Dirty South

47

“What you doin’,man?” Alias yelled to me.

“I’ll be right back.”

“No, you ain’t. What’s up?”

“Stay here.”

The man in the brown coat disappeared into a group of tourists walking down Chartres by the Fisheries building and across from the Napoleon House. Gold electric light leaked out of the glass doors from the bar as the man’s walk turned into a jog.

He was running, his brown hood tattered and worn, toward Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral. My boots clacked on the flagstone, most of the stores now closed. Antique weapons. Haitian art. High-dollar lingerie. Only two men running on an empty street. I could hear the breath inside my ears as he ran toward the steps of the great church and turned into Pirate’s Alley.

A few gas lamps burned in the narrow shot once used as an avenue for smugglers and thieves. The gap narrowed. He passed over Royal.

I hung back. Letting him run out.

I walked behind two women in yellow ponchos drinking Hurricanes.

When I looked again, he was gone.

I passed the women, running for a few blocks.

At Dauphine, I stopped in the middle of the street and turned in all directions. Dance music pulsed from the clubs on Bourbon. Crooked iron hitching posts with horse heads lined the now paved street. The dance music kept pumping.

I ran down St. Peter back toward the church, passing five college girls staggering in the street and holding a young girl up as her head lolled to the side.

I heard scraping.

I looked back down St. Peter toward Rampart.

I saw the hooded figure scaling an old broken drainpipe running along a brick wall. Moss and ferns grew wildly in cracks that he used for footholds.

He was almost to a fire escape that hung uselessly, headed nowhere.

I ran into the building, some kind of anonymous pool hall, and past a grizzled bartender slicing lemons. I moved toward a landing and ran up some beaten wooden stairs. The bartender yelled after me but I pushed through empty liquor boxes and crates of bottles to a door opening into an empty second floor. The dull light of a Falstaff beer sign out front lit half of the room.

I could hear the man’s hands scraping the outside wall. Climbing.

I followed the sound, my eyes adjusting in the light, slowly walking to the window. The dark figure emerged on the landing. I could see his back turned to me.

I grabbed a stray Barq’s bottle from the floor.

Someone ran after me from the steps below, yelling they were going to call the cops.

The yelling grew louder.

I squinted into the dark light.

The man in the hooded coat pressed his face to the glass.

I could not breathe.

His fingernails touched the dirty glass in sharp, long claws. Thick and hardened. His face was gray as a corpse, his eyes yellowed and narrow. Small broken teeth.

I stepped back, my breath caught halfway in my throat.

The face contorted into something someone might think was a smile as he pushed a foot against the sill and began to climb, almost arachnid in his movements. His legs disappeared upward by the time I tried the window, caked and frozen with paint.

I threw the bottle into the glass and kicked out the shards with my boot.

I found my way onto the landing and looking for a foothold to follow.

I heard sirens at the far edge of the Quarter. And when I reached another rusted ladder of a fire escape, I could see NOPD patrol cars stopping by the pool hall and the bartender pointing upstairs.

I climbed.

I pulled myself onto the sloped roof, the figure crawling over the peaked edge of the old metal. My hands shook and I felt with my knees and palms for something solid on the slant. Nothing but moss and mold and metal eaten with rust.

At the peak, I could see deep into Congo Square and the white-lighted marquee of Louis Armstrong Park. I lifted my leg over the peak and the wetness of the metal roof and slid on a steady slope toward the road below the three-story building.

I clawed at the wet metal, trying to stop, but only sliding more. A metal sheet dropped into the air, pinwheeling down.

I picked up speed, the ground below getting closer, and stopped just short of careening off the edge.

The heel of my boot caught in a groaning drainpipe. I held myself there, foot cocked into the mouth of the pipe, supporting all my weight. Three stories of air waited below.

Above me, the man in the coat turned back and then jumped over a narrow crevice onto another rooftop, maybe only three feet away.

More yelling from the broken window on the other side of the street.

Wind ruffled my hair and I smelled the tired beer and urine of Bourbon Street. My hands coated in rust and dirt.

I scrambled upward and made the jump.

A moon hung over the river, the peaks of the old district’s rooftops shining silver in the early light of the summer. My T-shirt covered in rust and mud, sweat soaking my face.

I made two more jumps over narrow alleys.

Then the sound of his scattering feet stopped.

I edged onto my butt, taking a seat. I saw muddy shoe prints running off the roof.

I slid close to the edge and peered into a little banquette.

I turned to my stomach, feetfirst, and left my legs hanging until I dropped onto a second-floor wooden balcony overlooking a little garden. Red, blue, and yellow light scattered in a large open fountain and upon palm and banana trees. Thick asparagus ferns grew from clay pots.

I ran down a creaking wooden staircase and down through a little alley. At the end, a huge metal gate swung open.

Rampart Street. A couple of homeless men on the corner. A crack pusher running for me to make a deal.

“Hey, man. I bet you I know where you got them boots,” he said.

I heard a horn honking from a car heading toward Canal, a hard thud on the other side of the grassless neutral ground, and saw the man I was following roll from the hood of a Buick.

I ran after him but he moved fast, dragging a leg behind him to the wall of the St. Louis Cemetery. He disappeared.

Two cop cars converged on me and shone lights into my face. I stopped.

One of them threw me on the asphalt and pushed a gun into my spine.

“I’m following-”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Listen to me, man.”

“Shut up before I kick you in the head.”

I heard the handcuffs clamp hard onto my wrists as the two cops yanked me to my feet and pulled me to the back of a patrol car.

“Stop.”

They did.

“What?” asked some twenty-something steroid freak as he gripped my arm tighter.

“That noise,” I said. “Can’t you hear it? He’s hiding in one of those mausoleums. He’s moving stones.”

“Drugs,” the cop said. “It’ll fry your mind.”