Ace Atkins: Dark End of the Street

“No, Miss Leigh,” he said, rearranging the cards like an idiot. She saw everything he had. But she’d let him win. Again. “I appreciate it though. My Lord, look how much I got. Must be two hundred dollars here.”

“Be a lot more if you take the offer,” she said. Real sweet. Not hard or hustly. But the way she imagined Gina would say it. Please, her words whispered, please accept your future.

“Ma’am,” he spoke, real indignant as if he’d just had a cattle prod inserted into his rectum. “We bought that land in ‘sixty-two and don’t see no good reason for leavin’ now.”

Perfect – in full Gina mode now – smiled. Real tight smile with her eyes crinkled up but not showing a bit of teeth. Maybe even showed a bit of broken heart in her failed mission.

“Well, if you folks ever reconsider,” she said, “we’d appreciate it.”

Her smile dipped into her glass of wine tasting their souls and their fears and desires. By morning’s end, she’d own them. They’d already opened too much. And they were hers.

She didn’t have them bent until 7:00 A.M… the next day over a breakfast in the casino’s Mardis Gras Time! restaurant. Some dummy in a red-and-white-striped vest played some New Orleans music on a Casio keyboard while a bunch of tired old people mashed soupy grits and butterless eggs into their dry mouths.

She’d stayed up with them all night, until a white sun washed through their curtains and over their soulless faces. Both full of whiskey, packs of cigarettes, totally spent from telling a volume worth of Gina stories.

Gina once adopted a stray cat that had a cyst the size of an orange in its throat. She cried and cried until her daddy took it to a country vet who cut it out for five hundred dollars. That old cat lived for another fifteen years and ate grits with honey and sugar.

And then there was the time Gina thought she’d created the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. She called the folks at Nestlé and asked them if they’d pay her a million dollars for the recipe. That’s when she was fifteen and, to be honest, to Perfect, Gina sounded kind of stupid.

But Perfect nodded and nodded.

Why were they telling her all of this after all these years? the Fishers asked. They’d barely spoken about dear Gina since the accident.

Yeah, Perfect wondered, as she combed the platinum hair back over the left eye and adjusted the rubber bracelets on her wrists.

When they got to the point about Luke, the tractor, and the wedding ring, she knew she had them. She just watched their faces fall, their hearts empty like a broken water main, and their bodies convulse with memories buried for far too long.

She didn’t even have to ask. She simply walked to the phone and called for the Cobra – her little pet name for the casino’s oily attorney.

Within fifteen minutes of the contract signing at breakfast, she was washing that really god-awful Vidal Sassoon mousse from her hair in a room Humes had gotten for her. For some reason, Duran Duran songs kept playing in her head like a bad insult to a horrible night.

Soon they’d be kissing her ass before she headed back to her small apartment in Memphis where she lived with her ‘sixties picture books and her antique mirrors.

The money would come Western Union.

She’d live for months without the virus of the outside world to taint her.

But as she was letting down the top on her ‘sixty-five Mustang convertible, Humes stopped her. She lifted her travel bag into the backseat and stared at his face framed by the purple and green lights of the Magnolia Grand floating in a fake river.

An agriplane buzzed overhead and a stray cloud on a cloudless day shielded the sun.

“What?”

“He has something for you,” Humes said, his gray hair looking like silver against his black skin.

“Not interested.”

“It’s more money than you’ve ever known.”

“Keep talkin’,” Perfect said, checking out her reflection in the glass of an SUV parked behind him. “I’m always open to new ideas.”

FORTY MILES OUTSIDE MEMPHIS, I blew a tire, almost ran over a skin-and-bones mongrel dog, and nearly barreled off Highway 61 and headlong into a fundamentalist Baptist church. But luckily I missed the dog by a snout and came careening to a stop a few feet from the church’s cemetery. It was about noon and dry and hot as I climbed out of my dusty 1970 Bronco; a friend of mine dubbed it the Gray Ghost for its color and phantomlike ability to perform. I quickly began searching in the flatbed among milk crates full of cassettes of field interviews and juke house music for the jack and frequently patched spare. I could only find my Army duffel bag full of T-shirts and jeans and work boots, my case of Hohner harmonicas, and a box set of interviews conducted by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. The tire. No jack.

I took off my blue jean jacket, wiped my now-sweating face, and threw the jacket into the passenger seat. I wore a white T-shit, already smeared with sauce from a barbecue breakfast at Abe’s in Clarksdale, and rolled up my sleeves as I hunted for a greasy jack in the backseat. Finally, I found it and began to work.

I’d been out of New Orleans for the past three days and had only left Greenwood with about two hours of tape from a childhood friend of Eddie Jones, a.k.a. Guitar Slim, one of the greatest blues guitarists I’d ever heard and the subject of my often-delayed book. A book I’d delayed so much since joining the faculty at Tulane that they gave me until the fall to wrap up the project. I agreed. It was October and I was reworking chapter two.

As I cranked the jack, I looked at the countryside surrounding the highway. Besides the church, there wasn’t much. A rotted barn with a rusted roof, a defunct convenience store among a row of three other storefronts. Even the church looked abandoned in this Delta ghost town. About the only thing around here was cotton, and being that it was mid-October, the fields were brown and bursting with white bolls. A complete sea of those little white dots blowing under a cloudless blue sky in a wind that quickly dried my sweat from working the jack. My biceps swelled and heated with exhaustion.

I grunted and clenched my teeth when I finally got the truck up and began concentrating on the tire. As I worked, I thought about where I’d start looking for Loretta’s brother in Memphis.

Taking a break from Slim would be a welcome distraction. Of course, I’d become kind of an expert on these distractions. When I finished up playing defensive end for the New Orleans Saints about ten years ago, I found myself kind of lost for a trade. Hitting people really hard wasn’t something that you used on your résumé. So, I went back to Tulane, which I attended as an undergrad, got a masters, and then kept rolling on to the University of Mississippi for my doctorate in Southern Studies.

My specialty was recording oral histories or hunting information on long-lost or dead musicians. That meant crisscrossing the Delta or Chicago or parts of Texas searching for hundred-year-old birth certificates or trying to find folks who’d rather stay hidden. Among music historians, I was what you’d call a blues tracker.

And my limited trade often got muddled with helping musicians out: from royalty recovery to getting criminal cases re-examined.

But hunting down Loretta’s brother didn’t have a damn thing to do with my job teaching blues history at Tulane, or even with the small-time music articles I sometimes published.

I’d known Loretta and JoJo since I’d come to New Orleans as a skinny teenager from Alabama. After my parents died, the Jacksons kind of adopted me. Their apartment on Royal and the blues bar on Conti became my homes. JoJo taught me how to play nasty licks on my harp and Loretta taught me how to cook some mighty fine soul food. She also gave me a place to do my laundry and hang out while other kids were going home during Christmas and summer vacation. They attended every home game that I played at Tulane and with the Saints, and my graduation ceremonies with even more satisfaction.