by Chris Wiltz
He clicked his blinker off but said, “This's Convent Street, miss.”
“I know, but I want you to take me somewhere else first.” She gave him directions and the taxi cut across uptown New Orleans, traveling some avenues divided by medians, streets covered by oaks, then through treeless backstreets and into a quiet neighborhood. The houses looked as if they'd seen better days: torn screen hanging from one porch; the whole front of another house sinking, the steps separated from the rest of the structure; across the street, a badly rusted awning over a picture window. In contrast, there was a house with red geraniums growing in the front yard, another with its trim freshly painted a bold primary blue.
At a weatherbeaten white two-story building with large display windows to either side of doors set catty-corner to the street, she asked the driver to stop. He shifted in his seat to look at her, as if his big head couldn't turn on its thick neck any more than to show some cheek. Thea was noticing that the galvanized pole the grocery store's sign had hung from was still there, jutting out from the overhang above the doors. But there was no sign on it anymore, only the pole, and the windows as well as the glass on the upper part of the doors were blanked out by some white material, perhaps white paper on the doors, anonymous, no longer a store, impossible to tell if it was inhabited any longer. She edged closer to the car window to see the second floor. There were curtains upstairs.
She let out her breath, only now aware that she'd been holding it, and slid to her former position on the seat.
The driver, as if to answer the question evident in the arch of his eyebrows, said, “This used to be a grocery store.”
“Yes, Nick Tamborella's Neighborhood Grocery,” Thea said. “My father.”
“Yeah? I use to live a coupla blocks over.” He pointed back in the direction of Convent Street. Thea was holding her breath again, waiting for him to say something about the shooting, but he said, “I moved out to the Parish seventeen, eighteen years ago.” He wouldn't remember; he'd been gone too long. She breathed. He said, “They broke in my house three times in a month, I said that's it. The only people would buy here anymore were the blacks. I said let em have it.”
Thea remembered all the burglaries, she remembered people moving, times getting hard at the grocery, those times the only ones she could remember her parents ever arguing. Her mother wanted to leave; her father said there were no neighborhood groceries in Metairie. Her mother would suggest he work at one of the big supermarkets, he would be a manager in no time, and her father, in his hot-blooded Italian way, would strike his chest with his fist and shout, “Nick Tamborella works for no one!”
And then one afternoon the arguing was all over. Maybe the happy life she remembered living above this grocery store was over before that afternoon; it must have been over once all the fighting started. She didn't know, she couldn't remember that. What she did know was that one afternoon there were two gunshots. After that she had not returned to this neighborhood until today. She'd been—what was the word?—displaced; she'd been displaced ever since.
The cabdriver was shaking his head heavily. “Too bad,” he said. “Used to be a good neighborhood.”
He took Convent Street back across uptown, heading toward the river. When they got to the Convent Street Housing Project, Thea did not notice that what she could see of the project looked better now than it had ten years ago or that most of the houses across from it looked worse. She was thinking that she hadn't seen this many black people all together in one place since her move to Amherst. They were sitting out on their porches or front steps to escape the heat inside their houses. Women in big blousy dresses fanned themselves with newspaper; the few pedestrians moved slowly. On the project side of the street, little kids in their underwear squealed as they ran in and out of the strong jet of water coming from an open fire hydrant. Just past this activity, across the street, the side the cab drove down, Thea saw the Solar Club. It was impossible not to notice: a midnight-blue stucco facade on a tall wood house, the old roofline visible toward the back, and over the arched doorway Solar Club written in neon script, hot-orange, flame-colored. She didn't remember it being there before.
Then the scenery changed, and moments later Thea was standing in the shade of the huge oak tree in front of Aunt Althea's house. Her house. She had always loved this house, the sheer size of it, its gabled roof, its wide, curving porch, the four long front windows, their moss-green shutters, and the front double doors with their tiny panes of leaded glass, gas lamps flanking them. It didn't seem to be as bright a white, its green trim not as crisp as it used to be, as Aunt Althea had always kept it, but that didn't matter right then. The sight of it, graceful and splendid, gave her joy.
She went up the brick walkway and rang the doorbell. Through the little leaded panes she saw several different Zoras running as fast as they could on their short legs.
Delzora was crying as she flung open the door. “Goodness, honey, is that you?”
The smell of the house reached out for her as Zora did. The smell was pure Aunt Althea, and until that moment she had not known how much she disliked it. It had a diminishing effect, diminishing her joy at the sight of the house, her happiness to see Zora.
“Look at you,” Delzora said pulling back from their embrace, beaming up at her, though Thea herself was not a tall woman, “still a skinny ole thing, and you done cut off all your hair.”
Thea's hair no longer hung past her prominent collarbones but was cut to her chin. She wasn't using it to cover herself anymore, with too-long bangs to hide her thick black eyebrows and, she had hoped, de-emphasize her too-large Roman nose, features identical to her father's and not at all like the light, bright, petite features on the girls at school, the girls Aunt Althea had so admired, the blonds she would point out and say, “Isn't that the prettiest girl you ever saw?”
Thea brought her bags inside and put them at the bottom of the stairway. “This house, Zora, it still smells the same. Like her.”
“Everything here still be the same,” Delzora said, assuring her. She closed the front door. “Where is your husband? How come he not be here with you?”
“Michael and I divorced last year.”
“Lawd, honey, I'm sorry to hear that. You never tole your aunt?”
“I couldn't bear to. I couldn't bear to hear her say, ‘Didn't I tell you?'”
Delzora shook her head. “God rest her soul, she weren't never slow to say I done tole you so.”
“No, and it was hard enough, Zora, it was very hard.”
“Well, don't you worry none, honey,” Delzora said, taking two of Thea's bags and starting up the stairs with them, “everything gon be all right. You home now.”
3
Most of the time the police are slow to respond to calls from the Convent Street Project. Take an incident before Burgess moved back into the Convent, of an intruder breaking into the apartment of Sherree Morganza, an out-of-work stripper. The perpetrator used a simple screwdriver to get in through the front window. Luckily Sherree's boyfriend Dexter had spent the night, and he managed to wrestle the intruder to the ground out in front of the apartment. Sherree called the police, but it was an hour and a half before they arrived. While they waited, Sherree and Dexter saw two police cars drive past on Convent Street. Sherree yelled to them and danced around waving her arms but neither car stopped. Sherree had resisted letting her good-for-nothing, lazy bum of a boyfriend move in with her, but after that incident she gave in.
“Guy broke in was a crackhead,” Sherree told her friends, “and he just as well could have been a rapist too. What I'm supposed to do when there ain't nothin between me and a rapist that a screwdriver can't get through? At least the bum is some protection,” she said of Dexter.
The night a lone cop was killed in his car on a street at the edge of the Convent, the police were not slow to respond, but their reluctance and awareness of danger could be seen as they advanced crablike in the dark, their knees bent, stiff arms extended, guns lead
ing. They scuttled along the sides of the red-brick buildings, then over the grounds, hardly noticing that they trampled a newly sodded yard or that they went right through a vegetable garden, squashing nearly ripe tomatoes, eggplants, and bell peppers into the wet earth.
Burgess was sleeping when the scream of sirens closed in and created a wall of noise around the housing project. At first the sirens seemed to be part of a dream. It was a recurring nightmare of being hunted, thrashing through the jungle, panting heavily, terrified of being overtaken. Suddenly the jungle ends and he is in a city, in the slums, running through the stench of poverty, his way impeded by crowds of brown, half-dressed children who look mournfully at him as he runs past them, his legs brushing against their round distended stomachs. The terror turns stale, more of a dread of hands clutching him from behind, a hope that it will be over with soon. The sirens get closer, they seem to be everywhere . . .
With a lurch of his heart Burgess woke full of fresh fear of being caught. Janine was already up, the gun from the night table dangling in her hand as she looked out between the curtains. She went to the closet and got the cereal box with the money hidden in it and hid the gun with the money. She brought the box into the kitchen and buried it in the garbage. Burgess, meanwhile, felt under the bed for the pair of pajamas he kept stashed there. Before putting them on, he popped first the top then the bottom out into the air to make sure no roaches were crawling around on them. From the drawer of the night table he took out a salt-and-pepper beard and secured it to his face. It was a full beard, grizzled, covering most of his cheeks. Janine came back with a box of corn-starch. He dipped his fingers into it and dusted a small amount into his tight black curls. The residue he rubbed around his eyes and on his forehead. Janine snuffed away too-white places. Under the yellowy overhead light Burgess looked gray and sick.
Janine returned the cornstarch to the kitchen, then Burgess could hear her rustling the covers of the single bed they kept in the living room of the small one-bedroom apartment for just a night such as this.
Loudly and methodically the police raided the Convent. Periodically a clamor would arise as men were pulled under protest from their apartments and herded into the yard. The clamor came closer. Burgess could feel the bedclothes getting damp from his sweat. The light blanket he was under was smothering him. The tension in his muscles was so great that it was almost a relief when the fists hit his door.
“Police! Open up!”
Janine opened the door to two cops shining flashlights in her face. She moved too slowly for them and one shoved her back roughly.
“You here alone?” he asked. The other one turned on lights, kicked the pillow that had fallen from the single bed out of his path, and poked his gun into the hallway.
Janine shook her head, her eyes showing white all around the brown. This part didn't take any play-acting; her throat was practically closed with fright.
“Who else?” the cop demanded impatiently.
She answered slowly, “Mah daddy.”
A man on the premises made her insignificant to them. They went past her, leaving her in the front room, going down the hallway. She followed them.
The one who did the talking swung the beam of his flashlight around the room, then pointed it at the bed as he switched on the bedroom light. “Hey, old man.” The other one held his gun inches from the back of Burgess’ head.
Burgess made a feeble attempt to turn. Janine, in the doorway, said, “He sick,” and from the bed Burgess took in the dull, slack-jawed look on her face. He coughed, a phlegmy sound, and lifted the soiled sleeve of his pajama top to his mouth.
This movement caused the cop holding the gun on Burgess to grab Burgess’ arm and stick the gun in his face. Burgess went limp in his grip.
Janine said, “He got TB.”
That knocked the cop holding Burgess back. “Shit!” he said and the two of them hurried out, Janine at their heels. She locked the door behind them.
She ran softly on her bare feet back into the bedroom and leaned over Burgess. She still wore that uncomprehending stupid look, totally convincing. She smiled and it was gone.
“Hey, old man,” she said.
He pulled her down next to him and they stifled their nervous laughter up against each other, but then they heard cries coming from the yard. They got out of bed and went to the front window, where they saw men getting their faces shoved up against the red bricks, their heads and sides whacked with billy clubs. One of them was Dexter. The cops cuffed him and a few of the other men and took them to a police van.
Burgess stood at the window and knew something bad was happening, something that was going to change his new life in the Convent. It was a life that sometimes offered to eradicate the past and gave him the illusion of having a future. It was false, all false. The past could not be eradicated. The future was full of fear.
He and Janine went back to bed. He tried to lose his worry by making love to her. He took a long time. He held himself on rigid arms and moved over her, slowly at first, then more strenuously. She reached up and clung to him and he carried her weight too. He exhausted himself. But still he spent a fitful night having more dreams of being pursued.
4
Everyone was afraid of something. Delzora was afraid she wouldn't have a job much longer.
The morning after Althea Dumondville's death, Delzora went to work and followed her usual routine. But as she was reading the newspaper, she was overcome by a feeling she was unable to identify at first. It was nostalgia. For a woman who rarely thought about the future, Delzora had projected herself into a future in which there were no newspapers: she would miss reading the morning newspaper, a luxury she would not be able to afford if she lost her job. She could look for another job in another big house, but work cleaning houses was hard to find and getting harder even though the younger women scorned it as a way to make money. In Delzora's world, the world in and around the Convent, there were not very many opportunities. More people than opportunities existed. Maids stayed for years, as Delzora had, in the houses of their rich employers. They passed the jobs on to relatives when they left. It wasn't that Delzora liked being a maid, keeping house for a woman who had bossed her around and never said her work was good, hadn't commented on it at all unless something was wrong. But there were worse lives to live. As she sat at the kitchen table missing the morning newspaper of the future, she realized she might be forced to move back into the Convent. It hadn't occurred to her before simply because she wasn't used to thinking about the future.
Delzora had not thought about the future in terms of possibilities and life's potential for many years. When her son Burgess was barely a year old, her husband died. She had to give up the small house they rented and move into the Convent Street Housing Project. In one way this was a good move because there were other husbandless women with children in the Convent and these women helped one another and became family to one another. When Delzora got the job with the Dumondvilles she didn't have to worry about Burgess coming home from school to an empty house. Someone was always around. But in other ways the move was not good. As the Convent became filled with more and more jobless people whose hope of finding work dwindled as the jobs themselves did, it became a dangerous place to live.
One night a man broke into her apartment, and Delzora, in bed, watched with terror as he took all the money from her purse. He came to the foot of the bed and looked down at her. She pretended to be asleep, though she wondered how he couldn't hear her heart crashing around in her chest. He looked and he quietly left. She felt lucky on two counts: the man had not hurt her or Burgess, and Burgess had slept through the burglary. Delzora didn't want him to know someone had violated their home so easily and casually. She was afraid he wouldn't sleep anymore either.
Crime escalated along with the drugs. One evening she picked Burgess up at a neighbor's, but when she tried to go home, a man was shooting heroin on her stairway. Delzora left immediately and stayed away most of the night, but
it was too late. Burgess had seen the needle poking out of the man's vein. He asked endless questions about it. His curiosity was alarming. Delzora told him how bad needles were, what drugs did to people. She told him never to use a needle, never to let anybody give him one. That much he heard and listened to, but awareness of drugs was part of his life after that.
There was no way she could have protected him from it forever. The future, though, became more limited than it had ever been for Delzora. It was reduced to one goal—to get her son out of the Convent.
Finally the future arrived. Delzora moved several blocks away into an old house that had many of the same problems her Convent apartment had—rusty, clogged, noisy plumbing, inadequate heating, walls that were cold and clammy in the winter, not even a fan for the hot summer months, years’ worth of other people's dirt, a smaller apartment in a white clapboard house blackened by the mold that eventually overtook everything in this damp, humid city. But it was out of the confines of a place that had seemed like a prison for lifers, where she was confronted day after day by hostile, sad, tired, sick faces. Here was something that felt like freedom.
So what had Burgess gone and done? He'd moved right back into one of the red-brick square buildings like a cell, with its years of grime, the muddy yard, the dopers all around, the ragamuffin kids. So he could be Mr. Big Shot. No matter what else he said, that was the real reason. Mr. Big with all his money. Money he got from drugs. Money that was sure to bring him to a bad end.
It seemed no matter what, once you moved into the Convent, you never really came out.
5
The house, the parlor at any rate, reminded Thea of an aging whore. Worn brocade covered curvaceous Victorian sofas flanked by overwaxed, heavily scrolled and beaded tables. The maroon velvet curtains were faded to a dark pink luridness. Bunched on the floor, their extra length, once opulent, was now frumpy. The crystals on the chandelier at the center of the room had a milky coating of dirt, like eyes glazed over with cataracts. Patches of gold-flocked wallpaper were balding. Near the ceiling a piece had separated from the wall and curled limply under chipped and yellowed dentil molding. Thea could hardly believe she once had thought this was the most beautiful room in the world.