Dark End of the Street - v4 (27 page)

“Sure it is, cooch,” the black woman said. “Like as in coochie.”

“Yeah, but you spellin’ it with a K, ain’t that right, Bobby Lee? Look. K-O-O-C-C-H-I.” The little girl thrust the game in front of him for closer inspection. “That ain’t no word. It’s some kind of furrin country.”

Cook hadn’t seen us yet, even though we’d slid into a booth right next to him and his girls. As we waited, Loretta didn’t take off her coat, her gaze wandering over the cinder block walls and concrete floor. A half-dozen girls thrust and ground their hips to some Huey Lewis and the News relic on mini stages around the bar.

I kept listening to the women, shaking off a waitress who came over to take our order. A few seconds later, Loretta nodded and I tapped Cook on his shoulder. He was wearing a black muscle T-shirt, the nape of his neck coated in black-and-white hair. Even over the booth he emitted an odor of vinegar and talc.

I stared over his shoulder at the game. “Oh, there’s one more,” I said. “A-S-S, and on the other side there is a big ole hole.”

He turned.

“Hey, get the fuck out of here, Travers,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger when he saw me, being surprisingly cool. “You ruined my shirt. It was Calvin Klein.”

He scooted out of the booth, the little girl pulling the game close to her and reading different words she saw. I think she was really looking for asshole.

I remained seated, smiling up at him. But his eyes moved right over me to Loretta, his face softening. All that hard light in his eyes gone as he moved in beside her. “Holy shit. Loretta. Good God. I thought this boy was kidding.”

He hugged her tight and Loretta hugged him back. Her thick hands covered in gold rings, patted his shoulder. He motioned quickly over to the waitress and asked us what we wanted.

“Where’s the pooch?” I asked.

“Vet.”

“What happened?”

“Diarrhea. Got into my protein powder the other day. Shit all over the D.J. booth.”

His teeth looked yellow in the low light and I had to bend my ear toward him to make out what he was saying over the pumping music.

“Too bad. Nice dog.”

Loretta said something and he nodded. “You want something, buddy?”

“Beer,” I said. “Just a beer.”

He shrugged, told the waitress, and off she went. The girls remained at the next booth, its vinyl sealed in places with duct tape, laughing and shaking the Boggle bubble. I heard one of them make up another dirty word that I’d never heard but thought I understood from the way it sounded.

Loretta folded her hands before her and leaned in close to Cook. “Bobby, I known you for thirty-five years and I need help. Where’s Clyde?”

He looked at me and I could tell he was grinding the hell out of his teeth. The waitress came back and handed me a beer. Miller Lite. The worst.

“Clyde’s dead, Loretta,” he said in a soft graveled voice. “I’m sorry.”

I started absently peeling the label from the beer — much better than drinking it — and watched the neon light flash across Cook’s craggy face and blue eyes. I could tell he was holding his breath, his eyes staring straight into Loretta’s.

“He’s alive,” I said, looking at the table. I held my gaze for a few seconds and then stared up at Cook. “I know. I have witnesses. We just want to know where.”

“You don’t want—”

“To what? Let this woman that you like so much find her only brother? Yeah, that’d be a real shame. Listen, I know you guys were into some pretty fucked-up shit back then. Using the label as a wash for your buddies from Biloxi.”

Cook kept his head down and nodded along with a wide grin. He started laughing when I mentioned the name Levi Ransom and said that I believed Ransom had sent two men to hassle Loretta in New Orleans.

“You want to tell me what all that means?” I asked.

He just kept laughing. “Man, you have a hell of an imagination, Travers. Loretta, this boy really your friend?”

She smiled. “We just want to find Clyde. We don’t want to get you in no kind of trouble.” I felt her hand tightly grip my knee under the table.

“I do that to your head?” Cook asked, motioning at my bruised temple.

“Yeah,” I said. “Cook, you are the toughest.”

“Loretta,” he said, grabbing her hand and massaging her fingers. “Clyde is dead. All right? You understand? He’s not been with us for a long time. You remember how he used to get? He left us when all that stuff happened with Mary. Those blackouts and the fits. It got so much worse. Be glad you were in New Orleans. We all tried to help.”

I watched Loretta’s face tighten and eyes wander to an old jukebox in the corner, lights flashing and neon pumping with music that was a relic from another age.

“If he’s alive,” she said, “I want to know.”

The music faded out and the jukebox started playing Otis Clay’s “Tryin’ to Live Without You.” That driving Willie Mitchell beat and Hi horn section unmistakable. Pure Memphis.

Cook ran his fingers over his biceps with pride and nodded slowly to himself until the black girl stood before us and tossed the Boggle on the table. “That little bitch broke it,” she said. “Redneck can’t spell and blame me. She spell tootsie like in Tootsie Pop with a U: T-U-T-S-I. You hire some trips, Bobby.”

The woman left and Otis Clay kept singing. Loretta watched his face while I looked away. This was her move. Anything he would tell us would come to her, not to me. He probably just wanted to move our scuffle over to a Winn-Dixie.

“You remember when we first started?” he asked. “You remember how I got that little movie theater over in Soulsville and me and Eddie Porter spent two weeks in July cutting up old mattresses and hanging them on the walls? I thought I was going to be a failure. Thought I’d never have enough money to pay my aunt back, thought I’d have to go back to driving trucks. But you changed it. Those first singles you put out made me. We bought new equipment. Hired a secretary. You remember Mae? Made me. You know?”

“So where is he?” she asked.

Cook ground his teeth some more and softly pounded his fist onto the table. “This is all show, you know? The girls. This isn’t me, Loretta. This is money. Got to make that money.”

She smiled at him and moved her hand over his, his fingers delicate and manicured.

“Y’all know the Harahan Bridge?” he asked.

Loretta nodded.

“He may still be there. It’s been a few years. Little camp where people live on the Tennessee side. I just didn’t want you to see what he’d become.”

I WAS THINKING about a story I’d read about Clyde James when, in the glow of the neighboring Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, Loretta and I saw the two Erector setlike tunnels stretching out over the Mississippi. As we neared the bridges, I remembered a short profile of Clyde in the Living Blues soul section a few years back. It was an interview with a manager of his who Loretta said had died years ago. The manager talked about how, even before the death of his wife, Clyde would disappear for weeks at a time, already suffering from deep depression. He said it got worse after the events of ‘sixty-eight. He said Clyde took off during a tour of south Mississippi and showed up on his doorstep in Memphis a month later. Clyde very calmly said, “I been lookin’ all over for you. Where you been?”

I drove the little compact U had loaned me off the main highway, just before reaching the bridge, and dipped down a narrow dirt road. High clumps of weeds lined the path and the little tires of the car bumped and jostled us until I found a decent place to stop by the two railroad bridges. They seemed like relics of a Memphis that no longer existed. Rust and rotting wood. Thick bolts that fastened beams together probably a hundred years ago. In the distance, north toward the city, I saw the two distinctive humps of the Hernando-Desoto Bridge lit with fat white bulbs and the weird glow of the Pyramid sports arena.

“What if I asked you to stay here?” I asked. “Just till I check things out.”

Loretta opened the door and pulled herself out, smoothing down the suede of her coat. A hard fetid wind broke off the Mississippi and washed up the dirt bluffs to us. I lit a cigarette as I searched in U’s trunk for a flashlight. I found one and moved the Glock to a better position in my hand-tooled belt.

“Why you smoke those things?” she asked. “You want to die early? Don’t be a damned fool.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said as she pulled it from my lips and ground it under her foot. Her shoulders shook just a little and there was a little quiver in her voice. I put my arm around her as we made our way down an embankment, smelling burning wood and hearing the muffled grumbling of men.

Right below where the Harahan jutted out from the bluffs, I saw fire sparks catching in the wind and dying out below the bridge and far above the swirling black water of the Mississippi. Felt like we were hanging on the edge of the earth, the split in America, a place where Old World explorers marveled.

I offered Loretta a hand as we scooted down the hill, making sure she kept her balance. The heels of my boots ground in the soft mud making it easy to track down. The sound of the men grew. More smoke. Wood. Cigarettes? Bottles clinking. Grunts. Bizarre moaning.

The men had found a little cove in the groove where the bridge meets the hills. Four nasty recliners, a sofa (more springs than material), several refrigerator boxes squashed flat and used as pallets, and dozens of men warming themselves over little campfires. Drinking labelless whiskey and talking. Several were white with long, yellowed mountain-man beards but most were black, sallow-eyed, with nappy hair.

Toward the edge of the firelight, one man was leaning over the concrete embankment singing like hell and pissing toward the Mississippi like it was his own personal toilet.

“Loretta,” I said, grabbing her arm.

She looked over at me and shrugged. I moved ahead and began to search for a face that I only knew from a thirty-year-old picture. No one said a word to me. A few quit talking. Most just ignored us.

“Clyde?” Loretta yelled, like she was calling her cat home to dinner. “Clyde.”

Most of the men I saw would actually be younger than Clyde. A few too old. No one responded to her calls. I let out a steady stream of air and turned as I saw a wiry white man with an ax handle trying to sneak up from behind.

I dodged his blow, the handle raking across the concrete ground, and pulled his shoulders forward, making him smack the ground facefirst. There was an audible pop.

I yelled to the group that I didn’t want trouble. I told them that Loretta was just looking for her brother. “Clyde James. Any of y’all know Clyde? He used to sleep down at the Piggly Wiggly on Madison. The graveyard, right there.”

A couple of coughs, a grunt, the old man still pissing into the Mississippi like he had attached a hose inside himself.

“Look, I got twenty bucks for someone. Buy a lot of whiskey or Eight-Ball.”

“There,” grunted a little black man wearing a worn Confederate battle hat. His face covered in short silver whiskers and wearing a bright pink trench coat. “Y’all can see him right there.”

“Where?” I asked.

“There,” he said, aggravated as hell that he’d had to stand. “Look, I’ll show you. Just give me that twenty.”

And I did.

We crossed over a weedy lot strewn with empty beer cans and torn pieces of clothing. The man leading us down below the next bridge, identical to the Harahan, walked stoop-shouldered and slow. His face was gray, as if oxygen didn’t circulate above his neck. Bloodshot eyes. If I’d seen him sleeping on the street, I would have thought he was dead.

I pointed the flashlight down the path, every click and shuffle making my heart pound, until he pointed to a collection of grayish-black mounds gathered in the fall cold. A tin drum of old rags and driftwood had been lit at the base of the bridge as if marking an entrance to some kind of feudal castle.

I kept my fingers close to the Glock and I took comfort in the seventeen-shot capacity U had bragged about. Loretta wandered ahead and I soon lost our guide as I followed her underneath the bridge.

There I was greeted by a tremendous smell of piss and shit. I wanted to gag and buried my nose in my jacket.

“Good Lord,” I said.

Loretta took the flashlight out of my hand and swept it over the mounds.

They moved.

All dirty. Blacks and grays and sun-bleached browns. People under mounds of rags. Boxes of chicken bones and empty dog food cans. More bottles of whiskey. Pits bordered by barbed wire. Some slept in the pits, others in boxes, and even more just on the ground in heaps. There must’ve been thirty, forty of them.

“Clyde!” Loretta yelled. Just blind. Absolutely blind. I moved my hand away from the Glock and felt for her fingers. I had a hard time swallowing. God, the smell was absolutely awful.

Everyone was sleeping a hell of a hard sleep.

No one moved as we searched for about ten minutes. She’d stop, flash a light into their faces, and move on. One old guy sprang to his feet and tried to knock my teeth in. But these were weak people. Their bodies barely functioned; their minds were completely fucked up. I just sidestepped the old dude and he fell back to the ground.

Between the gaps of the massive supports of the bridge, I watched a tugboat pushing a barge upstream. The moonlight broke and swirled on the brown water in its wake. I spit on the ground, trying to remove the smell from my head when I noticed Loretta had stopped and bent down to the ground.

I followed.

She was crying.

I looked at her; she nodded to me.

Clyde James opened his eyes.

AT FIRST, CLYDE thought Loretta was his mother. Kind of strange and Freudian but he did. Thirty years. It had been thirty freakin’ years, I had to remember. His hair was almost straight, gray wisps. High cheekbones and blackish-red skin. Fingernails like daggers. As I watched his face, he moaned. His eyes bloodshot as hell, and his mouth smelling like a septic tank but asking for forgiveness. He just kept asking her to find pity on his soul. He then curled himself into a ball and started crying. Around him lay jug bottles of malt liquor and crushed soda cans punched with holes. His head lay on a tan vinyl suitcase and he’d wrapped his body in a plastic tarp. A Memphis winter wasn’t far away and I wondered how anybody could ever survive out here. I felt like we were on the bottom of an ocean.