by Ace Atkins
“I’m just wondering if this badass rap star is worth all this trouble.”
“Don’t get much meaner,” Christian said. “Man don’t like it when you talk that way ’bout him.”
27
FOUR HOURS AFTER THE POLICE LEFT, Teddy called to let me know he’d come up with a way to pay Cash. Just like that. He was at the airport about to fly to Los Angeles to strike a deal with Universal for distributing the final Dio album. He didn’t want to do it but he said the offer was his only option. While we were on the phone, I tried to talk to him about Malcolm and why he should try to work with Jay Medeaux at NOPD. But he didn’t want to, instead asked me to leave town with ALIAS. He needed me to keep the kid out of New Orleans until peace was made with Cash.
“I’m not worried about ALIAS,” I said. “I’m worried about you, man.”
“I have a dozen of the baddest motherfuckers in the Ward lookin’ out for me,” he said. “What’s a white boy from Alabama gonna add to the mix?”
I told him about the man from last night.
“Some ratty-clothes fucker?” Teddy asked. “Man, that some ole homeless dude lookin’ for a place to squat and a sandwich.”
I loaded up my army duffel bag, called JoJo in Clarksdale, picked up ALIAS, and headed the Gray Ghost west on I-10. We drove north on 55, passing supersize truck stops, Cracker Barrels, and rest areas. We stopped for gas outside Kentwood but kept rolling for a few more hours. ALIAS slept. I listened to a new album by Jim Dickinson and some old Ry Cooder sound tracks.
At about 3 P.M., ALIAS and I pulled off at an exit in Vaiden, Mississippi, for supplies and some chicken-fried steak at the All-American Diner. Eighteen-wheelers blew diesel fumes from their exhaust. Fords and Chevys nestled by a bank of glass windows, their owners inside shoveling in chicken-fried steak and fries.
“What the hell is that shit?”
“It’s steak.”
“Then why they call it chicken?”
“They don’t call it chicken, man,” I said to my young road Jedi. “They fry it like a chicken.”
“That sounds nasty.”
“Wait till you try it,” I said. “Best in the state.”
I imagined ALIAS’s do-rag and thick platinum chains would draw some stares from the truckers who were hunkered over their lunch platters. But I needed some good, warm food and often stopped here on my way to Clarksdale.
I let Annie make a deposit on the grass and left her in the shaded car with the windows down. ALIAS mumbled and planted his feet on the ground outside the truck. He yawned tall and hard and motioned at the windows of the restaurant.
“You takin’ me to a Klan meeting, Old School?”
“Bring your sheet?”
“Come on, man,” he said. He looked at all the spindly pine trees in the forest across the road and pickup trucks in the lot. The air was silent except for the roaring of semis every ten seconds on the interstate.
Two black truckers in tall cowboy hats — toothpicks wandering from the sides of their mouths — pushed the front doors open and gave long looks at ALIAS in his baggy FUBU jersey and low-ridin’ jeans.
I ordered coffee from a teenage waitress who looked as if she’d just woken up and the world held a million possibilities. Her smile plastered and hard, eyes so wide open that they gave me a headache. ALIAS got a Coke.
“That was some fucked-up shit, man, in New Orleans,” ALIAS said, playing games with his fingers. They fought one another as he refused to look me in the eye. “Don’t want to be part of that.”
“I’m sorry about Malcolm.”
ALIAS shrugged. “Nigga made his play.”
“That’s hard.”
“What ain’t?”
He looked away from me for a moment and I nodded.
“You want me to drive?” he asked.
“No one else drives the Ghost.”
“That ole piece of shit?” he asked. “I got some silk underwear that cost more money.”
“Probably runs better too.”
The waitress came back and I asked for the Texas-size chicken-fried steak and ALIAS ordered a cheeseburger and fries.
“You want to tell me more about your buddy Cash?” I asked.
“Cash ain’t my buddy.”
“Teddy heard he was at your place the other night,” I said. “He sent some folks by to find you and they said you were outside smokin’ it up with Cash.”
He didn’t say anything.
We stared out into the parking lot at the trucks until the food arrived.
The country-fried steak sat brown and covered in white peppery gravy in front of me. ALIAS ate a few fries and looked around for a ketchup bottle. There wasn’t one, and he tried to show he was so damned interested in finding the bottle that he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“You made up your mind?”
“Man, Cash want me to join his label,” he said. “You know that? Said I’m a punk for runnin’ to the Ninth Ward when you got a straight-up Calliope brother with L.A. connections.”
I watched his face. He blew out his breath and rubbed the top of his head. He’d quit eating his food.
“So you’re gonna stay with Teddy?”
“I’m gonna do whatever ALIAS want to do.”
“That have anything to do with Tavarius Stovall?”
“Man.”
“You know that your name comes from a plantation where we’re headed.”
“Slave name.”
“Sort of,” I said. “But someone in your family came from Clarksdale. I’d bet money.”
“My people come from Mississippi?”
“Where did you think they came from?”
“All I know is Calliope.”
“Maybe we can stop by,” I said. “Always good for the soul to know your roots.”
He looked up at me, in the eyes, and smiled. “’Cept when those roots are rotten.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Just repeatin’ the words my grandmamma tole me,” he said. “She said my mamma was a drug addict and a whore. Said she was sick in the head and I was just like her.”
The waitress came back and leveled a ketchup bottle on the table. She smiled at us and looked pretty even though she had crooked yellowed teeth and brown frizzy hair.
“I saw your video on BET,” I said. “You got talent.”
“You watch BET?”
“Frequently,” I said.
“Which one you see?”
“I don’t know. You were driving a Mercedes in the Quarter with three girls in bikinis. You looked pissed off talking on that cell phone.”
ALIAS laughed. “So where you takin’ me?” he asked, happy with the ketchup and tapping the bottle.
“I told you, we’re going to stay a few days with some friends of mine.”
“That old dude.”
“Yeah, that old dude,” I said, cutting into the steak.
“What he to you?” he said. “Some kin?”
“He and his wife took me in when no one else wanted me,” I said.
I watched ALIAS in his wrinkled shirt. His face covered in oil and sweat. Then I looked at two truckers by a window drinking a cup of coffee and enjoying a moment of silence. I could not see much beyond the road.
28
JOJO AND LORETTA LIVED in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse a few miles outside Clarksdale in a town that once had a name. I’d learned to recognize the county roads by piles of rocks or trees, since signs were rare. Soon I crossed their old footbridge and headed down a gravel road. The house was two stories and white with a wide screened-in porch where Loretta had draped blue Christmas lights right below the tin roof. It was just before sundown and JoJo and I slipped into some metal chairs flecked with green paint and rust and drank whiskey. The whiskey was hot and warm but surprisingly mellow.
Annie lay at JoJo’s feet.
“See?” he said. “That dog’s smart. She remember me.”
“Maybe she just wants some food.”
&n
bsp; “Dogs remember who save their ass,” he said. “She’ll always remember me. Right, girl?”
He scratched the back of her ears and she barked.
Loretta had shown ALIAS a bed in the back room of the old house and in the last few minutes had begun to make us dinner in the kitchen. I could smell the greens simmering with a fat, salty ham hock and cornbread baking in the oven. She served sweet tea and scowled at JoJo’s whiskey.
I returned to the porch with JoJo. The sun slowly headed down over his pastureland to the east in a slice of yellow. Dark patches of shadow hung beneath his hickories and pecan trees as I sipped on the tea and told him about ALIAS and Malcolm.
JoJo propped his feet up on the ledge and continued to run an oilcloth on his old .22. Chickens cackled behind the house.
“When did you get chickens?” I asked.
“When I decided I wanted eggs,” he said.
JoJo was in his late sixties now. Broad-shouldered and black. His arms starting to thicken from his return to farmwork and his rough fingers tough and quick over the stock and the barrel.
“What you gonna do with the kid?” he asked.
“Stay with him around here for a few days,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Why he got them gold teeth?”
“They were out of diamonds.”
“He’s street, Nick. Watch your ass. I don’t mess with those project folks in New Orleans.”
“Kid’s a millionaire.”
“You got to be shittin’ me.”
“I shit you not. He owns a big mansion on the lake-front. Has a Mercedes and doesn’t even have a learner’s permit.”
JoJo put the gun down on an old table. “You brought a drug dealer to my house?”
“Worse,” I said, and laughed. “A rapper.”
“No shit,” JoJo said, laughing too. “Kids will listen to anything these days. Man, when I was a kid, we all wanted to be Muddy Waters. The way he sang about women and whiskey. Made me want to play that ole blues.”
“Not much has changed,” I said.
“Except plenty,” he said. “That music is against God. Makes thugs into heroes, women into things, and money above all.”
I wanted to ask him about the stories he’d told me about Little Walter and his dice games and fistfights, but I didn’t.
The smell of Loretta’s cooking made my mouth water despite my stomach being full of that chicken-fried steak. I sank harder into the porch chair and rested my boots on the plank floor and took a deep breath. The old sun had touched the edge of JoJo’s farm, just nudging it a bit.
“Felix found a new job.”
“What?”
“Pours drinks into plastic peckers,” I said. “Says to tell you hello.”
JoJo stood. He walked to the screen door and opened it. The spring squeaked as he held it open and spit outside. “Lots of bad shit happened in New Orleans.”
“You ever think about coming home?”
JoJo held his eyes on mine. He had some deep bags under there and I suddenly thought that I was making them worse. “This is my home,” he said.
I laughed. “The Quarter is fresh out of good music.”
He pointed to the rolling acres past the porch.
“This is where I’ll die.”
The dozens of cattle he owned chowed down and swatted flies with their tails. A smooth, easy swat that looked effortless. Brown-and-white ones just enjoying their day eating in the morning sun.
“We can find a new building.”
“That place on Conti Street has always been the bar and always will be.”
“Except for now they serve martinis and play techno music.”
“What the hell is that?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“If you want a bar so much,” he said, “you open it up.”
I laughed. “You’re kidding.”
“Why not?” he said, and held up the gun, sighting the barrel into the field. “You can’t open a beer?”
“You know there’s more to it than that.”
He shrugged. Loretta’s deep voice called us in to eat.
“I’m too busy.”
“Working for Teddy?” JoJo asked, laying the gun down. “You crazy? Teddy would sell you for a quarter. Quit taking these jobs for folks. What you carryin’ inside of you that makes you feel like you got to pay the whole world back?”
“I want to see this one out. Then maybe I’ll think about it.”
“You think long and hard, son. ’Cause this old man ain’t comin’ back to the Big Easy for nothin’. I don’t care if I hear Miss Raquel Welch walkin’ naked down Bourbon Street waitin’ to give me a kiss.”
“Come on,” I said, knowing about the secret photo JoJo kept of Raquel in his desk drawer. She was his ultimate, the way I kept the calendar of Miss March ’91, although secretly guessing that Miss March would find me quite dull.
“All right,” he said. “I’d come back for that. But if you talkin’ to me about Sun and Felix and that crazy-ass friend of yours — what’s his name? Oz. Then no dice.”
Loretta called to us again.
“Kid stays clean. If he fucks up — if I smell him smokin’ some weed out back — he’s gone. This is my home and that kid don’t have the sense God gave a turkey.”
“Put him to work.”
“I do have a fence needs to be tended to.”
“He’s a teenager. Thinks he knows it all.”
“Like you did?”
I smiled. “Exactly.”
JoJo walked inside the old house, his feet beating hard on the hundred-year-old floors. Over his shoulder, he muttered: “Let’s hope he’s different.”
29
YOU DON’T LIKE to get fucked wit’. But the ole man and Nick did it to you every damned day. They get you up when it’s still dark and make you shovel shit out of some nasty-ass dirt yard — light comin’ from some little lantern — where some goats have crapped or somethin’. Nick make you jog with him before breakfast, right when the sun runnin’ down some dirt road and you can’t even keep up a mile. But on that sixth day, man, you keep up. You run strong by his side. He tell you that you fast and you like that when you eatin’ bacon and sweet-potato pancakes on that ole porch and that old woman warm you with a hand on your back.
You like the taste of the pancakes. The way the hot syrup is warm and flows right through them.
When you there for ten days, you ask him about that dream you been havin’ since you was a kid, to play pro. Nick say that you got to get back in school and the ole man ask how long you been out.
You tell him a few years.
That ole man shake his head and walk back into the red barn where he’s tearin’ out planks of wood that’s rotten with termites and making a heap to burn. He like tearin’ out all that old shit and puttin’ something right back to replace it. Good wood, he say, make it strong.
Sometimes y’all ride into Clarksdale inside JoJo’s old truck. That ride old as hell, smell like rust and funk, and JoJo make you listen to some station out of Memphis about Soul Classics and he think there’s something wrong with you ’cause you don’t know some singer named Al Green.
That’s when church start. And man, that church shit don’t let up. Wednesday too. Even Nick go to this country-ass thing by the highway where some fat-belly preacher start talkin’ for about four hours while your stomach gets all rumblin’ and you lookin’ at the bulletin. Bored as hell. Ain’t nothin’ goin’ on in town. Even the girls — and they do know you — ain’t that ripe.
They wear these lace gloves and hats and can’t look you in the eye when y’all talkin’ at the picnic after the service.
“I seen you on TV,” one of them says. But she smell like onions or some shit and has a little black mustache over her lip. Maybe she be all right she shave that thing off.
Nick take you down to some movies at some drive-ins a few nights those first two weeks. Some nights y’all roll into the Sonic, where y’all get bu
rgers, chicken fingers, and Cherry Cokes.
Y’all keep cleanin’ up JoJo’s world. You run with Nick.
Sometimes he talk to you. Sometimes he just stare outside at all the people movin’ by him.
That makes you wonder ’bout him.
Something just ain’t settin’ right in his head.
“You all right, man?”
He look at you like you the one who’s crazy.
“Just tryin’ to figure out some thoughts.”
30
MAGGIE LIVED A FEW MILES outside Taylor — about an hour from JoJo’s — in a small white farmhouse surrounded by rosebushes and rows of tomatoes and corn just planted. The hickory tree leaves made brushing sounds as we walked toward her front porch, the sky overhead the color of water in the Florida Keys. I held her hand and she gripped me hard as she told me about a new photo exhibit she was working on for a gallery on Oxford Square.
“It’s more than just headstones,” she said, pulling her sticky white T-shirt away from her chest. “I mean, we’ve seen that about a hundred times. I’ve done pictures of graves of woodworkers. They had some kind of fund that kicked in when they died and some of the monuments are incredible. There’s this man who died down in Paris and his headstone looks like a log stump.”
“Want to show me?”
She stepped back and closed one eye, trying to read my mind.
Maggie was tall and thin with muscular arms from working horses and she had these bright green eyes that made you just want to look at her all day. Her smooth skin was tanned from working outdoors and her hair was the color of black ink.
We took a drive down a backcountry highway, past the freshly planted cotton and small clapboard buildings and around an old gas station that sold hot boiled peanuts and warmer beer. We drove through the Yocona River basin forever flat and brown, waiting for the cotton to twist up out of the earth, and up into the Mississippi hills around Paris. We drove on a highway cut through a long forest of oaks and pines and poplar and hickory and pecan. Green leaves still in the early-summer heat. Dogs trotted loose in gullies and tractors drove slow, headed to turn over some more soil. The air smelled of rich dirt and green leaves.
