Dark End of the Street

“Look, Ellie, I get real sick to my stomach when I talk about this.”

“Sure, sure.” Ellie smiled and patted her thigh. “It’s just that sometimes holdin’ on to somethin’ so tight can make you sick inside. You know? Holdin’ on to things that aren’t healthy. I saw this movie one time where this man got real sick. I think cancer or somethin’. I’m not sure. Well, anyway, he goes to see this Chinese fella. You know really wise and old? Well, the Chinese fella tells him the sickness was caused by holding on to negative things. All the bad stuff he knew in his life lived in his insides.”

Abby watched the front of the car swallow the yellow passing lines, the soft blue glow of the car’s console lulling her to sleep. She turned away from Ellie, tucked her hands under her ear and stared out her window. A sickness passed through her like it was eating her insides. She could feel it like acid dripping through her heart and liver, yellow and burning. She shut her eyes as tight as she could.

A few minutes later, the car slowed, turned off the highway, and bumped along a dirt road before stopping. Abby opened her eyes, pellets of rain rolling down the passenger-side window. Outside, there was a 1940s gas station with those tall glass pumps rusting underneath a drooping overhang. The doors were sunbleached and padlocked. Windowpanes broken.

“Ellie?”

“Hold up, doll, just need to use the little girl’s room.”

“I don’t think…”

But she was gone and skirting around the edge of the old gas station. Abby stretched and looked across the highway to see if she recognized anything. A bright orange and red glow broke through some leafless trees as wind scattered pieces of loose trash across the window. The radio played some more of Ellie’s oldies.

Abby bit a piece of cuticle and turned down the stereo.

A few minutes passed and finally she opened the door, stood on the frame, and searched through the woods. She called Ellie’s name three times. Her heart began to beat strongly in her ears and even though it was cool, she could feel a bead of sweat run down the back of her neck.

“Ellie!”

She left the car door open, a warning bell sounding, and walked beneath the gas station overhang. Weeds grew at the base of a rotting gutter and a double-sided STP sign clacked against a rusted drum of oil.

The weeds ate past her sneakers and the bright light cutting through the darkness reminded her of dawn. A motorcycle whizzed by. The car’s warning bell kept sounding.

Abby skirted the corner of the store, loping down a red mud hill, rich with the storm’s runoff. The afternoon was almost electric in the rainy blue-gray light.

“Ellie?”

Abby heard the sound of skittering around the back edge of the building. Her breath came labored through her nose and she felt a dampness underneath her arms. A man’s voice mumbled somewhere deep into a patchy pine forest where branches clacked together like bamboo.

“Ellie?”

A piece of wood splintered.

Feet shuffled faster now.

Abby bolted back up the muddy embankment to the car. About halfway up the little hill, she heard an approaching car. Almost to the top, her feet gave out in the orange mud sending her sliding, fingernails clawing into the earth.

She could taste the iron-rich mud in her mouth and feel the dirt piercing deep under her nails. She pressed her palms flat against the hill and dug her sneakers into the ground.

A hand gripped the back of her sweatshirt.

She screamed.

She kicked at the head of a man in a black ski mask but he only gripped her ankle tighter. She kicked again and broke free and scrambled more, her breath working in her dry mouth.

At the top, another man in a mask grabbed her by her sweatshirt, twisted the muzzle of a gun into her ear, and pushed her back to Ellie’s car.

Two minutes later, they’d thrown her into the trunk and skidded out. In the weak red glow of the taillights, Abby said her first prayer in months.

Chapter 11

DIXIE HOMES, one of Memphis’s oldest public housing projects, stood tired and beaten not far from an insane asylum and a record store once frequented by Elvis Presley. I recognized the projects almost instantly because of an article I’d read in Rolling Stone about some rappers who’d been raised there. Name was hard to forget. But these projects weren’t even close to being as decrepit and mean as those in New Orleans. They were old but clean and reminded me of the stories I’d heard about what public housing used to be like in the ‘fifties. Dixie Homes consisted of several rows of two-story red brick units separated by a common area filled with blackened barbecue pits made from oil drums cut in half, rusted dime-store sun chairs, and clotheslines stretched taught from crooked metal crosses. Through the common areas, tattered clothes dried in the weak fall sun that had replaced the rain.