We walked down Conti to Decatur and then continued upriver north under wooden signs swinging in the fall wind and beneath wrought-iron balconies heavy laden with palms, banana trees, and stunted magnolias. Twisted Christmas lights shaped like chili peppers and little skulls burned from the rusted ironwork. We passed the new, tourist-friendly Tipitina’s, dozens of gift shops selling lewd T-shirts and cheap posters, and tired old restaurants serving reanimated crawfish, dead since spring, and watery gumbo.
We turned down the flagstone walkway running along Jackson Square – closed since dusk – and toward St. Louis Cathedral. The air smelled of the Mississippi’s fetid brown water and cigarette smoke from a loose gathering of skinheads playing with a mangy puppy by the front doors of the church.
Loretta ignored them and took a seat on a nearby green bench. I didn’t figure for wandering about tonight and had only worn a thin suede jacket over my black Johnny Cash T-shirt. It was the pose Cash did for Def Jam records when he wanted to thank the country music industry by saluting them with his middle finger.
I was pretty proud of it.
“If you don’t want to do this, you tell me,” Loretta said. “Right, baby? You don’t owe me nothin’.”
“Nothin’ but the world,” I said, grabbing her hand. “What’s on your mind?”
“I just been thinkin’ while we were walking ’bout all the things you do for folks. Like when you kicked the butt of that man who dress like Jesus. You know the one who took Fats’s money? And what you did for sweet Ruby Walker in Chicago last year? Nick, you ’bout got yourself killed to get that ole woman out of jail. I don’t want to be no burden.”
I squeezed Loretta’s plump fingers and smiled. “You remember you and JoJo taking me in when I lost everything? You remember cooking for me and taking me to church and sewing my ratty Levis? Loretta, you’re my family. I helped those people ’cause I wanted to. Because it’s what I do. But with you, it’s not even something I’d think about.”
Loretta peered up at the three spires of the cathedral. She seemed to concentrate a long time on the middle spire topped with a hollow cross. On the cathedral’s clock, the long hand swept forward and bells chimed for 3:00 A.M.
I rubbed my unshaven face and asked, “Loretta, tell me what’s bothering you.”
“You remember me telling you about my brother?”
“Hell yeah, I know all about your brother. He’s a legend. You kidding me?”
Clyde James started his career singing in a gospel trio back in the ‘fifties with Loretta and their sister, whose name I couldn’t remember after a few Dixies. Clyde went on to be a big crossover star in the ‘sixties with a small soul label called Bluff City. He was kind of a mix of Otis Redding and Percy Sledge.
Even though Loretta rarely spoke of him, I had most of his records. Mainly scratchy 45s with their dusty grooves filled with songs about longing, heartache, and all-around woman pain. Many a night they’d exorcised the latest shit I’d been going through with a woman I’d known for the last decade, Kate Archer.
I watched Loretta’s face fill with light from the street lamps and over at the skinheads playing tag with the puppy. The puppy licked their faces and rolled over on his back. He barked a couple times and the skinheads hooted with laughter.
“Well, yesterday two men come to see me at the bar about Clyde. Scared me so bad I ain’t been back down there since tonight. I didn’t even tell JoJo about it. ’Cause JoJo and I don’t discuss my brother. Not after he’d tried so many times to help. You know?”
I nodded. I had an uncle who’d been a moonshine runner turned preacher and used to ask my dad for donations for his “church” every Christmas.
“They were asking me all about Clyde,” Loretta said, reaching into her small jeweled pocketbook for a change purse. It killed me the way she could sing such nasty blues and then be such a proper old Southern woman. “They wanted to know when I seen him last and where they could find him. I tole them I ain’t seen him for fifteen years, but they didn’t believe me. They started breaking bottles and turning over tables. One of them even put his hand over my face and said he’d kill me if I didn’t help ’em find Clyde. JoJo’d gone down to the A amp;P on Royal to get me some milk and coffee.”
I could feel my cheeks flush with anger. “Did you tell them Clyde was dead?”
“They called me a liar. Said they seen him in Memphis two weeks back. Why would a man say something like that to me?”
I pulled out a Marlboro from a hard pack and lit it. I took a deep breath of smoke and settled back into the bench reaching my arm around Loretta.
“First off, I think you need to tell JoJo. And I can walk you guys home after the shows. That’s no problem.”
She looked back up at the slow-moving clock and then down at her hands. She unfolded them and reached into her change purse pulling out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. She crushed the money into my palm.
“When you headed up to Mississippi?” she asked.
“Monday.”
“I want you to ride up to Memphis and find out what you can about Clyde.”
“Clyde’s dead.”
She looked at me and patted my face as if I were a child with only a child’s understanding. “We always thought he was dead. In the end he turned us all away. His family. His friends. Only thing he wanted was that hurt he carried ’round with him. When we lost track of him, I had to say good-bye. I had to pray for his soul.”
I placed the money back in her purse and shook my head when she opened her mouth to speak. Her eyes closed and a single tear ran in a twisted pattern down her powdered face.
“You never told me what happened to him,” I said, finishing the cigarette and tossing it to the flagstone pavement. A young couple walked past, drunk and kissing madly. They tripped over a curb as they turned into Pirate’s Alley.
A gas lamp burned at the end of the alley by a house once rented by Faulkner. It was one of the loneliest sights I’d ever known but wasn’t sure why.
“Somebody killed a man in his band,” Loretta said. “And Clyde’s wife. She was pregnant, Nick. Woman was six-months pregnant.”
Chapter 3
Perfect Leigh didn’t like cartoons with talking animals, men who wore aftershave or Italian suits, self- appointed faith healers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, songs on the Waffle House jukebox, soap opera divas, collard greens, or sex of any type. She liked herself and that was enough for her. She liked the way she smelled like butterscotch candy. She liked the way she looked, with a mane of platinum blond hair and thirty-six, twenty- four, thirty-six measurements. She liked the way she appreciated the way Nancy Sinatra used to dance, the smell of new leather in her Mustang convertible, cheese sauce served in bad Mexican restaurants, and the way her Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album skipped because it warped during a hot day at the beach in Panama City, Florida.
She especially didn’t like good-ole-boy gatherings where men played poker in cigar-infested rooms and laughed with false self-knowledge and fears of their own inadequacies. She hated the smell of Scotch on their breath and of their crooked yellowed teeth. But they were gone now except for some poor old bastard named Fisher and his wheelchair-bound wife who screamed every time he plunked down a silly hand.
This was Tunica. From catfish farming to casinos in a few simple years. You could still smell the cowshit caked to the gamblers’ work boots.
She sat with the Fishers in this little glassed-in room on the second floor of the Magnolia Grand Casino, just a spit away from Highway 61. The old man ate the remainder of a tired wrinkled hotdog and his wife slobbered on herself while laughing at the ketchup that dropped on his horrible tie.
For days, Perfect had been watching and listening to them from closed-circuit cameras. In the main casino, in the restaurant, and even in their bedroom. She read their profiles down in Humes’s office about how they’d lost their daughter in a car accident about fifteen years ago and how they had some kind of benefit every year for her at a lake house with tons of deep-fried catfish and bream.
