Dark End of the Street

by Ace Atkins

  She smiled. Perfect teeth. Her hands moved around the edge of her coffee cup and I felt my face redden.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Nope.”

  “I appreciate you helpin’ Abby,” she said.

  “No problem. It all goes back to the man I’m looking for.”

  “Is he a friend?”

  “In a way.”

  “Oh,” she said, hopping up and grabbing the plates. “Almost forgot. You want salt and pepper?”

  “You have hot sauce?”

  She did and we ate for a while. Her son came in and took a seat on his mother’s knee. She broke off a piece of bacon and he ate it looking at me the whole time, as if I were a novelty. She bounced him on her leg and he smiled.

  After a few minutes, he became bored with us, jumped up, and made airplane sounds while he ran into the TV room.

  “Divorced?”

  “Yeah, Dylan’s dad ran off with one of his students. He taught creative writing.”

  “Here?”

  “Yep. She was only fucking nineteen. That’s why when I saw you with Abby I kind of freaked out.”

  “I only date students if they’re in junior high. Candy works, but I prefer furry animals.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Hand puppets?”

  She shook her head. “Abby says you’re plannin’ on getting married.”

  “Whoa. Man, why is it that every time a woman hears a man might get married they hassle him till he does? I said I was thinking about it.”

  “Known her long?”

  “About ten years.”

  “Love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  I looked back outside at the jungle gym and the homemade swingset and Tonka Trucks rusting in a sand pile. The harsh morning light made me squint as I sipped on the coffee.

  “Distance,” I began.

  “It’s just I was interested. I mean in…”

  I smiled at her.

  “And she knows I hate change,” I said, unaware why I was telling all this stuff to a woman I’d just met. But it felt good to get out and talk about things that had been festering inside me for the last couple months. It looped in my damned mind like a record with one groove. No answers. No epiphanies. I wished I was one of those people who heard a fucking song or watched the weather change or flipped to a portion of a book and made their decision. Yep, that’s it. God put that passage right down for me. But I wasn’t and I never would be and because of that I lived a hell of a lot of time in limbo.

  “You don’t like getting older, do you?”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “I just like keeping my world the way it is.”

  She nodded and poured the rest of the coffee. It was still hot and tasted the same way as the cup before.

  “If you don’t move on with your life you may just keep repeating the bad stuff, too.”

  I drank the coffee.

  We were quiet and looking at each other until Abby bounded into the room. She was showered and red-cheeked and smiling and said, “Ready?”

  I smiled across at Maggie.

  And she smiled back before looking outside at the wide expanse of cotton fields. Familiar and unknown.

  I stood and said: “I know a great barbecue restaurant in Clarksdale.”

  “You mind keeping Hank?” Abby asked.

  “Just get your gun ready and be quiet, for God’s sake,” Perfect said, as she checked her makeup in the rearview and blotted her Torch Lily lipstick with a gas receipt. They’d been squatting on Abby’s cousin’s house for the last hour and Jon had taken more of his little white pills. He wanted to break into the house right this second and kill them all.

  Jon unfolded his arms from his chest, his left leg jumping up and down, while he chewed a big wad of gum. “I’m gettin’ sick of waitin’,” he said, still pissed that she’d slapped his hand under the covers this morning. “Ransom didn’t hire me for no baby-sittin’ job.”

  “It’s his show,” she said. “We’ll just wait.”

  “Maybe I want to make it mine.”

  She had a damn awful hangover only made that much worse by this rockabilly hit man who wanted to get into her pants. Again. All right, so she got drunk. So, she asked him to perform a few duties. So what? She didn’t owe him shit.

  After a few moments, Jon asked, “Why didn’t you tell me last night about this cousin she had?”

  “I didn’t, that’s all.”

  “No. You was too busy playin’ with my mind,” Jon said, and rammed his fist into the dash of the car, grunting loud.

  “Grow up, Jon,” Perfect said. She felt a little edgy but at least clean. She’d taken a thirty-minute shower and shaved her legs, changed into a pink low-neck cashmere sweater, Earl Jeans, and Jimmy Choo stiletto boots. Huge tortoiseshell glasses with lenses so dark you couldn’t see her eyes.

  Something moved at the front of the old white house. “See him?” she asked, pointing out Travers walking down a crusty dirt road and getting into his truck.

  Jon licked his lips as the truck pulled out and disappeared. “We’ll catch you down the road,” he said to himself.

  Perfect cranked the car and followed, hanging back.

  Jon spun out the cylinder from his gun, counted the bullets, and popped it flush with the barrel. His leg kept hopping up and down off the floorboard as they curved off a county road to Highway 6 heading west to Batesville. Seemed like they were running on the bottom edge of that triangle that stretched southeast from Memphis to Oxford and west back over to Tunica and Highway 61. Or maybe they were just headed back north to Memphis when they hit I-55.

  “I want you to call up Ransom and tell him it’s time,” Jon said as he inspected his swollen knuckles and sucked the blood off the scrape. He must’ve hit the metal car logo when he punched the dashboard.

  She laughed at him.

  His eyes were dark and ringed with circles and he stared straight ahead, rocking. She saw another gun, looked like a little Beretta, sticking out of his jean pocket. He gritted his teeth when he noticed her staring.

  She could always read people. Get that feeling inside her head about them. But with Jon she didn’t feel anything. It was almost as if his head were blank, only wrapped up in the emotion he felt at the minute. He turned to her with hollow eyes and she got a chill.

  Gave her goose bumps all down her neck. Her mouth dried out for a second.

  She couldn’t breathe but then the old instincts came back. She reached down and grabbed him between the legs.

  “Are you really trouble, Mr. Jon?” Perfect asked, gripping him tight, making promises with her hand that the rest of her body would never keep.

  Jon curled his lip and put on a pair of gold metal glasses he’d bought when they met at Graceland. “If you’re looking for trouble, you came to the right place.”

  Chapter 31

  BACK IN THE DAY, Clarksdale was the capital of the Delta’s cotton kingdom and the central hub for Mississippi’s blacks leaving the South during the Great Migration. They could head out of the fields up to Memphis or purchase that big ticket to Chicago where they could reinvent themselves, as Muddy Waters did in ‘forty-three. The town pulsed with energy back then. Down on Issaquena Avenue, you could sell your cotton, rent a woman, buy a bottle of whiskey, or just a sack of cornmeal for your family. Now most of the black downtown was covered in spray-painted plywood and was wavering after a recent crack epidemic. Most folks who could get out went on to Memphis to find higher paying jobs, away from working crops or as maids in the half-dozen motels. But recently, the city had been trying damned hard to turn Clarksdale into a tourist site.

  The old underbelly of society, blues, was now the main focus of a town once overrun by white landowners. There was a damned good museum housed in the old train station and a few local businessmen had opened a juke with a Hollywood actor who was born around here.

  But the old circuit I remembered from t
en years ago was gone. Sunflower Avenue was pretty much vacant and old Wade Walton, who used to cut my hair – telling stories of doing the same for Muddy Waters, Ike Turner, and Sonny Boy Williamson – was dead. His store just an empty cinder block shell down by the museum that sat in the shadow of hulking grain elevators.

  It was Monday afternoon and gray and cold. Fat black clouds floated by as if they were in a dirty river. No thunder or rain. Tornado weather. An electric hum in the air and complete silence around the downtown.

  I had a lot of friends at the museum. Most of them pretty up-to-date on politics; one was a former raging hippie who knew exactly where to find Jude Russell’s place. It was on Highway 61 running down toward a little town called Alligator.

  Abby waited in the car while I used a pay phone to call Loretta. I knew she’d been appreciating the updates and I was glad to give them. It made me feel a connection to home that I always needed while I was on the road. It was almost as if I wanted someone to remind me who I was.

  The phone rang on a rough connection to New Orleans, wind blowing paper cups and clinking aluminum cans across the street. The phone kept on ringing and I looked at my watch, a warning siren howling in the distance.

  Inside my truck, Abby was reading liner notes on some CDs and playing with her hair. Two more rings. Ever since we’d met I had this overwhelming feeling that I needed to protect her. It felt like she was family. The way I imagined a big brother would look out for a younger sister. Like if some boy went too far with her, you’d feel the need to put his head through a wall. It was like that. I wanted to put someone’s head through a wall for Abby. Being with her in Oxford at her house and meeting Maggie only made that more intense.

  I waved. She waved back.

  The phone kept on ringing. Nothing.

  The hunting lodge wasn’t hard to find at all. It was just hard getting into. My buddy at the Delta Blues Museum had told me I’d have no problem finding it because of the wall around it. I asked him to describe it and he simply said, “You’ll see.”

  And I did. A log fence surrounded the property, probably about fifteen feet tall, with pointed edges on the top like the old cavalry forts, or the gate in Jurassic Park. There was a dirt road that followed the wall for about a half mile until a break where I saw the outline for a retractable door. An intercom with a keypad looped from a metal post and I drove next to it.

  I thought about pushing some buttons and asking for a Whopper with fries but that kind of shit usually made people mad while I laughed at my own joke. Maybe I could do a different voice.

  “Do you think they’d like me to do an impression?”

  “Who?”

  “Usual stuff. Sean Connery. Angry Chinese man. Scooby Doo’s country cousin.”

  “Scooby Doo’s country cousin.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  I punched a few buttons and for a while nothing happened. Just a few fat drops of rain intermittently began to pound the hood. Finally, the intercom crackled to life.

  “I’d like a Whopper with fries. No, make that onion rings.”

  “This is private property,” the voice said. Sounded like a woman.

  “I’m here to see Jude,” I said, you know, using the whole first name thing. They’d think we played golf together, drank Heineken, and slapped each other’s butts in the shower.

  “Sir, security has been called.”

  “Everything’s under control. Situation normal. We had a slight weapons malfunction.”

  Abby shook her head and kind of laughed, burying her face into her hands. I was laughing into the rain, too. Laughing at how damned stupid I suddenly realized I was for thinking I could knock on the front door of a house owned by a man running for governor. I’d put the Ghost in reverse, my arm on the back of the passenger seat, when three men holding shotguns blocked our path. They wore yellow rain slickers, hoods obscuring their faces.

  My heart beat a little faster.

  A man knocked the shit out of my window, so hard I remembered how much it cost to repair it. I rolled it down and looked at him, water twisting off his wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He had a gray goatee and hard blue eyes. A plug of tobacco in his mouth.

  “No onion rings?”

  He just looked at me.

  “Not a Star Wars fan?”

  “What?” he asked, just plain out aggravated we were wasting his time.

  “You know Obi-Wan? Luke? Chewie? The Force?”

  “Out. Get out of the car.”

  “Sorry, I was just curious. Saw the road.”

  “You lookin’ for Mr. Russell?”

  I glanced over at Abby and she was shaking and staring at her shoes. Her back was hunched as if it would hide her from the men.

  Pissed me off. Pissed me off these motherfuckers would do that to her.

  “Hey man, fuck you. I came here to see Jude Russell and if he’s here, great. I got something to tell him. If not, kiss my ass.”

  I heard the clack of a shotgun and he reached for my door handle.

  Without thinking, really acting more stupid than brave, I pulled out the Browning and leveled it at his head. Other shotguns clacked around me as he dropped the gun and took a few steps back. His face white and his mouth open.

  “I don’t want any trouble,” I said. “I have a message for Mr. Russell about Elias Nix. It’s something I’m sure he’d want to know.”

  The man nodded slowly.

  “Put down the gun, sir,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  I did and the men jumped to each door pulling me and Abby out into the rain. The thunder cracked way over a cotton field as they opened the mammoth doors, yawning like a whale, and pushed us inside.

  Chapter 32

  INSTEAD OF CUSSING out the men who stuck guns in our faces a few minutes ago or demanding to see Russell, I asked for a cup of coffee. I smiled pleasantly at these hard-core rednecks in flannel shirts and duck hunting boots and told them just three sugars would be fine. The man with the gray goatee, who had first pointed the shotgun into the car, then nodded to an old black woman. She left and reappeared a few minutes later with a steaming mug stamped with a Labrador’s face.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Got a little wet during the whole Bataan Death March up to the lodge. Nice place though. Very Ralph Lauren meets Ted Nugent.”

  I glanced around at the deer and boar heads on the wall. A full-sized black bear, various large-mouth basses on plaques, and even a bald eagle. Man had actually stuffed a bald eagle.

  I sipped my coffee – not bad – at a hardwood table that sat about twenty. A black chandelier with thick unlit candles hung overhead, reminding me of paintings I’d seen of the Spanish Inquisition.

  The man with the gray beard didn’t say much to me but had been nice to Abby. He’d immediately offered her a sweatshirt and a towel when we walked inside. She took the towel and was patting her hair dry when a momentary flash of lightning knocked off the lights for a second.

  The man took a seat by me and finally introduced himself. Easy to remember. Royal Stewart. I shook his hand and sipped the hot coffee while the other men loaded up their guns among dozens in racks by the front door.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you; we were all out hunting when we got a call,” Stewart said. Had a pleasant deep hum to his voice with a dose of Memphis in it. “Kind of my job to look out for the place and Jude. So, no misunderstanding. All right? Just finish that coffee and head on.”

  “Didn’t come here for the coffee. But it is good. Do I detect a little nutmeg?”

  “What is it?” Stewart asked, the pleasant hum with a mean quiver in it. “You want Mr. Russell to pay out for a little gossip? He doesn’t do things like that.”

  I put down the coffee. “Tell him it’s about Sons of the South.”

  Stewart laughed. He combed through his wet gray hair with his fingers and kept laughing. “That’s it? You want to tell us that Elias Nix is in with those nutcases? Don’t you read the paper? Hell, he brags about
it.”

  “Listen, let’s quit fucking around. All right? See that young lady over there? Her parents were murdered a few weeks ago. I found a hell of a lot of personal letters at her house that shows her dad was working for Sons of the South when he died, at Nix’s instruction. If I were a cop and I learned about that, I’d want to talk to him.”

  Stewart scratched his goatee. “Let me see the letters.”

  “Let me see Russell.”

  “Shit. He’s running for governor in an election that’s two weeks away. He’s at a rally in Memphis right now with another scheduled for later tonight. He has television appearances and speeches. Don’t you read the paper? Besides, I’m sure whatever unfortunate thing happened to this girl’s parents is being appropriately looked into. Who are you anyway?”

  Abby spoke up: “Friend of the family.”

  I smiled. “It will be worth his time. Besides, wouldn’t he want to know before reading it in the paper?”

  “What?”

  “What’s in the letters. A whole box of them, from Nix himself.”

  Stewart stood and left the room for several minutes. When he returned his face was reddened and he seemed a little more jumpy. He chewed at his cheek and twisted in his seat before finally leaning across the table. “If this is some kind of bullshit, I’ll have you arrested for trespassing.”

  Two-and-a-half hours later, Jude Russell walked through the hunting lodge’s oak door and shook the rain from his slicker and removed a wide-brimmed hat. He was younger than I expected, or just seemed younger. Slender boyish face with a lot of lines through his deeply tanned skin. He had thin brownish-gray hair and amber-brown eyes. He wore frayed jeans and beaten work boots that he slipped out of at the front door. He smiled to everyone seated in the kitchen as he padded in and opened a mammoth stainless-steel refrigerator searching for a beer. He found one and came back to the head of the table where he propped up his bare feet, smiled again at everyone seated around him, and said, “Now what the hell is all this about?”