"Paul J. McAuley - Cross Roads Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Cross Roads Blues
a novelette
by Paul McAuley
The first time Turner heard Robert Johnson play was to a vast crowd in Washington, D.C., December
5th 1945, the night the desegregation bill went through, and just three weeks before Johnson was
assassinated. The second time was on what was supposed to be a routine archive trip, June 3rd 1937, a
jook joint just outside the little Mississippi town of Tallula, and it was something else.

Afterwards, Turner hung around outside, an anonymous still point in the crowd that, slow as molasses,
dispersed into the hot dark night. The music still thrilled in his blood. Songs he had known only as ghosts
in the crackle of a few badly worn 78s or no more than titles in charred files from the fire-bombed office
of an obscure record company had one after the other ripped through the heat and noise of the crowded
jook joint, so much sound from one man and one guitar, driving the whoops and pounding feet of the
dancers, that Turner doubted his state-of-the-art Soviet recorder had been able to capture one tenth of
the reality. Turner had once played a little guitar himself, enough to know that what the old bluesmen said
about Robert Johnson was true. Even before the New York concerts, the years in prison on a
trumped-up murder charge, his letters and his protest songs, the Freedom Marches and the Segregation
Riots, near-canonization after his assassination, he had been the best of them all.

The hard little capsule planted under the skin beneath Turner's collarbone, where the grain of Americium
hung suspended in its Oppenheimer pinch, tingled. He should have cut out and closed the Loop when
Robert Johnson had finished his set. Get in, do the job, get out. Don't give the paradoxes any chance.
But Turner had heard raw truths in Johnson's songs; for the first time since he'd been brought home after
the Peace Corps had been disbanded, he felt alive again. Before he closed the Loop, he wanted to meet
the man whose music had cut him deep.

The sandy yard and dark road in front of the jook joint were empty now; only Turner and three men
sitting on the sagging porch were left. The men, all in various degrees of drunkenness, were passing
around a chipped enamel jug in the yellow light of a couple of kerosene lanterns, talking in low voices and
glancing sidelong at the stranger in the dark suit (it hung oddly around Turner, and the suspenders which
held up the trousers were gouging his shoulders), clean white shirt (soaked in sweat), and polished
two-tone shoes (which pinched like hell). He strolled over to them, casual as he could, wondering if one
of them was the man whose recollections about Robert Johnson, told to a field researcher in some twenty
years time, had brought him here. His pulse in his throat, his mouth dry, he asked where Robert Johnson
was.

One of them said, "He out back somewhere."

Another added, "With a woman. Comes to women, Bobby Johnson's like a snake in a henhouse."

The third wanted to know who was asking. Turner gave his cover story of being a talent scout, named a
large New York record company. It was sort of true.

The man, burly and barechested under bib overalls, fixed a mean look on Turner. "Never heard of no
gentleman of colour working for no record company before."

"Bobby Johnson, he already done got himself a deal," the first man said. He was the oldest of the three,
his face a map of wrinkles like drying mud, his eyeballs yellow as ivory, his nappy hair salt and pepper.
He peered at Turner and said, "You got yourself seventy-five cents, Mr New York, you can walk into
Mr Willis's dry goods store tomorrow and buy a record of his 'Terraplane Blues'."