Ace Atkins - Dirty South

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“People call him Redbone. The name he gave when he was booked went back to some man he killed. Oh yeah, he kills people for money too. Sounds like a sweet man.”

“Never convicted?”

“This guy in robbery suspects he kills people and lays them in old tombs. How we ever gonna find those bodies?”

Jay whistled low. “I got a couch,” he said to me. “Stay a few.”

“I’ve got the kid.”

“Bring him too.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m used to looking out for myself.”

“Listen, I know they’re looking at this Cash guy hard,” Jay said, exchanging looks with the officer and then back at me. “How ’bout we send a little warning to him?”

“It’s not him.”

“Right.”

“Just give me a few days,” I said.

“You still have that Browning?”

“I have a Glock I picked up in Memphis,” I said. “Holds seventeen rounds. Very handy.”

“Keep it close.”

TREY BRILL WATCHED HIMSELF in a wall of mirrors, flexing his chest in his new green Abercrombie T and pushing his hair off his forehead. Christian finished out a set of incline presses behind him, his green eyes glowing light under his thick dark eyelashes. Trey watched his friend, so sleek, brown, and hard under the health-club lights. If he was a woman, he’d like Christian. Christian had style and knew how to whisper the right words into their ears at the bars. He knew how to order drinks and choose a cigar and how to talk anyone into doing anything. Trey would like to be Christian one day. He’d like to be that cool.

Trey traded places with his friend on the bench, smelling his Calvin cologne and feeling his sweat against his neck. He could only hit ten and Christian had done fifteen. But Trey knew he’d still be ripped for Belize this summer. They’d party down there with all those college girls until they couldn’t freakin’ move. Rum Runners and reggae and golf.

“Why you smiling?” Christian asked, wiping his brow with a white towel. Limp Bizkit playing over the PA system. I did it all for the nookie. Goddamn right.

“Thinking about fuckin’ Belize, man,” Trey said.

“Sweet,” Christian said, and gave him a high five.

A couple of young girls in Nike workout tops and bare stomachs rolled by drinking pink smoothies. “That’s nice,” Christian said.

“Go work it.”

“Na, I’m cool.”

The men wandered by rows of mirrors, scattering their images all around them. Sometimes Trey couldn’t tell who was who. Their images merging and changing and morphing into something else. Made him feel a little dizzy just thinking about it.

“What do you want me to do if that Travers dude comes by again?” Christian asked.

“Tell him to piss off,” Trey said, sliding into the pecdec machine and hammering out about eight quick ones. He grunted and slid off the seat as if coming down from a horse.

“He thinks you rolled ALIAS.”

“He’s an idiot.”

Christian shook his head. “Fucking Malcolm Paris already took it for that and killing goddamn Dio. Why would a guy swing himself by a goddamn rope if he was lying?”

“Exactly,” Trey said. “I’m not worried.”

Christian looked at him, changing the weight on the machine to almost double Trey’s. He gave Trey that scary look, the one where he stared into his freakin’ mind with those weird green eyes. It was like he was psychic.

Christian began his set, not slamming the weight like Trey. He worked it slow and even.

“It’s just,” Trey started, “what if he finds out about Dio?”

“Fuck that shit,” Christian said, finishing up. He leaned into Trey’s ear and whispered – just like Trey had seen him do to women in the bars. Trey’s neck pricked in gooseflesh. “Teddy will never let him expose those ‘Lost Tape’ CDs. Dead or alive, Dio is fucking Ninth Ward.”

“Or ALIAS.”

“ALIAS is a punk,” Christian said.

“Teddy doesn’t trust him, either.”

“Would you?”

“Kid’s smart,” Trey said. “I’ll give him that. He sure as shit has fooled stupid-ass Travers.”

“Man thinks he’s saving a poor little black kid’s soul.”

“But really he’s playing with a demon.”

They finished their workout in silence. Trey and Christian exchanging spots, complimenting each other on their set, and working together. Life unchanged since they were boys.

They were walking in the parking lot when Christian asked him, “If this guy doesn’t stop harassing you, why don’t you talk to Teddy?”

“Teddy’s fucked in the head right now.”

“How bad?”

“Far gone,” Trey said. “He called me Malcolm the other day. Man, he misses that boy bad.”

“Kind of like if one of us went before the other.”

“We’ll make it,” Trey said, grabbing his friend’s shoulder. “Just like we made out from that punch in Chalmette. No one’s gonna fuck with the boys’ business.”

As they climbed into Trey’s BMW, the color seemed to shift in Christian’s eyes. A coolness spread across his face and his lips parted.

He stared at Trey as if seeing him for the first time.

They didn’t talk all the way back to Metairie.

“I CAN’T FIGURE THAT BOY OUT,” JoJo said, drinking his 9 A.M. café au lait from the end of the bar as if he’d never left New Orleans. “He wasn’t a bad worker. Got up in the morning, fed the cows, took the work to heart. Listen to me. You understand?”

I nodded. “When did he take the money?”

“Notice it two days ago,” he said. “Ask him about it and he said to me, ‘So what if I did take your money?’ What makes a child like that?”

I was finished up whitewashing the brick that had been blackened in the fire. I liked the way the paint covered and sealed the grooves, the unevenness of the old pattern of mortar. By the back loading dock, Curtis Lee screwed down ten-inch pine planks into the subfloor. His little cassette recorder shaking with some Little Walter I’d given him to replace the Whitesnake.

Curtis, with a long cigarette trailing from his lips, laid out the floor in a yellow pine jigsaw puzzle and pieced it together with his drill. The cigarette’s ash hung at least an inch long as the sound of the drill almost worked in time with Walter’s music.

“That song take you back, don’t it?” JoJo asked his buddy Bronco, who worked his brush on the opposite wall.

“I guess.”

Bronco wore a long-sleeved blue work shirt and dark jeans. I had yet to see him splatter a drop.

“You don’t like Walter?” I asked.

Bronco shook his head. A long scar on his forearm looked smooth and pink in the morning light.

JoJo sipped on his coffee and returned to the Picayune .

“We knew him,” JoJo said.

“Best harp player I ever heard,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can even touch his licks.”

“You’re right,” JoJo said. “But that doesn’t mean Walter wasn’t a evil motherfucker.”

Bronco kept painting.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Nope,” JoJo said to me, but looking over at Bronco. “Some things are meant to stay up in Chicago.”

When JoJo wanted to keep a secret, he could keep it for decades. You didn’t try.

“Y’all mind watching Tavarius?” I asked. “I’ve got to talk to some folks.”

“On Teddy’s business?” JoJo asked.

“Have to pay my debt.”

“Don’t be goin’ and payin’ it in full,” JoJo said. “All animals lay with their own kind.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means Teddy’s music brings on hate,” he said. “Rap doesn’t elevate us. It makes children turn to violence to buy things they don’t need. Money, money, money. Trashy women. That’s not music. Glorifies people being ignorant. Blues is music.”