Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

“You don’t like getting older, do you?”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I just like keeping my world the way it is.”

She nodded and poured the rest of the coffee. It was still hot and tasted the same way as the cup before.

“If you don’t move on with your life you may just keep repeating the bad stuff, too.”

I drank the coffee.

We were quiet and looking at each other until Abby bounded into the room. She was showered and red-cheeked and smiling and said, “Ready?”

I smiled across at Maggie.

And she smiled back before looking outside at the wide expanse of cotton fields. Familiar and unknown.

I stood and said: “I know a great barbecue restaurant in Clarksdale.”

“You mind keeping Hank?” Abby asked.

“Just get your gun ready and be quiet, for God’s sake,” Perfect said, as she checked her makeup in the rearview and blotted her Torch Lily lipstick with a gas receipt. They’d been squatting on Abby’s cousin’s house for the last hour and Jon had taken more of his little white pills. He wanted to break into the house right this second and kill them all.

Jon unfolded his arms from his chest, his left leg jumping up and down, while he chewed a big wad of gum. “I’m gettin’ sick of waitin’,” he said, still pissed that she’d slapped his hand under the covers this morning. “Ransom didn’t hire me for no baby-sittin’ job.”

“It’s his show,” she said. “We’ll just wait.”

“Maybe I want to make it mine.”

She had a damn awful hangover only made that much worse by this rockabilly hit man who wanted to get into her pants. Again. All right, so she got drunk. So, she asked him to perform a few duties. So what? She didn’t owe him shit.

After a few moments, Jon asked, “Why didn’t you tell me last night about this cousin she had?”

“I didn’t, that’s all.”

“No. You was too busy playin’ with my mind,” Jon said, and rammed his fist into the dash of the car, grunting loud.

“Grow up, Jon,” Perfect said. She felt a little edgy but at least clean. She’d taken a thirty-minute shower and shaved her legs, changed into a pink low-neck cashmere sweater, Earl Jeans, and Jimmy Choo stiletto boots. Huge tortoiseshell glasses with lenses so dark you couldn’t see her eyes.

Something moved at the front of the old white house. “See him?” she asked, pointing out Travers walking down a crusty dirt road and getting into his truck.

Jon licked his lips as the truck pulled out and disappeared. “We’ll catch you down the road,” he said to himself.

Perfect cranked the car and followed, hanging back.

Jon spun out the cylinder from his gun, counted the bullets, and popped it flush with the barrel. His leg kept hopping up and down off the floorboard as they curved off a county road to Highway 6 heading west to Batesville. Seemed like they were running on the bottom edge of that triangle that stretched southeast from Memphis to Oxford and west back over to Tunica and Highway 61. Or maybe they were just headed back north to Memphis when they hit I-55.

“I want you to call up Ransom and tell him it’s time,” Jon said as he inspected his swollen knuckles and sucked the blood off the scrape. He must’ve hit the metal car logo when he punched the dashboard.

She laughed at him.

His eyes were dark and ringed with circles and he stared straight ahead, rocking. She saw another gun, looked like a little Beretta, sticking out of his jean pocket. He gritted his teeth when he noticed her staring.

She could always read people. Get that feeling inside her head about them. But with Jon she didn’t feel anything. It was almost as if his head were blank, only wrapped up in the emotion he felt at the minute. He turned to her with hollow eyes and she got a chill.

Gave her goose bumps all down her neck. Her mouth dried out for a second.

She couldn’t breathe but then the old instincts came back. She reached down and grabbed him between the legs.

“Are you really trouble, Mr. Jon?” Perfect asked, gripping him tight, making promises with her hand that the rest of her body would never keep.

Jon curled his lip and put on a pair of gold metal glasses he’d bought when they met at Graceland. “If you’re looking for trouble, you came to the right place.”

BACK IN THE DAY, Clarksdale was the capital of the Delta’s cotton kingdom and the central hub for Mississippi’s blacks leaving the South during the Great Migration. They could head out of the fields up to Memphis or purchase that big ticket to Chicago where they could reinvent themselves, as Muddy Waters did in ‘forty-three. The town pulsed with energy back then. Down on Issaquena Avenue, you could sell your cotton, rent a woman, buy a bottle of whiskey, or just a sack of cornmeal for your family. Now most of the black downtown was covered in spray-painted plywood and was wavering after a recent crack epidemic. Most folks who could get out went on to Memphis to find higher paying jobs, away from working crops or as maids in the half-dozen motels. But recently, the city had been trying damned hard to turn Clarksdale into a tourist site.

The old underbelly of society, blues, was now the main focus of a town once overrun by white landowners. There was a damned good museum housed in the old train station and a few local businessmen had opened a juke with a Hollywood actor who was born around here.

But the old circuit I remembered from ten years ago was gone. Sunflower Avenue was pretty much vacant and old Wade Walton, who used to cut my hair – telling stories of doing the same for Muddy Waters, Ike Turner, and Sonny Boy Williamson – was dead. His store just an empty cinder block shell down by the museum that sat in the shadow of hulking grain elevators.

It was Monday afternoon and gray and cold. Fat black clouds floated by as if they were in a dirty river. No thunder or rain. Tornado weather. An electric hum in the air and complete silence around the downtown.

I had a lot of friends at the museum. Most of them pretty up-to-date on politics; one was a former raging hippie who knew exactly where to find Jude Russell’s place. It was on Highway 61 running down toward a little town called Alligator.

Abby waited in the car while I used a pay phone to call Loretta. I knew she’d been appreciating the updates and I was glad to give them. It made me feel a connection to home that I always needed while I was on the road. It was almost as if I wanted someone to remind me who I was.

The phone rang on a rough connection to New Orleans, wind blowing paper cups and clinking aluminum cans across the street. The phone kept on ringing and I looked at my watch, a warning siren howling in the distance.

Inside my truck, Abby was reading liner notes on some CDs and playing with her hair. Two more rings. Ever since we’d met I had this overwhelming feeling that I needed to protect her. It felt like she was family. The way I imagined a big brother would look out for a younger sister. Like if some boy went too far with her, you’d feel the need to put his head through a wall. It was like that. I wanted to put someone’s head through a wall for Abby. Being with her in Oxford at her house and meeting Maggie only made that more intense.

I waved. She waved back.

The phone kept on ringing. Nothing.

The hunting lodge wasn’t hard to find at all. It was just hard getting into. My buddy at the Delta Blues Museum had told me I’d have no problem finding it because of the wall around it. I asked him to describe it and he simply said, “You’ll see.”

And I did. A log fence surrounded the property, probably about fifteen feet tall, with pointed edges on the top like the old cavalry forts, or the gate in Jurassic Park. There was a dirt road that followed the wall for about a half mile until a break where I saw the outline for a retractable door. An intercom with a keypad looped from a metal post and I drove next to it.