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.
5
“How did you meet this man?” I asked ALIAS, while we waited for a streetcar to move on St. Charles Avenue heading uptown to Lee Circle. Rain splattered the hood of my truck and wooden shop signs in the Warehouse District shook in the wind. Teddy had left me with the kid at my place and had gone back to the studio to make calls for last-minute loans. I told him I’d do my best but wished he’d just leave town.