Dirty South

50

“Ican’t figure that boy out,” JoJo said, drinking his 9 A.M. cafe au lait from the end of the bar as if he’d never left New Orleans. “He wasn’t a bad worker. Got up in the morning, fed the cows, took the work to heart. Listen to me. You understand?”

I nodded. “When did he take the money?”

“Notice it two days ago,” he said. “Ask him about it and he said to me, ‘So what if I did take your money?’ What makes a child like that?”

I was finished up whitewashing the brick that had been blackened in the fire. I liked the way the paint covered and sealed the grooves, the unevenness of the old pattern of mortar. By the back loading dock, Curtis Lee screwed down ten-inch pine planks into the subfloor. His little cassette recorder shaking with some Little Walter I’d given him to replace the Whitesnake.

Curtis, with a long cigarette trailing from his lips, laid out the floor in a yellow pine jigsaw puzzle and pieced it together with his drill. The cigarette’s ash hung at least an inch long as the sound of the drill almost worked in time with Walter’s music.

“That song take you back, don’t it?” JoJo asked his buddy Bronco, who worked his brush on the opposite wall.

“I guess.”

Bronco wore a long-sleeved blue work shirt and dark jeans. I had yet to see him splatter a drop.

“You don’t like Walter?” I asked.

Bronco shook his head. A long scar on his forearm looked smooth and pink in the morning light.

JoJo sipped on his coffee and returned to the Picayune.

“We knew him,” JoJo said.

“Best harp player I ever heard,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can even touch his licks.”

“You’re right,” JoJo said. “But that doesn’t mean Walter wasn’t a evil motherfucker.”

Bronco kept painting.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Nope,” JoJo said to me, but looking over at Bronco. “Some things are meant to stay up in Chicago.”

When JoJo wanted to keep a secret, he could keep it for decades. You didn’t try.

“Y’all mind watching Tavarius?” I asked. “I’ve got to talk to some folks.”

“On Teddy’s business?” JoJo asked.

“Have to pay my debt.”

“Don’t be goin’ and payin’ it in full,” JoJo said. “All animals lay with their own kind.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means Teddy’s music brings on hate,” he said. “Rap doesn’t elevate us. It makes children turn to violence to buy things they don’t need. Money, money, money. Trashy women. That’s not music. Glorifies people being ignorant. Blues is music.”

“So what happened with Walter in Chicago?” I asked.

Bronco shot JoJo a mean stare and JoJo just shook his head at me.

“Maybe ALIAS just doesn’t know how to ask,” I said. “Maybe he needed the money.”

“For what?” JoJo asked. “Two hundred dollars would buy half of Clarksdale. Besides, he didn’t want for nothin’ at my house. He got a room. Loretta cooked and he worked. What else he need?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I reached into my wallet to see how much cash I had on me to pay him back. He caught the wallet between his rough hands.

“Don’t embarrass me.”

“Did I tell you about his mother?”

JoJo turned to listen. Bronco shook out a long Kool cigarette from a pack and excused himself outside.

“His mother overdosed a few years back,” I said. “Tavarius was thirteen. They were living in Calliope and he didn’t tell anyone about it.”

JoJo watched my face, his jaw dropping slack. His eyes softened.

“He didn’t want anyone to take her away,” I said. “Teddy said he’d heard ALIAS thought he’d go to jail if anyone found out.”

“Lord,” JoJo said.

Curtis had finished half the floor while we talked. The puzzle pieces taking shape into the soft, yellow wood.

“Rap’s just dreams,” I said. “People in that world just want something to wish for.”

JoJo nodded. “I heard one time Muddy and old Wolf got into an argument up in Chicago. They kept lighting hundred-dollar bills to see which one would turn chicken. Bought a harp the next day.”

Tavarius walked into the bar, carrying a box of rollers and paintbrushes and some high-gloss black paint for our new front door.

“Old School,” he said, nodding over at me.

He handed JoJo the change, his hands pretend-shaking as if he were a beggar. “It’s all there.”

JoJo counted it out into his hand. “You got a receipt?”

“In the box.”

Tavarius tore open a bag of Doritos and wandered back to where Curtis had unfolded a Playboy he’d found in the trash.

JoJo went to the front door, his feet finding bare spaces in Curtis’s pattern. I watched JoJo, framed in the white afternoon light, laugh with Bronco. Bronco cupped the cigarette tight to his face, squinted up his eyes, and bellowed smoke deep from his body.

Behind me, Tavarius walked forward into the bar.

I could not help but notice the imprint of his sneakers on the fresh wood.