Crossroad Blues (The Nick Travers Novels) (12 page)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
She moved her hands under his denim shirt and then moved them onto his crotch.
"Whoa. What are we doing here?"
"I don't know, what do you want to do?" Her hands once again brushed his crotch.
"I, uh," he began, looking over at a hearse parked behind the Tutwiler mortuary.
She took one of his fingers and put it in her mouth, swirling it around.
"Ya know . . . "
She kissed his hands.
"Be quiet, Travers," she said, unbuttoning his jeans, then undoing hers. "You ain't so tough. I've been in the Delta too long."
She momentarily went back to the passenger seat, slid down and pulled off her boots and jeans and threw them in the backseat, laughing. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and crawled back on Nick's lap. She maneuvered one of his hands under the thin edge of her pink panties. As he moved his hand lower, she responded to him. They kissed hard and Nick heard her rip the panties off her legs. She brought herself up on him, sighed softly, and moaned as she joined with him. Her thighs were strong.
Nick put his arms around her and held her tight. With a late-summer wind against his back and the taste of strawberry hair in his mouth, he thought he heard the fleeting sounds of a trilling harp.
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The night's fine alcohol glow settled into an early-morning hangover as Nick slipped a key into the motel room's door. He could still taste Virginia's sweet lips and smell her scent all over him.
As he walked into his room and flipped the wall switch, a tight arm wrapped around his throat, and he was thrown onto the floor. His head thudded against the bed's headboard as he fell.
"Get down now!" a man's voice yelled.
Nick tried to fight, but one man restrained him while another clamped on handcuffs. The grip on his wrists was tight.
"You low-life sack of shit are under arrest for the murder of Deputy William Brown."
Chapter 22
Jail is about humiliation, loss of freedom, and being treated like an outcast degenerate. It is the antiseptic-urine smell that permeates your clothes and lungs. It is about pale blue iron bars and a bunk that stinks of human waste and pleasure. The only jail Nick had ever known was on White Street in New Orleans. That was only to visit his friend Jay Medeaux, a police detective, or occasionally bail out a fellow musician. It wasn't a hell of a lot different from this place, he thought. Jail is jail. They don't reflect local color.
He'd been there for more than a day. In that time, he'd familiarized himself with the residents. A happy bunch: a three-hundred-pound pedophile named "Big Larry," a wife beater who constantly cried, a local lawyer in for a DUI, a twenty-one-year-old car thief, and a muscular man who paced the room but did not speak.
Nick had found a three-year-old copy of
Newsweek
that he now read for the third time. What he wouldn't give for a decent book or meal. He wasn't trying to be snobbish about it, but eating gray gruel wasn't even above animal standards. A dog wouldn't shit on it.
Not only was the food bad, but there wasn't much of it. He began to hallucinate about the meal he'd had at Lusco's. That chicken and beer was a vision. He could see the beads form on the Budweiser label and the juicy white meat.
"Hey, shithead. You wanna piece of me?" the muscular man asked.
Nick continued reading.
"I said, shithead. You dickless turd."
Nick had no idea about the ethnic diversity in Bosnia. He read on.
The man spit on Nick's arm.
Nick folded the magazine neatly and laid it on the bunk next to him. He sighed. Moments like these really enforced the theory of evolution. Just a bunch of big monkeys in a cage. No different,t except monkeys were much more fun to watch.
The big man stepped forward and bumped his chest with Nick's.
Nick faked his head to the right and led with a hard elbow to the man's nose and a quick jab to his gut. When the man tried to come back, Nick head-butted him, knocking the man down hard on the floor.
Nick returned to the bunk, lay down, and crossed his feet in front of him. He picked up the magazine, found his place, and went back to Bosnia.
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That night Nick dreamed of bloodstains on the ceiling and blood all over the wall. That's all he could see--streaks of red all over the sheets and on the cracked headboard. He couldn't breathe, just standing there looking at rumpled sheets holding his breath. Bile came up in his throat.
Virginia Dare smiled at him between twirling red and blue lights. He thought someone yelled but he couldn't tell. It was outside of him. All of it was. Not a dream, just a surreal reality. He should have been there. They wouldn't be dead. He should've been watching instead of fucking.
More voices yelled. Red and blue lights spun. Someone grabbed his arm. He hit it hard, bent at the waist, and vomited. Cracker and Willie. And then he woke up.