Leavin' Trunk Blues (26 page)

“You ever think about leaving New Orleans?” she asked. “Taking a job somewhere else? Go back to Mississippi?”

“Thought about coming up here. Kick around Chicago for a while. Plenty of stories. Plenty of blues players. Depends on what else is up here.”

“Bad weather,” Kate said.

“Everything thaws.”

“Depends on how bad the winter was.”

Nick looked into her eyes and reached for her hand in her coat pocket. He traced her warm fingers.

She didn’t pull away for a few seconds. The warm coffee in her hand separating them.

“Goddamn, I hate you,” she said in her raspy voice.

“I hate you too.”

“You need help finding Florida? Don’t you?”

“Saddle up, Tonto,” Nick said.

The snow fell harder, and the lethargic wipers on Kate’s ragged black Karmaan Ghia weren’t helping much. One good patch of ice and they’d probably careen into oncoming traffic, she thought. She kept her hands tight on the leather steering wheel and her eyes focused on the few feet of visibility. The snow was beautiful among the neon storefront signs and tacky Christmas displays. Mechanical Santas. Plastic Nativity scenes. One had Rudolph grazing by the manger. The things you learn about the Bible.

She’d missed the change of seasons when she lived in New Orleans. After she’d taken the job with the Picayune—right out of Northwestern—she’d met people, characters really, she’d never imagined in her middle-class suburban world: voodoo priests who told futures with brittle chicken bones, Mardi Gras Indians with their headdresses full of jewels and feathers, and street kids who thought they were vampires with sharpened eye teeth. Broken-down bluesmen. Great writing material.

It was tough to load up her car with Bud, her Jack Russell terrier, and say good-bye to her apartment on St. Charles. But she also missed her family in Winnetka. Her loudmouth Irish cop father, her fast-talking Italian mother, and her five brothers and sisters. Nice to have roots again.

That afternoon, most of the South Side looked sand-blasted and worn as the wind shot though the holes in her softtop. Nick warmed his hands on the vents and calmly looked into the darkness. The heated air smelled like an old sock.

One day off—day before Christmas Eve no less—and she was going to spend it doing interviews on the South Side. She looked over at Nick’s scruffy profile and smiled. Been too long.

“Got big plans for all this research?” Kate asked as the wipers squeaked and moaned.

“Not really, just publish my findings,” Nick said, leaning over to wipe the condensation forming on the windshield with his glove. “Depends on what I find out. If it looks like she’s innocent, I’d like to see the State’s Attorney’s Office reopen the case. If not, it’s still a good story.”

“It’s exciting, isn’t it?” Kate asked.

“What?”

“Knowing the system has failed someone. That they don’t have a prayer in the world without you. You have it all there, Travers. It’s all there.”

She drove into the hazed snow past a commercial strip of used car lots, tire wholesalers, and fast-food franchises. Looked like Airline Highway in New Orleans. Every city has one, a collection of shitty chain businesses and anonymous apartments. A place devoid of personality or feeling. Somewhere to exist.

“How depressing,” Kate said.

“You know this ain’t about spotlighting on my work. You want to write about Ruby, go ahead.”

“No shit?” she asked, as the car thudded over a pothole.

“No shit,” Nick said, looking like he might barf onto his boots.

Nick getting sick wouldn’t make her feel any better about their past. She’d decided to play it cool and pretend like this fling didn’t mean anything. Like she was a big girl with a weak memory. But it still pissed her off. She remembered every detail. That bimbo’s blonde—almost white—hair, the woman’s damned boobs hanging out of her robe. It would have made more sense or it would have hurt less if it had been someone he worked with at Tulane. But just to pick up some piece of Quarter trash to take back to the warehouse—a place she helped restore—was too much.

Every inch of the red maple floor she stained. All that paint splattered in her hair.

Just the thought made her grind her teeth.

“May take you up on that offer, Travers,” she said, trying to take the edge off her voice. “Wouldn’t be a bad story for Christmas. Got a lot of great elements working for it. Think she’ll talk to me?”

“Don’t see why not.”

“There’s something else about this woman, right? Don’t bullshit me. Why are you working so hard on this? You should be sipping on Jack Daniel’s with JoJo right now. Maybe going out to the levee bonfires.”

She zipped around a yellow snowplow, feeling a slight swerve in her back tires. Nick fumbled with the watch cap in his hands, probably trying to keep his mind off the motion. She sped up and cut back into the lane.

“Ruby’s pretty special,” Nick said. “One of those blues artists that gave people a chance to remember the South after the migration. It’s like she’s been stuck in a time capsule all these years and forgotten by historians and musicians . . . but if you talk to people who really know, they realize she’s the end of an era. When they put Ruby away, they put away the spirit for a lot of people. The South Side. The blues. It’s all kind of been shut off for the last forty years.”

His voice grew louder over the car’s growling engine.

“Blues changed,” Nick said. “I mean, the classic stuff was still performed at revivals and as covers but it didn’t grow. It evolved into something else. It switched from a remembering song to a song of protest. Buddy Guy and Elmore King sang about the northern oppression and made the guitar speak for them instead of with them. Shit … Ruby wouldn’t have survived.”

“You okay, Travers?” Kate asked.

“What a waste,” he said. “She’s given up. You should see her face, she’s drained of everything. Completely void of emotion. She lives life out of obligation, trudging through it.”

Nick looked out the window and got quiet. She recalled late-night conversations in the old warehouse. Kate couldn’t think of anything to say as they rolled through the snow into another section of Chicago with an architecture of nowhere.

She knew all about Nick’s series of disappointments. The premature deaths of his parents, some woman who used him to further her social status, and his failed career in the NFL. He rarely spoke of any of those memories. Especially his mother.

Kate drove on in silence.

--

The address for Florida was in a tired apartment complex not far from O’Hare Airport. The cheap apartments were styled to look like English Tudor houses. Brown slats of wood crossed the white concrete siding. The design didn’t hide much. Most of the wood hung off the building like broken limbs over molting white paint. Plywood covered most windows with padlocks on several condemned apartments. A group of black teens sat on a Japanese import shaking with rap music as long-dead trees seemed to dance behind them. They eyed her car as she wheeled by them and deeper into the apartment complex.

Kate waved. This neighborhood was like Disney World compared to most places she visited. She pulled into a slot by a ragged Oldsmobile parked among vacant spaces. Nick got out and steadied his feet. He lit a cigarette and adjusted his worn leather belt as she walked to a stoop of an apartment with a plastic wreath on the door. Little lights blinked as fake pinecones buzzed an electronic “Jingle Bells.”

She knocked and scanned the almost empty parking lot. Snow had gathered a couple inches on the car hoods. The kid’s car boomed in the distant cold. The sky was nothing but a flat expanse of clouds. Deep depression winter, Kate thought as the biting wind ripped through her peacoat.

She knocked again.

Nothing.

Kate checked the mail slot and pulled out a few letters. Old trick she’d learned from a former editor. Not quite ethical. She flipped through them and slipped them back in the box.

“Not Whitaker,” she said. “Somebody named Lopez.”

Nick walked next door and knocked. She followed and heard a television inside. Canned sitcom laughter. A face soon emerged in the window and looked around. Someone had taped an eviction notice on the door scheduled for Christmas day. A black woman with green eyes and wrinkled skin opened the door a crack, her hair filled with tiny, pink curlers.

“Looking for Florida,” Nick said.

“What?” the old woman asked. “You a long way from the beach.”

She laughed at that for a good twenty seconds. Kate laughed too, waiting for the comedy to wear off. Nick rolled his eyes.

“A woman named Florida,” Kate said. “She still live next door?

Kate could just see the woman’s roving eyes above the door’s brass chain. She had a mole on her chin that resembled the tip of an eraser.

“Don’t know,” the woman said. “Only been here since the fall. Sorry.”

“Older black woman ever live next door?” Nick asked, pointing to the apartment to his right.

“Naw. Only people I knowed live there is a couple of Puerto Ricans.”

They thanked the woman and trudged back to the car. The snow gathered in Kate’s eyelashes as she watched Nick fire a rapid drumbeat on her tattered convertible top. A cigarette hung loose in his mouth.

“Maybe she gets the wrong mail, Marlboro man,” Kate said.

“And turned into a young Puerto Rican,” Nick said, rolling the cigarette to the other comer of his smile. “You mind knockin’ on a few doors with me?”

“Oh yeah, I’m so shy I might curl into a ball. Like I said, Travers, welcome to my life. You take the east row and I’ll take the west. We’ll meet in the middle.”

“Let’s stick together. I’ve had a few bad experiences since I’ve been in Chicago.”

“So sorry to hear that,” Kate said. “Now go on. This is what I do every fucking day. Somebody messes with me, I’ll kick ‘em in the nuts! Now go on.”

“Hey, Kate?”

“Yeah?” she asked, walking toward the commercial strip.

“Remind me not to mess with you. I kind of like my nuts.”

“This much I know, Travers,” she said, waving over her shoulder. “This much I know.”

--

Nick started at the end of the complex and worked his way down ten apartments before he got someone to open the door. Maybe they were at home and they thought he was an Avon salesmen or a Jehovah’s Witness. On the eleventh one, an incredibly short black man wearing a spaghetti-stained T-shirt made to look like a tuxedo stood in front of him.

“Hey, man,” Nick said. “I’m looking for one of your neighbors. Woman named Florida. You know if she still lives around here?”

“Well, ‘hey man’ yourself,” he said with a shit-eating grin that dropped into a frown. “I don’t know Florida and I ain’t got time for this shit.”

He slammed the door in Nick’s face.

Another five apartments down, an elderly woman carrying a four-pronged cane opened the door. Nick felt like he was trick or treating or Christmas caroling. That was it. He could sing a short song every time someone opened the door. They’d love him.

“Got me a pain in ma gogo,” she said. Her face a withered prune topped by a white wig. Norman Bates, please come get your mother.

“Where?” he said.

“In ma gogo.”

“Gotcha.”

Nick walked on and could see Kate working a row of apartments about a hundred yards away. Felt good working with her again. Didn’t matter if they were knocking on doors in some shitty apartments. He knew being with her was fleeting, that they’d break away in a few days and return to their own private worlds. Kate wasn’t impulsive. She wouldn’t let him get beneath her tough exterior. She’d work with him, joke around, but she wouldn’t let him know her anymore. He’d ruined all of that and now he was having to pay.

What he wouldn’t give for just one more meal at Antoine’s when the wine flowed and the conversation rolled and nothing mattered outside their small table.

Years ago, he’d shared a great meal and a couple bottles of wine with her in the old restaurant’s Mystery Room. At Antoine’s, the menu is more than one hundred years old and each of the fourteen dining rooms are lined with a barrage of images, from daguerreotype photos to pictures of long-dead Krewe queens.

That night, the crowd had thinned to a patter of conversation as they walked to a dimly lit back staircase to the second floor. Kate laughed and stumbled as Nick led her into an empty upstairs dining room and closed a squeaky door. The light was so dim, the furniture appeared as shadows in the orange glow. The old floors creaked beneath them as they wandered by the tables smelling of clean linen and the walls of hot wood.

The room had felt enormous. So silent, it buzzed.

Kate led him to an empty chair behind a partition. She was wearing a black summer dress with spaghetti straps and sat on his lap. Nick had felt the blood working through his veins as a door opened and someone switched off the lights. He touched her cheek in the darkness and slid down one of her straps. She wasn’t wearing a bra and he kissed her chest. She unbuttoned his pants and she stood as he worked her panties down her legs. It was all by touch. In the darkness, he couldn’t tell where he started and she ended. It was exciting knowing they could be caught as she breathed louder and began to make soft noises. They both melted into each other that June night in the desolate floor of the New Orleans institution. It ended with the longest, most twisted kiss he’d ever known.