Dark End Of The Street

Chapter 27

At midnight, Abby and I stopped off at a Chevron near downtown and grabbed several packs of beef jerky and bottled waters for Hank. The dog chomped down every damn piece next to the gas station’s air pump. Abby hugged him close while he lapped water from one of my old coffee mugs. Her face brightened as she squeezed the dog so tight that he grunted.

I watched her and smiled, my mind buzzing with everything that I’d learned.

Abby’s father wanted to find Clyde James and had been killed and his daughter kidnapped. Must’ve been a few weeks after Abby’s parents died that a couple of men showed up in New Orleans hassling Loretta. Now there was all this shit about some whacked-out group called Sons of the South.

We drove back to town, wheeling around the Square toward Maggie’s. We stopped at a crosswalk for a moment, Hank panting hard in the truck.

Five young girls about Abby’s age ran past in heavy sweatclothes, laughing. We could hear their yells, giddy from the cold. Rain beaded down my windshield and made funny patterns in the streetlights.

Abby hugged her dog again and watched the girls jog down a hill and out of sight.

I had hoped to put her up with Maggie and take off to Memphis tomorrow. But after the letter, I wasn’t so sure. Sons of the South. I turned off the R. L. Burnside CD and flicked on the radio, finding a station that played old-school soul.

Hank jumped into the backseat.

“Library still open?”

“The bar?”

“The real library,” I said.

“I guess.”

“You want to keep going tonight?”

She nodded. I kept looping around the old courthouse and headed to campus as Abby patted her leg along with a song written decades before she was born.

O n the second floor of the Ole Miss library, Abby was at a computer terminal and I was seated beside her. The library silent as hell. Just the buzzing of the fluorescent lights and some guy with a bad cold at the main counter sneezing every five seconds.

The screen got bright as she clicked through SONSSOUTH. COM. Most of what we found was the same old bullshit we’d read in her father’s files. We spent about fifteen minutes looking through pictures of middle-aged white guys going to conventions at airport hotels and scheming to return honor to the South. This was the kind of group that hustled in men too educated to be in militias and too arrogant to see they were doing any harm.

“Where do they keep microfilm?” I asked.

“What do you want?”

I looked at her. “Newspaper articles.”

“You want new ones, right?” she asked.

“Last few years.”

“It’s on computer.”

“Not everything we’re looking for.”

“Watch.”

She took me to an alcove located on the first floor and plugged in Sons of the South into a computer loaded with LexisNexis software. I’d heard of it, but most of my research dealt with musicians from decades ago.

Abby was really good. She clicked the hell out of the computer and brought up a dozen articles. Most were from the Commercial-Appeal but there were several in The Tennesseean.

She scrolled through the first few. Most seemed to be quoting a spokesperson for the group about their stance on keeping the Mississippi state flag with its embedded icon of the Confederacy.

This group loved that debate. And so did Mississippi; they kept the flag. It made me think about U telling me about his days playing football at Ole Miss and watching a bunch of spoiled white boys wave the flag every time he made a tackle.

He loved it so much that when the Kappa Alpha fraternity had their Old South parade, U stood on a street corner and burned the rebel flag. He didn’t tell me, but I don’t think anyone fucked with a man who could bench 485 pounds and practiced martial arts every day.

I laughed to myself and Abby kept scrolling.

There were a couple of editorials about how the Sons of the South were a bunch of privileged white men who wanted to play war games without really getting dirty. One columnist did a satirical piece about how the South should rise again and talked about the attributes of becoming a slave.

The columnist was black.

“Go on,” I said.

Abby clicked but before the story disappeared she saw something at the end of the piece that caught her attention.

“Wait,” she said. She clicked back and read through it, her nose inches away from the screen.

“What?”

“That man he’s talking about. That state senator, Elias Nix?”

“Yeah.”

“He was one of my father’s best friends. They went to school together or something. I’ve met him a few times. He was at their funeral.”

We read through a few more pieces on the group. Said they had a military compound in Jackson but their spokesman denied it. Once again, the spokesman said they were only community leaders interested in advancing Southern ways of life.

I had a pen in my mouth and had chewed the end off. I felt the ink on my tongue and spit into a trashcan.

“Your mouth’s blue,” she said.

“On my face?” I asked, rubbing my fingers over my lips.

“Nope.”

“Good.”

“You have a girlfriend, Nick?”

“Why? You like old men?”

“First off, you’re not old. You’re, like what, forty? Anyway, I was talking about Maggie. She likes you.”

“Shucks.” I wasn’t forty. Yet.

“I can tell,” Abby said. Her cheeks pinched tight as she smiled with her brown eyes.

“Is that why she grunts at me?”

“I think.”

“Well, I kind of have that department covered.”

“You married?”

“Scroll down,” I said.

“Are you?”

“No.”

“But your girlfriend wants to,” Abby said, her face glowing in the light from the monitor.

“Wait, can you pull up only ‘Elias Nix’ and ‘senator’?”

She nodded and the screen flashed with hundreds of hits.”

“How ’bout ‘Nix,’ ‘senator,’ and ‘gambling’?”

She tapped it in the prompt.

Two hits.

“What’s her name?”

“Kate.”

“You love her?”

“What is this, junior high?”

Abby laughed and socked me on the shoulder.

I smiled. “She lives in Chicago and we recently learned that’s a long way from New Orleans.”

“Your mouth is still blue.”

I spit again into the trashcan.

When I looked back at the computer screen, Abby was scrolling down a story – Nix was running for governor in November. Shit, I knew I’d seen the damned name. His face was plastered all over Memphis, but it was so late and I’d been so into Clyde James that I wasn’t thinking. Besides, I rarely paid attention. Louisiana politics were so bad that I usually slept in on election day.

“Look at this,” she said.

Apparently, this year, Tennessee was scheduled for a referendum to decide whether the state would have a lottery. And a lot of folks felt legalized gambling would be next.

Nix did, too.

He told a reporter in Memphis he’d like to see riverboat gambling on the banks of the Mississippi by the end of his term.