Dirty South

71

Cash Hugs that coast of Pontchartrain, that mean ole humpbacked levee running for miles out on-shore. Look like the spiny back of a dragon blockin’ you from seein’ anything off the lake. The sky is so pink and gray. These big-ass long clouds that crack and stretch like broken slabs of concrete in the early day. The sun just a slice of orange over that long, green levee, colorin’ these old fishin’ shacks on tall crooked wooden legs that stretch out long and crippled. Some of them is just legs now, weather and time and shit bleachin’ all that wood away.

Cash slow his purple boat, his right hand on that wheel that look like a racecar. He open up his C-phone and start talkin’. He yellin’ into it, tellin’ them to “Work ’em. Work ’em.”

He flick it shut and turn to JoJo. “My boys seen ’em. They was right down by the causeway and must’ve got scared. They’s runnin’ ’em back toward us. Both my boats like two pit bulls.”

JoJo smiled. “Hot damn,” he said. But then he stopped smilin’ when Cash turn the boat toward the bridges headin’ out of the city. “They see Nick?”

Cash shook his head. “Just Teddy and some other brother.”

“That brother is Dio,” you say.

“What?” Cash says, wealth flashin’ in his mouth. He starts to laugh.

“Dio ain’t dead,” you say. “Some rich motherfuckers over in Metairie made him up. He ain’t neva real.”

“What you mean, not real?” Cash asks, lookin’ back. Real concerned now.

“I said that nigga weren’t eva real,” you say. “This boy Christian just actin’ thugged up. They weren’t his rhymes, man. He stole them off a dead man he knew in Angola and then made his own self disappear. They schemed all them lost records and shit.”

Cash shook his head. “That the boy on the boat?”

“Yeah.”

“He got to win the Academy Award,” he say. “I even heard folks out in Calliope say they his people.”

Bronco reach into a duffel bag and hands JoJo a long, black pistol.

“Teddy know about this?” Cash ask.

You say he did.

“Lord help ’em both,” Cash say. “You gonna kill ’em, old man?”

“I kill anyone gets in my way.”

“You with him, Tavarius?” Cash ask.

“All the way.”

“Y’all just thugs and don’t even know it.”

Cash lay down the throttle and that long green levee break behind you. Y’all runnin’ down a long old railroad bridge crossin’ the water.

“The Trestle,” JoJo says, to no one in particular.

Christian steered the boat while Teddy tied Trey’s body with thick white rope and wrapped the cord of a ship radio around his neck, letting the heavy transmitter fall to his chest. He duct-taped a big red fire extinguisher to his dead body and pulled the cover of a black pillowcase over his head.

“Goddamn, he wouldn’t quit lookin’ at me,” Teddy said. “You like that, Malcolm?” He started to laugh. “You like that?”

“Yeah, Teddy,” Christian said. “Good boy.”

I held my place on a backseat, rolling and rocking with the boat. My entire body smeared with my own blood and vomit. Dark maroon stains across my palms.

“Teddy, you remember that time you won the Atlanta game? You scooped up the ball and ran in for a touchdown. We went down to that bar in the Quarter and later on you danced on a table with that midget. You remember that? Man, we had a good time.”

I smiled up at him.

He tilted his head at me. His eyes narrowing. “You ain’t nothin’.”

“I’m your friend. It’s Nick.”

“Nick?”

He smiled for a moment, eyes softening.

His shape darkened as we headed for the long train bridge – Christian squeezing through the narrow opening – sewing our way under two more long bridges of the old highway and then the interstate twisting north. He smiled as the day softened all pink and gold all the way to the Gulf. Christian running us close to the shore and cursing God for only finding marsh.

We slowed to a chug as he looked for solid ground.

I held out my hand to Teddy.

The smile shut off.

“It’s all gone too far,” he said.

We were on the far edge of Orleans Parish, the edge of the Bayou Sauvage.

I could smell the foulness of the bayou rot as we moved away from the lake and deeper into the high grass. I’d hunted around here sometime back with JoJo, a place called Blind Lagoon.

I heard the scream of a nutria in the slate-gray-and-pink morning. The swamp rat’s bloated body swimming in the high grass, slabs of yellow and brown teeth like a prehistoric animal. Red eyes watching us in the fresh light.

Dawn was here.

Dead cypress silhouetted the landscape like amputated appendages.

As Christian slowly moved into the marsh, engine revving and stopping, revving and stopping, I saw an eagle turn in the sky and hang there for a moment, just riding in the wind that moved him.