Ace Atkins - Dirty South

“You never saw him.”

“Ain’t that many people with yellow eyes. Had that raggedy-ass brown coat too. Just like you said.”

The coffee began to hiss a little, still not perking. I reached under the sink and pulled out a bag of trash, tying it tight. I hooked Annie on her leash with one hand and grabbed the trash in the other, making my way down to the street.

I left the trash on my stoop and kept on walking barefoot down Julia Street.

ALIAS followed. Annie sniffed the ground.

I heard him still talking behind me.

The morning light was clean and bright. A light blue sky, small wispy clouds. I thought about heading down to the restaurant supply place with JoJo. And we needed a new neon sign. We needed that bad before we opened. Blue cursive letters.

“Ain’t you listenin’, jackass?”

I turned. Annie squatted on moss growing on some old bricks.

I stared at him.

He smiled a gold smile. I kept staring.

“He wasn’t alone, neither,” he said.

“Fred Flintstone was riding shotgun.”

“Hey, man. Fuck you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t have time for this.”

I walked Annie across the road, fishing into my jeans for a pack of cigarettes and lit one, walking slow back to the warehouse. Some asshole had smashed a blue bottle of vodka on the street and I wished I’d worn shoes.

He stood by my small blue door. His hands crossed over his chest while he leaned back into the old red brick. A red baseball hat with a Japanese character for an insignia. The streetcar clanged way down on St. Charles. I looked at my watch.

ALIAS’s eyes narrowed, his face falling into the shadow of the street. He would not look me in the eye.

“Come get your donuts,” I said. “I’ll take you back. How’d you get here anyway?”

Annie tugged at my leash and I let her run on through the door and up the steps.

“Took a cab,” he said. “You eat ’em, Travers.”

“Hey, you don’t have to be like that.”

“Do what you like.”

He turned away.

I smiled at the ground. “Who was it?”

He got maybe ten yards down the street and turned back, staring into the sun. His feet pigeon-toed. “What?”

“Who was with freak?”

His mouth grew crooked. “Does it matter?”

“Who?”

“Dio.”

“He’s dead, you know.”

He nodded, still squinting at me. “Yeah.”

“Go home, ALIAS,” I said.

JOJO AND FELIX MOVED small tables around the hardwood floor trying to arrange the place like it used to be. They were doing a pretty good job, because for a second when I walked in, I was a little startled that maybe the bar never closed at all. The front door was open, four iron ceiling fans working hard with a straight shot to the rear exit. JoJo had scrounged up some old juke posters from Magic Bus Records Shop and that company from Slidell had finally delivered the jukebox. She wasn’t as pretty as that old sixties classic that had melted in the fire, but she was thick and chrome and stocked with all the great old blues. Bobby Blue to Z. Z. Hill.

“I got this old cooler from that zydeco bar on Bourbon,” JoJo said, pointing to a long refrigerator with a Jax Beer logo on the side. He slid open a top door to show the galvanized steel interior loaded down with Dixies. Regulars, Blackened Voodoo, and the Crimson Ale. “Don’t be a dumb-ass like that man. Keep it simple. Buy from places shuttin’ down.”

“How much I owe you?” I asked.

“A million dollars,” JoJo said.

Felix dropped a mop into a sudsy bucket filled with hot water and Murphy’s Oil Soap and began to wash down the wooden plank floors. I missed the old scarred hardwoods but these were thick and long and would soon become as beaten as an Old West saloon.

“How’d you do that?” I asked, nodding to some blackened grooves already worn by the back door.

JoJo walked over to the bar, where he pulled out a long section of chains. “I whupped the shit out ’em.”

Felt right and good to have JoJo break the place in. He walked around taking in every little curve and pocket, his mind workin’ on the way it should be.

I grabbed a beer from the old cooler, feeling good on the bar stools I’d bought earlier.

JoJo punched up “Mannish Boy” on the jukebox. The version Muddy did with Johnny Winter on the Hard Again album back in the seventies. The album, all bull-shit and academic rhetoric aside, is by far the most enjoyable blues record ever made.

“If you don’t like that,” JoJo said, “you got nothin’ between your legs.”

Muddy sang he was a man. Johnny Winter howled and screamed, backing him up.

Felix moved his hips a bit as he mopped.

JoJo slid behind the bar and opened a cold Dixie with a bottle opener he’d installed under the flat top. “You got four bottle openers all down the line. Don’t want to be foolin’ with nothin’ you got to look for.”

I nodded. He sat beside me, taking a sip.

“Come back, JoJo.”

“No, sir,” he said. “Not yet.”

He smiled. He looked around the dim light of the bar, Muddy alive again on Conti Street. “Besides, if I come back now, how are we gonna see what you gonna do?”

I sipped the beer. It was two o’clock. I didn’t care.

“You want to get a muffuletta down at Central?” JoJo asked.

“Yeah, let me get it,” I said.

JoJo smiled. “I’ll let you.”

“When you headed back?”

“After I eat my muff.”

“Come on, JoJo.”

“It’s all you, son,” he said. He patted me on the back. “How’s it feel?”

“What’s that?”

“To be grown.”

I smiled, the beer was cold in my hand, and I understood.

Felix kept mopping. The blues played on. Old rhythms returned.

“ALIAS has lost his mind,” I said, and told him about my run-in with Trey Brill and what I learned from Teddy. “This morning, before I picked up the tables and chairs, he told me a dead man had come to visit him in the night.”

“Maybe it happened.”

“Hell no,” I said. “I’m done. Teddy can deal with him the way he wants.”

“Look deeper,” JoJo said.

“Oh, come on, JoJo,” I said. “That kid conned you and me and Loretta. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

He looked at me. His brown eyes looked heavy with the creased skin around them. “I don’t waste time,” he said. “There’s more to Tavarius. That kid is all right.”

“Maybe he killed Malcolm too,” I said. “He made up a damned good lie about folks ripping him off. He’s so smart, JoJo. I mean, that kid can lie.”

“Easy when you do that,” JoJo said, standing from the bar. “Ain’t it?”

“What’s that?” I said, enjoying the beer and watching Felix mop.

“Handin’ off your troubles.”

“Why are you on his side?” I said. “You were through with him too.”

JoJo settled into his seat, the jukebox cutting on to a new record. He watched the blank row of old brick as he used to when a mirror hung there. He took a sip of beer.

“I was wrong.”

“Come on.”

He opened his wallet and folded down two hundred-dollar bills on the table before me.

“Found it in my jacket last night,” he said. “Tavarius was tellin’ the truth and I shut him out.”

JoJo left me there to think with the folded bills.

And I did for a long time.

AT SUNSET, I RAN down St. Charles, turned onto Canal past all the camera shops and jewelry stores, and wound my way to the Aquarium, where I followed the Riverwalk downriver. I passed the vagrants sleeping on rocks still warm from the sun and watched rats skittering through overflowing trash cans. I almost tripped on one as it ran back with a hot dog in its mouth and headed into the rocks along the Mississippi. My Tulane football shirt was soaked in sweat. I tried to slow my breathing and pick up my pace as I stopped at the Governor Nichols Street Wharf. I put my hands on top of my head and noticed everything turn a murky gold and red. The brick and stucco of the old buildings of the Quarter softening.