Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

Abby stirred melted ice cream around the last peaches and Maggie pulled out another cigarette. She had on those scuffed show boots and a clean white T-shirt that advertised Stetson hats.

The T-shirt was tight. Her breath didn’t stink.

When the band hit the last note of the William Bell song, Abby put down the cobbler, her eyes staring straight ahead. She hiked the elastic band of her sweatpants leg up to her knee and rubbed the tiny red bumps that had formed on her calf. Maggie picked up our bowls and walked back inside, the screen door banging the frame behind her.

Abby kept staring into the darkness.

“I want to go with you,” she said. “I want to help.”

“Let’s go down to the police station and we’ll talk about getting you some protection. I have to head back to Memphis.”

She shook her head and bit the edge of her lip. “You promised.”

“I promised to find your cousin and make sure you were safe.”

“You need me,” she said.

Maggie came back and took a seat, resting her back against the worn wall. She cracked open a fourth beer she’d gotten from somebody inside, and nodded along with the music. The Dobro and the mandolin melted into the crisp fall night, their notes twisting and falling with a sweetness of old memories. The music reminded me of times I’d failed to recognize as being the best I’d ever known.

I looked over at Abby. She’d had on the same old sweatpants for two days and they were stretched like socks over her running shoes. The knees had already become balled and dirty.

“Abby?” Maggie asked, blowing out some smoke. “Been picking up your folks’ mail and found something kind of strange. Letter from Memphis to your daddy. Did he always work with private investigators?”

“I guess.” I watched her as she wrapped herself tighter in my jean jacket.

I placed the cup of coffee by my feet and stared in each direction at the two women.

“Your daddy’s secretary gave it to me and said it was personal,” Maggie said. “Maybe you should take a look.”

MAGGIE LIVED JUST a few miles from Taylor, at the end of a twisting dirt road lined with mounds of kudzu and honeysuckle vines. The house was white and old, an elongated box made of clapboard and tin, with fat Christmas lights dangling from the roof. Outside, thickets of rosebushes grew near short rows of corn and tomatoes, now withered and brown. A laundry line hung loose to the side of the house filled with flowered cotton dresses and extremely short pairs of pants.

“You live with a midget?” I asked after we parked and walked through the chilled fall night. The stars above were bright and crisp but a biting wind had kicked up and I saw a dark cloud curtain headed east.

“A son,” Maggie said in the darkness. “You know those little things that men help create but often leave?”

“I ain’t got no kids,” I mumbled, following her. We stepped into a wide wood-paneled room that smelled like burnt Italian food. It was dimly lit with a television flashing a Chevy truck commercial.

A little boy with inky-black hair lay on a tattered couch, a coloring book loose in his hands. An older black woman came out from the kitchen wiping her hands with a rag and exchanged a few words with Maggie before disappearing out a side door.

I stood, afraid to wake the kid.

The floor was buckled linoleum and dotted with broken trucks and headless plastic heroes. She’d lined the walls with frames filled with photos too personal to have been bought. Black-and-whites of headstones and old people on porches and brilliant white suns setting low across cotton fields.

“Yours?” I asked.

She nodded and handed Abby a Golden Flake potato chip box filled with mail. Maggie picked up the boy, slack but grumbling, and left the room. Abby dropped the box onto the old sofa and I took a seat by her.

The woman had been watching Leno and I quickly flipped the channels to Letterman with a heavy remote. The sofa was thick with animal hair. Above the mantel gazed a mounted deer head.

Abby flipped through several letters, mailers, and magazines. I noticed a couple. Southern Living. Soldier of Fortune.

She stared at the outside of one envelope longer than the others and then quickly tore into it. She read it for a few moments. Her lips slightly parted and she used her right hand to brush the hair from her face onto the back of her ear. She tucked her legs up under her, shook her head, and then handed the letter to me.

The letterhead was, like Maggie said, from a private investigator in Memphis named Art Copeland. He wrote pretty simply that he intended to keep the deposit that Bill MacDonald had given him. He said he’d exhausted his search through Social Security, criminal, and Department of Motor Vehicles records. Still, he could not find out more about the man Abby’s father wanted.

I’m sorry but there is no record of Clyde James since 1974.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Holy shit,” Abby said.

The rain hit us as soon as we reached this wide-porched white house on the outskirts of Oxford. Man, it felt like it had been raining since I arrived in Memphis and I just wished it would stop for a few minutes. I was tired of being wet and cold and having to change clothes about every hour. Somehow, the rain felt different here as we ran to the house. Felt much colder and more brittle, little tiny needles angled at my face.

We clamored up onto the porch filled with dead plants in mossy terra-cotta pots. Abby walked ahead of me, pulling out a key from her balled fist.

Crime-scene tape covered the back entrance and it looked like someone had tried to lock up the house. A padlock had been ripped from the frame and it sat dangling and useless.

Abby tossed it aside and opened the door’s dead bolt. We ran inside as thunder boomed in the thick night, making patting sounds in the pine forest.

As we entered, thunder boomed again and shook the dark house.

She tried the light switch but nothing worked. I clicked on my lighter and Abby scurried off for a few seconds and returned with two thick candles. She rushed back into the room as if the other rooms lacked oxygen and she could only breathe when she was next to me.

“Where’s the office?” I asked.

She carefully held the candles as I, slightly shivering from the cold rain, lit them and followed her to the back of the house. The thunder crashed pretty damned close to us again and Abby reeled but caught herself and kept walking. I knew she could hear the gunshots in her head and it gave me a thick lump in my throat as I watched her trying to ignore the sounds and images.

She rolled back some wide-paneled doors and pointed at a large wooden desk and two tall metal file cabinets. The walls were painted a deep red and lined with prints of Confederate battle scenes. There was a collection of antique guns mounted on the wall.

Abby sat on the couch, teeth chattering pretty badly. Lightning spliced in a blue and purple zigzag outside and she covered her face with her hands.

“Do you have any clothes here?” I asked, trying to get her mind on something else.

She nodded, face in hands. “No.”

“Still at the dorm?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Abby, I’ll go with you. Where’s your room?”

She stayed still for a few moments and then she wordlessly got to her feet and circled around the den to a short hallway and a room covered in art print posters. Renoir. Picasso. On a long blue bookshelf, she had several trophies topped with gold horses. An old cowboy hat sat crooked on a life-size cutout of James Dean.

The room smelled stale and dead. Almost like some of the museums in New Orleans. Place had the feeling that nothing should be touched here. In the candlelight, Abby carefully opened an antique dresser and pulled out a pair of old jeans and a sweatshirt.