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.
I parked near Poplar and walked through the projects asking anyone I saw if they knew a woman named Wordie. Didn’t feel uncomfortable or uneasy. Most people in the projects were a hell of a lot friendlier than those you’d meet in those yuppie cracker box apartments that lined Metairie. Shit, this was a community. I knew I’d find Wordie within ten minutes. People here actually knew each other. Had to if they wanted to survive. About five minutes later, a little old black woman with enormous – almost Jackie O-sized – sunglasses carrying a walker pointed to the next street over. Said Wordie had a Santy Claus on her porch.
I thanked her, popped a couple of fresh pieces of Bazooka in my mouth, and walked up the winding hill where yellow, red, and brown leaves scattered over me like ticker tape.
I soon saw the plastic Santa Claus, black and carrying a fat sack, standing by a corner unit. A crushed Coke can and stray headless Barbie doll lay at the foot of the Santa like discarded presents. I knocked on the worn wood of the screen door.
At the top of the hill, a group of teens lingered by a convenience store pay phone waiting to sell crack to white kids from the suburbs. At the base of the hill, two black children dressed in starched school uniforms walked by my Bronco carrying backpacks heavy laden with books.
Just as I was about to look in the window, the door swung open revealing one of the largest women I’d ever seen. Even larger than the woman at Wild Bill’s. This woman could kick her ass. Her arms were the size of my thighs. Her thighs were as large as my waist. She wore a heavy scowl upon her lips as if she’d been waiting for me to show up all day so she could vent all her problems upon me.
“Hello, ma’am.”
She had on a tight black muscle T-shirt, black biker shorts, and pink Jelly shoes. Her hair had been woven and dyed into a mismatched pattern of yellow and red braids. I wanted to ask her where in the hell she got size-forty biker pants.
I didn’t. I was scared.
“You Wordie?”
“Maybe. Who the fuck is you?”
“A friend of Clyde’s.”
She crossed her arms over her massive breasts, the left one adorned with a tattoo of a red rose.
“His sister’s trying to find him.”
“Listen, I got to go,” she said, trying to close the door. I could hear the chatter of Oprah Winfrey inside.
“What’s Oprah talkin’ about today?”
Wordie gave me a frown. “Oh, I don’t know. Some woman givin’ advice to women whose got husbands that peckers don’t work.”
“You married?”
“Hell no,” she said, giving a little laugh, then catching herself and then trying to close the door again.
“His sister Loretta sent me.”
Wordie put her hands on her massive hips and said, “You know Loretta Jackson?”
“She’s family.”
“Hmm.”
“She’s like family.”
“Really?”
I nodded.
“C’mon in,” she said, leaving the wood door to batter the frame. I followed her inside to Oprah and the smell of smoked meat and greens.
T he greens were great. Firm and salty, but with that smoky flavor that tasted like home and JoJo’s and everything I valued. I liked Wordie, and for the moment Wordie seemed to like me. Well, she acted like she liked me in between commercials and Oprah – which did truly feature stories about men whose peckers didn’t work – as she showed me old brown vinyl picture albums containing clippings on Clyde James that dated back to 1964 and his work in gospel.
“Do you think I could borrow this sometime?” I asked. “Would love to make copies of these articles.”
She looked at me, her face pinched tight, and then back at the television.
I turned back to the newspaper clippings that were yellowed and worn thin from constant reading. I flipped to a page with an article whose headline read WIFE OF NEGRO MUSICIAN EXECUTED. I slowly read the story, the page smelling like mothballs and silverfish: