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

record, and I'm fixin now to be famous."

"I heard some of it in your songs."

"Got to tell it in my songs. Got no other way."

Robert Johnson drew on his cigarette. His fingers were so long they seemed to run back to his wrist.
Under his sharply creased suit, his white shirt was open down to his navel. He looked both easy and
dangerous.

He said, "I get to thinkin sometimes that there's somethin missing in them, maybe I need to make the beat
better. Not just louder, but more insistent. I remember when I was a little kid, down around Banks, the
cotton fields there? Way the croppers sang the old worksongs as they picked. I try to put that in, but my
ol gitar ain't enough."

Turner shrugged. He was inside something so deep he didn't know which way was up.

Robert Johnson laughed. "I guess them ol days are gone, teacher. I guess I got to figure my own way
now. But it's hard, you know? Sometimes the days just run by me, it seems, can't seem to catch hold of
anythin lasting."

"Your songs will last," Turner said. It was true, but the none of the songs Robert Johnson had sung
tonight were the songs he'd be remembered for.

"Maybe so." Robert Johnson said it softly, and exhaled a last riffle of smoke into the dark air. He took a
swig of whiskey and said, "You heard I got recorded? It could happen again, if I can get me to Dallas in
a couple of weeks."

"You'll be there."

Turner's colleague, Bill Frankel, would be there too, aiming his equipment at a warehouse room above a
Buick showroom that had been made over into a makeshift recording studio.

There was the sound of a car approaching, muffled in the humid night air; off across the dark fields,
headlights pricked the night. Someone on the jook joint's porch said, "Shit, here comes ol Sheriff Wiley,
looking to see if we wants trouble."

"I have to go," Turner said. The last thing he needed was a policeman asking him what he was doing with
a tape recorder that wouldn't be built for thirty years.

"Believe I'll fade too," Robert Johnson said. "Real nice seein you this one more time, Ike, and I'm
wonderin if you can help me out here. I got so busy with a lady friend I missed gettin paid, I'll have to
wait til mornin, and I done spent the money people put in my gitar on this good whiskey we shared.
Meanwhile me and my lady friend are lookin for a room to stay, only we lacks the necessary you
understand..."



Turner gave Robert Johnson all that was left of the little money he'd been issued and walked a little way
into the dark field and used his magnet to disrupt the Oppenheimer pinch. The flash decay of the grain of