by Ace Atkins
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.
Chapter 41
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.
I watched Loretta crying and felt a thick rock form in the back of my throat. She lay her hands across his cheek. “Oh, Lord. Clyde? Clyde?”
He said something about the cold as if reading my mind. His eyes wide open now, a feverish light cast across his face.
“It’s Lo. Baby. Clyde. Come on. Clyde?”
He rolled to his elbows. I cast a quick glance to the stirring mounds around us, the tug fighting the currents and the whipping strands of fire licking the base of the bridge. I wanted to grab him and get the hell out of here. I fingered the butt of the gun. I tried to steady my breathing.
Loretta moved by him and sat down in the dirt in her five-hundred-dollar jacket to cradle his head. The ceiling above us, seeming to close in even more, shook hard as a train passed for several minutes. Light from the train splintered in across the floor and over Loretta’s face and her lips moving with words I couldn’t hear.
Clyde was crying as she held his head like you would a child’s.
My ears rang with the sound of the train, looking for anyone moving around us.
When the train passed, Clyde was talking: “The rain. It was hurting, too. I could feel the rain hurting but it wasn’t really me. I was there, in sight and soul and everything, but my body wasn’t there.”
“Clyde, come with us.”
He flopped his head around in her lap. Violently.
“Some men are looking for you, Clyde. They want to kill you. It’s all about Mary. Clyde, what happened that night with Eddie and Mary? What?”
He rolled his head.
“It’s raining. God is raining. God’s face is raining. Black rust. Black rust all over my face.”
I put my hand on Loretta’s shoulder.
“Uh-uh. I ain’t leavin’ here without him. Grab him and let’s go.”
I nodded and reached around his waist. His body buckled and he rolled to his feet scattering leaves and torn-up pieces of yellowed newsprint in the air.
“We’re just trying to help,” I said.
He was crying and rocking and he beat his fist into his leg. “No!”
Somebody yelled at me and I felt a harp thwap at my back. More little hard hits on my legs. They were stoning us. I covered my head, reached for the Glock, and fired off a round.
The throwing stopped. I saw Loretta wiping blood from her ear and I gritted my teeth.
“Come on, Clyde. Come here.” I moved toward him and he snarled at me. I lunged, got a good hold of his arms, and he clawed at my face with his curved nails. I felt the blood heat in my skin as he buckled and tried to bite my arm. He almost chomped down when I pushed him away. It was a hell of a thing to try to grab someone you didn’t want to hurt. Kind of like alligator wrestling.
“Clyde,” Loretta said. “Let me get you some help. Be just like that doctor we used to see. Remember he gave you those pills? You all right with them pills. Come on.”
I lunged for him again, pulled his skinny arms down by his sides, and then he really started writhing. I moved him toward the lot separating the bridges and out from the camp in a bear hug. His head flew back and connected with my jaw sending me reeling, almost making me pass out, as I gritted my teeth and pushed him forward, his feet off the ground.
Then he gave the most god-awful howl I’d ever heard. He was screaming and crying and moaning. His body started convulsing and Loretta screamed to put him down. And I did. He rolled to his back shaking, his eyes up in his head until he flipped to his hands and knees and vomited. I saw a pool of urine collect at his brogan shoes.
“Leave him,” she said. Her face impassive. Tears streaking her perfect makeup.
I nodded.
“We’ll need some help. He needs to be in a hospital. Lord. Nick, I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I just gave up on him. I let him go. And I knew. Goddamn me, I knew.”
We walked to the car in the weak light, and I hugged her. I heard the horn of the tug upstream and felt a harsh wind blowing across the tips of my ears.
She pushed her face into the crook of my arm and I held her tight. Her words a confusing mix of sorrow and blame.
We drove back to the Peabody, to our suite and warm beds, not saying a word.
Chapter 42
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, we drove a rental car back into New Orleans, Canal Street, and the French Quarter a little after six. A tourist carriage driver had stopped off in front of the bar. His clients, confused elderly women with their new digital cameras, seemed impatient as we walked past them and found the driver drinking a cold one and talking with Felix about the Saints. Felix didn’t like him. And neither did I. We’d had some run-ins about the way he treated his horses. As soon as the driver saw me, he threw back the Dixie, washing off his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket, and tromped out the door.
Felix laughed as he continued to slice lemons and absently watch SportsCenter from behind the bar. His black bald head so slick and clean the images of the television reflected off his skull.
Loretta walked ahead of Abby and me into the far corner of the bar where JoJo kept his office, a dull yellow light showing from a cracked door. She was tired as hell and pretty quiet on the way home on Interstate 55. Earlier that morning, she’d had Clyde committed to the Memphis Mental Health Institute on Poplar. I’d gone out with some of their wranglers, although they called them something much more official, and I was tired, too. The fight with Clyde had been pretty nasty and the way Loretta’s face dropped again at the center was hard to watch.
I sat at the bar. Smiled at Felix. Felix smiled back and absently popped the top off a Dixie and hammered it next to my elbow.
“You thirsty?” I asked Abby.
She nodded. Felix popped another.
“You’re in luck,” he said. “I ain’t askin’ for IDs today.”
I introduced them as I finished half of the cold beer. I was dead, travel tired. I wanted to go back to the warehouse and sleep for a couple days. Maybe even hibernate. I stretched my legs off the barstool.
The pale yellow afternoon light shot in broken, loose fingers between handbills that had been Scotch-taped in the window. Some so brittle and old that they’d somehow fused to the glass. I heard the clip-clop of the driver and horse rambling away into a French Quarter dusk.
“How long has this place been here?” Abby asked. She tugged on the beer, too hard, and the foam spilled over onto her hand.
“Long as I’ve been alive.”
She seemed okay with the answer as she felt along the edges of the old mahogany bar, feeling the cuts, cigarette burns, and dents as if they were braille markings.
We watched SportsCenter with Felix for a while as the afternoon regulars of T-shirt salesmen and Bourbon Street day players rolled in for a cold one before heading home or to begin their night. I hoped I’d see Oz or Hippie Tom. But it was early and I believed Oz may have started his fall ghost tours since it was close to Halloween.
I felt an arm reach across my throat and heard a gruff, weathered voice say: “Gettin’ soft when an old man can sneak up behind you.”
Without looking up I said, “Shouldn’t have to watch your back in your own home.”
“Yeah,” JoJo said, laughing. “Just like a crazy man to call a bar his home.”
I turned and gave JoJo a quick shake so he wouldn’t try to crush my knuckles as he always did with his thick bricklayer hands.
“Abby, I’d like you to meet the top male stripper in New Orleans, Mister Joseph Jose Jackson.”
He reached out and kissed her hand. “With his legs, he’d be lucky to make a nickel on Rampart Street.”
Abby laughed and JoJo motioned us back to the far corner table where he conducted business and occasionally drank with dead men. I wondered how much Loretta had told him as we sat down.
The chairs were mismatched, rickety, and old. I felt a bit uncomfortable stretching my legs again as the chair strained with my weight. I watched JoJo’s face grow serious under a big red neon sign for Jax beer.
“Miss,” JoJo said. “I am real sorry to hear about your folks. If you get tired of this ole so and so, you can always come stay with us. Always need some help ’round here.” He winked at her, his face weathered and very black. “Jes let us know.”
Abby thanked him. Felix brought out another round on JoJo’s orders and Loretta soon appeared with four steaming portions of her famous soul jambalaya. Reheated but just as good. She didn’t tell anybody how she made it, but I knew she always began everything with a thick, smoked ham hock. Even reheated, this stuff was the essence of life: andouille sausage, onions, green peppers, and chicken soaked in Crystal sauce. A big crusty baguette from the market.
You knew food was good when no one talked. No one spoke until every bit of jam was gone and the bowl had been wiped clean with the bread. After that, Loretta began to talk about meeting with Cleve and Bobby Lee Cook and even about our encounter with Clyde at the bridge. As she told the
story, she watched my face, letting me know to leave out other parts. She hadn’t told JoJo about the men coming to the bar before I left, or that someone had tried to kill me and Abby.
“So the Ghost finally up and died on you?” JoJo asked.
I watched Loretta looking at her hands and said, “Yeah. She finally just fell apart.”
“Well,” JoJo began, his eyes narrowed. He leaned back and folded his arms, a man just watching what would come out our mouths next. “Glad y’all is back.”
Felix dipped by as an awkward silence fell onto the table and lit a candle in a red glass. It was night now and the evening’s band, some guys out of Atlanta called The Shadows, were setting up.
The doors had been propped open and a biting breeze shot off Conti and bent the candle’s flame.
“Lo, you mind closin’ up tonight?” JoJo asked. “Robert Junior down at Tips and asked me to sit in.”
“I can help,” I said. I guess I spoke too loud and too soon because JoJo raised his eyebrows. “We’ll come back for the last set. Just let me get Abby settled in to the warehouse and get some clean clothes.”
JoJo nodded to himself and got up from the table.
As he turned his back, Loretta winked at me and pinched my arm. She was actually having fun fooling the old man.
“I’ll be fine, Nicholas,” she said. “Y’all get home and get rested.”
“Don’t leave this bar without me tonight,” I said. “You hear me?”
“Nicholas, I ain’t ever lived my life in fear and won’t start now. Besides, we’re back home. Memphis is a long way.”