Leavin' Trunk Blues (18 page)

“That him?” Fannie said in a groggy voice from the backseat.

“That’s him,” Peetie said. “Had him sit down with me yesterday over some greens and talk to me about the old days and askin’ all kind of questions about when I was makin’ records and Billy Lyons and New Orleans. I tell you—”

“How do I turn off this little turd?” Annie asked.

“Annie,” Fannie said.

“I’m serious. I’m tired of this. It’s like diarrhea of the mouth. Shit, man, shut up.”

“Just tryin’ to help you girls out. Me and Stagger Lee go back a long ways.”

“Yeah. He said you were real tight. Said, ‘If Peetie gets on your nerves, why don’t you cut him up and throw him into the river.’”

Annie tongued the joint and scratched her nose as the big white man kept walking down the street. He was about six-foot-three and over two hundred pounds.

“Y’all like working for Stagger Lee?” Peetie asked. “Don’t mean to imply nothin’. Just wonderin’ if you like your work.”

“Yeah,” Annie said. “It’s kind of like working at Disneyland. He loves us.”

“Once again, don’t mean to be sayin’ nothin’ improper ‘bout my dear friend Mr. Stagger Lee. It’s just you two ladies are just so fine. Beautiful women down to your toes. Just made me kind of curious. Like you can’t find another line of work?”

“Fannie? You passed the bar exam lately?”

“Not lately, girlfriend. Still need to take my GED first then to med school.”

“Oh, that’s right. I forget. You’re going to be a cootie doctor.”

“Y’all afraid to leave him?”

Annie stared into the darkness and said: “You don’t leave Stagger Lee.”

“So what’d he tell you ladies to do? Kill the white man and that’s it?”

“Duh—what else is there?”

Peetie grinned over at Annie and then looked back and tipped his hat to Fannie. “So much more, ladies. So much more. You got to think about your future.”

“Sure, Peetie with you on our side, we can’t lose,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Shh, shh,” Peetie said. “Don’t look at him. Scoot down. Scoot down.”

The man disappeared around the next street comer. Peetie cranked his ignition but the car wouldn’t turn over. He cranked the key again. Ice clung to the still windshield wipers.

“You want us to get out and push?” Annie asked.

“Hold up. Hold up. She may be old, but she got some fire down below.”

The engine sputtered, caught, and Peetie turned into traffic following Travers. It was gonna be a long night. Annie straightened up in her seat and felt inside her old jacket—the one they’d bought today that looked like Daniel Boone with leather fringe— and ran her finger over Willie’s blade.

“Knew he’d come here,” Peetie said with a big shit-eating grin on his face.

“Think you can handle him?” Annie asked, stubbing the joint onto the heel of her platform shoe.

“Ain’t a man alive could stay away from my trap,” Fannie said. “All they got to do is smell me. They get a little whiff of this chocolate pie, how sweet it gonna taste, and mmm-mmm, they are gone.”

Nick hated to do it. Been too long to pick up the phone and act like an old friend just blew into Chi-town. But there he was in the back of a South Side liquor store cradling a pay phone in his hand. He’d already paid for the six-pack of Colt 45 at his feet and another bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Something had called him back here, made him stick the quarter into the slot, and dial the
Chicago Tribune
’s number. He even heard his own voice ask the news desk for Kate Archer. But she wasn’t there. He got an answering machine and was damned glad of it. What came next was something out of Travers’ jackass files.

“Kate?” Nick said, as if he could have gotten the wrong person. “I’m in Chicago. And could really use a little help. Need anything you guys have on a September fifty-nine murder of a man named Billy Lyons or the woman accused, named Ruby Walker ... I’m staying at the Palmer House. Thanks.”

Jesus. He sounded like an overanxious dork. He could have gone to the Washington Library and looked up the clips himself. He knew it. She knew it. Man, he came off like a freakin’ idiot.

He grabbed his paper sack and walked back outside and down the block to the place Jimmy said Leroy Williams’s son lived. The rundown house was surrounded by a chain-link fence with floodlights illuminating rusting metal chairs, floor lamps, patio sets, old metal beds, toppled dressers, and a stringless golden harp. Guess this is the place where old furniture came to die.

A pit bull with a mangy coat and yellow teeth gave a low growl as Nick shook the gate trying to attract whoever was in the house. He called out Williams’s name a couple times as the dog acted like she was about to have a conniption or chomp through the metal.

“Hold on, Fluffy,” Nick said to the dog.

A light switched on the porch and a man in pajama bottoms and no shirt popped out of the door. His gut hung over his waistband and a long cigarette lay low in his mouth. He had on a pair of gold round glasses, taped at the corners, and when he spoke his words came in clouds.

“What the fuck you doin’, man?”

“Merry Christmas,” Nick said.

“Fuck off.”

“Happy New Year?”

The man glared at Nick as the dog tried some type of Olympic leap over the fence but fell onto her back. Snow covered the furniture in rounded shapes in the yellow light.

“You Mr. Williams?”

“Fuck off.”

“Listen, man, I’ve come to talk to you about your father.”

“My daddy’s dead. You dumb-ass prick.”

“Season’s greetings,” Nick yelled. “Listen, I know that. I want to talk to you about why.”

Williams walked back into the house shaking his head. The lights fell across the junkyard, and Nick bent down to pick up his booze for an exciting night at the Palmer House. More drinking. Cable. Then the lights came back on. Twice as bright, in twice as many places.

Williams walked back to the front porch of the run-down two-story, this time in a ragged coat, and called the dog back inside.

“Lucifer! Get yo’ butt back in here.”

The dog yelped and turned back to the warm home. Williams ambled down the steps and weaved through the piles of garbage. He moved like there was a load in his pants. Back clenched, shoulders reared back.

Nick decided not to ask if it was true.

“What, you sellin’ somethin’ in the bag?” Williams asked.

“Just some booze for the night. You want a drink?”

“I don’t drink.” He looked through the diamonds in the fence. His face was round and weathered and wore an expression like he’d been shit on his whole life and never expected anything different.

“I know your father was murdered,” Nick said, grasping his fingers through the fence. “I’m trying to make some sense of it.”

“Ain’t no sense to it,” he said, spitting on the ground.

“Let me in and we’ll talk about it.”

“Fuck you,” Williams said and turned to walk back inside his warm home.

“Give me five minutes,” Nick said. ‘Your father was a great man. Heard he was one of the greatest blues piano men ever.”

Williams turned back as his dog opened the loose door with her snout and trotted down to her master. She growled at the man’s side until Williams grasped her by the spiked collar. He smiled.

“Was he that good?”

--

Nick sat in a ragged chair as Williams walked over and turned down the sound on a black-and-white television. The man sat back into a couch and reached into Nick’s sack for a cold Colt and settled into his seat.

“Thought you didn’t drink?” Nick asked.

“You want to leave, fuckhead?”

“No, I’m having too a good a time making friends.”

Williams scowled and popped the top of the can. He drank a long sip then tilted the can for Lucifer. The dog licked the rim and then kissed her owner’s face.

‘Yes, yes, yes, baby. Yes, my little, little Lucy.”

Nick raised his eyebrows. “Mr. Williams, what do you know about your father’s death?”

“Nobody ever did nothin’ about it.”

“I think an innocent woman was set up by the same people who killed your father.”

He scowled again and rubbed the wrinkles on the back of the dog’s neck. The dog made a burping sound and dropped to her stomach, her head in Williams’s lap. The man hit a button on an old coffee table and the sound came back on the television. Pro wrestling.

“Aw shit!” he shouted, watching two huge men collide with the mat.

Nick watched his face. It was as if no one was there, as if their conversation had never occurred. This was bullshit. Nick looked at his watch and groaned. He needed a hot shower, a hot meal, and some sleep.

“Good night,” Nick said.

The man continued to stare at the television.

The room smelled like the inside of a military footlocker. Old-fashioned fat Christmas lights hung in the window by a metal walker and a box of dozens of canes.

As he hit the door, Nick glanced back. The man looked at him.

“Stagger Lee,” Williams said softly.

“What?”

“Stagger Lee killed my father,” he said, scratching the dog’s stomach. “That’s what my mama said before she passed on a few years back.”

“Like the man in the song?”

“I guess … some folks say he ain’t even real. But I heard about this man. They say he was the first to bring crack into Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green. But shit, I don’t know. I heard he was killed in some gang fightin’ a few years back.”

“You know why?”

“My daddy wasn’t a good man. Never cared for us. Beat my mama. Let’s just say, I wish I gave a shit.”

Friday night in Chicago and Nick felt like pulling the hotel room’s curtains shut, finding a western on TV, and washing down some warm Jack with the Colt 45. When you retrace the steps of the dead, you begin to learn life doesn’t mean shit. You may work your ass off, be revered in your own time, but like Sam Chatmon sang, “We all go back to mother earth.” These men weren’t just footnotes in a history book. They laughed, drank, loved women, felt the blues, and all died in a horrific way. He could see their cold faces dried with blood and flashes of gaping wounds in his mind. Forty years ago.

He took a hot shower with the water slowly turning his blood back to a normal temperature. The water felt like small needles on his skin and his worn shoulders, lined with thick, diagonal scars. A little reminder of his football days, a probing scope, and a hundred dislocations. Maybe he was getting soft. Twelve years ago, he played the Bears in Soldier Field in a short-sleeve jersey. He could still feel the cold, brittle shock in his bones with each jarring tackle. But he wasn’t thinking too much then: The pain in his shoulders was constant, his drinking was out of control, and he was engaged to a woman who had the depth of a pancake.

Her name was Lisa. Green eyes, blonde hair, and a simply perfect body. Woman never worked out, ate ice cream like it was air, but retained this tiny waist with perfect hips and breasts that would make Hugh Hefner’s jaw drop. She couldn’t walk in a room without every single man almost breaking his neck. She loved the attention and seemed to be plugged into every member of New Orleans society.

Hell, the woman couldn’t go take a dump somewhere without having to hug some person she’d met before. Nick felt like a damned trophy. The football player. The one who got her good seats to the home games and into all the closed parties.

But she seemed to have a good heart. Lisa was always there waiting at the New Orleans airport with players’ wives and fans when he got off of the plane. She’d have on tight jeans tucked into cowboy boots with a low-cut T-shirt. Always with a brown paper sack holding a muffuletta and a six-pack of Dixie. He just didn’t want to see the flaws.

They didn’t start to crack wide open until he was kicked out of the league. Those were the days when his agent refused to answer calls, his investment broker dropped him as a client, and he had lost most of his savings.

Lisa had become a stranger to the townhome where they lived near Lake Pontchartrain. She said she needed space. She’d come in drunk or stoned and fall face-first into bed. She would say she went out dancing or had dinner with friends. But New Orleans is a small town. Rumors start. Messages trickled back from third parties. And then one day, about three months after the game, she disappeared.

Most of his friends, his money, and his pride went with her. He sold off the townhome, paid his bills, and moved into the warehouse. It seemed for a while his whole world was swirling in a toilet. His drinking spiraled into a daily collection of Jack Daniel’s on the side of Dixie. He lost about sixty pounds.

Mixed with the whiskey and self-pity came the blues. He absolutely enveloped himself in the culture. He drank with the players, practiced harp with JoJo until his lips bled, and even worked with some street players in the French Market.

The blues helped him put everything back together. He got his master’s and went after his doctorate. The layers of age fell from his warehouse as he worked on her piece by piece. And during that time, he also met Kate. Together they made the finishing touches on the warehouse. Paint splattered in her hair and a smile plastered on her face.