you thinkin’ about Nick and the old man. But they all there. Them doors on Conti closed, houselights on in the bar, and JoJo and him just clearin’ up beer bottles into a trash can.
JoJo singin’ along to the jukebox.
You knock on the glass.
And Loretta lets you in.
Everyone stops for a while. No money bein’ counted. No beer bein’ drunk.
Just all y’all sittin’ at this little table. Loretta and JoJo. You and Old School. And you laughin’ about things that been and some things that JoJo think gonna happen.
That jukebox slows after the last song. Neon and chrome real bright.
Another record slips onto the turntable and finds its groove.
That beat, man. It’s old but strong.
You’re home.
EPILOGUE
I still travel the Delta when I find myself lost. I like the feel of the wide expanse of flat brown earth, the clapboard bars with cold beer and greasy pork sandwiches, the tiny white Baptist churches that shake and pulse with religion on Sundays, the barren plantations and forgotten towns where ghosts still live. JoJo and I would meet halfway during our exchanges, most of the time along Interstate 55 down in Vaiden for a chicken-fried steak meal. It was early fall and even just off the interstate, I could smell the leaves burning from the little houses and trailers off the road.
I had a seat in a booth when JoJo walked in and hung up his Carhartt farm coat on a spindly hanger by the door. He slid into the seat, scanned the menu, and tossed it in the center of the table.
“ALIAS didn’t care much for this place,” I said. “Ordered a cheeseburger.”
He laughed. “Maybe he knows something we don’t.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why wouldn’t that surprise me?”
“You seen that new video he got out?” JoJo asked.
“He’s doing fine in L.A.,” I said. “Asked me to come out and see him.”
“You going to?”
“Can you see me in L.A.?”
“He may need you to,” he said. “This ain’t over. You understand?”
“I do.”
“When you side with a man, you keep on.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If not, you ain’t no better than Teddy.”
I looked out at the trucks lining up to hit the interstate. On the side of a trailer, someone had painted the image of three cowboys running cattle in a wide open prairie. The fall sun struck the painting as it turned and elevated up on the high road heading north.
“What made him sick in the mind?” JoJo asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re mad at yourself, but you always knew it,” he said.
I nodded. We ate the chicken-fried steak and drank coffee, talking more about ALIAS, two new hands JoJo had hired on the farm, the team I helped coach at JFK, and the possibility of getting Buddy Guy to play a small show during Jazzfest.
“Meet you back here in ten days,” he said. “Same time.”
I nodded.
“You quit teaching,” he said. “Didn’t you?”
“Tulane hired a Harvard professor to replace Randy,” I said. “He wanted me to expand upon theories of the blues and intercultural dimensions of the framework of the South.”
“That’s a lot of thought about blues.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I can do what I do on my own. And the bar is working right now.”
JoJo laughed. “Blues ain’t nothin’ but a botheration on your mind.”
“I’ve heard that.”
We shook hands and I watched his old truck stop before heading south to New Orleans. I thought I heard some pounding bass work and bounce coming from his cab. I tried to listen harder but JoJo pulled out onto the road and the music followed.
I shook my head.
I drove as far as Batesville. If I turned west, I’d head to Clarksdale, where Willie T. Dean wanted to meet. He said he had the most unbelievable lead on the best bluesman I never heard of. True Willie T. Always the next adventure.
I stopped at Highway 6 and instead headed east. The sun sank down behind me, swallowing the road and disappearing into the Delta.
I took a shortcut off 6 and wound down through a cypress swamp where men in small boats drank beer and fished with cane poles, the misty blue-and-yellow light filling the cab of my truck, where Annie slept on the rear seat. A bone tucked under her paw.
The fall sky was slate blue and gray when I arrived at the dented silver mailbox and turned along a long gravel road. The small white clapboard house waited, draped in big ceramic Christmas lights. Maggie’s truck parked sideways by a propane tank. Her cotton shirts, faded blue jeans, and her son’s jerseys riffled in the wind.
I parked alongside of her truck. The red, green, and yellow lights warming up the chill.
Annie and I followed a stone path as the door opened, an old screen door slamming shut from a rusted spring.
Maggie tucked her hands into her jeans and shrugged her shoulders in a tight black T-shirt. The summer tan still coloring her face and long arms. Wind sifting her black hair across her eyes.
She reached down a hand and pulled me up onto the porch.
The crossroads were far behind me.
