Dark End of the Street - v4 (21 page)

My face must’ve shown a lot of disappointment because Raven asked me to take a walk with him. Abby stayed behind and we went out through a back entrance to a little spot outside where old-time porch chairs lay rusting. I stood watching the patch of forest and all the cars bright in the intermittent glow of the moon. His eyes squinted and focused on me again.

“I wasn’t kidding about killing you,” he said, showing me two handguns he wore under his leather coat.

I pulled open my jacket and showed him the edge of my Browning hanging in a big inside pocket. “I watch my ass.”

“You watch out for her, okay?” His breath clouded before him.

I nodded and I could tell even though he was just a kid, he understood what it meant to give your word. I liked that.

“You think Ransom is running the Tennessee election?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“You know, when I’m in trouble or need some information I always find my opponent’s enemies. You know all that Art of War shit.”

“Who are Ransom’s enemies?”

“No one alive. But Nix, that’d be ole Jude Russell.”

“You know how to get to him?”

“Nope, but I can tell you he’s got a farm just north of Clarksdale. If he’s not out campaigning to be governor, he’d be there. If there was some shit about Nix and the ole Dixie Mafia, he’d either know it or be glad to hear about it. Besides, I hear he’s a just a good ole boy from Memphis. Likes to hunt and fish. Check it out.”

I told him I would. The moon cleared from a big black patch of sky. Water hung off pine branches like ice. The weight of all the water falling seemed more than the narrow trees could bear.

FROM THE ANTIQUE metal bed in Maggie’s house where I spent last night, I smelled smoked bacon frying and coffee perking. I’d been awake for a while, still feeling that uncomfortable vibe of being in a house that wasn’t my own. I stared up at the bead board ceiling, sagging in a few spots as if pregnant from rainwater, and stretched and rubbed my feet together. Pale white light blanched through the lead glass window and splayed onto warped pine floors.

I wanted to go back to sleep but I finally climbed into my clothes and pulled on my boots, tucking the Browning into my jean jacket. I hadn’t shaved for a few days and I hoped I could take a shower.

“Mornin’,” Maggie said to me at the stove, slipping the bacon off an iron skillet and onto a blue Fiesta plate. “Abby’s still sleepin’.”

She had on jeans and mud-crusted boots with a red checked shirt with snap buttons. Her black hair was wet and slicked back and her eyes were even greener than I remembered. Almost jade. I heard cartoons in the other room and a little boy laugh.

She nodded to a blue-speckled coffee pot on the stove and I poured a cup. Outside, a weak fall sun shone onto a small backyard cut into the woods. A jungle gym. A wooden swingset.

“Abby said y’all had some luck.”

I nodded. She was a beautiful woman. One that didn’t need makeup or perfume or anything else other than what she’d been born with. You could tell she liked an honest sweat. Her hands were chapped and her skin flushed from work.

We talked for a bit about the Sons of the South and Elias Nix and an idea I had for driving over to Clarksdale.

I said, “Maybe I could track down Jude Russell in Memphis.”

“What makes you think he’ll talk to you?”

“I’m gonna try and get one of his wranglers to give him a message at his lodge.”

“You ride?” she asked, taking a seat and pulling off her work boots.

“Not in a long time. My folks used to have a farm.”

“You had your own horse?”

I nodded. “My dad ended up selling him for a case of beer.”

“Let me know if you ever want to get back riding. I have trails that go on for acres. Good land with creeks and a nice bit of woods.”

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.

“J
ust 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.”

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 ten 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.

T
he 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.