Ace Atkins - Dirty South

Whoever had owned the place had covered up the brick walls and dropped a ceiling from the new rafters. The mahogany bar, seasoned over years with whiskey and gin, had been completely destroyed in the fire and replaced with something black and plastic looking. A lot of mirrors and chrome.

I set the toolbox on the floor, found a light switch, and handed ALIAS a crowbar.

“Ready.”

“For what?”

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s tear it all out.”

“All of it?”

I looked the bar up and down.

“All of it.”

“Why you got a problem with it?”

“Because it makes me sick to think about this bar disgraced another second.”

“You got a problem with things ain’t to your likin’?”

“Yeah.”

“Hard way to be.”

I began to rip the Sheetrock away from the high walls. My shoulders ached and stretched and my breath labored. Rain fell outside, thunder cracked. About seven o’clock, I walked outside, where the rain had stopped and heat rose from the broken streets like a hundred phantoms. A greenish-yellow light leaked down from the Mississippi and all the air seemed darkly blue as if I wore tinted glasses.

The air smelled of ozone, cooked fish, and boiling meat from Lucky Dog carts ready to start the night. Friday night in the Quarter was about to begin. I checked on Annie as ALIAS carried out some of our mess to a Dumpster behind the bar.

I watched the street for JoJo.

I drank a warm beer while Annie did her business on some discarded handbills from the House of Blues and gave ALIAS five bucks to run down to the corner store to grab a Gatorade.

JoJo didn’t come.

I was sitting on the stoop with Annie, the Manhattan sign broken at my feet, when Felix walked by. My friend and the greatest bartender in the Quarter ambled up to the steps and peered into the cave where I worked. “What’s up, Nick?”

His bald head shone like a black bowling ball in the hard outside light.

He sniffed inside, wearing his white tuxedo shirt and tie, the Indian headdress in his hand. I got up, rubbed my blisters on my jeans, and followed.

Felix walked in the bar and looked down at the floors covered in broken Sheetrock. He ran his fingers over the old brick that had been blackened in the fire. “Y’all can’t get this stuff off.”

I nodded.

“We ain’t gonna get arrested, are we?” Felix asked, suddenly pulling his hand back as if the walls were hot. “JoJo sold this place.”

“I got it back.”

He nodded with understanding and stood in the back of the room. “Too bad ole Rolande ain’t around. He could wire the stage back up in about two seconds.”

His words hung in the air, the thought of old Rolande and his scrunched Jack Daniel’s hat. I kicked some of the Sheetrock into a pile and added my completed Dixie.

“I need some music in here while I work.”

“I seen a jukebox for sale over at some place on Esplanade. Look like that ole one we had, only it loaded with stuff I never heard.”

“I can replace the music.”

Felix stood framed by the doorway, a wide swath of light from outside against his head. He stared up at the ceiling. “JoJo had a lot of friends might want to help.”

“He’s in New Orleans,” I said. “But he doesn’t want any part of this.”

Felix looked at his watch and then added the Indian headdress to the trash heap. “Some little Italian man with one of those cell phones been tellin’ me I work too slow. Pour the drinks too hard.”

I smiled.

“You put me back on?”

I nodded. He didn’t ask about his salary.

“I’ll see you Monday morning,” Felix said, and walked back into the street.

I found a cardboard box behind the bar and borrowed a pen from the dude at the used bookstore. I wrote in huge cap letters. JOJO’S BLUES BAR IS BACK. THE ORIGINAL WILL REOPEN SOON.

I hung the sign in the window and stood in the street admiring the work, my boots stuck in a big puddle of storm water. I even crudely drew some musical notes on each side of JoJo’s name.

I smiled and stood back.

The rain began to fall again when I saw him. Just a blur of brown about a block away. His face just a blackened oval in some sort of hood. The night turned the sky purple and gray. A hard wind ripped down Conti smelling of the Mississippi River.

I walked toward the corner.

He turned.

Rain ran down his coat, sluicing from his body, as if made from oil. The man who’d broken into my warehouse.

He buried his head deep into the folds of the wet brown coat as if it made him invisible. He turned a corner.

I followed.

“WHAT YOU DOIN’, MAN?” ALIAS yelled to me.

“I’ll be right back.”

“No, you ain’t. What’s up?”

“Stay here.”

The man in the brown coat disappeared into a group of tourists walking down Chartres by the Fisheries building and across from the Napoleon House. Gold electric light leaked out of the glass doors from the bar as the man’s walk turned into a jog.

He was running, his brown hood tattered and worn, toward Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral. My boots clacked on the flagstone, most of the stores now closed. Antique weapons. Haitian art. High-dollar lingerie. Only two men running on an empty street. I could hear the breath inside my ears as he ran toward the steps of the great church and turned into Pirate’s Alley.

A few gas lamps burned in the narrow shot once used as an avenue for smugglers and thieves. The gap narrowed. He passed over Royal.

I hung back. Letting him run out.

I walked behind two women in yellow ponchos drinking Hurricanes.

When I looked again, he was gone.

I passed the women, running for a few blocks.

At Dauphine, I stopped in the middle of the street and turned in all directions. Dance music pulsed from the clubs on Bourbon. Crooked iron hitching posts with horse heads lined the now paved street. The dance music kept pumping.

I ran down St. Peter back toward the church, passing five college girls staggering in the street and holding a young girl up as her head lolled to the side.

I heard scraping.

I looked back down St. Peter toward Rampart.

I saw the hooded figure scaling an old broken drainpipe running along a brick wall. Moss and ferns grew wildly in cracks that he used for footholds.

He was almost to a fire escape that hung uselessly, headed nowhere.

I ran into the building, some kind of anonymous pool hall, and past a grizzled bartender slicing lemons. I moved toward a landing and ran up some beaten wooden stairs. The bartender yelled after me but I pushed through empty liquor boxes and crates of bottles to a door opening into an empty second floor. The dull light of a Falstaff beer sign out front lit half of the room.

I could hear the man’s hands scraping the outside wall. Climbing.

I followed the sound, my eyes adjusting in the light, slowly walking to the window. The dark figure emerged on the landing. I could see his back turned to me.

I grabbed a stray Barq’s bottle from the floor.

Someone ran after me from the steps below, yelling they were going to call the cops.

The yelling grew louder.

I squinted into the dark light.

The man in the hooded coat pressed his face to the glass.

I could not breathe.

His fingernails touched the dirty glass in sharp, long claws. Thick and hardened. His face was gray as a corpse, his eyes yellowed and narrow. Small broken teeth.

I stepped back, my breath caught halfway in my throat.

The face contorted into something someone might think was a smile as he pushed a foot against the sill and began to climb, almost arachnid in his movements. His legs disappeared upward by the time I tried the window, caked and frozen with paint.