by Ace Atkins
She moved her hands under his denim shirt and then moved them onto his crotch.
"Whoa. What are we doing here?"
"I don't know, what do you want to do?" Her hands once again brushed his crotch.
"I, uh," he began, looking over at a hearse parked behind the Tutwiler mortuary.
She took one of his fingers and put it in her mouth, swirling it around.
"Ya know . . . "
She kissed his hands.
"Be quiet, Travers," she said, unbuttoning his jeans, then undoing hers. "You ain't so tough. I've been in the Delta too long."
She momentarily went back to the passenger seat, slid down and pulled off her boots and jeans and threw them in the backseat, laughing. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and crawled back on Nick's lap. She maneuvered one of his hands under the thin edge of her pink panties. As he moved his hand lower, she responded to him. They kissed hard and Nick heard her rip the panties off her legs. She brought herself up on him, sighed softly, and moaned as she joined with him. Her thighs were strong.
Nick put his arms around her and held her tight. With a late-summer wind against his back and the taste of strawberry hair in his mouth, he thought he heard the fleeting sounds of a trilling harp.
?
The night's fine alcohol glow settled into an early-morning hangover as Nick slipped a key into the motel room's door. He could still taste Virginia's sweet lips and smell her scent all over him.
As he walked into his room and flipped the wall switch, a tight arm wrapped around his throat, and he was thrown onto the floor. His head thudded against the bed's headboard as he fell.
"Get down now!" a man's voice yelled.
Nick tried to fight, but one man restrained him while another clamped on handcuffs. The grip on his wrists was tight.
"You low-life sack of shit are under arrest for the murder of Deputy William Brown."
Chapter 22
Jail is about humiliation, loss of freedom, and being treated like an outcast degenerate. It is the antiseptic-urine smell that permeates your clothes and lungs. It is about pale blue iron bars and a bunk that stinks of human waste and pleasure. The only jail Nick had ever known was on White Street in New Orleans. That was only to visit his friend Jay Medeaux, a police detective, or occasionally bail out a fellow musician. It wasn't a hell of a lot different from this place, he thought. Jail is jail. They don't reflect local color.
He'd been there for more than a day. In that time, he'd familiarized himself with the residents. A happy bunch: a three-hundred-pound pedophile named "Big Larry," a wife beater who constantly cried, a local lawyer in for a DUI, a twenty-one-year-old car thief, and a muscular man who paced the room but did not speak.
Nick had found a three-year-old copy of Newsweek that he now read for the third time. What he wouldn't give for a decent book or meal. He wasn't trying to be snobbish about it, but eating gray gruel wasn't even above animal standards. A dog wouldn't shit on it.
Not only was the food bad, but there wasn't much of it. He began to hallucinate about the meal he'd had at Lusco's. That chicken and beer was a vision. He could see the beads form on the Budweiser label and the juicy white meat.
"Hey, shithead. You wanna piece of me?" the muscular man asked.
Nick continued reading.
"I said, shithead. You dickless turd."
Nick had no idea about the ethnic diversity in Bosnia. He read on.
The man spit on Nick's arm.
Nick folded the magazine neatly and laid it on the bunk next to him. He sighed. Moments like these really enforced the theory of evolution. Just a bunch of big monkeys in a cage. No different,t except monkeys were much more fun to watch.
The big man stepped forward and bumped his chest with Nick's.
Nick faked his head to the right and led with a hard elbow to the man's nose and a quick jab to his gut. When the man tried to come back, Nick head-butted him, knocking the man down hard on the floor.
Nick returned to the bunk, lay down, and crossed his feet in front of him. He picked up the magazine, found his place, and went back to Bosnia.
?
That night Nick dreamed of bloodstains on the ceiling and blood all over the wall. That's all he could see--streaks of red all over the sheets and on the cracked headboard. He couldn't breathe, just standing there looking at rumpled sheets holding his breath. Bile came up in his throat.
Virginia Dare smiled at him between twirling red and blue lights. He thought someone yelled but he couldn't tell. It was outside of him. All of it was. Not a dream, just a surreal reality. He should have been there. They wouldn't be dead. He should've been watching instead of fucking.
More voices yelled. Red and blue lights spun. Someone grabbed his arm. He hit it hard, bent at the waist, and vomited. Cracker and Willie. And then he woke up.
Chapter 23
"I knew this day would come," Wayne Cary said as he laughed and looked through the Plexiglas at Nick. Even with the smart-ass remark, it was good to see Wayne. He'd been his drinking partner in Oxford while Nick worked on his doctorate. Man never asked him once about football. They'd just sit there all night at the bar, drinking Dixies and talking about their favorite restaurants in New Orleans. Wayne was a big guy, with thick brown hair and a hard Southern drawl, but not country. Wayne sounded the way Nick imagined Confederate officers talked.
Wayne's heroes were Stonewall Jackson, Lewis and Clark, and professional rock climbers.
"Either this or I'd be trying to release your mother for solicitation," Wayne said, really guffawing this time. His old friend actually enjoyed seeing him in jail, like it was some big fraternity joke.
"That's okay, Wayne, I left your momma in the back. She seems to make friends very quickly. Woman that big can really move."
The joke came up in some sick Pavlovian way, like they never left their old life routines. And that really cracked him up. Wayne leaned back in his chair and let go a revving staccato of giggles.
Behind him, Virginia Dare stood hugging her arms around her bare waist. She looked great to Nick in her faded jeans and flannel shirt tied in front. Nick smiled weakly up at her.
He leaned close to the Plexiglas wall and spoke into the speaker. "Wayne, it's really good to see you. Please don't get me wrong. But I've spent the last twenty-four hours lying on a piss-stained mattress having nightmares about being arrested for a double murder. It ain't happy hour."
"Sorry, Nick," Wayne said.
"No problem. When am I getting out of here?"
"Ain't it strange? But you rousted me this way like I was some type of Gerry Spence wanna-be or a character from a John Grisham novel, and you know what? It didn't matter. They don't have anything on you. Young deputy kinda jumped the gun because the woman working the night desk at the Dixie Motel said she saw you with Willie Brown. That was his name, right? She gave a fairly detailed description of your big ass. But nothing to tie you with the murders. Miss Dare here came to me and told me she was with you the entire night. She's found a half-dozen witnesses at Lusco's who also said you were there when the murders occurred. No fingerprints. You'll be out of here in a couple of hours. It's all bullshit."
Nick nodded and let all the breath ease out of him. "Thanks a lot, man. I owe you big. Can I talk to Virginia?"
"Sure," Wayne said. He pushed back his chair and exchanged places with Virginia in the corner.
Nick smiled a lopsided grin at her. "Thanks."
"I just found out last night," Virginia said. "I had a gig in Oxford at The Gin."
"Thought maybe you'd hopped a train like an old-time player."
"I wouldn't do that to you."
Wayne walked forward and leaned over Virginia's shoulder. "I've scheduled a hearing at noon. You should be out by one. A deputy here said they found a witness who saw two males boogie on out in a big, fat truck with Louisiana plates. One black and one white. And, of course, there is the unidentified body."
"His name is Cracker, an old hermit tha
t lived in the woods around Quito."
"Says here it was a white male in his late twenties found alongside Brown," Wayne said. "Kid was from New Orleans."
"What about an old albino man?"
"I don't know, man. Say, maybe those deputies knocked you silly. Sounds like you're chasing ghosts."
"Yeah," Nick said. "It's what I do."
Chapter 24
Pascal Cruz traced the sharp edge of the acetate disc and laughed. They were his, finally. After all the shit with that slick college professor, he now owned the damned heart of the blues. And damned if it wasn't just the nine tracks, but twelve whole discs. Paper thin, a little over ten inches wide, the discs were perfectly flat, no damage to the black lacquer. Johnson lived inside those grooves. This was it. The thing he'd waited for all of his life.
Cruz always knew he would be something, growing up in that no-name suburb outside San Francisco. He used to play his John Mayall and Stones and read the liner notes, curious about the blues. Something mysterious and dark. After Cruz became a record producer in Los Angeles, he used to watch some of the white blues acts and ask them about the music.
They said the blues just wasn't popular enough. It needed some kind of push. Years later, Cruz knew the marketing niche was ready. He was tired of working with a bunch of ignorant rappers and sluts with grating voices, so he played up the days, only a few, that he worked at Stax Records in the early seventies and created the mystique--dark sunglasses, black suits, and a talent for quoting blues lyrics.
He began to package young white guitarists who knew more about Eddie Van Halen than Buddy Guy. But they'd have the look, and he'd give them stacks of old Chess Records songs to listen to and practice. They'd mimic the licks like a parrot, make their voices scratchy and deep, and he'd have a hit. Didn't matter if it was blues or mayonnaise, he knew how to package and sell anything.
Soon, Cruz became an icon around L.A., making the old music a cool trend. He'd started hanging out at this small club off Sunset Boulevard called Louie Louie's. It was there that he first had the inspiration for the Blues Shack. Louie Louie's was all wrong, the way it had mixed blues and jazz as if they were the same thing. Cruz knew if someone could present blues performance in the right way, it would sell. He needed to build a high-tech juke joint. Old wood and rusted signs with video and state-of the-art sound. Make it feel like you were in Mississippi with a little Star Trek mixed in.
Besides, it was time to leave L.A. anyway. The place had drained almost everything he had. At the time, he was hooked on bourbon and cocaine. He craved it like a fucked-up monkey pressing buttons for bananas and could barely do business without thinking about that rushing hum in his brain and a warm glow in his stomach. The final act was the night he invited the wife of a record company president over to his Malibu beach house. He had the sliding glass doors open, listening to the surf and the Guess Who with the man's wife bent over.
She was biting on his fingers when her husband walked in and went crazy. The man tried to kill him with a fire poker. But the funny part was that the woman was so scared she had Cruz gripped inside her. They stuck together like a pair of horny dogs as her husband kept on swinging. Cruz rolled all around like he was on fire, trying to get that bitch off him. It was ridiculous. Finally, the man swatted his wife. She started bleeding, and the man started crying. Husband and wife roared out of Cruz's driveway together in a candy-apple-red Lotus.
It was a decisive moment.
The stereo was still jamming: No sugar tonight in my coffee, no sugar tonight in my tea. He lay paralyzed on the white carpet until the disc switched to Muddy Waters's "Mannish Boy." Even as fucked-up as he was, Muddy's deep growling voice, the twanging of Johnny Winter's guitar, and James Cotton's harp made his blood boil. It motivated him to rake all the cocaine off the table into a Ziploc bag and stumble onto the balcony. He tossed it into the wind as if it were fake snow.
Cruz then picked up the phone, called Floyd, and said, "Gas up, we're headed back South." Within six months, the Blues Shack was born. A bunch of white California investors came in on the project, even thought they thought New Orleans was a shit location. What they didn't understand was that the Big Easy was perfect because of all the mom-and-pop music joints, little places that didn't look at the overall tourist dollar.
Cruz did. He knew he could corral all the tourists into one huge joint, not leave them spread about the city in little dives. It worked, and now with these lost recordings, he didn't just have a marketing tool, he had a goddamned chain saw. Robert Johnson World: T-shirts, hats, CDs, posters, festivals, and coffee mugs. The Blues Shack would become the place where the tourists came to grab a piece of the South.
This would become "Robert's Place." The kind of bar Johnson would've hung out in. Or something like that. Cruz would continue to play up his phony Southern drawl and market the pale imitation of the real blues.
Cruz added a dash of Kentucky bourbon to a glass of water and cubed ice. He wanted to be alert and keep clear. As the ice clinked to the last swallow, he could taste a hint of aged whiskey. Sweet flavor. Floyd had a beer open from the minibar and drank it in about two seconds. Cruz handed him another and patted him twice on his thick arm. Floyd's loose gold jewelry jangled on his wrist.
"Good job. Good job," Cruz said. "Ain't nobody fuck with my Sweet Boy. You always hit it like it needs to be hit."
"I got that ole albino man, too," Floyd said. "Man was hunkered under a car when we found him like a scared dog. Had to use a stick to poke his ass out. If you want him, we got him. If not, we can tie a block to his leg and kick his ass in the Mississippi. See ya."
Cruz felt smooth and comfortable in a long black kimono, hishair knotted in a ponytail. Outside the top floor of his French Quarter hotel, fat raindrops pounded his window and fell to the neon rain-slicked world below.
"Keith's dead?" he remembered.
"Ain't nothin' we could do but put that boy out of his misery," Floyd said.
"Damn shame. We used to dream about this stuff in Memphis, didn't we, Floyd? You singin' backup at Stax. I knew it would happen."
Floyd nodded like he knew better than to try and rattle Cruz's image thing. He would never try to hold a mirror to the chuck wagon.
Cruz stroked his beard. "How's the kid doin'?"
"Awright."
"Does he really look like Elvis?"
"Son of a bitch, if he don't."
"What is he, a real fat country boy with sideburns?"
"Naw, man, like the young one on that postage stamp," Floyd said. "Kid's just a teenager. But he has that meanness in his eyes, like he would put a cat in the microwave just to see what'll happen next."
"I want you to take care of him. Make sure he eats and has a place to live. You say he handled himself well?"
"Kid done good. He's sleepin' on my couch, but my ole lady don't like it none. She call me a 'no-good muthafucka with punk friends' before I shoved some Dial soap in her mouth and locked her in the closet."
"You did good with this, Floyd," Cruz said, placing his hands behind his back. "You did real good."
"Thanks, man. I get that same faggot down on Royal to let us use his old phonograph like before," Floyd said. "Hope it ain't the same as Baker's tracks. Don't want you bein' too excited and shit for nothin'. You know I just grabbed what I seen in the motel, don't make it real. But I sure want to hear this man you love so much sing. Must be somethin' else."
"I appreciate your concern, but we'll be fine. I had a vision when I meditated today," Cruz said as he laced his hands together and slightly bowed. "You remember when I played that tape for you when we drove out to Las Vegas? Mozart made you cry."
"I tole you I had some road trash in my eye."
"Yeah, well, this man is one of those blips in music history that changes everything. A true genius."
Cruz stuffed a wad of cash in the front pocket of Floyd's shirt and walked back into the suite's adjoining room. Even though it was still early in the evening, the darkness felt
like midnight.
"What's going on?" Kimber asked.
He took off his robe and crawled back into bed, his skinny body coated in black hair.
"A job just got done."
Kimber pushed herself up onto one elbow. The weight of her heavy breasts dropped down and the neon light bathed her body in an intermittent red-and-blue glow. She looked like a damned perfect statue.
"Baby, I now own the best in the world," Cruz said. "A man who had guitar licks that could break your heart."
"Is he going to play at the club?"
"No, baby," Cruz said, laughing and patting her head as if she were a small child. "He was buried in a pauper's grave, many years ago."
"Oh."
"Like I always said, everything always works out when you have a plan. Come on over to papa and let him give you a little celebration present."
Kimber rolled over on her back.
Chapter 25
Nick was back in New Orleans by midnight. The smell of the fetid, salty Mississippi River was a homecoming as he passed the sporadic squares of light from Warehouse District windows. He liked New Orleans best late at night when the city resonated with a nocturnal loneliness.
Maybe he used melancholy the way some use a drug.
Nick remembered rolling back into town late one night several years ago. It was after a long drive from Alabama after his father's funeral. The only sound he'd heard on the two-lane highway back to Louisiana was the prattle of rain on his windshield. He hadn't slept a solid night in days and everything seemed to come at him in a gray tattered fuzz. There was no food in his stomach and his hands trembled when he shifted down, moving into the streets of New Orleans.
