Dark End of the Street

Ace Atkins Dark End of the Street

A book in the Nick Travers Mystery series, 2002

for Angela

At the dark end of the street,

that’s where we always meet.

Hiding in shadows where we don’t belong.

Livin’ in darkness to hide our wrong.

– DAN PENN AND CHIPS MOMAN,

“The Dark End of the Street”

I’ve been scarred and battered.

My hopes the wind done scattered.

Snow has friz me, sun has baked me.

Looks like between ’em

They done tried to make me

Stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’-

But I don’t care!

I’m still here!

– LANGSTON HUGHES, “Still Here”

Prologue

December 17, 1968

Memphis, Tennessee

THE DREAM OF SOUTHERN soul music was dead. It died last year when Otis Redding’s twin-engine plane crashed into an icy Wisconsin lake, killing him and the Bar-Kays, a bunch of kid musicians from the old neighborhood. It died a few months later, too, back in April, when some peckerwood sighted a rifle from a run-down rooming house near the Lorraine Motel, taking out a man who only wanted to see some garbage workers get their due. It died again every night that summer, when hate filled the neighborhoods of south Memphis. But for Eddie Porter, it died most when black musicians raised on gospel and white musicians weaned on country and blues quit working on a style of music that was the sweetest he’d ever known.

Porter could still remember that day in June when he was helping the bass player in his band carry milk crates full of guitar cords and microphones from the Bluff City studio. A cop car filled with two white men had stopped, the doors popped open, and the men aimed their pistols at Porter. Tate, shaking like an ole woman, spoke to them in this tone that kind of broke Porter’s heart. Kind of like he was embarrassed for his race. Tate, that bucktoothed country boy, had stared at the cops as they slid their guns back into their leather holsters, as if in some way he was responsible for all the shit that was happenin’.

For Otis and Dr. King. For the burning buildings. And maybe he even took the blame for the white politicians Porter watched on television in the apartment he shared with his mutt dogs and wife he didn’t love.

For a few weeks after the cops came, Porter tried to fill the silences between Tate and Cleve, his rhythm guitar man, with all the soul he could stand from his battered Hammond B-3 organ. The music soaked into red shag carpet walls of the old movie theater that served as their studio and out through the newly barred windows and into an emerging ghetto. He played as if somehow dance music could solve Memphis’s problems.

But Memphis kept boiling. Soul kept dying. Their horn section broke up. Porter’s drummer quit. His organ broke. And he knew he couldn’t stop any of it.

Wasn’t till June that the idea came to him.

When it did, he was at the Holiday Inn by the airport, caressing the soft face of a woman who was carrying another man’s baby. He remembered the stiff mustard-colored curtains were slightly drawn and the room smelled of chlorine, gin breath, and cigarettes.

He sat there smoothing the curly black hair away from her brown eyes and feeling the child kicking in her stomach and thought about the future for the first time in his life. He knew he didn’t have anything more for Memphis. And Memphis owed him something.

The owner of Bluff City Records – that sold nothing but black music – was a potbellied white man who spent his time sweet-talking teenaged girls in his second-floor office decorated in cheetah print and velvet paintings of naked Mexican women.

Porter never could figure out what the man did. He had Porter run the sessions, deposit the checks from distributors, and pay out the other musicians. Most of the profits came from one man. Their holy God almighty, soul sensation Clyde James.

That night at the Holiday Inn, Porter found the answers with James’s wife in his lap as he watched the swirl of blues, reds, and yellows play on the stones and plastic flowers near the swimming pool. He knew he couldn’t see anything beyond tonight and that scared him like nothin’ ever could.