Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

Perfect stood up to her full six feet (boots helping with four inches), tucked her hair behind her ears, and scanned each direction of the hallway. She suddenly ripped a long section of her blouse.

The men started backing away like they were watching a mad dog circling and foaming at the mouth.

“You tell me where they went or I start yelling rape.”

“Lord God!” Renaldo said under his breath, pulling away his hat and pulling the little black boy close to his chest. “You crazy.”

“You’re right, I’m one crazy fucking bitch. Now tell me where they went.” She started grunting and expelling little gasps of air like she was trying to scream. She tore at her blouse again and flashed the men her lacey bra. They averted their eyes but seemed to have their feet stuck in concrete.

“Mi-Mi-Mississippi,” the boy said. “Asked if they needed a cab and he asked for his truck. Said he goin’ to there. That’s all I know. Don’t know nothin’ about them.”

Perfect patted his cheek and straightened the hat for Renaldo.

“All I needed. You boys are so kind.”

Perfect seemed to float as she skipped down the hall and out to the car where Jon waited.

Woman seemed to give the ole boa constrictor who lived in his pants a good swellin’, Jon thought, as he watched Perfect emerge from the Peabody on Union and walk over to his car by the new baseball field. Lord, she had long legs like his old girlfriend Inga and had this self-confidence about her that made her seem more sexy than anything he’d ever imagined. Kind of like she always knew it’d be the biggest pleasure in his life if he ever got in her drawers and rooted around like a hog. But for some reason, Perfect treated him like the damned mental case at the family reunion. That kid that drooled in his wheelchair as everybody grabbed their potato salad and talked about grandpa’s drinkin’ problem.

She climbed in beside him and pulled off her shirt. She had on a pink bra with flowers. Man, her breasts were so full they just swelled. Tight little stomach with just a slash for a belly button. Man, oh man. If she wanted it here that was fine by him. He crawled over the gear shift feelin’ the ole snake gettin’ hungrier than hell before she slapped his face, pushed him back into the driver’s seat, and pulled on a fresh shirt.

“You touch me and I’ll have you back at that gas station from whatever Podunk town you’re from in two seconds. I don’t give a crap how many people you’ve killed.”

“Sorry, Miss Perfect.”

“That’s better. Now drive.”

“Where to?”

“Just drive, I’ll tell you. Head south.”

“Like Mississippi.”

“No, like Alaska. Yes, Mississippi. Now, go.”

She was checking her lipstick in the visor mirror as Jon dropped his gaze to his crotch to make sure nothin’ was showin’. She wasn’t like any other woman he’d ever known. She was it. She was that special woman that E always found halfway through the movie. And, at first, she always hated E, too.

If she was going to be his wife, he had some work to do. What would E do? Think. Jon pulled onto the highway headed south and ran his mind over some of those sacred scenes from Clambake. Shelley Fabares lookin’ for a rich man when all she really needed was E’s love.

Where was a guitar when you needed one?

THE LAST TIME I was in Oxford, Mississippi, I had to bail an old teacher of mine out of jail for exposing himself to a group of tourists at the home of William Faulkner. He said he was trying to finish a blues song he’d been working on for the last ten years when the group – retirees on a Southern Living tour – descended on the historic site on a day it was normally closed. He was so pissed off that they’d disrupted his peace that he thought it would be a fantastic idea if he unzipped his fly, pulled out his unit, and placed his National steel guitar between his legs. When this portly woman asked him if he could play her a little ditty, a dewy mint julip loose in her fingers, my blues-tracker mentor pulled the instrument to his chest and plucked away. Crazy old fucker was still laughing when I found him at the Oxford jail, explaining how the woman screamed all the way back to Ohio or Pennsylvania or wherever she lived.

I wondered where he was now as I turned off the highway and drove along Jackson and past the chain restaurants and superstores and corporate apartments that had descended on the small town in the last few years. I longed for even a decade ago, when my teacher and I would hit the back highways near Oxford, destination unknown, searching for blues men who’d disappeared into small towns across the state. The homogenization of a place so unique, so American, made me sick to my stomach.

I’d heard about a planned Super Wal-Mart that wanted to rape acres of nearby woods and a freakin’ Applebee’s that wanted to bring potato-skin cuisine to northern Mississippi, and even of the slack-eyed retirees that longed for three-hundred-thousand-dollar condos with five-foot setbacks along rolling acres of golf courses.

I knew that’s why I seldom came back. I wanted to remember the Oxford I once knew. Greasy biscuits at Smitty’s. Samurai films at the Hoka. Blues bands at Syd and Harry’s.

It had been years since I’d made it over to the Blues Archive for any work, but that was the first place I drove. I wanted to make the most of my time while I helped Abby. Maybe I could find out something about Clyde that wouldn’t have me going back to that asshole Cook again.

Earlier that morning, I’d left a message for Ed Komara, a friend of mine who ran the archive, and another message with a woman who worked at the Commercial-Appeal library. I knew the woman from hours of research at the paper’s morgue and had recently helped her get some B. B. King tickets through JoJo – a long-time friend of the legend.

In return, the woman said she’d pull any clips on Eddie Porter or Clyde James and fax them to Ed’s office at Ole Miss. I told Abby all this wouldn’t take too long and then we’d search for her cousin who she couldn’t seem to reach on the phone.

But a weird thing happened when we started talking about Clyde James and my work as a tracker. It was all Abby could talk about. She asked me about a million questions on the drive down and even had me play some of his music that I’d burned onto a CD.

“So this is what you do, look for these singers.”

“Yep.”

“And he was known? Famous?” she asked over my noisy muffler.

“Number-one hit in ‘sixty-six. Then, he just dropped out.”

Abby sat silent for a moment as we rounded the curve by The Grove and headed to Farley. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and sank it back through the loop in her Ole Miss hat. She wore the sweatpants and T-shirt like some kind of uniform.

“Can I help?”

“I think we just need to get you settled,” I said.

“I want to help,” she said, and nodded as if just making up her mind right there. The shadows from the oaks played over her face as we darted in and out of the sun. We parked on the street and went inside.

The university housed the Blues Archive in the old law library, a space a good size larger than where I worked at Tulane. At Tulane, we only had a small cluttered room for studying separated from the actual library, mostly dedicated to jazz. At Ole Miss it was almost all blues. Two floors that included more than 20,000 photographs (some the only ones in existence), 7,000 records donated by B. B. King himself, and even the financial documents of the old Trumpet Record Label. Posters, memorabilia, back issues of Living Blues, and old newspaper clippings.

As soon as we walked in the door, I saw a table by the staircase already loaded with magazines and manila files. A black woman in a dashiki nodded to me as she talked on the phone.