I couldn’t see her as I ran back to where we’d parted. The light was much better facing the Tennessee entrance and I knew she had to be hidden behind one of the beams.
I slowed my walk, trying to recall where I’d heard the scream.
I kept my eyes focused for any slight movement behind each rusted cove.
I walked. Slow. I pointed my gun and nearly fired at some birds nesting in some rafters above. They flew away in a peppered pattern in the dull glow of Memphis lights.
Then I heard the click of a gun.
Abby had the bearded man in a headlock. She had her pistol pointed at his head. She’d been screaming out of anger as she held his head tight into the crook of her elbow.
I lowered my gun.
She screwed the muzzle tighter into his ear. He was an older man, rough skin and black eyes. He wore an intensity on his face like this was a moment he’d relived a thousand times and would escape once again.
“Abby, I got him.”
“It’s him,” she said. “It’s Ransom.”
U jogged from across the bridge. He slowed when he saw Abby. I wanted so badly for her to shoot Ransom. I wanted it to happen but the words coming out of my mouth pleaded for her to be calm.
“Let U have him.” I wasn’t making sense to myself.
She kept pushing him back to the Tennessee side of the bridge until Ransom tripped over a railroad tie. The light and shadows broke about every few feet over my face until we found her half covered in darkness, a foot on Ransom’s throat.
She had the gun pointed at his head.
Ransom laughed and tried to move out from underneath her. “Your daddy just laid there, beggin’ while we shot him. Genetics is a funny thing. You ain’t got it in you either.”
“Abby, leave him,” I said.
He pulled free, stood, and dusted his coat. More a gesture of power than trying to get clean. He didn’t even look in our direction, trying to make himself believe we’d follow Abby’s lead.
He said: “Y’all take care.”
I was getting ready to pull the trigger when the gun fired in Abby’s hand and Ransom stumbled back, finally falling to his knees.
As he felt for the blood rushing from his heart, he wore an expression of someone caught in another’s nightmare.
He seemed to be thinking as he lay in shock, This wasn’t the way it was supposed to turn out.
The shot didn’t even faze U, who broke apart from us and ran back to where his truck had disappeared.
We jogged together, almost as if training camp were last summer, and I heard him talking shit the same as he’d done back then. But this time it wasn’t about his coaches or his first wife. He was mad at me. “Who is gonna pay for that, Travers? And, damn, you know I can’t take your car. It’s more of a piece of shit than it’s ever been.”
He stopped, winded, and looked up into the slatted high beams. About thirty feet up, we saw Garon holding on to a crosswalk. He smiled down to us and waved.
U said: “Had a CD changer in the back.”
I gripped the steel beams and found a foothold in crisscrossed slats held in place by rusted rivets. The wind cut into my ear canals and made sharp, whistling sounds.
“Don’t even,” U said.
I found another foothold.
And another.
“Crazy motherfucker,” was the last thing I heard before I got higher into the bridge’s supports and about ten feet away from Garon.
He kept smiling down at me the whole time. Each step I made, each foothold, I got more angry. I couldn’t stop seeing Loretta lying there. I couldn’t stop thinking about JoJo’s bar and my life and suddenly I felt like I was at the edge of this cliff. Jon was there. Standing. Looking down at me.
I gripped tight onto the crossbeam where he stood.
My stomach swayed when I stupidly glanced down at the swirling water below us, hundreds of feet. Freezing wind clawing at my fingers, making it tough to get a grip.
Garon didn’t move. Didn’t try to knock me off the ridge.
He stood on a crosswalk fashioned from three beams. Enough to walk. Keep your balance without tumbling off. As I walked toward him, he aimed a gun at my chest.
I couldn’t breathe and the wind cutting into my ears made me feel like I was bleeding.
He pulled the trigger.
Click.
Again.
Click.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. I was out of breath. I wanted to kill him. “Why’d you come back? After everything in New Orleans. Why’d you come back for me?”
He mumbled something.
“What?” I yelled.
“You killed me.”
He wore an ill-fitting white suit with a yellow scarf around his neck. His face was reddened and chafed and his sideburns were bushy and uneven. He had a face pockmarked with acne scars and his eyes showed the distracted glassy look of someone truly mentally ill. It was the same with Clyde.
“Stay there,” I said.
He shook, his whole body convulsing like an electric current was shooting through him. His eyes rolled into the back of his head. “Evil and lives,” he said.
“What?”
“Evil and lives,” he said, laughing. “It never really ends. We’re all just on a train bound for Tulsa.”
All of sudden, he rushed me and I dropped to my knees, getting a firm grip on the walk. Size wasn’t a factor up here.
As I hung on, he kept going.
He didn’t want to kill me at all.
I watched him sail over the edge of the bridge, his arms outstretched like he was in flight with his legs pinned together, until he disappeared hundreds of feet below into the Mississippi.
Chapter 62
It was thanksgiving, one of those worn, gray days when all you wanted to do was lie inside and eat and watch parades and footballs games. Maybe nap a little bit. Abby hated that feeling. She hated being sluggish and full and lazy, so she begged Maggie to take her down Old Taylor Road to the stables and get their horses out for a run. Abby brought Hank along for the ride in Maggie’s beat-up Rabbit and soon they had the horses saddled up and began beating a fine path beside a nameless creek, dodging tree branches and jostling along until the horses’ breath made foggy patterns in the dark mist.
The air smelled of barbecue fires and moldy leaves as she kicked her horse in the side for a good run in an open clearing of high, yellow grass that had once been a cotton field. Abby’s horse jumped ahead of Maggie and she laughed and yelled as they got closer and closer back to another clearing up on a hill dotted with rolls of hay leading to an old house and then back to the stables.
She hadn’t told Maggie yet about buying the land, the stables, and the horses. She wasn’t sure how her cousin would take it. She’d think it was charity, giving her a job and a business to run. But since Abby had sold her parents’ house and planned on traveling awhile, she got a little scared. She needed a place of her own.
They both slowed to a gallop, Abby tucking her beaten suede boots tight into the stirrups and ducking beneath the hardened fingers of a bare oak and the long, dying strands of a willow.
Hank ran ahead of them and quickly disappeared after sniffing out a rabbit. The path widened for a moment, by a pool of stagnant green water littered with cypress stumps and a few dead birds. Abby reigned in her horse and jostled down the other way, passing the ruins of an old house some said belonged to a Confederate captain. Her father always used to say that the Yankees burned down the house and killed the man’s family. Said when the man walked back from Georgia, he found everything he’d built destroyed.
There was only a stone floor and a chimney, a base really, but Abby had always thought it would be fine place to build a house someday.
“What do you think?” she asked Maggie.
“Fine,” she said. “I don’t know if the Johnsons would ever sell it, though.”
“They would,” Abby said, looking down the last bit of path into the clearing and the stables. Her last day in Oxford before driving up to Memphis for her flight. “I mean, they did.”