Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  Chicken stopped struggling, though whether he was knocked out or faking, Wil didn’t know. Wil’s anger was starting to leave him, and beating up on Chicken was starting to feel like work. Da hadn’t moved. Wil looked up at Da with what he hoped was a visible question: Can I stop now? He’s stopped moving; is this enough? Da, though, seemed to have fallen into a kind of sleepy trance watching his son kick the shit out of a street punk, and he didn’t answer. Wil was feeling a little sorry for Chicken now. He looked up at Da, hoping Da would say, “That’s enough,” and then Ma appeared at the screen door and came flying down the porch yelling, “What you doing! What you doing?” and pulling Wil off Chicken by his ear. Mom reached way up over her head to slap Wil’s dumbfounded face, and Da finally broke his silence, laughing like a man at the circus.

  ANTHONY WELLS

  I finally got to New Orleans in 1982, and it was a breath of fresh air. We didn’t have to deal with the white world at all. My uncles were plasterers. I had people, you feel me? Peanut: he was the Mescals’ grandson. Spoonie and Poochie: them’s my cousin Jerry’s sons. They had my back, you hear what I’m saying? People. Had me a car, too; the bee I called her, on account she was yellow and black. If trouble came, we dealt with it.

  I did maintenance at the Municipal Auditorium, got it ready for their Mardi Gras balls and shit, which was like fucking Gone With the Wind. Then I fell off a scaffold and broke my arm, and the city terminated me. I’d a been all right if I could have gotten the right kind of assistance, but all I got was like two thousand dollars workmen’s comp. Then I was all set up to be a security officer, investigator, some kind of shit. They had this place on Canal Street, the Lawton School, where you learn investigations, latent fingerprints, all that, and they give you a certificate. I thought it would be good; I could work for insurance companies and lawyers. The first day, they helped us fill out the form to get a federal education grant of four thousand dollars. They gave us books—Louisiana law and all that. I went there four weeks. They were about to take us for target practice, give us our little badge and gun, when one day I go down there and all the doors are open and the management people are gone. The computers and everything. They took that federal money and vamoosed.

  After that, I took care of my parents; they died in 1986. I did labor work in construction all over the city; couldn’t go to no Seventh Ward, though. I could work with my uncles a little bit, but what I loved about it, man, was if I said, “Fuck the world,” and got pissy drunk, there would be someone in the Goose to pick me up, give me something to eat.

  WILBERT RAWLINS JR.

  701 ST. ROCH AVENUE

  1986

  Da climbed from the passenger seat of Ma’s car, holding up a hand wrapped in white gauze, like a bowling pin. He looked gray and weak; Wil had never seen him like that. The guys at Schiro’s set down their clarinets and got to their feet; Wilbert Rawlins was hurt.

  “Hush,” Ma told Wil. “Hold the door.” She helped Da up the front steps, into the living room, and settled him in his chair. “All right now,” Da said. “You know that big grinder we got in the middle of the warehouse? I was pouring in beans and the bag got caught. I reached in to pull it out. I got these two fingers caught.” He held up his good left hand, wiggling the middle and ring fingers. “Ground them down to here.” He hooked the tip of his thumb onto the first knuckle of the middle finger.

  “Will they grow back?” Lawrence asked. Wil belted him on the arm with the back of his hand.

  “No, son, they won’t.” Da smiled kindly, propping up the bowling pin with his other hand. “It could have been worse, right? Could have taken my whole arm.”

  During dinner, a smoky spot of red appeared on Da’s gauze bandage. By the time Ma had cleared away the bread pudding, it was big as a rose, blooming over the top. Ma took Da to the bathroom to rewrap the bandage, then to their bedroom. She laid Da’s tuxedo out on the bed.

  “You gonna play?” Wil asked from the doorway. Da pulled off a shoe, one-handed.

  “I am Miss Irma’s drummer,” Da said. “I am it. I don’t show, she can’t go on.”

  Ma’s jaw muscles bunched, the way they did when she wanted to say something but didn’t let herself.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Da said, standing up and shuffling gingerly into his jacket. “You all come tonight. We’re playing a festival on Bayou St. John. You’ll see. I’ll be all right.”

  The night was hot, and the crowd a little drunk. Men with sweaty faces stood in the backs of pickups, moving slabs of pork and split-open sausages around on big iron barbecues, the sweet-smelling smoke drifting over the crowd. Wil looked down at Ma as they made their way toward the bandstand. Her jaw was set. Da’s whole world was his music, but there wasn’t a bit of jazz in Ma. She was all math teacher.

  They settled on the grass beside the low stage, next to Da’s drum set. Miss Irma came over, long fringes swaying on her sparkly silver dress. She gave Wil’s hand a squeeze, stepped up onto the stage, and sashayed over to the microphone. Da counted off, and the band launched into “Suffering with the Blues.” Wil leaned back on his elbows. Da had been playing with Miss Irma for as long as he could remember, and every time it washed over him fresh and mysterious how every member of the band did his own thing but it all clicked together like a puzzle to become one thing. Miss Irma slid up and down to her notes, bending and stretching the words. Da’s white bulb bounced up and down in perfect rhythm; if he was hurting, his face didn’t show it. Miss Irma sang “He’s My Guy,” “Safe with Me,” and “I Haven’t Got Time to Cry.” Lawrence fell asleep with his head on Ma’s outstretched leg and Wil felt his own eyes drifting shut. Miss Irma sang “It’s Starting to Get to Me Now” and “It’s Raining.” Wil lay back on the grass, floating on her voice and Da’s even, muscular drumming.

  When Wil woke up, Miss Irma was drinking a glass of water, the guitar player was lifting his guitar over his head, and Da was turning from the drum set, grimacing up at Ma with a helpless look. The bulb of gauze had gone entirely red. Ma fished in a grocery bag, came up with a fresh roll of gauze, tape, and scissors, and moved in front of Da, blocking Wil’s view.

  Da stood, his right hand in a fresh white bulb, his left hand holding a bottle of beer. He stood laughing and talking with the guitar player until it was time to sit back down and begin the second set. He counted off once again, and the bouncing white bulb went back to work. Wil lay quietly on the grass, throughout the second set, thinking about what he’d seen.

  JOYCE MONTANA

  EMPIRE STATE BUILDING

  1987

  The spires of the monstrous city rose around Joyce like trees in a forest. It was hard enough looking through them, at distant rivers and bridges; a glance straight down, at the cars and buses scurrying around like palmetto bugs, set her stomach to heaving. Joyce’s equilibrium was so sensitive that she could barely ride a New Orleans streetcar. Tootie was just as bad. He got carsick riding in a taxicab. Yet here they were, a thousand feet up in the wind, looking down on New York City. She felt like she’d just taken a slug of liquor.

  Tootie, though, was enchanted. He wouldn’t fly in an airplane—they’d traveled all the way from New Orleans on an overnight train that made both of them motion sick—yet the observation deck of the Empire State Building suited him. “It’s that one I love,” Tootie shouted over the wind, pointing to a silvery building that looked close enough to touch. The top was an echelon of arcs, like an old-fashioned table radio.

  “You have good taste,” shouted Maurice Martinez. “That’s the Chrysler Building, the most beautiful building in New York.”

  After years of pushing a camera into their faces, Maurice had done them a favor; he’d put Tootie up for a Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. It had seemed crazy to Joyce that anybody outside New Orleans would care about the Indians, but Tootie had won. The first thing the lady from the NEA had said was, please don’t take apart any more of your suits. The award came with a big check so they wou
ld be able to buy new feathers and beads every year and not have to spend weeks disassembling old suits.

  But things at home were worrisome. Darryl—sweet little Mutt-Mutt—was coming to no good. He hadn’t masked Indian in years; he was hanging with Tootie’s son from his first marriage, Boobie, who was out of Angola for the first time in years. Next time back, Boobie would probably take Darryl in with him. Darryl had been smoking that marijuana and then, she was sure, selling it. It wasn’t a far piece, in the Seventh Ward, from using and selling marijuana to using and selling cocaine. Darryl was jumpy and irritable lately, his eyes shining in a way she didn’t like. Some new kind of cocaine was showing up, changing hands right there at the corner of Villere and Annette streets. It looked like handfuls of teeth; people smoked it.

  Maurice, Tootie, and Joyce walked out onto Sixth Avenue and into a blur of people. Everyone seemed so rich in New York, dressed in fine jewelry, suits, and ties. Joyce felt like a lost soul from some remote bayou. The past ten years had been hard on New Orleans, seemed it got real poor real fast. Nobody talked about the waterfront anymore, and too many men were spending their days on the street corner. Welfare didn’t do any good; there were too many people having fifteen children just to get the checks, huddling up in them projects in a big pile.

  And, of course, the drugs.

  Maurice, Joyce, and Tootie climbed into a big yellow taxi, and after a very fast ride up a canyon of windows and concrete the taxi stopped in front of a giant building as fancy as Gallier Hall. Joyce was queasy; Tootie, too. “This is the Museum of Natural History,” Maurice said as he paid the cabbie. “There’s something in here I want you to see.”

  Joyce felt like a wide-eyed ten-year-old as Maurice led them through a fantasyland of animals, frozen in natural settings: wolves, lions, buffalo. Tootie was transfixed by the bison’s great, woolly collar; the tiger’s black-slashed orange coat; the spreading ears of an angry elephant. “Come,” Maurice said, urging them down a broad, high-ceilinged hallway. They rounded a corner, and there stood a Mardi Gras Indian made of solid stone, fifteen feet tall.

  Tootie stopped, his mouth open. The statue looked very old, maybe hundreds of years, but it also looked like Tootie on Mardi Gras day—the way the crown spread out from the head, the way the stone feathers stood up from the shoulders.

  “Lord, Tootie,” Joyce heard herself squeak. Her voice echoed off the marble walls. She pointed to the star-shaped pattern on the figure’s breastplate. “Look! You had that, one year!”

  “I’ll be doggone,” Tootie said, walking slowly around the statue. It was uncanny how similar the garb was to Tootie’s suits. There might have been egg cartons under the statue’s suit.

  “It’s Mayan,” Maurice said, “about three thousand years old.”

  “I never been to New York before,” Tootie said, “let alone to this museum. You know that.” He looked bewildered, standing in the vast hallway, a skinny, brown-skinned man whose hair was going white, gaping up at the mighty chief of stone.

  “I know,” Maurice said. “Tootie, I think you are a reincarnation of that man.”

  BILLY GRACE

  ANTOINE’S

  1988

  Billy Grace entered Antoine’s from Rue St. Louis through the Mystery Room and was struck immediately by how empty it was. He recalled from his childhood this red-walled room packed with people, the din of laughter and clinking china racketing between the rust-colored floor tiles and low-slung ceiling so intensely he used to get headaches waiting for the grown-ups to finish. And it seemed like just a couple of months ago every table was full of big loud men in powder blue suits who kept their three-hundred-dollar Stetsons on as they washed down their chateaubriand with Lone Star. None of the Mystery Room’s beautiful round tables was occupied now; fresh bouquets waited patiently in the center of each creamy white tablecloth. The oilmen were gone, and the oil boom with them.

  The waiter led him down a long hallway and opened the door to the Rex Room, and Billy’s momentary gloom vanished. It was like stepping into the private dining room of the Wizard of Oz—the carpet a rich purple, emblazoned with large oval Rex emblems; the walls kelly green, trimmed in gold leaf; the ceiling a riot of golden orb lights, recalling the gaudiness of the floats. Purple, gold, and green had been the colors of Rex, and by extension of Mardi Gras, since 1872.

  As the executive committee of the Rex krewe filtered in, greeted each other, and took cocktails, Billy made his tributary rounds of the walls. Framed black-and-white eight-by-tens of former Rexes hung between display cases, in which mannequins dressed in royal finery presided among scepters, diadems, medallions, Rex-ball invitations from a century back, and elegantly penned greetings from the crowned heads of Europe. It was a museum, a sanctuary, a refuge from the quotidian troubles of crime, corruption, collapse. To step inside was to pass through the looking glass into a bubble where all that mattered was the theme of next year’s floats, whose daughter would be queen, and who might be invited to the ball. In the Rex Room, even strivers like Billy could experience—however briefly—the frivolity of the idle rich. The space itself wasn’t exclusive. Other people could dine in the Rex Room if Rex didn’t need it—“Pro bono publico!”—but on a moment’s notice, Antoine’s would make it available to Rex’s officers, to the point of moving people mid-meal, their napkins dangling from their collars.

  Billy seated himself next to John Charbonnet, the Rex captain. John, owlish in big horn-rimmed glasses, was old uptown, but like Billy he worked for a living—as the owner and manager of a successful construction company. As white-jacketed waiters set platters of oysters Rockefeller along the tables, Billy leaned over and asked John softly if they should discuss “the Giarrusso ordinance.” City councilman Joe Giarrusso, avenging generations of excluded Italians, was circulating an ordinance that might, if read a certain way, forbid any Mardi Gras krewe that discriminated against blacks to parade on city streets. The majority of New Orleans’s publico, after all, was black. Bacchus and Endymion, the new superkrewes made up largely of out-of-towners, had included blacks from the start. None of the old-line krewes had any in their membership, though, and Billy knew that John shared his view that of all the old-line krewes, Rex should have integrated long ago.

  “Perhaps we should,” John said thoughtfully. “I’ll bring it up if we have time.”

  John ran them through a long list of logistics. Floats: Who would liaise with the float builder Blaine Kern in his complex of Quonset huts across the river? Throws: Gold doubloons or purple and green, as well; and how many colors of beads? Flambeau carriers: Continue the tradition of having black men carry oil lanterns to illuminate the floats, even though improved streetlights obviated them? The ball: Which limos, what orchestra, gardenias again? Like Eisenhower assigning beachheads for D-day, John compelled volunteers, elicited agreement, nudged the conversation toward conclusions that boosted morale.

  As Billy pushed through the doors onto Rue St. Louis, blinking in the bright sunshine, John caught up to him.

  “Hey,” he said softly, taking Billy’s elbow as they walked. “I didn’t want to tell you this inside. Amoco’s packing up.”

  Billy stopped abruptly and stared at him. John was chairman of the Chamber of Commerce; he’d know. “Packing up?” Billy asked.

  “Leaving New Orleans.”

  Billy felt the sidewalk heave under his feet. Amoco was a Poydras Street anchor; more than four thousand people worked in the company’s gleaming tower.

  “I just got back from Chicago,” John said. “We took everybody up there: the governor, Bennett Johnston, the mayor. Everybody. We offered the moon. Larry Fuller was polite. But when we were through, he said, ‘I’m not going to mislead you. The decision’s been made.’”

  “They didn’t ask for anything? A tax break? Nothing? Nobody hinted this was coming?”

  “I’m not socially acquainted with oil executives,” John said. “Are you?”

  “I see them at the country club.”

 
; “I know, but they’re not part of the lunch clubs. They’re not part of our krewes. They never were exactly included, if you know what I mean.”

  “You saying we drove Amoco out through snobbery?”

  John rested a hand on Billy’s shoulder. “In other cities, the guys who run a major corporation with thousands of downtown white-collar workers are social leaders, fixtures. Here they had to have their separate Mardi Gras krewes.”

  Billy opened his mouth, but John went on.

  “I’m sure it’s not just that. Mostly, it’s the glut. And computers. But the oil business and New Orleans were never the best fit.”

  Billy nodded. The oil business was all about growth and money, and New Orleans, at heart, was about neither.

  They walked in silence for a minute.

  “Hey,” Billy said, stopping. “We never got around to Giarrusso’s ordinance.”

  “You’re right,” John said. “Maybe next time.”

  FRANK MINYARD

  ORLEANS PARISH CORONER’S OFFICE

  1989

  Frank and Edgar stood a few feet back from the autopsy table, watching the new diener reach his arm up to the shoulder into the bowels of the man on the table.