Ace Atkins - Dirty South

I cleaned my hands with a gasoline-soaked rag and ran my fingers over the sleeves of his suit. “Nice.”

Malcolm laughed.

You would’ve thought I was a leper, the way Teddy yanked his arm away. “Get yo’ greasy-ass monkey hands off me.”

Malcolm crossed his arms across his ghetto denim, a scowl on his face. “Teddy don’t want no one messin’ with his pimpin’ clothes.”

“Nick-” Teddy began.

Annie ambled on over and made a slow growling sound. I scratched her antenna ears. She smelled his crotch and trotted away.

“What in the hell is that?” Teddy asked.

“A hint,” I said. “She says arf.”

“Look like a goddamn hyena to me.”

“So?” I asked, cleaning grease and oil off the timing cover. I reached for a putty knife resting on my battery. Teddy strolled in front of my workbench and admired my calendar featuring Miss March 1991. Annie found her bone.

Sweat ringed around Teddy’s neck and he kept patting his brow with a soiled handkerchief. Malcolm lit a cigarette from a pack of Newports and leaned against my brick wall. He kept his eyes on his brother and shook his head slowly. His beard was neatly trimmed, his thick meaty hands cupped over the cigarette as he watched us.

“Y’all never asked me to lunch before.”

“Sure we have,” Teddy said.

“When you wanted to borrow $3,000 to start your own line of hair-care products.”

“Macadamia-nut oil. It would have worked.”

“Well?” I scraped away at the old sealant around the timing cover. I studied the crap caked over the cover after decades of use. At least the truck was running even after I ran it into a north Mississippi ditch last fall.

“You ever listen to the CDs I send you?” Teddy asked.

“Nope.”

“You know ALIAS, right? You ain’t that livin’ in 1957 that you ain’t seen him. BET, MTV, cover of XXL .”

“I don’t watch TV except cartoons. But, yeah, I know ALIAS. So what?”

“He got caught in some shit,” Teddy said. His voice shook and he wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. “Need some help.”

“I can’t rap,” I said. “But I can break-dance a little.”

“Not that kind of help,” Teddy said.

“Aw, man. Kind of wanted some of those Hammer pants. Need a long crotch.”

“Kind of help you give to them blues players,” he said, ignoring me. “Them jobs you do that JoJo always talkin’ ’bout.”

“Royalty recovery?”

Malcolm spoke up in a cloud of smoke: “Finding people.”

I began to remove the screws from the old pump and looked at Malcolm. I still remembered when he was a nappy-haired kid who shagged balls at training camp for our kickers. Now he was a hardened man. I noticed a bulge in the right side of his denim coat.

“Who do you need found?”

“A man who conned my boy out of 500 grand,” Teddy said. “Goddamn, it’s hot in here.”

“Sorry, man,” I said. “Sounds like you need more help than me.”

“You the best I got.”

“We’ll talk.”

“There ain’t time.”

“Why?”

Malcolm looked at his brother and put a hand on his shoulder before walking back to his Hummer with an exaggerated limp.

“Some Angola-hard punk gave me twenty-four, brother,” Teddy said. “I only got twenty-one hours of my life left.”

AFTER TEDDY DROPPED THE NEWS, we decided there wasn’t a hell of a lot of time for soul food at Dunbar’s. So when we watched Malcolm head back out to the studio, I pulled on my walking boots and a clean T-shirt, closed down the garage, and we rolled down Freret and headed up to Claiborne in Teddy’s electric-blue Bentley. I cracked the window, lit a Marlboro, and sank into the rabbit fur while he leaned back into the driver’s seat and steered with two fingers. A sad smile crossed his face as we moved from the million-dollar mansions off St. Charles to candy-colored shotguns and onto a street populated with pawnshops, check-cashing businesses, and EZ credit signs. Neon and billboards. Broken bottles lay in gullies and yellowed newspapers twirled across vacant lots.

The air felt warm against my face, heavy bass vibrating my back and legs, when we rolled low under the giant oaks that shrouded the corners around the Magnolia projects. The trees’ roots were exposed, rotted, and dry near portions of the housing projects that had been plowed under. Their tenants now living in Section 8 housing in New Orleans East.

I felt the rabbit fur on the armrest and looked into the backseat, where Teddy had a small flat-screen television and DVD player. A copy of Goodfellas had been tossed on the backseat along with a sack of ranch-flavored Doritos.

“Why don’t you sell your car?”

“It’s a hell of a ride but ain’t no way close to 700 grand, brother,” he said.

“Your house?” I asked. “That mansion down by the lake with your dollar-sign-shaped pool? What about a loan on that?”

“Ain’t time,” he said. And very low, he said, “And I got three of them mortgage things already.”

“Oh, man.”

“What about J.J.?” I asked, dropping the name of our teammate who had just won two Super Bowls. “He’s got more money than God or George Lucas. You try and call him? He’d float you a favor.”

“J.J. and I ain’t that tight no more.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I owe him $80,000.”

“Jesus.”

“Don’t you go blasphemin’ in this car.”

“Why?” I asked. “You pay to have it baptized?”

We stopped at the corner of Claiborne, where on a mammoth billboard two hands were held together in prayer. Someone had spray-painted the words WHY ME? over the address of the church. Across the wide commercial street, I saw another billboard of Britney Spears. She was selling Pepsi. Britney hadn’t been touched.

“You’re deep in debt and can’t get a loan from anyone else,” I said. “Who is this Cash guy? Just kiss and make up.”

He didn’t even look over at me as he accelerated toward the Calliope housing projects. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crack a joke. See, Cash is a real humane individual.” Teddy licked his lips and wiped his face for the thousandth time. “Heard he once stuck a set of jumper cables in a man’s ass for spillin’ wine on his Italian leather coat. Up his ass, man. That’s fucked up.”

“Did the man turn over?”

Teddy shook his head. “Listen, I came to Cash ’bout two months back so we could get the money for ALIAS’s CD. Had to get some promotional dollars.”

“For what?”

“Advertisin’. This video we shootin’ tonight.”

“Call it off.”

“Too late,” he said. “Everyone’s been paid. See, we were all in some trouble and then Cash and me was tryin’ to put together this movie? I had this idea about New Orleans bein’ underwater and only the folks in the ghetto survived. You know like we were livin’ in this underwater world with boats made out of Bentleys and shit…”

“So he loaned you $700,000?”

“Half a mil,” he said. “He added another two for interest and his hard-earned time.”

Teddy shook his head as he drove, hot wind blowing through the car. The asphalt more cracked on this side of Uptown. We passed a Popeye’s fried chicken, a McDonald’s, some bulletproof gas stations. Barbershops. Bail bonds.

“Tell me about Cash,” I said. “Maybe I can reason with him.”

“You got a better chance of gettin’ a gorilla to sing you ‘Happy Birthday,’” Teddy said. “This ape raised in Calliope like my man ALIAS. But he don’t have no heart like the kid. He’s an animal. Bald head. Got all his teeth capped in platinum and diamonds. Stole everythin’ he have. Even his beats. Got his sound from this badass DJ ’bout five years back. Now Cash eatin’ steaks and lobster, screwin’ Penthouse pets and that boy coachin’ damn high-school football.”