Ace Atkins - Dirty South

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 swigged 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.”

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.