by Chris Wiltz
The name she’d searched for—the “o” name—was suddenly there. Devereux, exotic but still graceful, the name of the old man who’d given her Willie, a frog he’d raised on his frog farm on the outskirts of Rayne. Willie won the frog-jumping contest at the festival that year; then got disqualified because he was a farm frog. She’d been just a kid; she cried. “He’s still a real frog,” she said. Mr. Devereux told her not to worry. Willie would jump far, far away from all those fools.
Raynie Devereux. She said it to herself three times, caving to superstition. It worked. She definitely felt different.
Three
Karen was on the bus from Biloxi to New Orleans when she decided she’d be damned if she’d abandon all her stuff in Florida. Good stuff too—the best cookware, Egyptian cotton linens, down pillows, and her antiques. She didn’t feel like starting all over, living in a place with a mattress on the floor, pillows instead of a sofa, no rugs. Winters in New Orleans, the cold seeped up through the floorboards and tiles of the old houses. Your feet felt it unless you wore Canadian mountain boots. Maybe she’d spent too much time in sunny Florida. Or maybe she and Jack had played house too long.
Around noon she checked into Mary Pat’s Sun and Moon, a bed and breakfast on N. Rampart Street. The first thing she did was dump the money out on the bed and count it. She stacked it. She counted it again. She couldn’t believe it—$56,000 and change. Solo would want Jack’s nuts for this. What could he have been thinking?
What was she thinking?
She was too tired to think. She lay down on the bed with the money and let her mind wander. She wondered when Jack would have gotten around to telling her about the money, the way he would have told her. He would have waited until she’d gotten over being hustled out of Miami at three in the morning. Then he would have staged a scene, champagne in the hotel room, maybe a present—something outrageous, like the time he hired the guy in the red leather jockstrap to deliver a dozen roses and sing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” in a thick New Orleans accent trying to sound French, followed by a half-second strip show, which made her run from the room.
Or there was the time after an argument when they’d first moved to Miami. She told him she wished she’d never laid eyes on him and cried because she was homesick. She came home from work the next evening, found the living room lit with dozens of candles, and Fats Domino belting out “Walkin’ to New Orleans” on the stereo. Jack came into the room stark naked except for a gold turban like a genie’s and bands of bells around his ankles, carrying a couple of Schnapps shots like Tom Rivers used to serve at the Ace, the bar on Dumaine Street in the French Quarter where they’d met.
He was insane. Karen had no doubt that he could have made out with the blonde in the bar one night, then concocted something dramatically romantic for her the next. As she fell asleep she saw herself lying in bed, Jack straddling her, and from his hands, money and rose petals floating down to cover her….
She woke with a start nearly ten hours later. The room was dark, and she hugged the edge of the bed, one bent elbow and crooked knee off the mattress, sleeping as she had been living, on the edge. At night she retreated to the edge to stay away from Jack’s long limbs flailing about, and slept in protective position, body curled in on itself, one arm covering her head in case a rogue elbow entered her space. The silence around her seemed strange. Even if Jack wasn’t snoring or grunting as his big body thrashed, his breath rasped loudly in and out of his large nostrils.
The smell was missing, too, the straightforward smell of sweat overlaid with a slightly sweet bitterness that reminded Karen of anise. She drew a deep breath and thought she got a whiff of it, a scent as dark as his olive skin, as mysterious as what went on in his mind.
She shuddered, as if shaking off any longing she still felt for Jack, and turned on the bedside light. She must have thrashed quite a bit herself. Some of the money had fallen to the floor. From her position half off the mattress, she picked up what she could before she slid to the floor to look under the bed. She stuffed all the money back into the gym bag and hid it behind her suitcase in the closet. When she lifted the suitcase, she heard the gun clunk in it.
A couple of years with a man, and she wasn’t sure what he’d do when he found her, which wouldn’t take long. She knew she wanted the money and didn’t regret taking it, considering that it came from that slimeball Solo Fontova.
Just thinking about Solo raised the hair on the back of her neck, his thick-skinned face that looked as though it had been beat out of shape with an oiled meat mallet, or maybe the oil leaked from his expensive hair-do, swept back and polished with gobs of extra-shine product. Whenever they met he held her fingers as his beefy lips brushed her knuckles and told her what beautiful hands she had. A perfect gentleman, excused himself if he said fuck in front of a woman. A self-described businessman, his short, hard-gutted body in two-thousand-dollar expertly tailored iridescent suits, his feet in sheer-striped hose and eight-hundred-dollar alligator loafers. No pointy-toed shit kickers or guayabera shirts for Solo. His pocket handkerchief always matched his colorful silk shirts, which he wore with the top two buttons undone to give the ladies a glimpse of his immaculately waxed chest. Big thug in Little Havana, running his security company, his biggest client his own gambling enterprises. But an Allapattah Boy? Had he really left the tongues in refrigerators? Jack was so full of it…
But Solo was Jack’s problem. She’d figure out what to do about Jack when he showed up. Until then, Karen decided to take $5000 of the money to rent an apartment and get to Florida. The rest she’d put in a safe deposit box first thing in the morning. She would need a visible means of support. She showered, got dressed, and walked over to La Costa Brava to see if LaDonna Johnson would give her back her old bartending job.
***
The street action in the Faubourg Marigny, behind the French Quarter, was not as heavy as Karen remembered at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. At the top of Frenchman Street, the Hookah Café and Mona’s were open, both restaurants that Karen liked. Next door was a new place, Ray’s Boom Boom Room. The music was loud and people were packed in. Karen walked by slowly. This looked like the hot spot on the street. There was no one hanging in front of the Blue Nile, and when she got to it she saw it was closed, the front windows boarded up. Something like a shock wave went through her system. She picked up speed, anxious to get to La Costa Brava, wanting to make sure it was still there.
Karen didn’t want anything to be different. She wanted the same life she’d had before Jack, with all the familiar people and places, the Marigny a hip scene for locals, not just another tourist trap like most of the Quarter had become, and as she walked beyond the Blue Nile, she walked into her past. Behind the large ground-floor windows of the buildings down Frenchman were the same old haunts, with their peeling paint facades and chipped plaster showing blackened brick. From their doors came live music—reggae, Latin, and African—and good old rock ‘n roll at d.b.a.
When she got to La Costa, Karen could see through the window at the left that LaDonna had less than half a house of late-night diners. She went through the small front foyer into the bar on the other side. The battered wood floor creaked familiarly under her feet. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, that old feeling of possession swarmed her. She’d put in her time on both sides of the bar as well as most of the tables that lined the walls. Under the low ceiling, the jazz from the back room mixing with smoke and talk, it was a good place to hunker down, figure out the meaning of life, catch up on the local gossip.
The lone bartender moved fast to serve a healthy crowd, though nothing like the Boom Boom Room, that didn’t leave much space down most of the length of the bar. He had that kind of cool about him that he didn’t seem rushed or harried, plenty of time to joke around with a couple of women seated about center, who looked as though they’d reached their final destination for the night.
Karen stood back watching, realizing she had it in for this guy on tw
o counts: one, he was working her old job; two, he was too good looking in that bad boy way, with his messy dark hair, face unshaved, the sleeves of his plain black t-shirt rolled up and tight around his well-developed biceps. Benicio del Toro came to mind, or a darker version of the young Marlon Brando, though not quite as brooding. Karen credited herself with having learned a few things during her years with Jack. One thing, if a guy was that good looking and heterosexual, he was bound to be a bastard.
She pushed her way up to the bar, right next to the two women. The one closest gave her a look and leaned toward her friend. Karen kept her eyes on the bartender and felt pleased when she drew him right to her.
“Get you something?” he said.
“No thanks. Is LaDonna upstairs?”
“Who’s asking?” He let his eyes drift down, away from her face.
“Karen Honeycutt. I used to have your job.”
People were moving to the back room where the late show was starting, Delfeayo Marsalis, always drawing a good crowd.
The waitress from the back, who was standing at the end of the bar, shouted, “Luc, two Matadors, a blue-cheese martini, one Coke, Heineken, and a Turbo Dog.”
He started moving, but staying close enough to say, “Oh, yeah, hard-ass Honeycutt I heard they called you. When you were manager.”
Karen stared at him.
“Just kidding,” he said and lifted his chin toward the stairs at the back of the room. “LaDonna’s in her office.”
Karen unhooked the velvet rope and went up the narrow staircase, hidden from view of the bar by a wall. At the top of the stairs, she opened a bead-board door and entered a long hallway. Second door on the left, she knocked once, followed by three rhythmic taps, wondering if LaDonna would remember.
LaDonna called out, sounding surprised, “Who’s that?” then, “Enter.”
Karen opened the door to see LaDonna get up and nearly knock a stack of papers off the edge of her piled-high desk. Her gold bangle bracelets rattled on her wrist.
Big smile showing her large white teeth, she said, “Hey, girl,” and the two embraced. LaDonna, a head shorter than Karen, though she never seemed to be looking up at anyone, held her by the shoulders. “You’re not so good at keeping in touch, honey.”
“I feel bad about that, LaDonna. It’s been way too long.”
The smile shrunk. “Longer than you can count in real time, I’ll tell you that.”
“Is your house still there?”
“Hell no. It’s a pile of sticks. They still sittin’ out there. I just thank the Lord Jesus my mama and daddy didn’t have to see this. Would’ve broken their hearts.”
“I tried to reach you after the storm. I knew the 9th Ward went under. I wanted you to come stay with me.”
LaDonna laughed, deep and rich. “I should’ve headed your way, but let me give you the short version of what happened after Katrina.
“First, we commandeered a tour bus, king size, to get us out of town. We go East to head West, ’cause that’s what the radio told us to do, and that takes so long we run smack into that Hurricane Rita when we stopped at my cousin’s house in Erath. We gathered up the cousins and hauled ass to Lake Charles and kept on going to Houston. Then we couldn’t figure what to do with the bus. So we turn around and start back. We stayed on FEMA’s tab at a motel in Beaumont for a couple of days, took a detour to my other cousin’s in Lake Arthur where we scraped flood sludge out of her house, de-slimed back in Erath, and then we decided we didn’t care what was goin’ on in New Orleans, we said, we are goin’ home.”
“Who’s we?”
A question that threw LaDonna into distraction. “Oh, uh, musicians from the Lower 9, people hanging around the Marigny, anybody who wanted to come.”
“So all that’s after Katrina? Why didn’t you evacuate?”
“Honey, you are a New Orleans girl. You have to ask that question? We were open for business the Saturday night before. Everybody’s in a party mood. When C. Ray gave the evacuation order, they were all at a football game. Maybe half the ones who bothered to watch the weather left. The others, well, you know how it is. If they’re young, they’re immortal; if they’re as old as me, they say they went through Betsy, so they sure as hell ain’t leavin for this.”
“Did you manage to get anything out of your house?”
“Nope, stayed here the night the bitch hit so I’m down to my undies. If I didn’t have this club…Push some of that crap off the sofa and tell me about you. I can’t talk about this shit.”
The house phone rang and LaDonna went to the wing chair behind her desk. “What now?” she said wearily, listened, then said, “Tell the asshole those were the last two entrées, we’re out of food, he should try the Marigny Brasserie a couple doors down.”
Karen saw that the past nine months had put a few strands of gray in LaDonna’s black hair. She still wore it pulled back, a cascade of tiny braids down to the middle of her back. She’d lost a few pounds, which looked good, but the difference wasn’t in her looks so much as in her eyes. They had dark circles under them and they were flat and slow, without their usual quick interest. She sat tiredly in the big chair. Karen had never seen LaDonna slouch before; her normal posture was bolt upright, at the edge of her seat, taking care of two or three things at once.
She hung up the phone. “Why can’t people think on their feet any more? So tell me, you visiting or you back for good?”
“I’m back. You were right about Jack. I believe the term you used was lowlife.”
“I could have said worse, but, girl, he had to have something going for him. What was it, a couple of three years? That’s a long time at your age.”
“Yeah. I’ve been wondering since I left him why I ever thought it was a good idea to go off with him in the first place.” Karen shook her head and laughed. “He smelled good?”
“There’s something to that,” LaDonna told her. “Oprah, Dr. Phil, somebody said for men it’s the visuals attract them to women; for women, it’s smell. Anyway, there no wrong decisions, only decisions.”
“Who said that?” Karen got a visual of the money all over the bed at the Sun and Moon.
LaDonna sighed. “I don’t buy it either.” She stared off at the corner of the room.
Karen didn’t know what to say to LaDonna. She was different, changed by what she’d gone through or still in shock. LaDonna had never talked much about her personal life, though she was interested in Karen’s. She had a quick wit that deflected questions so that Karen never felt they were equals that way, LaDonna also being her employer and older, roughly Jack’s age. Now they had time and a catastrophe separating them. But until Jack came along with his slightly bowed legs, crooked smile and hot sex, LaDonna had been the final authority for Karen. In the three years she’d worked for LaDonna, she’d learned more from her than she had from her own mother. Then Karen had found out that it wasn’t just men who didn’t always think with their brains.
She cleared her throat. “I notice you seem a little short-handed downstairs.” Most nights the bartender didn’t work alone, never on weekend nights. “Could you use another bartender?”
LaDonna turned to her. “Business is off. I don’t use more than one bartender ’cept for Friday and Saturday nights. One of them didn’t make it tonight.” She thought for a moment. “What I could really use, some office help, move some of this paper around like you used to.”
“No manager?”
“I had to let her loose. Listen, the way things are, I can’t pay you what I used to, but I could use some part-time help in the dining room. The tips could make up the difference. You up for that?”
So because of Katrina, LaDonna had money problems. She’d had those before, but it had only made her work harder. Maybe the answers weren’t so simple now.
“Sure,” Karen said. “Give me a few days to get a place and get my things from Florida.”
“Florida? I thought you went to Detroit.”
“By way of Memphis.
It’s a long story. We’ll need a couple of drinks.”
“And a fast car, sounds like.”
***
Karen stepped from the brilliant Florida sunshine into the darkened townhouse. She didn’t remember drawing the curtains. That thought became secondary as soon as the cold air laden with the smell of food hit her. Her sensory confusion lasted only a split second, but she still didn’t bolt fast enough.
For a big man, he was quick, his thick arm across her collarbones, a long blade nudged up against her cheek. He kicked the door shut. He was shorter than Karen but twice as wide. He pushed her into the dining room, talking up close to her neck, black beans on his breath.
“You try to run, I slice your face.”
He increased the blade’s pressure against her cheekbone and used a cell phone with his other hand. He fired a rapid burst of Spanish, part of which she understood: “The girl is here.” Perhaps he also made a suggestion to disfigure her now rather than later.
Karen could hear Solo Fontova’s voice. “Solo!” she called out.
The Cuban moved the blade—she knew him, one of Solo’s thugs, Ernesto—and she felt its razor edge break her skin. She wanted to whimper but decided against it.
He ended the call, removed her purse from her shoulder, and shoved her toward a chair. “You sit,” he told her.
Karen put a finger to her cheek and felt the blood. She turned around, walking backwards the last couple of steps to the chair, not wanting her back to him. He was interested in her purse. He slung it on the table, and holding it and the knife in one hand, began to go through it. He found the manila envelope at the bottom, took it out, and smirked at her when he saw the money, his eyes not meeting hers but lingering on her chest. His jaw hung open. With his undershot bite he reminded Karen of a Bullmastiff. The latest Perro Chico? She expected him to drool. He was young, not twenty, maybe not a day over seventeen, eighteen. It was hard to tell, with his chunky build and pockmarked face like Solo’s.