Dark End of the Street - v4 (31 page)

I felt my breath drain from my body, thick and polluted. I took in some new air, watching the uncluttered blue sky. A perfect crispness seemed to be wrapping the whole world. But I felt stale. I couldn’t fall asleep or focus on anything but my anger.

He’d parked across the street at the Arcade diner and we found a little cove by the kitchen where we ordered a couple plates of sweet potato pancakes and coffee. Place hadn’t changed in fifty years. Same torn vinyl booths. Squiggly ‘fifties Orbit impressions on tables worn out in spots by years of elbows and coffee mugs.

“How you doin’, Miss Abby?” U asked.

“Fine, when one of y’all tell me why we’re back in Memphis,” she said. She sat taller in her seat. Hair in a ponytail. My Tulane football sweatshirt. “Whatever it is, I’m in.”

U raised his eyebrows. A green-haired waitress in a black T-shirt poured us some coffee. I passed U the sugar first. He watched me. He watched my hands shake.

I drank some coffee. I said: “Obviously you got my message.”

“Big job.”

“At least point the way.”

Abby picked at her food. Her fork clanked to the rim of her sticky plate. The green-haired waitress refilled our cups. A kid in the booth behind us sported a nose ring and a Britney Spears T-shirt. He looked like he liked Britney about as much as I liked the Dave Matthews Band.

“Said it was big,” U said. “Didn’t say I wasn’t coming.”

He looked over his shoulder, the leather of his jacket squeaking along the booth. The Britney kid was watching the green-haired waitress’s ass. U turned back and pulled a map of southern Tennessee before us, already marked in red pen. A big red circle had been drawn around an area south of Jackson.

“That’s it?”

He nodded, and as quickly as he slid it out, folded up the map carefully and stuck it back into his pocket. “We could be there by sundown. And that’s what we want.”

Abby was quiet. But she watched. I looked at her eyes; she stared back.

“How’d you find it?” I asked, still watching Abby. I smiled. She didn’t.

“Heard it was near Bemis, this little town that was some kind of social experiment around the turn of the century. Yeah, I checked it all out. Anyway, I called in a favor from a good ol’ boy I just keep on bringin’ back to jail,” U said, dropping into an imitation he believed sounded like a redneck. “Met this peckerwood at a bar. A biker bar. Imagine me in a biker bar. It was like Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours. ‘There’s a new sheriff in town,’ and all that.”

“So peckerwood–biker boy told you where to find the compound?”

“His nasty ass — and I do mean nasty — wore a leather vest and no shirt, even drew a little map for me. One electric fence. Some surveillance.”

“Two of us can do it?” I asked.

“Hold on,” Abby said, pushing her plate out of the way. “What are you going to do with me? You’re not leaving me here. I’m the one whose parents were killed. I’m the one who found Nix. What are you going to do, drop me at the mall with your credit card?”

“Nick ain’t got no credit,” U said.

She made a grunting noise. “I want to go back to Oxford.”

“Not till this is over.”

“I’m not moving in with Bubba so I can sit around and watch Ricki Lake,” she said. “Besides, do you even know how to shoot that gun?”

“Yes.”

“How? I hunted with my father; what did you do?”

“I used to—”

“Hold up,” U said, raising his palm out. “I got this. See, Nick is from Alabama.”

“So?”

“That about says it all.”

“Give me two days,” I said to Abby. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t up for committee.”

Abby grunted again and tromped to the bathroom to cool off. I got up to make sure she was all right. For some reason I wanted everyone to be okay with everything.

“Nick, cool out,” he said. “We got it.”

I sat back down and asked, “So, you’re in?”

“Me and you are the same, brother,” he said, looking out the window. Maybe seeing that same blue crispness but feeling better about it. “You know that. We just a couple of Zen cowboys, Travers. What else we supposed to do with our lives? Ain’t many of us around.”

“Thanks.”

“Listen, man. Loretta and JoJo have been real good to me, too,” U said, his head nodding with his own words. “Somebody mess with Loretta? Come on. You got to ask? You wanted backup on one thing, said you wanted a meeting with Elias Nix. . . . Well, I’m gonna get you that appointment tonight.”

W
e didn’t go alone. On the way out of town, U picked up Bubba Cotton in, of all places, Dixie Homes, where he’d been baby-sitting his sister-in-law’s twin boys. The boys had pulled out every pot and pan their mother owned, using them for drums, as we stepped over their mess and found Bubba swilling a forty and watching a little Ricki Lake.

His sister-in-law had gotten home before us and Bubba was glad to leave because she was cussing his ass out. He sat in back of U’s Expedition on the ride north with earphones on and silently bobbed his head.

We soon dropped off the highway and away from the commercial roads and hotels and restaurants and hit a long straightaway of curving hilly blacktop. A lot of cotton fields soon turned to woods. Maple trees with yellow and red leaves. Pin oak. Cedar. A lot of pine trees coated in kudzu, almost looked like a ‘fifties horror film, It Came from the South. Kudzu everywhere. Telephone poles. Abandoned shacks. The growth had even snaked its fingers and arms through several old rusted cars.

We traveled along the road for another thirty minutes with only the sound of Bubba’s Walkman and the roaring of tires on the blacktop. We passed some corn fields, yellowed and mowed flush, and then got into more woods with gullies of bottom land where rainwater stood in stagnant rows. Turtles slept on floating pieces of wood and trash. Red bud willows draped their branches across pools, catching the final reddish-purple light of the day.

U slowed, pointed out an anonymous dirt road, and kept driving.

“Let’s get some more coffee, stretch, and check our plan. Again. I found us a campsite up the road and we’ll go through the final details.” He looked over at me, taking off his sunglasses as if just realizing the sun had been down for a while. He yawned and ran a big hand over his face. “You still cool with this?”

I checked for the Glock he’d given me and smiled. “Yeah, everything is cool.”

But I remembered some graffitied words on a decaying brick wall in downtown as we headed out. It was one of those times when the message seemed to be written just for me:
SUPERMAN IS A DAMNED FOOL
.

NIGHT HAD ALMOST FALLEN in backwoods Tennessee and Bubba Cotton was smacking the hell out of a tin of Planter’s roasted peanuts and eating a Nestlé Crunch. He hummed along to some song I couldn’t quite make out as he stuffed another handful into his mouth and moved his head to the music. The sound must’ve been too much because U put down these night vision goggles he’d been bragging about for the last hour, Baigish B-21s with clear vision up to 250 meters, and looked into the rearview mirror at his big, silent (with words anyway) buddy shaking his ass while on recon.

U glanced over at me in the front seat of the Expedition, his hair braided tight against his skull and wearing the same Saints grays that we’d been issued about a decade ago. Number ninety-three stamped in the middle of his chest.

“Mystikal,” U said. “Kid out of New Orleans. Don’t look so damned confused, Travers. You know there’s got to be other music besides blues.”

“Name a truer music.”

“Jazz.”

“And you’d be wrong.”

“How can music be wrong or right?” he asked. “It’s what is true to me. If I say it’s Toumani Diabate or Ali Farke Toure, would that be better than blues, more roots for you?”

“If I said that I liked Cap’n Crunch better than Lucky Charms it would be a fact,” I said. “Lucky Charms has sweetened crap in it, yellow moons and blue diamonds, and Cap’n Crunch is simple and damned tasty. I’d say it’s downright Zen-like. Besides, why don’t those kids leave that poor leprechaun alone? Little bastard can’t even take a piss without being harassed.”

U nodded, switching out the batteries in his binoculars. “Yeah, that is pretty messed up.”

“Damn kids,” I said, waiting for darkness to drop on us. Still a grayish red burning through the branches, a light purple glow to the air around U’s truck.

U agreed: “Can’t even take a piss. Plain messed up.”

Bubba kept munching on the can of nuts till he was done, and then swigged down half a bottle of Mountain Dew.

“So you saw Nix?” I asked.

“Little pointy-eared mother was out for a night jog with a couple of beefed-up dudes in camos. They took a little run around that lake,” he said, handing me the binoculars. “They’ll be back.”

“Don’t see the lake.”

I felt him push the binoculars to the right and the lake came into view in a bright green image. On the other side of the water, I saw ropes hanging from a twenty-foot tower and some rutted, narrow tunnels underneath barbed-wire grate. A longer, more advanced version of monkey bars stretched out by a small stucco hut.

“Just in case being governor means storming a third-world country.”

“Exactly,” U said.

“So, how many?”

“Saw about six so far. Shouldn’t be much trouble. Big boy behind us acts stupid as shit but he’s a great shot. You got all the clips I gave you?”

I checked the inside pockets of my leather jacket, trying to keep a cool face as my blood rushed around my head and heart. I had a hard time breathing. But the thing that bothered me most is that I felt more excited than scared. Sure I wanted to talk to Nix, have him fill in some holes about Clyde James and the casinos, and some man named Levi Ransom. Find out how much he was going to make out of this deal. Find out why the most good-hearted human being I’d ever known had been shot in the chest and left to burn up along with my best friend’s bar.

I must’ve started shaking a bit because U reached over and grabbed the binoculars back from me. “What about that Trix rabbit?” he asked me. “Ain’t he a motherfucker?”

I tried smiling and poured some more coffee from a thermos we’d filled at a convenience store into a foam cup. I looked into the darkness around us and listened to the unfamiliar sounds of crickets and more bugs. The kudzu wrapped the trees in such a way that they became giants. Looming ten feet over us, green mouths open wide, fingers branching out like claws.

I spit out the window, checked the clip in my gun, and tried to be cool, slinking into the warm seats and sipping my coffee.

My fucking hand would not stop shaking.

O
ur recon mission failed to spot at least fifty guys who’d apparently shown up in the last twenty-four hours. At 8:00
P.M
., they flooded from a long ranch house with barred windows and metal doors and formed into columns, their breath warm clouds before their determined faces. They dressed in military pants, jackets, and boots. Some loaded into Hummers, black and green, all the stylish colors for paranoid wealthy men with small penises, and drove down rutted paths shining yellow spotlights into the woods.

“Hey,” U said, in this high-pitched old-black-woman voice he sometimes used. “We’s up here. All us black folks would love to meet such nice young mens.”

Bubba snorted out a laugh.

“Does he ever talk?” I asked.

He looked back at Bubba. Bubba shrugged.

“Guess not.”

“Let me guess,” I said, straightening myself into the seat and crushing my cup. “I crawl over that twenty-foot fence, slide by that razor concertina wire, and then jump into the middle of those God-lovin’ white boys and start raisin’ hell. You and Bubba can come, too. It’ll be a blood bath, man. Bullets everywhere. I’ll mow ’em down, reloading like hell, and then you’ll shield me as I run in and find Nix. Nix will get down on his knees as I kick the pole from their rebel flag up his ass.”

“Well, goddamn, Travers, you done figured it out.” U opened his door and walked outside. I followed, our feet crunching on the rotting earth. It was cold and I turned up the collar on my jacket.

The sound of Hummers and gunfire at a nearby target range drowned out our movements. I looked down the hill into a bowl where they’d formed their little training ground. All around us, orange signs warned
NO HUNTING ALLOWED
.

I asked for the night vision binoculars and scoped out the main building. It seemed just like an extremely long ranch house. If I’d seen it from the road, I’d have thought it was another hunting lodge. Of course, that’s what U said most of the people around here believed. A place for rich men from Nashville to come out, drink some Wild Turkey, and raise a little hell.

A long rat-a-tat erupted down in the bowl and U quickly grabbed the night vision back for another scan of the ground. “All right, we’re out of here. Man, that’s a damned M-60.”

“That’s bad?”

“You see Rambo?”

“Yeah.”

“You know that big mother gun he carries?”

I nodded.

“Let’s go.”

Bubba was behind us now, peering over my shoulder. He had on black sweats and high-top Chuck Taylor’s, looking like a wayward ninja. I smiled at him as we fast-walked back to the car. He wouldn’t look at me, he was transfixed by the sounds of the miniwar being played down the hill. I know he was wondering how he could have ever gotten this close.

“Those are fifty-caliber machine guns strapped on top of those Hummers,” U said. “They’d make hamburger out of a deer before it hits the ground.”

We’d almost made it back to the truck when three men walked from the brush, almost like they’d evolved from the night and trees, dressed in all black with blacked-out faces. They came to us with AK-47s pointed at our chests.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “A tribute to Al Jolson.”

“Nick,” U said under his breath. “Shut the fuck up.”

Bubba Cotton froze. If I hadn’t been so scared, I’d have laughed. His big ass looked like one of those men in Jackson Square who asked for tips for standing still.