by Ace Atkins
“Is he out?”
“Yeah, got out a few months back. Went back to Stella, too.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He nodded. I took a small sip of the blueberry margarita and pushed it away.
“You seen him around?”
“Puttin’ in some floors at some new bar on Decatur,” he said. “You know that place that used to be a coffee-house where them vampire people hung out?”
“Thanks.” I got up to leave and shook his hand again.
There was a long mirror behind the daiquiri machines framed in some dripping red chili pepper lights. I watched us — even as I continued to talk — and noticed the fine line of gray on the back of Felix’s normally smooth head. To me, he’d always been ageless, between forty and seventy. I’d never asked. Watching our reflections, I was jarred with a memory of when I was nine and at Disney World with my parents. It was the Haunted House, the end of the ride, and there was a trick mirror when you didn’t see who was sitting with you, only the ghosts who’d stowed away.
“You tell Loretta hello,” he said. “Would you do that?”
I told him I would.
7
THE FRENCH QUARTER is a shiftless little town. People gain and lose jobs the way some change underwear. You may be working as a bouncer at a club on Decatur one week and the next you find yourself as cook at a four-star restaurant on Bienville. Addresses don’t mean much. Most people just crash, always looking for the cheapest housing where you won’t be too worried about getting jacked every night. I needed to find a buddy of mine named Curtis Lee. Curtis, as I learned from Felix, had been out of Angola for at least six months and had gone straight. Again. Either it was religion or AA; Curtis always found the latest salvation. After one short stint in the Jefferson Parish Jail — this for pissing on the sheriff’s boots during Mardi Gras — he told me he wanted to become a monk and spent months at JoJo’s reading prayer books.
I parked at Decatur and Esplanade behind the French Market, smelling the strands of garlic, dried red pepper, and fish on ice sold there as I hooked Annie onto a leather leash. We walked down Decatur underneath a metal overhang and past a couple of Italian delis and a store that sold Christmas ornaments all year. Cajun Santa. An alligator Rudolph.
I heard hard hammering and the buzz of a saw. The air inside the open door smelled of sawdust and burned wood. On his knees by a miter saw, I saw Curtis, all wiry and mullet-haired, smoking a cigarette and cutting down a tongue-and-groove board.
He smiled up at me, the cigarette pinched between his front teeth. He shut off the saw and stood, shaking the shavings from his coveralls and bending the bill of his Styrofoam hat. The hat asked: GETTIN’ ANY?
I shook his hand. He was playing some Journey on an Emerson cassette player that was held together with duct tape.
“Travers, I heard you was up in Mississippi.”
“I just got back,” I said. “Finished up the project.”
“What was it?” He said wuzzit in that redneck drawl. New Orleans was a long way from Curtis’s north Louisiana home.
“Researching the early days of Sonny Boy Williamson. Found an old partner of his who was the only man I ever met that could take a leak and walk at the same time.”
“How’d he stop from pissin’ on himself?” Curtis asked.
“He didn’t.”
He walked over to a cooler and cracked open the top of a Bud Light. He asked me if I wanted to join him and I said I was cool. I knew it was going to be a very long night.
The hammering in the other room stopped. A large-framed white woman wearing a jogging bra that could’ve comfortably held a third-world country came in and grabbed the beer from his hand. She swigged it, looked at me, and blew out her breath, foam still on her chin.
“Hello, Stella.”
“Eat me, Nick.”
“I’ll take a rain check.”
She turned back to her husband. “Soon as you finish with the professor, let’s get rollin’. You wanted to lay 300 feet today. I’m already growin’ mold.”
Annie started to growl low at her.
“That your mutt?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“Figured you for the mutt, Travers,” she said. “He’s just your style.”
“Her name is Annie.”
She laughed, making snorting piglike grunts in her nose. “Hope you’re happy together.”
Curtis cracked open a beer for himself and watched his wife’s big ass waddle away. “Man, she still makes me hard.”
“Oh, boy.”
“So what can I do for you, brother? Those red maple floors of yours cracking up?”
“Nope. Need some advice on working a con.”
He nodded outside and spoke a little louder for his wife’s benefit. “Let me finish this cigarette outside. All right?”
Outside, he leaned against a metal support pole and watched a couple of Hare Krishnas banging the shit out of a tambourine. “Hey,” he yelled. “Hey.”
One of the Krishnas, orange robe and standard bald head, turned around.
“Y’all fuck off.”
They started singing and banging some more but turned the other way.
“Goddamned assholes,” he said. “Jesus will turn those fuckers into an orange quilt.”
“About the con.”
“Yeah, what’s up? I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Stella. She’d keep my nuts in her purse if she knew you had something for me.”
“Need some direction. I’m working a job for an old buddy of mine. He has this kid he works with — he’s in the music business and they make rap records — and this kid got taken for a huge one.”
“What they use?”
I told him about the offices at Lee Circle and this guy named Thompson and the way they worked on the kid’s paranoia about his trust fund.
“Man, that’s some good shit.”
“Sound like anyone you know?”
He shrugged. “Not really. You say he had fucked-up ears?”
I nodded.
“I know people with fucked-up noses and necks and faces. Maybe even some peckers. But no ear things. Wow, man. How much was it?”
“A lot.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means I don’t want to say.”
“That’s cool,” he said, taking a sip of beer, starting on what would be one of the first of about one hundred today. He had small hands and yellow teeth. I knew he’d been busted last year for trying to work a handkerchief game on a couple of Lithuanians. When he made the switch and they found the bag full of cut-up newspapers, they tried to stuff him into a mail drop. Apparently the slot was thinner than Curtis and there had been chafing.
“I can ask around,” he said. “Could use a little help, though.”
I knew it’d come to this. Curtis liked to be paid and I didn’t blame him. He had Stella to feed.
“How much?”
“Five hundred.”
“Shit, no.”
“You said it was a ton of money.”
“I said it was a lot. What the hell do you think I keep in my bank account?”
“Two?”
“A hundred if this pans out. I don’t know if I’ll be paid back for this shit.”
“Done,” Curtis said, lighting up his second cigarette. Stella began to yell for him to get back inside. Her voice made nails on a chalkboard seem like chanting monks.
“Goddamn,” he said. “She’s on this new kind of diet from TV. Something that all the stars are onto. Like those little girls on that coffee-shop show in New York. You know where all the girls got tight little asses?”
“Friends.”
“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, we was watching the other night and she says she wanted her ass to look just like that Courtney Love.”
I didn’t correct him.
“I told her I like that booty,” he said. “I like ’em full and healthy.”
Stella screamed: “Hurry up.”
&n
bsp; Curtis’s shoulders shrank a bit. “Maybe it would make her more quiet.”
“You’re a lucky man, brother.”
He winked. “I’ll call.”
“I need this fast,” I said. “Today.”
I held his gaze and he slowly nodded, understanding. Some of the biggest fuckups I’ve ever known always come through in a pinch. Maybe they do because they’ve been in similar situations.
“What’s up?”
“My friend borrowed money from the wrong folks.”
“Greaseballs?”
“Nope,” I said. “A mucho bad motherfucker.”
“Man,” he said. “At least with the greaseballs you knew where the shit was flyin’. This city has turned to shit ever since the Mafia turned into a bunch of pussies.”
He wrote my cell-phone number on his hand.
8
I STOPPED AT THE MARKET and bought a large Snoball in a cup, black cherry, and sat on the back loading dock trying to figure out what to do next. I had to wait for Curtis, since ALIAS hadn’t given me anything to work with. I shared a little of the cone with Annie while a farmer in overalls unloaded crates of strawberries. She worked her tongue over the ice neatly as her tail wagged a lot. I scratched her chest and kept watching the man unload the crates.
“Dem dogs are nasty, no?” he asked in a deep Cajun accent.
“No,” I said, smiling. “Dogs’ mouths are cleaner than a human’s.”
“No human I know lick their backside like that,” he said.
“Annie doesn’t lick her ass,” I said, digging my spoon into the ice. “Very much.”
The old Cajun shook his head and disappeared with a dolly full of strawberries. I turned back to Annie.
“You want to stay with me?”
Annie wagged her tail, the twisted muttlike loop knocking against my arm. I thought about where she’d been in the Delta, days before. Starving out by a dusty road where she would’ve probably died under a truck tire.
I called Teddy from my cell and asked him about the DJ he’d mentioned. The guy who’d been sold out by Cash.
“Lorenzo Woods?”
“Where does he coach?”
Teddy told me. I laid the rest of the Snoball on the ground for my new friend. Annie scarfed it up and pawed at the Styrofoam when it was gone.
“What you wastin’ your time with him?” Teddy asked, his voice broken by static. “He doesn’t know shit.”
“He knows Cash.”
“Yeah,” he said. “They was tight.”
“And now he doesn’t like him.”
“Yeah.”
“JFK is on Wisner, right?”
THE SCHOOL’S security guard stopped us as soon as we hit the front door. He had a big belly and a small gun and snorted when he talked as if announcing a sermon on where dogs are welcome. Apparently school wasn’t one of them.
“That’s racism.”
“A dog ain’t no race.”
“It’s a species.”
“That ain’t no race, and it needs to be outside.”
He put his hands on his hips.
“Will you call Coach Woods?”
“Why would Coach Woods want to see some dog?”
“She’s the best placekicker in the southern parishes.”
He squinted his eyes up and shook his head, turning his back to us.
“Wait till you go pro, Annie,” I said. “They’ll all be sorry.”
Coach Woods found us a little while later on this old practice field where Annie and I were playing with a tennis ball she’d found. He was about forty and black. Wore a crewneck T that said KENNEDY D-LINE. LIKE A ROCK.
“You lookin’ for me?” He kept his hair short and it had started to turn gray at the temples. Annie trotted over with the tennis ball and dropped it against my leg. I took the slobbery ball, tossed it about thirty yards, and she took off for it.
“Heard you used to be DJ Capone.”
He just watched me.
“Heard that Cash stole your beats.”
Woods walked closer. “What you sellin’, man?”
“I’m a friend of Teddy Paris. Said maybe you could help me figure out Cash a little bit.”
“Teddy?” he said, smiling.
He squinted into the sun behind my head as Annie looped back and dropped the ball by my foot. Out in the field, the team still kept the old-school goalposts that were shaped like an H. They reminded me of a field with high grass in south Alabama where my dad coached. He used to have to cut the grass himself. Sometimes he’d make me weed the field as he slipped back into his office to drink some Beam on ice.
“You know Cash?”
I shook my head and dropped to a knee to slow Annie down a bit. She was still too skinny to be a healthy dog.
“He give you that scar on your face?”
“Got that myself.”
“Figured as much,” he said. “What business you got with Cash?”
“Teddy and Cash are fighting over money and recording this boy out of Calliope.”
“ALIAS,” he said. “Yeah, I know all about that.”
“I’m looking out for the kid’s interests.”
“Cash will kill you if you get in the way.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But would he really kill Teddy?”
“Teddy owe him money?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Teddy owes everybody money.”
“You want to take a walk?”
I hooked up Annie to her leash and we began to walk around a rubberized track that circled the football field. We kept looping around the field and I still felt like I needed to be weeding all these years later. I thought about ALIAS at fifteen, wondered how long he’d been out of school.
“You’re Nick Travers, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said and shook his hand.
“I seen you play many times, man. Y’all had the best defense those years. You and that man from Mississippi, linebacker?”
“Ulysses Davis.”
“The Black Knight.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell him that somebody remembers him,” I said. “He’ll like that.”
“Y’all stay in touch?”
I nodded.
“Tell me about what happened with you and Cash.”
“I grew up in Calliope,” he said. “Proud of that. Most of my kids come from there or Magnolia. I got out by workin’ block parties. Hustlin’ for any money I could make. I invented bounce, man. You know bounce?”
“It’s the Dirty South sound.”
“Damn right,” he said. “That’s me.”
“Cash took it.”
“Took my beats, put his lame-ass raps over it, and threatened all the record stores in Uptown. Made ’em sell his record or he’d fuck their ass up.”
“Man, that’s good marketing.”
“That ape don’t play,” he said. He patted Annie on her head and reached down to pull some high grass from some broken asphalt inside the track. “When I confronted the man, he just walk away. We was at a block party at the Y when I let him know he was a thief. Didn’t even answer me. But that motherfucker sure broke into my apartment one night. Tied up me and my girl. Made her watch while he beat my ass.”
I changed the leash into the other hand. Woods put his hands into his coaching shorts and pulled out a whistle. He twirled it into his fingers. “Stuck a knife into my mouth. Cut my tongue.”
He shook his head. “Made me go back to school, though. I played ball in high school but I wasn’t like y’all. Didn’t have the speed. No real size. Got my degree from Xavier on my twenty-sixth birthday, man. Now I teach computer skills to these kids.”
Annie kept pulling on the leash, not sure why it was slowing her down. Her tongue lolling out, antenna ears askew.
“Someone took ALIAS,” I said. “They conned him. Made him think he was represented by some big agency. Does Cash have the connection or the smarts to make that work?”
“Man’s smart. But he don’t
have the patience for something like that. He wants the kid. Wants Teddy to look bad. But see, Cash doesn’t work that way, conning somebody. If he wanted something done, he’d head right to it. He’ll lie, steal, and cheat. But he’ll do it face-to-face. Con games and playin’ ain’t the man’s style.”
“You answered my question.”
“What kind of dog is that anyway?” he asked.
“A Delta dog,” I said. “The finest breeding outside Memphis.”
“Got some pit in her?”
“Maybe.”
“What else?”
“Boxer. Shepherd. Wookie.”
“Man,” he said, laughing. “Listen. You think you could come by practice sometime this fall? Kids ’bout to get out of school now. Tryin’ to make ’em show up to workouts this summer and all. Ain’t workin’ that great. All kinds of distractions. Girls. Drugs. Money. Man, when I was a kid, football was everything. Now they just into ballin’.”
“I guess when you hit the big time, you don’t even need school.”
“ALIAS will have to come down hard one day,” he said. “You ever want to help out, let me know.”
“Sure, man,” I said. “I work at Tulane. They know how to find me.”
I stopped walking at the gate to the parking lot. Annie needed some water and to be fed. I needed to make a few calls. “Who would want to cheat this kid?” I asked.
Woods stretched out his fist and gave me the pound. Hard black clouds rolled in from the east, a few small trees planted around the field started to shake. I heard thunder crack. The rain was back.
“A millionaire kid with a Calliope education?” he asked. “I’d look at everybody who breathes in this city.”
“Will Cash come for me?”
“If you’re in between him and the boy, you better bet on it.”
9
CASH STAYED UPTOWN in this purple mansion with yellow shutters just off the streetcar line where white people played tennis and parked their cars behind thick iron fences. You’d heard that his neighbors don’t like him none. Not ’cause he’s black and rich but ’cause he throws parties about every night, rips apart some old-as-hell house breakin’ the law, and threatens folks with sawed-off shotguns. He even made some white lawyer get on his knees and kiss his buck-naked ass after the man told Cash to cut his lawn. In a lot of ways, you got to respect that.