It’s almost dawn now. Miles is sitting on the ridge of the roof, his knees splayed on the shingles, like a human clothespin, staring at a speck on the southern horizon. The wind shifts, and I smell an odor like night-blooming flowers in a garden that has been fertilized with fish blood.
“Hey, Miles?” I say.
“Yeah?” he says impatiently, not wanting to be distracted from the speck on the horizon.
“We played with Louis Prima. He said you were as good as Krupa. We blew out the doors at the Dream Room with Johnny Scat. We jammed with Sharkey and Jack Teagarden. How many people can say that?”
“It’s a Jolly Green. Look at it,” he says.
I don’t want to listen to him. I don’t want to be drawn into his delusions. I don’t want to be scared. But I am. “Where?” I ask.
“Right there, in that band of light between the sea and sky. Look at the shape. It’s a Jolly Green. It’s Tony, man, I told you.”
The aircraft in the south draws nearer, like the evening star winking and then disappearing and then winking again. But it’s not a Jolly Green. It’s a passenger plane and it goes straight overhead, the windows lighted, the jet engines splitting the air with a dirty roar.
Miles’s face, his eyes rolled upward as he watches the plane disappear, makes me think of John the Baptist’s head on a plate.
“He’s gonna come with an airboat. Mark my word,” he says.
“The DEA killed him, Miles,” I say.
“No, man, I told you. I got a postcard. It was Tony. Don’t buy government lies.”
“They blew him out of the water off Veracruz.”
“No way, man. Not Tony. He got out of the life and had to stay off the radar. He’s coming back.”
I lie on my back, the nape of my neck cupped restfully on the roof cap, small waves rolling up my loins and chest like a warm blanket. I no longer think about the chemicals and oil and feces and body parts that the water may contain. I remind myself that we came out of primeval soup and that nothing in the earth’s composition should be strange or objectionable to us. I look at the smoke drifting across the sky and feel the house jolt under me. Then it jolts again and I know that maybe Miles is right about seeing Tony, but not in the way he thought.
When I look hard enough into the smoke and the stars behind it, I see New Orleans the way it was when we were kids. I see the fog blowing off the Mississippi levee and pooling in the streets, the Victorian houses sticking out of the mist like ships on the Gulf. I see the green-painted streetcars clanging up and down the neutral ground on St. Charles and the tunnel of live oaks you ride through all the way down to the Carrollton District by the levee. The pink and purple neon tubing on the Katz & Besthoff drugstores glows like colored smoke inside the fog, and music is everywhere, like it’s trapped under a big glass dome — the brass funeral bands marching down Magazine, old black guys blowing out the bricks in Preservation Hall, dance orchestras playing on hotel roofs along Canal Street.
That’s the way it was back then. You woke in the morning to the smell of gardenias, the electric smell of the streetcars, chicory coffee, and stone that has turned green with lichen. The light was always filtered through trees, so it was never harsh, and flowers bloomed year-round. New Orleans was a poem, man, a song in your heart that never died.
I only got one regret. Nobody ever bothered to explain why nobody came for us. When Miles and me are way out to sea, I want to ask him that. Then a funny thing happens. Floating right along next to us is the big wood carving of Jesus on his cross, from the stucco church at the end of my street. He’s on his back, his arms stretched out, the waves sliding across his skin. The holes in his hands look just like the petals from the bougainvillea on the church wall. I ask him what happened back there.
He looks at me a long time, like maybe I’m a real slow learner.
“Yeah, I dig your meaning. That’s exactly what I thought,” I say, not wanting to show how dumb I am.
But considering the company I’m in — Jesus and Miles and Tony waiting for us somewhere up the pike — I got no grief with the world.
Last Fair Deal Gone Down
by Ace Atkins
(Originally published in 2010)
Warehouse District
I’ve always been one to keep an eye open during a church prayer — not because of my lack of faith in God but because of my lack of faith in people. What I learned by watching was that others were doing the same. People mistrust people. Each of us pulses with our own agenda. In New Orleans, and particularly in the French Quarter, those agendas cross frequently.
That night I was in my own house of worship — JoJo’s Blues Bar — with both eyes closed tight as I chased a shot of Jack with a cold Dixie. Fats’s band banged out the last few chords of “Blue Monday,” his lazy sax matching my own black mood. Each drink softened that black mood into brown melancholy.
A December drizzle rained outside. Cold droplets fell a muted pink along the window lit by JoJo’s neon sign, only a few regulars in the bar with ragged fedoras pulled low. JoJo’s niece Keesha, the only waitress on duty, tapped her foot slowly to Fats’s music. While she smoked, she read the Bible by dim candlelight.
“Keesha, how ’bout another Dixie?”
“You know where they’re at.”
And I guess I did. JoJo was my best friend and this was my second home. I took off my trench coat and old scarf and walked behind the bar. Pushing up my shirtsleeve, I reached into the slushy ice bin and grabbed a beer. My hand instantly went numb.
“Who’s closing up?” I asked.
“Felix,” she answered, stuck somewhere in the middle of Corinthians. “JoJo and Loretta went to Baton Rouge.”
The set finished and the sparse crowd clapped. Most of them were old men like JoJo who had frequented this place since the early sixties. JoJo’s was the only decent blues bar in a city dominated by jazz. A Little Delta on the Bayou, is what the sign outside read.
Fats pulled up a stool next to me. His face grayed under the tiny Christmas lights strung over the bar’s mirror. I looked across at both of our reflections and tilted my head. He said my name dully back to me.
“How ya been, Fats?”
“Hmm.”
“You know why JoJo’s in Baton Rouge?” I asked, for lack of anything better.
“Naw.” Fats shifted in his seat and coughed, politely turning his head away. He looked over at Keesha with her head close to the Bible.
“What? You got religion now or somethin’?”
“Seek and ye shall find,” Keesha said, blowing smoke in his face.
“Hmm,” Fats said. “Ain’t that some shit?”
Someone opened the two rickety Creole doors and a cold breeze rushed in off Conti. A horse-drawn tourist carriage clopped by with a guide pointing out famous sites. Fats popped a handful of salted peanuts into his mouth, shell and all.
“You hungry, Fats?”
He looked at my face for the first time, right in the eyes. “Yeah, I could eat.”
Fats was known for gambling or drinking away his weekly profits every Friday. He usually lived on Loretta’s leftover gumbo or handouts from JoJo.
We walked over a few blocks to the Café Du Monde. I asked for a couple orders of beignets and two large café au laits. A Vietnamese waiter set down the square donuts covered in powered sugar, and within a minute Fats ate them all.
“Hungry?”