Authors: Ace Atkins
You remember that thug’s face and his rhymes when you was a kid and now all them T-shirts and lost albums and tributes. Death make you live forever.
All that talk about Dio and your own chances and risks make you want to take the boat out.
When you start that motor, Cash flashes a smile loaded with platinum and diamonds on the dock and then you disappear. His dogs playin’ with green-and-yellow bottle rockets out by your pool and hills of green grass on the levee.
You take that boat way out in the lake, where the lights don’t mess with the crisp stars. You smoke a blunt to take it all down, flat back in that skinny little boat, just driftin’ in loopy choppy circles trying to figure out what happens next. You think about that, the way you drift, and that’s cool with you. Because you are a puzzle. Them pieces come to be known as you grow. Ain’t that right?
Because evil can’t touch you. You away from that evil and men that can pull a young brother apart. It makes you smile as the blunt stinks up your clothes — the Little Dipper burnin’ so bright it reminds you of the Christmas lights that used to frame your grandmamma’s window — to know you are safe. Goblins and them mean ole ghosts have disappeared from your life like the edges of the smoke into that cold wind at the lip of the boat.
WE SEARCHED ALL NIGHT LONG. We took Teddy’s black Escalade with silver rims with a few of his people following. We used a ton of cell phones and followed a trail through so many strip clubs that I started to smell like smoke and could guarantee that they’d play some Aerosmith song before I left. We checked out late-night diners like the Hummingbird and clubs where he’d hung out. We checked out this Uptown apartment he’d shared with a woman who’d borne two of his children and even deep down into the Ninth Ward to the leaning shotgun houses where the Paris brothers had grown up.
Teddy told me stories about their grandmother and that an uncle of theirs had been some kind of soundman for the Ohio Players. He told me about his first business running dime bags for some local hustler in the early seventies and how Malcolm once had a box haircut so tall it bounced when he walked.
He talked about his brother’s talent and how he recognized hit songs the first time he heard them on the radio. Teddy talked about how Malcolm had found Dio and how it had changed him from a man selling CDs out the back of his Buick Regal to being one of the richest African-Americans in Louisiana. He smiled.
“We worked together, all right,” he said.
He steered the Escalade with both hands.
“We done all right.”
We drove.
No one knew a thing about his brother. ALIAS still wouldn’t answer his phone.
From cinderblock bars in Algiers to some backdoor clubs in the Quarter, we were worn-out by 6
A.M
. I was outside the Ninth Ward Studio leaning against the gold brick wall and smoking when I heard Teddy walk back out.
The sky had just started to turn purple at dawn. The air in the Ninth Ward smelled salty and mildewed from the channel. I could smell the diesel fumes from the trucks and hear the hiss of the brakes as they moved on. I watched Teddy as he rolled up his sleeves and made a couple more calls, pacing.
ALIAS came down to the studios about 7:30 wearing the same clothes from when I’d left him at his house. He gave Teddy and me a tired pound and said, “I heard.”
Everybody had heard. Everyone Teddy knew — a big crowd — was looking for Malcolm.
We all drove. The thought of Cash seemed weaker now. Teddy almost welcomed it.
“The deal’s off,” Teddy told me with such confidence I almost believed him.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“My family’s in trouble,” he said. “That will make sense to him.”
“And you being dead wouldn’t cause trouble for your family?”
“It ain’t the same,” Teddy said, wheeling the Bentley with me and ALIAS back down Canal and onto St. Charles and then to the Camellia Grill at the end of the streetcar line. He bought breakfast for twenty-three people who’d been out looking for Malcolm and gave a big speech right outside the diner as the rain first started to come about 8
A.M
.
He offered a reward for anyone who could find his brother alive. He never mentioned the note or suicide or anything other than that something had happened. I got the feeling that most people blamed Cash.
I had just gotten my third cup of coffee to go and was walking outside when I saw Teddy leaned against his Bentley crying. He just kept nodding and nodding but his words made him sound like a child who was confused.
I watched ALIAS disappear down the streetcar tracks and then turn his walk into a run as if he could escape from the sadness that was about to wash over people he knew.
I walked slow across the tracks and stood by Teddy.
He looked down on me.
“They found him,” he said. “He’s come home.”
“What?”
“He’s finally come home.”
Teddy had cracked. I just helped him into the car and aimed it toward the parish line. That’s where Teddy said they were keeping the body.
The rain started hammering the hood of the car just as we made the turn by the Metairie Cemetery.
BAMBOO ROAD ran flush along a dirty concrete canal that stretched from Pontchartrain to the Mississippi. The road was the edge of the Orleans Parish line and I slowed Teddy’s Bentley along the muddy shoulder, where NOPD, Orleans, and Jefferson Parish patrol cars all parked at weird angles. The sun rose into a thick mass of high, gray-black clouds and the spinning lights made the drops of rain on his windshield come out in colors of red and blue.
When we got out of the car, my mind numb, heart breaking into hard slivers, I heard the sound of bamboo canes knocking against one another as if someone was waiting at an unseen door. Their narrow leaves flickered in the wind of the approaching storm.
Someone grabbed Teddy’s big arm, a cop, and led him down to the bank of the canal. The bamboo continued to knock as the sky opened up and a thick, warm shower of rain began to cover our faces.
I was glad. Teddy didn’t like people to see him cry.
A black man in a tight Italian suit and a hard woman in a black jacket met us on the path. Behind them, there was a tangle of cops standing at a clearing of trees. Jay Medeaux was there and I hung back with him. The canal was long and narrow and dry except for a few puddles of brown water. Someone had left a bicycle without tires on its steep concrete slope.
“Where is he?” Teddy asked Jay.
He didn’t say anything. Jay just let Teddy pass, walk down that muddy path, through all that knocking bamboo, to the police on the hill. Rain full-out all over them now. I saw a few scatter, holding notebooks and jackets above their heads. A cracking sound of thunder far off in the lake.
Teddy’s thousand-dollar shoes were caked in mud and leaves and moss.
I hung back. The smell of the green leaves and dirt strong in my nose.
My vision tilted as my friend moved among them, the way the camera does in old movies when they want to make you feel like you’re on a ship.
I felt some acid rise in my throat.
Malcolm would not face us.
He was strung up in a dead oak tree by the neck. Twirling slightly as if he could still control his movements. His platinum chain twisted deep and red into his neck behind the rope.
Teddy walked to look at him but strong hands held him back.
“You can’t,” the woman cop said.
“Why?”
“Please wait, sir,” she said.
He shook her off, walked through four other cops who tried to hold him back, oblivious to any strength but his own.
He stared up at Malcolm. I bent down and toyed with some wet grass, shaking my head.
Bamboo knocked as if in applause. The sky above closed in like a dome.
Dark gray rain coated Malcolm’s face.
FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS after we found Malcolm’s body on Bamboo Road, it rained. I’m not talking about a slow drizzle or boring patter that we get almost every spring afternoon in New Orleans, but real out-and-out thunderstorms that flooded the lower Garden District and closed parts of the city. I had to drive with water up to the running boards on the Gray Ghost just to make it to this community center in the Ninth Ward where there was a remembrance ceremony for Malcolm. Basically it was just a fancy word for a big wake open to fans and friends. They’d already had a more private ceremony the night before at this Uptown funeral home. I was there but chose to stay outside and offer a few kind words to Teddy. We spoke. But I don’t think he noticed me.
The gravel lot outside the community center was packed with cars. I had to park four streets over on Desire beside some abandoned food mart and walk the whole way past rotting shotgun shacks. The red, green, and blue faded and bleached like something out of the Caribbean. Water had soaked through my boots and into the black blazer I’d picked from the back of the closet for the occasion.
But the rain hadn’t discouraged the onlookers and fans. Some held up fluorescent yellow-and-orange posterboards with words of love for Malcolm. The words, written in black ink, ran and smeared over the paper and down on the arms that held them high. News crews from local TV stations waited in vans with open doors for the right time for a live shot. I saw one cameraman with a BET T-shirt on standing beside a tall black woman with extremely long legs and soft relaxed hair. I followed the echoing sounds of a preacher’s voice into a basketball court where rows and rows of folding chairs had been set up.
“No Jesus, no peace,” said the gray-suited man at the podium. “Know Jesus. Know peace. Our friend brother Malcolm knew peace. Knew it before the Lord came knockin’ on his door. Knew he had family. Knew what family meant. Y’all hear what I’m sayin’?”
I looked around the basketball court and at the elevated stage where there was a purple casket with an inscribed
P
on the side. Teddy sat wide-legged on a small chair by an older woman who I’d met last night. I think a distant aunt who’d helped raise them. Several long-legged beauties, some holding children, sat closest to the coffin. Many wearing dark sunglasses and nodding to the preacher’s words. Nae Nae was absent.
The thunder rattled the high panes above the bleachers and kept cracking out in the distance. We weren’t far from the channel and I suddenly had the thought of all that dirty rainwater washing out into the port and then into the Mississippi.
Teddy walked up in a draping black suit, jacket falling to his knees, and spit-polished boots. He kept on his shades and the size of his earring made an impact at even forty yards.
“We all family,” Teddy said, holding his hands tight on the podium. Old preacher-style. Even his cadence reminded me of two-hour sermons I’d heard sitting between JoJo and Loretta. “That name. Our name. The Paris name. That’s what it all about. Malcolm and me used to talk about that. When we was growin’ up and used to take the streetcar past all them fine homes, he used to say some hardworkin’ man made that family about two hundred years ago. Ain’t that a trip. We just layin’ it all down for our grandkids…”
Some of the well-dressed women with children shifted in their seats behind the coffin.
“And their kids. That Paris name. We always gonna have that, Brother,” Teddy said, dropping his hands to his side and walking to the coffin. I could only see the profile of Malcolm’s gray face and the edge of a satin pillow. I didn’t want to see. I’d had problems with these kind of things since I was a child.
Teddy kissed the tips of his fingers and touched them to the coffin. He reared his shoulders back and strutted to the edge of the stage, where he stopped. I saw his head drop, his arms shake, and he fell to one huge knee, rocking the entire platform.
I stood.
But two rappers I’d met, T.H.U.G. and Stank, grabbed each of his elbows and helped him down the stairs. He’d reached the back door, near the locker room, when I heard the cry. A deep gut-churning moan and scream that made me drop my own head and pray.
After the ceremony, people stood and talked. The television news crews moved in. Hundreds of flowers continued to be dropped at the base of Malcolm’s body. Cards and little notes written on napkins. Rain-streaked signs and CDs of his music. Some dude even dropped a baggie full of weed into the casket. One woman dropped her red panties.
I pushed past them to find Teddy but he’d already emerged from the back locker room and had a strong gait as he walked through the huge crowd on the court. You could hear his shoes click above all the talking. Strong and confident.
He smiled at me. And I believed he was headed toward me when
they
entered.
Beneath the exit doors, right beside the “Drugs Kill” sign, stood the entire crew that had wrecked my warehouse. They all wore identical black leather jackets and shades.
Cash grinned at Teddy in the thirty yards that separated them.
He tossed down a white wreath and it skidded for about ten yards before stopping way short of my friend’s feet.
“That’s the way it go,” Cash yelled, his platinum teeth shining with the fluorescent light.
I looked at Teddy.
“He’s a little upset,” Teddy said.
“Why?”
“I had his Rolls torched last night.”
“Why?”
“He set Malcolm off.”
Cash nodded. “Sleep tight, Teddy. Watch out for them bedbugs.”
He and his thugs disappeared.
IT WAS DARK AGAIN and I knew I’d slept through the day. I awoke to a cracking sound rattling my warehouse. It sounded like the floor, but in the darkness I heard a deep roll of thunder and knew the storm from the Gulf was blowing over the city. The air smelled of ozone and salt. The bank of windows facing Julia Street shook and I turned back into my pillow, hearing Annie get to her feet and start into a low growl. I’d been dreaming about Maggie. I was at her house in Taylor and we’d been staring up at the branches of a huge pecan tree and the blue sky beyond.