Authors: Ace Atkins
“
Rockford Files
comes on at six.”
Her eyes tilted up and met mine.
“Tell me how it worked.”
“He hates you a lot.”
“What do you want?”
She tugged at her thumb again with her strong lips and wet them with her tongue.
“I’m tired,” she said. “Either play with me or leave.”
“Trey had Malcolm killed.”
“Who’s Malcolm?”
“Come on.”
“How much?” she asked.
“Depends on what you have to say.”
“Listen, Trey didn’t know about the job on the kid.”
“So, you and Marion just stumbled upon a mark who just happened to work with a man you fucked.”
“I met ALIAS at a club with Trey,” she said. “A kid. A kid that is a millionaire. Marion wanted to use him. This wasn’t about Trey.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Marion took it.”
“Where is he?”
“Fuck off.”
“Why are you still in this shit hole?” I asked. “He left you. Didn’t he?”
“Yeah, he’s gone,” she said. “Way gone.”
I started to laugh.
Her jaw tightened and her nostrils flared.
She reached out to claw my face.
I grabbed her wrist and pushed her back into the couch. I held both of her arms over her head and placed a knee between her legs. “Trey hired some street freak to kill Malcolm and me. Right? You heard of a man called Redbone?”
She spit in my face. I let her go, my breath rushing from my mouth.
“I don’t know Malcolm. I tole you me and Marion’s thing got nothing to do with Trey. Tell him. I don’t care.”
I heard feet on the boards of her porch and moved close to the door. I steadied my breath and looked down at her. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and reached down on a glass-and-chrome table filled with copies of
TV Guide
and
Star
for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
The screen door opened and a large black man walked inside. In his fifties with a short black beard. Greasy white T, hard dark jeans, and fucked-up Wolverine work boots. “Dataria? Who the fuck is this? What y’all doin’ in my house?”
She lit the cigarette and blew smoke up at a cheap fan rocking in the sagging ceiling.
“Oh, just a boy, Daddy,” she said. “He came over and tried to save my soul. Ain’t that right?”
He moved toward me, his hands clenching around the handle of an old lunch pail.
I headed out to the porch and walked to my truck.
I heard him yelling more, a slap, and then a high-pitched scream from inside the tiny house.
I thought about the scream and then kept smelling her on my shirt the whole way down St. Charles.
I REMEMBERED JIMMY RIGGINS as the white boy from Nebraska who carried defensive linemen on his back like children as he shot through blocking holes and scrapped for five to ten yards almost every time he touched the ball. He wore black reflective paint under his eyes like some leather-helmeted wonder from another era and after games often wore fur coats he’d made from animals he killed himself. Wildcats and Kodiaks from Alaska. He bragged once of making love to three women simultaneously and of outrunning a deer that he’d startled in a backwoods creek in rural Louisiana. He’d been on three
Sports Illustrated
covers, cut a locally produced country-western album, and made All-Pro for four years as if the NFC’s fullback was a position he owned.
But after a string of eight DUIs, even fans and front-office types in New Orleans became a little worn with his personality. And then five years ago, when he was photographed sunbathing nude with a sixteen-year-old singer who’d made a name for herself on a nationwide shopping mall music tour, the ride was over.
He was traded to the Cardinals, the worst of all pro football franchises, and soon disappeared. Replaced by a stable of fresh new runners with better knees and media-savvy personalities.
I never knew Riggins that well. After all, he’d been an offensive player, and even on the same team, folks tend to stick to their own kind. But through the
Picayune
stories I found yesterday, I learned of a lawsuit he’d filed against Trey Brill three years ago. And after calling around to some old teammates on Sunday, I found Riggins’s address — a rural route in Slidell, only about fifteen minutes out from the city.
The country road wound around a small creek and through a cattle pasture where fattened red-and-white cows chomped down grass. I followed my coffee-stained map through three or four country roads until I found the house.
The place was colorless, eroded clear of paint from decades of rain, with a ripped screen door hanging off a lower hinge. Behind the old house and under a live oak draped in Spanish moss sat a little squat trailer, the towing hitch held vertical by a pile of concrete blocks.
A yellow “No Hunting” sign had been nailed to a dying tree.
Two Big Wheels, a rusted-out Fiero, and an early-nineties F-150 with K-C lights had been parked in a muddy, grassland ground.
I knocked on the door and then hung back off his stoop beside some piles of two-by-fours and bricks. I listened to the crickets hanging into the woods of pine and large oak. In the deep woods, I heard feet shuffle.
Near the edge of the woods, a man giggled.
Then a shot.
I ran fast around my old truck, where Annie yelped to me from the passenger seat, and through a scattered patch of trees.
I squatted down into a ditch by the edge of the small forest. Pines, palmettos, and knotted old oaks surrounded me. Vines and broken branches and decaying stumps covered the forest floor. A thick black snake twisted out from a hole in a toppled tree and sauntered away. Overhead, only small pricks of yellow light broke through the leafy ceiling.
A flash of a plaid shirt showed deep in the woods.
Another giggle.
“Riggins,” I shouted. “It’s Nick Travers.”
My voice echoed as I crouched forward and moved out of the ditch and into the trees.
Another shot cracked farther away and I saw the driver’s side mirror of my truck explode. I moved slow, still bending at the waist, watching.
I only heard crickets. Soft feet crunched.
A woodpecker returned to a dead oak tree and a couple of squirrels scattered in the leaves and needles.
More feet ran and then slowed.
The woodpecker stopped.
Then returned.
Dry heated air ran through the woods. A small creek oozed through the uneven splice of a narrow muddy bank.
I crept over the water, several hundred yards from the trailer.
I thought I could come back on whoever was out there.
I was a silent Indian creeping through the land. I could not be heard. I imagined sneaking up behind this peckerwood and catching him. Maybe not.
I tripped over some fishing line tied to a bunch of beer cans, cutting into my palms, and fell to the ground.
A long bowie-knife blade found my throat and I heard a voice I remembered from a decade ago say, “When y’all gonna realize this is the U.S.A., not the U.S.S.R.? I don’t owe shit.”
I looked back. “Hello, Riggins,” I said.
“Travers?”
RIGGINS TOOK ME and Polk Salad Annie to a small camp he’d built in the woods. Nothing more than a child’s play fort made of plywood, furnished with large spindles that once held telephone wires and big tree stumps for seats. I found a stump and sat down by a little ring of rocks filled with charred wood. Riggins poked at the wood with a stick he’d found and belched into his fist.
Annie licked his face.
“You didn’t come out here to bring me a fuckin’ fruit basket or build me a goddamned house,” Riggins said. “Because some of those dickbrains came out last spring and said I need better shelter.”
Riggins had kept the crew cut but decided at some point to grow the whole Grizzly Adams beard. His once thick biceps had grown fat and meaty and it looked as if his stomach had doubled in size. He’d cut his flannel shirt at the armpits and I noticed the Saints tattoo still running down his shoulder.
A COUNTRY BOY CAN SURVIVE
printed on a Rebel flag flew on the opposite side.
“Some guy that sells RVs out in town knew where I was livin’ and, because he’s some mucho jock sniffer, decided I need some shit called ‘a hand up.’ I said that sounded like a hand job and to take both of his hands to spread his ass real wide to make room for his fuckin’ head.”
“I need to talk to you about Trey Brill,” I said. I had to squint into the sunlight shooting through the oak leaves and vines just to watch his face.
The branch in Riggins’s hand snapped and he brushed at his beard with his fingers. He nodded for a while and spit into the dead fire.
“You seen my wife?” he asked.
“Didn’t know you were married.”
“When Brill cleaned me out, she left me for my next-door neighbor,” he said, his muscles tightening under the bristled cheeks. “A guy who made fuckin’ watches for a living. Watches out of jewels and faces of old movie stars. Guy had this hair transplant that looked like the goddamn head on a little girl’s doll. Goddamn. I stole his Jet Ski, rode it down to St. Charles Parish, and then set the motherfucker on fire.”
I nodded.
“You knew about me and Brill, right?” he asked. “You’re not thinking of having him run your money. God, I thought everybody knew how he fucked me like a monkey on a football.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “The money. Not the monkey. I saw that you filed suit for mismanagement.”
“Yeah, my lawyer was a cocksucker,” he said. “You know that little weight coach we had? The one who drank protein shakes and wore bikers’ pants? He told me this guy was the best in New Orleans. All he did was clean out the rest of my bank account and have his secretary send me a ‘sorry for fuckin’ up your life’ card on my goddamned birthday.”
I picked up a couple of stones on the ground and whizzed them into the woods. The afternoon sun had flushed blood and heat into my face. “What did he do, Riggins?”
“You’re gonna think I’m the biggest dumb-ass you ever heard,” he said. “Almost don’t want to tell you.”
“Trey’s fucking over Teddy Paris.”
“Fat Teddy?”
I nodded.
“Remember when I sent that fucking whore to meet Teddy after we got back from San Francisco?”
“Yeah,” I said, my face unchanging. “Hilarious.”
“Man, that was funny as shit.”
He laughed for a few minutes, really chuckling to himself, until he dropped his big head into his hands and his back began to shake.
“What did Trey do?”
“He sold me my own property.”
“Come again?”
He snorted and pulled out some Copenhagen from a tin. “I know that sounds crazy. But a few years back, he had me invest in this condo project out in Gretna,” he said, tucking a pinch into his lip. “Well, a year after I retired, I didn’t get dick. I get this lawyer and he has some accountant check things out. Turns out, I’d already put in for a hundred grand on the place. He’d sold it back to me for fucking three. Shit, I didn’t know one of these deals from another.”
“I guess Matlock wasn’t your lawyer,” I said.
“The police and my lawyer couldn’t prove shit,” he said. “He’s got these little corporations set up all over. More hidden names than assholes in China.”
“He run over anyone else?”
He nodded. “Tim Z. Bone. DuBois.”
“You know how to find them?”
“No,” he said. “But they were all in the same deal. Tim Z. wanted to grease Trey’s ass with STP and run a rabid squirrel into his cornhole with some PVC pipe. He got put in jail just for tellin’ Trey about it on the phone. He’s got one of those restraining-order things on him now. But in the end, we all decided he’d wallow in his own sin. You know, that’s back when I was all into the Fellowship of Christian Athletes shit. I thought the world was gonna end in 2000. That’s when I built the bunker.”
“Never can be too careful.”
“I got enough cans of beans to make the whole nation fart on cue.”
“What made you trust this guy so much?”
“He’d keep your mind on other things,” he said. “Like this one time, he had this woman come over when I had the gym. To sign contracts and shit. She looked just like Barbie. Had big fake tits and blond hair and the IQ of a squirrel.”
“Smart as the one who would run into the PVC pipe?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Well, anyway, we ended up doin’ it in a three-way mirror after the gym had closed.”
“So there were six of you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s funnier than shit. Would you quit fuckin’ with me and let me tell the damned story? That’s what you wanted, right?”
He didn’t smile.
I did.
“I found out when we were about to go to court that she didn’t even work for Brill,” he said. “She was a damn stripper at that place on Bourbon called the Maiden Voyage. You know, where they used to brag they had the Best Chest in the West?”
We walked back to the trailer, Annie by my side, Riggins leading the way. He strategically spit as we walked, and pointed out different markers that signified boundaries of his land.
“I guess you getting ready for training camp,” Riggins said, his eyes wide.
“Jimmy, I haven’t played for ten years.”
“Really?” he asked, squinting into the sun.
“No lie.”
“Been chopping a lot of wood,” he said. “I’m gonna call the suits tomorrow. Tell them I’ll take a little less for this season.”
“See you out there, brother.”
From my rearview mirror, I watched Jimmy wave from the middle of his long dirt road. I noticed a wall he’d made from small logs that seemed to go on forever. Before I turned a corner, I saw him grab his ax and start on another tall pine.
SUMMER HEAT BAKED oil puddles in the eight-story garage where I sat on the hood of Trey’s new silver BMW with a rusty crowbar in my hand. I’d taken Annie back to the warehouse and spent my last hour counting people walking off the elevator, checking out trucks in the garage, and noticing all the oil spots that reminded me of presidents’ heads. I thought about Maggie and her farm, Polk Salad Annie taking a crap on my sofa yesterday, and ALIAS stealing from JoJo. I tried to remember what JoJo had told me about the liquor-license changeover and a bouncer he knew we could trust.