Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

  He was running, his brown hood tattered and worn, toward Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral. My boots clacked on the flagstone, most of the stores now closed. Antique weapons. Haitian art. High-dollar lingerie. Only two men running on an empty street. I could hear the breath inside my ears as he ran toward the steps of the great church and turned into Pirate’s Alley.

  A few gas lamps burned in the narrow shot once used as an avenue for smugglers and thieves. The gap narrowed. He passed over Royal.

  I hung back. Letting him run out.

  I walked behind two women in yellow ponchos drinking Hurricanes.

  When I looked again, he was gone.

  I passed the women, running for a few blocks.

  At Dauphine, I stopped in the middle of the street and turned in all directions. Dance music pulsed from the clubs on Bourbon. Crooked iron hitching posts with horse heads lined the now paved street. The dance music kept pumping.

  I ran down St. Peter back toward the church, passing five college girls staggering in the street and holding a young girl up as her head lolled to the side.

  I heard scraping.

  I looked back down St. Peter toward Rampart.

  I saw the hooded figure scaling an old broken drainpipe running along a brick wall. Moss and ferns grew wildly in cracks that he used for footholds.

  He was almost to a fire escape that hung uselessly, headed nowhere.

  I ran into the building, some kind of anonymous pool hall, and past a grizzled bartender slicing lemons. I moved toward a landing and ran up some beaten wooden stairs. The bartender yelled after me but I pushed through empty liquor boxes and crates of bottles to a door opening into an empty second floor. The dull light of a Falstaff beer sign out front lit half of the room.

  I could hear the man’s hands scraping the outside wall. Climbing.

  I followed the sound, my eyes adjusting in the light, slowly walking to the window. The dark figure emerged on the landing. I could see his back turned to me.

  I grabbed a stray Barq’s bottle from the floor.

  Someone ran after me from the steps below, yelling they were going to call the cops.

  The yelling grew louder.

  I squinted into the dark light.

  The man in the hooded coat pressed his face to the glass.

  I could not breathe.

  His fingernails touched the dirty glass in sharp, long claws. Thick and hardened. His face was gray as a corpse, his eyes yellowed and narrow. Small broken teeth.

  I stepped back, my breath caught halfway in my throat.

  The face contorted into something someone might think was a smile as he pushed a foot against the sill and began to climb, almost arachnid in his movements. His legs disappeared upward by the time I tried the window, caked and frozen with paint.

  I threw the bottle into the glass and kicked out the shards with my boot.

  I found my way onto the landing and looking for a foothold to follow.

  I heard sirens at the far edge of the Quarter. And when I reached another rusted ladder of a fire escape, I could see NOPD patrol cars stopping by the pool hall and the bartender pointing upstairs.

  I climbed.

  I pulled myself onto the sloped roof, the figure crawling over the peaked edge of the old metal. My hands shook and I felt with my knees and palms for something solid on the slant. Nothing but moss and mold and metal eaten with rust.

  At the peak, I could see deep into Congo Square and the white-lighted marquee of Louis Armstrong Park. I lifted my leg over the peak and the wetness of the metal roof and slid on a steady slope toward the road below the three-story building.

  I clawed at the wet metal, trying to stop, but only sliding more. A metal sheet dropped into the air, pinwheeling down.

  I picked up speed, the ground below getting closer, and stopped just short of careening off the edge.

  The heel of my boot caught in a groaning drainpipe. I held myself there, foot cocked into the mouth of the pipe, supporting all my weight. Three stories of air waited below.

  Above me, the man in the coat turned back and then jumped over a narrow crevice onto another rooftop, maybe only three feet away.

  More yelling from the broken window on the other side of the street.

  Wind ruffled my hair and I smelled the tired beer and urine of Bourbon Street. My hands coated in rust and dirt.

  I scrambled upward and made the jump.

  A moon hung over the river, the peaks of the old district’s rooftops shining silver in the early light of the summer. My T-shirt covered in rust and mud, sweat soaking my face.

  I made two more jumps over narrow alleys.

  Then the sound of his scattering feet stopped.

  I edged onto my butt, taking a seat. I saw muddy shoe prints running off the roof.

  I slid close to the edge and peered into a little banquette.

  I turned to my stomach, feetfirst, and left my legs hanging until I dropped onto a second-floor wooden balcony overlooking a little garden. Red, blue, and yellow light scattered in a large open fountain and upon palm and banana trees. Thick asparagus ferns grew from clay pots.

  I ran down a creaking wooden staircase and down through a little alley. At the end, a huge metal gate swung open.

  Rampart Street. A couple of homeless men on the corner. A crack pusher running for me to make a deal.

  “Hey, man. I bet you I know where you got them boots,” he said.

  I heard a horn honking from a car heading toward Canal, a hard thud on the other side of the grassless neutral ground, and saw the man I was following roll from the hood of a Buick.

  I ran after him but he moved fast, dragging a leg behind him to the wall of the St. Louis Cemetery. He disappeared.

  Two cop cars converged on me and shone lights into my face. I stopped.

  One of them threw me on the asphalt and pushed a gun into my spine.

  “I’m following-”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  “Listen to me, man.”

  “Shut up before I kick you in the head.”

  I heard the handcuffs clamp hard onto my wrists as the two cops yanked me to my feet and pulled me to the back of a patrol car.

  “Stop.”

  They did.

  “What?” asked some twenty-something steroid freak as he gripped my arm tighter.

  “That noise,” I said. “Can’t you hear it? He’s hiding in one of those mausoleums. He’s moving stones.”

  “Drugs,” the cop said. “It’ll fry your mind.”

  48

  JAY MEDEAUX STOOD over me in the NOPD homicide bureau in a red-and-white softball uniform complete with cleats and scrunched cotton cap. He was popping a ball into his glove pocket and chomping on Big League Chew while he waited for me to finish my story. Two other detectives scribbled on reports in the pooled desk space, their heads down near banker’s lights glowing green.

  “You told two officers in the First District you’d seen a ghost,” Jay said. “They thought you was juiced up.”

  Anytime Jay was mad he reverted back to his y’at Irish Channel accent, even though he’d graduated from Tulane with a 4.0. When we were roommates in college, he would rarely go beyond the Boot to drink beer because he was studying history and criminology. But when he was pissed, he went back home.

  He tossed me the ball.

  “You seen that movie Lord of the Rings?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sounds like you been chased by some of those goblins.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  Jay was a big guy with sandy-blond hair cut down to the millimeter. In the last couple of years, his linemen’s gut flattened out and his face had grown more hardened.

  “Nick, it’s Friday night,” he said. “Why’d you have to pick Friday freakin’ night? We were winning. My wife was there showin’ off her new ta-tas in this sweet tank top.”

  “New?”

  “They were runnin’ a sale in the paper. You believe that? Like they we
re selling used cars.”

  “Vroom. Vroom.”

  “You find JoJo?” he asked.

  “Yeah, he picked up the kid.”

  “Come on.”

  Jay took me into a room where a large woman in blue uniform laid out some plastic binders filled with mug shots. I spent more than an hour flipping the sheets, looking at some wonderful freaks that could make only P. T. Barnum smile. But nothing matched the gray face with the yellow eyes in the window.

  Jay walked me to a break room on the eighth floor, where he made some coffee and we sat near a window overlooking the tall Gothic-looking Dixie Brewery. Small mushroom patterns of crime lights shone for miles, seeming to spawn from the brightness of the parish jail. Everything in New Orleans worked from pockets of darkness.

  “You really going to open the bar?”

  “Why not?” I settled into my seat and used a napkin to clean the gutter grime off my boots.

  “What about teaching?”

  “I only teach two classes a year.”

  “What about all your research in Mississippi?”

  “Do you want to be the devil’s advocate or are you just trying to yank my chain?”

  “Mainly yanking your chain,” he said. “But I don’t think you know what you’re in for. Bills, loans, payroll. Out of your league.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “I have JoJo for advice. He knows a few things about running a bar.”

  “True,” he said.

  I looked over at Jay in his red-and-white baseball outfit and started to laugh.

  “What?”

  “You look like a big candy cane.”

  He didn’t laugh.

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’d tell me, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s all twisted and incestuous, man. Just give me a few days.”

  “It’s not my case,” he said. “I just hear things. They just took a bunch of files and shit from that record company in the Ninth Ward.”

  “What do they think?”

  Jay shrugged.

  “I understand,” I said. “Any forensic stuff? DNA, fingerprints?”

  “It’s all being run,” he said. “But right now, I don’t see a lot of work being done.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s New Orleans, man,” Jay said. “The dead need to wait in line.”

  Just as I began to stand, the officer who’d shown me the photopacks walked into the room and opened a binder to a new page.

  “That him?”

  I stood and flattened my hands on each side of the book. I began to nod slowly and didn’t say anything. I looked at the dirt on my hands and wiped them on my leg.

  “Who is he?” Jay asked.

  “Some freak grave robber,” she said. “Remember all those tombs in Metairie that got busted into a few years back? He stole old battle flags and Civil War uniforms. Guys in robbery been looking for him ever since.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “People call him Redbone. The name he gave when he was booked went back to some man he killed. Oh yeah, he kills people for money too. Sounds like a sweet man.”

  “Never convicted?”

  “This guy in robbery suspects he kills people and lays them in old tombs. How we ever gonna find those bodies?”

  Jay whistled low. “I got a couch,” he said to me. “Stay a few.”

  “I’ve got the kid.”

  “Bring him too.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m used to looking out for myself.”

  “Listen, I know they’re looking at this Cash guy hard,” Jay said, exchanging looks with the officer and then back at me. “How ’bout we send a little warning to him?”

  “It’s not him.”

  “Right.”

  “Just give me a few days,” I said.

  “You still have that Browning?”

  “I have a Glock I picked up in Memphis,” I said. “Holds seventeen rounds. Very handy.”

  “Keep it close.”

  49

  TREY BRILL WATCHED HIMSELF in a wall of mirrors, flexing his chest in his new green Abercrombie T and pushing his hair off his forehead. Christian finished out a set of incline presses behind him, his green eyes glowing light under his thick dark eyelashes. Trey watched his friend, so sleek, brown, and hard under the health-club lights. If he was a woman, he’d like Christian. Christian had style and knew how to whisper the right words into their ears at the bars. He knew how to order drinks and choose a cigar and how to talk anyone into doing anything. Trey would like to be Christian one day. He’d like to be that cool.

  Trey traded places with his friend on the bench, smelling his Calvin cologne and feeling his sweat against his neck. He could only hit ten and Christian had done fifteen. But Trey knew he’d still be ripped for Belize this summer. They’d party down there with all those college girls until they couldn’t freakin’ move. Rum Runners and reggae and golf.

  “Why you smiling?” Christian asked, wiping his brow with a white towel. Limp Bizkit playing over the PA system. I did it all for the nookie. Goddamn right.

  “Thinking about fuckin’ Belize, man,” Trey said.

  “Sweet,” Christian said, and gave him a high five.

  A couple of young girls in Nike workout tops and bare stomachs rolled by drinking pink smoothies. “That’s nice,” Christian said.

  “Go work it.”

  “Na, I’m cool.”

  The men wandered by rows of mirrors, scattering their images all around them. Sometimes Trey couldn’t tell who was who. Their images merging and changing and morphing into something else. Made him feel a little dizzy just thinking about it.

  “What do you want me to do if that Travers dude comes by again?” Christian asked.

  “Tell him to piss off,” Trey said, sliding into the pecdec machine and hammering out about eight quick ones. He grunted and slid off the seat as if coming down from a horse.

  “He thinks you rolled ALIAS.”

  “He’s an idiot.”

  Christian shook his head. “Fucking Malcolm Paris already took it for that and killing goddamn Dio. Why would a guy swing himself by a goddamn rope if he was lying?”

  “Exactly,” Trey said. “I’m not worried.”

  Christian looked at him, changing the weight on the machine to almost double Trey’s. He gave Trey that scary look, the one where he stared into his freakin’ mind with those weird green eyes. It was like he was psychic.

  Christian began his set, not slamming the weight like Trey. He worked it slow and even.

  “It’s just,” Trey started, “what if he finds out about Dio?”

  “Fuck that shit,” Christian said, finishing up. He leaned into Trey’s ear and whispered – just like Trey had seen him do to women in the bars. Trey’s neck pricked in gooseflesh. “Teddy will never let him expose those ‘Lost Tape’ CDs. Dead or alive, Dio is fucking Ninth Ward.”

  “Or ALIAS.”

  “ALIAS is a punk,” Christian said.

  “Teddy doesn’t trust him, either.”

  “Would you?”

  “Kid’s smart,” Trey said. “I’ll give him that. He sure as shit has fooled stupid-ass Travers.”

  “Man thinks he’s saving a poor little black kid’s soul.”

  “But really he’s playing with a demon.”

  They finished their workout in silence. Trey and Christian exchanging spots, complimenting each other on their set, and working together. Life unchanged since they were boys.

  They were walking in the parking lot when Christian asked him, “If this guy doesn’t stop harassing you, why don’t you talk to Teddy?”

  “Teddy’s fucked in the head right now.”

  “How bad?”

  “Far gone,” Trey said. “He called me Malcolm the other day. Man, he misses that boy bad.”

  “Kind of like if one of us went before the other.”

  “We’ll make it,” Trey said, grabbing his
friend’s shoulder. “Just like we made out from that punch in Chalmette. No one’s gonna fuck with the boys’ business.”

  As they climbed into Trey’s BMW, the color seemed to shift in Christian’s eyes. A coolness spread across his face and his lips parted.

  He stared at Trey as if seeing him for the first time.

  They didn’t talk all the way back to Metairie.

  50

  “I CAN’T FIGURE THAT BOY OUT,” JoJo said, drinking his 9 A.M. café au lait from the end of the bar as if he’d never left New Orleans. “He wasn’t a bad worker. Got up in the morning, fed the cows, took the work to heart. Listen to me. You understand?”

  I nodded. “When did he take the money?”

  “Notice it two days ago,” he said. “Ask him about it and he said to me, ‘So what if I did take your money?’ What makes a child like that?”

  I was finished up whitewashing the brick that had been blackened in the fire. I liked the way the paint covered and sealed the grooves, the unevenness of the old pattern of mortar. By the back loading dock, Curtis Lee screwed down ten-inch pine planks into the subfloor. His little cassette recorder shaking with some Little Walter I’d given him to replace the Whitesnake.

  Curtis, with a long cigarette trailing from his lips, laid out the floor in a yellow pine jigsaw puzzle and pieced it together with his drill. The cigarette’s ash hung at least an inch long as the sound of the drill almost worked in time with Walter’s music.

  “That song take you back, don’t it?” JoJo asked his buddy Bronco, who worked his brush on the opposite wall.

  “I guess.”

  Bronco wore a long-sleeved blue work shirt and dark jeans. I had yet to see him splatter a drop.

  “You don’t like Walter?” I asked.

  Bronco shook his head. A long scar on his forearm looked smooth and pink in the morning light.

  JoJo sipped on his coffee and returned to the Picayune.

  “We knew him,” JoJo said.

  “Best harp player I ever heard,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can even touch his licks.”

  “You’re right,” JoJo said. “But that doesn’t mean Walter wasn’t a evil motherfucker.”