by Dan Baum
“Ooh, you have a farm?” she said, sniffling and blowing her nose. “Do you have horses? I love to ride. It’s my salvation. If I could spend all my time with animals, that’s where I’d be.”
“Listen,” he said. “Leave the soup. Let me take you out for a steak.”
BILLY GRACE
2525 ST. CHARLES AVENUE
Mardi Gras 2002
Rex, king of carnival, was the highest honor New Orleans society could bestow upon a man. Billy’s father had never made it. George had never made it. But by the fates, Billy, the son of a bank teller, had become the king of Mardi Gras.
From his throne atop the Rex float, across the throngs of celebrants, Billy could see 2525 St. Charles Avenue looming into view, its broad porch packed with family and friends. In front of him, a high-school band in green and orange uniforms was blaring its heart out. Behind him, the Rex floats spread for half a mile. The day was perfect, not so hot that the long fake beard and gold-upholstered parade outfit chafed, not so cold as to dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd. “Throw me something, mister!” they shouted, jumping up and down to catch strings of cheap plastic beads. Billy’s best friends, in brocaded outfits and masks, leaned over the street from their places on the float, tossing beads and doubloons to the upturned faces. The float bumped over the curve and veered left, leading the parade across the broad grassy neutral ground and the streetcar tracks, toward Billy’s house.
Here came dear George now in morning coat and striped trousers, still graceful, carrying a bottle of champagne. Ivory, who had been working for George and Anne for as long as Billy could remember, carried the beribboned stepladder. Ivory—short and dark—was as much a part of 2525 as the portico or the porch. He set it up next to Billy’s float and stepped back, smiling proudly. George climbed up and upended the champagne into the same silver and deer-antler loving cup that had been used for the Rex toast since 1907. He passed it to Billy with a laugh and a wink. The band members stopped playing, turned sharply on their heels like the king’s own honor guard, and brought their instruments crisply to parade rest.
Billy raised the cup to the crowd and shouted, “I would like to thank the collective group! And that includes all the spectators here in New Orleans! The Mardi Gras lovers! These are the people who make Mardi Gras!” That was the point of Mardi Gras, was it not? To serve and honor all the people, to bring into hard lives a touch of royalty and grandeur.
Billy turned back to 2525, drank from the cup, and handed it back to George, who climbed down with Ivory’s help. It was a hoot, a goof—but it was serious, too, the culmination of years of dreaming and hard work, his own, as captain, but, more important, that of the entire Rex organization. To put on a spectacle such as this, free of charge, was an honor. New Orleans was sick and wounded, but no other city in the world had a celebration quite like this. It was beautiful precisely because it was so frivolous. The float lurched, and Billy rolled on. The band struck up again a martial tune, and the float bumped over the neutral ground to take its place in the river of Mardi Gras floats.
TIM BRUNEAU
ERATO STREET
March 2002
Fast bastard. No matter how Tim poured it on, the kid stayed half a block ahead. He looked small, but there was no way of telling how tough he’d fight, because his body was draped in a bale of oversized cotton clothing. One hand held up ballooning carpenter’s pants while the other went methodically through each pocket, flipping bright little plastic bags into the air like beads off a Mardi Gras float. With any luck, Andrew was huffing along behind, gathering the evidence, before some other kid came along and snapped it up like the blackbirds in “Hansel and Gretel.” Not least of the great things about Tim’s transfer to the Sixth District was Andrew. A real partner.
The kid darted off Erato Street and around an overturned Dumpster, skimming along one of the brick buildings of the B. W. Cooper housing project. His legs looked disconnected from his upper body, snapping along with incredible fluidity, given the outsized shoes; they seemed to spin in circles, like a cartoon character’s, while his upper body floated, as relaxed as could be. He disappeared around the corner of the building, short dreadlocks flying. Tim pivoted, gaining a few yards, zooming along the front of the building, past ground-floor windows grated with steel mesh like the windows on a prison bus. These buildings must once have been nice to live in, Tim often thought, as solid as blocks of stone, with thick walls for cool interiors. This courtyard must once have been a sweet oak-shaded lawn where kids could play safely away from cars. Now it was a no-man’s-land, bleak and barren, the grass worn away like the flank of a mangy dog, the trees reduced to graffiti-carved stumps.
The kid peeled off his sweatshirt as he ran, revealing a gleaming white wife-beater T-shirt bisecting chocolate-colored shoulders and hourglass-shaped biceps. He’d be slippery to fight. Two young men drinking beer on a stoop sat up to watch, like spectators at a NASCAR race, and Tim felt a flash of resentment that they were lounging away their Tuesday morning while he was working his ass off to make their lives a little safer. Living from one crazy check to the next, they were probably grandsons of the project’s original residents, the downstream evidence of generations of uselessness. Sit right there and watch the show, you lazy bastards.
On the other hand, the kid might be from the C. J. Peete or Desire, poaching on the B. W. Cooper, in which case these gold-toothed spectators were watching him with an eye toward cutting his throat. You’re better off in my hands, Tim thought.
The kid shot between two apartment blocks and around a corner into the next courtyard. Tim followed and stopped short, panting. The courtyard was full of wiry young men with short dreadlocks, wearing identical white wife beaters and sagged carpenter’s pants. The fucking uniform of the day: What do they do, call each other every morning? They looked at him with no expression, a field of identical statues. But that one—his chest was heaving. When Tim made eye contact, he took off.
The kid swerved around the building, glancing back like he’d expected Tim to sprint a few blocks and give up. You’re not dealing with a fat-assed patrolman in a baby blue shirt, Tim thought. The Task Force is on you. This kid did not seem to have gotten the memo. All Tim was supposed to do as a member of the new Task Force was cruise around waiting for a scumbag to make a mistake and then rough him up and haul him in with maximum show of force—an extra punch, an extra kick, the cuffs bitten down hard. Not enough to bring a brutality charge, but enough to make him think, to make the word get out that the NOPD was taking back the streets. Grab a purse, deal a bag, wave a gun at a rival, and Task Force will be on your ass. Task Force—the “Jump-Out Boys” in department parlance—was Tim’s dream job: no directing traffic, inspecting liquor licenses, investigating accidents, responding to calls for service, or any other dreary nonsense. Just boot-in-the-ass policing. It was amazing how easy the scumbags made it. Tim would swerve fast around corners, watching for the kid who dropped to tie a shoe that was already tied, the kid who turned his face away, the kid who shoved something into a wastebasket. They practically begged to be arrested.
The kid cut a broad arc across Galvez Street and into the other side of the project. Tim stayed with him like an F-16 on the tail of a MiG. His pistol slapped rhythmically against his thigh. The weight of his duty belt—nightstick, cuffs, radio, and pepper spray—cost him speed, but at least he didn’t have to hold up his pants. The paramilitary fatigues fit him snugly, as skinny as he was. The baseball-style cap stuck fine to his narrow head. The combat boots gave him ankle support, though he’d have preferred the springy Nikes he’d used for cross-country in high school.
A quarter mile now, and Tim was just hitting stride. He could keep this up as long as the kid. The kid would trip on those damned pants, or get hit by a car, crossing Claiborne. Tim would get lucky.
The Seventh District had the Goose, the Fifth District had the Lower Ninth Ward, but none of the eight police districts of New Orleans had as many housing projects as the Sixth.
If you wanted action, the Sixth was the shit.
The kid squirted out of B. W. Cooper onto Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. An old lady in a churchly purple overcoat and hat stepped out of the way without looking up; they might as well have been a couple of squirrels dashing about after acorns. The kid got lucky at Claiborne, parting the traffic like Moses at the Red Sea, and Tim plunged through after him. The kid had speed.
Splintery, tumbledown houses slid by on either side, bare-chested men sitting on stoops. Your great-auntee leaves you a house that’s been paid off since 1940, Tim thought, and you sit on your ass and watch it fall down around you. It’s always, Oh, Mr. Officer, we got it hard. Oh, Mr. Officer, I got the sugar and can’t work. Oh, Mr. Officer, I don’t know where he’s at.
The kid veered left on Magnolia Street, and Tim put a little extra into the curve, narrowing the gap. Nothing like running, especially after sitting in a patrol car. He stretched his long legs into it, and the pavement flew by. The kid darted right onto Clio Street.
Up ahead, at the corner of Freret Street, the blue and white fender of a patrol car peeked out from behind an abandoned Lucky Dogs hot dog cart. Excellent, Tim thought: someone with the brains to figure out where the kid was running and cut him off. The kid bolted so close by the front of the cruiser that he might have grazed the fender. To Tim’s surprise, he kept going, unmolested. Tim looked in the windshield as he passed. A fat patrolwoman was slumped to the side of the wheel, murmuring into her cell phone, oblivious. Fucking NOPD.
They crossed Simon Bolivar, and the kid veered left, toward the freeway overpass at Calliope Street, hoping to lose himself among the cars entering and exiting the freeway. Tim was gaining. The kid executed a balletic evasion of a turning car and kept going, bursting into the treeless sunlight of Calliope, pelting into a fast-moving stream of cars. Then he was through, lost in the deep shadows of the overpass.
Tim glanced left and right, barely slowing, and plunged into the glare of Calliope. Something moved to his right, by the entrance ramp—the kid? He turned toward a sound like a concentrated pocket of wind and glanced over his shoulder. Under his face, in his personal space where nothing should be, was the silver-blue hood of a BMW. Three-Eighteen-I, Tim thought crazily, a beauty. The woman driving had her mouth in a perfect O. The hood scooped his hips sideways, and his pelvis collapsed with a deep crunch. He saw sky behind his feet where the pavement should have been, and the soaring span of the Crescent City Connection bridge. A jolt turned his attention left; his cheek was smacking a folded windshield wiper blade. The world wheeled past—the top of the windshield, the underside of the freeway, the trunk, a squeal of brakes, a smack on the pavement, the smell of hot tires, pain, blackness.
WILBERT RAWLINS JR.
MURIEL’S RESTAURANT
2002
Belinda looked beautiful sitting across the table in the candlelight. Her hair was wrapped around her head like a turban. Her rectangular glasses made her look severe and hip at the same time. Luscious had been sexy, but common. Belinda was elegant. Refined. Serious.
Wil loved bringing Belinda to the French Quarters to eat, with a sport coat on and plenty money in his pocket. But Belinda looked tired. “You okay?” he asked.
“Just a little overwhelmed, with classes and studying and the job.” She pushed slices of buttery mirliton around on her plate.
“Belinda.” Wilbert put down his glass of tea and looked at her, until she looked up at him.
“Hmm?”
“Quit your job.”
“Quit my job?”
“Quit your job. Let me carry it awhile, while you finish college.” Belinda narrowed her eyes. She’d had it rough, he knew; suspicion was a residue of hard times. “Look,” he said, putting his hand on hers. “I can handle it. It won’t be forever. And once you get your degree, you’ll earn that much more.” Belinda smiled. “So you see, it’s selfish,” he said. “It will all come back to me.”
“We’ll see,” she said, looking at her plate and tamping down the smile.
Wil’s heart flushed. “This is what it means to look after your family,” he said softly. “This is how we get ahead, as a team.”
Belinda shrugged and forked a piece of catfish. “Wil,” she said, “I got another house to look at. You want to see it?”
She’d taken on the job of finding them a house to buy, and Wil had to admit he hadn’t made it easy. Much as he wanted to have a house of his own before Da died, he’d stopped shopping for one. After the first dozen or so, all of them tiny and ugly, Wil had gotten hot, started grumbling that no white real estate agent could believe a black man could afford a proper house. Just how hard is it in this world, he’d wondered aloud, for a black man to be respected? He’d stopped going to look at houses until Belinda went first.
And then there was the time he spent with the band. He’d explained it to her over and over, but she never got it. He was the only thing some of those kids had to hang on to. Even wild Nyja Sanders. She was the first one to show up at practice, ready to go. She called Wil Daddy. But as far as Belinda was concerned, staying late with the band was the same as leaving her home to drink and play dominoes with Squaly and the brothers. She didn’t see the difference.
They finished dinner and walked out onto Jackson Square. The evening air was soft, warm, and damp, smelling of tourist-buggy horses. They turned up Chartres and right on Dumaine, passing under the colonnade in front of Harry’s Corner bar, toward Wil’s car.
A couple of tough-looking teenage boys loomed up as though summoned from the memory of the night Wil and Chicken had botched a robbery. Wil put his hand over the pocket that held his wallet. But slowly recognition dawned: the one with the ringlets and the heart-shaped face, that was Brandon Franklin. The light-skinned one: Jason Slack. Both from the Carver band. They were fixing to sell me some dope, Wil thought, or roll me.
“Hey, Mr. Rawlins,” Jason said morosely. Four more boys from the band emerged from the shadows. They looked terrible—dirty, ragged, and neglected.
“What you doing down here in the Quarters for ten o’clock at night?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
Brandon, the clown, gave an exaggerated Stepin Fetchit shrug, with a broad grin. The others looked at their feet.
“Belinda,” Wil said. “These are my bandsmen. Gentlemen, this is Mrs. Rawlins.”
“Hey,” they mumbled.
“Not ‘hey,’” Wil said. “It’s ‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Rawlins.’”
“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Rawlins.”
“Where are your parents?”
“My mama don’t care I’m here.”
Wil put his hand on a column and leaned for a long moment, looking them over. “You boys want to make some money?”
“That’s what we’re doing,” Jason said, shrugging.
“I’m thinking of another way,” Wil said. “You boys are a band. Come see me tomorrow.”
TIM BRUNEAU
INTENSIVE CARE
2002
Tim’s mouth was dry, and when he tried to lick his upper lip, he couldn’t move his tongue. Something big was stuck in his mouth. Far away, a woman’s voice burbled on a loudspeaker, followed by a soothing electronic tone. Up close, it smelled of steam-table food, laced with iodine and alcohol. A hospital. Something had happened. Was he shot?
Tim lifted an eyelid. Sunlight streamed in a huge window. The walls were clean and smooth, hung with futuristic medical equipment like sick bay aboard the Starship Enterprise. His heart sank; he must be in some suburban hospital. Everybody knew that if you had to get shot, the place to go was Charity. Why had they taken him here?
He let the eye drift closed, feeling achy, tired, feverish. His body felt far from his head, but there was no pain. He tried to remember what had happened, but the effort exhausted him, and he sank back into blackness.
The next time his eyelid opened, the light filling the window was dimmer. Mom and his stepfather, Gary,
were talking about a tuna fish sandwich. Damn, they made it fast: seven or eight hours from Boerne. “I’ll be fine here,” said a voice from the foot of the bed, and he flicked his eye to see his big sister, Lisa, rooting in her purse. She looked up and caught his eye, then down into her bag, and up again. She leaned toward him.
“Mom,” she whispered.
Tim’s mother and stepfather murmured to each other.
“Mom!”
They stepped closer.
“I think Timmy’s awake!” Lisa’s fingers rose to her cheeks. She hopped up and down. “Call somebody! Call somebody! He’s awake!”
“Oh, my God.” Mom fumbled in the sheets for the nurse-call button. “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.”
Tim’s head throbbed. Eight hours driving from Boerne—he’d been out cold for a whole day.
“Don’t try to talk, son.” Gary leaned over him, whispering. “You got a tube in your throat to help you breathe.”
Damn.
“Timmy!” a woman’s voice shouted, and his eyes sprang open. A nurse’s face hovered over him. “Timmy!” she barked. “If you can hear me, blink twice.”
Christ almighty, Tim thought. Couldn’t they let him sleep a little longer? He blinked twice and gazed at the nurse with a look that meant to say, “I’m hurt; I’m not stupid.”
“Do you know your name? Spell it out on your mother’s palm.” He felt his mom’s warm hand on his. With his index finger, he spelled out “Timothy B. Bruneau,” adding the B to make sure they understood that his mind was fully aware.