Thomas Adcock - New Orleans Noir

Some of the girls said they didn’t like it but they had to do it to keep a man, but Rita liked it. She liked feeling him in her mouth and liked the soft, slightly salty taste of his sperm. As with most of the girls she grew up around, Rita knew there were only two ways out for most women: one was to hitch your wagon to a man on the move and the other was to luck up and get a good job if somebody put in a good word for you, or somebody who was related to you got you on somewhere. There generally wasn’t no other way out, and usually finding a good job, when all you had was, at best, a public high school diploma, was harder than finding a good man. At least every young girl had a body and most of them could attract a man for a good six or seven years after they made eighteen. There wasn’t nothing they taught you in high school that lasted that long.

“Wait a minute, baby. Go close the door, this is something for just me and you.”

When Rita turned away from Sil’s dick and made her first move toward the door, she saw little Paul standing there wide-eyed. She never said a word to him, just closed the door in his face.

How could she tell Tyronne about all of that?

By the time Rita discovered she was pregnant, she and Sil had already broken up. Her turn was over and it was time for another high school cutie to hang on Sil. And when Samuel was born, Sil was in prison. Rita didn’t even bother trying to contact him. You ride it till it’s through, and when it’s over you let it go.

Rita snapped back to the present and began pulling clothes, boxes, and whatnot out of the closet, setting them on the floor beside her in three distinct piles. One pile was clothes she would give away. One pile was stuff she would throw away, sneakers, two old pairs of underwear, stuff like that, and a third pile — well, not really a pile, just a couple of things — a third stack was memorabilia she would keep. Sammy’s drawing notebooks mainly and a neat stack of comic books he liked to read. Rita didn’t know why she felt it important to keep the short stack of comic books, but somehow these things reminded her of Sammy more than even his picture on the bedroom dresser.

Rita lovingly looked through Sammy’s notebooks. He had two that were full and one only partially complete. The partially complete one had the best drawings and also had a phone number written on the inside cover.

She had noticed the number immediately, because, unlike everything else in the notebook, it was written in ink and underlined.

Maybe this number held the key to who killed him. Rita believed it was Snowflake but she had no proof.

“Girl, he like you. Look how he looking at you.”

“LaToya, I got a baby already. Less he ready to be a daddy and a lover, I don’t even want to hear nothing.”

“Girl, he kinda cute. I wish he would look at me like that.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“What you mean, ‘whatever’? That man got a job. He a security guard.”

“Yeah, and since he got a job, he probably got a woman.”

Rita and LaToya went up to the window together to cash their Shoney’s paychecks. LaToya kept eyeing Tyronne. He was kind of built, too. LaToya cashed her check first and stepped away while Rita cashed hers.

When they got outside, LaToya burst out laughing.

“Girl, what’s so funny?”

“You gon’ see.”

“No, tell me now. What up?”

“You gon’ see, when he call you.”

“When who call me?”

“Tyronne.”

“Tyronne who? What you talking about?”

“I’m talking about that security guard in the bank who had them juicy lips.”

“Call me... What you talking about? He don’t even know me.”

“Well, he got your number.”

“How he got my number?”

“’Cause while you was cashing your check, I told him that you liked him but you was shy and that you told me to give him your number.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“586-8540. Rita Deslonde.”

“Oh, you wrong for that,” Rita said, and chased LaToya a quarter of the way down the block.

Now, as she held Tyronne’s revolver in her hand, Rita had to smile as she thought back to how they had gotten together. He had called. He had asked for a date, and Rita decided he was all right when he didn’t hesitate about taking her and her eleven-year-old son Samuel to the Audubon Zoo.

What she liked most about Tyronne was the way he talked to her about his life and his experiences — not just his dreams but also his fears.

“So, Tyronne, I can’t believe you don’t have a girlfriend already.”

“Believe it or not, it’s true.”

“How come?”

“I guess ’cause a lot of girls think I’m kind of square or something.”

“Well, after what all I done seen, square seems kind of nice to me.”

“We’ll see.”

Rita smiled, thinking about just how square Tyronne actually was. He wasn’t much of a lover. He would roll on top of her and be through almost as soon as they got started. But that was okay, she could teach him how to take his time.

She also had to teach him how to get high. He said he never like smoking “that stuff” all that much. With him around, a nickel bag lasted a long time. They might smoke once a week or so. Gradually, Rita just gave it up, unless she was under a lot of stress.

The only thing they ever fought about was keeping a gun in the house. Rita knew having a weapon went hand in hand with being a security guard, but she just didn’t like the idea of one in the house with a child who was always snooping into everything. Finally, Tyronne hit on the idea of keeping the gun in a lock box. She had a key and Tyronne had a key. Rita could live with that.

Rita slid Tyronne’s gun into her purse, closed the box, covered it back up with clothing, and slid the second dresser drawer fully closed. Then she turned around in the dim bedroom. It would soon be dusk. She had no words to tell Tyronne about Sammy, about his father — well, she had told him that Sammy was the result of a brief fling when she was seventeen years old and that she had never told the man that he was the boy’s father. That was true. However, Rita hadn’t told Tyronne that Silas Moore was the father, or that Silas was in prison. Nor, of course, had she told Tyronne that Snowflake was Silas’s baby brother. New Orleans was such a small town, all the poor people knew each other, or knew somebody who knew some...

Her past wasn’t pretty and there was no way she wanted to share the foolishness of her youth with Tyronne. He wouldn’t be able to deal with it. It would haunt him. He was a good man but... well, it would hurt him too much to hear certain details of her life. Plus, he had no way of understanding some things. Rita remembered a conversation about a news show on Channel 4.

“Well, goddamn, look at that. That girl can’t be no more than sixteen or seventeen and she caught up in a drug ring.”

“Tee, when it’s all around you—”

“It was all around me when I grew up. But I mean, she’s a girl...”

“Well, the drug dealer is probably her pimp. But sometimes it ain’t even about being no prostitute or nothing. Those girls just be starved for affection and those guys give them dresses and jewelry and stuff and they think they’re in love.”

“Yeah, and after they get pre—”

“You mean like I got pregnant with Sammy?”

The question hung in the air for a long time.

After about a minute of silence, Tyronne spoke up: “So, I guess you’re telling me you’re like that girl.”

“No, I’m telling you I understand what that girl is going through and I don’t think you do. I think you see the condition she’s in only from the outside, and me, I feel the condition she’s in on the inside.”