Leavin' Trunk Blues (27 page)

Twenty minutes later, Nick saw Kate about a dozen apartments away chatting with a skinny, black woman in a Bart Simpson nightshirt who smoked a cigarette and held a baby.

She smiled and waved him over.

He lit a cigarette and jogged down the apartment row, his feet beginning to feel like bricks and his face turned to stone. He smiled at the woman.

“This is Ellen,” Kate said.

The baby cried as Ellen soothed its curly head. The young mother stuck a bottle back in the child’s mouth and wiped her dirty hands on her nightshirt.

“Wish I could help you folks,” Ellen said. “But people ‘round here ain’t too comfortable knowin’ their neighbors. Don’t know nobody named Florida.”

“What about an apartment manager or landlord?” Kate asked.

“If you can get him to return your calls, then you must be a magician. I’ll give you his number but he don’t know who’s livin’ here now, let alone few years back.”

“What about any old tenants?” Nick asked. “Someone who may recognize the name.”

“Take your pick. Maybe some of the church folks.”

“What church?” Kate asked.

“The church,” she said, torching a skinny cigarette with a flame as long as her finger. “The First Church of Prayer on Halsted. Everybody ‘round here goes to the show on Sunday. Wearin’ expensive clothes and talkin’ bad things ‘bout their neighbors. Best thing goin’ if you into that mess.”

“Praise the Lord,” Nick said.

The First Church of Prayer shook with a hard-hitting spiritual presence that Saturday afternoon. About thirty men and women in street clothes rocked with the music in the back of the huge brick church. Down the length of the building, stained glass windows of apostles glowed like sugar candy as Nick and Kate walked down a side aisle. Midway, they sat in hard wooden seats stamped with the sign of the cross. Kate smiled as she watched the rehearsal heat up. Nick leaned back into his seat and felt the pleasant hum of the music take over the building and the souls of listeners. The pews were almost empty as the choir prepared for tomorrow’s Christmas Eve service.

Nick could feel the music deep in his tired limbs. The old church seemingly pulsed with God’s energy. Lights, paned in gold and glass, swung from the ceiling, scattering light through the church. A tall Christmas tree sat to the right of the pulpit. The church smelled of dry-cleaned clothes and burning candles. Felt good to be inside as the snow chilled the outside streets. Nick could feel the hot blood moving again through his face and ears.

At the altar, dozens of red candles flickered as the minister took the microphone and looped the cord in his hands, like a Stax soul singer. He was a young man with light skin, a mustache, and a soul patch below his lip. He wore a thick, gold chain around his neck that swung like a clock’s pendulum.

“I come a long way,” he belted out to the mostly empty pews. “Come through the sun and the rain, people holding my hand by the grace of God … I come a long way.”

An organist, bass player, electric guitarist, and drummer jammed at the foot of the pulpit. A lanky, balding man in a gray suit played the organ. Looked like a funeral director as he moved with a quiet enthusiasm.

The beat of the music was not unlike the trademark sound of Muddy’s “Mannish Boy.” The gospel edge such an important part of the blues. The preacher’s growl and elevated vocals emphasized the roots. Something that resonated in Ruby’s music.

JoJo always said all you had to do was replace “oh Lord” with “oh baby” and you had a great rhythm and blues song. A lot was the same. The hand clapping, the call and response, and the moaning voices.

All the Delta players had a church background. And almost every great blues singer Nick knew spent some time with a gospel choir. That edge is what gave blues its soul. If you don’t have the soul, you’re just faking it. It’s why most white guys look like mannequins trying to be bluesmen.

Blues is religion.

In the South, the black church was the social center of the community, an outlet during segregation to express feelings. Before television or radio, Sunday services would last way into the afternoon. Picnic tables buckled from good food surrounded by a buzz of conversation.

During the migration, northern cities were overrun with storefront churches to feed the masses. It was a survival of the fittest, storefronts with the strongest base evolved into larger buildings. This was the ultimate. The great whale that devoured nearby competitors. Took a lot of money to run this holy place.

“I want to thank you, Jesus,” the preacher sang as he rattled his tambourine. “I want to thank you. I could have been dead! But by the grace of God, I’ve come a long way.”

An old woman in lime green with silver hair sang, “Amen! Amen!” from a front pew.

She was “getting happy,” like what Alan Lomax witnessed in the Coahoma County project so many years ago in the old churches of Mississippi. The women feeling the holy spirit take over their bodies. An African spiritualism. It was hard not to “get happy.” Nick remembered going to church in Alabama with his mother and the droning sound of white hymns. It seemed to stamp out any flicker of human emotion. But in this church, deep soul brought out the deepest part of humanity.

Kate clapped her hands in time with the music as the choir members shuffled their shoulders and let it all out. Nick started clapping too, watching the service. The preacher danced on the tips of his toes as a hefty woman reached a high note with the choir keeping the melody.

The band changed into a mellow breakdown of “Silent Night” that raised the hair on the back of his neck. The woman pierced any jaded conceptions about organized religion that he sometimes had. She sang deep and bellowed a wonderful testimonial to her faith:

“
It was a siiilent night,

Oh Lord, it was hoooly night,

Lord, don’t you know all was caaalm,

Lord, don’t you know all was briiight.”

The singer was a stout woman with red-tinted hair and oversize glasses. During the last verse, Kate dug her nails into Nick’s palm as she listened. Her eyes closed, rocking with the music. The chorus finally broke up after some words from the minister about the Christmas Eve service. Nick walked back to the pulpit. As he followed the center aisle, he felt like he was about to take Communion.

He hadn’t been to church in years.

The minister looked down and smiled. Nick introduced himself and complimented the minister’s choir. The man thanked him.

“Dr. Anthony Dowdell,” he said.

Nick asked him about Florida. The minister shook his head sadly and said he didn’t believe he had any parishioners by that name. His face showed a grave concern with a passing light of regret. His tone was even and his handshake warm.
Thank you so much for stopping by.

Nick thanked him and motioned for Kate to follow him through a back hallway that led to a metal exit door. Outside, several members of the chorus had gathered to talk, scarves around their necks, stomping their feet in the cold. They asked the choir members the same question and they all shook their head, not speaking a word, and returned to talking.

“Let’s go get drunk,” Kate said.

“Now you’re talking.” Nick crawled into the Karmaan Ghia’s passenger door and sank into the seat. He rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. Kate sat beside him, pulled the cigarette from his mouth, and tossed it out the window.

“No smoking?”

“No smoking,” she said, watching him pull the watch cap over his ears. “That has to be the ugliest hat I’ve ever seen.”

“It was on sale.”

“Where? The Salvation Army?”

“Woolworth. A dollar ninety-nine.”

“Where do you want to go?” she asked, pulling her hair into a ponytail and wrapping it with a rubber band.

“The nearest bar.”

Nick scratched his unshaven face and stared across the parking lot at the great brick church. The minister walked out the front door, still in a robe, and disappeared. Dead leaves scattered on the stone steps covered in a light snow.

The whole neighborhood had the feeling of decaying dark wood. The old Victorians surrounding the church leaned like a James Michalopoulos painting.

Kate started her car and wheeled out of the parking lot. But something caught Nick’s eye and he asked her to loop back off Halsted and into the church lot.

“Stop right here,” he said as she passed an old Chevrolet. Rust-splotched green.

“Novas sure are ugly,” he said.

Kate smiled. She had a beautiful smile.

“Plate match?” he asked.

“Never trust a preacher man,” she said.

--

Later that afternoon, Annie and Fannie rode the El downtown with Peetie. The wheels screeched like a scalded cat as the train rattled and rocked. Just as she was getting into a really good Archie’s Digest, some sex weirdo walked over and kept trying to make eye contact.

“Where you guys going?” the fuckup asked. He was about thirty-five. Suit. And the biggest damned head she’d ever seen. Like a walking potato.

Peetie had his hat slanted over his eyes but she could tell he was listening.

“Hawaii,” Fannie said popping her gum and not giving him a look.

He gave an old har-har laugh. Guess they did look pretty tough today in complete black leather head to toe. Both of them. Fannie had on this cool silver lipstick and bright blue eye shadow. Annie wore a little black hat like you’d buy in France or something.

Annie put her feet up on the seat before her and played with the zipper on her chest. She looked down at the black lace on her bra.

“I guess you guys hear that all the time,” he said, “but you’re about the hottest things I’ve ever seen.”

“We know,” Fannie said and waved him away. “Now you may go.”

“Yeah, go piss up a tree,” Annie added.

Fannie whipped out a nail file and began to work on a hangnail. She’d been talking about some new process she’d read about in Cosmo all day. Something about soaking your hands in olive oil. Something real crazy.

“I like nasty girls,” the man said. “I like it when they’re mean to me. You two want to get mean?”

He looked down at his crotch.

Fannie waved the nail file a few inches from his rod. “Mister, you want to keep that little worm? Then you best move on. If you don’t think I’ll cut your dick off and throw it out the window…” She bobbed her head from side to side. “You are sor-row-ly mistaken.”

The man moved on.

Peetie crossed his arms before him and gave a little laugh.

“What did Stagger Lee say?” he asked. First time he’d spoken since she called from the old wooden platform.

“Said it was cool,” Annie said. “But he wanted to take care of the exchange tonight. Didn’t like the idea of getting out of Robert Taylor for the cash.”

“Did you tell him that was the only way?”

“What do you think, dipshit?”

“Just askin’, woman, don’t be gettin’ all testy on me.”

Fannie finished with her nails and dropped the file in her purse. “What about that Travers man? We get a second shot?”

“No,” Annie said. “As much as I’d like to take his ass out for what he did to Willie . . . Stagger Lee said he’d take care of it. That man won’t live to see Christmas.”

The brakes of the El screeched in her ears as they stopped downtown.

Nick sipped on gas station coffee while he watched Florida’s apartment and thought about what Ruby had said about blues fading. He never liked to think the music would die but he knew today’s blues lacked an emotional intensity it had with the golden-era folks. A friend of his once wrote that blues was a remembering song just like the African slaves played in Congo Square in New Orleans. Tribal rhythms played on jawbones and wooden horns to evoke the homeland.

There was no doubt the great bluesmen and women of Chicago were recalling their southern home. But, like Ruby said, these days amplification had taken over soul. Life experience didn’t mean as much. It was more about learning another’s style played louder and fancier.

Where were the spirits of Robert Johnson, Son House, and Charley Patton?

Nick remembered that great line from Deep Blues. Something about the Zen-like attitudes of rural musicians: “The intimate link between worlds outside and inside our bodies that city dwellers aren’t attuned to but country people simply know.”

Maybe that was the key.

Nick took another sip of the foul coffee and kept watching the apartment. They’d followed Florida from church to a grocery store—where they waited for thirty minutes in a parking lot—and then to her new place. It was a brownstone quartered into apartments with heavy concrete steps leading to a glass door.

She’d disappeared into the building ten minutes ago.

Kate had the driver’s seat reclined with her arms folded over her chest and a gray wool hat pulled over her ears. She’d buttoned her peacoat to the very top with the collar high around her neck. Nick looked back through windows coated with frost and took another sip of coffee.