Ace Atkins - Dark End of the Street

The Pippin dipped down low again and he heard Miss Perfect scream loud.

And as they cranked real slow up another hill, waitin’ for another drop, he whispered, “I loved you, but Ransom wants you dead.”

Perfect’s whole body shook and her stomach growled. She tried to run to the dark cove of that bathroom underneath a big oak, but he wouldn’t let go of her wrist. He was just a flurry of white sound and booming and swirling black and red light that ran around her brain making it buzz and fry. Goddamn, what had he done to her? What had he given her?

“Fuck you,” she said, not sure if the words were coming out or not. “Stay away.”

He reached his whole arm around her waist and walked her back to an arcade where every plinking sound and flush of color and noise made her even more sick. She thought about that woman she’d shot and even that family with the dead daughter back in Tunica and she started praying that she’d live. She would not end up a loser and dumped and used like they had been. She would get out of this.

She coughed, heaved, and puked all over herself.

Her lips and face felt disgusting, covered in vomit, her head sunk to her shoulder and she could smell her own odor and it sickened her.

She tried to stand by herself but her feet hung loose and useless like a twisted doll. She tried to be rigid but only slunk more.

“What did you do? What did you do to me?”

“I just gave you a few vitamins, woman,” he said.

Her eyes closed again and she felt her stomach keep grumbling and her bladder and bowels fill. She tried to pinch herself and stay tight but the pressure kept on building as her eyes filled with water. Her long legs were loose and exposed through her skirt and her blouse had torn at the shoulder. Dirt on her knees. Puke on her face. Her beautiful blond hair a tangled mess.

She was in a bathroom now, her panties full and soaked and she lay in a corner by a toilet. Little black hairs and smeared dirt and urine were all around her. She felt her skin get tight and the need to puke. She lathered her hands together and rubbed them all over her skirt and looked at her dirty arms and crawled farther into the nasty, horrible corner. She screamed real low and covered her face, tried to curl into a little ball like an animal. She closed her eyes real tight.

She was nasty and useless and no one would ever want her. She screamed again, it was hoarse and low and she could barely hear herself.

She peered up at the wavering figure of Jon. Clean and black-leathered and smiling down at her with his hardened blue eyes and sharpened sideburns. He kicked at her knees trying to bring them back into a more ladylike position. She pulled the material of her skirt over her soiled panties.

“Why are you doing this? Why?”

“Who am I?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Who am I?”

“Jon.”

“Who?”

“Jon.”

Then she understood and she felt her neck fill with blood and heat and she smelled the horrible smells coming from her armpits. Her head cleared for a moment with her own anger. She gripped the edge of the toilet and wavered to her feet. The bathroom stall had been scrawled on with dirty words and phone numbers. The toilet hadn’t been flushed and it looked like the water had been drained from a swamp. She clenched her teeth and stared right into his eyes and wiped her polluted hands on his leather jacket.

“Fuck you!” she screamed. “You are nobody! Nobody.”

His lip quivered and he snarled before slapping her hard across the face. “Don’t you ever say that. I am more somebody than you’ll ever be. I am somebody!”

“No, you’re not,” she said, knowing she was dead anyway. “Do you even know who you are? Are you Elvis? Are you? Are you even Jon? What happened, Jon? Can’t you speak? You pathetic little shit.”

His eyes squinted and the black circles under his eyes became even more pronounced. Like sharp sickles.

She jabbed his chest with her finger again.

“Where’s your mamma, Jon?”

He was crying now and covering his ears as if a high-pitched noise leaked into the room.

“She burned up just like those books you carry with you, didn’t she? Did you do it? Did you set fire to her house? What did she do, Jon? Why did you kill your mamma?”

“No!” he screamed. “It’s not true. My name is Jesse Garon and I’m from Mississippi and I moved to Memphis to make something of myself. My mamma lives in Hollywood and she’s livin’.”

Exhausted, he laid his back to the bathroom stall and cried as he pulled a long yellow scarf from his black leather jacket. “This was hers. He gave it to her. She kept it her whole life in her sweet, little pillow. Little sweet girl.”

She laughed, tasting the blood from her lip. She laughed and watched him smelling his scarf and covering his face with it as if he could hide.

“Ransom will kill you,” she said and stood. “He needs me.”

“Ransom tole me make it look all random and such,” he said. “They’ll find you late tonight. All twisted up and nasty.”

“Fuck you, Absalom Roach.”

Suddenly, he leaped from the ground and exploded his hands against her chest, slamming her against the metal wall. She choked, not being able to catch her breath. Her eyes filled with tears. Little short breaths of nothing.

Jon briskly twisted the yellow scarf against her neck and cried and babbled to himself, like the cooing of a baby, and then hummed a song that she’d heard before.

“Wise men say, only fools rush in,” he sang, almost as if a lullaby.

She heard her voice box crack and she fell to her ass with a squish, the broken, filthy writing on the wall around her bringing no comfort. Her hands felt wet, touching the dead hairs and urine and dirt and she cried looking at a single sentence scratched into the bathroom wall with a key: PRIDE GOETH BEFORE DESTRUCTION, AND AN HAUGHTY SPIRIT BEFORE A FALL. PROVERBS 16:17-19.

The last thing she heard was Jon singing directly and softly into her ear, “ ’Cause I can’t help, falling in love with you.”

THE MEMPHIS MENTAL HEALTH INSTITUTE was everything you could hope for in an insane asylum. The building had to have been designed sometime in the late ‘fifties or early ‘sixties with its cold white brick and blocked institutional architecture. Very boxy and utilitarian at eight stories. Gave off the same homogenized blandness of those flickering science films that I had to watch in junior high. Everything had that same washed-out feeling. The magnolia trees along the sidewalk seemed dirty and dying. The volleyball nets behind a long row of chain link were wispy and brown, the sidewalks pale and sun-bleached.

I thought about calling Charity Hospital when we got back to U’s office. Last night, Loretta’s condition had been upgraded to stable. I just wanted to make sure that change continued. I wanted her away from hospitals and soulless dwellings and back home where she belonged.

All around me, I felt like I was being watched. Workers watching my eyes to see if I was coming in to stay. Faceless people who peered from skinny little windows in the building. As U and I walked along a broken sidewalk, the 8:00 A.M… cold made me put my hands in my pockets.

Someone had slapped a flyer for a new rap album on the institute’s metal sign. OUT THA FRAME, the words read, blowing in the wind. U started laughing as we passed. I didn’t get it. It was cold. It was earlier than I’d been up in ages. I was white.

“What’s that?”

“Means you’re crazy.”

I looked at him.

“You know, not quite thinkin’ in the lines.”

“Ah-ha,” I said and winked at him while shooting a gun made out of my thumb and forefinger. “Got it, G.”