Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

  He tilted his head at me, his green eyes seemed to glow as a slow smile sliced across his face. He chewed gum and stuck his hands into his pockets. He hunched his shoulders while he watched and chewed, almost cheetahlike in the roundness of his muscles.

  “Things working out for you since you left the Farm?” I asked.

  His gaze loosened and he squinted one eye at me. “What do you know about that?”

  “I go to Angola to record musicians,” I said. “One of the finest guitar players of this century, Leadbelly, was once there.”

  He popped his gum. “Quit fucking with Trey.”

  “He never looked out for you.”

  He walked in close, his hands still in his jeans and eyes focused somewhere on the ground below me. He inched in to my face. “You can’t work me. It can’t be done. You can try, but you’re gonna lose.”

  “I heard Trey took most of his vacations in Aspen while you were inside. I guess those nice cold beers tasted mighty fine. But I’m sure you met friends.”

  “I don’t suck dick.”

  “Did Trey come visit you, man?”

  He looked away. Stepped back and watched me.

  “You think you can come up to my home and disrupt my mother’s party telling me shit about my best friend? You’ve got to be fucked in the head.”

  “He conned that money from ALIAS. I need someone to lead me through how it was done.”

  “Trey has been my friend since we were six.”

  “Whose idea was it to take that girl from Chalmette? Why do you think a black man got stuck with it?”

  “Didn’t have anything to do with that,” Christian said. “You liberal fucks always want to play race like we’re cripples. Fuck off.”

  “Brill sure didn’t push his daddy away,” I said. “You could’ve used just one person to stand up. But no one did.”

  Christian Chase turned and walked away down the narrow stone path. The rain fell harder on me while he opened the porch door and walked inside to the music. He just kept shaking his head and laughing.

  The door closed with a solid thud.

  45

  FOUR MEMORIES OF MALCOLM played in my head. I didn’t like to remember him. I didn’t want to keep making myself sad and sick over something I had nothing to do with. But these were so personal and old that I was glad this was what my brain had selected. It was the kid, not the man, that stayed. Malcolm remained fifteen in my head: catching balls at the old Saints camp on Airways, hustling players for money the moment we’d step off the plane, smiling on his sixteenth birthday when his brother bought him a Mercedes, and watching him steal the dance floor the night we’d made the play-offs for the first time in years.

  He was not hard or scarred. He was unbearded and smiling. He wasn’t left swinging in a tree like a tattered photo from a nineteenth-century lynching.

  I drove into my garage and bounded up the steps to the second floor of the warehouse. I heard the laughing. Voices rebounded off my high ceilings and into the metal stairwell like an echoing funnel. I was soaked with water and grew cold on the landing.

  I was too tired for another round with Cash or any other random freak who’d broken into my house. I crept back to my truck and grabbed my Glock.

  When I returned to the landing, I slid back my metal door, ready to face whatever shit I’d been handed.

  “Goddamn, boy,” a voice said. “Look like someone shit in your Cap’n Crunch.”

  JoJo, ALIAS, and some friend of JoJo’s I’d met years ago sat at my kitchen table playing cards and feeding Annie leftovers from a Burger King bag. I slowly tucked the gun back into my belt.

  “Made some coffee,” JoJo said. “Left it warmin’ on your stove. Why don’t you get some Community Coffee? This cheap shit taste like mud.”

  I found a towel in my kitchen and dried my hair, offering my fist to ALIAS.

  He gave me a pound but kept his gaze down at the table. I noticed he didn’t have any cards. He leaned his head into his hands.

  I shook JoJo’s friend’s hand.

  “You remember Bronco?” JoJo asked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We met a long time ago.”

  “Back when Pinetop come back,” Bronco said. “It has been a while.”

  Bronco was about JoJo’s age and black, but with green eyes and high cheekbones. A strong Native American face.

  “Bronco rode down with me to help me get some things for Lo,” JoJo said. “You know we sold our place on Royal? Need to clean out by end of the month.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  I took off my jean jacket and hung it on a peg by the door.

  “You helpin’ out?” I asked ALIAS.

  ALIAS shook his head, dug his sneaker heels into my floor, and pushed back his chair. He stomped off to the bathroom and slammed the door.

  “Okay, no help from the kid.”

  “Kid’s upset,” JoJo said.

  “This I see.”

  Bronco sipped on some coffee and rearranged the cards in his hand. “He forgot his head in my home.”

  “And?”

  “He took two hundred-dollar bills from my wallet.”

  I blew out my breath. “Fantastic.”

  “I gave him two days to come to Jesus Christ,” JoJo said. “But he wouldn’t. He’s back with you. I can’t do nothin’ with a kid that steal from me. You know my rule.”

  I did. Any employee even suspected of stealing was gone. I knew a waitress who once pocketed maybe five bucks from a table. She was let go on the busiest of nights. It was a reputation that had only grown since JoJo opened the bar in ’65.

  “Okay,” I said. “I got him now.”

  “Me and Bronco goin’ down to Anchor to get dinner,” he said. “You wanna come?”

  “Can I bring the kid?”

  “Why not?” JoJo said. “He’s yours.”

  I looked at the floor for a few moments before walking over to the old gas stove and pouring the coffee JoJo had made. It had been sitting on the burner a long time and seemed slow to pour from my old speckled pot.

  “I got the bar,” I said.

  JoJo nodded.

  Bronco laid down a hand. Three queens and two tens.

  JoJo said, “Shit.” He tossed his cards facedown into a pile of matchsticks on the table. Annie followed me from the kitchen.

  “I’m gonna ride down to the bar and check things out.”

  “Thought you said it was some high-dollar place now.”

  “It is,” I said. “It was.”

  JoJo looked at me strangely.

  “Teddy gave it to me,” I said. “But it’s yours. It’s your bar.”

  JoJo laughed. “Bronco, did I not say this was gonna happen?”

  “Yes, sir, you did,” Bronco said, shuffling his cards into each hand and keeping his eyes trained on me and JoJo at the same time.

  “You want to go check it out?” I said. “See what we can do.”

  “You.”

  “What?”

  “What you can do.”

  I nodded, lowered my head, and sipped the coffee.

  “We’ll come by after we eat.”

  “Fair deal.”

  “Last fair deal gone down.”

  “On this Gulfport island road,” I said, completing the Robert Johnson lyrics.

  ALIAS walked back from the bathroom and took a seat at my sofa. “Y’all give me a phone. I’ll have my people come for me.”

  “No,” I said.

  “What you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I mean, you’re comin’ with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Help with some things.”

  “Fuck that, man,” ALIAS said, leaning forward, his Superman symbol dangling off his chest.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  The kid followed, shoulders slumped and hat down far into his eyes.

  I said to the men: “We’ll see you at the bar.”

  JoJo winked.


  I grabbed a clean shirt, a toolbox, and a flashlight.

  At the bottom of the landing and on into the garage, ALIAS turned to me and said, “Man, fuck all this. That man call me a thief.”

  “Is that not true?”

  “Shit, no.”

  “That old man only deals in respect.”

  “You got to give it to get it.”

  I climbed in and started my truck. We backed out onto Julia Street.

  “You know Trey Brill?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. He shook his head and made a wry smile.

  “Don’t like him,” I said.

  “He’s like this white dude that’s always tryin’ to be down and shit. Calls me dog and tries out words he’s heard on BET. He’s just some white boy on the lake tryin’ to call on me. Come on, man.”

  “You know a friend of his named Christian Chase?”

  ALIAS laughed. “Na, man. Don’t know no dudes named Christian.”

  “Was Trey tight with Malcolm?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Malcolm and him rolled.”

  “Where?”

  “You know, clubs and shit.”

  “He ever talk to you about money?”

  “Na,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “Just askin’.”

  “You think he played me?”

  “I think he played a lot of folks,” I said.

  “Why he do that?” he said. “Boy gets a cut of Teddy’s money all the way.”

  “People like that you can’t figure out,” I said. “Their souls are polluted.”

  “What about you?” ALIAS said. “Teddy bought you a bar. Ain’t nobody in it for nothin’ else but themselves.”

  “That’s a cold attitude.”

  “Cold keeps your ass alive,” he said, sliding down deep into the seat, watching the gray buildings and neon weather the rain.

  46

  DOGS LIKED BEER. I had just cracked opened a Dixie when Annie craned her neck in the slot between the driver and passenger seats and tried to get a good gulp. I gently pushed her into the backseat of my truck with the flat of my hand and pulled out a po’boy from Johnnie’s for ALIAS. He grabbed it and unwrapped the fried oyster sandwich, eating while we waited for the rain to quit pelting the Quarter. I soon learned that ole Polk Salad liked po’boys better than beer. I had to push her back about a dozen times.

  The sky turned a deep bluish green and black and the little wooden signs under the crooked wrought-iron balconies swung in the wind. A stripper, bathed in red light, smoked a cigarette by an open door, her black silk robe open to show a pasty white belly.

  “You mind if I start calling you Tavarius?”

  “Na, that’s cool. But if you holla at me, you know, with my people, call me ALIAS.”

  “You think that stripper would like a beer?”

  “Man, I wouldn’t let that woman lick the rims on my Mercedes.”

  “I see what you mean.” I flicked the switch for my windshield blades on my truck to clear the view. “Good God.”

  We laughed for a while. Tavarius worked on his sandwich and I stared across the little street. I felt my breath change. “You want to tell me about what happened in Clarksdale?”

  “Ain’t nothin’ to tell.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it.”

  “All y’all think I’m a thief.”

  “You didn’t take JoJo’s money?”

  “I got a mansion, two Mercedeses, a four-wheeler with chrome rims, and a Sea-Do. What do I need with an old man’s two bits?”

  I finished the beer, the rain still hitting the hood, and tucked the trash back in the sack. I reached into my glove compartment and pulled out the Polaroid I’d found of Bloom and Dahlia at the piano bar.

  “You recognize them?”

  Tavarius took the picture from my hand, bit his lower lip, and started to nod. “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Her name is Dahlia.”

  “That’s the man too,” he said. “That’s them. See that fucked-up ear?”

  “Never can be too sure.”

  “What you gonna do now?”

  “I’m workin’ on some things,” I said. “Don’t want to scare anyone off yet.”

  “What these jokers got to do with Teddy’s white boy?”

  I shook my head. “That’s the question, man.”

  He nodded. I grabbed my toolbox from the rear hatch and ALIAS and I ran for the doors. Annie stayed in the truck with the uneaten portion of my crawfish-and-Crystal po’boy.

  In the little cove by the door, a curtain of rain fell close to my shoulder while I turned the key in the lock. The air in the bar popped inside from the vacuum.

  ALIAS pulled at his shirt and loose water fell on his jeans and oversized jean jacket. “Shit.”

  The bar smelled of fresh paint and Sheetrock. I held open the door while ALIAS wandered inside. I followed, hearing my feet under me sound hollow and unfamiliar. Looking around. Confused. Our voices echoing from the emptiness of the place. I could almost hear the bass and rhythm guitar shaking the old bar despite the black walls and velvet drapes.

  Whoever had owned the place had covered up the brick walls and dropped a ceiling from the new rafters. The mahogany bar, seasoned over years with whiskey and gin, had been completely destroyed in the fire and replaced with something black and plastic looking. A lot of mirrors and chrome.

  I set the toolbox on the floor, found a light switch, and handed ALIAS a crowbar.

  “Ready.”

  “For what?”

  “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s tear it all out.”

  “All of it?”

  I looked the bar up and down.

  “All of it.”

  “Why you got a problem with it?”

  “Because it makes me sick to think about this bar disgraced another second.”

  “You got a problem with things ain’t to your likin’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hard way to be.”

  I began to rip the Sheetrock away from the high walls. My shoulders ached and stretched and my breath labored. Rain fell outside, thunder cracked. About seven o’clock, I walked outside, where the rain had stopped and heat rose from the broken streets like a hundred phantoms. A greenish-yellow light leaked down from the Mississippi and all the air seemed darkly blue as if I wore tinted glasses.

  The air smelled of ozone, cooked fish, and boiling meat from Lucky Dog carts ready to start the night. Friday night in the Quarter was about to begin. I checked on Annie as ALIAS carried out some of our mess to a Dumpster behind the bar.

  I watched the street for JoJo.

  I drank a warm beer while Annie did her business on some discarded handbills from the House of Blues and gave ALIAS five bucks to run down to the corner store to grab a Gatorade.

  JoJo didn’t come.

  I was sitting on the stoop with Annie, the Manhattan sign broken at my feet, when Felix walked by. My friend and the greatest bartender in the Quarter ambled up to the steps and peered into the cave where I worked. “What’s up, Nick?”

  His bald head shone like a black bowling ball in the hard outside light.

  He sniffed inside, wearing his white tuxedo shirt and tie, the Indian headdress in his hand. I got up, rubbed my blisters on my jeans, and followed.

  Felix walked in the bar and looked down at the floors covered in broken Sheetrock. He ran his fingers over the old brick that had been blackened in the fire. “Y’all can’t get this stuff off.”

  I nodded.

  “We ain’t gonna get arrested, are we?” Felix asked, suddenly pulling his hand back as if the walls were hot. “JoJo sold this place.”

  “I got it back.”

  He nodded with understanding and stood in the back of the room. “Too bad ole Rolande ain’t around. He could wire the stage back up in about two seconds.”

  His words hung in the air, the thought of old Rolande and his scrunched Jack Daniel’s hat. I kicked some of the Sheetrock into a pile and added my completed D
ixie.

  “I need some music in here while I work.”

  “I seen a jukebox for sale over at some place on Esplanade. Look like that ole one we had, only it loaded with stuff I never heard.”

  “I can replace the music.”

  Felix stood framed by the doorway, a wide swath of light from outside against his head. He stared up at the ceiling. “JoJo had a lot of friends might want to help.”

  “He’s in New Orleans,” I said. “But he doesn’t want any part of this.”

  Felix looked at his watch and then added the Indian headdress to the trash heap. “Some little Italian man with one of those cell phones been tellin’ me I work too slow. Pour the drinks too hard.”

  I smiled.

  “You put me back on?”

  I nodded. He didn’t ask about his salary.

  “I’ll see you Monday morning,” Felix said, and walked back into the street.

  I found a cardboard box behind the bar and borrowed a pen from the dude at the used bookstore. I wrote in huge cap letters. JOJO’S BLUES BAR IS BACK. THE ORIGINAL WILL REOPEN SOON.

  I hung the sign in the window and stood in the street admiring the work, my boots stuck in a big puddle of storm water. I even crudely drew some musical notes on each side of JoJo’s name.

  I smiled and stood back.

  The rain began to fall again when I saw him. Just a blur of brown about a block away. His face just a blackened oval in some sort of hood. The night turned the sky purple and gray. A hard wind ripped down Conti smelling of the Mississippi River.

  I walked toward the corner.

  He turned.

  Rain ran down his coat, sluicing from his body, as if made from oil. The man who’d broken into my warehouse.

  He buried his head deep into the folds of the wet brown coat as if it made him invisible. He turned a corner.

  I followed.

  47

  “WHAT YOU DOIN’, MAN?” ALIAS yelled to me.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “No, you ain’t. What’s up?”

  “Stay here.”

  The man in the brown coat disappeared into a group of tourists walking down Chartres by the Fisheries building and across from the Napoleon House. Gold electric light leaked out of the glass doors from the bar as the man’s walk turned into a jog.