“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.