Dark End of the Street - v4 (41 page)

“What?”

“Evil and lives,” he said, laughing. “It never really ends. We’re all just on a train bound for Tulsa.”

All of sudden, he rushed me and I dropped to my knees, getting a firm grip on the walk. Size wasn’t a factor up here.

As I hung on, he kept going.

He didn’t want to kill me at all.

I watched him sail over the edge of the bridge, his arms outstretched like he was in flight with his legs pinned together, until he disappeared hundreds of feet below into the Mississippi.

IT WAS THANKSGIVING, one of those worn, gray days when all you wanted to do was lie inside and eat and watch parades and footballs games. Maybe nap a little bit. Abby hated that feeling. She hated being sluggish and full and lazy, so she begged Maggie to take her down Old Taylor Road to the stables and get their horses out for a run. Abby brought Hank along for the ride in Maggie’s beat-up Rabbit and soon they had the horses saddled up and began beating a fine path beside a nameless creek, dodging tree branches and jostling along until the horses’ breath made foggy patterns in the dark mist.

The air smelled of barbecue fires and moldy leaves as she kicked her horse in the side for a good run in an open clearing of high, yellow grass that had once been a cotton field. Abby’s horse jumped ahead of Maggie and she laughed and yelled as they got closer and closer back to another clearing up on a hill dotted with rolls of hay leading to an old house and then back to the stables.

She hadn’t told Maggie yet about buying the land, the stables, and the horses. She wasn’t sure how her cousin would take it. She’d think it was charity, giving her a job and a business to run. But since Abby had sold her parents’ house and planned on traveling awhile, she got a little scared. She needed a place of her own.

They both slowed to a gallop, Abby tucking her beaten suede boots tight into the stirrups and ducking beneath the hardened fingers of a bare oak and the long, dying strands of a willow.

Hank ran ahead of them and quickly disappeared after sniffing out a rabbit. The path widened for a moment, by a pool of stagnant green water littered with cypress stumps and a few dead birds. Abby reigned in her horse and jostled down the other way, passing the ruins of an old house some said belonged to a Confederate captain. Her father always used to say that the Yankees burned down the house and killed the man’s family. Said when the man walked back from Georgia, he found everything he’d built destroyed.

There was only a stone floor and a chimney, a base really, but Abby had always thought it would be fine place to build a house someday.

“What do you think?” she asked Maggie.

“Fine,” she said. “I don’t know if the Johnsons would ever sell it, though.”

“They would,” Abby said, looking down the last bit of path into the clearing and the stables. Her last day in Oxford before driving up to Memphis for her flight. “I mean, they did.”

Maggie shook her head and steadied her horse’s feet. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“Will you take care of it?” she asked, taking off her straw cowboy hat and fingering away her loose hair.

Maggie nodded that she would. And that was it. No fight. No more talking. Not even an explanation of how it would all work out. They’d been friends since Abby was born and it wasn’t necessary.

“You heard from Nick?” Maggie asked. Her sharp green eyes looking exotic and bright against her dark skin and hair.

“Only took you two hours to ask today.”

“Well?”

“He’s back in New Orleans. Called me yesterday.”

“And?”

“Said he was going to finish some book he’d been working on about a blues singer. Said it helped having something to keep his mind off things.”

“He can keep his mind on me.”

Abby laughed.

“He’ll come around,” Maggie said, smiling and putting a hand on her very round denimed hip. “They always do.”

Abby trotted her horse into the stable. The wood there was ancient, been there since the turn of the century, and had the same coloring of driftwood. She unbuckled the saddle and, despite the cold, removed a sweaty blanket from the animal’s back.

After Abby finished putting away the saddle and rig, Maggie tossed her a pitchfork.

“Nothin’s changed,” Maggie said.

Abby smiled and said, “Nothin’.”

She worked for a while cleaning out the stable, until the sky grew darker and they both knew that the families back at Maggie’s house would wonder where they went. Nothing had changed. Maggie was sixteen and Abby was ten.

“You gonna be all right out there, wherever you’re going?”

“Firenze.”

“Which is a fancy word for . . . ?”

“Italy.”

“And you’ll be fine?”

From the base of the road and rumbling up a dirt path, Abby watched a massive Chevy Silverado pickup, black with tons of extra chrome, pass the sagging cattle gate and drive to the barns where they worked. The windows had been tinted and Maggie squinted through the darkening light to watch for the driver.

“Did I say I was going alone?”

Maggie narrowed her eyes.

The door opened and Raven, all lanky and James Dean in his deep indigo jeans and pressed snap-button shirt, got out. He’d slicked back his long black hair and even shaved. The leather on his pointed black boots shined in the glow of his headlights.

“Too late for supper?” he asked.

Maggie grinned, it was one of those true Maggie expressions where you could tell she was overflowing with skepticism but kept her teeth clamped tight. Still, she managed to keep smiling and speak. “Yeah. Plenty left. Follow us to the house and pull up a chair.”

Abby smiled, and for a moment looked back through the narrow back gate of the stables where, framed in purple gray light, sat the old house. Come spring that strange relic would be a fine place to begin.

H
e was a strange, lone figure walking along Elvis Presley Boulevard that Thanksgiving Day. A skinny black man in a white jumpsuit studded in rhinestones. Black wig with sideburns, oversized metal glasses. He followed the curving rock wall that hugged the holy estate scrawled with words and prayers for the Man. They always changed. Prayers of thanks during the winter became prayers of sorrow in the fall. He’d seen the words in Japanese and German. Nasty letters from women still hot for Him after all these years. Tourists who often wrote the date they’d arrived as if carving their immortality on a religious relic.

But for the truly devout, it was a place of contact. Leaving personal messages that only a few would understand. The last time Black Elvis had come through Memphis as he dipped down to Florida for more tribute acts, he’d received word on the forty-third stone from the gates that one of the True Believers needed some guidance. A young man from Mississippi who held more faith than any man he’d ever met.

When they broke company a while back, the young man said he’d soon leave word in the same place if everything worked out as planned. Good wishes. Maybe a prayer. Or, again, the need for help.

As a couple Hondas raced by Black Elvis on the holy boulevard, the shops sitting dark across the street, he stood high in his patent-leather boots and checked the rock.

No wish. No prayers.

Just a simple message dated three days ago.

JESSE GARON LIVES!

The words were signed by the loopy signature of a man named Lucky Jackson who listed his home as Las Vegas, Nevada.

Black Elvis smiled.

He’d look him up when he got there.

ALL THAT REMAINED of JoJo’s Blues Bar was a blackened shell of stucco and brick with charred beams running overhead where a mess of crows had decided to roost. I scanned the ruins and noticed the skeletal remnants of chairs and tables, even crushed red, blue, and green ceramic Christmas lights in the soot and rubble. The old jukebox that once shined in chrome and neon sat in a deflated lump next to a black brick wall where the Sheetrock had been eaten to the bone by flames. Warped and fried old Chess and V.J. 45s littered out of the side of the machine like discarded pie plates.

As awful as things turned out, I was still glad to be back in New Orleans and out of Memphis.

My plan with U had worked, for the most part, the way we’d hoped. Neither of us had fired a shot and Abby had used one of the Sons of the South’s guns to kill Ransom before throwing it into the river. U was a little worried about the cops finding his truck and that nice little dent he left in the bridge, so he’d concocted a story about chasing a bounty on one of Ransom’s henchmen. That was about it.

The shitstorm landed on the Sons of the South. They’d really left themselves swinging in the wind, leaving bullet casings and cartridges, tire tracks and rappelling equipment near the bridge. They even abandoned one of their damned Hummers and pretended like some black kids had broken in to their compound and taken it for a spin. Several were arrested. Several were dead. Besides Ransom, their names didn’t mean anything to me.

Elias Nix was mentioned in the Commercial-Appeal for his loose association. But by the time the arrests took place, Nix was old news. When Jude Russell bowed out just days before the election due to an “undisclosed medical problem,” a former U.S. senator and state favorite on the lecture circuit decided to take one last ride for the party.

His win over Nix was so big that the ten o’clock newscasts declared him the winner barring a massive natural disaster.

There was no satisfaction in my role. I wished none of it had ever happened. I wished I could close my eyes and open them again, watching the lights brightening inside the bar and hearing JoJo’s keys jangling on his hip as he opened up.

I heard a shuffle behind me.

The crows flew off in a flock, their black feathers almost blue in the afternoon sun, as JoJo peeked through an opening where those big Creole doors had stood. He reached down and found the handle and lock in a pile of ash, his keys in his other hand.

“You want to help me lock up?”

“JoJo,” I said, resting on my haunches and finding a half-eaten framed picture of a blues man named Earl Snooks. We called him Henry. I showed it to JoJo as he peered over my shoulder. “Jesus.”

“Jesus? He can’t help us now,” he said. Across the street, I noticed his Cadillac chugging exhaust into the cold air.

“You goin’ somewhere?” I asked.

“Headed back up Highway 61 for a while,” he said. “Not hidin’. Just searchin’.”

I squinted into his deep black face framed by the bright white light. “You mind if I stop by sometime?”

“Listen, Nick,” he said, his hands shaking on the meat of my back arm. I never knew that man’s hands to shake ever. He was the definition of steady. “Why didn’t you tell me about what you was doin’ for Loretta?”

“Didn’t think it was necessary at the time.”

He took the photograph of Snooks from my hand and studied his old friend’s face. “You want it?” he asked, handing it back.

“No, I remember him.”

I walked with him back to the Cadillac and talked to him over the long car door where he’d rested his elbows.

“What you gonna do?” he asked.

“Not far behind you,” I said, smiling. “A woman I met in Oxford invited me up to take riding lessons.”

“That what they callin’ it now?” he said and laughed. It was a JoJo laugh, deep and weathered and came from deep within him. It made me pretty damned happy as I watched the red twin taillights of the Cadillac disappear.

I stood on Conti after he left, staring back at the shell of the bar, and wondered how he’d ever packed so many people into such a tiny space. I thought about the beer and the smoke and the nights I’d played harp, sweating my ass off in the New Orleans heat, as Loretta had belted out her nasty blues. I could almost hear the cheers and yells as she’d step into the crowd, those little red and blue lights on her face in the darkened bar, making fun of JoJo or me. A sweet cold Dixie by my side, my friends floating nearby, feeling like we were immortal, our party would never end.

I knew I wouldn’t come back here for a while. I wanted to believe the bar was still there, that the next time I was ever in the Quarter I could stroll down Conti Street and hear the music from blocks away.

I flipped the photograph around in my hands and tucked it back into a pile of soot and ash. The night air was cold and punk music began to blare across the street as if the town bully was announcing he’d won the neighborhood fight.

I listened for a while and smoked a couple cigarettes. I was almost done when I saw JoJo round the curve, this time with Loretta in his front seat. She waved. Her face glowed with a mammoth smile.

“You want to get somethin’ to eat with us in Vicksburg?” she yelled to me.

I nodded, stubbed out the cigarette, and got off my ass.

I jumped into Gray Ghost, much uglier than she’d been a few weeks ago, but still running. I thought about that for a long while as we turned onto the old blues highway and headed north.

TO MEMPHIS AND BACK, the following provided needed help, inspiration, or some top-notch grub: my family, Michael Baker, B. F. Vandervoort, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Jim Kennedy, Harry Smith, Debbi Eisenstadt, Bogie “Raven” Miller, Joe Durkin, Darryl Wimberley, Burnis Morris, Elvis (my canine companion), the gang at Square Books, and the staff at Ajax Diner, Taylor Grocery, and the Bottletree.

Much thanks to Richard and Carolyn for their continued direction, support, and for being great friends to Loretta. I’m looking forward to many more adventures.

Without a doubt, Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music transported me to Memphis 1968, and Edward Humes’s
Mississippi Mud
took me into the core of the Dixie Mafia. Shangri-La Records’s
Lowlife Guide to Memphis
and Tad Pierson provided invaluable information and true “grit” away from Beale.

Special thanks to Robert Gordon, whose article, “Way Out on a Voyage,” gave voice to Clyde James and Paul Bergin, who heard of an evil woman that I had to meet.