Dirty South

I grabbed a beer from the old cooler, feeling good on the bar stools I’d bought earlier.

JoJo punched up “Mannish Boy” on the jukebox. The version Muddy did with Johnny Winter on the Hard Again album back in the seventies. The album, all bull-shit and academic rhetoric aside, is by far the most enjoyable blues record ever made.

“If you don’t like that,” JoJo said, “you got nothin’ between your legs.”

Muddy sang he was a man. Johnny Winter howled and screamed, backing him up.

Felix moved his hips a bit as he mopped.

JoJo slid behind the bar and opened a cold Dixie with a bottle opener he’d installed under the flat top. “You got four bottle openers all down the line. Don’t want to be foolin’ with nothin’ you got to look for.”

I nodded. He sat beside me, taking a sip.

“Come back, JoJo.”

“No, sir,” he said. “Not yet.”

He smiled. He looked around the dim light of the bar, Muddy alive again on Conti Street. “Besides, if I come back now, how are we gonna see what you gonna do?”

I sipped the beer. It was two o’clock. I didn’t care.

“You want to get a muffuletta down at Central?” JoJo asked.

“Yeah, let me get it,” I said.

JoJo smiled. “I’ll let you.”

“When you headed back?”

“After I eat my muff.”

“Come on, JoJo.”

“It’s all you, son,” he said. He patted me on the back. “How’s it feel?”

“What’s that?”

“To be grown.”

I smiled, the beer was cold in my hand, and I understood.

Felix kept mopping. The blues played on. Old rhythms returned.

“ALIAS has lost his mind,” I said, and told him about my run-in with Trey Brill and what I learned from Teddy. “This morning, before I picked up the tables and chairs, he told me a dead man had come to visit him in the night.”

“Maybe it happened.”

“Hell no,” I said. “I’m done. Teddy can deal with him the way he wants.”

“Look deeper,” JoJo said.

“Oh, come on, JoJo,” I said. “That kid conned you and me and Loretta. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

He looked at me. His brown eyes looked heavy with the creased skin around them. “I don’t waste time,” he said. “There’s more to Tavarius. That kid is all right.”

“Maybe he killed Malcolm too,” I said. “He made up a damned good lie about folks ripping him off. He’s so smart, JoJo. I mean, that kid can lie.”

“Easy when you do that,” JoJo said, standing from the bar. “Ain’t it?”

“What’s that?” I said, enjoying the beer and watching Felix mop.

“Handin’ off your troubles.”

“Why are you on his side?” I said. “You were through with him too.”

JoJo settled into his seat, the jukebox cutting on to a new record. He watched the blank row of old brick as he used to when a mirror hung there. He took a sip of beer.

“I was wrong.”

“Come on.”

He opened his wallet and folded down two hundred-dollar bills on the table before me.

“Found it in my jacket last night,” he said. “Tavarius was tellin’ the truth and I shut him out.”

JoJo left me there to think with the folded bills.

And I did for a long time.

60

AT SUNSET, I RAN down St. Charles, turned onto Canal past all the camera shops and jewelry stores, and wound my way to the Aquarium, where I followed the Riverwalk downriver. I passed the vagrants sleeping on rocks still warm from the sun and watched rats skittering through overflowing trash cans. I almost tripped on one as it ran back with a hot dog in its mouth and headed into the rocks along the Mississippi. My Tulane football shirt was soaked in sweat. I tried to slow my breathing and pick up my pace as I stopped at the Governor Nichols Street Wharf. I put my hands on top of my head and noticed everything turn a murky gold and red. The brick and stucco of the old buildings of the Quarter softening.

I decided to cut back through the old district, before the streets became flooded with cars and tourists. I jogged my way down Royal Street, looking up at the scrolled ironwork on JoJo and Loretta’s old apartment, and wound my way around a street musician who used his dog to pick up tips with its mouth.

I wondered if Annie could do that.

She’d probably take the cash and then piss on their foot.

I slowed, made a couple of cuts, and found myself at the old Woolworth’s and a blank stretch of Bourbon. Where Bourbon met Canal, I heard a brass band of teenagers running through the standard “Somebody Is Taking My Place.”

Trombones and trumpets. A skinny kid with an overpowering dented tuba.

All of them were black and wearing T-shirts and shorts.

A little girl, about four, walked around with a shoebox filled with loose coins.

I stopped. Caught my breath.

In the fading light of the day, all gold and dark blue, in this unremarkable little stretch of the Quarter, a half-dozen kids entertained about twenty people. They rolled through “Saints” and took a big finish with some really wonderful solos.

Just when you grew to hate New Orleans with all its dark places and overwhelming violence, you saw something like a bunch of ragtag kids making some spectacular music. I wondered about the violence and the art and how it all fit together.