“ALIAS,” he said. “Yeah, I know all about that.”
“I’m looking out for the kid’s interests.”
“Cash will kill you if you get in the way.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But would he really kill Teddy?”
“Teddy owe him money?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Teddy owes everybody money.”
“You want to take a walk?”
I hooked up Annie to her leash and we began to walk around a rubberized track that circled the football field. We kept looping around the field and I still felt like I needed to be weeding all these years later. I thought about ALIAS at fifteen, wondered how long he’d been out of school.
“You’re Nick Travers, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said and shook his hand.
“I seen you play many times, man. Y’all had the best defense those years. You and that man from Mississippi, linebacker?”
“Ulysses Davis.”
“The Black Knight.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell him that somebody remembers him,” I said. “He’ll like that.”
“Y’all stay in touch?”
I nodded.
“Tell me about what happened with you and Cash.”
“I grew up in Calliope,” he said. “Proud of that. Most of my kids come from there or Magnolia. I got out by workin’ block parties. Hustlin’ for any money I could make. I invented bounce, man. You know bounce?”
“It’s the Dirty South sound.”
“Damn right,” he said. “That’s me.”
“Cash took it.”
“Took my beats, put his lame-ass raps over it, and threatened all the record stores in Uptown. Made ’em sell his record or he’d fuck their ass up.”
“Man, that’s good marketing.”
“That ape don’t play,” he said. He patted Annie on her head and reached down to pull some high grass from some broken asphalt inside the track. “When I confronted the man, he just walk away. We was at a block party at the Y when I let him know he was a thief. Didn’t even answer me. But that motherfucker sure broke into my apartment one night. Tied up me and my girl. Made her watch while he beat my ass.”
I changed the leash into the other hand. Woods put his hands into his coaching shorts and pulled out a whistle. He twirled it into his fingers. “Stuck a knife into my mouth. Cut my tongue.”
He shook his head. “Made me go back to school, though. I played ball in high school but I wasn’t like y’all. Didn’t have the speed. No real size. Got my degree from Xavier on my twenty-sixth birthday, man. Now I teach computer skills to these kids.”
Annie kept pulling on the leash, not sure why it was slowing her down. Her tongue lolling out, antenna ears askew.
“Someone took ALIAS,” I said. “They conned him. Made him think he was represented by some big agency. Does Cash have the connection or the smarts to make that work?”
“Man’s smart. But he don’t have the patience for something like that. He wants the kid. Wants Teddy to look bad. But see, Cash doesn’t work that way, conning somebody. If he wanted something done, he’d head right to it. He’ll lie, steal, and cheat. But he’ll do it face-to-face. Con games and playin’ ain’t the man’s style.”
“You answered my question.”
“What kind of dog is that anyway?” he asked.
“A Delta dog,” I said. “The finest breeding outside Memphis.”
“Got some pit in her?”
“Maybe.”
“What else?”
“Boxer. Shepherd. Wookie.”
“Man,” he said, laughing. “Listen. You think you could come by practice sometime this fall? Kids ’bout to get out of school now. Tryin’ to make ’em show up to workouts this summer and all. Ain’t workin’ that great. All kinds of distractions. Girls. Drugs. Money. Man, when I was a kid, football was everything. Now they just into ballin’.”
“I guess when you hit the big time, you don’t even need school.”
“ALIAS will have to come down hard one day,” he said. “You ever want to help out, let me know.”
“Sure, man,” I said. “I work at Tulane. They know how to find me.”
I stopped walking at the gate to the parking lot. Annie needed some water and to be fed. I needed to make a few calls. “Who would want to cheat this kid?” I asked.
Woods stretched out his fist and gave me the pound. Hard black clouds rolled in from the east, a few small trees planted around the field started to shake. I heard thunder crack. The rain was back.
“A millionaire kid with a Calliope education?” he asked. “I’d look at everybody who breathes in this city.”
“Will Cash come for me?”
“If you’re in between him and the boy, you better bet on it.”
9
Cash stayed uptown in this purple mansion with yellow shutters just off the streetcar line where white people played tennis and parked their cars behind thick iron fences. You’d heard that his neighbors don’t like him none. Not ’cause he’s black and rich but ’cause he throws parties about every night, rips apart some old-as-hell house breakin’ the law, and threatens folks with sawed-off shotguns. He even made some white lawyer get on his knees and kiss his buck-naked ass after the man told Cash to cut his lawn. In a lot of ways, you got to respect that.
At 3, it’s dark as hell from that storm rollin’ in off the Gulf, and you see all his boys sittin’ in rockin’ chairs on this wide porch like gunfighters from old movies. Drinkin’ Cristal and forties and listenin’ to the music comin’ from open windows. Thin curtains ruffle like ghosts. The thunder breaks above your head, and fat little salty drops that you imagine come from around Mexico slap you in the eyes as you walk to the porch. You don’t pay them niggas no mind. Cash called you. This his invite and you welcome as hell. It’s payday and you got to smile.
This fat ole oak’s roots has cracked open the sidewalk like ripped skin and you almost trip while opening up the gate to Cash’s place. The floors inside are wood and bleached and buffed smooth. Cash has lined the walls in blue and red neon, his gold records behind a long glass case lit up with little lights. The rest of the house is dark and smells like the inside of this old shoebox where your grandmamma used to keep her needles. The floor tilts slightly to the left, and in the dark, the thunder coming again, you follow the slant to that back room where you find Cash.
He ain’t wearin’ no shirt and he’s sweating with the windows open and playing poker with three women and some young white dude. Cash smiles a silver mouth. The red tattoo on his big chest muscles seems to beat when he flex up. The white dude don’t look right, sweat rings under his shirt, his tie hangin’ loose.
Two of the women are black. One’s white. One of the black girls is naked as hell and her fat old titties lay over a pile of money that Cash has been tossin’ to her.
“How ’bout a hundred for them li’l ole panties,” he say when you walk in.
The girl shake her head and ask for a thousand.
“Girl, that trap ain’t worth fifty,” Cash say, and laugh, taking a sip of champagne in a jelly jar and grabbing some potato chips. The music is all around you and low. Some raps and sounds you ain’t never heard and you recognize the voice as Dio’s and you wonder about that.
Cash introduces you to the white dude. Some man from L.A. who’s workin’ on distribution, and the man about shits on himself when he hears your name. He palms you off a card and smiles a little too wide to be real.
You and Cash wander out back, past a couple women in bikinis playin’ with his pit bull, Jimmy, that he uses in all his videos. They rubbin’ the dog’s stomach and cuttin’ his toenails.
Y’all walk into a maze of bushes, some ole hedges cut higher than you and Cash are tall and you wander through the cuts and turns as he tell you about some Greek man and a freak that had the head of a bull.
“Yeah, boy,” he say. “I like that history shit. You know what the Civil War is?”
You nod. But you don’t.
“Nigga, don’t lie. You know some peckerwood white folks used to keep us like hogs, right, and there was a big war ’cause of it. Don’t be all ignorant. Learn to read.”
You look at him. He is open and easy and you see all the holes and cracks that run from his face to his heart. The sky opens and begins to rain but Cash is drunk and shoeless and you don’t give two shits. He unzips his pants, whips out his dick, and starts pissin’ on the shrubs.