by Haven Kimmel
“You a Jew, by any chance?” he asked. “Excuse me, Jew-ish?”
Hard, he was going to make this as hard as possible.
“Not so far as I know.”
“A shame,” he said, mustering a sad smile. “I’ve always wanted to, you know.”
He took the second game without Cassie attempting a shot. She paid him, and he turned and ordered more drinks.
“You know I’m a doctor? Anything ail you?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“You say we have mutual friends?” Myoo-chal.
“One or two.”
In the third game he broke without making a shot, and Cassie approached the table carefully, holding her cue at the joint and stalking possible shots. She could see her way clear through the first three balls, then took a safety on the 4. Jack was perplexed by the problem—the 4 downtable, tight against the rail with the 6 slightly in front of it—and passed as well, but his shots were getting wilder, and he set her up for a difficult but possible bank. He had begun to leave his cigarette burning on the edge of the table, then was unable to pick it up after he’d attempted his shot; the cigarette was too small and too far away. She won the third game.
By midnight she was up six hundred dollars, and the band packed up and went home. The bartender put on a Tommy Dorsey record; none of the players was ready to leave.
“My family practically owns this town, one brother in the bank, one in the pharmacy, one on the bench. Been running this place a long time.”
“So you said.”
“We know the same people? Somebody sent you here?”
By one in the morning she thought he would fall, but he continued standing. She had seen him drink twelve whiskeys and go through a whole pack of cigarettes. She’d won twelve hundred dollars.
“I live here when the wife kicks me out. These days that’s most …” He squinted. “What was I saying?”
“You live here most of the time.”
“Right. Are you a Jewish?”
By two-thirty, the other players had gathered casually at the bar and were watching Cassie and Jack. She was up twenty-five hundred dollars. Jack strolled over to the bartender, said a word to him, then walked back. He was having difficulty finding the table. “Double or nothing,” he said, trying to leer but unable to make eye contact.
“Give me a minute?” she asked.
“Sure, sweetheart. Take all the time you need.” He turned back to his cronies, the men he lived with in this hidden place, who sat silent, drinking. They were impossible to read.
Cassie glanced at the waitress, then headed for the women’s room, which had been added as an afterthought and was little more than a closet with two toilets and a pedestal sink. She washed her hands, splashed her face with water. Her chest was beginning to ache. The waitress walked in and headed for the sink; she didn’t look at Cassie.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d call this number for me, please,” Cassie said, handing the waitress the slip of paper from her pocket and a hundred-dollar bill. The waitress took it and tucked it in her apron.
Maybe she’d call him and maybe she wouldn’t.
“The king of Rex. Everybody important, either me or my mama or my daddy.” Jack reached up to rub his eyes like a little boy, and his sweater and shirt, already untucked, lifted, too. Cassie caught a glance of his stomach: purple and mottled with stretch marks. She hoped he’d live ten more minutes. “Say again who shent you here?” The bartender walked up quietly and handed Jack his money. He pretended to count it, then handed it to a man at the bar.
Cassie placed the cue ball just behind the headstring, close to the right rail, then hit the 1 just right, sinking a wing ball in a corner pocket. A part of her considered giving up a shot, letting Jack humiliate himself, but ultimately she wasn’t that sort of player. All these years—her whole life, really—he’d been her shadow father, the man her mother almost married. Cassie was the child they almost had. She had been able to imagine the possibilities in great detail, the wealth, the extended family, the promise; all children are gifted at picturing such things. But in the end she played it safe and all the way through, and tapped the 9 in, just kissed it.
She raised the cue and slipped it into the house rack. Without it, she had nothing in her hands. The man who held the money at the bar gave her a slight smile, then handed her the five thousand. She gave a nod to everyone there, then turned and headed toward the double doors. Jack continued to stand where she’d left him, next to the shelf where twelve untouched gin gimlets had gone warm. Cassie didn’t walk quickly; she led with her hips, as Laura would have done, and made her stride as long as possible. You don’t know how to walk, forget it, the world wants nothing to do with you; your genes get lost, and there go all your bright-eyed babies.
“Sorry I forgot to introduce myself,” she called back over her shoulder. “I’m Cassie Claiborne, Jimmy Claiborne’s daughter.” She opened one of the double doors and walked out into the dim hallway. Ten steps, she thought, to the parlor, fifteen steps to the door; she made it into the lobby, where the bald man continued to stand guard, before the hall door slammed behind her. She didn’t turn around, she counted the steps, sped up maybe a little bit, he was shouting at her to turn her ass around. Jack shouted things about Jimmy that she’d thought plenty of times herself, but they sounded unseemly coming from him. She considered saying so. The brass door handle was cool in her hand, she’d opened the door, she’d stepped out into the night, and Jack snagged her sweater, pulled it hard enough that it came untied and let go; she had taken another step, and he grabbed her around her left bicep. His big hand closed around her upper arm, I’ll be bruised there tomorrow, she thought, and that was the last thing she thought, because it isn’t right to grab a woman anywhere, for any reason, and before she’d really planned it, she was spinning on her left foot, her right leg tucked close to her chest, there was no time, but what can you do. The thick heel of her boot slammed into his chin so hard she heard his teeth crash together like dropped dinner plates. His head snapped backward, and the muscle in Cassie’s inner thigh twanged like a rubber band.
“Ow! Dammit!” she said, as Jack bent slowly at the knees, went down. His knees hit the pavement, but his eyes were open, so Cassie brought her knee up and nailed him in the nose, not hard enough to break it, but he would certainly feel regret. “Ow, ow, ow.” She limped toward the waiting cab, thinking how sorry she was to be leaving the windpipe, solar plexus, groin, and instep part of the program unfulfilled. He was tall.
“You forgot your sweater,” Eddie said.
“Ow, ow, ow,” she said, limping back to the fallen man and gently pulling her sweater out of his hands. “Ow, ow, ow.” Her entire right leg was on fire. She wondered briefly if perhaps it had come unattached.
Eddie pulled away from the curb, then turned up WWOZ, where Beausoleil was playing “Blue a Bebe.” Laura loved that band. Cassie gave him the address of the guest house on Rampart, then let her head fall back against the seat. After a few minutes he said, “You enjoying New Orleans?”
“It’s great,” Cassie said. “It’s the best.”
He lit a cigarette, smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “That’s my girl. That’s what we like to hear.”
The next morning Cassie called the airline and moved her reservation up. She had only one thing left to do, and it wouldn’t take long; she could fly out early that afternoon.
In the dining room Marcelle and Martine were enjoying coffee and corn muffins, reading the Times-Picayune. “Good mornin’,” they said.
“Morning.” Cassie limped to the table and sat down.
“What’s wrong, why are you limping?” Marcelle, the more matronly of the two, leaned toward Cassie.
“Marcelle,” Martine said, lowering her part of the paper. “Don’t ask a person that.”
“It’s okay,” Cassie said. “I just pulled a muscle, I think.”
The sisters were in their sixties and had matching gray pageboys.
Cassie thought they might be twins and could tell them apart only because Marcelle wore lipstick.
“Can I ask if she had a good day yesterday?”
“I don’t care what you do.”
“Would that be all right, if I just asked that?”
“Go on, ask.”
“Did you have a good day yesterday, Cassie?” Marcelle poured her a cup of coffee and pushed a muffin her way.
“I had”—Cassie thought about it a moment—“a remarkable day.”
“Splendid,” Marcelle said, handing her a small knife and bowl of butter.
“Is there anything else you want to know?” Martine asked without lowering her paper.
“No!” Marcelle folded her hands primly on the table and looked out the dining room window, as if concerned with nothing. “Someone slept poorly last night, I think.”
They sat in silence. Martine turned to the sports section.
“Not you, though, Cassie, you slept well enough? You got in quite late.”
“She’s a grown woman, Marcelle.”
“I’m perfectly aware.”
“She can come and go freely.”
“Of course she can.”
“I sort of lost track of time,” Cassie said. “I was playing pool.”
“Pool! I didn’t know people still did that.”
Martine sighed.
“They do.” Cassie took a drink of her coffee.
“Would you like part of the paper?” Martine asked.
“Now, did you make friends, or, or,” Marcelle picked at the corner of her linen napkin, “were they strangers?”
“Marcelle, isn’t there something you should be doing? Do you actually still work here?”
“It is Easter Sunday, Easter Sunday, Martine.”
“I was playing against a man named Jackson LaFollette.”
Martine lowered her paper. Marcelle laid her hand flat against her chest; her pink bathrobe seemed to get pinker.
“I hope you won,” Martine said, going back to reading.
“I did.”
Marcelle cleared her throat, took a sip of her coffee. “Well. Well, that’s something.”
Cassie peeled the wrapper off her muffin, cut it in half.
“I haven’t heard his name in a while is why it’s something.”
Cassie buttered one side, took a bite; it was sweet.
“He kilt his first wife.”
Cassie put the muffin down.
Martine grumbled, shook the paper. “He kilt his second wife, too. Not many people commit suicide by shooting theirselves in the head twice.”
Marcelle pursed her lips. “And you just know he kilt his dear mother. He was the only person in the house with her the night she died! She was fine, perfectly fine, and then Jack came home for a visit, and the next thing you know.”
Cassie sat back in her chair, smiled at Marcelle.
“I think his third wife ought to watch herself, if you know what I mean.”
A light, an effervescent light, seemed to fill Cassie’s body until she thought she might rise and float away. She tipped her head back and looked at the ceiling, which the sisters had painted lime green, and heard Laura say to Jimmy, heard her whisper in the fierce tone children can pick up from miles away, “Do you have any idea what sort of life I would have had if I hadn’t married you? Do you know? Do you know what I could have given my children? You took my life and you squandered it.” Cassie wanted to go home now, she didn’t want to wait, she could imagine herself bursting through the door, calling to Belle, asking Belle to summon Edwin, because Listen to this. Edwin would give his small, sweet smile, and in it Cassie would see all the years he’d counseled Laura and tried to track down Jimmy, tried to make things right. But it was Belle whose face she was most anxious to see. Belle, who was a student of history, and thus well acquainted with irony.
“Did he look like a killer, Cassie?” Marcelle leaned close.
Cassie shrugged, still smiling. “Everybody looks like a killer to me.”
Martine lowered her paper. “You got that right.” She raised it again.
Marcelle looked out the window, tugged at her napkin. “Not me,Martine. I’m not a killer. I’da kilt you by now if I was.”
The cabdriver said a storm was coming up, and Cassie said she’d just be a minute. He waited at the curb as she walked to the front of the house on Rendon Street, a lovely house painted gray and yellow, a marmalade cat asleep on the step, a spider plant dying in a pot by the door. A driveway led into a one-car garage, Cassie hadn’t pictured that, and part of the house was built on top of the garage. The backyard was fenced in, but she didn’t see a dog. Neighbors were out; one man was scraping a window frame and listening to salsa music, children were riding tricycles across the street. A mother, likely their mother, sat on the porch and watched them, her expression both loving and bored. The sky was very dark, and the air felt progressively denser, almost solid, but Cassie knew it was only weather, it had nothing to do with grief or the passage of time or a woman’s failure to ever make it home. She would be falsifying everything if she turned this street, this sweet house, into something it wasn’t.
Back in the cab she asked the driver to take her to the Quarter, then mentioned to him that her grandfather had been a cabdriver.
“Yeah? What was his name?”
“Stanley Dubuisson.” He left his daughter, she didn’t say, when she was just five years old.
The driver thought a minute, shook his head. “Don’t know him.”
“I didn’t, either.”
She barely found a seat at the Café Du Monde; there were tourists everywhere, and the rain had started to fall. She ordered a coffee, then sat very still, there were so many voices rising up, and the rain on the awning, but she let the warm humid air enclose her and listened to nothing in particular. For years she had tried to imagine her world without her mother in it, or without Belle, and had assumed that everything would stop, we don’t know how to go on living except by going on. She had seen Laura do so after Poppy died: she got up the next morning and put the coffee on and smoked a cigarette, and they put him in the ground. There were still library books to return, so they returned them, and a garden to plant, so they planted it, but Cassie had known that for her, as much as she had grieved for him, Poppy’s death was an intimation of the Larger Death. It is one thing to lose a grandfather, but something entirely different to become a woman without a mother. A woman without a mother. Cassie could almost hear the whistle of that arrow as it shot past her. The rain came down so hard she could no longer see the sidewalk, a few feet away, and the tourists got louder, as if in a contest. She would go home and say to Belle, Our mother was poisoned. Laura was poisoned by her inability to give herself over to her own life, the life she made and shored up every day, and I, Cassie would say to Belle, will not do the same. Belle was Cassie’s responsibility now, and she accepted it; one can’t be everywhere, Laura couldn’t be both at the kitchen window and in New Orleans. I will stand, Cassie practiced saying in her head.
And then a man stood up from his table near the street, he walked out into the pounding rain, turned and faced the crowd of diners. He threw his arms out in surrender, he let the rain hit his face, began to sing “Amazing Grace,” it rose up from him and rang out in a deep baritone that silenced everyone. The servers in their striped polyester shirts stopped moving, the restless children stopped, all the tourists with their blank expressions turned toward him. Cassie closed her eyes and decided to take it personally, four verses bright shining as the sun. She sat and let the singer grant his benediction, and when he was finished, in the burst of applause that followed, she headed out into the rain herself; as she passed the man, she thanked him and dropped five dollars in the bucket at his feet.
On the flight to Atlanta, Cassie looked at the Los Angeles guidebook she’d purchased at the airport; the history of the city was rich with dramatic and frequent suicides. Laura would have loved it. The flight reached a cruising al
titude, and Cassie closed the book and thought of Belle. When Cassie got home, Belle would ask her questions about her trip, and all of them would be punctuated by a certain look Belle had, a kind of knowing sneer. Laura had asked Cassie once, “You know that face Belle makes?” and Cassie had said yes, she certainly did, and Laura said, “Why is it so dear?”
Belle would ask, Did you eat well?
And Cassie would say she did.
Did you see interesting things?
Yes, very.
Did you bring me any presents?
Cassie would give her the Vishniac collection.
And then Belle would ask, in Laura’s place: Did you meet the Minor Criminals of Louisiana?
Cassie opened her eyes. She would answer: I met a Minor Criminal, yes. And I met an Innocent Man.
She didn’t have to wait long for her suitcase in Indianapolis, and she was in her truck by eight o’clock, saying a prayer that it would start. It started. She drove gingerly out of the airport and on to 465, the loop around Indianapolis, soon to be named after David Letterman; she headed for Highway 69 North, and every gear that took, every mile she covered, was a relief. By nine-thirty she was in the dark driveway of Billy and Patty Poe. Their ranch house was dwarfed by Billy’s body shop, but all the lights were shining, and she could hear their kids yelling in the living room. She knocked on the front door and disturbed two coon hounds in a kennel between the house and shop; when Patty opened the door, she looked worried and frazzled. She looked like a mother, overweight, her hair untended, drying her hands on a dish towel.
“Cassie? Is everything okay? Come in,” Patty said, and through the doorway Cassie could see three children jumping on the living room furniture and gradually destroying a pop-up tent set up on the floor.
“I don’t mean to bother you,” Cassie said, “is Billy around? I just need to see him a minute.”
“Sure, he’s in the shop. Go to that side door, he might not hear you knock.”