Dark End of the Street

I thought about the Sons of the South and Abby’s father. An old cop like Raymond L. Jenkins would’ve been the only one who could’ve kept an original file, no names blacked out. A blackmail scheme set in motion by a bitter old bastard and only furthered by a misguided Oxford attorney. They could’ve easily changed the election.

“Russell’s been chained to him ever since,” Cook said. “Now Ransom is just calling in his chips.”

“So Russell flips his stance on gambling?” I asked, looking down at the riverfront and some old tourist paddle wheelers tying up for the storm. “He’ll allow it down there?”

Cook watched me and shook his head. “Now why would the Dixie Mafia invest all that money in Tunica if Memphis wasn’t that far behind?”

I felt a spot of rain on my cheek. The wind began to blow harder.

I understood why Cook lived on the Bluffs.

Chapter 57

JUDE RUSSELL DIDN’T want him here. He hated every time that son of a bitch ever tried to make contact. The last time he’d seen him was about a week ago when Ole Miss was playing Auburn and Ransom had shown up at a party thrown by the CEO of a company that made kitchen appliances. He stood there and ate fried chicken and drank whiskey with one of his whores like he belonged among them. But Levi Ransom would never belong. He had the stink of gutter trash that seeped from his pores like urine and testosterone. No matter how many millions he stole or killed for, Ransom would always be that yellow-toothed hood that for some twisted reason he’d found so damned appealing when he was a teenager. How stupid could a boy be? He’d alienated everyone who’d tried to help him, thought his daddy was the Antichrist and his mother a babbling drunk. But Levi Ransom, with his greased ducktail and hot-rodded Mustang, was about the coolest thing he’d ever known.

At sixteen, he’d met Ransom at this little pool hall down on Beale. He’d liked the street before it had changed. Blues. Beer. Good dope. Women. Ransom knew every darkened corner of the street. He’d buy him pitchers of beer and let him play pool for free and get women to do things to him that he’d never imagined in the bedroom of his Germantown mansion.

He’d walk over to Russell stretched over the cigarette-burned felt of a pool table and stick two fingers under his nose. He’d point to some teenager, drunk or stoned, leaning against the old brick wall of the bar, and let him know it was his turn. Ransom was like that. He tried to make you think he shared it all.

Russell didn’t have too many friends. How could you when you changed boarding schools about every month and most people only wanted to talk about your daddy? Ransom was twenty-five and had a look like he’d been around the world a dozen times and was not too impressed with what he saw. He’d brag about setting fire to a courthouse in south Mississippi when he was fourteen by using a cigarette and pack of matches. He said he’d killed thirteen men, two of them with a buck knife, for not paying their debts.

Most of all, when he was drunk, he’d brag about being part of an organization out of Biloxi. He said he’d gotten in good because his granddaddy had ties with a man who owned a club down there. Said when he got kicked out of the service, he started running poker and blackjack tables for the man. And pretty soon, Ransom said, he was involved in more complicated games like turning out little girls and using them to bait businessmen. He said a pack of Polaroids could net you a mighty nice return.

He called his pool hall on Beale just a little starter kit. Said it was an office for much bigger things that were happening. But he never did explain what those things were until the night of Russell’s seventeenth birthday when they sat loaded up on Falstaff outside a little grocery in south Memphis. Ransom handed him a.45 and told him to go in and get back some change.

Funny how one moment can change your life forever. He should have walked away. He should’ve understood that Ransom was only using him the way he’d used the little girls he’d turned out. But he didn’t. He only thought of a daddy who returned to Memphis from D.C. to talk about the safety of keeping blacks in their place and a mother who had her maid drop off a birthday cake while she drove to Florida with the church deacon.

Russell knew that.45 felt good that night. Felt so good he’d even smacked the head of the fat-ass clerk who’d laughed at him when he asked him to empty the drawer into a paper sack.

Ransom had called that night his baptism. And anytime that he tried to resist the jobs, usually only when he was sober, Ransom would smile at him like he’d been there himself and laugh. “We ain’t like other people, you and me. We are takers.”

The money didn’t mean shit. But the you and me part meant everything.

They probably robbed twenty-five stores over the summer of ‘sixty-eight while the world fretted over Kennedy and King, men who later became his heroes.