“It must have been a hurricane if you made eleven dollars in tips.”
“Orly.”
“I know you play better than anyone in this town. But eleven dollars?”
“We raised Cain.”
“You’re bringing some bad business home with you. Home to us.”
“Baby—”
She pointed to the door.
“To go where?”
“To my mother’s house. Or anywhere else you go. I’m tired.”
He wondered what she would do if he just fell onto the ground and started to snore. Probably she would beat on his head until he woke up.
She stuffed the wad back into the pocket and held the jacket out as if it were a garbage bag containing a dead rodent. He slumped toward her but she sidestepped him, dropping the jacket onto his shoulder. He bent for a kiss and she jerked her face away. Her eye was wet.
“I suppose you didn’t go see about the canal,” she said, looking away.
He froze. He didn’t know what she was talking about.
“I’m not just making words over here.”
“You said a canal?”
“The dig, Izzy.”
Right. Several days ago she’d handed him a classified ad, clipped from the Tiltons’ copy of the Times-Picayune. Men were wanted for a major industrial project at the eastern edge of the city. They were digging a river. It would connect the Mississippi to the lake, crossing the city at its narrowest point, in the Ninth Ward. It promised to be filthy, grueling work. He was too defeated to lie anymore.
“I haven’t asked about the dig. I will. I promise.”
Orly walked past him to the door. She placed her hand on the knob—and hesitated. With a surprising nimbleness, a bird hopping from one branch to the next, she pulled back the doily that covered the small blue transom window and just as quickly released it. She covered her mouth to stop herself from screaming.
Isadore approached and slowly lifted the doily. There, on the other side of the door, not four feet away, stood the fat man. One of his eyes was closed and puffed over. He cocked his head, listening.
“I’ll kill him,” said Isadore beneath his breath.
She put her hand over his mouth.
They stood in the dark, staring through the threadbare doily at the silhouette of the man’s derby, a hillock of darkness darker than the night. Had Boyle heard them? Inside Isadore the fear spread like mildew.
“The kids don’t wake until seven at the earliest,” Orly whispered. “The Rizzo’s Grocery truck comes at six. I know the driver, Reginald.”
“How?”
“Shhh.”
“How you know driver Reginald?”
“He delivers the groceries every morning at six o’clock.” She sucked her teeth. “He’ll take you in the back of the truck, hide you under some rice sacks or something. Rizzo’s is at Danneel and Terpsichore. You can walk safely from there.”
She tiptoed away from the window. He heard the springs of the bed creak beneath her weight. He counted to fifteen and looked outside again. Boyle was gone. The Paddy’s derby was bobbing down the alley toward Carondelet Street.
Orly turned to face the wall and Isadore pulled the revolver from his waistband, balling it in his jacket. It wasn’t exactly a goose-down pillow but it would serve and he needed easy access in case Boyle returned. The floor was hard but it beat to hell the crumbling cot in the room he shared with Orly and her mother on Liberty Street.
“Orly,” he said, “I’m going to do it.”
“He didn’t hear us.”
“I’m not talking about the watchman. I’m talking about the Slim Izzy Quartet.”
“I know, honey,” she said, after a pause. “I know you will.”
“We’re just about there. Lot of people come in Savocca’s. Kid Ory last week. George Baquet comes between gigs at the Funky Butt. Then there’s the bookers—from the Country Club, Jackson Hall. Even the advance man from the Butt, looking for new acts. They just have to hear me.” He was surprised at the urgency in his voice. Orly, judging by her silence, was surprised too. But he felt it powerfully, the desire to prove his greatness. He wasn’t convinced, despite Orly’s praise, that he had even proved it to her, not yet. He carried the secret of his genius like a bellyache. He felt relief when he played but it was never enough relief, and too many things kept trying to pull him away from the music: money trouble, the tone of his flesh, the human hostility to original sound.
“Why are you on the ground?” said Orly.
“Figure if I lie across the doorway, Mr. Boyle won’t be able to force it in.”
She sucked her teeth. The bedsprings creaked. Isadore could see, through the darkness, that Orly was rubbing her stomach.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Orly, I’m sorry.” In his mind he heard an echo of Boyle’s eye socket popping.
“Don’t say sorry,” said Orly quietly, “when you know how much I love you.”
“I’m going to work the dig. And I’m going to get some big shows.”
“Hm.”
“I’m lying here on the floor begging you, woman.”
“You’re lying all right.”
“Begging your mercy.”
She gave a low laugh. “All right, rough boy.” Her voice was so quiet he had to strain to hear it. “Come get onto this bed.”
MAY 26, 1918—HEINEMANN PARK
Pels salivaballer Dick Robertson, unbeaten in his first six starts, will put his perfect record to the test against the Little Rock Travelers in today’s tilt between the Southern League’s two top squads. How to win a ball game off the Pelicans with “Robby” on the hill: this is the conundrum that none of the Pels’ rivals have mastered. “A lucky victory,” said the Mobile Bears, on April 21, after being held to five hits and zero runs; “fortune flew with him,” said the Birmingham Barons, whose nine hits came to naught on April 27, and who did no better five days later (“luck was a rueful chippy this afternoon”). From the Memphis Chicks, the Chattanooga Lookouts, and the Nashville Vols, the same response, the sentiment more pathetic with each iteration. Robby is now the leading pitcher in the Southern League and undoubtedly at the top of his form, the slender spitballist flinging better than at any point in his career—and at a discount no less, as Prexy Heinemann purchased him off the Barons for a piddling five hundred dollars in advance of the 1917 season. But today Robby draws his toughest challenge yet in Kid Elberfeld’s Travelers, who will send out Ham Hyatt, Bob Fisher, and Dutch Distel: batters that will not be easily intimidated by the saliva-ball expert.
And what a glorious day for a ball game—pale blue heavens, high sun, a casual breeze off the Mississippi—so glorious that even Detective Bill Bastrop, emerging from beneath the grandstand, was momentarily distracted from his inner seethings. The sight of Heinemann Park’s vast grassy atrium restored in him the old boyish excitement. The Pelicans arrayed across the outfield, lazily warming up in their cream uniforms, their left breasts stamped with a baseball framed by the Star of David. Dick Robertson, cap doffed, flannel jacket loose on his shoulders, chatted to a small crowd of women along the third-base grandstand. The colors were sharp, the air bright, having been scrubbed by the storm. Rising heat, full sky—nowhere to hide.
This was reassuring as Bill had begun to suspect that things were hiding from him. Strange things, hiding in plain sight, glimpsed in his peripheral vision. When he squinted at St. Louis Cathedral, it transfigured itself into the Ypres belfry tower; the ghost of Leonard Perl of the 69th Regiment stared with his one eye from a passing streetcar; a black cur in Lafayette Square, at least until Bill turned to look at it directly, had walked upright on its hind legs like a man, as if only to mock him. He had seen an identical dog, with the same white snub nose, striding briskly through the Forest of Purroy at the end of his tour, but he had assumed then it was a product of his wartime delirium. Now he wasn’t certain.
Surely there could be no tricks of sight in Heinemann Park on such a clear bright day. Bill was reli
eved to spot Maisie immediately, or at least her wide yellow straw hat, a purple iris fastened to the brim. She sat in the box behind the Pelicans’ dugout, alone in the last seat of the row, which had been reserved for the soldiers and their guests. It might have been the fatigue—it was probably the fatigue—but the sight of that great big hat on her small delicate head made him want to weep. An innocent woman, bursting with so many contradictions and obscurities it was a wonder she could get out of bed. When he came up behind her he lifted the hat straight off her head, causing her to whirl around in shock. He laughed and handed it back to her.
“Billy.” She frowned. “You pulled out my hairs.” With a dainty, almost comically refined gesture, she smoothed her thin brown hair over her white ears, gleaming like cockleshells, and rebalanced the hat on her head. “I got enough problems.”
When she’d first showed him, not long after his return, the clumps that collected like miniature hassocks of dead grass on her pillow, he’d tried to reassure her. Hair came out; it was a natural process. But the tangles that appeared on her pillow grew denser. She’d tried every scalp bath ballyhooed in the newspaper columns: Knowlton’s Danderine, Honic’s Baldpate Tonic, Frenchy’s Follicle Cure. Her hats, meanwhile, grew larger and wider, until he couldn’t sit beside her unless he arranged himself at a cockeyed angle. She attributed the hair loss to anxiety—first the anxiety of failing to find a job, later the anxiety of being yelled at, by her boss at the law office of Dufour and Janvier, for misfiling meal receipts. Bill didn’t argue but he didn’t think she had it right, exactly. Anxiety may have plucked out her hairs—and inscribed inky lines beneath her eyes and flattened her belly until the ribs started to show—but it wasn’t her anxiety. It was his.
Bill once read a story about a man whose outward appearance never changed even as he defiled his body with liquor, drugs, and criminal sex. But a painting of the man, hidden in his attic, revealed the toll of his behavior, becoming bloated, liver-spotted, diseased. Bill wondered whether a similar transference was taking place in his marriage. His appearance had barely changed since he’d left for basic training. He returned from Europe the “same old Billy Bastrop”—that’s what everyone said. But Maze had altered significantly and their reunion seemed only to accelerate the transformation. She wasn’t going to pieces or anything, but she had suffered a more gradual, elusive transformation. It was as if she were being poisoned by his nightmares. He hadn’t told her what had happened in the Forest of Purroy in any detail—she couldn’t possibly comprehend—but a wife could intuit evil. Once she learned what had occurred that morning at the Louisiana Demolishing Company, whatever was changing inside her would only change faster.
“It’s glorious,” she said.
“It is a strange green, the field.”
“You can scream as loud as you want and nobody looks at you funny.”
“You can be as silent as you want and nobody looks at you funny.”
“You didn’t sleep,” she said, noting his rumpled uniform, the dried mud on his pant cuffs. His bloodshot eyes. “Again.”
“How can you tell?”
“You’re the same color as the sand.”
He followed her eyes to the manicured diamond, with its smoothly raked base paths. They were also a peculiar hue, a grayish white. It wasn’t sand, exactly, but silt dredged from the Mississippi at Point Manchac, about a hundred miles upriver, by Jahncke Service, Inc., a sponsor of Heinemann Park. JAHNCKE proclaimed a banner on the left-field fence, the letters bright red against a black background. WE GETS OUR HANDS DIRTY, SO YOU DON’T GOTS TO.
“I intended to come home before the game. But it didn’t fall out that way.”
“I guess I’ll never understand why you have to work nights.”
“Have you seen the papers?”
“I saw the States. ‘U-boat Sunk by the British.’ ‘Wilson Marches for Red Cross.’ ‘Digging of the Industrial Canal, Triumph of the South, Set to Commence.’”
A young girl squealed as a ball bounced into the stands several rows ahead. Two boys raced down the aisle, competing with the girl’s father for the ball.
“A navy got killed,” said Bill.
“What?” Maze’s eyes widened. They were still magnificent: hazel, lucid, shielded by long, fluttering lashes.
“Teddy Obitz.”
One of the boys, having crawled beneath a seat to grab the ball, emerged triumphantly, dancing in the aisle.
“The man who trained you? The handsome blond man?”
“They called him Big Blond.”
Maze visibly shuddered.
“He has a wife and two daughters,” Bill heard himself say. The boy threw the ball on a line to the Pelican fielder and whooped with joy. “It was the Negro highwayman who did it.”
Maze had stopped listening. The shudder had intensified into a convulsion of rage. “Just quit, won’t you?”
“You’re right. We don’t need to talk about it.”
“No—quit the Department.”
“Maze.”
“It’s too horrible. I never thought I’d survive the war, but this—it’s an endless war, war forever.”
“I guess I won the war.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I killed the highwayman.” Bill chuckled in a way that he hoped she might interpret as blithely heroic.
He looked out over the field, surveying the players. They tossed baseballs, they joked, they lay on the grass, stretching hamstrings. Yes, thanks to him—and the other navies—these men could play a child’s game under the sun and thousands of complacent citizens could assemble in peace on a Sunday afternoon, worrying about nothing more than the viscosity of Dick Robertson’s saliva. Bill glanced at Maze to gauge the effect of his bravura. Her mouth was twisted all the way to one side.
“What?”
“You killed a man?”
“Not a man. A murderer.”
“Murderers are men too.” She shook her head. “My God. You must be upset.”
“Can’t say I am.”
She paused, studying him. “Why not?”
Someone leaned over and tapped the rim of Bill’s cap. He turned and stared into the damp, grinning face of Captain Thomas Capo.
“Billy Bastrop.” Capo was cleanly shaven and when he removed his cap his black hair was bright with brilliantine. Apparently he had found time to go home this morning, likely while Bill was still in the interrogation room. After an excruciating visit to Obitz’s widow, Eloise, Bill had helped to interview nearly two dozen potential witnesses—anyone they could find outdoors in the Irish Channel between 3:00 and 6:00 a.m. Only two were willing to identify the corpse as the man who had shot Obitz and fled to the Louisiana Demolishing Company. The first was a petty foon with several outstanding warrants. The other was a Spaniard without papers. Bill cleared the warrants and sent a note to a friend in Immigration. But the witnesses’ statements were merely corroborative and would have had no value were it not for the testimony of Obitz’s partner.
A navy of fourteen years experience, Harry Dodson understood that he needed to give a clean account, and quickly. Not only for Bill—he didn’t owe Bill a thing—but for the Department, for the easily panicked public, for Captain Capo and Superintendent Mooney, and, most of all, for Obitz’s widow and little girls. At the Obitzes’, after Dodson and Bill had delivered the news, Teddy’s eight-year-old, Carrie, insisted on giving them a tour of her father’s war garden, proudly listing the names of the exotic vegetables they were cultivating for Uncle Sam: chard, salsify, kohlrabi. The whole business was unsettling, frightening. After a painful half hour in which Carrie explained fertilization strategies and canning processes, Dodson mentioned delicately that he had to return to the station. Carrie burst into tears. It was a grim tableau: Dodson standing in the doorway of his fallen partner’s house; Carrie, sobbing, tugging on his legs; Mrs. Obitz, sobbing, tugging on Carrie’s legs.
If Dodson said that the man Bill had shot was the highwayman, a
nd Captain Capo was satisfied, then Bill figured he ought to be satisfied too. He rose to greet his boss.
“Captain Cap.” Bill smiled tightly. “Have you met my wife, Maisie Bastrop?”
Bill was relieved to see that Maze had recomposed her face into a pantomime of polite expectation.
“You war heroes.” Capo shook his head. “You always attract the most fetching female company.”
Bastrop noted that he hadn’t used the word beautiful. It was a precipitous fall from beautiful to fetching and Maze had tumbled the full distance in less than seven months. Not that fetching was unlovable, or undesirable. Fetching was wonderful. But there was a distinction.
Capo—stout, firm, with professional creases around his mouth and a purple liver spot beneath his left eye, the same size as the eye—touched Bastrop’s shoulder.
“Give us a sec, would you?” said Bill.
Maze seemed relieved to turn back to the field. She appeared to give her attention to it fully, as if instead of pepper and lazy games of catch it were the ninth inning of a tie game, runner in scoring position, two outs, full count.
“The teenagers,” Capo was saying, as he steered Bastrop up the aisle, “they were giddy. Never been inside a morgue before.”
“You’re saying that they took suggestions well.”
“Didn’t have to suggest anything. Not in words, that is. The Hun—Bodemuller? He said he was ‘almost positive’ that the Negro on the table was the same who held him up on Friday. And little Richard Bray says, ‘Yah, he looks like the same Negro, but they all look the same if you want my professional opinion.’”
Capo gave a vacant laugh. The stress of the last days showed on the captain’s face—his jowls, already pendulous, had begun to melt.
“How long is this going to go?” said Bill. “Not to be ungrateful.”
“You trot out to the mound, throw the pitch, shake some hands. Then you can go home.” Capo again touched Bill’s shoulder. “Superintendent Mooney wanted me to thank you. These are on the house.”
Capo waved two nickels in the air, rubbing them between thumb and forefinger. A Dixie boy promptly appeared by his side and traded him two mugs for the coins.
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