Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

The chairs were mismatched, rickety, and old. I felt a bit uncomfortable stretching my legs again as the chair strained with my weight. I watched JoJo’s face grow serious under a big red neon sign for Jax beer.

“Miss,” JoJo said. “I am real sorry to hear about your folks. If you get tired of this ole so and so, you can always come stay with us. Always need some help ’round here.” He winked at her, his face weathered and very black. “Jes let us know.”

Abby thanked him. Felix brought out another round on JoJo’s orders and Loretta soon appeared with four steaming portions of her famous soul jambalaya. Reheated but just as good. She didn’t tell anybody how she made it, but I knew she always began everything with a thick, smoked ham hock. Even reheated, this stuff was the essence of life: andouille sausage, onions, green peppers, and chicken soaked in Crystal sauce. A big crusty baguette from the market.

You knew food was good when no one talked. No one spoke until every bit of jam was gone and the bowl had been wiped clean with the bread. After that, Loretta began to talk about meeting with Cleve and Bobby Lee Cook and even about our encounter with Clyde at the bridge. As she told the story, she watched my face, letting me know to leave out other parts. She hadn’t told JoJo about the men coming to the bar before I left, or that someone had tried to kill me and Abby.

“So the Ghost finally up and died on you?” JoJo asked.

I watched Loretta looking at her hands and said, “Yeah. She finally just fell apart.”

“Well,” JoJo began, his eyes narrowed. He leaned back and folded his arms, a man just watching what would come out our mouths next. “Glad y’all is back.”

Felix dipped by as an awkward silence fell onto the table and lit a candle in a red glass. It was night now and the evening’s band, some guys out of Atlanta called The Shadows, were setting up.

The doors had been propped open and a biting breeze shot off Conti and bent the candle’s flame.

“Lo, you mind closin’ up tonight?” JoJo asked. “Robert Junior down at Tips and asked me to sit in.”

“I can help,” I said. I guess I spoke too loud and too soon because JoJo raised his eyebrows. “We’ll come back for the last set. Just let me get Abby settled in to the warehouse and get some clean clothes.”

JoJo nodded to himself and got up from the table.

As he turned his back, Loretta winked at me and pinched my arm. She was actually having fun fooling the old man.

“I’ll be fine, Nicholas,” she said. “Y’all get home and get rested.”

“Don’t leave this bar without me tonight,” I said. “You hear me?”

“Nicholas, I ain’t ever lived my life in fear and won’t start now. Besides, we’re back home. Memphis is a long way.”

I slipped back into my jacket and motioned to Abby. The band launched into their first song, the lyrics about souls slipping off into the Dark Side.

PERFECT LEIGH WAS damned tired of waiting. She’d been sitting on her ass in the stinky French Quarter since noon, most of it in some nasty old burger joint where she’d watched this elderly cook ritualistically pick his nose, and now she wanted a little action. She was bored. And that was about the worse thing that you could make Perfect Leigh. When she got bored she got bad. She clicked her nails together. Nice color. Siren. She whispered the words to herself, her tongue flattening on the roof of her mouth, as a cold wind knocked down Royal Street and into the darkened bar.

Where was Jon? She’d gotten off the phone with Ransom thirty minutes ago and he said to go on and get what they needed. But Jon wanted to get the car ready, said they needed good parking as if they were goin’ shopping down at Maison Blanche.

She blew out a long breath, studying the fine curve of her nails in the candlelight.

Bar was called Lafitte’s. It was supposed to be some kind of historic site although it looked to Perfect as if it’d been slapped together with a bucket of concrete and rotten wooden beams. They didn’t have lights; each one of the tables was dim and yellow from little candles. No air-conditioning either. Its tall creaky doors had been propped open to breathe in the night’s snappy cold air.

Finally, Jon sauntered on in from the cold, lanky and determined, and sat across from her. His face nothing but a bearded black grin under his cowboy hat. “What time you got?”

“Almost midnight,” she said, studying the way his mouth formed words. She wondered how he’d say si-ren. “You park in Mississippi?”

Jon didn’t answer. His face pinched in the glow of the table’s candle. Dark circles seemed to grow under his eyes as he leaned close and he played with the rings on his fingers. “Did you see him?”

“He wasn’t there, only the black woman.”

Jon looked back at the open doors and felt at the side pocket of his jacket. Perfect watched his pistonlike leg and the way his jaw chomped on a whole pack of gum. Juicy Fruit. She hated Juicy Fruit. Reminded her of when she was in Biloxi and thirteen and her mother had paid off the pageant’s judge with a visit to Perfect’s room at the Motel Six.

“Why do you care about Travers so much?” she asked, trying to turn her head and not take a whiff of the sickly sweet gum.

“He killed me.”

She again studied his features under the Resistol’s brim.

“Years ago, I died and this man was responsible.”

“You’re insane. I knew you had some quirks but I refuse to work with a real life walking head case.”

A waitress came over and asked if they wanted another couple of Cokes. They said they didn’t, but she paid her a decent tip. Decent. Not enough to be remembered. She looked around the bar and noticed the way everyone ignored them. She’d taken a lot of care to look so ordinary. Didn’t brush her hair or make up her face. Even tried to slack her shoulders a bit so no one could notice her sculpted body.

“Sweet sister, I’m not crazy,” Jon said when the woman walked away. “The man took my holy name of Jesse Garon and my birthright as the brother of E. I died at Graceland one night. All the papers said so. They said I tried to steal E’s Sun God jumpsuit and the police shot me in the heart. They said my blood washed against E’s leather bedspread.”

Perfect listened but she couldn’t think of a response. She felt all the air in the bar heat and turn to vapor before floating away as if sucked into a vacuum.

“It wasn’t me,” Jon said. “It was another True Believer who stole my wallet at the motel. He took all the money I had and thought he could get away with my driver’s license because he, too, had the look. I guess he did. He’s dead. I’m dead. Now I’m invisible. I’m Jon Burrows who floats on the mist and kills people with a talent that the world will never understand.”

“So who are you?” Perfect asked.

“Just a believer on the path.”

His jagged curve of a smile and the soaking smell of puke and Quarter beer from the street was too much already. She wanted to get it done.

“Ready?” he asked, pulling out a cheroot and striking a match against the grain of the rickety table. A breeze buckled off the flagstone walk outside and across her face like a slap.

She nodded.

“And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fell from heaven,” Jon said as he stood and began their trek over several blocks to Conti.

When E shot the holiest of messages to his fans, the ‘68 Comeback Special, He only had a few words of advice to D.J. and Scotty who were backin’ Him up: “Tell it like it is and play it dirty.” It was the first time that E had been in front of a live audience in eight years because of the secret deal He’d made with the government and President Kennedy to make films and help America’s youth. That night in ‘sixty-eight, He couldn’t even sit in the chair with the guitar. All them emotions was bubblin’ up to the surface. It was like that now for Jon; he felt an overwhelming need to kill Travers. Why couldn’t he be there, too? That’s why he was here. On this path.