Dark End of the Street

“Hold on,” Abby said, pushing her plate out of the way. “What are you going to do with me? You’re not leaving me here. I’m the one whose parents were killed. I’m the one who found Nix. What are you going to do, drop me at the mall with your credit card?”

“Nick ain’t got no credit,” U said.

She made a grunting noise. “I want to go back to Oxford.”

“Not till this is over.”

“I’m not moving in with Bubba so I can sit around and watch Ricki Lake,” she said. “Besides, do you even know how to shoot that gun?”

“Yes.”

“How? I hunted with my father; what did you do?”

“I used to-”

“Hold up,” U said, raising his palm out. “I got this. See, Nick is from Alabama.”

“So?”

“That about says it all.”

“Give me two days,” I said to Abby. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t up for committee.”

Abby grunted again and tromped to the bathroom to cool off. I got up to make sure she was all right. For some reason I wanted everyone to be okay with everything.

“Nick, cool out,” he said. “We got it.”

I sat back down and asked, “So, you’re in?”

“Me and you are the same, brother,” he said, looking out the window. Maybe seeing that same blue crispness but feeling better about it. “You know that. We just a couple of Zen cowboys, Travers. What else we supposed to do with our lives? Ain’t many of us around.”

“Thanks.”

“Listen, man. Loretta and JoJo have been real good to me, too,” U said, his head nodding with his own words. “Somebody mess with Loretta? Come on. You got to ask? You wanted backup on one thing, said you wanted a meeting with Elias Nix… Well, I’m gonna get you that appointment tonight.”

We didn’t go alone. On the way out of town, U picked up Bubba Cotton in, of all places, Dixie Homes, where he’d been baby-sitting his sister-in-law’s twin boys. The boys had pulled out every pot and pan their mother owned, using them for drums, as we stepped over their mess and found Bubba swilling a forty and watching a little Ricki Lake.

His sister-in-law had gotten home before us and Bubba was glad to leave because she was cussing his ass out. He sat in back of U’s Expedition on the ride north with earphones on and silently bobbed his head.

We soon dropped off the highway and away from the commercial roads and hotels and restaurants and hit a long straightaway of curving hilly blacktop. A lot of cotton fields soon turned to woods. Maple trees with yellow and red leaves. Pin oak. Cedar. A lot of pine trees coated in kudzu, almost looked like a ‘fifties horror film, It Came from the South. Kudzu everywhere. Telephone poles. Abandoned shacks. The growth had even snaked its fingers and arms through several old rusted cars.

We traveled along the road for another thirty minutes with only the sound of Bubba’s Walkman and the roaring of tires on the blacktop. We passed some corn fields, yellowed and mowed flush, and then got into more woods with gullies of bottom land where rainwater stood in stagnant rows. Turtles slept on floating pieces of wood and trash. Red bud willows draped their branches across pools, catching the final reddish-purple light of the day.

U slowed, pointed out an anonymous dirt road, and kept driving.

“Let’s get some more coffee, stretch, and check our plan. Again. I found us a campsite up the road and we’ll go through the final details.” He looked over at me, taking off his sunglasses as if just realizing the sun had been down for a while. He yawned and ran a big hand over his face. “You still cool with this?”

I checked for the Glock he’d given me and smiled. “Yeah, everything is cool.”

But I remembered some graffitied words on a decaying brick wall in downtown as we headed out. It was one of those times when the message seemed to be written just for me: SUPERMAN IS A DAMNED FOOL.

Chapter 47

NIGHT HAD ALMOST FALLEN in backwoods Tennessee and Bubba Cotton was smacking the hell out of a tin of Planter’s roasted peanuts and eating a Nestlé Crunch. He hummed along to some song I couldn’t quite make out as he stuffed another handful into his mouth and moved his head to the music. The sound must’ve been too much because U put down these night vision goggles he’d been bragging about for the last hour, Baigish B-21s with clear vision up to 250 meters, and looked into the rearview mirror at his big, silent (with words anyway) buddy shaking his ass while on recon.

U glanced over at me in the front seat of the Expedition, his hair braided tight against his skull and wearing the same Saints grays that we’d been issued about a decade ago. Number ninety-three stamped in the middle of his chest.

“Mystikal,” U said. “Kid out of New Orleans. Don’t look so damned confused, Travers. You know there’s got to be other music besides blues.”

“Name a truer music.”

“Jazz.”

“And you’d be wrong.”

“How can music be wrong or right?” he asked. “It’s what is true to me. If I say it’s Toumani Diabate or Ali Farke Toure, would that be better than blues, more roots for you?”