Leavin' Trunk Blues (6 page)

“Went straight to the top,” she said with dead, black eyes. “You know that magazine Cashbox? They called it pure gold. Billy couldn’t press ‘em fast enough.”

“You cut how many, ten others?”

“ ‘Bout a dozen.”

“Which ones were your favorites?”

“Dude, you’re askin’ questions from way back.” She sighed. “Let’s see, ‘Blues Highway.’ I wrote that. Couple of Memphis Minnie numbers, ‘Please Don’t Stop Him’ and ‘Fashion Plate Daddy.’ And Tie Yo’ Monkey in a Knot.’”

Nick sang:

“
When you see that woman

dressed so fine,

And you got lovin’

on your mind,

You better tie,

You better tie,

Yo
^’
monkey in a knot.”

Ruby listened to the words, her face intent. The guard laughed and turned away. Guess he never would make it as a singer. But maybe he’d loosen Ruby up.

“Moses Jordan wrote that one?” Nick asked.

“Yeah, Moses wrote most of my songs.”

“You still see him?”

“He’s come to see me a few times,” she said. “He sent a few letters. But your friends have a way of forgettin’ when you’re inside. Used to have this big woman in here who told me that. Said forget your friends. Forget your family. Only person you can rely on is yourself.”

“Last year, Elmore King told me you got a raw deal,” Nick said. “You know why he would say that? You two close?”

“I thought you said you wanted to hear my story,” Ruby said. “You said you wanted to know all of it.”

“I do.”

“Aren’t you gonna ask me why I pointed that gun at Billy?”

“All right—why’d you point the gun?”

“After forty years, those things start to rattle in your mind,” she said slowly. She never looked Nick in the eye, reciting what she had to say like a bored minister working with an old sermon. ‘You fill your cell with books and your mind with the past. I still see it in my sleep. Wakes me up.”

The cassette recorder whirred in the silence. Nick scratched his cheek and shifted in his chair. He smiled at her again. Her face was without expression.

Ruby leaned back into her seat and laced her hands in her lap. “Me and Billy was fightin’ over money that day,” she said. “They tried to make it seem like I was jealous, but he owed me for my records. We’d been through for a long time.”

“Seems like you loved him a lot.”

“I did.”

“But you didn’t kill him over love?”

Ruby looked up from her seat. Her face drawn, her eyes hooded. “I didn’t kill him at all. Don’t you know that yet? Didn’t you read my letters?”

He should have realized what this was about. An interview granted after you listened to some long, hard bullshit story of innocence. Most prisoners had spent so much time alone and in law libraries that they really believed they never committed the crime. Nick could play the game. He had before. When they got tired of repeating the stories, they finally tell you things you want to know about their music. Besides, Elmore King thought she was treated unfairly. Maybe that was a story in itself.

“Who would want to set you up?” Nick asked, trying to seem sincere. Maybe not looking too good doing it.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Any ideas?”

She shook her head and looked at her hands. Short nails. Winter chapped.

“Billy owed a lot of folks money. I was just standin’ in line. Could of been a lot of people. He used to run numbers, hookers, you name it. Made A1 Capone look like a mama’s boy.”

“What about appeals?”

“Done ‘em all. Hope can be mean, so I quit . . . Used to think I deserved what I got. I took my sentence but always thought I’d get out.”

“What about parole? Seems like you’re the model prisoner. You’ve cooked, served forty years.”

“Yeah, well, there was some trouble ‘bout fifteen years ago.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Guard. Man guard was messin’ with me. Tryin’ to touch me and things.”

“Did you complain?”

“Yeah, I complained. I stuck a fork right up his ass in the kitchen. Had to have surgery to get it out and got me in solitary for a month. Had some cross-eyed psychologist tell me I had a problem with men and pointed things. Said I had issues with my daddy. Ain’t that somethin? I never knew my daddy.”

“And that was the end of parole?”

She took another deep breath, staring at the floor and rocking in her chair. “The board told me 1 was still a threat on the outside. Hell, took me three years just to get back into the kitchen.”

“Listen, we don’t need to get into all that yet,” Nick said. “I want to hear about when you were young, your recordings, leaving Clarksdale.”

“What do you mean, you don’t want to hear all that yet?”

“Your guilt or innocence isn’t my business. I’m a historian. I want to know about your life.”

“And bein’ innocent ain’t a part of my life?” Ruby asked.

“Not all of it.”

She stared straight into his eyes. She wasn’t mad. Just worn. She looked like a person suffering from severe sleep deprivation begging a doctor for a pill or some advice. Her eyes dropped somewhere into an open space and again nodded with an understanding only she knew.

“Ruby, I’ve been on a train from New Orleans all night. We’ll get to your story … be cool.”

“Don’t be coolin’ me, dude,” Ruby said. “Uh-ah. Why do you think I gave you a chance? Spent my days tellin’ you my story in those letters? That was my insides I wrote.”

“You heard about how handsome I was?”

Ruby blew out her breath and leaned back into her chair. “Look like that face been in some fights to me.”

The guard behind her laughed. Nick looked up at the guard and raised an eyebrow.

“Where’d you get that scar?” Ruby asked. “Fightin’?”

“Quarterback kicked me in the face.”

“Reason I answered you is I checked you out. I keep up with blues. I know what’s goin’ on out there and the sad state of things. Reason they ain’t deadened my mind yet.”

“How did you check me out?”

Ruby had her shoulders pinched together and her head in her hands. She rubbed her rough brown hands over her face and said, “I read about you helpin’ that man in Memphis.”

Nick looked away and down at his notes.

“That old dude whose manager left with everything he owned. Said you found the man at a strip club in Jackson.”

“Biloxi.”

“Said you went to jail for a few days.”

“Yeah.”

“Man called you a saint.”

“He said I once played for the Saints.”

She skimmed her hand over her short gray hair. It was if she was searching for the glistening tresses she once owned. He had an hour for this interview and was losing time fast.

“Tell me about growing up in Mississippi,” Nick said.

“Why?” she asked. “Nobody cares.”

“Your music was and is important. People still listen to it.”

“Who? No one knows me.”

“I do.”

“And you want to hear my story from the beginning. Everything?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ruby looked down at her hands and inhaled a long breath. She blew it out and looked back at the masculine guard. The female guard rolled up on her toes and looked away.

“I’ll make you a deal, dude,” Ruby said. “I’m tired. Look at me. I’m a mess. That’s another thing. Don’t want no pictures. You hear me? I want to be remembered for what I was.” She pulled the denim material from her chest. “Not this.”

“What’s the deal?” Nick asked.

‘You find out what happened to Billy and you get my story.”

Nick laughed. He could feel his face flush with embarrassment. “That was forty years ago.”

“You tellin’ me?”

Somehow this always happened. He had a weakness for involving himself with his subjects. He knew he’d helped Will Roy get his cash back from his manager, done odd jobs for friends like tracking down Jesus for Fats. But what Ruby was asking was something altogether different. He should learn from his mistakes. Willie Brown, Henry.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Ruby leaned her head to the table. He could see the top of her matted hair and the chaffed skin that had formed on her elbows. Ruby was eroded. Her body, her soul. Everything about her seemed to have been stripped away. It was a state Nick had seen before. So clear, it appeared like a photograph from his past.

“You still keep in contact with anyone from the old days?” he asked.

“Just one. But hadn’t seen him for a couple years. Peetie Wheatstraw. He hasn’t done nothin’ but suck up every last cent I made on the outside. Said he was my agent. That he’d take care of me and all that kind of mess. We ain’t talkin’, but Peetie knew all them folks.”

“Where can I find him?”

“Last time I heard, he was workin’ at a men’s shop on the South Side called the Soul Train,” she said. “Been doin’ that ever since he got out of the business … Other than that, don’t know what to tell ya.”

Ruby cocked her head and watched Nick’s face. “So, you gonna do it?”

“I’ll ask around during my research,” Nick said. “That’s all I can promise.”

She stretched out her hand. Nick shook it. She felt warm and small. He smiled at her again. She looked down at the concrete floor dabbed with cigarette butts.

“So your family were sharecroppers?” Nick asked.

“Slaves more like it. We worked on a plantation outside Clarksdale. Beautiful place. Still think about it. Can just see the way thunderstorms would roll over the Delta. Looked like big black islands that would beat the dirt for hours …”

Nick decided to loop back through the South Side and search for Peetie Wheatstraw early that afternoon. Peetie was about the only lead he had on King Snake and shouldn’t be too hard to find. You start with the easy ones and work backward. After a few minutes of searching though a soggy White Pages by a Burger King and consulting a folding map, he was on Forty-seventh Street, riding low in the stubby Tic Tac, heater cranked in the slushy gray cold, as the dilapidated brick buildings and crumbling Eastlake homes whizzed by in his peripheral vision.

He tried to imagine the neighborhood in the forties and fifties. He thought of the days when Forty-seventh cut through the heart of Bronzeville, a working-class neighborhood of hotels, shops, and theaters. He thought of the excitement of when Cab Calloway played the Regal and fresh faces from Mississippi cotton fields drank in an endless row of blues joints. Trading brogan shoes and overalls for creased suits and mack daddy hats. When Billy Lyons breathed and Ruby Walker was the hottest female blues act in town.

As he drove farther into the neighborhood, to the core of the South Side, the images of the past were shattered by liquor stores, check cashing joints, pawnshops, and storefront churches that hadn’t had a service for twenty years. The neighborhood was a land of outdoor drinkers and men in black leather jackets and do-rags with cigarettes loose in their mouths. There were razor-sharded parking gates, rusted stop signs, burned-out brownstones with plywood windows, and crumbling buildings decomposing into trash-strewn lots.

It was a forgotten place. An apocalyptic world. Chained. Gated and covered for rediscovery.

Nick already knew Peetie Wheatstraw’s name but not for any connection to King Snake Records or the blues scene of fifties Chicago. Peetie Wheatstraw was a brooding piano player with a potato-shaped head from St. Louis in the thirties. He was known for his songs about sex, death, and the supernatural and often bragged that he was the devil’s son-in-law. But that Peetie Wheatstraw died more than fifty years ago in a car crash. His real name was William Bunch and used the name Peetie Wheatstraw for show. Wheatstraw was the trickster from black folklore. The evil spirit waiting at the crossroads.

Nick had never heard that name associated with King Snake. He would have remembered it. But so much about King Snake is unknown. It wasn’t like Vee Jay or Diamond where oral histories were told so often they became redundant. Over forty years, names can become lost and people forgotten. Especially the money men.

Five minutes later, Nick walked through a narrow alley next to the store.

Soul Train Fashions sat inside a tri-corner, three-story building with a long row of plate glass windows wrapping the bottom floor filled with candy-colored suits, Stacey Adams shoes, and fedoras with feathers. A hand-painted sign in red and green said don’t let the preacher catch you out of style.

When Nick pushed the door, a buzzer sounded and a lock released. Inside, the store had cheap wood-paneled walls and smelled of cellophane packaging and new shoes. Rows and rows of suits stretched to a back counter. Lime green, cherry red, sky blue. Hats sat behind a locked glass case like relics in a museum. A purple bowler hung in the middle as the crown jewel with a smallish yellow feather tucked into its band.