Dark End of the Street

She looked over at me and shrugged. I moved ahead and began to search for a face that I only knew from a thirty-year-old picture. No one said a word to me. A few quit talking. Most just ignored us.

“Clyde?” Loretta yelled, like she was calling her cat home to dinner. “Clyde.”

Most of the men I saw would actually be younger than Clyde. A few too old. No one responded to her calls. I let out a steady stream of air and turned as I saw a wiry white man with an ax handle trying to sneak up from behind.

I dodged his blow, the handle raking across the concrete ground, and pulled his shoulders forward, making him smack the ground facefirst. There was an audible pop.

I yelled to the group that I didn’t want trouble. I told them that Loretta was just looking for her brother. “Clyde James. Any of y’all know Clyde? He used to sleep down at the Piggly Wiggly on Madison. The graveyard, right there.”

A couple of coughs, a grunt, the old man still pissing into the Mississippi like he had attached a hose inside himself.

“Look, I got twenty bucks for someone. Buy a lot of whiskey or Eight-Ball.”

“There,” grunted a little black man wearing a worn Confederate battle hat. His face covered in short silver whiskers and wearing a bright pink trench coat. “Y’all can see him right there.”

“Where?” I asked.

“There,” he said, aggravated as hell that he’d had to stand. “Look, I’ll show you. Just give me that twenty.”

And I did.

We crossed over a weedy lot strewn with empty beer cans and torn pieces of clothing. The man leading us down below the next bridge, identical to the Harahan, walked stoop-shouldered and slow. His face was gray, as if oxygen didn’t circulate above his neck. Bloodshot eyes. If I’d seen him sleeping on the street, I would have thought he was dead.

I pointed the flashlight down the path, every click and shuffle making my heart pound, until he pointed to a collection of grayish-black mounds gathered in the fall cold. A tin drum of old rags and driftwood had been lit at the base of the bridge as if marking an entrance to some kind of feudal castle.

I kept my fingers close to the Glock and I took comfort in the seventeen-shot capacity U had bragged about. Loretta wandered ahead and I soon lost our guide as I followed her underneath the bridge.

There I was greeted by a tremendous smell of piss and shit. I wanted to gag and buried my nose in my jacket.

“Good Lord,” I said.

Loretta took the flashlight out of my hand and swept it over the mounds.

They moved.

All dirty. Blacks and grays and sun-bleached browns. People under mounds of rags. Boxes of chicken bones and empty dog food cans. More bottles of whiskey. Pits bordered by barbed wire. Some slept in the pits, others in boxes, and even more just on the ground in heaps. There must’ve been thirty, forty of them.

“Clyde!” Loretta yelled. Just blind. Absolutely blind. I moved my hand away from the Glock and felt for her fingers. I had a hard time swallowing. God, the smell was absolutely awful.

Everyone was sleeping a hell of a hard sleep.

No one moved as we searched for about ten minutes. She’d stop, flash a light into their faces, and move on. One old guy sprang to his feet and tried to knock my teeth in. But these were weak people. Their bodies barely functioned; their minds were completely fucked up. I just sidestepped the old dude and he fell back to the ground.

Between the gaps of the massive supports of the bridge, I watched a tugboat pushing a barge upstream. The moonlight broke and swirled on the brown water in its wake. I spit on the ground, trying to remove the smell from my head when I noticed Loretta had stopped and bent down to the ground.

I followed.

She was crying.

I looked at her; she nodded to me.

Clyde James opened his eyes.

Chapter 41

AT FIRST, CLYDE thought Loretta was his mother. Kind of strange and Freudian but he did. Thirty years. It had been thirty freakin’ years, I had to remember. His hair was almost straight, gray wisps. High cheekbones and blackish-red skin. Fingernails like daggers. As I watched his face, he moaned. His eyes bloodshot as hell, and his mouth smelling like a septic tank but asking for forgiveness. He just kept asking her to find pity on his soul. He then curled himself into a ball and started crying. Around him lay jug bottles of malt liquor and crushed soda cans punched with holes. His head lay on a tan vinyl suitcase and he’d wrapped his body in a plastic tarp. A Memphis winter wasn’t far away and I wondered how anybody could ever survive out here. I felt like we were on the bottom of an ocean.

I watched Loretta crying and felt a thick rock form in the back of my throat. She lay her hands across his cheek. “Oh, Lord. Clyde? Clyde?”

He said something about the cold as if reading my mind. His eyes wide open now, a feverish light cast across his face.

“It’s Lo. Baby. Clyde. Come on. Clyde?”