Dark End Of The Street

Chapter 40

I was thinking about a story I’d read about Clyde James when, in the glow of the neighboring Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, Loretta and I saw the two Erector setlike tunnels stretching out over the Mississippi. As we neared the bridges, I remembered a short profile of Clyde in the Living Blues soul section a few years back. It was an interview with a manager of his who Loretta said had died years ago. The manager talked about how, even before the death of his wife, Clyde would disappear for weeks at a time, already suffering from deep depression. He said it got worse after the events of ‘sixty-eight. He said Clyde took off during a tour of south Mississippi and showed up on his doorstep in Memphis a month later. Clyde very calmly said, “I been lookin’ all over for you. Where you been?”

I drove the little compact U had loaned me off the main highway, just before reaching the bridge, and dipped down a narrow dirt road. High clumps of weeds lined the path and the little tires of the car bumped and jostled us until I found a decent place to stop by the two railroad bridges. They seemed like relics of a Memphis that no longer existed. Rust and rotting wood. Thick bolts that fastened beams together probably a hundred years ago. In the distance, north toward the city, I saw the two distinctive humps of the Hernando-Desoto Bridge lit with fat white bulbs and the weird glow of the Pyramid sports arena.

“What if I asked you to stay here?” I asked. “Just till I check things out.”

Loretta opened the door and pulled herself out, smoothing down the suede of her coat. A hard fetid wind broke off the Mississippi and washed up the dirt bluffs to us. I lit a cigarette as I searched in U’s trunk for a flashlight. I found one and moved the Glock to a better position in my hand-tooled belt.

“Why you smoke those things?” she asked. “You want to die early? Don’t be a damned fool.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said as she pulled it from my lips and ground it under her foot. Her shoulders shook just a little and there was a little quiver in her voice. I put my arm around her as we made our way down an embankment, smelling burning wood and hearing the muffled grumbling of men.

Right below where the Harahan jutted out from the bluffs, I saw fire sparks catching in the wind and dying out below the bridge and far above the swirling black water of the Mississippi. Felt like we were hanging on the edge of the earth, the split in America, a place where Old World explorers marveled.

I offered Loretta a hand as we scooted down the hill, making sure she kept her balance. The heels of my boots ground in the soft mud making it easy to track down. The sound of the men grew. More smoke. Wood. Cigarettes? Bottles clinking. Grunts. Bizarre moaning.

The men had found a little cove in the groove where the bridge meets the hills. Four nasty recliners, a sofa (more springs than material), several refrigerator boxes squashed flat and used as pallets, and dozens of men warming themselves over little campfires. Drinking labelless whiskey and talking. Several were white with long, yellowed mountain-man beards but most were black, sallow-eyed, with nappy hair.

Toward the edge of the firelight, one man was leaning over the concrete embankment singing like hell and pissing toward the Mississippi like it was his own personal toilet.

“Loretta,” I said, grabbing her arm.

She looked over at me and shrugged. I moved ahead and began to search for a face that I only knew from a thirty-year-old picture. No one said a word to me. A few quit talking. Most just ignored us.

“Clyde?” Loretta yelled, like she was calling her cat home to dinner. “Clyde.”

Most of the men I saw would actually be younger than Clyde. A few too old. No one responded to her calls. I let out a steady stream of air and turned as I saw a wiry white man with an ax handle trying to sneak up from behind.

I dodged his blow, the handle raking across the concrete ground, and pulled his shoulders forward, making him smack the ground facefirst. There was an audible pop.

I yelled to the group that I didn’t want trouble. I told them that Loretta was just looking for her brother. “Clyde James. Any of y’all know Clyde? He used to sleep down at the Piggly Wiggly on Madison. The graveyard, right there.”

A couple of coughs, a grunt, the old man still pissing into the Mississippi like he had attached a hose inside himself.

“Look, I got twenty bucks for someone. Buy a lot of whiskey or Eight-Ball.”

“There,” grunted a little black man wearing a worn Confederate battle hat. His face covered in short silver whiskers and wearing a bright pink trench coat. “Y’all can see him right there.”

“Where?” I asked.

“There,” he said, aggravated as hell that he’d had to stand. “Look, I’ll show you. Just give me that twenty.”

And I did.

We crossed over a weedy lot strewn with empty beer cans and torn pieces of clothing. The man leading us down below the next bridge, identical to the Harahan, walked stoop-shouldered and slow. His face was gray, as if oxygen didn’t circulate above his neck. Bloodshot eyes. If I’d seen him sleeping on the street, I would have thought he was dead.

I pointed the flashlight down the path, every click and shuffle making my heart pound, until he pointed to a collection of grayish-black mounds gathered in the fall cold. A tin drum of old rags and driftwood had been lit at the base of the bridge as if marking an entrance to some kind of feudal castle.

I kept my fingers close to the Glock and I took comfort in the seventeen-shot capacity U had bragged about. Loretta wandered ahead and I soon lost our guide as I followed her underneath the bridge.

There I was greeted by a tremendous smell of piss and shit. I wanted to gag and buried my nose in my jacket.

“Good Lord,” I said.

Loretta took the flashlight out of my hand and swept it over the mounds.

They moved.

All dirty. Blacks and grays and sun-bleached browns. People under mounds of rags. Boxes of chicken bones and empty dog food cans. More bottles of whiskey. Pits bordered by barbed wire. Some slept in the pits, others in boxes, and even more just on the ground in heaps. There must’ve been thirty, forty of them.

“Clyde!” Loretta yelled. Just blind. Absolutely blind. I moved my hand away from the Glock and felt for her fingers. I had a hard time swallowing. God, the smell was absolutely awful.

Everyone was sleeping a hell of a hard sleep.

No one moved as we searched for about ten minutes. She’d stop, flash a light into their faces, and move on. One old guy sprang to his feet and tried to knock my teeth in. But these were weak people. Their bodies barely functioned; their minds were completely fucked up. I just sidestepped the old dude and he fell back to the ground.

Between the gaps of the massive supports of the bridge, I watched a tugboat pushing a barge upstream. The moonlight broke and swirled on the brown water in its wake. I spit on the ground, trying to remove the smell from my head when I noticed Loretta had stopped and bent down to the ground.

I followed.

She was crying.

I looked at her; she nodded to me.

Clyde James opened his eyes.