Ace Atkins - Dirty South

My day was just starting.

“Kid won’t talk to you.”

“I have to try.”

Orval looked around at a prostitute sauntering into the grill with a stained dress and two Japanese tourists in black leather. Both men ordered a couple of Budweisers.

“Jail changes people,” he said. “But you still live a long way from Old Metairie.”

OLD METAIRIE WAS NEW MONEY that had grown old. Big houses and big cars huddled under sprawling oak branches and lined idyllic streets; children rode bicycles and played football in between the rare traffic. There was a pink stucco country club and a ton of small boutiques, coffee shops, and little bistros. A little oasis away from downtown. The neighborhood streets disappeared off Metairie Road under a dome of oak branches as if to hide the secret garden. Marble statues. Stone walkways.

Ferns grew on oaks in the richness of the humidity as a light shower hit the top of the canopied trees and dropped down with a splat on my windshield. The sky had turned a dark gray and pink in the north. I slowed to a stop down on a street called Nassau.

The Chase house was whitewashed brick with big green shutters held down firm with wrought iron. A white lawn jockey showed his lantern to the walkway. I rang the bell. Christian hadn’t been at his father’s office and I’d found his family’s home address in the White Pages.

A black woman appeared, laughing and holding a highball in her hand. Her gray hair pulled straight and tight into a comb. Green eyes wrinkled at the edges. She wore a black pantsuit with a white silk shirt splayed open with several buttons loose.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Chase,” I said, guessing.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Is Christian around?”

She looked back into the house and I heard several people talking and some jazz playing low. It sounded like Earl Hines. Mrs. Chase looked into my eyes and then turned away back into the house, her heels clicking on the marble floors.

I heard her call her son’s name.

I took a few steps back and saw a couple of Mercedeses and Cadillacs parked in a little cove by the four-car garage. No one came to the door for a while. Mrs. Chase did not ask me if I wanted to join the party or have a drink with a few of her friends.

I walked down a stone path back to my truck to make a call when a young man in his late twenties opened the door and followed.

Blue-jeaned and shoeless. A tight black T-shirt hugging his muscular upper body. I almost didn’t recognize him as the man I’d seen with Trey at his firm in the CBD. As he walked toward me, I remembered him playing ball while we waited and the foul smell coming from his body.

Shit.

Christian Chase flexed his arms across his chest and I saw the scarred brand on his arm. The flesh on his biceps had grown pink and swollen where he’d been touched by a hot iron. He smelled like a ton of Calvin Klein.

“Good to see you again.”

“What’s your problem, man?”

“Kenny G, Michael Bolton, Dave Matthews, and Fred Durst. I call them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

He tilted his head at me, his green eyes seemed to glow as a slow smile sliced across his face. He chewed gum and stuck his hands into his pockets. He hunched his shoulders while he watched and chewed, almost cheetahlike in the roundness of his muscles.

“Things working out for you since you left the Farm?” I asked.

His gaze loosened and he squinted one eye at me. “What do you know about that?”

“I go to Angola to record musicians,” I said. “One of the finest guitar players of this century, Leadbelly, was once there.”

He popped his gum. “Quit fucking with Trey.”

“He never looked out for you.”

He walked in close, his hands still in his jeans and eyes focused somewhere on the ground below me. He inched in to my face. “You can’t work me. It can’t be done. You can try, but you’re gonna lose.”

“I heard Trey took most of his vacations in Aspen while you were inside. I guess those nice cold beers tasted mighty fine. But I’m sure you met friends.”

“I don’t suck dick.”

“Did Trey come visit you, man?”

He looked away. Stepped back and watched me.

“You think you can come up to my home and disrupt my mother’s party telling me shit about my best friend? You’ve got to be fucked in the head.”

“He conned that money from ALIAS. I need someone to lead me through how it was done.”

“Trey has been my friend since we were six.”

“Whose idea was it to take that girl from Chalmette? Why do you think a black man got stuck with it?”

“Didn’t have anything to do with that,” Christian said. “You liberal fucks always want to play race like we’re cripples. Fuck off.”

“Brill sure didn’t push his daddy away,” I said. “You could’ve used just one person to stand up. But no one did.”

Christian Chase turned and walked away down the narrow stone path. The rain fell harder on me while he opened the porch door and walked inside to the music. He just kept shaking his head and laughing.

The door closed with a solid thud.

FOUR MEMORIES OF MALCOLM played in my head. I didn’t like to remember him. I didn’t want to keep making myself sad and sick over something I had nothing to do with. But these were so personal and old that I was glad this was what my brain had selected. It was the kid, not the man, that stayed. Malcolm remained fifteen in my head: catching balls at the old Saints camp on Airways, hustling players for money the moment we’d step off the plane, smiling on his sixteenth birthday when his brother bought him a Mercedes, and watching him steal the dance floor the night we’d made the play-offs for the first time in years.

He was not hard or scarred. He was unbearded and smiling. He wasn’t left swinging in a tree like a tattered photo from a nineteenth-century lynching.

I drove into my garage and bounded up the steps to the second floor of the warehouse. I heard the laughing. Voices rebounded off my high ceilings and into the metal stairwell like an echoing funnel. I was soaked with water and grew cold on the landing.

I was too tired for another round with Cash or any other random freak who’d broken into my house. I crept back to my truck and grabbed my Glock.

When I returned to the landing, I slid back my metal door, ready to face whatever shit I’d been handed.

“Goddamn, boy,” a voice said. “Look like someone shit in your Cap’n Crunch.”

JoJo, ALIAS, and some friend of JoJo’s I’d met years ago sat at my kitchen table playing cards and feeding Annie leftovers from a Burger King bag. I slowly tucked the gun back into my belt.

“Made some coffee,” JoJo said. “Left it warmin’ on your stove. Why don’t you get some Community Coffee? This cheap shit taste like mud.”

I found a towel in my kitchen and dried my hair, offering my fist to ALIAS.

He gave me a pound but kept his gaze down at the table. I noticed he didn’t have any cards. He leaned his head into his hands.

I shook JoJo’s friend’s hand.

“You remember Bronco?” JoJo asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We met a long time ago.”

“Back when Pinetop come back,” Bronco said. “It has been a while.”

Bronco was about JoJo’s age and black, but with green eyes and high cheekbones. A strong Native American face.

“Bronco rode down with me to help me get some things for Lo,” JoJo said. “You know we sold our place on Royal? Need to clean out by end of the month.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

I took off my jean jacket and hung it on a peg by the door.

“You helpin’ out?” I asked ALIAS.