Ace Atkins: Dark End of the Street

A book in the Nick Travers Mystery series, 2002

December 17, 1968

Memphis, Tennessee

THE DREAM OF SOUTHERN soul music was dead. It died last year when Otis Redding’s twin-engine plane crashed into an icy Wisconsin lake, killing him and the Bar-Kays, a bunch of kid musicians from the old neighborhood. It died a few months later, too, back in April, when some peckerwood sighted a rifle from a run-down rooming house near the Lorraine Motel, taking out a man who only wanted to see some garbage workers get their due. It died again every night that summer, when hate filled the neighborhoods of south Memphis. But for Eddie Porter, it died most when black musicians raised on gospel and white musicians weaned on country and blues quit working on a style of music that was the sweetest he’d ever known.

Porter could still remember that day in June when he was helping the bass player in his band carry milk crates full of guitar cords and microphones from the Bluff City studio. A cop car filled with two white men had stopped, the doors popped open, and the men aimed their pistols at Porter. Tate, shaking like an ole woman, spoke to them in this tone that kind of broke Porter’s heart. Kind of like he was embarrassed for his race. Tate, that bucktoothed country boy, had stared at the cops as they slid their guns back into their leather holsters, as if in some way he was responsible for all the shit that was happenin’.

For Otis and Dr. King. For the burning buildings. And maybe he even took the blame for the white politicians Porter watched on television in the apartment he shared with his mutt dogs and wife he didn’t love.

For a few weeks after the cops came, Porter tried to fill the silences between Tate and Cleve, his rhythm guitar man, with all the soul he could stand from his battered Hammond B-3 organ. The music soaked into red shag carpet walls of the old movie theater that served as their studio and out through the newly barred windows and into an emerging ghetto. He played as if somehow dance music could solve Memphis’s problems.

But Memphis kept boiling. Soul kept dying. Their horn section broke up. Porter’s drummer quit. His organ broke. And he knew he couldn’t stop any of it.

Wasn’t till June that the idea came to him.

When it did, he was at the Holiday Inn by the airport, caressing the soft face of a woman who was carrying another man’s baby. He remembered the stiff mustard-colored curtains were slightly drawn and the room smelled of chlorine, gin breath, and cigarettes.

He sat there smoothing the curly black hair away from her brown eyes and feeling the child kicking in her stomach and thought about the future for the first time in his life. He knew he didn’t have anything more for Memphis. And Memphis owed him something.

The owner of Bluff City Records – that sold nothing but black music – was a potbellied white man who spent his time sweet-talking teenaged girls in his second-floor office decorated in cheetah print and velvet paintings of naked Mexican women.

Porter never could figure out what the man did. He had Porter run the sessions, deposit the checks from distributors, and pay out the other musicians. Most of the profits came from one man. Their holy God almighty, soul sensation Clyde James.

That night at the Holiday Inn, Porter found the answers with James’s wife in his lap as he watched the swirl of blues, reds, and yellows play on the stones and plastic flowers near the swimming pool. He knew he couldn’t see anything beyond tonight and that scared him like nothin’ ever could.

He could hold back a little cash with each deposit and by December he’d be free. So that’s what he did. And man, he was so cool about the whole thing. For every five checks, he’d only deposit one in his account down at the First National. It worked so good that he had more than he needed by September. And by Thanksgiving, shit, he had more than he could ever spend. Two hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars and some change. He tried like hell to get Mary to leave with him. But by that time she was fixing to have Clyde’s baby and the whole thing had turned to shit.

So, tonight, he’d packed his alligator briefcase with bundles of hundreds and covered them with paperback Westerns.

As Porter packed, he watched himself in a mirror spotted with rust. He tucked a ticket for a midnight flight to Buffalo into his corduroy jacket and smoothed his goatee.

He felt light and hard in his yellow turtleneck and brown bellbottoms. He had a Smith and Wesson tucked into a wide leather belt at his spine and almost shook with its power. Felt like the first time he’d ever been moved by a woman.

Porter was a goddamned man who was about to take what he deserved. Besides, who was going to miss that cash but fat boy Bobby Lee Cook and those hoodlums he hung around?

It was night. The moon looked like the cut edge of a fingernail and a brittle cold wind made his skin feel like paper.

He slid into his white Toranado with gray interior, cranked up WDIA, and listened to his competitors at Stax, Booker T. & the MGs, play out some soulful take on the Beatles. He could do anything. He could go anywhere and be anybody.

Porter knew he should wait it out at the airport. But he guessed he wanted to shove his deceit in Cook’s face. He circled his car to downtown and on to Germantown, where rich white people played golf and held parties under candy-striped awnings, and where the only blacks held silver trays of chilled pink shrimp.

Porter parked on Bobby Lee Cook’s lawn, nearly tripping over one of those little iron black men holding a lantern, and strutted out of the bright, cold night and into a Christmas party filled with politicians and pimps, musicians and wannabes of every kind. Some were black. Most were white. He even saw a Chinese girl wrestling with another woman in a dark room filled with a pile of mink coats.

People were drinking martinis and whiskey on ice. There were trays of liver wrapped in bacon and fat olives and candies and little sandwiches dyed red and green for Christmas. The light was dim as hell and lamps burned out green and yellow and red bulbs. Almost made you drunk to walk inside and feel the pulse of the music and see the couples rolling on the green shag or hear loud laughing in huddled circles.

Porter just wanted to see Cook, look him in the eye again, and be gone. Cook had made a point of calling him five times that day to make sure he came. At first he thought Cook was onto the scam, but then Porter figured he’d be on his doorstep if he knew.

Porter first saw Cook out of the corner of his eye in one of those silly Nehru jackets with slim black pants and Italian boots. He looked ridiculous. A fat white boy trying to be hip.

Cook ushered him into a closed office by the dining room where the muted sounds of Eddie Floyd singing “Blood Is Thicker than Water” played low on his Fisher Hi-Fi. That upbeat song really gave Porter a headache as Cook walked over to the little bar covered in zebra print.