by Chris Wiltz
“Oh, for pity’s sake!”
“You see. No one else I know says, oh for pity’s sake. For fuck’s sake, for…”
Raynie took off at a fast clip. “Let’s just get there so we won’t be the only people at the bar.”
***
Even though the restaurant was shut down and the live music in the back room had ended over an hour ago, Little Joe had The Pretenders on at almost max volume, giving the audio-illusion of action. There were four people at the bar, a man and woman deep into getting-to-know-you, and two women in close conversation. Not a lone drinker in sight.
“Perfect,” Raynie said.
The short end of the bar, with the only unobstructed view of the cash register when Little Joe stood in front of it, was the hinged lift-top entrance and the service station for staff. Raynie and Harley took the last two stools near that end.
Little Joe drew them a couple of beers and took the ten Harley laid on the bar to the cash register. His long hair streaked with gray was pulled back into a pony tail.
Harley nudged Raynie. “Skinny tail,” he said up close to her ear. She scowled and nudged back, harder. “His, not yours.” She pushed him and he caught himself on the bar, as if she’d pushed him off the stool. “The pony tail,” he said, righting himself.
“I know.”
“Needs new ink.” He paused a beat. “Tattoos.”
“I know.”
The red and blue peace sign on his left forearm had blurred edges, as though it had nearly been scrubbed off. He’d ripped off his t-shirt sleeves, so the heart on the bicep of his right arm was visible. All one color, old-tattoo blue, Little Joe’s heart belonged to Mother Fucker, one word on top of the other, ribbons curling from its sides around his arm.
“Must have been the coolest motherfucker in the French Quarter back in the sixties,” Harley said.
Raynie wrinkled her nose. “Ssh. He’s going to hear you.”
“What? Do I smell bad?” He sniffed his armpit. Raynie pushed him off the stool.
Every time Little Joe opened the cash register he’d step to the side of it for a moment before he closed the drawer. They couldn’t see what he was doing, but his hands never went to his pockets. For half an hour they watched, their heads close together and eyes on each other when Little Joe turned. He wiped down the bar’s apron, washed some glasses. The two women left.
Harley swiveled his stool so he faced Raynie and draped his arms around her neck. He leaned in close to her and said that since they had accepted this mission to help stop the rash of post-Katrina criminal activity, he was taking the only opportunity he might ever have to soul- kiss her. Her lips latched to Harley’s, her eyes slit, Raynie saw Little Joe lift the rubber mat next to the cash register, take several bills from under it, and put them in the back pack he had stashed on a shelf underneath. Then he emptied the tip jar. She closed her eyes and kissed Harley as soulfully as she knew how.
“Dee-vine,” he said when she broke it off. “I’m in plenty trouble now.” He looked down.
She patted his cheek. “No you’re not.” She put a five on the bar. “Buy yourself a, um, stiff drink. I’ll be right back.”
He groaned as she got up and went to the bathroom where she called Karen on her cell phone. “The cash is in his back pack, but first he puts it under a small rubber mat next to the cash register.” She folded the cell, did a quick mirror check, and returned to the bar.
“Let’s sit at a table,” she said to Harley. He picked up his drink.
Raynie ordered a Coke. The change from Harley’s drink covered it, but she took out another dollar and pushed all the money toward Little Joe. He smiled at her. She didn’t smile back.
As she followed Harley to the table, she turned enough to see Little Joe standing to the side of the cash register, which he hadn’t bothered to open.
Raynie sat so her back was against the wall. She watched as Karen hooked the velvet rope in place and made her entrance. She glanced over at Harley, a shine in her eyes. She was going to enjoy this.
***
Karen ducked under the lift-top. Little Joe, cutting a lime at that end of the bar, stepped to the side, said, “Hey,” and when she didn’t answer, left the knife poised in the middle of a juicy wedge to glance over his shoulder at her. She walked the length of the bar to where the couple sat and said, “Last call, guys. We’re closing down a little early tonight—got some clean-up to do.”
Little Joe had just made them Tequila Sunrises. Karen poured the drinks into go-cups and they wandered out into the night. She slipped into a nook off the bar and switched off the music.
“Y’all want go-cups?” Little Joe called to Raynie and Harley.
“They’re with me,” Karen said as she moved to stand next to the rubber mat.
“LaDonna didn’t tell me to close early. We don’t kick out paying customers.”
Karen lifted the mat and took the money from under it. “LaDonna told me to bust you.”
His head jerked to look over at Raynie and Harley. Raynie smiled and waved an index finger at him. Karen reached down to get his backpack from the bottom shelf. As her hand closed around one of the straps, Little Joe sprang across the narrow space to her, his pony tail flying, and pushed her roughly away with his tattooed forearm. He grabbed the backpack from her and slung it over his shoulder. Karen had nearly lost her balance. She pulled herself up to see Raynie and Harley standing at the bar.
“Don’t touch her again,” Harley said.
Little Joe shrugged. “She keeps her hands off my private property.”
“Give her the backpack.”
Karen, annoyed that the conversation excluded her, waved Harley off. “Put the money on the bar, Little Joe, and walk away.”
He smirked at her. “Call the cops.”
“I can do that. LaDonna will go for full restitution if I do.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, I can see a lot of problems with that. Begin with the cops actually showing up. Then prove it. I hear the courts are all jammed up. You think anybody’s gonna give a shit? You read the paper? The murder rate’s skyrocketing.”
“I read the paper. Did you see the guy who was in parish prison for nine months, just got released, arrested last September, a few days after the storm, for looting a grocery store? He walked out with a couple of loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter. Never even got arraigned. Said the smell of piss and shit can’t begin to cover the smell of death over there. Want to take your chances?”
They stared at each other. Little Joe broke first. “What are you going to do if I just walk out of here?”
“That isn’t going to happen.”
“You think he can stop me?” He lifted his chin toward Harley.
Karen nodded. “With a little help, sure.”
“With or without,” Harley said.
Little Joe paid him no attention. “Who’s the help, your boyfriend Luc?”
“And his friend Buddha.” Karen held out her hand.
“You’re so important you have your own henchmen now? I guess henchmen are the new accessory.” But Little Joe’s face had lost the raised eyebrow and cocky smile. Buddha, a six foot seven bald man, with the build of a Sumo wrestler and very small ears, had a bad habit of sitting on people. In spite of his name, he worshipped LaDonna, who hired him for odd jobs and called him La Costa Brava’s official bouncer. Little Joe handed over the backpack.
“Not all of it’s yours,” he said as Karen shook the money out of yet another bag of stolen money.
“None of it’s mine.”
“I brought money in here with me.”
Karen sliced him a look. “You’re getting the backpack. Show some gratitude and,” she said tossing it to him, “run.”
He walked out slowly, hanging on to some attitude. When he opened the door he saw Luc and Buddha half a block away and took off like one of those kids who grabbed women’s purses over on Bourbon Street. Luc said later it was impressive for a sixty-something.
&nbs
p; Karen had both her old jobs back, but that didn’t mean La Costa Brava as she knew it would survive. LaDonna got stranger by the day. She’d left two nights ago, just before the second show at eleven, telling Karen to keep the place running. Karen asked her when she’d be back.
“I don’t know, Honeycutt,” LaDonna had said. “Sometime. I’ll call.”
But it was almost three days now and she hadn’t. She wasn’t answering calls either. Karen had been trying to figure out when to start worrying.
Eleven
The next morning when Karen opened the door to the office, LaDonna was sitting at the desk, shuffling papers with her old-time lightning speed.
“Honeycutt?” She said it so loud Karen jumped. “Have you been to the Lower 9 since you got back to town?”
“No.”
LaDonna slapped some invoices on the desk. “What kind of fucking citizen are you? Come on. I’m taking you on the Misery Tour.”
***
The roof of LaDonna’s Lower Ninth Ward house stood on one end, leaning against the house next door, which looked as though it had started toppling under the weight until some invisible super-hand had stopped its fall and held it in its precarious position. The rest of the house had been reduced to an eight-foot high stack of pick-up-sticks from the force of the water breaking through the levee. The ground had a crusty look, and when LaDonna rolled down her window, there was an unpleasant smell, something toxic underlying the stench of organic decay. LaDonna rolled up her window.
The landscape was eerily deserted. All over town FEMA trailers stood in front of houses that the residents were rebuilding or intending to rebuild. But not here. The devastation was too complete. The houses left standing were too unstable to cover with a blue tarp. Nine months after the storm and still there was no electricity, no gas, and worse, no potable drinking water. The city couldn’t say when the services would be restored.
LaDonna had driven Karen past the place where a barge had broken through the levee at the Industrial Canal. She zig-zagged through the debris-littered streets, Karen hoping they wouldn’t end up with a flat tire, or two, or four. She seemed to be looking for something, maybe signs of life, but the only people they’d seen had been over on St. Claude Avenue, a church group with their van in the parking lot of a former auto parts store, eating an early lunch around a camp stove—a whiff of meat cooking that made Karen feel a little sick as they drove past—and a Humvee with four National Guardsmen dressed in camouflage, driving the wrong way on St. Roch. LaDonna said the church group was probably gutting houses in the Holy Cross neighborhood closest to the river where the damage hadn’t been so severe and people were fighting to return. Fighting, she said, because the city wasn’t making it easy for them, and there had been rumors of developers wanting to take over the land near the river.
LaDonna stared out the driver’s window at what was left of her house. Karen wanted to ask her where she’d been the past three days, but now didn’t feel like the right time to bring it up.
“It’s supposed to be removed tomorrow,” she said, and then she laughed. “Mother Nature took care of the demolition.”
“What are you going to do?”
LaDonna turned to Karen so fast that the beads at the end of her braids hit the glass, clicking against it.
“What am I go-ing to do?”
Karen looked at her. She must have just said the stupidest or most insensitive thing she could have said to LaDonna.
“There is nothing I can do. I let the flood insurance lapse a couple of years ago, for which I beat myself up on a daily basis. The government is supposed to help us out, but we don’t live in a foreign country, so that don’t look like it’s gonna happen. There is nothing to do. And let me tell you, if I had any choices, I wouldn’t know what to do. Just keep on keepin’ on, I guess, but isn’t that what we do in New Orleans? All the time?” She shifted in her seat and turned away from Karen. She said quietly, alarming because of the anger Karen thought she heard raging underneath the quiet, “I don’t even know if I want to be here any more.”
For the first time Karen understood that what had happened to LaDonna lay far beyond her imagination. When she was leaving town with Jack, LaDonna had said, “Why would anyone want to be anywhere but New Orleans? Don’t do it, girl. You’ll regret it.” No doubt this wouldn’t be a good time to throw LaDonna’s words back at her. Karen looked out at the street.
LaDonna said, “I’m so fucked up I don’t even know if I want to be with Ramon. Here I been grieving over that man all this time, and he finally comes back groveling, and I can’t decide if I’m in or out.” She turned from the destroyed house toward Karen. “You know me, girl. I’ve hardly experienced an indecisive moment in my life. I feel fuckin’ insane.”
“So that’s where you’ve been. With Ramon.”
“Three solid days, and I still don’t know what I want.”
“Why should you want to get back with him, LaDonna? His behavior has been shocking, leaving you at what had to be the worst moment in your life. I think you should boot him right back to California.”
LaDonna laughed. “You are righteous, Honeycutt, you know that? But if you want to talk about shocking behavior, you should’ve seen what people were doing after the storm. Forget looting for food; the bunch of us down here were looting for booze. We waded barefoot into the Robért’s grocery that had five inches of putrid water in it, in the pitch black, all the way to the back and discovered no one had found the wine yet. Shelves of it. And we didn’t have nothin’ to carry it in. We broke as many bottles as we finally took out of there. Everyone was drinking as much as they could, and then they started fucking all the people they know they should never fuck. Nobody gave a shit. We were all insane. Yeah, girl, don’t look at me that way. I balled Little Joe. You believe that?”
“For Christ sake, LaDonna, I hope you got tested.”
“You know how long that little son-of-a-bitch has worked for me? Over two years, something like that. He came on right after you left. So one crazy night, both of us drunk, Ramon hadn’t been home for two days, and I let the asshole bust a nut. One time. Never came up again, and he starts stealing from me, like I owe him something ‘cause I got laid. Just goes to prove not all whores are women.”
“So you knew he was stealing and you let him get away with it.”
“I sort of knew. Look, by that time my emotions felt like they were in one of those daiquiri blenders, maybe my brain fell in too. Not that I’m so different than anyone else in this city. Nobody knows what they’re doing, what they want to do, if they’re coming or going. It’s like mass insanity. Even the people sitting in their high and dry houses, they don’t know what to do. One day they put their house on the market, the next day they take it off. They’re acting just as nuts as anybody.”
“That must be annoying.”
“No, that’s not annoying. That’s a post-Katrina fact of life. Hell, most of those people were displaced too, but they feel guilty their house is okay, their life is easy compared to all the homeless people. They’ve got survivor’s guilt so bad they can hardly feel lucky.”
Karen was shaking her head. “I know I don’t understand, LaDonna. I don’t understand why you think you want to go. What would you do with La Costa? Why would you leave your friends? I know you lost your home, but the city’s still home. Why would you leave it?”
LaDonna looked away from Karen, pursing her lips. “Maybe so I don’t have to look at it everyday. Maybe because my heart got broken twice, right in a row, and believe me, the city was the bigger loss.”
Karen could see that she was fighting tears, but LaDonna turned toward her with something like ferocity. “I can see why you’re confused. You’re glad to be home, and you came back with certain expectations that life would be more or less the same, even when you know it can’t be. It’s nine months later and maybe you don’t get it why people are acting the way they are. It’s like, let’s get a move on, right? But this thing is far from ov
er, I mean really far. The system is fucked up, the mayor seems to be spending a lot of time in Dallas, people like me are waiting for money it’s going to take months maybe years to get, the levees aren’t fixed and hurricane season just started. Everyone’s scared shitless. If the thing touched you at all, even on a bureaucratic level—I can’t wait to see how bad all that gets—you are fucking insane. You can’t grasp it ’cause it didn’t touch you. You weren’t here. You are confused, girl, but understand me, you are not insane.”
“You don’t think coming back after the fact makes me eligible? Look, I get it, LaDonna. I don’t think everyone should just get a move on. And it isn’t my fault I wasn’t here.”
“Don’t you go get pissed now, you hear me? I got enough piss and vinegar for the both of us.”
“Well, let it rip. And, by the way, I caught Little Joe stashing the money and I fired him.”
“Yeah? Gonna be real hard for the poor son-of-a-bitch to find another job.”
“What, now you feel sorry for him?”
LaDonna shrugged her face. “I wouldn’t go that far. He could go uptown. I hear they’re scrounging for help on Magazine Street. But he won’t. That one is a true Quarter rat. He won’t ever live any place but downtown. The thing is, he’s getting old, he’ll never make as much money as he made at La Costa—before and after the storm—and if he ever steals again he might not be so lucky to stick it to someone who’ll keep their mouth shut. Little Joe’s getting poorer by the day and the city’s getting more expensive. In the brave new world, Little Joe is an endangered species. New Orleans gonna be a place for rich people. And Little Joe could end up homeless while he waits to go extinct.”
“You really think the city’s going to get too expensive to live in?”
“Don’t panic, Honeycutt. You’ll be all right. Anyway, what do I know? I already told you I don’t know shit from shit.”
LaDonna put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook and Karen thought she was crying. When she took her hands away she let out a shriek of laughter. “You want to hear some shit, girl? Here’s what Ramon wants me to do. Since the first reality show didn’t quite pan out, now he wants to do a documentary—and don’t go call this no reality show…New Orleans after the storm, follow a woman, me, who lost everything, and see what happens to her.”