Ace Atkins: Dirty South

But the true genius in the plan was that this guy really had to do little work. ALIAS had to break into Teddy’s office and get the bank account numbers for the ALIAS money market account. Mr. Thompson – bless his heart – acted as his legal guardian (with just a little maneuvering or forgery) and siphoned every bit of cash from the fund that was earmarked for the kid when he turned twenty-one.

I told him that I’d start with the owners of the building and look for any short-team leases he probably did not sign. I asked ALIAS more about the woman from the club and the secretary. The club girl was hot. The secretary had a big butt.

“Why an island?” I asked. “Where did that come from?”

“Shit,” he said as we climbed back in the Gray Ghost. The smell of a warm rain mixed with exhaust and heat from the asphalt.

“You sure no one else could’ve seen them?”

He shook his head.

“No one ever came with you? Took a phone call? Vouched for these folks?”

“No one,” he said. He turned the bill of his Saints cap backward and slumped into his passenger seat.

“I’ll have to talk to your friends,” I said, spitting the Bazooka out the window. The gum had lost its taste and I reached for a fresh piece.

“Do what you got to, man,” he said. “My friends got heart.”

He pounded his chest two times and raised his chin into the wind cutting from the road.

WHEN JOJO OPENED HIS BUSINESS back in 1965, he hired one of the best bartenders in the Quarter. Felix Wright transcended just pouring Jack into a shot glass or popping the top off a Dixie. He performed. He’d have a cold beer rolled down to you from five feet like in an old Western. He kept a file of New Orleans facts in his head, things about Jean Lafitte or Andrew Jackson. Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet. Some of it was probably bullshit. But Felix made you feel welcome. Made you feel like you owned a little bit of JoJo’s, too, while he’d tell you about the night he’d seen Steve McQueen shooting The Cincinnati Kid.

I’d dropped ALIAS back at the Ninth Ward studio and picked up Polk Salad Annie from home. I’d finally taught her to hop up in the Gray Ghost with me. We parked down by the old bar so I could find Felix. Someone had rebuilt the place after the fire last year and turned it into a martini bar where everyone wears all black and compares what they do for a living.

I turned my head as I passed. The blue neon and velvet drapes were enough. I missed the old blues posters in the window and those tall doors fashioned for a Creole restaurant more than 150 years ago.

I had to find Felix and I knew where to look.

It wasn’t pretty. The top bartender in the Quarter had taken a job at Kra-zee Daiquiris down on Bourbon Street. It was the kind of place where you had the option of pouring your drink into a pair of plastic breasts or a long green penis.

Kra-zee’s pumped with that song “Mambo No. 5” and had Polaroid photos of Girls Gone Wild on the walls. The bar was long but thin, maybe six feet from door to counter, just stools lined up under a fake grass canopy like the place was in the middle of the South Pacific. I knew the building used to house a bar that had been around since the early 1800s, serving presidents and pirates in its time. But the new owner wanted to update. Bring in some new tourist dollars in the form of to-go cups.

Felix wore a Mardi Gras Indian headdress on his bald black dome. Strong forearms and quick in his step behind the bar. He was frowning, but his face brightened when I took a seat.

He gripped my hand very hard as he slid down a couple of daiquiris to two women at the end of the bar. Maybe more like plunked them down; apparently the plastic penis doesn’t slide in the same way as JoJo’s glasses.

“How you been?”

“Workin’.”

“You all right?”

“Fine,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye. Hadn’t since I’d walked in.

“JoJo wanted me to tell you hello.”

He didn’t respond.

“He’s finally got the farm running again. Bought twenty-five head of cattle.”

“Good for him.”

He looked at me and then flashed his eyes away. He poured me a margarita made out of blueberries. I was thankful for the regular to-go cup with just the logo of the bar. I asked for a small glass of water for Annie. He poured it and didn’t comment on a dog being in the bar. Just normal. Crazy Nick and his friends.

“You seen Sun?”

“No.”

“Oz? Hippie Tom?”

He shook his head. “JoJo’s Bar is closed,” he said. “Ain’t you heard?”

I nodded and looked at my hands. A couple of men in pink tank tops and cutoff shorts sauntered into the bar and asked for some margaritas. They began to dance to “Mambo No. 5.” More followed. Drunk at one in the afternoon. I lit a cigarette and waited for Felix to finish.

Felix poured the margaritas with a little panache. He wiped down the cheap Formica bar as if it were still the worn mahogany of JoJo’s. He took drink orders, sometimes three at a time, and worked the stirring machines as if pouring a perfect shot or finding the right head of foam on a Dixie. I kind of respected that. A professional to the last.

“I need to find Curtis,” I said.

“Peckerwood Curtis?” he asked, laughing.

“Is he out?”

“Yeah, got out a few months back. Went back to Stella, too.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

He nodded. I took a small sip of the blueberry margarita and pushed it away.

“You seen him around?”

“Puttin’ in some floors at some new bar on Decatur,” he said. “You know that place that used to be a coffee-house where them vampire people hung out?”

“Thanks.” I got up to leave and shook his hand again.

There was a long mirror behind the daiquiri machines framed in some dripping red chili pepper lights. I watched us – even as I continued to talk – and noticed the fine line of gray on the back of Felix’s normally smooth head. To me, he’d always been ageless, between forty and seventy. I’d never asked. Watching our reflections, I was jarred with a memory of when I was nine and at Disney World with my parents. It was the Haunted House, the end of the ride, and there was a trick mirror when you didn’t see who was sitting with you, only the ghosts who’d stowed away.

“You tell Loretta hello,” he said. “Would you do that?”

I told him I would.

THE FRENCH QUARTER is a shiftless little town. People gain and lose jobs the way some change underwear. You may be working as a bouncer at a club on Decatur one week and the next you find yourself as cook at a four-star restaurant on Bienville. Addresses don’t mean much. Most people just crash, always looking for the cheapest housing where you won’t be too worried about getting jacked every night. I needed to find a buddy of mine named Curtis Lee. Curtis, as I learned from Felix, had been out of Angola for at least six months and had gone straight. Again. Either it was religion or AA; Curtis always found the latest salvation. After one short stint in the Jefferson Parish Jail – this for pissing on the sheriff’s boots during Mardi Gras – he told me he wanted to become a monk and spent months at JoJo’s reading prayer books.

I parked at Decatur and Esplanade behind the French Market, smelling the strands of garlic, dried red pepper, and fish on ice sold there as I hooked Annie onto a leather leash. We walked down Decatur underneath a metal overhang and past a couple of Italian delis and a store that sold Christmas ornaments all year. Cajun Santa. An alligator Rudolph.

I heard hard hammering and the buzz of a saw. The air inside the open door smelled of sawdust and burned wood. On his knees by a miter saw, I saw Curtis, all wiry and mullet-haired, smoking a cigarette and cutting down a tongue-and-groove board.