Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

The east was blushing and brightening. The wind, himself a vagrant rover, saluted his brother upon the cheek. Some wild geese, high above, gave cry. A rabbit skipped along the path before him, free to turn to the right or to the left as his mood should send him. The river slid past, and certainly no one could tell the ultimate abiding place of its waters.

A small, ruffled, brown-breasted bird, sitting upon a dog-wood sapling, began a soft, throaty, tender little piping in praise of the dew which entices foolish worms from their holes; but suddenly he stopped, and sat with his head turned sidewise, listening.

From the path along the levee there burst forth a jubilant, stirring, buoyant, thrilling whistle, loud and keen and clear as the cleanest notes of the piccolo. The soaring sound rippled and trilled and arpeggioed as the songs of wild birds do not; but it had a wild free grace that, in a way, reminded the small brown bird of something familiar, but exactly what he could not tell. There was in it the bird call, or reveille, that all birds know; but a great waste of lavish, unmeaning things that art had added and arranged, besides, and that were quite puzzling and strange; and the little brown bird sat with his head on one side until the sound died away in the distance.

The little bird did not know that the part of that strange warbling that he understood was just what kept the warbler without his breakfast; but he knew very well that the part he did not understand did not concern him, so he gave a little flutter of his wings and swooped down like a brown bullet upon a big fat worm that was wriggling along the levee path.

(Originally published in 1941)

Upper Quarter

It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans.

There was a bartender whose mouth and eyes curved downward from the divide of his baby-pink nose, as if he had combed them down, like his hair; he always just said nothing. The seats at his bar were black oilcloth knobs, worn and smooth and as much alike as six pebbles on the beach, and yet the two customers had chosen very particularly the knobs they would sit on. They had come in separately out of the wet, and had each chosen an end stool, and now sat with the length of the little bar between them. The bartender obviously did not know either one; he rested his eyes by closing them...

The fat customer, with a rather affable look about him, said he would have a rye. The unshaven young man with the shaking hands, though he had come in first, only looked fearfully at a spot on the counter before him until the bartender, as if he could hear silent prayer, covered the spot with a drink.

The fat man swallowed, and began at once to look a little cozy and prosperous. He seemed ready to speak, if the moment came...

There was a calm roll of thunder, no more than a shifting of the daily rain clouds over Royal Street.

Then — “Rain or shine,” the fat man spoke, “she’ll be there.”

The bartender stilled his cloth on the bar, as if mopping up made a loud noise, and waited.

“Why, at the Palace of Pleasure,” said the fat man. He was really more heavy and solid than he was simply fat.

The bartender leaned forward an inch on his hand.

“The lady will be at the Palace of Pleasure,” said the fat man in his drowsy voice. “The lady with the purple hat.”

Then the fat man turned on the black knob, put his elbow on the counter, and rested his cheek on his hand, where he could see all the way down the bar. For a moment his eyes seemed dancing there, above one of those hands so short and so plump that you are always counting the fingers... really helpless-looking hands for so large a man.

The young man stared back without much curiosity, looking at the affable face much the way you stare out at a little station where your train is passing through. His hand alone found its place on his small glass.

“Oh, the hat she wears is a creation,” said the fat man, almost dreamily, yet not taking his eyes from the young man. It was strange that he did not once regard the bartender, who after all had done him the courtesy of asking a polite question or two, or at least the same as asked. “A great and ancient and bedraggled purple hat.”

There was another rumble overhead. Here they seemed to inhabit the world that was just beneath the thunder. The fat man let it go by, lifting his little finger like a pianist. Then he went on.

“Sure, she’s one of those thousands of middle-aged women who come every day to the Palace, would not be kept away by anything on earth... Most of them are dull enough, drab old creatures, all of them, walking in with their big black purses held wearily by the handles like suitcases packed for a trip. No one has ever been able to find out how all these old creatures can leave their lives at home like that to gamble... what their husbands think... who keeps the house in order... who pays... At any rate, she is one like the rest, except for the hat, and except for the young man that always meets her there, from year to year... And I think she is a ghost.”

“Ghost!” said the bartender — noncommittally, just as he might repeat an order.

“For this reason,” said the fat man.

A reminiscent tone came into his voice which seemed to put the silent thin young man on his guard. He made the beginning of a gesture toward the bottle. The bartender was already filling his glass.

“In thirty years she has not changed,” said the fat man. “Neither has she changed her hat. Dear God, how the moths must have hungered for that hat. But she has kept it in full bloom on her head, that monstrosity — purple too, as if she were beautiful in the bargain. She has not aged, but she keeps her middle age. The young man, on the other hand, must change — I’m sure he’s not always the same young man. For thirty years,” he said, “she’s met a young man at the dice table every afternoon, rain or shine, at five o’clock, and gambles till midnight and tells him good-bye, and still it looks to be always the same young man — always young, but a little stale, a little tired... the smudge of a sideburn... She finds them, she does. She picks them. Where I don’t know, unless New Orleans, as I’ve always had a guess, is the birthplace of ready-made victims.”

“Who are you?” asked the young man. It was the sort of idle voice in which the greatest wildness sometimes speaks out at last in a quiet bar.

“In the Palace of Pleasure there is a little catwalk along beneath the dome,” said the fat man. His rather small, mournful lips, such as big men often have, now parted in a vague smile. “I am the man whose eyes look out over the gambling room. I am the armed man that everyone knows to be watching, at all they do. I don’t believe my position is dignified by a title.” Nevertheless, he looked rather pleased. “I have watched her every day for thirty years and I think she is a ghost. I have seen her murdered twice,” said the fat man.

The bartender’s enormous sad black eyebrows raised, like hoods on baby carriages, and showed his round eyes.

The fat man lifted his other fat little hand and studied, or rather showed off, a ruby ring that he wore on his little finger. “That carpet, if you have ever been there, in the Palace of Pleasure, is red, but from up above, it changes and gives off light between the worn crisscrossing of the aisles like the facets of a well-cut ruby,” he said, speaking in a declarative manner as if he had been waiting for a chance to deliver this enviable comparison. “The tables and chandeliers are far down below me, points in its interior... Life in the ruby. And yet somehow all that people do is clear and lucid and authentic there, as if it were magnified in the red lens, not made smaller. I can see everything in the world from my catwalk. You mustn’t think I brag...” He looked all at once from his ring straight at the young man’s face, which was as drained and white as ever, expressionless, with a thin drop of whiskey running down his cheek where he had blundered with his glass.