Gone, No Forwarding

Nineteen

New Orleans — Nawlens, as the locals called it. The sinking city, built on a marsh so they had to bury their dead above ground. Heslip’s folks had moved to San Francisco from Baton Rouge, the state capital, a couple of years before he’d even been born, but his ma had talked about Louisiana a lot and until the day she’d died had put chicory in her coffee.

Coffee. Ballard should be here, not me, he thought. Man would go insane over this coffee. Hot and black, like a good woman. He chuckled to himself, and drained his cup. Old Corinne catch him thinking about hot black women, she’d take his head off. ’Cause she could never get it through her head that she was the only woman he ever thought about. Now, here he was on a trip like she always was after him for them to take, and she wasn’t along! Damn, he missed her.

“More coffee?”

He smiled up at the white waitress. He was in a chain drug store on Canal Street, without even a motel room yet because he didn’t know where, or if, he would want to stay.

“Can you tell me where the topless places are located?”

She filled his cup. “Y’all fum outta town. Ah can tell by y’accent.” Heslip smothered laughter. “Most places ah on Bourbon Street. In the Vieux Carré? But most of the Nigra gahls dance in the cheapah places. On the sahd streets.”

A Nigra gahl was who he was looking for, in a cheap topless joint, after talking with the old black lady, Mrs. Delbert, who ran the broken-down rooming house from which Verna had sent her postcard to Sally. It was just a few blocks from Canal Street where he now was, by the Superdome, next to the William Guste Housing Project. Heslip had posed as Samuel Rounds, Verna’s brother and a deacon of the Four Square Gospel Church of Oakland, California.

“Your sister was here from around Christmas to early March, Deacon Rounds. Went off ’thout any forwarding. Left with a man...” She stopped suddenly at the implications of her own words. Deacon Rounds cast his eyes heavenward.

“I know my poor sister lost her way,” he said piously. “Like to broke our poor mother’s heart. Uh... was she using...” He found the word. “Anything?”

“You mean drugs? Could have been, now you mention it, Deacon Rounds. I never saw no indication, but then I wouldn’t...”

“She ever mention he... our father? It was here in New Orleans that he abandoned Momma and us kids, fifteen years ago.”

Mrs. Delbert shook her head sadly. Then brightened. “One thing was, around mid-February she all of a sudden told me she’d got a job. She was happy ’bout that.” Her eyes misted with remembrance. “She was a good girl, Deacon Rounds. Such a good girl in her heart.”

“What was the job?”

Her face clouded again. “Topless dancing in one of those I clubs over there in the Old Quarter. Told her a job at Woolworth’s was a lot better than showing her body to lustful men—”

“Better than giving her body to them, Mrs. Delbert,” said the Deacon. “You wouldn’t remember the name of the club where she worked, would you?”

The old black lady shook her head regretfully. Heslip thanked her and shook hands with her and started down off the stoop. When he reached the sidewalk, she called suddenly after him. “Fleur.”

He paused on the cracked, uneven concrete. “Fleur?”

“The girl who got her the job at that topless place. Fleur. Skinny little thing with freckles all over her face, light enough to pass, almost...”

So here he was, drinking coffee and bracing himself for a long night of ducking in and out of topless joints, asking for Fleur or Verna, trying to dredge up a lead. But it sounded as if Verna never did find her father — if that was indeed who she’d been looking for — and Johnny Mack Brown had moved her on elsewhere.

He looked out and saw he’d coffee’d away the daylight; ornate streetlights had begun to glow on the center islands of Canal Street. He signaled the waitress. “How far is Bourbon Street?”

“Just two blocks down — toward the river.”

Bart Heslip turned a corner and was suddenly engulfed in the raucous gaiety of Bourbon Street after dark. Masses of shirt-sleeved and cotton-dressed tourists wandered the street from sidewalk to sidewalk, since striped police barricades interdicted the street to auto traffic.

From open honky-tonk doorways poured hot jazz. The topless joints and strip houses had their doors open to give passers-by quick glimpses of the meat on display inside. Heslip was starting early to hit as many places as possible before the lines waiting for the next complete show started building up. At a po’boy stall he got a beer in a paper cup — glasses were forbidden outside on Bourbon Street — and a sandwich; ate and drank standing at the curb, happy with the warm night and the festive throng.

And then it was time for work. He angled across the street toward the nearest topless joint where two dancers sprawled in chairs just inside the open doorway, their loose, meaty, naked thighs spread wide to catch the cool breeze and indiscriminate male pedestrians. Heslip slipped into the empty chair between them. On his passage across the street a pair of mirrored shades had appeared on his eyes. “You lovely ladies are as sweet as a mother’s love, I swear.”

Neither girl answered, so he leaned over and pinched one gently on the thigh.

“Hey, listen, shithead,” she snarled, sitting up straight, “you just look, you don’t touch.”

“Praise de Lawd. I thought you wuz daid.”

“Oh you’re funn-n-ny. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

“Little Verna, she thinks I got my game uptight. What time she come on?”

“No Verna here, black boy,” she said with a lifted lip.

“Fleur?”

“No Fleur, either.” She raised her voice toward the dim interior. “Hey, Chuck, this Nigra...”

Heslip was up and out, sliding away nimbly through the crowd, an eye to storefront windows reflecting the street behind him until he was sure Chuck wasn’t following his scent. Then he slowed and turned into the next topless joint. No girls on display outside this one, so he threaded his way through darkness, noise, smoke, and the jazz beat of the band next to the raised stage where a girl in a frayed, filmy negligée moved in approximate time to the music.

He slid onto a stool and ordered a beer. As he paid he flashed a Stepin Fetchit grin at the bartender and said. “Hey, my man, if you can tell me what time Verna comes on...”

Back into a 4 A.M. street, dimly lit and alive with ghosts, stepped Heslip, zipping up, after depositing the most recent two hours of beer in a littered doorway. He’d lost track of the number he’d drunk, as he’d lost track of the number of near-naked women he’d looked at in the last seven hours with only negative results. They’d all run together in his mind — a single fat, skinny, beautiful, sad, ugly, happy, alcoholic, straight, spaced-out, drunk, coked-up, sober woman with an indifferent body who smelled of perspiration and tired feet.

He checked his watch: 1:30 A.M. in San Francisco. Here, only blown trash and rumbling garbage trucks and early delivery vans and the lonely sound of his solitary footsteps, but there, his fragrant, elegant lady asleep in her bed. Was it too late — too early? — to call her and tell her how he missed her?

Far down the street, on the far side next to an alley, light and jukeboxed jazz spilled from an all-night bar. He looked in the window when he got to the place; in the back, near the restrooms, was a pay phone. He went in.

Stale beer. Sweat. Dime-store musk. Seven male patrons, two with women of their own, watching the almost naked black girl on stage display her ineptitude. A tall blond with the strident tones of a drag queen was using the phone. Heslip sat at the nearest table and leaned back and shut his eyes. Tired. The music stopped to a smattering of applause. A new record started.

“Yeah, what’ll it be?”

“The phone,” said Heslip without opening his eyes.

“Gotta order.”

He opened his eyes. The waiter was short and black and had led with his nose against a fist or a bottle many years before.

“Beer,” he said, as his eyes looked beyond the waiter to the stage where, now, a small skinny girl with breasts a midget’s hands might cup and the body curves of a high school sprinter, gyrated with great energy and no talent. Heslip added sharply to the waiter’s back, “Hey.”

When the waiter turned, he was holding out a ten-dollar bill. The girl on stage had freckles and skin light enough to pass.

“And tell the little lady that Santa Claus is black and early this year.”

He shut his eyes and drifted again. The music stopped. Started. Stopped. Did it all again. Dusting of applause. Finally, one of the chairs squealed being pulled back from the table.

“Jingle Bells?” It was a little voice willing to be playful.

He opened his eyes. A good face, small and serious behind all the cosmeticked garbage.

“Hello, Fleur,” he said. “Where’s Verna?”