Leavin' Trunk Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

Station.
    When he was finishing his Great Migration project at Tulane a few years ago, Nick traced the routes of the Delta greats from Mississippi to Chicago. The change was bone-jarring. The Mississippi Delta was a fertile oasis. Everything green and alive. Chicago was industrial. Gray and cold. But for sharecroppers making inhuman wages, if anything at all, Chicago was about hope. They would’ve probably traveled to the depths of hell to escape the poverty and racial barriers.
    Nick imagined folks like Muddy and Ruby Walker and the absolute loneliness they must’ve felt approaching the belching smokestacks of Chicago industry. Did Ruby wait for a train in Clarksdale with a suitcase made of paper filled with everything she owned as Nick had read? Big boasts to farmers in Mississippi about how she was going to make it in Chicago? About how she was going to come back driving a long, shiny car throwing money out her window at country relatives? But when the cold night cloaked around the train, it must have been like traveling to another planet. The boast becoming an internal fear.
    Bright lights, big city, gone to my baby’s head , Nick thought, closing his eyes.
    Today, most of that hope was gone. The Twelfth Street Station was now a barren field at Twelfth and Michigan, and much of the South Side was nothing but rotting slums and burned-out shells. In Muddy’s and Ruby’s time, Chicago was a place where blacks could make it, where wealth was as obtainable as someone’s work ethic. But today, many blacks were taking that same blues highway back to the Delta. Somewhere, the dream had become an economic nightmare.
    The lights of the small towns and lonesome highways scattered across his face as the train rolled through the cold neverending night. As he fell asleep, he imagined Kate’s face close to his. Brown eyes like sunlight hitting morning coffee. Perfect dimpled chin. Reminded him of a young Ali MacGraw about the time of The Getaway . He imagined her pulling the dark brown hair from her eyes and pursing a smile into the corner of her mouth.
    I’ve been gone so long, I know things ain’t what they used to be.

Chapter 7
    An hour later, Annie and Fannie had their arms around the little man as they led him up to his apartment on Rush Street. Place was over a pizzeria and Annie could smell the crust, cheese, and sauce baking into a symphony. Made her mouth water as she watched the guy fumbling with his key for the hole and missing the entire knob.
    “Baby, let me slip in it,” Fannie said, guiding his key into the lock. “Mama will take care of you.”
    The hallway was covered with muddy, red carpet with blue lights shining in a cavelike glow. Looked like they were inside a carnival ride. Step right up, see what it’s like to live in a shithole.
    Fannie smoothed her gloved hand over his greasy head with about four long hairs plastered over a bald spot. Over his shoulder, Fannie made a queer-looking face like she’d just stroked a dead chicken. Annie smiled back at her friend and could feel her heart pounding in her chest like a bass drum. She crushed her lip with her teeth.
    The man stumbled into an apartment that smelled of pizza and cat piss. He had an unmade bed under a window heater with clothes strewn around the room like they’d flown out of a blender. Dirty grippie underwear littered the floor along with crushed cans of Hamm’s beer. Real class act. Didn’t even seem worth the effort. But this was the man, and they had a job to do.
    The man fell onto his bed, turned on an AM clock radio, unbuckled his pants, and pushed his loose polyester trousers to his ankles. The radio droned an old ABBA song as he put his hands behind his head and spread his legs. His legs were skinny, white, and covered in coarse black hair like some kind of fucked up Chia pet.
    “I want you, Blackie, to get naked and put your muff in my face while Blondie over there kisses my lizard,” he said with a thick tongue.
    “How about a