Dark End of the Street

I crawled for her, almost touching her fingers, when three men pulled me away. I saw two others picking up Loretta and dragging her from the building. She wasn’t moving.

In the clearing of tearing eyes, ragged and stinging, I saw the blood across her dress.

I crawled away from the men trying to give me oxygen and ran to her as they loaded her into the ambulance and sped away. I ran after the ambulance for a few blocks, coughing in spasms, until I bent over and tried to steady my breathing with my hands on my knees.

The ambulance screamed, lights twirling and scattering on the old buildings, all the way to Decatur and heading to Charity.

I ran back to JoJo’s and a fireman confirmed that’s where they’d taken her.

I stood at the bar for a moment watching the smoke pouring from the broken plate glass window and snaking from the broken twin doors. Dozens of firefighters held firm, washing the fire down as it continued to eat away the chairs, tables, jukebox, bar, and vintage photographs and posters. All that heat. The heat felt like a sunburn across my face where I held myself. Paralyzed.

The sound of cracking. Brick buckling.

I turned to find a phone.

But he was already there.

JoJo watched his business of thirty-five years curl and bend with that pressure and heat. His expression dropped and froze as I watched someone that he didn’t know tell him about Loretta. As I walked to him, he saw me.

JoJo turned his back and got into his Cadillac, speeding away.

Abby and I found JoJo a little after 3:00 A.M… at Charity Hospital. I’d picked her up, worried they’d head over to the warehouse next. He sat in an anonymous room full of dozens of vending machines and scattered tables and chairs sipping coffee from a paper cup with an old teammate of mine, Teddy Paris, and his brother Malcolm. They owned a small rap label called Ninth Ward Records and were a hell of a nice couple of guys. But lately they’d been making quite a chunk of change. So much that I overheard 300-pound Teddy telling JoJo he’d pop a cap in the bastard who torched JoJo’s bar and shot Loretta. “Just a word,” Teddy said. “And it gets done.”

Teddy was no gangster. But it was that kind of night.

Abby and I joined JoJo.

The Paris brothers politely left, swearing their return.

“Teddy shoot himself if he tried to use a gun,” JoJo said, lazy and unfocused to no one in particular.

“I don’t know who called him.”

JoJo nodded.

I felt raw and beaten. I’d had to wake up Abby from the couch where she’d fallen asleep. Her eyes were dazed and unfocused. But she seemed determined to go with me the same way victims of crimes want to help others to ease their own pain.

I got a cup of coffee. Abby just sat there and tried to smile at JoJo.

JoJo watched the wall.

“Heard the surgery went fine,” I said.

He nodded.

JoJo had on a gray cardigan over a black golf shirt. As I reached for his shoulder, I noticed he was still wearing bedroom slippers.

My hand weight felt dead and useless. He wouldn’t look at me. Hadn’t looked at me since I’d walked in.

A cleaning crew of three men in gray coveralls propped open the doors to the cafeteria and began swishing their mops all around us. They worked as if we lived on this tiny island and were forbidden to move.

I leaned back into my chair and smiled at Abby.

I hated hospitals. I hated their smells and sounds. They reminded me of spending the night in one when I was twelve. My mother had shot herself and I’d spent five hours in a waiting room alone while my father disappeared to drink himself into a world of shit. I had to be told my mother was dead by an arrogant surgeon who felt himself morally above anyone who would end her own life.

I asked JoJo if he needed anything.

For a while he didn’t answer.

The cleaning crew soon left, the floor wet and shining like glass but smelling putrid.

“Why you bring these people in our lives?” JoJo asked. He slumped forward and folded his thick, scarred hands together. He stared up at me with such an intensity that I felt bumps form on the back of my neck. “Why, Nick?”

I opened my mouth but words wouldn’t form.

“That detective said you knew who did this. Said you tole him they were folks from Memphis following you.”

I wanted to tell him about Clyde and the men who had harassed Loretta before I’d even agreed to help. But it didn’t seem appropriate. It was a deal I’d made with Loretta, and although I didn’t see how it could possibly cause anymore pain to JoJo, I just nodded with him.

“Loretta’s gonna live,” JoJo said. “Has to. Don’t nothin’ work without her. Understand?” He raised his voice. “I said, do you understand, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

It was me that couldn’t look at him now.

“I worked my whole life to own that bar. Been open since nineteen sixty-five. Do you know what it means to pour your soul into something and see it disappear?”

I watched the toe of my boot.

He knocked the coffee away with his hand. Some of the brown mess scattered across my face and poured toward Abby’s lap. She stood quickly and walked into the hall to leave us alone.