Dark End of the Street

Hank ran ahead of them and quickly disappeared after sniffing out a rabbit. The path widened for a moment, by a pool of stagnant green water littered with cypress stumps and a few dead birds. Abby reigned in her horse and jostled down the other way, passing the ruins of an old house some said belonged to a Confederate captain. Her father always used to say that the Yankees burned down the house and killed the man’s family. Said when the man walked back from Georgia, he found everything he’d built destroyed.

There was only a stone floor and a chimney, a base really, but Abby had always thought it would be fine place to build a house someday.

“What do you think?” she asked Maggie.

“Fine,” she said. “I don’t know if the Johnsons would ever sell it, though.”

“They would,” Abby said, looking down the last bit of path into the clearing and the stables. Her last day in Oxford before driving up to Memphis for her flight. “I mean, they did.”

Maggie shook her head and steadied her horse’s feet. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“Will you take care of it?” she asked, taking off her straw cowboy hat and fingering away her loose hair.

Maggie nodded that she would. And that was it. No fight. No more talking. Not even an explanation of how it would all work out. They’d been friends since Abby was born and it wasn’t necessary.

“You heard from Nick?” Maggie asked. Her sharp green eyes looking exotic and bright against her dark skin and hair.

“Only took you two hours to ask today.”

“Well?”

“He’s back in New Orleans. Called me yesterday.”

“And?”

“Said he was going to finish some book he’d been working on about a blues singer. Said it helped having something to keep his mind off things.”

“He can keep his mind on me.”

Abby laughed.

“He’ll come around,” Maggie said, smiling and putting a hand on her very round denimed hip. “They always do.”

Abby trotted her horse into the stable. The wood there was ancient, been there since the turn of the century, and had the same coloring of driftwood. She unbuckled the saddle and, despite the cold, removed a sweaty blanket from the animal’s back.

After Abby finished putting away the saddle and rig, Maggie tossed her a pitchfork.

“Nothin’s changed,” Maggie said.

Abby smiled and said, “Nothin’.”

She worked for a while cleaning out the stable, until the sky grew darker and they both knew that the families back at Maggie’s house would wonder where they went. Nothing had changed. Maggie was sixteen and Abby was ten.

“You gonna be all right out there, wherever you’re going?”

“Firenze.”

“Which is a fancy word for…?”

“Italy.”

“And you’ll be fine?”

From the base of the road and rumbling up a dirt path, Abby watched a massive Chevy Silverado pickup, black with tons of extra chrome, pass the sagging cattle gate and drive to the barns where they worked. The windows had been tinted and Maggie squinted through the darkening light to watch for the driver.

“Did I say I was going alone?”

Maggie narrowed her eyes.

The door opened and Raven, all lanky and James Dean in his deep indigo jeans and pressed snap-button shirt, got out. He’d slicked back his long black hair and even shaved. The leather on his pointed black boots shined in the glow of his headlights.

“Too late for supper?” he asked.

Maggie grinned, it was one of those true Maggie expressions where you could tell she was overflowing with skepticism but kept her teeth clamped tight. Still, she managed to keep smiling and speak. “Yeah. Plenty left. Follow us to the house and pull up a chair.”

Abby smiled, and for a moment looked back through the narrow back gate of the stables where, framed in purple gray light, sat the old house. Come spring that strange relic would be a fine place to begin.

He was a strange, lone figure walking along Elvis Presley Boulevard that Thanksgiving Day. A skinny black man in a white jumpsuit studded in rhinestones. Black wig with sideburns, oversized metal glasses. He followed the curving rock wall that hugged the holy estate scrawled with words and prayers for the Man. They always changed. Prayers of thanks during the winter became prayers of sorrow in the fall. He’d seen the words in Japanese and German. Nasty letters from women still hot for Him after all these years. Tourists who often wrote the date they’d arrived as if carving their immortality on a religious relic.

But for the truly devout, it was a place of contact. Leaving personal messages that only a few would understand. The last time Black Elvis had come through Memphis as he dipped down to Florida for more tribute acts, he’d received word on the forty-third stone from the gates that one of the True Believers needed some guidance. A young man from Mississippi who held more faith than any man he’d ever met.

When they broke company a while back, the young man said he’d soon leave word in the same place if everything worked out as planned. Good wishes. Maybe a prayer. Or, again, the need for help.