New Orleans Noir

What’s the score? by Ted O’Brien

Mid-City

The door swings open, in walks Reggie. Paul, on the stool next to me, gives him the once-over, shakes his head. “Man,” Paul whispers, “they say being black in the South is like being black twice. Being a dwarf, too? Man, what’s that like?”

Reggie’s eyes are bloodshot, yesterday’s clothes soiled. He stands, legs bowed, lets the door swing shut behind him. Give him a cowboy hat, it’s like he’s sizing up a Western saloon.

He’s got the swagger. He should. None of us have ever beat him at pool. Reggie plays up the angle for the newcomers, What, I’m just a dwarf AND a nigger, think you can’t beat me? Half-hour later your wallet’s lighter, and Reggie’s drunker.

First time I lost to him, I just shook my head. Maybe it’s his height. He sees things we don’t.

At the end of the bar, Reggie sidles up to Wayne, the meanest son of a bitch in the bar. Old rugby player from Wales. Reggie says, “My nigga.”

“My nigga,” says Wayne.

Billy, behind the bar, pulls out a Coke and an Abita, puts them side by side on the counter in front of me. “What’ll it be?” he asks in his thick Irish brogue.

“What time is it?”

“Uh,” checks the wall clock behind me, which I could’ve done. “Eight in the morning. What’ll it be?”

“You know me,” I say, “caffeine before alcohol.” Billy hands me a glass of ice. I pour the Coke over the cubes, down it like water. Already hot as a motherfucker outside. You’d think Billy could turn up the a/c. Cheap bastard. Billy waits. “Right,” I say, “guess I’ll have that beer now.”

Billy laughs and pops the top off. I take a swig, survey the crowd. Everybody’s baked. I’m always bringing up the rear.

Five televisions hang from the ceiling, various points, all with the pre-match commentary from across the pond. Ireland versus Switzerland. Onscreen, three fellows dressed for a night on Miami Beach break down the X’s and O’s. Billy’s got it turned down low, for now.

“What do you think they’re saying?” I ask Paul.

“I’m Scottish, who gives a fuck. What are they saying? Ireland are going to play like shite.”

I look around the bar. All familiar faces. The soccer fans in their jerseys, the neighborhood fellows, black, keeping to themselves by the pool table, watching us warily, wearily.

“Once again,” I say, “Louisiana’s Swiss community has let us down. Maybe they forgot to set their watches.”

At the end of the bar, other side of Reggie and Wayne, someone yells, “Fuck Switzerland!”

Hear hear, fuck Switzerland.

“Who plays after this?” I ask Billy.

“England versus Turkey.”

Again, from the end of the bar: “Fuck Turkey!”

Billy raises his glass with a hearty, “Fuck England!”

“Think you’ll have a good turnout?”

Billy shrugs. “Be plenty of English bastards,” he says, so the bastards hear it. “Don’t know of many Turks in the city. Wish I had a Turkish flag.”

The brothers hang back by the pool table, occasionally sending an emissary to the bar, whispering PBR orders like sweet nothings.

The Ireland game comes on. Reggie’s the only brother watching. He’s excited. “Fuck, I didn’t know they was any Irish niggas! Look at that one! Who that?”

Billy laughs. “Clinton Morrison.”

“Yeah! Clinton Morrison! Man, that ain’t no nigga name. The fuck?”

“He plays for shite.”

“Nigga plays for you, Billy!”

Wayne says, “Irish first, nigga second. Doubly fucked.”

“Nigga, you Irish.”

“Welsh, you dumb fuck.”

“Ain’t that worse than Irish? Welsh still answer to the Man, don’t they? Hell, it ain’t even the Man, it’s the fucking Queen.”

Wayne glares at him, doesn’t say anything.

“Yeah, Wayne, you think a dumb nigga don’t know nothin’ about history, huh? I fuckin’ went to school. Probably know just as much as you ignorant Welsh muthafuckas.”

Paul’s already up out of his chair, gets between Reggie and Wayne. Wayne’s got a short fuse. Rugby player, you know.

Reggie backs off. “Come on, Wayne, just fuckin’ with ya.”

Wayne forces a smile. “You’re lucky I like you, man.”

White guys in English jerseys begin pouring into the bar, waving Union Jacks, awaiting their game. Don’t ever bet the farm on Irish football. They play like shite. Switzerland wins it, two-nil.

Paul nods approvingly at the crowd, better part of a hundred, mostly English now. Waving flags, drinking Budweiser. “That’s a lot of English wankers,” says Paul.

It’s an hour until England-Turkey. The front door bursts open. A collective roar, singing as if in tongues, a wall of people wrapped in red flags, pours into the bar. We’re struck numb. The brothers in the corner, by the pool table, scurry out the back door.

Paul speaks first. “Fuck. Al-Qaeda.”

There has to be at least two hundred Turks, singing, yelling, waving flags. None of us can move. Literally. Try to fall down, you’ll stay upright. Fuck the fire code.

The Turks take over the pool table. They take over the dartboard. They pin Turkish flags up on the wall, over Celtic crosses, over printed lyrics to “Danny Boy,” over family photographs.

“Fuck,” Billy says, behind the bar. “Muslims. They don’t drink.”

Happily, not true. Like their English nemeses, it’s Budweiser all around.

I step outside for the fresh air. Two buses from Florida, Escambia County plates, parked in the left lane of Banks, next to the neutral ground. Florida?

More Turks are pouring out of the buses, singing.

It’s enough for me. Across the street there’s a birthday party. Some guy’s kids. They’ve got one of those giant inflatable jungle gyms — moonwalks is what they call them — out front, the kids, six of them, all of four or five years old, catapulting themselves to the top, back down, over and over, happy as hell. Man out front, drinking a High Life, I recognize from nights at the pub.

“Hey, man,” I holler, crossing the neutral ground, crossing Banks.

He calls back: “The hell’s going on over there?”

I reach his fence. “Turks. Fucking Turks.”

“Turks? Ragheads?”

“Well, you’d think. They all drink, though.”

“Oh,” he says, then “oh” again, as if, well, in that case, they must be all right. “Hey, it’s Sharonda’s birthday! She’s five. She’s right there, see her? Jumping up, there!”

Sharonda, on the descent, waves to her daddy.

I approach the giant plastic gym. “Sharonda! Your daddy says it’s your birthday! How old are you?”

“I... am...” She holds up her hand, giggles, counts fingers. “I’m FIVE!!”

The girls resume their jumping, higher now, to entertain the new guest. “Hey, man,” the daddy says, never can remember his name, “have a drink, huh?”

We go up the stairs to the front porch. Cooler in front, High Lifes. His lady’s sitting on a wooden rocker, glass of iced tea in hand. “How you doin’, baby?” she says to me.

“Pretty good. Congratulations on your daughter’s birthday.”

“Ohhh... I can’t believe she’s five. You got kids?”

“No. No wife either.”

She laughs. “’S wrong with you? You got cooties?”

“Lots of angry ex-girlfriends.”

We sit and watch the kids, quietly. The music coming out of the house, it’s kid music, something like Raffi. My man digs out two more High Lifes, pops the tops off, hands me one. He makes eye contact with his wife, says “Baby?” real quiet, but she shakes her head.

Across the street, the jerseys are gathered outside the front door in shock. Most of them have palms attached to ears, phones cradled between, shaking their heads, you won’t fucking believe what’s going on here.

A kid rides through the crowd, and I watch him lazily drift toward downtown; he fades out of sight. Kids are everywhere — street, neutral ground, sidewalk. Some are oblivious to the excitement at the pub, a few point and laugh. Makeshift hoops hang off second-floor porches, a few games of horse. The soccer jerseys stand out. Everyone’s got torn clothes, matches the paint peeling off crumbling houses.

I slap my friend on the back and rise. “You’re a lucky man,” I say.

He laughs. “Sometimes, man.” I catch the funny look he gives me before he turns his head.

I wish his wife a good day, and run downstairs to the kids in their jungle gym. “Hey, Sharonda, y’all want to make some noise?”

“YEAHHHHHH!!” The kids have been hitting the caffeine.

“Okay, look across the street. There, see the guy in the green shirt? That’s Billy. Everybody, on the count of three, yell Hi, Billy! Okay? One, two, THREE.”

It’s a hell of an uproar. Billy peers across the street, shakes his head and waves. As I cross the street, the kids take turns yelling at Billy again.

“Hey, Billy, so what’s the story?”

“Ah, mate, there’s too many fucking people in there.”

“And?”

He shakes his head, smiles. “What are ya gonna do? Drink faster!”

England-Turkey kicks off. The Turks shred their vocal cords, singing. I stand in the corner by the front door. Any trouble breaks out, quick exit.

Fifteen minutes into the game, the door swings open next to me. A bunch of the brothers who had run out after the Turkish invasion peer in. The one in front chews a plastic straw. “Shee-it,” he mutters, slams the door shut.

Drink faster. Billy tosses me another Abita, another, crowd just as packed but becoming less relevant. Halftime approaches. Penalty awarded to England. The Turks roar indignantly, deafeningly.

Paul moves next to me. “Christ,” he says, “all fucking hell.”

We tense up, awaiting the kick, the goal, the angry Turks to turn as one toward us. David Beckham takes the kick, sends it high into the stands above the posts. The Turks roar again, a gift from the heavens, and they sing aloud to them.

Paul sighs. “Thank God.”

Halftime. We move out onto the sidewalk. There’s rain. It’s light but getting heavier. Clouds darkening. My friend across the street is slowly gathering the kids, ushering them up the steps, into the house. He looks our way, waves. I raise my bottle.

I’ve lost interest in the game. I wander off to Telemachus Street, to my car. The brothers are out on their porch, safe from the rain, falling harder. They wave me up.

It’s not uncommon. Most evenings I come to the pub, I park at their house, hang out for a bit, bring up some forties. Good security. Nobody’s going to fuck with my car.

“I was just wondering who that ugly white motherfucker was.”

“Yeah? I was wondering who the blind black motherfucker was.”

They’ve got Juvenile pumping out of the house. He’s rapping about sets going up, the Third Ward, the UTP. The hell’s the UTP?

Rainfall hits the roof, a clatter of buckshot. The brothers offer me a Colt 45. Shit’s strong, goes down smooth. I’m lit. One of them’s up out of his chair, rapping over the sound of the rain, smacking an invisible ass in front of him, baby, let me see you do the rodeo.

The brothers whisper shit about their girlfriends, look over their shoulders, make sure they can’t hear. I offer up an ex-girlfriend, several months vintage. I say mine had a bigger ass.

Nah, man, white bitches don’t have no big asses!

Shit, this white bitch had an ass so big an astronaut could see it.

The rain lets up, enough. I’m on the sidewalk in the drizzle, back at the pub. Paul’s outside, cigarette in hand.

“What’s the score?” I ask.

“Nil-nil, mate. Almost over. Hope it stays a draw. Don’t want to have to fight the Turkish bastards.”

“Or English bastards.”

“Right. Not sure which ones smell worse.”

It’s the anticlimax we all craved. Fulltime, the Turks drift out of the bar onto their Florida buses. Some sing halfheartedly, most trudge by quickly, making rapid eye contact, then breaking it.

Naturally, the English stick around. They’re happier. They only need a draw to go on to the next round.

Soon, it’s just twenty of us. Shitfaced. Billy pours himself a draft Harp, leans on the bar. “Without a hitch. What a relief.”

Quiet hangs over the establishment. The building sighs, and settles. Zombielike, we sit at the counter watching our drinks, unable to make the effort to lift them. I’ve developed a dark ring around my line of sight; tunnel vision. Too shit-faced to care.

The front door opens slowly, then four figures pour into the room, slamming it shut behind them.

The first thing that registers is the straw in his mouth. I notice it before I hear him. Everything appears at the end of the tunnel. He says, next to me, wet with rain, “Motherfucker, open the register!”

Hands grab me from behind, throw me to the floor. My palm hits the ground first, my head next. Distantly aware of impact. My wallet’s ripped out of the sucker pocket.

There’s yelling. I don’t move. I make careful observations of the grime on the bottom of Billy’s barstools. Mental note.

Paul’s down here too. He’s looking back at me, not at the barstools. Blood’s coming out of his ear. They threw him down hard. He’s not blinking. Shock.

Billy’s voice, from a long distance: “That’s all I’ve got.”

I think of that scene from Apocalypse Now on the boat, when they suddenly go crazy and shoot that family. That’s what happens now. I feel the explosions in the floor, barstools clattering to the ground, specks of red like schools of fish. Hearing’s gone but for the deafening beating of my heart.

I move my head, just enough. Blue jeans, baggy, riding low, striped boxers. The fucker who opened fire.

There’s no conscious decision made, no preparation. I drop him. My right leg comes up in a scissor kick, behind the knee, fucker goes down. I see the gun hit the wall behind me, but can’t hear a thing. I imagine a satisfying clatter.

I’m up. The three other dudes stand by the door, aghast. Can’t believe that white motherfucker dropped their boy. Boys, I can’t believe it either.

Behind the bar, Billy’s slumped over the cooler, green jersey spotted with red. He blinks, but I’m not sure if there’s anything there.

I rush the brothers by the door. They’re out ahead of me, into the wall of rain. Cold water streams across the street, up onto the sidewalk and neutral ground. They’re gone.

Ah, but not the guy I left back in the bar. With his gun.

Before I realize I’m running, I’m halfway down the street. Rain blows into my eyes. I’m going to fall. I’m going to trip. The last thing I’ll see through rain-washed eyes, black motherfucker with a gun.

Yet there’s my car, water coming up to the rims — shit, I got this far, maybe I’ll make it. I start to fumble for the keys.

Nah. I’ll never make it.

The brothers on the porch. I take the stairs two at a time, and I’m up, dry, they’re on either side of me rising slowly, eyes wide, mouths moving. Something registers behind me, and their hands dart into their waistbands.

Pieces brought up, aiming toward the bottom of the stairs.

I turn around.

There’s just the one, inside the gate. Straw firmly in mouth. The dude lowers his gun. For the first time, he looks me in the eye. He smiles.

The current in the street is steady, rainwater halfway up to the knees. The man with the gun looks down, as if noticing the water for the first time, then slowly follows the current in the direction he came from. A wall of rain hits the street, and he vanishes into it.

Two-story brick houses by Patty Friedmann

Uptown

You only need two things to feel good at Newman School: Pappagallos that show your toe crack and a two-story brick house. Well, three things if you’re Jewish. If you’re Jewish, you have to go to Sunday school. I don’t have any of those things, but I can fake the third one. Thirty-seven out of sixty-two kids in my class at Newman are Jewish, if you count Carolyn and Shira, and strangely enough, you don’t think about them as being Jewish because they had bat mitzvahs. They also came from public school in seventh grade and are fat and don’t care. It was Carolyn, who goes to a synagogue I’ve never heard of, who told me just to say that I go to Gates of Prayer. It’s reform, but nobody’s ever heard of it.

I keep working on my mother to buy me Pappagallos, but she says I get my shoes free and I should brag about it instead of mope. My great-grandfather owned the Imperial Shoe Store, which is on the corner of Bourbon and Canal Streets, and my grandfather gets such a deep discount that he buys all my shoes. Imperial is one of those stores that sells sturdy shoes like Stride Rites. Okay, but I don’t understand why they waited until Capezios went out of style to get them in. I can have all the Capezios I want, now that I don’t want them.

I don’t think we’re poor, but I can’t really tell. We live in a house that’s actually old and pretty, but it’s wood and one-story so it doesn’t even matter that my grandmother pays for us to have a maid. Well, she pays twenty-five dollars a week, but after a while Rena wanted a raise, and my grandmother said no, so my father pays her extra every week, taking it out of what he would spend on dry cleaning his suit. That’s the way it is with my grandparents. My grandmother paid my tuition to Newman for kindergarten, and then she said she didn’t feel like it anymore, so I’ve been on scholarship ever since. Which means my daddy has to reveal his income every year. Newman is very low-key about it, but my mother’s not. I have to have very good grades. Which is pretty easy because this is more a school for rich kids than for smart kids, in spite of what the whole city thinks. I know for a fact that if your parents knew the admissions director when you were coming into kindergarten, she asked you which train was red and which one was black, and if you got it right, you were in. She came from a very old Jewish family and had nothing better to do than give admissions tests for Newman. She still does it.

There’s a slumber party at Louise Silverman’s house tonight, and I’m invited. I have been at this school for over ten years, and this is the first time I’m friends with all the snobbish girls. My mother is thrilled, and I am disgusted, but I’m also thrilled, to tell the truth. Louise lives on Octavia Street, and two of the other girls can actually walk to her house. Their houses look almost the same, and I think that’s a message to me that if you want to be the right kind of person, then you should have that kind of house. Brick two-story. A plain rectangle. My mother probably thinks so too, but my father is the manager of a supermarket, and she knows crummy shoes and Rena’s twenty-five dollars a week is probably her limit with her parents.

Louise and Meryl and both of the Lindas are failing Geometry. For a while, they took turns calling me up for homework help, then I started going over to their houses after school, and finally they quit pretending they could do anything without me. This is how I know people at Newman aren’t smart. For Monday’s homework we have to prove the congruence of the two triangles in a parallelogram. I’m headed over to Louise’s early and we’re going to work on it. She’ll just hand it over to the other three. They won’t be able to do it in Mrs. Walter’s class when she comes at them, and they won’t be able to do it on tests, and from what I’ve heard Mrs. Prescott will threaten them with public school, but at homework time they will think I’m giving them hope.

My mother has packed me my gold silk pajamas that my grandmother bought me on her last trip to Japan. “Those girls are going to be so jealous,” she says. I think there’s a chance she might be right, though I also think that even gold silk shoes from Japan would not hold up next to nice baby-blue leather Pappagallos.

I ask her to drop me off and not wait until someone opens the door. We have a 1956 Ford Fairlane sedan. I figure that if no one opens the door I can go ring another girl’s bell. It is better than being seen in a 1956 Ford Fairlane sedan.

Louise grabs my arm at the door and pulls me in, which is as close as she comes to affection. “We’ll do math right now,” she says, and I think she must see that I’m excited, too, by an idea I’ve come up with on the way over. If Mrs. Silverman sees this little lesson I’ve made up for Louise, she will decide I am the best girl in all of Newman School and should be the only one Louise is friends with. She might tell all the other mothers, and then I’ll be popular. These girls aren’t like me. They definitely plan to grow up to be just like their mothers.

While I pull my math book out of my overnight bag, I ask Louise to get me a couple of envelopes, please. She looks at me like I’ve asked her to get me cleaning supplies. This is not something she’s ever found necessary. “Mama!” she hollers, and goes running upstairs. Her mother comes down to the kitchen and rummages in a drawer in the butler’s pantry. These two-story brick houses fascinate me. They have rooms that make sense only for rich people who lived a hundred years ago, but they were actually built just ten years ago. I ask for scissors too. Louise’s maid stands at the sink watching us with her arms folded. She’s not doing anything but watching us. Her expression says she could do this geometry if someone asked her.

My wish comes true: Mrs. Silverman watches as I cut and fold and draw straight lines and prove beyond doubt the congruence of the triangles in a parallelogram. I even cut the envelope into the shape of a parallelogram despite the fact that a rectangle is already a sort of parallelogram, because I figure Louise and her mother aren’t going to follow that extra piece of information. They are as delighted as if I’ve just guessed which card they’ve pulled from a deck. Mrs. Silverman kisses my cheek with red lips, and I leave the mark because no other girl is going to have a print to match Mrs. Silverman’s tonight.

The maid is still standing at the sink around midnight when I pad into the kitchen to find a way not to cry. We are in our nightclothes, and everyone in her pink shortie pajamas has said how pretty mine are and has examined the little frog buttons closely so she can comment when I leave the room. Silk is so hot, and I don’t want to have perspiration stains under my arms. They will show so easily. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I really don’t. I feel sorry for Carolyn, who of course is not here. I feel sorry for the maid. I feel sorry for everybody. I must look pitiful.

“What’s a big old girl like you doing in baby nightclothes?” the maid says.

“They’re from Japan,” I say like a white person, and I suddenly don’t feel so bad.

Louise is the one making the calls. They are calling Negro cab companies and sending taxis to Carolyn’s house. “How you doin’?” she says, trying to sound colored. I think she sounds fifteen and stupid, but everyone else thinks it’s hysterical and is laughing into a pillow. “Yeah, I just got off work, you could pick me up?” She rifles through the school directory. This is why she’s flunking math. She can’t even hold Carolyn’s address in her head for two minutes. When she hangs up, they all start screeching with laughter.

“I thought you liked Negroes,” I whisper. Though right now I hate her maid.

Louise looks around to see whether she does or not. She draws blank stares. We all took Civics last year and Mr. Ralph taught us to love President Kennedy, and now all the girls except me have giant hair rollers on their heads so they can look like Mrs. Kennedy in the morning. That is supposed to mean we like Negroes. I explain that to Louise, and she agrees. She has a picture of him in her room. Rena has one in her kitchen, but I’ve never told Louise that. President Kennedy is very good-looking, she says, but why am I asking about Negroes?

Because it’s their cabs.

Oh, says Linda B., they’re out anyway. We’ll make Carolyn crazy. Remember Teal? I remember Teal. They called her all night every night until she was driven to public school in sixth grade.

And I think, I have a feeling you are going to be sitting in public school when Carolyn is up there in Trigonometry at

Newman. I’m having a good time. I’m inside my own head, but I like being in their company.

Linda B. is the one who makes the calls to Carolyn’s house. She thinks she can do a voice deep enough to be a boy our age, and she asks for Carolyn. “Oh God, she used the F word and all kinds of Jewish words,” Linda says, covering the receiver. “What’s a shwotzer?”

“It’s schvartze,” I say, “and it’s a derogatory word for Negroes.” Then I realize they are going to think I’m Jewish the way Carolyn and Shira are, so I have to explain really fast that if they paid attention to the way words are derived they’d notice that there are people at school named Schwartz, and that means “black,” so it’s just a form of a German word. I don’t mention that my father is from Germany, and that he’s been secretly teaching me German since I was three years old. Well, talking to me in German. You don’t teach a child. My mother doesn’t know.

All the girls trip all over themselves telling me how smart I am. I think this is different from my pajamas. This is not something they are going to talk about differently when I leave the room. I am smart, and that fact is unassailably good, and in their presence I am better than they are no matter what subject comes up, as long as it isn’t fashion.

When it seems that Carolyn has been tormented as close to going back to public school as is possible for one night, Linda R. says we need to play Secrets. Louise dims the lights, and we sit in a circle, and we drink Coke. There are eight of us, and we’re going clockwise, and since we started with Meryl, I have three people ahead of me before I have to think up something to tell. I figure I’ll decide on the basis of what they tell. My father likes to have what he calls private jokes with himself. I want to think up a private joke with myself. If I can think of a secret that they think is something they can hold against me, but really is something I can use against them, it’ll be a lot of fun.

Of course, Meryl has a crush on our English teacher and she had a dream last week that she went down to his French Quarter apartment and had sex with him. This is a complete lie. People don’t have night dreams that everyone in the room has daydreams about, especially when nobody really wants to do anything more with that man than kiss him. I pick this apart in my head. It’s a secret about her, and it’s one people can use in the halls. Louise tells that Becca in her fourth period French class came right out in the girls’ bathroom and said that her parents got a divorce because her mother was having an affair, not her father, even though it’s always the father who fucks around. Becca is an atheist, and she doesn’t care if she has any friends, but boys call her up anyway because she has huge breasts. She tells them no and goes out with Tulane boys. I’m not sure what to do with this for the purposes of tonight, but I am sure what to do with it for life in general. I’m going to quit pretending I’m anything but an atheist. My father hasn’t said so, but I know he’s one. He won’t affiliate with a synagogue because he says synagogues in New Orleans are really just churches without crucifixes. I think he’s just figured out that this God thing makes no sense. I know I have.

When it’s my turn, something makes me tell that I speak German. It will be a private joke with myself. Linda B. says I have to say something, and I say, “Du bist böse und hässlich,” which means, You are mean and ugly, but I tell them it means, You are smart and beautiful. Linda says it sounds like the way Carolyn’s mother talks, and everyone else chimes in, agreeing. Carolyn’s mother throws in maybe one word that sounds sort of German, I tell them, and they mull that over for a while, ask me to say something else. I take it on as a parlor trick: They ask for Boys think I’m sexy, and I give them back, “Männer denken dass Ich rieche wie Pferdescheisse,” which means, Boys think I smell like horse shit. Linda wants to know how I know how to speak German when I’ve been sitting in Newman all these years with all of them, and Newman hasn’t taught it to me. My father’s from Germany, I tell them. No, he’s not, they say. Nazis are from Germany. They start looking at me hard. My last name is Cooper. That’s not a Jewish name. It’s not a German name. It was Kuper until my father got to Ellis Island. I shouldn’t have to explain this.

“I’m Jewish, for Chrissakes,” I say, which I think is a pretty good joke, but they don’t get it.

“How do we know you’re not a Nazi?” Linda says.

“Because my grandmother was killed by the Nazis,” I say. I want to go home.

They all get quiet for a moment. They all have grandmothers who are just like their mothers.

Finally, Louise, who is in my European History class and getting a B without cheating, says, “If the Nazis killed her, how can she be your grandmother when she was dead before you were born? I mean, the war ended in, what, 1945?”

“Because my father had a mother, and that’s how you have a grandmother, no matter what,” I say. I’m feeling better. Newman is a remarkable school. All of these girls will go on to college. Though some are going to take a detour through public school.

“Prove it,” Louise says.

And I tell them, “There’s a bundle of letters in my parents’ bottom desk drawer.” I can read every one. In German. Right up to the very end.

Mrs. Prescott has done the math for the mothers, and this six weeks is going to require As from all four of those girls just to get Ds. She’s not sure any of them is what she calls Newman material. Meryl says that Newman material also has a lot to do with donations to the school, and her father is going to give five thousand dollars, and there’s probably a secret formula that mixes grades with parents’ contributions, so she’s not worried. But she must have some kind of dignity problem, because she’s not willing to come out of tenth grade with an F in Geometry, and that means I’m still going to have four friends at least until June. Meryl says we should have a slumber party at my house.

If people are going to come to my party, I want to have it, and I want to have it just the way they would. My mother won’t have Rena spend the night, and when I think about it, I’m relieved but angry anyway. She also won’t buy me shortie pajamas. So I cut the legs and sleeves off my silk pajamas and make very good hems in them, and there’s not a thing my mother can do. There’s also not a thing the other girls can say because the truth is that my pajamas are really better than theirs. At least I hope they are. My mother lets me have Coke. She doesn’t know that Coke and Oreos are right while Pepsi and Hydrox are wrong. Daddy knows, and he’s not telling. He doesn’t think I should have to squirm through life. But there’s no way to tell that to my mother because she likes to see me squirm. At least that’s the way it looks to me.

When my very cute house is quiet, and we’re all sitting around in my very cute living room, Linda R. looks at my parents’ desk and says, “So, is that their desk?” As if it is a peculiar kind of furniture found only in some obscure foreign country. Which to most of them it might be. I haven’t seen desks in most of their houses. Or bookshelves. I tell her yes. “So is that where you found the letters from the lady that got killed by the Nazis?”

I tell her yes.

Linda R. crawls right over to the desk and opens the bottom drawer. It’s the drawer where we keep all our memorabilia. Very neatly. My baby book, my mother’s baby book. A scrapbook of photos and an envelope of more photos. My mother’s diploma and my father’s honorable discharge from the U.S. Army, which he got four years and two months after he left Germany. And the packet of letters, which always lies nestled in the lower right-hand corner at the front. It’s impossible to miss, and Linda doesn’t miss it. She plucks it without the tenderness a person should afford these pages and pages of aerogramme paper, thin as onionskin. “Be careful with that,” is all I can think to say.

She undoes the ribbon, and they cascade to the floor. I leap to take them before they can fall out of order. I have read them, but I’ve read them like a detective who doesn’t want even fingerprints left behind. Linda pulls back, offended, as if I’ve called her a slob. “Hey, I just want you to read us one. Read it in German.”

Of course, the one on the top of the stack is the last one, the most frantic one. My grandmother has seen the light now that it is too late. She is writing to my father in New York, sorry she didn’t listen to him when he said they had to leave. My father has enlisted in the military to survive. I think you know people on Park Avenue, she says. People on Park Avenue have money. I understand you can still buy a way to America. Please ask your friends for help. I don’t know why I don’t hear from you. I read it in German. I translate without playing around.

“God, she didn’t get it, did she?” Meryl says.

“Did your dad really know a lot of rich people?” Louise asks.

I don’t say anything.

“Well, how come your father didn’t just go over and get her?” Louise says. “I mean, just get on a plane or something? That’s what I’d’ve done.”

I tell her it was 1943. That ought to connote more than the fact that commercial air travel didn’t exist, but it probably doesn’t.

Louise says, “So what happened next?” She is far too excited.

“She fucking died in a concentration camp,” I say. I fold the letter back and put it in its envelope and reassemble the packet of letters so it’s impossible to tell they’ve been touched. I put them back in the drawer. I go to sleep hours before they have their fill of Coke and meanness.

Mrs. Prescott comes to take me out of Geometry class, and Mrs. Walter makes her wait until the end of the period; such is her power. I’m not bothered until she tells me she’s taking me home. This is not something Mrs. Prescott would do; it’s too generous. People who work at Newman are not generous because they would be destroyed by the children. She protects herself, saying nothing in the car, and when we approach my house and I see my grandparents’ car and a police car, she doesn’t do anything except say that someone will get me my homework. I have to walk in alone.

This morning, an hour before Geometry class, my father killed himself in his office.

He found a bag made of plastic in the store, put it tight over his head, and waited to die. The policeman has a manila envelope with some evidence in it that he wants me to look at. Everyone in the room is wide-eyed and dry-eyed, and

I’m supposed to be that way too, but I bawl like a baby, and I can’t look at stupid evidence, and I don’t know who they think I am. I see Rena standing by the wall, and her eyes are wet and red. She loves my father. He always jokes with her, tries to use a Southern accent and says he’s from the south of Germany. I go over and hug her because among Mrs. Prescott and my mother and Rena, she’s the only hugging type I’ve seen today, even though she’s tall and skinny. The policeman wants a sample of my handwriting. My mother tries to sound protective. “She doesn’t need to give it to you,” she says. “We’ve got a million samples all over the house.”

Rena whispers to me that they have checked her handwriting too. Rena has very girlish writing. In fact, she writes like a fifth-grade girl. Which, if I think about it, is probably what she was when she quit school. I tell them I’ll write anything they want if they will tell me what this is all about.

In the manila envelope is one of my father’s mother’s letters. It’s the one I read at my party, but that doesn’t mean anything because it was the one on top. Scotch-taped to it is a note. The note says, Hitler didn’t kill your mother. You killed your mother.

I go over to the bottom drawer of the desk. Everyone follows me. I can’t believe no one has looked. My mother knows about the letters. I pull the drawer open. Slowly, while my mother explains rapid-fire that this is where the letter came from, that it was in a packet, that she should have thought of this before. The packet of letters is gone. Well, the letters are gone, but the ribbon is lying on the bottom of the drawer, swirled around. And under it is a scrap of paper. I recognize it. It’s torn from the pad we keep by the telephone in the kitchen. In the same handwriting as on the note attached to the letter, it says, You’re not so smart.

Scared rabbit by Tim McLoughlin

Irish Channel

“Okay, okay, so the mayor is looking to start a new antiterrorist task force and he only wants the cream of the crop from law enforcement.”

Tommy Mulligan had settled into his joke-telling stance, his back to the bar, elbows resting on the hammered copper surface. He faced his audience, seven or eight other cops and a few nurses, standing in a loose semicircle at the back of the crowded room. Thursday was nurses’ night at the Swamp Room, and the place was packed. Nurses’ night at a cop bar was always busy. Nurses’ night at a cop bar in the Irish Channel was very busy. Nurses’ night at the Swamp Room was a zoo.

“Which mayor?” someone asked.

“What?” Tommy said.

“Which mayor?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Not this bald prick.”

“Better than Barthelemy,” another said.

“So’s bin Laden.”

“Could it be Morial?” a nurse from Touro suggested.

“Screw him too. All the money in heaven for Comstat, but splits hairs about the goddamn raises.”

“It don’t matter which mayor,” Tommy said, sensing he was losing his audience. “It’s a joke. Let me tell the fuckin’ joke.”

Tommy had been hitting it heavy for the last hour, and his face was already flushed and sweaty. He’d reached that point in the evening where he thought he was the wittiest son of a bitch on God’s green earth, and that was usually Lew Haman’s cue to leave. But Lew wasn’t going anywhere quite yet tonight. He sat silently next to Tommy, his back to the others, facing the bar in the rear, its rows of bottles decorated with casually tossed toy stethoscopes and white garters.

The Swamp Room had been a real bucket of blood when Lew was a kid, with a large scratched and smoke-yellowed Plexiglas panel in the floor. Beneath it two alligators were kept in a tank that, as he thought about it now as an adult for the first time, had to have been woefully small for them. His father would let him come in to watch them be fed, and more than the feeding itself he remembered the horrendous stench when the panel was lifted.

The space where the Plexiglas had been was covered with stone tile now, and sometimes used as an impromptu tiny dance floor. The whole bar had been rehabbed about twenty years ago, just long enough that it was beginning to look shabby again.

“So he calls in two state troopers,” Tommy continued, “two FBI agents, and two New Orleans detectives.”

It was the awful end to an awful night, and Haman was not in the mood to indulge his partner’s humor. He drained his Jameson on the rocks and signaled the bartender silently to bring another. Seventeen years, he thought. Three to go. For the thousandth time lately he lamented joining the force so late in life. He’d come on an old man of thirty, and now he felt like a dinosaur at forty-seven, old even for a detective; and fuck that television Law and Order bullshit with fifty-five-year-olds running down gang-bangers in an alley. Everybody knew that if you hadn’t secured a desk job, you were an asshole to stay on past your early-, or at most mid-forties. You were an asshole or you were Lew Haman, with three years to go. Same thing, he decided.

“So the mayor takes all six guys, and he drives them upstate, somewhere in the woods, middle of fuckin’ nowhere. He tells them ‘Here’s your first test. Go into the woods and find a rabbit. Bring it back out here.’”

They had been only fifteen minutes from going off-duty when they got the call. Lew had planned to go straight home after work, to skip the Swamp Room, the nurses, the drinking. He made such plans often, and rarely adhered to them, but you never knew. It might have happened tonight. Then the call came in.

Two uniforms had been driving along Magazine Street toward Jackson when a short, heavyset Hispanic woman stepped off the curb into traffic and waved them down. She told them that two kids had just robbed her on Constance Street. One held her face tightly scrunched in his hand while the other cut the shoulder strap on her bag with a large knife. The one holding her face pushed her backwards unexpectedly, and she fell. Then they ran off, laughing.

The uniforms loaded her into the back of their car and started cruising the side streets. Within a few minutes she began screaming and gesturing at a kid in a hoodie and ghetto-slung pants walking up Fourth Street toward Laurel.

“That’s him,” she said. “The one that pushed my face.”

The uniforms jumped out and confronted the kid, and he reached one hand under his sweatshirt. One of the cops yelled, “Drop the knife!” then fired three times.

“So the first two guys to go in are the state troopers. They look at each other like — catch a rabbit, no fucking problem. These are Troop D guys, country boys. They go into the woods and they come back out in about five minutes with a goddamned rabbit. Mayor tells ’em good work and he sends in the second team, the FBI guys.”

Ernie Lowell was about the nicest guy you could hope to meet. His nickname around the Sixth District was Reverend Ernie, a moniker bestowed upon him because he was always counseling fellow officers about staying on the straight-and-narrow, and avoiding the lure of drinking and dope, corruption, or ill-gotten pussy. He was married and had five children. To a lot of the other cops he seemed too good to be true, but Lew had always found him to be a sincere guy. He was a year younger than Lew, but had been smart enough to come on earlier, and was now in his twenty-fifth year, planning to retire in about six months. He’d never shown much interest in moving up in the ranks, and until tonight he had never, to Lew’s knowledge, drawn his weapon from its holster, much less fired it at anyone.

Ernie’s sergeant was the first to arrive after the shooting, and he relieved Ernie of his gun. The sergeant put Ernie, shaking and in shock, in the backseat. Ernie’s partner told the story to the sergeant, and the mugging victim backed it up. There were no other witnesses on the street. No one but Ernie had seen a knife.

Lew and Tommy arrived next, and Lew dropped Tommy in front of the scene, then drove a few yards down the street until he could pull over to the curb. He walked back to Tommy and the sergeant. The kid in the hoodie was face down at their feet, the hood of his dark green sweatshirt still covering the back of his head. There was a thin stream of blood running from under the body, and the slightest beginning of a damp red stain on the back of the sweatshirt, as though one of Ernie’s shots had almost, but not quite, gone through the body.

“What have we got?” Lew asked. The sergeant repeated Ernie’s partner’s story. Lew walked over to the partner and got it again from him, then spoke to the mugging victim, who also corroborated it.

“And you’re sure this was one of the guys who robbed you?” Lew asked.

“That’s him,” she said, pointing to the body with her chin. “That’s him.”

Lew turned to leave.

“I think that’s him,” she said to his back.

“So the FBI guys, they take out an attaché case filled with all kinds of bells and whistles. First thing they do is divide the area into two sectors, and each one picks a sector. Then they disappear into the woods with global positioning equipment, sonar, and who the fuck knows what else. They’re gone for about an hour, then they come back, and sure as shit they’re carrying a rabbit.”

Tommy and Lew stood over the body and compared notes as the ambulance arrived.

“Anybody else see the knife?” Tommy asked.

“No,” Lew said. “Did you look at him yet?”

“Not yet,” Tommy said. “Shame it’s Reverend Ernie.”

“I know.”

“At least Ernie’s black,” Tommy said, and Lew looked at him. “You know, no media. Black cop, black perp, offsetting minorities.”

“No yardage gain?”

“Yeah.”

Lew looked over at Reverend Ernie in the backseat of the sergeant’s car and nodded to him. Ernie looked confused, as though he didn’t recognize him.

“So now he sends in the last team, the New Orleans detectives, you know. Old-time guys, polyester pants and skinny ties. They disappear into the woods and nobody hears a thing for about three hours.”

The bartender returned and stood in front of Lew. Lew looked at his glass and saw that it was empty again. How many was that? The bartender rapped his knuckles sharply on the bar twice, indicating that the next round was on the house. He gestured broadly at the row of bottles behind him. “Make a wish.”

Lew looked at him and smiled for the first time that day. Make a wish.

He wished that his hands didn’t shake so much in the morning. He wished that he didn’t hurt all the time, like there was an animal dying inside him. He wished that his daughter wasn’t living in Algiers with a drug dealer who might or might not be a member of the gang Lew just got assigned to monitor. He wished that he wasn’t having an affair with his doctor’s receptionist. He wished his wife didn’t know.

“Jameson,” he said, still smiling. The bartender poured generously.

He wished he wasn’t partnered with Tommy Mulligan. He wished he could still feel drunk when he drank, not just the dulling of pain. He wished he hadn’t stopped off tonight, or that he hadn’t had this last drink, or that he wouldn’t have the ones that would follow. He wished that he wouldn’t have to drive home tonight to Metarie as he did most nights, with his shield case open in his lap, badge and ID card readily visible for when he got pulled over. Mostly he wished he didn’t have three years to go. Three years was too long. It was too damn long to be stuck with the likes of Tommy Mulligan, a bad drunk, and a loud, stupid braggart. A man who couldn’t hold his tongue for three years. A man who would crack if pushed, even slightly.

He wished he didn’t make decisions that were wrong; knowing they were wrong, feeling compelled to make them anyway.

He wished there hadn’t been three men on the scene before he arrived today, and he wished there hadn’t been three knives under the body when he’d turned it over. Three knives stupidly, amateurishly tossed, practically on top of one another. He wished he didn’t feel the sickening weight of two of the knives in his left pocket. He had left the one that most closely resembled Ernie’s description. He wished he had six months to go, like Ernie, instead of three years. Three years if he could even get Tommy Mulligan past a grand jury without stepping on his own dick.

The bartender replaced Lew’s drink again as Tommy turned and winked at him.

“So, after like three hours, there’s suddenly all this fucking noise. Bang. Crash. Whap, whap, whap.” Tommy emphasized every sound by pounding his hand — palm flat — on the bar. “The two New Orleans boys come out of the woods, and they’re carrying this deer. And the deer is like, all beat up. He’s been worked over. So the deer looks at the mayor, and the deer says,” and Tommy paused, savoring the moment. He was just telling a joke in a bar. Not a care in the world. He was beaming. “‘Okay, okay, I’m a rabbit.’”

Lew raised his glass and let the laughter behind him blend in with the background bar din. It sounded distant, and somehow warm and cozy. Inviting. He wished he was there with everyone enjoying himself. He thought about where he’d toss the knives into the lake out at the West End tomorrow. He drank half his drink in a swallow and held the glass in front of him, looking through the amber fluid and ice at the bar mirror. Tommy Mulligan nudged him, hard, and some of the drink spilled from the glass and ran down his arm. He felt it inside his shirtsleeve.

“Get it?” Tommy said. “Do you get it? ‘I’m a rabbit.’”

“Sure,” Lew said, feeling the cold liquid almost to his elbow. He continued to look through his trembling glass at the faraway party in the mirror.

“I get it,” he said, “I’m a rabbit.”

Schevoski by Olympia Vernon

University District

She vomited on Magazine Street.

She stumbled in. The sign read, Miss Mae’s. A bar. She and the other white girls, their angular faces melting and disobedient like a blade, a glacier. She and the other white girls, laughing, laughing and stumbling about on the corner of Magazine Street in Uptown New Orleans.

Yes, they laughed and stumbled about with their angular faces pointing eastward; everything about them — the whiteness of them collectively — caught the pupil of the eye and pinned it down. One of them, the girl on the edge of the crowd, stood dark-haired and falling apart; she spoke of her ex, the one who dumped her.

What was his name?

Schevoski, Schevoski was his name and she hated him now.

The tail end of her yellow hair stood away from her shoulders, parted in the middle; there was a strand in the corner of her mouth, her lips purred upward, as if she could not help but notice that she was the dying kind in the crowd; he had, indeed, dumped her, gone back to Russia or some other place where boys go when they’re done with you.

Where had she met him?

At the university, at Tulane, where she’d turned the corner of St. Charles and some other street she could not remember, now that she was drunk, now that she stood amidst the other Tulane girls with their Tulane bodies and wished, she wished she could evaporate.

Yes, now she remembered, she had turned the corner of Tulane and some other street and she wanted something to occur, something that girls her age wanted to happen without having to call out to it; help me, it whispered.

And there, Schevoski stood.

He had been pronouncing a singular word, like beast, and saw her, standing there before him; this is when he asked her: Can you? he asked in the beginning, but then, then when he saw how vulnerable she was, he said: Say it, beast.

Beast, she whispered. Beast.

How did he look to her now? Could she recall the drunken weave of his posture when she met him? It was that, that, that cooing sound he made, as if he were calling out to her, Come here, there is something I need you to do.

For no one needed her, not really.

Or was it that he had no face at all? Even when her friends asked her to describe the boy she’d come across at the corner of St. Charles and some other street, she could not remember — Napoleon, was it? — she could only say that he was from Russia and something had bitten her about the flesh.

He was invisible.

It was no wonder that because she had felt like this, that he was invisible, he wove around her a feeling of powerlessness. He had crept up behind her, just behind the ear, and let her go.

Now, now that she and the white girls stood near the edge of the jukebox at Miss Mae’s, they, too, cooed, as Schevoski had cooed, and lifted their angular faces upward; a water stain the shape of a guitar lay flat on the ceiling.

One of the girls whispered: Look where he died.

And they all laughed again when she whispered, Look where he died, all laughing and shouldering each other, as if they knew, inwardly, that this was Schevoski and that thing he called music; the beast was dead.

They looked at her, the broken-hearted girl who had driven them here, and yelled: Look where he died, Look where he died. Schevoski. Schevoski is dead!

Why had they been so cruel? the girl thought. Because she could not remember one street? One word? Because this water-stained guitar was his voice and mind? Why ever had she driven them here?

She leaned over the edge of the jukebox and vomited.

And the other white girls, the girls who had come to mock her in their drunkenness, shouted as she vomited: Schevoski! Schevoski is dead!

And she vomited and vomited, her index finger over the Bee Gees label of the jukebox, until her mouth grew immediate and she turned, held her stomach, and stumbled through the shouting girls and their exclamatory language, stumbled until she reached the wooden door of the bathroom, stumbled until everything she had eaten this morning came up.

Finally, her stomach was bare.

And the world seemed to spin around her and the water-stained guitar seemed to crawl upon the ceiling, follow her through the wooden door of this place and mock upon her the power of its language; Schevoski is dead. And you are dead. You, beast.

And the girls who she had driven here, the Tulane girls, as if they had suddenly become aware of their cruelty, took their fists and banged on the outer walls of the lavatory; they banged and their banging seemed to echo throughout Magazine Street and the city of New Orleans that there was a girl in the john and she was weak and her old man had dumped her and she brought us to this place so we could mock her, make her afraid, tear down these walls she had collapsed into and whatever it was she had left, we would take it. Everything would come true.

Her head spun inside the lavatory and the banging of the other girls from Tulane now began to bang inside her head and she could see them, each of them at once, their mouths open and childlike, swimming around in her heart and mind the torturous chaos of one’s not knowing how vulnerable, how thin she is.

Just then, she thought of Schevoski, thought of how she’d met him, how cunning he was to have met her there on the corner of St. Charles and that street she could not remember — she wasn’t the only one; now, now amidst the other girls from Tulane and the water-stained guitar, she remembered the photos of the other girls, the other exes, and the labels he had written underneath, all named after the streets on which he had met them — Elba, Dupre, Willow, General Pershing, Eden — and there, scribbled beneath her own name, on the corner of St. Charles and...

Now, now that these things had come to her, she looked up to where the water-stained guitar had been and did her own laughing. And the other girls from Tulane heard it, how powerful it was, and stepped away from the wooden door of the lavatory and stumbled, stumbled back to the abandoned jukebox, back to where the vomit had begun to swell.

Each of them noticed, one at a time and collectively, the image of the water-stained guitar: the Schevoski is dead! had now disappeared into the odorous air of Magazine and it was no matter, they were all dead, as the girl who’d brought them here was dead, as Schevoski was dead, like a blade, a glacier.

A beast.

Algiers by David Fulmer

Algiers

Valentin St. Cyr crossed to Algiers on the ferry. It was the end of a hot day in May of 1905, and the fading sun reached out to paint the sky in bloody streaks and spread little points of light over the river like early stardust. Every so often, the wake of a barge would traverse the surface. Then the water got quiet again.

The ferry moved unperturbed through the green shifting swirls. Valentin leaned on the stern railing as the profile of New Orleans retreated. It was good to get out of the city, especially out of Storyville, if only for one night. To get paid for it made it even better, even if he dropped a few dollars while he went about running off the card cheat.

What was the character’s name again? McTier?

In any case, it was a Tuesday, and the red light district would be quiet. The Basin Street madams and the sporting women and their gentlemen callers could do without him for one night, and any problems would still be there when he got back.

Valentin spent a few moments patting his clothes in what must have looked like some sort of private genuflection. In fact, he was checking his weapons. The weight of his favored Iver Johnson revolver settled in the pocket of his light cotton suit jacket. His whalebone sap was lodged in the back pocket of his trousers, so that he could reach in with his right hand to swing it around with the force to roll up eyes and buckle knees. Finally, he kept a stiletto in a sheath strapped to his ankle, so it would be easy to grab if some rascal tried to drag him to the floor.

Not that he expected that sort of trouble tonight. He had handled cheapjack hustlers by the dozens. He wouldn’t be walking into a rough back-of-town saloon to encounter a sport down on his luck and desperate for a good score, a rounder who thought he owned the place, or, worst of all, some low-down, no-good son of a bitch on a cocaine jag who saw things that weren’t there, imagined everyone in the room was out to get him, and itched for an excuse to pull out his own weapon of choice and have at it.

There would be none of that tonight, or so said Valentin’s employer, Mr. Tom Anderson. This McTier fellow was just another loud-mouthed, bullying sort, which meant he was most likely a coward, and would quail and run as soon as someone showed up to beat his hand — someone like Valentin St. Cyr. Sometimes all it took was a cold-eyed stare to get a sharp to pick up his loose change and crooked cards or dice and clear out. Other times, a fellow made his exit with his bloody forehead in his hands. And every now and then, nothing but a promise of deadly violence would do. So far, it hadn’t gone any further than that.

Once the ferry docked, he stepped onto the pier and walked up the incline and through the narrow avenues of the little town until he found Evelina Street. When he arrived at the corner address, it was little more than a storefront that had been set up with a plank bar and some tables and chairs, not all of them matching. A ceiling fan creaked overhead and the floor was spread with dunes of sawdust that had gone dark with tobacco juice and spilled whiskey. The windows were open on two sides so the breezes off the river could carry away some of the smell. There was a trough in back that served as a toilet. It would take a hurricane to blow that stench away.

A Negro boy who was standing watch opened the door for Valentin, who tossed him a nickel and stepped over the threshold. Two working men leaned their elbows on the near end of the bar. Valentin stepped up and asked for Mr. Roy. The bartender, a tall and lank mulatto, pointed a finger toward the back of the room.

Settled behind the wooden table in the corner was Mr. Roy, a hugely fat man with broad African features and skin a mottled brown, as if he was suffering from some odd ailment. His hair was woolly and the whites of his eyes were a deep yellow, matching his large teeth. He wheezed on every breath and his body and clothes reeked of sweat.

Valentin had never seen him before and didn’t know if he was a lawman, a criminal, or a nobody. Valentin didn’t know much of anything, other than the fact that Anderson, “The King of Storyville,” owed the owner of this rundown establishment a debt, and that Valentin was there to pay it off.

He took a seat across the table from Mr. Roy, who gasped lightly though his mouth as he regarded his visitor. The mulatto came creeping from behind the bar with a bottle and a clean glass, then made a quick retreat — making Valentin wonder if his reputation had arrived there ahead of him.

There was no point in exchanging niceties, so Mr. Roy got right to the point.

“The fellow’s name is Eddie McTier,” he said, heaving like a tugboat. “He’s a guitar player and a gambler out of Georgia. He been in near every night. He busts in on every game, then cheats and takes all the money. Then he lies to cover it. When that don’t work, he starts talking that he’s fixing to pull his pistol. He must have took fifty dollars off my customers over here. Now no one wants to come around no more.”

Valentin was noncommittal. He recognized the type, one of an army of tramps who preyed in places like Algiers, within spitting distance of New Orleans, where he wouldn’t last a minute. That he was a guitar player signified nothing.

“Why don’t you just put him out?” he inquired.

“I tried that,” Mr. Roy huffed. “He just laughed in my face and spit on the floor, and then come right back in the next night. He says he ain’t broke no law, and so he has a right. He also say he be carryin’ some voodoo, ’count of playin’ the blues and all, and so nobody want to cross him. Anyway, the gentleman owns the property wants him out for good. He’s ruining business.”

For a moment, Valentin thought Mr. Roy was making a joke. What business would that be? But the fat man’s face was grave.

Valentin had seen this gambit before. If a fellow talked tough or bragged on his voodoo enough, people who should know better fall for the act. This McTier had everyone in the place believing he was a bad actor who wasn’t going anywhere until he was good and ready.

Valentin poured an inch of whiskey in his glass and drank it down. “What time does he come around?”

“Soon as the sun goes down. So any time now.”

Valentin picked up the bottle and the glass and nodded in the direction of the table in the other corner. “I’ll sit over there. He and I’ll play some cards. See if he tries to cheat on me.”

“Oh, he will,” Mr. Roy said.

“Then I’ll have reason to put him out.”

The fat man pursed his heavy lips. “Don’t go gettin’ yourself kilt over here.”

“Don’t plan to,” Valentin said. “But if anything starts, you make sure everybody stays the hell out of the way.”

He got up and moved to the table, so that he was for the moment hidden in shadow to everyone except the bartender and Mr. Roy, and only because they knew he was there. He drank one more short glass of whiskey. It was hot, and he wanted his wits about him.

Some minutes passed as the sun went all the way down over the river. Valentin let his thoughts wander until the boy who was standing guard stepped inside, rolled his eyes a certain way, then faded into the woodwork. Valentin smiled; the kid would himself make a decent rounder one day.

He heard Eddie McTier before he saw him. The windows were open all along the street side of the saloon and a raucous voice echoed from the next corner: jagged laughter, a blunt shout, and a couple raw curses. Valentin heard the thump of boots on the banquette and finished the liquor in his glass in one quick swallow. Then he leaned back a few inches from the table. The front door flapped rudely open and a short barrel of a black man pushed inside, dressed in brown trousers, a soiled white shirt, and a vest that had seen some dusty miles. A misshapen gray Stetson was cocked sideways on his head.

Eddie McTier stopped to glance around with a cunning sort of smile, almost a childish thing, as if pleased with himself and all he surveyed. He took the Kalamazoo guitar that was strapped on his back and set it in the corner next to the door. Then he let his oily eyes roam past Valentin, circle the saloon, and come back.

He stared into the corner, looking unsure. “Who the hell’s that?” he asked the bartender.

The bartender swallowed.

McTier smacked a palm on the bar and said, “Twine! You hear me?”

“Fellow come over from New Orleans,” Twine stuttered quickly. “He’s lookin’ for a game.”

McTier peered at the man at the back table. “That right, friend?” he called.

Valentin didn’t move or speak.

“You looking for a game or not?” McTier demanded.

Valentin leaned forward so that his face came out of the darkness and into the light. Without a word, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a new deck of cards, which he tossed to the center of the table.

McTier peered at the faces as if looking for someone to let him in on the joke. All he got were averted eyes, so he started a slow stroll along the bar.

From the table in the opposite corner, Mr. Roy cleared his throat. “You ort to leave your pistol with Twine there.”

McTier cocked his head toward Mr. Roy and then swiveled it to look at the bartender. Twine didn’t make the slightest move.

“Let him hold onto it.”

All three men turned to toward Valentin. McTier was the only one who spoke. “And what are you carryin’ this evening, mister?” he asked.

“That ain’t none of your business,” Valentin said in an off-hand way.

There was another pause while Eddie McTier decided whether or not to take offense. It was as if an invisible artist had drawn invisible lines in the air, defining the two men and the cold drama that was being staged within those four clapboard walls. Twine stared between them, feeling sweat run from beneath his hair and down his forehead.

It took another few seconds for it to dawn on Eddie McTier that if he did anything except stand there, he’d be finished in Algiers and in New Orleans, for that matter. Meanwhile, Mr. Roy was idly imagining that he could have sold tickets to this event.

Valentin broke the silence. “Did you come to play cards or talk about firearms?”

McTier grinned with his gray, uneven teeth. He turned and called over his shoulder for Twine to bring him a pint and a glass. With a hitch of his shoulders, he pulled out the chair opposite the Creole and sat down.

“I come to play,” he said.

Valentin nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “But, so you understand, you cheat and you’re out.”

McTier had been reaching for the deck. Now his lazy hand stopped in midair. He cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “What’d you say?”

“I said if you cheat, you’re out. And you don’t come around here anymore.”

McTier let out a disbelieving little snicker. “Is that so? And who says if I cheat?”

“We’ll let God be the witness,” Valentin said, his mouth curving into a smile that his eyes didn’t share.

McTier hiked his eyebrows and snatched up the deck with a brusque motion. “God, huh? You gonna need God if you play cards with me. ’Cause I got the devil on my side. I brought some voodoo from Georgia y’all ain’t even heard of.”

Valentin gave him a dubious look, as if suffering some boastful child. “Put your money on the table,” he said. He reached into his own pocket, took out an envelope, opened it, and dumped out twenty gold dollars. He raised his eyes to meet McTier’s. “And I mean all of it,” he said.

McTier had three choices. He could get up out of the chair, leave, and never come back. He could play it straight and lose his poke. Or he could brazen it out and chop this Creole character into pieces.

While he waited for the guitar player to make up his mind, Valentin gazed past him toward the door, where two men in cheap suits and a young woman in a thin cotton dress had stopped to peer inside. They were whispering among themselves and the girl was staring as if she had never seen anything quite like him before. Once he caught her eye, her face broke into a smile that was shyly wicked.

Eddie McTier shifted his way into Valentin’s line of vision and rapped his knuckles on the table. “That’s it,” he said. There was a small cylinder of gold coins in front of him that looked to be at least the equal of Valentin’s own.

“That all of it?” Valentin asked.

“Every fucking dime,” McTier replied with a snide curl of his lip.

Twine stepped up to the table with a pint bottle of amber liquor in one hand and a short glass in the other. He placed them at McTier’s elbow and skipped away in a hurry.

McTier frowned at the bartender “How come everybody’s so damn skittish today?” he said. “Y’all are actin’ crazy.”

Valentin pushed the deck of cards across the table. “You deal,” he said.

McTier’s face pinched with distrust. He watched Valentin for a second, then fanned a thumb through the deck. Satisfied it was clean, he broke it in half and began to shuffle. “What’s your story, friend?” he inquired.

“No story,” Valentin said. “Just passing through and looking for a game. What about you?”

“What, ain’t nobody told you?”

“Told me what.”

“I come from Georgia. Place called Happy Valley. I heard they like the blues in New Orleans. So I come over and I’m here to stay.”

Valentin studied the sharp’s face, feigning a vague interest, and watched his hands at the same time. McTier was playing it straight so far, but he was talking faster and faster, an old trick that was a variation on the magician’s sleight of hand.

“I got me a woman back home in Thomson. Ain’t but fifteen years old.” He seemed to stumble for a moment. “Got me a child name of Willie. He’s blind.” Now he fell curiously silent for a few seconds, as if he had lost his way. Recovering, he poured his glass full and drank it halfway down. “But truth is, I got more women than I know what to do with,” he crowed as his hands got busy again. “I found me this here young Ethiopian gal and brought her along. I left her over across the river.”

“And what are you doing in Algiers?” Valentin asked.

McTier smiled and said, “Takin’ your money, friend.”

Valentin’s face lightened suddenly and he grinned as if the guitar player had just told a good joke. The whispers at the door stopped and even Mr. Roy halted his wheezing for a few seconds.

“I say somethin’ funny?” McTier asked.

“Deal,” Valentin said.

“I’ll deal all right,” McTier said, and began snapping cards.

Valentin caught the move on the first hand and let it go. It was the same with the second and third, and McTier, looking giddy, drank some more as he watched the Creole’s stack of coins shrink while his grew. A quarter-hour passed in this manner, and Mr. Roy, Twine, the two fellows at the bar, and the trio near the door were all looking at Valentin as if realizing that in fact he was a fool.

For Valentin, it was as easy as hooking a Mississippi catfish. Thinking he had a chump in his sights, and doing some showing off for the locals, McTier tried a more brazen ploy. This time the Creole’s left hand came down with the force of a guillotine to grab the guitar player’s wrist in an iron grip.

“What did I tell you?” Valentin’s voice, though soft, rang out in a room that had suddenly gone dead quiet.

McTier tried to bluff his way out. “What the hell? Take your goddamn paw off me!”

Valentin shrugged and let go, then used the free hand to tear away the cuff of McTier’s shirt, popping the link and revealing the card hidden there, an ace of spades. It would have come in handy on the next deal.

McTier lowered his forehead and his eyebrows dipped into a valley. He muttered something under his breath and a rank smell came off him. On the periphery of his vision, Valentin saw the two men standing in the doorway pull the girl back out onto the banquette as the rounders and Twine dropped from sight like ducks in a shooting gallery. Mr. Roy was too fat to move with any haste, so he just pushed his chair back into the corner as far as he could go, and watched.

McTier got to his feet, the torn cuff dangling. “This game’s over,” he said.

“Damn right,” Valentin countered.

The guitar player jerked a thumb. “Door’s right back there.”

Valentin smiled dimly. “I ain’t going anywhere.”

“Then I’ll take my money and leave.”

Valentin shook his head slowly and said, “No, you won’t.”

A silence fell with a dark weight. From the corner, Mr. Roy saw the way McTier’s face changed. He had made his last threat and it hadn’t worked. This time he had only two choices, to run away or stand and fight. Meanwhile, the Creole sat perfectly still, his hands on the table. Mr. Roy hadn’t even seen him blink.

McTier let out a sudden raw growl as his hand went across his torso to the waist of his trousers. He snapped out a long-barreled Stevens Tip-Up.22 and brought it around at the same moment that Valentin rose abruptly, knocking back his own chair. The bark of the pistol shook the glasses behind the bar and the slug whistled past Valentin’s temple so closely that he felt the wind as it thunked into a wall board behind his head.

In his arrogance, McTier had packed a single-shot revolver, never dreaming that he’d have to use it. It was a mistake, because now a second pistol cracked, and the guitar player stumbled back in two long strides, as if pulled by a rope. Both his hands came up and the.22 tumbled out of the right one. The hole in his chest was still smoking when his knees crumpled and he collapsed to the floor.

The last hollow echo died. Now flat on his back, McTier tried to raise himself, then collapsed back, coughed out a ragged breath, and went still as the blood from his chest welled and spread.

Mr. Roy let out a long, noisy wheeze. Three heads rose up from the cover of the bar and the two men and the young girl edged back into the doorway. The Negro boy who had so ably faded into the wall reappeared, his face cracking into a grin of amazement.

Twine leaned over the bar to stare down at the body. “Holy Jesus,” he said.

Valentin lowered the pistol, laid it on the table, and sat back down. He picked up the pint, poured some of McTier’s whiskey into his glass, and drank it down in a long, slow sip. He looked surprised and perhaps baffled, as if he had wandered in from outside.

Mr. Roy managed to push himself to his feet. “We can take care of it from here on.”

Valentin, coming to his senses, understood. They would remove McTier’s body and cover the shooting with the police, if they talked about it at all. He also understood that he needed to leave. “Give his guitar to someone who can use it,” he said.

Mr. Roy nodded his heavy head.

Valentin walked across the dirty sawdust floor and out onto the banquette, where the young girl’s dark round eyes locked on him with a sort of primitive wonder. She seemed to barely breath as he stepped past her and continued down Evelina Street without looking back. He arrived at the pier just in time to catch the last ferry.

Pony Girl by Laura Lippman

Tremé

She was looking for trouble and she was definitely going to find it. What was the girl thinking when she got dressed this morning? When she decided — days, weeks, maybe even months ago — that this was how she wanted to go out on Mardi Gras day? And not just out, but all the way up to Claiborne Avenue and Ernie K. Doe’s, where this kind of costume didn’t play. There were skeletons and Mardi Gras Indians and baby dolls, but it wasn’t a place where you saw a lot of people going for sexy or clever. That kind of thing was for back in the Quarter, maybe outside Café Brasil. It’s hard to find a line to cross on Mardi Gras day, much less cross it, but this girl had gone and done it. In all my years — I was nineteen then, but a hard nineteen — I’d only seen one Mardi Gras sight more disturbing, and that was a white boy who took a magic marker, a thick one, and stuck it through a piercing in his earlobe. Nothing more to his costume than that, a magic marker through his ear, street clothes, and a wild gaze. Even in the middle of a crowd, people granted him some distance, let me tell you.

The Mardi Gras I’m talking about now, this was three years ago, the year that people were saying that customs mattered, that we had to hold tight to our traditions. Big Chief Tootie Montana was still alive then, and he had called for the skeletons and the baby dolls to make a showing, and there was a pretty good turnout. But it wasn’t true old school, with the skeletons going to people’s houses and waking up children in their beds, telling them to do their homework and listen to their mamas. Once upon a time, the skeletons were fierce, coming in with old bones from the butcher’s shop, shaking the bloody hanks at sleeping children. Man, you do that to one of these kids today, he’s likely to come up with a gun, blow the skeleton back into the grave. Legends lose their steam, like everything else. What scared people once won’t scare them now.

Back to the girl. Everybody’s eyes kept going back to that girl. She was long and slinky, in a champagne-colored body stocking. And if it had been just the body stocking, if she had decided to be Eve to some boy’s Adam, glued a few leaves to the right parts, she wouldn’t have been so... disrupting. Funny how that goes, how pretending to be naked can be less inflaming than dressing up like something that’s not supposed to be sexy at all. No, this one, she had a pair of pointy ears high in her blond hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail. She had pale white-and-beige cowboy boots, the daintiest things you ever seen, and — this was what made me fear for her — a real tail of horsehair pinned to the end of her spine, swishing back and forth as she danced. Swish. Swish. Swish. And although she was skinny by my standards, she managed the trick of being skinny with curves, so that tail jutted out just so. Swish. Swish. Swish. I watched her, and I watched all the other men watching her, and I did not see how anyone could keep her safe if she stayed there, dancing into the night.

Back in school, when they lectured us on the straight-and-narrow, they told us that rape is a crime of violence. They told us that a woman isn’t looking for something just because she goes out in high heels and a bustier and a skirt that barely covers her. Or in a champagne-colored body stocking with a tail affixed. They told us that rape has nothing to do with sex. But sitting in Ernie K. Doe’s, drinking a Heineken, I couldn’t help but wonder if rape started as sex and then moved to violence when sex was denied. Look at me, look at me, look at me, the tail seemed to sing as it twitched back and forth. Yet Pony Girl’s downcast eyes, refusing to make eye contact even with her dancing partner, a plump cowgirl in a big red hat, sent a different message. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me. You do that to a dog with a steak, he bites you, and nobody says it’s the dog’s fault.

Yeah, I wanted her as much as anyone there. But I feared for her even more than I wanted her, saw where the night was going and wished I could protect her. Where she was from, she was probably used to getting away with such behavior. Maybe she would get away with it here, too, if only because she was such an obvious outsider. Not a capital-T tourist, not some college girl from Tallahassee or Birmingham who had gotten tired of showing her titties on Bourbon Street and needed a new thrill. But a tourist of sorts, the kind of girl who was so full of herself that she thought she always controlled things. She was counting on folks to be rational, which was a pretty big count on Mardi Gras day. People do odd things, especially when they’s masked.

I saw a man I knew only as Big Roy cross the threshold. Like most of us, he hadn’t bothered with a costume, but he could have come as a frog without much trouble. He had the face for it — pop eyes, broad, flat mouth. Big Roy was almost as wide as he was tall, but he wasn’t fat. I saw him looking at Pony Girl long and hard, and I decided I had to make my move. At worst, I was out for myself, trying to get close to her. But I was being a gentleman, too, looking out for her. You can be both. I know what was in my heart that day and, while it wasn’t all over pure, it was something better than most men would have offered her.

“Who you s’posed to be?” I asked after dancing awhile with her and her friend. I made a point of making it a threesome, of joining them, as opposed to trying to separate them from one another. That put them at ease, made them like me.

“A horse,” she said. “Duh.”

“Just any horse? Or a certain one?”

She smiled. “In fact, I am a particular horse. I’m Misty of Chincoteague.”

“Misty of where?”

“It’s an island off Virginia.” She was shouting in my ear, her breath warm and moist. “There are wild ponies, and every summer the volunteer firemen herd them together and cross them over to the mainland, where they’re auctioned off.”

“That where you from?”

“Chincoteague?”

“Virginia.”

“My family is from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But I’m from here. I go to Tulane.”

The reference to college should have made me feel a little out of my league, or was supposed to, but somehow it made me feel bolder. “Going to college don’t you make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an oven can call itself a biscuit.”

“I love it here,” she said, throwing open her arms. Her breasts were small, but they were there, round little handfuls. “I’m never going to leave.”

“Ernie K. Doe’s?” I asked, as if I didn’t know what she meant.

“Yes,” she said, playing along. “I’m going to live here forever. I’m going to dance until I drop dead, like the girl in the red shoes.”

“Red shoes? You wearing cowboy boots.”

She and her friend laughed, and I knew it was at my expense, but it wasn’t a mean laughter. Not yet. They danced and they danced, and I began to think that she had been telling a literal truth, that she planned to dance until she expired. I offered her cool drinks, beers and sodas, but she shook her head; I asked if she wanted to go for a walk, but she just twirled away from me. To be truthful, she was wearing me out. But I was scared to leave her side because whenever I glanced in the corner, there was Big Roy, his pop eyes fixed on her, almost yellow in the dying light. I may have been a skinny nineteen-year-old in blue jeans and a Sean John T-shirt — this was back when Sean John was at its height — but I was her self-appointed knight. And even though she acted as if she didn’t need me, I knew she did.

Eventually she started to tire, fanning her face with her hands, overheated from the dancing and, I think, all those eyes trained on her. That Mardi Gras was cool and overcast, and even with the crush of bodies in Ernie K. Doe’s, it wasn’t particularly warm. But her cheeks were bright red, rosy, and there were patches of sweat forming on her leotard — two little stripes beneath her barely-there breasts, a dot below her tail and who knows where else.

Was she stupid and innocent, or stupid and knowing? That is, did she realize the effect she was having and think she could control it, or did she honestly not know? In my heart of hearts, I knew she was not an innocent girl, but I wanted to see her that way because that can be excused.

Seeing her steps slow, anticipating that she would need a drink now, Big Roy pressed up, dancing in a way that only a feared man could get away with, a sad little hopping affair. Not all black men can dance, but the ones who can’t usually know better than to try. Yet no one in this crowd would dare make fun of Big Roy, no matter how silly he looked.

Except her. She spun away, made a face at her cowgirl, pressing her lips together as if it was all she could do to keep from laughing. Big Roy’s face was stormy. He moved again, placing himself in her path, and she laughed out loud this time. Grabbing her cowgirl’s hand, she trotted to the bar and bought her own Heineken.

“Dyke,” Big Roy said, his eyes fixed on her tail.

“Yeah,” I said, hoping that agreement would calm him, that he would shake off the encounter. Myself, I didn’t get that vibe from her at all. She and Cowgirl were tight, but they weren’t like that, I didn’t think.

When Pony Girl and Cowgirl exited the bar, doing a little skipping step, Big Roy wasn’t too far behind. So I left, followed Big Roy as he followed those girls, wandering under the freeway, as if the whole thing were just a party put on for them. These girls were so full of themselves that they didn’t even stop and pay respect to the Big Chiefs they passed, just breezed by as if they saw such men every day. The farther they walked, the more I worried. Big Roy was all but stalking them, but they never looked back, never seemed to have noticed. And Big Roy was so fixed on them that I didn’t have to worry about him turning around and spotting me. Even so, I darted from strut to strut, keeping them in my sights. Night was falling.

They reached a car, a pale blue sedan — theirs, I guess — and it was only when I watched them trying to get into it that I began to think that the beers they had drunk had hit them awfully hard and fast. They weren’t big girls, after all, and they hadn’t eaten anything that I had seen. They giggled and stumbled, Cowgirl dropping her keys — Pony Girl didn’t have no place to keep keys — their movements wavy and slow. The pavement around the car was filthy with litter, but that didn’t stop Pony Girl from going down on her knees to look for the keys, sticking her tail high in the air. Even at that moment, I thought she had to know how enticing that tail was, how it called attention to itself.

It was then that Big Roy jumped on her. I don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe he assumed Cowgirl would run off, screaming for help — and wouldn’t find none for a while, because it took some time for screams to register on Mardi Gras day, to tell the difference between pleasure and fear. Maybe he thought rape could turn to sex, that if he just got started with Pony Girl, she’d like it. Maybe he meant to hurt them both, so it’s hard to be sorry for what happened to him. I guess the best answer is that he wasn’t thinking. This girl had made him angry, disrespected him, and he wanted some satisfaction for that.

But whatever Big Roy intended, I’m sure it played different in his head from what happened. Cowgirl jumped on his back, riding him, screaming and pulling at his hair. Pony Girl rolled away, bringing up those tiny boots and thrusting them at just the spot, so he was left gasping on all fours. They tell women to go for the eyes if they’s fighting, not to count on hitting that sweet spot, but if you can get it, nothing’s better. The girls had all the advantage they needed, all they had to do was find those keys and get out of there.

Instead, the girls attacked him again, rushing him, crazy bitches. They didn’t know the man they were dealing with, the things he’d done just because he could. Yet Big Roy went down like one of those inflatable clowns you box with, except he never popped back up. He went down and... I’ve never quite figured out what I saw just then, other than blood. Was there a knife? I tell you, I like to think so. If there wasn’t a knife, I don’t want to contemplate how they did what they did to Big Roy. Truth be told, I turned my face away after seeing that first spurt of blood geyser into the air, the way they pressed their faces and mouths toward it like greedy children, as if it were a fire hydrant being opened on a hot day. I crouched down and prayed that they wouldn’t see me, but I could still hear them. They laughed the whole time, a happy squealing sound. Again I thought of little kids playing, only this time at a party, whacking at one of those papier-mâché things. A piñata, that’s what you call it. They took Big Roy apart as if he were a piñata.

Their laughter and the other sounds died away, and I dared to look again. Chests heaving, they were standing over what looked like a bloody mound of clothes. They seemed quite pleased with themselves. To my amazement, Pony Girl peeled her leotard off then and there, so she was wearing nothing but the tights and the boots. She appeared to be starting on them as well, when she yelled out, in my direction: “What are you looking at?”

Behind the highway’s strut, praying I couldn’t be seen, I didn’t say anything.

“Is this what you wanted to see?” She opened her arms a little, did a shimmying dance so her breasts bounced, and Cowgirl laughed. I stayed in my crouch, calculating how hard it would be to get back to where the crowds were, where I would be safe. I could outrun them easy. But if they got in the car and came after me, I wouldn’t have much advantage.

The girls waited, as if they expected someone to come out and congratulate them. When I didn’t emerge, they went through Big Roy’s pockets, took the cash from his wallet. Once the body — if you could call it that — was picked clean of what little it had, Pony Girl popped the trunk of the car. She stripped the rest of the way, so she was briefly naked, a ghostly glow in the twilight. She stuffed her clothes, even her ears and her tail, in a garbage bag, then slipped on jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes. Cowgirl didn’t get all the way naked, but she put her red hat in the garbage bag, swapped her full skirt for a pair of shorts. They drove off, but not at all in a hurry. They drove with great deliberation, right over Big Roy’s body — and right past me, waving as they went.

I suppose they’s smart. I suppose they watch those television shows, know they need to get rid of every little scrap of clothing, that there’s no saving anything, not even those pretty boots, if they don’t want the crime to be traced back to them. I suppose they’ve done this before, or at least had planned it careful-like, given how prepared they were. I think they’ve done it since then, at least once or twice. At least, I’ve noticed the little stories in the Times-Picayune this year and last — a black man found dead on Mardi Gras day, pockets turned out. But the newspaper is scanty with the details of how the man got dead. Not shot, they say. A suspicious death, they say. But they don’t say whether it was a beating or a cutting or a hot shot or what. Makes me think they don’t know how to describe what’s happened to these men. Don’t know how, or don’t feel it would be proper, given that people might be eating while they’s reading.

Just like that, it’s become another legend, a story that people tell to scare the little ones, like the skeletons showing up at the foot of your bed and saying you have to do your homework and mind your parents. There are these girls, white devils, go dancing on Mardi Gras, looking for black men to rob and kill. The way most people tell the story, the girls go out dressed as demons or witches, but if you think about it, that wouldn’t play, would it? A man’s not going to follow a demon or a witch into the night. But he might be lured into a dark place by a fairy princess, or a cat — or a Cowgirl and her slinky Pony Girl, with a swatch of horsehair pinned to the tailbone.

The battling priests of Corpus Christi by Jervey Tervalon

Seventh Ward

Some priests you know what they’re up to before they open their mouths. Father Murphy acted so righteous you’d believe his sermons were spun gold, but he really didn’t need to say a word, I already knew all about him. He hated Negroes, and if they made the mistake of coming to his church and sat in the colored section, the last two pews of Sacred Heart, like they were supposed to, he would berate them for being so brazen and uppity as to actually attend Mass. Colored people needed to make novenas, and I don’t think the Lord makes a distinction between white people and everybody else, so we had to put up with this heartless man who must have thought wearing a collar excused him of having to treat Negroes with a hint of kindness, Christian or otherwise. He still had a swollen face and the shadow of a black eye he had received almost a month ago from Father Fitzpatrick, but obviously you can’t beat the hate or hell out of someone. It doesn’t work no matter how good it might feel to try, and Father Fitzpatrick had done his brutal best.

I looked as white as anyone at Sacred Heart, but I didn’t pretend to be anything other than Negro. I assumed I’d receive a special dispensation from him, I’d be spared the vicious race baiting that he’d become notorious for, but before he began his sermon he pointed at the last two pews to the few Negroes who were there and shouted, “You people are not welcome, but you still come!” Then he looked directly at me, red-faced and breathing heavily; but it didn’t seem as though he knew who I was; he didn’t seem to recognize me as the daughter of John Carol, his friend, drinking partner, and fellow Irishman. I couldn’t imagine him saying to me during Mass, Helen, move to the back of the church. Don’t make me embarrass you, but after hearing the venom in his voice I wasn’t sure. I sat there stone-faced and could only breathe easily when Mass ended and the pews emptied.

Once away from the pulpit, outside on the steps, he presented himself with reserve and dignity as though his heart wasn’t as black as night. It was odd to me that this man who was kind to me as a child had changed so much as to hate so blindly. Or maybe I had never noticed it before because to him I was John Carol’s daughter, and not the daughter of a colored woman. He had overlooked that because he thought of me as he wanted to think of me, a pretty little Irish girl. When I grew into a woman, that had changed too, and I began to receive letters from him that I could never show my father.

I waited for most of the crowd to disperse before I approached Father Murphy.

“What brings you here to Sacred Heart, Helen, novenas to St. Jude?”

“Yes, Father, but I wonder if I may have a minute of your time.”

“Well, I’m busy,” he said snappishly.

“It’ll only take a minute.”

At first I thought he’d turn me down, and I have to admit I was surprised by the frown on his face, but that passed. He looked at me and smiled as though this was the first time he’d truly noticed me, and I was uncomfortable because of it; just as I was uncomfortable about the letters he had sent me.

“Walk with me,” he directed.

For an older man, he moved quickly and I could barely keep up. He led me to the rectory, unlocked it, turned and waved impatiently for me to enter. I followed him along the dim hall watching his narrow shoulders, wondering if I had made a mistake.

He opened another door and there was a young priest behind a desk typing.

“Please leave,” Father Murphy said, and the priest moved quickly out of the room. When we were alone, he pointed to a very large leather chair. Then he pulled another chair close to it and sat down next to me.

“What can I do for you, Helen? Are you finally responding to the letters I’ve been sending you?” he asked with a stupidly coy smile.

I paused for a moment, trying not to show how afraid I was as I looked for the right words.

“It’s about Father Fitzpatrick.”

His face suddenly drained of its ruddiness. He leaned forward until he was so close to my face that I could see his nose hairs.

“What about him? Did you find him lying drunk in his own filth in a gutter? He’s a disgrace to himself and to the Church, and to associate with him proves that you have no self-respect. To the world you consort with niggers like he does. They don’t see you as a colored woman. They see you as a white woman who’s an embarrassment to her race.”

I stood ready to walk out on him and slam the door hard enough to shatter the frosted glass window.

Father Murphy sighed, and took my hand. “I apologize for that. Please don’t tell your father. He needn’t be reminded how bad my temper is.”

I refused to respond with words; instead I glared, wanting very much to slap him across the face. Maybe he didn’t respect me because I was colored, but I did respect myself and I refused to be insulted by any man, and I didn’t think he was much of a man.

“I never understood you, Helen. You’re a beautiful young woman; you could marry well, but you lower yourself. You could live a good life and leave New Orleans and no one would ever have to know that you’re a Negro. You must realize you have friends who want to help you better yourself.”

“I’m not here for my benefit. The situation with Father Fitzpatrick is out of hand. Negroes are enraged and won’t stand for drunken louts disrespecting and sometimes threatening them because they come to Sacred Heart to make a novena.”

“I encourage anyone to come to our church — the Germans, the Italians — but I draw the line at Negroes. One can’t be open-minded about what is unnatural. These blacks need to know their place.”

I sighed deeply and tried to remain civil, though my blood boiled and I could feel my face flush with anger.

“Knowing one’s place may be important, but Father Fitzpatrick came to Sacred Heart to talk things out and you insulted him, and then you were both rolling in the street. That can’t go on; someone is going to get killed.”

Father Murphy abruptly shouted, “You defend that fool, Fitzpatrick! He can go to hell! What is done is done. I will deal with him. What about you? Why do you keep company with such a man? You need to ask yourself why you live as though you are colored; you have a choice. You can turn your back on those people and trash like Fitzpatrick and live with dignity. I’ve talked to your father about this and he refuses to say more than you’ve made your decision and that you’re stubborn. If you were under my roof I wouldn’t allow you to degrade yourself associating with those who are obviously your inferiors. You aren’t the same as the common Negro any more than I am.”

Furious words burst from my mouth: “The English think you Irish are dogs. I’m not interested in your opinion of the colored, as I’m sure you’re not interested in the English’s opinion of you. My father came here to find his fortune and he did; he took up with a colored woman who loved me as he does. I am as colored as she was, and I’m proud of that.”

“You’re young,” he said with an odd smile. “Your sentiments are admirable. It would be good if this could be worked out.”

The anger was gone from his voice, and then Father Murphy moved his hand down to my thigh.

“Helen, I can give you far more than your father. I can help you if you’re kind to me. Why won’t you respond to my letters?”

I let his hand stay there for a second, paralyzed by the suddenness of it.

“Be kind to me, Helen,” he said with a smile that was more a leer, and he moved his hand higher up my thigh.

I reached for the lamp on the coffee table before I knew what I was going to do. He realized it, but he was a split second too late. I caught him flush on the side of the head. He dropped with the heaviness of someone dead; I stood over him for a moment, wondering what to do next.

“My God, Helen, did you kill him?” Father Fitzpatrick asked in horror.

He was a good-looking, tall, and well-built man with hair black as a crow’s feathers. He did have bad teeth, due mostly to his habit of getting into fistfights. Father Fitzpatrick insisted that we call him Billy and never Father unless he was in the church, and even then he looked pained when someone did.

He was seated on the steps of a very clean but small shotgun house that served as the temporary rectory of the Corpus Christi Church while the parishioners raised the money to build the real rectory. I stood in the shade fanning myself with a street car schedule.

“No, Billy, he moaned... and before I ran from the office, I saw him try to stand.”

“Good. He deserves to die, but not by you.”

“It’s not good. My temper has gotten me nothing but trouble. My father wants to send me to Baton Rouge.”

“Listen to him. You must know how vindictive Murphy can be. He can do most anything without remorse. He has no conscience, but he does have all the conviction of a man who speaks with the authority of Jesus Christ himself. If I see him on the street it’s unbearable. He mocks the priesthood and demeans it; and it’s shameful that no one will stand up to him.”

“So you must? No matter how awful Murphy is, you can’t think that beating him in the street will solve anything. Aren’t you afraid of losing your church or being defrocked?”

He laughed. “This from a woman who just bashed a man in the head. God knows the truth but waits. I trust in the Lord to guide and protect me. Or least to help me sober up before Mass.”

“Must you make light of everything?”

He shrugged. “Why are you afraid of Baton Rouge? It’s a fine town.”

“I won’t go to Baton Rouge. My father wants me to stay with relatives who I can’t tolerate.”

“Why can’t you tolerate them? From what I hear, they eat and dance in Baton Rouge just like they do here.”

“They drink and argue constantly. They have no culture.”

He poured himself another whiskey and laughed. “Sometimes I forget how haughty you are.”

“I am not haughty,” I said, and waved goodbye to him as I rushed to catch the trolley. I couldn’t help but like Father Fitzpatrick. He was a kind and worldly man who was ill-suited for the priesthood, and largely lived his life as though he wasn’t part of it. I knew that he frequented bars and gambling dens, and it was rumored that he had more than one female admirer, but he had a good heart and made sure that those who had need in the Seventh Ward were tended to, and that the Creoles and Negroes were treated with the same respect as the whites. The rumors that Father Fitzpatrick was on the way out of town were very hard to ignore, but until the day they ran him out of town, his rage at Murphy would be uncontrollable. It was only a matter of time before he’d get a couple too many whiskeys in him and walk the few blocks to Sacred Heart to bust Murphy’s eye once again, and this time Murphy would most certainly be ready for him.

When I arrived home on Gravier she was already on the porch, fanning herself with her hat. Even from a distance she looked tall and imposing, an iron rail of a woman, black as night and fiercer than a lioness.

“Your father asked me to escort you to Baton Rouge. He explained to me his thinking and I agree with him. He has very good reasons for you to go.”

“Yes, Aunt Odie, he does, or so I’ve been hearing for the last few days.”

“Have you gotten threats?”

“Threats? Not yet. I can’t say that I expect threats.”

“Child, think. You assaulted the kind of man who has the means and the temperament to hurt you.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Listen to your father. If you don’t go to Baton Rouge, you need to leave this house and move in with him for a time.”

“I can’t do that. This is my mother’s house and I promised her I wouldn’t become a child tethered to his ankle.”

“Well, if you’re not going to Baton Rouge, I will stay with you until this situation is resolved. Murphy holds sway with those drunken countrymen of his. Those Irish thugs drove the colored off the docks. They want to chase us out of town and they will certainly hurt you if given a chance.”

I always listened to Aunt Odie, but of course she didn’t necessarily feel the same sort of obligation to listen to me. If she thought I needed watching, I would be watched. I was a woman with some means and I did have a mind equal to a man’s, and though I loved my father, sometimes it seemed I was still that child wrapped around his ankle.

I was preparing to stew a rabbit that evening and my hands were bloody with it, when I heard someone rattling the screen. I supposed it might have been Aunt Odie, who had gone to the market for lemons. I called out to her, but she didn’t respond. I turned to the door and saw a redhaired white man standing there, rubbing his hands together with a brutal look on his face.

“You know why I’m here,” he said with vicious pleasure.

“Get out of my house!” I shouted at him.

“I will teach you a lesson.”

“Damnit, I said get out of here!”

He ignored me and took a step forward, pulling at his belt. I retreated to the kitchen, hoping to get my hands on a knife before he reached me.

Then I heard Aunt Odie’s voice.

“Stop!” She had a knife in one hand and an open jar in the other filled with what looked to be water.

The big redhaired man didn’t seem impressed. He pulled a blackjack from his pocket and started toward her while keeping an eye on me.

“Run home now, before something bad happens to you,” Odie said, as if she were talking to a child.

“Nigger woman, don’t order me.”

Aunt Odie tossed the contents of the jar into his face and he screamed and smashed against the wall and the door before stumbling outside, begging for water for his eyes.

“Lye,” she said as she locked the door. “It’s as good as a bullet or a knife.”

I was in Baton Rouge when I heard about Father Fitzpatrick; that he never made it home the night before from the Napoleon House, the bar he frequented in the French Quarter.

We were sure that he was dead, beaten to death by one of Murphy’s hooligans and tossed into the river. I wasn’t surprised, though I was grief-stricken. My father insisted that I stay in Baton Rouge, but I was nearly losing my mind with my relatives.

I spent weeks at my aunt’s bakery, sweat blinding my eyes, roasting while the bread baked. My unhappiness was too much for words; I didn’t want to drown in my sweat in a town without culture, without my friends and loved ones. I was finished with Baton Rouge; my time in exile was done. I had to return to New Orleans with or without my father’s permission. My mother hadn’t raised me to be a coward, living in fear, in seclusion. I had to know what happened to Father Fitzpatrick.

Rumors continued to roil that the colored would be attacked if they tried to enter Sacred Heart, and worse. I wanted one last conversation with Father Murphy, one that he wouldn’t recover from, but that wasn’t to happen. I can’t say I was unhappy when I heard that Murphy was found beaten to death in the rectory, but the bitterness in my heart would last as long as my memory of Father Fitzpatrick.

Open Mike by James Nolan

French Quarter

There must be hundreds of kids who have wound up dead in the French Quarter. Eva Pierce was just one of them. Everywhere you walk in the neighborhood you see fliers about them taped to lampposts: Information Wanted or $5,000 Reward. And below is a blurry snapshot of some scruffy young person. After Eva’s body was discovered, bundled inside a blue Tommy Hilfiger comforter floating in Bayou St. John, the girl’s mother moved down here from Idaho or Iowa or Ohio — however you pronounce it — and blanketed the Quarter with those signs. She even printed her daughter’s last poem on the flier, but no dice. The fifteen hours between when Eva was last seen and when her body was found in the bayou remained a blank.

That’s when the mother rang me. I’m listed in the Yellow Pages: Off-Duty Homicide Detective: Dead or Alive, Inc.

Mrs. Pierce met me under the bingo board at Fiorella’s restaurant at the French Market. It wasn’t my suggestion. I hadn’t been to the market since I was a kid, when my daddy used to take me on Saturday mornings to squabble with his wop relatives while we loaded up at a discount on their fruits and vegetables. On my daddy’s side I’m related to everyone who ever sold a pastry, an eggplant, or a bottle of dago red in the Quarter, and on my mother’s side to everyone who ever ran the numbers, pimped girls, or took a kickback. I peeked inside the rotting old market, but sure didn’t see any Italians or tomatoes. Now it’s just Chinese selling knock-off sunglasses to tourists.

Mrs. Pierce was short and round as a cannoli, with a stiff gray bouffant and a complexion like powdered sugar. With those cat’s-eye bifocals, she looked like someone who might be playing bingo at Fiorella’s. But when she opened her mouth... Twilight Zone. Mrs. Pierce said it wasn’t drugs or sex that did her daughter in, but — get this — poetry.

“And the police aren’t doing anything,” she said with a flat Midwestern whine that made me want to go suck a lemon.

“Look, lady, I’m a cop — Lieutenant Vincent Panarello, Sixth District — and the police have more trouble than they can handle in New Orleans. They don’t pay us much... I got a wife and three kids in Terrytown, so that’s why I moonlight as a detective.”

“My daughter loved moonlight.”

“I bet.”

“She read her own original poetry every Tuesday night at that rodent-infested bar on Esplanade Avenue called the Dragon’s Den.” She was twisting the wrapper from her straw into a noose.

“Yeah, that used to be Ruby Red’s in my day. A college joint, the floor all covered with sawdust and peanut shells.” I didn’t tell her how drunk I used to get there in high school with a fake ID. While I was going to night school at Tulane, Ruby Red’s was where I met my first wife Janice, may she rest in peace.

“Well, the place has gone beatniky.” Mrs. Pierce leaned forward, her eyes watering. “And do you know what I think, Lieutenant Panarello?’

“Shoot.”

“I think one of those poets murdered my daughter. One of those characters who read at the open mike. And that’s where I want you to start. To listen for clues when the poets read. Eventually one of them will give himself away.”

“Listening to the perms will cost you extra.” And so will the French Quarter, but I’d already averaged that in when I quoted her my fee.

“I’ll meet you there Tuesday at 9 p.m. It’s above that Thai restaurant. Just go through the alley—”

“I know how to get up there.” I could have climbed those worn wooden steps next to the crumbling brick wall in my sleep. That’s where I first kissed Janice. Funny, but she also wrote poems she read to me on the sagging wrought-iron balcony. The life I really wanted was the one I had planned with her. The life I settled for is the one I got.

Mrs. Pierce handed me a picture of her daughter, a list of her friends, and a check. I eyed the amount. Local bank.

“What your daughter do for a living?” I pushed back my chair, antsy to blow Fiorella’s. I could already smell the fried chicken grease on my clothes.

“Why, she was a poet and interpretive dancer.”

“Interpretive dancer. Gotcha.”

I studied the photo. Eva was about twenty-four, pretty, with skin as pale and powdery as a moth’s wing. But she was dressed in a ratty red sweater over a pink print dress over black sweatpants. Her dyed black hair was hanging in two stringy hanks of pigtail like a cocker spaniel’s ears. Who would want to kill her, I wondered, except the fashion police?

When I got down to the station I pulled the report. Eva was last seen at Molly’s bar on Decatur Street at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday, where she told her roommate, Pogo Lamont, that she was going home to feed their one-eyed dog named Welfare. They lived on Ursulines at Bourbon, upper slave quarter, uptown side. She never made it home. After an anonymous 911 tip, her body was hoisted out of the bayou at 7 p.m. the next evening. One clean shot through the temple, real professional. No forced sexual entry. Her purse was lying open on the grassy bank, surrounded by a gaggle of ducks trying to get at the bag of stale popcorn inside. A cell phone and twenty-five dollars were tucked in the bag, so the motive wasn’t robbery. Also inside the purse were a red lipstick, a flea collar, a black notebook filled with poems, two 10 mg. Valiums, an Ohio picture ID, a plastic straw that tested positive for cocaine residue, and a worn-out restraining order against Brack Self, a bartender and “performance artist” who turned out to have been locked up the whole time in Tampa for beating on his present girlfriend. That, and an Egyptian scarab, a petrified dung beetle supposed to be a symbol of immortality.

Which didn’t seem to have worked for Eva Pierce, poet and stripper.

I made it to the Dragon’s Den on a sticky Tuesday evening, with a woolly sky trapping humidity inside the city like a soggy blanket. It had been trying to rain for two weeks. The air was always just about to clear but never did, as if old Mother Nature were working on her orgasm. I carried an umbrella, expecting a downpour. The place was right next to the river, and hadn’t seen a drop of paint since I last walked in the door thirty years ago, with all my hair and a young man’s cocky swagger. A whistle was moaning as a freight train clacked along the nearby tracks, and the huge live oak out front shrouded the crumbling façade in a tangle of shadows. An old rickshaw was parked outside, where an elfin creature with orange hair sat scribbling in a notebook. He shot me a look through thick black plastic glasses, and then went back to writing.

Guess I’d found the poets.

I slapped a black beret on my head as I headed through the clammy alley, the bricks so decrepit that ferns were sprouting from the walls. I needed to blend in with the artsy crowd here, so I wore a blousy purple shirt and tight black pants, and carried a paperback by some poet I’d had to read at night school called Oscar Wilde. A wizened old Chinese guy was squatting over a tub of vegetables in the patio, and the air smelled like spices. Something was sizzling in the kitchen. I felt like I was in Hong Kong looking for my Shanghai Lil.

Except for the Far East decor, the bar upstairs hadn’t changed that much. A small stage and dance floor had been added at the center, and the tables were low, surrounded by pillows on the floor. Is that where poets eat, I wondered, on the floor?

“I’ll have something light and refreshing, with a twist of lime,” I lisped to the two-ton Oriental gal behind the bar, waving my pinky. A biker type in a leather cowboy hat was observing me from across the bar.

“You a cop?” he yelled.

“Why no,” I said, batting my eyelashes, holding up the lavender book so he could read the cover. “I’ve come for the poultry.”

“Hey, Miss Ping,” he shouted to the bartender, “give Lieutenant Girlfriend here a wine spritzer on my tab.”

Just as I lurched forward to knock this asshole’s block off, in walked Mrs. Pierce with that orange-haired garden gnome from out front.

“Here you go, Lieutenant Girlfriend,” Miss Ping said, setting down the drink.

“Lieutenant,” Mrs. Pierce said, “this was Eva’s roommate, Pogo Lamont.”

“Lieutenant Girlfriend,” Pogo cackled, extending his hand.

“Come on, son, I want to talk to you on the balcony,” I said, grabbing him by the shoulder.

“Unhand me this instant!” the little creep cried out.

“Watch out,” grunted the joker in the leather cowboy hat. “Lieutenant Girlfriend’s already hitting on the chicken.” Miss Ping barked a throaty laugh.

The kid followed me onto the balcony, which was pitching precariously away from the building. I steadied myself as if stepping onto a boat, not trusting the rusted iron-lace railing to keep all 250 pounds of me from rolling off.

“Okay, you know why I’m here,” I said, plunking down my drink on a wobbly table. “Who’s this Brack Self character that Eva took out a peace bond against?”

“Oh, that snarling beast,” Pogo said, curling up like a cat into a chair. “A former beau who used his fists to make a point. Black and blue weren’t Eva’s most becoming colors.”

“She liked it rough, huh?”

“Oooh, Lieutenant Girlfriend,” Pogo squealed.

“Say, you little—” Play it cool, I thought. This is just a job.

“She met him here at the open mike when the poetry series started. That first night he got so wasted he just unzipped, whipped it out, and pissed sitting right at a table. While I was performing, I might add. Now that, honey, is what I call literary criticism. Eva mopped it up, and never stopped. And ended up mothering him.”

“How long they together?”

“Until the third occasion she summoned the police.”

He couldn’t have killed her from a jail cell in Tampa. Maybe he had friends.

“How long you been coming here?”

“Since I was a boy. When Mother couldn’t find a babysitter, she’d haul me here when it was Ruby Red’s—”

“I used to come here then, too. Who was your mom?”

“Lily.”

“Lily Lamont?” She was the fancy-pants Uptown debutante who used to cause scenes whenever I was here with Janice. In those days the port was right across the train tracks from the Quarter, and Lily Lamont was usually being held upright between a couple of Greek or Latino sailors. Once I swung open the door to the can to find her on her knees giving one of them a blow job while a rat looked on from the urinal. That’s when I stopped bringing Janice to this dump.

“Did you know Mother?” Pogo squirmed in his seat.

“Only by sight.” So this was the stunted offspring of one of those Ruby Red nights. If Janice were still here, we’d have children his age.

“Your mother still alive?” I asked. “If you care to call it that. She’s secluded inside her Xanadu on Pirate’s Alley.”

I softened to the little creep. He told me that as a kid, his mother would often show up at their apartment on Dumaine with a strange man and they’d lock themselves inside her room for three days with a case of bourbon. Now Pogo lived on a trust fund from the Lamonts, which paid the rent on the apartment. He was finishing a book of poems dedicated to his mother titled The Monster Cave.

“Where did Eva strip?”

“At Les Girls on Iberville. She gave it up soon after she moved in with me. You see, I paid for everything. Because Eva was my teacher and muse.”

“She ever bring any guys home from there?”

“Not guys. Other strippers sometimes.”

“So she swung both ways?”

“Oooh, Lieutenant Girlfriend.” Pogo nudged my leg with his foot. “Do you?”

I heard some ranting and raving from inside the bar, and edged my way in to listen. The place was packed, with a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke hovering in the spotlight. First up was Millicent Tripplet, an obese woman with ruby lipstick, who recited a poem about how oppressed she felt when she was being fucked by a certain guy, and how depressed she felt when she wasn’t. That got a howl of appreciation. Then a rapper named Pawnshop took the stage, coked out of his gourd, to blow the trumpet and rap about how all the bitches and ho’s weren’t down with his skinny black ass in the baggy jumpsuit. His rhymes were catchy but the rhythm was a snooze. Then came a comic from the racetrack who sounded like my Uncle Dominic; next up was some nerd in a plaid sports coat who read a sonnet about peat moss and death; and then some anorexic lady dressed all in lilac who choked up in the middle and had to sit down. I couldn’t figure out what her poem was about. I think her pooch died.

One thing I clocked: The better the poet, the shorter the spiel. The worst ones droned on forever. I gave Mrs. Pierce an empty shrug, as if to say, No clues here, lady. Then she took the stage, hands folded, looking like a Methodist Sunday school teacher. She held up the flier and announced that she would read the last poem her daughter ever wrote:

The words sent a chill down my spine. It was as if Eva had been waiting for her murderer. Had a date with death. All I could see was Janice, her face bent over a glowing red candle holder, her straight blond hair swaying as she read poems to me. I had to rush out onto the balcony where I could sit alone and be twenty again, if only for a moment, and remember what a love so fragile felt like.

Finally it was raining, coming down in torrents, the oak branches and curlicues of iron lace dripping fat, dirty tears. Drip drop, drip drop. What was that Irma Thomas song we were always listening to in those days? “It’s raining so hard, it brings back memories.” An ambulance raced past, its flashing red lights hellish on the slick street. And I had to endure it all over again, her body dragged from the driver’s seat of our crumpled red Chevy. She had been coming home with a birthday surprise for me, and the MacKenzie cake box was soaked with her blood. I never thought I’d be sitting again with Janice on the balcony at Ruby Red’s, listening to the rain.

I began to haunt the Quarter for the first time in years, trying to get a handle on Eva’s world. Mostly she hung out in what they used to call Little Sicily, around the French Market and lower Decatur Street, where my daddy grew up. Like all the Sicilians in this town, his family had lived over their corner grocery store, Angelo’s Superette at Decatur and Governor Nicholls. My only relative left in the neighborhood was Aunt Olivia, a butch little old maid who used to run a laundromat with her mama on Dauphine Street. She owned half the Quarter, and my Uncle Dominic, who hadn’t worn anything but pajamas for the past twenty years, owned the other half. When I was young everyone was always going, Oh, jeez, you got family in the Quarter, you should visit them. But like my mama always said, “Me, I don’t go by them dagos none. They just as soon stick a knife in your back.”

The neighborhood was a different place now, and I couldn’t understand what anyone down here did to make a living. You hardly saw any grocery stores or dry cleaners or fruit vendors or florists or printing offices or notions stores. Mostly the shops were Pakistani joints selling Mardi Gras masks made in China. Even the criminals were candy-assed, just a bunch of two-bit drug dealers and purse snatchers, nothing like the outfit my mama’s family used to run. In those days, if a girl didn’t cough up to her pimp, she got a Saturday-night makeover with acid splashed in her face. The girls used to roll the sailors right and left, slipping mickeys in their drinks or switchblades between their ribs. Now I walked around at night unarmed with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. The streets were filled with gutter punks, their mangy mutts, and older kids playing dress-up. These kids thought they were being bad bad bad. They’d snort their little powders and do their little humpety-hump on somebody’s futon. Then they’d ride their bikes and eat their vegetables, just like their mamas told them. They even recycled.

I figured with all these Pollyannas floating around, older predators were bound to be lurking in the shadows, dying to take a bite out of this innocent flesh. So the first place I hit was where Eva used to strip, Les Girls de Paree on Iberville between Royal and Chartres. This block of seedy dives was the real thing, the way the whole Quarter used to look when I was coming up. The Vieux Carré Commission must have preserved it as a historical diorama. A hulking bozo with a mullet haircut held the doors open onto the pulsing red lights of a dark pit belting out bump-and-grind. Inside, Les Girls smelled like dirty drawers in a hamper. Or to put it less delicately, like ass.

Some skanky brunette with zits on her behind was rubbing her crotch on an aluminum pole and jiggling her store- bought titties. You’d have to be pretty desperate to throw a boner for a rancid slice of luncheon meat like that. Only two old guys were sitting in the shadows, and I couldn’t figure out how this joint sucked in any bucks. Finally, Mullet-head waltzed over to ask what I wanted.

“I want to talk about Eva Pierce.”

“Miss Ivonne,” he called out, eyeballing me up and down, “copper here.”

This over-the-hill fluffball with champagne hair clopped over to my table. I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips. “What can I do for you, officer?”

“Eva Pierce” is all I said. Her lips were pink and puffed out like Vienna Sausages. They must have kept a vat of collagen under the bar.

“I’ve been waiting for this little bereavement call,” she said, sliding into a chair. “I’m still broke-up about Eva. She didn’t belong here, and I was glad to see her leave. All she ever did was write poetry and sip 7-Up. But she sure attracted the chicken-hawks.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“I don’t rat out my customers.”

“Eva liked it rough, and swung both ways, right?”

“Where you hear that, babe?” She yanked a Vantage from inside her bra and lipped it.

“Her roommate Pogo.”

“Me and his momma used to have the best damn time.” she shrieked, pounding the table. “But don’t ever cross that woman. No siree.”

“You know Lily Lamont?”

She slit her eyes at me. “You sure get around for a cop.”

“Some people pay me to.”

“Look, officer,” she said, shooting a stream of smoke toward the ceiling through those lips, “Eva went home with a couple of the girls here, but they just wanted somebody’s shoulder to cry on. Eva was a mommy, not a dyke. She took care of stray animals and people. Like that Brack creature and poor Pogo. She was like Dorothy in the goddamn Wizard of Oz. All she ever talked about was that farm in Ohio.”

“So who’d want to kill her?”

“You got me,” she said. “Maybe the wicked witch with her flying monkeys. Or the blue guy.”

“The blue guy?”

Miss Yvonne stifled a laugh. “Buffed-up psycho used to come in here, hair and beard dyed cobalt-blue. He wore a cat-o’-nine-tails around his neck. Sure took a liking to Eva, but I run him off.”

I was walking back down Chartres Street, thinking about Janice, when I heard a dog leash rattling behind me.

“Oh, Lieutenant Girlfriend.” It was Pogo walking this dust mop named Welfare, now squatting at the curb. I hadn’t seen Pogo since last Tuesday at the Dragon’s Den. I was becoming a regular at the open mike, and starting to get a kick out of it. It was like a cross between a gong show and the observation room on Acutely Disturbed at DePaul’s.

“Been meaning to ask you,” I said. “Eva go to the movies a lot?”

“Never,” he said, picking up a dog turd between two fingers with a plastic baggie. “She preferred to star in her own epic drama.”

“So why was she carrying popcorn the night she died?”

He stopped. “Popcorn? I never thought about that. Maybe she swung by the Cloister after she said goodnight at Molly’s. Sometimes the bartender there hands out bags of popcorn. Just before dawn.”

I smiled. The Cloister. A few doors down Decatur from Molly’s.

Pogo put the plastic baggie in his pocket. Who would’ve ever thought that one day the Quarter would be filled with rich people walking around with dog turds in their pockets? The dagos moved to Kenner just in time.

“Ever see Eva around a man with a blue beard? Blue hair and beard. And a whip?”

“Oh, him.”

“She date him?”

“He followed her to the open mike from Les Girls. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Now we have to listen to his poetry.”

“His perms any good?”

Pogo pulled out the baggie of dog mess and waved it in my face. “See you at the open mike, Lieutenant Girlfriend.”

If the garage rock band at the Cloister banged out one more song, I thought my skull would pop. I nursed several Seven and Sevens while I jotted down random thoughts in my notebook, hoping Swamp Gas would finally run out of steam. The crowd was twenty-somethings dressed in black with all the hardware in Home Depot dangling off their mugs. I wondered if they got snared in each other’s rings and things when they got down to business and had to use a wire cutter to separate themselves. Nobody seemed to be having a particularly good time. Janice and I’d had more fun eating thirty-five-cent plates of red beans and rice at Buster Holmes. A steady stream of couples was going in and out of the bathrooms in back, but not for any lovey-dovey. They were wiping their noses and clenching their jaws when they walked out. That explained the coke residue on the straw in Eva’s purse.

Finally I was getting somewhere.

Swamp Gas petered out at about 5:00 in the morning. I was getting ready to leave when I spotted this geezer with a snowy white pompadour hobbling around in his bathrobe and slippers. When he turned around, I had to laugh.

“Hey, Uncle Dominic, it’s me, Vinnie. Chetta’s boy.” I hadn’t see the old guy since my daddy’s funeral.

“Vinnie, let me get a look at you.” He cuffed my head and patted my cheeks. “Not a day goes by I don’t think of my sweet little sister. How she making?”

“Same old, same old.” Mama was still fuming about how Uncle Dominic had gypped her on the inheritance. He stuck a knife in my back, she growled whenever his name came up.

“Remind her she still owes me three hundred bucks for property taxes the year she sold out.”

“What you doing here at this hour,” I asked, swiveling my hips, “getting down with the girlies?” His robe was covered with lint balls.

“Just checking on my investment. Got six, seven other buildings to see this morning. You?” he asked, swiveling his own hips. “Thought you was married. You just like your papa.”

“Here on a murder case. Know this young lady?” I flipped out the picture of Eva and he fished glasses from his robe pocket. “Killed the night of March 28.”

“Let me think,” he said, staring at the snapshot. “Yeah, yeah, I seen her here that morning. Last time I come in to check on my investment. Around this time. I axed her what she was writing down in her little book, and she says, ‘A perm.’ Looked like a bunny with them funny pigtails.”

“She leave alone?”

“Yeah, yeah. No, wait—” He slapped his forehead. “Madonna, how could I forget? She left with that pazzo what got the blue beard.”

Blue Beard.

Bingo.

Then somebody handed me some popcorn still warm in the bag.

The next morning I radioed Blue Beard’s description in to the Eighth District station in the Quarter, and rang Pogo, Miss Ivonne, Miss Ping, and Uncle Dominic to ask them to contact me the minute they spotted him. Uncle Dominic told me he wanted a cut of the reward, and lost interest fast when I told him there wasn’t any. But both he and Miss Ivonne promised to make a few phone calls to help locate Blue Beard. Mrs. Pierce sputtered “God bless you” when I reported that I was zeroing in on the killer.

Where the hell could he be? It wasn’t like a man with blue hair could hide just anywhere, even in the French Quarter.

That afternoon I got a staticky message on my cell phone.

Lily Lamont.

A husky, spaced-out voice said she needed to talk with me in person. That evening. She left an address that at first she couldn’t remember right.

My heels echoed on the flagstones in deserted Pirate’s Alley like the approaching footsteps in those radio plays my daddy used to listen to. A mist had rolled in from the river, wrapping St. Louis Cathedral in fog, and I squinted to make out the address under the halo of a streetlamp. I pictured Lily Lamont blowzy and toothless now, passed out on a filthy mattress cradling an empty bourbon bottle.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I found.

After I was buzzed in, I mounted a curved mahogany staircase that swept me up into a cavernous Creole ballroom under a spidery bronze chandelier. In a zebra-upholstered throne, there sat a mummified lady with white hair pulled back tight from her porcelain face, buttering a slice of raisin-bread toast.

“I’m famished,” Lily Lamont said, taking a bite. “Would you care for some toast and tea? That’s all I ever, ever eat.”

I shook my head. Perched in the zebra chair next to hers was a bulky goon with a body like a boxer’s gone to seed. He was caressing the top of his shiny bald head, several shades paler than his face.

“I don’t believe we’ve ever formally met, Lieutenant Panarello,” she said. Her bones, thin as chopsticks, were swallowed by a red silk kimono fastened by a dragon brooch.

“Not face-to-face.” What was I supposed to do, tell this lady I saw her on her knees in a men’s room thirty years ago?

“And this is my associate, Lucas,” she said, gesturing to Baldie.

I nodded, taking a seat in an elaborately carved bishop’s chair under an alabaster lamp of entwined snakes.

“Nice place,” I said. The floor-to-ceiling windows were draped with damask swags. Outside, shadows from the extended arms of a spotlit Jesus loomed over the cathedral garden.

“I bought this house last year from your uncle, Dominic Zuppardo.” Her sharp little teeth gnawed on the toast like a rat’s. “At a pretty penny. Actually, I paid him twice as much as the sale price we registered. That helped with my property assessment and his capital gains taxes. Smart man.”

Bet Uncle Dominic is kissing her butt now, I thought. So that’s who tipped her off to my investigation.

“Met your friend Miss Ivonne,” I said, since we were having a family reunion. “Place where Eva Pierce used to strip.”

“How is Ivonne?” Lily asked with a tight smile. “I set her up with that club. I’ve never been in it, of course.” Her frail shoulders shuddered.

Ditto, I thought. Miss Ivonne probably called her, too.

“Look, I won’t beat around the bush,” Lily Lamont said, brushing toast crumbs from her fingertips. “I want you to call off your investigation into Eva Pierce’s death. The killer is probably in Timbuktu by now. Questioning all of these people is silly.”

“But I know who did it. A guy with blue hair and beard.”

“Have you ever seen him?” Her enormous hazel eyes studied me slyly over the gold rim of an ornate teacup.

“No, but he used to come to the open mike at the Dragon’s Den all the time to read his lousy perms.”

Baldie winced. Then a shit-eating grin spread across his face. Why the hell would he care about Blue Beard’s poems?

Unless he wrote them.

“Do you have children, lieutenant?” Lily’s voice was filling with church choirs.

“Three. A boy at De la Salle, a girl at Mount Carmel, and another girl starting out at Loyola University next year.” That was why I moonlighted — to pay all those tuitions. The older girl worked at a pizza parlor after school to save up for Loyola. Her dad, you see, was a New Orleans cop.

“And wouldn’t you do anything to help your children?”

“Anything short of—”

“Eva Pierce was a horrible influence on my son.” Lily swayed like a cobra as she mouthed the words in a slow, woozy monotone. “She turned him against me. You should read the venomous words about me she inspired him to pen. She was just using him.”

“Maybe he liked being used,” I said, locking eyes with Pogo’s mother. “Maybe it’s all he’s ever known.”

“Here, this is for you.” Her long indigo fingernail flicked an ivory envelope across the coffee table. “It’s a check for $25,000. Eva’s mother hired you to investigate. I’m hiring you to stop the investigation.” She arched a penciled eyebrow. “Simple.”

I stood up. “Can I used the john?”

“Lucas will show you the way.”

I studied the rolls of skin on the back of Baldie’s head as I followed him down a long corridor, trying to picture him with blue hair and beard. The smartest thugs know the best disguise is something attention-getting but dispensable. And who would testify against Lily and this hitman? My uncle? Miss Ivonne? Trust-fund Pogo? The whole Quarter owed Lily Lamont a favor.

In the bathroom I tore open the envelope with an Egyptian scarab embossed on the flap: 25,000 smackers, made out to cash. I folded the check into my wallet. It was five times what Mrs. Pierce was paying me. I splashed water on my face and took a long look in the mirror. The jowly, unshaven mug of my daddy stared back at me, the face of three generations of Italian shopkeepers who worked like hell and never managed to get ahead. What, you crazy or something? they screamed at me. You want your daughter to graduate from college? Take the damn dough and run, Vinnie.

I picked up the plush blue bath towel folded next to the mirror. Underneath was a syringe, a packet of white powder, and a silver iced-tea spoon.

I rang Mrs. Pierce as soon as I’d escaped the junkie fog in Pirate’s Alley.

“Look, lady,” I told her, “the investigation is off. Your daughter just got mixed up with the wrong crowd, that’s all. Blue Beard is probably unidentifiable by now. He could be anywhere. I can’t, in good conscience, waste any more of your money.” All true.

Mrs. Pierce started sobbing and then hung up. She’d been right. It wasn’t sex or drugs that got her daughter killed, but poetry. Me, I was never so glad to drive home to Terrytown, to the wife and life that I’ve got.

I didn’t make it back to the Dragon’s Den until one sweltering August night later that year. The air smelled of river sludge and the façade was shimmering in the heat like a mirage made of shadows and memories. The old Chinese guy was still hanging over his tub of vegetables in the patio. He shot me a thumbs-up as I mounted the stairs, mopping my face with a handkerchief.

Every step was an effort.

“Look what the cat drug in,” Miss Ping said, setting me up with my Seven and Seven.

“Where’s that sign-up sheet for the open mike?” I asked her. She pushed a clipboard toward me. With a shaky hand I scrawled Vinnie P., third name on the list. I couldn’t believe what I was about to do. It seemed like jerking off in public. So I sat on the balcony to calm myself down and go over what I’d written.

“Hey, honey, what you doing in the den with the TV off?” my wife had asked me. “You sick?”

“Writing a report.” I’d swatted her away.

What I’d been writing for two weeks wasn’t exactly a report but some buried feelings — poems, I guess you’d call them. I couldn’t sleep or concentrate, and had even thought of going to Saturday confession, but then nixed that dumb-cluck idea. I couldn’t tell the Father who would marry my kids and christen my grandbabies that I, a cop, was the accessory to a murder. Those poets that I’d listen to during the open mike, something like this was eating them up, too. Their girlfriends left them or their parents never loved them or they felt lonely and empty — I don’t know — they just needed to spill their guts and be heard. By anyone. Just heard. They didn’t tell it straight but in a symbolic way, you know, twisting it up enough so that it wouldn’t be only their story but everybody’s. So that’s what I’d been writing: what happened to me investigating Eva Pierce’s murder. And with Janice.

Where it all went wrong and how I wound up feeling the way I did, as old, corrupt, and dirty as this French Quarter.

I had to get it off my chest.

Pogo stuck his face into the balcony, eyes popping out at the sight of me.

“She’s a vile bitch,” he hissed, biting his lip. Then he waved me inside.

Only about ten of the usual suspects were sprawled around the room. The first two poets went on forever. I was so wound up I couldn’t concentrate on a word they said.

Finally, the clown with the leather cowboy hat held up the clipboard.

“And here, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “is a rising star in the Quarter poetry scene. A man of the law who will grace us with his debut reading. He came to bust us, and now he’s one of us. Put your hands together to welcome Lieutenant Girlfriend.”

Everyone clapped like crazy as I stepped onto the stage feeling like a horse’s ass. Pogo was jumping up and down, waving his arms like a cheerleader. I shuffled through the pages to get them in order. My voice caught as I started to speak.

Miss Ping plinked an ice cube into a glass. The air conditioner coughed.

Then a huge gray rat scurried across the room, stopped in the middle of the floor to take in the audience, and disappeared under the stage I was standing on.

Everyone jumped to their feet.

“Okay, you assholes, sit down,” I said, adjusting the mike. “That rat has to wait its turn just like all us other poets. This is called ‘Janice and Eva Swap Lipsticks in the Changing Room to Hell.’ I bet you lunkheads aren’t going to get it, but here goes.”

All i could do was cry by Kalamu ya Salaam

Lower Ninth Ward

Even though her mouth was empty, Rita savored the crunchy flavor of animal cookies, old-time animal cookies made with real vanilla. Her son laid out in a casket and here she was thinking about snacks. But that was because animal cookies were Sammy’s favorite.

When he was small, Rita would gallop the shapes up Sammy’s little round stomach, moving the crisply baked dough in bounding leaps. Usually the miniature animals ended up between Sammy’s laughing lips.

His fat cheeks dimpled with a grin, Sammy would squirm in Rita’s lap, turn and clap his small hands in glee as he chomped down on the golden tan figures. Sometimes he’d cry out in mock pain when a bear would take a really hard jump and end up bounding over his head into Rita’s mouth. Animal crackers and funerals.

Now little Gloria, twenty-three-and-a-half months old, sat in Rita’s lap. Tyronne sat silently next to her. Gloria squirmed briefly. Without really hearing a word he said, Rita patiently endured Pastor White droning on and on. Out of the corner of her eye, Rita stole a glance at Sammy’s corpse laying in the coffin. Absorbing that awful stillness, Rita’s instinct took over: She protectively hugged Gloria, bowed her dark face into the well-oiled coiffure of her daughter’s carefully cornrowed hair, and planted a silent kiss deep between the black, thick, kinky rows.

Rita was beginning to doubt life was worth living, worth sacrificing and saving... for what, to have children who get shot down? What sense did it make to be a mother and outlive your children?

Two deacons moved forward and flanked the coffin. Like passing through a room where the television is on but no one is watching and the sound is off, Rita was aware the men were there to lower the coffin lid, but she really paid no attention to the dark-suited sentinels. Rita had long ago said goodbye and there was no need to drag this out. The elder of the church-appointed guardians efficiently closed the blue velvet — trimmed coffin lid. Someone two rows to the rear of Rita uttered a soft but audible, “Oh, my Lord.” The lamentation cut clearly through the reverent silence that had settled on the small congregation. This was the end of the wake but only the beginning of a very long and sleepless night.

Friends and acquaintances shuffled slowly, very slowly, out of the sanctuary into the small vestibule where people lined up to script their condolences in one of Sammy’s school notebooks that had been set out on a podium. There was a pencil sitting in the middle of the book. A few people had signed in ballpoint pen, but most signatures (some were written in large block letters, others in an indecipherable cursive) were scripted with the pencil’s soft lead and seemed to fade immediately upon writing.

Rita looked up. No, that couldn’t be, she thought to herself. That couldn’t be Paul “Snowflake” Moore darkening the sanctity of her sorrow. Rita instantly shifted the sleeping weight of Gloria from her shoulder. Wordlessly, she handed Gloria to Tyronne. Tyronne had already seen Snowflake and knew a confrontation was in the making. In one seamless motion, as soon as Tyronne received Gloria into his large hands, he spun on his heels and handed Gloria to the first older woman he saw. By the time he turned back to Rita, she was already in Snowflake’s face.

“Get out of here!” Rita hissed between tightly clenched teeth. “You the—”

“I just come to pay my respects. I ain’t come to cause no trouble.”

“You don’t respect nobody.”

By now the packed anteroom crackled with dread. The woman who had taken Gloria scurried back into the sanctuary; just a few months ago she had witnessed a fight break out at a funeral.

Tyronne rushed behind Rita, who was oblivious to her backup towering above her. With the arrogance of power, Snowflake stoically stood his ground and impassively peered at Rita and Tyronne. The tension increased.

“Get out!” Rita screamed, and pushed Snowflake hard in his chest. Snowflake glowered. She was fortunate that this was a wake, that Sammy was her son and might even be related to him, fortunate that a lot of people were standing there watching, but most of all, fortunate that none of Snowflake’s usual retinue was surrounding him, because then Snowflake would have been bound, at the very least, to slap her down. As it was, Snowflake’s hand instinctively went to his.38 derringer, snug but ready in the waist-pocket of his vest.

The confrontation escalated so fast the onlookers barely had time to breathe in and out; a few of the younger men were in fact holding their breath. Surely Snowflake wasn’t going to accept being pushed around without doing something in retaliation.

Tyronne quickly stepped between the antagonists. “She’s upset, you understand. Please, leave her be. We appreciate your concern but it would be better, man, if you would leave.” Tyronne stared unflinchingly into the depths of Snowflake’s emotionless eyes. Snowflake stared back and pulled an empty hand out of his vest pocket.

Everybody except Tyronne, Snowflake, and Rita prematurely relaxed and let out a relieved breath.

“I said get out!” Rita screamed a second time. The deacon who had closed the coffin lid ran to the phone to dial 911. Half the people who had been standing around now quickly moved out, some exiting the front door, others retreating back into the sanctuary. Rita reached around Tyronne in another attempt to shove Snowflake toward the door.

The rest happened so quickly only Tyronne and Snowflake saw it all. Tyronne took a swift half-step to his right to cut off Rita, who was charging around him. He leaned backward briefly, pushing against her with his shoulders.

Snowflake’s left hand leapt with lizard rapidity to knock away Rita’s outstretched right arm, and in the process was detained by Tyronne’s right hand that gripped with a viselike strength and was surprisingly unyielding.

An onlooker moaned, “Oh, Lordy, no!”

“Get out!” Rita’s vehement command overpowered the onlooker’s exclamation.

Snowflake’s right hand had already come up with his gun at the ready. Tyronne stepped in so close to Snowflake that if he pulled the trigger there was no telling what direction the slug would travel: upward into the ceiling, upward into Tyronne’s chest, or upward into Snowflake’s jaw.

“He got a gun,” some young male voice blurted at the same time Rita was reaching to get around Tyronne so she could sink her nails into Snowflake’s smoothly groomed face. Snowflake pushed his right forearm against Tyronne’s chest, attempting to back him up and simultaneously free his left arm, which Tyronne held secure at the wrist. As is often the case in impromptu street fights, the peacemaker in the middle was the person in the most danger.

“Young man, please. Has there not been enough shooting and death?” the pastor asked in a calm but insistent voice, as he rushed through trying to get to where Rita, Tyronne, and Snowflake were locked in a tug-of-war.

Rita spit at Snowflake. She missed his face but a glob stuck to the top of his left shoulder. Some older lady fainted but no one paid her any mind because she was too far away from the focal point of the fight. The minister smothered Rita in his protective arms.

“Can’t you see this woman is grieving over her son?”

When Reverend White grabbed Rita, Tyronne bear-hugged Snowflake and spoke slowly and carefully into Snowflake’s ear: “I’m begging you, man. Please don’t shoot my wife. She’s so upset she ain’t got no idea what she’s doing. You can understand her only son is dead and she thinks you had something to do with it. You got the gun. If you got to shoot somebody, shoot me. But please don’t shoot my wife.”

Snowflake’s gun was pinned between the two men.

“Will everyone please either leave out the front door or join me in the sanctuary where we will pray for sister Rita?” Reverend White picked Rita up and dragged her out of immediate danger. Supporting her with firm grips under her arms, two ushers grabbed the woman who had briefly fainted and spirited her out into the welcome chill of the night air.

The whole scene had been acted out so quickly, it seemed like a blur of simultaneous motion. Within ninety- five seconds, Snowflake and Tyronne were alone in the forlorn vestibule.

“Thank you,” Tyronne said as he stepped back half a step, reached into his lapel pocket, pulled out a white handkerchief, and gently dabbed Rita’s spittle off Snowflake’s cashmere jacket. “Thank you.”

It sounded so, so insane, but that was all Tyronne could think to say to the man standing in the receiving area of the church holding a loaded gun gleaming beneath the chandelier lights. From inside the sanctuary, the Twenty-third Psalm seeped through the swinging doors. Reverend White led and the assembled congregation responded with a tremulous sincerity.

“... Yeh, though I walk through...”

“Yeah, what up?”

Rita almost dropped the phone. It was Snowflake. She quietly hung up. So it was just like she thought. Snowflake was behind it all.

Here it was, two weeks after the funeral, and only now had Rita finally been able to summon the strength to clean out Sammy’s closet.

When she pulled the closet door open, Sammy’s scent assaulted her. She buckled at the knees and had to grab the door frame with one hand and push hard against the knob with the other just to keep from falling. It was like Sammy was hiding in the closet and had come charging out when she opened it.

Rita started to close the closet door. She couldn’t stand any more. Her intruding into Sammy’s life had already gotten him killed. She blacked out momentarily.

When she recovered consciousness, she was stooped on one knee inside the closet door. This was as close to a breakdown as she had allowed herself to come.

Fueling her weakness was the indescribable mantle of guilt that refused to lift. She had taken the money out of Sammy’s backpack because she wanted to talk him into stopping. He did. His death stopped everything. And the money, well, four thousand dollars barely paid for the funeral.

Rita heard some sound behind her, turned to look over her shoulder, and saw Tyronne standing in the doorway, his brow deeply furrowed.

“I’m all right. I was just going to clean out his closet and...” How do you explain to a man that a mother knows how her child smells, that you could identify his clothes blindfolded, that opening this closet door was like finding the secret place your child’s death had not yet visited, the place where the child was still overpoweringly present? How does a mother tell a stepfather that the smell of dirty clothes piled on a closet floor knocked you to your knees?

“If you want me to help, I’ll be in the front room,” Tyronne said softly. Then, after waiting a few moments and hearing no response to his offer, he turned and left the room even more quietly than he had entered.

Tyronne was trying so hard to be helpful and patient and considerate. But Rita knew the details, and the ultimate impact of all of this was way beyond his understanding. So much of Rita’s reality was based on events she would never reveal to Tyronne, such as the fact that Sammy’s father was Silas Moore, Snowflake’s oldest brother, and that she and Snowflake knew each other in ways that were hard to explain.

“Stand up, baby, show this boy what a woman look like.”

“Silas, I don’t have any cloth — Silas, I’m naked.”

“I know you naked. This my little brother. He ain’t nothing but ten years old and he ain’t never even seen no pussy.”

“I done seen it before.”

“Yeah, when?”

“Joanne showed me her thing.”

“Who you talking ’bout?”

“Joanne dat live ’cross the hall.”

And Silas had laughed at Paul. “Bo-Bo, that ain’t no pussy. Bet she ain’t even got no hair on it good yet. How old that girl is?”

“She eight and it’s still pussy, it just girl pussy.”

“Yeah, well, I’m talking ’bout real pussy. I’m talking ’bout a woman’s pussy. Rita, stand up and show this boy what a woman’s pussy look like.”

“Sil, I don’t want to.”

“Do it for me, baby.”

“She ain’t got to show me nuthin’, I done seen pussy befo’.”

“Rita, I said stand up.”

As Rita recalled standing up that day with Silas, she turned around to see if Tyronne was still there looking at her, but he was gone. Rita lowered herself into a sitting position in the closet doorway and another wave of memories flooded over her.

When she was seventeen, the fact that twenty-two-year-old Silas “Silky Sil” Moore considered her a woman filled her with pride. Sil was the biggest player in the courtyard. He always had money — had a big car and could have any woman he wanted, and he wanted Rita.

“Why you like me?”

“Look here, Rita, let me give you some good advice. When you hit a streak a good luck, don’t question why. Just ride it long as it last, and when the luck leave you, get up off it and be thankful you got what you did.”

“You saying you gon’ leave me?”

“Naw, baby, I’m saying life is like the weather — it’s always changing. Sooner or later, everything gon’ change.”

“I ain’t gon’ never stop lovin’ you.”

“Now, nah, girl, you can’t say that. Don’t be judging tomorrow by what’s happening today. Suppose I take to liking another girl? Would you still love me?”

“As long as it was liking and not loving, what I care? My love for you ain’t got nothing to do with you liking or not liking somebody else.”

“You don’t sound like no seventeen-year-old. That’s one of the reasons I likes you.”

“Yeah, and what’s another reason?”

“Come here, I can show you better than I can tell you.”

Rita could see her silly little seventeen-year-old self trying to act so womanish, and really doing nothing but being a stone fool for a man who was just using her.

No matter how hard she tried, Rita could never forget that day. Sil had pulled her close and kissed her. As her tongue flickered into his mouth, he sucked it hard, almost to the point of hurting her, and then released her.

Sil unbuckled his pants and let them drop at his feet. He slid his shorts down and sat on the side of his bed. “You want a mouthful of this?” he said, while guiding her hand to his erect penis.

Rita knelt quickly and started to give him head — she knew he liked the way she did it. She practiced doing it, sucking on a banana sometimes for five minutes straight without stopping, strengthening her jaw muscles. And other times she would chew five sticks of gum at a time, over and over, and over and over, and over, building up her stamina.

Some of the girls said they didn’t like it but they had to do it to keep a man, but Rita liked it. She liked feeling him in her mouth and liked the soft, slightly salty taste of his sperm. As with most of the girls she grew up around, Rita knew there were only two ways out for most women: one was to hitch your wagon to a man on the move and the other was to luck up and get a good job if somebody put in a good word for you, or somebody who was related to you got you on somewhere. There generally wasn’t no other way out, and usually finding a good job, when all you had was, at best, a public high school diploma, was harder than finding a good man. At least every young girl had a body and most of them could attract a man for a good six or seven years after they made eighteen. There wasn’t nothing they taught you in high school that lasted that long.

“Wait a minute, baby. Go close the door, this is something for just me and you.”

When Rita turned away from Sil’s dick and made her first move toward the door, she saw little Paul standing there wide-eyed. She never said a word to him, just closed the door in his face.

How could she tell Tyronne about all of that?

By the time Rita discovered she was pregnant, she and Sil had already broken up. Her turn was over and it was time for another high school cutie to hang on Sil. And when Samuel was born, Sil was in prison. Rita didn’t even bother trying to contact him. You ride it till it’s through, and when it’s over you let it go.

Rita snapped back to the present and began pulling clothes, boxes, and whatnot out of the closet, setting them on the floor beside her in three distinct piles. One pile was clothes she would give away. One pile was stuff she would throw away, sneakers, two old pairs of underwear, stuff like that, and a third pile — well, not really a pile, just a couple of things — a third stack was memorabilia she would keep. Sammy’s drawing notebooks mainly and a neat stack of comic books he liked to read. Rita didn’t know why she felt it important to keep the short stack of comic books, but somehow these things reminded her of Sammy more than even his picture on the bedroom dresser.

Rita lovingly looked through Sammy’s notebooks. He had two that were full and one only partially complete. The partially complete one had the best drawings and also had a phone number written on the inside cover.

She had noticed the number immediately, because, unlike everything else in the notebook, it was written in ink and underlined.

Maybe this number held the key to who killed him. Rita believed it was Snowflake but she had no proof.

“Girl, he like you. Look how he looking at you.”

“LaToya, I got a baby already. Less he ready to be a daddy and a lover, I don’t even want to hear nothing.”

“Girl, he kinda cute. I wish he would look at me like that.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“What you mean, ‘whatever’? That man got a job. He a security guard.”

“Yeah, and since he got a job, he probably got a woman.”

Rita and LaToya went up to the window together to cash their Shoney’s paychecks. LaToya kept eyeing Tyronne. He was kind of built, too. LaToya cashed her check first and stepped away while Rita cashed hers.

When they got outside, LaToya burst out laughing.

“Girl, what’s so funny?”

“You gon’ see.”

“No, tell me now. What up?”

“You gon’ see, when he call you.”

“When who call me?”

“Tyronne.”

“Tyronne who? What you talking about?”

“I’m talking about that security guard in the bank who had them juicy lips.”

“Call me... What you talking about? He don’t even know me.”

“Well, he got your number.”

“How he got my number?”

“’Cause while you was cashing your check, I told him that you liked him but you was shy and that you told me to give him your number.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“586-8540. Rita Deslonde.”

“Oh, you wrong for that,” Rita said, and chased LaToya a quarter of the way down the block.

Now, as she held Tyronne’s revolver in her hand, Rita had to smile as she thought back to how they had gotten together. He had called. He had asked for a date, and Rita decided he was all right when he didn’t hesitate about taking her and her eleven-year-old son Samuel to the Audubon Zoo.

What she liked most about Tyronne was the way he talked to her about his life and his experiences — not just his dreams but also his fears.

“So, Tyronne, I can’t believe you don’t have a girlfriend already.”

“Believe it or not, it’s true.”

“How come?”

“I guess ’cause a lot of girls think I’m kind of square or something.”

“Well, after what all I done seen, square seems kind of nice to me.”

“We’ll see.”

Rita smiled, thinking about just how square Tyronne actually was. He wasn’t much of a lover. He would roll on top of her and be through almost as soon as they got started. But that was okay, she could teach him how to take his time.

She also had to teach him how to get high. He said he never like smoking “that stuff” all that much. With him around, a nickel bag lasted a long time. They might smoke once a week or so. Gradually, Rita just gave it up, unless she was under a lot of stress.

The only thing they ever fought about was keeping a gun in the house. Rita knew having a weapon went hand in hand with being a security guard, but she just didn’t like the idea of one in the house with a child who was always snooping into everything. Finally, Tyronne hit on the idea of keeping the gun in a lock box. She had a key and Tyronne had a key. Rita could live with that.

Rita slid Tyronne’s gun into her purse, closed the box, covered it back up with clothing, and slid the second dresser drawer fully closed. Then she turned around in the dim bedroom. It would soon be dusk. She had no words to tell Tyronne about Sammy, about his father — well, she had told him that Sammy was the result of a brief fling when she was seventeen years old and that she had never told the man that he was the boy’s father. That was true. However, Rita hadn’t told Tyronne that Silas Moore was the father, or that Silas was in prison. Nor, of course, had she told Tyronne that Snowflake was Silas’s baby brother. New Orleans was such a small town, all the poor people knew each other, or knew somebody who knew some...

Her past wasn’t pretty and there was no way she wanted to share the foolishness of her youth with Tyronne. He wouldn’t be able to deal with it. It would haunt him. He was a good man but... well, it would hurt him too much to hear certain details of her life. Plus, he had no way of understanding some things. Rita remembered a conversation about a news show on Channel 4.

“Well, goddamn, look at that. That girl can’t be no more than sixteen or seventeen and she caught up in a drug ring.”

“Tee, when it’s all around you—”

“It was all around me when I grew up. But I mean, she’s a girl...”

“Well, the drug dealer is probably her pimp. But sometimes it ain’t even about being no prostitute or nothing. Those girls just be starved for affection and those guys give them dresses and jewelry and stuff and they think they’re in love.”

“Yeah, and after they get pre—”

“You mean like I got pregnant with Sammy?”

The question hung in the air for a long time.

After about a minute of silence, Tyronne spoke up: “So, I guess you’re telling me you’re like that girl.”

“No, I’m telling you I understand what that girl is going through and I don’t think you do. I think you see the condition she’s in only from the outside, and me, I feel the condition she’s in on the inside.”

“I guess I’m thinking of how we used to mess over them young girls in Vietnam and it’s hard for me to imagine them growing up and coming out okay after all that stuff...”

“Well, if you live, you grow up. You got no choice about that. As for it being okay, who’s to say what’s okay?”

After another long pause, Tyronne looked at Rita. “Baby, there’s a whole lot I don’t know, but I know you’re okay and I love you.”

Tyronne’s love was disarming and sometimes uncomfortable. He was so honest about his own shortcomings and so accepting of hers. Rita used to wish she could start her life over with Tyronne, wish she had met him when she was fourteen instead of meeting Roger, wish she had gone with him in high school instead of Sherman and Bekay, wish she had waited for Tyronne to father Sammy. But what was the use of wishing? Life was what it was, not what you wished it to be. She should just count her blessings and feel lucky she and Tyronne had eventually hooked up.

The whole time they were discussing the girl on Channel 4, Rita had been standing next to the chair where Tyronne liked to sit while watching television. She bent and kissed him lovingly. “I love you back, Tee, with everything I got. I love you too.”

Everything I got, Rita thought to herself. The rub was, there were things she no longer had because they had been taken from her. Rita wished she had those missing things so that she could love Tyronne with everything, just like he loved her. But that was only a wish. The reality was both more complex and much more repulsive.

Clearly, Tyronne had never been molested as a child, so he still had some innocence in his loving. Rita had no innocence left. To Rita, the fierce reality of her childhood was unsparing and unforgiving. Rita was certain if Tyronne knew all the sad and sordid things that had happened to her and all the silly and stupid things that she had done to herself, no matter how much he loved her, he would probably leave her. Everything in Rita’s life told her, no matter what they said or how much they loved you, men didn’t tolerate their women making too many mistakes and indiscretions, especially if sex was involved. Tyronne was a man and, deep down, was probably no different.

Plus, Tyronne was nice and good-hearted, the very kind of man who always has a hard time dealing with people who fuck up over and over again. Tyronne got upset if she threw a Coke cup out the car window. Rita could imagine what would happen if he knew about some of the other things she had thrown out the windows of her life.

He believed that most people were basically good and a few people were evil-minded. Rita knew that everybody could go either way, it just depended on the circumstances and what they felt their chances were of getting what they wanted versus getting caught.

Rita paused briefly in the doorway and hoped everything would be all right for Tyronne. He deserved good things. He was a good man.

Even though he had killed as a soldier, Rita could tell, from the way Tee talked about his ’Nam experiences, that he would never kill anyone in cold blood nor would he understand being a cold-blooded killer, and that’s why right now she couldn’t share with Tyronne that she had decided she was going to kill Snowflake.

She wasn’t going to talk about it and she wasn’t going to think about it. She wasn’t even going to cook up no scheme about how she was going to do it. She was just going to do it.

Some things are best never said, Rita thought to herself as she passed through the front room. It’s bad enough we act on some of the evil thoughts and fucked-up desires we have, we don’t have to talk about them; or, at least, that’s how she rationalized walking out the door past Tyronne without telling him anything other than, “Tee, I got to get some air. Walk around some. I’ll be back.”

Tyronne looked at her. He ached to comfort her but knew her well enough to recognize that there were areas of her life she refused to allow him to touch. All he could do was wait, helplessly wait, until she was ready to open to him. “Rita, be careful.”

“I’m just going for a little walk.” If she stopped to say any more she might not do it. She had to do it now, while the smell of Sammy was still in her nose and the fuck-ups of the past were lingering in her consciousness.

Twelve blocks later, Rita stood in the gloaming looking at Snowflake’s house across the street. Lights were on. A Jeep was in the driveway and a fancy car was parked out front. She knew he was home.

Should she go knock on the door? Should she just stand and wait? Was it safe to just stand on the sidewalk? Maybe he was checking her out right now.

Sheltered by the darkening dusk, Rita simply waited for something to happen. A light shower began. She’d had the presence of mind to bring an umbrella and she raised it above her head. She stood in the rain for twenty-eight minutes, her eyes fastened to Snowflake’s house. Then she saw the door open. He was standing on the porch locking the door.

Rita quickly dashed across the street, holding the umbrella in her left hand and reaching into her dangling purse to pull out the revolver with her right. She had no plan. She was just going to flat-out kill him.

They almost bumped into each other as Snowflake ran toward his BMW. Snowflake had seen the woman running across the street in the rain but had paid her no mind until she was right on top of him.

“Paul Moore, this is for Samuel Deslonde.” Bam. The first shot caught him square in the chest. He had no time to react. The force of the bullet hurled him over the hood of his car. Rita stood over Snowflake and shot him twice more. Bam. Bam. Once in his right side and the other in the back of his right shoulder. He slid off the car, a bleeding heap of inert flesh in the street.

The rain was falling steadily. Rita froze momentarily. Not sure what to do now, she looked around. A few people near the corner were standing under a sweetshop awning, looking at her. She put the warm pistol back in her purse and swiftly walked away. No one said anything to her as she passed.

Rita took the long way home and did not stop until she was standing, wet and distraught but dry-eyed, in their living room. When she came in, Tyronne rose slowly. He had Gloria in his arms, she was sleeping. He gently set her down in the chair and rushed silently over to Rita.

He quickly surveyed her from head to toe, wiped her damp hair back from her face, and gathered her up in a huge embrace.

“Tee, I—”

“Shhhh, shhhhh. Don’t say nothing, baby. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it. I don’t care. We’ll deal with it.”

“I shot Snowflake.”

There were so many questions he wanted to ask her. Had anyone seen her? Did anyone follow her? Had it been on the street or in a bar, or where? She had probably used his gun, which meant he could take the rap if it came down to that. Say he did it. Gloria needed a mama more than a daddy. Besides, probably wasn’t nothing going to happen. The cops never spent too much time looking for who shot a known drug dealer. No matter what happened, they would deal with it.

Tyronne hugged her tighter. “I don’t care. All I care about is you back here with me. Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it. Together.”

Rita buried her face in Tyronne’s shoulder and did something she had not done since she was fifteen and had a train pulled on her at a party. After that gang rape she had cried.

She cried and she cried. And she cried.

It felt good. Rita cried for twelve long minutes, tears rolling out of her eyes big as Cuff. When she finished, Tyronne was still holding her and whispering into her ear, “No matter what happens, we gon’ deal with it. We gon’ deal with it.”

What started out as tears of pain were now tears of gratitude. Nobody had ever loved her like this before. Nobody. All Rita could do was cry.

There shall your heart be also by Barbara Hambly

The Swamp

Kentucky Williams owns a Bible?” Benjamin January cast a doubtful glance catty-corner across the trampled muck of the Broadhorn Saloon’s yard to the shabby building’s open back door. The Broadhorn was a substantial building for this part of New Orleans, a neighborhood known quite accurately as the Swamp. Constructed of the lumber from dismantled flatboats, it stood a story-and-a-half tall and boasted not only porches but a privy, though the four whores who worked out of it did so in a line of sheds that straggled away into the trees of the true swamp — the ciprière — beyond. Under the brilliant winter sunlight the bullet-pocked planks and unspeakably puddled weeds looked every bit as grimy and rough-hewn as the establishment’s proprietress, who a few moments before had bellowed out the back door for January to come in: She needed his services.

“Last night some suck-arse bastard tried to steal my Bible!” she shouted at January.

“In many ways that’s the most surprising element of last night’s fracas,” remarked January’s friend and fellow musician Hannibal Sefton, fishing in the pocket of his dilapidated frock-coat for a bottle of opium-laced sherry. “It was her uncle’s — another surprise, since I’d always assumed that, like the Athenian hero Erechtheus, she was birthed from the earth itself. It’s in no way a remarkable volume: printed in Philadelphia thirty or forty years ago by a Bible society. The frontier was flooded with them when families started taking up lands in the Mississippi and Alabama territories.”

He had risen from the bottom step of the ladder he was sitting on when January emerged from the trees. January had reason to approach the Broadhorn cautiously: Even at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning there were men drunk enough to take violent exception to a man of January’s color appearing in the vicinity of white men’s chosen watering holes. January stayed away from the Swamp when he could. Only Hannibal’s note had brought him that morning.

“I thought myself something might have been hidden in it,” Hannibal went on, as they crossed the goo of the yard to the saloon’s rear door. “Pages cut out to make a hollow, or something of the kind. I can’t imagine anyone in the Broadhorn ever opened the book. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. For whatever reason, the thief was prepared to do murder to get it.”

January paused on the saloon’s sagging rear porch, trying to see into the impenetrable gloom within. Born a slave, one of the first things he’d learned in early childhood was that there was “buckra territory” — in his case, the front part of his master’s house — where a black child would be thrashed for setting foot. Even after his mulatto mother had been freed and they’d gone to live in New Orleans, he’d still been forbidden to use the front entrance of the house her white protector had given her.

In the Swamp, it was as much as a black man’s life was worth to go into a saloon patronized by the white crews of the flatboats and keelboats that came down the river with their cargoes of furs, pigs, and corn. The black prostitutes would be tolerated in most saloons in that insalubrious district that sprawled from the upper end of Girod Street along the back of the town to the canal and the cemeteries. But the only black who was truly able to come and go freely in the Broadhorn was Delly, a sweet-tempered, simpleminded girl of seventeen whose buck teeth, skewed jaw, and prominent facial moles had relegated her to the role of washing cups and doing as much cleaning up as the Broadhorn ever got.

It was Delly who lay on the narrow bed in Kentucky Williams’s room behind the bar. Williams yelled, “Git the hell in here, Ben, what you doin’, wipin’ your goddamn feet?” and January followed her voice into that tiny cubicle, which appeared to do duty as the Broadhorn’s storeroom as well. Williams sat at the foot of the bed, a big-boned white woman wearing what the black whores called a good-time dress, a faded calico mother-hubbard whose front was splashed and blotted now with crusted brown blood. One sleeve was torn and a makeshift bandage, also spotted from a seeping wound underneath, ringed her right forearm. “Gimme your dope, Hannibal,” she added more quietly, holding out her uninjured hand, and Hannibal passed over his bottle of opium-laced sherry without a word.

The girl Delly lay quietly on the bed, her face wrapped in several bar rags and what looked like somebody else’s torn-up mother-hubbard bound around her chest and shoulder.

“Dumb bitch tried to pull him off me,” growled Williams to January, gently holding the bottle to Delly’s lips. “Can you swallow a little of this, honey? Easy... not too much... that’s my good girl.” She patted Delly’s hand encouragingly. “Didn’t think I could goddamn take care of myself.” She took the cigar out of her mouth for a gulp of the sherry, then passed the bottle back to Hannibal. “How bad’s she hurt, Ben? She be all right?”

Hannibal’s note had said, Bring your kit, so January had brought the battered leather case of probes, forceps, fleams, and scalpels that his mentor in New Orleans had given him back in 1817, when he’d left to study medicine in Paris — little realizing at that time how useless it was for a black man to attempt to practice medicine on whites, even in that land of liberté, egalité, etc. Oddly enough, in the two years since his return to New Orleans in 1833, he’d found himself acquiring a clientele after all: unfortunately, all of it among the poorest class of freed (or runaway) slaves, who couldn’t afford the mainly light-complected physicians patronized by the better-off free colored artisans.

January had long ago resigned himself to the fact that he was going to be playing piano for his living the rest of his life.

In addition to the tools of his one-time trade, he’d brought vials of camphor and opium, and bundles of herbs recommended by his voodoo-priestess sister and various “root doctors” — freed and slave — in the countryside. One of these he held out to Hannibal.

“Can you get some boiling water from the Turkey Buzzard, and steep about a quarter of this in it?”

The Turkey Buzzard stood about a hundred feet from the Broadhorn, and combined the usual Swamp amenities of barroom, gambling parlor, and bordello with about a dozen beds for hire in three or four chambers, qualifying it as a hotel. It boasted a kitchen of sorts, and a dining room that served up grits, beans, and whatever mules might have given up the ghost the previous day — occasionally varied if an alligator happened to get too far from the canal at a time when the patrons were sober enough to hit it.

“Did you put anything on this, Mrs. Williams?” January asked, gingerly beginning to unwrap the bandages on Delly’s face.

“Like what?” The proprietress pulled her snarly light-brown hair back into a knot on her nape. “My daddy said duck shit an’ cobwebs was good for cuts, but I was goddamned if I’d go huntin’ for a duck in the middle of the night. ’Sides, that was just for little cuts, not a big hack like he gave her. There’s ducks down at the turnin’ basin by the cemetery, though, if you need—”

“My teachers swore by brandy.” January flinched a little as the bandages stuck, then came away from the split mess of brow and cheek. Though crusted almost shut with blood, Delly’s brown eyes blinked up at him unharmed.

“You mean brandy-brandy?” asked Williams doubtfully. “Or the tonsil varnish me an’ Railspike make out of tobacco juice an’ red pepper?”

“Brandy-brandy, if you’ve got it.”

Williams fished in a broken goods box under the bed. “You want Lemercier or Saint-Valbert?”

Stifling the urge to inquire how bottles of France’s finest had wound up in the back room of a New Orleans bucket shop, January asked instead, “What happened here?” as he took the bottle and gently began to clean the wounds with its contents. “And how do you know the thief was trying to steal your uncle’s Bible? What happened to the thief, by the way?”

“Absquatulated, the pusillanimous fuckard.” Williams perched back on the bed at his side and took a thoughtful swig of the Lemercier. “Lit out of here like I’d stuck a burnin’ fuse up his arse. I marked him good, though. And I know he was tryin’ to steal my Bible ’cause he come in here an’ tried to buy it yesterday afternoon.”

“Buy it?”

“Yeah. I thought it was queer.” She took the cigar from her mouth and blew a thoughtful cloud, lashless blue eyes narrowing in their tangle of lines and crusted paint. January would have guessed the saloonkeeper’s age at forty or so — his own — had he not known how quickly the harsh life of the riverfront dives aged a woman: She was probably a decade younger than she looked, and unlikely to live a decade longer.

“This po’-faced jasper comes in here yesterday afternoon, just as I got the doors open. Asks for rum an’ stands here sippin’ at it — who wants to taste it, fer God’s sake?” She took another gulp of the Lemercier, and passed it back to January to daub on the long knife rake that slashed across Delly’s right pectoral and down the side of her breast. Delly herself lay listening, jaw gritted hard, her eyeballs drifting now and then from the opium. January guessed she wasn’t used to it, from the way one swallow seemed to have dulled the pain.

On the other hand, of course, Hannibal’s favored brand was quadruple-strength Black Drop that would knock out a horse.

Now Delly whispered, “You said he was a ringer, ma’am.”

“That I did, honey.” Williams squeezed the girl’s hand again. “That I did. He was dressed rough, like most of the hard cases that come in here — plug hat, Conestoga boots — but he wore it like he didn’t want to touch the insides of his clothes with his body. His hands was clean, too. You could tell he hadn’t never done hard work with ’em, not like hau-lin’ on a line or pole-walkin’ a boat up a bayou. His hair, too, clean an’ cut short, an’ he had one of them sissy little beards, just around his mouth. Well, he coulda been a gambler, an’ it wasn’t none of my laundry to wash.” She shrugged. “But then he starts an argument with the next man who comes in — Snag-Face Rawlin, that was — pushin’ on about some-thin’ in the Bible, like who was the first King of Israel or somethin’ like that. Next thing I know, he asks me, do I have a Bible to settle the question? Snag-Face is sayin’, Oh, hell, what’s it matter? But this stranger just won’t quit, an’ wants to settle the question—”

“Herod,” whispered Delly through teeth clenched against the pain, as January quickly cleaned out the wound on her chest with the hot herbal wash Hannibal brought in. “Was Herod the first king of Israel?”

“That was it. He pushed a bet onto Snag-Face — fifty cents Herod was. And when I guess Herod wasn’t, he said all damn an’ blast, an’ would I sell him the Bible so’s he wouldn’t make that kind of fool mistake again? I said no, it was my uncle’s Bible. He offered me five dollars for it, and when I said no, he offered me ten.”

January’s eyebrows shot up. Cheaply printed evangelical Bibles could be purchased for twenty-five cents, new.

Williams ground out her cigar under her heel. “So I figured, when my door creaks open in the dead of night an’ some plug-ugly with a handkerchief tied over his face holds a gun on me an’ says, Gimme the Bible, I’m guessin’ it was the same po’-faced bastard with the sissy beard.”

January finished tying off the stitches and took from his satchel clean rags for a bandage. “I think I’d like a look at this Bible.”

“There,” said January, and flipped the pages at random in four or five places till he found what he sought.

Hannibal leaned around his shoulder and read: And the greater house he cieled with fir tree, which he overlaid with fine gold... He glanced at January inquiringly.

“Not at the words. Under them.”

Hannibal leaned close to the page, squinting in the strong morning sunlight. They’d carried the book out to the porch and rested it on the rail. Around them, in sheds and shanties and tents, the Swamp was waking up, as usual with a hangover. “Are those pencil dots?” asked Hannibal after a moment. “Under each letter?”

“Not just pencil dots.” January took a magnifying lens from his instrument case and held it above the page. “That page has been marked two or three times — sometimes in pencil, once with a pin. Look back in Genesis, you’ll see some of the pages have been marked that way four and six times, sometimes for as much as a dozen lines down the column. Always starting at the top of the page...”

Hannibal’s mobile eyebrows shot up in enlightenment. “Someone was using it for a book code.”

“That’s right. And instead of doing the sensible thing one would do with a Bible — citing book, chapter, verse, and then letter-count — our code-makers simply treated it as an ordinary book, starting at the top of the page: 101st letter, or whatever it was. Which meant that both the sender and the receiver had to have the same edition of the Bible, which would have been easy if they’d originally bought them together in the same shop in Philadelphia. What did you say your uncle’s name was, Mrs. Williams?”

“Walter.” The proprietress scratched under one uncorseted breast. “Walter Buling. My daddy had a farm below Natchez. Uncle Walter came there in 1825, sick as a horse with the consumption. That’s where he died.”

“Walter Buling.” January nodded slowly, and turned to the back of the book. Where pages are sometimes inserted to make up odd-numbered signatures, only a single, ragged, yellowed edge remained. “When I was eleven years old,” he said, “in 1806, New Orleans was clapped under martial law for a number of weeks by the governor of the Louisiana Territory, a gentleman named Major-General James Wilkinson.”

“Wilkinson!” exclaimed Williams. “Gentleman my arse — wasn’t he the skunk who swindled all them folks out of Texas land grants about ten years ago?”

“He was indeed,” January replied. “He’d earlier been twice court-martialed for botching invasions of Canada and Spanish Florida during the war with England in 1812, and died in disgrace in Mexico shortly after the Texas debacle. But in 1806, while governor of the Territory, he teamed up with former Vice President Aaron Burr, allegedly to conquer Mexico, to separate the Southern states from the North, to loot all the banks in New Orleans in the confusion, and to form an empire that Burr would then rule from New Orleans, presumably with the help of Wilkinson’s American troops.

“Now, my mother still swears that Wilkinson was playing a double game and taking money from the Spanish viceroy of Mexico — then as now, she knew everyone in town. In any case, Wilkinson sold Burr out, testified against him in court, and was protected by Thomas Jefferson for the rest of his life as a result. Who was paying whom how much back in 1806 I have no idea, but I do remember that Walter Buling of Natchez was one of Wilkinson’s lieutenants.”

“So you think Buling lifted some money in the confusion?” Hannibal thumbed the onion-skin pages, peering through the glass at the lines of pinpricks and dots, the occasional notes in the margin: e-45, t-67, a-103... “Either a Spanish payoff or from one of the New Orleans banks...?”

“In partnership with a Confederate who either died or was taken out of the game somehow. The Confederate’s coded directions to the money is probably what’s in our friend’s hands — and I’d guess our friend has only recently learned that the books containing the key were Bibles owned by Buling and the Confederate.”

“How would he find out?”

“Probably the same way you did,” said Hannibal. “The Confederate may very well have been our friend’s uncle or father, the same way Buling was related to you.”

January nodded. “However he found it out, he did find it out. But since Buling counted the letters as if the Bible were an ordinary book — from the top of the page, rather than by chapter and verse — our friend needs to have the identical edition to decode them. Obviously he doesn’t: his relative’s Bible having disappeared in the intervening years, leaving only the coded message itself. So all he could do was trace Buling’s.”

Williams scowled, and she rubbed gingerly at the bandages January had put on her arm. “That means he’ll be back, don’t it?”

“If he’s come this far, I think it definitely means he’ll be back.”

Her eyes narrowed, cold as a wild pig’s. “Thinks he can go cuttin’ up Delly an’ whoever gets in his way... I’ll be ready for him when he comes back...”

“It will probably be with Confederates of his own,” pointed out Hannibal. “Bella, horrida bella, et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno...”

“Oh, I think we can deal with our friend without causing the river to run red with blood.” January picked up the Bible and thumbed again to the torn-out page at the back. “And if we’re lucky, compensate poor Delly for her injuries as well.”

It didn’t take January long to locate the culprit. It was all a question of knowing who to ask. The Carnival season was in full swing, and he and Hannibal were playing that night at a ball in one of the great American mansions that lined St. Charles Avenue, upriver from the old French town. In between sets of marches and quadrilles, waltzes and schottisches, January made it his business to nod smiling greetings to every one of the dozen or so physicians who attended, men with whom he’d worked at the Charity Hospital during the summer epidemics of cholera and yellow fever. These greetings led to soft-voiced chats and a little friendly joshing about his “winter job” from white men who hadn’t the slightest idea what it was like to be denied work because of the color of their skin. From this, January deftly steered the conversation to inquiries about a thin-faced white man with a Vandyke beard, probably at a hotel, who’d called in a physician’s services that morning for knife wounds...

By the end of the evening he knew that the man who’d knifed Delly — and who’d been cut in return by Kentucky Williams — was Matthew Porter of St. Louis. St. Louis, January recalled, being the city from which Major-General Wilkinson had governed the Louisiana Territory in 1806.

Since January was a law-abiding soul, even when the laws included Black Codes that forbade him among other things to smoke cigars in public, the following morning he consulted the City Guard, in the person of his friend Lieutenant Abishag Shaw. He suspected it would do him no good and his suspicion was rapidly confirmed.

“Iff’n you want me to, I’ll speak to Captain Tremouille about it,” offered Lieutenant Shaw, scratching his verminous hair. “But I’ll tell you right now what he’ll say: that we got too few men — ’specially now in Carnival season — to go chasin’ after a white man who’ll just say he never knifed no nigger gal in his life. No jury in town’s gonna convict him of it on the word of a Salt River man-eater like Kentucky Williams anyways.”

His due to law and order paid, January then took a long walk into the genuine swamp beyond the Swamp, the ciprière: the maze of small bayous, impenetrable tangles of palmetto and hackberry, tall silent groves of cypress and magnolia that lay between New Orleans and the lake. Few white men came here. Even now, in the winter with the ground mostly dry, it was easy to become lost, even for January who’d been raised with a slave-child’s awareness of the invisible geography of landmarks, paths, rendezvous points. In the summer it was a nightmarish jungle of standing water, gators, snakes, and mosquitoes that would swarm a man like a living brown blanket.

He wasn’t sure if there was still a runaway slave village somewhere west of Bayou St. John, but as he quartered the squishy ground he would occasionally see fish lines in the bayous, or red flannel juju-bags hanging from the trees. He was just beginning to wonder if he’d have to abandon his quest and return to town — he would be playing at a subscription ball at the Théâtre d’Orléans that night — when he turned his head and saw, standing in the deep oyster grass across a murky little bayou, the one man in New Orleans taller than his own 6'3" height: massive, African-black like himself, clothed in rags with only a muscular stump where his left arm had been.

Cut-Arm, king of the runaways of the ciprière.

“You not wanderin’ around out here lookin’ for anybody, Music-Master, are you?”

“It just so happens,” said January, “that I am.”

Cut-Arm’s dark eyes narrowed with fury when January spoke of what had happened to Delly, who like most freed slaves in town had some passing acquaintance with the runaways in the ciprière. When January spoke of how he intended to get his revenge, the big runaway’s teeth showed white in a savage grin. “That’s good,” he rumbled. “Maybe not so good as seein’ his blood, but it’ll take a lot longer, and I think he’ll suffer more.”

Thus it was that January was loitering on the brick banquette of Rue Chartres opposite the Strangers Hotel at 10:00 the next morning when a man who fit the description of Matthew Porter emerged from its doors: tallish, well-dressed, his brown Vandyke beard newly barbered, and his right arm in a sling. January’s guess was confirmed a few minutes later when, as Cut-Arm had promised, one of the hotel’s maids came across the street to him and whispered, “He just left. It’s all clear.”

January had taken the precaution of dressing that morning in the simple but respectable dark clothing that could have passed him as either a free workman or an upper servant. Nobody gave him a glance as the woman brought him to one of the smaller guest rooms on the second floor. He’d gambled that Porter would be too cautious of pickpockets to take the coded message — whatever it was — with him when he went out, and a few minutes’ search of the trunk yielded it, tucked of an almanac that was in turn nestled among Porter’s shirts.

It was, as January had suspected, the end leaf torn out of the back of Kentucky Williams’s Bible, covered with neatly inscribed numbers. In his own memorandum book he made a note of the number of lines (thirty-two), the approximate number of characters per line (between forty-seven and fifty-four), and the width of all margins. “Meet me tomorrow,” he said to the maid, handing her a dollar, “at the same place, at the same time as today, bringing me this paper.” He slipped it back into the almanac. “You make a note of what two pages it’s between when you take it out — he may move it, and I don’t want him to guess it’s been messed with. I’ll give you another piece of paper, just like it, to put back in its place. You think you can do that?”

“Shoot.” She grinned. “For two dollars I’d swap out the whole damn almanac one page at a time. Cheap bastard didn’t give me no tip, not even a dime, when I brought him up a bath last night, and pinched my tit into the bargain. You know how heavy it is, luggin’ all that hot water? What is it?” she asked hopefully. “You put a juju on the new piece of paper?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said January.

Returning to the room he rented from his widowed mother on Rue Dauphine, he carefully tore one of the front blank pages from Kentucky Williams’s Bible, meticulously matching the irregularities of the ragged remains of the torn page in the back. It took him a little experimentation with watering ink to achieve the faded hue of the original. While his various samples were drying, he set to work with the Bible to code a new message, using for good measure as many of the letters as had been in the original’s first three lines, which he’d taken the precaution of copying.

“My guess is, those are all that Porter read, if he even read that far,” he said to Hannibal that night, when he walked out to the Broadhorn to check on his two patients. “If anything sticks in a man’s mind out of a mass of numbers like that, it’ll only be the first few. Which is the reason, of course, for a code in the first place.”

“Did you figure out what them first lines said?” Delly asked, her brown eyes round in the grimy lamplight of her attic cubicle. “Does it say where the treasure’s hid?”

“It does.” January tied up the clean dressing, gently tugged the girl’s ragged nightdress back into place. “The first three lines — and, I suspect, the rest of the coded text — are names, clearly invented. Jack Falstaff is one; Montague Capulet is another. Beside each name is the name of a bank.”

Delly frowned at this prosaic anticlimax — she’d clearly expected paces counted from Death-Head Oak and Skull Rock.

But a slow grin spread over Hannibal’s thin face. “Where Uncle Water Buling cached whatever he could make off with under Wilkinson’s nose, in the confusion of Burr’s projected invasion. How many of those banks are still in operation, do you suppose? Private banks come and go like waterfront cafés.”

“Which would be why Uncle Walter spread the funds out among so many. The first on the list is the Bank of New York, and that’s still in operation. So Kentucky will get at least a little money out of it.”

“Which she’ll probably drink up within a week,” sighed Hannibal. “I would, anyway. It does seem a waste.”

Screams resounded from the yard below, followed by shots and the crash of a body being heaved out the Broadhorn’s back door. Both men and Delly tilted their heads toward the window to ascertain that it was only a fight between six or seven customers, clawing and gouging in the mud of the yard while Kentucky Williams roared curses at them from the porch.

“It does,” January agreed. “But if we do more than take a reasonable sum for services rendered, on the grounds that as upstanding citizens we deserve the money more than she does, how does that make us different from the man who slashed up Delly with a knife?”

The next morning, January took delivery of the code paper, and spent until early afternoon closeted up with the Bible, deciphering names. “I’d like to get this back to the saloon before it opens,” he said to Hannibal, who had put in an appearance — at a far earlier hour than was usual for him to be about — to assist. “The doctor I talked to said Porter’s wounds weren’t deep. He should be able to use his arm by this evening. It would be a shame if the book isn’t there when he makes his next attempt.”

Right on schedule, that evening, while January was again changing Delly’s dressings, a tumult of shouting and two shots resounded from the saloon below, followed a moment later by Hannibal’s arrival at the top of the ladder.

“He’s downstairs,” gasped the fiddler, panting from just the climb. “Done up as a preacher in the most ridiculous wig and false whiskers you’ve ever seen.”

“Who got shot?” January asked, scrambling down the ladder after Hannibal, crossing to the porch at a run.

“Nobody — but Porter went down with what I assume to be chicken blood all over him like an Indian massacre.”

They sprang up the porch steps and peered through the Broadhorn’s back door in time to see a tallish, thin man in the shabby black suit of an impoverished minister lying, gasping theatrically, on the floor among a half-dozen kneeling ruffians. His hands and gray-whiskered face were covered with gore in the saloon’s dim lamplight.

“I’m dying! Oh, I’m dying! For the love of God, is there a Bible in this house?”

As Williams promptly fetched the Holy Writ from where January had stowed it earlier under the bar, Hannibal and January traded disbelieving glances. “I’ve seen better acting at Christmas pantomimes,” Hannibal whispered.

The allegedly dying alleged preacher clutched the volume to his ensanguined chest and sobbed, “Bless you, my daughter—”

And with a crash, the lights went out.

“Two accomplices,” reported Hannibal softly, as he and January stepped aside to let three blundering forms spring through the door between them and sprint away across the yard.

Inside the saloon, men were crashing around and cursing; a moment later a match flared, and someone exclaimed, “Fuck me, where’d that preacher go?”

“Not badly done, though,” added the fiddler, as he and January strolled back to the ladder. “Kentucky’s promised us each ten percent of whatever we can retrieve from those bank accounts, and twenty percent for Delly, which is very generous of her. I’ll write to the Bank of New York tomorrow. I suspect that our friend Mr. Porter’s in for a very frustrating few months, writing to banks that no longer exist about accounts whose names he doesn’t have right.”

“Oh, I didn’t substitute names,” said January. “A man who considered it his right to carve up a saloonkeeper and a completely innocent black girl — who’s going to be scarred for the rest of her life — deserves more than a little frustration. No, I wrote up a very elaborate treasure map leading to an island in the middle of the swamps below Villahermosa in the south of Mexico; a friend of mine in Paris who’d been a doctor in the French Navy under Napoleon told me about it. He said nine-tenths of their men came down with fever there and most of them died. A land wrought by Satan, he said, to punish sinners.”

Hannibal’s eyes widened. “Do you think he’ll go?”

“He will if he wants the four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Spanish gold I said was buried there.”

“Considering the amount of money he’ll have to borrow to finance an expedition,” mused Hannibal, “and the time it will take, and the gnawing anxiety of knowing there’s a treasure just waiting for him...”

“If he’s willing to seek it,” said January gently. “Which we know, from his actions, that he is. Where your treasure is — wholly imaginary, in this case — there shall your heart be also... and for Mr. Porter, almost certainly his fever-ridden bones as well.”

Hannibal paused, his hand on the rungs of the ladder. “For such a thoroughly nice man, Ben, you can be a complete son of a bitch.”

“Thank you,” said January. “I have my moments. Now let’s start writing those letters to the banks, and see how much of the real treasure is left to collect.”