Leavin' Trunk Blues (13 page)

He was a timid, little man with a violent stutter. He became confused givin’ facts 1 knew by heart. Twice, he called me by the wrong name.

I didn’t cry durin’ my trial even as the prosecuting attorney strutted before me and made me into a drunken whore. He painted a picture of a woman who laid with them all. He said I liked men and women. He said I liked dope and whiskey.

He embarrassed my friends on the witness stand while people I respected watched on. Musicians from all over stopped by the courthouse. One day, I even saw Mr. Sonny Boy give me a strong nod. I remember it ‘cause he had this suit that was half-black and the other half-blue.

I wondered what happened to Dirty Jimmy until I saw him on the stand. He told the story about me threatenin’ Billy’s life in September. I thought I was guilty myself, the way that attorney pulled it from him.

Florida stayed by me though. She wrote me letters and sent me food. And although she never came to see me in jail, I never lost
respect for our friendship. Her words were like manna fallin’ from heaven as the locusts gnawed around me.

The jury was all white. Mostly men.

One of them smiled at me every time the bailiff sat me down by my lawyer. It wasn’t a good smile; he looked like he could smell me. Little bald man with black hair in his ears.

I used to watch all their faces durin’ the trial. I knew people. I felt I could sense their feelings and with concentration, make them feel mine.

But change swept through them like a heated lightning bolt when that detective man took the stand. My attorney sank into his seat and rubbed his temples through the whole thing. Had to poke him to make him sit straight.

That detective nailed it on me. They brought in pictures of my bloody mattress and of the bloody sheets they found in a trash can down the street.

My lawyer tried to argue, but it couldn’t be undone. “Blood doesn’t lie,” the prosecutor said as he grinned with pointed teeth.

I thought the trial lasted forever.

Two days later, I got life.

The hammer came down on the bench like thunder through my soul.

Friday morning, three days before Christmas, and Nick was already beat. He’d hit the Palmer House gym at 9:00 a.m., bench-pressed two-fifty for three sets of ten, shoulder pressed seventy pounds for another three sets, and finished with a few sets of cable pressdowns at ninety pounds. His triceps screamed and the front of his gray T-shirt was soaked with sweat.

After his last set, he took the elevator to the lobby and grabbed a cup of joe and a couple donuts. He dropped into a plush red chair and stared at the golden candelabrums, marble arches, and oriental rugs that filled the grand room. Fat naked ladies loomed in a fresco above as he sipped on the scalding coffee.

The Palmer House was classic Chicago. The hotel opened back in 1871, thirteen days before the great Chicago fire. Rebuilt several times after that. He’d heard it was the first hotel in the city with elevators, electric lights, and telephones. From cowboys to gangsters. Now it was a little 1920s and a little 1980s. A world of tiny chocolates on your pillow and a minibar filled with shots of Jack for six bucks.

An old woman in a mink coat glared at his sweaty T-shirt littered with powdered sugar. He winked at her. Never got this kind of attention when he stayed at the Motel 6 by the airport.

As much as he’d like to sit on his ass and enjoy the atmosphere, somewhere in the back of his mind he could hear Ruby’s voice call. Her pleadings of love and moans of happiness. That constant humming vibrating her silver, honeycomb microphone. The drained expression on her face.

He thought about what Peetie Wheatstraw said about her robbing Billy. But seventy-seven times implied a mind-set much more than a drunken robbery. And if she was so drunk or stoned, how did she have the power to kill him and move the body? A second-floor apartment. No car.

Nick thought of the promise he’d made and a curiosity he’d created. Dawkins. Williams. He could pull records and see if Gerri had the story right about how the men died. He’d planned to dig up the court file anyway.

Ruby trusted him. He could see her wide, black eyes staring into his soul. Trust was not something that woman gave easily.

Nick knew people. He’d worked years on sifting the good stuff from the bullshit. About every other blues player he interviewed lied. Everyone played with Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters. Hell, it was easy to lie about dead people or playing at clubs that had closed their doors decades ago. How do you check references?

You could see it their eyes. You could hear the conviction in their voices. Call it a hunch. Call it using The Force. But whatever it was, he knew Ruby wasn’t reciting a a tired mantra. Ruby thought she was innocent and unless she was a complete nutcase, then she was to be believed.

He was sure no one ever really worked to prove her story.

The last of the great female blues singers.

He might as well quit tracking the blues if he didn’t keep his word. He remembered a conference a few years ago in Helena, Arkansas, where white, southern, self-proclaimed intellectuals debated arcane facts about long-dead musicians. After this historian Nick had always admired finished his hour-and-a-half lecture on Lonnie Johnson, he joined some back-slapping colleagues at the hotel bar.

After the man’s fourth scotch, the man started telling some really borderline racist stories about some musicians he had been talking about an hour earlier with awe. He probably meant to share the story-behind-the-story thing with some men he trusted. But to Nick, he came off like a jackass. He thought it was funny the way an elderly woman lay in her own waste in her rusted trailer. In his speech, he called her brilliant. He laughed at a guitarist from Betonia who signed an autograph with an X. Earlier, he compared that man to Mozart. This historian painted blues with a intellectual fence that only the trained could understand. But personally, he scoffed at the music’s ignorance.

You don’t feign respect. You don’t find stories of lynchings, back-breaking labor, and soul-tearing depression quaint. This was an opportunity to show you stand behind your sermons. What JoJo would call a “proving day.” Ruby was also a second chance to help a woman who thought the world had left her.

Nick pulled the drapes open in his hotel room and stared across the gothic city. Steam and smoke worked from chimneys and vents. Battered fire escapes wrapped brick buildings like skeletons. Snow as fine as powdered sugar fell from the gray skies.
Time to hit the records trail.

Christmas in Chicago. New Orleans had its own traditions, but somehow the deep cold put the season in perspective. Chicago was like a big family you desperately wanted to join, Nick thought, a big aunt with her meaty arms spread wide in welcome. Down on State Street, he lit a Marlboro and watched little mechanical figures dance, make pies, and turn pirouettes in the Carson Pirie Scott window display. He passed the tarnished copper clock of Marshall Field’s and saw the white bulbs of the Chicago Theater burn in the distance. When he smiled, the wind hurt his teeth.

Nick walked north past an outdoor skating rink, to Randolph, and then over to the Cook County Building to pull death certificates on Lyons, Williams, and Dawkins. He hoped the bits of information he’d gathered from his tattered
Blues Who’s Who
would be enough.

He waited in the basement of the building for about thirty minutes after giving an attendant death dates on the men. He knew their fates lived somewhere in the system.

In a hard plastic seat, Nick glanced through a ragged spiral notebook and watched people to pass the time. He thought about the brutal deaths of other Chicago bluesmen. Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson. Sonny Boy was the man who took a novelty instrument and turned it into a blues staple. “Good Morning Little School Girl.” “Early in the Morning.” Beaten to death in ‘48 over a wallet, a watch, and three harps.

Little Walter Jacobs . . . Walter was the greatest. For years, Nick had tried to draw that complex sound from such a simple instrument. His licks were perfection. A member of the original Muddy Waters’s band and the man most credited with first amplifying the harp. Nick could still hear his teasing laugh on the alternate version of “Worried Life.”

Some hustler killed Walter with a lead pipe over a back alley dice game. He was 37. Nick shook his head at the thought and scanned the room.

Dozens of people slowly moved over the linoleum floor in five lines for the official word on death and marriage. Hard to tell which from their faces. Soon, he became particularly interested in a young woman in a ragged fur coat at the desk. She reminded him of a young Madonna—mole above her lip, eyes painted like an Egyptian, and hair in dirty blonde ringlets. She gave him a few glances and Nick shot her a weathered smile.

She finally motioned him over to the desk with the crook of her finger. Nick jumped ahead of the crowd and met her at a corner window slot.

“Franky Dawkins, nineteen-sixty?” she asked, chomping some gum. She showed him Dawkins’s full name, date of death, and a file number. “And here. This is William J. Lyons.”

“Williams?”

“No record of Leroy S. Williams,” she said.

“Could be a few years earlier or later,” he said.

“I could try again,” she said.

“I like your eyes,” Nick said.

She stopped chomping and grinned. Her lips were the color of a fire engine.

“1 could also check the surrounding counties,” she said.

“Anyone ever say you look like Madonna?”

“You can stop now,” she said, blushing. “You got it. You got it.”

Nick watched the line snake out the hall. The dirty water from slush-covered boots had wiped the floor in a muddy smear. The crowd looked like a Russian food line, with their bundled jackets and scarves covering their heads, moving with grim faces in the basement of the old rock of a building.

Madonna whistled for him about fifteen minutes later.

“You meant sixty-five,” she said, looking over at a supervisor.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sorry you had to wait so long.”

“No problem, caught up with my sitting.”

She slid across three death certificates on bonded paper crushed with an official stamp of Illinois. The room buzzed around him as he searched for cause of death on Dawkins. Multiple stab wounds. Homicide. Williams? Stabbed. Drowned in the Chicago River.

“Sir?” Madonna asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Nick said, paying for the certificates. He ordered three copies each. One for his files, one for the archive, and another for his friend Ed Komara at Ole Miss.

He thanked the woman and noticed a business card paper-clipped to Dawkins’s death certificate as he walked away. Home number scrawled on the back. Nick turned back and waved. The woman shrugged and gave a weak smile.

--

The inside of the Cook County archives reminded Nick of a worn-out airplane hangar. A long, concave building made of stamped tin. Thick erector-set like beams, coated in rust, crisscrossed overhead. Metal warehouse lights shined down its corridors with metal shelves stacked ten feet high with employee personal records, court transcripts, and endless official documents. The place smelled like the inside of a worn paperback book.

A gray-headed woman with yellowed teeth slammed a sagging cardboard box onto a military desk at the far end of the archives. Gray light cut in laser sheaths above him from windows coated in dust and city grime.

“I appreciate it,” Nick said.

She scowled.

“Thank you,” Nick said.

“Your friend is a real jerk,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Really, I mean it,” she said. “Public record request doesn’t mean ‘thirty minutes or it’s free.’ We ain’t fuckin’ Domino’s. You see all this shit? It took me all morning to find this file.”

Even from his small insignificant pine desk at Tulane, Randy’s presence was felt. He handed her the death certificates on Williams and Dawkins and politely asked for their files before turning back to the State of Illinois vs. Ruby Walker.

She gave a rotten sigh and trudged off.

Nick exhaled a long breath and scratched his bristly chin. He needed witnesses. Contacts. Right now, he was just rubbing a couple of sticks together to kick up a little fire. He needed to get into the scene of Chicago blues in the fifties. He had to imagine the rough texture and smoky fabric that held together the ramshackle blues joints, fledging record companies, and singers with faded souls.

Nick could feel the connection as he extracted Lyons’s personal effect sheet.

The report read: one ring with ten stone sets, one ring with white stone set, one ring with two side stone sets, one money clip fashioned from a silver dollar with $3.96 attached, and a cigarette lighter marked with a snake.

Medical Examiner’s report wasn’t a surprise. Seventy-seven stab wounds. Sometimes oral histories are right. But Lyons was also shot once in the head with a .44-caliber gun, according to the report and the death certificate. Nothing of value had been taken. Nick rubbed his temples and took notes.