New Orleans Noir

by Julie Smith

  He took a seat across the table from Mr. Roy, who gasped lightly though his mouth as he regarded his visitor. The mulatto came creeping from behind the bar with a bottle and a clean glass, then made a quick retreat—making Valentin wonder if his reputation had arrived there ahead of him.

  There was no point in exchanging niceties, so Mr. Roy got right to the point.

  “The fellow’s name is Eddie McTier,” he said, heaving like a tugboat. “He’s a guitar player and a gambler out of Georgia. He been in near every night. He busts in on every game, then cheats and takes all the money. Then he lies to cover it. When that don’t work, he starts talking that he’s fixing to pull his pistol. He must have took fifty dollars off my customers over here. Now no one wants to come around no more.”

  Valentin was noncommittal. He recognized the type, one of an army of tramps who preyed in places like Algiers, within spitting distance of New Orleans, where he wouldn’t last a minute. That he was a guitar player signified nothing.

  “Why don’t you just put him out?” he inquired.

  “I tried that,” Mr. Roy huffed. “He just laughed in my face and spit on the floor, and then come right back in the next night. He says he ain’t broke no law, and so he has a right. He also say he be carryin’ some voodoo, ’count of playin’ the blues and all, and so nobody want to cross him. Anyway, the gentleman owns the property wants him out for good. He’s ruining business.”

  For a moment, Valentin thought Mr. Roy was making a joke. What business would that be? But the fat man’s face was grave.

  Valentin had seen this gambit before. If a fellow talked tough or bragged on his voodoo enough, people who should know better fall for the act. This McTier had everyone in the place believing he was a bad actor who wasn’t going anywhere until he was good and ready.

  Valentin poured an inch of whiskey in his glass and drank it down. “What time does he come around?”

  “Soon as the sun goes down. So any time now.”

  Valentin picked up the bottle and the glass and nodded in the direction of the table in the other corner. “I’ll sit over there. He and I’ll play some cards. See if he tries to cheat on me.”

  “Oh, he will,” Mr. Roy said.

  “Then I’ll have reason to put him out.”

  The fat man pursed his heavy lips. “Don’t go gettin’ yourself kilt over here.”

  “Don’t plan to,” Valentin said. “But if anything starts, you make sure everybody stays the hell out of the way.”

  He got up and moved to the table, so that he was for the moment hidden in shadow to everyone except the bartender and Mr. Roy, and only because they knew he was there. He drank one more short glass of whiskey. It was hot, and he wanted his wits about him.

  Some minutes passed as the sun went all the way down over the river. Valentin let his thoughts wander until the boy who was standing guard stepped inside, rolled his eyes a certain way, then faded into the woodwork. Valentin smiled; the kid would himself make a decent rounder one day.

  He heard Eddie McTier before he saw him. The windows were open all along the street side of the saloon and a raucous voice echoed from the next corner: jagged laughter, a blunt shout, and a couple raw curses. Valentin heard the thump of boots on the banquette and finished the liquor in his glass in one quick swallow. Then he leaned back a few inches from the table. The front door flapped rudely open and a short barrel of a black man pushed inside, dressed in brown trousers, a soiled white shirt, and a vest that had seen some dusty miles. A misshapen gray Stetson was cocked sideways on his head.

  Eddie McTier stopped to glance around with a cunning sort of smile, almost a childish thing, as if pleased with himself and all he surveyed. He took the Kalamazoo guitar that was strapped on his back and set it in the corner next to the door. Then he let his oily eyes roam past Valentin, circle the saloon, and come back.

  He stared into the corner, looking unsure. “Who the hell’s that?” he asked the bartender.

  The bartender swallowed.

  McTier smacked a palm on the bar and said, “Twine! You hear me?”

  “Fellow come over from New Orleans,” Twine stuttered quickly. “He’s lookin’ for a game.”

  McTier peered at the man at the back table. “That right, friend?” he called.

  Valentin didn’t move or speak.

  “You looking for a game or not?” McTier demanded.

  Valentin leaned forward so that his face came out of the darkness and into the light. Without a word, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a new deck of cards, which he tossed to the center of the table.

  McTier peered at the faces as if looking for someone to let him in on the joke. All he got were averted eyes, so he started a slow stroll along the bar.

  From the table in the opposite corner, Mr. Roy cleared his throat. “You ort to leave your pistol with Twine there.”

  McTier cocked his head toward Mr. Roy and then swiveled it to look at the bartender. Twine didn’t make the slightest move.

  “Let him hold onto it.”

  All three men turned to toward Valentin. McTier was the only one who spoke. “And what are you carryin’ this evening, mister?” he asked.

  “That ain’t none of your business,” Valentin said in an off-hand way.

  There was another pause while Eddie McTier decided whether or not to take offense. It was as if an invisible artist had drawn invisible lines in the air, defining the two men and the cold drama that was being staged within those four clapboard walls. Twine stared between them, feeling sweat run from beneath his hair and down his forehead.

  It took another few seconds for it to dawn on Eddie McTier that if he did anything except stand there, he’d be finished in Algiers and in New Orleans, for that matter. Meanwhile, Mr. Roy was idly imagining that he could have sold tickets to this event.

  Valentin broke the silence. “Did you come to play cards or talk about firearms?”

  McTier grinned with his gray, uneven teeth. He turned and called over his shoulder for Twine to bring him a pint and a glass. With a hitch of his shoulders, he pulled out the chair opposite the Creole and sat down.

  “I come to play,” he said.

  Valentin nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “But, so you understand, you cheat and you’re out.”

  McTier had been reaching for the deck. Now his lazy hand stopped in midair. He cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “What’d you say?”

  “I said if you cheat, you’re out. And you don’t come around here anymore.”

  McTier let out a disbelieving little snicker. “Is that so? And who says if I cheat?”

  “We’ll let God be the witness,” Valentin said, his mouth curving into a smile that his eyes didn’t share.

  McTier hiked his eyebrows and snatched up the deck with a brusque motion. “God, huh? You gonna need God if you play cards with me. ’Cause I got the devil on my side. I brought some voodoo from Georgia y’all ain’t even heard of.”

  Valentin gave him a dubious look, as if suffering some boastful child. “Put your money on the table,” he said. He reached into his own pocket, took out an envelope, opened it, and dumped out twenty gold dollars. He raised his eyes to meet McTier’s. “And I mean all of it,” he said.

  McTier had three choices. He could get up out of the chair, leave, and never come back. He could play it straight and lose his poke. Or he could brazen it out and chop this Creole character into pieces.

  While he waited for the guitar player to make up his mind, Valentin gazed past him toward the door, where two men in cheap suits and a young woman in a thin cotton dress had stopped to peer inside. They were whispering among themselves and the girl was staring as if she had never seen anything quite like him before. Once he caught her eye, her face broke into a smile that was shyly wicked.

  Eddie McTier shifted his way into Valentin’s line of vision and rapped his knuckles on the table. “That’s it,” he said. There was a small cylinder of gold coins in front of him that loo
ked to be at least the equal of Valentin’s own.

  “That all of it?” Valentin asked.

  “Every fucking dime,” McTier replied with a snide curl of his lip.

  Twine stepped up to the table with a pint bottle of amber liquor in one hand and a short glass in the other. He placed them at McTier’s elbow and skipped away in a hurry.

  McTier frowned at the bartender “How come everybody’s so damn skittish today?” he said. “Y’all are actin’ crazy.”

  Valentin pushed the deck of cards across the table. “You deal,” he said.

  McTier’s face pinched with distrust. He watched Valentin for a second, then fanned a thumb through the deck. Satisfied it was clean, he broke it in half and began to shuffle. “What’s your story, friend?” he inquired.

  “No story,” Valentin said. “Just passing through and looking for a game. What about you?”

  “What, ain’t nobody told you?”

  “Told me what.”

  “I come from Georgia. Place called Happy Valley. I heard they like the blues in New Orleans. So I come over and I’m here to stay.”

  Valentin studied the sharp’s face, feigning a vague interest, and watched his hands at the same time. McTier was playing it straight so far, but he was talking faster and faster, an old trick that was a variation on the magician’s sleight of hand.

  “I got me a woman back home in Thomson. Ain’t but fifteen years old.” He seemed to stumble for a moment. “Got me a child name of Willie. He’s blind.” Now he fell curiously silent for a few seconds, as if he had lost his way. Recovering, he poured his glass full and drank it halfway down. “But truth is, I got more women than I know what to do with,” he crowed as his hands got busy again. “I found me this here young Ethiopian gal and brought her along. I left her over across the river.”

  “And what are you doing in Algiers?” Valentin asked.

  McTier smiled and said, “Takin’ your money, friend.”

  Valentin’s face lightened suddenly and he grinned as if the guitar player had just told a good joke. The whispers at the door stopped and even Mr. Roy halted his wheezing for a few seconds.

  “I say somethin’ funny?” McTier asked.

  “Deal,” Valentin said.

  “I’ll deal all right,” McTier said, and began snapping cards.

  Valentin caught the move on the first hand and let it go. It was the same with the second and third, and McTier, looking giddy, drank some more as he watched the Creole’s stack of coins shrink while his grew. A quarter-hour passed in this manner, and Mr. Roy, Twine, the two fellows at the bar, and the trio near the door were all looking at Valentin as if realizing that in fact he was a fool.

  For Valentin, it was as easy as hooking a Mississippi catfish. Thinking he had a chump in his sights, and doing some showing off for the locals, McTier tried a more brazen ploy. This time the Creole’s left hand came down with the force of a guillotine to grab the guitar player’s wrist in an iron grip.

  “What did I tell you?” Valentin’s voice, though soft, rang out in a room that had suddenly gone dead quiet.

  McTier tried to bluff his way out. “What the hell? Take your goddamn paw off me!”

  Valentin shrugged and let go, then used the free hand to tear away the cuff of McTier’s shirt, popping the link and revealing the card hidden there, an ace of spades. It would have come in handy on the next deal.

  McTier lowered his forehead and his eyebrows dipped into a valley. He muttered something under his breath and a rank smell came off him. On the periphery of his vision, Valentin saw the two men standing in the doorway pull the girl back out onto the banquette as the rounders and Twine dropped from sight like ducks in a shooting gallery. Mr. Roy was too fat to move with any haste, so he just pushed his chair back into the corner as far as he could go, and watched.

  McTier got to his feet, the torn cuff dangling. “This game’s over,” he said.

  “Damn right,” Valentin countered.

  The guitar player jerked a thumb. “Door’s right back there.”

  Valentin smiled dimly. “I ain’t going anywhere.”

  “Then I’ll take my money and leave.”

  Valentin shook his head slowly and said, “No, you won’t.”

  A silence fell with a dark weight. From the corner, Mr. Roy saw the way McTier’s face changed. He had made his last threat and it hadn’t worked. This time he had only two choices, to run away or stand and fight. Meanwhile, the Creole sat perfectly still, his hands on the table. Mr. Roy hadn’t even seen him blink.

  McTier let out a sudden raw growl as his hand went across his torso to the waist of his trousers. He snapped out a long-barreled Stevens Tip-Up .22 and brought it around at the same moment that Valentin rose abruptly, knocking back his own chair. The bark of the pistol shook the glasses behind the bar and the slug whistled past Valentin’s temple so closely that he felt the wind as it thunked into a wall board behind his head.

  In his arrogance, McTier had packed a single-shot revolver, never dreaming that he’d have to use it. It was a mistake, because now a second pistol cracked, and the guitar player stumbled back in two long strides, as if pulled by a rope. Both his hands came up and the .22 tumbled out of the right one. The hole in his chest was still smoking when his knees crumpled and he collapsed to the floor.

  The last hollow echo died. Now flat on his back, McTier tried to raise himself, then collapsed back, coughed out a ragged breath, and went still as the blood from his chest welled and spread.

  Mr. Roy let out a long, noisy wheeze. Three heads rose up from the cover of the bar and the two men and the young girl edged back into the doorway. The Negro boy who had so ably faded into the wall reappeared, his face cracking into a grin of amazement.

  Twine leaned over the bar to stare down at the body. “Holy Jesus,” he said.

  Valentin lowered the pistol, laid it on the table, and sat back down. He picked up the pint, poured some of McTier’s whiskey into his glass, and drank it down in a long, slow sip. He looked surprised and perhaps baffled, as if he had wandered in from outside.

  Mr. Roy managed to push himself to his feet. “We can take care of it from here on.”

  Valentin, coming to his senses, understood. They would remove McTier’s body and cover the shooting with the police, if they talked about it at all. He also understood that he needed to leave. “Give his guitar to someone who can use it,” he said.

  Mr. Roy nodded his heavy head.

  Valentin walked across the dirty sawdust floor and out onto the banquette, where the young girl’s dark round eyes locked on him with a sort of primitive wonder. She seemed to barely breath as he stepped past her and continued down Evelina Street without looking back. He arrived at the pier just in time to catch the last ferry.

  PONY GIRL

  BY LAURA LIPPMAN

  Tremé

  She was looking for trouble and she was definitely going to find it. What was the girl thinking when she got dressed this morning? When she decided—days, weeks, maybe even months ago—that this was how she wanted to go out on Mardi Gras day? And not just out, but all the way up to Claiborne Avenue and Ernie K. Doe’s, where this kind of costume didn’t play. There were skeletons and Mardi Gras Indians and baby dolls, but it wasn’t a place where you saw a lot of people going for sexy or clever. That kind of thing was for back in the Quarter, maybe outside Café Brasil. It’s hard to find a line to cross on Mardi Gras day, much less cross it, but this girl had gone and done it. In all my years—I was nineteen then, but a hard nineteen—I’d only seen one Mardi Gras sight more disturbing, and that was a white boy who took a magic marker, a thick one, and stuck it through a piercing in his earlobe. Nothing more to his costume than that, a magic marker through his ear, street clothes, and a wild gaze. Even in the middle of a crowd, people granted him some distance, let me tell you.

  The Mardi Gras I’m talking about now, this was three years ago, the year that people were saying that customs mattered, that we had to hold ti
ght to our traditions. Big Chief Tootie Montana was still alive then, and he had called for the skeletons and the baby dolls to make a showing, and there was a pretty good turnout. But it wasn’t true old school, with the skeletons going to people’s houses and waking up children in their beds, telling them to do their homework and listen to their mamas. Once upon a time, the skeletons were fierce, coming in with old bones from the butcher’s shop, shaking the bloody hanks at sleeping children. Man, you do that to one of these kids today, he’s likely to come up with a gun, blow the skeleton back into the grave. Legends lose their steam, like everything else. What scared people once won’t scare them now.

  Back to the girl. Everybody’s eyes kept going back to that girl. She was long and slinky, in a champagne-colored body stocking. And if it had been just the body stocking, if she had decided to be Eve to some boy’s Adam, glued a few leaves to the right parts, she wouldn’t have been so … disrupting. Funny how that goes, how pretending to be naked can be less inflaming than dressing up like something that’s not supposed to be sexy at all. No, this one, she had a pair of pointy ears high in her blond hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail. She had pale white-and-beige cowboy boots, the daintiest things you ever seen, and—this was what made me fear for her—a real tail of horsehair pinned to the end of her spine, swishing back and forth as she danced. Swish. Swish. Swish. And although she was skinny by my standards, she managed the trick of being skinny with curves, so that tail jutted out just so. Swish. Swish. Swish. I watched her, and I watched all the other men watching her, and I did not see how anyone could keep her safe if she stayed there, dancing into the night.

  Back in school, when they lectured us on the straight-and-narrow, they told us that rape is a crime of violence. They told us that a woman isn’t looking for something just because she goes out in high heels and a bustier and a skirt that barely covers her. Or in a champagne-colored body stocking with a tail affixed. They told us that rape has nothing to do with sex. But sitting in Ernie K. Doe’s, drinking a Heineken, I couldn’t help but wonder if rape started as sex and then moved to violence when sex was denied. Look at me, look at me, look at me, the tail seemed to sing as it twitched back and forth. Yet Pony Girl’s downcast eyes, refusing to make eye contact even with her dancing partner, a plump cowgirl in a big red hat, sent a different message. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me. You do that to a dog with a steak, he bites you, and nobody says it’s the dog’s fault.