Table Of ContentLeavin’ Trunk Blues
A Nick Travers Novel
By Ace Atkins
Leavin’ Trunk Blues Digital Edition
Copyright 2011 by Ace Atkins
Carrefour, Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any
form without permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is
entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Mark Francis.
For Ian Fleming and Muddy Waters
Well, there's a road that leads to glory, through a valley so far away.
Nobody else can walk it for you, all they can do is point the way.
—Sweet Black Angel, “Lonesome Blues Highway,” King Snake Records, 1957
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to
be onto something is to be in despair. —Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Ruby
So many roads. So many trains.
I stood on the station platform that July of '55 with my suitcase made of paper,
and ambition burnin’ in my soul. As I waited for the City of New Orleans to
billow black smoke into the eggshell blue sky of a Mississippi summer, I thought
back on my past life. About being born the ninth child of a sharecropper in a
windowless, clapboard shack outside Clarksdale. About my daddy leavin’ with a
whore for Chicago when I was six and the disappointment in my mama’s face.
She was a stout black woman with hands like anvils who kept us all workin’. I
rubbed the tips of my fingers together and could still feel the thorns of the cotton
piercin’ my skin as the sun wrapped the Delta in a hellish halo. I could still hear
the cicadas buzzin’ and boilin’ in the trees as the old fieldhands moaned and
hollered to pass time. It was a steady hum of parched voices waitin for mercy
and peace. We would leave the fields drained and soaked with sweat. Our
muscles knotted in our fingers.
Before I’d cook a supper of salted ham and biscuits, I brought my sacks of cotton
to the scale. Mr. Williams, a white man who wore black glasses shaped like cat
eyes, would peek at the weight then back at me. Never spoke. Just spit. Then he
would tell me to move on.
Yeah, move on.
We were all movin’ on at the time. There wasn’t a soul in the Delta that didn’t
know someone who was goin’ to Chicago. I guess my daddy just got bit by the
bug early. Never did see him when I got there.
In Mississippi, everyone was talkin’ about jobs in the meatpackin’ factories and
in the steel mills. Payin’ four times what we made in the fields. Course, the ones
not replaced by machines only made ‘bout a dollar for every pound of cotton
picked.
I knew I was leavin’. When I got old enough, I used to sneak out to juke houses
on the weekends. Me and my girlfriends would stay out all night just hopin’ one
of them mens would let us sing at Red’s juke. We used to have a time out there.
I’d imagine I was Bessie Smith or Memphis Minnie.
I always knew I wanted to be known. Always knew I was born to be somethin’
more. That’s what Chicago was—a chance to become me. So the day after my
nineteenth birthday, I stood on that platform, my thin yellow dress flappin’
round my legs, and heard the train whistle blow like a dronin’ harmonica.
It was the sweetest sound.
But Chicago wasn’t my answer. City life engulfed me like fire upon brittle paper.
Five years later, I was given a room in an Illinois state prison. They say I killed
Billy Lyons. Some say for love. Others for money. But that wasn’t the truth.
Truth is somethin’ I’ve seldom known in the last forty years. I am imitated,
duplicated, and faded out of history. My music today is barely recognizable.
I am the blues.
PROLOGUE
Christmas Eve
Chicago, Illinois
Stagger Lee waited to kill Nick Travers where the old railroad tracks converge in
a city of rust and rotting wood. The faded freight cars sat in coupled decay like
still ramblers in a forgotten section of Chicago where brittle metal chains and
warped springs littered the snowy ground below. In the moonlight, his breath
crystallized before him as he gripped the handle of his blue steel .44.
There used to be a time when those old cars moved with hope and promise, he
thought, filled with hungry people wanting to be part of it all. But that was
before it fell apart, before their dreams drained into a world of shit.
In the distance, the blinking red lights above the skyscrapers pulsed like blood in
his veins. Red hot and burning his mind. That hatred pumped through him like
acid, making his muscles tight and jaw clench. Just like in the fifties when he
was a pro wrestler in Memphis. Black Hercules, they called him. Six-foot-six,
three hundred pounds. All man.
A cold wind ripped through the sliding door’s gaping hole but Stagger Lee
didn’t try to stomp his feet or rub his hands together. The cold was nothing. A
warning signal from the brain. Tonight, he wanted to keep quiet. He was on the
hunt. Travers would tramp through the snow any minute and he’d take his ass
out.
Stagger Lee felt the torn, bloody flesh at his side and smiled. He was about to
give this man Travers a special present in return.
He wiped the red smears from his fingertips and adjusted his black leather trench
coat.
Through the boxcar opening, Stagger Lee heard the zoom of cars over the
Roosevelt Road bridge and the crunch of granite buried beneath someone’s feet.
The steps and slurred singing moved closer. Some kind of Christmas tune. This
man Travers really was a fool. Stagger Lee clutched the .44 tighter. He liked the
way the cold steel felt. Solid. Strong.
More singing echoed off the old metal cars as the hot blood dripped down his
side. The man began to whistle “Silent Night.” Stagger Lee knew Travers had no
idea it was his time. He probably never thought this would be the last minute he
would breathe or feel a cold night. Stagger Lee liked that power. The grim reaper
of Chicago.
The sound of whistling and crunching feet moved down the aisle of cars. Stagger
Lee’s heart raced and he felt his nails dig into his palm around the gun. He
waited and readied every muscle. His breathing came in low, ragged gasps. The
blood boiled in his ears like a man trapped below the water’s surface about to
break through. His exhaling breath clouded his eyes.
He couldn’t wait.
Stagger Lee lunged from the car. He grasped the man by his red coat and thrust
him against the old railcar. He could see the fear in the black bum’s eyes. The
man’s eyes bulged from under his Santa hat as his feet dangled below. Stagger
Lee held him for a few moments before he set him down and smiled.
The bum smiled back.
Stagger Lee slid his gun in his overcoat pocket and grabbed the ice pick that
hung from his belt.
The man’s smile dropped as Stagger Lee thrust the pick into the man’s ear and
let him slump to the ground. He reached down with one hand and held the man’s
quivering body like he would a mechanical doll. The man moved in some kind
of convulsions. Dead, but the body just catching on to the idea. He tossed the
writhing body into the boxcar. Shit.
Stagger Lee hopped back in and closed the sliding door. The rusted wheels
screeched. He put another few holes in the man’s head, blood misting his face,
until the man stopped flopping around.
The last thing he needed to do was scare off Travers. Everything was a mess,
everyone was dead, and this was the last chore left undone. Heard Travers was a
real tough southern boy. But this wasn’t the South Travers knew. In Chicago,
every corner was a crossroad.
