Leavin' Trunk Blues (35 page)

Nick felt like he’d sat on those concrete bricks for a century when Kate pulled into the parking lot and jumped out of the car. He slowly stood as she helped him ease into the black convertible. Thank God, the heater was fully in effect.

He gave her directions to King’s country ranch.

As they pulled back onto the street, a patrol car roared past with its lights spinning and sirens blaring. Kate shook her head and bit her lip.

“This is not right,” she said. “This is not right. You can’t leave something like this. You left the scene of a crime.”

“If we don’t get there,” Nick said, “someone else will.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked. “This is fucking nuts.”

Nick told her to pull over. As the car continued to roll, he opened his door and threw up into the passing slush. He closed the door and wiped his lips with his jacket. She stopped the car and pulled up the emergency brake.

Kate moved close and Nick wrapped his arms around her. He held her tight and kissed her forehead as the car idled on the city streets. He could feel her chest rise and fall.

“You son of a bitch,” she said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“I scared the shit out of myself.”

For the next hour, they drove in silence along an anonymous interstate to a rural Illinois county an arm’s length from Chicago. They passed franchise upon franchise, dozens of super-size gas stations, and rows of houses that looked like they were constructed by insects. Nick had never felt so unimportant in his life.

At about seven a.m., they waited for Doyle at the entrance to Elmore King’s ranch. Kate had fallen asleep in Nick’s arms as he scanned the gray dawn for a battered Volkswagen. The morning sky was a mixture of black and red like something out of a Dali painting as gray light leaked through dead cornstalks and winter weeds partially hidden in snow.

Nick flicked on the Karmaan Ghia’s windshield wipers again to clear the frost. The red and black turning a bluish gray in a flat and hard morning. He looked at his bloodied reflection in the mirror and shook his head as he listened to Kate’s sweet breath in his ear.

He brushed his hand over her cheek. A semi passed, rattling her little car and she yawned, her eyes still closed.

Nick kissed her cheek with his broken lips as he heard a horn in the distance play “Dixie.”

Doyle pushed his horn again and Kate opened her eyes as the van chugged and spurted beside them. Doyle’s gray-bearded mug, craning from his open window. Nick had never been so glad to see anyone.

“You look like you’ve been dating Mike Tyson,” Doyle said.

“Yeah, I’ve ruined my good looks,” Nick said through his open window.

“Follow me,” Doyle said, running the van down a crooked dirt road to a huge white house a dead blues singer called Crossroads.

Doyle had on a tattered blue robe and black Chuck Taylor high- tops as he walked to the grand porch of the faux antebellum home and knocked. The door opened and Doyle disappeared for about twenty minutes. He reemerged grim-faced and hugging an older black woman in the frame of the front door.

Soon, Cadillac Mack Miller walked out by the woman, and he and Doyle trotted off the porch, walking around the back of the home.

Nick could hear the Karmaan Ghia’s engine tick in his ears after Kate cut the engine. Doyle motioned for them to follow the teen protégé to a slat fence behind the house.

“Servants’ entrance?” Kate asked.

“Who knows.”

On the other side of a gate sat an Olympic-size swimming pool. Empty. Only a blue and white cord and an old life preserver sat stiff in a foot of frozen brown water.

The kid, in a black Levi’s jacket and jeans, rounded the edge of the pool and walked over to the diving board. Across the pool, and separate from the house, stood an elongated brick building. Looked like a sun room or an old greenhouse with dozens of broken panes curved over half the roof.

Miller tossed back his stringy blond hair, yet to say a word or show a drop of emotion, and handed Doyle the key. Doyle scratched his beard, walked inside, and flipped a switch. Dozens of fluorescent lights sputtered to life above them.

The room was haphazardly stacked with old jukeboxes, pinball machines, and pool tables. Someone had grouped a few plastic chairs in a circle for a jam session. A couple of amps lay toppled on the floor.

Place made Nick think of Chuck Berry’s pad in
Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll
. He thought of that scene at the end when Berry sat in that room of red carpet and played some of the loneliest lap steel Nick had ever heard.

Doyle followed Miller to a back corner of the building packed with a mountain of bent cardboard boxes marked with scrawled black pen. The boxes smelled like the inside of a fading photo album—full of old heat from disintegrating moments.

“I don’t think we can truck all of this,” Doyle said.

Nick crossed his arms over his chest and nodded. He looked at a huge pile of amplifiers and broken instruments that sat discarded among the mess. Loose papers littered the floor and piles of old concert bills were stacked in old milk crates.

“Sweet Black Angel,” Nick said. “He said we had to hear her song.”

Doyle sighed. “Let’s start box by box. Hey kid, move those amps and all that crap in the corner, okay?”

Miller began hoisting the crates in his arms. Nick pulled the top box teetering a few feet over his head and checked its contents. Six-millimeter master tapes in skinny cardboard boxes. Each marked. Most of these came from a 1966 session for Diamond.

Nick set them aside. Kate and Doyle were doing the same thing, taking a few boxes they needed outside and to the van. Nick’s labored breath came out in cloudy spurts as he searched through countless boxes, setting aside a few that contained sessions that would have included Ruby. Unbelievable he’d kept all these. For a blues tracker, this was like breaking into King Tut’s grave. Old photos, cardboard ads, outtakes, and numerous studio sessions. When he found what he needed, he had to come back and shuffle through King’s life. If he was ever allowed back in it.

Nick took a deep breath as he saw six twisted cowboy hats on top of an old amplifier. He shook off the black feeling and hoisted off two more boxes filled with more master tapes and a hundred feet of guitar cord.

An hour later, Doyle had loaded his van with what they needed and headed back to Chicago. Nick carefully put every mike stand, amplifier, and box back in its place. Outside the fence, Kate was waiting in her car, her exhaust beating hot air in the chilled Christmas Eve moming.

As he walked out of the sun room, shards of light shot through broken panes of glass crisscrossing the face of Cadillac Mack Miller. Miller sat on an overturned milk crate in the cold and worked on three strings of one of King’s broken guitars. He stopped, returned a loose string, and worked off a hollow version of one of King’s classic tunes. Without an amp, the electric sounded small, lonely, and almost dying.

The teen’s face was obscured by his blond hair as he labored for a sound that was not his own.

Hours later, Doyle walked next door to his record shop near the Miracle Mile and bought a dozen donuts and three large coffees. But Nick didn’t need caffeine, the adrenaline pump was working just fine as he listened to another reel of tape. King Snake’s Greatest Hits. The complete recordings. Every take, every cough, and every sigh of when Billy Lyons started the machine. He felt he’d been connected back to the late fifties and to a world that only existed in a tattered memory. The sound of Lyons calling the countdown to the songs raised the hair on his arms.

King had told him to look for the Sweet Black Angel, so they’d grabbed every disintegrating cardboard box filled with Ruby’s old music. But Doyle, God bless him, grabbed other singers too. He grabbed thirty reels from 1959. Some of the last music Ruby sang and some classic stuff from King.

Kate was asleep in an office chair with Chicago working in an electric pulse around the shop when Nick saw the faded writing on the boxed reel, Black Angel Blues.

But it wasn’t Ruby.

It was Elmore King. A reel from September 22, 1959. He tipped the marked end toward Doyle.

Doyle just shook his head and crashed his big frame into his office chair, a trace of chocolate icing on his lips. “Unbelievable, man. Unbelievable.”

“You think?”

“Only one way to find out,” Doyle said.

Nick handed him the brittle tape and let Doyle loop it through the reel-to-reel. Nick’s hands shook too much to handle the music.

This was another version of “Black Angel Blues.” A song first recorded by Lucille Bogan in 1930 but most recognized by Robert Nighthawk’s cover in 1948. Nighthawk, a master slide guitarist from Helena, cut a mean version of the song for Aristocrat.

Elmore King’s recording started out with Billy Lyons saying, “Okay, this will be take one. ‘Black Angel Blues,’” in the metallic burn of a studio mike. The band tore into an uptempo, electric variation of the refrain and then he could hear Lyons’s voice saying, “Again. No, again.”

“Who’s that?” Kate asked.

“Billy Lyons,” Doyle said, with sleepy eyes.

The band started back into the song and the same thing happened several times again. Finally, King broke into the classic chorus of the song.

“I got a sweet black angel,” he sang roughly. “I love the way she spreads her wings.”

“Was this version ever released?” Nick asked.

Doyle shook his head and tossed Nick a cigarette. Kate stirred in her seat and wiped the sleep from her eyes. Nick lit the cigarette and strained to listen to the recording. He grabbed a pen and paper from Doyle’s desk and began transcribing.

KING:
“I ask my black angel for a nickel, you know she gives me a twenty-dollar bill.”

Doyle drummed his fingers on his desk, took a bite of a powdered donut and a puff off his cigarette.

KING:
“I ask her for a small drink of liquor, she gives me the whole whiskey still.”

The band played through the entire song. After the final turnaround, they quit but the recording kept playing through. Doyle started to press stop but Nick reached over and cued forward. He stopped when the squawking began.

Through the brilliant, crackling hiss, Nick heard the voices of the band members keep talking. He could hear the gathering of instruments and loose good-byes.

A door slammed a few times and Nick could imagine the old studio back in the day. The gray recording machines that resembled NASA supercomputers looped with tape. Microphones that looked like honeycombs. He could imagine King placing his guitar back in its worn black case and Billy Lyons smoking a cigarette as he logged the session, a white Stetson slipped back on his head.

LYONS:
“Got to be rougher, man.”

KING:
“Huh?”

LYONS:
“You playin’ like a woman.”

NEW VOICE:
“Cool it, Billy.”

Doyle turned off the reel-to-reel and leaned back into his seat.

“Who’s that?” Nick asked.

“Can’t you tell?” Doyle asked.

Nick shook his head.

“Moses Jordan, man. He didn’t tell you he was there?”

Nick shook his head again and Doyle flipped the switch on the reel-to-reel; 1959 began again and Nick’s heart slammed in his chest.

LYONS:
“Man, I pay him. He can take it.”

KING:
“If I don’t get my cut this time, I’m walkin’. This whole thing fallin’ apart.”

LYONS:
“This is Chicago, boy. We do things different in the city.”

Inaudible discussion and yelling.

JORDAN:
“Y’all cool out. C’mon. Cool out.”

Footsteps thud across the floor and a door slams, the sound of labored breathing.

KING:
“That motherfucker has all of us by the nuts.”

JORDAN:
“Remember what I tole you.”

KING:
“Man takin’ all my work and gamblin’ it away. Tell me, Moses, what’s the difference between Chicago and Alabama? You tole me when you brought me up here it’d be different.”

JORDAN:
“It will. You’re the finest guitarist I’ve ever known.”

KING:
“Why’d you make me sign with that man? You lied, man. You lied.”

JORDAN:
“Be cool, I got the whole thing. We got the whole thing. Go on.”

KING:
“You’re talkin’ a mess but you don’t play.”

JORDAN:
“I want you to get Ruby out tonight.”

KING:
“Why?”

JORDAN:
“Keep her away. Take her out. Here, take this.”

KING:
“Aw, man.”