Dirty South

34

Antoine’s isn’t my favorite restaurant. Most of the places I enjoy are far out of the Quarter in little neighborhood pockets where the food’s cooked on broken-down stoves by women who look on their customers as extended family. But I used to eat at Antoine’s and Commander’s Palace – one of my favorites – for special occasions with JoJo and Loretta. They found it very important that I know how to handle myself in nice places. Sit up straight. Use the right fork. They also taught me how to order and how to dress and how to recognize the better foods. “Don’t be so country,” JoJo said to me about a thousand times. Antoine’s used to have a menu printed completely in French with waiters who held their jobs as lifelong professions.

But recently I’d noticed a change in the old place. You saw more and more out-of-town businessmen walking from its century-plus doors chomping on toothpicks, wearing golf shirts without a tie or jacket. The waiters had grown ruder, the food a shadow of what it had once been. The menu printed in English.

We rode in a stream of Bentleys and Escalades rolling into the Quarter. I’d grabbed the sport coat that I’d worn to Malcolm’s wake over my white T-shirt. Jeans and boots were at least better than a golf shirt. The music battling from each car didn’t even stop when we rolled onto St. Louis near the old Wildlife and Fisheries Building and Teddy’s flunkies were left to go park.

We were seated at a huge rectangular table in the center of the restaurant. White tile floors. Cafe chairs with tables covered in white linen. The walls lined with pictures of dead starlets and U.S. presidents.

A man in an out-of-style Italian suit sat with a peroxide-blond woman with mammoth breasts. He fed her ice cream from his spoon and nearly dropped the white mess in his lap when Teddy’s boys walked in.

We didn’t even have time to settle our asses in our seats when Cash parted a scurrying group of waiters with about ten of his men and found a seat opposite Teddy. He wore a white linen suit without a shirt. Platinum weighing hard on his neck and fingers. Teddy nodded but did not get up.

Bad energy filled the room.

He saw me but didn’t look at me. My hands clenched at my sides and my mouth grew dry.

Teddy motioned over the waiter, ordered chilled shrimp for his people and five bottles of Dom Perignon.

The weight of his eyes stayed on Cash, who had dipped a shrimp as large as a cat’s paw into some cocktail sauce. When the waiter brought the Dom to Cash’s side of the table, he told the man to pour it straight up into his water glass.

The waiter blanched, so Cash took the whole thing from the man, popped the top with his bare hands, and drank off the running foam like a child at a fire hydrant in summer.

I motioned to the waiter for a Dixie. I hated champagne.

“Big family,” Cash said, his mouth full of wet shrimp meat and champagne. “Got you a white boy and everything.”

“What?” Teddy asked. He had yet to touch any food. He waited for the waiter to splash a bit into his glass. He took a small sip, nodded, and waited for the man to pour.

Teddy placed the glass to his lip and tasted the champagne. The waiter nodded and ground the bottle deep into an iced bucket by his elbow. Two waiters filled everyone else’s glass from other bottles.

“We through?” Cash asked.

Teddy nodded.

“You know you should be in the ground.”

All the men at the table were quiet. They didn’t take a bite of their food. The chatter from the small islands of tables around us sounded like insects against a screen door.

“Sorry about your brother,” Cash said. “You know? We ain’t neva seen alike. But shit with your family tears your heart out from inside.”

Teddy nodded.

The waiter brought my beer.

“That white boy and me played a couple weeks back,” Cash said. “He tell you about that? Yes, sir, me and him got down in Algiers for you, nigga. Why he do that for you? Crazy, man. He’s a crazy motherfucker takin’ on Cash like that. He lucky he alive too.”

Cash moved his fingers around his bare chest. He still wore sunglasses. I didn’t say anything. Teddy looked at me and shrugged.

“You got that money?” Cash asked.

“It’ll be loaded in your trunk.”

Teddy tasted some chilled shrimp. Then everyone started eating. I tried a few. They tasted thawed and tasteless to me. Even the cocktail sauce was a grade over ketchup. Teddy ordered those french fries loaded with hot air that he liked so much and even started talking among us for a while.

I ate. But I watched too. Cash swigged down his own damned bottle of Dom. His platinum teeth gleaming, a black tattoo of a pistol on his left hand, a blue cross burning bright on his right. Sweat drained from his face and slick bald head and onto his chest.

In the middle of it all, just as the lights had dimmed in the restaurant when a bunch of tourists had ordered crepes suzette or some shit, Cash spoke loud. “I want the boy. I want ALIAS. He’s my blood. We the same.”

“Ain’t no boundaries at Nint’ Ward,” Teddy said. He sipped down the rest of the champagne, crooked his finger at the waiter, and whispered something in his ear. The man looked confused and walked away. “I respect what you sayin’, man. I respect that you tryin’ to make the peace. But you made the play.”

“You can keep your respect,” Cash said. I could tell his eyes were reddening and he was a little drunk. “Or we can play.”

“Play what?” Teddy said, leaning back into his chair. His arms spread across his chest. Full Marlon Brando mode. “You ain’t had no business interruptin’ Malcolm’s thing.”

“You burned my Rolls,” he said.

Cash tucked four shrimp into the pockets of his right fingers. He gnawed off each one as if eating parts of his own flesh and laughed with shit stuck in his teeth.

The woman with big boobs next to us sucked in her cheeks and turned her head away. Cash smelled her action and got up out of his chair.

He leaned down to her and said something to her that made her clutch her chest and then run to the bathroom. He sat back down at the table and wiped his mouth as if his dirty words had spilled on him.

“The kid?”

Teddy hadn’t moved from the Brando pose. He stroked under his chin with the tops of his fingers. “ALIAS is my company.”

Teddy stood.

All of his boys stood and for a moment I felt like a kid who didn’t attend church enough to know the rules. I stood too, a few seconds later.

“I appreciate the dinner,” Teddy said. “I look forward to concluding our business in the future. You’ll get your money but you ain’t never gettin’ ALIAS.”

Just as he turned his back, there was a mammoth crash. Cash had flipped the table, splattering the champagne and shrimp cocktail and sending my beer into a foaming skitter across the floor.

“You’re dead, motherfucker,” he screamed. “Goddammit, you’re dead.”