Cruz wiped it off, opened the crate's top, and peeled back the old material. He stared for a moment at the labels marked in faded pen ink. "Until they're played, I'll be taking Miss Dare with me. I've been fucked by these things twice before."
Nick thumbed back the gun's hammer.
"I'm a man of my word. You know that, Travers."
"Oh. I feel so much better now," Nick said.
The fumes coming from around the station made his eyes water, but Nick didn't let Cruz's man out of sight. A light went out from the passenger car like an extinguished candle.
"I'm not leaving here without her," Nick said.
Cruz raised his hand, "All right, Floyd, get the bitch."
The train lurched forward and as Floyd turned, a quick double snap came from inside the car. Floyd's head lolled like a drunkard's. His gun raised and came upward, spinning in the palm of his hand.
Nick pushed JoJo to the ground and covered his head, the rusted wheels of the train gliding by. A gun exploded and another double pop came from inside the car. Nick saw Henry pull out a revolver from his coat and level it at Cruz, who was looking back into the railcar at the Elvis kid, who'd apparently shot Cruz's bodyguard.
Henry squeezed off four rounds into Cruz. Cruz leveled his gun at Henry and pulled the trigger as they both fell onto the concrete.
Through his fingers, Nick looked up again, and saw Cruz lying in a twisted pile with Floyd. The top quarter of his head had been blown away and a small bubble of spit and blood formed on his bottom lip.
The records were gone, and Henry lay dying on the cold concrete with a hole in his stomach the size of a silver dollar. Cracker was nowhere on the platform.
?
Nick grabbed hold of the last passing railcar and ran through the baggage compartment, jumping over suitcases. But when he reached the connecting door, it was locked. He kicked it until his knee ached. The monotonous bump of the train thudded in his ears as the door flung open. He crossed into the next compartment and passed through three more before he was in the same railcar where Elvis had been.
He had left JoJo on the platform to find help for Henry. Cruz and his bodyguard were positively dead and there was no threat to his old friend. JoJo had just yelled to get that kid.
In the first cabin, he found a grizzled woman wearing an Atlanta Braves ball cap and spitting snuff. The next cabin was dark, and he fumbled for the light switch before a fist smashed into his stomach. He lost his breath reaching out for the kid, who ran by him into the hall. Nick lunged for his legs and brought him down. Still out of breath, he held him to the ground.
"Where are they?" Nick yelled.
"Eat me," the kid said, his black hair covering his dark-ringed eyes, his face as smooth as a woman's. He had to remember the kid just murdered a man before he smacked him hard in the face.
"What'd you do with the records?"
"I ain't got 'em, man. I ain't got them."
Nick punched him again. There were no reservations now. He was so close to hearing the third recording sessions of Robert Johnson. Some punk-ass kid trying to make some cash wasn't going to destroy that. Nick had worked his entire life for this. This was it. There was nothing else. This was it.
The kid tried to knee Nick in the crotch and scratch at his eyes. Nick locked his grip and was about to yank the kid to his feet when two train conductors ran down the hall and knocked him off. They pinned Nick to the ground and let the kid go. Out of the corner of his eye, Nick could see the young Elvis pick up a backpack, wipe his bleeding lip, and flee down the hall.
"Get the hell off me!" Nick yelled. "That kid just murdered a man back at the station."
One of the conductors, a middle-aged white guy with narrow eyes and a stubbled jaw, yelled back to another porter to grab the kid, who was already into another car.
They let Nick up, and within a few minutes, four waiters from the dining car tried to wrestle the kid down. The kid shot one of them and jumped off the train a few miles later. No one, not even the police, was even sure where. Nick found Virginia in a drugged sleep in the railcar, and he held her hand all the way to Memphis.
Nick never heard of the lost recordings again. No one would ever know what filled their lacquered grooves. The sound caught more than fifty years ago had vanished deep into the Delta night.
Epilogue
The story, as Nick read, ended in swirling blue and red lights outside the Graceland mansion in Memphis. A night security guard had called police after he'd seen a white male crawling over the fence and briefly weeping at the Presley family graves. The suspect then broke into the museum where they kept Presley's clothes and gold records.
Jesse Garon-- a nineteen-year-old who was wanted for the deaths of a Mississippi deputy and two New Orleans security guards-- shattered the glass case containing Presley's "Sun God" outfit. He put on the costume, complete with cape and massive belt buckle, and fled the building.
The security guard, quoted in the paper, said Garon was headed back over the fence when he saw several Memphis police cars outside the gates. Garon turned and ran back toward the mansion, breaking through a back door into the green-shag-carpeted Jungle Room.
Police and security officers surrounded the building but didn't try to follow after Garon began shooting at them. About five A.M., the mansion was flooded with spotlights from police and news helicopters.
Police tried to communicate with Garon inside the mansion with megaphones, but they got no response. The management of the tourist site threatened lawsuits if the mansion was damaged in any way during a siege for the alleged murderer. They said tear gas could damage the furniture.
A few hours later, the sharp report of a pistol crack came from inside the mansion. The officer in charge gave the order to head in. Team members split up searching the entire home for Garon. Their guns were draw,n waiting for the killer at every turn.
Instead, they found Garon upstairs, already dead.
Past the red velvet ropes where simple tourists weren't able to go, he lay on Presley's black leather bedspread in a pool of blood. The bullet had made a gaping hole through the jumpsuit's emblazoned sequined sun and right through the kid's heart.
Police later searched the motel where Garon had stayed. But no one ever found a single recording of a blues guitarist who was murdered on a hot August night in 1938, his twenty-nine songs a bible for twentieth-century music.
?
It was a tattered November night and Nick was back at JoJo's bar sipping on a Dixie. He sat right under the framed black-and-white picture of Earl Snooks, the patchwork scar and gray eyes were more familiar now. They'd buried him under his real name back in Greenwood. There was even talk of reissuing some of the songs he cut in the forties, due to the press his reemergence attracted.
A writer from
Living Blues
even came to JoJo's a few weeks ago to ask Nick and JoJo about Henry.
Did they have any idea of his real identity?
They both shook their heads and said he really didn't even seem like a musician. Nick fed him a few nice anecdotes and the guy left New Orleans pleased with the story.
Nick didn't tell anyone except JoJo about the conversation he'd had with Henry in Algiers, about the night Robert Johnson was killed. It was like he was surrounded by this incredible wine of knowledge but couldn't offer a drink. Maybe that's the way Johnson would've wanted it. Forever the phantom poet of Mississippi, even his death a continuing debate.
After the shooting at the train station, Nick spent weeks in Greenwood looking for Cracker and answering more questions for the Leflore County Sheriff's Department. Some of the deputies knew about Cracker but hadn't seen him. Nick stayed most nights on James's porch at the old Three Forks store, hoping he would return. He promised not to tell Henry's story, but he could tell Cracker's.
Nick kept a vigil as the summer waned into a cool fall, the sun turning a bitter harvest orange over the cotton, as it had for decades. Their inky patterns quiet and brittle. Wind in the old woods, nothing but a whisper.
But Cracker never returned. His old shack's doors and windows stayed open, allowing leaves to fall inside and mold. His walls, plastered with newspapers, turned brown and splotched, and the deep mildew made the entire shack smell like a decaying stump.
Finally, Virginia came for Nick at his motel one night and begged him to come back to New Orleans. He finally started work again on the Guitar Slim book and the old patterns returned. JoJo laughed, Loretta cooked and sang, and that old deep melancholy feeling came back into the pit of his stomach.
Even having Virginia cradled on his chest with the industrial windows wide open and the soft sounds of an urban night didn't help. He jogged every morning at the Riverwalk, found a battered gym to get the blood flowing in his tired shoulders, and picked up a class to teach in the fall.
So there he was, feeling a nice buzz, his gloved hands wrapped around a beer, when Virginia walked in. She wore an old blue jean jacket and had her guitar and duffel bag with her. Nick turned back to his drink as she punched up "Walkin' After Midnight" in the jukebox.
She sat down and Nick could smell her freshly shampooed hair. Honeysuckle. She touched her palm to Nick's face.
"Time to head on back down that lonesome blues highway," she said. "I've stayed too long. Got a gig in Austin next week."
"I never asked you to leave," Nick said, still looking down at his Dixie beer.
She touched her fingers to his mouth and pursed her lips. Her arms wrapped around his neck, and she leaned forward and kissed him deeply.
She smiled and kissed him again. Nick looked into her sky blue eyes and kissed her once on the forehead and then on a dimpled cheek. She pulled up her duffel bag and was gone.
The song finished, and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" started. JoJo sat down next to Nick, a wet rag still in his hand. He smiled and told Felix to grab them a couple more Dixies.
"Just keep on pluggin' and everythin' always works out," JoJo said, his wise brown eyes soft. "Remember, son, life is easy--livin' is hard."
"I think I've heard that before."
Johnson's voice on the old juke box was like chilled rain.
?
Cold rain pelted the rich Delta earth as a dark figure stumbled upon the old Zion Church. His hands were chafed and his light blue eyes reddened from the whipping cold. He'd walked four days to come back past the trailer homes and shacks strung with fat Christmas lights.
He had to come back. This might be the final time.
The shadow of the small white church grew larger as he approached the crossroads. The moon was a sliver as thin as a thumbnail in the Delta sky. A beat-up pickup truck passed him but kept going, its twin red lights turning away on another country road.
He removed the wrapped scarf around his head and loped down the weed-covered hill to the cemetery. The whitewashed tombstones were black slabs in the night. He had to feel around, squint, and finally he fell to his knees when he reached the right one.
The pointed obelisk read:
ROBERT JOHNSON
"KING OF THE DELTA BLUES SINGERS"
HIS MUSIC STRUCK A CHORD THAT CONTINUES TO RESONATE.
HIS BLUES ADDRESSED GENERATIONS HE WOULD NEVER KNOW
AND MADE POETRY OF HIS VISIONS AND FEARS.
Cracker laid some limp purple flowers at the base of the monument and then scrambled to his feet. He picked up the heavy sack he'd toted with him for months and headed on down the highway.
R.L.'s footsteps thumped heavy in his ears.
Acknowledgments
A great thanks to all my friends who assisted in one way or another or just offered support: George Plasketes, Tim Green, Warren Ripley, Tammy Trout, Art Copeland, the Hudgins family, B.F. Vandervoort, Lynn Hartman, Moby, Peter Golenbock, Jay Nolan, Gabe Navarro, the Sack family, Lindy Wolverton, Andrew Pope, Preston Trigg, Shelli Johannes, and most of all, Pete Wolverton for starting my career. And for those lending their scholarship to Nick: Stephen LaVere, Wayne Moss, Kurt Nauck, Rudi Blesh, Peter Guralnick, John Hammond, Alan Lomax, Mack McCormick, Robert Palmer, Robert Santelli, Pete Welding, Jerry Wexler, Ed Komara, and Gayle Dean Wardlow.
Additional thanks to Jim O'Neal for that five-buck roadmap to the Delta blues sites before there was thought of an official trail.
Afterword
By Greil Marcus
ROBERT JOHNSON GOT a few minutes in
Phoenix
, a 1997 cops-as-robbers bloodbath. In the Arizona bar she runs, Anjelica Huston leans over a jukebox, punching up Johnson's "Terraplane Blues," named for a '30s machine and a concatenation of woman-as-automobile metaphors that makes Prince's "Little Red Corvette" sound chaste. Cop Ray Liotta walks in, catches the tune: "My grandfather used to have one of those," he says. "Good car."
"It's not about a car," Huston says mordantly. So they banter back and forth, tossing lines from the song at each other like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall running their horse-race double entendres in
The Big Sleep
. It's as if familiarity with Robert Johnson music on the part of even vaguely cool middle-aged white people can be taken for granted, like alcohol and insomnia.
You can get as good a sense of Johnson's presence in present-day life from this barely noticed movie as you can from any number of grander manifestations: his first-team 1986 entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; the 1990 release of his
Complete Recordings
, and the subsequent Grammy and gold-record awards; his 1994 stamp. There are novels, from Walter Mosley's perfect-pitch
RL's Dream
, his best, to Sherman Alexie's pseudo-ghost story
Reservation Blues
, both from 1995. There are films, from Walter Hill's puerile 1986 fiction
Crossroads
to Peter Meyer's stunningly delicate 1997 documentary
Can't You Hear the Wind Howl?