Dirty South

“I seen you play many times, man. Y’all had the best defense those years. You and that man from Mississippi, linebacker?”

“Ulysses Davis.”

“The Black Knight.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell him that somebody remembers him,” I said. “He’ll like that.”

“Y’all stay in touch?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about what happened with you and Cash.”

“I grew up in Calliope,” he said. “Proud of that. Most of my kids come from there or Magnolia. I got out by workin’ block parties. Hustlin’ for any money I could make. I invented bounce, man. You know bounce?”

“It’s the Dirty South sound.”

“Damn right,” he said. “That’s me.”

“Cash took it.”

“Took my beats, put his lame-ass raps over it, and threatened all the record stores in Uptown. Made ’em sell his record or he’d fuck their ass up.”

“Man, that’s good marketing.”

“That ape don’t play,” he said. He patted Annie on her head and reached down to pull some high grass from some broken asphalt inside the track. “When I confronted the man, he just walk away. We was at a block party at the Y when I let him know he was a thief. Didn’t even answer me. But that motherfucker sure broke into my apartment one night. Tied up me and my girl. Made her watch while he beat my ass.”

I changed the leash into the other hand. Woods put his hands into his coaching shorts and pulled out a whistle. He twirled it into his fingers. “Stuck a knife into my mouth. Cut my tongue.”

He shook his head. “Made me go back to school, though. I played ball in high school but I wasn’t like y’all. Didn’t have the speed. No real size. Got my degree from Xavier on my twenty-sixth birthday, man. Now I teach computer skills to these kids.”

Annie kept pulling on the leash, not sure why it was slowing her down. Her tongue lolling out, antenna ears askew.

“Someone took ALIAS,” I said. “They conned him. Made him think he was represented by some big agency. Does Cash have the connection or the smarts to make that work?”

“Man’s smart. But he don’t have the patience for something like that. He wants the kid. Wants Teddy to look bad. But see, Cash doesn’t work that way, conning somebody. If he wanted something done, he’d head right to it. He’ll lie, steal, and cheat. But he’ll do it face-to-face. Con games and playin’ ain’t the man’s style.”

“You answered my question.”

“What kind of dog is that anyway?” he asked.

“A Delta dog,” I said. “The finest breeding outside Memphis.”

“Got some pit in her?”

“Maybe.”

“What else?”

“Boxer. Shepherd. Wookie.”

“Man,” he said, laughing. “Listen. You think you could come by practice sometime this fall? Kids ’bout to get out of school now. Tryin’ to make ’em show up to workouts this summer and all. Ain’t workin’ that great. All kinds of distractions. Girls. Drugs. Money. Man, when I was a kid, football was everything. Now they just into ballin’.”

“I guess when you hit the big time, you don’t even need school.”

“ALIAS will have to come down hard one day,” he said. “You ever want to help out, let me know.”

“Sure, man,” I said. “I work at Tulane. They know how to find me.”

I stopped walking at the gate to the parking lot. Annie needed some water and to be fed. I needed to make a few calls. “Who would want to cheat this kid?” I asked.

Woods stretched out his fist and gave me the pound. Hard black clouds rolled in from the east, a few small trees planted around the field started to shake. I heard thunder crack. The rain was back.

“A millionaire kid with a Calliope education?” he asked. “I’d look at everybody who breathes in this city.”

“Will Cash come for me?”

“If you’re in between him and the boy, you better bet on it.”

9

CASH STAYED UPTOWN in this purple mansion with yellow shutters just off the streetcar line where white people played tennis and parked their cars behind thick iron fences. You’d heard that his neighbors don’t like him none. Not ’cause he’s black and rich but ’cause he throws parties about every night, rips apart some old-as-hell house breakin’ the law, and threatens folks with sawed-off shotguns. He even made some white lawyer get on his knees and kiss his buck-naked ass after the man told Cash to cut his lawn. In a lot of ways, you got to respect that.