Burning Heat

by David Burnsworth

  Mr. Jameson’s face held a pleasant smile but his thick glasses couldn’t hide the reality that his eyes were sunken in. So was his mouth, although I suspected that was due to the absence of any teeth. When he shook my hand, I felt heavily callused skin.

  “Brother Brack here is Reggie’s nephew,” Brother Thomas told the Jamesons. “Remember? The man come by and ask about the children getting sick?”

  “I do,” Nelia Jameson said. “He got that old chemical plant cleaned up, didn’t he?”

  Like her husband, Nelia also had no teeth. But her eyes were clear and unassisted.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “We was just talkin’ about Willa Mae,” Brother said. “Alfonse and Nelia’s grandson went to school with her. Maybe he know something.”

  “Trevor is such a good boy,” she said, getting up from her seat. “I got a picture around here somewhere.”

  Trevor was the name Mrs. Pervis had supplied for Willa Mae’s ex-boyfriend. Mrs. Johnson opened an ancient screen door and went inside. It sprang shut behind her. I watched it bounce twice before she caught it and came out carrying a few photographs in her shaking hands.

  She handed me a picture. “Here’s one at his high school graduation.”

  “He the first one in the family,” Mr. Jameson said.

  Looking at the photo, I asked, “Any idea where he might be?”

  “Nossir,” Mrs. Jameson said. “That boy come for supper every now and then, though.”

  After viewing a few more pictures, Brother Thomas and I excused ourselves.

  On the sidewalk out of earshot of the Jamesons, Brother Thomas said, “What do you think?”

  The burden of my friend’s grief weighed heavily on my shoulders. I didn’t want to let him down.

  “That’s the second time Trevor’s name has come up.” I stood there looking at a street with few working streetlights. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

  “Keep doin’ what you’re doin’,” my friend said. “I’ll see what I can do from my end.”

  I nodded.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “I really appreciate this, Brother Brack. Ain’t too many others woulda taken this on.”

  Brother Thomas was probably the best person I knew. Unlike the ones I went to war for, he had what born-again Christians called “righteousness.” And I would gladly go to the grave for him. Looking into what happened to one of his flock seemed like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

  I headed across the street to Mutt’s Bar. One thing Brother Thomas did not need to know about was where I planned to take Mutt. I grabbed the handle of the bar’s rusty screen door and opened it. The smell never changed—tobacco smoke and bar wash. Across the small room, I could see Mutt use a towel to mop sweat off his black face as he told Willie a story.

  “An’ you know what she said to the man?” Mutt added from behind the bar, a big grin highlighting his missing front teeth.

  Willie’s drunken smile showed his own weathered and cracked teeth. “Naw, man. What she say?”

  “She say that wouldn’t even get her started.” Mutt slapped his hand on the bar. “How!”

  Willie swayed back and howled with him and almost fell off the barstool, but caught himself in time to prevent something else from cracking.

  Mutt’s eyes met mine.

  I said, “I can come back if you’re busy.”

  He scratched the side of his boxed afro. “Naw. We out of good jokes. You always give us something to laugh at, Opie.”

  I pulled out three cigars and a cutter from the pocket of my linen trousers and sat on the barstool to Willie’s left. Mutt and Willie watched as I clipped the end off each cigar and handed them out.

  Mutt read the label. “Ma-can-u-do.”

  Willie had the cigar in his mouth, ready for someone to light it.

  I flicked open the Zippo lighter my uncle brought back from Vietnam and lit their stogies before catching my own. The ten-dollar special was probably wasted on Willie, but Mutt seemed to enjoy the smoke.

  “You want a soda or something, Opie?” He knew I was on the wagon.

  I nodded and he went to the rusty cooler at the corner of the bar, opened the lid, and pulled a can from the ice water. We puffed on the stogies and took in the captivating aroma that pushed the baked-in smell of bar wash to the outer edges of the room.

  Mutt leaned against the back counter and took the Macanudo out of his mouth, curling his index finger around the stogie to brace it against his middle finger. “Every time you come in here with a cigar, you got somethin’ up your sleeve.”

  I tilted my head back and blew a stream of smoke to the exposed rafters. “Now, what would give you that idea?”

  “Tell him, Willie,” Mutt said.

  “Aw, ma-an,” Willie grunted. “Mr. Brack is good people.”

  Anyone else calling a white man Mr. anything in this bar would have received a stiff backhand from any of the patrons. But I knew Mutt well enough to know that he loved Willie too much as his friend to disrespect him.

  “I wouldn’t go that far, Willie,” I said.

  Mutt cackled. “You got that right.”

  “Besides,” I continued, smiling at Mutt, “I do need a favor.”

  He smiled back, showing me gums flanked by two fangs. “I knew it.”

  “Yeah, but I think you’re gonna like this,” I said.

  Mutt leaned forward to listen. “Uh-huh.”

  “Ever hear of a place called the Treasure Chest?”

  By the way Mutt’s face lit up when I mentioned the name, I sensed we were heading into dangerous waters.

  Mutt rode shotgun in my uncle’s Shelby Mustang. “This is one nice ride. It never looked like this when Reggie had it.”

  I tried real hard not to think about my having parked the six-figure car on the darkening street in front of Mutt’s Bar.

  The parking lot for the Treasure Chest was at least partly lit. We found a spot close to the door and pulled in. The rundown building could have been a nice place twenty years ago. Now, two of the neon letters that spelled its name flickered on and off, and not on purpose. The place seemed the right type for a new girl on her way up or a worn-out one on her way down.

  The doorman nodded when we walked up. Short but stocky, he wore a leather vest but no shirt and looked like Martin Lawrence in the first Bad Boys movie.

  He said, “How you doin’, Mutt?”

  “Not bad, Robbie. Not bad.”

  One of the Pirate’s Cove regulars who used to work the door to a gentlemen’s club once told me he got kickbacks from the strippers for pointing out to them the big spenders. I’d asked him how he identified them.

  He said, “When they flipped open their wallets to pay I made a special point to look for cash and plastic. The real players had fat money clips and peeled off twenties like Kleenex.”

  So tonight I made sure this doorman saw the thick fold of bills I had, held together by a shiny, silver clip I’d bought for the occasion from Big Al’s Pawn. After handing him two twenties for Mutt’s and my cover, he personally walked us inside. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the smell of cheap perfume and stale smoke accompanied a bass thumping hard. On stage, a plump black girl dangled from a hopefully well-anchored pole. The doorman led us to a half-booth just off to the right of the performance. I scanned the room and noticed a dozen other men, most of them sitting on chairs at the base of the stage.

  The girl slid down the pole, faced away from the crowd, and bent over. A young patron wearing a Tarheels basketball jersey and matching ball cap stood and stroked the back of her thigh. She squealed and jumped away. The doorman went over to the kid, grabbed a handful of Carolina blue, and yanked him back in his seat.

  “Must not be his team,” I yelled to Mutt over the thumping.

  “That’s Wanda up there,” Mutt said.

  I sat back in the worn vinyl-covered seat and tried to relax, which was kind of difficult at the moment with the music so loud and half-
naked women everywhere.

  A tall, solid black woman in a white bra, dark hot pants, and spike heels came up to our table. “It’s a two-drink minimum. What can I get you?”

  “You can get me a hello, Kali,” Mutt said.

  The woman looked up from her order pad. “Sorry, Clarence.” She smiled at me. Her mouth was big and full. “And who’d you bring with you?”

  “This here’s Opie,” Mutt said. “He wants a root beer. Who workin’ the bar tonight?”

  “Cherise,” she said. “You want one of her specials.”

  “You got that right, mamma.”

  Kali left to get our order.

  I said, “I don’t get it.”

  Mutt said, “Don’t get what?”

  “The name Treasure Chest,” I said. “I expected the minimum to be double D’s, not two drinks.”

  Mutt put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s where they keep all the booty, my man.”

  “I should have known.”

  “Maybe you could hook your place up wit this one. They both got that pirate thing goin’ for them.”

  Kali came back with our drinks as the D.J. announced that Glitter would be the next act.

  I looked at the stage. The young woman Brother Thomas had introduced as Mary Ellen strutted on. She wore a bad imitation of a nurse’s outfit complete with mini skirt, tight blouse, and white cap, and looked a little different up there dancing around than when she was crying in the church.

  I handed Kali an extra twenty. “When the nurse gets done with her routine on stage, we’d like a private session.”

  She nodded and walked away.

  Mutt said, “You gettin’ into this, ain’t you?”

  “That’s Willa Mae’s friend up there.”

  After a few minutes of watching Mary Ellen work the pole, a man in a suit came to our table and asked us to follow him. We grabbed our drinks and were led behind a curtain into a twelve by twelve room with a couch and table.

  The man in the suit said, “Would you gentlemen like a bottle of champagne?”

  It kind of cracked me up, this man acting suave in this dump. But it was his world.

  “Naw, man,” Mutt said. “Just get us our second round.”

  “No, problem,” the man said. “I’ll have Glitter bring them to you. We do ask for this room to be paid in advance, though.”

  I said, “How much?”

  He opened his mouth to say something, stopped, then said, “Two hundred.”

  Mutt and I looked at each other, and I realized the price had probably just doubled. I winked at my friend and handed the man the money.

  He folded the bills and placed them in his front pants pocket. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “Make yourselves comfortable. Glitter’ll be right up.”

  After the man in the suit left, Mutt lit a cigarette. “What you wanna ax the girl?”

  “Why she lied.”

  “Well, can you do it after she give me a lap dance? I’d hate for yo’ money to go to waste.”

  Before I could reply, the curtains parted. The woman Brother Thomas had referred to as my sister-in-Christ, now a.k.a. Glitter, walked in, carrying our drinks on a tray. The nurse’s outfit had found its way back onto her small, young body, and she swayed on four-inch stilettos, giving me a smile, oblivious to our having met before. Her eyes were solid black pupils. It wasn’t the heels causing her to be off balance.

  She set the tray of drinks on the table and went to a stand with a small stereo system and CDs stacked on it. “What kind of music you like? We got Jay Z, Snoop, um—”

  “Got anything good up in here?” Mutt asked.

  Mary Ellen steadied herself as she looked through the disks. I walked over, studied the titles, and pointed to one. She put it in the player, hit the start button, and turned to me.

  The wail of harmonica came out of the speakers as Mannish Boy began.

  She said, “Who first?”

  Bom bom bom bom bom, dum dum dum …

  “How!” Mutt dropped backwards onto the couch and snapped his fingers. “You know it’s me.”

  The girl concentrated on Mutt. “I know you.”

  Mutt opened his mouth to say something, but I beat him to it.

  “Do we call you Glitter, or Mary Ellen?”

  She gave me a lazy smile, her sway a little more exaggerated now, and rested a hand on the stereo stand. “What you talkin’ about, sugar?”

  “Aw, come on Opie,” Mutt said. “This can wait, can’t it?” He looked at Mary Ellen and patted his leg. “Come on over here, baby.”

  “Look, little girl,” I said, “you better watch your back. I was there when Willa Mae got shot.”

  “She gone,” Glitter said, her voice trying to get an edge that might have worked sober, “and so am I.”

  I watched her leave, deciding that her soul was not mine to rescue today. “Remember what I said, Mary, or it might happen to you, too.”

  She managed a half-hearted effort of storming out, stumbling only a few times, as if a new focus had come into her life. The black curtains parted and swung back in a whoosh after her exit.

  “We better get out of here before they throw us out,” I said.

  “This the last time I come out wit you, Opie. You all business and no party.”

  We went through the curtains and ran into the manager and two tall bodybuilders on bulk juice.

  The manager said, “It’s time for you gentlemen to leave.”

  “Leave?” I asked. “I’m not waiting half the night for you to send a girl up. I want my money back.”

  The manager grabbed my shirt and moved me to the door. I popped his ears with my palms and he let go. When he did, I decked him. He went down.

  The other two rushed us. Mutt sidestepped and shoved them. I swung hard and hit the closest with a solid uppercut. The second meathead caught me in a headlock and squeezed. It felt like my head was in a vise.

  Mutt threw a wild punch and busted the guy’s nose. He released his grip on my head and Mutt finished him off with a solid blow to the jaw. The guy crumpled to the ground next to the manager and his buddy.

  My sidekick and I walked out the door.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Outside the Treasure Chest, Kali, the tall one who’d taken our drink order, leaned against my Mustang smoking a cigarette. She said, “I knew you wasn’t right.”

  “Whaddaya mean?” Mutt asked. “You know me.”

  She had changed out of the hot pants and into shorts and added a blue polo to cover her white bra.

  “Clarence, you never come here unless Willie win the double,” Kali said. “This white boy put everybody on edge.”

  I checked the entrance to the Treasure Chest. “This is nice and friendly and all, but if they come out that door, it will get ugly.”

  “You right about that,” Mutt said.

  “You off the clock?” I asked Kali.

  “I am for you, baby.”

  “Then if you got something to say,” I said, “hop in and we’ll give you a ride.”

  We piled in the Mustang and I laid two black streaks of burnt rubber while exiting the parking lot. A mile down the road, the tension in my shoulders loosened. Kali sat in the middle of the backseat, leaning forward and holding the factory-installed roll bar above our heads for support.

  “My house is the other way,” Kali said. “You ain’t gonna try nothin’ are you?”

  “No, honey,” I said. “I think Mutt and I are already outnumbered here.”

  “How!” Mutt yelled.

  She touched my cheek. “Why not, baby? Buy me a drink and let’s see what happens.”

  Taking Kali to Mutt’s Bar was out of the question. Any time a female set foot in that place, every able-bodied man in the neighborhood showed up. I drove to Calhoun Street and got lucky again with a parking spot.

  The rooftop bar overlooking Marion Square seemed like a good place to go this time of night. On the elevator ride up, I reappraised Kali. In flats she stood eye to e
ye with me. Even if she hadn’t been so solidly built, her height would have been enough to intimidate me.

  The exotic-club waitress caught me looking, smiled, and said, “That’s right, baby.”

  On the rooftop, we sat at a table. Kali and Mutt lit cigarettes in one of the few bars in the tourist district that allowed smoking. I excused myself and went to the restroom. On my way back, I pulled out my cell and made a call.

  “Hello,” boomed Brother Thomas.

  “Hey, brother,” I said. “Sorry to bother you so late.”

  “Brother Brack? Is that you?”

  “Yessir,” I said.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Not really. We’re fine. It’s—”

  “Oh, Lord,” he said. “What happened now?”

  I told him Mutt and I found Mary Ellen at the Treasure Chest, tried to talk to her, and almost didn’t make it out.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Anyway, she might be in trouble now is all I’m trying to say. Can you check on her?”

  I felt Brother Thomas’s sigh through the phone. He said, “You really know how to keep the pot boiling, don’t you, Brother Brack?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Good. By the way, you know a girl by the name of Kali? I’m not sure if it’s her real name.”

  “Yeah, her son comes to Bible school most Sundays. She’s another lost one needs found. Too smart for her own good.”

  I asked, “Can I trust her?”

  There was a pause.

  “Brother Brack, most people around here don’t trust white folk. It’s a fact of life. If she talkin’, she got a reason. May be a whole bunch of things. Be careful. I’m on my way to get Sister Mary Ellen.”

  With that, my phone chirped off. I had been standing with my back to the hallway leading to our table. When I turned around, I found Kali staring at me, arms folded across her chest.

  She asked, “You think I’m gonna set you up?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m looking for a lost woman named Willa Mae.”

  “Well, I was lookin’ for you,” she said. “Mutt tried to grab my leg.”

  I couldn’t take that mutt anywhere.

  “If you want,” I said, “I’ll sit between you and him. He probably won’t grab my leg.”