by Ace Atkins
“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.”
We 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.
Chapter 47
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.
Our 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.
U spoke a little louder when the muzzle of their guns came inches from our chests. “Hey man, saw your fire. Y’all wouldn’t know where a brother could find some decent barbecue?”
Much better, I thought, blood now swimming through my ears. Heart lodged behind my larynx. At least Al Jolson confused them.
Chapter 48
“THRILL KILL,” Ransom said to Jon Burrows as they continued to hunt the wildcat in back of the casino. “Is that what it’s all about for you?”
“No, sir,” Jon said, takin’ good aim into the edge of cotton fields, where they’d seen the skinny ole cat disappear. He sighted down his arm and along the straight edge of the Beretta. For a moment, he wondered what would happen if he turned the gun around to Ransom and shot that grizzled fucker right in the throat. He rested the gun at his side, the grip loose in his fingers. Might as well hear what he got to say.
“Seems to me you know the difference,” Ransom said, smashing cotton plants under his muddy boots and tracking the wildcat into the woods. “You know when I was your age, I ran most of south Memphis. Took me about six months to figure out the players and then how to play them. Make them turn against each other. Make ’em afraid of me. Sometimes you got to crawl up high in a tree and watch the animals below you. It’s not hard.”
Ransom pulled out a cigar from a deep pocket in his heavy hunting coat. He snipped the end, offered another to Jon, snipped that one, and lit both. Jon took a good draw, trying to make sure he didn’t cough none and show he didn’t know nothin’ about cigars. He did. He’d been through his share of Tampa Nuggets and Swisher Sweets.
It was night and kind of cold. His face felt all funny every time the wind blew out of the trees and cut across his face. He’d shaved off his beard a few hours ago, leavin’ a pair of perfect sideburns just like E in sixty-eight, and splashed all his pores with Hai Karate. That wind ’bout tore his face up when they’d walked out back of the hotel and tromped about a half mile to that new site, lookin’ for some wildcat a guard had seen.
“How far you want to take this?”
“What you mean?” Jon said, spittin’ out the smoke from his mouth. Much more blue and heavy than them Nuggets. Felt rich.
“You travel a lot?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You taken lots of jobs?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How’d you like to get out of that mess?” Ransom said. “I liked the way you took care of that body in New Orleans. You took care of any evidence real quick. If you’d moved that woman, we might have some folks breathin’ from behind… Did Perfect really go crazy?”
“Yes, sir,” Jon said. He thought he saw some movement along the edge of the high grass, right near that clearing of maples. “You see it?”
Ransom aimed his Browning and fired off three quick hits into the grass. They ran over to the clearing to find an opossum, about the size of a fat squirrel, bleedin’ from the mouth. Ransom kicked it over and Jon saw a dozen little tiny babies, like pink worms, wigglin’ all about.
Ransom didn’t notice and kept walking along the edge of the woods, turning inside on a narrow path, all the way clearing away the branches for Jon. Ransom was showin’ him respect. Showed respect for his talents. Jon’s hands quivered along the handle of the gun.
Felt like he could run around the woods about a million times and not get tired. Ride into daylight without a lick of sleep. He was E.
“I could use you permanent,” Ransom said.
“Yes, sir.”
“So…”
Jon suddenly had the vision of Colonel Tom Parker and Hollywood and record deals and spreadin’ the word of E in every language on the gosh dang planet. E on cologne and shampoo bottles and bumper stickers. This is what Jon needed, someone to take his skills to the next level. Someone to get him them high-level killin’ jobs to make him a legend.
“Yes, sir,” Jon said, smiling, leg just ashakin’ at his side.
They were surrounded by darkness now. Nothin’ but woods and a narrow path. Tree branches swattin’ into their faces with every step. Barely even hearin’ the semis rollin’ off Highway 61.
A cry.
A dang wild animal in heat.
Jon followed Ransom down through a loose gathering of small trees. Small moon above beamin’ down some pale silver light that reflected off the leaves and the back of Ransom’s leathery neck.
Ransom crept along, listening.
“Kid, you know much about politics?”
“No, sir.”
“You know Tennessee is gettin’ a new governor next month? The first Tuesday in November?”
Jon listened for another wild cry.
“I don’t want to lose,” Ransom said. “You get back to Memphis tomorrow. All right?”
He looked back at Jon. Jon felt a heat spread through his body. Real warm. Man appreciated him. Colonel Ransom.
“Yes, sir,” Jon said, biting into the cigar and taking a long puff. A nice old buzz mixing with the Benzedrine.
Another wild cry. The fast rush of leaves and little twigs cracking under paws.
Jon saw the dang cat first. Didn’t even wait for Ransom, just squeezed off five rounds from his Beretta. That cat crying and wrigglin’ on his back, screaming wild as hell and swattin’ that ole tail.
Ransom laughed and ran to the animal. “Hot damn, boy,” he said. “That was a hell of a shot. See what I mean about lookin’ around you. Can you do that fast for me?”
Jon nodded as Ransom aimed at the wrigglin’ cat, ears pinned back and teeth exposed with fright, and fired off two rounds into the animal’s skull.
He kicked the cat in the side. “Mean bitch, too,” he said.
“Can you do that again?” Ransom asked.
Jon didn’t understand but didn’t want to say it. He looked down at his cigar; it had gone out and sat wet and useless in his mouth. He wanted to relight it more than anything in the dang world.
“Can you take care of another mean ole bitch?” Ransom asked.
; The cat’s blood was scattered and red on Ransom’s boots like a crazy painter’s dream.
Perfect walked back to her hotel room adjoined with Jon’s and noticed the connecting door was cracked open. She heard the buzz of a television on some kind of teenage sitcom where this little girl was a witch and had a damned talking cat. The cat made some kind of crack about the teenage witch’s boyfriend being stupid and a sissy and was shut up into a pet kennel to the delight of a laugh track.
She called out Jon’s name. Nothing. She checked the bathroom and even the closet and made sure the hall door was locked. Even if he was at the door right now she could scoot on out of Dodge before he knew she was in there. Nothing much in the bathroom. A toothbrush and a bottle of white pills. Wet towels on the floor. A wrinkled JCPenney catalog, opened to the teenage girl’s underwear page, lay wide open by the toilet along with a couple Captain America comic books and a Gideon’s Bible with a crude hand-painted image of Elvis on the cover.
The drawing was so bad that she could barely recognize the singer. His head was kind of lopsided and he had on a high, white collar studded with jewels and thick black sideburns. Below were the words: My name has Evil and Lives. It’s probably better not to worry too much about it.
Back in the bedroom, she opened the drawers in a long chest. Nothing. Not even lint. She looked under the bed and in the nightstand. Some stray socks and a book on numerology and sexual positions. But tucked behind a long row of curtains, standing on its side, sat a little Captain America suitcase. Something seriously made for an eight year old. It had been buckled tight, its plastic hide ragged and worn at the edges. She pulled it up to a coffee table, loose beams of sunlight breaking through the blowing curtains, opened it, and rifled through.
Inside: four pairs of dark-indigo unfaded Levis, five white T-shirts (crisp and ironed), four pairs of tube socks, a couple leather wristbands, a couple Polaroid shots of a naked woman with dark hair and long legs in a shower stall (on the back, words written in German), a couple more Captain America comics, Vitalis hair oil, a dozen identical postcards of Graceland, a beat-up cassette of Elvis: Live at Madison Square Garden, and a full bottle of Hai Karate cologne.