Crossroad Blues (The Nick Travers Novels) (25 page)

Planks of wood painted long ago in a seafoam green crudely buckled from the wall. Plywood separated some of the rooms, hammered lazily with crooked rusted nails. Nick could imagine sacks of feed, rows of fruit jars, and farm supplies lining the old building before it was partitioned. A woman yelled in a back room, and two pig-tailed little girls stared wide-eyed at Henry.

As James turned, there were heavy footsteps on the porch outside. Everyone stopped cold. Nick walked over and pulled the plastic sheeting from a nail. His breath caught in his throat when he saw who was outside. Sallow-faced and dressed in rags, Cracker paced on the porch.

His weak face drew into a smile when Nick opened the front door. "I was
w-w
onder-wonderin' when y'all show up here," he said.

"Cracker," Nick said, putting an arm around the old man. "You okay?"

Henry slowly ambled onto the brittle porch and stared at Cracker as if he were a reflection of an ugly woman. He spat on the ground, twisted his head away, and then looked back at Cracker, his tired red eyes rimmed with tears.

"Cracker," Henry said, his voice like brittle ice.

"Earl. Earl," Cracker's age fell away and once again he was a scared fifteen-year-old boy. "What are we gonna do? They know?
W-W
hat-what we gonna do?"

Cracker got close to Henry, and for a moment, Nick thought Cracker was going to hug the older man. Nick could imagine the pair of them working in the heat of a Mississippi night to hide the body of a white record producer from Texas.

Henry gave Nick a mean stare, then placed his quivering arm around Cracker's shoulders. "Jes like I said, Cracker. Every little thing gonna be jes fine. Jes fine."

After several more payoffs from JoJo, James finally let them tear the pick into two separate walls at the front of the house. The old two-by-fours became exposed through several layers of wood until there came a loud thunk.

"That's it," Henry said.

Cracker was outside eating some cold chicken with James's children. He hadn't eaten for days and had made his way back to Memphis through the kindness of a white Methodist minister. Then a trucker, on advice of the good-hearted minister, whom Cracker said liked cherry pie, took him down to Greenwood. Cracker walked the rest of the way back through the fields and woods he knew so well.

The pick was embedded and Nick strained until he felt his shoulders might leave their sockets again. His cast was a sticky mess and he wanted to cut the thing off. Nick finally dislodged the pick and then began to pry the wood off the section of the old wall. The dawn filtered weak sunlight through the plastic-covered windows. Nick carefully removed sections of the wood, his back and arm aching.

A large, jagged chunk came away to expose a human skull and torso. Henry walked outside as Nick and JoJo stood staring at the upper portion of the skeleton. Clutched in its arms sat a wooden crate, identical to the one from under Cracker's porch.

They'd found the man who'd served Robert Johnson his last drink.

Mr. Cruz's flask caught the sunlight just right as he took a sip and made the redheaded woman squint. It hadn't been tough to get her on the train. Hell, she was so doped up she'd probably done a striptease in the projects. She'd just walked real cool-like until they got in their train cabin and shut the door. They hadn't messed with her. Floyd wanted to, but Cruz said no way, not till after.

If they got the records, Mr. Cruz wanted all them old men dead, and the big white dude, too. What all them didn't know, hadn't a damned idea in their heads about, was that Jesse was gonna take it all and meet Puka and Inga in a suite at The Peabody in Memphis.

He'd be high as a kite and talkin' to the ducks on the roof by midnight.

"Jesse, I sure am proud of what you've done for me," Cruz said. "Must be that good Mississippi breeding. You know, I'm a Southerner, too. Have a little water moccasin in both of us."

Mr. Cruz was just funnin' with him. He must know that he was leaving them Sun Records days and going right for Las Vegas. He and his German woman would start their own shrine there. He'd be E without anyone else.

"He ain't comin' and I need to take a shit," Henry said, as he dropped his head and spit on the weathered train station's floor. Nick could tell he was tired of reliving the past and confronting ghosts, the meanness powering his old age taken from him at the Three Forks as if he were a scolded child.

JoJo was indifferent, asleep and snoring softly as Nick looked around the small station. Cracker had a couple of lollipops the kids at the Three Forks had given him. He licked on one as he watched a black man in indigo overalls and an elderly white woman in a faded, flowered dress. A steady night heat hovered, broken only by the momentary sweeping arc of a 1950s table fan.

Nick stood and walked back into the station's bathroom, where the cream-colored paint was so thick on the door that it looked like spoiled milk. He checked for feet under the stalls before he inserted the clip into the Browning 9mm and thumbed down the slide release. He tucked it back into the inside pocket of his faded jean jacket and walked back into the station, wishing he was alone.

None of the men would even listen to his reasoning.

JoJo woke up as Nick sat back on the hard wooden bench and began to rub his fingers hard around his eyes. "Goddamn, I forgot where I was at," JoJo said. "Thought I was dreamin' 'bout all this shit."

"How about we all become Hare Krishnas and play the tambourine on Bourbon Street if we get through this?" Nick asked.

It was a mundane comment, something typical before a football game, when conversation is as pointless as chewing on a hangnail--a tool to focus away from the energy of an approaching conflict.

"When he gets nervous, he talks," JoJo said.

"Mmm," Henry said. "You good with that gun, kid?"

Nick looked down at the bulky outline in his jacket and smiled. "We'll be fine, y'all just stay cool."

Cracker continued to lick his candy and turned his head as a train whistle sounded outside and a light rumble shook the crumbling brick building.

"I don't know.
H-h
e use to try to get me to take off from Mista Devlin. Say I-I could do better. Say just hop that ole train, son, and
m-m
ornin' comes you at where you suppose to be. Never made much sense. How a train know where I suppose to be at?"

"When we get done with this, would you talk to me? Tell me all about Robert. What he played. What he talked about. All of it."

"Yes suh. But I'll
t-t
ell you one thing," Cracker said as they all stood and walked to the platform. "He wouldn't wanna be used like this. Them
r-r
ecords of his shoulda neva been found. He kept that music with him until the end. Didn't want no one hearin' it."

"Why?"

"He
s-s
ay it was all he was," Cracker said, turning to Henry. "
W-w
hy you make me think them record were mine.
I-I
stayed all them years in the woods to protect them, and weren't even R.L.'s. Why you do that, Big Earl? Why you do that to me?"

Henry looked away.

Cruz stood up and fell forward as the train slowed. "We're leaving the girl in the compartment. Jesse, you watch her. And, Floyd, you watch Travers."

Floyd self-consciously touched his swollen lip and agreed. Jesse said he would too, but it wasn't part of his divine plan. He watched the black ovals of Mr. Cruz's sunglasses, but nothing registered. It was just like lookin' at the old wooden shacks slide by the window--shadows the color of old bruises.

"How we know if we ain't bein' screwed?" Jesse asked.

"I'll know," Cruz said, as he dotted the beads of sweat rolling into his eyes, his stiff black suit not much for the heat.

Jesse rolled the sleeves higher on his black T-shirt and tightened the grip on the Glock 9mm. His hands shook a little on the rough handle as the train slowed, still feeling the constant rocking motion of the trip.

"Kid, be tough," Floyd said. "Remember to hit it like a black man and take no prisoners."

Jesse just stared at him.

The view from the train's open window soon filled with a redbrick train station. Jesse heard the screech of metal-on-metal braking. He looked down at the redhead, her body as limp as a wet napkin, just lying there with no idea that her boyfriend was about to die. In a way, she kinda looked like Ann-Margret, and he wondered if she could dance like that.

Nick opened the door for Henry, who held the boxed nine records packed in a moldy, red velvet cloth, brittle as a dried rose petal. JoJo winked at Nick when the train slowed to the platform, a little gesture to let him know everything was going to be all right.

Cracker lagged behind. He hung loose from the crowd, reminding Nick of the omega wolf in the pack, his head down and not looking anyone in the eye. This isn't what he wanted. Nick could tell he felt like he was letting Johnson down, like he was throwing the very thing he'd sworn to protect into the abyss.

A loose-tied man in a business suit got off the train and trotted inside with a travel bag thrown over his shoulder. A large black woman carried two sleeping children, and a coachman stepped outside with a notebook flipped open.

Last train to Memphis.

"Goddamn, I tole you," Henry said.

Finally, Cruz and the big black man walked off the very last train car. Nick kept his empty hands in plain view as he walked toward them. A smile crept onto his face as he saw the swollen profile of the man, just a beaten dog. He could hear Henry cough and JoJo jingling change in his pocket behind him.

Cruz's face split into a wide grin, and he opened his hands like a good host meeting guests on the stoop of his mansion. A dark, heavy silence beat around them in blackness.

Cruz's face twitched, maybe from the comment or maybe from seeing Cracker lagging behind. Whatever the reason, the light went from his face like the last spark from a cigarette butt.

"I guess you know my friend Cracker," Nick said. "Said you weren't too big on the hospitality. Didn't pour him a beer or offer him a job."

Cruz nodded to the black man, who yelled back into the car. A light flicked on in the window of a train car and a limp Virginia appeared with the kid who looked like Elvis.
Great.
In the shadow, he could see the kid laughing and pretending like they were dancing. The scene framed by the smooth silver car.

Nick whipped out his gun and Cruz's flunky drew his.

"She's fine, just sedated," Cruz said. "Don't want her stressed out."

The gun looked like a small toy in the black man's huge hands. His biceps bulging and his eyes were flat and hard, waiting to fire. Nick could see the injured pride in the man's reddened eyes.

"Remember, Travers, just a white man trying to carve a little niche from the black man's world," Cruz said. "We're the same."

"He ain't nothin' like you," JoJo said. "You the stink on the bottom of my shoe."

Nick kept his gun trained on the black man as he heard the coachman make a last call. The train whistle blew and the coachman stepped inside.

"Are we going to do this?" Cruz asked.

Henry stepped forward holding the records flat and in both hands like a holy sacrament before he handed them to Cruz and spit his face. The white spittle trickled down his bearded chin.