Dark End of the Street - v4 (28 page)

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.

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.”