New Orleans Noir

by Julie Smith

Most of the prisoners were looters, some stole cars, some broke into mansions, and about ten had tried to kill folks. Mainly taking shots at cops who were trying to rescue people from their swamped neighborhoods.

  “Hey, Audie Murphy!’’ yelled a man with a long gray beard stained yellow. “Go suck a turd.’’

  Jack walked into the wide expanse of the train station, the newspaper racks selling a copy of USA Today from August 26, a picture of Martha Stewart on the cover with a big shit-eating grin on her face.

  Welcome to Angola South read a cardboard sign by the door.

  Jack got a break just before sundown.

  He used his cell phone to call his father back on Grand Isle, a man who’d been left alone to pick through the wreckage of a shrimp company he’d owned since ’64, surviving even Hurricane Betsy. His dad told him that every boat they owned, the refrigerated warehouse, and their stilt house had all washed out into the Gulf.

  “Say hello to Mama for me,’’ Jack said before ending the call and heading out in his truck along the river.

  Jack rode through the city and drank a cold Budweiser, a cooler in the back of his Chevy loaded down with ice brought in by the Indiana National Guard. The radio carried nothing but news, so he shut it off and just drove slow out Canal Street past the carnival of TV trucks and reporters camped out on the neutral ground. At one point, he slowed, noticing a leg sticking out from under a tarp.

  But raising his sunglasses, he saw it was only a mannequin. He glimpsed a couple of cameramen in the shadows laughing and pointing.

  He drove on.

  Rampart at Canal was the foot of the swamp, water all the way to Lake Pontchartrain. He turned around and crossed back through the Quarter, found higher ground and crossed Rampart further downriver, ending up at the corner of St. Louis and Tremé, right by the old housing projects, St. Louis Cemetery, and the looted-out Winn-Dixie. All along Tremé, tree branches and drowned cars filled the road. Birds and loose trash skittered in the warm breeze.

  Jack polished off the Bud and pulled a plug of tobacco from his pouch. Sitting on his hood, he brushed off the brown pieces of Redman from his mustache and spit into the swampy water covering his truck tires.

  The warm air was calm. The city completely still, with huge clouds above the Central Business District. A skinny, mangy dog wandered past him.

  An old black man on a bicycle peddled through the foot-deep water and waved.

  The only sound came from helicopters loaded down with machine guns passing over the Mississippi and the Lower Ninth Ward looking for bodies and looters. An old-fashioned Army Jeep passed, driving in reverse with a young kid in the passenger seat wearing an NOPD shirt and Chinese hat. He eyed down his rifle, scoped a bird on the cracked cemetery wall, and then, satisfied he had the shot, dropped the gun at his side.

  Jack spit and smiled.

  He wasn’t even back at the train station for his next shift when he saw the smoke curling and twisting like a mythical snake. Jack followed the smoke and called in on his handheld radio, arriving before the firetrucks at a block of row houses at Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and Jackson Avenue. Two of them burned, crackling and popping as only ancient wood can. Hard and buckling, turning to coal-black smoke.

  Six firetrucks. And then seven.

  The sun set through leafless oaks, the light orange and slatted and broken through black smoke. A helicopter passed overhead and dropped a huge bucket of water on the dying buildings. The falling water stirred up dead leaves and stale wind and fell with a whoosh.

  Dried pieces of debris and smoke blocked out the sun.

  “So you were scared?” Jack asked the pretty girl from Indiana.

  “Hell yes, I was scared,’’ she said.

  It was the next day at sunset and they talked at an old convent in the Bywater near a statue of the Virgin Mary.

  “They dropped us off in the middle of the night,’’ she said, smoking. Her hand shook a bit. “The water was up past the transport’s tires and you couldn’t see two feet in front of your face. No moon. Nothing.’’

  The girl was pretty. Blond and muscular with brown eyes. She wore camouflage but sat like a girl, on her butt with her knees pulled up to her chin. Jack met her when she’d delivered the ice.

  He turned away when she exhaled.

  “You want one?”

  “I don’t smoke.’’

  She nodded. “So they dropped us off on the high ground,’’ she said. “When was that, a few weeks ago?”

  “Last week.”

  “Last week,’’ she repeated, thinking. “And they dropped us off, like I said. On the high ground. Well, we didn’t have orders or anything. We just sat there.’’

  “All night.’’

  “All night,’’ she said. “We could hear gunshots and people yelling. Families passing us on boats and little pool floats … So anyway, I finally fall asleep and I hear something at the edge of sleep. You know how that can go? Kind of a dream but you’re awake. And it’s a trudging sound through the water and this heavy breathing. I couldn’t see anything. It was so dark I wasn’t sure if it was just in my head.’’

  “What was it?”

  “You’ll laugh at what I thought it was.’’

  “What did you think it was?”

  “Demons.’’

  “What was it?”

  “Horses.’’

  “You religious?’’ Jack asked.

  The pretty Indiana girl stubbed out her cigarette on one of the statue’s base stones and tucked back on her uniform hat. “Not at all.’’

  At midnight there was a riot. A man who’d shot at the police from the top of the hot sauce factory in Mid-City had decided to lock himself in the portable toilet.

  A few minutes before, he’d stuck his penis through one of the holes and told a female guard to “suck it’’ as he masturbated with his eyes rolling up in his head. Instead, she’d whacked it hard with a billy club and then two of the other inmates in an adjoining cell had started climbing the chain link and screaming at the guards.

  The guards were able to mace the two on the walls but the man who’d started it all had run and shut himself in the toilet.

  Jack said: “Give me the hose.’’

  Guards pulled the hose from the edge of the train platform and ran the nozzle to Jack.

  “Turn it up.’’ And he unlocked the gate and walked inside and thumbed open the toilet’s door.

  The flush of water blew the man against the back wall of the toilet and washed him outside in a long brown stream until he rolled and crawled to the far corner of the cell.

  “Goddamn!’’ the man yelled, curling into a ball. Both hands on his privates, his brown pants at his knees.

  “Turn it down,’’ Jack said.

  You wrote a report, fingerprinted them, and then tagged them. Pink for federal cases, green for misdemeanors, and red, yellow, and blue for different kinds of felonies. They were locked up, given something to eat, and then shipped on buses by gun bulls out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola the next morning.

  “Move ’em in, herd ’em out,’’ Jack always said.

  A few days before, a two-time loser had driven a stolen car to the drop-off zone at the old Amtrak station, walked up to the front desk, and asked the warden for a one-way train ticket.

  The warden, ten years on the job running Angola, asked for his driver’s license and registration, and it wasn’t but a second later that he nodded to Jack and another guard. “Yes sir. Yes sir. One-way ticket to Angola coming up.’’

  They took him to the platform and locked him in with a French Quarter street musician who’d been caught stuffing his pockets with cold medicine and NoDoz at what was left of the Walgreens on Canal.

  The next day, transport carriers and Humvees passed by the Convention Center carrying soldiers with farm-boy grins and buzz cuts. They waved and smiled in a slow, steady parade, most of them carrying cameras and camcorders aimed at all the wreckage.

  Jack wat
ched another Humvee roll by the La Louisiane Ballroom—two skinny, goofy kids giving a thumbs-up—where the Guard held two prisoners. The officers came from Arkansas and rolled their own cigarettes and wore sunglasses like Jack.

  “Y’all got to clean this up?” Jack asked.

  “Good God Almighty, I hope to hell not.’’

  Jack eyed the mess and walked under the shaded outdoor roof. There were: folding chairs and MRE packs, spoiling milk and open Heineken bottles, inflatable mattresses, CDs, overnight cases, water jugs and suitcases, rotting food and bottles of urine and piles upon piles of garbage, a faded World War II veteran’s hat, baby blankets and some kid’s New York Giants helmet, jumper cables, unopened bottles of Corona, and hotel beach chairs.

  A chopper’s propellers beat overhead and along the Mississippi.

  Jack picked up the vet’s hat, studied the gold pins, and placed it back, softly, on the chair.

  In an old pile of dog food sat an empty bottle of champagne. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. Forty-five-dollar label.

  There were millions of flies and the foul smell of rotting food and human waste. Jack reached into his pocket for a bandana and covered his mouth. He felt lunch back up in his throat.

  From the other side of the building, one of the Army men yelled: “It’s a grand ol’ ballroom, ain’t it?”

  There was better cell phone coverage up on the overpass, and even though I-10 didn’t go anywhere, Jack would drive his truck up there, heading north toward the airport until the water started coming up at the Metairie Cemetery. And he’d sit there and call his dad and talk about busted boats and files lost at sea and insurance folks who wouldn’t respond to messages. Mostly he’d eat MREs with the sun going down, occasionally giving directions to rescue workers from other states who didn’t know the damn interstate was closed.

  It was a week or so after the storm when he felt that bullet zip by his ear and heard the sharp report of a pistol.

  He rolled off the hood and found his footing.

  Reaching into the passenger seat, he pulled out a rifle and duck-walked back behind the concrete barrier. He didn’t have field glasses or a scope but could pick out the rough-shadowed shape in the sun setting through the endless marble mausoleums.

  Another shot pinged off the concrete.

  With breath held, he took aim and shot.

  He heard a scream.

  Jack jumped over the barricade and moved across the interstate and into the waist-deep water, rifle in the crook of his arm, his eyes following the shadowed shape through the rows of crypts and canals of golden water under oaks.

  The water grew up to his chest and he waded into the city, breathing hard, and stopped to listen, slowing down his heart and lungs, hearing that splashing frantic sound in the distance, and then he turned and took in another row of mausoleums, another grand monument to wealth, another angel, another sphinx, another proud man in marble staring down with sad dead eyes.

  He lost the sound.

  He heard birds and a siren, and standing there he knew he was lost. He could not see the road or even find it. He only saw the sun, the giant glowing orb of light painting everything orange and gold and making all the dead things shine so soft.

  Jack spat some tobacco juice into the stale water and walked, wiping his mustache with the back of his hand, following the rows. Past a giant monument to the lost Confederate dead and then past a small statue of a fat man holding a quill pen.

  The light was dull orange now. The bearded trees giving long shadows.

  The sound of birds.

  And then a sucking sound of rotten, slow breath.

  He turned blind down a waist-deep path. In the shadows, only the thinnest sliver of gold light ran down the middle of the still brown water, almost an arrow.

  At the top step of a marble crypt sat a young boy, maybe ten, holding his swollen belly, covered in blood. He breathed thick and hard and wet and he watched Jack come down the waterway and soon emerge on a bottom step, and then another, until the man grew tall and towered above him.

  Jack placed his rifle on the last step. His clothes dripping.

  The boy pushed himself against the locked glass doors to the long-dead family, each of their names and dates of life written in gold on marble.

  Jack took off his shirt and pressed it to the boy’s stomach. He reached for his radio but it had been shorted out. “I’ll fix it,’’ he said to the boy, even as the long shadows covered the lost cove. “I’ll fix it.”

  Jack stayed there until the boy’s head grew cool in the dark, a soft green-marbled moon shining on the cemetery water like silver.

  MARIGNY TRIANGLE

  BY ERIC OVERMYER

  Faubourg Marigny

  Pretty and sad, like New Orleans

  —The Iguanas

  Ask me, things started to go to shit way before the hurricane. The Pizza Kitchen killings, for instance. Well, what would you have done? One of your coworkers, that sullen kid from the Iberville projects, that dishwasher you hired, him, he was a friend of a friend and needed a break, knocks on the door as you’re getting ready to open for lunch, him and a couple of his equally sullen, hunched-up, shifty friends, course you let ’em in. And then he pulls a nine and ties you and everybody else in the place up, and executes all y’all with a shot to the backa the head using a raw peeled potato as a silencer, for eighty-eight dollars and change. And somebody else, who got lucky and missed her bus and was a little late to work that day, finds five bodies a few minutes later, still warm and oozing.

  And this on a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend morning, clear blue Creole sky in the French Quarter, for God’s sake, well, felt like the beginning of the end to me. Maybe more so ’cause it was a rare day off for me, and I’m taking the kids on a little stroll through the Quarter, pointing out this and that historic feature, and the difference between a slave quarters and a garçonnière, and I get the call to get on over there, sorry ’bout your day off, Reynolds, and I say, nah, I don’t need no address, I’m lookin’ at it, mac—and I am, standing across the street, taking in the crowd and the cop cars and emergency vehicles, and when I can’t bear it no more, looking up again at the soft blue Louisiana sky, trying to put the two together.

  Or maybe it was when those kids popped that priest, Father Peterson, off his bike further down in the Marigny, almost to Bywater. Out for a sunset ride, beloved in the neighborhood, and these punks just whacked the padre for kicks, far as we know, wasn’t like nobody was ever arrested. And this sorta shit’s why the town was deserted after dark in most neighborhoods long before the hurricane tore it up—and talking about that, parts of this town were always so raggedy-assed, you’d be hard-pressed to know what piece of decrepitude was there before or after Katrina: St. Claude, Tremé, St. Roch, St. Bernard, Central City, Desire. I mean, I defy you to tell me—

  Or maybe it was Officer Antoinette Frank that broke my particular camel’s back, where she and her cousin lit up her partner and the Vietnamese family they both moonlit for as part-time after-dark security. A police officer, sworn to serve and protect. She was that family’s guardian angel, and she did them like that—and again, all for a few bucks, supposedly. The cousin said she thought they kept gold bullion in the back room, them being Vietnamese and all. Maybe. But who’d be that stupid? And what the real reason was, how’ll we ever know? She’s still on death row, Officer Frank, and the hurricane probably gave her another five years of undeserved life at least, delaying as it did every judicial proceeding large or small in the great state of Louisiana. And her, we know she done her daddy, too, filed a missing person’s on him and moved right into his house, and they found his bones under it and didn’t even bother to charge her with that.

  You smell that? I don’t mean that slop in the footlocker—a smell I could never possibly describe to a civilian, except to say you gotta burn your clothes after a crime scene like this. Never wear nothing you wanna hold onto to a crime scene, I tell the rooks. Nah. I mean that—the night air. Sweet.
Jasmine. Confederate jasmine.

  Now, I’m a Seventh Ward, all the way. That’s the Creole ward, y’all, the Mighty Seventh. And I always lived in the Seventh Ward—always. Where I live since the hurricane, my mama’s house. I mean, same house I come up in on Dauphine Street in the Marigny, the Triangle, between Touro and Pauger—a double camelback with a screened-in side gallery, that we all piled into since our place in Gentilly had thirteen inches of water in it … on the second floor. I lie in bed, windows thrown open in the nice weather, I can smell the jasmine, the coffee roasting down along the river, hear the carriages rattling home at night after a day in the tourist trade, the clack clack of the mules’ hooves. I just lie there, I can hear the train whistle way down in the Bywater. Can hear the ferry boat horns out on the river. The out-of-tune calliope on the Creole Queen. All kinds of birds. The rain rattling in the gutters. The wind whipping the palm fronds. I don’t know. Place makes my heart ache. Way it smells, way it sounds. Way it looks. No place as pretty and sad as New Orleans. Depending on if the sun’s shining or not. You ever notice that? Sun’s out, ain’t no prettier place on earth. No place more … resplendent. But gray and gloomy, cloudy, rainy, this town is so shabby, dreary, and downright depressing, makes you wanna take morphine and die. As the old song goes.

  If I believed in karma I’d be worried I’d come back as one of those mules. Those carriage mules. I would just hate like hell to come back as a mule.

  It is a beautiful night. Despite this shit here. Sweet and soft, balmy. Dark. I know that sounds odd to say. The night is dark. But it is. Here in New Orleans, it is really dark. One or two things I know about New Orleans. The nights are darker here. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I’m not talking about human darkness. About evil, or shit. I’m talking about the quality of the night. The feel. I been everywhere, all over this country. The Gulf of Mexico. Jamaica. I’m telling you. I seen a lot of darkness, stayed up a lot of nights. It’s just a fact. The nights are darker here. Palpably darker. And thicker. You can reach out and stroke the darkness. Touch it. Run your hand over it, like somebody’s skin, or a piece of soft cloth. Got a soft feel to it, New Orleans nights. The nights are always soft here. No matter what else has happened. No matter what kind of horror show. The nights are always soft. I can’t tell you how many times, how many blood-stained crime scenes I been privy to, how many murders. I just stepped away, stepped outside, into the night, and been struck by how thick and soft and sweet and downright dark the nights are here. Struck dumb. It’s a mystery.