Thomas Adcock - New Orleans Noir

“No yardage gain?”

“Yeah.”

Lew looked over at Reverend Ernie in the backseat of the sergeant’s car and nodded to him. Ernie looked confused, as though he didn’t recognize him.

“So now he sends in the last team, the New Orleans detectives, you know. Old-time guys, polyester pants and skinny ties. They disappear into the woods and nobody hears a thing for about three hours.”

The bartender returned and stood in front of Lew. Lew looked at his glass and saw that it was empty again. How many was that? The bartender rapped his knuckles sharply on the bar twice, indicating that the next round was on the house. He gestured broadly at the row of bottles behind him. “Make a wish.”

Lew looked at him and smiled for the first time that day. Make a wish.

He wished that his hands didn’t shake so much in the morning. He wished that he didn’t hurt all the time, like there was an animal dying inside him. He wished that his daughter wasn’t living in Algiers with a drug dealer who might or might not be a member of the gang Lew just got assigned to monitor. He wished that he wasn’t having an affair with his doctor’s receptionist. He wished his wife didn’t know.

“Jameson,” he said, still smiling. The bartender poured generously.

He wished he wasn’t partnered with Tommy Mulligan. He wished he could still feel drunk when he drank, not just the dulling of pain. He wished he hadn’t stopped off tonight, or that he hadn’t had this last drink, or that he wouldn’t have the ones that would follow. He wished that he wouldn’t have to drive home tonight to Metarie as he did most nights, with his shield case open in his lap, badge and ID card readily visible for when he got pulled over. Mostly he wished he didn’t have three years to go. Three years was too long. It was too damn long to be stuck with the likes of Tommy Mulligan, a bad drunk, and a loud, stupid braggart. A man who couldn’t hold his tongue for three years. A man who would crack if pushed, even slightly.

He wished he didn’t make decisions that were wrong; knowing they were wrong, feeling compelled to make them anyway.

He wished there hadn’t been three men on the scene before he arrived today, and he wished there hadn’t been three knives under the body when he’d turned it over. Three knives stupidly, amateurishly tossed, practically on top of one another. He wished he didn’t feel the sickening weight of two of the knives in his left pocket. He had left the one that most closely resembled Ernie’s description. He wished he had six months to go, like Ernie, instead of three years. Three years if he could even get Tommy Mulligan past a grand jury without stepping on his own dick.

The bartender replaced Lew’s drink again as Tommy turned and winked at him.

“So, after like three hours, there’s suddenly all this fucking noise. Bang. Crash. Whap, whap, whap.” Tommy emphasized every sound by pounding his hand — palm flat — on the bar. “The two New Orleans boys come out of the woods, and they’re carrying this deer. And the deer is like, all beat up. He’s been worked over. So the deer looks at the mayor, and the deer says,” and Tommy paused, savoring the moment. He was just telling a joke in a bar. Not a care in the world. He was beaming. “‘Okay, okay, I’m a rabbit.’”

Lew raised his glass and let the laughter behind him blend in with the background bar din. It sounded distant, and somehow warm and cozy. Inviting. He wished he was there with everyone enjoying himself. He thought about where he’d toss the knives into the lake out at the West End tomorrow. He drank half his drink in a swallow and held the glass in front of him, looking through the amber fluid and ice at the bar mirror. Tommy Mulligan nudged him, hard, and some of the drink spilled from the glass and ran down his arm. He felt it inside his shirtsleeve.

“Get it?” Tommy said. “Do you get it? ‘I’m a rabbit.’”

“Sure,” Lew said, feeling the cold liquid almost to his elbow. He continued to look through his trembling glass at the faraway party in the mirror.

“I get it,” he said, “I’m a rabbit.”

University District

She vomited on Magazine Street.

She stumbled in. The sign read, Miss Mae’s. A bar. She and the other white girls, their angular faces melting and disobedient like a blade, a glacier. She and the other white girls, laughing, laughing and stumbling about on the corner of Magazine Street in Uptown New Orleans.

Yes, they laughed and stumbled about with their angular faces pointing eastward; everything about them — the whiteness of them collectively — caught the pupil of the eye and pinned it down. One of them, the girl on the edge of the crowd, stood dark-haired and falling apart; she spoke of her ex, the one who dumped her.

What was his name?

Schevoski, Schevoski was his name and she hated him now.

The tail end of her yellow hair stood away from her shoulders, parted in the middle; there was a strand in the corner of her mouth, her lips purred upward, as if she could not help but notice that she was the dying kind in the crowd; he had, indeed, dumped her, gone back to Russia or some other place where boys go when they’re done with you.

Where had she met him?

At the university, at Tulane, where she’d turned the corner of St. Charles and some other street she could not remember, now that she was drunk, now that she stood amidst the other Tulane girls with their Tulane bodies and wished, she wished she could evaporate.

Yes, now she remembered, she had turned the corner of Tulane and some other street and she wanted something to occur, something that girls her age wanted to happen without having to call out to it; help me, it whispered.

And there, Schevoski stood.

He had been pronouncing a singular word, like beast , and saw her, standing there before him; this is when he asked her: Can you? he asked in the beginning, but then, then when he saw how vulnerable she was, he said: Say it, beast.

Beast, she whispered. Beast.

How did he look to her now? Could she recall the drunken weave of his posture when she met him? It was that, that, that cooing sound he made, as if he were calling out to her, Come here, there is something I need you to do.

For no one needed her, not really.

Or was it that he had no face at all? Even when her friends asked her to describe the boy she’d come across at the corner of St. Charles and some other street, she could not remember — Napoleon, was it? — she could only say that he was from Russia and something had bitten her about the flesh.

He was invisible.

It was no wonder that because she had felt like this, that he was invisible, he wove around her a feeling of powerlessness. He had crept up behind her, just behind the ear, and let her go.

Now, now that she and the white girls stood near the edge of the jukebox at Miss Mae’s, they, too, cooed, as Schevoski had cooed, and lifted their angular faces upward; a water stain the shape of a guitar lay flat on the ceiling.

One of the girls whispered: Look where he died.

And they all laughed again when she whispered, Look where he died, all laughing and shouldering each other, as if they knew, inwardly, that this was Schevoski and that thing he called music; the beast was dead.

They looked at her, the broken-hearted girl who had driven them here, and yelled: Look where he died, Look where he died. Schevoski. Schevoski is dead!

Why had they been so cruel? the girl thought. Because she could not remember one street? One word? Because this water-stained guitar was his voice and mind? Why ever had she driven them here?