Dark End of the Street

I rubbed my unshaven face and asked, “Loretta, tell me what’s bothering you.”

“You remember me telling you about my brother?”

“Hell yeah, I know all about your brother. He’s a legend. You kidding me?”

Clyde James started his career singing in a gospel trio back in the ‘fifties with Loretta and their sister, whose name I couldn’t remember after a few Dixies. Clyde went on to be a big crossover star in the ‘sixties with a small soul label called Bluff City. He was kind of a mix of Otis Redding and Percy Sledge.

Even though Loretta rarely spoke of him, I had most of his records. Mainly scratchy 45s with their dusty grooves filled with songs about longing, heartache, and all-around woman pain. Many a night they’d exorcised the latest shit I’d been going through with a woman I’d known for the last decade, Kate Archer.

I watched Loretta’s face fill with light from the street lamps and over at the skinheads playing tag with the puppy. The puppy licked their faces and rolled over on his back. He barked a couple times and the skinheads hooted with laughter.

“Well, yesterday two men come to see me at the bar about Clyde. Scared me so bad I ain’t been back down there since tonight. I didn’t even tell JoJo about it. ’Cause JoJo and I don’t discuss my brother. Not after he’d tried so many times to help. You know?”

I nodded. I had an uncle who’d been a moonshine runner turned preacher and used to ask my dad for donations for his “church” every Christmas.

“They were asking me all about Clyde,” Loretta said, reaching into her small jeweled pocketbook for a change purse. It killed me the way she could sing such nasty blues and then be such a proper old Southern woman. “They wanted to know when I seen him last and where they could find him. I tole them I ain’t seen him for fifteen years, but they didn’t believe me. They started breaking bottles and turning over tables. One of them even put his hand over my face and said he’d kill me if I didn’t help ’em find Clyde. JoJo’d gone down to the A &P on Royal to get me some milk and coffee.”

I could feel my cheeks flush with anger. “Did you tell them Clyde was dead?”

“They called me a liar. Said they seen him in Memphis two weeks back. Why would a man say something like that to me?”

I pulled out a Marlboro from a hard pack and lit it. I took a deep breath of smoke and settled back into the bench reaching my arm around Loretta.

“First off, I think you need to tell JoJo. And I can walk you guys home after the shows. That’s no problem.”

She looked back up at the slow-moving clock and then down at her hands. She unfolded them and reached into her change purse pulling out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. She crushed the money into my palm.

“When you headed up to Mississippi?” she asked.

“Monday.”

“I want you to ride up to Memphis and find out what you can about Clyde.”

“Clyde’s dead.”

She looked at me and patted my face as if I were a child with only a child’s understanding. “We always thought he was dead. In the end he turned us all away. His family. His friends. Only thing he wanted was that hurt he carried ’round with him. When we lost track of him, I had to say good-bye. I had to pray for his soul.”

I placed the money back in her purse and shook my head when she opened her mouth to speak. Her eyes closed and a single tear ran in a twisted pattern down her powdered face.

“You never told me what happened to him,” I said, finishing the cigarette and tossing it to the flagstone pavement. A young couple walked past, drunk and kissing madly. They tripped over a curb as they turned into Pirate’s Alley.

A gas lamp burned at the end of the alley by a house once rented by Faulkner. It was one of the loneliest sights I’d ever known but wasn’t sure why.

“Somebody killed a man in his band,” Loretta said. “And Clyde’s wife. She was pregnant, Nick. Woman was six-months pregnant.”

Chapter 3

PERFECT LEIGH DIDN’T like cartoons with talking animals, men who wore aftershave or Italian suits, self-appointed faith healers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, songs on the Waffle House jukebox, soap opera divas, collard greens, or sex of any type. She liked herself and that was enough for her. She liked the way she smelled like butterscotch candy. She liked the way she looked, with a mane of platinum blond hair and thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six measurements. She liked the way she appreciated the way Nancy Sinatra used to dance, the smell of new leather in her Mustang convertible, cheese sauce served in bad Mexican restaurants, and the way her Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album skipped because it warped during a hot day at the beach in Panama City, Florida.