by Ace Atkins
“Miss Perfect, let’s get on the Zippin Pippin one more time,” Jon said.
She still couldn’t see why this place was so important. Jon guessed she couldn’t have known this was the old fairgrounds that E used to rent out all night for Him and the boys. They’d run the whole damned park till the sun came up; E sometimes ridin’ the Pippin all night long.
“Amusement parks are for morons and white trash,” she said. “Goddamn, I feel sick. Jesus.”
Her eyes got real lazy and she stumbled, almost falling to the sidewalk. She caught herself, but one of her high heels came off and Jon walked back to pick it up.
“Here you go,” he said, a true gentleman.
“Take me home now, Jon. Or whatever your real name is.”
“Why do you say such things, Miss Perfect?” He felt his legs starting to jump and a jolt of electricity shoot into the base of his brain. “You doubt my Christian name?”
She laughed it out before she looked at his face and poked out her lower lip. “Oh, little Johnny, did I make you sad? I’m sorry. You are. You are Jon Burrows. Okay. That’s fine by me.”
The lines in her face made puzzles in the falling light. Brown dead leaves skittered down the concrete walkway that led over to the Pippin and for some reason Jon felt very sad. He zipped up his leather coat and checked his new boots for any mess.
But she didn’t move. He felt for a knife in his pocket and it gave him comfort. His breath comin’ real fast through his nose.
She laughed and said, “I’m going to scream now.”
“Cops are lookin’ for you,” he said.
“What?”
“That nigra woman is alive. You didn’t even kill her.” Jon leaned in close and smelled her neck. “You want another ride, then. Right? If not, I’ll take this knife in my pocket and carve up that pretty face.”
He pointed out the Zippin Pippin, one of the holy relics of Memphis, standing tall and wooden against the night sky like a dang wonder of the world. “Come on.”
Her skin was cold at the base of her spine as the Pippin cranked to the top of its wooden platform ready to shoot down that hill and launch into all them curves and twists and gut-churners.
He remembered comin’ to the park when he was a kid and his mamma spendin’ every dime she’d made down at the Zippymart so they could stay all day at the park and get treated like somethin’ special. She’d buy him hotdogs and cotton candy till his belly would swell and them dark circles under his eyes would seem to disappear in the fun-house mirrors.
The Pippin dipped down low again and he heard Miss Perfect scream loud.
And as they cranked real slow up another hill, waitin’ for another drop, he whispered, “I loved you, but Ransom wants you dead.”
Perfect’s whole body shook and her stomach growled. She tried to run to the dark cove of that bathroom underneath a big oak, but he wouldn’t let go of her wrist. He was just a flurry of white sound and booming and swirling black and red light that ran around her brain making it buzz and fry. Goddamn, what had he done to her? What had he given her?
“Fuck you,” she said, not sure if the words were coming out or not. “Stay away.”
He reached his whole arm around her waist and walked her back to an arcade where every plinking sound and flush of color and noise made her even more sick. She thought about that woman she’d shot and even that family with the dead daughter back in Tunica and she started praying that she’d live. She would not end up a loser and dumped and used like they had been. She would get out of this.
She coughed, heaved, and puked all over herself.
Her lips and face felt disgusting, covered in vomit, her head sunk to her shoulder and she could smell her own odor and it sickened her.
She tried to stand by herself but her feet hung loose and useless like a twisted doll. She tried to be rigid but only slunk more.
“What did you do? What did you do to me?”
“I just gave you a few vitamins, woman,” he said.
Her eyes closed again and she felt her stomach keep grumbling and her bladder and bowels fill. She tried to pinch herself and stay tight but the pressure kept on building as her eyes filled with water. Her long legs were loose and exposed through her skirt and her blouse had torn at the shoulder. Dirt on her knees. Puke on her face. Her beautiful blond hair a tangled mess.
She was in a bathroom now, her panties full and soaked and she lay in a corner by a toilet. Little black hairs and smeared dirt and urine were all around her. She felt her skin get tight and the need to puke. She lathered her hands together and rubbed them all over her skirt and looked at her dirty arms and crawled farther into the nasty, horrible corner. She screamed real low and covered her face, tried to curl into a little ball like an animal. She closed her eyes real tight.
She was nasty and useless and no one would ever want her. She screamed again, it was hoarse and low and she could barely hear herself.
She peered up at the wavering figure of Jon. Clean and black-leathered and smiling down at her with his hardened blue eyes and sharpened sideburns. He kicked at her knees trying to bring them back into a more ladylike position. She pulled the material of her skirt over her soiled panties.
“Why are you doing this? Why?”
“Who am I?” he asked.
“Why?”
“Who am I?”
“Jon.”
“Who?”
“Jon.”
Then she understood and she felt her neck fill with blood and heat and she smelled the horrible smells coming from her armpits. Her head cleared for a moment with her own anger. She gripped the edge of the toilet and wavered to her feet. The bathroom stall had been scrawled on with dirty words and phone numbers. The toilet hadn’t been flushed and it looked like the water had been drained from a swamp. She clenched her teeth and stared right into his eyes and wiped her polluted hands on his leather jacket.
“Fuck you!” she screamed. “You are nobody! Nobody.”
His lip quivered and he snarled before slapping her hard across the face. “Don’t you ever say that. I am more somebody than you’ll ever be. I am somebody!”
“No, you’re not,” she said, knowing she was dead anyway. “Do you even know who you are? Are you Elvis? Are you? Are you even Jon? What happened, Jon? Can’t you speak? You pathetic little shit.”
His eyes squinted and the black circles under his eyes became even more pronounced. Like sharp sickles.
She jabbed his chest with her finger again.
“Where’s your mamma, Jon?”
He was crying now and covering his ears as if a high-pitched noise leaked into the room.
“She burned up just like those books you carry with you, didn’t she? Did you do it? Did you set fire to her house? What did she do, Jon? Why did you kill your mamma?”
“No!” he screamed. “It’s not true. My name is Jesse Garon and I’m from Mississippi and I moved to Memphis to make something of myself. My mamma lives in Hollywood and she’s livin’.”
Exhausted, he laid his back to the bathroom stall and cried as he pulled a long yellow scarf from his black leather jacket. “This was hers. He gave it to her. She kept it her whole life in her sweet, little pillow. Little sweet girl.”
She laughed, tasting the blood from her lip. She laughed and watched him smelling his scarf and covering his face with it as if he could hide.
“Ransom will kill you,” she said and stood. “He needs me.”
“Ransom tole me make it look all random and such,” he said. “They’ll find you late tonight. All twisted up and nasty.”
“Fuck you, Absalom Roach.”
Suddenly, he leaped from the ground and exploded his hands against her chest, slamming her against the metal wall. She choked, not being able to catch her breath. Her eyes filled with tears. Little short breaths of nothing.
Jon briskly twisted the yellow scarf against her neck and cried and babbled to himself, like the cooing of a baby, and then hummed a song that she
’d heard before.
“Wise men say, only fools rush in,” he sang, almost as if a lullaby.
She heard her voice box crack and she fell to her ass with a squish, the broken, filthy writing on the wall around her bringing no comfort. Her hands felt wet, touching the dead hairs and urine and dirt and she cried looking at a single sentence scratched into the bathroom wall with a key: PRIDE GOETH BEFORE DESTRUCTION, AND AN HAUGHTY SPIRIT BEFORE A FALL. PROVERBS 16:17–19.
The last thing she heard was Jon singing directly and softly into her ear, “ ’Cause I can’t help, falling in love with you.”
Chapter 51
THE MEMPHIS MENTAL HEALTH INSTITUTE was everything you could hope for in an insane asylum. The building had to have been designed sometime in the late ‘fifties or early ‘sixties with its cold white brick and blocked institutional architecture. Very boxy and utilitarian at eight stories. Gave off the same homogenized blandness of those flickering science films that I had to watch in junior high. Everything had that same washed-out feeling. The magnolia trees along the sidewalk seemed dirty and dying. The volleyball nets behind a long row of chain link were wispy and brown, the sidewalks pale and sun-bleached.
I thought about calling Charity Hospital when we got back to U’s office. Last night, Loretta’s condition had been upgraded to stable. I just wanted to make sure that change continued. I wanted her away from hospitals and soulless dwellings and back home where she belonged.
All around me, I felt like I was being watched. Workers watching my eyes to see if I was coming in to stay. Faceless people who peered from skinny little windows in the building. As U and I walked along a broken sidewalk, the 8:00 A.M.. cold made me put my hands in my pockets.
Someone had slapped a flyer for a new rap album on the institute’s metal sign. OUT THA FRAME, the words read, blowing in the wind. U started laughing as we passed. I didn’t get it. It was cold. It was earlier than I’d been up in ages. I was white.
“What’s that?”
“Means you’re crazy.”
I looked at him.
“You know, not quite thinkin’ in the lines.”
“Ah-ha,” I said and winked at him while shooting a gun made out of my thumb and forefinger. “Got it, G.”
“Don’t do that. Somebody’ll think you’re serious.”
“Clyde’s pretty out tha frame. Isn’t he?”
“From what you told me, out the frame, out his mind, out this universe.”
“When they were grabbing him back under the bridge, he told one of the handlers that he rode the candy beams of the galaxy highway. But then again, who hasn’t?”
“Sometimes I forget who I’m talkin’ to, Travers.”
Some orderlies took us outside to the volleyball court where we sat at what looked like an old dinette set surrounded by four mismatched plastic chairs. The ground was bumpy and filled with rocks. Grass grew in yellowed splotchy patterns. U and I didn’t talk, just yawned and shuffled in our seats feeling the calm that filled the vacant space as sunlight started flooding through the chain-link fence. We were outdoors but I felt like we were in a basement or cavern, the bluish-gray sky simply a painted ceiling.
Within a few minutes, they led Clyde — drawn face and shaky-legged — out to the table situated in the ragged void. We were so exposed and in the open, I felt like we were having a tea party on the fifty-yard line. I smiled up at him, but he didn’t seem to notice. Didn’t seem to remember the fight, or the day, or who he was. This was going to be a huge waste of time.
As I watched him slump into his chair and stare into a far corner of the building where he now lived, I tried to focus on who he’d once been. I tried to think about the Apollo, the sessions at Bluff City, and that brilliant sharp voice on Dark End. Those words seeming to come through the wind and my imagination and memories. A phonograph needle catching a man’s soul came to mind.
But all I saw was a withered old man. He was just plain beaten. Any brilliance had been stripped away like water eroding the side of a mountain.
He wore a blue gown under a thick bathrobe and paper shoes. His fine hair seemed like feathers blowing against a rock.
“Clyde?” I asked. Just a knock on the door.
His gaze didn’t leave the vacant corner where he stared. It wasn’t a place you stared. You stared into the sky or a parking lot or at a nice-looking woman. You didn’t stare at beams supporting an ugly building or damned old washing machines collected in rusted heaps nearby.
His eyes didn’t wander.
“I’m a friend of your sister’s,” I said. “Loretta. What happened, Clyde? There were men looking for you. What did you get yourself into?”
I felt like I was talking to a second grader.
I put my hand on his back. I wanted to establish some kind of link, but instead felt foolish and manipulative.
His dry lips parted and he moaned. I think it was a moan. Maybe it was the wind sneaking around the buildings and down into the valley where we sat.
The sound again. His lips shifted against each other and finally some more sounds. With a little more effort, that same staring into the blankness of forever, he spoke: “I went to sleep.”
“What?” I asked and looked over at U. He nodded and gave me another be-cool gesture. We’d been told he’d been put on some medication that would help with the tantrums. The doctors weren’t even sure he’d be able to communicate.
But he did. Sort of.
“After I was born, I went to sleep and woke up other people.”
“What do you mean you woke up other people?”
“Some of them was parading, some of them was performing, some of them was doin’ movies, stuff like that,” he said. “So I woke up with them, and carried on their duty, their performing. For that short period of time, when I was first born.”
“Clyde, listen to me,” I said. “Tell me about the men.”
“They put me to sleep, and I woke up then, woke up in midair, in rain, woke up the rain, the rain was hurting, hurting me, yeah it was hurting me, it was hurting, I could feel it. Snow. Stuff like that. . . . It hurt Mary, too.”
“What happened with Mary? Is that why they’re after you? I want to help. I want to find out who wants to hurt you.”
His eyes suddenly turned to me looking like he wanted to accuse me of coming here and disturbing his delusions. “Hurt?”
“Who?”
“They’re dead.”
“Who?”
“Eddie and them.”
“Mary?”
“She dead.”
“What happened?”
“The car is dark at the bottom of a lake. I see them coming but I can’t move. My feet stuck down deep.”
I folded my hands and covered my mouth and nose. My head pounded from lack of sleep and a bad need for a cup of coffee. I felt blurry.
Then he started. He did it right here. The song. Right in the dead center of a nut-house exercise yard, he started performing. The voice was cracked but clear in its warped, weathered perfection. Almost as if it had been aging for decades for this one moment. The words were sung low and heated and with emotion. But his face was completely impassive. Fucking “Dark End of the Street” in a nut house. The world was upside down and I was excited and nauseated at the same time.
“They’re gonna find us,” he said. “They’re gonna find us, Lord, some day, you and me, at the dark end of the street.”
I waited for him to trail off into that twirling, dripping line of emotion about you and me as if that heartache of not being together in the daylight would last forever. But he didn’t. He left it there like the last words of a funky poem. A question mark. A structure too cool to be messed with.
“What happened?” I asked for the twentieth time. I wanted to take in the whole moment and savor it and write about it and let everyone in the world know that I’d heard Clyde James sing “Dark End” one fall morning in Memphis. But I couldn’t. I had gone too far from caring about moments and music and poetr
y and finding beauty in a crazy old man clinging to the one song that made him immortal.
I wanted to find out how he got hooked up with the Dixie Mafia. The sky began to turn purple and black and clouds streaked by in loose, torn colors.
“Who killed them, Clyde?”
He looked at me and smiled. A loose, goofy-old-man smile. His hands outstretched like a circus clown apologizing for dropping the oranges he was juggling. “Don’t you see? We all did.”
“Bobby Lee Cook?”
His eyes squinted at me and then stared back into the dark space filled with rusted machines that didn’t work.
“Let’s go,” U said. “That night messed him up something terrible.”
I didn’t move.
“I got a buddy who can get us the case file,” U said. “It’s all we can do.”
I looked at Clyde James as I stood. I cupped my hand around his shoulder, but I didn’t want to build a connection anymore. I think I just wanted to pass on some of Loretta’s love. I patted his back and gave him a smile that only confused him as he continued to hum his song.
Gooseflesh raised on the back of my neck as we walked away. I heard him speaking, not to me, but to the air. To anything that listened.
“All I am is a voice,” he said. “Lost in a dream.”
Chapter 52
THE PHRASE PUBLIC RECORD is misleading. Most people think it means they have access to all the governmental information they want, anytime they want it. The truth is that the “all” part of the statement varies from state to state — mainly watered down to “some” — and the “anytime” means when they get around to it. Last year, I was helping a fellow tracker look for a death certificate on legendary bluesman Blind Blake in Atlanta and ran into a mighty long clusterfuck. He had the theory that Blake had died somewhere in south Georgia after being hit by a streetcar in the ‘twenties and that ole Blake’s death would show up somewhere in state records. My written request was never answered. My phone calls were greeted by polite paper sluggers, but no answers were ever given. A trip to Georgia confirmed that no one had even looked for the damned thing.