Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

Abby was really good. She clicked the hell out of the computer and brought up a dozen articles. Most were from the Commercial-Appeal but there were several in The Tennesseean.

She scrolled through the first few. Most seemed to be quoting a spokesperson for the group about their stance on keeping the Mississippi state flag with its embedded icon of the Confederacy.

This group loved that debate. And so did Mississippi; they kept the flag. It made me think about U telling me about his days playing football at Ole Miss and watching a bunch of spoiled white boys wave the flag every time he made a tackle.

He loved it so much that when the Kappa Alpha fraternity had their Old South parade, U stood on a street corner and burned the rebel flag. He didn’t tell me, but I don’t think anyone fucked with a man who could bench 485 pounds and practiced martial arts every day.

I laughed to myself and Abby kept scrolling.

There were a couple of editorials about how the Sons of the South were a bunch of privileged white men who wanted to play war games without really getting dirty. One columnist did a satirical piece about how the South should rise again and talked about the attributes of becoming a slave.

The columnist was black.

“Go on,” I said.

Abby clicked but before the story disappeared she saw something at the end of the piece that caught her attention.

“Wait,” she said. She clicked back and read through it, her nose inches away from the screen.

“What?”

“That man he’s talking about. That state senator, Elias Nix?”

“Yeah.”

“He was one of my father’s best friends. They went to school together or something. I’ve met him a few times. He was at their funeral.”

We read through a few more pieces on the group. Said they had a military compound in Jackson but their spokesman denied it. Once again, the spokesman said they were only community leaders interested in advancing Southern ways of life.

I had a pen in my mouth and had chewed the end off. I felt the ink on my tongue and spit into a trashcan.

“Your mouth’s blue,” she said.

“On my face?” I asked, rubbing my fingers over my lips.

“Nope.”

“Good.”

“You have a girlfriend, Nick?”

“Why? You like old men?”

“First off, you’re not old. You’re, like what, forty? Anyway, I was talking about Maggie. She likes you.”

“Shucks.” I wasn’t forty. Yet.

“I can tell,” Abby said. Her cheeks pinched tight as she smiled with her brown eyes.

“Is that why she grunts at me?”

“I think.”

“Well, I kind of have that department covered.”

“You married?”

“Scroll down,” I said.

“Are you?”

“No.”

“But your girlfriend wants to,” Abby said, her face glowing in the light from the monitor.

“Wait, can you pull up only ‘Elias Nix’ and ‘senator’?”

She nodded and the screen flashed with hundreds of hits.”

“How ’bout ‘Nix,’ ‘senator,’ and ‘gambling’?”

She tapped it in the prompt.

Two hits.

“What’s her name?”

“Kate.”

“You love her?”

“What is this, junior high?”

Abby laughed and socked me on the shoulder.

I smiled. “She lives in Chicago and we recently learned that’s a long way from New Orleans.”

“Your mouth is still blue.”

I spit again into the trashcan.

When I looked back at the computer screen, Abby was scrolling down a story – Nix was running for governor in November. Shit, I knew I’d seen the damned name. His face was plastered all over Memphis, but it was so late and I’d been so into Clyde James that I wasn’t thinking. Besides, I rarely paid attention. Louisiana politics were so bad that I usually slept in on election day.

“Look at this,” she said.

Apparently, this year, Tennessee was scheduled for a referendum to decide whether the state would have a lottery. And a lot of folks felt legalized gambling would be next.

Nix did, too.

He told a reporter in Memphis he’d like to see riverboat gambling on the banks of the Mississippi by the end of his term.

I CALLED U from a pay phone at the student union building and bought a Coke to wash the blue off my tongue. Abby had printed off dozens of articles and sat by a long row of vending machines, shuffling and marking pages. A few feet from me, a hippie-looking kid slept with the Cliff Notes for Crime and Punishment in his hands. He smelled pretty damned bad and I turned to face the other way, toward a long row of windows as I waited for Ulysses to pick up. He didn’t. I tried his beeper number and within about thirty seconds he called back.

“Mrs. Davis’s cathouse; may I take your order?”

“Yeah, I’m looking for a punk named Travers. Has to pay for his pussy.”

“Hold on,” I said in a high voice.

“Nick, quit fuckin’ around. What do you want? Man, I’m sitting outside some peckerwood’s trailer waiting for him to come back and get some money from his wife. I’m down to my last bottle of water and I’ve only got that bootleg Marsalis CD you sent me. It’s gettin’ old as hell.”

“At least it’s not that shit you listened to on road trips. What was that, Grand Master who?”

“Flash,” he said and took a deep breath.

“That and the Sugarhill Gang and Run DMC.”

“Man, I’m fine with that. I still love it. I have faith in the old school. And you better, too.”

“All right, listen,” I said, the hippie starting to stir at my feet. He smelled his armpit, rubbed the peach fuzz on his chin and tried to hug the brick wall. “I’m still with Abby and we found out a few things. First off, her father had hired a P.I. in Memphis to find Clyde James.”

“Your Clyde James?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Whew.”

“Second, her old man was connected to a group called Sons of the South. You know them.”

There was silence.

“You’re a charter member.”

U laughed.

“Anyway, this group is apparently connected to this state senator Elias Nix who’s running for governor.”

U coughed and I heard the static of his cell phone as he moved around. “You had me for a while. Now your ass is talking about conspiracy theories and governor’s candidates and… man, I think that peckerwood is coming in…”

“U?”

“Hold on,” he whispered. “All right, had to scrunch down in my seat again. Thought that was him.”

“Was it?”

“We’re still talkin’, ain’t we?”

“This whole thing connects back to the casinos for Abby and for me and for Clyde… Nix wants to bring casinos to Memphis.”

“That’s all we need. We’re a broke-ass city as it is.”

“Hey, man, we have them in New Orleans, too.”

“So you want me to go to Nashville and wake up Nix? Ask him why he wants to make money off all these broke motherfuckers?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Maybe later. What do you know about Tunica and the Dixie Mafia?”

“What I told you.”

“What about property records? Can we find out who owns the Grand?”

“Man, that’s a great idea. I’d call you Sherlock but that’s more an idea from Larry Holmes.”

“So you did?”

“Yep,” he said. “Hey, man, look. I got to go for real. Peckerwood is home and he’s walkin’ up the steps with a Budweiser tallboy and a fuckin’ Glock. Shit. All right; real quick: That casino is buried under corporate names so thick it would take your whole life and a NASA computer to find out who owns it.”

“You know any FBI folks we can talk to?”

“Let me check into it,” he said, sighing. “Adios.”

The hippie was wide awake at my feet and petting a small ferret; apparently he’d kept it in his ragged green book bag. He smiled and fed it some biscuit. The ferret took the morsel and then crawled back into the bag looking for more.