Dark End Of The Street

Chapter 46

The city of New Orleans rolled into Memphis a little after 3:30 P.M. I’d spent most of my trip awake on the train watching the Mississippi Delta flash by in scattered bits of old rusted trailers, eternal acres of fattened white cotton ready for the gins, and crevices of cypress swamps, morning light hard and gold on the green skin of the water. I prayed a little, thinking about Loretta, wanting God to help. Help me put things back in order. Help me, knowing I shouldn’t ask, find whomever was responsible and take them out. I couldn’t stop seeing the face of that Elvis freak in my mind. He’d been there. That piece of shit broke into JoJo’s. Set fire to my second home.

I could still smell the smoke on my shirt as I reached up and grabbed Abby’s bag from the overhead bin. She thanked me and I followed her off the train and onto a wide concrete platform with a tall view of short buildings built along the bluffs. Mostly old warehouses, a few bars, and art studios.

We followed the herd down some marble steps into a wide train terminal filled with long wooden benches and lit with green neon signs marking the ten tracks out of town. U was at the foot of the steps, arms crossed over his body, broad smile on his face, as he walked up a few steps to meet us. He surprised me with a huge hug – U wasn’t what I’d call an emotional man – and yanked the duffel bag from Abby’s hand.

“I got it,” I said, taking the bag back from him. Carrying both outside.

“Just talked to JoJo,” U said. “Said Loretta’s awake. Said she was sorry about the bar… but glad she got the day off. She asked ’bout you, thought those people coming for your ass next.”

I felt my breath drain from my body, thick and polluted. I took in some new air, watching the uncluttered blue sky. A perfect crispness seemed to be wrapping the whole world. But I felt stale. I couldn’t fall asleep or focus on anything but my anger.

He’d parked across the street at the Arcade diner and we found a little cove by the kitchen where we ordered a couple plates of sweet potato pancakes and coffee. Place hadn’t changed in fifty years. Same torn vinyl booths. Squiggly ‘fifties Orbit impressions on tables worn out in spots by years of elbows and coffee mugs.

“How you doin’, Miss Abby?” U asked.

“Fine, when one of y’all tell me why we’re back in Memphis,” she said. She sat taller in her seat. Hair in a ponytail. My Tulane football sweatshirt. “Whatever it is, I’m in.”

U raised his eyebrows. A green-haired waitress in a black T-shirt poured us some coffee. I passed U the sugar first. He watched me. He watched my hands shake.

I drank some coffee. I said: “Obviously you got my message.”

“Big job.”

“At least point the way.”

Abby picked at her food. Her fork clanked to the rim of her sticky plate. The green-haired waitress refilled our cups. A kid in the booth behind us sported a nose ring and a Britney Spears T-shirt. He looked like he liked Britney about as much as I liked the Dave Matthews Band.

“Said it was big,” U said. “Didn’t say I wasn’t coming.”

He looked over his shoulder, the leather of his jacket squeaking along the booth. The Britney kid was watching the green-haired waitress’s ass. U turned back and pulled a map of southern Tennessee before us, already marked in red pen. A big red circle had been drawn around an area south of Jackson.

“That’s it?”

He nodded, and as quickly as he slid it out, folded up the map carefully and stuck it back into his pocket. “We could be there by sundown. And that’s what we want.”

Abby was quiet. But she watched. I looked at her eyes; she stared back.

“How’d you find it?” I asked, still watching Abby. I smiled. She didn’t.

“Heard it was near Bemis, this little town that was some kind of social experiment around the turn of the century. Yeah, I checked it all out. Anyway, I called in a favor from a good ol’ boy I just keep on bringin’ back to jail,” U said, dropping into an imitation he believed sounded like a redneck. “Met this peckerwood at a bar. A biker bar. Imagine me in a biker bar. It was like Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours. ‘There’s a new sheriff in town,’ and all that.”

“So peckerwood-biker boy told you where to find the compound?”

“His nasty ass – and I do mean nasty – wore a leather vest and no shirt, even drew a little map for me. One electric fence. Some surveillance.”

“Two of us can do it?” I asked.

“Hold on,” Abby said, pushing her plate out of the way. “What are you going to do with me? You’re not leaving me here. I’m the one whose parents were killed. I’m the one who found Nix. What are you going to do, drop me at the mall with your credit card?”

“Nick ain’t got no credit,” U said.

She made a grunting noise. “I want to go back to Oxford.”

“Not till this is over.”

“I’m not moving in with Bubba so I can sit around and watch Ricki Lake,” she said. “Besides, do you even know how to shoot that gun?”

“Yes.”

“How? I hunted with my father; what did you do?”

“I used to-”

“Hold up,” U said, raising his palm out. “I got this. See, Nick is from Alabama.”

“So?”

“That about says it all.”

“Give me two days,” I said to Abby. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t up for committee.”

Abby grunted again and tromped to the bathroom to cool off. I got up to make sure she was all right. For some reason I wanted everyone to be okay with everything.

“Nick, cool out,” he said. “We got it.”

I sat back down and asked, “So, you’re in?”

“Me and you are the same, brother,” he said, looking out the window. Maybe seeing that same blue crispness but feeling better about it. “You know that. We just a couple of Zen cowboys, Travers. What else we supposed to do with our lives? Ain’t many of us around.”

“Thanks.”

“Listen, man. Loretta and JoJo have been real good to me, too,” U said, his head nodding with his own words. “Somebody mess with Loretta? Come on. You got to ask? You wanted backup on one thing, said you wanted a meeting with Elias Nix… Well, I’m gonna get you that appointment tonight.”

W e didn’t go alone. On the way out of town, U picked up Bubba Cotton in, of all places, Dixie Homes, where he’d been baby-sitting his sister-in-law’s twin boys. The boys had pulled out every pot and pan their mother owned, using them for drums, as we stepped over their mess and found Bubba swilling a forty and watching a little Ricki Lake.

His sister-in-law had gotten home before us and Bubba was glad to leave because she was cussing his ass out. He sat in back of U’s Expedition on the ride north with earphones on and silently bobbed his head.

We soon dropped off the highway and away from the commercial roads and hotels and restaurants and hit a long straightaway of curving hilly blacktop. A lot of cotton fields soon turned to woods. Maple trees with yellow and red leaves. Pin oak. Cedar. A lot of pine trees coated in kudzu, almost looked like a ‘fifties horror film, It Came from the South. Kudzu everywhere. Telephone poles. Abandoned shacks. The growth had even snaked its fingers and arms through several old rusted cars.

We traveled along the road for another thirty minutes with only the sound of Bubba’s Walkman and the roaring of tires on the blacktop. We passed some corn fields, yellowed and mowed flush, and then got into more woods with gullies of bottom land where rainwater stood in stagnant rows. Turtles slept on floating pieces of wood and trash. Red bud willows draped their branches across pools, catching the final reddish-purple light of the day.

U slowed, pointed out an anonymous dirt road, and kept driving.

“Let’s get some more coffee, stretch, and check our plan. Again. I found us a campsite up the road and we’ll go through the final details.” He looked over at me, taking off his sunglasses as if just realizing the sun had been down for a while. He yawned and ran a big hand over his face. “You still cool with this?”

I checked for the Glock he’d given me and smiled. “Yeah, everything is cool.”

But I remembered some graffitied words on a decaying brick wall in downtown as we headed out. It was one of those times when the message seemed to be written just for me: SUPERMAN IS A DAMNED FOOL.