New Orleans Noir: The Classics

Rich by Ellen Gilchrist

(Originally published in 1978)

Garden District

Tom and Letty Wilson were rich in everything. They were rich in friends because Tom was a vice president of the Whitney Bank of New Orleans and liked doing business with his friends, and because Letty was vice president of the Junior League of New Orleans and had her picture in Town and Country every year at the Symphony Ball.

The Wilsons were rich in knowing exactly who they were because every year from Epiphany to Fat Tuesday they flew the beautiful green and gold and purple flag outside their house that meant that Letty had been queen of the Mardi Gras the year she was a debutante. Not that Letty was foolish enough to take the flag seriously.

Sometimes she was even embarrassed to call the yardman and ask him to come over and bring his high ladder.

“Preacher, can you come around on Tuesday and put up my flag?” she would ask.

“You know I can,” the giant black man would answer. “I been saving time to put up your flag. I won’t forget what a beautiful queen you made that year.”

“Oh, hush, Preacher. I was a skinny little scared girl. It’s a wonder I didn’t fall off the balcony I was so sacred. I’ll see you on Monday.” And Letty would think to herself what a big phony Preacher was and wonder when he was going to try to borrow some more money from them.

Tom Wilson considered himself a natural as a banker because he loved to gamble and wheel and deal. From the time he was a boy in a small Baptist town in Tennessee he had loved to play cards and match nickels and lay bets.

In high school he read the Nashville Banner avidly and kept an eye out for useful situations such as the lingering and suspenseful illnesses of Pope Pius.

“Let’s get up a pool on the day the Pope will die,” he would say to the football team, “I’ll hold the bank.” And because the Pope took a very long time to die with many close calls there were times when Tom was the richest left tackle in Franklin, Tennessee.

Tom had a favorite saying about money. He had read it in the Reader’s Digest and attributed it to Andrew Carnegie. “Money,” Tom would say, “is what you keep score with. Andrew Carnegie.”

Another way Tom made money in high school was performing as an amateur magician at local birthday parties and civic events. He could pull a silver dollar or a Lucky Strike cigarette from an astonished six-year-old’s ear or from his own left palm extract a seemingly endless stream of multicolored silk chiffon or cause an ordinary piece of clothesline to behave like an Indian cobra.

He got interested in magic during a convalescence from German measles in the sixth grade. He sent off for books of magic tricks and practiced for hours before his bedroom mirror, his quick clever smile flashing and his long fingers curling and uncurling from the sleeves of a black dinner jacket his mother had bought at a church bazaar and remade to fit him.

Tom’s personality was too flamboyant for the conservative Whitney Bank, but he was cheerful and cooperative and when he made a mistake he had the ability to turn it into an anecdote.

“Hey, Fred,” he would call to one of his bosses. “Come have lunch on me and I’ll tell you a good one.”

They would walk down St. Charles Avenue to where it crosses Canal and turns into Royal Street as it enters the French Quarter. They would walk into the crowded, humid excitement of the quarter, admiring the girls and watching the Yankee tourists sweat in their absurd spun-glass leisure suits, and turn into the side door of Antoine’s or breeze past the maitre d’ at Galatoire’s or Brennan’s.

When a red-faced waiter in funereal black had seated them at a choice table, Tom would loosen his Brooks Brothers tie, turn his handsome brown eyes on his guest, and begin.

“That bunch of promoters from Dallas talked me into backing an idea to videotape all the historic sights in the quarter and rent the tapes to hotels to show on closed-circuit television. Goddamnit, Fred, I could just see those fucking tourists sitting around their hotel rooms on rainy days ordering from room service and taking in the Cabildo and the Presbytere on TV.” Tom laughed delightedly and waved his glass of vermouth at an elegantly dressed couple walking by the table.

“Well, they’re barely breaking even on that one, and now they want to buy up a lot of soft-porn movies and sell them to motels in Jefferson Parish. What do you think? Can we stay with them for a few more months?”

Then the waiter would bring them cold oysters on the half shell and steaming pompano en papillote and a wine steward would serve them a fine Meursault or a Piesporter, and Tom would listen to whatever advice he was given as though it were the most intelligent thing he had ever heard in his life.

Of course he would be thinking, You stupid, impotent son of a bitch. You scrawny little frog bastard, I’ll buy and sell you before it’s over. I’ve got more brains in my balls than the whole snotty bunch of you.

“Tom, you always throw me off my diet,” his friend would say, “damned if you don’t.”

“I told Letty the other day,” Tom replied, “that she could just go right ahead and spend her life worrying about being buried in her wedding dress, but I didn’t hustle my way to New Orleans all the way from north Tennessee to eat salads and melba toast. Pass me the French bread.”

Letty fell in love with Tom the first time she laid eyes on him. He came to Tulane on a football scholarship and charmed his way into a fraternity of wealthy New Orleans boys famed for its drunkenness and its wild practical jokes. It was the same old story. Even the second-, third-, and fourth-generation blue bloods of New Orleans need an infusion of new genes now and then.

The afternoon after Tom was initiated, he arrived at the fraternity house with two Negro painters and sat in the low-hanging branches of a live oak tree overlooking Henry Clay Avenue, directing them in painting an official-looking yellow-and-white-striped pattern on the street in front of the property. “D-R-U-N-K,” he yelled to his painters, holding on to the enormous limb with one hand and pushing his black hair out of his eyes with the other. “Paint it to say D-R-U-N-K Z-O-N-E.”

Letty stood near the tree with a group of friends watching him. He was wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows, and a freshman beanie several sizes too small was perched on his head like a tipsy sparrow.

“I’m wearing this goddamn beanie forever,” Tom yelled. “I’m wearing this beanie until someone brings me a beer,” and Letty took the one she was holding and walked over to the tree and handed it to him.

One day a few weeks later, he commandeered a Bunny Bread truck while it was parked outside the fraternity house making a delivery. He picked up two friends and drove the truck madly around the Irish Channel, throwing fresh loaves of white and whole wheat and rye bread to the astonished housewives.

“Steal from the rich, give to the poor,” Tom yelled, and his companions gave up trying to reason with him and helped him yell.

“Free bread, free cake,” they yelled, handing out powdered doughnuts and sweet rolls to a gang of kids playing baseball on a weed-covered vacant lot.

They stopped off at Darby’s, an Irish bar where Tom made bets on races and football games, and took on some beer and left off some cinnamon rolls.

“Tom, you better go turn that truck in before they catch you,” Darby advised, and Tom’s friends agreed, so they drove the truck to the second-precinct police headquarters and turned themselves in. Tom used up half a year’s allowance paying the damages, but it made his reputation.

In Tom’s last year at Tulane a freshman drowned during a hazing accident at the Southern Yacht Club, and the event frightened Tom. He had never liked the boy and had suspected him of being involved with the queers and nigger lovers who hung around the philosophy department and the school newspaper. The boy had gone to prep school in the East and brought weird-looking girls to rush parties. Tom had resisted the temptation to blackball him as he was well connected in uptown society.

After the accident, Tom spent less time at the fraternity house and more time with Letty, whose plain sweet looks and expensive clothes excited him.

“I can’t go in the house without thinking about it,” he said to Letty. “All we were doing was making them swim from pier to pier carrying martinis. I did it fifteen times the year I pledged.”

“He should have told someone he couldn’t swim very well,” Letty answered. “It was an accident. Everyone knows it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.” And Letty cuddled up close to him on the couch, breathing as softly as a cat.

Tom had long serious talks with Letty’s mild, alcoholic father, who held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and in the spring of the year Tom and Letty were married in the Cathedral of Saint Paul with twelve bridesmaids, four flower girls, and seven hundred guests. It was pronounced a marriage made in heaven, and Letty’s mother ordered Masses said in Rome for their happiness.

They flew to New York on the way to Bermuda and spent their wedding night at the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue. At least half a dozen of Letty’s friends had lost their virginity at the same address, but the trip didn’t seem prosaic to her.

She stayed in the bathroom a long time gazing at her plain face in the oval mirror and tugging at the white lace nightgown from the Lylian Shop, arranging it now to cover, now to reveal her small breasts. She crossed herself in the mirror, suddenly giggled, then walked out into the blue and gold bedroom as though she had been going to bed with men every night of her life. She had been up until three the night before reading a book on sexual intercourse. She offered her small unpainted mouth to Tom. Her pale hair smelled of Shalimar and carnations and candles. Now she was safe. Now life would begin.

“Oh, I love you, I love, I love, I love you,” she whispered over and over. Tom’s hands touching her seemed a strange and exciting passage that would carry her simple dreamy existence to a reality she had never encountered. She had never dreamed anyone so interesting would marry her.

Letty’s enthusiasm and her frail body excited him, and he made love to her several times before he asked her to remove her gown.

The next day they breakfasted late and walked for a while along the avenue. In the afternoon Tom explained to his wife what her clitoris was and showed her some of the interesting things it was capable of generating, and before the day was out Letty became the first girl in her crowd to break the laws of God and the Napoleonic Code by indulging in oral intercourse.

Fourteen years went by and the Wilsons’ luck held. Fourteen years is a long time to stay lucky, even for rich people who don’t cause trouble for anyone.

Of course, even among the rich there are endless challenges, unyielding limits, rivalry, envy, quirks of fortune. Letty’s father grew increasingly incompetent and sold his seat on the exchange, and Letty’s irresponsible brothers went to work throwing away the money in Las Vegas and LA and Zurich and Johannesburg and Paris and anywhere they could think of to fly to with their interminable strings of mistresses.

Tom envied them their careless, thoughtless lives and he was annoyed that they controlled their own money while Letty’s was tied up in some mysterious trust, but he kept his thoughts to himself as he did his obsessive irritation over his growing obesity.

“Looks like you’re putting on a little weight there,” a friend would observe.

“Good, good,” Tom would say, “makes me look like a man. I got a wife to look at if I want to see someone who’s skinny.”

He stayed busy gambling and hunting and fishing and being the life of the party at the endless round of dinners and cocktail parties and benefits and Mardi Gras functions that consume the lives of the Roman Catholic hierarchy that dominates the life of the city that care forgot.

Letty was preoccupied with the details of their domestic life and her work in the community. She took her committees seriously and actually believed that the work she did made a difference in the lives of other people.

The Wilsons grew rich in houses. They lived in a large Victorian house in the Garden District, and across Lake Pontchartrain they had another Victorian house to stay in on the weekends, with a private beach surrounded by old moss-hung oak trees. Tom bought a duck camp in Plaquemines Parish and kept an apartment in the French Quarter in case one of his business friends fell in love with his secretary and needed someplace to be alone with her. Tom almost never used the apartment himself. He was rich in being satisfied to sleep with his own wife.

The Wilsons were rich in common sense. When five years of a good Catholic marriage went by and Letty inexplicably never became pregnant, they threw away their thermometers and ovulation charts and litmus paper and went down to the Catholic adoption agency and adopted a baby girl with curly black hair and hazel eyes. Everyone declared she looked exactly like Tom. The Wilsons named the little girl Helen and, as the months went by, everyone swore she even walked and talked like Tom.

At about the same time Helen came to be the Wilsons’ little girl, Tom grew interested in raising Labrador retrievers. He had large wire runs with concrete floors built in the side yard for the dogs to stay in when he wasn’t training them on the levee or at the park lagoon. He used all the latest methods for training Labs, including an electric cattle prod given to him by Chalin Perez himself and live ducks supplied by a friend on the Audubon Park Zoo Association Committee.

“Watch this, Helen,” he would call to the little girl in the stroller, “watch this.” And he would throw a duck into the lagoon with its secondary feathers neatly clipped on the left side and its feet tied loosely together, and one of the Labs would swim out into the water and carry it safely back and lay it at his feet.

As so often happens when childless couples are rich in common sense, before long Letty gave birth to a little boy, and then to twin boys, and finally to another little Wilson girl. The Wilsons became so rich in children the neighbors all lost count.

“Tom,” Letty said, curling up close to him in the big walnut bed, “Tom, I want to talk to you about something important.” The new baby girl was three months old. “Tom, I want to talk to Father Delahoussaye and ask him if we can use some birth control. I think we have all the children we need for now.”

Tom put his arms around her and squeezed her until he wrinkled her new green linen B.H. Wragge, and she screamed for mercy.

“Stop it,” she said, “be serious. Do you think it’s all right to do that?”

Then Tom agreed with her that they had had all the luck with children they needed for the present, and Letty made up her mind to call the cathedral and make an appointment. All her friends were getting dispensations so they would have time to do their work at the Symphony League and the Thrift Shop and the New Orleans Museum Association and the PTAs of the private schools.

All the Wilson children were in good health except Helen. The pediatricians and psychiatrists weren’t certain what was wrong with her. Helen couldn’t concentrate on anything. She didn’t like to share and she went through stages of biting other children at the Academy of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The doctors decided it was a combination of prenatal brain damage and dyslexia, a complicated learning disability that is a fashionable problem with children in New Orleans.

Letty felt like she spent half her life sitting in offices talking to people about Helen. The office she sat in most often belonged to Dr. Zander. She sat there twisting her rings and avoiding looking at the box of Kleenex on Dr. Zander’s desk. It made her feel like she was sleeping in a dirty bed even to think of plucking a Kleenex from Dr. Zander’s container and crying in a place where strangers cried. She imagined his chair was filled all day with women weeping over terrible and sordid things like their husbands running off with their secretaries or their children not getting into the right clubs and colleges.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with her next,” Letty said. “If we let them hold her back a grade it’s just going to make her more self-conscious than ever.”

“I wish we knew about her genetic background. You people have pull with the sisters. Can’t you find out?”

“Tom doesn’t want to find out. He says we’ll just be opening a can of worms. He gets embarrassed even talking about Helen’s problem.”

“Well,” said Dr. Zander, crossing his short legs and settling his steel-rimmed glasses on his nose like a tiny bicycle stuck on a hill, “let’s start her on Dexedrine.”

So Letty and Dr. Zander and Dr. Mullins and Dr. Pickett and Dr. Smith decided to try an experiment. They decided to give Helen five milligrams of Dexedrine every day for twenty days each month, taking her off the drug for ten days in between.

“Children with dyslexia react to drugs strangely,” Dr. Zander said. “If you give them tranquilizers it peps them up, but if you give them Ritalin or Dexedrine it calms them down and makes them able to think straight.

“You may have to keep her home and have her tutored on the days she is off the drug,” he continued, “but the rest of the time she should be easier to live with.” And he reached over and patted Letty on the leg and for a moment she thought it might all turn out all right after all.

Helen stood by herself on the playground of the beautiful old pink-brick convent with its drooping wrought-iron balconies covered with ficus. She was watching the girl she liked talking with some other girls who were playing jacks. All the little girls wore blue-and-red-plaid skirts and navy blazers or sweaters. They looked like a disorderly marching band. Helen was waiting for the girl, whose name was Lisa, to decide if she wanted to go home with her after school and spend the afternoon. Lisa’s mother was divorced and worked downtown in a department store, so Lisa rode the streetcar back and forth from school and could go anywhere she liked until five thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes she went home with Helen so she wouldn’t have to ride the streetcar. Then Helen would be so excited, the hours until school let out would seem to last forever.

Sometimes Lisa liked her and wanted to go home with her and other times she didn’t, but she was always nice to Helen and let her stand next to her in lines.

Helen watched Lisa walking toward her. Lisa’s skirt was two inches shorter than those of any of the other girls, and she wore high white socks that made her look like a skater. She wore a silver identification bracelet and Revlon nail polish.

“I’ll go home with you if you get your mother to take us to get an Icee,” Lisa said. “I was going last night but my mother’s boyfriend didn’t show up until after the place closed so I was going to walk to Manny’s after school. Is that okay?”

“I think she will,” Helen said, her eyes shining. “I’ll go call her up and see.”

“Naw, let’s just go swing. We can ask her when she comes.” Then Helen walked with her friend over to the swings and tried to be patient waiting for her turn.

The Dexedrine helped Helen concentrate and it helped her get along better with other people, but it seemed to have an unusual side effect. Helen was chubby and Dr. Zander had led the Wilsons to believe the drug would help her lose weight, but instead she grew even fatter. The Wilsons didn’t want to force her to stop eating for fear they would make her nervous, so they tried to reason with her.

“Why can’t I have any ice cream?” she would say. “Daddy is fat and he eats all the ice cream he wants.” She was leaning up against Letty, stroking her arm and petting the baby with her other hand. They were in an upstairs sitting room with the afternoon sun streaming in through the French windows. Everything in the room was decorated with different shades of blue, and the curtains were white with old-fashioned blue-and-white-checked ruffles.

“You can have ice cream this evening after dinner,” Letty said, “I just want you to wait a few hours before you have it. Won’t you do that for me?”

“Can I hold the baby for a while?” Helen asked, and Letty allowed her to sit in the rocker and hold the baby and rock it furiously back and forth crooning to it.

“Is Jennifer beautiful, Mother?” Helen asked.

“She’s okay, but she doesn’t have curly black hair like you. She just has plain brown hair. Don’t you see, Helen, that’s why we want you to stop eating between meals, because you’re so pretty and we don’t want you to get too fat. Why don’t you go outside and play with Tim and try not to think about ice cream so much?”

“I don’t care,” Helen said, “I’m only nine years old and I’m hungry. I want you to tell the maids to give me some ice cream now,” and she handed the baby to her mother and ran out of the room.

The Wilsons were rich in maids, and that was a good thing because there were all those children to be taken care of and cooked for and cleaned up after. The maids didn’t mind taking care of the Wilson children all day. The Wilsons’ house was much more comfortable than the ones they lived in, and no one cared whether they worked very hard or not as long as they showed up on time so Letty could get to her meetings. The maids left their own children with relatives or at home watching television, and when they went home at night they liked them much better than if they had spent the whole day with them.

The Wilson house had a wide white porch across the front and down both sides. It was shaded by enormous oak trees and furnished with swings and wicker rockers. In the afternoons the maids would sit on the porch and other maids from around the neighborhood would come up pushing prams and strollers and the children would all play together on the porch and in the yard. Sometimes the maids fixed lemonade and the children would sell it to passersby from a little stand.

The maids hated Helen. They didn’t care whether she had dyslexia or not. All they knew was that she was a lot of trouble to take care of. One minute she would be as sweet as pie and cuddle up to them and say she loved them, and the next minute she wouldn’t do anything they told her.

“You’re a nigger, nigger, nigger, and my mother said I could cross St. Charles Avenue if I wanted to,” Helen would say, and the maids would hold their lips together and look into each other’s eyes.

One afternoon the Wilson children and their maids were sitting on the porch after school with some of the neighbors’ children and maids. The baby was on the porch in a bassinet on wheels and a new maid was looking out for her. Helen was in the biggest swing and was swinging as high as she could go so that none of the other children could get in the swing with her.

“Helen,” the new maid said, “it’s Tim’s turn in the swing. You been swinging for fifteen minutes while Tim’s been waiting. You be a good girl now and let Tim have a turn. You too big to act like that.”

“You’re just a high-yeller nigger,” Helen called, “and you can’t make me do anything.” And she swung up higher and higher.

This maid had never had Helen call her names before and she had a quick temper and didn’t put up with children calling her a nigger. She walked over to the swing and grabbed the chain and stopped it from moving.

“You say you’re sorry for that, little fat honky white girl,” she said, and made as if to grab Helen by the arms, but Helen got away and started running, calling over her shoulder, “Nigger, can’t make me do anything.”

She was running and looking over her shoulder and she hit the bassinet and it went rolling down the brick stairs so fast none of the maids or children could stop it. It rolled down the stairs and threw the baby onto the sidewalk and the blood from the baby’s head began to move all over the concrete like a little ruby lake.

The Wilsons’ house was on Philip Street, a street so rich it even had its own drugstore. Not some tacky chain drugstore with everything on special all the time, but a cute drugstore made out of a frame bungalow with gingerbread trim. Everything inside cost twice as much as it did in a regular drugstore, and the grown people could order any kind of drugs they needed and a green Mazda pickup would bring them right over. The children had to get their drugs from a fourteen-year-old pusher in Audubon Park named Leroi, but they could get all the ice cream and candy and chewing gum they wanted from the drugstore and charge it to their parents.

No white adults were at home in the houses where the maids worked so they sent the children running to the drugstore to bring the druggist to help with the baby. They called the hospital and ordered an ambulance and they called several doctors and they called Tom’s bank. All the children who were old enough ran to the drugstore except Helen. Helen sat on the porch steps staring down at the baby with the maids hovering over it like swans, and she was crying and screaming and beating her hands against her head. She was in one of the periods when she couldn’t have Dexedrine. She screamed and screamed, but none of the maids had time to help her. They were too busy with the baby.

“Shut up, Helen,” one of the maids called. “Shut up that goddamn screaming. This baby is about to die.”

A police car and the local patrol service drove up. An ambulance arrived and the yard filled with people. The druggist and one of the maids rode off in the ambulance with the baby. The crowd in the yard swarmed and milled and swam before Helen’s eyes like a parade.

Finally they stopped looking like people and just looked like spots of color on the yard. Helen ran up the stairs and climbed under her cherry four-poster bed and pulled her pillows and her eiderdown comforter under it with her. There were cereal boxes and an empty ice cream carton and half a tin of English cookies under the headboard. Helen was soaked with sweat and her little Lily playsuit was tight under the arms and cut into her flesh. Helen rolled up in the comforter and began to dream the dream of the heavy clouds. She dreamed she was praying, but the beads of the rosary slipped through her fingers so quickly she couldn’t catch them and it was cold in the church and beautiful and fragrant, then dark, then light, and Helen was rolling in the heavy clouds that rolled her like biscuit dough. Just as she was about to suffocate they rolled her face up to the blue air above the clouds. Then Helen was a pink kite floating above the houses at evening. In the yards children were playing and fathers were driving up and baseball games were beginning and the sky turned gray and closed upon the city like a lid.

And now the baby is alone with Helen in her room and the door is locked and Helen ties the baby to the table so it won’t fall off.

“Hold still, Baby, this will just be a little shot. This won’t hurt much. This won’t take a minute.” And the baby is still and Helen begins to work on it.

Letty knelt down beside the bed. “Helen, please come out from under there. No one is mad at you. Please come out and help me, Helen. I need you to help me.”

Helen held on tighter to the slats of the bed and squeezed her eyes shut and refused to look at Letty.

Letty climbed under the bed to touch the child. Letty was crying and her heart had an anchor in it that kept digging in and sinking deeper and deeper.

Dr. Zander came into the bedroom and knelt beside the bed and began to talk to Helen. Finally he gave up being reasonable and wiggled his small gray-suited body under the bed and Helen was lost in the area of arms that tried to hold her.

Tom was sitting in the bank president’s office trying not to let Mr. Saunders know how much he despised him or how much it hurt and mattered to him to be listening to a lecture. Tom thought he was too old to have to listen to lectures. He was tired and he wanted a drink and he wanted to punch the bastard in the face.

“I know, I know,” he answered, “I can take care of it. Just give me a month or two. You’re right. I’ll take care of it.”

And he smoothed the pants of his cord suit and waited for the rest of the lecture.

A man came into the room without knocking. Tom’s secretary was behind him.

“Tom, I think your baby has had an accident. I don’t know any details. Look, I’ve called for a car. Let me go with you.”

Tom ran up the steps of his house and into the hallway full of neighbors and relatives. A girl in a tennis dress touched him on the arm, someone handed him a drink. He ran up the winding stairs to Helen’s room. He stood in the doorway. He could see Letty’s shoes sticking out from under the bed. He could hear Dr. Zander talking. He couldn’t go near them.

“Letty,” he called, “Letty, come here, my god, come out from there.”

No one came to the funeral but the family. Letty wore a plain dress she would wear any day and the children all wore their school clothes.

The funeral was terrible for the Wilsons, but afterward they went home and all the people from the Garden District and from all over town started coming over to cheer them up. It looked like the biggest cocktail party ever held in New Orleans. It took four rented butlers just to serve the drinks. Everyone wanted to get in on the Wilsons’ tragedy.

In the months that followed the funeral Tom began to have sinus headaches for the first time in years. He was drinking a lot and smoking again. He was allergic to whiskey, and when he woke up in the morning his nose and head were so full of phlegm he had to vomit before he could think straight.

He began to have trouble with his vision.

One November day the high yellow windows of the Shell Oil Building all turned their eyes upon him as he stopped at the corner of Poydras and Carondelet to wait for a streetlight, and he had to pull the car over to a curb and talk to himself for several minutes before he could drive on.

He got back all the keys to his apartment so he could go there and be alone and think. One day he left work at two o’clock and drove around Jefferson Parish all afternoon drinking Scotch and eating potato chips.

Not as many people at the bank wanted to go out to lunch with him anymore. They were sick and tired of pretending his expensive mistakes were jokes.

One night Tom was gambling at the Pickwick Club with a poker group and a man jokingly accused him of cheating. Tom jumped up from the table, grabbed the man, and began hitting him with his fists. He hit the man in the mouth and knocked out his new gold inlays.

“You dirty little goddamn bond peddler, you son of a bitch! I’ll kill you for that,” Tom yelled, and it took four waiters to hold him while the terrified man made his escape. The next morning Tom resigned from the club.

He started riding the streetcar downtown to work so he wouldn’t have to worry about driving his car home if he got drunk. He was worrying about money and he was worrying about his gambling debts, but most of the time he was thinking about Helen. She looked so much like him that he believed people would think she was his illegitimate child. The more he tried to talk himself into believing the baby’s death was an accident, the more obstinate his mind became.

The Wilson children were forbidden to take the Labs out of the kennels without permission. One afternoon Tom came home earlier than usual and found Helen sitting in the open door of one of the kennels playing with a half-grown litter of puppies. She was holding one of the puppies and the others were climbing all around her and spilling out onto the grass. She held the puppy by its forelegs, making it dance in the air, then letting it drop. Then she would gather it in her arms and hold it tight and sing to it.

Tom walked over to the kennel and grabbed her by an arm and began to paddle her as hard as he could.

“Goddamn you, what are you trying to do? You know you aren’t supposed to touch those dogs. What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Helen was too terrified to scream. The Wilsons never spanked their children for anything.

“I didn’t do anything to it. I was playing with it,” she sobbed.

Letty and the twins came running out of the house and when Tom saw Letty he stopped hitting Helen and walked in through the kitchen door and up the stairs to the bedroom. Letty gave the children to the cook and followed him.

Tom stood by the bedroom window trying to think of something to say to Letty. He kept his back turned to her and he was making a nickel disappear with his left hand. He thought of himself at Tommie Keenen’s birthday party wearing his black coat and hat and doing his famous rope trick. Mr. Keenen had given him fifteen dollars. He remembered sticking the money in his billfold.

“My god, Letty, I’m sorry. I don’t know what the shit’s going on. I thought she was hurting the dog. I know I shouldn’t have hit her and there’s something I need to tell you about the bank. Kennington is getting sacked. I may be part of the housecleaning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before? Can’t Daddy do anything?”

“I don’t want him to do anything. Even if it happens it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s just bank politics. We’ll say I quit. I want to get out of there anyway. That fucking place is driving me crazy.”

Tom put the nickel in his pocket and closed the bedroom door. He could hear the maid down the hall comforting Helen. He didn’t give a fuck if she cried all night. He walked over to Letty and put his arms around her. He smelled like he’d been drinking for a week. He reached under her dress and pulled down her pantyhose and her underpants and began kissing her face and hair while she stood awkwardly with the pants and hose around her feet like a halter. She was trying to cooperate.

She forgot that Tom smelled like sweat and whiskey. She was thinking about the night they were married. Every time they made love Letty pretended it was that night. She had spent thousands of nights in a bridal suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York City.

Letty lay on the walnut bed leaning into a pile of satin pillows and twisting a gold bracelet around her wrist. She could hear the children playing outside. She had a headache and her stomach was queasy, but she was afraid to take a Valium or an aspirin. She was waiting for the doctor to call her back and tell her if she was pregnant. She already knew what he was going to say.

Tom came into the room and sat by her on the bed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Please don’t do that. I’m tired.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong. Tom, please leave me alone.”

Tom walked out through the French windows and onto a little balcony that overlooked the play yard and the dog runs. Sunshine flooded Philip Street, covering the houses and trees and dogs and children with a million volts a minute. It flowed down to hide in the roots of trees, glistening on the cars, baking the street, and lighting Helen’s rumpled hair where she stooped over the puppy. She was singing a little song. She had made up the song she was singing.

“The baby’s dead. The baby’s dead. The baby’s gone to heaven.”

“Jesus God,” Tom muttered. All up and down Philip Street fathers were returning home from work. A jeep filled with teenagers came tearing past and threw a beer can against the curb.

Six or seven pieces of Tom’s mind sailed out across the street and stationed themselves along the power line that zigzagged back and forth along Philip Street between the live oak trees.

The pieces of his mind sat upon the power line like a row of black starlings. They looked him over.

Helen took the dog out of the buggy and dragged it over to the kennel.

“Jesus Christ,” Tom said, and the pieces of his mind flew back to him as swiftly as they had flown away and entered his eyes and ears and nostrils and arranged themselves in their proper places like parts of a phrenological head.

Tom looked at his watch. It said six fifteen. He stepped back into the bedroom and closed the French windows. A vase of huge roses from the garden hid Letty’s reflection in the mirror.

“I’m going to the camp for the night. I need to get away. Besides, the season’s almost over.”

“All right,” Letty answered. “Who are you going with?”

“I think I’ll take Helen with me. I haven’t paid any attention to her for weeks.”

“That’s good,” Letty said, “I really think I’m getting a cold. I’ll have a tray up for supper and try to get some sleep.”

Tom moved around the room, opening drawers and closets and throwing some gear into a canvas duffel bag. He changed into his hunting clothes.

He removed the guns he needed from a shelf in the upstairs den and cleaned them neatly and thoroughly and zipped them into their carriers.

“Helen,” he called from the downstairs porch, “bring the dog in the house and come get on some play clothes. I’m going to take you to the duck camp with me. You can take the dog.”

“Can we stop and get beignets?” Helen called back, coming running at the invitation.

“Sure we can, honey. Whatever you like. Go get packed. We’ll leave as soon as dinner is over.”

It was past nine at night. They crossed the Mississippi River from the New Orleans side on the last ferry going to Algier’s Point. There was an offshore breeze and a light rain fell on the old brown river. The Mississippi River smelled like the inside of a nigger cabin, powerful and fecund. The smell came in Tom’s mouth until he felt he could chew it.

He leaned over the railing and vomited. He felt better and walked back to the red Chevrolet pickup he had given himself for a birthday present. He thought it was chic for a banker to own a pickup.

Helen was playing with the dog, pushing him off the seat and laughing when he climbed back on her lap. She had a paper bag of doughnuts from the French Market and was eating them and licking the powdered sugar from her fingers and knocking the dog off the seat.

She wasn’t the least bit sleepy.

“I’m glad Tim didn’t get to go. Tim was bad at school, that’s why he had to stay home, isn’t it? The sisters called Momma. I don’t like Tim. I’m glad I got to go by myself.” She stuck her fat arms out the window and rubbed Tom’s canvas hunting jacket. “This coat feels hard. It’s all dirty. Can we go up in the cabin and talk to the pilot?”

“Sit still, Helen.”

“Put the dog in the back, he’s bothering me.” She bounced up and down on the seat. “We’re going to the duck camp. We’re going to the duck camp.”

The ferry docked. Tom drove the pickup onto the blacktop road past the city dump and on into Plaquemines Parish.

They drove into the brackish marshes that fringe the Gulf of Mexico where it extends in ragged fingers along the coast below and to the east of New Orleans. As they drove closer to the sea the hardwoods turned to palmetto and water oak and willow.

The marshes were silent. Tom could smell the glasswort and black mangrove, the oyster and shrimp boats.

He wondered if it were true that children and dogs could penetrate a man’s concealment, could know him utterly.

Helen leaned against his coat and prattled on.

In the Wilson house on Philip Street, Tim and the twins were cuddled up by Letty, hearing one last story before they went to bed.

A blue wicker tray held the remains of the children’s hot chocolate. The china cups were a confirmation present sent to Letty from Limoges, France.

Now she was finishing reading a wonderful story by Ludwig Bemelmans about a little convent girl in Paris named Madeline who reforms the son of the Spanish ambassador, putting an end to his terrible habit of beheading chickens on a miniature guillotine.

Letty was feeling better. She had decided God was just trying to make up to her for Jennifer.

The camp was a three-room wooden shack built on pilings out over Bayou Lafouche, which runs through the middle of the parish.

The inside of the camp was casually furnished with old leather office furniture, hand-me-down tables and lamps, and a walnut poker table from Neiman-Marcus. Photographs of hunts and parties were tacked around the walls. Over the poker table were pictures of racehorses and their owners and an assortment of ribbons won in races.

Tom laid the guns down on the bar and opened a cabinet over the sink in the part of the room that served as a kitchen. The nigger hadn’t come to clean up after the last party and the sink was piled with half-washed dishes. He found a clean glass and a bottle of Tanqueray gin and sat down behind the bar.

Helen was across the room on the floor finishing the beignets and trying to coax the dog to come closer. He was considering it. No one had remembered to feed him.

Tom pulled a new deck of cards out of a drawer, broke the seal, and began to shuffle them.

Helen came and stood by the bar. “Show me a trick, Daddy. Make the queen disappear. Show me how to do it.”

“Do you promise not to tell anyone the secret? A magician never tells his secrets.”

“I won’t tell. Daddy, please show me, show me now.”

Tom spread out the cards. He began to explain the trick.

“All right, you go here and here, then here. Then pick up these in just the right order, but look at the people while you do it, not at the cards.”

“I’m going to do it for Lisa.”

“She’s going to beg you to tell the secret. What will you do then?”

“I’ll tell her a magician never tells his secrets.”

Tom drank the gin and poured some more.

“Now let me do it to you, Daddy.”

“Not yet, Helen. Go sit over there with the dog and practice it where I can’t see what you’re doing. I’ll pretend I’m Lisa and don’t know what’s going on.”

Tom picked up the Kliengunther 7mm magnum rifle and shot the dog first, splattering its brains all over the door and walls. Without pausing, without giving her time to raise her eyes from the red and gray and black rainbow of the dog, he shot the little girl.

The bullet entered her head from the back. Her thick body rolled across the hardwood floor and lodged against a hat rack from Jody Mellon’s old office in the Hibernia Bank Building. One of her arms landed on a pile of old Penthouse magazines and her disordered brain flung its roses north and east and south and west and rejoined the order from which it casually arose.

Tom put down the rifle, took a drink of the thick gin, and, carrying the pistol, walked out onto the pier through the kitchen door. Without removing his glasses or his hunting cap he stuck the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver against his palate and splattered his own head all over the new pier and the canvas covering of the Boston Whaler. His body struck the boat going down and landed in eight feet of water beside a broken crab trap left over from the summer.

A pair of deputies from the Plaquemines Parish sheriff’s office found the bodies.

Everyone believed it was some terrible inexplicable mistake or accident.

No one believed that much bad luck could happen to a nice lady like Letty Dufrechou Wilson, who never hurt a flea or gave anyone a minute’s trouble in her life.

No one believed that much bad luck could get together between the fifteenth week after Pentecost and the third week in Advent.

No one believed a man would kill his own little illegitimate dyslexic daughter just because she was crazy.

And no one, not even the district attorney of New Orleans, wanted to believe a man would shoot a $3,000 Labrador retriever sired by Super Chief out of Prestidigitation.

Spats by Valerie Martin

(Originally published in 1988)

New Orleans East

The dogs are scratching at the kitchen door. How long, Lydia thinks, has she been lost in the thought of her rival dead? She passes her hand over her eyes, an unconscious effort to push the hot red edge off everything she sees, and goes to the door to let them in.

When Ivan confessed that he was in love with another woman, Lydia thought she could ride it out. She told him what she had so often told him in the turbulent course of their marriage, that he was a fool, that he would be sorry. Even as she watched his friends loading his possessions into the truck, even when she stood alone in the silent half-empty house contemplating a pale patch on the wall where one of his pictures had been, even then she didn’t believe he was gone. Now she has only one hope to hold on to: he has left the dogs with her and this must mean he will be coming back.

When she opens the door Gretta hangs back, as she always does, but Spats pushes his way in as soon as she has turned the knob, knocking the door back against her shins and barreling past her, his heavy tail slapping the wood repeatedly. No sooner is he inside than he turns to block the door so that Gretta can’t get past him. He lowers his big head and nips at her forelegs; it’s play, it’s all in fun, but Gretta only edges past him, pressing close to Lydia, who pushes at the bigger dog with her foot. “Spats,” she says, “leave her alone.” Spats backs away, but he is only waiting until she is gone; then he will try again. Lydia is struck with the inevitability of this scene. It happens every day, several times a day, and it is always the same. The dogs gambol into the kitchen, knocking against the table legs, turning about in ever-narrowing circles, until they throw themselves down a few feet apart and settle for their naps. Gretta always sleeps curled tightly in a semicircle, her only defense against attacks from her mate, who sleeps on his side, his long legs extended, his neck stretched out, the open, deep sleep of the innocent or the oppressor.

Lydia stands at the door looking back at the dogs. Sometimes Ivan got right down on the floor with Spats, lay beside him holding his big black head against his chest and talking to him. “Did you have a good time at the park today?” he’d croon. “Did you swim? Are you really tired now? Are you happy?” This memory causes Lydia’s upper lip to pull back from her teeth. How often had she wanted to kick him right in his handsome face when he did that, crooning over the dog as if it were his child or his mistress. What about me? she thought. What about my day? But she never said that; instead she turned away, biting back her anger and confusion, for she couldn’t admit that she was jealous of a dog.

Spats is asleep immediately, his jaws slack and his tongue lolling out over his black lips. As Lydia looks at him she has an unexpected thought: she could kill him. It is certainly in her power. No one would do anything about it, and it would hurt Ivan as nothing else could. She could poison him, or shoot him, or she could take him to a vet and say he was vicious and have him put away.

She lights a match against the grout in the countertop and turns the stove burner on. It is too cold, and she is so numb with the loss of her husband that she watches the flame wearily, hopelessly; it can do so little for her. She could plunge her hand into it and burn it, or she could stand close to it and still be cold. Then she puts the kettle over the flame and turns away.

She had argued with Ivan about everything for years, so often and so intensely that it seemed natural to her. She held him responsible for the hot flush that rose to her cheeks, the bitter taste that flooded her mouth at the very thought of him. She believed that she was ill; sometimes she believed her life was nearly over and she hated Ivan for this too, that he was killing her with these arguments and that he didn’t care.

When the water is boiling she fills a cup with coffee and takes it to the table. She sits quietly in the still house; the only sound is the clink of the cup as she sets it back in the saucer. She goes through a cycle of resolutions. The first is a simple one: she will make her husband come back. It is inconceivable that she will fail. They always had these arguments, they even separated a few times, but he always came back and so he always would. He would tire of this other woman in a few weeks and then he would be back. After all, she asked herself, what did this woman have that she didn’t have? An education? And what good was that? If Ivan loved this woman for her education, it wasn’t really as if he loved her for herself. He loved her for something she had acquired. And Lydia was certain that Ivan had loved her, had married her, and must still love her, only for herself, because she was so apparent, so undisguised; there wasn’t anything else to love her for.

So this first resolution is a calm one: she will wait for her husband and he will return and she will take him back.

She sets the cup down roughly on the table, for the inevitable question is upon her: how long can she wait? This has been going on for two months, and she is sick of waiting. There must be something she can do. The thought of action stiffens her spine, and her jaw clenches involuntarily. Now comes the terrible vision of her revenge, which never fails to take her so by surprise that she sighs as she lays herself open to it; revenge is her only lover now. She will see a lawyer, sue Ivan for adultery, and get every cent she can out of him, everything, for the rest of his life. But this is unsatisfactory, promising, as it does, nothing better than a long life without him, a life in which he continues to love someone else. She would do better to buy a gun and shoot him. She could call him late at night, when the other woman is asleep, and beg him to come over. He will come; she can scare him into it. And then when he lets himself in with his key she will shoot him in the living room. He left her, she will tell the court. She bought the gun to protect herself because she was alone. How was she to know he would let himself in so late at night? He told her he was never coming back and she had assumed the footsteps in the living room came from the man every lonely woman lies in bed at night listening for, the man who has found out her secret, who knows she is alone, whose mission, which is sanctioned by the male world, is to break the spirit if not the bones of those rebellious women who have the temerity to sleep at night without a man. So she shot him. She wasn’t going to ask any questions and live to see him get off in court. How could she have known it was her husband, who had abandoned her?

Yes, yes, that would work. It would be easily accomplished, but wouldn’t she only end up as she was now? Better to murder the other woman, who was, after all, the cause of all this intolerable pain. She knew her name, knew where she lived, where she worked. She had called her several times just to hear her voice, her cheerful hello, in which Lydia always heard Ivan’s presence, as if he were standing right next to the woman and she had turned away from kissing him to answer the insistent phone. Lydia had heard of a man who killed people for money. She could pay this man, and then the woman would be gone.

The kettle is screaming; she has forgotten to turn off the flame. So she could drink another cup of coffee, then take a bath. But that would take only an hour or so and she has to get through the whole day. The silence in the house is intense, though she knows it is no more quiet than usual. Ivan was never home much in the daytime. What did she do before? It seems to her that that life was another life, one she will never know again, the life in which each day ended with the appearance of her husband. Sometimes, she admitted, she had not been happy to see him, but her certainty that she would see him made the question of whether she was happy or sad a matter of indifference to her. Often she didn’t see him until late at night, when he appeared at one of the clubs where she was singing. He took a place in the audience and when she saw him she always sang for him. Then they were both happy. He knew she was admired, and that pleased him, as if she were his reflection and what others saw when they looked at her was more of him. Sometimes he gave her that same affectionate look he gave himself in mirrors, and when he did it made her lightheaded, and she would sing, holding her hands out a little before her, one index finger stretched out as if she were pointing at something, and she would wait until the inevitable line about how it was “you” she loved, wanted, hated, couldn’t get free of, couldn’t live without, and at that “you” she would make her moving hands be still and with her eyes as well as her hands she would point to her husband in the crowd. Those were the happiest moments they had, though neither of them was really conscious of them, nor did they ever speak of this happiness. When, during the break, they did speak, it was usually to argue about something.

She thinks of this as she stares dully at the dogs, Ivan’s dogs. Later she will drive through the cold afternoon light to Larry’s cold garage, where they will rehearse. They will have dinner together; Larry and Simon will try to cheer her up, and Kenneth, the drummer, will sit looking on in his usual daze. They will take drugs if anyone has any, cocaine or marijuana, and Simon will drink a six-pack of beer.

Then they will go to the club and she will sing as best she can. She will sing and sing, into the drunken faces of the audience, over the bobbing heads of the frenzied dancers; she will sing like some blinded bird lost in a dark forest trying to find her way out by listening to the echo of her own voice. The truth is that she sings better than she ever has. Everyone tells her so. Her voice is so full of suffering that hearing it would move a stone, though it will not move her husband, because he won’t be there. Yet she can’t stop looking for him in the audience, as she always has. And as she sings and looks for him she will remember exactly what it was like to find herself in his eyes. That was how she had first seen him, sitting at a table on the edge of the floor, watching her closely. He was carrying on a conversation with a tired-looking woman across from him but he watched Lydia so closely that she could feel his eyes on her. She smiled. She was aware of herself as the surprising creation she really was, a woman who was beautiful to look at and beautiful to hear. She was, at that moment, so self-conscious and so contented that she didn’t notice what an oddity he was, a man who was both beautiful and masculine. Her attachment to his appearance, to his gestures, the suddenness of his smile, the coldness of his eyes, came later. At that moment it was herself in his eyes that she loved; as fatal a love match as she would ever know.

The phone rings. She hesitates, then gets up and crosses to the counter. She picks up the receiver and holds it to her ear.

“Hello,” Ivan says. “Lydia?”

She says nothing.

“Talk to me!” he exclaims.

“Why should I?”

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

“What are you doing?”

“Why are you calling me?”

“About the dogs.”

“What about them?”

“Are they okay?”

She sighs. “Yes.” Then, patiently, “When are you coming to get them?”

“I can’t,” he says. “I can’t take them. I can’t keep them here.”

“Why?”

“There’s no fenced yard. Vivian’s landlord doesn’t allow dogs.”

At the mention of her rival’s name, Lydia feels a sudden rush of blood to her face. “You bastard,” she hisses.

“Baby, please,” he says, “try to understand.”

She slams the receiver down into the cradle. “Bastard,” she says again. Her fingers tighten on the edge of the counter until the knuckles are white. He doesn’t want the dogs. He doesn’t want her. He isn’t coming back. “I really can’t stand it,” she says into the empty kitchen. “I don’t think I will be able to stand it.”

She is feeding the dogs. They have to eat at either end of the kitchen because Spats will eat Gretta’s dinner if he can. Gretta has to be fed first; then Spats is lured away from her bowl with his own. Gretta eats quickly, swallowing one big bite after another, for she knows she has only the time it takes Spats to finish his meal before he will push her away from hers. Tonight Spats is in a bad humor. He growls at Gretta when Lydia sets her bowl down. Gretta hangs her head and backs away. “Spats!” Lydia says. “Leave her alone.” She pushes him away with one hand, holding out his bowl before him with the other.

But he growls again, turning his face toward her, and she sees that his teeth are bared and his threat is serious. “Spats,” she says firmly, but she backs away. His eyes glaze over with something deep and vicious, and she knows that he no longer hears her. She drops the bowl. The sound of the bowl hitting the linoleum and the sight of his food scattered before him brings Spats back to himself. He falls to eating off the floor. Gretta lifts her head to watch him, then returns to her hurried eating.

Lydia leans against the stove. Her legs are weak and her heart beats absurdly in her ears. In the midst of all this weakness a habitual ambivalence goes hard as stone. Gretta, she thinks, certainly deserves to eat in peace.

She looks down at Spats. Now he is the big, awkward, playful, good fellow again.

“You just killed yourself,” Lydia says. Spats looks back at her, his expression friendly, affable. He no longer remembers his fit of bad temper.

Lydia smiles at him. “You just killed yourself and you don’t even have the sense to know it,” she says.

It is nearly dawn. Lydia lies in her bed alone. She used to sleep on her back when Ivan was with her. Now she sleeps on her side, her legs drawn up to her chest. Or rather, she reminds herself, she lies awake in this position and waits for the sleep that doesn’t come.

As far as she is concerned she is still married. Her husband is gone, but marriage, in her view, is not a condition that can be dissolved by external circumstances. She has always believed this; she told Ivan this when she married him, and he agreed or said he agreed. They were bound together for life. He had said he wanted nothing more.

She still believes it. It is all she understands marriage to be. They must cling to each other and let the great nightmarish flood of time wash over them as it will; at the end they would be found wherever they were left, washed onto whatever alien shore, dead or alive, still together, their lives entwined as surely as their bodies, inseparably, eternally. How many times in that last year, in the midst of the interminable quarrels that constituted their life together, had she seen pass across his face an expression that filled her with rage, for she saw that he knew she was drowning and he feared she would pull him down with her. So even as she raged at him, she clung to him more tightly, and the lovemaking that followed their arguments was so intense, so filled with her need of him that, she told herself, he must know, wherever she was going, he was going with her.

Now, she confesses to herself, she is drowning. Alone, at night, in the moonless sea of her bed, where she is tossed from nightmare to nightmare so that she wakes gasping for air, throwing her arms out before her, she is drowning alone in the dark and there is nothing to hold on to.

Lydia sits on the floor in the veterinarian’s office. Spats lies next to her; his head rests in her lap. He is unconscious but his heart is still beating feebly. Lydia can feel it beneath her palm, which she has pressed against his side. His mouth has gone dry and his dry tongue lolls out to one side. His black lips are slack and there is no sign of the sharp canine teeth that he used to bare so viciously at the slightest provocation. Lydia sits watching his closed eyes and she is afflicted with the horror of what she has done.

He is four years old; she has known him all his life. When Ivan brought him home he was barely weaned and he cried all that first night, a helpless baby whimpering for his lost mother. But he was a sturdy, healthy animal, greedy for life, and he transferred his affections to Ivan and to his food bowl in a matter of days. Before he was half her size he had terrorized Gretta into the role he and Ivan had worked out for her: dog-wife, mother to his children. She would never have a moment’s freedom as long as he lived, no sleep that could not be destroyed by his sudden desire for play, no meal that he did not oversee and covet. She was more intelligent than he, and his brutishness wore her down. She became a nervous, quiet animal who would rather be patted than fed, who barricaded herself under desks, behind chairs, wherever she could find a space Spats couldn’t occupy at the same time.

Spats was well trained; Ivan saw to that. He always came when he was called and he followed just at his master’s heel when they went out for their walks every day. But it ran against his grain; every muscle in his body was tensed for that moment when Ivan would say, “Go ahead,” and then he would spring forward and run as hard as he could for as long as he was allowed. He was a fine swimmer and loved to fetch sticks thrown into the water.

When he was a year old, his naturally territorial disposition began to show signs of something amiss. He attacked a neighbor who made the mistake of walking into his yard, and bit him twice, on the arm and on the hand. Lydia stood in the doorway screaming at him, and Ivan was there instantly, shouting at Spats and pulling him away from the startled neighbor, who kept muttering that it was his own fault; he shouldn’t have come into the yard. Lydia had seen the attack from the start; she had, she realized, seen it coming and not known it. What disturbed her was that Spats had tried to bite the man’s face or his throat, and that he had given his victim almost no notice of his intention. One moment he was wagging his tail and barking, she told Ivan; then, with a snarl, he was on the man.

Ivan made excuses for the animal, and Lydia admitted that it was freakish behavior. But in the years that followed, it happened again and again. Lydia had used this evidence against him, had convicted him on the grounds of it; in the last two years he had bitten seven people. Between these attacks he was normal, friendly, playful, and he grew into such a beautiful animal, his big head was so noble, his carriage so powerful and impressive, that people were drawn to him and often stopped to ask about him. He enjoyed everything in his life; he did everything — eating, running, swimming — with such gusto that it was a pleasure to watch him. He was so full of energy, of such inexhaustible force, it was as if he embodied life, and death must stand back a little in awe at the sight of him.

Now Lydia strokes his head, which seems to be getting heavier every moment, and she says his name softly. It’s odd, she thinks, that I would like to die but I have to live, and he would like to live but he has to die.

In the last weeks she has wept for herself, for her lost love, for her husband, for her empty life, but the tears that fill her eyes now are for the dying animal she holds in her arms. She is looking straight into the natural beauty that was his life and she sees resting over it, like a relentless cloud of doom, the empty lovelessness that is her own. His big heart has stopped; he is gone.

The Man with Moon Hands by O’Neil De Noux

(Originally published in 1993)

Tchoupitoulas and Jackson

Before the meat wagon arrived, LaStanza went to take a look at the body. He didn’t need a flashlight. The bright moon shined directly into that dirty New Orleans alley. Just inside the alley, LaStanza passed a young patrolman with sandy hair explaining to the other policemen, “He had a gun.”

The body was about halfway down the dead-end alley. LaStanza’s partner, Paul Snowood, stood over it. Next to him, a crime lab technician was reloading his camera.

“Come see this,” Snowood twanged. “Got him through the pump with one shot.” In his cowboy hat, rope tie around the neck of his western shirt, brown jeans, and snakeskin boots, Detective Snowood couldn’t look more out of place if he tried.

“You sure you don’t want me to take this?” LaStanza asked as he stepped up.

“You’re up to your ass in murders already, boy,” Snowood said. “This ain’t nothin’ but paperwork.” Tilting his Stetson back, Snowood pointed to the body with his notepad and added, “Anyway, it looks like a good shootin’.”

The body was on its side, legs straight out, arms contorted like soft pretzels. There were holes in the soles of both shoes and a worn spot on the man’s jeans above the left knee. A stain of dark blood had gathered beneath the twisted torso. A small-caliber, blue-steel semiautomatic lay two feet from the man’s head. It was a typical Saturday night special.

“You can handle the canvass for me, if you’ve a hankerin’.”

“Sure,” LaStanza said as he leaned over the body.

It was a white male, midtwenties, about five feet eight inches tall, one hundred and eighty pounds, with frizzy brown hair and a large gunshot wound in the center of his chest. Stepping out of the way of the technician, LaStanza paused and looked back at the body. There was something familiar about it. That was when he saw the hands.

He found some empty soft drink cases a few feet away and sat on them as his partner and the technician began taking measurements. Tugging angrily on his mustache, LaStanza stared at the pallid hands, at the limp fingers that looked like white goldfish left out to rot, and remembered...

LaStanza had been riding alone that night when the call came out.

“Headquarters — any Sixth District unit. Signal 103M with a gun. 2300 block of Rousseau.”

A disturbance on Rousseau Street involving a mental case with a gun. There was only one appropriate thought: Fuck me!

It was a typically busy night in the bloody Sixth District. LaStanza was the only one available. He flipped on his blue lights, accelerated, and made it to Rousseau in less than two minutes. He found a small gathering in the 2300 block, about a dozen people standing in the street in front of an alley between a large warehouse and a junkyard. He was surprised to see a white face in the crowd.

As he climbed out, the white face approached and pointed to the alley and said, “My son’s in there with a.25 automatic. He’s a mental patient.” The man was tall and very thin and wore thick spectacles.

“What’s his problem?” LaStanza asked the spectacles.

“He’s crazy.”

“Who gave him the gun?”

“I did. I mean it’s mine.”

Crazy? It ran in the family. Now it was LaStanza’s problem. There was a loony-tune in an alley with a gun. LaStanza withdrew his stainless steel .357 Smith & Wesson and approached the alley. He could see the young man clearly, standing under a light near the side door of the warehouse.

The man paid no attention to LaStanza moving into the alley. Looking up at the sky, the loony-tune ran his left hand through his frizzy hair. In his right hand he held a small, blue-steel automatic. He looked to be in his early twenties.

When he finally noticed LaStanza, he craned his neck forward and grinned. His large, bulbous eyes batted frantically at the approaching patrolman. He slowly raised the automatic and pointed it toward LaStanza, who ducked into the shadows.

The man went, “Zap. Zap.” He followed this with a frightened laugh. His hand was shaking so hard, LaStanza thought the gun would fall.

The .357 magnum was cocked and pointed center on the man’s chest.

“Put it down,” LaStanza told the man as calmly as he could, “or I’ll blow your brains out the back of your head.” LaStanza’s hands were steady, his voice flat and dry.

The man laughed again as his gun slowly inched forward until he let it drop to the ground. Then he raised his hands and said, “You see these hands?” The man glared at the huge white digits at the end of his palms. “They’re not my hands. They’re moon hands!”

LaStanza moved forward, stepped on the automatic, holstered his magnum, and slapped a handcuff across the loony’s right wrist.

“These aren’t my hands,” the man complained as he tried to put his free hand in front of LaStanza’s eyes. With a quick jerk, LaStanza twisted the man around and cuffed both hands behind his back before picking up the automatic.

“They’re moon hands!” the man cried.

On the way to Charity Hospital, the man told LaStanza he was a second-generation clone. Then he started pleading for LaStanza to take him to Tchoupitoulas and Jackson Avenue, to catch his flight — to Alpha Six.

“This one needs a ride,” LaStanza told the standard-issue, heavyset, flat-faced admitting nurse. “Put him on the nonstop to Mandeville.” It was nuthouse time, absolutely.

“Must be a full moon tonight,” the bored nurse said. “All the loonies are out.”

While LaStanza was filling out his report, a Seventh District patrolman came in with a howling man.

“What’s his problem?” LaStanza asked.

“He thinks the world’s being taken over by clones.”

LaStanza couldn’t resist. “Put him in with mine. He’s a second-generation clone.”

The patrolman eagerly obliged. LaStanza and the other cop watched the two men standing at opposite ends of the small trauma room, hissing and spitting at one another. LaStanza laughed so hard, his side ached. He’d been on the street long enough to not pass up an opportunity like that. Laughs were hard to find along the bloody streets of the Sixth District.

The Man with Moon Hands became one of LaStanza’s favorite cop stories, especially after the man was released, as all nutcases inevitably were. The frizzy-haired loony began waiting every night at Tchoupitoulas and Jackson Avenue, for his flight — to Alpha Six. No matter the weather, he would be there, standing with his tattered brown suitcase in front of the old, abandoned New Orleans Cotton Exchange. No one bothered him. Most people probably figured he was just waiting in the wrong place for the Jackson Avenue Ferry.

One evening LaStanza watched the Man with Moon Hands for an hour and the man never moved a muscle. He stood patiently, the moon hands wrapped around the suitcase, the bulging eyes tilted upward at the dark sky, as he waited for his flight — to Alpha Six.

Then LaStanza got transferred to Homicide. Three years later, LaStanza was in a different alley.

“What’s the matter wit’ you?” Snowood yelled. “I thought you was gonna canvass!”

LaStanza climbed off the cases and started down the alley. He was still looking at the body.

“Mark and I are taking Wyatt Jr. here to the Bureau for his statement,” Snowood said. To Snowood, a cop who shot someone had to be related, no matter how distantly, to Wyatt Earp himself.

LaStanza watched as the corpse was zipped into a black body bag and hauled off by the coroner’s assistants. In the span of two minutes, he was alone. But there was nothing to canvass. It was a dead-end alley with no doors or windows, just brick walls and rusted dumpsters and bent-up garbage cans. It was a garbage alley.

It became very quiet. If he strained, LaStanza could hear cars in the distance, but it was silent in the alley. There was no movement except for the gnats circling over the fresh blood, and the rats crouching in anticipation of the moment when the detective would be gone.

On his way out of the alley, he remembered something else. He remembered yet another alley, back when he was a rookie. It was Mardi Gras morning and someone had killed a cop. LaStanza found the cop killer in a foggy alley. The man had a gun and it was over in less than a second. It was a good shooting, a clean shooting.

He’d shot the man without hesitation. And he wondered about that, about the intangible, about the unspoken reason a cop shoots one and not another. Maybe there was something in the moon man’s frantic eyes that told LaStanza not to shoot. Maybe it was the frizzy hair. Or maybe it was the moon white hands.

“Looks like a good shooting,” Sergeant Mark Land told LaStanza when he arrived at the Homicide office. “Looks like our man had no choice.”

LaStanza sat heavily in his chair and didn’t answer.

Big, burly, and Italian, with thick dark hair and a full mustache, Mark looked like an oversized version of LaStanza. Grinning broadly, the sergeant pulled up Snowood’s chair and began to run down the patrolman’s statement in detail, but LaStanza wasn’t listening. He was thinking about the faded bricks of the old Cotton Exchange and the rusted drain pipes and all the lonely nights spent looking up at an empty sky.

When Mark finished, he yawned and said, “Shit, we’ll be outta here in no time.”

LaStanza leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, but only for a moment.

“Say, boy, what’s wrong wit’ you?” Snowood called out as he approached. “You been acting spooky.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Don’t give me that shit. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I told you.” LaStanza scooped up his black coffee mug with its small inscription that read: FUCK THIS SHIT! He moved over to the coffeepot and poured the hot coffee-and-chicory into his mug, then filled his sergeant’s cup when Mark stepped up. The young patrolman moved up with a Styrofoam cup. LaStanza put the pot down and turned away.

“Something wrong?” the patrolman asked in a shaky voice.

“No,” Mark answered quickly.

LaStanza turned back and looked at the patrolman, noticing how the man’s hand shook when he poured the coffee.

“He pulled the same gun on me a couple years ago,” LaStanza said.

“What?” Mark said as he nearly spilled his coffee.

LaStanza took in a deep breath before adding, “That was the Man with Moon Hands.”

“I’ll be damned!” Mark did spill his coffee this time. Switching his cup to his other hand, he turned to the patrolman and said, “You killed a legend tonight, pal.”

“What are y’all yakkin’ about?” Snowood asked from his desk.

“Your victim was the Man with Moon Hands,” Mark told him.

“No shit?”

LaStanza watched the patrolman’s eyes. There was confusion there, along with a touch of fear.

“You never heard of the Man with Moon Hands?” Mark asked the patrolman.

“No,” the man answered softly. “I’ve only been on the road six months.”

“He was the most famous 103M in the city.”

“At least we know who he is now,” Snowood injected. “Sumbitch had no ID on him.”

“He was a 103M?” the patrolman asked LaStanza, who did not respond. Turning back to Mark, the patrolman added, “He did look weird.”

“What was his name?” Snowood asked his partner.

“I don’t remember,” LaStanza answered, still watching the patrolman, “but it’s gotta be in the computer.”

“Well I’ll be,” the patrolman sighed in relief. “He was crazy!”

LaStanza couldn’t stop his voice from sounding vicious: “You couldn’t see that?”

“What am I,” the patrolman snapped back, “a psychiatrist?” He seemed stunned.

LaStanza gave him the Sicilian stare, the one that went straight through to the back of the man’s skull. Then he walked to his desk and flopped in his chair.

The exasperated patrolman continued explaining to Mark, “He looked right at me and pointed the gun and zapped me.” The patrolman’s voice began to rise as he followed the sergeant back into the interview room. “How’d he get the gun back anyway?”

“Goddamn courts release everything nowadays,” Mark growled angrily.

LaStanza was finishing his daily report when the patrolman approached. Snowood had gone to the computer to try to identify the Man with Moon Hands.

“Excuse me, Detective LaStanza. Can I have a word with you?” The patrolman looked like a dog lost out in the rain.

LaStanza nodded to his partner’s empty chair.

The patrolman’s voice was almost a whisper: “I didn’t know he was... a legend.”

“He was a second-generation clone.”

“What?”

“Forget it.”

The patrolman’s hands were shaking again. He looked like he wanted to run away. Gulping, he managed to say, “How was I supposed to know?”

LaStanza said nothing.

“He pointed a gun at me.”

“You didn’t see a tall man with thick glasses near the alley, did you?”

“No.” The patrolman looked back anxiously.

LaStanza just nodded and returned to his daily.

After a minute, the whisper voice of the patrolman came back: “When he drew down on you, why didn’t you shoot him?”

There it was again, the intangible. How do you explain what couldn’t be explained? How do you explain what was incapable of even being comprehended by the mind, incapable of being distinguished by any of the senses? How do you explain something like that?

LaStanza knew he could not. You just knew.

Peering back into a pair of searching eyes, LaStanza recognized something. He recognized a look. It was a look that said, I’ve got something to live with for the rest of my life. He’d seen that same look in his own mirror.

“I passed the shoot-don’t-shoot class with an A at the academy,” the patrolman said in a strained voice.

“Some things can’t be taught,” LaStanza said finally. “Some things can’t even be explained. You just know.”

“You didn’t shoot him and I did,” the patrolman said. “Why?”

“I just knew.”

It was as if he’d reached over and slapped the patrolman across the face. It took a second for the man to recover. He looked away from LaStanza’s eyes and took in a couple breaths before asking, “Do you think I’ll have any trouble with the grand jury?”

“Don’t worry about it,” LaStanza heard himself say. “It was a good shooting.”

This story is for Josie.

Rose by John Biguenet

(Originally published in 1999)

Gentilly

“It must have been, I think she said, two years after the kidnapping when your wife first came by.” The voice on the phone sounded young. “What was that, ’83, ’84?”

“Kidnapping?”

“Yeah, she told me all about it, how it was for the private detective you hired after the police gave up.”

“You mean the picture?”

“Right, the age progression.”

“You could do it back then?”

“It was a pain in the ass. You had to write your own code. But, yeah, once we had the algorithms for stuff like teeth displacement of the lips, cartilage development in the nose and ears, stuff like that, all you had to do was add fat-to-tissue ratios by age, and you wound up with a fairly decent picture of what the face probably looked like. I mean, after you tried a couple different haircuts and cleaned up the image — the printers were a joke in those days.”

“And you kept updating Kevin’s...” He hesitated as he tried to remember the term. “Kevin’s age progression?”

“Every year, like clockwork, on October 20. Of course, the new ones, it’s no comparison. On-screen, we’re 3-D now; the whole head can rotate. And if you’ve got a tape of the kid talking or singing, there’s even a program to age the voice and sync it with the lips. You sort of teach it to talk, and then it can say anything you want, the head.”

The voice was waiting for him to say something.

“I mean, we thought it was cool, Mr. Grierson, the way you two didn’t lose hope you’d find your boy one day. Even after all these years.”

He hung up while the man was still talking. On the kitchen table, the photo album Emily had used to bind the pictures, the age progressions, lay open to one that had the logo and phone number of Crescent CompuGraphics printed along its border. His son looked fifteen, maybe sixteen, in the picture.

He had found the red album the night before, after his wife’s funeral. Indulging his grief after the desolate service and the miserly reception of chips and soft drinks at her sister’s, he had sunk to his knees before Emily’s hope chest at the foot of their bed, fingering the silk negligee bruised brown with age, inhaling the distant scent of gardenias on the bodice of an old evening gown, burying his arms in all the tenderly folded velvet and satin. It was his burrowing hand that discovered the album at the bottom of the trunk.

At first, he did not know who it was, the face growing younger and younger with each page. But soon enough, he began to suspect. And then, on the very last leaf of the red binder, he recognized the combed hair and fragile smile of the little boy who returned his gaze from a school photograph.

As he thought of Emily secretly thumbing through the age progressions, each year on Kevin’s birthday adding a new portrait on top of the one from the year before, he felt the nausea rising in his throat and took a deep breath. It’s just another kind of memory, he told himself, defending her.

He, for example, still could not forget the green clock on the kitchen wall that had first reminded him his son should be home from school already. Nor could he forget the pitiless clack of the dead bolt as he had unlocked the door to see if the boy was dawdling down the sidewalk. And he would always remember stepping onto the front porch and catching, just at the periphery of his vision, the first glimpse of the pulsing red light, like a flower bobbing in and out of shadow.

In fact, turning his head in that small moment of uncertainty, he took the light to be just that: a red rose tantalized by the afternoon’s late sun but already hatched with the low shadows of the molting elms that lined the street. And he remembered that as he turned toward the flashing light, lifting his eyes over the roses trellised along the fence — the hybrid Blue Girl that would not survive the season, twined among the thick canes and velvet blossoms of the Don Juan — and even as he started down the wooden steps toward the front gate, slowly, deliberately, as if the people running toward the house, shouting his name, had nothing to do with him, he continued to think rose, rose, rose.

Mussolini and the Axeman’s Jazz by Poppy Z. Brite

(Originally published in 1995)

Basin Street

Sarajevo, 1914

Stone turrets and crenelated columns loomed on either side of the Archduke’s motorcade. The crowd parted before the open carriages, an indistinct blur of faces. Francis Ferdinand swallowed some of the unease that had been plaguing him all day: a bitter bile, a constant burn at the back of his throat.

It was his fourteenth wedding anniversary. Sophie sat beside him, a bouquet of scarlet roses at her bosom. These Serbs and Croats were a friendly crowd; as the heir apparent of Austria-Hungary, Francis Ferdinand stood to give them an equal voice in his empire. Besides, Sophie was a Slav, the daughter of a noble Czech family. Surely his marriage to a northern Slav had earned him the sympathy of these southern ones.

Yet the Archduke could not divest himself of the notion that there was a menacing edge to the throng. The occasional vivid detail — a sobbing baby, a flower tucked behind the ear of a beautiful woman — was lost before his eyes could fully register it. He glanced at Sophie. In the summer heat he could smell her sweat mingling with the eau de parfum she had dabbed on this morning.

She met his gaze and smiled faintly. Beneath her veil, her sweet face shone with perspiration. Back in Vienna, Sophie was snubbed by his court because she had been a lady in waiting when she met the Archduke, little better than a servant in their eyes. Francis Ferdinand’s uncle, the old Emperor Francis Joseph, forbade the marriage. When the couple married anyway, Sophie was ostracized in a hundred ways. Francis Ferdinand knew it was sometimes a painful life for her, but she remained a steadfast wife, an exemplary mother.

For this reason he had brought her on the trip to Sarajevo. It was a routine army inspection for him, but for her it was a chance to be treated with the royal honors she deserved. On this anniversary of their blessed union, Sophie would endure no subtle slights, no calculated cruelties.

The Archduke had never loved another human being. His parents were hazy memories, his uncle a shambling old man whose time had come and gone. Even his three children brought him more distraction than joy. The first time he laid eyes on Sophie, he discerned in her an empathy such as he had never seen before. Her features, her mannerisms, her soft ample body — all bespoke a comfort Francis Ferdinand had never formerly craved, but suddenly could not live without.

The four cars approached the Cumuria Bridge. A pall of humidity hung over the water. The Archduke felt his skin steaming inside his heavy uniform, and his uneasiness intensified. He knew how defenseless they must look in the raised carriage, in the Serbian sun, the green feathers on his helmet drooping, Sophie’s red roses beginning to wilt.

As they passed over the bridge, he saw an object arc out of the crowd and come hurtling toward him. In an instant his eye marked it as a crude hand bomb.

Francis Ferdinand raised his arm to protect Sophie and felt hot metal graze his flesh.

Gavrilo Princip’s pistol left a smell on his palm like greasy coins, metallic and sour. It was a cheap thing from Belgium, as likely to blow his hand off as anything else. Still, it was all Gavrilo had, and he was the only one left to murder the villainous fool whose good intentions would crush Serbia.

He had known the other six would fail him. They were a young and earnest lot, always ready to sing the praises of a greater Serbia, but reluctant to look a man in the face and kill him. They spoke of the sanctity of human life, a short-sighted sentiment in Gavrilo’s opinion. Human life was a fleeting thing, an expendable thing. The glory of a nation could endure through the ages. What his comrades failed to fully comprehend was that it must be oiled with human blood.

He raked his dirty hair back from his face and stared along the motorcade route. It looked as if the cars were finally coming. He took a deep breath. As the wet, sooty air entered his lungs, Gavrilo was seized with a racking cough that lasted a full minute. He had no handkerchief, so he cupped his hand over his mouth. When he pulled it away, his fingers were speckled with fresh blood. He and his six comrades were all tubercular, and none of them expected to live past thirty. The fevers, the lassitude, the night sweats, the constant tickling itch deep in the chest — all these made the cyanide capsules they carried in their pockets a source of comfort rather than of dread.

Now the task was left to him. Mohammed and Nedjelko, the first two along the route, were carrying hand bombs. One of them had heaved his bomb — Gavrilo had seen it go flying — but the motorcade had continued toward City Hall with no apparent damage. His comrades between Cumuria Bridge and City Hall — Vasco, Cvijetko, Danilo, Trifko — had done nothing.

The Archduke’s carriage moved slowly through the crowd, then braked and came to a standstill less than five feet from Gavrilo. This struck him as nothing short of a miracle, God telling him to murder the villains for the glory of Serbia.

He fired twice. The pistol did not blow his hand off. He saw Countess Sophie sag against her husband, saw blood on the Archduke’s neck. The deed was done as well as he could do it. Gavrilo turned the pistol on himself, but before he could fire, it was knocked out of his hand. The crowd surged over him.

Gavrilo got his hand into his pocket, found the cyanide capsule and brought it to his mouth. Hundreds of hands were ripping at him, pummeling him. His teeth cracked the capsule open. The foul taste of bitter almonds flooded his mouth. He retched, swallowed, vomited, convulsed. The crowd would surely pull him to pieces. He felt his guts unmooring, his bones coming loose from their sockets, and still he could not die.

Sophie stood on the steps of City Hall between her husband and Fehim Effendi Curcic, the burgomaster of Sarajevo. Though Sophie and several of her attendants were bleeding from superficial cuts obtained from splinters of the bomb casing, and twelve spectators had been taken to hospital, Curcic obviously had no idea that the motorcade had come close to being blown up. He was surveying the crowd, a pleased look on his fat face. “Our hearts are filled with happiness—” he began.

Francis Ferdinand was white with anger. He grabbed the burgomaster’s arm and shouted into his face, “One comes here for a visit and is received with bombs! Mr. Mayor, what do you say?”

Curcic still didn’t understand. He smiled blandly at the Archduke and launched into his welcome speech again. The Archduke let him continue this time, looking disgusted. Never once did Curcic mention the bombing attempt.

Sophie gripped her husband’s hand. She could see Francis Ferdinand gradually pulling himself together. He was a man of inflexible opinions and sudden rages, painfully thin-skinned, capable of holding a grudge for eternity. He was like a spoiled child, bragging that he had shot five thousand stags, darkly hinting that he had brought down as many political enemies. But Sophie loved him. Not even her children fulfilled her vast need to be needed. This man did.

There was a delay while Francis Ferdinand sent a wire to the Emperor, who would have heard about the bomb. The army wanted to continue with the day’s events, but the Archduke insisted upon first visiting the wounded spectators in the hospital.

He turned to Sophie. “You must not come. The risk is too great; there could be another attack.”

Fear clutched at her heart: of dying, of losing him. “No, I must go with you,” she told him, and Francis Ferdinand did not argue. When they entered their carriage again, Oskar Potiorek, the military governor, climbed in with them. His presence made Sophie feel a little safer.

The motorcade rolled back through the thronged streets. When they turned a corner, Sophie saw a sign marking Francis Joseph Street. Just as she noticed this, Potiorek sat up straighter and cried, “What’s this? We’ve taken the wrong way!”

The driver braked. The motorcade ground to a halt. Sophie felt something graze the top of her head, a sharp stinging sensation. The Archduke’s head snapped to one side. At the same time, Sophie felt something like a white-hot fist punch into her belly.

Through a haze of agony she reached for her husband. He leaned toward her, and a torrent of blood gushed from his mouth. She crumpled into his arms. Attendants swarmed around them, asked Francis Ferdinand if he was suffering. The last thing Sophie heard was her husband replying in a wet whisper, “It is nothing... it is nothing.”

They were both dead before the sun had reached its apex in the blazing sky.

New Orleans, 1918

New Orleans is commonly thought of as a French and Spanish town. “Creole,” a word now used to describe rich food of a certain seasoning and humans of a certain shade, first referred to the inevitable mixture of French and Spanish blood that began appearing several years after the city’s founding. The buildings of the Vieux Carré were certainly shaped and adorned by the ancestry of their builders: the Spanish courtyards and ironwork, the French cottages with their carved wooden shutters and pastel paint, the wholly European edifice of St. Louis Cathedral.

But, block by sagging block, the Vieux Carré was abandoned by these upwardly mobile people. By the turn of the century it had become a slum. A wave of Sicilian immigrants moved in. Many of them opened groceries, imported and sold the necessities of life. Some were honest businessmen, some were criminals; most made no such clear distinction. The onorata società offered them a certain amount of protection from the hoodlums who roamed the French Quarter. Naturally they required a payment for this service, and if a man found himself in a position to do them a favor — legal or otherwise — he had no choice but to oblige.

The Italians gradually branched out of the Quarter into every part of the city, and New Orleans became as fully an Italian town as a French or Spanish one.

Joseph D’Antonio, formerly detective of the New Orleans Police Department, had been drinking on the balcony of his second-story hovel since late this afternoon. Bittersweet red wine, one bottle before the sun went down, another two since. His cells soaked it up like bread.

Two weeks in, this hot and sticky May portended a hellish summer. Even late at night, his balcony was the only place he could catch an occasional breath of air, usually tinged with the fetor of the Basin Canal nearby. Most nights, he had to force himself not to pass out here. These days, few things in his life were worse than waking up with a red-wine hangover and the morning sun in his eyes.

D’Antonio was forty-three. The circumstances of his early retirement had been as randomly cruel as the violence that presaged it. A crazed beat cop named Mullen walked into headquarters one afternoon and gunned down Chief Inspector Jimmy Reynolds. In the confusion that followed, an innocent captain also named Mullen was shot dead. Someone had come charging in and asked what happened, and someone else was heard to yell, “Mullen killed Reynolds!”

The yeller was Joe D’Antonio. Unfortunately, the dead Mullen had been widely known to harbor a strong dislike for Italians in general and D’Antonio in particular. No one accused him directly, but everyone wondered. His life became a hell of suspicious looks and nasty innuendo. Six months later, the new chief persuaded him to take early retirement.

D’Antonio leaned on the rickety railing and stared at the empty street. Until last year he had lived on the fringes of Storyville, the red-light district. In the confusion of wartime patriotism, somebody had decided Storyville was a bad influence on Navy boys, and all the whorehouses were shut down. Now the buildings were dark and shabby, broken windows covered with boards or gaping like hungry mouths, lacework balconies sagging, opulent fixtures sold away or crumbling to dust.

D’Antonio could live without the whores, though some of them had been good enough gals. But he missed the music that had drifted up from Storyville every night, often drawing him out to some smoky little dive where he could drink and jazz away the hours till dawn. Players like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and some new kid named Armstrong kept him sane throughout the bad months just after he left the force. He got to know some of the musicians, smoked reefer with them from time to time, warned them when undercover presence indicated a bust might be imminent.

Now they were gone. There were still jazz clubs in the city, but many of the players D’Antonio knew had moved to Chicago when Storyville closed down. They could record in Chicago, make money. And in Chicago they didn’t have to sleep, drink, eat, and piss according to signs posted by white men.

Pissing sounded like a fine idea. He stood, steadied himself on the railing, and walked inside. The place had none of this modern indoor plumbing, and the odor of the slop jar filled the two airless rooms. Still, he’d never stooped so low as to piss off the balcony as some of his neighbors did, at least not that he could remember.

D’Antonio unbuttoned his fly and aimed into the jar. Behind him, the shutters on the French doors slammed shut with a report loud as a double-barreled shotgun in the airless night. His hand jerked. Urine sprayed the dingy wall.

When he’d finished pissing and cursing the freak wind, he wiped the wall with a dirty sock, then went back to the balcony doors. It was too hot in here with the shutters closed, and too dark. D’Antonio pushed them open again.

There was a man standing on the balcony, and the shutters passed right through him.

Francis Ferdinand scowled in annoyance. The first flesh-and-blood creature he’d met since his inglorious exit from this plane, and of course the fellow had to be stinking drunk.

Perhaps his drunkenness would make Francis Ferdinand’s job easier. Who could know? When one had to put himself together from whatever stray wisps of ectoplasm he could snatch out of the ether, it became increasingly difficult to fathom the minds of living men and women.

Joseph D’Antonio had a shock of black hair streaked with silver and a pale complexion that had gone florid from the wine. His dark eyes were comically wide, seeming to start from their sockets. “Hell, man, you’re a ghost! You’re a goddamned ghost, ain’tcha?”

English had never been one of his better languages, but Francis Ferdinand was able to understand D’Antonio perfectly. Even the drunken slur and the slight accent did not hinder him. He winced at the term. “A wraith, sir, if you please.”

D’Antonio waved a dismissive hand. The resulting current of air nearly wafted the Archduke off the balcony. “Wraith, ghost, whatever. S’all the same to me. Means I’ll be goin’ headfirst offa that balcony if I don’t get to bed soon. By accident... or on purpose? I dunno...”

Francis Ferdinand realized he would have to speak his piece at once, before the man slipped into maudlin incoherence. “Mr. D’Antonio, I do not come to you entirely by choice. You might say I have been dispatched. I died in the service of my country. I saw my beloved wife die, and pass into the Beyond. Yet I remain trapped in a sort of half-life. To follow her, I must do one more thing, and I must request your help.”

Francis Ferdinand paused, but D’Antonio remained silent. His eyes were alert, his aspect somewhat more sober than before.

“I must kill a man,” the Archduke said at last.

D’Antonio’s face twitched. Then he burst into sudden laughter. “That’s a good one! You gotta kill somebody, but you can’t, ’cause you’re a goddamn ghost!”

“Please, sir, I am a wraith! There are class structures involved here!”

“Sure. Whatever. Well, sorry, Duke. I handed over my gun when I left the force. Can’t help you.”

“You addressed me as Duke just now, Mr. D’Antonio.”

“Yeah, so? You’re the Archduke, ain’tcha? The one who got shot at the beginning of the war?”

Francis Ferdinand was stunned. He had expected to have to explain everything to the man: his own useless assassination; the ensuing bedlam into which Europe had tumbled, country after country; the dubious relevance of these events to others in New Orleans. He was glad to discover that, at least in one respect, he had underestimated D’Antonio.

“Yeah, I know who you are. I might look like an ignorant wop, but I read the papers. Besides, there’s a big old bullet hole in your neck.”

Startled, the Archduke quickly patched the wound.

“Then, sir, that is one less thing I must explain to you. You have undoubtedly heard that I was murdered by Serbs. This is the first lie. I was murdered by Sicilians.”

“But the men they caught—”

“Were Serbs, yes. They were also dupes. The plot was set in motion by your countrymen; specifically, by a man called Cagliostro. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”

“Some kind of magician?”

“A mage, yes. Also a doctor, a swindler, a forger, and a murderer. He is more than a century old, yet retains the appearance of a man of thirty. A wicked, dangerous man.

“He was born Giuseppe Balsamo in Palermo, 1743. By the time he began his scourge of Europe, he had dubbed himself Cagliostro, an old family name. He traveled the continent selling charms, potions, elixirs of youth. Some of these may have been genuine, as he himself ceased to age at this time.

“He also became a Freemason. Are you familiar with them as well?”

“Not particularly.”

“They are a group of powerful mages hell-bent on controlling the world. They erect heathen temples in which they worship themselves and their accomplishments. Cagliostro formed his own ‘Egyptian Order’ and claimed to be thousands of years old already, reminiscing about his dalliances with Christ and various Pharaohs. It was power he sought, of course, though he claimed to work only for the ‘Brotherhood of Man.’

“At the peak of his European success, he became entangled in the famous scandal of Marie Antoinette’s diamond necklace. It nearly brought him down. He was locked in the Bastille, then forced to leave Paris in disgrace. He wandered back through the European cities that had once welcomed him, finding scant comfort. It has been rumored that he died in a dungeon in Rome, imprisoned for practices offensive to the Christian church.

“This is not so. His Masonic ‘brothers’ failed him for a time, but ultimately they removed him from the dungeon, whisked him out from under the noses of the French revolutionary armies who wished to make him a hero, and smuggled him off to Egypt.

“The practices he perfected there are unspeakable.

“Fifty years later, still appearing a young and vital man, he returned to Italy. He spent the next half-century assembling a new ‘Egyptian Order’ of the most brilliant men he could find. With a select few, he shared his elixirs.

“Just after the turn of the century, he met a young journalist named Benito Mussolini, who called himself an ‘apostle of violence’ but had no direction. Cagliostro has guided Mussolini’s career since then. In 1915, Mussolini’s newspaper helped urge Italy into war.”

D’Antonio started violently. “Aw, come on! You’re not gonna tell me these Egyptian-Dago-Freemasons started the war.”

“Sir, that is exactly what I am going to tell you. They also ordered my wife’s death, and my own, and that of my empire.”

“Why in hell would they do that?”

“I cannot tell you. They are evil men. My uncle, the Emperor Francis Joseph, discovered all this inadvertently. He was a cowardly old fool who would have been afraid to tell anyone. Nevertheless, they hounded him into virtual retirement, where he died.”

“And told you all this?”

“He had no one else to talk to. Nor did I.”

“Where’s your wife?”

“Sophie was not required to linger here. We were.”

“Why?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“You keep saying that. Does it mean you don’t know, or you aren’t allowed to tell me?”

Francis Ferdinand paused. After a moment, D’Antonio nodded. “I see how it is. So I’m supposed to dance for you like Mussolini does for Cagliostro?”

The Archduke did not understand the question. He waited to see if D’Antonio would rephrase it, but the man remained silent. Finally Francis Ferdinand said, “Cagliostro still controls Mussolini, and means to shape him into the most vicious ruler Europe has ever known. But Cagliostro is no longer in Italy. He is here in New Orleans.”

“Oh-ho. And you want me to kill him for you, is that it?”

“Yes, but I haven’t finished. Cagliostro is in New Orleans — but we don’t know who he is.”

“We? Who’s we?”

“Myself, my uncle.”

“No one else?”

“No one else you would care to know about, sir.”

D’Antonio sagged in his chair. “Yeah, well, forget it. I’m not killin’ anybody. Find some other poor dupe.”

“Are you certain, Mr. D’Antonio?”

“Very certain.”

“Very well.” Francis Ferdinand drifted backward through the balcony railing and vanished in midair.

“Wait!” D’Antonio was halfway out of his chair by the time he realized the wraith was gone. He sank back, his brain seasick in his skull from all the talk of mages and murders, elixirs and dungeons, and the famous scandal of Marie Antoinette’s diamond necklace — whatever the hell that was.

“Why me?” he murmured into the hot night. But the night made no reply.

Cagliostro stood behind his counter and waited on the last customer of the day, an old lady buying half a pound of salt cod. When she had gone, he locked the door and had his supper: a small loaf of bread, a thick wedge of provolone, a few olives chopped with garlic. He no longer ate the flesh of creatures, though he sold it to maintain the appearance of a proper Italian grocery.

Above his head hung glossy loops of sausage and salami, rafters of wind-dried ham and pancetta, luminous globes of caciocavallo cheese. In the glass case were pots of creamy ricotta, stuffed artichokes, orbs of mozzarella in milk, bowls of shining olives and capers preserved in brine. On the neat wooden shelves were jars of candied fruit, almonds, pine nuts, aniseed, and a rainbow of assorted sweets. There were tall wheels of parmesan coated in funereal black wax, cruets of olive oil and vinegar, pickled cucumbers and mushrooms, flat tins containing anchovies, calamari, octopus. Enormous burlap sacks of red beans, fava beans, chickpeas, rice, couscous, and coffee threatened to spill their bounty onto the spotless tile floor. Pastas of every shape, size, and color were arranged in an elaborate display of bins facing the counter.

The aroma of the place was a balm to Cagliostro’s ancient soul. He carried the world’s weight on his back every day; he had pledged his very life to the furthering of the Brotherhood of Man; still, that did not mean he could shirk small duties. He fed the families of his neighborhood. When they could not pay, he fed them on credit, and when there was no hope of recovering the credit, he fed them for free.

He had caused death, to be sure. He had caused the deaths of the Archduke and his wife for several reasons, most importantly the malignant forces that hung over Europe like black clouds heavy with rain. Such a rain could mean the death of millions, hundreds of millions. The longer it was allowed to stagnate, the more virulent it would grow. It had needed some spark to release it, some event whose full significance was hidden at first, then gradually revealed. The assassination in Sarajevo had been that event, easy enough to arrange by providing the dim-witted Serbian anarchists with encouragement and weapons.

His name was synonymous with elaborate deception, and not undeservedly so. But some of his talents were genuine. In his cards and scrying-bowl Cagliostro could read the future, and the future looked very dark.

He, of course, would change all that.

This war was nearly over. It had drained some of the poison from those low-hanging clouds, allowed Europe to shatter and purge itself. But it had not purged enough; there would be another great war inside of two decades. In that one, his boy Benito would send thousands of innocent men to their useless deaths. But that was not as bad as what could be.

Though he had never killed a man with his own hands, Cagliostro bitterly felt the loss of the human beings who died as a result of his machinations. They were his brothers and sisters; he mourned each one as he would a lovely temple he had never seen, upon hearing it had been demolished. He could not accept that their sacrifice was a natural thing, but he had come to understand that it was necessary.

Mussolini was more than a puppet; he was a powerful orator and propagandist who would learn to yank his followers in any direction that pleased him. But he was unbalanced, ultimately no better than a fool, ignorant of the Mysteries, incapable of seeing them when a few of the topmost veils were pulled aside. He would make an excellent pawn, and he would die believing he had engineered his own destiny.

The only reason he could be allowed into power was to prevent something far worse.

Cagliostro had seen another European tyrant in his cards and his bowl, a man who made Mussolini look like a painted tin soldier. Mussolini was motivated exclusively by power, and that was bad enough; but this other creature was a bottomless well of hatred. Given the chance, he would saturate all creation with his vitriol. Millions would die like vermin, and their corpses would choke the world. The scrying-water had shown terrifying factories built especially for disposal of the dead, ovens hot enough to reduce bone to ash, black smokestacks belching greasy smoke into a charred orange sky. Cagliostro did not yet know this tyrant’s precise identity, but he believed that the man would come from Austria and rule Germany. Another good reason for the Archduke’s death: Francis Ferdinand would have made a powerful ally for such a man.

Cagliostro did not think he could altogether stop this tyrant. He had not foreseen it in time; he had been occupied with other matters. It was always thus when a man wished to save the world: he never knew where to look first, let alone where to begin.

Still, he believed he could stop the tyrant short of global domination, and he believed Mussolini was his key. Members of the Order in Italy were grooming him for Prime Minister. The title would unlock every door in Europe. If they could arrange for Mussolini to become the tyrant’s ally, perhaps they could also ensure that Mussolini would in some way cause the tyrant’s downfall.

Cagliostro finished his simple supper, collected the day’s receipts, and turned off the lights. In the half-darkness he felt his way back to the small living quarters behind the store, where he sat up reading obscure volumes and writing long letters in a florid hand until nearly dawn. Over the past century, he had learned to thrive on very little sleep.

D’Antonio was sitting up in bed, back propped against the wooden headboard, bare legs sprawled atop the sweat-rumpled coverlet, bottle nestled between his thighs. The Archduke appeared near the sink. D’Antonio jumped, slopped wine onto the coverlet, cursed. “You gotta make me stain something every time you show up?”

“You need have no fear of me.”

“No, you just want me to murder somebody for you. Why should that scare me?”

“It should not, sir. What should scare you is the prospect of a world ruled by Cagliostro and his Order.”

“That guy again. Find him yet?”

“We know he came to New Orleans before 1910. We know he is living as an Italian grocer. But he has covered his tracks so successfully that we cannot determine his precise identity. We have a number of candidates.”

“That’s good.” D’Antonio nodded, pretended to look thoughtful. “So you just gonna kill all of ’em, or what?”

“I cannot kill anyone, sir. I cannot even lift a handkerchief. That is why I require your help.”

“I thought I told you last time, Duke. My services are unavailable. Now kindly fuck off.”

“I feared you would say that. You will not change your mind?”

“Not a chance.”

“Very well.”

D’Antonio expected the wraith to vanish as it had last time. Instead, Francis Ferdinand seemed to break apart before his eyes. The face dissolved into a blur, the fingers elongated into smoke-swirls; then there was only a man-shaped shimmer of gossamer strands where the Archduke had been.

When D’Antonio breathed in, they all came rushing toward him.

He felt clammy filaments sliding up his nose, into his mouth, into the lubricated crevices of his eye sockets. They filled his lungs, his stomach; he felt exploratory tendrils venturing into his intestines. A profound nausea gripped him. It was like being devoured alive by grave-worms. The wraith’s consciousness was saturating his own, blotting him out like ink spilled on a letter.

“I offered you the chance to act of your own free will,” Francis Ferdinand said. The voice was a hideous papery whisper inside his skull now. “Since you declined, I am given no choice but to help you along.”

Joseph Maggio awoke to the sound of his wife choking on her own blood. Great hot spurts of it bathed his face. A tall figure stood by the bed, instrument of death in his upraised hand. Maggio recognized it as the axe from his own backyard woodpile, gleaming with fresh gore. It fell again with a sound like a cleaver going into a beef neckbone, and his wife was silent.

Maggio struggled to sit up as the killer circled to his side of the bed. He did not recognize the man. For a moment their eyes locked, and Maggio thought, That man is already dead.

“Cagliostro?” It was a raspy whisper, possibly German-accented, though the man looked Italian.

Wildly, Maggio shook his head. “No, no sir, my name’s Joseph Maggio, I just run a little grocery and I never heard of no Cagli-whoever... oh Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph, please don’t hit me with that thing—”

The blade glittered in a deadly arc. Maggio sprawled halfway off the bed, blinded by a sudden wash of his own blood. The axe fell again and he heard his own skull crunching, felt blade squeak against bone as the killer wrenched it out. Another searing cut, then another, until a merciful blow severed his jugular and he died in a red haze.

It was found that the killer had gained access to the Maggios’ home by chiseling out a panel in the back door. The chisel had belonged to Joseph Maggio, as had the axe, which was found in a pool of blood on the steps. People all over New Orleans searched their yards for axes and chisels, and locked away these potential implements of Hell.

A strange phrase was found chalked on the pavement a block from the Maggios’ house: Mrs. Maggio is going to sit up tonight, just like Mrs. Tony. Its significance has not been discovered to this day.

Maggio’s two brothers were arrested on the grounds that the Maggios were Sicilians, and Sicilians were prone to die in family vendettas. They were released by virtue of public drunkenness — they had been out celebrating the younger one’s draft notice on the night of the murders, and had staggered home scarcely able to move, let alone lift an axe.

The detective in charge of the case was shot to death by a burglar one week after the murders. The investigation languished. News of the Romanov family’s murder by Bolsheviks in Russia eclipsed the Maggio tragedy. The temperature climbed as June wore on.

“I detect Cagliostro’s influences still at work on this plane,” the Archduke said. “We must move on to the next candidate.”

Deep inside his own ectoplasm-snared brain, which the wraith kept docile with wine except when he needed to use the body, D’Antonio could only manage a feeble moan of protest.

A clear tropical dawn broke over New Orleans as John Zanca parked his wagon of fresh breads and cakes in front of Luigi Donatello’s grocery. He could not tell whether the grocer and his wife were awake yet, so he decided to take their order around to the back door. He gathered up a fragrant armful of baked goods still warm from the oven and carried them down the narrow alley that led to the Donatellos’ living quarters.

When he saw the back door with its lower left panel neatly chiseled out, his arms went limp. Cakes and loaves rained on the grass at his feet.

After a moment, Zanca stepped forward — careful not to crush any of the baked goods — and knocked softly on the door. He did not want to do so, but there seemed nothing else to do. When it swung open, he nearly screamed.

Before him stood Luigi Donatello, his face crusted with blood, his hair and mustache matted with it. Zanca could see three big gashes in his skull, white edges of bone, wet gray tissue swelling through the cracks. How could the man still be standing?

“My God,” moaned Donatello. “My God.”

Behind him, Zanca saw Mrs. Donatello sprawled on the floor. The top of her head was a gory porridge. The slender stem of her neck was nearly cleaved in two.

“My God. My God. My God.”

John Zanca closed his eyes and said a silent prayer for the Donatellos’ souls and his own.

The newspapers competed with one another for the wildest theory regarding the Axeman, as the killer came to be known. He was a Mafia executioner, and the victims were fugitives from outlaw justice in Sicily. He was a vigilante patriot, and the victims were German spies masquerading as Italian grocers. He was an evil spirit. He was a voodoo priest. He was a woman. He was a policeman.

The Italian families of New Orleans, particularly those in the grocery business, barricaded their doors and fed their dogs raw meat to make them bloodthirsty. These precautions did not stop them from lying awake in the small hours, clutching a rosary or perhaps a revolver, listening for the scrape of the Axeman’s chisel.

In high summer, when the city stank of oyster shells and ancient sewers, the killer returned. Two teenage sisters, Mary and Pauline Romano, saw their uncle butchered in his own bed. They could only describe the man as “dark, tall, wearing a dark suit and a black slouch hat.”

Italian families with enemies began finding axes and chisels dropped in their yards, more like cruel taunts than actual threats. Some accused their enemies. Some accused other members of their families. Some said the families had brought it upon themselves. Tempers flared in the sodden August heat, and many killings were done with weapons other than axes. Men with shotguns sat guard over their sleeping families, nodding off, jerking awake at the slightest noise. A grocer shot his own dog; another nearly shot his own wife.

The city simmered in its own prejudice and terror, a piquant gumbo.

But the Axeman would not strike again that year.

D’Antonio came awake with a sensation like rising through cool water into sunlight. He tried to move his hands: they moved. He tried to open his eyes: the ceiling appeared, cracked and water-stained. Was it possible? Was the fucking monster really gone?

“Duke?” he whispered aloud into the empty room. His lips were dry, wine-parched. “Hey, Duke? You in there?”

To his own ears he sounded plaintive, as if he missed the parasitic murdering creature. But the silence in his head confirmed it. The wraith was gone.

He stared at his hands, remembering everything he had seen them do. How ordinary they looked, how incapable of swinging a sharp blade and destroying a man’s brain, a woman’s brain. For a long time he sat on the edge of the bed studying the beds of his nails and the creases in his palms, vaguely surprised that they were not caked with blood.

Eventually he looked down at himself and found that he was wearing only a filthy pair of trousers. He stripped them off, sponged himself to a semblance of cleanliness with the stale water in the basin, slicked his hair back, and dressed in fresh clothes. He left his apartment without locking the door and set off in a random direction.

D’Antonio wandered hatless in the August sun for an hour or more. When he arrived at the States newspaper office, his face was streaming with sweat, red as a boiled crawfish. He introduced himself to the editor as a retired police detective, an expert on both Italians and murderers, and gave the following statement:

“The Axeman is a modern Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A criminal of this type may be a respectable, law-abiding citizen when he is his normal self. Compelled by an impulse to kill, he must obey this urge. Like Jack the Ripper, this sadist may go on with his periodic outbreaks until his death. For months, even for years, he may be normal, then go on another rampage. It is a mistake to blame the Mafia. The Mafia never attacks women as this murderer has done.”

He left the States office with several people staring bemusedly after him, but they printed the interview in its entirety.

After that, he lived his life much as he had before the wraith’s first visit. Armistice Day brought throngs of joyous revelers into the streets, as well as a blessed wave of cool weather; it had stayed sweltering through October. The war was over, and surely the wraith would never come back and make him do those things again.

He could not forget the organic vibration that ran up his arms as blade buried itself in bone.

In fact, he dreamed about it almost every night.

Francis Ferdinand returned in the spring of 1919.

He did not muck about with appearances this time, but simply materialized inside D’Antonio’s head. D’Antonio collapsed, clawing at his temples.

“He deceived me for a time, but now I know he still walks this earth,” said the wraith. “We will find him.”

D’Antonio lay curled on his side, blinded by tears of agony, wishing for the comforts of the womb or the grave.

Giacomo Lastanza was a powerful man, but he had been no match for the fiend in his bedroom. Now he lay on the floor with his head split as cleanly as a melon, and his wife Rosalia cowered in a corner of the room clutching her two-year-old daughter, Mary. Mary was screaming, clutching at her mother’s long black hair. As the Axeman turned away from her husband’s body, Rosalia began to scream too.

“Not my baby! Please, Holy Mother of God, not my baby!”

The axe fell. Mary’s little face seemed to crack open like an egg. Rosalia was unconscious before her skull felt the blade’s first kiss.

D’Antonio lay naked on the floor. The apartment was a wasteland of dirty clothes and empty wine bottles. But his body was relatively sober for once — they’d run out of money — and as a result he was sharp enough to be carrying on an argument with the wraith.

“Why in hell do we have to kill the women? You can’t be worried one of them is Cagliostro.”

“He has consorted with a number of dangerous women. When we find him, his wife will bear killing also.”

“And until then, you don’t mind killing a few innocent ones?”

“It is necessary.”

“What about that little baby?”

“If it had been Cagliostro’s daughter, he would have raised her to be as wicked as himself.”

D’Antonio got control of one fist and weakly pounded the floor with it. “You goddamn monster — you’re just gonna keep wasting people, and sooner or later I’ll get caught and rot in prison. Or fry in the chair. And you’ll go on your merry way and find some other poor sap to chase down that shadow of yours.”

“The next one must be him! He is the last one on the list!”

“Fuck the list.”

A bolt of excruciating pain shot through D’Antonio’s head, and he decided to drop the argument.

Cagliostro was reading by candlelight when he heard the chisel scraping at his door. He smiled and turned a page.

The creature crept into his room, saw him in his chair with his head bent over a book. When it was ten feet away, Cagliostro looked up. When it was five feet away, it froze in midmotion, restrained by the protective circle he had drawn.

By looking into its eyes, he knew everything about Joseph D’Antonio and the Archduke Francis Ferdinand. But the creature upon which he gazed now was neither D’Antonio nor the Archduke; this was a twisted amalgamation of the two, and it could only be called the Axeman.

He smiled at the creature, though its eyes blazed with murderous rage. “Yes, poor Archduke, it is I. And you will not harm me. In fact, I fear I must harm you yet again. If only you had accepted the necessity of your death the first time, you would be Beyond with your beloved Sophie now.

“No, don’t think you can desert your stolen body as it lies dying. You’ll stay in there, my boy. My magic circle will see to that!” Cagliostro beamed; he was enjoying this immensely. “Yes, yes, I know about unfortunate ex-Detective D’Antonio trapped in there. But why do you think it was so easy for the Duke to take hold of your body, Mr. D’Antonio, and make it do the terrible things it did? Perhaps because you care not at all for your fellow human beings? When they came for the Jews, I did nothing, for I was not a Jew... ah, forgive me. An obscure reference to a future that may never be. And you will both die to help prevent it.”

He reached beneath the cushion of his armchair, removed a silver revolver with elaborate engraving on the butt and barrel, aimed it carefully, and put a ball in the Axeman’s tortured brain.

Then he put his book aside, went to his desk, and took up his pen.

The letter was published in the Times-Picayune the next day.

Tuesday was St. Joseph’s Night, always a time of great excitement among Italians in New Orleans. This year it reached a fever pitch. The traditional altars made of a hundred or more kinds of food were built, admired, dismantled, and distributed to the poor; lucky fava beans were handed out by the fistful; the saint was petitioned and praised. Still, St. Joseph’s Night of 1919 would remain indelibly fixed in New Orleans memory as the Axeman’s Jazz Night.

Cafés and mansions on St. Charles blazed with the melodies of live jazz bands. Those who could not afford to pay musicians fed pennies into player pianos. A popular composer had written a song called “The Mysterious Axeman’s Jazz, or, Don’t Scare Me, Papa.” Banjo, guitar, and mandolin players gathered on the levees to send jazz music into the sky, so the Axeman would be sure to hear it as he passed over. By midnight, New Orleans was a cacophony of sounds, all of them swinging.

Cagliostro walked the streets for most of the night, marveling (if not actively congratulating himself) at how completely he had brought the city together, and how gay he had made it in the process. No one so much as glanced at him: few people were on the streets, and Cagliostro had a talent for making himself invisible.

He had left the Axeman’s corpse locked in the back of the house where it wouldn’t spoil the groceries. First, of course, he had bludgeoned the face into unrecognizable mush with the Axeman’s own axe. Everything that suggested the murdered man might be someone other than “Mike Pepitone,” simple Italian grocer, was in the satchel Cagliostro carried with him.

On the turntable of his phonograph, as a final touch, he had left a recording of “Nearer My God to Thee.”

When the jazz finally began to die down, he walked to the docks and signed onto a freighter headed for Egypt. There were any number of wonderful things he hadn’t gotten around to learning last time.

Italy, 1945

Toward the end, Mussolini lived in an elaborate fantasy world constructed by the loyal sycophants who still surrounded him. Whole cities in Italy were sanitized for his inspection, the cheering crowds along his parade routes supplemented by paid extras. When Hitler visited Rome, he too was deceived by the coat of sparkle on the decay, the handpicked Aryan soldiers, the sheer bravado of Il Duce.

He believed he had cost Hitler the war. Germany lost its crucial Russian campaign after stopping to rescue the incompetent Italian army in Albania. Hitler had believed in the power and glory of Italy, and Mussolini had failed him.

Now he had been forced into exile on Lake Garda. He was a failure, his brilliant regime was a failure, and there were no more flunkies to hide these painful truths. He kept voluminous diaries in which he fantasized that his position in history would be comparable to Napoleon or Christ. His mistress Claretta lived nearby in a little villa, his only comfort.

On April 25, Germany caved in to the Allies. The Italian people, the ones he had counted on to save him with their loyalty, turned against him. Mussolini and Claretta fled, making for Switzerland.

A few last fanatical companions attempted to help them escape by subterfuge, but they were arrested by partisans on the north shore of Lake Como, discovered hiding in a German truck, cringing inside German coats and helmets. They were shot against the iron gate of an exquisite villa, and their bodies were taken to Milan and strung up by the heels to demonstrate the evils of Fascism.

All in service of the brotherhood of man.

GDMFSOB by Nevada Barr

(Originally published in 2006)

Versailles Boulevard

All Walgreen’s had was a little kid’s notebook, maybe four by five inches, the binding a fat spiral of purple plastic, the cover a Twiggy — Carnaby Street — white boots — flower power mess of lavender and yellow blooms.

Jeannie put it on the café table, opened it, and carefully wrote, Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch, in her best schoolgirl cursive. The juxtaposition of sentiment and sentimentality pleased her.

Next she wrote, Divorce Rich, then sat back, looked at the words, and took a long luxurious sip of the cheap but not inexpensive Pinot Grigio a harried waitress in too-tight jeans had brought her.

Rich thought she drank too much. Of course she drank too much. She was married to a goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch. She drew a neat line through the word divorce.

Divorce was out of the question. Rich would never grant her a divorce. Not if it meant giving up the “income stream from the family business,” as he euphemistically referred to her earnings as a sculptress.

No. Divorce wasn’t happening.

That left suicide and murder.

When Rich had been particularly demeaning, Jeannie’d had the occasional fling with Dr. Kevorkian, but, in all honesty, she had to admit that she was a decent individual. She paid her taxes — and his — kept a tidy house, and got her oil changed every three thousand miles. And Rich...

Rich was boring.

Not casually boring; he was a bore of nuclear magnitude. More than once she had witnessed him turn entire dinner parties to stone, seen guests’ eyes roll back in their heads and their tongues begin to protrude as he replaced all the available oxygen with pomposity. Not being a jobholder himself, he felt uniquely qualified to lecture on the subject. He told her cleaning lady how to clean, her gallery owner how to present art, the man who cast her work how to run a foundry, her agent how to sell sculpture.

Suicide was out. It would be wrong, un-American even, to deny the world her lovely bronzes while simultaneously condemning it to Rich’s monologues.

That left murder.

In the ordinary run of things, Jeannie didn’t condone murder. She wasn’t even a proponent of capital punishment. But her husband wasn’t in the ordinary run of things. He was extraordinarily in need of being dead.

Kill Rich, she printed carefully beneath the crossed-out divorce.

Another long swallow of wine and contemplation.

Over the eight years of their marriage she had shared all the nasty bits with shrinks, groups, AA, and half a dozen girlfriends. There was so much dirty laundry lining the byways of her past they rivaled the back alleys of Mexico City on wash day. Should anything untoward befall Rich, she would be the prime suspect.

There must be no evidence. None.

She scribbled out everything she’d written, then tore out the page. Feeling a fool, but being a nonsmoker and thus having no recourse to fire, she surreptitiously soaked the page in the wine and swallowed it.

As easily as that, she decided to kill her husband.

Setting her glass on the uneven surface of the wrought-iron café table, she watched the wine tremble as minuscule earthquakes sent out barely perceptible tsunamis and she thought of the things people die of.

Drowning, burning, choking, crushing, goring by bulls, hanging, falling, dismemberment, being devoured by wild beasts, poisoning, exploding, crashing in cars, boats, planes, and motorcycles, disease, cutting, stabbing, slashing, blunt trauma to the head, dehydration, hypothermia, heatstroke, starvation, vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bears’ livers, snakebite, drawing and quartering, asphyxiation, shooting, beheading, bleeding out, infection, boredom — Lord knew Rich had nearly done her in with that one.

Rumor had it people died of shame and broken hearts. No hope those would work on Rich, though over the years she had given it a go, usually at the top of her lungs with tears and snot pouring attractively down her face. A dedicated philandering deadbeat pornographer, Rich had embraced shame as an alternative lifestyle and his heart was apparently made of India rubber.

Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch, she wrote on the fresh, yet-to-be-eaten page of her notebook, knocked back the last of her wine, and left the waitress a five-dollar tip.

Two hours later she was again staring at the page. The compulsion to write what she’d done was overwhelming. Vaguely she remembered there was actually a word for the phenomenon, hyperscribblia or something. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she said as she uncapped a razor-point Pilot and put the tip against the smooth paper.

Mildly fascinated and massively alarmed, she watched as the pen flickered down the page, line by line, leaving a trail the dumbest of cops couldn’t fail to follow.

Went to the garage. Shoulder-deep in junk. No room for car. Found motorcycle. Put on gardening gloves. Drove roofing tack three-quarters of an inch into front tire just below fender. On the pen flew, painting the pictures so clear in Jeannie’s mind: Rich’s praying mantis form, clad in the endless leathers that arrived almost daily from eBay — chaps, fringed and plain, leather vests, gloves, leather pants, boots, leather jackets, leather shirts, helmets, do-rags, even a leather face guard that made Jeannie want to reread The Man in the Iron Mask — or rent Silence of the Lambs. Done up like a macho caricature of a macho caricature, the imaginary Rich pushes the bike out with his long spider’s legs. Backward rolls the heavy machine, the tack slides unnoticed up beneath the fender.

Words flow across the tiny cramped pages, spinning a tale of how the tack, pounded in at an angle just so, remains static until the curve heading out onto the freeway, where the wheel turns and the bike leans and the head of the tack finally hits the pavement, driven deeper. Bang! The tire has blown! Out of control, the motorcycle is down. Rich is sliding. My God! My God! His helmet pops off and bounces across two lanes of freeway traffic. The motorcycle is spinning now; Rich’s protective leathers begin to tear, leaving black marks on the pale concrete, hot and lumpy like a black crayon dragging across sandpaper. Leather is rasped away; flesh meets the road. Crayon marks turn from black to red. The driver of an eighteen-wheeler, high on methamphetamines, barrels down the highway, unaware of the man and motorcycle spinning toward his speeding rig. Look out! Look—

“Lover Girl? Have you been in the garage?” Rich’s murmuring voice, always pitched a decibel or so lower than the threshold of human hearing, thus forcing the unfortunate listener to say “What?” several times just to make audible something not worth hearing anyway, wisps down the short hall between the garage and the kitchen, where Jeannie sits at the counter.

“The garage? No. Why?” she calls as his rubber-soled slip-ons shuff-shuffle down the hall.

The pages. She shoves them into the Osterizer and pushes Puree. Jammed. A pint of milk. Bingo. Pasta. “Thankyoubabyjesus.”

Rich’s bald head on its Ichabod Crane neck pokes around the corner. “My things. In the garage. Did you touch them?” Rich hates her to move his things.

“No, sweetheart.”

“Dinner?” he asks, eyeing the Osterizer.

Jeannie nods, too scared to talk.

Rich settles on a stool, his pale bulbous eyes fixed on her. Under the blue stare Jeannie pours the mixture into a casserole dish with pasta and sauce from a bottle and sets the oven to three-fifty.

Rich likes it. “Happy tummy,” he murmurs as he eats, eyes glued to Fear Factor contestants on the television gagging down pig bowels in cockroach sauce.

GDMFSOB, Jeannie chants in her mind as she surreptitiously makes herself a ham-and-cheese sandwich and takes it to bed.

Rich stays up till three, as he often does. Jeannie has learned to sleep. She knows if she tiptoes down the hall like a curious child on Christmas Eve night and peeks in the piled mess he calls his office, Good Old Rich will be hunkered in front of his computer screen, bald head nestled between hunched shoulders like an ostrich egg in a lumpy nest, watching the X-rated cavortings of what he insists is not pornography but Adult Content Material.

Sleep is good.

Plotting is better.

The next day, armed with information from the library’s computer — so there will be no history on her own — Jeannie cultures botulism. It is surprisingly easy and naturally deadly. Perfect. Bad salmon. The GDMFSOB loves salmon. She doesn’t. Perfect. Until she gets hold of the pen and out it comes: Rich reeling out of the marital bed, dragging himself to the bathroom, Jeannie pretending to sleep as his calls grow ever weaker. She dialing 911, but alas! Too late! Weeping prettily as she tells the kind, attractive, young policeman how she took an Ambien and can’t remember anything until, gulp, sigh, she woke to find this. Mea culpa, mea culpa, but not really...

Damning, damning, damning, the words rattle over page after page.

Shuff-shuffle. The bald pate, the watery blue eyes. “Sketching a new sculpture?” Rich is oh-so-supportive of her work. He needs the money for his lifestyle.

“Sketching,” Jeannie manages as she snatches up the pages.

Rich turns on the television. It’s Thursday. Survivor is on Thursdays. Rich never misses Survivor.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Salmon.” Perfect but for the incriminating compulsion.

The Osterizer: olive oil, pesto, onion.

“Dinner is served.”

“Lover Girl, the salmon smells funny. Did you get fresh?”

“Fresh.”

“The pesto is great. Happy tummy.”

Over subsequent days Jeannie drips acid on brake lines and writes, melts off the tips of his épées and writes. Osterizes and seasons and serves.

And Rich lives. Thrives. Like the cat who came back the very next day. Jeannie cannot get her hands on an atom bomb.

Damn.

Nothing.

Damn.

Rich is hunkered on the sofa eating lasagna of hamburger, cheese, and the pages detailing how she greased the feet of the extension ladder before asking him to take a look at the chimney, when Jeannie realizes that, as a murderess, she’s a bust. Rich is protected by angels. Or demons. Or stupidity.

Suicide returns as an option. She can’t love. She can’t leave. She can’t live.

Damn.

Guns are too messy. Hanging too painful. Pills. Being with Rich for eight years has driven her to a veritable cornucopia: Ambien, Effexor, Desyrel, Xanax — all good traceable drugs. Surely if she takes them all at once...

The nagging of Big Brother on the forty-two-inch TV whines into the bedroom, where Jeannie, tuna sandwich untouched, sits in bed, sixty-two pills in pink, white, and yellow cupped in her palm, bottled water on the nightstand. Usually she sleeps nude, but tonight she has put on a nice pair of pajamas: discreet, modest. Lord knew how she might sprawl and froth. Better to be on the safe side.

Suicide.

So be it.

Rich had won.

Jeannie tips all sixty-two pills into her mouth and reaches for the water.

“Lover Girl?” Rich stands in the bedroom door. He looks peaked, as Jeannie’s mother might say.

“What?” she mumbles around the deadly sleep in her mouth.

“Unhappy tummy,” he moans.

He runs for the bathroom. Jeannie spits out the pills.

“Haven’t taken a dump in days,” he calls genteelly through the open bathroom door. Rich never closes the bathroom door. In fact, he makes deposits while she showers, brushes her teeth, suffocating, stifling deposits.

“Oh,” she calls with mechanical sympathy.

Two days later Rich is dead. Jeannie dials 911.

“Impacted bowel,” the coroner tells her. “Was your husband eating anything unusual?”

“Murder,” Jeannie might have said, but she didn’t.

Jesus Out to Sea by James Lee Burke

(Originally published in 2006)

Ninth Ward

I grew up in the Big Sleazy, uptown, off Magazine, amongst live oak trees and gangsters and musicians and bougainvillea the Christian Brothers said was put there to remind us of Christ’s blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.

My best friends were Tony and Miles Cardo. Their mother made her living shampooing the hair of corpses in a funeral parlor on Tchoupitoulas. I was with them the afternoon they found a box of human arms someone at the Tulane medical school left by the campus incinerator. Tony stuffed the arms in a big bag of crushed ice, and the next day, at five o’clock, when all the employees from the cigar factory were loading onto the St. Claude streetcar, him and Miles hung the arms from hand straps and the backs of seats all over the car. People started screaming their heads off and clawing their way out the doors. A big fat black guy climbed out the window and crashed on top of a sno-ball cart. Tony and Miles, those guys were a riot.

Tony was known as the Johnny Wadd of the Mafia because he had a flopper on him that looked like a fifteen-inch chunk of radiator hose. All three of us joined the Crotch and went to Vietnam, but Tony was the one who couldn’t deal with some stuff he saw in a ville not far from Chu Lai. Tony had the Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars but volunteered to work in the mortuary so he wouldn’t have to see things like that anymore.

Miles and me came home and played music, including gigs at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon Street. Tony brought Vietnam back to New Orleans and carried it with him wherever he went. I wished Tony hadn’t gotten messed up in the war and I wished he hadn’t become a criminal, either. He was a good guy and had a good heart. So did Miles. That’s why we were pals. Somehow, if we stayed together, we knew we’d never die.

Remember rumbles? When I was a kid, the gangs were Irish or Italian. Projects like the Iberville were all white, but the kids in them were the toughest I ever knew. They used to steal skulls out of the crypts in the St. Louis cemeteries and skate down North Villere Street with the skulls mounted on broomsticks. In the tenth grade a bunch of them took my saxophone away from me on the streetcar. Tony went into the project by himself, made a couple of guys wet their pants, then walked into this kid’s apartment while the family was eating supper and came back out with my sax. Nobody said squat.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, criminals had a funny status in New Orleans. There were understandings between the NOPD and the Italian crime family that ran all the vice. Any hooker who cooperated with a Murphy sting on a john in the Quarter got a bus ticket back to Snake’s Navel, Texas. Her pimp went off a rooftop. A guy who jack-rolled tourists or old people got his wheels broken with batons and was thrown out of a moving car by the parish line. Nobody was sure what happened to child molesters. They never got found.

But the city was a good place. You ever stroll across Jackson Square in the early morning, when the sky was pink and you could smell the salt on the wind and the coffee and pastry from the Café du Monde? Miles and me used to sit in with Louis Prima and Sam Butera. That’s no jive, man. We’d blow until sunrise, then eat a bagful of hot beignets and sip café au lait on a steel bench under the palms while the sidewalk artists were setting up their easels and paints in the square. The mist and sunlight in the trees looked like cotton candy. That was before the city went down the drain and before Miles and me went down the drain with it.

Crack cocaine hit the projects in the early eighties. Black kids all over the downtown area reminded me of the characters in Night of the Living Dead. They loved 9mm automatics too. The Gipper whacked federal aid to the city by half, and the murder rate in New Orleans became the highest in the United States. We got to see a lot of David Duke. He had his face remodeled with plastic surgery and didn’t wear a bedsheet or a Nazi armband anymore, so the white-flight crowd treated him like Jefferson Davis and almost elected him governor.

New Orleans became a free-fire zone. Miles and me drifted around the Gulf Coast and smoked a lot of weed and pretended we were still jazz musicians. I’m not being honest here. It wasn’t just weed. We moved right on up to the full-tilt boogie and joined the spoon-and-eyedropper club. Tony threw us both in a Catholic hospital and told this three-hundred-pound Mother Superior to beat the shit out of us with her rosary beads, one of these fifteen-decade jobs, if we tried to check out before we were clean.

But all these things happened before the storm hit New Orleans. After the storm passed, nothing Miles and Tony and me had done together seemed very important.

The color of the water is chocolate-brown, with a greenish-blue shine on the surface like gasoline, except it’s not gasoline. All the stuff from the broken sewage mains has settled on the bottom. When people try to walk in it, dark clouds swell up around their chests and arms. I’ve never smelled anything like it.

The sun is a yellow flame on the brown water. It must be more than ninety-five degrees now. At dawn, I saw a black woman on the next street, one that’s lower than mine, standing on top of a car roof. She was huge, with rolls of fat on her like a stack of inner tubes. She was wearing a purple dress that had floated up over her waist and she was waving at the sky for help. Miles rowed a boat from the bar he owns on the corner, and the two of us went over to where the car roof was maybe six feet underwater by the time we got there. The black lady was gone. I keep telling myself a United States Coast Guard chopper lifted her off. Those Coast Guard guys are brave. Except I haven’t heard any choppers in the last hour.

Miles and me tie the boat to a vent on my roof and sit down on the roof’s spine and wait. Miles takes out a picture of him and Tony and me together, at the old amusement park on Lake Pontchartrain. We’re all wearing jeans and T-shirts and duck-ass haircuts, smiling, giving the camera the thumbs-up. You can’t believe how handsome both Tony and Miles were, with patent-leather-black hair and Italian faces like Rudolph Valentino. Nobody would have ever believed Miles would put junk in his arm or Tony would come back from Vietnam with helicopter blades still thropping inside his head.

Miles brought four one-gallon jugs of tap water with him in his boat, which puts us in a lot better shape than most of our neighbors. This is the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish. Only two streets away I can see the tops of palm trees sticking out of the water. I can also see houses that are completely covered. Last night I heard people beating the roofs from inside the attics in those houses. I have a feeling the sounds of those people will never leave my sleep, that the inside of my head is going to be like the inside of Tony’s.

The church up the street is made out of pink stucco and has bougainvillea growing up one wall. The water is up to the little bell tower now, and the big cross in the breezeway with the hand-carved wooden Jesus on it is deep underwater. The priest tried to get everybody to leave the neighborhood, but a lot of people didn’t have cars, or at least cars they could trust, and because it was still two days till payday, most people didn’t have any money, either. So the priest said he was staying too. An hour later the wind came off the Gulf and began to peel the face off South Louisiana.

This morning, I saw the priest float past the top of a live oak tree. He was on his stomach, his clothes puffed with air, his arms stretched out by his sides, like he was looking for something down in the tree.

The levees are busted and a gas main has caught fire under the water and the flames have set fire to the roof of a two-story house on the next block. Miles is pretty disgusted with the whole business. “When this is over, I’m moving to Arizona,” he says.

“No, you won’t,” I say.

“Watch me.”

“This is the Big Sleazy. It’s Guatemala. We don’t belong anywhere else.”

He doesn’t try to argue with that one. When we were kids we played with guys who had worked for King Oliver and Kid Orey and Bunk Johnson, Miles on the drums, me on tenor sax. Flip Phillips and Jo Jones probably didn’t consider us challenges to their careers, but we were respected just the same. A guy who could turn his sticks into a white blur at The Famous Door is going to move to a desert and play “Sing, Sing, Sing” for the Gila monsters? That Miles breaks me up.

His hair is still black, combed back in strings on his scalp, the skin on his arms white as a baby’s, puckered more than it should be, but the veins are still blue and not collapsed or scarred from the needlework we did on ourselves. Miles is a tough guy, but I know what he’s thinking. Tony and him and me started out together, then Tony got into the life, and I mean into the life, man — drugs, whores, union racketeering, loan-sharking, maybe even popping a couple of guys. But no matter how many crimes he may have committed, Tony held on to the one good thing in his life, a little boy who was born crippled. Tony loved that little boy.

“Thinking about Tony?” I say.

“Got a card from him last week. The postmark was Mexico City. He didn’t sign it, but I know it’s from him,” Miles says.

He lifts his strap undershirt off his chest and wipes a drop of sweat from the tip of his nose. His shoulders look dry and hard, the skin stretched tight on the bone; they’re just starting to powder with sunburn. He takes a drink of water from one of our milk jugs, rationing himself, swallowing each sip slowly.

“I thought you said Tony was in Argentina.”

“So he moves around. He’s got a lot of legitimate businesses now. He’s got to keep an eye on them and move around a lot.”

“Yeah, Tony was always hands-on,” I say, avoiding his eyes.

You know what death smells like? Fish blood that someone has buried in a garden of night-blooming flowers. Or a field mortuary during the monsoon season in a tropical country right after the power generators have failed. Or the buckets that the sugar-worker whores used to pour into the rain ditches behind their cribs on Sunday morning. If that odor comes to you on the wind or in your sleep, you tend to take special notice of your next sunrise.

I start looking at the boat and the water that goes to the horizon in all directions. My butt hurts from sitting on the spine of the house and the shingles burn the palms of my hands. Somewhere up in Orleans Parish I know there’s higher ground, an elevated highway sticking up on pilings, high-rise apartment buildings with roofs choppers can land on. Miles already knows what I’m thinking. “Wait till dark,” he says.

“Why?”

“There won’t be as many people who want the boat,” he says.

I look at him and feel ashamed of both of us.

A hurricane is supposed to have a beginning and an end. It tears the earth up, fills the air with flying trees and bricks and animals and sometimes even people, makes you roll up into a ball under a table and pray till drops of blood pop on your brow, then it goes away and lets you clean up after it, like somebody pulled a big prank on the whole town. But this one didn’t work that way. It’s killing in stages.

I see a diapered black baby in a tree that’s only a green smudge under the water’s surface. I can smell my neighbors in their attic. The odor is like a rat that has drowned in a bucket of water inside a superheated garage. A white guy floating by on an inner tube has a battery-powered radio propped on his stomach and tells us snipers have shot a policeman in the head and killed two Fish and Wildlife officers. Gangbangers have turned over a boat trying to rescue patients from Charity Hospital. The Superdome and the Convention Center are layered with feces and are without water or food for thousands of people who are seriously pissed off. A bunch of them tried to walk into Jefferson Parish and were turned back by cops who fired shotguns over their heads. The white-flight crowd doesn’t need any extra problems.

The guy in the inner tube says a deer was on the second floor of a house on the next street and an alligator ate it.

That’s supposed to be entertaining?

“You guys got anything to eat up there?” the guy in the inner tube asks.

“Yeah, a whole fucking buffet. I had it catered from Galatoire’s right before the storm,” Miles says to him.

That Miles.

Toward evening the sun goes behind the clouds and the sky turns purple and is full of birds. The Coast Guard choppers are coming in low over the water, the downdraft streaking a trough across the surface, the rescue guys swinging from cables like anyone could do what they do. They’re taking children and old and sick people out first and flying without rest. I love those guys. But Miles and me both know how it’s going to go. We’ve seen it before — the slick coming out of a molten sun, right across the canopy, automatic weapons fire whanging off the airframe, wounded grunts waiting in an LZ that North Vietnamese regulars are about to overrun. You can’t get everybody home, Chuck. That’s just the way it slides down the pipe sometimes.

A guy sitting on his chimney with Walkman ears on says the president of the United States flew over and looked down from his plane at us. Then he went on to Washington. I don’t think the story is true, though. If the president was really in that plane, he would have landed and tried to find out what kind of shape we were in. He would have gone to the Superdome and the Convention Center and talked to the people there and told them the country was behind them.

The wind suddenly blows from the south, and I can smell salt and rain and the smell fish make when they’re spawning. I think maybe I’m dreaming.

“Tony is coming,” Miles says out of nowhere.

I look at his face, swollen with sunburn, the salt caked on his shoulders. I wonder if Miles hasn’t pulled loose from his own tether.

“Tony knows where we are,” he says. “He’s got money and power and connections. We’re the Mean Machine from Magazine. That’s what he always said. The Mean Machine stomps ass and takes names.”

For a moment I almost believe it. Then I feel all the bruises and fatigue, and the screaming sounds of the wind blowing my neighborhood apart drain out of me like black water sucking down through the bottom of a giant sink. My head sinks on my chest and I fall asleep, even though I know I’m surrendering my vigilance at the worst possible time.

I see Tony standing in the door of a Jolly Green, the wind flattening his clothes against his muscular physique. I see the Jolly Green coming over the houses, loading everyone on board, dropping bright yellow inflatable life rafts to people, showering water bottles and C-rats down to people who had given up hope.

But I’m dreaming. I wake up with a start. The sun is gone from the sky, the water still rising, the surface carpeted with trash. The painter to our boat hangs from the air vent, cut by a knife. Our boat is gone, our water jugs along with it.

The night is long and hot, the stars veiled with smoke from fires vandals have set in the Garden District. My house is settling, window glass snapping from the frames as the floor buckles and the nails in the joists make sounds like somebody tightening piano wire on a wood peg.

It’s almost dawn now. Miles is sitting on the ridge of the roof, his knees splayed on the shingles, like a human clothespin, staring at a speck on the southern horizon. The wind shifts, and I smell an odor like night-blooming flowers in a garden that has been fertilized with fish blood.

“Hey, Miles?” I say.

“Yeah?” he says impatiently, not wanting to be distracted from the speck on the horizon.

“We played with Louis Prima. He said you were as good as Krupa. We blew out the doors at the Dream Room with Johnny Scat. We jammed with Sharkey and Jack Teagarden. How many people can say that?”

“It’s a Jolly Green. Look at it,” he says.

I don’t want to listen to him. I don’t want to be drawn into his delusions. I don’t want to be scared. But I am. “Where?” I ask.

“Right there, in that band of light between the sea and sky. Look at the shape. It’s a Jolly Green. It’s Tony, man, I told you.”

The aircraft in the south draws nearer, like the evening star winking and then disappearing and then winking again. But it’s not a Jolly Green. It’s a passenger plane and it goes straight overhead, the windows lighted, the jet engines splitting the air with a dirty roar.

Miles’s face, his eyes rolled upward as he watches the plane disappear, makes me think of John the Baptist’s head on a plate.

“He’s gonna come with an airboat. Mark my word,” he says.

“The DEA killed him, Miles,” I say.

“No, man, I told you. I got a postcard. It was Tony. Don’t buy government lies.”

“They blew him out of the water off Veracruz.”

“No way, man. Not Tony. He got out of the life and had to stay off the radar. He’s coming back.”

I lie on my back, the nape of my neck cupped restfully on the roof cap, small waves rolling up my loins and chest like a warm blanket. I no longer think about the chemicals and oil and feces and body parts that the water may contain. I remind myself that we came out of primeval soup and that nothing in the earth’s composition should be strange or objectionable to us. I look at the smoke drifting across the sky and feel the house jolt under me. Then it jolts again and I know that maybe Miles is right about seeing Tony, but not in the way he thought.

When I look hard enough into the smoke and the stars behind it, I see New Orleans the way it was when we were kids. I see the fog blowing off the Mississippi levee and pooling in the streets, the Victorian houses sticking out of the mist like ships on the Gulf. I see the green-painted streetcars clanging up and down the neutral ground on St. Charles and the tunnel of live oaks you ride through all the way down to the Carrollton District by the levee. The pink and purple neon tubing on the Katz & Besthoff drugstores glows like colored smoke inside the fog, and music is everywhere, like it’s trapped under a big glass dome — the brass funeral bands marching down Magazine, old black guys blowing out the bricks in Preservation Hall, dance orchestras playing on hotel roofs along Canal Street.

That’s the way it was back then. You woke in the morning to the smell of gardenias, the electric smell of the streetcars, chicory coffee, and stone that has turned green with lichen. The light was always filtered through trees, so it was never harsh, and flowers bloomed year-round. New Orleans was a poem, man, a song in your heart that never died.

I only got one regret. Nobody ever bothered to explain why nobody came for us. When Miles and me are way out to sea, I want to ask him that. Then a funny thing happens. Floating right along next to us is the big wood carving of Jesus on his cross, from the stucco church at the end of my street. He’s on his back, his arms stretched out, the waves sliding across his skin. The holes in his hands look just like the petals from the bougainvillea on the church wall. I ask him what happened back there.

He looks at me a long time, like maybe I’m a real slow learner.

“Yeah, I dig your meaning. That’s exactly what I thought,” I say, not wanting to show how dumb I am.

But considering the company I’m in — Jesus and Miles and Tony waiting for us somewhere up the pike — I got no grief with the world.

Last Fair Deal Gone Down by Ace Atkins

(Originally published in 2010)

Warehouse District

I’ve always been one to keep an eye open during a church prayer — not because of my lack of faith in God but because of my lack of faith in people. What I learned by watching was that others were doing the same. People mistrust people. Each of us pulses with our own agenda. In New Orleans, and particularly in the French Quarter, those agendas cross frequently.

That night I was in my own house of worship — JoJo’s Blues Bar — with both eyes closed tight as I chased a shot of Jack with a cold Dixie. Fats’s band banged out the last few chords of “Blue Monday,” his lazy sax matching my own black mood. Each drink softened that black mood into brown melancholy.

A December drizzle rained outside. Cold droplets fell a muted pink along the window lit by JoJo’s neon sign, only a few regulars in the bar with ragged fedoras pulled low. JoJo’s niece Keesha, the only waitress on duty, tapped her foot slowly to Fats’s music. While she smoked, she read the Bible by dim candlelight.

“Keesha, how ’bout another Dixie?”

“You know where they’re at.”

And I guess I did. JoJo was my best friend and this was my second home. I took off my trench coat and old scarf and walked behind the bar. Pushing up my shirtsleeve, I reached into the slushy ice bin and grabbed a beer. My hand instantly went numb.

“Who’s closing up?” I asked.

“Felix,” she answered, stuck somewhere in the middle of Corinthians. “JoJo and Loretta went to Baton Rouge.”

The set finished and the sparse crowd clapped. Most of them were old men like JoJo who had frequented this place since the early sixties. JoJo’s was the only decent blues bar in a city dominated by jazz. A Little Delta on the Bayou, is what the sign outside read.

Fats pulled up a stool next to me. His face grayed under the tiny Christmas lights strung over the bar’s mirror. I looked across at both of our reflections and tilted my head. He said my name dully back to me.

“How ya been, Fats?”

“Hmm.”

“You know why JoJo’s in Baton Rouge?” I asked, for lack of anything better.

“Naw.” Fats shifted in his seat and coughed, politely turning his head away. He looked over at Keesha with her head close to the Bible.

“What? You got religion now or somethin’?”

“Seek and ye shall find,” Keesha said, blowing smoke in his face.

“Hmm,” Fats said. “Ain’t that some shit?”

Someone opened the two rickety Creole doors and a cold breeze rushed in off Conti. A horse-drawn tourist carriage clopped by with a guide pointing out famous sites. Fats popped a handful of salted peanuts into his mouth, shell and all.

“You hungry, Fats?”

He looked at my face for the first time, right in the eyes. “Yeah, I could eat.”

Fats was known for gambling or drinking away his weekly profits every Friday. He usually lived on Loretta’s leftover gumbo or handouts from JoJo.

We walked over a few blocks to the Café Du Monde. I asked for a couple orders of beignets and two large café au laits. A Vietnamese waiter set down the square donuts covered in powered sugar, and within a minute Fats ate them all.

“Hungry?”

His coffee sat empty before him. I ordered another round for him.

Fats didn’t say a word. He leaned an arm on the iron railing and looked across the street at St. Louis Cathedral. Or maybe he was looking at the bronze statue of Andrew Jackson. I’ve always liked to think it was the church, with the spotlight beams illuminating the simple high cross.

“Is it the track?”

“Naw.” He laughed.

“You need help?”

“No,” Fats said. “What I got, pod’na, is a fair deal. Just like Robert Johnson said, Last fair deal goin’ down. You know about Johnson?”

“Sure.”

“He sure played a weird guitar. I’ve always tried to make my sax do that. But it just ain’t the same.”

“What’s the deal, Fats?”

He laughed again and shook his head. He looked up. “You ever been in love, Nick?”

“Every Saturday night.”

“No, man. I mean really in love. Where it make you sick jus’ to think you ain’t gonna get no more.”

“I guess.” I looked at him as he brushed a hand over his gray suit to get off the fallen powdered sugar.

“Let’s just say I found somethin’, all right, big chief.”

“That’s where the money went?”

“Thanks for the eats, Nick.”

And with that, Fats reached down, grabbed the handle of his battered sax case, patted it like a child, and was gone. I sipped on another café au lait, warming my hands on the steaming mug.

Two days later, JoJo called to tell me that Fats was dead.

The sleet played against the industrial windows of my loft, a 1920s lumber storage in the Warehouse District, on the blackest early afternoon I could remember. Tulane was on Christmas break and instead of teaching blues history, I found extra time to loaf. I was practicing some of Little Walter’s harp licks on my Hohner Special 20 when JoJo buzzed me from Julia Street.

“I’ve already joined the Moonies,” I said, pressing the button on my intercom. “Fuck off.”

“Goddammit, open the door.”

I went to the kitchen portion of the second floor’s open space, lit the stove with a kitchen match, and began to make coffee. I left the sliding metal door ajar and JoJo walked in, tramping his feet and muttering obscenities under his breath.

“You don’t even know my mother,” I said.

“I need you to go with me to clear out Fats’s shit. That’s if you want him to have a proper funeral. Man died without a cent. And no family that anyone knows about. Loretta said we should do it.”

“She’s right.”

It was a bullet through a clouded mind that killed him. A self-inflicted wound. Or so read the coroner’s report that my friend, Detective Jay Medeaux, shared with me. He told me a pink-haired runaway found Fats’s body on the Riverwalk, his back broken from a final fall onto the jagged rocks lining the Mississippi River.

All I could imagine was the grayness of those rocks and the grayness of his face among the damp paper bags and broken multicolored bottles as we climbed the stairs to his apartment. It was on Decatur, not far from the French Market — a sign outside asked for fifty bucks a week.

The apartment manager met us on the stoop, thumbing through the sports section of the Times-Picayune. Wordless, with an impassive face, he led us to a second-floor efficiency. Hazy white light sprouted through rust-flecked metal blinds onto a rat’s nest of dirty clothes, an empty bottle of Captain Morgan’s spiced rum, a rumpled black suit on a bent hanger, a book called The Real Israelites, a juke joint poster, a toothbrush with a box of baking soda, and a pack of sax reeds on an unmade bed.

No sax.

“Mmhmm,” JoJo said.

“It’s not here.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Hey, buddy,” I said to the manager, “where’s his saxophone?”

“What’s here is here. I ain’t responsible.”

“Where’s his goddamned sax?”

I felt JoJo’s strong hand on my shoulder. “Man doesn’t know.”

The manager bit his lower lip, turned on a heel, and left us. We spent five minutes packing everything in the room into a cardboard box made for Colt 45 malt liquor. I took the rumpled black suit from the hanger, folded it, and handed it to JoJo. He nodded.

I heaved the box up into the crook of my elbows and walked down a urine-scented staircase. My ears rang, full of Fats’s sax, those deep full notes that bled the man’s life and loss. He never cheated, putting all he was into every note. And now someone had taken the one thing he cared about even more than his own life.

That afternoon I started searching all around the Quarter. I looked into any painted window using the words MUSIC, PAWN, or ANTIQUE. I learned his sax was a classic made in the forties, a collector’s item that could pay for a dozen caskets and burial plots.

I found nothing.

The cool day turned into colder night as the setting sun turned burnt orange over the Mississippi. Driving down St. Charles Avenue, mottled shadows played over my face. Leaves turned end over end from the knurled water oaks dripping with Spanish moss.

I parked off Prytania, where Fats’s drummer lived in a rotting carriage house among mansions.

He was stoned when he opened the door. Red-eyed, sunken-shouldered, giggly stoned. Tom Cat usually wore his hair in a greasy ponytail, but tonight it hung wild in his face. Clutching a bag of Cheetos in his skinny white arms, he wiped orange dust from the corner of his mouth and invited me in.

“Hey, dude.”

I pulled a crumpled pair of jeans and a foul-smelling T-shirt off a chair and sat down. The place reeked of marijuana. He’d be lucky if the paint didn’t start to peel.

“Want a smoke?”

“No thanks,” I said, smiling and pulling a pack of Marlboros from my jean-jacket pocket.

“Jesus, Nick, I’m a mess.” He started to giggle. “Why’d he do it, man? Didn’t he realize it wasn’t just him, man, that...” He laughed uncontrollably.

I smoked my cigarette and looked outside. Two kids played touch football in the street.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His laughing died like a cold engine. “I just can’t handle the shit now. Ya know?”

“Yeah.”

“Your band need a drummer?”

“Did Fats have a girlfriend?”

“I really don’t want to talk about this. It makes me feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

“I need to know.”

“You ain’t a cop, man. Don’t be a hard-on.”

“Did he have a girlfriend?”

He dropped his head between his knees, black hair cascading into his face. In a few seconds he raised back up, looked at the ceiling, red-faced from the inversion, and said, “See, Fats didn’t have a girlfriend. Fats... Fats had a whore.”

Her name was Sarah. Petite hands, delicate face, soft brown skin. She was probably in her late twenties, going on fifty. Her lips quivered when she blew cigarette smoke over her head, and she liked to drink. Crushed ice, Jim Beam, and cherries. The closer I sat to her at the hotel bar, the more I smelled the cherries. The more I smelled her perfume. I see, Fats. I see.

On her third drink, she looked over at me and grinned widely into the left corner of her mouth. Her lips were full and thick. Her small body tight and exposed in black hot pants and black shirt tied above her stomach.

“You sure are big. You a Saint?” she said.

“No, I’m a dancer. Jazz, modern, and some tap. I used to break-dance, but I never could spin on my head.”

She laughed. And even from the six feet that separated us, I could tell she had been crying. Dry streaks through her makeup. I moved closer.

She kept wiping her nose and eyes. She turned her gaze back to a book placed in front of her drink.

“How is it?” I asked.

She cocked her head at me and a thin strap fell from her shoulder.

“The book.”

“Oh,” she said, and closed it and showed me the cover. Lady Sings the Blues. “A friend gave it to me.”

As I was about to pursue the thought, two guffawing men walked into the deserted bar. Laughing, smirking. Drunk, with slow-moving eyes and aggressive swaggers. One nodded at the bartender. He nodded back.

“Ready?” the bartender asked her.

“Oh. Yes.”

I put my hand over hers; it was cold and shaking. “You don’t have to do this.”

She smiled at me with her eyes. “It’s gonna be just fine. Just gonna be fine.”

I kept my hand over hers.

One of the businessmen approached me. Maybe I was generalizing, but he sure fit the description. Brooks Brothers suit and a wedding ring. His hair was silver, and his expensive cologne clashed with his hundred-buck-meal onion breath. Big fun on the bayou in the Big Easy.

“We already paid,” he said. “You’ll have to do it yourself, son.” He made a yanking motion with one hand.

The younger businessman snorted. The bartender was wise enough to shut up.

I looked for a long time at the older man. He probably had everyone in his company scared of him. Everyone called him sir and catered to his every egotistical whim. He’d never sweated, never done a damn thing but hang out at the fraternity house and kiss ass until he made partner. I stared.

He looked down at my tattered and faded jean jacket and sneered. “What do you want?”

I slowly reached down the side of my leg and pulled out my boot knife. I grabbed him by his tie — red with paisley patterns — cut it off at the knot, and shoved it in his mouth. The younger man moved in as the CEO took a swing at me. I caught his fist in my hand and squeezed. If I had anything, it was strong hands from shirking tackles when I played football.

I brought the guy to his knees.

“Sir, when your grandkids are sitting on your lap this Christmas and everything is all warm and fuzzy, I want you to remember this. I want you to think about it as you light the tree, cut the turkey, and pat the kids on the head. Tell the boys when they come to New Orleans to treat the ladies real nice.”

I released my grip. He wouldn’t think about what I said. He was not me, and I was not him. I remembered something a psychologist friend had told me years ago: Don’t expect anything from a pig but a grunt.

She agreed to walk with me to the Quarter only after I gave her fifty bucks. It was fifty I didn’t have, but it was the only way. Together we crossed Canal, dodging cars, soon smelling that cooked-onion-and-exhaust scent that floats around the old district.

I took her to a small bar off Decatur to talk, really it was just a place to sit and drink, only four feet from a sliding window. I got two beers in paper cups, and we sat down. No one around us except an elderly black waiter in a tattered brown sweater. Sarah finished half her beer in one gulp.

I asked her if she was afraid.

“No. Not of you.”

“What then?”

She finished her beer and pulled a cigarette from a pack extracted from a cheap vinyl purse. I lit it.

“Tell me about you and Fats. You know he’s dead?”

“I know.”

She sat there for a moment just looking at me.

“Was he a regular?”

She dropped her head, kneading the palm of her hand into her forehead. The cigarette held high in her fingers.

“Did you work for him at his apartment or did he get a hotel?”

She scratched the inside corner of her mouth and took another drag of the cigarette.

“You were with him the night he died, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

I exhaled a long breath and gambled with what I said next. “That man didn’t have anything. Why’d you set him up? You could’ve rolled anybody, like those two in the hotel. You’d come up with a lot more money than what Fats had. He was a sweet old guy. He had more talent than someone like you could ever comprehend. Just tell me who helped you.”

“Stop it. Just stop it. You don’t know anything.”

“Why?”

“You got it all messed ’round. You don’t know how it was.”

“How was it, Sarah? You tell me.”

“I loved him.”

I laughed.

“He tole me he’d marry me. Imagine that. Him marrying me. Even sold his saxophone to—” She was sobbing now.

I waited. When she stopped, she told me about how they first met. Thursday nights she would wait for him outside JoJo’s, listening to his sweet music. The day he told her that he loved her, it was raining. “Real black clouds over the Mississippi,” she said.

“So why’d he sell his sax?”

“To buy me.”

It was two in the morning when I got back to the Warehouse District, lonely, cold, and tired. I didn’t want to be alone. A light was on across Julia Street in the warehouse of a neighbor, one of the many artists who lived in the district. A ballet instructor. Beautiful girl. Good person.

I parked my Jeep, grabbed a six-pack of Abita out of the fridge, then found myself buzzing her from the street-level intercom. I could hear Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 filtering out a cracked second-story window and reverberating off the concrete and bricks down the street. Her blurred image floating past the dim windows.

As I stood there, I suddenly felt silly because she could have company. I guess I arrogantly thought she would always just be there when I needed her. Just waiting, no need for a life of her own. But I guess she thought of me like one of the neighborhood cats that she consistently fed whenever they decided to wander by for a meal.

Sam slid back a rusted viewing slot, then opened the door smiling. Short blond hair and blue eyes. She wore cutoff gray sweatpants and a man’s ribbed white tank top tied at her waist. She’d been dancing a long time — enough to build a sweat.

“I don’t remember ordering a pizza,” she said.

“I do. Should be here in fifteen minutes — chicken, artichoke hearts, and white cheese.”

She shook her head and laughed. She slid two heavy bolts behind us, and I followed her up the stairs. I put my hand on her back. It was very warm.

The next day I played the waiting game in a little tourist café on Royal. I waited and I watched Sarah’s apartment. I ate two bowls of bland gumbo and a soggy muffuletta, drank draft Abita until I got loopy, and then switched to “Authentic French Market Coffee.” Tasted like Maxwell House.

I saw her walk outside to a scrolled balcony in a loose-fitting robe and lean over, sipping coffee. That was noon.

At three, she came back to the balcony. She sat down in a director’s chair, propped her feet on the iron railing, and read. The Billie Holiday book?

At 3:43, she went back inside and did not come back out for two hours. The bright sunshine barely warming a cold day retreated, and the shadows finally returned, falling over my face.

Around six, she came out of the street entrance walking toward Esplanade. I tucked the copy of Nine Stories back in my jacket pocket, where I always kept it, placed a few bills under the weight of a salt shaker, and began to follow.

I had a ragged Tulane cap pulled low over my eyes and wore sunglasses — some Lew Archer I was. I pulled the collar of my trench coat tighter around my face. Not just for disguise, but also to block the cold. December wind shooting down those old alleys and boulevards can make a man want to keep inside.

She went into the A&P on Royal, and I stayed outside. In a few minutes she returned, unwrapping a pack of cigarettes and continuing toward the far end of Royal. She walked into a place with the doors propped wide open, leaned over the bar, and French-kissed the bartender. He struck an effeminate, embarrassed pose and laughed. She patted him on the face and kept walking.

At the end of the street, she went inside a bed and breakfast. Semirenovated. New awning, peeling paint on the windows. I got close enough to see through the double-door windows. She was talking to someone at the front desk. Then she turned, going deeper inside the building. I waited.

It was cold. There were no restaurants or coffee houses on this side of the district. It hadn’t been civilized yet. I blew hot breath through closed fits.

I waited.

I got solicited twice. Once by a man. Once by a woman. And had a strange conversation with a derelict.

“Crack,” he said.

“Gave it up for the holidays. Thank you, though.”

“Naw, man. Dat’s my name.”

“Your name is Crack?”

“Shore.”

I asked “Crack” where the nearest liquor store was. He said it was on Rampart, so I gave him a few bucks and told him to buy me a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and whatever he wanted. Actually, it wasn’t really a gamble to give him money. Most of those guys work on a strange ethical code when it comes to a fellow drinker.

He came back, and we sat on the other side of Esplanade watching the bed and breakfast until nearly ten o’clock. The whiskey tasted like sweet gasoline.

When Sarah came back, her hair was mussed, her jaw worked overtime on gum, and she looked tired. She certainly did not expect what came next as she bent down to restrap a sequined stiletto.

As she pulled the buckle tight around her ankle, an early-seventies black Chrysler whipped around the corner of Chartres, speeding right toward us. I had no time to push her out of the way or yell. I could only watch as she just stayed bent over with her butt in the air. Hand still touching those ridiculous shoes. Very still.

I knew the car would hit her.

But it didn’t. Instead, the car skidded to a halt next to her, and a white arm grabbed her by the hair and jerked her in. She screamed as I sprinted across the street. Because of the tinted windows I couldn’t see the driver, who put the car back in gear and weaved to hit me.

I bolted away and lunged toward the curb, where Crack was standing holding his bottle of apple liquor. The car’s tires smoked as it headed down Royal.

I followed.

My breath came in hard, fast spurts. I knew I was sprinting a losing race, but I followed until I saw the dim glow of the car’s cracked red taillights turning somewhere near Toulouse.

And she was gone.

Whoever took Sarah dumped her body underneath the Greater New Orleans Bridge on the Algiers side of the Mississippi. Naked with a cut throat.

Jay Medeaux stood over me at police headquarters on Broad Street and slurped on a cup of black coffee. I rubbed my temples. It was nine a.m. and I hadn’t slept. His wide, grinning face looked more amused with my situation than sympathetic.

“No coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“Cruller?”

“Jay, do you mind?”

“Touchy. Touchy.”

I regurgitated every trivial detail of what I witnessed and knew. Jay listened without asking any questions. He didn’t even lecture me about conducting my own investigation — which he knew I was prone to do. Jay was a good friend.

I remember him happiest when we beat LSU. His grin wide as he held our coach high on his shoulders in a warped, fading photograph I still kept on my desk.

He pulled Sarah’s file from Vice and made a few phone calls. We found out she was working for a pimp with the awful moniker of Blackie Lowery. A lowlife whose previous convictions included running a strip club staffed with twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, trucking oysters from a polluted water zone, indecent exposure at Antoine’s restaurant, selling illegal Jazz Fest T-shirts, and beating the shit out of his pit bull with a Louisville Slugger. Sounded like our man.

Jay let me go with him to pick the guy up.

We found Blackie outside his Old Style Voodoo Shop spray-painting a dozen little cardboard boxes black — his back turned as he spurted out a final coat. He was a skinny guy with pasty white skin, a shaved head, and a thick black mustache curled at the end like Rollie Fingers used to wear. He stopped painting and looked sideways at us.

“Hey, Blackie, why don’t you spell shop with two Ps and an E?” Jay said. “The tourists would like it more, I bet. Make it sound real authentic, ya know?”

Blackie had his shirt off, and a tiny red tattoo was stamped over his heart.

“We found one of your employees this morning,” Jay said. “Blade sliced her throat real even.”

He gave a crooked smile and threw down his paint can. “I don’t have a clue.”

“That’s beside the point,” Jay said. “Come on with us.”

“Eat me,” Blackie said.

I walked through a side door and into the voodoo shop. The smell of incense was strong among the trinkets, stones, and powders. A small, glass-topped casket sat in the middle of the room with a carved wooden dummy inside painted to look like a decomposing corpse.

But beyond the Marie Laveau T-shirts and the hundreds of bags of gris-gris powders, something interested me.

Fats’s sax sat in a corner.

Sometimes I like to hear Dixieland jazz after several drinks. Sometimes I like to hear my boots as they clunk across a hardwood floor. Sometimes I even like to cover the tall windows of my warehouse with bedsheets and watch old movies all day. But most of all, I like to sit in JoJo’s and listen to Loretta Jackson sing. Her voice can rattle the exposed brick walls and break a man’s heart.

It was Christmas Eve, a week after Jay picked up Blackie. I was nursing a beer and watching Loretta rehearse a few new numbers. Old blues Christmas songs that she always mixed in with her set during the season. Growling the words to “Merry Christmas, Baby” and making my neck hairs stand on end.

“You keep babyin’ that beer and it’s gonna fall in love with ya,” JoJo said, as he washed out a couple shot glasses in the sink.

“Everybody needs a friend.”

“Mmhmm.” He dried the inside of the glasses with a white towel and then hung it over his shoulder. “Why you down here today, anyway?”

“Sam’s been wanting to go Christmas shopping in the Quarter all week. And I promised.”

“You hear any more from Medeaux ’bout that pimp?”

“Nah. Blackie’s still in jail far as I know.”

“You let me know if somethin’s different.”

Loretta finished the song with a great sigh into her microphone and a quick turnaround from the band. The guitar player made his instrument give a wolf whistle as Loretta stepped off stage. Running a forearm over her brow, she walked over and sat next to me.

“My boy Nicholas,” she said as she rubbed my back. “My boy.”

“Your boy Nicholas sittin’ on his ass drinking while his new woman trudgin’ ’round these old French streets lookin’ for gifts.”

“My boy deserves it.’

“Hmphh.”

“Y’all talkin’ ’bout Fats, weren’t cha?”

JoJo nodded and walked back into the kitchen.

“Man had a sad life, Nick. Cain’t believe he sold his sax for that girl.”

“Guess he loved her.”

“Hell, she was just a two-bit whore.”

“Loretta.”

“Naw, I’m serious. She was fuckin’ half the band.”

“What?”

“Sure she was. Saw her almost get her cheap ass beat by Fats’s drummer out back. Havin’ some kind of lover’s quarrel, I guess.”

“When was this?”

“Few days before he died.”

I took a deep breath, and my fist tightened on top of the bar.

Tom Cat was passed out on his sofa when I kicked in the door to his apartment. Little multicolored Christmas lights had fallen on his body and face, and it gave him a festive, embalmed look. I grabbed him by a dirty Converse high top and yanked him off the sofa. His eyes sprung awake.

“Who killed him?”

“Nick, man. Merry Christmas to you too. Hey, I—”

“Who killed him?”

“You trippin’, man.”

I yanked him to his knees and punched him hard in the stomach. He doubled over weakly.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were sleeping with her?”

“I wasn’t.”

“The pimp didn’t kill Sarah, did he? He had no reason. You did. You loved her.”

“Fuck you.”

I kicked him hard in the side with my boot. I didn’t enjoy it. It didn’t make me feel like a man. I just did it.

“It was a mistake. Fats shouldn’t been a part of it.”

“Part of what?”

He rolled to his side and wiped his tears with a ragged flannel shirtsleeve. Pushing his long greasy hair, he told me.

I did not interrupt.

It was blackmail. Sarah and Tom Cat had worked out a scam on a local trial lawyer. But he wasn’t just any lawyer. He was Spencer Faircloth, lawyer to the New Orleans mob. An all-star backslapper among criminals.

Their plan included a sick little videotape. Maybe it included a burro. I don’t know what was on it, didn’t want to know, but I took it with me.

I let Tom Cat go, drove to a nearby K&B Drugstore, and looked through a waterlogged phone book. Some of the pages were so stuck together that the book felt like papier-mâché.

There was no listing. I called information and was told he had an unpublished number.

I called a 250-pound bail bondsman I know named Tiny. He asked for the pay phone’s number.

He called me back in five minutes with the address.

Faircloth lived in an ivy-covered brick mansion with a spiked iron fence and stained-glass windows. When I pulled up near the address on St. Charles, dozens of finely dressed men and women were drinking in Faircloth’s hospitality.

I could see them all, like fish in an aquarium, through the tall windows. I lit a cigarette, smoked it into a nub, and then decided to go in.

Most of the men I passed were in winter wool suits, accented with the occasional silly holiday tie. Candy canes, reindeer, and elves.

I was dressed in blue jeans, boots, and a jean jacket.

I wasn’t accepted.

“Sir?” a large black man asked me.

“Sí.”

“Can I have your invitation?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Faircloth.”

“Mr. Faircloth is spending time with his guests. Can I help you?”

The man’s hair was Jheri-curled, and he wore a finely trimmed mustache.

“Aren’t you Billy Dee Williams?”

He made a move toward me.

“Tell him that a friend of Sarah’s is here.”

He looked down at me, and then left.

I walked over to the buffet line and ate three very tiny turkey sandwiches. I didn’t see any tiny quiches.

A few minutes later, a young man in his twenties walked over to me. I didn’t recognize him at first. His hair seemed slicker tonight. His movements were more polished.

“Can I help you?”

“Are you Spencer Faircloth?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t. I’ll just stay here, continue to eat, and thumb my nose at the conventions of the rich.”

“I’ll have you removed.”

“You do and I’ll propose a toast to Sarah. The finest whore that Faircloth ever had killed.”

“You’re insane.”

“Perhaps.”

Then I remembered him, the younger man from the hotel where I first met Sarah. The one who’d backed up the older man. I looked for him.

I saw the gray-headed gent laughing it up with a group of his ilk near the French doors.

I jumped upon the top of the linen buffet table, my dirty buckskin boots soiling the whiteness. I grabbed a glass and spoon and clinked the two together loudly.

“I would like to propose a toast to the hostess with the mostest. Spence Faircloth.”

The party hesitatingly clapped. A drunk elderly man hooted his approval.

“Thank you, grandpa,” I announced to the old man. “But right now, I would like to offer Mr. Faircloth a deal.”

They were silent.

The two men were whispering to Faircloth, who had his arms tightly wrapped around himself.

“You might call it the last fair deal gone down, like my old friend Fats used to say. The deal, Mr. Faircloth, is that you join me on this table and announce to the party that you are a gutless turd who had a friend of mine killed.”

The crowd stayed silent. A wrinkled old woman with huge breasts shook her head and breathed loudly out her nose.

“But where is the deal, you ask?” I said, reaching deep into the inner layer of my denim jacket and pulling out the videotape.

I held it high over my head like a Bourbon Street preacher does a Bible. I mimed my hands to pretend I was weighing the two.

Billy Dee Williams was trying to approach me from behind.

“What’ll it be, Spence?”

Faircloth shook his head, turned on his heel like a spoiled child, and walked away.

I put the videotape back in my jacket and hopped off the table.

Just like with any other unwanted guest, no one tried to stop me as I left. I think they were waiting for me to pull a red bandanna up over my nose and ask for their jewels.

I got in my Jeep and headed back to the Warehouse District, my hands shaking on the wheel.

I returned to my warehouse only long enough to grab a fresh set of clothes, binoculars, a six-pack of Abita, a frozen quart of Loretta’s jambalaya, my Browning, and Sam’s Christmas present — a 1930s Art Deco watch that I bought on Royal Street a few weeks ago.

It was so silent in my darkened space that I could hear the watch’s soft ticks as late-day orange light retreated through the industrial windows.

I tucked everything in a tattered army duffel bag and put it outside my door.

I used only the small lock near the doorknob, leaving the dead bolt open.

Walking across Julia Street, I felt a cold December wind coming from the Mississippi. It smelled stagnant and stale. I could almost taste its polluted, muddy water.

In the warehouse opposite mine, Sam slid back the door with a scowl on her face. Her short blond hair was tousled, and she was wearing an old gray Tulane sweatshirt of mine that hung below her knees.

“You’re scowling.”

“You left me wandering around the Quarter. What the hell is the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry.”

She let me in and I followed her to the second floor of her warehouse that looked down on a dance studio. The lights were dimmed on the floor below, and a stereo softly played Otis Redding.

“I’m still mad.”

“I know.”

She reheated the jambalaya in a black skillet, and we shared the six-pack of Abita. I told her about Tom Cat and about Spencer Faircloth’s dinner party. She shook her head and tried not to laugh. When I told her I had my gun, she didn’t like that at all, and walked out of the kitchen. One of her cats trailed her.

But she warmed up after a few more of Otis’s ballads and a few more Abitas.

Later, we made love in her antique iron bed, Christmas lights strung over her headboard. The beer, food, and music blended into a fine holiday mood.

The next day we opened our gifts. She gave me an old Earl King record I’d wanted for years, a gunmetal cigarette lighter, a first edition of Franny and Zooey, and a framed picture of Tom Mix.

She loved the watch.

We returned to bed a few more times that day, only leaving the mattress for the kitchen and something to eat. It was one of the best Christmases I can remember.

They came around midnight, Sam still cradled in my arms asleep. Two cats were curled in balls at the foot of the bed. I could hear the sound of the engine and two doors closing while I carefully unentwined myself from Sam and peeked through her blinds. The car, a black sedan, was still running. Two men were at my front door with a crowbar.

I walked into the kitchen, pulled on my jeans, boots, and the Tulane sweatshirt. I inserted a clip into the Browning and pulled a black watch cap over my ears.

Before clanking down the steps to the street level, I called 911, reported a burglary and shooting at my address, and hung up.

Outside, it was cold enough to see my breath.

I could see someone seated in the back of the sedan smoking a cigarette. A tiny prick of orange light and then a smoky exhaling that clouded the windows. Without stopping, I bent at the waist and jogged behind the car. I opened the back door and climbed inside.

I was seated right next to Spencer Faircloth.

I’ll never understand why he came. He was far too smart to put himself anywhere near something as dirty as this. I’m pretty sure it was just ego. The gutless turd remark must have gotten to him.

I poked him in the ribs with my Browning.

“Spencer, you old dog.”

I reached over the driver’s seat and pulled the keys from the ignition while I kept the gun pointed at him. I then motioned him outside, found the key for the trunk, and pushed him in with the flat of my palm.

My face felt cold and wind-bitten when I smiled.

They had made a real mess of my turn-of-the-century door, which had scrolled patterns around the mail slot. Splintered wood and muddy boot tracks led up my side staircase.

This time I did not run. I crept.

But I had the advantage. I knew every weakness in that staircase. Each creak. Every loose board.

I heard crashes and thuds. They were throwing my shit all around. And they must have enjoyed making a mess because they were laughing the whole time.

At the top of the landing, I straightened my right arm and fired a slug into the shoulder of the black man with curly, greasy hair. As he spun, one of my old books flew out of his hands, pages fluttering like a wounded bird before it crashed to the floor.

The young preppy white guy I’d encountered twice wasn’t ready either. It took him a full four seconds before he tried to reach inside his raincoat. His eyes were wide with fear when I fired, hitting him in the thigh.

His gun slid along the floor, several feet away from him.

He was no bodyguard or the triggerman. He was just the guy fetching laundry and coffee for Faircloth.

But ole Billy Dee was the real deal.

I walked over to him, slowly. My boots clanking hard in my warehouse, the place where I slept, ate, and read.

The book he’d been tearing pages from was Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues. The dog-eared pages littered the floor around him, some misted with blood from the bullet’s impact.

He had his gun still in hand. A revolver.

“You’re not a blues fan, are you?”

He looked up at me and laughed.

“You remember that old man who you shot in the head?”

“Should have been you, motherfucker.”

“That old man could play ‘Blue Monday’ and break your heart.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Maybe.”

With my gun pressed flat against his nose, I took his revolver.

“I’ll find you,” he said. “I promise you that.”

The police arrived a short time later, and with the coaxed testimony of Tom Cat, all three were charged with murder.

On New Year’s Eve, I played “Auld Lang Syne” on Fats’s tarnished sax and Loretta sang. Everyone made toasts and kissed while I placed the battered instrument in a dusty glass case, where it still remains today.

Sam came over, put an arm around my neck, and kissed me hard. I stood back and looked at Fats’s picture on top of the wooden case.

She kissed me again, and I turned away.

JoJo told me I did a “real nice job” playing harp that night and handed me another Dixie. Drunk, JoJo ambled up onstage and professed his love for his wife. She watched him and smiled, then gave him a kiss too.

I wish I could’ve kept the moment, everything the way it was right then. But that was the year I met Cracker and went looking for the lost recordings of Robert Johnson in the Mississippi Delta. And my life was never the same.

Pie Man by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

(Originally published in 2012)

Central City

The Pie Man tells Baby that a man has got to grab his own future for his own self. The City of New Orleans pays good to work disaster cleanup and Baby would do well to cash in before all the money gets carted off. A lot more sensible, the Pie Man says, than running around punching on Spanish dudes. The Pie Man walks across the living room in his chef’s jacket. He plops down on the couch, making himself at home. The walls have been stripped naked to the studs. Baby doesn’t know which way his future is, but he’s damn sure it’s got nothing to do with scooping mold out of some abandoned school.

Baby sits at the plastic folding table in white briefs and a tank top, fingering the dry skin around his bulky, plastic ankle bracelet. He plucks a Vienna sausage from its tin and tosses the wiener in his mouth. Baby eyes the Pie Man. The Pie Man doesn’t seem to get that he has no claim on this place or anyone in it. Baby may be only fourteen, but this is his house. He’s the man here.

The Pie Man’s eyes are red. He kneads his face with both hands and looks around like he doesn’t remember why he’s there. Sauced out of his mind before noon. Probably spent the night with the winos back in Gert Town.

Baby’s mom doesn’t notice because she’s too busy flapping around the room like a hen with a case of colic. As she gathers her things for the day care center, she keeps clucking at him about making the right choices in life. Her standard rave.

She’s on Baby because a Latino day-jobber got jumped outside the package liquor last night, the latest in a string of black-on-brown beatdowns in retaliation for what happened to Baby’s boy, Chaney. Baby’s mom thinks Baby is part of the jump squad. He’s not. Yet. He doesn’t tell her this. If she and everyone else think he’s in on the attacks, it beats the alternative. Better to be feared than understood.

Baby’s mom checks her hair in a handheld mirror before placing it on the table he’s sitting at. It doubles as her dresser and the couch is her bed. Baby sleeps on the floor in his fleece blanket, wrapped up tight as a papoose. A portable stovetop makes the bathroom their kitchen. All their real stuff was destroyed in the flood from the levee breech after Hurricane Katrina passed nearly three years ago. They live in the front half of the house since the back is sealed off with blue tarp to keep the fungus odor out. It doesn’t work. Everything smells like old people’s feet to Baby.

Sanchez, the carpenter Baby used to gopher for, shot Chaney in cold blood, but the police called it self-defense — as if Chaney’s back had a chance against Sanchez’s .38. Baby’s mom called the Pie Man in to odd-job their General Pershing Street home three months ago because Sanchez and the rest of the Latinos are afraid to work in Baby’s neighborhood. She can’t afford a contractor with papers or real tools.

Baby’s mom didn’t confirm the Pie Man was his pops until old man Sanchez quit. Baby told his mom and the Pie Man that it didn’t make any difference that the drunk was his father. The Pie Man has no business making any claims after all this time. Either way, Baby sometimes finds himself staring into the Pie Man’s face, wondering what life might have been like if the man had always been around.

Chin on the table, eyes clamped shut, Baby realizes the Pie Man and his mom have been jabbering at him the whole time. Who knew? He wonders what they were like when they met each other back in the Stone Age. During the time of Public Enemy and parachute pants. Back when the Pie Man’s uneven flattop fade was in style. Back before they became voices in the wall.

They have a similar way of phoning in their rants. No commitment. They talk at him like they’re being watched. As if they’ll get in big trouble for failing to pay the right amount of lip service.

The Pie Man tells Baby he ought to respect his mom, man, because that’s the least she deserves for bringing him into this unbalanced world, and if Baby’s going to keep driving her every which way like he’s been doing, then Baby ain’t no kind of man. The whole issue could be that Baby’s not thinking, says the Pie Man, but he can start anytime now. He tells Baby to sit up and pay attention. Because he doesn’t know the Pie Man well, Baby does as he’s told. The Pie Man could be crazy or something, like Baby’s friend Touché.

“What, am I supposed to call you Daddy or something?” Baby nudges the skateboard under the table with his bare foot.

The Pie Man’s slacks, shoes, and neckerchief match his jacket, dingy white from head to toe. He mismatched the cloth buttons so that his collar is higher on one side than the other. To Baby the Pie Man looks like a homeless chocolate Chef Boyardee. There’s no trace of the freckles Baby got from his redheaded mom. The ones he catches hell for at school. The ones he tried to scrub off after reading the Dred Scott decision in American history the year before. Yet even though Baby’s freckles won’t come off, that doesn’t mean he can’t become the next great civil rights leader like Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur, or Lil’ Wayne. Holding it down for the people. Real niggas.

Baby scratches the oval scab on his shin, thinking it’s going to leave a mark when it heals. If it heals. Maybe he’ll cover it with a black fist tattoo when Mom’s not looking. The tattoo is Touché’s idea. Touché wants everyone in the Mighty Black Ninja Krew to get black fist tattoos after they find and stomp Sanchez today. Baby’s heard through the grapevine that Sanchez feels bad about what he did to Chaney, and it might be true. Sanchez never held back telling Baby when he’d screwed up, but he was quick to give Baby props for good work, and he always gave Baby a cold can of soda at the end of the day.

Baby gets up to leave. But his mom yells at him and makes him sit his rear back in that chair right this instant. He’s a target, she says, and Baby feels she’s right. The Latinos have been dishing out hard-core payback. Curtis Thompson, the running back at Baby’s school, got whacked in the knee with a galvanized-steel pipe the other day. Curtis is out for the season, and with him any shot at the state championship. They say he never saw the guys who did it, but they had Spanish accents. Nobody’s safe, thinks Baby. Baby’s mom thinks she can protect him by sending him to the barber. His hair makes him look like a maniac, she says.

But Baby’s Afro is a matter of pride for him. It’s a fuzzy crown that radiates out six inches, going from black at the scalp to reddish brown at the tips. Like a halo made of rabbit’s fur. Most of his friends think it’s pretty cool. It counteracts the freckles.

One thing at a time, says the Pie Man to Baby’s mom. Baby follows the Pie Man’s lips. The way they form words. Inner-tube round one second, then flat like a pair of rotten bananas. The Pie Man says he knows Baby doesn’t want to go back on full house arrest. The Pie Man says Baby’s free lawyer, Mr. Bates, already told them Baby was out of chances. The Pie Man looks at Baby as if expecting a response, which Baby doesn’t give. Baby stares at those bananas.

The Pie Man tells Baby to get up because it’s time to go to work.

Baby looks out the window. Orange traffic barrels flank a Do Not Enter sign at the end of the block.

“Nope,” Baby says. “I ain’t doing your slave work. If that means I’m stuck inside, then so what?”

Baby’s mom sprays air freshener at him. She tells him she’ll turn him in herself if he doesn’t get that haircut. And he better be home before the streetlights come on. If he’s more than a half-inch from the front door by then, the SWAT team will come after him, she reminds him for the umpteenth-and-a-half time. She kisses him on the forehead and leaves.

The Pie Man says he’ll bring Baby to the barber now but doesn’t get up from the couch. He continues to stare at the empty space behind Baby.

“I’ll get ready.” Baby rides his skateboard to the bathroom where he straps on his Chuck Taylors and a pair of brown plaid shorts before climbing out the window.

The outside of Lawrence D. Crocker Elementary isn’t much different from how Baby remembers it growing up. Lots of brick walls and stucco pillars. Plenty of rectangles. Gravel lot. The narrow Plexiglass windows were faded opaque even before Baby and his friends went here, but the interior is totally different since Hurricane Katrina turned it out. Dried gack coats the tile and baseboards. Green paint curdles from the floodwater pox. Rivulets of rust and mold syrup drool down the walls. Waterlogged books, tiny chairs coated in sludge, poster boards covered in blue-black fungus. The dump smells like anchovies pickled in urine.

Baby hasn’t cut his hair but figures skipping the job would be going too far. He does skateboarding tricks on the retaining wall outside of the school, knowing it will be some time before the Pie Man puts his brain on and figures out to come. But the van appears at the street corner within minutes. The clunker has one headlight and Nobody Starves When the Pie Man’s Around scrawled in faded orange letters across the side. Ever since the Pie Man decided he’s Baby’s pops again, he’s begun following Baby around in that death trap even when they’re not working.

The Pie Man used to sell gumbo ya-ya, greens, and bread pudding at barbershops and car washes. Sometimes he makes pies — pecan, apple, and sweet potato — all with his own two hands. Baby can tell the Pie Man had been real proud of his business selling catballs to the citizenry. Baby chuckled when he remembered the web video he’d seen of a stupid toothless cat doing its best to gum a mouse to death. The mouse kept plopping out — pissed, but pretty much okay. The Pie Man said he got shut down when the health inspector caught him selling reconstituted meat. Baby asked him, reconstituted from what? Meat mostly, said the Pie Man.

Now two-by-fours and tangled wires choke the van’s bay. The Pie Man must have had breakfast, thinks Baby, because he looks sober. He managed to button his jacket right and comb his flattop so that his head looks like an eraser.

“Why can’t they just bulldoze this hole and start from scratch?” Baby skates toward the Pie Man, who is unloading sledgehammers in the lobby outside of the cafeteria. Sanchez’s tools were used for assembling things. Baby learned, to his own amazement, how to hang a door. It was harder than it looked, Sanchez told Baby, because you had to make many little decisions to get the right fit. Baby imagines swinging one of those sledgehammers at Sanchez’s head, watching it roll across the ground like an eight ball after contact.

The Pie Man shrugs and tosses his jacket on a wheelbarrow. He has ink on his bicep. An eagle, perched above an earth and anchor, flaps its wings whenever the Pie Man flexes.

“You ever shot somebody?” Baby says.

The Pie Man slings a wide shovel onto his shoulder and says he shot two people.

“Did they die?”

The Pie Man shrugs.

They work their way into the library, where red wall pennants form a frieze near the ceiling. Bookcases lean at odd angles, having dominoed during the flooding. All the books are on the floor, mush. As little boys, Baby and Chaney filed these books for the librarian as punishment after starting a food fight. Today, the books look like cream of wheat.

They both died, says the Pie Man, but he’s not entirely sure about whether he killed the second dude. The second dude he shot was an insurgent with his finger on a trip wire. The whole convoy unloaded on him and any one of them might have gotten the kill shot, he says. Or, he tells Baby, maybe the hajji died of fear.

“What about the first one?” Baby asks.

The Pie Man shovels books into the wheelbarrow on top of his jacket. He says it was his friend Freddie Lane, the first person he met when he enlisted. He murdered Freddie dead. He tells Baby he’s not sure if either situation matters because at war it’s legit to kill, but if you kill one of your own you’d better have your reasons clean as a fresh latrine, which is what the Pie Man had. Freddie had flipped the fuck out and tried to mow down the boys in the mess with a fifty cal. The Pie Man capped him from behind with his M240, which took Freddie’s arm clean off above the elbow.

The Pie Man says Baby and his boys shouldn’t be so ready to go settle scores with that Spanish guy. Baby can go any way he wants, but that doesn’t mean he has to. The Pie Man says he should just sit on his hands. Baby notices a corroded picture of Nat Turner clipped to one of the wall pennants.

“People will roll you, if you let them,” says Baby as he points a finger from the Pie Man to himself. “I’m done getting rolled, you heard me?” Baby straightens to his full height. “We getting him tonight.”

The Pie Man pops a pill and says he can’t argue with that much. He says he can’t argue with much of anything except that the VA could stop screwing around and send him better medication. The Pie Man’s face is scrunched up again like he’s confused. He says he ain’t slept since Kirkuk.

“What made you join the Marines?” Baby asks.

The Pie Man says it seemed like a good way to go. They needed a chef, and he needed a job for the future he had mapped out. A fair exchange, he thought at the time. But he never baked a single pie in the military. When he came home, he’d forgotten how to. Whether you get Sanchez or he gets you, the Pie Man tells Baby, you end up in the same place.

The Pie Man and Baby put on respirator masks. Baby thinks the Pie Man looks like a futuristic rat. Baby grabs a sledgehammer and zeroes in on the face of Guy Bluford, the first brother launched into outer space. He swings and before long the walls are coming down all around him.

It’s an hour to sundown and the Pie Man left Baby once they finished work for the day. Touché and Turtle skate up the driveway in front of the school.

Touché does a 360 from a ramp angled over a mound of bricks and stops near Baby.

“Welcome back to Genitalia.” Touché’s got a faux-hawk and his striped hoody makes it look like he’s still spinning. General Taylor and Peniston are the streets closest to Crocker facing downtown. They’ve called the streets Genitalia and Peniston since the sixth grade. Dry Ass Street runs perpendicular to them both, a few blocks closer to the streetcar line. “You still got your Oreo ’fro, little man?”

“Man, my mama can’t make a brother cut off his trademark,” says Baby. He hates it when Touché makes fun of his size almost as much as he hates when he makes fun of the fact he’s practically half white. It isn’t Baby’s fault his mom’s pops wasn’t black like everyone else. Touché seems to know where everyone’s buttons are. He’s like a video-game champ who’s got all the secret codes memorized. X to kick you in the gizzards. Z plus turbo to take out your knees and dump you in Lake Pontchartrain. Sometimes you don’t even know it was Touché who got you. Touché’s manipulations bug Baby sometimes, but more often than not Baby is silently praying he learns how to do it himself.

“Yeah, I asked your mama for a haircut. She gave me a blowjob instead.” Baby pokes his tongue against his cheek and pumps his fist. “The bitch still don’t understand English.”

“Your mama so fat,” says Touché, “I pushed that ho in the Mississippi River and rode her to the other side.”

“I heard in Sunday school,” Baby says, “your mama so old she was Jesus’ nanny.”

“Your mama so fat she went to an all-you-can-eat buffet and ate the Chinese waitress,” says Turtle, adjusting his thick glasses. “She be using Ethiopians as toothpicks.”

“Your mama—” says Touché, but he stops and punches Turtle in the shoulder. No one makes fun of Turtle’s real mom. Not even Touché. Not since the last time they saw her, dry-skinned and strung out, begging for change on Canal Street. She wore a tank top and jeans so small they could have fit a ten-year-old, but loose enough to reveal her soiled lace underwear. “We need to get that Sanchez and pop him. Whap.” Touché clutches his board and brings it down on Sanchez’s imaginary head. “Or drag him across town by a rope.”

“Kill that noise,” says Turtle. “We ain’t getting nobody.” He grabs Baby’s shoulder. “I saw the Pie Man’s van earlier.” Turtle is nearly blind from getting his head kicked in.

Baby always thinks he’s staring at him from another world through those binoculars. A scarier world. Turtle’s pops is a scary dude. He’s in Orleans Parish Prison for drugs and guns. Two life sentences.

“He playing camp counselor again?” Turtle asks.

Baby nods.

“Come on.” Turtle skates off with his glasses in hand. He doesn’t need them to get where they’re going.

All three boys glide to the lot behind the school. Scraggly grass forms a crescent along the edges of the fractured concrete. Baby is reminded of the Pie Man’s receding hairline. They enter a rusting cargo container where the Mighty Black Ninja Krew keeps the gas canisters.

The Mighty BNK is what Baby and his boys do when they’re bored. And for fame. Like the time they went berserk-boarding through the Catholic church by the house where Turtle’s foster family lives. Baby videoed the others zipping across the checkerboard floors and leaping from the altar. As Touché spray-painted MBNK on the wooden doors during their escape, Baby noticed statues of old men in the gallery above. They wore flowing pink sheets, one statue dangling a key, the other a sword. They looked like they wanted to kick his ass. He gave them the finger, and the Mighty BNK got away clean.

Touché posted the video, which went viral on the web. The Mighty Black Ninja Krew was right behind a video of a white guy demonstrating stupid dance moves and that toothless cat trying to slurp up that mouse.

If he were being totally honest, Baby would admit he joined the Mighty BNK for the same reason as the others: to get laid. They hide their faces on camera with white stockings, but everybody at school knows who they are. It’s worked out great for the rest of the Mighty BNK. It hasn’t worked at all for Baby.

He doesn’t have the swagger of Touché or the brains of Turtle or the wicked determination of Chaney, shot dead when the Mighty BNK tried to loot Sanchez’s garage. Baby’s fourteen, but looks closer to nine since he’s two heads shorter than the others and has no stubble on his chin, chest, or groin. It’s caused trouble for him with the girls at school, and when they call him Baby, they mean it.

He’s got a plan, though. He’ll lay some pipe on Trenisha, who plays center for the girls basketball team. That shorty is over six feet tall and rough around the edges, but Baby knows he can smooth her out doggie-style like a Chihuahua on a Great Dane in the janitor’s closet or, better yet, in the backseat of Principal Colton’s Cadillac while the Mighty BNK cheers him on. The video would make him a legend in his own time.

But Baby doesn’t know the first, second, or third thing about girls, let alone what it might be like to go to any of the bases with them. He listens to the rest of the Mighty BNK kid around and is sure they’ve all done it — even Chaney, who will never do it again. Baby fears he’ll die without doing it. He wonders if dying without doing it means he winds up in heaven as a kid for all eternity. Or hell.

Touché snickers in the corner of the rusty cargo container, having gone first. His arms are tight against his chest. Baby knows this pose means to leave him be. Baby and the Mighty BNK jacked the nitrous oxide from Sanchez because they were tired of sniffing airplane glue and Freon, which burned the ever-loving b’jesus out of their noses.

Turtle fills a blue balloon from the nitrous oxide canister and hands it to Baby. Baby’s careful not to let any gas escape. Touché’s face is wet. He always cries when they fly.

Turtle tokes weed in a crouch. He offers to Baby, but Baby shakes his head. Baby takes a draw from the balloon, nearly as much as his lungs will hold. Then he sucks a bit of straight air on top to hold the gas steady. The nitrous is sweet on his tongue. Sweet like he’s just licked a birthday cake. Sweet and steady, like his birthday was yesterday, is today, and will be tomorrow. Seated and holding his breath, Baby clutches the tips of his Chuck Taylors for dear life. A tingling rips up his spine like electric spiders on parade. The spiders are angry this time. They rummage through Baby’s innards for flies, bad ideas, and mildew, but don’t find enough.

Baby pushes the gas from his lungs. He feels like propeller blades are chopping him into finer and finer pieces. Every time he feels this, Baby wonders what it would be like to choose how he puts himself back together. Maybe in Atlanta instead of New Orleans this time. Bigger and stronger this time. Taller and darker this time. This time hung like a mutant ox. Maybe this time feared by men and loved like a widow’s diamond. Baby clutches his hair and falls onto his back, shivering.

They were good until the alarm in Sanchez’s garage went off. Baby saw the flash of Sanchez’s gun, and Chaney’s eyes open as full moons on his way to the ground. After Touché and Turtle ran away, the police found Baby frozen in place, his sneakers covered in vomit, the only member of the Mighty BNK captured alive.

Touché finishes the weed before Baby gets a second tug at the balloon. Touché is tapping the side of the cargo container with the tree limb he sometimes uses as a walking stick.

“They running a terror campaign on all the blacks in our ’hood.” Touché flicks the spent bud away.

The gas has different effects on each member of the Mighty BNK. It makes Touché paranoid. Well, more paranoid than normal, Baby thinks.

“Them rednecks can’t just shoot any brother they feel like,” Touché says.

“That’s dumb,” Turtle says. “Sanchez ain’t no kind of redneck.” The gas brings out Turtle’s argumentative side. Sober, he would let Touché carry on until he got tired of hearing himself. “Old Sanchez’s Hispanic.”

“I don’t care if he Jesus on the cross,” says Touché. “His people coming over the borders taking our space, our girls.”

Baby knows Sanchez didn’t come over any border. Sanchez’s son went to the same school as Baby’s mom.

“And what about you?” Touché asks Baby.

Baby toys with his ankle bracelet. It’s a hunk of plastic in the shape of a watch, a handless, faceless watch that refuses to let him know what time it is. Baby wonders what will happen after they get Sanchez. Maybe the guy didn’t mean to kill Chaney, and it’s not like a smackdown will bring him back. Baby raises his eyebrows as if to say, What about me?

“You so fake.” Touché spits. “You need to man up.”

“I ain’t stomping some old dude,” Turtle says.

“He shot our boy. He got Baby with a tracking band on his leg. But he gets to walk around scot-free. This is our neighborhood. Shit, this is our country.” Touché started saying this after Chaney died. “We about to get a black president. People can’t screw with us like this anymore.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to take his stuff,” Turtle says.

Baby skates past a one-way sign on Claiborne Avenue, his hair bouncing in the wind. A police car with its sirens going nearly sideswipes him. He salutes it, but trips to his knees in the process. That’s what the gas does to Baby: it kills his balance. Baby looks around to make sure no one saw him and picks up his board. He hurries past an abandoned double the Latinos tagged with graffiti. He can’t accept that his own neighborhood isn’t safe anymore. The jerkholes are everywhere.

It’s almost dark, and Baby’s mom will start check-up calling for him from her night job scrubbing hospital bedsheets clean. She expects him to tell her he’s safe and sound in their box of old people’s feet.

Baby thought Touché and Turtle might fight over getting Sanchez, but Touché dropped it and skated off, muttering. Baby’s relieved. He feels like there might be a better way to get payback for Chaney but doesn’t know what that way might be.

A Latino in overalls is perched on a ladder, applying stucco to the side of a two-story house. The lawn is littered with empty stucco bags. Baby hums a stone at the man, but misses. The man waves at Baby. Baby searches for another good rock, but the world disappears. His head is covered by a bag and he can’t breathe. Something hard whacks him senseless, and even though he’s defenseless, whoever’s on top of him is having too much fun to let up. He kicks Baby in the stomach and twice in the face. Baby pulls the bag off his head, but the attacker is gone. He knows he’s in trouble when he wipes his mouth and finds blood and tooth fragments.

When Baby gets home, the Pie Man is asleep on the side steps, using a paint can for a pillow. Baby goes inside and looks in his mom’s hand mirror. He’s glad she’s not around to see his nose is smashed or that he’s missing half an eyetooth. Blood coats his chin, and the dust from the stucco bag makes him look like a spook. He doesn’t want to wash the dust off, though. He’s afraid water will activate the stucco mix and turn his head to stone.

Even his mom would agree somebody has to pay for this. If the Mighty BNK let this go, pretty soon Baby, Touché, and every other kid in the neighborhood would be swinging from trees like piñatas at Sunday picnics. Baby runs outside and fingers the van keys from the snoring Pie Man’s pocket. Every color in the rainbow is on the Pie Man’s grungy jacket. Baby hops into the Pie Man’s van and cranks the ignition. The van is hard to drive since the pedals are so far from the seat, but it’s only a couple of blocks to Touché’s.

The van seems fake, like one of those twenty-five-cent rides you plunk your kid brother into outside of a grocery store. The kind with two doughnut-sized steering wheels that don’t do anything.

“They rolled you like a blunt.” Touché purses his lips in a mock whistle after he climbs into the passenger seat. He almost seems to be enjoying this.

Baby rubs his mouth, but the sharp pain stops him. Although the bleeding has slowed, his jaw clicks when he moves it.

“Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you before,” Touché says. “It’s get or get got out here.”

They stop at a gas station in Gert Town. There’s a darkened church on the next lot. One of the neon cross arms is out, so it looks like a machine gun turned on its nose. Touché leaps out and disappears into the station. The station lights are painfully bright to Baby. He’s starting to think taking the van was not the greatest idea.

Touché sprints from the gas station, toting a bottle. He hands it to Baby; it’s a bottle of Goose.

“Should we go get Turtle?” Baby says.

“We don’t need no pussies in the way. We mad dogs tonight.”

Baby doesn’t let the vodka bottle touch his sore lips when he drinks. Tilting his head back makes him woozy, but he recovers as his insides swelter. He tastes ashes and rust and pours some onto the van floor.

“Why’d you do that for?” Touché says.

“That’s for Sanchez,” Baby says. “He’s going to need it.”

Touché chuckles and takes the bottle. “That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”

They drive to Sanchez’s garage and climb out. Touché and Baby slip white stockings over their heads. Baby’s hair makes the stocking pooch out so that he looks like a lightbulb. Baby immediately wants to tear the mask off. It mashes the swollen parts of his face and sandpapers the sweat-moistened stucco coating his skin.

It’s still early enough that Sanchez is bent under a hood like he’s praying to the engine. Water tings as it circulates in the van radiator.

“Yo, old man Sanchez! What’s up, amigo?” Touché calls out before they enter the wooden fence. Before Sanchez can see who’s coming. Touché says amigo wrong. Hi-meego, he says.

“Que pasa, ’migo?” says Sanchez, stuffing a rag into his overalls. He stops in place when Touché and Baby step into view. Baby figures Sanchez will take off running or go for a gun in his toolbox, but he doesn’t. He rakes a hand through his thin white hair. Baby keeps expecting the Pie Man to show up and slap Touché on the back and say they’ve had enough fun for one night. Instead, they stand in silence broken only by nature: crickets and toads rioting in the bushes.

Sanchez steps backward. He’s short. Not Baby short, but not much taller.

“Move.” Touché shoves Sanchez toward the van.

“You’re Reverend Goodman’s son?” Sanchez says to Touché. The stocking mask smushes Touché’s features. It flattens out his cheekbones and tweaks his nose downward. Like he’s wearing a mask under his mask.

“You don’t know me, niño,” Touché says.

“Ian?” Sanchez says to Baby, calling him by the name Baby’s mom only uses when she’s about to lay down the law. Sanchez can see Baby’s face through the mask. “Why are you here to do this?”

Touché cracks Sanchez in the back of the head with the shaft of his stick. Sanchez is out cold. Baby smells copper. Blood.

“It’s on and popping,” Touché laughs.

Baby thinks it’s over, that they’ll drive off and put this behind them, but Touché stoops and wraps twine around Sanchez’s wrists and ankles. Within minutes, they’re speeding toward the levee on the back side of City Park. When they reach the muddy access road that shadows the levee, Touché nearly rolls the van. Sanchez clutches his knees on the floor. A dark landscape whizzes by as Baby grips the metal handles in the van bay.

The van pitches when they scale the levee, causing a box of nails to fall on Sanchez. He yelps. Baby wants to catch the next box to fall, but doesn’t. He feels like he’s on a conveyer belt, heading toward an open furnace. Touché stops near the concrete floodwall, which sits atop the levee. He takes Sanchez’s ankles, Baby his armpits, and they haul him from the van. Sanchez is heavier than he looks. They drop him in the moist grass at the foot of the wall.

“Maybe we can just leave him,” Baby says.

Touché remains silent and switches on his video camera. The van’s headlights flood the scene so there’s no color. Sanchez prays into his bound hands.

“You first.” Touché hands his walking stick to Baby.

Baby steps toward Sanchez and water snakes in through the seams of his Chuck Taylors, sending a jolt up his spine. Sanchez looks up at him. The stick is covered with spikes. Touché added nails to it, Baby realizes.

“Take your shot, little man.”

Crooked nails glisten like fingers in the moonlight. Baby brings the stick up high above Sanchez’s head. Some of the nails are angled at the van. Others slant toward Touché, Sanchez, and the night sky. One points straight at Baby.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to all the writers who so kindly contributed excellent work, especially James Lee Burke and his team — the nice people at the Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency, Simon & Schuster, and Pamala Burke — for making it possible to include “Jesus Out to Sea.”

Also to Johnny Temple and his incomparable staff for amazingly efficient work, as always; and a special shout-out to the scholars I consulted: Kenneth Holditch, who introduced me to “Desire and the Black Masseur,” and who reminded me of “Mussolini and the Axeman’s Jazz,” already a longtime favorite; and to Nancy Dixon, whose remarkable collection, N.O. Lit: 200 Years of New Orleans Literature, confirmed many of my choices and introduced me to others, notably Tom Dent’s Ritual Murder and the writers of Les Cenelles. Nancy, thanks for a lovely morning at the Fair Grinds, and for Armand Lanusse.

About the contributors

Ace Atkins is the New York Times best-selling author of seventeen novels, including the forthcoming The Redeemers and Robert B. Parker’s Kickback. He has been nominated for every major award in crime fiction, including the Edgar Award twice. A former newspaper reporter and SEC football player, Atkins also writes essays and investigative pieces for several national magazines including Outside and Garden & Gun. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his family.

Nevada Barr’s first novel, Bittersweet, was published in 1983. The first book in her Anna Pigeon series, Track of the Cat, was brought to light in 1993 and won both the Agatha and Anthony awards for best first mystery. In the years since, sixteen more Anna Pigeon novels have been published, twelve of them New York Times best sellers. At present Barr lives in New Orleans with her husband, four cats, and two dogs.

John Biguenet’s seven books include The Torturer’s Apprentice and Oyster, a novel. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Esquire, Playboy, Storie (Rome), Tin House, Zoetrope, and many anthologies. He is the author of such award-winning plays as Wundmale, The Vulgar Soul, Rising Water, Shotgun, Mold, Broomstick, and Night Train. An O. Henry Award winner, he is currently the Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Poppy Z. Brite is the author of eight novels, several short story collections, and some nonfiction. Brite now goes by the name Billy Martin and lives in New Orleans with his partner, the artist Grey Cross.

James Lee Burke, a rare winner of two Edgar Awards, and named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, is the author of more than thirty novels and two collections of short stories, including such New York Times best sellers as Light of the World, Creole Belle, Swan Peak, The Tin Roof Blowdown, and Feast Day of Fools. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Kate Chopin (1850–1904), born Katherine O’Flaherty, was the author of two published novels and about one hundred short stories, and lived in New Orleans for over ten years. She is widely considered one of the first feminist authors of the twentieth century. She is best known for her short story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), and her novel The Awakening (1899).

John William Corrington was raised in Shreveport, Louisiana. He received a JD at Tulane University School of Law (1971), but after a few years left the practice of law and began writing full time. Before his death in 1988 he had published four books of poetry, four novels, three books of short fiction, two anthologies, and, with his wife, had written a four-book mystery series, six feature movies, and numerous television episodes.

O’Neil De Noux writes in multiple genres with twenty-nine books published and hundreds of short story sales. His mysteries have won Shamus and Derringer awards and his novel John Raven Beau was the 2011 Police Book of the Year. His historical novels include Battle Kiss and USS Relentless. The French Detective is De Noux’ s latest, a historical mystery novel set in 1900 New Orleans. A former homicide detective, De Noux is currently a police investigator at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Tom Dent (1932–1998) was a New Orleans — born poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher, and was an active participant in the Black Arts and civil rights movements. He was a leading literary figure in New Orleans and spearheaded the Free Southern Theater community workshop program to cultivate local talent within the New Orleans community. His work as an oral historian culminated with his book Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement (1997).

Ellen Gilchrist won the National Book Award for her 1984 collection Victory Over Japan. She is the author of more than twenty books, including novels, short stories, essays, and poetry, most recently her story collection Acts of God. Gilchrist lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and teaches creative writing at the University of Arkansas.

Shirley Ann Grau is the author of nine novels and short story collections who was raised in Alabama and Louisiana. Her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), portrayed the descendants of European pioneers living on an island off the coast of Louisiana. Her public profile rose during the civil rights movement, when her dynastic novel Keepers of the House (1964), which dealt with race relations in Alabama, earned her a Pulitzer Prize.

O. Henry (1862–1910), born William Sydney Porter, was an American writer of short stories known for his wit, wordplay, and plot twists. He lived briefly in New Orleans in 1896 while fleeing embezzlement charges before eventually settling in New York City, where he would spend the remainder of his life. His most notable stories include “The Ransom of Red Chief” (1910), “The Duplicity of Hargraves” (1902), and “The Gift of the Magi” (1905).

Grace King (1852–1932) was a New Orleans novelist and historian whose writing captured Louisiana’s complex racial identity. Her writing career began when the editor of Century challenged her to counter negative depictions of mixed-race slave owners. King’s short fiction appeared in major national magazines before being collected in Tales of a Time and Place (1892) and Balcony Stories (1893). Her most notable work of nonfiction is New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895).

Armand Lanusse (1812–1867) was an educator and poet who lived in New Orleans his entire life. In 1845 he edited and contributed to Les Cenelles, a collection of eighty-five poems written by seventeen free black Louisiana poets and the first collection of poems by African Americans ever published in the United States. In 1848 he helped establish a school for orphans of color and worked as its director until his death.

Valerie Martin is the author of ten novels, including Trespass, Mary Reilly, and Property, three collections of short fiction, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi titled Salvation. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain’s Orange Prize (for Property). Her most recent novel is The Ghost of the Mary Celeste.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance and the MelaNated Writers Collective. His work has appeared in Redivider, Callaloo, the Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City. He is the winner of the 2014 Iowa Review Fiction Award, the 2014 So to Speak Journal Short Story Award, and the 2014 William Faulkner Competition for Novel in Progress.

Julie Smith is an Edgar Award winner for best novel, and the author of four mystery series set in New Orleans and San Francisco. A former journalist, she has worked for newspapers in both those cities and now lives in New Orleans. She is the owner of booksBnimble, which publishes mysteries and other quality works digitally. In 2007 Smith edited the best-selling anthology New Orleans Noir for Akashic Books.

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was a National Book Award — winning author of short stories and novels that center around the American South. She was born in Jackson, Mississippi, where she lived until her death. Her most famous novel, The Optimist’s Daughter (1973), takes place in New Orleans and won her the Pulitzer Prize. She is also notable for her photograph collection One Time, One Place (1971).

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was an American playwright and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and four Drama Critic Circle Awards. He was born in Mississippi and in 1939 moved to New Orleans, a city that inspired much of his writing, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which won him his first Pulitzer Prize. His most famous plays include The Glass Menagerie (1944) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the stories in this anthology. “A Conscientious Marriage” by Armand Lanusse was originally published in French as “Un Mariage de Conscience” in L’Album Littéraire: Journal des Jeunes Gens, Amateurs de Littérature, Vol. 1, August 15, 1843, translated here by David and Nicole Ball; “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin was originally published in Vogue as “The Dream of an Hour” on December 6, 1894; “The Little Convent Girl” by Grace King was originally published in Balcony Stories (New York: Century, 1893); “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking” by O. Henry was originally published in McClure’s (December 1899); “The Purple Hat” by Eudora Welty was originally published in Harper’s Bazaar (November 1941), reprinted by permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author, copyright © 1941 by Eudora Welty, renewed 1969 by Eudora Welty; “Desire and the Black Masseur” by Tennessee Williams was originally published in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Vol. 10 (1948), licensed here from One Arm and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1967), copyright © 1977, 1979 by the University of the South, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.; “Miss Yellow Eyes” by Shirley Ann Grau was originally published in The Black Prince and Other Stories (New York: Knopf, 1955), reprinted by permission of G Agency LLC, copyright © 1953; “Pleadings” by John William Corrington was originally published in Southern Review (Winter 1976), © 1976 John William Corrington; “Ritual Murder” by Tom Dent was originally published in Callaloo 2 (February 1978), © 1978 Tom Dent; “Rich” by Ellen Gilchrist was originally published in Intro 9: Close to Home, eds. George P. Garrett & Michael Mewshaw (Austin, Texas: Hendel & Reinke, 1978), copyright © 1981 by Ellen Gilchrist, reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc.; “Spats” by Valerie Martin was originally published in The Consolation of Nature and Other Stories (New York: Houghon Mifflin, 1988), © 1988 by Valerie Martin; “The Man with Moon Hands” by O’Neil De Noux was originally published in New Mystery, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Winter 1993) as “Old Foister: A Folk Tale: The Man with Moon Hands,” © 1993 by O’Neil De Noux; “Rose” by John Biguenet was originally published in Esquire (January 1999), licensed here from The Torturer’s Apprentice by John Biguenet (New York: Ecco, 2001), copyright © 2000 by John Biguenet, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers; “Mussolini and the Axeman’s Jazz” by Poppy Z. Brite was originally published in Dark Destiny: Proprietors of Fate, ed. Edward E. Kramer (Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1995), copyright © 1995 by Poppy Z. Brite; “GDMFSOB” by Nevada Barr was originally published in Deadly Housewives, ed. Christine Matthews (New York: William Morrow, 2006), copyright © 2006 by Nevada Barr; “Jesus Out to Sea” by James Lee Burke was originally published in Esquire (April 2006), reprinted here with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. from Jesus Out to Sea and Other Stories by James Lee Burke, copyright © 2007 by James Lee Burke, all rights reserved; “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Ace Atkins was originally published in Crossroad Blues by Ace Atkins (Houston: Busted Flush Press, 2010), copyright © 2010 by Ace Atkins; “Pie Man” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin was originally published in the South Carolina Review, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Fall 2012), copyright © 2012 by Maurice Carlos Ruffin.