Ace Atkins - Dirty South

He looked down at me. “Push, goddammit. Push us out of this shit.”

I moved to the side of the boat, found my fists on the hull loosening, handprints painting brown patterns on the white paint, and pretended to move the boat from the reeds.

Christian revved her motor again and foul-smelling bubbles of marsh gases erupted from deep in the bottom.

Teddy stood over me, his arm extended with his gun. He squeezed off a few in the direction of Cash.

Still, I heard the steady, constant motor of Cash’s boat. Chugging. Ready to pounce.

I pretended to push more. My weight not moving a feather.

Teddy disappeared from the stern.

I walked backward in the thick water. The water level coming up to my neck.

I saw a water moccasin glide and curve sideways from the middle of the little lagoon.

Cash hit the engine hard and the long torpedo of boat shot forward hard and fast.

Teddy fired, the glass windshield exploding from Cash’s boat.

The boat whooshed by me and collided hard with Teddy’s Scarab. A cracking thunderous crash.

I heard two splashes and saw Teddy scrambling into the water, paddling his way to a shore that barely existed. Deeper into the reeds and grasses.

Silence. The engines died.

Yelling.

JoJo jumped in and high-stepped his way to me.

I felt my eyes roll back in my head and I tumbled backward.

He caught me and dragged me to a long flat of mud. My face flush into the gray muck, seeing scattering animals’ footprints. The early-morning heat rising in odorous waves from the pile.

I collected myself. Wavered to my feet.

I heard a few more shots.

Two other big purple Cigarette boats ran close to the line of tall grasses. Some of Cash’s boys getting up to their waists, guns held high over the water, slogging through. I saw a couple up to their ankles in marsh. Each step taking a grimace from the men, mud and decaying earth sucking them down.

I heard rustling. Grasses shifted near where I stood.

I wandered forward, the heat and sun and loss of blood wrapping the whole earth in a halo.

JoJo yelled for me.

I fell to my knees, sinking up to my elbows and thighs through it all, water and mud covering my face. Losing a boot and pulling off the other one, crawling for the sound through a tunnel of broken reeds, where cloven feet scattered in a labyrinth of high grass.

I tumbled out about thirty yards on the other side.

I stood on a muddy little bank, the bayou holding me up to my knees.

Teddy was stuck, frozen. Birds trilling all around us.

He turned to me. His red shirt muddy and torn. Dirt and mud caked over his face and into his hair. He looked almost comical.

But he wasn’t laughing.

His gun hung loose in his hand.

TWO of Cash’s boys haul Dio’s ass out of the damned bayou, pulling him out by his neck. Cash stand like some kind of general, shirtless and scarred, on our boat waiting to meet him. He reach down into the water, grab him by his arms, and pull him on board with all of us. Ain’t no real sound comin’ from nowhere. Just animal sounds and water slapping real low from beneath them bridges. You don’t say a word.

You just walk over with Cash and look down at the man you thought was God.

He look the same but don’t seem the same.

He look at you, recognize you know he ain’t shit, and then see his eyes jump down to your Superman platinum.

He reach for it and you knock his hand away.

“You just takin’ my place,” Dio says. “You just like me.”

Cash says, “Shut the hell up.” He knock him across the mouth with the butt of his gun. Then you hear him cock the motherfucker and hand it to you.

It feel strong and warm in your hand and don’t take you but two seconds to aim that bitch right at Dio’s heart.

“What’s your name?” you say.

“What?”

“What’s your name?”

JoJo behind him now and he got his hand out. He got his palm out, waiting for you to lay that steel in his hand.

“Shoot him!” Cash yell. “Shoot. Shoot.”

JoJo shake his head on the other side.

“My name is Christian,” he says. “Christian Chase.” His eyes are green but loose and heavy. He don’t show nothin’.

You thumb back the hammer and let it down loose.

You hand that gun to JoJo.

He take it.

Just as you step back, Christian turn and come at Cash with a knife in his hand. He gets that blade right at his face.

But Bronco steps from beside you, grab him at his wrist, and you see the punk drop to his knees and start cryin’ like a bitch. The knife fallin’ out of his hand.

Cash pick up the knife, look at it, and toss it in the water.

He nod at Bronco.

Bronco nod back at him, their shapes gettin’ thrown down on the tops of water in a silver mirror.

A boat pull up beside you and Cash pulls Christian from his feet and throw him in with some of his boys.

“Welcome to the Dirty South, Christian Chase.”

Cash smile at y’all from the other boat, throwing you the keys.

They float off and turn, breaking hard in the middle of the bayou and headin’ back out into Pontchartrain.

JoJo’s hand feel good on your shoulder.

I LOOKED at Teddy frozen in the mud. We didn’t exchange words. His eyes watched something beyond my shoulder, maybe a sound he heard, and wavered deep into the marsh that held him.

“Come on.”

He stretched the gun out from his arm. His eyes reflected a person I’d never met.

“We all go back to mud,” Teddy said, the fat shaking under his chin. Contorting with the emotion in his voice. “My preacher used to tell me and Malcolm that. Told us to be like the mud. That’s what we came from. What we all gonna be.”

I breathed, smelling the putrid smell of animals and plant life rotting around us in a big compost pile. Bile rose in my throat.

I heard boats buzzing and scattering away out in the bayou.

He pulled the gun back into him. An eagle swooped down and then caught a wave of rising air, shooting quickly back up into the blue sky.

Teddy Paris smiled. “Always knew you could take a joke, Travers.”

He slid the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The hard cracking sound brought a scattering of birds and insects floating off the marsh in a black stream and pinpointed dots that covered the white sun.

I dropped my head, turned, fighting the marsh, and made it halfway back through the grassy tunnel carved by a wild animal.

I crawled to get away from the place I’d seen Teddy slowly disappear into the bayou.

THE WORD CAME DOWN two weeks later that Ninth Ward Records was no more. You thought you was headed right back to Calliope, slidin’ right back in with your grandmamma and workin’ block parties to feed yourself. But right when you think you broke, you find yourself in New York City. You and Cash got a mack deal with a record company that been around for a hundred years. You see pictures of all them folks that come before you down this long white hall at these tight offices. Jazz women and blues daddies like the old man and Nick listen to. And that’s all cool, ’cause you know someday you just gonna be down that same line.

That new joint you’re workin’ in New York keepin’ you away from the Dirty South. You like seein’ your face off buses and bein’ thug-lipped over Times Square and it’s cool and all meetin’ Diddy and LL at some party in the middle of a big park made out of green grass. But somehow you feel like you losin’ you. Your rhymes not comin’ out the way you feel. The beats you hear sound like someone openin’ up a tin can.