Leavin' Trunk Blues (33 page)

What is it, R. L.? Nick heard himself say.

You brought yourself into a world of pain, Johnson said, pulling a fedora lower over his bad eye.

Had to.

Why do you believe in a world that doesn’t believe in you?

Stubborn.

That Elmore King’s a joker, ain’t he?

He is.

You know he holds that old, rusted key.

To what?

Freeing the blues.

Nick broke out of the dream, hearing a scratchy song spinning in a jukebox that glowed like rock candy before dissolving in his waking eyes. He could feel his ragged breath catch somewhere down deep in his chest soaked in sweat, as snowflakes the size of sand bits scattered on the ledge.

The red lights on the alarm clock read 2:00 A.M. There was still time to catch him. Without a word, Nick brought his feet to the floor and looked back at Kate sleeping. He leaned over and kissed her on the ear. She smiled, moaned, and pulled the blankets close as he grabbed his watch from the nightstand and hunted for his clothes.

“Where are you going?” she asked, half-awake.

“Downstairs for a drink.” He pulled on his socks and jeans and sat down for his boots. “Can’t sleep.”

“Now?” Kate stirred in bed. “Hold on, let me get up.”

Nick leaned to her on the bed and kissed her on the mouth.

“I’ll be right back.” He stood and watched Kate close her eyes again. He searched in his army duffel bag for his stainless-steel Browning and his Tom Mix boot knife. He grabbed an extra clip and quietly slid the gun into his coat pocket.

“
Oh, baby don’t you want to go

Back to that land of California,

to my sweet home Chicago.”

If there were a heart of the blues, it would surely beat like the tattered drum in the Checkerboard Lounge. The blues joint was housed in a rugged, brick building down on Muddy Waters Avenue where guys on the street drank cheap booze from paper bags and warmed their hands over oil drum fires. But the neighborhood didn’t keep the blues pilgrims away—everyone from James Cotton to the Rolling Stones jammed there. In the capital of the blues, with so many false temples, the Checkerboard pounded like truth itself.

Early that morning, a ragtag band played the drivin’ chords of a Jimmy Reed song as a big woman in white pants and an orange fur coat shook her ass near the stage. In a comer booth, an old timer sat grim-faced under a cheap baseball hat, a Budweiser sign burning above him. Swivel school chairs with hard wooden backs surrounded long thin counters the width of ironing boards on a linoleum floor buckled with water damage.

Nick ordered a Bud from the bartender and took a seat.

Garland, white Christmas lights, and fake snow sprayed from a can framed the mirror in front of him where he studied his haggard face. He looked like he belonged here. A street guy. Unshaven. Drawn eyes. A watch cap on his head. Nick took a sip of the Bud to hopefully soothe his lack of sleep and still-pulsing hangover from the night before.

He’d give King another twenty minutes, then he was out of there. The Christmas lights, the blues coming from the stage, and the softly falling snow on the decaying brick outside had him thinking about R. L. again.

He wondered what Johnson could have accomplished if he hadn’t been murdered in Greenwood. Would Johnson have preceded Muddy to form the first modern blues band? How would his music have evolved from his country roots singing of bare crossroads and midnight meetings with Satan? Johnson had been dead almost a quarter century by the time Nick was born. His legacy had manifested in the lives of Chicago masters like Johnny Shines, Muddy, Wolf, and Sonny Boy.

But Ruby was still here. Ruby had a completely different legacy still left.

Nick heard some commotion by the door and watched Elmore King strut in, shaking hands with several people. King was a hero to the South Side, and his people wanted to be near him. He patted their backs, talked about his latest album, and finally took a seat at the bar next to Nick. His smile dropped and his eyes stared at the jug-size whiskey bottles. The bartender poured a tall glass of Crown Royal on the rocks and sat it before him.

“We come a long way from New Orleans,” Nick said. “We could have talked about this at JoJo’s.”

“Figured you be here.” King took off his cowboy hat and laid it on the bar before turning to the stage and sipping on the Royal.

The band changed into an instrumental of Ike and Tina’s “Everythin’s Going to Turn Out Alright.” The guys on stage couldn’t be making much, just enough to cover their drinks at best. In old T-shirts and jeans they tore into some blues covers. But there was a difference in their playing. These guys were saying something with the music. You could tell they were feeling it, not like King going through the motions earlier that night.

“Funny, I couldn’t get these guys a record deal,” King said. “White people run the blues now. I never thought our own people would stop caring for us. But I look out at the crowds at festivals across the country, and all I see is white faces. No offense, man. Just makes me think.”

Nick finished his beer. He watched King staring at the stage.

“Where’s your protégé?” Nick asked.

“Fuckin’,” King said, sipping the Royal.

Nick kept watching his face until King finally turned to him. His face parched and worn as old leather.

“You a professor?” he asked.

Nick nodded.

“I’d like someone to write a book about my life,” King said. “I’ll put my name on it as the only official history of the Elmore King experience. How’d you like them apples, man? Cash be shootin’ out the ass.”

“I don’t take bribes.”

King flared his nose and squinted his eyes. He turned back to the bar and put down the drink. His shoulders slumped as he stared at the flickering TV set. A man walked over and said he just wanted to shake a legend’s hand. King forced a smile and signed an autograph.

Nick placed his elbows on the bar and remained quiet. There was nothing to say, this was King’s move.

“You understand what you’re doin?” King asked.

“You want to explain it to me?”

King’s mouth curved into a grin as he looked to the door. He looked back at Nick as a brittle wind shot through the room. A slump-shouldered black man took a couple’s cover, nodding them into the door. The man leaned back against the wall and worked on a Polish sausage.

“You waiting on someone?”

“Yeah,” King said. “He said he’d be here.”

King stared at an old clock hanging on the wood-paneled wall.

On stage, there was a poster of Robert Johnson, covered in torn, plastic sheeting. It was the shot of Johnson grinning with the guitar in his lap and the world seemingly by the balls. R. L. before the darkness set in. Above the poster, a curtain shook with a cold wind as the front door opened again.

King looked at the patron then back at the top of his drink.

“Man, you’re ripping away something,” he said. “And there’s something mighty ugly beneath it.”

Nick watched his eyes.

“You want to tell me why you did it?”

King laughed through his nose. “Goddamn, dude, don’t you let up?”

“I have a pretty good idea what happened,” Nick said. “Billy had you locked in. He tied you with that contract and King Snake was going nowhere. A man like you doesn’t sit idle. You could almost taste that fame, couldn’t you? I know you hired Stagger Lee.”

King laughed again and watched Nick. A smile smeared on his face. “You have no idea.”

He looked at the old wall clock again and then at the door.

“What dragged you away from your ranch and your groupies?” Nick asked, finishing the last of his Budweiser, still reeling with the thought of Kate in his arms.

King played with the napkin around his Royal. He lovingly wiped away the condensation from the glass before watching his reflection in the warped mirror in front of him.

“I guess I’m tired of being jerked around,” King said, almost to himself.

Nick watched him. The man’s beaten face almost falling from the bone.

“Guess my friend is tired of this shit too,” King said, leaving his drink on the bar and laying down a few bucks. “Goodnight.”

“What is it? Who are you talking about?”

But it was too late. King walked out of the front door and onto the desolate street shining in the intermittent glow of a few lights. Nick followed into the early morning chill and saw King about ten yards away walking down Forty-third Street.

“King!” Nick yelled jogging over to the man.

King stopped, looked down at Nick’s coat, and then stared up into his eyes. Nick self-consciously felt his pocket and touched the butt of the Browning. King put his hand on Nick’s shoulder as the muffled blues wailed across the bleak landscape.

“I need some help,” King said.

“Yeah, right.”

“Listen, what I tole you with JoJo that night was right on,” King said. “You come with me tonight, and I’ll tell you the whole deal.”

Nick looked down at the cracked sidewalk under his boots and back into King’s ancient eyes. The man slipped the black cowboy hat back on his head. “You want to help that ole woman or not?”

Navy Pier rambled a half mile into the freezing black water of Lake Michigan in a testament to a Chicago that no longer existed. The place had been used for shipping warehouses, World War II troop training, and even a college campus. To Nick, all the red-brick buildings looked like a collection of small football arenas connected on a long, rectangular floating sheet. In its present life, the pier had added an indoor garden, a movie theater, and even a small amusement park complete with a huge Ferris wheel. He was sure the wheel was supposed to add a whimsical edge to the hulking structures with domed tops. But at three a.m. on Christmas Eve, it reminded him of the one in
The Third Man
. Dark and ominous.

Something about silent amusement parks, cold black water, and early morning exchanges turned his stomach. His head still whirred with beer and lovemaking as a vicious wind tore deep off the lake. He wrapped his arms around himself.

On the ride from the Checkerboard in his two-ton Mercedes, King had told Nick about the threats from Stagger Lee. King, his cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, said he was innocent. He said Stagger Lee was blackmailing him and he had an old doctor’s bag stuffed with cash in his trunk. Nick had asked why an innocent man pays someone off, but King had just cranked a Bobby “Blue” Bland song louder as he wheeled toward the pier.

The answers will come, King promised.

Dock Street sat empty. At the top of a wide staircase, the skating rink was closed and the carousel sat covered. A red light from another pier blinked in the muddled air. A thick fog rolled off the lake mixing with the intermittently falling snow. Water slammed against pilings like a fist.

The falling snow looked like pieces of cut lace.

Nick could hear his boots crunch below him in the electric silence as he reached in his coat pocket and switched off the slide release on his Browning. King kept pace beside him, scanning the never-ending fog, his black boots clicking on the concrete edge of the pier.

“After this, let’s find Peetie,” King said.

Tall green streetlamps lined the pier’s edge like matchsticks. Nick took off his right glove and felt his hand sweat around the walnut handle of the gun.

“Why?”

“He’s been playing you, man. Me too. He knows everything.”

“Is that why Stagger Lee is after you?”

King looked confident, his shoulders reared back, as he walked through the fog. Nick felt his heart pound as he searched through the swirling wind. King seemed like he wanted to kick somebody’s ass as he kept walking and spit on the frozen ground.

“If something happens to me,” he said, looking over at Nick, “I want you to hear a song.”

“How ‘bout you be straight with me for once?” Nick said. This was getting ridiculous. Kate’s warm body was waiting for him back at the hotel as King played the same mind games he’d started in New Orleans.

“Close your mouth and listen, man,” King said. “I kept all my masters from King Snake and Diamond at my ranch. Bet you didn’t know that. Did you?”

Nick shook his head.

“I want you to listen to the Sweet Black Angel.”

“C’mon, I’ve heard all those songs.”

“No, listen to me.” King said. He’d stopped walking, his face tight with concentration. “I want you to hear that song. Everybody needs to hear that song. I’m tired of cleaning up everybody’s shit. Man, I paid my dues. Too many times.”

King looked over at Nick and gave a confident nod as the fog enshrouded his tired face.

--

Annie and Fannie skipped though the snow out toward the docks where they used to catch tour boats in the summer. Kind of fitting they had to come here tonight; Navy Pier was the place to clean up. When it was warm, all they had to do was wear some really flimsy satin dresses and they’d come home with more than five hundred apiece. Fannie would distract the men while Annie went through their pockets. If the guy noticed, she’d just feel around like she was looking for his rod. Or pinch him in the ass.