about ALIAS and Malcolm.
JoJo propped his feet up on the ledge and continued to run an oilcloth on his old. 22. Chickens cackled behind the house.
“When did you get chickens?” I asked.
“When I decided I wanted eggs,” he said.
JoJo was in his late sixties now. Broad-shouldered and black. His arms starting to thicken from his return to farmwork and his rough fingers tough and quick over the stock and the barrel.
“What you gonna do with the kid?” he asked.
“Stay with him around here for a few days,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Why he got them gold teeth?”
“They were out of diamonds.”
“He’s street, Nick. Watch your ass. I don’t mess with those project folks in New Orleans.”
“Kid’s a millionaire.”
“You got to be shittin’ me.”
“I shit you not. He owns a big mansion on the lake-front. Has a Mercedes and doesn’t even have a learner’s permit.”
JoJo put the gun down on an old table. “You brought a drug dealer to my house?”
“Worse,” I said, and laughed. “A rapper.”
“No shit,” JoJo said, laughing too. “Kids will listen to anything these days. Man, when I was a kid, we all wanted to be Muddy Waters. The way he sang about women and whiskey. Made me want to play that ole blues.”
“Not much has changed,” I said.
“Except plenty,” he said. “That music is against God. Makes thugs into heroes, women into things, and money above all.”
I wanted to ask him about the stories he’d told me about Little Walter and his dice games and fistfights, but I didn’t.
The smell of Loretta’s cooking made my mouth water despite my stomach being full of that chicken-fried steak. I sank harder into the porch chair and rested my boots on the plank floor and took a deep breath. The old sun had touched the edge of JoJo’s farm, just nudging it a bit.
“Felix found a new job.”
“What?”
“Pours drinks into plastic peckers,” I said. “Says to tell you hello.”
JoJo stood. He walked to the screen door and opened it. The spring squeaked as he held it open and spit outside. “Lots of bad shit happened in New Orleans.”
“You ever think about coming home?”
JoJo held his eyes on mine. He had some deep bags under there and I suddenly thought that I was making them worse. “This is my home,” he said.
I laughed. “The Quarter is fresh out of good music.”
He pointed to the rolling acres past the porch.
“This is where I’ll die.”
The dozens of cattle he owned chowed down and swatted flies with their tails. A smooth, easy swat that looked effortless. Brown-and-white ones just enjoying their day eating in the morning sun.
“We can find a new building.”
“That place on Conti Street has always been the bar and always will be.”
“Except for now they serve martinis and play techno music.”
“What the hell is that?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“If you want a bar so much,” he said, “you open it up.”
I laughed. “You’re kidding.”
“Why not?” he said, and held up the gun, sighting the barrel into the field. “You can’t open a beer?”
“You know there’s more to it than that.”
He shrugged. Loretta’s deep voice called us in to eat.
“I’m too busy.”
“Working for Teddy?” JoJo asked, laying the gun down. “You crazy? Teddy would sell you for a quarter. Quit taking these jobs for folks. What you carryin’ inside of you that makes you feel like you got to pay the whole world back?”
“I want to see this one out. Then maybe I’ll think about it.”
“You think long and hard, son. ’Cause this old man ain’t comin’ back to the Big Easy for nothin’. I don’t care if I hear Miss Raquel Welch walkin’ naked down Bourbon Street waitin’ to give me a kiss.”
“Come on,” I said, knowing about the secret photo JoJo kept of Raquel in his desk drawer. She was his ultimate, the way I kept the calendar of Miss March ’91, although secretly guessing that Miss March would find me quite dull.
“All right,” he said. “I’d come back for that. But if you talkin’ to me about Sun and Felix and that crazy-ass friend of yours – what’s his name? Oz. Then no dice.”
Loretta called to us again.
“Kid stays clean. If he fucks up – if I smell him smokin’ some weed out back – he’s gone. This is my home and that kid don’t have the sense God gave a turkey.”
“Put him to work.”
“I do have a fence needs to be tended to.”
“He’s a teenager. Thinks he knows it all.”
“Like you did?”
I smiled. “Exactly.”
JoJo walked inside the old house, his feet beating hard on the hundred-year-old floors. Over his shoulder, he muttered: “Let’s hope he’s different.”
29
You don’t like to get fucked wit’. But the ole man and Nick did it to you every damned day. They get you up when it’s still dark and make you shovel shit out of some nasty-ass dirt yard – light comin’ from some little lantern – where some goats have crapped or somethin’. Nick make you jog with him before breakfast, right when the sun runnin’ down some dirt road and you can’t even keep up a mile. But on that sixth day, man, you keep up. You run strong by his side. He tell you that you fast and you like that when you eatin’ bacon and sweet-potato pancakes on that ole porch and that old woman warm you with a hand on your back.
You like the taste of the pancakes. The way the hot syrup is warm and flows right through them.
When you there for ten days, you ask him about that dream you been havin’ since you was a kid, to play pro. Nick say that you got to get back in school and the ole man ask how long you been out.
You tell him a few years.
That ole man shake his head and walk back into the red barn where he’s tearin’ out planks of wood that’s rotten with termites and making a heap to burn. He like tearin’ out all that old shit and puttin’ something right back to replace it. Good wood, he say, make it strong.
Sometimes y’all ride into Clarksdale inside JoJo’s old truck. That ride old as hell, smell like rust and funk, and JoJo make you listen to some station out of Memphis about Soul Classics and he think there’s something wrong with you ’cause you don’t know some singer named Al Green.
That’s when church start. And man, that church shit don’t let up. Wednesday too. Even Nick go to this country-ass thing by the highway where some fat-belly preacher start talkin’ for about four hours while your stomach gets all rumblin’ and you lookin’ at the bulletin. Bored as hell. Ain’t nothin’ goin’ on in town. Even the girls – and they do know you – ain’t that ripe.
