But before we got close, about fifty men slathered in camou face paint, carrying rifles, and driving ATVs blocked our path. I slowed to a jog. I heard Bubba’s labored breath beside me.
The men told us to drop the guns.
We did.
We just stood there, hands on top of our heads, until they jabbed the muzzles of semiautomatic guns into our backs, and marched us down a thin but old path and into the valley.
A n hour later, my knees screamed from standing on them so long. My shoulder, that I’d dislocated for the thirtieth time, ached in its socket so bad that I clenched my teeth in pain. I had my hands laced on top of my head. Bubba’s and U’s had been lashed behind their backs with rope.
The floor was smooth concrete and splatted with the occasional patch of leaking oil. Over our heads stretched a huge arc of corrugated tin forming some kind of large garage with a retractable door big enough for an airplane. The door was open. I could smell the Sons of the South campfires burning and hear gaggles of men talking.
Every time I breathed, the hot air expelled in a cloudy mass.
I looked over at U. He slowly shook his head and kept his eyes focused on the twelve men guarding us. He was watching hard, taking it all in.
I dropped my shoulder an inch. One of the guards screamed for me to raise it back up.
On the other side of me, Bubba had his eyes closed. He was either meditating or sleeping.
Soon another ATV’s engine gunned outside. The sound grew close enough that it rattled the tin above our heads until it pulled inside and shut off the motor.
A dozen or so men formed a line behind the man dismounting from his ride. Short and gray haired. Large, almost comical ears and yellowish eyes. He had an oversized mouth when he smiled, appraising us down on our knees. His hair was cut extremely short with a section on top that struck me as so hard and perfect that it had to be a toupee. His teeth were little, worn-down nubs.
He placed his smallish hands on his waist as he stood in front of me and said: “You with these niggers?”
“Oh, thank God,” I said. “The senator will save us.”
Elias Nix laughed for a moment with me and then kicked out my knees. I landed on my back and then worked my way to a resting position on my elbows.
“They yours?” Nix asked, looking over at U and Bubba.
Some of his group laughed.
He’d left the square headlight of the ATV shining bright in our eyes. I squinted at his face – smooth, thin skin with bluish veins on his cheeks.
I looked over at U but didn’t say anything.
I crept to my knees again, like I was about to get back into the same position, closed my eyes, and waited for Nix to relax. Slowly I opened them, dug in with the balls of my feet, and launched from my knees, grasping for his throat.
I ringed a good grip, feeling the cold, corpselike skin, and yanked him from his feet. The shorter man was level with my eyes. I was throttling even harder when something struck the back of my head and my vision left me for a moment.
I felt a hundred kicks in my side.
U yelled for them to stop.
More yells. Some screams at U to shut up. But they did as he said.
I rolled to my side, coughed several times, and stood as if I were a boxer wavering in the first round. One of Nix’s men, I couldn’t make out his face, pointed a gun into my ear.
“Why are you here?” Nix said, hands behind his back, strutting rooster-proud now. Trying to make up for being the little toy he was.
“You assholes tried to kill one of my friends,” I said, my breath wheezing. “I guess since you killed Bill MacDonald and his wife, you thought y’all were unstoppable.”
“You’re not a friend of Bill’s,” he said. “We’re his friends.”
He said friends as if it had a couple of “e”s in it. Nix jerked his head over at U and Bubba on their knees. “And Lord knows they’re not.”
“Stay out of New Orleans,” I said. “Those people don’t know anything.”
“Son, I haven’t a clue what you’re talkin’ about.”
“Your friends down in Tunica killed the MacDonalds and then sent some assholes to work my friends.” I didn’t want to say their names. I thought by uttering the words in this place I would pollute their dignity.
Nix let out a long laugh. His breath, clouded and foggy, obscured his face. I couldn’t quite make it out anymore. The yellow eyes. Grayed toupee. Nothing was clear anymore.
“Now you’re making sense,” he said, whistling and pointing to a herd of men at the back. Several ATVs, thick tires coated in mud, kicked to life buzzing away into the night. “Son, you boys are so dang thick in a world of shit that you’re drownin’ in it. Little advice: Let the big dogs handle the war.”
I looked at him. Still everything was cloudy and hidden in the lights. I squinted harder.
Two men stood behind U and Bubba and quickly brandished a pair of Bowie knives. I yelled to them but as I did, I could see their hands were already free.
They’d been cut loose.
My friends stood.
“Y’all have ten seconds to get out of my world,” Nix said.
U led the way and Bubba and I followed past the buzz-cut boys, mouths pocketed full of Redman and Kodiak, and onto the same path we’d followed before. We were just walking pretty damned fast, but picked up the pace when automatic weapons sounded from down in the valley.
As we got close to the truck, Bubba’s big ass passed both of us as if he were chomping for the finish line. We all jumped inside and U cranked his Expedition.
As he spun away, I heard Bubba screaming in that same low hoarse whisper. He was yelling with volume set at two.
“Goddamn, I’m hit, they shot me right in the ass,” he croaked. “Y’all get me to a hospital, I’m bleedin’ to death. They got me. They got me with them machine guns.”
U didn’t look back for several miles. He only stopped for a second before we turned onto another highway heading south to Memphis.
He turned on an overhead light, crawled halfway over the seat, looking for the wound.
Bubba yelped.
“Damn, Bubba,” U said, laughing as the truck idled. “That sure was a mean-ass tree.” He showed me the broken-off end of a stick and shook his head as we headed south again. “That tree just jumped up and bit him in the ass.”
The laughter came again in waves. I must’ve laughed for five miles.
“Y’all be quiet,” Bubba croaked, again. “Ain’t funny.”
But soon the laughter spilled back into silence and we were left with the feeling of failure. Even though I knew it would’ve been pretty damned stupid to have stayed, I felt like I’d failed Loretta. I had come to face Elias Nix and left with my tail between my ass.
“Those assholes could’ve killed us,” U said.
“But they didn’t,” I said.
“Ain’t ’cause they’re good people.”
I could feel U’s eyes watching me as I continued to stare out into the darkness and passing signs along the highway. He turned on some jazz and we entered a section of road jammed up with construction and soon I couldn’t see anything around us but flashing yellow signs and orange barrels. U checked in his rearview mirror again as we slowed and waited for a semi to merge.
I watched him as he turned the wheel hard and passed on a closed section of highway before darting in front of the semi.
U punched the accelerator up to eighty and with the windows down I felt like I could breathe again. My blood pressure had slowed and my head no longer buzzed like it had been filled with hornets.
He asked: “Why would them boys want some broken-down soul singer?”
“The only man who can answer that question checked out some time ago,” I said. I didn’t talk for a while, thinking of our meeting with Clyde James. Then I said: “But we could try again.”
Memphis shined loose, bright, and broken before us.
Chapter 50
Didn’t take but about two seconds for Perfect Leigh to spot a man in the first floor of the casino, not bad-looking, either, in kind of a bland-businessman way, and get that ride to Memphis. The man was even up about five hundred bucks at the blackjack table, but left it all just for a chance to take Perfect for a spin in his Lexus. He was nice and clean, thirtyish with a couple kids and a wife that didn’t like sex anymore, and even opened the door for Perfect when they got back to Midtown. She gave him a phony phone number, said she couldn’t wait to see him again, and walked the next two blocks to her real apartment.