Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

  “You feelin’ better?” I asked.

  “I ain’t leavin’ town,” he said.

  “Cash just wants the kid.”

  “Cash will do what he says,” he said. “That’s his way.”

  “I know his way,” I said, feeling the bruise beginning to form beneath my eye. I opened the door from my truck and stepped out onto the gravel and into the darkness. “Don’t tell me about Cash’s way.”

  Nae Nae’s house was painted pink with green trim and had children’s toys scattered across her weedy lot. I saw the strobelike flashes of a television coming from the inside. It was almost 2 A.M.

  Teddy knocked on the door and relit his cigar.

  Nothing.

  He knocked some more.

  A woman in her early twenties opened up with a kitchen knife in her hand. She wore an old Saints T-shirt of Ricky Williams and her long braids whipped across her face as she jabbed the knife near Teddy’s heart.

  “What the fuck are you doin’ at this time of night?” she asked in a high-pitched whisper. “Don’t you know my baby still asleep in here? Your goddamned nephew and all you got to say is nothin’, standin’ there with your white hoodlum friends tryin’ to get me up to get yourself some of that ass that you always wantin’. Well, you ain’t gettin’ shit from this girl, and you tell that greasy-ass brother of yours that I ain’t satisfied for shit.”

  She dropped the name of a local attorney who was known throughout the black neighborhoods as “Pitbull” Sammy. I’d seen the billboards and they were good.

  “Hey, Nae Nae,” Teddy said, taking off his hat and moving the knife down at her side. “Good to see you.”

  “What he want?” She pointed at me with the knife.

  “He’s my driver,” Teddy said. “Listen, did Malcolm give you something this week?”

  She pulled at the frayed bottom of her Saints T-shirt and tucked the knife into the elastic band of her panties. “Maybe.”

  “Nae Nae?”

  “You try and take that away,” she said, shaking her little fist at Teddy. “And I’ll kill you dead.”

  “Get in line,” Teddy said. He slipped the hat back on his head and motioned for me to wait back at the truck with Annie. I did. Teddy knew what I wanted. I let him take the lead.

  They talked for a good fifteen minutes in the yellow light of the porch. Bugs flitting about their heads. She eventually moved up under the bridge of Teddy’s arm and looked up at him, laughing. Teddy picked her up off her feet right before he left and swung her back down to the ground.

  He’d turned a knife-wielding woman into a friend. I couldn’t believe how good Teddy could be.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said, my voice sounding hollow from inside the truck. Annie moved, her head between the two front passenger seats with the bone stuck between her molars, curious about my musings.

  Teddy slid back in and kept puffing on the cigar. I reached over him and rolled down the window.

  Teddy rubbed the back of his neck, the seats cracking under his weight. “All right.”

  “All right, what?”

  “Let’s go see him.”

  “You sure?”

  “My brother givin’ away fifty-thousand-dollar cars on the week Cash is about to take my ass out,” Teddy said, gritting his teeth and slamming his fists into the dash. His breath came in jumpy spurts.

  I started the truck and we drove north toward Lake Pontchartrain where Malcolm kept his house across the street from his brother.

  We didn’t talk the whole way. Teddy just kind of leaned into the wind as we rode, puffing on his cigar and searching for answers in his mind.

  21

  AT 3:45, TEDDY BOOSTED me onto his shoulders to grab the second-floor balcony of Malcolm’s house. I reached the lowest edge of the iron, got a good grip, and pulled myself onto the ledge. We’d spotted a French door ajar by his bedroom and outdoor Jacuzzi after ringing his doorbell about thirty times. Down from the patio, Teddy told me to come down and let him in. I looked down at Teddy, still in the bathrobe and slippers, and said, “No shit.”

  I walked through the darkness of the house, white carpet, gold albums on the walls, and down onto the slate of his foyer and the front door. I saw a Brinks security system by the row of switches but it didn’t seem to be armed. But really I couldn’t tell if the red light meant it was on or off. I opened the door anyway.

  Teddy strolled in, punching a code, and turned on all the lights.

  Malcolm had a big open den with three big-screen televisions lined up side by side and a back bookshelf filled with CDs and dozens of pieces of Sony stereo components and Bose speakers. A few books on the Kama Sutra. Playboys going back to the mideighties in leather cases.

  “Quite a collection,” I said.

  “He’s always been into freaks.”

  “A man of classics.”

  “Why you always makin’ jokes, Nick?” he asked. “This shit ain’t funny. Goddamn.”

  “It’s gonna be all right,” I said. “Be cool.”

  “Ain’t your ass.”

  We moved upstairs to Malcolm’s bedroom. He had one of the last water beds I’d seen since the seventies and a ceiling that was completely mirrored. Prints of Janet Jackson and Aaliyah and some woman named Gangsta Boo hung on the walls. Gangsta Boo had even signed and dated hers. Thanks for that night in Memphis. In the photo she was grabbing her crotch.

  “What happened that night in Memphis?” I asked Teddy. “With the upstanding young woman?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  Teddy and I looked through his chest of drawers and found a lot of sweats and Ts and jewelry but no check stubs or deposit statements. He had a small desk by a window but the drawers were all empty. The room smelled of cologne and sweat.

  We walked downstairs and Teddy opened up his brother’s refrigerator, pulling out a couple of Eskimo Pies. He handed one to me.

  I grabbed the wooden stick. I hadn’t eaten in a while.

  We walked through the house like a couple of kids in a museum, eating ice cream and talking. He pointed out some family photos hung on the wall and a ten-foot-tall oil painting of Teddy leaning against his Bentley. “That was his Christmas present.”

  The house was still and hummed with the quiet AC.

  “I don’t think we’re going to make it,” I said. “I’ll stay with you, Teddy. All right?”

  “No way.”

  “Make me leave.”

  He nodded and pulled me into his big meaty arms and rubbed the top of my head.

  “Shit, man, cut it out,” I said.

  “I love you, Nick,” he said. He hugged me like he always did after a game, whether we won or lost. He always acted like he just wanted to savor this one moment and keep it forever fresh in his head.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Really, man,” he said. “You the only one I trust.”

  I found a little room by the kitchen with his washer and dryer, a bulletin board, and a tiny little desk. I rifled through the drawers and saw nothing, but reached high on a ledge and found a large box filled with bank statements and credit card bills.

  Teddy helped himself to another Eskimo Pie. I had the same.

  “What you think of ALIAS?” he asked as I pulled out a few slips of paper, looked through them, and passed them on to him for a second opinion.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s a good kid,” Teddy said. “Grew up in Calliope and lost his mamma about two years back. Heard she’d been dead for a couple of weeks before anyone called the cops. ALIAS wouldn’t call ’cause he thought the child welfare people would take him away.”

  I didn’t say anything. We kept working, looking through the box.

  “Guess we all know about that,” he said. “Right?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Losin’ family.”

  I nodded.

  “But you got JoJo and Loretta now and I still got Malcolm, that sorry sack of shit. Man, look what he did to me.”


  We walked back in the TV room and sat down on the leather couch. The room was dark except for a couple of tall stainless-steel lamps Teddy had turned on by the windows. We were in a large cavern, twelve-foot ceilings, space big enough for a scrimmage. The place felt hollow, like the inside of a whale.

  “ALIAS talk to you about ball?” Teddy asked.

  “No.”

  “Kid wants to be a DB,” Teddy said. “Sometimes I have him pickin’ off passes when me and Malcolm be jackassin’ around the studios. Man got vert, you know. If the kid could read, man, I think he could play.”

  “He can’t read?”

  “Can’t even spell his name.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Not somethin’ he talks about,” Teddy said. “Don’t mean he ain’t bright, though. You know that. Just never been to no real school.”

  Teddy crossed his big fat legs and propped them up on a glass coffee table with the latest issues of XXL. He dropped the fedora’s brim down in his eyes, switched the old cigar – now just a nub – into the other side of his mouth.

  “Good Lord,” he said, scanning a picture of a rapper in a gold bikini. Unfazed he was a few hours away from Cash.

  “So we wait?”

  “Nothin’ else to do.”

  I looked at the television. Something had been taped on its blank screen but I was too far away to read it. I walked close and pulled off a piece of paper Scotch-taped to the fifty-inch Sony.

  Someone had typed a note and torn the paper in half.

  I read the note and then reread it:

  To my big-brother Teddy and all my people at Ninth Ward,

  Thank you for a great ride these last three years. Y’all made it happen. Put the Ward, NOLA, all of it, up on top.

  But some of us make mistakes. Money make men be some evil people. Do evil things against family.

  I ask for the Lord’s and my family forgiveness.

  I can’t live another day takin’. I set up ALIAS and killed the best friend I ever had in Dio.

  Lord forgive me. Bury me in the Ninth.

  Y’all party, roll, and remember what I used to be.

  I handed the note to Teddy.

  I had to help him get to his feet. His whole body shook and he dropped to one knee. “Where’s the kid?” he asked.

  “Home.”

  “You sure?”

  22

  YOU ASLEEP WHEN CASH KNOCK on your window holdin’ a tall forty and that little girl from the strip club by the hand. He say he want to take you on a ride and you crawl into your P. Miller jeans and Lugz shoes fast as hell. You want to be lookin’ tight for that girl, show you Uptown all the way.

  Y’all soon kicked back in his Escalade, ridin’ past them projects that you share. You gettin’ high with Cash, that man promising you the world just to make him millions if you leave Teddy and the Ward. You marvel at that, the way your mind works, the way it brings in that gold, as you float by the strawberries givin’ out fifteen-dollar blow jobs and thirteen-year-olds on BMX bikes shufflin’ off that crack for grandmamma pushers. Grandmammas who watch their soap operas while their little boys carry Ravens and Glocks.

  “That white man won’t bother you no more,” he says.

  The girl, still don’t know her name, snuggle into your arm and play with that platinum necklace like a little drunk cat.

  The blue-and-red neon in the all-night liquor stores and those hard crime lights over oak trees almost make your mind drunk while Cash tellin’ you why you should get out from Teddy and Malcolm.

  He say they don’t want him tellin’ you the truth about yo’ man Dio.

  You don’t ask questions. He don’t serve up no answers. To you, Dio was God. He started the whole sound. He played the block parties out in the yard. Showed you that you could break out of Calliope.

  Sometimes you wear Dio’s clothes. Malcolm even give you that Superman symbol that the man used to keep on his neck. Sometimes you wonder if his spirit don’t move your rhymes.

  Cash is smart the way he play you. He come from Calliope too and turned himself into a billionaire. That nigga just made a deal with some label in NYC that jacked him up about $10 million. Now that make him ’bout light-years away from Teddy and his brother. Cash don’t hustle. He don’t sell from the back of his car. He run with the big dogs.

  He say he still tied to CP3. Still get his hair cut in the ’hood and rolls block parties. He say Teddy and Malcolm are just country-ass Nint’ Warders. And you can’t trust ’em. Cash been you, he says. He know what you need.

  Even before it’s out his mouth, you down at this club off Airways Boulevard where nineteen-year-old women are grindin’ their sweaty asses in your lap and rubbin’ your head with their soft fingers and rakin’ their long red claws over your neck. Cash and his playas watchin’ you as you strut from that VIP room while he sips on a bottle of Cristal and nods to move on.

  You do, leavin’ the girl at work. You move on to three other clubs before he drop you back lakefront, to that mansion you was designin’ from a space movie you seen on cable. High humpback gates like you seen on MTV, all surrounded by cement mixers, stacks of plywood, and plastic sheeting popping in your empty windows.

  “Why Teddy kick you out and now he say he want you back?”

  “Mad, I guess.”

  “Friends don’t play like that.”

  Cash’s boys crack open some Cristal and y’all drink it straight from the bottle. You take a couple hits from a joint, making it wash deep into your lungs, and listen to all them boys talkin’ shit ’bout their new Italian cars, freaks they met out on the road, and high-dollar restaurants with pink shrimp as big as yo’ big toe.

  Cash tell you again about Teddy and Malcolm and all about what happened to Diabolical. He say that Teddy and Malcolm finally gonna pay for what happened to the man who made Dirty South. He say the Paris brothers only killed that young nigga so his sales would double. And truth be known, Dio weren’t nothin’ till they jacked his ass at Atlanta Nites.

  You remember that thug’s face and his rhymes when you was a kid and now all them T-shirts and lost albums and tributes. Death make you live forever.

  All that talk about Dio and your own chances and risks make you want to take the boat out.

  When you start that motor, Cash flashes a smile loaded with platinum and diamonds on the dock and then you disappear. His dogs playin’ with green-and-yellow bottle rockets out by your pool and hills of green grass on the levee.

  You take that boat way out in the lake, where the lights don’t mess with the crisp stars. You smoke a blunt to take it all down, flat back in that skinny little boat, just driftin’ in loopy choppy circles trying to figure out what happens next. You think about that, the way you drift, and that’s cool with you. Because you are a puzzle. Them pieces come to be known as you grow. Ain’t that right?

  Because evil can’t touch you. You away from that evil and men that can pull a young brother apart. It makes you smile as the blunt stinks up your clothes – the Little Dipper burnin’ so bright it reminds you of the Christmas lights that used to frame your grandmamma’s window – to know you are safe. Goblins and them mean ole ghosts have disappeared from your life like the edges of the smoke into that cold wind at the lip of the boat.

  23

  WE SEARCHED ALL NIGHT LONG. We took Teddy’s black Escalade with silver rims with a few of his people following. We used a ton of cell phones and followed a trail through so many strip clubs that I started to smell like smoke and could guarantee that they’d play some Aerosmith song before I left. We checked out late-night diners like the Hummingbird and clubs where he’d hung out. We checked out this Uptown apartment he’d shared with a woman who’d borne two of his children and even deep down into the Ninth Ward to the leaning shotgun houses where the Paris brothers had grown up.

  Teddy told me stories about their grandmother and that an uncle of theirs had been some kind of soundman for the Ohio Players. He told me about his first busin
ess running dime bags for some local hustler in the early seventies and how Malcolm once had a box haircut so tall it bounced when he walked.

  He talked about his brother’s talent and how he recognized hit songs the first time he heard them on the radio. Teddy talked about how Malcolm had found Dio and how it had changed him from a man selling CDs out the back of his Buick Regal to being one of the richest African-Americans in Louisiana. He smiled.

  “We worked together, all right,” he said.

  He steered the Escalade with both hands.

  “We done all right.”

  We drove.

  No one knew a thing about his brother. ALIAS still wouldn’t answer his phone.

  From cinderblock bars in Algiers to some backdoor clubs in the Quarter, we were worn-out by 6 A.M. I was outside the Ninth Ward Studio leaning against the gold brick wall and smoking when I heard Teddy walk back out.

  The sky had just started to turn purple at dawn. The air in the Ninth Ward smelled salty and mildewed from the channel. I could smell the diesel fumes from the trucks and hear the hiss of the brakes as they moved on. I watched Teddy as he rolled up his sleeves and made a couple more calls, pacing.

  ALIAS came down to the studios about 7:30 wearing the same clothes from when I’d left him at his house. He gave Teddy and me a tired pound and said, “I heard.”

  Everybody had heard. Everyone Teddy knew – a big crowd – was looking for Malcolm.

  We all drove. The thought of Cash seemed weaker now. Teddy almost welcomed it.

  “The deal’s off,” Teddy told me with such confidence I almost believed him.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “My family’s in trouble,” he said. “That will make sense to him.”

  “And you being dead wouldn’t cause trouble for your family?”

  “It ain’t the same,” Teddy said, wheeling the Bentley with me and ALIAS back down Canal and onto St. Charles and then to the Camellia Grill at the end of the streetcar line. He bought breakfast for twenty-three people who’d been out looking for Malcolm and gave a big speech right outside the diner as the rain first started to come about 8 A.M.