Dark End of the Street - v4 (18 page)

Abby tossed it aside and opened the door’s dead bolt. We ran inside as thunder boomed in the thick night, making patting sounds in the pine forest.

As we entered, thunder boomed again and shook the dark house.

She tried the light switch but nothing worked. I clicked on my lighter and Abby scurried off for a few seconds and returned with two thick candles. She rushed back into the room as if the other rooms lacked oxygen and she could only breathe when she was next to me.

“Where’s the office?” I asked.

She carefully held the candles as I, slightly shivering from the cold rain, lit them and followed her to the back of the house. The thunder crashed pretty damned close to us again and Abby reeled but caught herself and kept walking. I knew she could hear the gunshots in her head and it gave me a thick lump in my throat as I watched her trying to ignore the sounds and images.

She rolled back some wide-paneled doors and pointed at a large wooden desk and two tall metal file cabinets. The walls were painted a deep red and lined with prints of Confederate battle scenes. There was a collection of antique guns mounted on the wall.

Abby sat on the couch, teeth chattering pretty badly. Lightning spliced in a blue and purple zigzag outside and she covered her face with her hands.

“Do you have any clothes here?” I asked, trying to get her mind on something else.

She nodded, face in hands. “No.”

“Still at the dorm?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Abby, I’ll go with you. Where’s your room?”

She stayed still for a few moments and then she wordlessly got to her feet and circled around the den to a short hallway and a room covered in art print posters. Renoir. Picasso. On a long blue bookshelf, she had several trophies topped with gold horses. An old cowboy hat sat crooked on a life-size cutout of James Dean.

The room smelled stale and dead. Almost like some of the museums in New Orleans. Place had the feeling that nothing should be touched here. In the candlelight, Abby carefully opened an antique dresser and pulled out a pair of old jeans and a sweatshirt.

Her curly blond hair hung loose. Her brown eyes looked tired as hell. I folded my arms and studied the spines of her books as she pulled off her jacket and peeled off her T-shirt.

In a short flash I saw her wet bra and tight stomach. I turned my head quickly.

“Doesn’t matter. You’ve already seen all of me anyway.”

I nodded and studied the books. Eudora Welty. Willie Morris.

“You like Salinger?” I asked.

I heard her slough off the sweatpants and saw a wet bra tossed onto the floor.

“Haven’t read him,” she said.

“You should. He has this story he tells in Catcher in the Rye about finding an old baseball mitt that belonged to his brother, Allie. He said Allie used to write poems up and down the fingers and into the pocket.”

When I turned back she was pulling her wet hair into a ponytail and had on a fresh pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. I picked up the wet clothes and balled them under my arm. She waited for me to finish whatever the hell I was talking about.

I smiled and said, “After a while this stuff won’t hurt so much. Keep some of their things so you can remember them.”

“You close to your folks?” she asked.

“I was.”

“They’re dead?”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

“Shit,” I said, looking away. “That was a long time ago.”

“Were they killed or something?”

“My father was an alcoholic and drank himself to death.”

“Your mother?”

I grabbed the candle from the bookshelf and took a deep breath.

“My mother just didn’t like living very much,” I said.

Her eyes changed as she watched me. They went from sad to soft, picking up her candle and for the first time truly leading the way.

F
or more than an hour, we tore through her father’s twin file cabinets. Seemed like we went through every file her father had ever touched. I’d read through each one and then passed it to her to read by candlelight. A couple times she looked like she had something she desperately wanted to tell me, but at the last second would change her mind and bury her head back into a file.

“What kind of law did your father practice?” I asked.

“Mainly he worked on contracts,” she said. “He helped people with their money, set up special accounts. And he did a lot with wills for old people around town. He was always busy when someone died.”

“What’s the Sons of the South?” I asked.

I tossed her a loose pile of papers and pamphlets with a Confederate battle flag logo. She read along as I did, about a lot of mission statements and quotes from dead generals. Kept on saying they were not a hate group, only preservers of Southern culture.

“Never heard him mention it,” she said, her lips still silently reading along. Rallies to save the Mississippi state flag. A battle re-enactment in Vicksburg. Some kind of big convention in Jackson, Tennessee.

“It’s a hate group,” I said.

“Says it’s not.”

“ ‘We don’t endorse the Klan’ doesn’t exactly mean they want to hold hands and sing the world a song in perfect harmony.”

“Look right here,” Abby said. “ ‘The Sons of the South does not advocate any violence or malice to anyone outside the Celtic heritage of the South. The SOS will further the sponsorship of stronger states’ rights, the advancement of Southern heritage, and the return of Christian morals to our children.’ That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“What kind of Southern heritage?”

“Oh, says ‘Celtic,’ “ she said, frowning at me. “Listen, my daddy loved the Civil War. That doesn’t mean he was a racist. Just because you support having a flag with history doesn’t mean you don’t like black people. My daddy worked with blacks his whole life.”

“Abby, it’s okay.”

“There was one time we were having a dinner party and some asshole from New York was there and talking about how Southerners were racist because we were illiterate. I thought my daddy was going to tear his head off. He said the most racist people he’d ever known lived up north.”

“Calm down,” I said, prying the pamphlet from her fingers. “Let’s just put this aside. I just wanted to know if your daddy ever talked about joining this group.”

She shook her head as I moved the folder to a separate file. We studied more and placed a few more files with the Sons of the South.

“Did he ever go over to the casinos?”

She shook her head. “Never mentioned them.”

After a while, I got up and stretched and shuffled back through the files, carefully inserting them back into each of the eight slots in the cabinet. She noticed I’d pulled out one file that contained a few crayon pictures she’d made as a kid and looked away.

“Your father owned a lot of property. Looks like he had thousands of acres across the Delta and up north. Owned some land in Jackson, Tennessee, too.”

Abby nodded, really listening, hands wandering over her face with fatigue. “Yeah, he used to take me out to some of those places. We’d hunt a little. He liked to hunt. We also used to break into old cabins in the woods and go find stuff. Sometimes we’d look for arrowheads in creeks.”

I smiled at her as I flipped back through four files I’d pulled from the rest. Outside the dull patter of rain fell from the gutters. The candles shook light across her face as I stood.

“You want to get out of here?”

“More than anything,” she said. “You find anymore about that singer?”

“I’m sure I’m missing a hell of a lot,” I said, scooping up some letters. “There were tons of case files in there that didn’t make a damned bit of sense to me.”

“Or me.”

“I’d need an accountant to decipher most of those financial records. Mainly, I found a shitload about Sons of the South and a thick file of personal letters I’ll need your help going over if you don’t mind. . . . So, you never heard him mention the Sons of the South?”

She shook her head again and soon walked with me through the dead caverns of the house, holding the candles, and back out into the rain. She locked the door behind us, as if it really mattered, and I smelled the strong scent of candles as the small flames quickly died in the wind and wetness.

As she followed me back to my truck, her eyes on the broken rocks of the road, I noticed a skinny brown lab wagging its fat tail and placing its two muddy paws onto her chest.

“Old friend?”

She nodded.

I held my truck door open and we all climbed inside.

JON WAS BATHED in sweat and excitement waiting for the skinny guy with bad teeth to call his name and play his song. This was the opportunity that he knew would come since he met Miss Perfect. This is the way it worked when you were courtin’ a high-class woman. You sang the song. She saw you had talent. And soon you kissed her under a fake moon. Dang, it had taken him long enough to talk her into calling off their search for tonight. They were in Oxford and they could stand for a little fun. Stretch the legs. Live a Little. Love a Little. He knew what to do as soon as they’d looped through the Square for about the fiftieth time and he spotted the big plastic road sign with mismatched letters reading,
KAR-E-OKE TONITE
!

She’d said about a thousand times that they needed to get back and watch the house so they could kill that man Travers and some bad little girl. He told her to relax, they could track ’em to Timbuktu tomorrow. He kind of let it hang there between them like that. Kind of like that he wouldn’t mind going to Timbuktu with Miss Perfect, if he knew where it was.

Now Perfect was workin’ on her fourth daiquiri while she watched this ole goofy cat clock by the door. Swingin’ tail. Shifty bug eyes.

The little bar was kind of dark and smelled like the half-eaten pizzas that lay on the tables around them. There was a good ole handful of college kids around them, too, kids about his age, that were drunker than a goat.

One big ole boy had a straw in his pitcher of beer. A couple of girls on stage were belting out some ole song about “Summer Lovin’” and gigglin’ like crazy. They were makin’ big eyes at a couple of skinny boys in high-collar T-shirts and beaded necklaces. The girls were so drunk they were about stumblin’ off stage.

Jon drank a Dr Pepper. E never drank. And neither would he.

This place reminded him of the time down on E.P. Boulevard when a bus full of Yankees come down to sing all of E’s Sun songs at the Holiday Inn. Jon didn’t think the police ever did find the one who wore E’s metal shades and fake sideburns. Funny how he disappeared after he sang “That’s All Right Mamma” while eatin’ a big ole cheeseburger, laughin’ ’cause he thought E had gotten fat. Never understandin’ about the replacement E. Not even when Jon choked the life from his worthless body.

Jon shook his head. Man, his mind sure was hummin’ along tonight. He popped another pill in his mouth, pretendin’ like he was about to cough, and took another drink of his Dr Pepper. He looked over at Miss Perfect who was slunked into the vinyl of the pizza joint’s booth. Bored as hell. Playing with the straw in the daiquiri.

She wouldn’t be bored when he hopped on stage. She’d see all the people screamin’ and yellin’ and goin’ crazy, like in his mind, and would love him so hard that he’d never be able to crawl out of bed.

“Has Elvis left the building?” the guy with the bad teeth asked, looking into the crowd.

Jon jumped onto the old wooden stage and felt that same power that E had. Even disguised in a beard, he felt stares onto his body covered in black leather and his electric sideburns and even on the gold T.C.B. necklace (twenty-four carat) that hung from his neck.

But the weird thing was that they was kind of laughin’ at him. Thinkin’ he was some kind of freak. That’s all right. That’s the way it worked. There was always the big dumb guy by the jukebox that said E couldn’t sing. One, two. One, two, three.

He looked down at Miss Perfect and she was mad as a pie-eyed snake. Mad he was makin’ a scene. That people were rememberin’ him. But she didn’t know that’s what he wanted.

And then it happened. The magic.

Jon held the fat microphone to his lips and called out that sacred song, so haunting and beautiful that he almost wanted to cry, as the words escaped from his lips:

Down in Louisiana,
Where the alligators grow so mean,
There lives a girl, I swear to the world,
Makes the alligators seem tame.
Polk Salad Annie.

The college kids went wild, man, as he dipped his shoulders and shook all over. Perfect just kept watching, jaw dropped down, and cigarette burning between her cherry-red nails. He sang like E would, right to her. He wanted the holy words to float through the air and into her ears twisting through the miles of veins right to her heart. He wanted to see her wiggle that fine heart-shaped butt and crinkle up that little rabbit nose. Man, he could feel himself heatin’ up singin’ about ole Polk Salad Annie, that woman wild as hell. He started imaginin’ as he was singin’ — beer splatterin’ all around him — that Perfect was like Annie. He imagined her in a bikini made out of animal hide, showin’ off her tight little belly, maybe carryin’ a spear down in the bayou. She’d have a wildcat she kept like a damned pet and she’d scream like hell when Jon made love to her up in the trees and sloshin’ around in the mud.

“Polk Salad Annie!” Jon sang on the second chorus. “Everybody said it was a shame . . . that her mamma was workin’ on a chain gang.”

Jon sang it like Perfect’s mamma was the one who done wrong. And she had. She’d created a woman so damned fine that it was distractin’ to men ’round the world.

Jon looked over at her and ignored the college girl runnin’ her tongue across her lips or the two women clawin’ at his feet. He just kept singin’ to his woman. His Ann-Margret.

T
en minutes later, Perfect had Jon by the arm and was leading him back to her car. She may not be an expert on killing people, but she knew they’d been seen way too much tonight. If there was killing to be done, they would do it outside Oxford.