Ace Atkins: Dark End of the Street

He made a big deal out of feeling the skin on the bar, pulling out a gin bottle, and examining the damned thing like it was a newborn child. He poured himself another drink over crushed ice.

“Eddie,” he began, “I want you to quit messin’ with Clyde’s wife. You know more ‘an anyone his head ain’t right. I need that boy. If he falls again, we all do. Comprende, podna?”

“Ah, fuck you, Cook. Ain’t none of your concern what goes on in my world.”

Porter caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror behind the bar and he somehow looked smaller than he felt.

“Just stay away from there tonight,” Cook said, feeling for one of his silly cheetah-print chairs like a blind man. He sat down with a sigh and closed his eyes. “Just stay away from there tonight.”

“I’m quitting,” Porter said, walking away. “Find someone else to shovel your shit.”

“Eddie?”

He turned back.

“How long we knowed each other?”

Porter shrugged.

“I consider you a friend.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Do what you need to do. But do it tonight. Stay away from Clyde’s wife.”

Porter gave a short laugh with his exhaling breath.

“You ain’t listenin’,” Cook said again. “Do what you need to do. But keep away from there tonight.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Porter said. “You motherfucker.”

He picked up a fat gold statue of Buddha and threw it into the glasses and whiskey and flickering red cocktail candles. The mirror broke into jagged knives knocking over the candles and liquor bottles. The glass sounded like tiny bells in the wind.

“You motherfucker,” he said again. It wasn’t a yell. Porter said it more to himself than anything as he headed back to his car.

Twenty minutes later, he sped across Lamar Avenue as slatted light played over his face and prized fingers. Somehow he knew they’d catch up. It just happened a whole mess sooner than he thought.

He mashed the pedal of his Toranado and the cold wind howled through the ripped holes in its canvas top.

Mary lived down in south Memphis, in a house built from her husband’s million-seller, “Dark End of the Street.” A song about a cheating man who can’t face his lover in the light of day. Clyde didn’t write it, two white boys did, but he sang it like it was his damned life story. Porter had heard it so many times he wanted to throw up, he thought, while pulling into the circular drive.

The house was one of those places designed in weird geometrical patterns and shapes. Huge plate glass windows, doors made out of circles of brass, and sharp triangle edges at every corner. He could see a white-frosted artificial tree in the window decorated with red balls and green blinking lights.

Clyde would be in there somewhere passed out. A ghost in his own home wearing that mind sickness like a cape.

Sometimes Porter didn’t know why he and Mary even bothered.

As Porter rounded the corner, he could see someone sunk down into the seat of Clyde’s old Lincoln Continental. The black one he drove into a lake in Mississippi about three years ago. Man had it pulled from the scum and mud of the lake, fish flopping off his seats, to have it rot in his front yard.

Porter glanced down in the car and saw Clyde huddled on the floorboard like a child, a bottle of cheap rum in the driver’s seat. His face was wet and his eyes red and he was making sounds like that time he had to be pulled off stage at the Apollo. Sounded like he was going to choke on his own tongue.

Porter reached through the window of the tarnished car for his hand but Clyde crawled deeper in the floorboard and closed his eyes. It was almost as if he was willing Porter to disappear. Porter could feel him slipping through the small space and into the cloudy lake bottom where they’d found the car.

He walked away.

The door to the house was open. Yellow light spilled out onto the gray steps and dead lawn. As Porter approached the door, he kept hearing Clyde. That perfect voice singing the song like his whole life depended on the story he was going to tell.

If we should meet, just walk on by.

Oh, darlin’, please don’t cry.

A gentle smile crossed his lips as his mind exploded in black light flickering with violent white swirls.

Someone had hit him across the back of his head as soon as he stepped over the landing. He fell into a macramé rug and rolled onto the brown tile floor and felt boots kicking at him. Blood rushed through his ears and he covered his head with his hands. He saw there were two of them in leather and black, ski masks covering their faces.

One jerked Porter to his feet, his head still reeling with Clyde’s song.

Tonight we meet

At the dark end of the street.

The kitchen was bright and obscenely yellow and covered with thick smears of maroon blood. Porter tried as hard as hell to get loose, but the man just shoved his face into a Formica breakfast table and laughed. He felt his teeth in the back of his throat.

And then he saw her.

Mary, clutching her fat stomach in her hands, blood across her thin yellow top. Blousy sleeves, daisy edges.

Goddamn.

They’re gonna to find us.

They’re gonna find us, Lord, someday.

A man, smelling of onions and cigarette butts, tied Porter to the chair facing her. He felt the cold cylinder sink into the soft spot at the base of his skull.

“Where is it?” the man asked.

Porter leaned forward and vomited onto his shoes. The ticket to Buffalo twirled down to the floor catching into the sticky mess. Through blurred eyes he stared into Mary’s face. She bit her lip, and her eyes went soft, and he heard her praying like a child, like a twelve year old. It was something simple and quiet and for a moment Porter felt more like her father than her lover.

But tonight we’ll meet

At the dark end of the street.

He mouthed the words that he loved her.

She smiled. Weakly.

Then he heard the click.

“My trunk,” Porter said. Praying, too.

You and me, he heard Clyde sing in his mind.

And with the blast, came silence.

Saturday night

New Orleans, Louisiana

WHEN I WAS A KID I used to keep one eye open while I prayed. It wasn’t that I lacked faith in God or wanted to show any disrespect to the folks in church, it was just that I was curious about human nature. In that one silent moment, when everyone’s power was turned to their deepest wishes and desires, I tried to imagine what everyone around me wanted. The more I watched and later learned about death, the more I believed all those desires were fleeting. And really kind of sad. In the end, everyone just wants some kind of miracle. His own private resurrection.

I kept thinking about those weird life patterns as I walked behind the old scarred mahogany bar of JoJo’s place in the French Quarter, and reached deep into the brittle frost of a dented Coca-Cola cooler. I searched for my fourth Dixie.

JoJo’s Blues Bar had closed about thirty minutes ago. It was late. Or early. Dark as hell. Tables had been cleared and stacked with inverted chairs. Stage lights cast red beams on microphones and a lone upright piano. Over by the twin Creole doors, beaten and weathered with time, only the faintest orange glow came from the old jukebox pumping out Otis Redding’s “Cigarettes and Coffee.”

All that remained were four of my closest buddies in a back corner booth, underneath a poster of the American Folk and Blues Festival 1965, celebrating with one of my former friends.

Well, I guess Rolande was still a friend. But he was dead. So did that mean we weren’t friends anymore?