Ace Atkins - Dirty South

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.”

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 burgers, 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.”

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.