Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

Bronco kept painting.

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “Nope,” JoJo said to me, but looking over at Bronco. “Some things are meant to stay up in Chicago.”

  When JoJo wanted to keep a secret, he could keep it for decades. You didn’t try.

  “Y’all mind watching Tavarius?” I asked. “I’ve got to talk to some folks.”

  “On Teddy’s business?” JoJo asked.

  “Have to pay my debt.”

  “Don’t be goin’ and payin’ it in full,” JoJo said. “All animals lay with their own kind.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means Teddy’s music brings on hate,” he said. “Rap doesn’t elevate us. It makes children turn to violence to buy things they don’t need. Money, money, money. Trashy women. That’s not music. Glorifies people being ignorant. Blues is music.”

  “So what happened with Walter in Chicago?” I asked.

  Bronco shot JoJo a mean stare and JoJo just shook his head at me.

  “Maybe ALIAS just doesn’t know how to ask,” I said. “Maybe he needed the money.”

  “For what?” JoJo asked. “Two hundred dollars would buy half of Clarksdale. Besides, he didn’t want for nothin’ at my house. He got a room. Loretta cooked and he worked. What else he need?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I reached into my wallet to see how much cash I had on me to pay him back. He caught the wallet between his rough hands.

  “Don’t embarrass me.”

  “Did I tell you about his mother?”

  JoJo turned to listen. Bronco shook out a long Kool cigarette from a pack and excused himself outside.

  “His mother overdosed a few years back,” I said. “Tavarius was thirteen. They were living in Calliope and he didn’t tell anyone about it.”

  JoJo watched my face, his jaw dropping slack. His eyes softened.

  “He didn’t want anyone to take her away,” I said. “Teddy said he’d heard ALIAS thought he’d go to jail if anyone found out.”

  “Lord,” JoJo said.

  Curtis had finished half the floor while we talked. The puzzle pieces taking shape into the soft, yellow wood.

  “Rap’s just dreams,” I said. “People in that world just want something to wish for.”

  JoJo nodded. “I heard one time Muddy and old Wolf got into an argument up in Chicago. They kept lighting hundred-dollar bills to see which one would turn chicken. Bought a harp the next day.”

  Tavarius walked into the bar, carrying a box of rollers and paintbrushes and some high-gloss black paint for our new front door.

  “Old School,” he said, nodding over at me.

  He handed JoJo the change, his hands pretend-shaking as if he were a beggar. “It’s all there.”

  JoJo counted it out into his hand. “You got a receipt?”

  “In the box.”

  Tavarius tore open a bag of Doritos and wandered back to where Curtis had unfolded a Playboy he’d found in the trash.

  JoJo went to the front door, his feet finding bare spaces in Curtis’s pattern. I watched JoJo, framed in the white afternoon light, laugh with Bronco. Bronco cupped the cigarette tight to his face, squinted up his eyes, and bellowed smoke deep from his body.

  Behind me, Tavarius walked forward into the bar.

  I could not help but notice the imprint of his sneakers on the fresh wood.

  51

  DAHLIA’S CARRIAGE HOUSE off Napoleon was empty. I peered through a window at the top of a wooden landing and saw a bare bulb shining over an empty room. Packing crates, tape, and discarded magazines lay on the blue carpet. The summer light shone gold and hard through the edges of the oaks and the wetness from last night’s rain scattered down on the uneven sidewalks. I asked around but no one seemed to know her, so I walked back to my truck and scanned through the sheet that a bail bondsman I knew in Memphis had faxed me. I located her two most recent addresses, places where she’d received paychecks or credit cards, and headed out to the Hollygrove neighborhood by the riverbend only to find another vacant place. Nothing.

  I soon turned back the way I came, into the Irish Channel near the Parasol Bar. An old white-boarded drinking hole that served Wednesday specials on Guinness.

  The Irish Channel is a mostly black neighborhood squeezed between St. Charles Avenue and the river. Shotgun shacks and little bungalows. Postwar working-class houses with chain-link fences and mean-ass dogs. It was Saturday and folks hung out on porches and on the stoops of their houses, smoking and playing with children with ragged toys.

  I matched the address with a narrow little shotgun so small that it looked like a doll’s house, and walked up a creaking paint-flaked porch. Someone was frying bacon in the back kitchen and playing some T.L.C. “Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls.”

  A woman sang in the back, and when I knocked on the warped screen porch, she popped her head out and pushed the hair from her eyes. About halfway through the long shot of hall, I knew it was Dahlia.

  She wiped her brown hands on a white towel and walked toward me.

  Long-limbed with straight black hair and soft almond-shaped eyes, she wore a tan halter top tied at the neck and tight blue jeans. No shoes. A casual smoothness about her walk, a relaxed but confident sexuality.

  I swallowed. The Polaroid shot. Only better.

  She inched open the door and tugged a smile into the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were so huge and brown that she sort of swallowed you with them. Her teeth white and perfect, lips sensual.

  “I work with Trey Brill.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “Your name is Nick and you think Trey ripped off one of your boys.”

  I smiled.

  The halter top didn’t quite stretch to the edge of the jeans and I noticed how flat and hard her stomach muscles were. I was conscious of her breathing.

  “You mind if we talk out here?”

  “Come inside.”

  I didn’t want to but followed as she returned to the kitchen. I waited in the parlor.

  She had a television stranded on a rickety metal-and-faux-wood cart on the right wall as you walked into the room. On the opposite side sat a yellow-and-black couch, a beanbag, and a cheap rocking chair filled with a small back pillow reading LOVE. Small hearts and a couple of angels had been embroidered on the material.

  A silent air-conditioning unit sat in a far window. The room’s air was heavy and moist and felt even more humid than it had underneath the thick oak trees outside.

  I heard water hissing onto a blackened skillet. She walked back in the room from the kitchen. When I sat down on the couch, she fell in beside me, her arm brushing against mine.

  “I’m surprised I found you,” I said. “I’m surprised you know who I am. About the only thing I can do is offer you some money to tell me about you and Trey.”

  She leaned back in the pillows and stretched her arms over her head, yawning, her breasts swelling in her shirt. Her chest moist with sweat.

  “I’ll also tell the detectives that you were just a player. It was Marion who worked the con, hired by Brill. Right?”

  She dropped her chin, put the flat of her palm across my cheek, and crawled into my lap, her legs straddling me. I froze.

  Her fingers looped around the back of my neck. She pursed her lips, closed her eyes, and kissed me on the mouth.

  I did not kiss her back, but I didn’t knock her off me either. I could not breathe.

  “What?” I asked. My voice was not raised but instead had dropped to almost a whisper.

  “That was a job,” she said. “I’m through.”

  She smelled like vanilla and ripe flowers and I gently pushed her to the side and stood. She rolled onto the side of her butt and propped herself up with one arm, dark hair spilling over one eye. She drew some imaginary lines in the material of the old sofa. She sighed.

  “Trey’s just a boy,” she said. “You playin’ with his mind.”

  “And that made y
ou want me?”

  “Maybe,” she said, sticking the back of her thumb into her mouth. “Maybe I just wanted to fuck with you.”

  “Get in line.”

  “People always like to fuck with you?”

  I nodded.

  “Poor baby,” she said, withdrawing the thumb from her lips.

  She picked up the remote and switched the channels, the high-pitched laughter of a sitcom filling the room. Three’s Company. She changed the channel again, soft music. A love scene. And then again, two people fighting. WWF pro wrestling.

  “Rockford Files comes on at six.”

  Her eyes tilted up and met mine.

  “Tell me how it worked.”

  “He hates you a lot.”

  “What do you want?”

  She tugged at her thumb again with her strong lips and wet them with her tongue.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “Either play with me or leave.”

  “Trey had Malcolm killed.”

  “Who’s Malcolm?”

  “Come on.”

  “How much?” she asked.

  “Depends on what you have to say.”

  “Listen, Trey didn’t know about the job on the kid.”

  “So, you and Marion just stumbled upon a mark who just happened to work with a man you fucked.”

  “I met ALIAS at a club with Trey,” she said. “A kid. A kid that is a millionaire. Marion wanted to use him. This wasn’t about Trey.”

  “Where’s the money?”

  “Marion took it.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Why are you still in this shit hole?” I asked. “He left you. Didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he’s gone,” she said. “Way gone.”

  I started to laugh.

  Her jaw tightened and her nostrils flared.

  She reached out to claw my face.

  I grabbed her wrist and pushed her back into the couch. I held both of her arms over her head and placed a knee between her legs. “Trey hired some street freak to kill Malcolm and me. Right? You heard of a man called Redbone?”

  She spit in my face. I let her go, my breath rushing from my mouth.

  “I don’t know Malcolm. I tole you me and Marion’s thing got nothing to do with Trey. Tell him. I don’t care.”

  I heard feet on the boards of her porch and moved close to the door. I steadied my breath and looked down at her. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and reached down on a glass-and-chrome table filled with copies of TV Guide and Star for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

  The screen door opened and a large black man walked inside. In his fifties with a short black beard. Greasy white T, hard dark jeans, and fucked-up Wolverine work boots. “Dataria? Who the fuck is this? What y’all doin’ in my house?”

  She lit the cigarette and blew smoke up at a cheap fan rocking in the sagging ceiling.

  “Oh, just a boy, Daddy,” she said. “He came over and tried to save my soul. Ain’t that right?”

  He moved toward me, his hands clenching around the handle of an old lunch pail.

  I headed out to the porch and walked to my truck.

  I heard him yelling more, a slap, and then a high-pitched scream from inside the tiny house.

  I thought about the scream and then kept smelling her on my shirt the whole way down St. Charles.

  52

  I REMEMBERED JIMMY RIGGINS as the white boy from Nebraska who carried defensive linemen on his back like children as he shot through blocking holes and scrapped for five to ten yards almost every time he touched the ball. He wore black reflective paint under his eyes like some leather-helmeted wonder from another era and after games often wore fur coats he’d made from animals he killed himself. Wildcats and Kodiaks from Alaska. He bragged once of making love to three women simultaneously and of outrunning a deer that he’d startled in a backwoods creek in rural Louisiana. He’d been on three Sports Illustrated covers, cut a locally produced country-western album, and made All-Pro for four years as if the NFC’s fullback was a position he owned.

  But after a string of eight DUIs, even fans and front-office types in New Orleans became a little worn with his personality. And then five years ago, when he was photographed sunbathing nude with a sixteen-year-old singer who’d made a name for herself on a nationwide shopping mall music tour, the ride was over.

  He was traded to the Cardinals, the worst of all pro football franchises, and soon disappeared. Replaced by a stable of fresh new runners with better knees and media-savvy personalities.

  I never knew Riggins that well. After all, he’d been an offensive player, and even on the same team, folks tend to stick to their own kind. But through the Picayune stories I found yesterday, I learned of a lawsuit he’d filed against Trey Brill three years ago. And after calling around to some old teammates on Sunday, I found Riggins’s address – a rural route in Slidell, only about fifteen minutes out from the city.

  The country road wound around a small creek and through a cattle pasture where fattened red-and-white cows chomped down grass. I followed my coffee-stained map through three or four country roads until I found the house.

  The place was colorless, eroded clear of paint from decades of rain, with a ripped screen door hanging off a lower hinge. Behind the old house and under a live oak draped in Spanish moss sat a little squat trailer, the towing hitch held vertical by a pile of concrete blocks.

  A yellow “No Hunting” sign had been nailed to a dying tree.

  Two Big Wheels, a rusted-out Fiero, and an early-nineties F-150 with K-C lights had been parked in a muddy, grassland ground.

  I knocked on the door and then hung back off his stoop beside some piles of two-by-fours and bricks. I listened to the crickets hanging into the woods of pine and large oak. In the deep woods, I heard feet shuffle.

  Near the edge of the woods, a man giggled.

  Then a shot.

  I ran fast around my old truck, where Annie yelped to me from the passenger seat, and through a scattered patch of trees.

  I squatted down into a ditch by the edge of the small forest. Pines, palmettos, and knotted old oaks surrounded me. Vines and broken branches and decaying stumps covered the forest floor. A thick black snake twisted out from a hole in a toppled tree and sauntered away. Overhead, only small pricks of yellow light broke through the leafy ceiling.

  A flash of a plaid shirt showed deep in the woods.

  Another giggle.

  “Riggins,” I shouted. “It’s Nick Travers.”

  My voice echoed as I crouched forward and moved out of the ditch and into the trees.

  Another shot cracked farther away and I saw the driver’s side mirror of my truck explode. I moved slow, still bending at the waist, watching.

  I only heard crickets. Soft feet crunched.

  A woodpecker returned to a dead oak tree and a couple of squirrels scattered in the leaves and needles.

  More feet ran and then slowed.

  The woodpecker stopped.

  Then returned.

  Dry heated air ran through the woods. A small creek oozed through the uneven splice of a narrow muddy bank.

  I crept over the water, several hundred yards from the trailer.

  I thought I could come back on whoever was out there.

  I was a silent Indian creeping through the land. I could not be heard. I imagined sneaking up behind this peckerwood and catching him. Maybe not.

  I tripped over some fishing line tied to a bunch of beer cans, cutting into my palms, and fell to the ground.

  A long bowie-knife blade found my throat and I heard a voice I remembered from a decade ago say, “When y’all gonna realize this is the U.S.A., not the U.S.S.R.? I don’t owe shit.”

  I looked back. “Hello, Riggins,” I said.

  “Travers?”

  53

  RIGGINS TOOK ME and Polk Salad Annie to a small camp he’d built in the woods. Nothing more than a child’s play fort made of plywood, furnished with l
arge spindles that once held telephone wires and big tree stumps for seats. I found a stump and sat down by a little ring of rocks filled with charred wood. Riggins poked at the wood with a stick he’d found and belched into his fist.

  Annie licked his face.

  “You didn’t come out here to bring me a fuckin’ fruit basket or build me a goddamned house,” Riggins said. “Because some of those dickbrains came out last spring and said I need better shelter.”

  Riggins had kept the crew cut but decided at some point to grow the whole Grizzly Adams beard. His once thick biceps had grown fat and meaty and it looked as if his stomach had doubled in size. He’d cut his flannel shirt at the armpits and I noticed the Saints tattoo still running down his shoulder. A COUNTRY BOY CAN SURVIVE printed on a Rebel flag flew on the opposite side.

  “Some guy that sells RVs out in town knew where I was livin’ and, because he’s some mucho jock sniffer, decided I need some shit called ‘a hand up.’ I said that sounded like a hand job and to take both of his hands to spread his ass real wide to make room for his fuckin’ head.”

  “I need to talk to you about Trey Brill,” I said. I had to squint into the sunlight shooting through the oak leaves and vines just to watch his face.

  The branch in Riggins’s hand snapped and he brushed at his beard with his fingers. He nodded for a while and spit into the dead fire.

  “You seen my wife?” he asked.

  “Didn’t know you were married.”

  “When Brill cleaned me out, she left me for my next-door neighbor,” he said, his muscles tightening under the bristled cheeks. “A guy who made fuckin’ watches for a living. Watches out of jewels and faces of old movie stars. Guy had this hair transplant that looked like the goddamn head on a little girl’s doll. Goddamn. I stole his Jet Ski, rode it down to St. Charles Parish, and then set the motherfucker on fire.”

  I nodded.

  “You knew about me and Brill, right?” he asked. “You’re not thinking of having him run your money. God, I thought everybody knew how he fucked me like a monkey on a football.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “The money. Not the monkey. I saw that you filed suit for mismanagement.”