Dirty South

I hopped the fence and followed a stone path covered in pink bougainvillea that grew over a fence and rotted awning. On the shaded back patio, white and purple impatiens hung from large baskets. In the deep shade, I recognized some yellow jasmine growing from iron grillwork. The air smelled of musky sweetness that enveloped me.

“My mother loved them,” she said.

Dahlia smiled at me, hands covered in white gloves and mashing potting soil into a terra-cotta pot. She wore a boy’s white tank top covered in mud. The cotton hugged the perfect shape of her breasts and tiny waist. She ran her forearm over her brow.

Her dark hair had grown curly in the heat and her large eyes watched me, her jaw loose. Lips parted.

“You want to tell me about your brother?” I asked.

“Jesus,” she said. Smiling. “You don’t stop.”

“I think I have it all figured out, but why don’t you tell me.”

She tilted her head and wrapped her long brown hair into a ponytail. Her hair seemed moist and rich. I could smell her scent. She smelled like coconut oil and warm skin.

“How’d your brother know Christian?”

She held her stare. “My daddy doesn’t like you too much.”

“He thinks I’m trying to save your soul.”

“Too far gone for that.” She pushed out her lower lip with mock sadness.

“Calvin was the real thing.”

“Calvin was a genius,” she said. “He was tested when we was kids and he was off the charts. My daddy tole me they put him in a room with a bunch of toys to figure things out. You know triangle to triangle? Circle to circle? He did all right till he clocked some poor child in the head with a block.”

“Couldn’t stay straight?”

“Hell, no,” she said. She looked at me, suddenly reminded of who I was and backed off. “Oh no. That’s enough. Take what you got and leave.”

“Let me come inside.”

“That just leads to bad things.”

“Not for me.”

“Don’t you like women?” she asked, brushing my chin with her index fingers.

“I like ’em too much,” I said. “They get me in trouble.”

“You got a woman now?”

“Yep.”

“Where she at?”

“She’s waiting on me,” I said. “I can’t leave till I find out what happened with Dio.”

“Dio,” she said. “Shit. Calvin wouldn’t ever taken no name like that. That was his invention.”

“When did you find out?” I asked, leading her into an area I didn’t know myself.

“Last year,” she said. “When he was dead.”

“Dio?”

“The one they called Dio.”

“They used him and killed him.”

She smiled and patted my face. “Right.”

She walked up some concrete blocks and into her house. I followed. She had her back turned to me leaning over her cast-iron sink. Her blue-jean shorts hugged her rounded thighs and her shoulder blades stretched under her brown skin. I was drawn to her neck, the beads of moisture collecting right among the tiny, soft hairs.

“They pay you to be quiet?”

“When I heard those rhymes, I knew,” she said. “Calvin had been workin’ on them since he was twelve. He had notebooks full of ’em. He wrote in them all the time. Made hand copies and sent them to me, even in jail. The ones that came out. The ones about Uptown life and all that? That was him. They didn’t change a word. His heart lived in those old ragged notebooks. We may have moved on, but his soul was still in Calliope where we was raised.”

“What happened?”

“A guard scrambled his brains,” she said, turning her back to me. She was crying. She tilted her head into her hands. Sunlight skimmed through the oaks and broke apart in strobe flashes across her face. Her back door kept slamming open and shut in the summer wind.

I could still smell the jasmine. So sweet and rich.

“I heard he filled the guard’s water bottle with horse shit,” she said. “The guard later said Calvin had tried to kill him with a broken piece of glass.”

I nodded, leaning against the back wall of the tiny kitchen. The ragged wallpaper made soft rubbing sounds.

“So his cellmate was Christian Chase,” I said.

She nodded.

“He pay you for keeping quiet?”

“Trey Brill did,” she said. “I came to them quick and asked for a cut. They let me in. They took me to dinner and later out to clubs with them.”

“And whose idea was it to work ALIAS?”

She shook her head.

“Come on,” I said. “You’ve come this far.”

“They fucked me,” she said. “Both of them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They played with me for ten months,” she said. “I came to them whenever they wanted me. They put me on video and would make me sit there while I watched it with their friends. But they didn’t know who I was inside. It was my goddamn idea to run the kid. Marion and I got the idea when he came into the club that night. Kid was fifteen with millions. He had time to make it back. Besides, that was money built on my brother’s soul. Without Calvin, you wouldn’t have no ALIAS.”

“Come with me,” I said. “I need you to tell this to a friend of mine.”

“I’m not talking to the police.”

“Shit,” I said, grabbing her hand. “Come on.”

She twisted her head back and forth like a child. “No.”

“Did you know this guy, Dio? The one who used your brother’s lyrics?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Of course.”

Her eyes narrowed. I was losing her.

“They killed him and Malcolm.”