by Ace Atkins
The huge sliding door had been pushed open and inside about a half-dozen men rifled through my shit. A man with a puckered burn mark across his cheek drank my Jack Daniel’s from the bottle and then spit a mouthful onto the floor. Two of the men were shirtless and muscular, wearing stiff, wide-legged jeans and clean work boots. Gold and platinum in chains hung around their necks and molded into their teeth.
I couldn’t spot Annie.
I slipped my finger tighter on the trigger and backed down the stairs to call the police. My heart began to palpitate, my breathing quick. The man with the burn mark asked for a lighter.
I took another step backward.
I felt the sharp prick of a flat, wide blade in my side.
The knife moved up to my neck.
“Slow down, motherfucker. We waitin’ on you.”
He pushed me forward on the landing while I slipped the gun into my jacket pocket. In the darkness, he hadn’t seen it.
As we entered the large open space of the warehouse, a couple of tool shelves by the window where I kept my field interviews had been toppled. Several VHS tapes — loaded with interviews of people who’d died years ago — lay in piles on the floor.
A short, muscular man in a net shirt walked toward me, his palms open on each side as if waiting to begin prayer. His teeth were platinum and jeweled and he had a red tattoo of a heart that seemed to be live and beating on his muscled chest.
His right hand darted to the small of his back and he came up with a snub-nosed .38 that he jammed and twisted in my ear. I was so intent on not moving, I didn’t even notice his feet kicking out my legs.
I fell to the floor. He inched closer with the gun to the bridge of my nose.
“You like scrambled eggs?”
He called ’em “aigs.”
His group ringed me. Their eyes were red and squinted tight and they gritted their teeth while I squirmed.
“What you doin’ with them Paris brothers?” the man asked.
The man with the scar pulled out a book, Catcher in the Rye, from my kitchen table and held a Zippo against its pages. He dropped my book next to the pool of whiskey and I watched its pages curl with smoke.
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. Annie’s yelps came from inside my bathroom.
The leader knocked me across the face, holding the gun in my ear.
“Teddy’s my friend,” I said.
He laughed at that, his platinum teeth feral and wild. He yanked me halfway off the floor with one hand and an arm the size of my leg. His arm didn’t even tremble as he held me there.
I smelled the fire burning into the book’s musty pages.
“I take it you’re Cash?”
“How you know my name?”
“Luck.”
He let me go. As I got to my knees, I heard the clicking of guns around me. He kicked me hard in the ribs. I tried to breathe but couldn’t. My bones felt like they were made of splintered wood. He thumped my head with the back of his hand. “Who got that money?”
I gasped that I didn’t know. Cash picked up the smoldering book, nodded at my shelf of first editions, and asked if I thought it was too cold in the room. “Need some heat.”
One of the thugs gripped the back of my neck and I could smell his rancid body odor, like that of spoiled milk, seeping through his bare chest. He threw me forward, my head connecting hard with the wood floor. I rolled on my stomach, wheezing and groaning a bit, and reached into my jacket for the Glock.
Two of his boys tackled me and wrestled the gun from my hand. Annie kept yelping. One of the boys let her out and she came running to me, licking my face. I held her close and stayed on the floor.
“Teddy Paris sold out the kid,” Cash said. “You keep out ALIAS’s business. He roll with me now. You hear? Don’t come round Calliope no more. That’s my world.”
I wiped the blood off my mouth and stood, holding Annie’s collar. “Someone conned ALIAS.”
“Ain’t my trouble.”
“If anything happens to Teddy, a detective from NOPD will be coming for you before you can take your morning piss.”
He smiled some more. I got to my feet. Annie stood by me and began to growl.
“You set Teddy up?” I asked.
He laughed and pawed at his chest. His mouth shined in the light.
“We goin’ for a ride,” Cash said.
I could taste the blood in my mouth and my hands shook uselessly at my sides.
“And if I refuse?”
“Then we’ll kill your ass.”
18
CASH AND HIS ENTOURAGE drove me over the river to Algiers, where they ate greasy sacks of Burger King, traded stories about women they’d done, and passed around joints as fat as rolls of quarters. All this while I waited for someone to put a bullet in my head. I was too tired to be scared. My hands had stopped shaking a few minutes before and I just listened to the river moving past us and the sound of tugs and faint music from the Quarter. The air smelled of sulfur and old dirt.
We were in the dead zone. Nothing but warehouses and vacant shotguns. Rusted cars and spare parts from the World’s Fair in 1984.
Their Rolls, Ferraris, and Escalades ringed me like some kind of old wagon train. Cash was doing business in his car. Someone had built a fire from some driftwood. I kept thinking about my dog. Wondering why such a group of thugs would’ve let me lock her up before coming along.
Cash climbed out of his ride and strutted over.
“You know you used to could ride over the river in a bucket,” I said, growing tired of the silence.
Cash turned to me. I thought I heard him growl.
“It’s true,” I said. “It was like Disneyland; you could pay a few bucks and get a nice view of the city and everything. Those were what I like to call simpler times.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“You want some of your boys to hold me down while you beat me again?”
“You sayin’ I ain’t hard?”
It was so dark that a few of the thugs had turned on their headlights to spot the high grass where we stood.
“I think you’re a pussy who needs help winning a fight,” I said.
Wrong choice of words. Cash pulled off his net shirt and moved in for me. His fist cocked back, eyes wild. He pushed me with his right hand.
I led with my left and connected with his ear with the right. He leapt on top of me and started hammering at my face, but I kneed him in the nuts and he fell off me. I wrapped his bald animal head into the crook of my elbow and I squeezed until he started trying to gasp for air that would not come.
All his boys circled us, drawing their guns back on me.
I let him go.
He stood, started to laugh, and walked to me with a smile. He bent his neck to the side and I heard his spine pop.
I thought I’d gained his respect up until the point he punched me in the stomach.
I fell. I breathed in as hard as I could, feeling the air narrowly pass into me. I noticed all the lights across the river. Everything grew muffled around me.
“Punk?” Cash yelled. “Punk!”
I used a concrete block to find my feet and I wavered in front of him.
I punched for his temple, but he ducked. I tried another shot and he ducked again.
I gave up on boxing and tackled his legs out from him. All of his boys whooped and hollered as he tried to get off his back like a fallen turtle and I wrapped him up in a headlock. I tasted blood and dirt in my mouth.
“We even,” he said. He spit in my face.
“Stay away from Teddy.”
“Stay away from my boy ALIAS,” he grunted.
I let him go and for several moments we both tried to catch our breath. He paced around and talked a little shit about me being a cheater and then moved in close, his eyes wild like he wanted to go again.
“Teddy needs more time.”
“Fuck him,” Cash said. “Teddy tell me that he need more time too. How come his brother paid off t
hat bitch Nae Nae then? Dropped off a goddamned Mercedes truck yesterday. Now does that sound broke-ass? He just wavin’ that shit in my face. That I cannot stand.”
“Who’s Nae Nae?”
“Stay away from ALIAS,” he said, reaching for a shirt a flunky held open for him. As soon as he looped his arm into the fresh silk, he reached out for the man’s joint and took a hit. “Tell Teddy I’m ready to deal.”
His breath expelled into a big fat ganja cloud and then dissolved into the wind.
“He won’t give you the kid.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna let him fall like Dio. Man, that boy had some heart and he dead ’cause of it. Tell Teddy to stay in the city.”
“Teddy didn’t kill Dio.”
“You sure?”
I looked at him.
He sucked on the joint. “Why you fight me? You crazy in the head?”
“Maybe.”
“Ain’t nobody takes on Cash like that.”
I nodded.
He did too. He looked down at his watch. “That dawn come mighty early. Tell Teddy we lookin’ forward to taking him for a ride.”
“What’d you want with me?”
“How ’bout you just stay home tonight?” he asked. “What happenin’ between me and Teddy is our own thing. This shit been comin’ for a long time. He don’t need to come up with that money. You see?”
I left my hands at my side and Cash shook his head like I’d just given an incredibly stupid answer to a very simple question. He ran his fat tongue over the platinum and diamonds in his mouth. His small pit-bull eyes lazy but still intense.
As he drove away, he threw my Glock 17 into the ditch along the road. I wiped the dirt on the side of my leg and tucked the empty gun into my jacket.
Their wagon train of SUVs and Italian imports looped back onto Powder Street and the old rusted bridge that stretched over to the city. I walked behind them, rubbing the blood from my face, straightening out my clothes and calling a United Cab from the cell still in my pocket.
19
TREY LOVED THAT SCENE from The Grifters. The one when Cusack walks into that TGI Friday’s place and holds a twenty in his fingers but has the folded dollar flipped underneath his palm. When the bartender gets ready to make his change, he coolly flicks out the buck and no one notices a freakin’ thing. Trey didn’t like to keep things from Teddy. Didn’t like to hide things from the big guy. He’d always gotten along with him, enjoyed picking out his clothes, decorating his home, and shaping Ninth Ward into a national company. But Teddy didn’t have to know everything.
Trey looked over at Malcolm, drunk and stoned, sleeping on the couch in Trey’s office in the CBD. He clicked off his e-mail and reached into his desk drawer for two CDs he’d burned earlier today. Nothing but a white paper label.
On his walls hung pictures of his travels with his fraternity brothers from college. All of them in that little bar down in Costa Rica listening to that reggae band and singing like hell. Another of him and Christian in Switzerland when they climbed that mountain and drank some really good German beer, both flashing their wrists with freshly built Rolexes. The good one. The Submariner.
Trey tucked the CDs into Malcolm’s coat pocket and shook him awake. The overhead lights had been shut off by his secretary and only small little table lamps glowed. Malcolm stirred a bit and Trey made himself a Ketel One martini at the minibar. No vermouth. He hated vermouth. A clean twist of lemon.
On the bar, he kept a small CD player and flicked through the CDs. No fucking rap. But he did have some awesome Dave Matthews. A little Widespread Panic and some Limp Bizkit. Great driving music.
He cranked up the Bizkit. It was Friday night. All the offices were closed and he could play a little. Malcolm grabbed a beer beside him and began to wash his face in the tiny marble sink.
“What are you doing?”
“Cleanin’ up,” Malcolm said.
“There’s a bathroom down the hall.”
He began to walk away, shaking his head, his Hornets jersey slipped over a white T with some hundred-dollar jeans. His face covered in shadows.
“Why don’t you turn that shit down?” Malcolm said.
“Check your pockets while you’re out.”
Malcolm looked at Trey for a second and then walked back to his stiff jean jacket, searching through each compartment. When he found the CDs, he froze.
“How many more?”
“Twenty-two tracks, enough for a double album.”
“Don’t make no sense.”
Trey took the martini and walked back to his desk and plunked down the drink on the table. He just started to dance, rocking his head up and down. Feeling that music. All that energy. He might be a businessman but he could still rock.
Malcolm turned down the music. He walked over as Trey started giggling a little and reached his right hand in the air for a high five.
“Where you gettin’ this?”
“His mother.”
“Dio said his mamma died.”
“Then it was his aunt.”
“Damn, man,” he said.
“A little extra kick that we needed,” Trey said. “Right?”
“Teddy will want to know.”
“And you’ll tell him about his aunt,” Trey said. “I keep up with all his family. They’re all part of the estate. Teddy will understand.”
“Is it good?”
“The best.”
“Don’t want to be known for producin’ a dead man all my life.”
“Dio is forever,” Trey said, reaching for Malcolm’s hand.
Malcolm didn’t take it. “You startin’ to make sense.”
Trey stopped smiling and had to catch his breath. “What are you talking about?”
“You know, Brill,” he said. “Quit tryin’ to fuck me.”
“Keep cool.”
Malcolm’s face turned inward. “This shit got to stop.”
Trey walked over to the window. From the outside, they just looked like mirrors. Dozens of silver glass frames. But on the inside, everything was so fucking clear. The Quarter. A gambling boat drifting down the river. Some women lining up down by Harrah’s.
“Let’s roll,” Trey said.
“I’m done.”
“Nope,” Trey said. “We’re hangin’ out Uptown. Some wicked women I know going be down at F&M’s later. You’re a celebrity after that spread of you and Teddy in the Picayune.”
Malcolm stared at Trey. Trey could hear Malcolm’s breathing.
Trey didn’t even look back. He’d come back around. They always did.
He downed the martini, cranked the tunes, and danced. It was Friday night every night of his life.
Malcolm flipped the CDs onto Trey’s desk and walked away.
20
I EXAMINED A SMUDGE of blue welts along my rib cage as I stepped out of the shower and got more pissed off. I hurt. I could smell the sour-milk body odor of that one thug and see flashes of the fire. I looked down at the remnants of my old book and rubbed Annie’s head, checking her over. She seemed fine. A little wired and confused, but fine.
I needed to call Teddy and tell him about Cash. He’d want to know about the deal for ALIAS, although he wouldn’t take it. Everything was about the kid. His money and his talents.
As I was about to pick up the phone, I kicked my toe at the copy of Catcher in the Rye that I’d found in my mother’s things when I was fifteen. It was scorched, the dust jacket destroyed, but some of the pages remained intact.
The book had been my only insight into a woman who’d killed herself the day she’d turned thirty-two.
She left me with my father, an alcoholic high-school football coach, who let our farm in Alabama become overgrown in high grass and filled with rotting fences and barns.
I brushed off the blackened edges of the book, flipped through the pages that weren’t fused. I checked the cover page, as I often did.
To Alice,
H.C.’s alter ego — accept this humbl
e offering (condition, etc.) but I wasn’t sure if you had a hardbound copy.
For myself, the chief in “laughing man” is easy to identify with. It’s in Nine Stories (find included).
Hope you enjoy (if you haven’t already read it) and accept these from,
Your secret admirer
I stood for a few minutes trying to catch my breath and slipped into a pair of 501s, a King Biscuit Festival T from 1991, and my boots. I thought about the Chief and wondered who he’d been to my mother and sometimes got mad at him for not trying to save her.
I called Pinky’s Bar. Fred wasn’t there and I hung up.
The phone rang in my hand.
“What you got?” Teddy asked.
“Who’s Nae Nae?”
“Nick, man, I told you to stay out of Malcolm’s business.”
“Who is Nae Nae?”
“Bitch he got pregnant last year,” he said. “What she tellin’ you about Malcolm? Ain’t nothin’ but lies, man. Did you know she even set up a goddamned Web site about her havin’ Malcolm’s baby and him not giving her any money. Ain’t that some shit? A Web site, man. Somethin’ like malcolmsbaby-dot-com. Shit.”
“Cash said he wants to trade ALIAS for your life.”
“No way.”
“Where does Nae Nae live?”
“Nick,” he said. “Come on.”
THIRTY MINUTES later, I pulled into a short driveway off Elysian Fields with Teddy and Polk Salad Annie by my side. Teddy was in his silk bathrobe and working cell phone calls trying to borrow the money Cash wanted, while Annie chewed on a bone I’d brought.
“Does that animal fart?” Teddy asked. “Or was that you, Nick?”
“She’s a lady.”
“So it was you?”
“It was the dog.”
Teddy snapped shut the cell phone and tucked it into his pocket. He wore a black fedora on his head and had an unlit cigar in his mouth. A dry wind kicked up some elephant ears and palm trees. Across the street, I heard a child screaming.
