Ace Atkins - Dirty South

You order a forty and get one but the old man swipes it from you.

Two old men sit down with you. Just as old and black and gray as the man and you gettin’ tired. You walk over to the jukebox and check out the tunes while the old men start talkin’ about cotton and farming and some man named Sonny Boy.

Juke has some old-school joints. Run-D.M.C. like Malcolm used to play for you. Music made before you was born. Something called “It’s Like That and That’s the Way It Is.”

You kick it up. Even other punks noddin’ with the music, ’cept the old men.

In the dark bar, concrete cave over your head, you get the mean eye.

Just for playin’ music.

“Tavarius,” the old man call you. “This man is Bronco and his brother, Eddie Wilde. We went to school together here. We was you once.”

You look at his face and don’t see it, listenin’ to Run-D.M.C. and then flippin’ that song to “Rock Box.” You think about Malcolm and the way he died and you clench your jaw real hard. Sweat workin’ hard in this concrete room.

“You still got it?” JoJo ask.

The man he call Bronco, black with green eyes and a face like an Indian, show the back of his forearm and four scars runnin’ like tracks.

“What happen to you?” you ask.

“We had some women trouble.”

You smile, take a swig from JoJo’s beer. He don’t say nothin’, like he can’t see it.

“In fact,” Bronco say, “her name was T-R-O-U-B-L-E. And wadn’t worth the time.”

Eddie Wilde, thin and tall and in a black suit, shake his head. “Pussy make you do some dumb shit.”

“You right,” JoJo say. “Ever think about that? Everythin’ a man do is for pussy. His job, his clothes. Even drivin’ a silly-ass car. But he ain’t never believe it.”

“I remember when you wore your first suit to church,” Bronco say. “You just met Loretta, I do believe, and just about lose your mind.”

“Shit,” JoJo say, snatching the forty away from you and takin’ a sip.

Y’all sit like this a long time. You can hear the trucks and cars prowlin’ down MLK and hear the country thugs talkin’ shit outside. The air is so hot your T-shirt sticks to your skin and soon you start lookin’ at yourself in the mirror when JoJo send you to get beers. You look back at the old men and flex the muscles in your arm.

JoJo start playin’ blues on the jukebox and the old men come alive. Eddie Wilde dance with himself out on the smooth floor, waggin’ his old black-man finger. Bronco sing along with a song call “Feel Like Goin’ Home.”

You could swear that your old man’s eyes get heavy with that, his lips moving over the words. “Late in the evenin’,” he say. His mind forty years behind.

They all slammin’ beers and talkin’ shit when you see those young thugs walk into the joint. They little older than you, wearin’ black Ts with no sleeves and thick gold around their neck. They watch you from the end of the bar with their red eyes.

Under the table, you feel for the knife in your pocket.

While laughin’ at one of JoJo’s jokes, Bronco take the blade from you hand and starts cleanin’ his nails with it.

The country thugs come to you.

You kick the chair out. Ready to fight.

One of the boys smiles. “You right,” he say. “ALIAS, my man.”

Everybody slappin’ you on the back, pullin’ you away from the small corner where the old men drink.

They keep talkin’ but no one is listening.

“HAVE YOU TALKED TO JOJO?” Maggie asked, very early and very bright the next morning. I rolled off the mattress I kept on the warehouse floor and cradled the phone closer to my ear.

“No.”

“He seemed pretty pissed,” she said. “You know, like he didn’t have time to talk.”

“He always sounds that way.”

“You doin’ okay?”

“Fine.”

“You know what I did yesterday?”

“No, but I’d like to know,” I said, growing awake thinking about Maggie. I knew she’d been up since dawn. Her skin would be flushed from taking care of her horses, the smell of hay on her sweaty T-shirt and in her dark hair.

“I rode for about two hours up in the north county,” she said. “You know the land that Abby’s parents had?”

“Yeah.”

“Just me,” she said. “I tried to keep in trees but I got all sweaty and my jeans and boots got hot as hell.”

“I like you sweaty.”

“Well, Tony finds this little creek that I hadn’t thought about since when I was a kid. I just kind of kicked out of my boots and clothes and jumped right in. Nick, it was so cool in there. Some nice big rocks to dry yourself in the sun.”

“You lay in the sun without your boots?”

“Nothin’ else.”

“Nothin’?”

I rolled over on my back and stared at the tin-stamp ceiling. Red chili-pepper lights burned in my kitchen. Morning light shot through the cracks in my bookshelves like lasers.

“Nick?”

“I wish I was in Mississippi.”

“Me too.”

“You’re in Mississippi.”

“But not in Mississippi with you.”

“The entire state is better with me?”

“Not really,” she said. “I just need some help shoveling out the shit in my barns.”

“That’s me,” I said. “Shit shoveler first class.”

“Glad you finally found your calling.”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “It’s a gift.”

I showered and shaved. Annie needed a short walk to fertilize a little tree and I grabbed a croissant and cup of chicory coffee down at Louisiana Products. I made some phone calls. Finally I got one back.

HIGH GLASS walls surrounded Alyce Diamandis in the little fishbowl office where she worked on the third floor of the Times-Picayune . File cabinets filled almost every other inch of the research library, long and thick as coffins, loaded with newspaper clippings going back to the twenties.

Alyce was a tall, thin woman who wore her black hair twisted up into a bun and held in place with chopsticks. She had on cat-shaped glasses with small rhinestones and a red Chinese dress embroidered with gold dragons.

“Somewhere there’s an Asian drag queen running around naked,” I said, walking into the little cube.

“I was feeling a little yin and yang.”

I’d known Alyce for years through my longtime ex, who once worked at the paper as a crime reporter.

Alyce kept on typing and pushed the glasses up her nose. Wall-to-wall books lined her office and reference guides waited crammed between metal bookends of an A and a Z . A Rubik’s Cube and a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary sat on her desk. “One minute,” she said. “Al-most.”

I picked up the Rubik’s Cube and began twisting it around. “I used to have one of these.”

“I read this morning that when you turn thirty-five,” she said, still typing, “you are officially no longer in a cool demographic.”

“Already passed that.”

“But soon Rubik’s Cubes, Pac-Man, and Duran Duran will be like our grandparents’ nostalgia over Benny Goodman or Clark Gable,” she said. “You know? When Generation X all passes over thirty-five, it’s all over.”

“All those Corey Feldman movies on American Movie Classics.”

She finished clicking, laughing, and turned to me and crossed her long arms across her chest. A small candle burned by the computer monitor, some kind of chocolate aromatherapy. There was a little Zen sand garden and two open Mountain Dew cans.