Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  By the time the cart reached Hunter’s Field, a triangle of grass beside the overpass, several hundred people had gathered. “Big Chief Tootie Montana is saying farewell to y’all!” a young man on a raised platform shouted into a microphone. “This is his last.” Tootie climbed down from the cart, mounted the platform, and moved to the mic. “That’s right,” he said. “This here is my last suit. But I’ll be doing this until the day I die. Wherever the Indians are, you’ll see me!”

  One by one, young Indians came forward to praise Tootie and shake his hand. It was a beautiful scene, but something troubled Joyce. His last suit. Yet he’ll be doing this until the day he dies? What does he mean by that?

  “You know what he said?” Darryl loomed up in front of Joyce in an enormous white suit, breaking her reverie. Darryl’s crown was an entirely new design. Instead of radiating out from his head, it flew straight up, like a stovepipe, supporting a hoop of four-foot-long feathers, which hovered above him like a halo. An umbrella crown, he called it, something that Tootie had talked about but never made. Darryl’s face was alight, his eyes wet. “He said, ‘You’re pretty, you’re pretty.’ He couldn’t stop saying it. I told him he done good, too. I been out of hand with him, but I told him, ‘You done good. You’re pretty.’ I told him that.”

  “Good for you!” Joyce beamed.

  “But he couldn’t stop saying it.” Darryl’s eyes shone. “‘You’re pretty,’ he said. ‘You’re pretty.’”

  WILBERT RAWLINS JR.

  5972 DREUX AVENUE

  2004

  The Carver band was soaring. They’d played in Pasadena at the Rose Bowl—the first airplane ride for most of these kids. They’d played in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial and on the White House lawn and then—on a spontaneous invitation—at the Kennedy Center in a concert hall full of people in tuxedos and gowns. They’d filled the Superdome more than once. But to come home at the end of a long day to a house he owned, to make plans for expansions and landscaping without having to worry about a landlord—that was the dream.

  Wil parked his Lexus and took a moment to enjoy the feeling. The car itself meant nothing to him; he kept it to show the band kids that you didn’t have to be a drug dealer to have nice things. The house, though, was the achievement of his dreams. A redbrick ranch on a sweep of lawn, like out of a storybook. No more moving around, Burgundy to St. Roch, to St. Roch again, to Roger. The three months since he and Belinda had moved in to 5972 Dreux had been heaven. He had roots now. He was somebody.

  He walked up the path to the door, where he’d been considering adding flower beds, a project he could take on with his ma. It was good to have her living with them since Da’s death. Wil unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  The door bumped something: suitcases. He looked up. Ma sat in the recliner with her head tipped to one side, leaning on her fist, looking like the day Da died: not surprised, but infinitely sad and disappointed. She brought her eyes up slowly to Wil’s.

  Belinda stepped through the archway into the living room, regal in a suit and high heels, holding Curtis by the hand. His cheeks were wet. Mookey stood behind them, nearly as tall as Belinda, but gazing at the floor, as though trying to shrink.

  “Hey, Mr. Wil,” Curtis squeaked.

  Wil winced. So much for “Dad.”

  Belinda flapped a hand at the suitcases. “Yeah, they’re mine. I’ll be back for the rest.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t compete. You got your band. That’s all you need.”

  “Wait.” Wil grabbed the door handle, propping himself up. “Sit down a minute.”

  Ma hadn’t changed her position in the recliner.

  “Please,” Wil said.

  Belinda marched to the sofa, sat heavily, and pulled Curtis onto her lap. Mookey went and stood behind her, an ungainly changeling looking for a private place to rest her eyes.

  “Maybe my ma is right,” Belinda said, choking up. “Maybe what I need is a hobby. But what am I going to do, go bowling? Oprah says do a book group. I can’t do a book group, because nobody else I know wants to read.”

  “Belinda …”

  “After parade season comes concert band. Then comes summer band camp, then football, and then it’s Mardi Gras all over again. Homecoming’s on my birthday. A convention’s on our anniversary. I never see you.”

  “I got a responsibility …,”Wil began.

  “What about to me?” Belinda splayed her long fingers on her chest. “What about your kids right here—Mookey and Curtis? What about making sure Niecy gets through college?”

  “I love Niecy and Mookey and Curtis. But they have you. The kids in band—they don’t have nobody. You got to get to know them, Belinda.”

  “I don’t want to know them!”

  Wil slumped against the door. “How could you not want to know them?”

  “What was last night?” Belinda sat up, and Curtis tumbled off to the side. “You get a call for ten o’clock and you’re up and out the door.”

  Wil threw his big arms wide. “That was Ramón’s mom, in tears. You know Ramón: plays mellophone, has an ear, has rhythm, all the makings of a musician. But he’s not in control. Last night he said—excuse me, Ma—he said, ‘Fuck you,’ to his grandmother.”

  “So?”

  “So? So? Boy says that to his grandmother?”

  “You the band teacher, Wilbert. You’re not the father.”

  “I’m all the father he’s ever going to have! I drove over to the Desire to bust his ass for him. I put the wood on him till he apologized, and today in school Ramón had focus.” Wil’s voice dropped to a whiny whisper. “That’s what it means to be a bandleader. You take care of your band, Belinda. Not just the part that blows the horn, the whole child.”

  “Robin’s got me half convinced it isn’t band at all,” Belinda said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Belinda …”

  “All I’m saying is, I don’t know, maybe band’s enough for you, but I don’t care about band, Wil! I don’t care!” She stood up.

  “Don’t I take care of you?” Wil threw his arms wide. “I put you through school! I gave you a hundred dollars for a ‘me’ day, and you gave it away to some friend and had lunch at McDonald’s!”

  “Maybe that’s it!” Belinda’s voice shook. “Maybe I’m not used to being taken care of! I can’t get used to it. I came up hungry.”

  “So you’re leaving because you’ve got it too good?”

  “No.” Belinda stepped in close, firing a sharp, painted nail at his chin. “I’m leaving because I can’t compete with band. That’s all you want in the world. It’s all you’ve got time for. It’s all you think about. I’m not going to try to compete. I’m not going to put Curtis through it. He looks up to you, and you don’t see him. All you see is your band.”

  Belinda marched over to Ma, leaned down, and kissed her. Ma hugged Curtis, then Mookey. Belinda led them across the living room, gathered up the bags, handed two to Mookey, and walked out. The door closed behind them with a loud click.

  JOYCE MONTANA

  VILLERE STREET

  March 19, 2005

  “What’s that?” Tootie whispered. Joyce’s eyes popped open. Someone was banging on the glass storm door. She looked at the clock; it was after midnight. Someone must be dead.

  The doorbell rang. Tootie got out of bed and padded to the door. Joyce stood in the bedroom, wide-eyed.

  “Who is it?” Tootie yelled.

  “It’s Darryl.” Tootie opened up. Darryl was out of breath, his eyes wild. Joyce’s heart skipped. One of the girls—Gwendolyn or Phyllis or Denise. One of them must be dead. “I’m sorry to come so late,” he said.

  “What is it?” Tootie stood with his chest out, belligerent.

  “I know you and I have had our differences,” Darryl said. “I know you think we’re in some kind of competition.”

  “I’m just saying that
umbrella crown was trying to make me look bad,” Tootie grunted. “The concept was out of my head, not yours.”

  Joyce was filled with a mixture of relief and disappointment. If they were bickering about the suit, everybody must be alive.

  “You think I let you down when you went to jail.”

  “That’s not why I’m here!” Darryl said.

  “Tootie!” Joyce came up behind him. “Let him talk!”

  Tootie looked Darryl up and down, as though only now realizing that something extraordinary must have brought Darryl here in the middle of the night. “What is it?”

  “I wanted you to hear from me what just happened at St. Joseph’s Night.”

  Tootie’s eyebrows went up. “Sit down.” He had skipped St. Joseph’s Night; he wasn’t masking, so he didn’t have any business there.

  Darryl sat on the yellow sofa, and Joyce brought him a glass of cold drink from the kitchen. “We was up at Washington and La Salle like always and it was good. Man, you should have seen them suits.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was cool. Everybody was having a good time. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, come half the police force, driving in from all directions, their sirens going, like whoop whoop whoop. And they’re making everybody get out the street. Like, ‘Shut this down!’ and ‘Get your ass out the street.’ They was talking rough, I’m telling you. Pushing children out the street, putting their hands on old ladies, like we was criminals or something. Like we was rioting.

  “I had Bertrand Butler in my car. He got out to try to talk and they right away threw him on the ground.” Joyce gasped. Delicate little white-haired Bertrand! “Someone yelled, ‘Shoot! Shoot!’ and I turned my car around, keeping my head behind the metal post so that if they started shooting, I wouldn’t get a bullet in my head. They held Bertrand awhile, but I think they let him go. Arrested his daughter, though, and I heard one guy got his arm broke.”

  Tootie frowned at the carpet, massaging his shoulder where it burned inside. His whole life, he’d worked to get the humbug out of the Indians; they never cut or shot each other anymore. The police, though, were still beating on them. He looked up at Darryl. “Thank you for coming over. You’re a good boy.”

  TIM BRUNEAU

  ST. ANDREW STREET

  2005

  The boy lay upside down on his back, feet and lower legs on the cement porch, body draped head down on the peeling stairs. He’d come out of his outsized shoes when he fell; they sat neatly, side by side, on the front-door lintel. He was wearing a white T-shirt silk-screened with a smiling face. Under the picture: “James Tapp, Third Ward Magnolia Gone Home. Thugged in 09.09.77, Thugged out 11.26.03.” By tomorrow, someone would be wearing a T-shirt with this kid’s picture on it. Thugged out.

  Tim sat on the stoop beside the body, bending his left leg painfully. The kid had a small burn on his upper lip from holding a lighter too close when firing up crack. Tim bent to look at the hole in the forehead and with a gloved hand turned the kid’s head to see the exit wound. The head resisted; the kid was stiffening up.

  “I’ll get that shirt off him.” James Brown, the morgue tech from the coroner’s office, stood at the bottom of the stairs in a Rasta skullcap and sunglasses, his gray beard twisted into a fashionable tail like an aging reggae star.

  “Yeah?”

  “Chance of powder residue, if the gun was close enough. That might tell you something.”

  Tim pulled himself to his feet and hobbled up the stoop. Homicide was better than fact-checking other cops’ reports as an A-case detective, but it wasn’t the boot-in-the-ass kind of work he loved. Police, in Tim’s mind, were supposed to stop crime. Investigating a murder after it happened was clerical work. It didn’t do a thing for the victim.

  He stepped inside the house, blinded momentarily by the contrast between harsh sunlight and shade-drawn gloom. The stink—an oleaginous miasma of sweat, dirty laundry, cigarettes, and bacon—made him want to retch.

  The front room was tiny, with walls of cheap brown paneling. A bare single mattress, copiously stained, lay atop four milk cartons. Paper grocery bags on the floor overflowed with old clothing. A bottle of berry-flavored Cisco wine lay overturned on the grimy carpet. A plastic bookshelf displayed a china angel with big eyes, a purple jar of hair pomade, a gold plastic crucifix rising from a disk of marble, and a plastic cup in the shape of a hand grenade, encircled with Mardi Gras beads. An aluminum fry pan half full of old dried food balanced precariously atop a television set with a vise grip for a channel selector and a bent-wire hanger for an aerial. Three more television sets made a little tower in the corner.

  Tim rotated, scanning for clues. The front wall had nine bullet holes—beside the door, above the door, in the door frame.

  Armando, Tim’s stocky, light-skinned partner, emerged from the back of the house with a befuddled-looking, emaciated old man who was holding up filthy jockey shorts with one hand and scratching his bushy gray beard with the other. “He says he was sleeping in back and didn’t see a thing.”

  “Does he know the kid?”

  “No sir, Mr. Officer. I never seen him,” the old man said, glassy-eyed. “Leastways I don’t think.”

  “Anything on the kid?” Armando asked.

  “Crackhead,” Tim said. How many millions of dollars had gone to bringing these people out of poverty? Job Corps, United Negro College Fund, welfare …

  The old man banged around in a box and brought out a miniature Crock-Pot. He took it to the sink and ran water into it. He plugged it in and from a plastic bag shook in what looked like pink and red dried flowers. A sickly sweet aroma mingled with the stink.

  “Potpourri,” the man said proudly.

  “Shell casings,” Tim said to Armando. They looked balefully at the floor. Between the grimy clothes, old shoes, and wine bottles rooting for spent brass was going to be disgusting work.

  “How many we looking for?” Armando asked. He turned to the old man. “How many shots did you hear?”

  “Just a couple. Maybe three.”

  “There’s more holes than that.” Tim pointed to the riddled wall.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Officer.” The old man hobbled to the front door and pointed with a long, bony finger to the two holes above it. “That’s from when Felton shot Bonnie in 1992,” he said. He pointed to a hole in the door frame. “Cecilia put that one there, but she didn’t hurt nobody.” He hobbled to the TV. “These two here I did one time by mistake.”

  Tim needed air. He stepped onto the porch.

  Up and down St. Andrew, people were watching from open doors. Since the so-called police riot in Shakespeare Park on St. Joseph’s Night, relations between the NOPD and the people of New Orleans had hit a new low, especially in the Sixth District. It would be a rotten morning, going door-to-door, asking who’d heard what, who’d seen what, who knew what. “I didn’t see nothing, Mr. Officer” was probably all he’d get.

  The old man stepped onto the porch, squinting. He looked down at the kid sprawled on the steps, cocked his head to one side. “Hmf.”

  “Know him?”

  “That could be Marvin’s sister’s cousin’s son.”

  “Got a name?”

  “I know him as Boot.” He cocked his head to the other side. “Him and his daddy used to fish. Brought me a speckled trout big as my arm one time. You know what I found in its belly? An earring. Solid gold. Got it right inside if you want to see it.”

  The sun was hot. The man’s story enveloped Tim like kicked-up dust. Tim sometimes preferred the stony silence.

  New Orleans was like one big misdemeanor lockup—miscreants, fuckups, and screw-offs, even the harmless old men. The rest of the United States—the rest of the world—was out there working its ass off, getting ahead, while New Orleans lazed along, sitting on stoops and drinking beer. Tim’s churchgoing, Republican, Texas upbringing told him that sooner or later, a city this slovenly would have to pay a price. Only the bill never seemed to come due.

  ANTHONY
WELLS

  A po-lice was tricking with some broad; she took his money and gave him no pussy, then she told him we were selling dope or some shit. They come in like storm troopers with masks and helmets and weapons, like in Iraq somewhere. “I don’t have no dope,” I said. “I didn’t get no pussy.” They found some baking soda in the refrigerator, and were all like, “Look what we got.” I was still on parole from Angola, so I couldn’t get no bail. In New Orleans if they don’t file a bill of information in sixty days, they have to let you go. They arraigned us sixty-seven days, but it was Mardi Gras, so the judge let it go. Roger did eleven months; I did sixteen. Fifty-one fucking years old. I worked on the food line, which was all right. You eat certain things and you trade what you don’t want. OPP is in violation all the time; it’s like one of them old French prisons. It’s hooked up to the courthouse. You come right from your cell through these tunnels to the back door to the courtroom you’re assigned to. They still got the electric chair, in the barbershop. They used to execute people there in the ’30s. It’s a real jail. If you’re not a man, you’re not going to last.

  They were arresting more people than they could hold, so they built a tent city in the yard. They had these Army cots and fans and that’s how you lived. It was better in a way, but it was too many people. And then the wind came and the tents fell and hurt people; they got sued and shit.

  Dudes would come by outside the fence; they’d wrap up weed or drugs in a rag with a big rock and throw it over. They would get it in there. Dudes used to come through OPP with crack, money, pipes in their ass and shit. One dude had a fifth of gin.

  Finally the judge got tired of us coming and nothing happening. So he said, “I’m going to give you until tomorrow to have a case, and if you don’t, I’m going to turn them loose.” They brought us to court next day, and the judge said, “These charges are dropped for lack of evidence.” Sixteen motherfucking months, and me fifty-one years old.