Dark End of the Street

As he felt for the blood rushing from his heart, he wore an expression of someone caught in another’s nightmare.

He seemed to be thinking as he lay in shock, This wasn’t the way it was supposed to turn out.

The shot didn’t even faze U, who broke apart from us and ran back to where his truck had disappeared.

We jogged together, almost as if training camp were last summer, and I heard him talking shit the same as he’d done back then. But this time it wasn’t about his coaches or his first wife. He was mad at me. “Who is gonna pay for that, Travers? And, damn, you know I can’t take your car. It’s more of a piece of shit than it’s ever been.”

He stopped, winded, and looked up into the slatted high beams. About thirty feet up, we saw Garon holding on to a crosswalk. He smiled down to us and waved.

U said: “Had a CD changer in the back.”

I gripped the steel beams and found a foothold in crisscrossed slats held in place by rusted rivets. The wind cut into my ear canals and made sharp, whistling sounds.

“Don’t even,” U said.

I found another foothold.

And another.

“Crazy motherfucker,” was the last thing I heard before I got higher into the bridge’s supports and about ten feet away from Garon.

He kept smiling down at me the whole time. Each step I made, each foothold, I got more angry. I couldn’t stop seeing Loretta lying there. I couldn’t stop thinking about JoJo’s bar and my life and suddenly I felt like I was at the edge of this cliff. Jon was there. Standing. Looking down at me.

I gripped tight onto the crossbeam where he stood.

My stomach swayed when I stupidly glanced down at the swirling water below us, hundreds of feet. Freezing wind clawing at my fingers, making it tough to get a grip.

Garon didn’t move. Didn’t try to knock me off the ridge.

He stood on a crosswalk fashioned from three beams. Enough to walk. Keep your balance without tumbling off. As I walked toward him, he aimed a gun at my chest.

I couldn’t breathe and the wind cutting into my ears made me feel like I was bleeding.

He pulled the trigger.

Click.

Again.

Click.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. I was out of breath. I wanted to kill him. “Why’d you come back? After everything in New Orleans. Why’d you come back for me?”

He mumbled something.

“What?” I yelled.

“You killed me.”

He wore an ill-fitting white suit with a yellow scarf around his neck. His face was reddened and chafed and his sideburns were bushy and uneven. He had a face pockmarked with acne scars and his eyes showed the distracted glassy look of someone truly mentally ill. It was the same with Clyde.

“Stay there,” I said.

He shook, his whole body convulsing like an electric current was shooting through him. His eyes rolled into the back of his head. “Evil and lives,” he said.

“What?”

“Evil and lives,” he said, laughing. “It never really ends. We’re all just on a train bound for Tulsa.”

All of sudden, he rushed me and I dropped to my knees, getting a firm grip on the walk. Size wasn’t a factor up here.

As I hung on, he kept going.

He didn’t want to kill me at all.

I watched him sail over the edge of the bridge, his arms outstretched like he was in flight with his legs pinned together, until he disappeared hundreds of feet below into the Mississippi.

Chapter 62

IT WAS THANKSGIVING, one of those worn, gray days when all you wanted to do was lie inside and eat and watch parades and footballs games. Maybe nap a little bit. Abby hated that feeling. She hated being sluggish and full and lazy, so she begged Maggie to take her down Old Taylor Road to the stables and get their horses out for a run. Abby brought Hank along for the ride in Maggie’s beat-up Rabbit and soon they had the horses saddled up and began beating a fine path beside a nameless creek, dodging tree branches and jostling along until the horses’ breath made foggy patterns in the dark mist.

The air smelled of barbecue fires and moldy leaves as she kicked her horse in the side for a good run in an open clearing of high, yellow grass that had once been a cotton field. Abby’s horse jumped ahead of Maggie and she laughed and yelled as they got closer and closer back to another clearing up on a hill dotted with rolls of hay leading to an old house and then back to the stables.

She hadn’t told Maggie yet about buying the land, the stables, and the horses. She wasn’t sure how her cousin would take it. She’d think it was charity, giving her a job and a business to run. But since Abby had sold her parents’ house and planned on traveling awhile, she got a little scared. She needed a place of her own.

They both slowed to a gallop, Abby tucking her beaten suede boots tight into the stirrups and ducking beneath the hardened fingers of a bare oak and the long, dying strands of a willow.