Ace Atkins - Dirty South

You make a call. You on a plane.

You ride onto Canal, cruise uptown, pick up that little honey you’d met at this club with Malcolm Paris back when, and roll down to the Quarter in a white Escalade limo. See how Old School makin’ out. You don’t need to know. You just wonderin’.

You pay some big man in a straw hat five dollars at the door and see Loretta howlin’ a big mess onstage. Man, you ain’t never known that woman could sing like that. She got a storm inside her that always seem quiet to you.

Nick behind the bar with some bald black man. JoJo hangin’ in the back, leanin’ against the wall by the door. He smilin’, watchin’ his wife and Nick. Kind of takin’ it all in. You smile at that, shrug off your mink coat, and order a bottle of Cristal from some little honey waitress. Little Miss you with punch you in the ribs and you laugh till they ask you for ID and say champagne ain’t on the menu. And that shit ain’t cool.

Loretta keep singin’, all wrapped up in some fine-ass green satin. Face all painted up, silk hankie in her hand. “Don’t ask me no questions, and I won’t tell you no lies.”

The music is old. You don’t like it. But you can’t help but move your feet. ’Cause you been to where it come from and some way you knowin’ more about yourself.

Nick come by and say hello to you and your girl in between sets, but a few seconds later, he get called back to the bar to give a mess of folks some more beer. He seems to like poppin’ the tops of those Dixies and you thinkin’ about grabbin’ some while he ain’t lookin’.

Your date not hangin’ with the scene and disappears back into the bathroom. You tell her to hang. But she want to move on now. She got some girlfriends down at some club that you used to know. Everything in New Orleans change. But still the same.

The old man and you talk about New York and he ask you about some clubs in Harlem that you know ain’t even real. He make fun of your mink and them boots you paid a thousand bucks for and you laugh at that. ’Cause that teasin’ ain’t no disrespect. That ole man like you.

Nick still won’t pour you no alcohol and you knock hard on the bathroom tryin’ to find the girl. You hear her laughin’ inside and you push open the door, findin’ her snortin’ up off the top of a towel rack with some little white dude.

She don’t see you. But you leave her there and walk the Quarter. You got $2,000 in your pocket, a room at the Monteleone, and a record in the gate just jumpin’ for number one.

You sit down at Jackson Square, where you used to make money shinin’ shoes, and down past the mall, where you was thrown out for hustlin’. Your mind race over these months. Teddy’s ride. Malcolm and you hangin’ at the clubs. All the champagne and the way Malcolm treated you. He tellin’ you it’s family. But he just treatin’ you like he treat himself.

Time on your Cartier say you left the bar two hours ago. You thinkin’ about the girl, you guess. Ain’t no way you thinkin’ about Nick and the old man. But they all there. Them doors on Conti closed, houselights on in the bar, and JoJo and him just clearin’ up beer bottles into a trash can.

JoJo singin’ along to the jukebox.

You knock on the glass.

And Loretta lets you in.

Everyone stops for a while. No money bein’ counted. No beer bein’ drunk.

Just all y’all sittin’ at this little table. Loretta and JoJo. You and Old School. And you laughin’ about things that been and some things that JoJo think gonna happen.

That jukebox slows after the last song. Neon and chrome real bright.

Another record slips onto the turntable and finds its groove.

That beat, man. It’s old but strong.

You’re home.

I STILL TRAVEL the Delta when I find myself lost. I like the feel of the wide expanse of flat brown earth, the clapboard bars with cold beer and greasy pork sandwiches, the tiny white Baptist churches that shake and pulse with religion on Sundays, the barren plantations and forgotten towns where ghosts still live. JoJo and I would meet halfway during our exchanges, most of the time along Interstate 55 down in Vaiden for a chicken-fried steak meal. It was early fall and even just off the interstate, I could smell the leaves burning from the little houses and trailers off the road.

I had a seat in a booth when JoJo walked in and hung up his Carhartt farm coat on a spindly hanger by the door. He slid into the seat, scanned the menu, and tossed it in the center of the table.

“ALIAS didn’t care much for this place,” I said. “Ordered a cheeseburger.”

He laughed. “Maybe he knows something we don’t.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why wouldn’t that surprise me?”

“You seen that new video he got out?” JoJo asked.

“He’s doing fine in L.A.,” I said. “Asked me to come out and see him.”

“You going to?”

“Can you see me in L.A.?”

“He may need you to,” he said. “This ain’t over. You understand?”

“I do.”

“When you side with a man, you keep on.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If not, you ain’t no better than Teddy.”

I looked out at the trucks lining up to hit the interstate. On the side of a trailer, someone had painted the image of three cowboys running cattle in a wide open prairie. The fall sun struck the painting as it turned and elevated up on the high road heading north.

“What made him sick in the mind?” JoJo asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re mad at yourself, but you always knew it,” he said.

I nodded. We ate the chicken-fried steak and drank coffee, talking more about ALIAS, two new hands JoJo had hired on the farm, the team I helped coach at JFK, and the possibility of getting Buddy Guy to play a small show during Jazzfest.

“Meet you back here in ten days,” he said. “Same time.”

I nodded.

“You quit teaching,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

“Tulane hired a Harvard professor to replace Randy,” I said. “He wanted me to expand upon theories of the blues and intercultural dimensions of the framework of the South.”

“That’s a lot of thought about blues.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “I can do what I do on my own. And the bar is working right now.”

JoJo laughed. “Blues ain’t nothin’ but a botheration on your mind.”

“I’ve heard that.”

We shook hands and I watched his old truck stop before heading south to New Orleans. I thought I heard some pounding bass work and bounce coming from his cab. I tried to listen harder but JoJo pulled out onto the road and the music followed.

I shook my head.

I drove as far as Batesville. If I turned west, I’d head to Clarksdale, where Willie T. Dean wanted to meet. He said he had the most unbelievable lead on the best bluesman I never heard of. True Willie T. Always the next adventure.

I stopped at Highway 6 and instead headed east. The sun sank down behind me, swallowing the road and disappearing into the Delta.

I took a shortcut off 6 and wound down through a cypress swamp where men in small boats drank beer and fished with cane poles, the misty blue-and-yellow light filling the cab of my truck, where Annie slept on the rear seat. A bone tucked under her paw.

The fall sky was slate blue and gray when I arrived at the dented silver mailbox and turned along a long gravel road. The small white clapboard house waited, draped in big ceramic Christmas lights. Maggie’s truck parked sideways by a propane tank. Her cotton shirts, faded blue jeans, and her son’s jerseys riffled in the wind.