Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

Her curly blond hair hung loose. Her brown eyes looked tired as hell. I folded my arms and studied the spines of her books as she pulled off her jacket and peeled off her T-shirt.

In a short flash I saw her wet bra and tight stomach. I turned my head quickly.

“Doesn’t matter. You’ve already seen all of me anyway.”

I nodded and studied the books. Eudora Welty. Willie Morris.

“You like Salinger?” I asked.

I heard her slough off the sweatpants and saw a wet bra tossed onto the floor.

“Haven’t read him,” she said.

“You should. He has this story he tells in Catcher in the Rye about finding an old baseball mitt that belonged to his brother, Allie. He said Allie used to write poems up and down the fingers and into the pocket.”

When I turned back she was pulling her wet hair into a ponytail and had on a fresh pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. I picked up the wet clothes and balled them under my arm. She waited for me to finish whatever the hell I was talking about.

I smiled and said, “After a while this stuff won’t hurt so much. Keep some of their things so you can remember them.”

“You close to your folks?” she asked.

“I was.”

“They’re dead?”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

“Shit,” I said, looking away. “That was a long time ago.”

“Were they killed or something?”

“My father was an alcoholic and drank himself to death.”

“Your mother?”

I grabbed the candle from the bookshelf and took a deep breath.

“My mother just didn’t like living very much,” I said.

Her eyes changed as she watched me. They went from sad to soft, picking up her candle and for the first time truly leading the way.

For more than an hour, we tore through her father’s twin file cabinets. Seemed like we went through every file her father had ever touched. I’d read through each one and then passed it to her to read by candlelight. A couple times she looked like she had something she desperately wanted to tell me, but at the last second would change her mind and bury her head back into a file.

“What kind of law did your father practice?” I asked.

“Mainly he worked on contracts,” she said. “He helped people with their money, set up special accounts. And he did a lot with wills for old people around town. He was always busy when someone died.”

“What’s the Sons of the South?” I asked.

I tossed her a loose pile of papers and pamphlets with a Confederate battle flag logo. She read along as I did, about a lot of mission statements and quotes from dead generals. Kept on saying they were not a hate group, only preservers of Southern culture.

“Never heard him mention it,” she said, her lips still silently reading along. Rallies to save the Mississippi state flag. A battle re-enactment in Vicksburg. Some kind of big convention in Jackson, Tennessee.

“It’s a hate group,” I said.

“Says it’s not.”

“ ‘We don’t endorse the Klan’ doesn’t exactly mean they want to hold hands and sing the world a song in perfect harmony.”

“Look right here,” Abby said. “ ‘The Sons of the South does not advocate any violence or malice to anyone outside the Celtic heritage of the South. The SOS will further the sponsorship of stronger states’ rights, the advancement of Southern heritage, and the return of Christian morals to our children.’ That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“What kind of Southern heritage?”

“Oh, says ‘Celtic,’ “ she said, frowning at me. “Listen, my daddy loved the Civil War. That doesn’t mean he was a racist. Just because you support having a flag with history doesn’t mean you don’t like black people. My daddy worked with blacks his whole life.”

“Abby, it’s okay.”

“There was one time we were having a dinner party and some asshole from New York was there and talking about how Southerners were racist because we were illiterate. I thought my daddy was going to tear his head off. He said the most racist people he’d ever known lived up north.”

“Calm down,” I said, prying the pamphlet from her fingers. “Let’s just put this aside. I just wanted to know if your daddy ever talked about joining this group.”

She shook her head as I moved the folder to a separate file. We studied more and placed a few more files with the Sons of the South.

“Did he ever go over to the casinos?”

She shook her head. “Never mentioned them.”

After a while, I got up and stretched and shuffled back through the files, carefully inserting them back into each of the eight slots in the cabinet. She noticed I’d pulled out one file that contained a few crayon pictures she’d made as a kid and looked away.

“Your father owned a lot of property. Looks like he had thousands of acres across the Delta and up north. Owned some land in Jackson, Tennessee, too.”

Abby nodded, really listening, hands wandering over her face with fatigue. “Yeah, he used to take me out to some of those places. We’d hunt a little. He liked to hunt. We also used to break into old cabins in the woods and go find stuff. Sometimes we’d look for arrowheads in creeks.”

I smiled at her as I flipped back through four files I’d pulled from the rest. Outside the dull patter of rain fell from the gutters. The candles shook light across her face as I stood.

“You want to get out of here?”

“More than anything,” she said. “You find anymore about that singer?”

“I’m sure I’m missing a hell of a lot,” I said, scooping up some letters. “There were tons of case files in there that didn’t make a damned bit of sense to me.”

“Or me.”

“I’d need an accountant to decipher most of those financial records. Mainly, I found a shitload about Sons of the South and a thick file of personal letters I’ll need your help going over if you don’t mind… So, you never heard him mention the Sons of the South?”

She shook her head again and soon walked with me through the dead caverns of the house, holding the candles, and back out into the rain. She locked the door behind us, as if it really mattered, and I smelled the strong scent of candles as the small flames quickly died in the wind and wetness.

As she followed me back to my truck, her eyes on the broken rocks of the road, I noticed a skinny brown lab wagging its fat tail and placing its two muddy paws onto her chest.

“Old friend?”

She nodded.

I held my truck door open and we all climbed inside.

JON WAS BATHED in sweat and excitement waiting for the skinny guy with bad teeth to call his name and play his song. This was the opportunity that he knew would come since he met Miss Perfect. This is the way it worked when you were courtin’ a high-class woman. You sang the song. She saw you had talent. And soon you kissed her under a fake moon. Dang, it had taken him long enough to talk her into calling off their search for tonight. They were in Oxford and they could stand for a little fun. Stretch the legs. Live a Little. Love a Little. He knew what to do as soon as they’d looped through the Square for about the fiftieth time and he spotted the big plastic road sign with mismatched letters reading, KAR-E-OKE TONITE!

She’d said about a thousand times that they needed to get back and watch the house so they could kill that man Travers and some bad little girl. He told her to relax, they could track ’em to Timbuktu tomorrow. He kind of let it hang there between them like that. Kind of like that he wouldn’t mind going to Timbuktu with Miss Perfect, if he knew where it was.

Now Perfect was workin’ on her fourth daiquiri while she watched this ole goofy cat clock by the door. Swingin’ tail. Shifty bug eyes.