When the lieutenant stepped out of the car, the soles of his shoes sizzled against the black top. It’d been over a hundred for two weeks now. The city couldn’t take much more of this heat.

The first officer on the scene was a young patrolman, he sat on a concrete planter in front of the modest shotgun house, holding a handkerchief against his mouth, vomit splattered at his feet and over his shoes.

“Another one?” Asked the lieutenant.

“Yes, sir. Elderly lady. Neighbors called in about the smell. She’s – it’s bad in there, I wouldn’t go in, wait on the morgue boys.”

“Might be a bit of a wait.” Sighed the lieutenant, he hadn’t gotten much sleep since the bodies started piling up. “They’re pullin’ some triangulation crap, saying the need the city council to authorize the overtime or they can’t keep workin’ these hours.”

“How many does this make?”

“Somewhere north of seventy, I imagine. If it keeps up at this rate, we’ll be lucky if it stops before it breaks a hundred.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do, sir? Can’t arrest the weather.”

“Do like they did in the old days, son. Pray for rain.”

Memphis Note
During the summer of 1980, a killer stalked the streets of Memphis, taking 83 lives in less than three weeks. It was a heat wave that locked the city and most of the Midwest in hundred-plus degree temperatures. All of the victims were elderly citizens, and nearly all of those were poor minorities. While the cost in human life was staggering, it helped teach the city how to prepare and manage extreme heat, keeping future death tolls to a minimum.

The addict, crouched in a boarded up doorway half way up the street, eyed the two men warily. He probably wasn’t used to seeing people dressed this nicely in this part of town. Or anyone for that matter.

There was no reason to come down this way anymore. Beale was dead. The stores closed, the buildings boarded over, the music gone quiet. The birthplace of rock and roll was now a rotting corpse stinking up the rest of downtown.

One of the men kicked at a chunk of broken asphalt, mumbling to himself.

“I don’t know why you’re apprehensive about this.” Said the other man, an annoyed tone in his voice. “The City Council botched the last try at this so horribly, as long as the buildings don’t fall over we’ll be hailed as the saviors of downtown. We’ll be heroes.”

“And if we don’t pull this off, we’ll be ruined.” Responded his companion. “Just like all this.”

“C’mon. A little glitz and glam can go a long way toward fixing that. This place used to be a regular Sodom and Gomorrah. People want that again. They expect it. And we’ll be the ones collecting twenty percent when it does.”

Memphis Note
Beale Street has not always been the neon-lit and alcohol-fueled stretch we know today. For a large part of the 20th century, Beale was little more than a boarded up side street. The city bought the buildings in the 70s, but their attempt at urban renewal was an utter disaster. It wasn’t until the current management company took over in the early 80s that anything started to change for the better.

“Doc told me I had to lay off the coffee and smokes. Didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout any sweet tea.” Shack hands the woman a tall, sweating glass of the stuff. She wasn’t as pretty or young as the girls that used to come by. But, then again, neither was he. Neither was anything anymore.

“Ever had real Southern sweet tea before?” He asks her, playing for time to try and remember her name. S-something, wasn’t it? She shakes her head and says no in an unfamiliar accent, which doesn’t help anything.

“They make it by takin’ regular iced tea and then boiling it. See, when you boil tea, you make more space for the sugar. You get everything movin’ around so quick, it slides together. That’s what I was like on the skis, you know. Movin’ and slidin’ around. All fast like.”

The segue is unintentional, and the nostalgia hits him like a submerged log.

He peers out at McKellar Lake, the estuary where he made a name and built his houseboat, not saying anything. “But, now look at it. It’s all crap and limbs and chemical run-off.”

He sighs.

“Guess everything’s gotta cool down at some point.”

Memphis Note
Southern sweet tea is an absolutely insane super-solution of sugar and tea. Which makes it a perfect paring to Marvin “Shack” Shackelford, the impresario water skier that dominated the marina scene at McKellar Lake in the 1970s. For a period, he held the world record for distance skiing, setting it on the slackwaters of the Mississippi that make up McKellar Lake. I don’t know what happened to Shackelford after the McKellar lake marina scene dried up as pollution became unbearable.

“I’m tellin’ you, that man’s gotta be straight up bat shit crazy!” They all were leaving a convenience store, pulses still racing from their trip to Voodoo Village, a crazed little cul-de-sac in South Memphis. “Why else would you live like that? Crosses and statues and candles all over the place!”

They gathered around his car, each fiddling with their respective post-fright snacks.

She’d gone for the sorbet, and dug at it with one of those awkward, Popsicle stick spoons.

“No, I don’t think it’s like that.” It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d all sprinted out of Voodoo Village. “I don’t think it’s like that at all.”

She ate a bit of it, cooling her in the summer heat.

“You saw that place. You saw how those people live. None of use would last a day in that life. And so, ok, what if because of that life one day something in you breaks, breaks so bad you see God in the burning wick of a candle?

“Does that make you crazy? Or does it make you incredibly lucky because you got to see God.

“I think I would like to be that lucky.”

Memphis Note
Voodoo Village, one of the most haunted places in Memphis, or at least that’s what the urban legends would have you believe. In reality, it was an impoverished stretch of back-road known as Boxtown that’s been shoved aside and forgotten by the rest of the city. The name came from a fenced in compound at the end of the street decorated a rather eccentric manner, but really, which one of us isn’t eccentric in our own way?