Crossroad Blues (The Nick Travers Novels) (3 page)
Chapter 4
Opening the doors to the Jazz and Blues Archives building was like taking a hot shower and then getting thrown into a meat cooler, felt good and human. Randy's office was down the corridor and to the right, next door to the office Nick kept during his rotations. The head of the department had no anterooms or secretary, just a small, simple office with sagging bookshelves filled with magazines and biographies. There was not a man alive who knew more about the development of New Orleans music than Randy Sexton -- author of more than a dozen books on early jazz and the roots of African music, from Congo Square to Satchmo.
However, his knowledge didn't come from genetics. Randy was a short white man who squinted through his round glasses like a cartoon mouse staring at cheese. He had a head of curly brown hair and talked in excited sentences flowing from an information-flooded brain.
At his desk, Randy wore a black T-shirt from the1981 Jazz Fest and black jeans. A stack of papers marked with a red felt-tipped pen sat on his desk, and one finger was stuck up his nose.
Nick knocked on the outside door.
The finger shot out of Randy's nose and behind the desk.
"Catchin' anything good?"
"Shut up, man. It was a scratch."
"Right. Hey, JoJo said you were drunk last night at the bar. Said you had a hooker with you and she was dancing on the table."
"Yeah. That's right. How you been, man?"
Nick plopped down in the chair across from him. "Fine. Life's one big exciting party."
"You want a cigarette?"
"I quit."
Randy shook one loose from the pack of Marlboros, lit it and threw the pack at Nick.
"Just in case."
"Thanks." Nick shook another loose. Most of the trackers he knew smoked. With long hours in clubs, cars, and conversations, smoking was just something to do while waiting for a interview that would be catalogued in the patchwork of music history.
Blues experts could be sociologists, anthropologists, historians, or psychologists. But to Nick, if you really got out there to find the folks who lived it, you were a tracker. To conduct interviews with someone who cut a record fifty years ago for a now-defunct label wasn't like looking in the phone book--although sometimes it was that simple.
Tracking usually consisted of running names through driver's license checks in dozens of states, cultivating sources in the business, making hundreds of phone calls, and writing dozens of letters. But most of the time, finding the subject wasn't enough. Sometimes they didn't want to be found. They sold their guitars, let go of the rambling lifestyle, and settled down. To them, the lonesome blues highway was just a tattered memory. Many had found religion and remembered their musical accomplishments as that "ole devil time."
Many nights, Nick had waited outside a clapboard shack somewhere in Mississippi or a snow-covered home in Chicago, only to be ignored, insulted, or threatened.
"So, what's up?" Nick asked Randy, as he leaned forward resting his elbows on his knees. "You want to show me those dirty shadow puppets again?"
"Michael's missing."
"Haven't talked to the guy since June. Course, I never talked to him much then anyway."
Michael Baker, a tenured professor in music history, was a real jackass. Nick couldn't stand listening to his pompous lectures or erroneous facts based on his political ideology. Guys like Baker took the stick and muddied the waters of a diminishing river of information.
"He was in the Mississippi Delta looking for some blues performers from the thirties and stopped checking in with his wife."
"Blues? He doesn't know shit about blues."
"I know. I think he was freelancing for somebody. Anyway, he seemed excited. Talked all about how great it was taking pictures of these abandoned clapboard jukes in the woods."
Nick laughed. "That's bullshit. He'd be afraid his Gucci loafers would get a speck of cowshit on them."
"Last time we talked, he was in Greenwood. He wanted me to look up a few things and I haven't heard from him in over a month."
"Did you call the police in Mississippi?"
"Yeah," Randy said, leaning back in his chair and tossing a pencil into the corkboard above. It didn't stick. "Nick, how many times have you been to the Delta?"
"Oh no."
"Please. Just drive to Greenwood, talk to some people. Have dinner at that restaurant you like . . . Lucky's."
"Lusco's."
"Whatever. You know how Michael is, sometimes condescending and rude."
"If he's condescending in the Delta, they'll string him up by those pleated slacks and make him into a life-size pinata."
"That's what I'm afraid of. Please?"
"Will you recommend me for a two-year grant on that Babe Stovall project?"
"Uh, no. Remember, I don't like Michael that much either. He came with the department job. I'm sorry, that's terrible. His wife is really upset."
"I guess I can take off Friday from JoJo's. But I've got to be back in two weeks for a gig at Tipitina's. We've planned it for a while."
Randy smiled. "Thanks, man."
"What'd he want you to look up, his ass?"
"Impossible. Too tight. He had me fax him a list of living performers from the thirties and forties who lived around Greenwood."
"You mean all I have to go on is an outdated contact list, half of which I wrote?"
"Yeah."
"I guess it's time to get back on it then," Nick said, squashing the cigarette in a plastic ashtray.
"What?"
"Words to live by, my friend," Nick said. "Why didn't you tell me he was snooping around? That's all I need is him pissing off my contacts."
"Academic cooperation? You scratch my back . . . "
"Shiiit."
"He was excited when we talked," Randy said as he fished around his rat's nest of a desk. "Here it is."
"Thanks," Nick said, taking the wrinkled coffee-stained sheets. "I have a dozen copies in my office."
"Probably won't help anyway."
"Why's that?"
"I think he spent the most time with an old man in his seventies. He's not listed. Interesting thing is, the man claims he knew Robert Johnson."
Nick laughed. "Everybody in the Delta claims they met Johnson."
"I know, but Michael believed him. Said the old man lived like a hermit out in the woods. No electricity. Nothing. Said he hadn't much contact with anyone in years."
"Where's he live?"
"Greenwood, I think. Can't tell you his name or how to find him. Can't be too hard though."
"Why's that?"
"The old man is an albino."
Chapter 5
In Memphis, Jesse Garon honed his switchblade knife on the rough, concrete edge of the Heartbreak Motel's empty swimming pool. He sat and watched the Sri Lankan manager tossing handfuls of wet, moldy leaves onto the mildewed diving board above and thought what a waste of time. No one comes to this end of Elvis Presley Boulevard anymore. Only the devout. But E would appreciate the effort he had made to live close to Him.
"Oh, sir, it is hot. Yes?" the little dark guy asked him. His bare feet stuck in the brown, oozing muck, with his black trousers rolled to the knees. The man's scraggly mustache dripped with sweat.
"Uh-huh," Jesse answered.
"You do not talk much, sir, for such an energetic young man."
"Uh-huh."
"I have told you I left my country when I was only twenty. Now I work so that I may bring the rest of my family to the United States. Might I ask what has brought you to Memphis?"
Jesse stopped in midscrape of the knife, looked down into the empty cracked pool, and simply said, "God."
He stood and walked back to his room, one of only three with a working toilet, where the red shag carpet deeply covered his toes. He winced. The damp, musty smell was like ghosts from a hundred puking guests. He opened a window as an 18-wheeler roared past.
No television, no "Kool AC," like the neon sign advertised out front. Just a room and a hot plate at the Heartbreak Motel. He grabbed his last two pieces of white bread, smeared butter on the spongy pair, and placed them on the plate. The smell of burning butter made his mouth water as he changed into a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut out and blue jeans. He sat on the edge of the bed and rolled the crisp new jeans into a two-inch cuff. Perfect, he thought, running a hand over his bare upper arm to make contact with a stenciled black tattoo. He'd paid a hundred bucks for it on Beale Street.
The tattoo was of a young Elvis Presley wearing a crown of thorns, a simple inscription below: "He died for our sins."
Every afternoon was the same. After eating supper and getting dressed, Jesse would leave the Heartbreak Motel and walk two miles to Graceland. There, he would stroll through the gift shops at the Elvis Mall and sit for hours in the darkened car museum. He could watch clips from E's films in '57 Chevys cut in half and turned into seats.
Sometimes, when no one was around, he would slip under the velvet ropes and slide into E's cars, feeling the leather where He'd sat, the steering wheels and the gear shifts He'd touched. A vehicle to that connection he'd always felt with E. Jesse would sink low into the floor of the backseat and smell the holy air that E had breathed. Sometimes he'd stay there until the following day, sleeping in E's cars.
Today they showed
Viva Las Vegas,
and he thought about that incredible chemistry between Ann-Margret and E. They did everything but touch each other. It was like they were so damned close to tearing each other's clothes off, but it was like there was some kind of force field between them. Somethin' holding them back. All she could do was coo and purr the whole damned film.
Man, oh man.
Jesse shook his head and walked next door to the gift shop, a buzzin' in his loins like a snapped electric cable. Out of all the official shops, this one concentrated mostly on T-shirts and small tokens of love. The pencils, coffee mugs, buttons, necklaces, postcards, and toenail clippers, all of them icons of affection.
Inside, he watched two middle-aged women--one short and dumpy and the other trim and athletic with frizzy hair and big boobs. Jesse massaged a hand over a dusty porcelain head of Elvis. He smiled and walked toward them, pushing back the jet-black pompadour that cascaded over his forehead. He ran his fingers over the back of his neck, real modest-like, and gave the trim woman with big boobs a good two-second eye contact. He knew he had it, that confidence E had. The way of working the eyes and body. A way of showin' that you were a little shy, but the devil sure did know where you lived.
"Afternoon, ma'am," Jesse said.
She nodded her head and gave a little grin. "Do you work here?"
"Ah, no ma'am. Why do you ask?"
"Well, you look just like him. I guess you know that, though," she giggled.
"Ma'am, I can show you all Memphis like you've never seen. I can take you to some of the places not on the maps. Where he worked. His high school."
"Actually," she said, laughing, "we don't even like Elvis." She and her friend both kept snickering as they left the store.
Jesse could feel the heat in his face. It wasn't that they were laughing at him that made him mad. It was how they did it. Like he was some kind of freak. Well, he wasn't.
He turned and walked down to Rockabilly's malt shop and waited until he saw an old couple leave. Before the busboy could clear the table, Jesse sat down, finished half a cheeseburger, and gulped down a melted chocolate milk shake. He belched as he stared through the plate glass and across the boulevard at the grand house. The damned center of it all.
It wasn't until two hours later that he saw another target. She stood at the wishing wall around Graceland. Seventeen or eighteen years old. About his age. She smoked a cigarette and doodled a message to E on the wall. Short dark hair, tight blue jeans, and a short, black baby-doll shirt that showed a pierced belly button. He just stood and watched.
She leaned on the wall and stuck the pen in her mouth, twirling it around. Her lips were red and puffy. On the ground next to her was a tattered brown teddy bear, some kinda weird purse. She stopped working the pen and stared.
"If looks could kill," she said, putting her hands on her hips and looking at him with the greenest eyes he'd ever seen.
"No," Jesse said. "If eyes could fuck."
Chapter 6
That night, Jesse snuck the girl inside Graceland. A few months, back he'd made himself seduce this nasty, alcoholic-hag employee so he could learn the back-entry code. He already knew where to hop the fence behind the meditation gardens where E, Vernon, and Gladys were buried. And E's twin brother--the one they said died at birth.
The girl was a German tourist and said she quivered just thinking that E had once been in her country. She could imagine feeling the stubble of His army haircut and the way He smelled after basic training. She worked nights in a McDonald's in Frankfurt just for the airfare to New York City. After arriving in the States, she'd hitched all the way to Memphis. There was a little trouble with a trucker in Kentucky, but she grabbed his balls until his eyes bulged. Gutsy little piece.
The girl thought she was psychic or something because she knew this was where she would meet another E. It was a vision that told her she'd find that missing part of her soul at Graceland to make her a complete woman.