Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

“So?”

“That about says it all.”

“Give me two days,” I said to Abby. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t up for committee.”

Abby grunted again and tromped to the bathroom to cool off. I got up to make sure she was all right. For some reason I wanted everyone to be okay with everything.

“Nick, cool out,” he said. “We got it.”

I sat back down and asked, “So, you’re in?”

“Me and you are the same, brother,” he said, looking out the window. Maybe seeing that same blue crispness but feeling better about it. “You know that. We just a couple of Zen cowboys, Travers. What else we supposed to do with our lives? Ain’t many of us around.”

“Thanks.”

“Listen, man. Loretta and JoJo have been real good to me, too,” U said, his head nodding with his own words. “Somebody mess with Loretta? Come on. You got to ask? You wanted backup on one thing, said you wanted a meeting with Elias Nix… Well, I’m gonna get you that appointment tonight.”

We didn’t go alone. On the way out of town, U picked up Bubba Cotton in, of all places, Dixie Homes, where he’d been baby-sitting his sister-in-law’s twin boys. The boys had pulled out every pot and pan their mother owned, using them for drums, as we stepped over their mess and found Bubba swilling a forty and watching a little Ricki Lake.

His sister-in-law had gotten home before us and Bubba was glad to leave because she was cussing his ass out. He sat in back of U’s Expedition on the ride north with earphones on and silently bobbed his head.

We soon dropped off the highway and away from the commercial roads and hotels and restaurants and hit a long straightaway of curving hilly blacktop. A lot of cotton fields soon turned to woods. Maple trees with yellow and red leaves. Pin oak. Cedar. A lot of pine trees coated in kudzu, almost looked like a ‘fifties horror film, It Came from the South. Kudzu everywhere. Telephone poles. Abandoned shacks. The growth had even snaked its fingers and arms through several old rusted cars.

We traveled along the road for another thirty minutes with only the sound of Bubba’s Walkman and the roaring of tires on the blacktop. We passed some corn fields, yellowed and mowed flush, and then got into more woods with gullies of bottom land where rainwater stood in stagnant rows. Turtles slept on floating pieces of wood and trash. Red bud willows draped their branches across pools, catching the final reddish-purple light of the day.

U slowed, pointed out an anonymous dirt road, and kept driving.

“Let’s get some more coffee, stretch, and check our plan. Again. I found us a campsite up the road and we’ll go through the final details.” He looked over at me, taking off his sunglasses as if just realizing the sun had been down for a while. He yawned and ran a big hand over his face. “You still cool with this?”

I checked for the Glock he’d given me and smiled. “Yeah, everything is cool.”

But I remembered some graffitied words on a decaying brick wall in downtown as we headed out. It was one of those times when the message seemed to be written just for me: SUPERMAN IS A DAMNED FOOL.

NIGHT HAD ALMOST FALLEN in backwoods Tennessee and Bubba Cotton was smacking the hell out of a tin of Planter’s roasted peanuts and eating a Nestlé Crunch. He hummed along to some song I couldn’t quite make out as he stuffed another handful into his mouth and moved his head to the music. The sound must’ve been too much because U put down these night vision goggles he’d been bragging about for the last hour, Baigish B-21s with clear vision up to 250 meters, and looked into the rearview mirror at his big, silent (with words anyway) buddy shaking his ass while on recon.

U glanced over at me in the front seat of the Expedition, his hair braided tight against his skull and wearing the same Saints grays that we’d been issued about a decade ago. Number ninety-three stamped in the middle of his chest.

“Mystikal,” U said. “Kid out of New Orleans. Don’t look so damned confused, Travers. You know there’s got to be other music besides blues.”

“Name a truer music.”

“Jazz.”

“And you’d be wrong.”

“How can music be wrong or right?” he asked. “It’s what is true to me. If I say it’s Toumani Diabate or Ali Farke Toure, would that be better than blues, more roots for you?”

“If I said that I liked Cap’n Crunch better than Lucky Charms it would be a fact,” I said. “Lucky Charms has sweetened crap in it, yellow moons and blue diamonds, and Cap’n Crunch is simple and damned tasty. I’d say it’s downright Zen-like. Besides, why don’t those kids leave that poor leprechaun alone? Little bastard can’t even take a piss without being harassed.”

U nodded, switching out the batteries in his binoculars. “Yeah, that is pretty messed up.”

“Damn kids,” I said, waiting for darkness to drop on us. Still a grayish red burning through the branches, a light purple glow to the air around U’s truck.

U agreed: “Can’t even take a piss. Plain messed up.”

Bubba kept munching on the can of nuts till he was done, and then swigged down half a bottle of Mountain Dew.

“So you saw Nix?” I asked.

“Little pointy-eared mother was out for a night jog with a couple of beefed-up dudes in camos. They took a little run around that lake,” he said, handing me the binoculars. “They’ll be back.”

“Don’t see the lake.”

I felt him push the binoculars to the right and the lake came into view in a bright green image. On the other side of the water, I saw ropes hanging from a twenty-foot tower and some rutted, narrow tunnels underneath barbed-wire grate. A longer, more advanced version of monkey bars stretched out by a small stucco hut.

“Just in case being governor means storming a third-world country.”

“Exactly,” U said.

“So, how many?”

“Saw about six so far. Shouldn’t be much trouble. Big boy behind us acts stupid as shit but he’s a great shot. You got all the clips I gave you?”

I checked the inside pockets of my leather jacket, trying to keep a cool face as my blood rushed around my head and heart. I had a hard time breathing. But the thing that bothered me most is that I felt more excited than scared. Sure I wanted to talk to Nix, have him fill in some holes about Clyde James and the casinos, and some man named Levi Ransom. Find out how much he was going to make out of this deal. Find out why the most good-hearted human being I’d ever known had been shot in the chest and left to burn up along with my best friend’s bar.

I must’ve started shaking a bit because U reached over and grabbed the binoculars back from me. “What about that Trix rabbit?” he asked me. “Ain’t he a motherfucker?”

I tried smiling and poured some more coffee from a thermos we’d filled at a convenience store into a foam cup. I looked into the darkness around us and listened to the unfamiliar sounds of crickets and more bugs. The kudzu wrapped the trees in such a way that they became giants. Looming ten feet over us, green mouths open wide, fingers branching out like claws.

I spit out the window, checked the clip in my gun, and tried to be cool, slinking into the warm seats and sipping my coffee.

My fucking hand would not stop shaking.

Our recon mission failed to spot at least fifty guys who’d apparently shown up in the last twenty-four hours. At 8:00 P.M., they flooded from a long ranch house with barred windows and metal doors and formed into columns, their breath warm clouds before their determined faces. They dressed in military pants, jackets, and boots. Some loaded into Hummers, black and green, all the stylish colors for paranoid wealthy men with small penises, and drove down rutted paths shining yellow spotlights into the woods.