Dirty South

28

Jojo and Loretta lived in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse a few miles outside Clarksdale in a town that once had a name. I’d learned to recognize the county roads by piles of rocks or trees, since signs were rare. Soon I crossed their old footbridge and headed down a gravel road. The house was two stories and white with a wide screened-in porch where Loretta had draped blue Christmas lights right below the tin roof. It was just before sundown and JoJo and I slipped into some metal chairs flecked with green paint and rust and drank whiskey. The whiskey was hot and warm but surprisingly mellow.

Annie lay at JoJo’s feet.

“See?” he said. “That dog’s smart. She remember me.”

“Maybe she just wants some food.”

“Dogs remember who save their ass,” he said. “She’ll always remember me. Right, girl?”

He scratched the back of her ears and she barked.

Loretta had shown ALIAS a bed in the back room of the old house and in the last few minutes had begun to make us dinner in the kitchen. I could smell the greens simmering with a fat, salty ham hock and cornbread baking in the oven. She served sweet tea and scowled at JoJo’s whiskey.

I returned to the porch with JoJo. The sun slowly headed down over his pastureland to the east in a slice of yellow. Dark patches of shadow hung beneath his hickories and pecan trees as I sipped on the tea and told him 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.”