nowhere Mississippi town. Something clicked.

  It wasn't just the oppression. As a white man born in the sixties, there was no feasible way to understand that. It was the loneliness and the isolation in the center of the fertile region. Virginia held a finger to his lips and simply said, "I want to go. Now."

  The rain stopped about thirty miles outside Greenwood as if they'd peeked out of a huge, wet curtain. She was reclined like a contented cat as the wind whipped red hair across her face. A Patsy Cline song played on a scratchy AM radio station. Filled with music and alcohol, Virginia sang along.

  "You know I love that woman. I could listen to 'Walkin' After Midnight' over and over," she said. "Never get tired of it. I just feel the mood. I know what she was sayin'. Too beautiful. Too beautiful."

  Nick smiled. It felt good to be with a woman again. Sometimes being lonely for so long made you think you didn't need anything, like a person who denies himself guilty pleasures.

  "We're almost there," he said.

  They passed a long row of one-story, brick storefronts, all deserted with boarded-up doors and broken windows. The buildings seemed too small, as if they were modeled slightly less than life scale. But it didn't matter now. There was no life. Tutwiler was almost a real ghost town.

  "This is it?" she asked, nodding toward the railroad tracks. "Doesn't look like anyone has been here since Handy."

  Nick shifted into neutral, put his foot on the brake, and shut off the engine. "Sonny Boy came back. Ran his life in a complete circle. From Tutwiler, then all over the world, then back to Tutwiler."

  She combed the hair from her eyes and scooted herself up in the seat.

  "This is where it all began," Nick said. "The home of the blues. Over there is where Handy first heard a field hand playin' slide. He was just waitin' for a train and heard this weird music. Now, it really started God knows where, maybe Dockery Farms, but this is where a man really took a good listen. Wrote the lyrics and structure down. And right there, you see those murals?"

  He punched on his high beams to hit the back of the deserted storefronts. Painted on the brick walls were five colored murals. "That one right there is the one I told you about. Sonny Boy Williamson rising from the grave."

  It was a dark mural of the famous harp player halfway out of the ground. A Second Coming-type image. Nick remembered Wade Walton--another famous harp player, now a barber in Clarksdale--telling him a story about Sonny Boy coming back from Europe very sick. He said the legend walked around downtown Clarksdale with a gin bottle shortly before he died, his life empty. Dead blues singer, buried in a dead town.

  Nick offered Virginia a cigarette. She accepted from the pack of Marlboros and Nick lit both. The air was muggy, blowing from over the railroad tracks. No houses nearby. No sign of life.
At once, he felt vulnerable, nervous, and lonely.

  "How long you been in Mississippi?" Nick asked, shifting in his seat.

  "About three months. I was in Austin, but I knew if I was going to develop a real sound, I needed to come here. Everybody told me I was crazy, said I'd get killed in these jukes out here. But I work them from Jackson to Clarksdale. I never had a problem."

  "What do you think? This spot changed my life," he said. "People say if you keep real quiet you can hear Sonny Boy's harp."

  "Shh." She put a long finger to her red lips. "Let's listen."

  Nick flicked his cigarette out the Jeep, its red end rolling down the asphalt.

  Virginia's eyes closed and she began to hum to herself. A basic blues rhythm. Hands locked together and arms stretched tall above her. Her chest rose and fell with the music.

  She opened one eye mischievously. "Two white blues musicians in the Delta. What are the chances?"

  Nick pulled the weight of his smile to one corner. "Who would have thought it?"

  Virginia leaned over, put both hands on Nick's face, and kissed him. Hard. Her hands moved around his neck, and she crawled out of her seat and onto his lap, straddling him.

  "That was unexpected," he said.

  "Mmm-hmm," she said, going back to kissing him.

  Nick's legs began to go numb with Virginia on his lap. But all he could do was respond. His hands under her thin T-shirt. Her bra already on the floor of his Jeep. Her skin was warm and her body tight. She pulled a piece of deep red hair out of her mouth and smiled.

  Her eyes reminded him of a Siberian husky's. Sky blue with a strong black edge around the iris, as if they were circled in ink. She put both hands back on his face again, closed her eyes, and continued.