Authors: Ace Atkins
“Who do you need found?”
“A man who conned my boy out of 500 grand,” Teddy said. “Goddamn, it’s hot in here.”
“Sorry, man,” I said. “Sounds like you need more help than me.”
“You the best I got.”
“We’ll talk.”
“There ain’t time.”
“Why?”
Malcolm looked at his brother and put a hand on his shoulder before walking back to his Hummer with an exaggerated limp.
“Some Angola-hard punk gave me twenty-four, brother,” Teddy said. “I only got twenty-one hours of my life left.”
AFTER TEDDY DROPPED THE NEWS, we decided there wasn’t a hell of a lot of time for soul food at Dunbar’s. So when we watched Malcolm head back out to the studio, I pulled on my walking boots and a clean T-shirt, closed down the garage, and we rolled down Freret and headed up to Claiborne in Teddy’s electric-blue Bentley. I cracked the window, lit a Marlboro, and sank into the rabbit fur while he leaned back into the driver’s seat and steered with two fingers. A sad smile crossed his face as we moved from the million-dollar mansions off St. Charles to candy-colored shotguns and onto a street populated with pawnshops, check-cashing businesses, and EZ credit signs. Neon and billboards. Broken bottles lay in gullies and yellowed newspapers twirled across vacant lots.
The air felt warm against my face, heavy bass vibrating my back and legs, when we rolled low under the giant oaks that shrouded the corners around the Magnolia projects. The trees’ roots were exposed, rotted, and dry near portions of the housing projects that had been plowed under. Their tenants now living in Section 8 housing in New Orleans East.
I felt the rabbit fur on the armrest and looked into the backseat, where Teddy had a small flat-screen television and DVD player. A copy of
Goodfellas
had been tossed on the backseat along with a sack of ranch-flavored Doritos.
“Why don’t you sell your car?”
“It’s a hell of a ride but ain’t no way close to 700 grand, brother,” he said.
“Your house?” I asked. “That mansion down by the lake with your dollar-sign-shaped pool? What about a loan on that?”
“Ain’t time,” he said. And very low, he said, “And I got three of them mortgage things already.”
“Oh, man.”
“What about J.J.?” I asked, dropping the name of our teammate who had just won two Super Bowls. “He’s got more money than God or George Lucas. You try and call him? He’d float you a favor.”
“J.J. and I ain’t that tight no more.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I owe him $80,000.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t you go blasphemin’ in this car.”
“Why?” I asked. “You pay to have it baptized?”
We stopped at the corner of Claiborne, where on a mammoth billboard two hands were held together in prayer. Someone had spray-painted the words
WHY ME
? over the address of the church. Across the wide commercial street, I saw another billboard of Britney Spears. She was selling Pepsi. Britney hadn’t been touched.
“You’re deep in debt and can’t get a loan from anyone else,” I said. “Who is this Cash guy? Just kiss and make up.”
He didn’t even look over at me as he accelerated toward the Calliope housing projects. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crack a joke. See, Cash is a real humane individual.” Teddy licked his lips and wiped his face for the thousandth time. “Heard he once stuck a set of jumper cables in a man’s ass for spillin’ wine on his Italian leather coat. Up his ass, man. That’s fucked up.”
“Did the man turn over?”
Teddy shook his head. “Listen, I came to Cash ’bout two months back so we could get the money for ALIAS’s CD. Had to get some promotional dollars.”
“For what?”
“Advertisin’. This video we shootin’ tonight.”
“Call it off.”
“Too late,” he said. “Everyone’s been paid. See, we were all in some trouble and then Cash and me was tryin’ to put together this movie? I had this idea about New Orleans bein’ underwater and only the folks in the ghetto survived. You know like we were livin’ in this underwater world with boats made out of Bentleys and shit…”
“So he loaned you $700,000?”
“Half a mil,” he said. “He added another two for interest and his hard-earned time.”
Teddy shook his head as he drove, hot wind blowing through the car. The asphalt more cracked on this side of Uptown. We passed a Popeye’s fried chicken, a McDonald’s, some bulletproof gas stations. Barbershops. Bail bonds.
“Tell me about Cash,” I said. “Maybe I can reason with him.”
“You got a better chance of gettin’ a gorilla to sing you ‘Happy Birthday,’” Teddy said. “This ape raised in Calliope like my man ALIAS. But he don’t have no heart like the kid. He’s an animal. Bald head. Got all his teeth capped in platinum and diamonds. Stole everythin’ he have. Even his beats. Got his sound from this badass DJ ’bout five years back. Now Cash eatin’ steaks and lobster, screwin’
Penthouse
pets and that boy coachin’ damn high-school football.”
“How’d he steal his sound?”
“The bounce, man,” Teddy said. He turned up the music. That constant driving rhythm I’d heard played all over New Orleans shook the car. The drums keeping the rap elevated as if the music was made of rubber-reflecting words.
“Why don’t you just run?” I asked. “Get out of town till you can raise the money?”
“I got family here,” Teddy said. “Besides, a Paris don’t ever run. You know that.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “Quit your posturing before you do get killed.”
“Ain’t no bullshit,” he said. “I leave and then he fuck with a member of my family? Man, I couldn’t live with myself.”
“Can’t you just sign over something to him? Just give him your house. You can stay with me.”
“I appreciate it, brother,” he said. “I really do. But there is only one thing this mad nigga want and he ain’t getting it.”
I looked at Teddy — out of breath, sweating like hell — as he turned into the housing projects. Two men on the corner with hard eyes and wearing heavy army coats watched us turn. Teddy lowered the stereo. The heat whooshed through the car, just making the silence between us more intense.
Teddy gritted his teeth as he passed the men. “ALIAS my boy and I ain’t neva losin’ that boy. Not again.”
I watched him. “I want y’all to meet,” he said.
“YOU GONNA VALET this thing in Calliope?” I asked. “Or are you trying to collect insurance?”
“You don’t know who I am,” Teddy said. “Respect everything around here.”
“Even for a Ninth Warder?”
“For Teddy Paris.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
He kissed a ruby pinkie ring on his fattened little finger and gave me a wink. “You’ll see.”
Calliope soon swallowed us into endless rows of four-story colorless brick buildings seeming to sag with exhaustion. Fire escapes lined each building in V patterns; some hung loose like broken limbs. In a commons that reminded me of a prison yard, Dumpsters spilled trash onto the wide dirt ground. Along the walls of project houses, signs read
NO DOG FIGHTING
.
We slowed and rolled into the commons.
As Teddy shut off his engine and coasted to a stop, dozens of black children wrapped their arms around the car. I could hear them laughing and breathing and giggling. Making faces with their eyes pressed against the glass. Teddy got out and ripped out a massive roll of ten-dollar bills, palming them off to more than a dozen kids.
Stay in school; get yo’ mamma right; no way, you been back twice.
I smiled as the kids formed a tight circle around the car, the chirp of Teddy’s alarm locking them out.
We walked along a buckled path and by a brick wall where someone had painted the huge face of a rapper named Diabolical. I’d read he’d been killed in some gang shit last year and now he’d taken on some kind of martyr status in the projects. The slanted warped image of his face in bright colors surrounded by painted candles reminded me of a Russian icon.
Teddy nodded to his face, “That’s the one I lost.”
We found ALIAS among a loose group of teen boys and two girls tossing quarters along a concrete staircase stained with rust. Teddy pointed out the kid, and as he saw Teddy’s wobbling figure coming toward him, he picked up the collection of cash and sat back down.
He didn’t look up. Teddy took off his coat and sweat stains spread under his arms and across his back in a big
X
. ALIAS muttered something and the kids broke away.
He was a tall kid. Lanky and slow-moving in red basketball shorts that slipped past his knees. He wore a white FUBU baseball jersey with his sleeves rolled up and sneakers made of black fabric and gel. He sported an awkward mustache that only a fifteen-year-old could appreciate.
He still didn’t look at us, counting the money.
“How you feelin’?” Teddy asked.
“Sore,” ALIAS said, pulling up his shirt and showing a white and red puckered scar on his side. “Still don’t know who jumped me.”
The kid shook his head and pocketed the money, watching the uneven open earth and the slabs of projects that stacked farther north like dirty caves. He leaned forward, a piece of platinum jewelry slipping from his shirt. The Superman symbol inscribed in diamonds.
“Happens out here in the yard.” Teddy leaned down and made the kid look at his face. “Didn’t want you to come back here where that kind of shit happen. But you fucked up, kid. That’s a lot of money to lose. Put me in a hell of a tight.”
The kid nodded. “Yeah, I heard about that shit. I’m sorry, man.”
Teddy opened his big arms wide and the kid fell into his clutch. Teddy swallowing him into his sweaty silk shirt, patting him on his back.
In the yard, a shirtless man clutching a long bottle staggered toward Teddy’s child security. “Teddy,” I said, nudging him.
“Get back, motherfucker,” Teddy yelled and rolled off to the yard.
I sat down next to the kid. He pulled the money back out, probably about twenty in cash, and I watched him recount it.
“Teddy told me what happened.”
He looked at me. One eye had yellow flecks in the iris and he had a very pink scar that slashed from the bridge of his nose and ran into one eyebrow. His teeth were gold.
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“What you gonna do about it?”
I watched Teddy’s fat butt jangle in his $2,000 suit as he ran off the man. The children laughed while the crazy shirtless man darted across the grass and mud field like an aimless dog.
“I helped a woman who got sent to prison for forty years because people lied,” I said. “She got stuck. No one believed a word she said. Thought she was crazy.”
He looked at me. Then back at the money.
“If you don’t help,” I said, “your boy Cash is gonna mess Teddy up bad.”
“What the fuck you know about Cash?” ALIAS asked. “He ain’t my boy.”
“What did the man who shot you look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Fuck no.”
“What did he look like?”
“White.”
“Terrific.”
Teddy looked down at us, sweating and out of breath. “Y’all ready to go? I ain’t got the energy to run that motherfucker off again. What you poor-mouthin’ for, kid? I said let’s go.”
“What’d you do with my dogs?”
“I got ’em.”
“You ain’t got the right.”
“Sure I do. That was a ton of money. Had to make you think about the shit you done.”
“That was my money.”
“Yeah, I heard Cash was fillin’ your head up. Wants you to roll with those Angola ballers when I’m dead. Right?”
I got up from the stoop. Looked at the time. Noon. I should’ve been on the road by now. Eatin’ chicken-fried steak in Vaiden, Mississippi. Headed into Maggie’s heavy iron bed. Her Texas show boots by the door.
“You see this man?” Teddy said, pointing at me. “See him? He don’t look like much. All that gray hair and don’t shave his face and tries to be funny all the time. Which of course he ain’t. But he gonna help find them fuckers. He ain’t like the police.”
“Why wouldn’t they help?” I asked. He did bring it up.
“‘Signal 7,’” ALIAS said.
Two teenage girls in halter tops, lollipops in splayed fingers, strolled by ALIAS and smiled. Both with bright red lips. Bare feet dusty from the broken concrete around Calliope.
ALIAS smiled back.
“What’s ‘Signal 7’?”
“‘The popo ain’t got answers,’” ALIAS began in a slow, deliberate rap. Enunciating words to me the way you would to a retarded person or a very smart monkey. “‘Ain’t nothin’ but lies. Put that Glock in their face and see if they read our minds.’”
“The ‘popo’ didn’t like that too much?” I asked.
Teddy nodded his head.
“Guess not,” I said.
We followed ALIAS into a small room with three filthy windows crowded with dead plants and covered in comic strips. A haggard woman, oddly old in a way I couldn’t quite place, had her feet up in a ratty recliner chair. She flipped through channels on a television that flickered so much it made me dizzy.
No one spoke to her. ALIAS disappeared down a short hall and returned with a leather duffel bag with the Timberland logo.
“That’s it?” Teddy asked.
ALIAS said, “You locked me out of my own home.”
“Did I?” Teddy asked, leading the way as we passed the silent old woman living in her TV.
When we got back to his Bentley, the commons was bare of the children. A low bank of dark clouds rolled toward the river and there was the slight smell of rain in the distance mixed with the loose dust of scattering feet.
ALIAS held his bag. No expression.
Teddy circled his ride, searching for scratches or dents.
He shook his head. We both scanned the four clusters of housing projects surrounding us. No one. Loose popping of dried clotheslines stretching from metal crosses.
He pressed the release on the locks. The alarm chirped and I looked back at the long row of clouds. The silence was almost electric as I waited for him to take me home.
We rolled away in the Bentley, his car smelling of leather and new wood and some kind of lime perfume he sprayed on the rabbit fur. When we drove away, I watched three teenagers being hustled into the back of a black Suburban by about ten DEA officers. An old woman in pink house slippers yelled at them and kept throwing rocks at their back as they all loaded into the car.