“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. He hustled by her, slippin’ another Benzedrine onto his tongue, feelin’ the medicine dissolve. He rubbed his hands together like he was gonna be eatin’ a big feast as he stepped into the wide parking lot lookin’ for Ransom’s sweet ride.
In the cold, he slipped into the man’s truck, adjusted his gold metal shades, and slunked down into his seat. His legs jumpin’ and quiverin’ off the floor. He plunked another stick of gum into his mouth as Ransom wheeled out onto Highway 61 and headed back to Tunica proper. But before they hit the little ole brick town, he ducked onto a rutted road into Nigraville.
Dang. People was livin’ out here in some kind of wildness. Houses slapped together out of rotten wood and old tin. Parts of trailers and shacks mashed together like somethin’ out of his aunt’s National Geographic magazines. One house was even built around an old car like that was some kind of bedroom. Made the place where he’d grown up in Hollywood seem like the Peabody.
All the shacks sank beneath the level of the road in these little gulleys. Smoke and small fires from oil drums kicked up into the cold, ole gray day. Gray and brown. Nothin’ else. Streams of smoke seeped out of the back of hot-rodded nigra rides.
Jon nodded. Yeah, he understood. “In the Ghetto.” He hummed the song a little bit.
“You all right?” Ransom asked. “Seem a little jumpy.”
“Just a mite excited.”
“You seen the papers?”
“Don’t believe in ’em.”
“Said they found Miss Perfect at Libertyland,” Ransom said. “That where you left her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s a public place, kid.”
“Said make it random.”
Ransom didn’t seem too pleased with the words comin’ from him, so Jon added a bit. “She was given’ me T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Ma’ boy. Ma’ boy. Was she ever.”
“What about leavin’ prints?”
“Don’t have none,” Jon said. “I don’t exist.”
Ransom didn’t say nothin’ as they rounded a corner onto a one-lane road and stopped in front a long green shack with a screened-in porch. A skinny black man that Jon had seen with Ransom at the casino was cooking out on a pit made from an oil drum. Guess that’s what all these people were doin’, livin’ off the casinos.
Man gave a toothless smile as they passed.
Jon followed Ransom into the porch where he saw a white man, lookin’ young and kind of muscled, in a tan sheriff’s outfit. At first Jon thought about boltin’ for the front door but eased back a bit when he seen the man give Ransom a real good handshake.
“Jon, this is Sheriff Beckum. Wanted y’all to talk.”
Jon took a seat in an old schoolhouse chair. Orange plastic and dirty as hell.
“Everything goin’ ‘right?” Beckum asked.
“Up twelve points in the polls,” he said. “And that’s in Nashville.”
“I guess ole Tunica was just too small for you,” Beckum said. The sheriff sat in an old chair, too. But his was wood and looked like it’d been sittin’ around since the beginning of time. He took a cigar from Ransom and lit it with a lot of satisfaction.
Ransom didn’t offer Jon nothin’.
Dang sittin’ down was about to drive Jon crazy. His leg felt like it was gonna explode. He had so much energy. So much dang vitamins in his system that he wanted to jump through that ole rusted screen and fly to the moon.
“Jon, you listenin’?” Ransom asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
“I said when Travers was up here last, he came with a black fella,” Beckum said. “Some bondsman, bounty hunter type named Davis.”
The sheriff started laughin’ up a mess when he said it. Thought it was funny that a nigra could ever work as such. Jon didn’t think that was funny. Black Elvis was one of the finest men he’d ever known.
“Travers will be with him,” Ransom said. “Can you do it, Jon?”
Jon smelled the magnolias on his scarf again. He felt a stirring down between his legs.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“All three this time. The black man, Travers, and the girl.”
Jon nodded and kept chewing on his gum, thinkin’ about the sweetness of it all.
Ransom laughed and punched Beckum in the shoulder. “He likes ’em sweet and young.”
At that, Jon stood and walked back outside. His mind and legs just atinglin’ and buzzin’. Memphis was waitin’.
Chapter 55
The election surrounded us. Everywhere U and I drove, we saw huge posters, cardboard signs, and billboards for Elias “Honor for Our State” Nix and Jude “Commitment to Our Future” Russell. The election was next week and all the white noise of signs and radio ads and television interviews made my head throb and my eyes feel raw. I kept thinking about the night before and those crazed rednecks at the compound, that rebel flag waving obscenely by Nix’s true office, and the men who’d wanted to kill us. I wondered how a man with such a polluted mind could’ve ever reached such a level. I couldn’t even contemplate that he was being seriously considered for such an important office. Then, I remembered Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Trent Lott.
U turned on Riverside Drive and wound up a twisting hill to the Bluffs overlooking the city. I remembered from my history classes how the early frontiersmen and Indians used the Bluffs for protection against flooding and attacks, even recalling how the French governor of Louisiana had tried to overrun the Chickasaw back in the seventeen hundreds and had his ass handed to him.
As U drove closer to the address we had for Bobby Lee Cook, my stomach twisted and my head pounded more, knowing the only one who could help us hated me beyond words.
“Remind me to stop pissing off people,” I said, watching the front of his truck hugging the road, passing million-dollar houses with wrought-iron security gates.
“It’s a talent,” U said. “You’re too good at it.”
At the peak of the Bluffs, U pulled in front of a Mediterranean Revival number with lots of stucco and a red barrel-tiled roof. Two vans and Cook’s Cadillac was parked outside. U pulled in, close to the front door, and shut off his engine.
“You want to do this alone?” he asked.
“Could use someone to watch my ass.”
U pulled off his shades. “Cool. Didn’t want to have to tell Abby and her mean-ass cousin how you got it shot off.”
Two girls in sweaty long-sleeve T-shirts and jeans were pulling weeds by a wide marble staircase flanked by squatty palm trees. One was blond, her hair up in a bun, no makeup. The other had red hair pulled into a ponytail and extremely long legs. They were both dirty and grass-stained but I knew from one glance they worked for Cook.
The women were used to spinning on brass poles in air-conditioning, swindling old men into having ten-dollar drinks, and telling tales to customers about dreams they’d never had. I had to laugh. Cook had them doing real work.
We rang the bell and within a minute, the lithe bartender I’d met at the Golden Lotus, the one with short brown hair and a nice stomach, opened the door. She had on an apron and was drying her hands on a towel. I’d really hoped all these women would’ve been hanging out by his pool in bikinis. Not doing manual labor.
“Cowboy,” she said, a tight smile in the corner of her mouth.
“Howdy,” I said. “Cook home?”
She looked over at U and then back at me.
“Don’t make trouble here. He has people, too, you know.”
“No trouble.”
“Just a friendly warning,” she said, tossing the towel over her shoulder and hooking her thumbs into belt loops along her small waist.
“Appreciated.”
She told us to wait in the foyer. We did.
A massive chandelier dripped down from a high ceiling. Big marble statues of naked women eating grapes stood out from the garish red walls. The foyer spread in to an open living room with a sunken pit like the Beatles’s pad in HELP! Zebra- and Cheetah-printed furniture. Class with a capital K.
U nudged me and I looked by a coat rack near the door. In a glass case for all visitors to see, stood three large trophies celebrating second, third, and fifth place in local bodybuilding championships for men over fifty.