Dark End of the Street

by Ace Atkins

  Abby didn’t seem like the girl who said fuck a lot and the word seemed a hell of a lot dirtier and hard coming out of her mouth. Just kind of hung there for a moment.

  “So who is he? You really meet him in Memphis?”

  “No, he helped me back at the casino. He killed a man trying to make sure I was safe.”

  “God,” Maggie said, stubbing out her cigarette and looking at my face again.

  The bluegrass band began to play outside and we walked to the porch to finish our peach cobbler. I balanced the cobbler and a coffee in my arms and took a seat between Abby and Maggie on the two-by-eight bench. The band had moved onto the back of a ‘fifties pickup and was picking out a combination of songs. “You Are My Sunshine” to “You Don’t Miss Your Water.”

  Lately, it seemed that fun had to be engineered. I saw it all across the Quarter, bars that packaged phony Cajun and New Orleans culture in easy, digestible bites. There was something solid about wondering if you’d make it back from a night at the old Tips or playing a game of chance by leaving your car parked near the Rivershack. Now, we had House of Blues and the new Tips and daiquiri stands that had taken over smoke-filled piano bars unchanged since the ‘forties. I would’ve never guessed I would have ended up having a hell of a time with Abby and her surly cousin. But I did. Never plan a thing. A sure route to enjoyment.

  Abby stirred melted ice cream around the last peaches and Maggie pulled out another cigarette. She had on those scuffed show boots and a clean white T-shirt that advertised Stetson hats.

  The T-shirt was tight. Her breath didn’t stink.

  When the band hit the last note of the William Bell song, Abby put down the cobbler, her eyes staring straight ahead. She hiked the elastic band of her sweatpants leg up to her knee and rubbed the tiny red bumps that had formed on her calf. Maggie picked up our bowls and walked back inside, the screen door banging the frame behind her.

  Abby kept staring into the darkness.

  “I want to go with you,” she said. “I want to help.”

  “Let’s go down to the police station and we’ll talk about getting you some protection. I have to head back to Memphis.”

  She shook her head and bit the edge of her lip. “You promised.”

  “I promised to find your cousin and make sure you were safe.”

  “You need me,” she said.

  Maggie came back and took a seat, resting her back against the worn wall. She cracked open a fourth beer she’d gotten from somebody inside, and nodded along with the music. The Dobro and the mandolin melted into the crisp fall night, their notes twisting and falling with a sweetness of old memories. The music reminded me of times I’d failed to recognize as being the best I’d ever known.

  I looked over at Abby. She’d had on the same old sweatpants for two days and they were stretched like socks over her running shoes. The knees had already become balled and dirty.

  “Abby?” Maggie asked, blowing out some smoke. “Been picking up your folks’ mail and found something kind of strange. Letter from Memphis to your daddy. Did he always work with private investigators?”

  “I guess.” I watched her as she wrapped herself tighter in my jean jacket.

  I placed the cup of coffee by my feet and stared in each direction at the two women.

  “Your daddy’s secretary gave it to me and said it was personal,” Maggie said. “Maybe you should take a look.”

  Chapter 25

  MAGGIE LIVED JUST a few miles from Taylor, at the end of a twisting dirt road lined with mounds of kudzu and honeysuckle vines. The house was white and old, an elongated box made of clapboard and tin, with fat Christmas lights dangling from the roof. Outside, thickets of rosebushes grew near short rows of corn and tomatoes, now withered and brown. A laundry line hung loose to the side of the house filled with flowered cotton dresses and extremely short pairs of pants.

  “You live with a midget?” I asked after we parked and walked through the chilled fall night. The stars above were bright and crisp but a biting wind had kicked up and I saw a dark cloud curtain headed east.

  “A son,” Maggie said in the darkness. “You know those little things that men help create but often leave?”

  “I ain’t got no kids,” I mumbled, following her. We stepped into a wide wood-paneled room that smelled like burnt Italian food. It was dimly lit with a television flashing a Chevy truck commercial.

  A little boy with inky-black hair lay on a tattered couch, a coloring book loose in his hands. An older black woman came out from the kitchen wiping her hands with a rag and exchanged a few words with Maggie before disappearing out a side door.

  I stood, afraid to wake the kid.

  The floor was buckled linoleum and dotted with broken trucks and headless plastic heroes. She’d lined the walls with frames filled with photos too personal to have been bought. Black-and-whites of headstones and old people on porches and brilliant white suns setting low across cotton fields.

  “Yours?” I asked.

  She nodded and handed Abby a Golden Flake potato chip box filled with mail. Maggie picked up the boy, slack but grumbling, and left the room. Abby dropped the box onto the old sofa and I took a seat by her.

  The woman had been watching Leno and I quickly flipped the channels to Letterman with a heavy remote. The sofa was thick with animal hair. Above the mantel gazed a mounted deer head.

  Abby flipped through several letters, mailers, and magazines. I noticed a couple. Southern Living. Soldier of Fortune.

  She stared at the outside of one envelope longer than the others and then quickly tore into it. She read it for a few moments. Her lips slightly parted and she used her right hand to brush the hair from her face onto the back of her ear. She tucked her legs up under her, shook her head, and then handed the letter to me.

  The letterhead was, like Maggie said, from a private investigator in Memphis named Art Copeland. He wrote pretty simply that he intended to keep the deposit that Bill MacDonald had given him. He said he’d exhausted his search through Social Security, criminal, and Department of Motor Vehicles records. Still, he could not find out more about the man Abby’s father wanted.

  I’m sorry but there is no record of Clyde James since 1974.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Holy shit,” Abby said.

  The rain hit us as soon as we reached this wide-porched white house on the outskirts of Oxford. Man, it felt like it had been raining since I arrived in Memphis and I just wished it would stop for a few minutes. I was tired of being wet and cold and having to change clothes about every hour. Somehow, the rain felt different here as we ran to the house. Felt much colder and more brittle, little tiny needles angled at my face.

  We clamored up onto the porch filled with dead plants in mossy terra-cotta pots. Abby walked ahead of me, pulling out a key from her balled fist.

  Crime-scene tape covered the back entrance and it looked like someone had tried to lock up the house. A padlock had been ripped from the frame and it sat dangling and useless.

  Abby tossed it aside and opened the door’s dead bolt. We ran inside as thunder boomed in the thick night, making patting sounds in the pine forest.

  As we entered, thunder boomed again and shook the dark house.

  She tried the light switch but nothing worked. I clicked on my lighter and Abby scurried off for a few seconds and returned with two thick candles. She rushed back into the room as if the other rooms lacked oxygen and she could only breathe when she was next to me.

  “Where’s the office?” I asked.

  She carefully held the candles as I, slightly shivering from the cold rain, lit them and followed her to the back of the house. The thunder crashed pretty damned close to us again and Abby reeled but caught herself and kept walking. I knew she could hear the gunshots in her head and it gave me a thick lump in my throat as I watched her trying to ignore the sounds and images.

  She rolled back some wide-paneled doors and pointed at a large wooden desk and two tall m
etal file cabinets. The walls were painted a deep red and lined with prints of Confederate battle scenes. There was a collection of antique guns mounted on the wall.

  Abby sat on the couch, teeth chattering pretty badly. Lightning spliced in a blue and purple zigzag outside and she covered her face with her hands.

  “Do you have any clothes here?” I asked, trying to get her mind on something else.

  She nodded, face in hands. “No.”

  “Still at the dorm?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Abby, I’ll go with you. Where’s your room?”

  She stayed still for a few moments and then she wordlessly got to her feet and circled around the den to a short hallway and a room covered in art print posters. Renoir. Picasso. On a long blue bookshelf, she had several trophies topped with gold horses. An old cowboy hat sat crooked on a life-size cutout of James Dean.

  The room smelled stale and dead. Almost like some of the museums in New Orleans. Place had the feeling that nothing should be touched here. In the candlelight, Abby carefully opened an antique dresser and pulled out a pair of old jeans and a sweatshirt.

  Her curly blond hair hung loose. Her brown eyes looked tired as hell. I folded my arms and studied the spines of her books as she pulled off her jacket and peeled off her T-shirt.

  In a short flash I saw her wet bra and tight stomach. I turned my head quickly.

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ve already seen all of me anyway.”

  I nodded and studied the books. Eudora Welty. Willie Morris.

  “You like Salinger?” I asked.

  I heard her slough off the sweatpants and saw a wet bra tossed onto the floor.

  “Haven’t read him,” she said.

  “You should. He has this story he tells in Catcher in the Rye about finding an old baseball mitt that belonged to his brother, Allie. He said Allie used to write poems up and down the fingers and into the pocket.”

  When I turned back she was pulling her wet hair into a ponytail and had on a fresh pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. I picked up the wet clothes and balled them under my arm. She waited for me to finish whatever the hell I was talking about.

  I smiled and said, “After a while this stuff won’t hurt so much. Keep some of their things so you can remember them.”

  “You close to your folks?” she asked.

  “I was.”

  “They’re dead?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

  “Shit,” I said, looking away. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Were they killed or something?”

  “My father was an alcoholic and drank himself to death.”

  “Your mother?”

  I grabbed the candle from the bookshelf and took a deep breath.

  “My mother just didn’t like living very much,” I said.

  Her eyes changed as she watched me. They went from sad to soft, picking up her candle and for the first time truly leading the way.

  For more than an hour, we tore through her father’s twin file cabinets. Seemed like we went through every file her father had ever touched. I’d read through each one and then passed it to her to read by candlelight. A couple times she looked like she had something she desperately wanted to tell me, but at the last second would change her mind and bury her head back into a file.

  “What kind of law did your father practice?” I asked.

  “Mainly he worked on contracts,” she said. “He helped people with their money, set up special accounts. And he did a lot with wills for old people around town. He was always busy when someone died.”

  “What’s the Sons of the South?” I asked.

  I tossed her a loose pile of papers and pamphlets with a Confederate battle flag logo. She read along as I did, about a lot of mission statements and quotes from dead generals. Kept on saying they were not a hate group, only preservers of Southern culture.

  “Never heard him mention it,” she said, her lips still silently reading along. Rallies to save the Mississippi state flag. A battle re-enactment in Vicksburg. Some kind of big convention in Jackson, Tennessee.

  “It’s a hate group,” I said.

  “Says it’s not.”

  “ ‘We don’t endorse the Klan’ doesn’t exactly mean they want to hold hands and sing the world a song in perfect harmony.”

  “Look right here,” Abby said. “ ‘The Sons of the South does not advocate any violence or malice to anyone outside the Celtic heritage of the South. The SOS will further the sponsorship of stronger states’ rights, the advancement of Southern heritage, and the return of Christian morals to our children.’ That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “What kind of Southern heritage?”

  “Oh, says ‘Celtic,’ “ she said, frowning at me. “Listen, my daddy loved the Civil War. That doesn’t mean he was a racist. Just because you support having a flag with history doesn’t mean you don’t like black people. My daddy worked with blacks his whole life.”

  “Abby, it’s okay.”

  “There was one time we were having a dinner party and some asshole from New York was there and talking about how Southerners were racist because we were illiterate. I thought my daddy was going to tear his head off. He said the most racist people he’d ever known lived up north.”

  “Calm down,” I said, prying the pamphlet from her fingers. “Let’s just put this aside. I just wanted to know if your daddy ever talked about joining this group.”

  She shook her head as I moved the folder to a separate file. We studied more and placed a few more files with the Sons of the South.

  “Did he ever go over to the casinos?”

  She shook her head. “Never mentioned them.”

  After a while, I got up and stretched and shuffled back through the files, carefully inserting them back into each of the eight slots in the cabinet. She noticed I’d pulled out one file that contained a few crayon pictures she’d made as a kid and looked away.

  “Your father owned a lot of property. Looks like he had thousands of acres across the Delta and up north. Owned some land in Jackson, Tennessee, too.”

  Abby nodded, really listening, hands wandering over her face with fatigue. “Yeah, he used to take me out to some of those places. We’d hunt a little. He liked to hunt. We also used to break into old cabins in the woods and go find stuff. Sometimes we’d look for arrowheads in creeks.”

  I smiled at her as I flipped back through four files I’d pulled from the rest. Outside the dull patter of rain fell from the gutters. The candles shook light across her face as I stood.

  “You want to get out of here?”

  “More than anything,” she said. “You find anymore about that singer?”

  “I’m sure I’m missing a hell of a lot,” I said, scooping up some letters. “There were tons of case files in there that didn’t make a damned bit of sense to me.”

  “Or me.”

  “I’d need an accountant to decipher most of those financial records. Mainly, I found a shitload about Sons of the South and a thick file of personal letters I’ll need your help going over if you don’t mind… So, you never heard him mention the Sons of the South?”

  She shook her head again and soon walked with me through the dead caverns of the house, holding the candles, and back out into the rain. She locked the door behind us, as if it really mattered, and I smelled the strong scent of candles as the small flames quickly died in the wind and wetness.

  As she followed me back to my truck, her eyes on the broken rocks of the road, I noticed a skinny brown lab wagging its fat tail and placing its two muddy paws onto her chest.

  “Old friend?”

  She nodded.

  I held my truck door open and we all climbed inside.

  Chapter 26

  JON WAS BATHED in sweat and excitement waiting for the skinny guy with bad teeth to call his name and play his song. This was the opportunity that he knew would come since he met Miss
Perfect. This is the way it worked when you were courtin’ a high-class woman. You sang the song. She saw you had talent. And soon you kissed her under a fake moon. Dang, it had taken him long enough to talk her into calling off their search for tonight. They were in Oxford and they could stand for a little fun. Stretch the legs. Live a Little. Love a Little. He knew what to do as soon as they’d looped through the Square for about the fiftieth time and he spotted the big plastic road sign with mismatched letters reading, KAR-E-OKE TONITE!

  She’d said about a thousand times that they needed to get back and watch the house so they could kill that man Travers and some bad little girl. He told her to relax, they could track ’em to Timbuktu tomorrow. He kind of let it hang there between them like that. Kind of like that he wouldn’t mind going to Timbuktu with Miss Perfect, if he knew where it was.

  Now Perfect was workin’ on her fourth daiquiri while she watched this ole goofy cat clock by the door. Swingin’ tail. Shifty bug eyes.

  The little bar was kind of dark and smelled like the half-eaten pizzas that lay on the tables around them. There was a good ole handful of college kids around them, too, kids about his age, that were drunker than a goat.

  One big ole boy had a straw in his pitcher of beer. A couple of girls on stage were belting out some ole song about “Summer Lovin’” and gigglin’ like crazy. They were makin’ big eyes at a couple of skinny boys in high-collar T-shirts and beaded necklaces. The girls were so drunk they were about stumblin’ off stage.

  Jon drank a Dr Pepper. E never drank. And neither would he.

  This place reminded him of the time down on E.P. Boulevard when a bus full of Yankees come down to sing all of E’s Sun songs at the Holiday Inn. Jon didn’t think the police ever did find the one who wore E’s metal shades and fake sideburns. Funny how he disappeared after he sang “That’s All Right Mamma” while eatin’ a big ole cheeseburger, laughin’ ’cause he thought E had gotten fat. Never understandin’ about the replacement E. Not even when Jon choked the life from his worthless body.