Ace Atkins: Dirty South

He smiled up at me, the cigarette pinched between his front teeth. He shut off the saw and stood, shaking the shavings from his coveralls and bending the bill of his Styrofoam hat. The hat asked: GETTIN’ ANY?

I shook his hand. He was playing some Journey on an Emerson cassette player that was held together with duct tape.

“Travers, I heard you was up in Mississippi.”

“I just got back,” I said. “Finished up the project.”

“What was it?” He said wuzzit in that redneck drawl. New Orleans was a long way from Curtis’s north Louisiana home.

“Researching the early days of Sonny Boy Williamson. Found an old partner of his who was the only man I ever met that could take a leak and walk at the same time.”

“How’d he stop from pissin’ on himself?” Curtis asked.

“He didn’t.”

He walked over to a cooler and cracked open the top of a Bud Light. He asked me if I wanted to join him and I said I was cool. I knew it was going to be a very long night.

The hammering in the other room stopped. A large-framed white woman wearing a jogging bra that could’ve comfortably held a third-world country came in and grabbed the beer from his hand. She swigged it, looked at me, and blew out her breath, foam still on her chin.

“Hello, Stella.”

“Eat me, Nick.”

“I’ll take a rain check.”

She turned back to her husband. “Soon as you finish with the professor, let’s get rollin’. You wanted to lay 300 feet today. I’m already growin’ mold.”

Annie started to growl low at her.

“That your mutt?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“Figured you for the mutt, Travers,” she said. “He’s just your style.”

“Her name is Annie.”

She laughed, making snorting piglike grunts in her nose. “Hope you’re happy together.”

Curtis cracked open a beer for himself and watched his wife’s big ass waddle away. “Man, she still makes me hard.”

“Oh, boy.”

“So what can I do for you, brother? Those red maple floors of yours cracking up?”

“Nope. Need some advice on working a con.”

He nodded outside and spoke a little louder for his wife’s benefit. “Let me finish this cigarette outside. All right?”

Outside, he leaned against a metal support pole and watched a couple of Hare Krishnas banging the shit out of a tambourine. “Hey,” he yelled. “Hey.”

One of the Krishnas, orange robe and standard bald head, turned around.

“Y’all fuck off.”

They started singing and banging some more but turned the other way.

“Goddamned assholes,” he said. “Jesus will turn those fuckers into an orange quilt.”

“About the con.”

“Yeah, what’s up? I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Stella. She’d keep my nuts in her purse if she knew you had something for me.”

“Need some direction. I’m working a job for an old buddy of mine. He has this kid he works with – he’s in the music business and they make rap records – and this kid got taken for a huge one.”

“What they use?”

I told him about the offices at Lee Circle and this guy named Thompson and the way they worked on the kid’s paranoia about his trust fund.

“Man, that’s some good shit.”

“Sound like anyone you know?”

He shrugged. “Not really. You say he had fucked-up ears?”

I nodded.

“I know people with fucked-up noses and necks and faces. Maybe even some peckers. But no ear things. Wow, man. How much was it?”

“A lot.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means I don’t want to say.”

“That’s cool,” he said, taking a sip of beer, starting on what would be one of the first of about one hundred today. He had small hands and yellow teeth. I knew he’d been busted last year for trying to work a handkerchief game on a couple of Lithuanians. When he made the switch and they found the bag full of cut-up newspapers, they tried to stuff him into a mail drop. Apparently the slot was thinner than Curtis and there had been chafing.

“I can ask around,” he said. “Could use a little help, though.”

I knew it’d come to this. Curtis liked to be paid and I didn’t blame him. He had Stella to feed.

“How much?”

“Five hundred.”

“Shit, no.”

“You said it was a ton of money.”

“I said it was a lot. What the hell do you think I keep in my bank account?”

“Two?”

“A hundred if this pans out. I don’t know if I’ll be paid back for this shit.”

“Done,” Curtis said, lighting up his second cigarette. Stella began to yell for him to get back inside. Her voice made nails on a chalkboard seem like chanting monks.

“Goddamn,” he said. “She’s on this new kind of diet from TV. Something that all the stars are onto. Like those little girls on that coffee-shop show in New York. You know where all the girls got tight little asses?”

“Friends.”

“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, we was watching the other night and she says she wanted her ass to look just like that Courtney Love.”

I didn’t correct him.

“I told her I like that booty,” he said. “I like ’em full and healthy.”

Stella screamed: “Hurry up.”

Curtis’s shoulders shrank a bit. “Maybe it would make her more quiet.”

“You’re a lucky man, brother.”

He winked. “I’ll call.”

“I need this fast,” I said. “Today.”

I held his gaze and he slowly nodded, understanding. Some of the biggest fuckups I’ve ever known always come through in a pinch. Maybe they do because they’ve been in similar situations.

“What’s up?”

“My friend borrowed money from the wrong folks.”

“Greaseballs?”

“Nope,” I said. “A mucho bad motherfucker.”

“Man,” he said. “At least with the greaseballs you knew where the shit was flyin’. This city has turned to shit ever since the Mafia turned into a bunch of pussies.”

He wrote my cell-phone number on his hand.

I STOPPED AT THE MARKET and bought a large Snoball in a cup, black cherry, and sat on the back loading dock trying to figure out what to do next. I had to wait for Curtis, since ALIAS hadn’t given me anything to work with. I shared a little of the cone with Annie while a farmer in overalls unloaded crates of strawberries. She worked her tongue over the ice neatly as her tail wagged a lot. I scratched her chest and kept watching the man unload the crates.

“Dem dogs are nasty, no?” he asked in a deep Cajun accent.

“No,” I said, smiling. “Dogs’ mouths are cleaner than a human’s.”

“No human I know lick their backside like that,” he said.

“Annie doesn’t lick her ass,” I said, digging my spoon into the ice. “Very much.”

The old Cajun shook his head and disappeared with a dolly full of strawberries. I turned back to Annie.

“You want to stay with me?”

Annie wagged her tail, the twisted muttlike loop knocking against my arm. I thought about where she’d been in the Delta, days before. Starving out by a dusty road where she would’ve probably died under a truck tire.

I called Teddy from my cell and asked him about the DJ he’d mentioned. The guy who’d been sold out by Cash.

“Lorenzo Woods?”

“Where does he coach?”

Teddy told me. I laid the rest of the Snoball on the ground for my new friend. Annie scarfed it up and pawed at the Styrofoam when it was gone.

“What you wastin’ your time with him?” Teddy asked, his voice broken by static. “He doesn’t know shit.”

“He knows Cash.”

“Yeah,” he said. “They was tight.”

“And now he doesn’t like him.”

“Yeah.”