Thomas Adcock - New Orleans Noir

Paul’s down here too. He’s looking back at me, not at the barstools. Blood’s coming out of his ear. They threw him down hard. He’s not blinking. Shock.

Billy’s voice, from a long distance: “That’s all I’ve got.”

I think of that scene from Apocalypse Now on the boat, when they suddenly go crazy and shoot that family. That’s what happens now. I feel the explosions in the floor, barstools clattering to the ground, specks of red like schools of fish. Hearing’s gone but for the deafening beating of my heart.

I move my head, just enough. Blue jeans, baggy, riding low, striped boxers. The fucker who opened fire.

There’s no conscious decision made, no preparation. I drop him. My right leg comes up in a scissor kick, behind the knee, fucker goes down. I see the gun hit the wall behind me, but can’t hear a thing. I imagine a satisfying clatter.

I’m up. The three other dudes stand by the door, aghast. Can’t believe that white motherfucker dropped their boy. Boys, I can’t believe it either .

Behind the bar, Billy’s slumped over the cooler, green jersey spotted with red. He blinks, but I’m not sure if there’s anything there.

I rush the brothers by the door. They’re out ahead of me, into the wall of rain. Cold water streams across the street, up onto the sidewalk and neutral ground. They’re gone.

Ah, but not the guy I left back in the bar. With his gun.

Before I realize I’m running, I’m halfway down the street. Rain blows into my eyes. I’m going to fall. I’m going to trip. The last thing I’ll see through rain-washed eyes, black motherfucker with a gun.

Yet there’s my car, water coming up to the rims — shit, I got this far, maybe I’ll make it. I start to fumble for the keys.

Nah. I’ll never make it.

The brothers on the porch. I take the stairs two at a time, and I’m up, dry, they’re on either side of me rising slowly, eyes wide, mouths moving. Something registers behind me, and their hands dart into their waistbands.

Pieces brought up, aiming toward the bottom of the stairs.

I turn around.

There’s just the one, inside the gate. Straw firmly in mouth. The dude lowers his gun. For the first time, he looks me in the eye. He smiles.

The current in the street is steady, rainwater halfway up to the knees. The man with the gun looks down, as if noticing the water for the first time, then slowly follows the current in the direction he came from. A wall of rain hits the street, and he vanishes into it.

Uptown

You only need two things to feel good at Newman School: Pappagallos that show your toe crack and a two-story brick house. Well, three things if you’re Jewish. If you’re Jewish, you have to go to Sunday school. I don’t have any of those things, but I can fake the third one. Thirty-seven out of sixty-two kids in my class at Newman are Jewish, if you count Carolyn and Shira, and strangely enough, you don’t think about them as being Jewish because they had bat mitzvahs. They also came from public school in seventh grade and are fat and don’t care. It was Carolyn, who goes to a synagogue I’ve never heard of, who told me just to say that I go to Gates of Prayer. It’s reform, but nobody’s ever heard of it.

I keep working on my mother to buy me Pappagallos, but she says I get my shoes free and I should brag about it instead of mope. My great-grandfather owned the Imperial Shoe Store, which is on the corner of Bourbon and Canal Streets, and my grandfather gets such a deep discount that he buys all my shoes. Imperial is one of those stores that sells sturdy shoes like Stride Rites. Okay, but I don’t understand why they waited until Capezios went out of style to get them in. I can have all the Capezios I want, now that I don’t want them.

I don’t think we’re poor, but I can’t really tell. We live in a house that’s actually old and pretty, but it’s wood and one-story so it doesn’t even matter that my grandmother pays for us to have a maid. Well, she pays twenty-five dollars a week, but after a while Rena wanted a raise, and my grandmother said no, so my father pays her extra every week, taking it out of what he would spend on dry cleaning his suit. That’s the way it is with my grandparents. My grandmother paid my tuition to Newman for kindergarten, and then she said she didn’t feel like it anymore, so I’ve been on scholarship ever since. Which means my daddy has to reveal his income every year. Newman is very low-key about it, but my mother’s not. I have to have very good grades. Which is pretty easy because this is more a school for rich kids than for smart kids, in spite of what the whole city thinks. I know for a fact that if your parents knew the admissions director when you were coming into kindergarten, she asked you which train was red and which one was black, and if you got it right, you were in. She came from a very old Jewish family and had nothing better to do than give admissions tests for Newman. She still does it.

There’s a slumber party at Louise Silverman’s house tonight, and I’m invited. I have been at this school for over ten years, and this is the first time I’m friends with all the snobbish girls. My mother is thrilled, and I am disgusted, but I’m also thrilled, to tell the truth. Louise lives on Octavia Street, and two of the other girls can actually walk to her house. Their houses look almost the same, and I think that’s a message to me that if you want to be the right kind of person, then you should have that kind of house. Brick two-story. A plain rectangle. My mother probably thinks so too, but my father is the manager of a supermarket, and she knows crummy shoes and Rena’s twenty-five dollars a week is probably her limit with her parents.

Louise and Meryl and both of the Lindas are failing Geometry. For a while, they took turns calling me up for homework help, then I started going over to their houses after school, and finally they quit pretending they could do anything without me. This is how I know people at Newman aren’t smart. For Monday’s homework we have to prove the congruence of the two triangles in a parallelogram. I’m headed over to Louise’s early and we’re going to work on it. She’ll just hand it over to the other three. They won’t be able to do it in Mrs. Walter’s class when she comes at them, and they won’t be able to do it on tests, and from what I’ve heard Mrs. Prescott will threaten them with public school, but at homework time they will think I’m giving them hope.

My mother has packed me my gold silk pajamas that my grandmother bought me on her last trip to Japan. “Those girls are going to be so jealous,” she says. I think there’s a chance she might be right, though I also think that even gold silk shoes from Japan would not hold up next to nice baby-blue leather Pappagallos.

I ask her to drop me off and not wait until someone opens the door. We have a 1956 Ford Fairlane sedan. I figure that if no one opens the door I can go ring another girl’s bell. It is better than being seen in a 1956 Ford Fairlane sedan.

Louise grabs my arm at the door and pulls me in, which is as close as she comes to affection. “We’ll do math right now,” she says, and I think she must see that I’m excited, too, by an idea I’ve come up with on the way over. If Mrs. Silverman sees this little lesson I’ve made up for Louise, she will decide I am the best girl in all of Newman School and should be the only one Louise is friends with. She might tell all the other mothers, and then I’ll be popular. These girls aren’t like me. They definitely plan to grow up to be just like their mothers.

While I pull my math book out of my overnight bag, I ask Louise to get me a couple of envelopes, please. She looks at me like I’ve asked her to get me cleaning supplies. This is not something she’s ever found necessary. “Mama!” she hollers, and goes running upstairs. Her mother comes down to the kitchen and rummages in a drawer in the butler’s pantry. These two-story brick houses fascinate me. They have rooms that make sense only for rich people who lived a hundred years ago, but they were actually built just ten years ago. I ask for scissors too. Louise’s maid stands at the sink watching us with her arms folded. She’s not doing anything but watching us. Her expression says she could do this geometry if someone asked her.