by Ace Atkins
Thunder cracked in the distance.
I’d been in homeless camps before but couldn’t quite figure out the purpose of the dirty garden until I saw the marble slab. DRURY LYON BETTIS — AUGUST 21, 1814, TO AUGUST 9, 1854. More toppled headstones and marble slabs were hidden among the heaps of trash.
Several plastic lighters lay upon a cracked slab in the far corner. I kicked away a dirty sheet that obscured its purpose. DANIEL HARKLECADE — JANUARY 15, 1803, TO APRIL 5, 1845.
The man had been buried beneath a quiet oak tree more than 150 years ago. Now he was spending time with crack addicts and the city’s unwanted. I dropped to my knee and began clearing away the dirty bottles, cans, and a stray boot. I used the leg from a pair of discarded jeans to clean off the mud.
I scanned the uneven ground again, unsure what I wanted to find. I backed out of the cemetery surrounded by concertina wire and gang graffiti and walked into the Piggly Wiggly searching for Cook.
I found him in the fruits-and-vegetables section feeling up a softball-sized tomato and admiring his reflection in a long silver mirror that wrapped a far wall. The air was cold against my wet face. I stood next to him and picked up another tomato.
“You might need two,” I said. “Yours looks a little small.”
Cook looked over at me with lazy eyes, his wet gray hair metallic and false in the harsh fluorescent light. His jaw muscles twitched and I could see his hand wrap tighter around the tomato.
“Look, man, just help me out,” I said.
Cook nodded and walked over to a huge pyramid of rattlesnake watermelons. He was trying to be cool, ignore me as if I were of no more importance than an unwanted itch. He even whistled along to some Muzak version of “LaBamba.” I followed him, my hands in my Levi’s jacket, and smiled.
“You tell me where he died and when and I’ll leave.”
Cook pulled out his pair of yuppie glasses and slipped them over his nose. He inspected a fat green watermelon and tucked it under his left arm. He was quiet for a moment and then ushered me close with a head movement.
I moved closer. He smelled like a wet dog. His breath of dead fish.
He whispered, “If you don’t get the fuck out of my face in five seconds, I’m going to make a fuckin’ hat out of your ass.”
I smiled back.
“My ass would make a terrible hat.”
“Then I’d get the fuck out of here.”
“What’s your problem?” I asked. “I told you, I’m a friend of Loretta Jackson. I’m sure you fucked her out of plenty of money back then, too, so why don’t you—?”
“I treated her with respect, you little shit. Don’t you even mention her name to me.”
“She’s my friend.”
Cook snorted out a laugh.
“Clyde isn’t dead. Is he?”
“Hell, yes, he’s dead.”
“Did you see him?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
Cook shoved the watermelon at my stomach like a medicine ball and tried to hook me with his left fist. As the watermelon splattered in a red mess on the floor, I ducked the punch and gripped the front of Cook’s shirt, tossing him into a table piled high with okra. The okra scattered and an old woman with blue hair shrieked. A black woman with two kids pushed her cart away like she was escaping a nasty plague and an elderly man with no teeth wearing checked pants and a Bart Simpson T-shirt yelled, “Fight. It’s a fight! Fight.”
Cook, his feet dangling to the linoleum floor, grinned at me and for a moment I thought it was over, but he lunged, tackling me at the waist and driving me toward a pile of Georgia peaches. I felt my back smoosh into the pile and could smell the broken sweetness across it.
I quickly grabbed Cook into a headlock. Mother was strong, I thought, and I held his head tight in the crook of my arm before Cook punched me between the legs.
I fell to my knees, pain shooting through my entire body. I felt like I might vomit right there. Cook was laughing and walking away as I gathered my strength and rushed him and wrapped my right arm across his throat. I pushed Cook facefirst into a mound of tomatoes. The wet red mess covered his face and T-shirt like blood.
But damn if he wasn’t smiling with red teeth as he picked up a handful of red goop, walked over to me, and rubbed it down the front of my white T-shirt.
I smiled over at the old man in the cartoon T-shirt and took a step back to grab a handful of muscadines.
I gripped the back of Cook’s neck and force-fed him a mouthful.
That’s when the shitstorm really started.
Cook punched me hard in the ear. I could hear a pop and the air went suddenly electric around me as I connected my two knuckles with Cook’s nose. Blood squirted over his shirt and oozed down his lip. He made several jabs to my head and tried to kick out my knees.
Man knew how to fight.
But he was older and slower and I punched him in the ear, took hold of his arms, and threw him into the sweet potatoes. Cook rolled out onto the other side of the bins where plums dropped to the floor in heavy thuds.
A man in a green vest, who looked to be the manager, ran out and starting yelling that he’d called the police.
Cook didn’t seem to hear him. He ran toward me, his eyes squinted and his fists face-high. He jabbed again, connecting once with my rib. I could feel the air rush from me as I made a jab to the left and punched Cook hard in the mouth.
“He’s alive,” I said, gasping for air. “He’s alive and you’re protecting him.”
Cook made a grunt, his face turning purple, and made another run. He tackled me again at the waist, but this time he didn’t have the energy to push me back.
I grabbed him at the scruff of his leathery neck and tossed him five yards away, his butt skidding on the floor covered in mushed tomatoes and muscodines.
The Muzak still played overhead through the odd silence that buzzed in my right ear. The manager held up a mop in his hand like it was a sword and he was fending off a pair of wild lions.
“Y’all stay right where you are,” the manager said, his swooped comb-over sticking up like a rooster’s.
Cook staggered to his feet, walked over to the man, and pulled out his wallet. He counted out four bills and jogged away. With my ear still ringing and my breath labored, I followed.
The parking lot shone with a patch of sunlight striking the pavement, steam rising in a low fog. I pulled a piece of tomato off my shirt and looked through the lot for the Cadillac.
I caught a quick glimpse of the hood as it fishtailed out to Madison, the tires squealing on wet asphalt.
I wanted to get back in my Bronco and haul ass back to the Peabody. I could just hear Randy’s voice when he heard one of his professors had been arrested for a scuffle at a damned Piggly Wiggly.
But instead, I walked back up the stairs to the hidden cemetery and sat on the crooked grave of Daniel Harklecade. I smoked a Marlboro, studied the piles of garbage and makeshift beds, and watched a couple of homeless men as they ate cans of beans in the far corner of the lot.
I didn’t hear a siren as the dark storm clouds swirled by in broken patterns. A slab of yellow light still beamed on the store.
The men didn’t seem to notice me. Maybe I was so silent, so lithe, that they didn’t feel my presence.
“Hey, cap’n,” a craggy white man in a plaid hat finally yelled. His teeth were the color of old coffee. Beans dripped down off his chin.
“Sir?” I called back.
“Me and my buddy was wonderin’ if you gonna sleep here? ’Cause if you is, it’s gonna mean that we’s maybe have to move on. You don’t look real friendly.”
I started another cigarette and peered back down on the lot, a stiff fall wind scattering oak leaves on the graves.
“Cap’n?”
“Yes?” I said, watching the cigarette burn between my fingers and feeling my labored breathing.
“You want some beans?”
“No, thanks.”
“W
e ain’t shittin’ on your relatives or nothin’,” the other man said, pulling off an old brogan and smelling it.
“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.”
Chapter 10
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?”
“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.
Chapter 11
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.