Dark End of the Street - v4 (8 page)

“Nope.” I took a few breaths and pulled some tomatoes off my boot. “Hey man, you guys don’t happen to know a man named Clyde James?”

“Yeah, we know a Clyde. Sleep here sometime.”

“He’ll be back?”

“Prolly down with Wordie,” one said.

“Who’s Wordie?”

“Some woman who kiss his ass,” the man said, smelling his shoe again.

I took a final puff of the cigarette and pulled some soggy peach off my jacket. The man kept muttering, “She only like him ’cause she think he used to be somebody famous.”

I smiled.

“You know where she lives?”

“Down in Dixie somewhere. You know, Dixie Homes. Where the po’ folks stay.”

WHEN ABBY WAS eight years old, she used to sneak into the woods behind her parents’ house in Oxford to make forts from small trees like the Indians once did. She’d read somewhere in a child’s science book about how some tribe up north would bend little trees to the ground to make an arc. The Indians would then make a shell by covering the tree with more leafy branches to protect themselves from the wind and rain. When Abby made her little fort, she always chose the most remote location on her parents’ land. She didn’t want Maggie to find her, or her parents, or anyone. Inside, she’d kept simple things: an old broom to smooth the dirt floor, a few My Little Ponys, and her favorite book, Where the Wild Things Are.

Mostly she’d just hidden from everyone, beneath the branches listening to the birds and the rustle of squirrels, believing the animals would keep her secret. No one would know where she was. Abby was invisible and that had given her peace.

On the road with Ellie, Abby wondered if she’d ever know that same peace again as lightning cracked a veined pattern across the flat sky of northern Mississippi. Ellie sped through back hamlets to Oxford skirting the highway around Holly Springs. The leather of Ellie’s car smelled fresh and new, and the hot coffee they bought at the truck stop made her think of home.

She took a deep breath and watched the weathered barns, trailer homes, and convenience stores whip by the car window. Her eyes felt heavy and she hugged her arms across her chest. Ellie was still rambling on about her latest boyfriend and some new restaurant on the Square that served crepes with strawberries. Abby wasn’t listening and didn’t really care. She was going home. She was leaving the woods.

“Son of a bitch,” Ellie yelled, thumping the wheel of her car. “We’re going to have to stop in a minute. I’m out of gas and about to pee in my pants.”

The blacktop loped into a sharp curve before stretching into a brief straightaway and then cutting through a red mud hill. Ellie flicked on the stereo and started singing along with some old song about “boots made for walkin’.”

“ ‘One of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you,’ “ Ellie sang, beating out the fuzzy guitar on the wheel.

Abby tore open a Butterfinger she’d bought at the truck stop, tried to ignore the music, and said, “You still in school?”

“Yep,” Ellie said. “You ever hear of a professional student?”

Abby nodded, taking a small bite. Orange crumbs dropping into her lap while Ellie punched the car up to about seventy.

Abby’s fingers clawed into the leather of the seats. White lights in the buildings shot by almost as if they were in a dark tunnel. Rain splattered her windshield and in the headlights the highway asphalt looked like glass.

“So you met Maggie through your boyfriend?”

“Yep.”

“Who is that?”

“Jamie Jensen.”

“Don’t know him.”

“He was a backup quarterback a couple years back, now he’s a bouncer at the High Point.”

Abby laughed. “For Raven?”

Ellie nodded in the passing light of the road and mashed the accelerator up to eighty-five. Everyone knew Raven “Son” Waltz. At twenty-eight, he was the biggest dope supplier for most of Oxford and north Mississippi. Kid had black eyes and dirty fingernails and ran this cinder block roadhouse at the county line where you could drink on Sunday.

Ellie’s fingers rolled over the steering column and the back wheels slightly fishtailed turning a corner. Suddenly, a deer sauntered out to the middle of the road and Abby shut her eyes tight as Ellie took the car up onto the muddy shoulder, punched the accelerator again, and careened around the animal.

“Jesus,” Abby said. “Could you slow it down a little?”

“I told you, I have to pee. All this water is pushing at me.”

Ellie slowed the car and turned down the stereo as a song came on about a bad dude named Tony Rome.

“Abby, I hate to ask this, darlin’, but do the police know what happened to your parents?”

“Police say they were robbed.”

“You believe ’em?”

A tow truck barreled toward them in the passing lane and cut back about twenty yards ahead. Ellie gave a short burst of the horn but otherwise seemed to ignore the fact she’d almost crashed.

“No,” Abby said.

“What do you think happened?”

Abby shrugged.

“Was your father workin’ on anything?”

“Look, Ellie, I get real sick to my stomach when I talk about this.”

“Sure, sure.” Ellie smiled and patted her thigh. “It’s just that sometimes holdin’ on to somethin’ so tight can make you sick inside. You know? Holdin’ on to things that aren’t healthy. I saw this movie one time where this man got real sick. I think cancer or somethin’. I’m not sure. Well, anyway, he goes to see this Chinese fella. You know really wise and old? Well, the Chinese fella tells him the sickness was caused by holding on to negative things. All the bad stuff he knew in his life lived in his insides.”

Abby watched the front of the car swallow the yellow passing lines, the soft blue glow of the car’s console lulling her to sleep. She turned away from Ellie, tucked her hands under her ear and stared out her window. A sickness passed through her like it was eating her insides. She could feel it like acid dripping through her heart and liver, yellow and burning. She shut her eyes as tight as she could.

A few minutes later, the car slowed, turned off the highway, and bumped along a dirt road before stopping. Abby opened her eyes, pellets of rain rolling down the passenger-side window. Outside, there was a 1940s gas station with those tall glass pumps rusting underneath a drooping overhang. The doors were sunbleached and padlocked. Windowpanes broken.

“Ellie?”

“Hold up, doll, just need to use the little girl’s room.”

“I don’t think . . .”

But she was gone and skirting around the edge of the old gas station. Abby stretched and looked across the highway to see if she recognized anything. A bright orange and red glow broke through some leafless trees as wind scattered pieces of loose trash across the window. The radio played some more of Ellie’s oldies.

Abby bit a piece of cuticle and turned down the stereo.

A few minutes passed and finally she opened the door, stood on the frame, and searched through the woods. She called Ellie’s name three times. Her heart began to beat strongly in her ears and even though it was cool, she could feel a bead of sweat run down the back of her neck.

“Ellie!”

She left the car door open, a warning bell sounding, and walked beneath the gas station overhang. Weeds grew at the base of a rotting gutter and a double-sided STP sign clacked against a rusted drum of oil.

The weeds ate past her sneakers and the bright light cutting through the darkness reminded her of dawn. A motorcycle whizzed by. The car’s warning bell kept sounding.

Abby skirted the corner of the store, loping down a red mud hill, rich with the storm’s runoff. The afternoon was almost electric in the rainy blue-gray light.

“Ellie?”

Abby heard the sound of skittering around the back edge of the building. Her breath came labored through her nose and she felt a dampness underneath her arms. A man’s voice mumbled somewhere deep into a patchy pine forest where branches clacked together like bamboo.

“Ellie?”

A piece of wood splintered.

Feet shuffled faster now.

Abby bolted back up the muddy embankment to the car. About halfway up the little hill, she heard an approaching car. Almost to the top, her feet gave out in the orange mud sending her sliding, fingernails clawing into the earth.

She could taste the iron-rich mud in her mouth and feel the dirt piercing deep under her nails. She pressed her palms flat against the hill and dug her sneakers into the ground.

A hand gripped the back of her sweatshirt.

She screamed.

She kicked at the head of a man in a black ski mask but he only gripped her ankle tighter. She kicked again and broke free and scrambled more, her breath working in her dry mouth.

At the top, another man in a mask grabbed her by her sweatshirt, twisted the muzzle of a gun into her ear, and pushed her back to Ellie’s car.

Two minutes later, they’d thrown her into the trunk and skidded out. In the weak red glow of the taillights, Abby said her first prayer in months.

DIXIE HOMES, one of Memphis’s oldest public housing projects, stood tired and beaten not far from an insane asylum and a record store once frequented by Elvis Presley. I recognized the projects almost instantly because of an article I’d read in Rolling Stone about some rappers who’d been raised there. Name was hard to forget. But these projects weren’t even close to being as decrepit and mean as those in New Orleans. They were old but clean and reminded me of the stories I’d heard about what public housing used to be like in the ‘fifties. Dixie Homes consisted of several rows of two-story red brick units separated by a common area filled with blackened barbecue pits made from oil drums cut in half, rusted dime-store sun chairs, and clotheslines stretched taught from crooked metal crosses. Through the common areas, tattered clothes dried in the weak fall sun that had replaced the rain.

I parked near Poplar and walked through the projects asking anyone I saw if they knew a woman named Wordie. Didn’t feel uncomfortable or uneasy. Most people in the projects were a hell of a lot friendlier than those you’d meet in those yuppie cracker box apartments that lined Metairie. Shit, this was a community. I knew I’d find Wordie within ten minutes. People here actually knew each other. Had to if they wanted to survive. About five minutes later, a little old black woman with enormous — almost Jackie O–sized — sunglasses carrying a walker pointed to the next street over. Said Wordie had a Santy Claus on her porch.

I thanked her, popped a couple of fresh pieces of Bazooka in my mouth, and walked up the winding hill where yellow, red, and brown leaves scattered over me like ticker tape.

I soon saw the plastic Santa Claus, black and carrying a fat sack, standing by a corner unit. A crushed Coke can and stray headless Barbie doll lay at the foot of the Santa like discarded presents. I knocked on the worn wood of the screen door.

At the top of the hill, a group of teens lingered by a convenience store pay phone waiting to sell crack to white kids from the suburbs. At the base of the hill, two black children dressed in starched school uniforms walked by my Bronco carrying backpacks heavy laden with books.

Just as I was about to look in the window, the door swung open revealing one of the largest women I’d ever seen. Even larger than the woman at Wild Bill’s. This woman could kick her ass. Her arms were the size of my thighs. Her thighs were as large as my waist. She wore a heavy scowl upon her lips as if she’d been waiting for me to show up all day so she could vent all her problems upon me.

“Hello, ma’am.”

She had on a tight black muscle T-shirt, black biker shorts, and pink Jelly shoes. Her hair had been woven and dyed into a mismatched pattern of yellow and red braids. I wanted to ask her where in the hell she got size-forty biker pants.

I didn’t. I was scared.

“You Wordie?”

“Maybe. Who the fuck is you?”

“A friend of Clyde’s.”

She crossed her arms over her massive breasts, the left one adorned with a tattoo of a red rose.

“His sister’s trying to find him.”

“Listen, I got to go,” she said, trying to close the door. I could hear the chatter of Oprah Winfrey inside.

“What’s Oprah talkin’ about today?”

Wordie gave me a frown. “Oh, I don’t know. Some woman givin’ advice to women whose got husbands that peckers don’t work.”

“You married?”

“Hell no,” she said, giving a little laugh, then catching herself and then trying to close the door again.

“His sister Loretta sent me.”

Wordie put her hands on her massive hips and said, “You know Loretta Jackson?”

“She’s family.”

“Hmm.”

“She’s like family.”

“Really?”

I nodded.

“C’mon in,” she said, leaving the wood door to batter the frame. I followed her inside to Oprah and the smell of smoked meat and greens.

T
he greens were great. Firm and salty, but with that smoky flavor that tasted like home and JoJo’s and everything I valued. I liked Wordie, and for the moment Wordie seemed to like me. Well, she acted like she liked me in between commercials and Oprah — which did truly feature stories about men whose peckers didn’t work — as she showed me old brown vinyl picture albums containing clippings on Clyde James that dated back to 1964 and his work in gospel.

“Do you think I could borrow this sometime?” I asked. “Would love to make copies of these articles.”

She looked at me, her face pinched tight, and then back at the television.

I turned back to the newspaper clippings that were yellowed and worn thin from constant reading. I flipped to a page with an article whose headline read
WIFE OF NEGRO MUSICIAN EXECUTED
. I slowly read the story, the page smelling like mothballs and silverfish:

M
EMPHIS
— Police discovered the bodies of two Negroes early Sunday morning in what detectives are calling an apparent execution.
    The victims have been identified as Mary James, 29, and Eddie Porter, 33. James is the wife of Clyde James, a local singer. Porter played organ in James’ band, said Bobby Lee Cook, owner Bluff City Records.
    According to Detective Ray Jenkins, Memphis Police Department, the bodies were found at the James’ home, 433 Rosewood Ave. about 10
a.m.
Both had suffered gunshot wounds to the back of the head.
    Jenkins would not say if the department had any suspects. No arrests have been made.
    Cook said Clyde James has reached national success with a recent chart topper called “Lonely Street.” He said James was devastated when he learned of the death of his wife and friend. Cook said the singer is with family and members of the First Zion Church.
    “Eddie Porter was one of the finest musicians I’ve ever known and will be greatly missed by everyone in the Memphis’s recording industry,” Cook said.