Leavin' Trunk Blues (4 page)

Then I woke up.

A single bulb burned and rocked above my head and I knew I had been dreamin again. My sister is dead. Billy is dead. And it’s lockdown time. I heard the locks crack through the concrete walls as I turned my pillow. I closed my eyes, waitin’ for sleep to come so that I could return to my dreams, Billy, and my promised land.

In Chicago, the snow fell in ashen flakes as large as Annie’s hands. She watched the crystal patterns drop and burn as soon as they touched the black asphalt on Wabash Avenue. The snow almost didn’t look real as the cars’ headlights cut through the white curtain and into the hotel bar. Bet she could walk out and catch the frozen wetness in her mouth like when she was a kid.

The Cass Hotel was a real gangster-looking place. Sandstone blocks topped with a dozen stories of sturdy brick. She sat on the first floor in a bar called the Sea of Happiness with her partner Fannie. A model cutter ship hung over beer taps and about a dozen neon signs buzzed in the plate glass windows. A couple of video games pinged away along the back wall as a jukebox played bad eighties music.

She and Fannie watched the man slinking down at the end of the bar over some drink as thick as maple syrup. The little fat guy wasn’t a social drinker. He was a professional on a mission. His beady black eyes were like slits as he downed the last drop, coughed, and moved his neck like a dodo bird. Made Annie sick to know she’d have to see him naked by the end of the night. Bet he had a dick like a little wet noodle.

Fannie yawned next to her. The long-legged black woman just wasn’t in the mood, Annie guessed. Fannie just sat there all prim and proper with her legs crossed and her tongue running around a straw.

What a woman.

Fannie could’ve been one of those women who made money modeling underwear. She had a tight body filled with good curves and bumps and skin the color of the inside of a Milky Way bar. Wide-set almond-shaped eyes. But what Annie liked best about her partner and best friend was the scrolled tattoo above her pierced navel. Real sweet-girl-gone-bad look.

Fannie, the perfect black love machine.

Annie rubbed her hand over the little smiley face near her own breast and looked at the mirror in front of her. Maybe she wasn’t that bad. Kind of cute with blonde hair cut as short as a boy’s and wild blue eyes. Pert little nose too.

But she wasn’t looking for a man. Already had one. Willie, her butcher knife. He’d never let her down. She remembered when she and Fannie were both growing up in the Robert Taylor projects, Willie became her best friend. Sometimes, she would stroke him under her pillow as she heard the screaming from the floors below.

She thought about the time when she was fourteen and that man who smelled like garlic grabbed her boob and tried to put her hand on his dick. They were stuck in a stairwell and the man was panting and making all kinds of dog noises. He gripped her small boob so tight she thought he was going to try and rip it off. But before he could get the second button undone on her shorts, she had the knife halfway in his belly.

Yeah, Willie was her man.

Butcher Knife-Totin’ Annie and Fast-Fuckin’ Fannie. Together they could do anything they wanted. Now that Fannie was out of jail for those B and E, possession, and prostitution charges, they’d take on the whole fucking world.

The Oriental bartender plunked down another orgasm for Fannie and a shot of Bacardi lemon rum for herself. There was a ratty captain’s hat sitting on his head like he thought he was being cool as he flashed some rotten teeth. Pimple marks dotted his face and he had a sweaty white bandanna cocked on his neck.

“What you lookin’ at, Chinaman?” Annie said. “You just gave us what we want, so go away, dick brain.”

The bartender frowned, then grinned and blew them a kiss.

Guess you really couldn’t blame the guy for staring at all their leather-and-lace glory. Fannie had on the tightest black pants Annie had ever seen. Looked like she’d spray painted her legs. And her low-cut red sweater really brought out the tiger tattooed on her right breast. The old beast growling.

She watched Fannie sip out of the glass like she was the damn Queen of England, her legs crossed and locked in a vise. The short man at the end of the bar looked like he was about to start drooling.

“Maybe you should just cut the crotch out of your pants, woman,” Annie said. “That’d make it easier for all your men.”

“Girlfriend,” Fannie said, taking another sip of the orgasm and licking the rim. “Please kiss my black coochie.”

“Promise?” Annie asked, raising her eyebrows and smiling a rubbery grin.

“Girrrl … you are too sick.”

“We got work to do,” Annie said, patting her side where Willie lived. His cold steel firm.

“You got a plan?”

“One of two things,” Annie said. “1 can stick Willie up his ass and make him disappear or you can fuck him to death.”

Fannie grinned and uncrossed her legs.

In a fake British accent, she said: “I’m quite glad us ladies still have options.”

The two girls shielded their mouths with their hands as they snickered.

In the blackness of a Mississippi night, Nick watched the Delta landscape roll by from the Amtrak car window. The barren shotgun cottages, tired mobile homes, and brittle patterns of dead cotton fields shot out in strobelike flashes as he kicked off his old boots and took a sip from a stainless steel flask. The thumping metal on metal pounded a rhythm in his ears.

Kate Archer. JoJo had to bring her up. He just had to plant that seed in his mind to sprout and grow until he stepped off the train in Chicago. What a friend.

Nick heard she’d taken a job with the
Tribune
after a failed relationship with an Uptown restaurateur named Richard Brevard. A man she was supposed to marry. She must’ve met Richard shortly after she’d found Nick in bed with that lanky blonde two years ago. Nick remembered the vacant look on her face as she rolled back his warehouse door. She saw a strange woman sitting in her robe and drinking out of her favorite mug.

Kate had shot him a look that wasn’t exactly hatred, just a drained expression of absolute disappointment. She said in an even, dead-sure tone, “You’re such an ass.”

But there were other memories. Better memories. Nick could still feel the heat of her dark skin when they made love in his warehouse. Aaron Neville on the stereo. Both of them loaded with Dixies, whiskey, and blues. The best time he’d ever had.

Maybe JoJo was right. Maybe this whole trip was about her.

Some kind of masochism to see if she would kick him in the nuts this time. But she was worth it. If only he could talk to her for a moment, he’d feel better. He was never much for closure. In fact, he thought the whole concept was bullshit. Endings are seldom neat. They’re sometimes jagged and ugly. But he needed something … another screw you. Another chance.

Maybe he was just bringing hope with him, a dream of something that could never happen. Nick sipped the whiskey again and stared back at the blues highway and laughed at his situation. He felt New Orleans melt away in the flickering light, the history roll by, and the endless black night reconnect to a past that once showed hope to an entire generation. The train rolled, bumped, and vibrated his back. Thinking about the old travelers made him feel good.

Nick could imagine them now as he turned out his overhead light and pulled down his narrow bed. He could almost smell the migrants loaded with shoe boxes full of fried chicken and biscuits staring at the same Mississippi night. There were stories of women kissing the floor of the railcar as they crossed over the Mason Dixon line at Cairo, Illinois. Trading what was familiar for what could be.

The journey of the blues started somewhere outside, somewhere in a heated evening about a century ago. The blues was born in the rich, brown earth of the Delta, a region stretching two hundred miles from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis to the edge of Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was once a frontier of mean swamps with bears and water moccasins, a land broken in by blacks who worked from sunup to sundown in levee and prison camps. Sometimes at gunpoint.

From that soul-breaking work came the blues. Like their African forefathers, they used songs to make the work pass— sometimes alone, others in unison—as they picked cotton, unloaded steamship cargos, or beat their tools into the rich earth. Soon, they coupled the hollers with guitars and harmonicas.

The music worked its way into backwood shacks where couples danced, bathed in sweat, as the music brought back the spirit. The early players thumped drumbeats on the buckled, wooden floors, making the guitar talk back to them. The instruments just an intimate extension of the players’ voices.

Blues became a core of Delta life and of the southern black community.

And in the late thirties and forties, blues followed that community. About five million blacks left the south between World War II and 1970 for northern cities in a shift that changed the complexion of America. It used to cost about twelve bucks for a ticket from Clarksdale to Chicago on the Illinois Central—about a week’s pay for most. Some families, like Old World immigrants, had to split up. They would send money home to bring everyone over to the other side.

In 1943, Muddy Waters caught a train to Chicago with nothing but a yearning soul, a single change of clothes, and his old Silvertone guitar. He knew fame was just a trip away.

Nick believed that’s when the blues really left the Delta and started a new life in the Windy City. Muddy would help mold that country sound into a tightly backed band with piano, drums, bass, and harmonica. The future of the blues arrived with Muddy at the Twelfth Street Station.

When he was finishing his Great Migration project at Tulane a few years ago, Nick traced the routes of the Delta greats from Mississippi to Chicago. The change was bone-jarring. The Mississippi Delta was a fertile oasis. Everything green and alive. Chicago was industrial. Gray and cold. But for sharecroppers making inhuman wages, if anything at all, Chicago was about hope. They would’ve probably traveled to the depths of hell to escape the poverty and racial barriers.

Nick imagined folks like Muddy and Ruby Walker and the absolute loneliness they must’ve felt approaching the belching smokestacks of Chicago industry. Did Ruby wait for a train in Clarksdale with a suitcase made of paper filled with everything she owned as Nick had read? Big boasts to farmers in Mississippi about how she was going to make it in Chicago? About how she was going to come back driving a long, shiny car throwing money out her window at country relatives? But when the cold night cloaked around the train, it must have been like traveling to another planet. The boast becoming an internal fear.

Bright lights, big city, gone to my baby’s head
, Nick thought, closing his eyes.

Today, most of that hope was gone. The Twelfth Street Station was now a barren field at Twelfth and Michigan, and much of the South Side was nothing but rotting slums and burned-out shells. In Muddy’s and Ruby’s time, Chicago was a place where blacks could make it, where wealth was as obtainable as someone’s work ethic. But today, many blacks were taking that same blues highway back to the Delta. Somewhere, the dream had become an economic nightmare.

The lights of the small towns and lonesome highways scattered across his face as the train rolled through the cold neverending night. As he fell asleep, he imagined Kate’s face close to his. Brown eyes like sunlight hitting morning coffee. Perfect dimpled chin. Reminded him of a young Ali MacGraw about the time of
The Getaway
. He imagined her pulling the dark brown hair from her eyes and pursing a smile into the corner of her mouth.

I’ve been gone so long, I know things ain’t what they used to be.

An hour later, Annie and Fannie had their arms around the little man as they led him up to his apartment on Rush Street. Place was over a pizzeria and Annie could smell the crust, cheese, and sauce baking into a symphony. Made her mouth water as she watched the guy fumbling with his key for the hole and missing the entire knob.

“Baby, let me slip in it,” Fannie said, guiding his key into the lock. “Mama will take care of you.”

The hallway was covered with muddy, red carpet with blue lights shining in a cavelike glow. Looked like they were inside a carnival ride.
Step right up, see what it’s like to live in a shithole.

Fannie smoothed her gloved hand over his greasy head with about four long hairs plastered over a bald spot. Over his shoulder, Fannie made a queer-looking face like she’d just stroked a dead chicken. Annie smiled back at her friend and could feel her heart pounding in her chest like a bass drum. She crushed her lip with her teeth.

The man stumbled into an apartment that smelled of pizza and cat piss. He had an unmade bed under a window heater with clothes strewn around the room like they’d flown out of a blender. Dirty grippie underwear littered the floor along with crushed cans of Hamm’s beer. Real class act. Didn’t even seem worth the effort. But this was the man, and they had a job to do.

The man fell onto his bed, turned on an AM clock radio, unbuckled his pants, and pushed his loose polyester trousers to his ankles. The radio droned an old ABBA song as he put his hands behind his head and spread his legs. His legs were skinny, white, and covered in coarse black hair like some kind of fucked up Chia pet.