Dirty South

by Ace Atkins

  I found a comfortable place on the sofa and lay down like you would in a shrink’s office. I noticed one of Teddy’s old game balls from the Saints and read the writing. It was a play-off game against Atlanta where Teddy had picked up a fumble and ran it back fifteen yards for a TD to win the game.

  I tossed the ball up in the air and remembered the party at Teddy’s house when we got back to New Orleans. He’d shook his fat butt on the counter of his kitchen with two women and an honest-to-God midget someone met in the Quarter.

  I tossed the ball up in the air again. “ALIAS is safe,” I said. “He’s with JoJo. But in case anyone asks, you don’t know shit.”

  “A’ight,” he said, burying his big head into his beefy arms. I heard him sniffle and cough, his body shaking loud and hard deep inside, and the rippling pain hurt my heart so badly I worked to change the subject.

  “You can buy a new mixing board. That’s what, five thousand? Man, that’s how much you paid for those rims on that Bentley.”

  “If I don’t get another album from the kid, man…”

  On the wall, he had a picture of him and Mike Tyson and Don King. Another showed a picture of Teddy and Sherman Helmsley. He signed the photo “Movin’ on Up.”

  “He’ll be back,” I said. “I promise.”

  “He always come back here,” he said. He nodded to a long row of keys that hung from gold hooks behind his desk. “You see all that? I let all my talent see where I can take ’em. You see I got two Bentleys. Three Escalades. And that little one there, the one with the platinum fish? Man. That’s my baby right there. Sweet little Scarab boat. Got to slap ALIAS hand every time he come in here tryin’ to take them keys. I said he cut some platinum albums and he can have it. That’s how I know he’ll be back. He want it so bad it hurt him.”

  “This album was the trade with those people in L.A.?”

  “No,” he said, pulling his head free from his arms and settling into his large desk chair. “That’s the last of the Dio tracks. This is for somethin’ else I owe.”

  “What about Cash?”

  “Don’t worry about Cash,” he said. “He know the money comin’.”

  “You paid him back?”

  “Waitin’ on the call,” he said. “We got to meet. Calm things down. Smooth it over.”

  Teddy’s face sagged and his expression turned inward, looking down at the calluses on his hands and the manicure on his fingers.

  “Talked to Jay Medeaux,” I said. “Cops don’t think Malcolm killed himself. Didn’t think he could hang himself in that tree.”

  Teddy shook his head. “He hung himself.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Can I see his papers now?”

  Teddy shook his head and buffed his nails on his pant leg. “It’s over,” he said. “We straighten this thing out with Cash and we done. What Malcolm done was not right. He took a kid’s money and killed the best rapper we ever had.”

  “He was your brother.”

  “Let’s not talk,” Teddy said. The room quiet as hell, Teddy’s face only lit with a small banker’s light. “Okay?”

  The phone rang and Teddy took it, slumping back into his leather office chair. He grunted a couple times and then said, “I got it.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “You roll with us?” he asked.

  “Where to?”

  “Antoine’s,” he said. “Cash ready to make the deal.”

  34

  ANTOINE’S ISN’T MY FAVORITE restaurant. Most of the places I enjoy are far out of the Quarter in little neighborhood pockets where the food’s cooked on broken-down stoves by women who look on their customers as extended family. But I used to eat at Antoine’s and Commander’s Palace – one of my favorites – for special occasions with JoJo and Loretta. They found it very important that I know how to handle myself in nice places. Sit up straight. Use the right fork. They also taught me how to order and how to dress and how to recognize the better foods. “Don’t be so country,” JoJo said to me about a thousand times. Antoine’s used to have a menu printed completely in French with waiters who held their jobs as lifelong professions.

  But recently I’d noticed a change in the old place. You saw more and more out-of-town businessmen walking from its century-plus doors chomping on toothpicks, wearing golf shirts without a tie or jacket. The waiters had grown ruder, the food a shadow of what it had once been. The menu printed in English.

  We rode in a stream of Bentleys and Escalades rolling into the Quarter. I’d grabbed the sport coat that I’d worn to Malcolm’s wake over my white T-shirt. Jeans and boots were at least better than a golf shirt. The music battling from each car didn’t even stop when we rolled onto St. Louis near the old Wildlife and Fisheries Building and Teddy’s flunkies were left to go park.

  We were seated at a huge rectangular table in the center of the restaurant. White tile floors. Café chairs with tables covered in white linen. The walls lined with pictures of dead starlets and U.S. presidents.

  A man in an out-of-style Italian suit sat with a peroxide-blond woman with mammoth breasts. He fed her ice cream from his spoon and nearly dropped the white mess in his lap when Teddy’s boys walked in.

  We didn’t even have time to settle our asses in our seats when Cash parted a scurrying group of waiters with about ten of his men and found a seat opposite Teddy. He wore a white linen suit without a shirt. Platinum weighing hard on his neck and fingers. Teddy nodded but did not get up.

  Bad energy filled the room.

  He saw me but didn’t look at me. My hands clenched at my sides and my mouth grew dry.

  Teddy motioned over the waiter, ordered chilled shrimp for his people and five bottles of Dom Pérignon.

  The weight of his eyes stayed on Cash, who had dipped a shrimp as large as a cat’s paw into some cocktail sauce. When the waiter brought the Dom to Cash’s side of the table, he told the man to pour it straight up into his water glass.

  The waiter blanched, so Cash took the whole thing from the man, popped the top with his bare hands, and drank off the running foam like a child at a fire hydrant in summer.

  I motioned to the waiter for a Dixie. I hated champagne.

  “Big family,” Cash said, his mouth full of wet shrimp meat and champagne. “Got you a white boy and everything.”

  “What?” Teddy asked. He had yet to touch any food. He waited for the waiter to splash a bit into his glass. He took a small sip, nodded, and waited for the man to pour.

  Teddy placed the glass to his lip and tasted the champagne. The waiter nodded and ground the bottle deep into an iced bucket by his elbow. Two waiters filled everyone else’s glass from other bottles.

  “We through?” Cash asked.

  Teddy nodded.

  “You know you should be in the ground.”

  All the men at the table were quiet. They didn’t take a bite of their food. The chatter from the small islands of tables around us sounded like insects against a screen door.

  “Sorry about your brother,” Cash said. “You know? We ain’t neva seen alike. But shit with your family tears your heart out from inside.”

  Teddy nodded.

  The waiter brought my beer.

  “That white boy and me played a couple weeks back,” Cash said. “He tell you about that? Yes, sir, me and him got down in Algiers for you, nigga. Why he do that for you? Crazy, man. He’s a crazy motherfucker takin’ on Cash like that. He lucky he alive too.”

  Cash moved his fingers around his bare chest. He still wore sunglasses. I didn’t say anything. Teddy looked at me and shrugged.

  “You got that money?” Cash asked.

  “It’ll be loaded in your trunk.”

  Teddy tasted some chilled shrimp. Then everyone started eating. I tried a few. They tasted thawed and tasteless to me. Even the cocktail sauce was a grade over ketchup. Teddy ordered those french fries loaded with hot air that he liked so much and even started talking among us for a while.

  I ate. But I watched too. Cash sw
igged down his own damned bottle of Dom. His platinum teeth gleaming, a black tattoo of a pistol on his left hand, a blue cross burning bright on his right. Sweat drained from his face and slick bald head and onto his chest.

  In the middle of it all, just as the lights had dimmed in the restaurant when a bunch of tourists had ordered crêpes suzette or some shit, Cash spoke loud. “I want the boy. I want ALIAS. He’s my blood. We the same.”

  “Ain’t no boundaries at Nint’ Ward,” Teddy said. He sipped down the rest of the champagne, crooked his finger at the waiter, and whispered something in his ear. The man looked confused and walked away. “I respect what you sayin’, man. I respect that you tryin’ to make the peace. But you made the play.”

  “You can keep your respect,” Cash said. I could tell his eyes were reddening and he was a little drunk. “Or we can play.”

  “Play what?” Teddy said, leaning back into his chair. His arms spread across his chest. Full Marlon Brando mode. “You ain’t had no business interruptin’ Malcolm’s thing.”

  “You burned my Rolls,” he said.

  Cash tucked four shrimp into the pockets of his right fingers. He gnawed off each one as if eating parts of his own flesh and laughed with shit stuck in his teeth.

  The woman with big boobs next to us sucked in her cheeks and turned her head away. Cash smelled her action and got up out of his chair.

  He leaned down to her and said something to her that made her clutch her chest and then run to the bathroom. He sat back down at the table and wiped his mouth as if his dirty words had spilled on him.

  “The kid?”

  Teddy hadn’t moved from the Brando pose. He stroked under his chin with the tops of his fingers. “ALIAS is my company.”

  Teddy stood.

  All of his boys stood and for a moment I felt like a kid who didn’t attend church enough to know the rules. I stood too, a few seconds later.

  “I appreciate the dinner,” Teddy said. “I look forward to concluding our business in the future. You’ll get your money but you ain’t never gettin’ ALIAS.”

  Just as he turned his back, there was a mammoth crash. Cash had flipped the table, splattering the champagne and shrimp cocktail and sending my beer into a foaming skitter across the floor.

  “You’re dead, motherfucker,” he screamed. “Goddammit, you’re dead.”

  35

  FOR TWO DAYS, I didn’t see or hear from Teddy. I worked on my long-delayed book on Guitar Slim, planned another trip to Mississippi, replaced the radiator in the Ghost, and took Annie down to this place on the levee called Dog Park. I’d taught her to sit and stay, her reward some pepperonis off a pizza from Port of Call. I finally called Teddy on his cell Tuesday night and asked him on his voice mail when I could come by and look through Malcolm’s papers. He didn’t call back and I was beginning to think I was done. I figured he’d worked out his deal with Cash, maybe had accepted the idea of his brother being a thief and a killer, and wanted to mourn in peace.

  I reached into my pocket and found the pack of Newports that Malcolm had handed me a million years ago.

  I crumpled them into my hand and dumped the mess into the sink.

  Before I knew it, the rains would be here and then that first little fall chill and I’d be back trapped in a Tulane classroom teaching nineteen-year-olds about singers who’d been dead for fifty years. On Thursday, I was ready to go. Duffel bag packed with clean jeans, T-shirts, shit-kickin’ boots, and enough underwear in case that bad accident ever happened. I just needed some good CDs – fill up my case of fifty – when the phone rang.

  I should have ignored it. I wanted very badly to see Maggie. Check out ALIAS’s progress with JoJo and Loretta. Heard he’d actually followed through with JoJo’s deal. Loretta had bought him some kids’ books and he’d been working on the words. On the phone, she called him a genius.

  I packed up Big Jack Johnson, Tyler Keith and the Preacher’s Kids, Robert Bilbo Walker. The phone rang more.

  I grabbed it.

  “Man, Nick,” Teddy said. “Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  “No, you ain’t,” he said. “You in Hawaii.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Twenty minutes from the Paris abode,” he said. “We havin’ a luau.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Just stop by.”

  “I’m on my way out.”

  “It’s about JoJo.”

  He hung up.

  FROM THE porch in back of his Mediterranean Revival mansion – all creamy pink stucco and red barrel tile – I could smell the hog meat roasting in a spit and plantains frying in a blackened skillet. Teddy had hired a local reggae band to set up near his dollar-shaped swimming pool and a crew of women to give free massages. I pulled a Red Stripe from a galvanized tin bucket filled with ice and sat down on the diving board. Women in string bikinis and men in thousand-dollar suits roamed the patio. On the driveway sat a car lot full of Escalades and Bentleys, with those chrome rims shining like silver dollars in the afternoon sun.

  The patio was a jungle of palm trees, banana plants, and fat magnolias filled with white Christmas lights. Pounding rap filled the backyard from some speakers inside his living room and a rottweiler and a pit bull – someone told me had belonged to ALIAS – roamed the backyard, eating barbecue pork from unsuspecting partyers’ plates.

  Trey Brill held court at a dock on the lake, teaching some former Calliope and Magnolia kids the perfect swing. He let them take turns hitting golf balls over the levee while he sipped on a Heineken from a little chair.

  He caught me watching and gave me the two-finger salute and turned back to his pupils.

  Teddy walked by and handed me a paper plate laden with black beans and rice topped with shaved onion. He settled onto the base side of the board and began to eat too.

  About ten people suddenly rushed the pool and splattered us. But Teddy didn’t break stride with the fork. He stared into an empty field beside the house where a contractor’s bulldozers sat idle.

  The men in the pool had plucked a couple of women up on their shoulders and were chicken-fighting. A young kid had a circle of men around while he freestyle-rapped about the women he’d slept with and the cars he owned.

  I tried to find what Teddy saw in the open field.

  I think he was just numb.

  “Sold Malcolm’s car today,” he said to himself.

  “Jay Medeaux said you still believe he killed himself.”

  He nodded. “I don’t hate him, Nick. I don’t. Even after what coulda happen to me with Cash when that money disappeared. Still don’t change nothin’.”

  “I’m leaving town,” I said.

  Teddy shook his head and drank down the rest of the Red Stripe in one gulp. He smoothly shifted from the diving board, stood, and disappeared back into the house. I followed.

  The inside of his mansion was all slate and tile, all big chunks the size of flagstones in the Quarter. He had a couple of paintings of jazz scenes on the walls, a USS Enterprise-sized entertainment center with four big screens. Only one couch and a couple of chairs. Half of a furniture store display.

  Teddy handed me a Dixie. “That’s your brand, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I need you, Nick.”

  “Teddy,” I said. “You’re all right now. Talk to the police.”

  “Naw, man. Not for that. I need you to hang. You know? Like we did back at camp. Remember how we used to watch them soap operas and shit, laughin’ at them women with those big titties who couldn’t act? Remember that dude who had that eyebrow and shit? You would turn the sound off and make up his voice. Man, that was hilarious.”

  “I need to get back to ALIAS. JoJo can’t handle him on his own.”

  He reached inside his bulky pants pocket and then pressed a brass key into my palm. He gripped my hand inside his meaty fingers and held me there, looking into my eyes. “There you go.”

  I looked at him. He winked.

  “It�
��s the bar,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I bought JoJo’s back,” he said. “It’s yours. You were there when I needed you. You came through.”

  “I can’t take that,” I said. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t help you.”

  “How you supposed to know it comin’ from my own backyard?” Teddy smiled. “You my brother?”

  I nodded.

  He shook his head as two women in bikinis came up to him and started tickling him on his side. One of them, a black girl with ringlets of soft brown hair and softer eyes, had a squirt gun tucked into the elastic of her thong bikini. “Come on, Teddy,” she said, teasing. “You promised.”

  The other one, a blonde in a red-checked bikini, reached for my hand, her stomach flat and hard. Brown eyes and smooth rich tan. I shook my head, wanting to stay.

  “We cool?” Teddy asked. He nodded at me, waiting on my answer as if I had another to give. I nodded. The blonde smelled like cocoa butter and strawberries.

  I heard his booming laugh, the splash of water from the pool outside, and smelled the hog meat roasting in the air. I remembered something I had not thought about for years. About ten years ago, we had this smart-ass full-back from Nebraska who thought he was the ultimate practical joker. Sometimes his jokes were funny, like putting child-size jockstraps in all the coaches’ lockers, but sometimes he crossed the line. His jokes a little too mean.

  One season, after a few losses on the road, he started giving Teddy a hard time about never having a woman. He said if we won the next game, that he’d get Teddy a date with the best-looking woman in Louisiana.

  We won, unexpectedly, in San Francisco. When we stepped off the plane, there was a beautiful black girl in a cheetah print coat and spandex pants holding a sign that read TEDDY.

  Teddy, his long coat draped over his arm, stopped cold because he was the only Teddy on the team. He pointed to himself, a smile forming on his lips while the smart-ass fullback patted Teddy’s huge back and said “Good luck, Tiger.”