Dirty South - v4

by Ace Atkins

  He offered a reward for anyone who could find his brother alive. He never mentioned the note or suicide or anything other than that something had happened. I got the feeling that most people blamed Cash.

  I had just gotten my third cup of coffee to go and was walking outside when I saw Teddy leaned against his Bentley crying. He just kept nodding and nodding but his words made him sound like a child who was confused.

  I watched ALIAS disappear down the streetcar tracks and then turn his walk into a run as if he could escape from the sadness that was about to wash over people he knew.

  I walked slow across the tracks and stood by Teddy.

  He looked down on me.

  “They found him,” he said. “He’s come home.”

  “What?”

  “He’s finally come home.”

  Teddy had cracked. I just helped him into the car and aimed it toward the parish line. That’s where Teddy said they were keeping the body.

  The rain started hammering the hood of the car just as we made the turn by the Metairie Cemetery.

  BAMBOO ROAD ran flush along a dirty concrete canal that stretched from Pontchartrain to the Mississippi. The road was the edge of the Orleans Parish line and I slowed Teddy’s Bentley along the muddy shoulder, where NOPD, Orleans, and Jefferson Parish patrol cars all parked at weird angles. The sun rose into a thick mass of high, gray-black clouds and the spinning lights made the drops of rain on his windshield come out in colors of red and blue.

  When we got out of the car, my mind numb, heart breaking into hard slivers, I heard the sound of bamboo canes knocking against one another as if someone was waiting at an unseen door. Their narrow leaves flickered in the wind of the approaching storm.

  Someone grabbed Teddy’s big arm, a cop, and led him down to the bank of the canal. The bamboo continued to knock as the sky opened up and a thick, warm shower of rain began to cover our faces.

  I was glad. Teddy didn’t like people to see him cry.

  A black man in a tight Italian suit and a hard woman in a black jacket met us on the path. Behind them, there was a tangle of cops standing at a clearing of trees. Jay Medeaux was there and I hung back with him. The canal was long and narrow and dry except for a few puddles of brown water. Someone had left a bicycle without tires on its steep concrete slope.

  “Where is he?” Teddy asked Jay.

  He didn’t say anything. Jay just let Teddy pass, walk down that muddy path, through all that knocking bamboo, to the police on the hill. Rain full-out all over them now. I saw a few scatter, holding notebooks and jackets above their heads. A cracking sound of thunder far off in the lake.

  Teddy’s thousand-dollar shoes were caked in mud and leaves and moss.

  I hung back. The smell of the green leaves and dirt strong in my nose.

  My vision tilted as my friend moved among them, the way the camera does in old movies when they want to make you feel like you’re on a ship.

  I felt some acid rise in my throat.

  Malcolm would not face us.

  He was strung up in a dead oak tree by the neck. Twirling slightly as if he could still control his movements. His platinum chain twisted deep and red into his neck behind the rope.

  Teddy walked to look at him but strong hands held him back.

  “You can’t,” the woman cop said.

  “Why?”

  “Please wait, sir,” she said.

  He shook her off, walked through four other cops who tried to hold him back, oblivious to any strength but his own.

  He stared up at Malcolm. I bent down and toyed with some wet grass, shaking my head.

  Bamboo knocked as if in applause. The sky above closed in like a dome.

  Dark gray rain coated Malcolm’s face.

  24

  FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS after we found Malcolm’s body on Bamboo Road, it rained. I’m not talking about a slow drizzle or boring patter that we get almost every spring afternoon in New Orleans, but real out-and-out thunderstorms that flooded the lower Garden District and closed parts of the city. I had to drive with water up to the running boards on the Gray Ghost just to make it to this community center in the Ninth Ward where there was a remembrance ceremony for Malcolm. Basically it was just a fancy word for a big wake open to fans and friends. They’d already had a more private ceremony the night before at this Uptown funeral home. I was there but chose to stay outside and offer a few kind words to Teddy. We spoke. But I don’t think he noticed me.

  The gravel lot outside the community center was packed with cars. I had to park four streets over on Desire beside some abandoned food mart and walk the whole way past rotting shotgun shacks. The red, green, and blue faded and bleached like something out of the Caribbean. Water had soaked through my boots and into the black blazer I’d picked from the back of the closet for the occasion.

  But the rain hadn’t discouraged the onlookers and fans. Some held up fluorescent yellow-and-orange posterboards with words of love for Malcolm. The words, written in black ink, ran and smeared over the paper and down on the arms that held them high. News crews from local TV stations waited in vans with open doors for the right time for a live shot. I saw one cameraman with a BET T-shirt on standing beside a tall black woman with extremely long legs and soft relaxed hair. I followed the echoing sounds of a preacher’s voice into a basketball court where rows and rows of folding chairs had been set up.

  “No Jesus, no peace,” said the gray-suited man at the podium. “Know Jesus. Know peace. Our friend brother Malcolm knew peace. Knew it before the Lord came knockin’ on his door. Knew he had family. Knew what family meant. Y’all hear what I’m sayin’?”

  I looked around the basketball court and at the elevated stage where there was a purple casket with an inscribed P on the side. Teddy sat wide-legged on a small chair by an older woman who I’d met last night. I think a distant aunt who’d helped raise them. Several long-legged beauties, some holding children, sat closest to the coffin. Many wearing dark sunglasses and nodding to the preacher’s words. Nae Nae was absent.

  The thunder rattled the high panes above the bleachers and kept cracking out in the distance. We weren’t far from the channel and I suddenly had the thought of all that dirty rainwater washing out into the port and then into the Mississippi.

  Teddy walked up in a draping black suit, jacket falling to his knees, and spit-polished boots. He kept on his shades and the size of his earring made an impact at even forty yards.

  “We all family,” Teddy said, holding his hands tight on the podium. Old preacher-style. Even his cadence reminded me of two-hour sermons I’d heard sitting between JoJo and Loretta. “That name. Our name. The Paris name. That’s what it all about. Malcolm and me used to talk about that. When we was growin’ up and used to take the streetcar past all them fine homes, he used to say some hardworkin’ man made that family about two hundred years ago. Ain’t that a trip. We just layin’ it all down for our grandkids…”

  Some of the well-dressed women with children shifted in their seats behind the coffin.

  “And their kids. That Paris name. We always gonna have that, Brother,” Teddy said, dropping his hands to his side and walking to the coffin. I could only see the profile of Malcolm’s gray face and the edge of a satin pillow. I didn’t want to see. I’d had problems with these kind of things since I was a child.

  Teddy kissed the tips of his fingers and touched them to the coffin. He reared his shoulders back and strutted to the edge of the stage, where he stopped. I saw his head drop, his arms shake, and he fell to one huge knee, rocking the entire platform.

  I stood.

  But two rappers I’d met, T.H.U.G. and Stank, grabbed each of his elbows and helped him down the stairs. He’d reached the back door, near the locker room, when I heard the cry. A deep gut-churning moan and scream that made me drop my own head and pray.

  After the ceremony, people stood and talked. The television news crews moved in. Hundreds of flowers continued to be dropped at the base of Mal
colm’s body. Cards and little notes written on napkins. Rain-streaked signs and CDs of his music. Some dude even dropped a baggie full of weed into the casket. One woman dropped her red panties.

  I pushed past them to find Teddy but he’d already emerged from the back locker room and had a strong gait as he walked through the huge crowd on the court. You could hear his shoes click above all the talking. Strong and confident.

  He smiled at me. And I believed he was headed toward me when they entered.

  Beneath the exit doors, right beside the “Drugs Kill” sign, stood the entire crew that had wrecked my warehouse. They all wore identical black leather jackets and shades.

  Cash grinned at Teddy in the thirty yards that separated them.

  He tossed down a white wreath and it skidded for about ten yards before stopping way short of my friend’s feet.

  “That’s the way it go,” Cash yelled, his platinum teeth shining with the fluorescent light.

  I looked at Teddy.

  “He’s a little upset,” Teddy said.

  “Why?”

  “I had his Rolls torched last night.”

  “Why?”

  “He set Malcolm off.”

  Cash nodded. “Sleep tight, Teddy. Watch out for them bedbugs.”

  He and his thugs disappeared.

  25

  IT WAS DARK AGAIN and I knew I’d slept through the day. I awoke to a cracking sound rattling my warehouse. It sounded like the floor, but in the darkness I heard a deep roll of thunder and knew the storm from the Gulf was blowing over the city. The air smelled of ozone and salt. The bank of windows facing Julia Street shook and I turned back into my pillow, hearing Annie get to her feet and start into a low growl. I’d been dreaming about Maggie. I was at her house in Taylor and we’d been staring up at the branches of a huge pecan tree and the blue sky beyond.

  “Annie,” I whispered. “Annie. Lay down.”

  I pulled the pillows over my head, waiting for the sleep that would come to me so easily from the tap-tap-tap of rain against the windows and roof above me. Another flash of lightning broke close and the air became charged with electricity and white light. The brightness startled me and I opened my eyes to see Annie had disappeared.

  She was growling near the front door.

  I padded my way through the warehouse, scratching the hair that was sticking up on my head and calling her name.

  Another flash of lightning.

  A man stood in the corner. He had a gray face and wore a tattered overcoat.

  He looked to be a thousand years old.

  I didn’t even break stride. I ran for the kitchen in the darkness, feeling my way through the drawer where I kept my Glock.

  I wanted to make it to the switches and light up the floor. I couldn’t see shit. I thought maybe I was just tired, dreaming of ghosts the same way I did when I was hunting old blues singers. Robert Johnson at the foot of my bed.

  But there was a different smell to my room. It smelled of fish oil and mothballs and tattered winter clothes left too long in storage. A musty basement odor.

  I held the gun strong in my hand.

  Annie kept growling.

  Then she yelped.

  Hard.

  I fired off a round in the direction where I’d seen the apparition. High above the range of my dog.

  She trotted back to me and I felt her stand at my side. Her back was wet and sticky.

  My eyes adjusting in the darkness and then lit up again with lightning.

  The sliding door rolled back. I heard it. I saw a flash of brown coat and then it disappeared into my stairwell.

  I ran to the door and flicked on the lights. I stooped down to Annie and looked at her bloody flank. She’s been scratched hard but not deep, like another animal had clawed her.

  I left her and ran down the steps with my gun. The door to the street was wide open and I saw a sweeping mist of rain hitting the asphalt outside in the dull glow of the city’s crime lights.

  I carefully peered out, making sure I didn’t get my head blown off.

  A block away and across the road, I saw the darkened shape of a man in a long tattered coat, his face hidden into the lapels. He seemed to be made of nothing but shadows. His weight did not shift. He did not move.

  I squinted into the rain as I walked to him, half in a dream, half expecting his shape to dissolve into my hands when I touched him.

  He turned and walked into the hole of another warehouse covered in plywood. The wood over the lower windows ripped away by the homeless. I guess I needed to know if this was one of Cash’s boys back for more or some crack addict from the Hummingbird ready to make a score.

  I held the gun in my hands.

  On the lower floor, the vacant building shined silver from the crime light. My feet were still bare. I felt discarded pieces of wood and wet cardboard on my toes. The air smelled the way it had in my warehouse and I tried to slow down my breathing, already growing nauseous.

  The silver light leaked through like vapor.

  I could not see the man.

  No shadow. No ghosts.

  I found stairs leading to the level above me. But I did not follow.

  The light had ended. My heart beat in my chest so fast.

  I could not think. The smell overpowering.

  I walked back through the wind and rain to my stoop.

  At the base of my stairs, there was a gold pocket watch hanging from a tarnished chain.

  When I flicked open the cover, the old blues song “Love in Vain” played. I could not breathe. I felt someone had entered my head.

  I snapped shut the cover, walked back upstairs, and bolted my door three times before calling the police.

  26

  THE GIRL’S HAIR smelled of cigarettes early that morning. Her breath like Jack Daniel’s and old cherries. Trey moved out from under her and grabbed the suit pants that he’d kicked out of last night and carefully counted out the money in his wallet. His AmEx and ATM cards were where he’d left them. He slipped into his pants, the white sunlight crawling through the girl’s Pottery Barn curtains. The checked ones from page fifty-eight. Painful light that hurt his head a lot. He couldn’t remember when he’d lost count.

  Thirteen dirty martinis. Some bar owned by retired surfers down in the Warehouse District. Not far from his loft. There was blurry stuff in his head. A round of drinks for some girls from Loyola. Some dancing in the middle of a crowded bar. Some rap. ALIAS’s song. White girls singing along. Two more martinis. Three. The nineteen-year-old snuggled into his neck. Her grabbing his crotch by the cigarette machine. A cab ride to somebody’s house by Audubon Park. A pass-out, more drinks, some beer this time. The girl’s roommate’s boyfriend putting an X tablet into his hand. All that good feeling. That alertness. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, not even fucking moving last night.

  He pulled on the linen shirt, the good one from Brooks Brothers that his girlfriend Molly liked. Molly was always mothering him. She bought his food, did his laundry, made sure he was working out when she came in from Atlanta.

  He found the latch of the door, never taking another look at the girl in the bed.

  He took a cab back to the bar, found his BMW, and made his Saturday-morning calls. He called Molly, told her he had a cold. Made sure she hadn’t called last night. She had. He’d been too sick to pick up the phone. Poor baby, she said. She’d make him feel better next week. She talked about cooking for him or something. He wasn’t listening. He just wanted to make sure she was lined up. Her father was so damned close to investing in his company. All that old Atlanta money, lunch at the Cherokee, Buckhead parties where he could get even more. More contacts.

  He parked, opened the door to the loft, and found Christian lying on his leather couch. The one he’d had delivered from Restoration Hardware. Christian’s feet were rubbing around one of those Tuscany pillows.

  “Bitch, get your nasty feet off my shit.”

  Christian rolled over. “Eat it.”
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br />   Trey walked back to the kitchen. Everything stainless steel, the way Molly liked. She ordered them. He opened the refrigerator, grabbed a beer, watching himself in the warped reflection. Fuck, he needed a haircut. All shaggy and low, could barely see his eyes.

  “What’s up, Chaseboy?” Christian hated to be called that. All of that going back to Country Day. One black boy in the class. Some kind of Martian.

  “That dude Travers called.”

  Trey stopped drinking the beer, his stomach twisting.

  “I said you were at work. But it looks like you were out on pussy patrol.”

  “Hell, I think she was passed out for most of it.”

  Christian pointed at him and said, “You got game, motherfucker. You got game.”

  Trey nodded. Still feeling a little fuzzy with the X and the martinis. Really play up the whole sick thing. Call Molly. Have her mother him more.

  “Was she as good as Kristi Lynn?”

  “God damn, that redneck whore will never wash out. You know? I mean, who really gives a shit anymore.”

  Christian threw the remote at the brick wall and stomped into the bathroom, where he took a hard, long piss. He wandered back, laughing, no longer mad, and wanted to go down and score a dime bag from some niggers who lived down by the Riverbend.

  “What’s Travers want now?”

  “Maybe he thinks I took ALIAS’s money.” Trey laughed.

  “Why would you con out your own client?”

  “Exactly.”

  “He any good?”

  Trey’s head hurt more. He walked to the edge of the sink and held himself there. Williams-Sonoma towels. A rack of ten types of olive oil. Some with oregano and black pepper inside.

  “Yes,” Trey said finally.

  “You worried?”

  “I got it under control.”

  Trey looked over at Christian, suddenly remembering the fall carnival at Country Day, five years before that redneck bitch who changed their life. The families had paid some trash down south to bring in a Ferris wheel, some kind of ship that rocked back and forth till you about puked, and these little swings where you’d get strapped in for your ride and be twirled until you were almost horizontal. He remembered Christian being kind of gay about it and trying to catch his leg when they swung close. He held on to his leg and laughed and laughed like it was so funny. Why would he do something like that?