I closed my eyes. Had Glorette been looking up at the sky, then, when she died? Did she see the palm trees? “What did you do?” I whispered.
“I ran. And then Sidney found her. He called your brothers.” He ran his hands over his stubble. “I couldn’t never tell him. Victor. When he started ridin with us, after she was gone. That’s fucked up. That crazy lady, she was around for the summer, and then I never saw her again.”
Teeny and the others below us laughed, and someone played the trumpet far away, and the smoke shifted into the window. “Why did you shoot that kid?” I said. “You didn’t even know him.”
He murmured, “My job. We always ridin. You know. Rollin. What you said about the Indians? I remember the pictures from school. They on horses, ridin all over. The fellas. Huntin buffalo and they had peace pipes and shit. And they was fightin, too.”
He rubbed his forehead so hard that red marks appeared. “When I was little, I wanted to play football. Like your brothers. But then when I started hangin with Jazen, it was so easy to make that money. But you know, hangin with Victor—it’s like havin some guy from Def Comedy Jam tell me everything. I was thinkin—the other job I wanted when I was about twelve, I wanted to drive a truck. But not by myself. Drive a truck every day, like a beer truck or milk truck, and have a dude like Victor for my partner, and we just cruise all around, make them stops, and chill at the end of the day.”
I wanted to be sentimental. Say something movielike—You could still do that now. But he couldn’t.
“Can you tell my grandmère I need my clothes?”
“Anybody could come in that door.”
“JZ won’t come back that fast. He gotta meet some dude in the Ninth Ward.”
The smoke rose past the second floor like black ivy. I wouldn’t look back at the gun. The Indian suit in the corner watched me, faceless and flat.
Glorette killed by a stranger named Fly. The random act. More not to tell Victor, if I ever saw him again. I felt numb, walking down the steps. What was I supposed to do? Head to Inez’s place and say, “Claudine’s grandson still has her .45, but now he has to decide how not to die. And Victor’s gone.”
Miss Teeny was saying to a woman, “Hurricane Cindy was July. Knocked out the power, and then all the meat went bad.” She turned over chicken legs sprinkled with seasoning.
“These white girl storms,” one of the men tending the coals said.
“Like the Brady Bunch,” another woman said, arranging hot links on a tray.
“This one Katrina. Where they get these names? I like to see a Hurricane Shenene. Tell Jamie Foxx go on up there and name the next one.”
Everyone laughed. Miss Teeny looked at me. “Hey, now, Juanita said you a reporter.”
“You need to do a story on me,” the man said, closing the lid on the smoker. “Best barbecue in New Orleans.”
I smiled. “My godson—the one in the yellow shirt. Did you see which way he went?”
Miss Teeny gave me a long look. She pointed. “He went toward Orleans. Like he was catchin a ride to the Quarter.”
I went across the grass—the buildings curved, I saw now, like the famous town houses in Bath. Claudine sat on Inez’s porch in a metal chair, holding the baby a little awkwardly. “Here,” I said quickly, thinking of the stent in her breast.
The baby was solid and dense in my arms. She reared back and studied my face solemnly. Her eyes were black as polished hematite, and I waited for her to scream at my foreign status. But then she made up her mind and put her head against my shoulder. Her hair was soft as dandelion fluff against my neck.
I followed Claudine inside. Inez and Tweety Bird were sorting through a new batch of beads. My father sat in the easy chair beside the stand that held the suit. He seemed small and thin, suddenly, next to the huge frame of ostrich plumes. What had he and Claudine told each other? His eyes met mine, and he waited for me to say it.
I couldn’t move. The baby was heavy, content, already sealed to my chest, sweat from both of us meeting in the thin cotton. There was no way to ask questions of my father, or explain what had just happened, with the two women watching me.
“Jazen went one way and Victor went another,” I said. “Alfonso’s over there waiting for clothes.”
Claudine looked down at the beads. “Jazen come and go,” she said again. “That’s how he is. And he need to go, if he still doin what he been doin.”
“You know he is,” Inez said. “Once they get that easy money, they don’t stop.” She looked at the TV. A large halo of cotton, twirling in a sea of gray. “They say the storm probably headed this way, so maybe they don’t want you to come in.” She looked at her watch. “I’ma call Charity. I’m not supposed to work until graveyard. But I better get you to your chemo.”
The circular mass moved again and again, on different possible tracks. The blue hole at the center looked as if someone had poked a finger inside.
Two of the intricate sequined patches they’d taken off the suit—one was a buffalo, his massive head lifted, eyeing a warrior who held his arms to the sun.
“Isn’t there some place in the French Quarter called Pirate’s Alley?” I asked.
“Yeah. For tourists,” Claudine said. “Juanita work down there. She probably waitin on the van right now.”
I bent near my father and said, “Papa, he kept talking about pirates and treasure. You stay here and see if he comes back. He has Jazen’s gun. Alfonso has a gun. Jazen’s got nothin right now. But he might come back, too.” The baby held on tight to my neck. “I’m going to Pirate’s Alley. Maybe Victor’s trying to find some map.”
The empty crib was imprinted with the baby’s shape. And every sound and smell and noise and fear and comfort was imprinted into her, right now, every day here.
And me—I’d had my mother’s face to rise up to, when she bent over my crib. Her sunflowers. The vines that twined over my window, making a waterfall of green lace.
We had bought a crib for Glorette. Where had Victor slept, when she lived in that crappy little apartment with Grady?
What had happened to his back?
Inez said people caught rides on the south corner. I caught up with Juanita on the sidewalk. “I need to know where Pirate’s Alley is, or whatever it’s called.”
She sucked her teeth and gave me a look. “You never been here?”
“No.”
“That’s right. That boy—Glorette son—said somethin bout your daddy and her daddy from the end of the world. Not here.” She shrugged. “Nothin but fake pirate Johnny Depp shit all over the damn Quarter. Ain’t hard to find.” She kept walking on Orleans.
I said, “My car’s here. You want a ride?”
She shook her head. “Not with you. You don’t know where you goin.”
I put my hand on her arm to stop her. “Hey. You used to call Glorette a ho. That’s what your son kept telling Victor. A ho and a voodoo queen. That was messed up. Victor didn’t need to hear that.”
Juanita lifted her chin and moved her arm away from my hand. “What the hell you know? Glorette ain’t had no business actin crazy cause some man left her. I got married ten years ago, but I tried my best to raise Jazen before that.”
“You had him right after we graduated.”
“Yeah. A few months after Glorette had her son. I had gone out to the base and I met this guy. From New York. He kept sayin how pretty I was, my New Orleans accent, all that. How he bet I was Creole. Voulez-vous and all that shit.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Only French anybody ever said to me in California. That song.”
“I know.” Then I said, “So you’re gonna blame genetics for how Jazen lives?”
“I’m gonna get to work. And I don’t need you givin me a ride, or tellin me anything.” We were passing more courtyards with oak trees. “I take the ten-thirty van with Philip every day, and I ride back with my husband when he finish playin. He play trombone.”
On the corner was a big white van, sid
e door open, and a thin dark man with sedate, perfect dreadlocks lying on his shoulders. Inside the van were the two women with hotel uniforms. A third woman wearing a sundress got in, sweating heavily under a headscarf.
Pirate’s Alley must be the most touristy place in the world, I realized suddenly, and I was embarrassed. I was following someone without any notion of how to find him, and this time it was a huge city. I said, “I’ll get dropped off with Juanita.”
They each gave Philip three dollars, and I put a five in his hand. He handed me back two of Juanita’s dollars, and she kept her face turned to the window.
We left the Lafitte and crossed under the interstate. The 10, the long trail all the way from LA to here, the black belly of a river above us. In fifteen minutes, we were on Basin Street.
He let Juanita and me off on a corner. Chartres Street. The bricked gutters, the stucco walls in all the colors from tourist brochures and ads and photo essays—ocher and rose and soft blue. The balconies, the ferns, the woman driving past with an elegant little black cart and a brown horse—a white brimmed hat on her head. VOODOO TOURS, the placard on the cart read.
No sentences formed themselves in my head. Not easy, not elegant, no descriptions, no narrative. Two men were boarding up an antique store with plywood. Another man was taping windows in an X with electrical tape. Juanita looked up at the sky.
“I was four when Camille came through,” she said. “But I don’t remember it.”
Napoleon House was in front of us. The cupola had shuttered windows, and when we crossed the street, I realized I’d seen this a hundred times in magazines.
The French Quarter, the walls around me, the street a tunnel of pastel shades and lacy black iron. Lady Marmalade, quadroon balls, daughters of joy. I followed Juanita to the back entrance. She checked her hair once more, and started to tie on an apron.
Sweat dripped between my breasts and into my navel—I could feel it there—and even my eyelashes were wet.
She laughed at my face. “You need a beer.”
“A Coke.”
“People come in all day and drink that Pimms. Specialty of the house. Them white people love it. I cain’t stand that stuff.”
“You think white people have different taste buds?”
There were only white people at the bar. She said, “They got different hair. Different eyes. Different everything else. Why they have the same taste?” She looked sideways at me. “You hang out with em, right?” She bent down to pick up a napkin someone had dropped, and a man passed by and said, “You better get on it, baby. Bout leven now.”
“I’m here,” she said. But she was looking at the napkin. Thinking. She said, “Glorette’s son—they took the bullet out his arm and then Claudine went to get a bandanna. I remember when I was in California, when them fools first came out from LA to Rio Seco. I saw a guy with a blue bandanna. All that mess about red and blue.” She crumpled the napkin in her hand. “Glorette’s son said, ‘Red or blue kill me in California, but I don’t know what kill me here in Louisiana.’ She brought over that old bandanna and he start laughin. Said, ‘Cool—this a inde-somethin shade.’ ”
Independent. No. Indeterminate.
Then she said, “Pirate’s Alley is two blocks that way.” She pointed. “Right next to the church. But ain’t no reason for him to go there. Nothin but things to buy.”
A crowd of young guys were holding go-cups, and one yelled, “Fuck Katrina! She can’t kick a lemon daiquiri!” He threw the cup in the air, and a whipped cloud flew out.
Pirate’s Alley was a narrow row of shops adjacent to St. Louis Cathedral. VOODOO WEDDING, a sign said, propped in the entrance. Had someone told me ghosts lived in the alley, the ghosts of a doomed couple, one a pirate, and that’s why people were married here, in this place where about ten people were huddled in the shade around the couple, who wore white dress, tux, and top hat?
In front of the church, I sat on a bench. A bedraggled, lost tourist.
You could see the river from here. Moinette Antoine had been sold, not down the river. Up the river.
Sold in a market down in New Orleans, scarred old slaver know he’s doin all right. Hear him whip the women just around midnight. Brown sugar—how come you taste so good?
The river was just an absence, in the distance, with a steamboat floating like a wedding cake.
Moinette and her mother, Marie-Therese, had survived by washing and mending and sewing. “Clothes always dirty.” Had my aunt Almoinette said that when I was ten? Toujou sale.
The first time I was in Paris, I looked at the paintings of women lavandeuses and thought of the Mississippi and my great-aunt Monie.
The woman van Gogh painted—café proprietress at Arles—she could have been my mother’s mother, in Sarrat, cooking gumbo and rice and coffee and cake every day for the people coming in from the cane fields. I remembered that moment, before that painting, and how I saw the weariness in her eyes. Not the demure superiority of the Gainsborough women, in their careful poses and lush gowns.
Art was a moment captured, a piece of a day of the men stripping the varnish from the floor. I was twenty. I was alone in front of the paintings, and I could never talk about them with the people of my childhood. My father and Gustave in the trees, their fingers testing the dimpled rind of the navel crop. My brothers lying on top of the truck to reach into the engine, their legs scissored, their bare shoulders streaked with sweat and oil.
My mother at the table—her work to feed everyone, and listen. Her wrist moving, the muscles in her forearm when she chopped the tomatoes and onions.
My mother saying, “Always talk bout someone sell down the river. But she sell up the river. Marie-Therese. The one from Africa. Cause they down there at the end of the world. Lafitte man find her in the bayou. Moinette mama. She try to drown herself in Bayou Azure. But them pirate come up the bayou with some wine to sell. And they taken her to another place. Sell her, but first she have a baby.”
Treasure. He had two amber jewels he must have taken from the suit, and the bullet that had come from his arm, and the gun.
I walked back down Chartres to Napoleon House. It was open now, and a line stretched around the sidewalk. I went back to the service entrance, and waited until someone opened the door to empty trash. “I need to ask Juanita something,” I told the same man who’d seen me earlier.
She was carrying a tray with sandwiches. Jimmy Taco had sent us all an essay about layers of meat dripping with green dressing that smelled of olives.
She said, “What?” She winced at the weight of the tray. “I hate sandwiches. I like my meat on the plate, and my rice. Not all mushed together.”
“You said Victor mentioned the end of the world.”
“Yeah?”
“My papa’s from Plaquemines Parish.”
“Yeah. Down there. Glorette son was sayin something bout Plaquemines. He want to know how far it was.”
Azure was in Plaquemines Parish.
Juanita said, “I told him I never been down there and he said, FX got all those maps in her car. I said, Who FX? He told me that was you. Travel all over the world. And never been to New Orleans.” She glanced up at the bar, and put her head down to plow through the crowd.
I hailed a cab that had just let out two people in front of Napoleon House. I got in the back, and the driver pulled away slowly. “The Lafitte, please,” I said absently, and he swerved right back to the curb.
“You kiddin me?” he said angrily. His arm was tanned and hairy on the top of the seat when he turned around to see my face. “Hell, no. Where the hell you from?”
I sat there for a minute, in the humming sticky air, his hand flat on the leather. I was not a tourist.
I got out and started walking. Not like a walkin fool, or like myself at all. The hammered-tin sky, the puddles of water, and then under the freeway, my feet like boiled meat, my eyes stinging with sweat.
The white van was parked under the shade of an oak tree. When I asked Philip
if anyone else drove, he said, “Yeah, Ricky drive a cab.”
“Did you see a kid with a yellow shirt?”
“Ricky call me about a hour ago and say some kid give him a hundred-dollar bill take him to Plaquemines Parish. I was sayin, Man, that’s a long trip on a good day. He said, People packin up and business slow—I take him to Mars if he pay me.”
PART THREE
Even the smallest of creatures carries a sun in its eyes.
—ANTONIO PORCHIA
AZURE
I HAD FORGOTTEN HOW BIG IT WAS. The end of the earth. The whole of river and sky and marsh and swamp, the wind and grass, and everywhere the woods.
My father’s woods. But he stared out the window, impassive, while he drove. No more stories.
What would I say to Victor now? I’d been telling him stories for days—and they hadn’t been enough. What words would make him throw away the gun and smile again? Make him say, “Fervid, fervent, feverish, dervish, derivative”?
A hundred miles from New Orleans to the mouth of the Mississippi, they used to say. When we crossed over the bridge to the west bank, the river seemed even wider than it had that morning. The river, the barges and tugboats, the ragged trees along the edge of the water—all seemed still in the midday heat as if under a glass dome.
The bridge was crowded with people leaving the city. We went south, on Highway 23 through Gretna. Traffic was like LA, both sides jammed. The windows were open on the Corsica, and the heat from exhaust, from the asphalt, and from the sky was all around us. Trucks were crammed full of faces, and cars full of boxes and black plastic trash bags like fat pleated slugs pressed against the windows. “You sure we can get back out before the hurricane?” I asked my father.
My father looked at the oncoming traffic. “They headed east to Missippi or west to Texas. When we find him, we go to Lafayette.”
We kept south, past English Turn, then into Belle Chasse. The gas stations were crowded with cars and people carrying gas cans.
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