Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  “What’s mechanical and body shop going to say if we start paying roadway the same as them?” Hero barked. Ronald knew what he was saying: How are white men going to feel about being paid the same as blacks?

  “You let me worry about them,” Jimmy said.

  “Well, then,” Hero said. “How you going to feel when everything’s”—he smiled—“equalized?”

  “Let me tell you something,” Jimmy said. “When I joined the Army and realized I was going to be taking orders from a black sergeant, I thought it was the end of the world. That guy, the guy I was, is the guy you’re trying to talk to now. But let me tell you, it didn’t take me long to realize there were only two colors in Vietnam: dark green and light green. And red. We all bled the same color. So let me worry about the guys in maintenance and body shop.”

  Hero turned his reptilian eyes on big, gentle Frank Nettles. “What about you, Frank? You ready to go back and tell the rest of the guys in mechanical that they’re going to earn the same as the bo’s digging dirt on the roadway?”

  “Some of them won’t like it,” Frank said softly. The three executives had to lean forward to hear him. “But I’m sitting here remembering something. I was working the night we got rid of the screens.” Ronald turned in his chair to listen. The screens—wooden slats printed, “For Colored Patrons Only”—occupied a special place in New Orleans mythology, as one of the city’s few explicit Jim Crow rules from the bad old days. Everybody over a certain age remembered their delicate dance, moving up and down the seats as the streetcar filled with white or Negro riders. One day they’d mysteriously disappeared.

  “They called me in that night, late. Told me to be at the Canal barn,” Frank said, looking down at the tabletop. “They’d set up a band saw right there. They told me and another man to take all the screens and cut them in half, all of them. They had a supervisor there, and a watchman with a gun, in case there was trouble.” Frank lifted his eyes from the tabletop. “Something changed that night. Or, perhaps I should say, started changing. Would any of us really like to go back to the way it was?”

  Bob and Hero sat back in their chairs, scowling. Clarence took off his little round glasses, laid them on the table, and leaned across, smiling. “Ronald,” he said. “Maybe you’ve had enough of roadway. Maybe you’d prefer to put some distance between yourself and the pickax. Could we find you a position, in, say, the storeroom?”

  “We done tried that, Clarence,” Ronald said. “They sent me over the storeroom one time, but, sir, it didn’t suit me. Couple weeks of that, I asked to go back out to the wilderness. To my people.”

  Eckelmann spread his hands. “This is for your benefit.”

  Ronald felt a wave of electric heat rise up his backbone, out his shoulders and arms. He tapped a fingertip on the table. “You’re not doing nothing for my benefit,” he said, his jaw clenched. “Unless you’re doing something for my people on roadway, you’re doing nothing.”

  FRANK MINYARD

  ORLEANS PARISH CRIMINAL COURT

  1976

  The bailiff called Frank’s case, the doors to the courtroom flew open, and the French Market Jazz Band marched in, playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Frank, wearing the second-line band’s traditional bus driver’s cap, led the way, waving his trumpet and grinning at the TV cameras. Edgar Smith, cheeks as big as apples and dressed in a beige jail suit, brought up the rear on sousaphone. Judge Andrew Bucaro sat at his elevated bench, laughing and beating time with a gavel. Spectators filled the benches.

  “Do you have a lawyer present?” Bucaro asked, when the band stopped playing.

  “No, Your Honor,” Frank said, panting from exertion. “I am acting as my own lawyer.”

  “Then you have a fool for a client,” Bucaro said, and the crowd roared. Frank winked at the eye of a television camera.

  “You and your band were cited for performing on Royal Street without a permit,” Bucaro said. “You are charged with disturbing the peace and begging. How do you plead?”

  “Guilty as hell,” Frank said.

  “Well, I know you’re not a beggar, so we’ll drop that one. But you sure as hell disturbed the peace. So here’s your sentence: community service. You’re to take that trumpet of yours and go do some good with it.”

  “Yes sir, your honor.”

  Frank and Edgar walked out the courthouse into bright sunlight. “You should practice more, Dr. Minyard,” Edgar said, “and you shouldn’t play the fool. Music is serious.” He handed Frank the sousaphone. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to jail.”

  FRANK DROVE HOME to the antebellum French Quarter town house he’d bought after Emelie divorced him. The front of the house had two apartments; he rented those out and lived in the old slave quarters, which were across a small courtyard in back. He mixed himself a bullshot and called all the musicians he could think of: Milton Batiste, Harold Dejan, and old Danny Barker, who’d been playing banjo around the Quarter since the 1950s. The idea, he explained, was to hold a benefit concert for local charities, but with a twist. Instead of charging high ticket prices and donating the proceeds, Frank would hand out tickets to the charities and let them sell them. And here’s the twist, he said. We set a price limit of five dollars, so that the same people the charities served could come and enjoy the music. Within an hour, he’d lined up horns, guitars, and, once Al Hirt agreed to play, a big-name trumpet.

  “We need a piano player, Jumbo,” Frank told Hirt.

  “Well, how about your ma?”

  Frank was about to call her, when the phone rang.

  “Frank, it’s Harry Connick.” The district attorney.

  “Am I in trouble?” Frank asked. “No, let me guess. You want to perform at my benefit.”

  “Close,” Connick said. “How about you let Harry junior sing?”

  Frank laughed. “What is he, eight?”

  “Nine.”

  Well, sure, Frank thought. We’re only charging five dollars. No one’s expecting Louis Armstrong.

  WILBERT RAWLINS JR.

  3035 BURGUNDY STREET

  1980

  Wilbert Rawlins Jr. was never allowed to forget he was Wilbert Rawlins Junior. At ten years old, he was the biggest kid at Thomas Alva Edison Elementary—a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than even the biggest sixth grader—but Da towered over his world like the sun and moon rolled together. Da worked all day on the waterfront, hauling hundred-pound sacks of coffee, and when the muscles moved under his shirt, it looked like he had cats fighting under there. Four, five nights a week Da would come home, change into his tuxedo, and go right back out to play drums for Miss Irma Thomas. But even so, it seemed to Wil like Da was always around—fixing the bikes of every kid in the Marigny, cooking meals in the family’s cramped kitchen, taking everybody out to eat, hovering over him at school. Wil knew kids without fathers, but it was hard for him to imagine what that must be like. The whole world came to Wil filtered through Da. This is how you fix a radio, Da might say as he snapped the thing apart and together without a moment’s hesitation. This is how the toaster works. And this is what I expect of you. “Do you understand?” Da would say, putting the eye thing on Wil like his gaze could nail Wil’s head to the wall. “If you don’t understand, I’ll break it down for you. But if you tell me yes, and then you break the rules, that’s blatant disrespect.”

  The family was living that year at 3035 Burgundy, renting half a tall duplex whose front steps went up a full story to the porch. Ma taught math at Helen S. Edwards Elementary, and though she was already shorter than Wil, her authority was no less ferocious than Da’s. Let Wil come home with disappointing grades. Let one of his teachers call her in. He wasn’t too big yet for her to put him over her knee. Chubby little Lawrence, two years younger than Wil, was like a little ball of sunshine in that house, always smiling, always laughing. And why not? He didn’t have to hear Da growling down at him, “I did not give you my name to play with it in the streets that way.”

 
; Ma and Da both left the house at five o’clock every morning. Miss Camille would pick up the boys in her big station wagon and carry them across the canal to their grandmother’s house on Deslonde Street. The air those mornings was warm, wet, and fragrant: a hedge of star jasmine in the churchyard across Burgundy, coffee roasting on Congress Street, fish coming into the Spain Street wharf, the big old sweet olive hanging over the corner of Louisa. But what lit Wil up inside was the music—a ship on the river sounding its horn across the Marigny, the clickety-clack of the trains along the Press Street tracks accompanied by the eighth-note ding-ding-ding of the signal lights at Dauphine. The music was all around and inside him.

  JOYCE MONTANA

  VILLERE STREET

  1981

  “Tootie, we’re going to be late to Gallier Hall!” Joyce stood at the stove in her nightgown and robe, making a pot of strong coffee. Her head ached. It was eight o’clock, and the mayor wanted Tootie at Gallier Hall for nine. They’d been up almost all night, along with Ricky Gettridge and Paul Honoré, feverishly sewing beads and sequins into a brilliant pink suit.

  “I can’t help that,” Tootie said calmly, hunched over the kitchen table in his pajamas, sewing sequins into a moccasin. “The suit’s not done.”

  The mayor had invited Tootie and Joyce to receive an award and sit with him on the reviewing stand in front of Gallier Hall to salute Rex, king of carnival. Who’d ever have thought the city of New Orleans would honor a Mardi Gras Indian? And to greet Rex—the mayor was essentially inviting black Mardi Gras into white Mardi Gras, an unheard-of thing.

  “The mayor,” Tootie snorted, “ain’t nothing but a Seventh Ward boy like me.”

  Dutch Morial had been a fixture of Joyce’s childhood, a respectful, light-skinned, wavy-haired youth, standing with his foot up on a porch step, chatting with an elder, always a book tucked under his arm. He’d gone as far as they’d all expected: first black graduate of LSU Law School, first black to serve in the Louisiana legislature since Reconstruction, first black juvenile court judge, first black justice of the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal.

  “I’ll get there when I’m done,” Tootie said, without looking up. “It’s Mardi Gras day, and the suit’s not finished.”

  The doorbell rang, and Joyce padded to the front door in her bare feet. Tootie’s spy boy and flag boy, no doubt, come to get him into his suit and fill the house with their drumming and chanting. She pulled the door open.

  Dutch Morial stood on the porch—short, broad chested, arms cocked at his side as though ready to throw a punch—wearing a crisp double-breasted suit. Behind him, impeccably dressed in a pale green suit, was his beautiful wife, Sybil—a doctor’s daughter—and three of their children, scrubbed to shining. A hot wave of embarrassment washed over Joyce. She pressed her bathrobe closed over the old nightgown.

  “If everything I’ve heard about Tootie Montana is true, he’s not budging from this house until his suit is ready,” Dutch said, his dark eyes sparkling. He held up a fancy-looking framed document. “Muhammad won’t go to the mountain, so the mountain came to Muhammad. May we see him?”

  ANTHONY WELLS

  Cali is cold, man. Cold. Got into a little thing, so I was on probation, and once you on probation, man, they got you. Get a parking ticket, don’t see your parole officer, not working, any of that gets you picked up again. They want you to report what you’re making, where you working, like under communism or something. You’re not working, you’re violating your parole. You move without telling them, that’s absconding, and that’s automatic violation. It don’t stop. They finally sent me to this fire-suppression camp, and I finished high school there. They were like, “Ant’ny Wells, you got to find another way to deal with your anger,” and I thought, they’re right. I never saw my daddy use his fists. Never saw him use a gun on another man. So one day, me and a dude get into it, and I walk away. I’m thinking, what’s the New Orleans way? Use your head. Go around instead of through.

  My job was in the scullery, washing pots and shit. Tile floor. Other dude don’t have no rubber boots, so I put safflower oil and water on the floor, and then I talked some shit and he come charging through, slip on that oil, and bust his head on the tile. Blood everywhere. They charged him with being unauthorized in the scullery and didn’t do shit to me. The New Orleans way, man; it works.

  Vietnam come along and I get drafted. Did my service, but I don’t get no benefits on account I got a discharge. They drafted me into the fucking Seabees. We was three black dudes, two or three Mexicans, but the lieutenants and captains, they were all white. They told us as soon as we finished our basic training we were going to Nam to build highways and shit in the jungle. So we smoked weed, got drunk, started fucking up on purpose. I got in a fight with a lieutenant at the PX and tore that place up. Three of us got put out.

  Only thing is, I should have gotten more peacoats and shit out of it.

  Got introduced to freebase in 1979. It wasn’t no big deal; nobody could afford it. I’m out on Van Nuys Boulevard in my turquoise pants and French cuffs, doing my thing—some F40s, Tuinals, nothing big, you dig?—and this crazy motherfucker, Cecil, comes up and he got one of them old service revolver .38s. I could see the bullets in the chamber. So I go running across Van Nuys Boulevard, the busiest motherfucker in L.A., like eight lanes of traffic, and he’s like Pow! Pow! Pow! I had on this cold-blooded leather coat and I can feel them bullets hitting it. When I stop running, my friend says, “Ant’ny, look at your coat.” And I’m like, motherfucker: my brand-new Orbach’s leather coat. Six holes in it and not a scratch on me. Some kind of voodoo. That’s when I’m thinking I had to get back to New Orleans.

  WILBERT RAWLINS JR.

  ST. ROCH PARK

  1981

  Wil stood on first base, daydreaming. Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church loomed over one shoulder, the creepy mausoleums of St. Roch’s Campo Santo Cemetery loomed over the other. Heat rippled from the bare dirt of the baselines. His team, St. Roch Park, was up six to five in the top of the ninth. One more out and he could dive for the shade and some ice cream.

  “Wilbert!”

  Wil snapped awake and looked around. Parents were laughing and talking, Lawrence and his friends were hunting for treasure in the litter under the bleachers, but Da sat erect as a statue, glaring through aviator sunglasses with an intensity that burned a hole in Wil’s ribs. “Wake up and look sharp!”

  Wil waved his glove.

  With a loud, flat crack, the ball rocketed up the first-base line. I can end the game, Wil thought, stepping toward it. The ball smacked the ground and hopped crazily. Wil’s hands tangled, meeting the ball, and two bright yellow bolts of pain shot up his arms. “Aaah!” The ball skittered into the outfield. The base runner brushed past. Wil flipped off his mitt and stared at his hands. Both pinkies jutted at odd, terrifying angles. The pain rolled up his forearms in waves.

  He was instantly surrounded—ump, coaches, teammates—as he sobbed over his searing, broken fingers. Da shouldered through everybody, carrying his drumstick bag and snatching off his shades. He took Wil’s wrists in his enormous hands. “You stop that,” he hissed. He lowered his head to drill his gaze clean through to the back of Wil’s skull. “Don’t be doing this with my name out here.”

  Wil clamped his mouth shut, pinkies bright with pain.

  Da opened his drumstick bag and came up with a roll of white tape. Wil had never seen Da look in that bag without finding the thing he needed. Da turned and trotted over to an old man with a pushcart of ice cream, rooted in the cart—and trotted back. He tore open two Popsicles at once, knocking the ice off the sticks on the side of his shoe. “Give me your hands.” In one motion, he pressed both pinkies straight. Shafts of pain shot up Wil’s arms and it felt like his eyeballs would blow out the front of his head, but he bottled it up. Da laid the sticky-cold Popsicle splints against Wil’s pinkies and wrapped them with the tape, reassembling Wil’s hands as competently as he would a toaster.
“You are the only first baseman they’ve got,” he said, through heavy breaths. He wiggled Wil’s mitt back on, tucking the splinted pinkie carefully into place. His eyes drilled into Wil’s. “It’s all about the game,” he said. “You’ve got to suck up the pain.” With a shout to the umpire, he trotted off the field.

  Wil’s pinkies throbbed. He was dizzy from the shock. Next to his foot lay two lumps of sandy, melting ice. The pitcher hurled the ball, and with a dull crack the ball appeared to hang harmlessly in the air above Wil’s head. He reached up, and it thumped into his glove.

  FRANK MINYARD

  KENNER

  1982

  Frank stood beside his car in the fading light looking down a swath of destruction—six houses burst open and smoldering, trees singed, the crumpled wreckage of a big white 727 jet strewn across what had once been a neighborhood. Edgar Smith, the sousaphone-playing former jailbird and now a full-time diener, handed him a handkerchief, and he pressed it to his nose and mouth. He could feel the heat of the fires on his face, and the air was caustic with jet fuel, char, and the sickly sweet odor of burned flesh.

  Pan Am 759 had taken off from New Orleans International a little after 4:00 p.m., risen about a hundred feet, and fallen back to earth. Frank had heard the crash—all of New Orleans had heard it—and almost simultaneously the Jefferson Parish coroner’s office had called, begging for help.

  Young Joe Maumus was heading back into the smoking fuselage for—what?—the fifth time? Joe had been the coroner’s driver when Frank took over the office, a big jolly fellow so loyal to Frank that it was like having a son in the office. Frank had pushed him to become a New Orleans policeman and then arranged to have him returned to the coroner’s office as an investigator. Moving bodies wasn’t really his job, but there was no stopping him. He’d spread a tarp at Frank’s feet, and as Frank watched in wonder and admiration, Joe was retrieving corpses—blackened, twisted, horribly disfigured. His face was blank, his uniform was smeared with gore and carbon, and his shoes were thickly crusted. He laid the bodies on the tarp—some no more than limbs—waved away a drink of water, and went jogging back for more.