Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

  He was a tall kid. Lanky and slow-moving in red basketball shorts that slipped past his knees. He wore a white FUBU baseball jersey with his sleeves rolled up and sneakers made of black fabric and gel. He sported an awkward mustache that only a fifteen-year-old could appreciate.

  He still didn’t look at us, counting the money.

  “How you feelin’?” Teddy asked.

  “Sore,” ALIAS said, pulling up his shirt and showing a white and red puckered scar on his side. “Still don’t know who jumped me.”

  The kid shook his head and pocketed the money, watching the uneven open earth and the slabs of projects that stacked farther north like dirty caves. He leaned forward, a piece of platinum jewelry slipping from his shirt. The Superman symbol inscribed in diamonds.

  “Happens out here in the yard.” Teddy leaned down and made the kid look at his face. “Didn’t want you to come back here where that kind of shit happen. But you fucked up, kid. That’s a lot of money to lose. Put me in a hell of a tight.”

  The kid nodded. “Yeah, I heard about that shit. I’m sorry, man.”

  Teddy opened his big arms wide and the kid fell into his clutch. Teddy swallowing him into his sweaty silk shirt, patting him on his back.

  In the yard, a shirtless man clutching a long bottle staggered toward Teddy’s child security. “Teddy,” I said, nudging him.

  “Get back, motherfucker,” Teddy yelled and rolled off to the yard.

  I sat down next to the kid. He pulled the money back out, probably about twenty in cash, and I watched him recount it.

  “Teddy told me what happened.”

  He looked at me. One eye had yellow flecks in the iris and he had a very pink scar that slashed from the bridge of his nose and ran into one eyebrow. His teeth were gold.

  “You want to tell me what happened?”

  “What you gonna do about it?”

  I watched Teddy’s fat butt jangle in his $2,000 suit as he ran off the man. The children laughed while the crazy shirtless man darted across the grass and mud field like an aimless dog.

  “I helped a woman who got sent to prison for forty years because people lied,” I said. “She got stuck. No one believed a word she said. Thought she was crazy.”

  He looked at me. Then back at the money.

  “If you don’t help,” I said, “your boy Cash is gonna mess Teddy up bad.”

  “What the fuck you know about Cash?” ALIAS asked. “He ain’t my boy.”

  “What did the man who shot you look like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Fuck no.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “White.”

  “Terrific.”

  Teddy looked down at us, sweating and out of breath. “Y’all ready to go? I ain’t got the energy to run that motherfucker off again. What you poor-mouthin’ for, kid? I said let’s go.”

  “What’d you do with my dogs?”

  “I got ’em.”

  “You ain’t got the right.”

  “Sure I do. That was a ton of money. Had to make you think about the shit you done.”

  “That was my money.”

  “Yeah, I heard Cash was fillin’ your head up. Wants you to roll with those Angola ballers when I’m dead. Right?”

  I got up from the stoop. Looked at the time. Noon. I should’ve been on the road by now. Eatin’ chicken-fried steak in Vaiden, Mississippi. Headed into Maggie’s heavy iron bed. Her Texas show boots by the door.

  “You see this man?” Teddy said, pointing at me. “See him? He don’t look like much. All that gray hair and don’t shave his face and tries to be funny all the time. Which of course he ain’t. But he gonna help find them fuckers. He ain’t like the police.”

  “Why wouldn’t they help?” I asked. He did bring it up.

  “‘Signal 7,’” ALIAS said.

  Two teenage girls in halter tops, lollipops in splayed fingers, strolled by ALIAS and smiled. Both with bright red lips. Bare feet dusty from the broken concrete around Calliope.

  ALIAS smiled back.

  “What’s ‘Signal 7’?”

  “‘The popo ain’t got answers,’” ALIAS began in a slow, deliberate rap. Enunciating words to me the way you would to a retarded person or a very smart monkey. “‘Ain’t nothin’ but lies. Put that Glock in their face and see if they read our minds.’”

  “The ‘popo’ didn’t like that too much?” I asked.

  Teddy nodded his head.

  “Guess not,” I said.

  We followed ALIAS into a small room with three filthy windows crowded with dead plants and covered in comic strips. A haggard woman, oddly old in a way I couldn’t quite place, had her feet up in a ratty recliner chair. She flipped through channels on a television that flickered so much it made me dizzy.

  No one spoke to her. ALIAS disappeared down a short hall and returned with a leather duffel bag with the Timberland logo.

  “That’s it?” Teddy asked.

  ALIAS said, “You locked me out of my own home.”

  “Did I?” Teddy asked, leading the way as we passed the silent old woman living in her TV.

  When we got back to his Bentley, the commons was bare of the children. A low bank of dark clouds rolled toward the river and there was the slight smell of rain in the distance mixed with the loose dust of scattering feet.

  ALIAS held his bag. No expression.

  Teddy circled his ride, searching for scratches or dents.

  He shook his head. We both scanned the four clusters of housing projects surrounding us. No one. Loose popping of dried clotheslines stretching from metal crosses.

  He pressed the release on the locks. The alarm chirped and I looked back at the long row of clouds. The silence was almost electric as I waited for him to take me home.

  We rolled away in the Bentley, his car smelling of leather and new wood and some kind of lime perfume he sprayed on the rabbit fur. When we drove away, I watched three teenagers being hustled into the back of a black Suburban by about ten DEA officers. An old woman in pink house slippers yelled at them and kept throwing rocks at their back as they all loaded into the car.

  5

  “HOW DID YOU MEET this man?” I asked ALIAS, while we waited for a streetcar to move on St. Charles Avenue heading uptown to Lee Circle. Rain splattered the hood of my truck and wooden shop signs in the Warehouse District shook in the wind. Teddy had left me with the kid at my place and had gone back to the studio to make calls for last-minute loans. I told him I’d do my best but wished he’d just leave town.

  ALIAS wasn’t listening to me. He’d busied himself by flipping through some blues CDs in my toolbox as we headed to the office where he’d had most of his business meetings. “Who the fuck is Super Chikan?”

  “A guy I once got drunk with in Clarksdale. Can make his guitar talk like a chicken.”

  “Man, that’s country-ass.”

  More and more abandoned brick warehouses sported new rental and sale signs for the district. One showed a mural on an old cotton warehouse advertising white couples playing tennis, swimming, and drinking foaming coffees.

  “How did you meet this guy?” I asked again.

  “Through this woman I knew,” ALIAS said. He’d moved from the blues CDs to a cardboard box holding articles on Guitar Slim. I watched in the rearview as he scanned the articles and moved his lips.

  “Who was she?”

  “She came up to me when we was at Atlanta Nites,” he said. “Don’t remember her name. But man, she was fine.”

  “That doesn’t help much.”

  “She just gave me his card and was sayin’ that he worked with Mystikal and shit.”

  “Where did you first meet him?”

  “At my lake house. Dude just knock on the door like we old friends. Knew my name. Started to talkin’ to me right off about my Bentley. Knew all about my ride.”

  “Who else was there?”

  “That fine-ass woman.” />
  “You know anything else about her?”

  “She smelled real nice.”

  “Stinky ones don’t get much work.”

  I downshifted, rain against my windshield, and saw a parking spot by the Circle Bar. The bar made me think of cigarettes and Dixies and Jack Daniel’s and me about five years ago.

  Robert E. Lee stood tall on his pillar at Lee Circle, where streetcars made wide turns around its grassy mound and headed uptown.

  I reached across ALIAS and into my dash for a pack of Bazooka.

  I offered him a piece.

  “What’s that shit?”

  “Gum. You chew it. Brings enjoyment.”

  “Man, that shit looks old as hell.”

  “I will have you know that Bazooka is the finest damned gum ever known to man. All other bubble gum tastes like rubber paste. And they have comics inside. Brilliant.”

  He looked at me and flashed a gold grin.

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “Kind of bald but kept his hair real tight. Like shaved so no one would notice. White.”

  “You said that.”

  “Well, he kind of dark for a white dude. Nose kind of big.”

  “I’d ask how he dressed but it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Anything different about him? Moles? A tattoo?”

  “Naw, man. He did have this weird shit about his ears,” he said, and rubbed the cartilage in his ears. “Like he got shit stuck up in it.”

  “You mean like cauliflower ear?”

  “Yeah, sumshit like that.”

  We stopped at this three-story tan brick building on the Circle and got out. Most of the windows were open and we could hear a construction crew with their drills and hammers blaring Tejano music from small radios while they worked. We walked right into the first floor. It was gutted and open with exposed metal support beams. Even with the air flushing through the open space, it smelled of hot wood and oil from their tools and lifts.

  No one was on the floor.

  “Where were they?” I asked.

  “Second floor.”

  Upstairs, we found the office. Two Mexican workers were inside cleaning up a mess left by Sheetrock hangers. They swept the floor in their hard hats, T-shirts bulging with cigarette packs. They didn’t even look up at us as we walked over the stained plywood floor. I watched ALIAS taking it all in.

  “Tell me what you remember.”

  “They had a secretary. Every time I come in, she’d make me sit there awhile and read magazines till Mr. Thompson was ready.”

  “Did Mr. Thompson have a first name?”

  “Jim. He acted like we was friends.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Drove.”

  “By yourself?”

  He nodded.

  “Anyone know about this besides you?”

  “Naw.”

  He walked over to a window where you could see the statue of Lee on his pillar. A streetcar lapped him. Clanking bell. Gears changing. You could only see the back of Lee.

  “What’d they promise you, kid?”

  “ALIAS.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Tavarius.”

  “I like that better.”

  “Whatever.”

  I smiled.

  “I got a business card they gave me.”

  I shook my head. “Won’t do any good. Were any of these construction crews here when you came in?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t see anyone else in this building except Mr. Thompson and this secretary? Who was she?”

  “I don’t know. She was just always runnin’ around and answering phones and interruptin’ his meeting with calls from Britney Spears and shit,” he said, dropping his head.

  “So how did it work?” I found a huge paint bucket to sit on and nodded to its mate by the window. He seemed pretty embarrassed. He prided himself on being smart and quick-witted. It was his job. He was a rapper.

  Basically, this guy said he represented a ton of celebrities and boasted a long list of phony clients that included everyone from B. B. King to the Nevilles. He even had eight-by-ten photos of clients hanging above the secretary’s desk both times ALIAS visited the office. Once for the hook. The second was the yank.

  He told ALIAS long stories about his clients losing millions to their record companies – a common and unfortunately all-too-often-true tale of the recording business – and that he wanted to protect him. He said his group – ATU, or Artists Trust Union – would handle the major balance of ALIAS’s earnings that up until that point had been kept in a trust fund because he was a minor. The guy spun wild tales about potential earnings and even hooked ALIAS real good about being able to invest in a private island in the Caribbean. This all sounded like complete 101 con horseshit to me, but then again, I’m not fifteen years old. He exploited every facet of ALIAS’s teenage dreams and paranoid fantasies about Teddy and Malcolm ripping him off.

  But the true genius in the plan was that this guy really had to do little work. ALIAS had to break into Teddy’s office and get the bank account numbers for the ALIAS money market account. Mr. Thompson – bless his heart – acted as his legal guardian (with just a little maneuvering or forgery) and siphoned every bit of cash from the fund that was earmarked for the kid when he turned twenty-one.

  I told him that I’d start with the owners of the building and look for any short-team leases he probably did not sign. I asked ALIAS more about the woman from the club and the secretary. The club girl was hot. The secretary had a big butt.

  “Why an island?” I asked. “Where did that come from?”

  “Shit,” he said as we climbed back in the Gray Ghost. The smell of a warm rain mixed with exhaust and heat from the asphalt.

  “You sure no one else could’ve seen them?”

  He shook his head.

  “No one ever came with you? Took a phone call? Vouched for these folks?”

  “No one,” he said. He turned the bill of his Saints cap backward and slumped into his passenger seat.

  “I’ll have to talk to your friends,” I said, spitting the Bazooka out the window. The gum had lost its taste and I reached for a fresh piece.

  “Do what you got to, man,” he said. “My friends got heart.”

  He pounded his chest two times and raised his chin into the wind cutting from the road.

  6

  WHEN JOJO OPENED HIS BUSINESS back in 1965, he hired one of the best bartenders in the Quarter. Felix Wright transcended just pouring Jack into a shot glass or popping the top off a Dixie. He performed. He’d have a cold beer rolled down to you from five feet like in an old Western. He kept a file of New Orleans facts in his head, things about Jean Lafitte or Andrew Jackson. Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet. Some of it was probably bullshit. But Felix made you feel welcome. Made you feel like you owned a little bit of JoJo’s, too, while he’d tell you about the night he’d seen Steve McQueen shooting The Cincinnati Kid.

  I’d dropped ALIAS back at the Ninth Ward studio and picked up Polk Salad Annie from home. I’d finally taught her to hop up in the Gray Ghost with me. We parked down by the old bar so I could find Felix. Someone had rebuilt the place after the fire last year and turned it into a martini bar where everyone wears all black and compares what they do for a living.

  I turned my head as I passed. The blue neon and velvet drapes were enough. I missed the old blues posters in the window and those tall doors fashioned for a Creole restaurant more than 150 years ago.

  I had to find Felix and I knew where to look.

  It wasn’t pretty. The top bartender in the Quarter had taken a job at Kra-zee Daiquiris down on Bourbon Street. It was the kind of place where you had the option of pouring your drink into a pair of plastic breasts or a long green penis.

  Kra-zee’s pumped with that song “Mambo No. 5” and had Polaroid photos of Girls Gone Wild on the walls. The bar was long but thin, maybe six feet from door to counter, just stools lined up under a fa
ke grass canopy like the place was in the middle of the South Pacific. I knew the building used to house a bar that had been around since the early 1800s, serving presidents and pirates in its time. But the new owner wanted to update. Bring in some new tourist dollars in the form of to-go cups.

  Felix wore a Mardi Gras Indian headdress on his bald black dome. Strong forearms and quick in his step behind the bar. He was frowning, but his face brightened when I took a seat.

  He gripped my hand very hard as he slid down a couple of daiquiris to two women at the end of the bar. Maybe more like plunked them down; apparently the plastic penis doesn’t slide in the same way as JoJo’s glasses.

  “How you been?”

  “Workin’.”

  “You all right?”

  “Fine,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye. Hadn’t since I’d walked in.

  “JoJo wanted me to tell you hello.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “He’s finally got the farm running again. Bought twenty-five head of cattle.”

  “Good for him.”

  He looked at me and then flashed his eyes away. He poured me a margarita made out of blueberries. I was thankful for the regular to-go cup with just the logo of the bar. I asked for a small glass of water for Annie. He poured it and didn’t comment on a dog being in the bar. Just normal. Crazy Nick and his friends.

  “You seen Sun?”

  “No.”

  “Oz? Hippie Tom?”

  He shook his head. “JoJo’s Bar is closed,” he said. “Ain’t you heard?”

  I nodded and looked at my hands. A couple of men in pink tank tops and cutoff shorts sauntered into the bar and asked for some margaritas. They began to dance to “Mambo No. 5.” More followed. Drunk at one in the afternoon. I lit a cigarette and waited for Felix to finish.

  Felix poured the margaritas with a little panache. He wiped down the cheap Formica bar as if it were still the worn mahogany of JoJo’s. He took drink orders, sometimes three at a time, and worked the stirring machines as if pouring a perfect shot or finding the right head of foam on a Dixie. I kind of respected that. A professional to the last.