Dark End Of The Street

Chapter 30

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.”