Dark End Of The Street

Chapter 3

Perfect Leigh didn’t like cartoons with talking animals, men who wore aftershave or Italian suits, self-appointed faith healers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, songs on the Waffle House jukebox, soap opera divas, collard greens, or sex of any type. She liked herself and that was enough for her. She liked the way she smelled like butterscotch candy. She liked the way she looked, with a mane of platinum blond hair and thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six measurements. She liked the way she appreciated the way Nancy Sinatra used to dance, the smell of new leather in her Mustang convertible, cheese sauce served in bad Mexican restaurants, and the way her Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album skipped because it warped during a hot day at the beach in Panama City, Florida.

She especially didn’t like good-ole-boy gatherings where men played poker in cigar-infested rooms and laughed with false self-knowledge and fears of their own inadequacies. She hated the smell of Scotch on their breath and of their crooked yellowed teeth. But they were gone now except for some poor old bastard named Fisher and his wheelchair-bound wife who screamed every time he plunked down a silly hand.

This was Tunica. From catfish farming to casinos in a few simple years. You could still smell the cowshit caked to the gamblers’ work boots.

She sat with the Fishers in this little glassed-in room on the second floor of the Magnolia Grand Casino, just a spit away from Highway 61. The old man ate the remainder of a tired wrinkled hotdog and his wife slobbered on herself while laughing at the ketchup that dropped on his horrible tie.

For days, Perfect had been watching and listening to them from closed-circuit cameras. In the main casino, in the restaurant, and even in their bedroom. She read their profiles down in Humes’s office about how they’d lost their daughter in a car accident about fifteen years ago and how they had some kind of benefit every year for her at a lake house with tons of deep-fried catfish and bream.

They had just given the money to some Tunica preacher who had a cable-access show in Memphis where he pretended to heal people. Said he gained the gift when he was a child and fell beneath a frozen lake only to re-emerge two-and-a-half minutes later with a vision.

What a crock of shit. Now he just passed out silly little flyers on Beale Street and casino bathrooms speaking out against men humping other men or drinking whiskey like idiots.

The Fishers were blind. But Perfect saw everything. By watching, listening, and waiting, she’d learned just how much they wanted their daughter back.

So in the last twenty-four hours that’s what she’d become. She studied pictures of their dead little girl. She combed her platinum hair over one eye like the girl did, bought a wooly, early ‘eighties sweater, and even found some of those Madonna rubber bracelets at a vintage clothing shop in midtown Memphis.

Last night, she just sat there in the casino bar and studied that poor old child trapped in a real silly time.

Girl’s name was Gina.

Gina. Gina. Bobeeena. Mofanna-fanna. Momeena.

“Can I get you another hotdog, Mr. Fisher?” Perfect asked.

“No, Miss Leigh,” he said, rearranging the cards like an idiot. She saw everything he had. But she’d let him win. Again. “I appreciate it though. My Lord, look how much I got. Must be two hundred dollars here.”

“Be a lot more if you take the offer,” she said. Real sweet. Not hard or hustly. But the way she imagined Gina would say it. Please, her words whispered, please accept your future.

“Ma’am,” he spoke, real indignant as if he’d just had a cattle prod inserted into his rectum. “We bought that land in ‘sixty-two and don’t see no good reason for leavin’ now.”

Perfect – in full Gina mode now – smiled. Real tight smile with her eyes crinkled up but not showing a bit of teeth. Maybe even showed a bit of broken heart in her failed mission.

“Well, if you folks ever reconsider,” she said, “we’d appreciate it.”

Her smile dipped into her glass of wine tasting their souls and their fears and desires. By morning’s end, she’d own them. They’d already opened too much. And they were hers.

S he didn’t have them bent until 7:00 A.M.. the next day over a breakfast in the casino’s Mardis Gras Time! restaurant. Some dummy in a red-and-white-striped vest played some New Orleans music on a Casio keyboard while a bunch of tired old people mashed soupy grits and butterless eggs into their dry mouths.

She’d stayed up with them all night, until a white sun washed through their curtains and over their soulless faces. Both full of whiskey, packs of cigarettes, totally spent from telling a volume worth of Gina stories.

Gina once adopted a stray cat that had a cyst the size of an orange in its throat. She cried and cried until her daddy took it to a country vet who cut it out for five hundred dollars. That old cat lived for another fifteen years and ate grits with honey and sugar.

And then there was the time Gina thought she’d created the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. She called the folks at Nestle and asked them if they’d pay her a million dollars for the recipe. That’s when she was fifteen and, to be honest, to Perfect, Gina sounded kind of stupid.

But Perfect nodded and nodded.

Why were they telling her all of this after all these years? the Fishers asked. They’d barely spoken about dear Gina since the accident.

Yeah, Perfect wondered, as she combed the platinum hair back over the left eye and adjusted the rubber bracelets on her wrists.

When they got to the point about Luke, the tractor, and the wedding ring, she knew she had them. She just watched their faces fall, their hearts empty like a broken water main, and their bodies convulse with memories buried for far too long.

She didn’t even have to ask. She simply walked to the phone and called for the Cobra – her little pet name for the casino’s oily attorney.

Within fifteen minutes of the contract signing at breakfast, she was washing that really god-awful Vidal Sassoon mousse from her hair in a room Humes had gotten for her. For some reason, Duran Duran songs kept playing in her head like a bad insult to a horrible night.

Soon they’d be kissing her ass before she headed back to her small apartment in Memphis where she lived with her ‘sixties picture books and her antique mirrors.

The money would come Western Union.

She’d live for months without the virus of the outside world to taint her.

But as she was letting down the top on her ‘sixty-five Mustang convertible, Humes stopped her. She lifted her travel bag into the backseat and stared at his face framed by the purple and green lights of the Magnolia Grand floating in a fake river.

An agriplane buzzed overhead and a stray cloud on a cloudless day shielded the sun.

“What?”

“He has something for you,” Humes said, his gray hair looking like silver against his black skin.

“Not interested.”

“It’s more money than you’ve ever known.”

“Keep talkin’,” Perfect said, checking out her reflection in the glass of an SUV parked behind him. “I’m always open to new ideas.”