Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

I watched Loretta crying and felt a thick rock form in the back of my throat. She lay her hands across his cheek. “Oh, Lord. Clyde? Clyde?”

He said something about the cold as if reading my mind. His eyes wide open now, a feverish light cast across his face.

“It’s Lo. Baby. Clyde. Come on. Clyde?”

He rolled to his elbows. I cast a quick glance to the stirring mounds around us, the tug fighting the currents and the whipping strands of fire licking the base of the bridge. I wanted to grab him and get the hell out of here. I fingered the butt of the gun. I tried to steady my breathing.

Loretta moved by him and sat down in the dirt in her five-hundred-dollar jacket to cradle his head. The ceiling above us, seeming to close in even more, shook hard as a train passed for several minutes. Light from the train splintered in across the floor and over Loretta’s face and her lips moving with words I couldn’t hear.

Clyde was crying as she held his head like you would a child’s.

My ears rang with the sound of the train, looking for anyone moving around us.

When the train passed, Clyde was talking: “The rain. It was hurting, too. I could feel the rain hurting but it wasn’t really me. I was there, in sight and soul and everything, but my body wasn’t there.”

“Clyde, come with us.”

He flopped his head around in her lap. Violently.

“Some men are looking for you, Clyde. They want to kill you. It’s all about Mary. Clyde, what happened that night with Eddie and Mary? What?”

He rolled his head.

“It’s raining. God is raining. God’s face is raining. Black rust. Black rust all over my face.”

I put my hand on Loretta’s shoulder.

“Uh-uh. I ain’t leavin’ here without him. Grab him and let’s go.”

I nodded and reached around his waist. His body buckled and he rolled to his feet scattering leaves and torn-up pieces of yellowed newsprint in the air.

“We’re just trying to help,” I said.

He was crying and rocking and he beat his fist into his leg. “No!”

Somebody yelled at me and I felt a harp thwap at my back. More little hard hits on my legs. They were stoning us. I covered my head, reached for the Glock, and fired off a round.

The throwing stopped. I saw Loretta wiping blood from her ear and I gritted my teeth.

“Come on, Clyde. Come here.” I moved toward him and he snarled at me. I lunged, got a good hold of his arms, and he clawed at my face with his curved nails. I felt the blood heat in my skin as he buckled and tried to bite my arm. He almost chomped down when I pushed him away. It was a hell of a thing to try to grab someone you didn’t want to hurt. Kind of like alligator wrestling.

“Clyde,” Loretta said. “Let me get you some help. Be just like that doctor we used to see. Remember he gave you those pills? You all right with them pills. Come on.”

I lunged for him again, pulled his skinny arms down by his sides, and then he really started writhing. I moved him toward the lot separating the bridges and out from the camp in a bear hug. His head flew back and connected with my jaw sending me reeling, almost making me pass out, as I gritted my teeth and pushed him forward, his feet off the ground.

Then he gave the most god-awful howl I’d ever heard. He was screaming and crying and moaning. His body started convulsing and Loretta screamed to put him down. And I did. He rolled to his back shaking, his eyes up in his head until he flipped to his hands and knees and vomited. I saw a pool of urine collect at his brogan shoes.

“Leave him,” she said. Her face impassive. Tears streaking her perfect makeup.

I nodded.

“We’ll need some help. He needs to be in a hospital. Lord. Nick, I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I just gave up on him. I let him go. And I knew. Goddamn me, I knew.”

We walked to the car in the weak light, and I hugged her. I heard the horn of the tug upstream and felt a harsh wind blowing across the tips of my ears.

She pushed her face into the crook of my arm and I held her tight. Her words a confusing mix of sorrow and blame.

We drove back to the Peabody, to our suite and warm beds, not saying a word.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, we drove a rental car back into New Orleans, Canal Street, and the French Quarter a little after six. A tourist carriage driver had stopped off in front of the bar. His clients, confused elderly women with their new digital cameras, seemed impatient as we walked past them and found the driver drinking a cold one and talking with Felix about the Saints. Felix didn’t like him. And neither did I. We’d had some run-ins about the way he treated his horses. As soon as the driver saw me, he threw back the Dixie, washing off his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket, and tromped out the door.

Felix laughed as he continued to slice lemons and absently watch SportsCenter from behind the bar. His black bald head so slick and clean the images of the television reflected off his skull.

Loretta walked ahead of Abby and me into the far corner of the bar where JoJo kept his office, a dull yellow light showing from a cracked door. She was tired as hell and pretty quiet on the way home on Interstate 55. Earlier that morning, she’d had Clyde committed to the Memphis Mental Health Institute on Poplar. I’d gone out with some of their wranglers, although they called them something much more official, and I was tired, too. The fight with Clyde had been pretty nasty and the way Loretta’s face dropped again at the center was hard to watch.

I sat at the bar. Smiled at Felix. Felix smiled back and absently popped the top off a Dixie and hammered it next to my elbow.

“You thirsty?” I asked Abby.

She nodded. Felix popped another.

“You’re in luck,” he said. “I ain’t askin’ for IDs today.”

I introduced them as I finished half of the cold beer. I was dead, travel tired. I wanted to go back to the warehouse and sleep for a couple days. Maybe even hibernate. I stretched my legs off the barstool.

The pale yellow afternoon light shot in broken, loose fingers between handbills that had been Scotch-taped in the window. Some so brittle and old that they’d somehow fused to the glass. I heard the clip-clop of the driver and horse rambling away into a French Quarter dusk.

“How long has this place been here?” Abby asked. She tugged on the beer, too hard, and the foam spilled over onto her hand.

“Long as I’ve been alive.”

She seemed okay with the answer as she felt along the edges of the old mahogany bar, feeling the cuts, cigarette burns, and dents as if they were braille markings.

We watched SportsCenter with Felix for a while as the afternoon regulars of T-shirt salesmen and Bourbon Street day players rolled in for a cold one before heading home or to begin their night. I hoped I’d see Oz or Hippie Tom. But it was early and I believed Oz may have started his fall ghost tours since it was close to Halloween.

I felt an arm reach across my throat and heard a gruff, weathered voice say: “Gettin’ soft when an old man can sneak up behind you.”

Without looking up I said, “Shouldn’t have to watch your back in your own home.”

“Yeah,” JoJo said, laughing. “Just like a crazy man to call a bar his home.”

I turned and gave JoJo a quick shake so he wouldn’t try to crush my knuckles as he always did with his thick bricklayer hands.

“Abby, I’d like you to meet the top male stripper in New Orleans, Mister Joseph Jose Jackson.”

He reached out and kissed her hand. “With his legs, he’d be lucky to make a nickel on Rampart Street.”

Abby laughed and JoJo motioned us back to the far corner table where he conducted business and occasionally drank with dead men. I wondered how much Loretta had told him as we sat down.