Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

His gun slid along the floor, several feet away from him.

He was no bodyguard or the triggerman. He was just the guy fetching laundry and coffee for Faircloth.

But ole Billy Dee was the real deal.

I walked over to him, slowly. My boots clanking hard in my warehouse, the place where I slept, ate, and read.

The book he’d been tearing pages from was Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues . The dog-eared pages littered the floor around him, some misted with blood from the bullet’s impact.

He had his gun still in hand. A revolver.

“You’re not a blues fan, are you?”

He looked up at me and laughed.

“You remember that old man who you shot in the head?”

“Should have been you, motherfucker.”

“That old man could play ‘Blue Monday’ and break your heart.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Maybe.”

With my gun pressed flat against his nose, I took his revolver.

“I’ll find you,” he said. “I promise you that.”

The police arrived a short time later, and with the coaxed testimony of Tom Cat, all three were charged with murder.

On New Year’s Eve, I played “Auld Lang Syne” on Fats’s tarnished sax and Loretta sang. Everyone made toasts and kissed while I placed the battered instrument in a dusty glass case, where it still remains today.

Sam came over, put an arm around my neck, and kissed me hard. I stood back and looked at Fats’s picture on top of the wooden case.

She kissed me again, and I turned away.

JoJo told me I did a “real nice job” playing harp that night and handed me another Dixie. Drunk, JoJo ambled up onstage and professed his love for his wife. She watched him and smiled, then gave him a kiss too.

I wish I could’ve kept the moment, everything the way it was right then. But that was the year I met Cracker and went looking for the lost recordings of Robert Johnson in the Mississippi Delta. And my life was never the same.

(Originally published in 2012)

Central City

The Pie Man tells Baby that a man has got to grab his own future for his own self. The City of New Orleans pays good to work disaster cleanup and Baby would do well to cash in before all the money gets carted off. A lot more sensible, the Pie Man says, than running around punching on Spanish dudes. The Pie Man walks across the living room in his chef’s jacket. He plops down on the couch, making himself at home. The walls have been stripped naked to the studs. Baby doesn’t know which way his future is, but he’s damn sure it’s got nothing to do with scooping mold out of some abandoned school.

Baby sits at the plastic folding table in white briefs and a tank top, fingering the dry skin around his bulky, plastic ankle bracelet. He plucks a Vienna sausage from its tin and tosses the wiener in his mouth. Baby eyes the Pie Man. The Pie Man doesn’t seem to get that he has no claim on this place or anyone in it. Baby may be only fourteen, but this is his house. He’s the man here.

The Pie Man’s eyes are red. He kneads his face with both hands and looks around like he doesn’t remember why he’s there. Sauced out of his mind before noon. Probably spent the night with the winos back in Gert Town.

Baby’s mom doesn’t notice because she’s too busy flapping around the room like a hen with a case of colic. As she gathers her things for the day care center, she keeps clucking at him about making the right choices in life. Her standard rave.

She’s on Baby because a Latino day-jobber got jumped outside the package liquor last night, the latest in a string of black-on-brown beatdowns in retaliation for what happened to Baby’s boy, Chaney. Baby’s mom thinks Baby is part of the jump squad. He’s not. Yet. He doesn’t tell her this. If she and everyone else think he’s in on the attacks, it beats the alternative. Better to be feared than understood.

Baby’s mom checks her hair in a handheld mirror before placing it on the table he’s sitting at. It doubles as her dresser and the couch is her bed. Baby sleeps on the floor in his fleece blanket, wrapped up tight as a papoose. A portable stovetop makes the bathroom their kitchen. All their real stuff was destroyed in the flood from the levee breech after Hurricane Katrina passed nearly three years ago. They live in the front half of the house since the back is sealed off with blue tarp to keep the fungus odor out. It doesn’t work. Everything smells like old people’s feet to Baby.

Sanchez, the carpenter Baby used to gopher for, shot Chaney in cold blood, but the police called it self-defense — as if Chaney’s back had a chance against Sanchez’s .38. Baby’s mom called the Pie Man in to odd-job their General Pershing Street home three months ago because Sanchez and the rest of the Latinos are afraid to work in Baby’s neighborhood. She can’t afford a contractor with papers or real tools.

Baby’s mom didn’t confirm the Pie Man was his pops until old man Sanchez quit. Baby told his mom and the Pie Man that it didn’t make any difference that the drunk was his father. The Pie Man has no business making any claims after all this time. Either way, Baby sometimes finds himself staring into the Pie Man’s face, wondering what life might have been like if the man had always been around.

Chin on the table, eyes clamped shut, Baby realizes the Pie Man and his mom have been jabbering at him the whole time. Who knew? He wonders what they were like when they met each other back in the Stone Age. During the time of Public Enemy and parachute pants. Back when the Pie Man’s uneven flattop fade was in style. Back before they became voices in the wall.

They have a similar way of phoning in their rants. No commitment. They talk at him like they’re being watched. As if they’ll get in big trouble for failing to pay the right amount of lip service.

The Pie Man tells Baby he ought to respect his mom, man, because that’s the least she deserves for bringing him into this unbalanced world, and if Baby’s going to keep driving her every which way like he’s been doing, then Baby ain’t no kind of man. The whole issue could be that Baby’s not thinking, says the Pie Man, but he can start anytime now. He tells Baby to sit up and pay attention. Because he doesn’t know the Pie Man well, Baby does as he’s told. The Pie Man could be crazy or something, like Baby’s friend Touché.

“What, am I supposed to call you Daddy or something?” Baby nudges the skateboard under the table with his bare foot.

The Pie Man’s slacks, shoes, and neckerchief match his jacket, dingy white from head to toe. He mismatched the cloth buttons so that his collar is higher on one side than the other. To Baby the Pie Man looks like a homeless chocolate Chef Boyardee. There’s no trace of the freckles Baby got from his redheaded mom. The ones he catches hell for at school. The ones he tried to scrub off after reading the Dred Scott decision in American history the year before. Yet even though Baby’s freckles won’t come off, that doesn’t mean he can’t become the next great civil rights leader like Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur, or Lil’ Wayne. Holding it down for the people. Real niggas.

Baby scratches the oval scab on his shin, thinking it’s going to leave a mark when it heals. If it heals. Maybe he’ll cover it with a black fist tattoo when Mom’s not looking. The tattoo is Touché’s idea. Touché wants everyone in the Mighty Black Ninja Krew to get black fist tattoos after they find and stomp Sanchez today. Baby’s heard through the grapevine that Sanchez feels bad about what he did to Chaney, and it might be true. Sanchez never held back telling Baby when he’d screwed up, but he was quick to give Baby props for good work, and he always gave Baby a cold can of soda at the end of the day.