by Dan Baum
“Do you know who the president is?” the nurse asked. Oh, Jesus; the whole dreary drill he’d performed with any number of beat-up guys on the street. If they’d take the tube out of his mouth, he could tell them. Man, he was tired. He wrote W on Mom’s palm.
Her eyes filled with tears. She didn’t get it.
He wrote, “George W. Bush,” with the W huge so she’d understand what he’d been trying to say.
“Now,” the nurse said. “What day is it?”
Okay, Tim thought, head growing heavy, hot with pain. On Mom’s palm he wrote, “3 22 02.”
She didn’t get it. Jeez.
Stabbing his finger irritably into her palm, he wrote out, “Friday March 22 2002.”
Gary leaned down and spoke, in the faintly reproachful tone he’d used on Tim as a teenager, sleeping till mid-afternoon. “Son,” he said. “It’s Saturday, May the fourth. You’re in San Antonio.”
BELINDA RAWLINS
10810 ROGER DRIVE
2002
Belinda had gotten her hair done fancy, a complicated lacquer job that wove around her head in pretty braided loops. She opened her closet, momentarily dazzled by the clothes Wil had either bought her or insisted she buy. Years of deprivation before she’d married Wil—as a child, the wife of a no-count, and a single mother—had whittled her wardrobe down to about three drab outfits. “You are my wife,” he’d said. “You’re Mrs. Wilbert Rawlins Jr. You got to dress the part. You got to dress fine.”
She no longer lay awake worrying about the light bill. On a night when she didn’t feel like cooking, Wil took her out to eat—wherever she liked: Bennigan’s. Chili’s. Outback. Sizzler. All she had to do was name the place. They’d sit and talk like educated people. It was a little hard to get used to. She couldn’t quite let down her guard.
Six o’clock. Belinda reached for her cell phone, opened it, and called the band room. Wil answered on about the tenth ring, and she could hear the chaos of the band tuning up. “You haven’t left yet?”
“Huh?”
“We have a reservation for six thirty.”
“Tonight?”
“Wilbert.”
“Belinda, I thought I told you I got to play a convention.”
Belinda’s neck went cold. She closed her eyes. The white picket fence was so close, yet she couldn’t quite get her hand on it. Wil was such a good husband in so many ways, yet she couldn’t get his full attention, couldn’t get him to stop and look at her, the way men in Harlequin romances looked at their women. She actually saw more of Da than she did of Wil. A couple of times a week, she took Da to his chemotherapy at the VA hospital and then out to eat baked ham at Mother’s Restaurant on Poydras Street. He was all shrunk down now, but loved his food. And he knew how hard it could be to be married to his son. “You know how if you don’t dust your furniture the dust piles up?” Da had asked her. “Before you know it, you got a whole molehill. Being married’s the same way. When things go wrong, you better talk about them before they pile up too big.”
Wil muffled his phone a second to talk to a band kid, then came back on the line. “You know how much we earn for the band doing this?” he said. Conventioneers holding parties at Mardi Gras World, the big hangar where most Mardi Gras floats were built, often hired Wil’s band to play in a miniature Mardi Gras parade. “Band gets a thousand dollars,” Wil said. “I get three hundred. This is good.”
“Wilbert.”
“What?”
“What’s today’s date?”
“I don’t know. It’s Friday, right?”
“Wilbert.”
“What?”
“It’s our anniversary.”
Wil fell silent.
She slapped her phone shut.
TIM BRUNEAU
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, SAN ANTONIO
2002
Tim Bruneau sat by the window in his wheelchair, wearing a gray bathrobe and badly needing a shave. His left leg jutted straight ahead on a shelf, festooned with pins and brackets, like an oil derrick. The slightest movement made his pelvis feel like a rotted tree about to crack open. His left arm was cocked straight sideways, locked in the plaster cast encircling his chest. The pinkie finger, hanging out, throbbed like hell. The stapled seam where Charity had put his skull back together itched like a bastard, but if he tried to raise his good hand to rub it, every broken piece of his left side, from shoulder to ankle, lit up in agony. His head was a toxic dump; he couldn’t get a purchase on a thought, but could still see that fast little bastard running down Erato Street and remember the free exhilaration of being whole and running full out. He’d never know that again.
His parents and sister came every day, and so did the guys from the Task Force—they used up precious days off to drive eight hours and stand around him, making phony jokes. Between them and the satanic bastard from physical therapy, Tim hardly got a minute by himself to consider the problem that he seriously needed to solve: how to kill himself.
He gazed through the window at the parking lot. Only six stories. He couldn’t be absolutely sure that would do the job. He might be able to get his hands on something sharp—scissors, say—and do his wrists, but the capillary action of the sheets might take the blood up where a nurse would notice. Pills? He could hoard his pain meds, but he looked forward to them so much, he wasn’t sure he could endure the pain it would take to amass a deadly dose. Some of his friends kept off-duty guns on their hips, but there’d be no way to get one. No, the buffer cord was the thing. It had come to him on his way up from physical therapy, sweaty and trembling from the effort and pain: a stout black man was polishing the hallway floor with a thrumming power buffer, and as the nurse rolled him past, the long cord had gotten him thinking. First he’d have to get his hands on the buffer and hoist it onto the windowsill. He might have to make a ramp, maybe out of the Formica coffee table in the nurses’ lounge. Luckily, there was an air-conditioning unit in the window on which to rest it. He’d have to break the window, to make the opening big enough. The glass was probably pretty thick. On the other hand, the buffer was heavy. If he could get the leverage, he could swing it through the glass. He’d have to tie the power cord around his neck quickly—the noise would bring the nurses—and heave the buffer out the window. It would snap his neck as it yanked him out the window, and if that wasn’t enough, it would pull him toward the ground headfirst, so he’d die fast when he hit.
It would have to wait, of course, until he was out of the cast and had some use of his left leg. But that was okay. He had time. In fact, he had a lifetime. That was the problem.
BILLY GRACE
2525 ST. CHARLES AVENUE
Christmas Day 2002
Billy lay sprawled in his bathrobe in one of the oxblood leather chairs of his second-floor den, his sanctum of kudu, buffalo, and deer. On a tortoiseshell tray next to him lay a green and white pill. A clink of china and silver and an excited murmur of caterers’ voices rose through the floor. He should be down there helping, but he couldn’t raise enough enthusiasm to move. He picked up the Times-Picayune, folded open to the editorial page. “Fishy,” it called his defunct tax-collection contract with the city. A “cluster of New Orleans cronies” in “cahoots” with the mayor: it made Billy look like some cigar-chomping ward heeler. And to rub it in, they never failed to refer to him as “William Grace, 2002’s King of Carnival.” He couldn’t believe that James Gill, the popular columnist, would stoop to such sensationalism or that Ashton Phelps, the publisher and an acquaintance of Billy’s for years, would allow it.
Downstairs, they would be arraying duck sandwiches on silver trays, swirling pale yellow eggnog into silver tureens. Billy looked down at his pajama-clad legs, his feet in their slippers. Time to get up and get moving.
Yet he stayed in the chair. Did anybody, anywhere, understand what a contingency contract was? Was this his fate—to explain endlessly what it meant to win a contract in open bidding and be paid a legal percentage? He forced his eyes to the worst lin
e in the column: “a monument to greed and effrontery.” Greed! If there was a trait uptown reviled above all others, it was greed. Where else but New Orleans would enterprise and ambition be considered shameful?
“All right, Billy, enough,” Anne said behind him. He turned. She looked smashing in a dress of blue silk. She had both hands to an ear, installing a dangling diamond earring. The antique clock on the shelf, beneath his grandmother’s trophy tarpon, said eleven fifteen. In forty-five minutes, all of uptown would flood the house to nibble his duck sandwiches, sip his eggnog, and wish him a Merry Christmas. Among them would be his oldest friends. Among them, too, would be those relishing his comeuppance for getting down in the mud with the Morials. There was no having one without the other. The uptown life could not be ordered à la carte. He put the green and white pill on his tongue and swallowed it dry.
JOANN GUIDOS
ST. CLAUDE AVENUE
2003
JoAnn moved the reciprocating saw from the couch and the air compressor from the easy chair. She cleared a cardboard box full of wall clocks from the coffee table and moved a carton of clothes from the floor. “Sit down, sit down,” she said. “Want a beer?”
“Don’t you ever throw anything away?” Kathy asked. With those intense blue eyes, she was as beautiful in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt as she’d ever been in the Armani and Versace she’d worn as the high-spending Mrs. John Guidos.
“You don’t get to boss me around anymore,” JoAnn said, and they both laughed. JoAnn was nervous having Kathy and her new husband, Roney, in her apartment above the bar. She got along well enough with both of them to have helped them fix up a leased space in Arabi for a bar they’d wanted to open. Having them drop in, though, was confusing.
JoAnn wondered if she looked good to Kathy. She was wearing blue capris and a plain lavender pullover; her auburn hair was shoulder length, her nails an inch long and blood-red.
“How’s your back?” JoAnn asked Roney. He’d fallen against a crane on the job at Air Products and was applying for disability.
“Hurts,” Roney said, settling into JoAnn’s easy chair. He was a big, swarthy Italian guy from deep in the Plaquemines bayous, volcanic and quick to anger, but he treated Kathy well. He was respectful of JoAnn, too. He never said boo about her dressing as a woman, and the whole time they’d worked together fixing up the bar in Arabi, he’d called her “Chief,” in deference to her superior carpentry skills.
JoAnn had bought two side-by-side buildings on St. Claude Avenue between Elysian Fields and Colton Middle School. Both were total wrecks—listing, peeling, full of former tenants’ junk. One had no utilities at all. But she’d spent her life looking in mirrors at a football player and seeing a woman. She had no trouble envisioning a bar in one building and a restaurant in the other, with apartments above both.
Kathy took a deep breath and told a tale of woe. They’d lost the bar in Arabi and gone to live near Kathy’s mother in a mobile home in Mississippi. But Kathy and her mother had never gotten along, so that didn’t last. Then they’d tried living with Kathy’s brother in Virginia, but that went no better. Finally, they moved to the bayou where Roney had grown up, but living out in the bush, with no washer or dryer and nothing around but alligators and mosquitoes, had driven her crazy.
JoAnn laughed at the thought of Kathy, the princess of Metairie, in a shack on the bayou, washing clothes by hand. Nice little Baptist girl from Mississippi marries a football player, has a girl and a boy and a nice house in the suburbs. Then the man turns into a woman, she loses her house and her cars and all her fancy things, and here she is, close to fifty, still a princess at heart.
“We tried living by Mother’s daddy in Stateline, but that was no good.”
JoAnn saw where this was going. Roney and Kathy were homeless. If Kathy looked pale, it was no wonder, after the year they’d had. Roney couldn’t take a job or he’d lose his shot at disability.
“Hey,” JoAnn said quickly, so they wouldn’t have to ask. “Why don’t you stay here? We can fix this apartment up good enough to stay in.”
Kathy and Roney looked at each other. JoAnn could practically hear the tension hiss out of them like air from a punctured tire. Kathy’s eyes went wet. “Oh, John—JoAnn. Thank you!”
“It’ll be fun. I need help anyway, getting the bar open.”
WILBERT RAWLINS JR.
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER HIGH SCHOOL
2003
Wil ran his eye down the list of kids failing at least one course. Brandon, Jason, Joseph, Juicy, Christopher—almost every member of his second-line band. Since the night he’d run into six of them in the French Quarters, he’d been working with them every day at lunchtime and again after marching-band practice, standing over them as they blew in a circle, beating his hands together, shouting, breaking them off the steady beat of marching band and bringing out the jumping syncopation of the second line. He’d kept Mr. Jackson off their necks, incurred the wrath of Belinda, explained to any mama who’d noticed them missing that he was teaching them a skill they could use to make money. He was molding them into a genuine second-line band that someday could charge a thousand dollars or more to parade. They had it in them. They’d been hearing that unique rhythm since the day they were born, and peeling them back to find it was more fun than he’d had in years. But every day he’d ask, “You got your homework done, right?” and every day it was, “Yes, sir.”
Shit. The one thing he hadn’t done was ask to see it.
The noise from the band room was deafening—tubas and trombones tuning, the rat-a-tat of snare drums, a bass drum booming, chairs scraping, kids yelling, laughter. The usual pregame cacophony as the bandsmen worked themselves up for a basketball game.
“Hey!” he yelled. The room quieted. “Brandon! Jason! Joseph! Juicy! Christopher!” The boys separated themselves from the crowd, and as they approached, Wil could see his problem. Each wore a gleaming new T-shirt, brand-new Dickies, and a pair of hot-looking Nike Air Maxes: red, gold, black, silver.
There were twelve in the band; they’d reeled in a couple of Lawrence’s best bandsmen from Kennedy. Every night, out at the corner of Bourbon and Canal, they blew their hearts out. They played the Fairmont Hotel every Tuesday and Thursday. They’d even played behind Big Al Carson. Carson had named the band, as he waved them good night: “To Be Continued.” They were good. And they weren’t selling marijuana or rolling tourists in the French Quarters.
“What is this?” Wil asked in mock surprise, holding up the list. “Why are you failing classes?”
Silence.
“Didn’t Mr. Jackson tell you he’d shut you down if you didn’t keep your grades up?”
Silence.
“Listen to me,” Wil said. “Band. Does not. Supersede. Your education. If you don’t pass, you don’t graduate. If you don’t graduate, you don’t go to college.”
“Mr. Rawlins.” It was Brandon, holding up a hand and slouching at the same time.
“Without college, you can’t …”
“Mr. Rawlins.”
“What?”
“College?”
“College,” Wil said. “So you can be somebody.”
“Mr. Rawlins, how much you make?”
“I take home about a thousand dollars every two weeks,” Wil said. That would rock them back, he thought.
Brandon snorted. “Shit,” he said. “I made that last weekend.”
TIM BRUNEAU
NEW ORLEANS POLICE DEPARTMENT RECORDS ROOM
2003
Tim hoisted a file box from the steel shelf and, hugging it to his chest, began the long, awkward trip back to his desk, his gait like a marionette’s—bobbing, bouncing, insubstantial. He listed to the left; that leg didn’t straighten completely, and the toe dragged. His rebuilt left arm ached under the weight of the file box, but the pinkie no longer throbbed. After several surgeries to try to fix it, the doctors had finally chopped it off.
The Records room was a windowless cavern
in the basement of police headquarters on Broad Avenue, a dungeon from which no man returned alive. The shrunken gnomes of Records, clutching sheaves of paper, shuffled listlessly from file cabinet to desk and back, like Morlocks. That’s what he’d look like in another few years. He withdrew a handful of buff-colored liquor-license inspection forms from the file box and began cataloging. He was still a policeman, sort of. At least he was still around cops. Two uniformed patrolmen stood at a table across the room, looking through books of mug shots. Their duty belts, hung with guns, ammo clips, nightsticks, and cuffs, even more than their unbroken bodies, filled Tim with envy. He wore a badge, but he was a file clerk. They did police work.
The younger cop, a redhead, drifted down a row of filing cabinets, peering at the alphabetical listings.
“Hey,” the older cop hollered. He stood, holding his radio up. “Shooting on Bernadotte.” They hurried out, leaving the mug-shot books on the table. Tim felt like a kid with polio in one of those black-and-white movies, watching from an iron lung while his friends raced off to play stickball. His skull itched, and he ran his fingers along the curved welt under his hair. The Charity doctors had sawed off a huge piece of skull within minutes of his accident, to let the brain swell. They’d popped it into a freezer and sent it with him, in an Igloo cooler, to San Antonio. Good old Charity. Nobody knew trauma like those guys.
He pawed through the buff-colored liquor-license forms until a shadow fell across his desk: Steve Smiegel, from the Sixth District, broad and fit, wearing new sergeant’s stripes.
“Hey,” Tim said.
“You happy doing this?” Steve stood with his arms folded.