by Tony Dunbar
“I’ve never seen this before,” Gastro said.
Everybody on the street was male.
They promenaded on Bourbon Street in both directions. They mixed and mingled and stopped to peer into the music joints and to soak up the Dixieland Jazz and the smells of shrimp frying, but there wasn’t a woman in sight.
“These boys are all from Texas,” Steve said.
“They’re all Mexicans, you ask me,” was Gastro’s view.
“Whoo. There’s a lot of them. They ain’t no fair sex at all. We’re gonna have to protect our ladies tonight. These muchachos must be mighty lonely.”
27
The Dirty Dungeon on Esplanade Avenue was very crowded at seven-thirty when Gastro and Steve swaggered in. The juke box was playing loudly. The Breaded Sisters had not yet started their gig. Gastro finally found someone he knew, a bearded chemist with some sort of terminal disease that he rarely mentioned, and which had obviously not yet killed him. They screamed at each other over the noise. Steve watched the door, waiting for Christine and her friend to arrive.
At half past eight Christine showed up alone. This caused a minor sensation at the bar because she was almost the only female in the place. Steve had been on the alert, and he pushed his way through the crowd to claim the woman.
“It’s great to see you.” He gave her a bear hug. “Your friend didn’t come?”
“She’ll probably come later. She wants me to call her and tell her what kind of scene this is.”
“It’s Gastro’s scene, whatever you call it. If it was me we’d go out for country music. See, he already found somebody he knows.”
Steve directed Christine to a little table against the wall that Gastro and the chemist, wearing a red baseball cap backwards, were using for an ashtray. The guy with the cap melted away as they arrived. Gastro said “Hi” to Christine and confided to Steve that, “The dude might be able to help us.”
The juke box was playing Nine Inch Nails.
“This is the first time I’ve been out since I got back to New Orleans.” Christine had to shout to make herself heard.
“You wanna beer?” Steve asked.
She said fine, anything would do. Mindful that his treasury was getting thin, Steve barged his way to the bar in search of whatever was cheapest.
“Well, tell me what you’ve been doing since the last time I saw you,” Christine said to Gastro.
He blushed from the attention, but no one saw that in the dim Dungeon.
“Not much,” he said. “How about you?”
“Okay, well first I went to stay with my father at his house for a few days, and that was fine. We just worked to clean things up, but you know that, and then I went… .”
Bonner Rivette wedged his motorcycle between two parked cars on Esplanade Avenue. He had tracked Christine as she drove from her apartment to the French Quarter and had seen her go into the bar. This was the right time to make contact, he decided, since she was on foot and it was suitably dark.
The question was whether to follow her into the bar, and he pondered that for half an hour. Rivette was reclined against his chrome seat back, but he was quite aware of what was going on around him. He recognized the television show blaring from a nearby house, “The Simpsons.” He heard a man walking his dog down the sidewalk a block away. Rivette was wearing his new white chemical suit and white gloves for his night on the town. The paper bonnet and his respirator mask were in his pouch, and he could always put those on if he went into the club.
As it turned out, Christine came to him.
The smoke and closeness of the bar were getting to Christine.
“I’m going outside to call my friend Samantha,” she told her two escorts and pushed off, fiddling in her bag for her cell phone. Outside the air was sweet, and she shook her hair to get some of the cigarette smell out.
She flipped open the phone and found speed dial to connect to her roommate.
“Hello, Christine. What’s it like?”
“It’s not too bad. There’s lots of boys. Why don’t you come down?”
“I don’t know if I’m really up for loud music.”
“Come on. You haven’t been out for months. If you don’t like it we can go somewhere else.”
“I don’t know. I’m watching an old re-run of the ‘Brady Bunch.’”
“I’m going outside to check on Christine,” Gastro said. “This isn’t the best neighborhood in the world.” Even as he said this he realized that he was caring about Christine, and that caring about someone was not how you normally survived.
“Tell her the band’s about to start,” Steve called to his back.
Christine felt the tap on her shoulder and turned around to see Bonner Rivette. She shrieked.
“What’s happening?” her roommate on the phone asked.
“It’s him! Call my daddy! Call my daddy!” was all Christine could say before the criminal knocked the phone out of her hand.
She tried to bolt, but he fastened his grip onto both of her arms.
“Don’t scream, Christine,” he said soothingly. “I just want to talk to you.”
“You go to hell!” She struggled, but he pulled her further from the bar and its lights.
He was very strong, just as she’d remembered, and he succeeded in muffling her voice against his chest as he dragged her past the quiet houses and under the live oak trees. She tried to kick at him with her sneakers and knee him in the groin, but he clutched her so tightly that she couldn’t make it work. It was like they were two lovers dancing in slow motion down the sidewalk.
Tubby was driving his big Chrysler near Lee Circle when he got the call. He had been on a mission to make copies of his insurance claim forms at Kinko’s, but he had failed, not realizing that the once twenty-four-hour-a-day establishment was now open only from nine to three on weekdays because of a labor shortage.
“Mr. Dubonnet!” It was the excited voice of Christine’s roommate, finally talking. “That awful man has got her again.”
She told him what she knew and where Christine was.
He tore at the wheel, knuckles white, blaring his horn through stop signs, racing for the French Quarter. He tried to press 911 while he steered, but his fingers couldn’t find the numbers.
Gastro did not see Christine when he stepped out of the bar. He thought she might have ditched the party and taken herself home. He was disappointed, but then people often treated him that way. Since he had come outside to see to her safety, however, he waited for a minute to see if anything appeared to be amiss. His eye caught a movement down the street, and he moseyed that way. And then he heard the muffled scream and began to run.
Bonner Rivette had Christine in the driveway of a tall deserted house. Pieces of its roof lay about the pavement. His motorcycle was right across the street, and he was trying to squeeze enough air out of the girl so that she would listen to what he had to say. Like it or not, she was going to ride with him to the Gulf Coast. They were going to blow this city, even if he had to kill her to get her there.
He saw Gastro but perceived him to be a minor problem. Still holding Christine tightly by the arm with his left hand, Rivette prepared his right to take care of the hippy squirt.
Gastro yelled, “What’s going on?” but he didn’t wait for an explanation. He flailed his way in like a windmill, the only tactic that had ever worked for him in high school. Bonner sought to use Christine as a shield, but that started her swinging and kicking at him, too, so he threw her roughly onto the driveway. Then he could use both hands on the kid. One, two, three, and Gastro was on the ground with a broken nose.
“Helpless little woman, am I?” Christine screamed. “Your soul mate, am I?” She had a brick from a fallen chimney in her hand, and she clocked Rivette on the side of the head with it. He sank to one knee, and looked at her curiously.
“I’m just someone to knock around, right?” she shouted and whacked him again. Bonner rolled away trying to control the pain. Blood from hi
s forehead was coloring his white suit.
Christine threw her brick at him and picked up another one. Gastro was back up on his knees, shaking his head to clear it. A car screeched to the curb, horn blasting, and Rivette staggered to his feet. It was time to flee.
He ran behind Tubby’s Chrysler as the lawyer was leaping out. Christine pegged another brick which missed Bonner by several feet but which indicated to her father that she was bravely alive. He turned to give chase, but Bonner already had his Suzuki running. He kicked it onto gear and aimed himself down Esplanade Avenue.
“You’re not getting away again,” Tubby shouted and jumped back behind the wheel of his car. He burned rubber in pursuit while Christine, breathing heavily, tenderly used Gastro’s shirt to mop his crooked nose.
Bonner wasn’t feeling so good. He could make his Suzuki go fast, but he could not steer it so well. He thought his skull might be fractured, it hurt that bad. He blinked and almost ran over the curb into the shuttered Café du Monde. He righted his course. Headlights stabbed at his eyes. Drivers swerved to miss him.
More pain rushed through his right shoulder, almost causing him to crash high-speed into the iron fence around Jackson Square. Why, he’d been shot! That bastard father of Christine’s was shooting at him!
Indeed Tubby was firing away, big slugs from his .45—twenty-five years of practicing law forgotten. Nor was he the least concerned about winging bystanders, so it was lucky that the few about were Texans who knew how to take cover from a gunfight. Anytime he got within a hundred feet of the motorcycle’s taillights he pulled the trigger and the gun kicked hard. Since he was aiming out the window with his left hand, it was pure luck that he got anything into Rivette at all. Tubby had never fired a weapon at a human being before, but he had lost his mind over this one. He was cursing nonstop through his beard, intent on keeping the Suzuki in view. All he wanted was a chance to ram the son of a bitch and run him over.
Rivette went left between a parking lot and the Jax Brewery, lured there by the absence of street lights. His mind was blanking out. Tubby saw the turn and came around the corner on two tires. The street crossed the railroad tracks and ended in a small parking lot beside the Moon Walk, the little park for lovers and street musicians built atop the levee. It rambled above the rocky artificial shore of the Mississippi River. The railroad’s wooden crossing arm was down, but Rivette maneuvered his motorcycle around it. Tubby slammed on the brakes and slid to a halt next to the tracks.
He was out of the car, running after Rivette with his pistol still clutched in his hand. The criminal was just ahead. His bike, idling noisily, was pointed up the slope of the levee. Tubby hoped Rivette wasn’t dead yet because he wanted to shoot him himself.
Bonner’s strength was waning. The fire was going out. The wind inside was dying down. All he wanted to do was fly, high as he once had, clearing everything from his path. He heard that lawyer, Dubonnet, panting and cursing behind him. He gave the throttle a mighty twist and stomped the bike into gear.
He got the traction and came over the top of the levee with his speedometer sweeping toward sixty miles per hour. It went to the end of the gauge when the back tire came off the grass and Rivette sailed into the sky.
Running right behind him, Tubby clicked his useless empty gun repeatedly as Bonner soared over the rocks. He saw Rivette arc over the current and hit the water with a splash that seemed so silent because the engine roar extinguished, echoing away. The lawyer watched the motorcycle bubble around for one tiny moment before it sank beneath the surface. Bonner’s body detached. It floated away, a lump of blackness that quickly disappeared in the dark of the river.
“I didn’t know the gun was loaded,” Tubby sang to himself. “And I’ll never do it again.”
There were no recriminations from the police department. Johnny Vodka said he would notify Tubby as soon as Bonner Rivette’s body washed up. “It can’t be long,” he assured him. “That river’s got so many poisons in it he’ll die if he only had a little bitty scratch.”
28
The sky began to brighten. Tubby held that thought, watching the sun come up over the stubble of his trees. Christine and Gastro, after he had got his nose splinted at Touro Hospital, came to stay with him for a few days to recuperate. Camp Dubonnet now had electricity, water, and gas, and was starting to seem like a real home again.
“This is a really nice place you got, Mr. Dubonnet,” Gastro told him while they were cleaning the breakfast dishes together. Tubby had fixed a big cheese omelet for everybody, and now Christine was upstairs showering and getting dressed.
Using a brick on Bonner Rivette might have restored something in her. She did not avoid your eyes anymore when she spoke to you. She talked confidently about the forthcoming semester at Tulane. She had found some old jogging shoes from high school and taken them out for a run.
“Yeah, I guess things are getting better, Gastro. A little bit better each day.”
“That’s what Steve’s folks say down in the country. Except they don’t have jobs.”
“I don’t actually have a job, either. That’s still a problem.”
“Don’t you have clients? I mean, you’re a lawyer, right?” Gastro couldn’t believe that a lawyer would ever encounter any real hardships in life.
“I had clients, buddy, but I don’t know where most of them are. A lot of their houses got flooded, and I’m sure they’re spread out all over the country. Some of them have probably found something better than they had here. They’d be smart not to come back.” And truth was, Tubby wasn’t really sure that he still wanted to be a lawyer.
“You mean that? Why wouldn’t they come back? New Orleans is a great place to live. It’s pretty. It’s very interesting.”
“I didn’t know you had those kinds of ideas Sid, I mean Gastro. You think it’s pretty? Hey, you lived in the gutter, right?”
“Close,” Gastro said. “But I’ve been noticing the scenery lately. And the people around here aren’t so bad.”
“Maybe it’s that post-hurricane friendliness,” but Tubby knew that wasn’t true. People in New Orleans had always called you “honey” and “darling” even if you were just buying a loaf of bread.
Since the phones were working pretty well now, he called Hope.
She answered, and he liked hearing her voice.
“Uh,” he paused, then charged ahead. “I thought you might want to come over for dinner tonight,” he said.
“Well, maybe.”
“I’ve got Gastro and Steve Oubre here, and Christine’s here, and if you came it would be kind of like a reunion.”
“All the refugees in town at once.”
“Not all. That would be way too many to feed. But I’ve got a sack of oysters.”
“Yuck. From the Gulf? After the hurricane? No way?”
He was a little bit disappointed, but he had anticipated this eventuality.
“I’ve also got a couple of pounds of smoked sausage I’m gonna toss on the grill.”
“That sounds great for you men. I’ll stop at a store on the way—I think there’s one open on Tchoupitoulas Street—and pick up some chicken breasts.”
“Sure, that’ll be fine.” My favorite, he thought, boneless, skinless white meat. “Come on over.”
It was a nice party, in Tubby’s cleaned-up back yard, decorated with flowers from the Green Parrot nursery which was up and running, on a warm winter evening in the City That Got Forgot. Tubby had decided to toast his suspicious oysters on the grill, and he had Steve with him outside testing them. Everybody else was in the house watching an old Clint Eastwood video. The television worked, but Cox had yet to turn the cable on.
Gastro saw something in Clint he didn’t like and wandered out of the living room. Hope, who had been curious about this “boy-in-black” who kept a journal, gave him a minute or two and then followed. He was at the dining room table scratching away in a little notebook.
“What are you writing?” she interrupted.
>
The pen shot from his fingers and hit the floor. The notebook went into his shirt.
“I guess it’s a diary,” he said.
“And diaries are private.”
Gastro nodded.
Hope sat down.
“Not all diaries are,” she said. “A great many people’s diaries have been published. Sometimes you might as well call them journals. Have you ever heard of the Journals of Lewis and Clark?”
Gastro admitted he had not.
“Really. They’re famous around here because one of our local professors wrote about them, and of course they were exploring the Louisiana Purchase.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Gastro said. He ran his fingers nervously through his black hair.
“I’d like to read something of yours. You know, see if it’s any good. I’m a teacher and I can’t help being curious.”
“It’s mostly about the hurricane and the people I’ve met.”
“We’re all in that together, aren’t we honey. Anyway…”
“Okay,” he said eagerly, “there’s something I wouldn’t care if you read.”
“Yes?”
Gastro retrieved his book and flipped through the pages.
“It’s a poem,” he explained, and shoved the bent and weather-worn pad across the cherry-wood table.
I am warm and I am growing strong
For your arms I am wrong.
I am free, it’s meant to be
Hot sea
Hot sea coming into me
Alive and strong with jade water
The blue sky empty of all but me
Swirling, whirling, wetter, how much faster can I go?
Thunderbolts hurled in all directions
Bring the waves up to perfection
Land and sea make our connection
I feel like I’m getting a big…
“That’s as far as you wrote?” she asked. “I think you’ve been around nothing but men for too long.”