Dark End Of The Street

Chapter 12

Until a few years ago, Tunica was known as the poorest city in the poorest county in the poorest state in the whole nation. Jesse Jackson once called it the Ethiopia of America. Now it’s the third largest gambling mecca behind Las Vegas and Atlantic City. A damned county whose only hope for the future was catfish and cotton now has marquees with tiny white lights advertising loose slots and off-Broadway shows.

The late evening sky seemed lower and harder here than in Memphis, I noticed as I drove south along Highway 61 listening to the North Mississippi All-Stars jamming their version of K. C. Jones, a mighty man dead and gone. The horizon burned a bright orange, yellow, and blue leaving the tin-roofed farmhouses bleeding with rust and kudzu-covered trees, growing brown, in broken shadows.

Farm supply stores soon gave way to pawnshops and liquor stores blazing with neon. Old diners turned to outlet malls. It was as if George Bailey’s nightmare of Pottersville had descended on the Mississippi Delta.

I could feel the needle pricks of a fall chill through the open windows of my Bronco and smell the burning rows of dead leaves outside battered trailers and prefab homes. Agriplanes sat parked outside small hangars while rusted Oldsmobiles and Buicks stood restless outside tired motels.

The horizon soon turned an inky purple and then black. I saw lights flash far from the highway in an image that reminded me of that huge UFO from Close Encounters. About a mile from the highway, purple, green, blue, and pink neon blinked and shined in the darkness.

I turned the truck onto a wide, circular drive, lit with staggered wrought-iron street lamps and drove toward a four-story monstrosity that ran the length of three football fields. Intermittent white lights wrapped this faux antebellum building like a Christmas package. A fountain the size of a decent bass pond stood before the casino with about a dozen water jets zapping ten feet into the air.

Magnolia Grand. When I went back to change my clothes at the Peabody, a woman at the desk told me the place boasted about six hundred rooms, eight restaurants, a championship golf course, a skeet shooting center, and a casino with a thousand slots. She said it was “Vegas quality.” As if Vegas was a measurement of quality.

The Grand looked like a carnival’s midway crossed with a convention center. About the silliest thing about these places was that Mississippi law said all casinos had to be on water. So in Tunica, developers dug a channel from the Mississippi River for each casino to have its own private moat.

Man, I hated these places. They were the opposite of everything I loved about the Delta. Dozens of casinos had been built on the same rich, brown earth worked by sharecroppers for generations. Hell, Robert Johnson grew up about ten miles away. But not much had changed. The people of this county were now as shackled to the casinos as generations before them had been to the land.

I continued driving past a couple of hotels, midget versions of the main casino, and into a large parking lot filled with pickup trucks and weathered sedans. The crickets and cicadas whooped it up in the endless cotton fields while a maroon harvest moon hung low over a clearing of mimosa trees.

Amid some lite crappy jazz that played from hidden speakers, I walked over the drawbridge and into the casino. I strolled over green carpet embroidered with gold magnolia leaves as the sound of falling coins and laughing women echoed around me.

Revolving gold signs read CARIBBEAN-STYLE POKER and SUPER BLACK-JACK.

I found a bar near the blackjack tables, sat down, and ordered a Dixie and a hamburger. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, except for the bit of greens, and my stomach had been talking to me since the Tennessee border. Wasn’t a bad place to sit and get familiar with the surroundings. Maybe rest a little before I tried to find who ran security. Ask him a few questions about why the casino would be looking for a homeless man who didn’t have a penny to gamble.

I watched an old black man in a flannel shirt, a dangling cigarette in hand, punch a plastic cup of quarters into a slot as if a week’s worth of groceries was a spin away. His ancient work boots were coated in blackened Mississippi mud.

The bartender was a wiry white woman with long cherry-red nails and tight permed hair. She was probably in her early forties but had the look like she’d been rode hard and put up wet plenty of nights.

I thanked her for the Dixie and listened to the casino action – a steady beat of applause and crestfallen groans from the roulette wheel, a pinging Casio keyboard-type music beeping from the slots. As I prayed for the hamburger and studied a new gash on the toe of my boot, a woman with an unnaturally large chest and a helmet of blond hair sat beside me.

She gave me one of those smiles when the tongue gets caught between the upper and lower teeth. Her body wasn’t bad, but her breasts were so obviously aftermarket that they almost made me laugh.

The woman tosseled her hair and sighed. Actually tosseled it. Amazing. Maybe she’d do the trick with the tongue over the teeth again.

“What’s your name, partner?” she asked, making her eyes go soft.

“Tom Mix.”

“Let me guess: You’re not here to play poker.”

I kept smiling and watched the woman, who had a hard time keeping a steady gaze as she rocked back and forth. Her breath smelled like a whiskey barrel.

“What do you play?” she asked.

“Mousetrap,” I said. “I’m a damned fine Mousetrap player. But I still have a hard time with that spindly bucket thing, always falls down when you least expect it.”

She rolled her eyes and cackled without a clue.

“So, Tom,” she said, running her hands over the worn knees of my 501s. “You need a date for the night?”

She had on some kind of lacey white bra, more than the Fruit of the Loom type. This contraption had a thick front buckle and little blue flowers on the cups. I coughed and looked away.

“Actually here on business,” I said.

“What room are you in?” she asked.

“Don’t have a room.”

“You have a car?” she said.

Ahh. Ain’t ego a funny thing? I thought I was so damned handsome in my black T-shirt and faded jeans that she couldn’t resist. I wondered how much she cost.

“Nope,” I said. “Just a moped. And it doesn’t even have a seat.”

She snorted out her nose. No laugh. She turned her head away and flipped back her hair. I looked at the worn bartender, shrugged, and then back at the blonde. She was smooth and pressed but in another five years she’d be just as hard, battered, and tired.

I pulled her hand from my knee as the bartender plunked down a soggy-looking hamburger and cold fries. The meat looked almost like cardboard. I glanced over at the blonde and gave her a wink.

“Want some fries?” I asked, shoving a couple into my mouth.

“Go fuck yourself,” she said and almost fell as she got off the barstool.

“Be cheaper,” I muttered as I hit the sweet spot on the Heinz bottle.

About ten seconds later, the bartender wandered over and settled her elbows down on the table. She watched the woman walk away with a gentle smile on her lips. The pinging from the slots grew louder in my ears.

“Who runs security around here?” I asked.

“You lookin’ for work?” she asked in a hard, north Mississippi accent.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Black fella named Humes,” she said. “Office is in the lobby.”

A bby’s ride lasted for about an hour, bumping and jostling her all over the oil-soaked rubber mats in the trunk. When the car finally stopped, a man stuck a pillowcase over her head and stabbed a gun into her ribs. She saw patterns of lights and shapes through the cloth as the man moved his calloused hands over her butt and breasts before throwing her onto some cold concrete and slamming the door.

She tore the pillowcase from her head and began beating on the door and screaming for help. She must’ve beaten on that door for a half hour before she dropped to the ground, wiped her face with her hands, and looked around.

The room was about ten by ten and filled with stacks of dusty blackjack tables and slot machines. A craps table and old roulette wheel sat by the door. Concrete walls and ceiling. She couldn’t hear a sound outside and it was hot as hell. No air-conditioning. Almost like a sauna, she thought, as she moved the hair from her face and tucked it behind her ears.

She felt the scrapes on her elbows and spit out a trail of blood from her broken lip onto the dirty floor. She thought about Ellie and that long stretch of woods behind the gas station while she hugged her knees to her chest and began to cry. She could imagine the men grabbing Ellie and shoving her into the molded leaves. They raped her. She could see them straddling Ellie and choking her. Abby tried to block the thoughts from her mind, knowing it was her fault whatever happened to Ellie.

She heard footsteps approach and closed her eyes as tight as she could. She was away from this place. She was back in Oxford and her parents were alive and Maggie was there.

A bolt slid back with a hard clack.

Two men entered the room. One was a thin white guy about her age with slick black hair and the other was an old black man with gray hair. Both carried guns and wore blue blazers and red ties. Radios squawked on their hips.

“C’mon, let’s go,” the black man said. He had freckles and high cheekbones like an Indian. Mean eyes.

“Leave me alone,” Abby yelled. “Where the hell am I? Who the hell are you?”

“C’mon. He wants to see you.”

The black man grabbed the front of her shirt and yanked her to her feet. He twisted her arm behind her back and pushed her into a concrete tunnel. She gritted her teeth in pain – her shoulder screaming loose in the socket – as they marched her through the narrow passageway. The tunnel took several twists through a dozen curves with fluorescent lights beaming overhead.

At the end of another tunnel, the boy opened a side door into an office with dark wood paneling and dimly lit with Tiffany lamps. The shades looked as if they were cut from shards of colorful hard candy.

The black man shoved her onto a brown leather coach.

When she straightened her head, she gazed right into a shadow sitting in a leather chair. He was hard to see. His features were obscured by bright light and smoke from a cigar. She could see the orange glow of the butt and hear his rapid, uneven breath.

“Hello, Miss MacDonald.” His voice country and weathered. Someone who drank too much bourbon and had smoked since he was ten.

She tasted the blood in her mouth and heard the dull sound of locks pinging in the concrete room where they’d kept her. She tried to squint through the hot light.

“You got to be tired,” he said.

Abby could hear her own breath now. Way too fast.

“Haven’t stopped since the death of your parents.”

Abby bit into the side of her cheek and listened.

“Truck stops, cheap-ass motels. Always wondered, why the highway? Why not the beach? Or another country? You like bein’ anonymous? You like blending in?”

Abby felt the blood heating in her chest. This was it. This was it. “What the hell do you want?” she yelled. It was someone else’s voice. Someone stronger.

Above them there was a buzz of laughter and the sound of electronic bells. More laughter. Heavy footsteps.

“We need some help finding something belonging to your father.”

Her duffel bag sat open on his desk and her dirty underwear on the floor. She felt naked and embarrassed.

“You killed them. Didn’t you? You goddamned son of a bitch.”

“Help us find what we need. And let your parents die with grace.”

She saw his hands reach for the bag and pull it from view. The light was so bright that even when she squinted she couldn’t make out his features. A blue halo pulsed in her vision.

“Where does your daddy keep his papers?” he asked.

She shook her head. “You’re just gonna kill me anyway.”

“Nope. I don’t kill little girls. I just make ’em bleed and hurt like hell till they tell me what I want.”

Abby stared down at her hands. She breathed quick, her heart ticking. She began to pray silently again. It was the prayer she’d said the entire way in the car about appreciating every second the Lord gave her.

“Abby?”

She kept her eyes on her hands. She felt the gentle stroke of fingers across the back of her neck.

“Go on,” the man said to someone behind her. “Y’all have your fun.”

Out of the darkness two people walked between her and the man. One was the older black man with freckles. The other was Ellie.

At least it seemed like Ellie. In Abby’s scattered vision, the face and the body were the same. But she looked different and held herself in an unusual way. She even seemed to breathe like another person as she studied Abby with squinting eyes.

“Shall we go get this filthy bitch cleaned up?” Ellie asked.

T he door to the security office was closed and I was about to walk back to the lobby when a black woman dressed in maid coveralls sauntered by and jiggled a set of keys in her pocket. She opened the door.

I followed.

The office was tiny with a cheap desk and seascape prints hanging on the walls. Besides the smell of stale cigarettes, you couldn’t tell if the place was ever used. No loose papers on the desk. No bulletin boards. No appointment calendars.

“You know where I can find Humes?” I asked.

The woman jumped as if touched by a live wire. Her face was round and flat. Reddish brown skin.

“Sorry,” I said, my palms outstretched to show I was cool. Didn’t mean her any harm. “Lookin’ for my old buddy Mr. Humes.”

“Shiiit,” she said. She was very old and very short. Didn’t even come up to my chest. “You up to no good.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Yes, you is.” She smiled. “What you wantin’ Humes fer? He fucked up again?”

I smiled back.

“You gonna kick his ass?”

“Just want to talk to him.”

She looked up at me and studied my eyes. She squinted one eye and then patted me on the arm. “C’mon, he ain’t never in here. But don’t you be tellin’ him how you found him.”

She left the office door open and led me down a long hallway to a metal door by an emergency exit. Hundreds of tourist pamphlets sat in a nearby bin. Everything from Graceland to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale.

The woman unlocked the metal door and held it wide open.

“Go on,” she said. “Last door on the left. That’s where he sit at, pickin’ his ass and lookin’ at Playboys.”

I leaned down to the short old woman and kissed her on the cheek.

E ver since the truck stop, Perfect had had the uncontrollable desire to scrub Abby MacDonald clean. She stank. She smelled of body odor and gasoline and coffee breath. She had stubble underneath her arms and probably had long hair growing on her legs. Her eyebrows were unkempt and long cuticles grew over her nails. How could she live like that? How could she even think this was acceptable?

Perfect hated everything about the girl. She hated her greasy dirty-blond hair and her unmade face and her sinewy little body. Probably some kind of runner or athletic freak. Abby wasn’t curvy. The girl didn’t understand that women were supposed to be full and rounded.

In the concrete room, Perfect studied Abby. The way her head hung down in her hands, the mud splattered on her wide-legged jeans, and those awful running shoes. And, God, how she wouldn’t shut up. The little girl kept on crying and calling her Ellie and asking her to disappear.

Perfect, now dressed in hip-hugger cords and a white T-shirt with a sequin heart, moved closer to the girl and watched her cry. Humes sat on top of a blackjack table, a gun on his hip, drinking a cup of coffee. That bastard was waiting for the show to begin. Oh, well, guess she’d have to deliver.

Perfect grabbed a good handful of greasy hair from Abby’s head and pulled her to the stainless-steel tub. She tore the horrible-smelling T-shirt from her body and told her to take off those dirty jeans or die.

The girl kept sobbing but did what she said, lightly pulling them down over her knees, shaking.

Perfect knew the girl was expecting rape or some kind of sexual kicks from them. Instead, Perfect shoved her stinking ass down in the tub filled with scalding water. The girl, just wearing white bra and panties, pressed her back to the wall and covered her breasts with folded arms.

Perfect shook her head, put on a pair of Latex gloves, and lathered up a loofah.

She pulled up Abby’s armpit and began her long overdue cleansing process.

T he room at the end of the hall was more than just an additional office. Think Mission Impossible crossed with Dr. Strangelove. At least thirty black-and-white televisions showing various scenes from the casino were arranged along a gray cinder block wall. One had a closeup of the blackjack dealer’s hands and another showed some kind of warehouse where men unloaded an eighteen-wheeler. A narrow desk with microphones and a couple of rolling chairs sat close to the monitors. A coffee mug stamped with the Magnolia Grand logo and a crumpled pack of cigarettes lay on the desk.

I felt the mug. Still hot.

I took a seat in the chair and picked up the October Playboy sitting by the mug. Girls of the SEC and some pretty lame music reviews. I skipped past the reviews and some kind of rich man’s guide to stereo gadgets and went right to this month’s centerfold before leaning back in the chair and studying the wall of televisions.

A woman stood by a slot machine picking her nose and a young Hispanic boy was sitting on his father’s shoulders as the man danced in a disco. Two security guards hung out on the hood of a Pontiac, smoking cigarettes and talking shit.

“Hey,” someone said. “What the fuck are you doing back here?”

P erfect ran a towel over Abby’s reddened skin, the dirt scrubbed away with the hard loofah. The girl was crying because she’d gotten a little chapped and was bleeding. How else was Perfect supposed to get that stench away? God, that girl smelled so rotten and awful.

Humes had his gun pointed at the girl’s chest and licked his lips looking at her wet bra and chest. He smoothed his hands over her little stomach, soaking in the control he felt. Perfect smacked the gun away, told him to go back to his seat, and bound Abby’s wrist with handcuffs to a metal water pipe.

The girl now lay lengthwise on an elevated bed the casino used to give guest in-room massages. Abby was still crying and bleeding when Perfect dripped the hot wax into the girl’s armpits and spread it with a plastic spatula.

“Abby, don’t worry, I’ll take care of you. You’ll be fresh and smelling like honeysuckle when we let you go. Don’t worry,” she said, caressing Abby’s face in her hands. “You and me will be just fine.”

Perfect spread strips of cotton paper on her armpits, smoothing it in the direction the hair grew. She held Abby’s face in her hands, feeling the blubbering and whimpering, as she quickly ripped the paper backward, taking away a thick collection of dark hairs by the root.

Abby screamed and cried more.

“I remember the first time my mother made me get all dolled up,” Perfect said. “I was eight. She made me sit in a hot bath till my toes turned to prunes, and then rolled me in baby powder. She put gobs of blue eyeliner on me, painted my lips fire-engine red, and dressed me in my Sunday sailor suit. Told me I had to look right for my uncle. Said he liked sweet little girls. Are you sweet, Miss Abby? Are you my sweet little girl?”

The girl coughed and then spit right into Perfect’s eye. Perfect just smoothed away the spit and poured more of that hot yellow wax into Abby’s armpit. Abby was yelling and screaming and kicking now.

Perfect nodded over to Humes and they tied her legs to the table with some torn bed sheets. She used a short piece to gag the girl. Didn’t even know this was good for her.

She applied the wax and another strip just like she was taught and ripped it back away. Abby screamed a muffled scream, her eyes reddened and full of tears.

Perfect found a comb from her purse and then started roughly pulling away the tangles from the girl’s wet hair. She whistled a little bit as she worked.

She liked to feel good about helping someone be clean.

I turned to the door where I saw a kid in his early twenties with slick black hair, wearing a blue blazer and khaki pants.

“Sent back here to see Mr. Humes,” I said.

“No one told me,” the kid said.

“Are you Mr. Humes?” I asked.

“No,” the kid said, studying my face.

“Then maybe that’s the reason.”

“Nobody likes a smart-ass,” the kid said.

“You’d be surprised,” I said.

The kid’s jaw muscles twitched and he grabbed a radio at his hip.

“You stay here, buddy,” the kid said. “Don’t leave.”

I made a pistol with my thumb and forefinger and dropped the hammer. The kid shook his head and walked back down the hall.

Maybe Humes didn’t handle collections or maybe they’d already found Clyde. Or maybe I was wasting my fucking time. At least this was better than sitting in my warehouse in New Orleans rearranging vinyl.

I walked over to the cooler and poured some water into a paper cup. Really was pretty cool the way they had all these monitors set up. I laughed at some white dude in a white suit trying to dance and at some old lady who was beating the shit out of a losing slot.

I was about to turn back to the Girls of the SEC when something in the far right corner of the monitors caught my eye.

The scene wasn’t in the main casino. Looked like it was in some storage area with cinder block walls filled with old slots. Two people talking.

A woman leaned over a young girl who was lying down on a long table. I stood and walked toward the screen, transfixed and sickened by what I saw.

The girl was almost naked and tied down. Her arms were cuffed above her head to a water main and her legs were attached to the table by some kind of strips of cloth. Her loose hair fell into her eyes and she was twisting her head away from the woman’s face. I could feel my heart pound faster and heated adrenaline shoot through my body. The woman mashed a revolver in the girl’s eye as she poured something down the length of her legs.

Below the monitor was an imprinted plastic tag reading #102.