Dark End of the Street

by Ace Atkins

Randy was usually physically out of step with his subjects – a white man with a big head of curly brown hair – but always spiritually in tune. He was the author of about a million books on early New Orleans jazz players and had been featured in Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary series.

  Always cracked me up when Randy got drunk. This man was one of the most respected music historians in the country, but sometimes I swear he acted about thirteen.

  “Fuck, man,” Randy said. “I’m wasted.”

  I was sandwiched by a three-hundred-pound black man named Sun on the one side, and a transsexual tattoo artist named Oz on the other. Sun was crying for his lost friend, his straw hat shredded to bits in his almost-ham-sized hands. Eyes red, damn near sobbing.

  “Rolande always love you, Nick,” he said, kind of blubbering. “Remember that night when you dumped that Gatorade on your coach’s head?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, he love you for that. Love you for tellin’ the man to go fuck hisself.”

  I smiled and said, “Oh, I try.”

  Oz didn’t seem to be listening. He was just singing along to Otis’s ballad to a late-night love. He had on his standard black lingerie with thigh-high stockings. On his face he wore white pancake makeup and black lipstick.

  He’d strolled into the bar just minutes after a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The movie was his obsession. His life. Based every decision on what Dr. Frank-N-Furter would do.

  “Good Lord, pour the man another drink,” Oz said in a recently acquired British accent. “Death is so hard for some people to get over. Isn’t that right… What was his name again?”

  “Rolande,” JoJo said with a slight edge. “Rolande Goodine. You sure remembered it when you need him to rewire that piece-of-shit tattoo parlor.”

  “It is, first off, a house of medicinal cures and potions.”

  JoJo raised his eyebrows and looked over at me.

  “Goddamn, Nick, I don’t mess around with none of them hoodoo fuckers. I don’t care about the way he dresses, ’cause whatever gets you through the night and all that, but I will not mess with any of that hoodoo shit. You hear me?”

  “It’s cool,” I said. “It’s cool. Let’s just drink. This is Rolande’s last party. He wouldn’t want us fighting.”

  I reached across the table and filled everyone’s glass to the rim. JoJo looked away from Oz, over at Randy still grinning like a fool, and then over at sobbing Sun.

  JoJo shook his head. “Goddamn, no wonder he wanted to leave this world. Look at y’all. Like a fuckin’ freak show in here.”

  “I know a man who can drive a railroad spike through his nose,” I announced. “You want me to call him?”

  “I know a man in Algiers who’ll bring back your friend for fifty bucks,” Oz said with pursed lips. “But then Rolando would be a zombie and kind of a grumpy pain in the ass. You know how zombies get.”

  “Nick!” JoJo yelled.

  Rolande’s head rolled over to JoJo’s shoulder, mouth agape.

  The music stopped. And no one said a word as a brittle wind blew down Conti Street. I could only hear Sun’s heavy breathing and a rock band jamming at the new Irish pub a few doors down.

  Suddenly, the back door burst open and Randy dropped his glass on the hardwood floor. The glass scattered in shards dripping with amber whiskey.

  And even my heart skipped for a second until I saw it was Loretta, JoJo’s wife. Her flat face was full of frustration and exhaustion. She wore a long camel hair coat and her hair had been pulled back into a net.

  A hard wind shot inside.

  “What you want, woman?” JoJo asked like a man who wasn’t afraid of shit.

  Loretta – a two-hundred-pound-plus woman whose voice could make the bar jump when she sang – didn’t even glance at the men. “Not you, you ole fool,” she said. “I need Nick.”

  I crawled over Sun and followed her out to a loading dock facing a crushed shell lot where she crossed her arms and stared at JoJo’s 1963 Cadillac. Withered leaves from a dying palm tree brushed against the stucco outside the bar.

  “I’m sorry, Loretta,” I said. “I was the one who asked JoJo if we could… you know, like the old days when… you know.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s not that,” she said. “Nick, I need some help. In the worse kind of way, baby.”

  Chapter 2

  LORETTA JACKSON DIDN’T ask for favors. She sang deep, soulful blues from the pit of her big, curvy frame, she cooked jambalaya so sweet and spicy that all other food tasted hollow, and she took care of the ones she loved with such intensity that it even patched over that old familiar hole in my heart. A favor from Loretta wasn’t a favor at all. It was an opportunity to do something for someone who’d given me everything she had.

  We walked down Conti to Decatur and then continued upriver north under wooden signs swinging in the fall wind and beneath wrought-iron balconies heavy laden with palms, banana trees, and stunted magnolias. Twisted Christmas lights shaped like chili peppers and little skulls burned from the rusted ironwork. We passed the new, tourist-friendly Tipitina’s, dozens of gift shops selling lewd T-shirts and cheap posters, and tired old restaurants serving reanimated crawfish, dead since spring, and watery gumbo.

  We turned down the flagstone walkway running along Jackson Square – closed since dusk – and toward St. Louis Cathedral. The air smelled of the Mississippi’s fetid brown water and cigarette smoke from a loose gathering of skinheads playing with a mangy puppy by the front doors of the church.

  Loretta ignored them and took a seat on a nearby green bench. I didn’t figure for wandering about tonight and had only worn a thin suede jacket over my black Johnny Cash T-shirt. It was the pose Cash did for Def Jam records when he wanted to thank the country music industry by saluting them with his middle finger.

  I was pretty proud of it.

  “If you don’t want to do this, you tell me,” Loretta said. “Right, baby? You don’t owe me nothin’.”

  “Nothin’ but the world,” I said, grabbing her hand. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I just been thinkin’ while we were walking ’bout all the things you do for folks. Like when you kicked the butt of that man who dress like Jesus. You know the one who took Fats’s money? And what you did for sweet Ruby Walker in Chicago last year? Nick, you ’bout got yourself killed to get that ole woman out of jail. I don’t want to be no burden.”

  I squeezed Loretta’s plump fingers and smiled. “You remember you and JoJo taking me in when I lost everything? You remember cooking for me and taking me to church and sewing my ratty Levis? Loretta, you’re my family. I helped those people ’cause I wanted to. Because it’s what I do. But with you, it’s not even something I’d think about.”

  Loretta peered up at the three spires of the cathedral. She seemed to concentrate a long time on the middle spire topped with a hollow cross. On the cathedral’s clock, the long hand swept forward and bells chimed for 3:00 A.M.

  I rubbed my unshaven face and asked, “Loretta, tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “You remember me telling you about my brother?”

  “Hell yeah, I know all about your brother. He’s a legend. You kidding me?”

  Clyde James started his career singing in a gospel trio back in the ‘fifties with Loretta and their sister, whose name I couldn’t remember after a few Dixies. Clyde went on to be a big crossover star in the ‘sixties with a small soul label called Bluff City. He was kind of a mix of Otis Redding and Percy Sledge.

  Even though Loretta rarely spoke of him, I had most of his records. Mainly scratchy 45s with their dusty grooves filled with songs about longing, heartache, and all-around woman pain. Many a night they’d exorcised the latest shit I’d been going through with a woman I’d known for the last decade, Kate Archer.

  I watched Loretta’s face fill with light from the street lamps and over at the skinheads playing tag with the puppy. The puppy licked their faces and rolled over on
his back. He barked a couple times and the skinheads hooted with laughter.

  “Well, yesterday two men come to see me at the bar about Clyde. Scared me so bad I ain’t been back down there since tonight. I didn’t even tell JoJo about it. ’Cause JoJo and I don’t discuss my brother. Not after he’d tried so many times to help. You know?”

  I nodded. I had an uncle who’d been a moonshine runner turned preacher and used to ask my dad for donations for his “church” every Christmas.

  “They were asking me all about Clyde,” Loretta said, reaching into her small jeweled pocketbook for a change purse. It killed me the way she could sing such nasty blues and then be such a proper old Southern woman. “They wanted to know when I seen him last and where they could find him. I tole them I ain’t seen him for fifteen years, but they didn’t believe me. They started breaking bottles and turning over tables. One of them even put his hand over my face and said he’d kill me if I didn’t help ’em find Clyde. JoJo’d gone down to the A &P on Royal to get me some milk and coffee.”

  I could feel my cheeks flush with anger. “Did you tell them Clyde was dead?”

  “They called me a liar. Said they seen him in Memphis two weeks back. Why would a man say something like that to me?”

  I pulled out a Marlboro from a hard pack and lit it. I took a deep breath of smoke and settled back into the bench reaching my arm around Loretta.

  “First off, I think you need to tell JoJo. And I can walk you guys home after the shows. That’s no problem.”

  She looked back up at the slow-moving clock and then down at her hands. She unfolded them and reached into her change purse pulling out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. She crushed the money into my palm.

  “When you headed up to Mississippi?” she asked.

  “Monday.”

  “I want you to ride up to Memphis and find out what you can about Clyde.”

  “Clyde’s dead.”

  She looked at me and patted my face as if I were a child with only a child’s understanding. “We always thought he was dead. In the end he turned us all away. His family. His friends. Only thing he wanted was that hurt he carried ’round with him. When we lost track of him, I had to say good-bye. I had to pray for his soul.”

  I placed the money back in her purse and shook my head when she opened her mouth to speak. Her eyes closed and a single tear ran in a twisted pattern down her powdered face.

  “You never told me what happened to him,” I said, finishing the cigarette and tossing it to the flagstone pavement. A young couple walked past, drunk and kissing madly. They tripped over a curb as they turned into Pirate’s Alley.

  A gas lamp burned at the end of the alley by a house once rented by Faulkner. It was one of the loneliest sights I’d ever known but wasn’t sure why.

  “Somebody killed a man in his band,” Loretta said. “And Clyde’s wife. She was pregnant, Nick. Woman was six-months pregnant.”

  Chapter 3

  PERFECT LEIGH DIDN’T like cartoons with talking animals, men who wore aftershave or Italian suits, self-appointed faith healers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, songs on the Waffle House jukebox, soap opera divas, collard greens, or sex of any type. She liked herself and that was enough for her. She liked the way she smelled like butterscotch candy. She liked the way she looked, with a mane of platinum blond hair and thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six measurements. She liked the way she appreciated the way Nancy Sinatra used to dance, the smell of new leather in her Mustang convertible, cheese sauce served in bad Mexican restaurants, and the way her Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album skipped because it warped during a hot day at the beach in Panama City, Florida.

  She especially didn’t like good-ole-boy gatherings where men played poker in cigar-infested rooms and laughed with false self-knowledge and fears of their own inadequacies. She hated the smell of Scotch on their breath and of their crooked yellowed teeth. But they were gone now except for some poor old bastard named Fisher and his wheelchair-bound wife who screamed every time he plunked down a silly hand.

  This was Tunica. From catfish farming to casinos in a few simple years. You could still smell the cowshit caked to the gamblers’ work boots.

  She sat with the Fishers in this little glassed-in room on the second floor of the Magnolia Grand Casino, just a spit away from Highway 61. The old man ate the remainder of a tired wrinkled hotdog and his wife slobbered on herself while laughing at the ketchup that dropped on his horrible tie.

  For days, Perfect had been watching and listening to them from closed-circuit cameras. In the main casino, in the restaurant, and even in their bedroom. She read their profiles down in Humes’s office about how they’d lost their daughter in a car accident about fifteen years ago and how they had some kind of benefit every year for her at a lake house with tons of deep-fried catfish and bream.

  They had just given the money to some Tunica preacher who had a cable-access show in Memphis where he pretended to heal people. Said he gained the gift when he was a child and fell beneath a frozen lake only to re-emerge two-and-a-half minutes later with a vision.

  What a crock of shit. Now he just passed out silly little flyers on Beale Street and casino bathrooms speaking out against men humping other men or drinking whiskey like idiots.

  The Fishers were blind. But Perfect saw everything. By watching, listening, and waiting, she’d learned just how much they wanted their daughter back.

  So in the last twenty-four hours that’s what she’d become. She studied pictures of their dead little girl. She combed her platinum hair over one eye like the girl did, bought a wooly, early ‘eighties sweater, and even found some of those Madonna rubber bracelets at a vintage clothing shop in midtown Memphis.

  Last night, she just sat there in the casino bar and studied that poor old child trapped in a real silly time.

  Girl’s name was Gina.

  Gina. Gina. Bobeeena. Mofanna-fanna. Momeena.

  “Can I get you another hotdog, Mr. Fisher?” Perfect asked.

  “No, Miss Leigh,” he said, rearranging the cards like an idiot. She saw everything he had. But she’d let him win. Again. “I appreciate it though. My Lord, look how much I got. Must be two hundred dollars here.”

  “Be a lot more if you take the offer,” she said. Real sweet. Not hard or hustly. But the way she imagined Gina would say it. Please, her words whispered, please accept your future.

  “Ma’am,” he spoke, real indignant as if he’d just had a cattle prod inserted into his rectum. “We bought that land in ‘sixty-two and don’t see no good reason for leavin’ now.”

  Perfect – in full Gina mode now – smiled. Real tight smile with her eyes crinkled up but not showing a bit of teeth. Maybe even showed a bit of broken heart in her failed mission.

  “Well, if you folks ever reconsider,” she said, “we’d appreciate it.”

  Her smile dipped into her glass of wine tasting their souls and their fears and desires. By morning’s end, she’d own them. They’d already opened too much. And they were hers.

  She didn’t have them bent until 7:00 A.M… the next day over a breakfast in the casino’s Mardis Gras Time! restaurant. Some dummy in a red-and-white-striped vest played some New Orleans music on a Casio keyboard while a bunch of tired old people mashed soupy grits and butterless eggs into their dry mouths.

  She’d stayed up with them all night, until a white sun washed through their curtains and over their soulless faces. Both full of whiskey, packs of cigarettes, totally spent from telling a volume worth of Gina stories.

  Gina once adopted a stray cat that had a cyst the size of an orange in its throat. She cried and cried until her daddy took it to a country vet who cut it out for five hundred dollars. That old cat lived for another fifteen years and ate grits with honey and sugar.

  And then there was the time Gina thought she’d created the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. She called the folks at Nestlé and asked them if they’d pay her a million dollars for the recipe. That’
s when she was fifteen and, to be honest, to Perfect, Gina sounded kind of stupid.

  But Perfect nodded and nodded.

  Why were they telling her all of this after all these years? the Fishers asked. They’d barely spoken about dear Gina since the accident.

  Yeah, Perfect wondered, as she combed the platinum hair back over the left eye and adjusted the rubber bracelets on her wrists.

  When they got to the point about Luke, the tractor, and the wedding ring, she knew she had them. She just watched their faces fall, their hearts empty like a broken water main, and their bodies convulse with memories buried for far too long.

  She didn’t even have to ask. She simply walked to the phone and called for the Cobra – her little pet name for the casino’s oily attorney.

  Within fifteen minutes of the contract signing at breakfast, she was washing that really god-awful Vidal Sassoon mousse from her hair in a room Humes had gotten for her. For some reason, Duran Duran songs kept playing in her head like a bad insult to a horrible night.

  Soon they’d be kissing her ass before she headed back to her small apartment in Memphis where she lived with her ‘sixties picture books and her antique mirrors.

  The money would come Western Union.

  She’d live for months without the virus of the outside world to taint her.

  But as she was letting down the top on her ‘sixty-five Mustang convertible, Humes stopped her. She lifted her travel bag into the backseat and stared at his face framed by the purple and green lights of the Magnolia Grand floating in a fake river.

  An agriplane buzzed overhead and a stray cloud on a cloudless day shielded the sun.

  “What?”

  “He has something for you,” Humes said, his gray hair looking like silver against his black skin.

  “Not interested.”

  “It’s more money than you’ve ever known.”

  “Keep talkin’,” Perfect said, checking out her reflection in the glass of an SUV parked behind him. “I’m always open to new ideas.”