He say he still tied to CP3. Still get his hair cut in the ’hood and rolls block parties. He say Teddy and Malcolm are just country-ass Nint’ Warders. And you can’t trust ’em. Cash been you, he says. He know what you need.
Even before it’s out his mouth, you down at this club off Airways Boulevard where nineteen-year-old women are grindin’ their sweaty asses in your lap and rubbin’ your head with their soft fingers and rakin’ their long red claws over your neck. Cash and his playas watchin’ you as you strut from that VIP room while he sips on a bottle of Cristal and nods to move on.
You do, leavin’ the girl at work. You move on to three other clubs before he drop you back lakefront, to that mansion you was designin’ from a space movie you seen on cable. High humpback gates like you seen on MTV, all surrounded by cement mixers, stacks of plywood, and plastic sheeting popping in your empty windows.
“Why Teddy kick you out and now he say he want you back?”
“Mad, I guess.”
“Friends don’t play like that.”
Cash’s boys crack open some Cristal and y’all drink it straight from the bottle. You take a couple hits from a joint, making it wash deep into your lungs, and listen to all them boys talkin’ shit ’bout their new Italian cars, freaks they met out on the road, and high-dollar restaurants with pink shrimp as big as yo’ big toe.
Cash tell you again about Teddy and Malcolm and all about what happened to Diabolical. He say that Teddy and Malcolm finally gonna pay for what happened to the man who made Dirty South. He say the Paris brothers only killed that young nigga so his sales would double. And truth be known, Dio weren’t nothin’ till they jacked his ass at Atlanta Nites.
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.
23
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.