Cash smile at y’all from the other boat, throwing you the keys.
They float off and turn, breaking hard in the middle of the bayou and headin’ back out into Pontchartrain.
JoJo’s hand feel good on your shoulder.
I LOOKED at Teddy frozen in the mud. We didn’t exchange words. His eyes watched something beyond my shoulder, maybe a sound he heard, and wavered deep into the marsh that held him.
“Come on.”
He stretched the gun out from his arm. His eyes reflected a person I’d never met.
“We all go back to mud,” Teddy said, the fat shaking under his chin. Contorting with the emotion in his voice. “My preacher used to tell me and Malcolm that. Told us to be like the mud. That’s what we came from. What we all gonna be.”
I breathed, smelling the putrid smell of animals and plant life rotting around us in a big compost pile. Bile rose in my throat.
I heard boats buzzing and scattering away out in the bayou.
He pulled the gun back into him. An eagle swooped down and then caught a wave of rising air, shooting quickly back up into the blue sky.
Teddy Paris smiled. “Always knew you could take a joke, Travers.”
He slid the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The hard cracking sound brought a scattering of birds and insects floating off the marsh in a black stream and pinpointed dots that covered the white sun.
I dropped my head, turned, fighting the marsh, and made it halfway back through the grassy tunnel carved by a wild animal.
I crawled to get away from the place I’d seen Teddy slowly disappear into the bayou.
73
The word came down two weeks later that Ninth Ward Records was no more. You thought you was headed right back to Calliope, slidin’ right back in with your grandmamma and workin’ block parties to feed yourself. But right when you think you broke, you find yourself in New York City. You and Cash got a mack deal with a record company that been around for a hundred years. You see pictures of all them folks that come before you down this long white hall at these tight offices. Jazz women and blues daddies like the old man and Nick listen to. And that’s all cool, ’cause you know someday you just gonna be down that same line.
That new joint you’re workin’ in New York keepin’ you away from the Dirty South. You like seein’ your face off buses and bein’ thug-lipped over Times Square and it’s cool and all meetin’ Diddy and LL at some party in the middle of a big park made out of green grass. But somehow you feel like you losin’ you. Your rhymes not comin’ out the way you feel. The beats you hear sound like someone openin’ up a tin can.
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.
EPILOGUE
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.