“You that hungry, kid?” JoJo asked ALIAS.
“I was talking about me,” I said.
“When you headed back to New Orleans?” JoJo asked, his face covered in sweat.
“After I say good-bye to Loretta.”
JoJo nodded. “What about him?”
I looked over at ALIAS, who stood with his fists on his hips, grinning big and gold as he leapt back into the truck bed. Annie followed.
“You’re gonna like Clarksdale,” I said.
“Ah, man,” ALIAS said.
“JoJo, I’ll be back in a week,” I said.
JoJo eyed the boy. The sun was yellow and full. High beams on the back of our necks and forearms. Cicadas screamed their high-pitched sounds all around us in the distance of trees just starting to fully leaf.
“That okay with you, kid?” JoJo asked.
He shrugged.
“Could use some help painting the barn.”
“Shit, man.” ALIAS spoke up. “I ain’t no slave.”
JoJo walked over to the pile of broken glass and examined a sliver ALIAS had blown apart with his gun. The light refracted hard in my eyes. Multicolor prisms twisting and playing on the earth.
We piled into the truck.
In the grind of the truck’s engine and crunching of gravel and dirt under his old tires, JoJo asked: “Why do I think you’ve just brought me some kind of riddle I can’t figure out?”
33
When I drove back to New Orleans, I checked my messages. I’d received six since I’d been away, four from credit card companies, one from an old student working on her thesis, and one from Jay Medeaux. I didn’t even stop to unpack, only poured out a little Dog Chow for Annie and jumped right back into my truck and headed up Canal and down Basin to the Ninth Ward. Teddy and I needed to talk.
When I arrived at the studio, I felt I’d entered some type of medieval castle. A high chain-link fence surrounded the warehouse made of gold cinderblocks and a black tin roof. Saints colors. Young men in bandannas and stocking caps stood tough, their arms across their bodies, guns tucked into their fat belts. Wide-legged jeans down low. Some smoked cigarettes. None talked. They wore sunglasses, Secret Service-style, and held on to radios. Muscled and hard, they watched me as I parked the truck, my Creedence still playing loud, and walked up to the front of the building. They didn’t seem to appreciate John Fogerty the way I did.
A kid I didn’t recognize squashed a cigarette under his foot. He wore a thick platinum rope around his neck with the Ninth Ward “9W” symbol. The air was so hot outside it felt like radiation off the asphalt.
“You that white dude?” he asked. His skin glowed with a feverish sheen.
“That’s the rumor.”
White, red, and yellow roses had been laid on the leather seats of Malcolm’s Hummer.
“Teddy waitin’ on you,” he said.
Two of his rappers, or guards, escorted me into a backroom studio. The studio was dark and about thirty degrees cooler than outside. They’d set red and blue bulbs in floor lamps to create a mood. Thick glass hoodoo candles flickered in the air-conditioning. The air smelled like incense and weed.
“Where you been, man?” Teddy asked. His black silk shirt was rolled to the elbows. Pizza boxes and Chinese food cartons lay in huge piles on tables near the console. On the other side of the glass, I saw some kid with headphones on studying a small spiral notebook. He looked pissed-off with himself and kicked a stool across the room.
“Malcolm knew this was gonna be Stank’s ride,” Teddy said, watching him and shaking his head. “This thing called ‘Project Girl.’ He’d laid down this track straight on, sampling some ole Louis Armstrong shit. You know, workin’ that Louisiana sound like Mystikal? Man, he had it. But damn if I don’t know what the fuck I’m doin’ and I’ve seen him work this shit all my life.”
I took a seat by him in the cramped control room watching Stank in a black muscle shirt and a hooded parka. I could smell Teddy’s Brut aftershave but it disappeared when he fired up a plump cigar. The room suddenly became clouded and thick. I wedged the door open gently with my foot.
Teddy’s face had grown gray and he sweated in the sixty-degree coolness of the room. Great bags hung under his eyes and his fingers shook around a big plastic bottle of Mello Yello. Stank tapped on the glass and startled me.
He circled his index finger in the air.
Teddy squashed the new cigar into an empty coffee can filled with roach clips and the beat started once again. He slid his fat fingers across the mixing board, that same bounce that every other rapper in the country had tried to copy ever since it had been born in the South. The sound track to every black neighborhood in the U.S. Women and ice. Cars and clubs. Stank took a deep stance, hat sideways on his head, and rolled into it.
I watched Teddy’s head bobbing up and down, almost hearing the cash falling from the sky in green rain as he moved with his arms. I smiled.
Teddy smiled too until he swung his big arm too close to his food and knocked the Mello Yello all over the console, seeping into all those tiny knobs.
The equalizer’s green and red lights dimmed and then shut down. The music ceased in the monitors above us and I watched Stank’s hands turn to fists. “What the fuck’s up?”
Teddy grabbed his Italian leather jacket and started dabbing off the console. I pulled the jacket from his hands and found some napkins near a pizza box. I wiped the metal and plastic clean but knew it was no use. He’d shorted out the system.
He stood and kicked open the door, leaving the room. I sat there for a while and watched the others clear out. Some more of Teddy’s men walked around, prowling, making sure I didn’t start any shit. I saw some accusing stares and I smiled back. These boys were in their late teens. Twenty if they were lucky. Their scowls and the hard-edged violence in their eyes reminded me of angular men who’d worked the Delta land and had been beaten down for generations. They were teens; they were old men.
I grabbed a cold Coke from a cooler and found Teddy in his office. Glass desk. Black leather furniture. Boxes and boxes of CDs obscuring the windows. He yelled for everyone to leave him the fuck alone. About a dozen men streamed from his office, a couple of obscenely beautiful women. Black with ringlets of soft hair, T-shirts cut off below their breasts.
I found a comfortable place on the sofa and lay down like you would in a shrink’s office. I noticed one of Teddy’s old game balls from the Saints and read the writing. It was a play-off game against Atlanta where Teddy had picked up a fumble and ran it back fifteen yards for a TD to win the game.
I tossed the ball up in the air and remembered the party at Teddy’s house when we got back to New Orleans. He’d shook his fat butt on the counter of his kitchen with two women and an honest-to-God midget someone met in the Quarter.
I tossed the ball up in the air again. “ALIAS is safe,” I said. “He’s with JoJo. But in case anyone asks, you don’t know shit.”
“A’ight,” he said, burying his big head into his beefy arms. I heard him sniffle and cough, his body shaking loud and hard deep inside, and the rippling pain hurt my heart so badly I worked to change the subject.
“You can buy a new mixing board. That’s what, five thousand? Man, that’s how much you paid for those rims on that Bentley.”
“If I don’t get another album from the kid, man…”
On the wall, he had a picture of him and Mike Tyson and Don King. Another showed a picture of Teddy and Sherman Helmsley. He signed the photo “Movin’ on Up.”
“He’ll be back,” I said. “I promise.”
“He always come back here,” he said. He nodded to a long row of keys that hung from gold hooks behind his
