Leavin' Trunk Blues (11 page)

“It’s his right,” Jordan said.

Nick sat back down and checked the red light on the recorder.

“What about Lyons’s other interests? Someone else must’ve wanted him dead?”

“They did,” Jordan said. “He was shot at twice that I know of. Once he took a round in his leg and had to use a cane for a month. Some gangsters shot at his car but his bodyguard slipped it into reverse, hightailed it out, and saved Billy’s life. But this was different. Ruby Walker killed that man. I’m just surprised she didn’t do it sooner.”

“But who else would’ve wanted him dead?” Nick asked.

“Why you so interested in that nasty part of Chicago blues? Man, there was so much more to King Snake than a killin’.”

Jordan sighed, his face the complete picture of aggravation. Knitted brow. Squinted eyes.

“I know that woman threatened Billy’s life about every day,” he said. “I know that woman was mean. No, I didn’t see anything. No, I didn’t hear anything. But when I found out Billy was dead, I didn’t even have to ask.”

“You know anyone else who may have seen Lyons on his last day?” Nick asked.

“No, I don’t. Billy had lost interest in King Snake. He had other pressures, you know.”

“Yeah,” Nick said slowly, the cigarette smoke rushing from his mouth. “Like what?”

“Just troubles . . . listen, I don’t want anything negative to be written about Ruby or any of this. I’ve tried too hard to bring back the South Side without some bad shit from the past bein’ smacked all over the place.”

“I apologize,” Nick said, watching the man’s face harden. “I’m just a historian trying to put the jigsaw together. I’ve learned more about King Snake in the last five minutes than has been written in the last forty years.”

Jordan relaxed and smiled. He offered Nick a cup of coffee, and for the next thirty minutes, he served up some nice anecdotes about King Snake and the sequence of their first recordings. Old guy even got a little misty remembering all the musicians who were now dead. As Nick was about to stop the recorder and put in a fresh tape, the kid with the splotched Afro walked in and said someone had knocked over a paint bucket. Jordan growled and stood. Nick shut off the recorder and thanked him for his time.

“I’d like to talk again,” Nick said.

“Let me take you to breakfast Saturday at my spot,” he said. “Lou Mitchell’s on Jackson. How ‘bout ten?”

Jordan grasped Nick’s shoulder again as they walked to the front door and talked of a drug march he’d planned for the weekend and his lost battle to save a section of Maxwell Street from demolition.

“Travers, you ever seen the monument?” Jordan asked with the door cracked. A brittle wind biting his back.

“Which monument?”

“The monument. At King Drive and Twenty-sixth Place. Tall bronze statue surrounded by concrete trunks.”

“No.”

“You should drive by there,” Jordan said. “Call it Monument to the Great Northern Migration or something like that. Man waving to the north carrying his ratty old suitcase. Reminds me of the South Side story. We all came here with nothin’ but dreams. Broke, filled with heartache for home. Guess everybody got that some time or another. Them leavin’ trunk blues.”

Annie turned up the volume on the Prince tape as they rounded the corner toward the Robert Taylor Homes. She could see the high-rises get closer as Prince squealed off one of her faves. When she was a kid, she never understood what he meant when he sang that line about “used Trojans.” But now she could just see those nasty things sitting inside that little red Corvette’s glove box. Prince must’ve really felt bad knowing that girl was a ho.
Sing it, little man. Sing it.

Prince always made her feel a little better about going back to the projects. Seemed like every time she got close, her gut did backflips. All the old smokestacks, lots filled with broken-down cars and shit, and all those empty meatpacking factories made her want to scream. Kind of pissed her off too. She’d worked too hard to get pulled back into this world of crap. She wanted to run their piece of shit Subaru over the teenage crack dealers on BMX bikes and through the windows of the all-night liquor stores. The neon and fluorescent lights shined deep into her eyes. A vision in a desert of shit.

Annie turned onto State Street nearing a group of housing projects towering above the decay like upturned ocean liners. The Robert Taylor Homes looked abandoned beyond the chain- link fences with only a few lights in thousands of windows. Whoever thought they could put poor people in high-rises? That had to be one of the worst dumb-fuck ideas she’d ever heard. Like they wouldn’t start robbing and stealing from the git-go. It was like locking up the criminals in the jail without any guards to keep order, like that movie Escape from New York when they put all those prisoners in the city and let them fend for themselves. Big fucking mistake.

Ghettos in the sky.

She parked the Subaru, duct tape on the windshield, up on a curb, and made a vibrating sound with her lips. A wino sat in the middle of an empty playground drinking some cheap liquor to keep himself warm.

“Goddamn, I hate going in there,” Fannie said. “I hate this shit. I hate it.”

“It won’t take long,” Annie said. “C’mon, I hate it too.”

“You know it will. You know we’ll be here all night long and what he’ll make us do. You know he won’t let us leave without showing he’s in control. It’s what he does. It’s what he is. Like a big dog humpin’ a little one.”

“If Peetie finds him before we do,” Annie said, “he’s gonna be pissed. He’ll hump us all at the same time.”

“God, I feel nasty already,” Fannie said. “We’ve come so far, Annie. I feel like I’ve just put on my best clothes and someone wants me to jump in a big pool of pig shit.”

“I told you we can run,” Annie said. “All we need is a plan. We could change our names legally to Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge.”

“Yeah, I always wanted to be a spoiled white girl,” Fannie said. “What’s the name of that butler she got? Fat dude? Cadbury.”

“No, that’s Richie Rich. Hers is Smithers.”

“I wonder if he’d paint my toenails. Even wax my bikini area.”

“You know he would. And he’d love it.”

“Keep talkin’, girlfriend, and you might have somethin’.”

Annie giggled, opened her car door, and walked through a weeded lot to the high-rise. Fannie followed, cautiously stepping around the dirty Colt 45 bottles and the pieces of clothing littering the grass-splotched mud. The ground was like someone had emptied their suitcase from a high window. Annie looked up into the middle building, at a lone apartment shining in the cold night. Stagger Lee.

The early days in the projects with Fannie were nightmarish visions of the worst in human nature. Real crazy animal shit. People pissing in the hallways. Rapes. Murders. They had to rely on their street smarts. Shit, it was beyond street smarts. We’re talking about the fuckin’ law of the jungle shit. She couldn’t even remember all the guys she’d poked with Willie.

A rusted metal door at the base of the building was propped open with a sawhorse. No lights inside. Annie tugged at a fallen chain-link fence until it fell to the ground. They walked inside a place they called The Hole.

“I hate it. I hate it. I hate it,” Fannie said, walking blind through the blackness to the third floor. “Tell me about Riverdale.”

“Again?”

“Yes, again.”

“They got that old malt shop. A beach. A high school. Bunch of white dudes with pointed noses.”

Fannie made a little howling noise. “Girrl, I think I just stepped on something dead and it smells so bad in here. Smells like a man’s bathroom.”

Annie could see the top of the stairs and the light leaking from a door.

“Why doesn’t he just move?” Fannie asked. “His brains in the blender?”

“Man won’t let the past go. Still thinks he’s the king of the black mafia. Doesn’t know he’s just a broke-dick dog.”

Annie stopped cold at the top of the steps and waited for Fannie to bump into her. She reached back and squeezed her butt. The leather felt warm in her hands. Fannie giggled.

They’d always been good friends. Annie’s mother had been a drugged-out whore and Fannie’s father had been the plumber who’d found her mother in a gutter like a stray cat. He brought her mother home, cleaned her up, and even helped her get custody of her child—a young Annie. It was only the two little girls, like some kind of low-budget Brady Bunch.

Annie kicked open the door and followed the graffiti-sprayed halls to a door no different than every dozen they passed. Someone had crudely painted a sloppy heart encircling a thick peephole. Fannie slunked against the wall by the door and sucked on her lower lip. Annie tucked Willie in her coat pocket and removed the grime from her teeth with her tongue. She knocked and heard six different locks sliding away.

A young pudgy black dude wearing sunglasses and smoking a short cigar opened the door. He had on a black parka with fake fur around a loose hood and held a shotgun. Single action with a thick handle for a pump.

He pointed at them real serious. Then he smiled like fucking Buckwheat.

“Get up on my nuts if you wanna come on in,” he said.

“Only the one?” Fannie asked.

“Yeah, only the one, Twondell?” Annie repeated. “We heard the other was a rubber one you paid twenty-five cents for in a gumball machine.”

He grabbed his crotch and motioned them in. “Y’all can have a protein shake for dinner.”

The room inside smelled dead. The walls were a collection of chipped paint from the last twenty years—splotches of greens and blues—with nothing in the room but a few dozen boxes, a stained bare mattress in the corner, and a buzzing refrigerator. Somehow the big man had figured how to rig some juice into his broken-down lair. A yellow bulb swung in the middle of the ceiling, scattering light on the empty floor.

Stagger Lee walked into the room naked wearing a spiked dog collar. He pulled open a huge refrigerator by the door and pulled out a small bottle of Coke. He nodded inside the refrigerator to all the other little green bottles.

Annie wrapped her arms around her stomach.

Fannie looked at the bottom of her clunky brown shoe.

“Twon, get me a towel,” Stagger Lee said, before dropping to the floor and cranking out about thirty push-ups. His breath came out like a bark with his big, fat dong never leaving the floor. When he was done, Twon pulled open a pink towel for his boss and walked away into the next room. Stagger Lee gulped down the rest of the Coke and wiped his mouth with a forearm. He opened another bottle, popping off the top with his bare hands, and finishing most in one swallow.

Annie wasn’t sure what the dog collar was all about. She never knew what was going through his sick mind. The man had to be past sixty years old with an obsession for staying young. Always working out and shaving away his gray hairs. Looked good for an old man though. Thick black muscles wrapped his body like bulging balloons of sand. His head a perfectly round cannonball. He crossed his massive arms and stared at the women.

“We saw Peetie tonight,” Annie said.

Stagger Lee untucked his arms and finished the last of the Coke. The pink towel on his waist looked kind of like a tutu. Six foot six, three hundred pounds, in a pink tutu.

“He wanted us to tell you about a man named Lyons,” Fannie said.

Stagger Lee rolled the little bottle in between his huge hands like it was clay.

“Well, he said you would know,” Annie said. “Said, Tell Stagger Lee someone is looking for Billy Lyons.’ Figured he was looking for some more money or somethin’.”

Stagger Lee stood motionless.

“Said somebody was looking for who killed Lyons,” Fannie said. “Yeah, said a man was looking for who killed him.”

“Tell him, I don’t give a fuck.” Stagger Lee grunted and threw the green bottle against the wall. “Tell him he say the name Lyons again and I’ll knock his fucking head off.”

The girls turned to leave.

“Wait,” he said, grabbing them both by their upper arms.

“He say who lookin’? Cops?”

“A man called Traveler or Travers.”

“Peetie know where to find him?”

“I guess,” Annie said and shrugged her shoulders as Stagger Lee leaned over and whispered his hot, angry breath into her ear. He said, “Bring me Peetie.”

A deep urban night cloaked the street as if morning was not a possibility.

Nick’s heart sank as he checked the address again and referenced his map. Right street. Wrong decade. The entire row of brick and rotting wood buildings where Ruby had lived had been destroyed long ago. Now, it was just a vacant lot at the cross street off Drexel Boulevard. Dead grass. A couple of old tires. A brittle wind rattled down the old boulevard as Nick rested his chin on the car’s door and stared into the past like an idiot.

A block away, a single streetlamp scattered light onto a Dumpster filled with an old mattress as snow trickled down onto the dirty streets. Nick lit a cigarette and scanned the lot, trying to imagine Ruby’s view. A view sharply different from the flat cotton fields outside Clarksdale. Brownstones, with castle-like turrets, sat empty by bare poplar trees. Chicago rose in a bright hub of buildings to the north. He could imagine the black Cadillacs, Buicks, and Hudsons parked nearby and the upper-class blacks who lived on the South Side. The women in stiff white clothing, maybe with gloves and hats, chatting down the busy street.