Dark End of the Street

She yawned and stretched, feeling with delight her rib cage and firm ass.

She picked up one of the many compacts and twirled it in her fingers as she flopped onto her back and moved her hands over her breasts, when suddenly there was a thud on her little balcony.

She saw the shifting figure of a man in black. Had to have crawled up three stories to reach her. Perfect had a gun in her bedroom and a set of steak knives in the kitchen. She slowly let her bare toes touch the carpet; she didn’t want him to think she knew.

But he saw her. He was watching her with those damned black-ringed eyes.

Jon had dropped to his knees in the cold onto a big pile of leaves that had fallen from a nearby oak. He had on this sad face. Humble as hell and holding some more of those nasty grocery-store flowers.

She shook her head and started to drop the blinds over the window. Her heart ramming against her rib cage.

The window exploded with glass.

A large pot filled with a dead palm tree cracked and scattered dirt all over her floor. She scrambled to her bedroom but only got halfway when he jumped her from behind and started prying her mouth open. He stuffed a handful of pills deep down into her mouth, so far that she started gagging, while he rubbed her throat making her swallow.

He pushed her wrists to the hard wooden floor and stuck a knee into her stomach. He lay his head across her bare breasts, like a child would, listening to her heart. She couldn’t move with his sinewy weight holding her. “We just stay here,” he whispered. All right? Then I got somewhere special we can go. It’s a real happy place.”

“I’ll cut your fucking nuts off,” Perfect Leigh said, slurring her words and walkin’ crooked toward the exit of Libertyland as an orange-black sky twisted overhead. “I want to scream but it makes me sick. I’m not feeling well.”

The little white lights on the trees had just flickered on at dusk. Families pushed strollers and carried huge teddy bears and hustlin’ young black kids in Grizzlies jerseys and gold bracelets prowled nearby. The air smelled like popcorn and hotdogs with an edge of baby powder.

“Miss Perfect, let’s get on the Zippin Pippin one more time,” Jon said.

She still couldn’t see why this place was so important. Jon guessed she couldn’t have known this was the old fairgrounds that E used to rent out all night for Him and the boys. They’d run the whole damned park till the sun came up; E sometimes ridin’ the Pippin all night long.

“Amusement parks are for morons and white trash,” she said. “Goddamn, I feel sick. Jesus.”

Her eyes got real lazy and she stumbled, almost falling to the sidewalk. She caught herself, but one of her high heels came off and Jon walked back to pick it up.

“Here you go,” he said, a true gentleman.

“Take me home now, Jon. Or whatever your real name is.”

“Why do you say such things, Miss Perfect?” He felt his legs starting to jump and a jolt of electricity shoot into the base of his brain. “You doubt my Christian name?”

She laughed it out before she looked at his face and poked out her lower lip. “Oh, little Johnny, did I make you sad? I’m sorry. You are. You are Jon Burrows. Okay. That’s fine by me.”

The lines in her face made puzzles in the falling light. Brown dead leaves skittered down the concrete walkway that led over to the Pippin and for some reason Jon felt very sad. He zipped up his leather coat and checked his new boots for any mess.

But she didn’t move. He felt for a knife in his pocket and it gave him comfort. His breath comin’ real fast through his nose.

She laughed and said, “I’m going to scream now.”

“Cops are lookin’ for you,” he said.

“What?”

“That nigra woman is alive. You didn’t even kill her.” Jon leaned in close and smelled her neck. “You want another ride, then. Right? If not, I’ll take this knife in my pocket and carve up that pretty face.”

He pointed out the Zippin Pippin, one of the holy relics of Memphis, standing tall and wooden against the night sky like a dang wonder of the world. “Come on.”

Her skin was cold at the base of her spine as the Pippin cranked to the top of its wooden platform ready to shoot down that hill and launch into all them curves and twists and gut-churners.

He remembered comin’ to the park when he was a kid and his mamma spendin’ every dime she’d made down at the Zippymart so they could stay all day at the park and get treated like somethin’ special. She’d buy him hotdogs and cotton candy till his belly would swell and them dark circles under his eyes would seem to disappear in the fun-house mirrors.

The Pippin dipped down low again and he heard Miss Perfect scream loud.

And as they cranked real slow up another hill, waitin’ for another drop, he whispered, “I loved you, but Ransom wants you dead.”