Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

Chris’s eyes crinkled up out of sight the way they had before. “I might could just call you Miss Yellow Eyes. Old Miss Yellow Eyes.”

Lena just wrinkled her nose at him. In that light her eyes did look yellow, but usually if a man said something like that she’d walk out. Not this time. She just poured herself a cup of coffee, and when Chris pulled out a chair for her, she sat down, next to him.

I looked at them and I thought: They look like a white couple. And they did. Unless you had sharp trained eyes, like the people down here do, you would have thought they were white and you would have thought they made a handsome couple.

Chris looked over at me and lifted an eyebrow. Just one, the left one; it reached up high and arched in his forehead. “What you looking so solemn for, Celia?”

“Nothing.”

And Lena asked: “You work with Pete at the railroad?”

“Sure,” he said, and smiled at her. Only, more than his mouth was smiling. “We go swinging on and off those old tenders like hell afire. Jumping on and off those cars.”

“I reckon that’s hard work.”

He laughed this time out loud. “I ain’t exactly little.” He bent forward and hunched his shoulders up a little so she could see the way the muscles swelled against the cloth of his shirt.

“You got fine shoulders, Mr. Watkin,” she said. “I reckon they’re even better than Pete there.”

Pete grunted and finished his coffee. But she was right. Pete’s shoulders were almost square out from his neck. Chris’s weren’t. They looked almost sloped and hunched the way flat bands of muscles reached up into his neck.

Chris shrugged and stood up. “Do you reckon you would like to walk around the corner for a couple of beers?”

“Okay,” Pete said.

Lena lifted one eyebrow, just the way he had done. “Mr. Watkin, you do look like you celebrating something.”

“I sure am,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“I plain tell you later, kid.”

They must have been gone near two hours because Ma came home before they did. I’d fallen asleep. I’d just bent my head over for a minute to rest my eyes, and my forehead touched the soft pages of the book — Treasure Island . I’d got it from the library at school; it was dog-eared and smelled faintly of peanuts.

Ma was saying: “Lord, honey, why ain’t you gone to bed?”

I lifted my head and rubbed my face until I could see Ma’s figure in the doorway. “I’m waiting for them,” I said.

Ma took off her coat and hung it up on the hook behind the door. “Who them?”

“Lena,” I said, “and Pete. And Chris.” I knew what she was going to say, so I answered first. “He’s a friend of Pete, and Lena likes him.”

Ma was frowning very slightly. “I plain wonder iffen he belong to that club.”

“I don’t know.”

It was called the Better Days Club and the clubroom was the second floor of a little restaurant on Tulane Avenue. I’d never gone inside, though I had passed the place: a small wood building that had once been a house but now had a sign saying Lefty’s Restaurant and Café in green letters on a square piece of board that hung out over the sidewalk and creaked in the wind. And I’d seen something else too when I passed: another sign, a small one tucked into the right center corner of the screen door, a sign that said White Entrance to Rear . If the police ever saw that they’d have found an excuse to raid the place and break up everything in it.

Ma kept asking Pete what they did there. Most times he didn’t bother to answer. Once when she’d just insisted, he’d said, “We’re fixing to have better times come.” And sometimes he’d bring home little papers, not much more than book-size, with names like New Day and Daily Sentinel and Watcher .

Ma would burn the papers if she got hold of them. But she couldn’t really stop Pete from going to the meetings. She didn’t try too hard because he was so good to her and gave her part of his paycheck every week. With that money and what she made we always had enough. We didn’t have to worry about eating, way some of our neighbors did.

Pete was a strange fellow — moody and restless and not happy. Sometimes — when he was sitting quiet, thinking or resting — there’d be a funny sort of look on his face (he was the darkest of us all): not hurt, not fear, not determination, but a mixture of all three.

Ma was still standing looking at me with a kind of puzzled expression on her face when we heard them, the three of them, coming home. They’d had a few beers and, what with the cold air outside, they all felt fine. They were singing too; I recognized the tune; it was the one from the jukebox around the corner in that bar.

Ma said: “They got no cause to be making a racket like that. Somebody might could call the police.” Ma was terribly afraid of the police. She’d never had anything to do with them, but she was still afraid. Every time a police car passed in the street outside, she’d duck behind the curtain and peek out. And she’d walk clear around a block so she wouldn’t come near one of the blue uniforms.

The three came in the kitchen door, Pete first and then Lena and Chris.

Pete had his arms full of beer cans; he let them all fall out on the table. “Man, I like to drop them sure.”

“We brought some for you, Ma,” Lena said.

“And Celia too,” Chris added.

“It’s plenty late,” Ma said, looking hard at Chris.

“You don’t have to work tomorrow,” I said.

So we stayed up late. I don’t know how late. Because the beer made me feel fine and sick all at once. First everything was swinging around inside my head and then the room too. Finally I figured how to handle it. I caught hold and let myself ride around on the big whooshing circles. There were times when I’d forget there was anybody else in the room, I’d swing so far away.

“Why, just you look at Celia there,” Ma said, and everybody turned and watched me.

“You sure high, kid,” Chris said.

“No, I’m not.” I was careful to space the words, because I could tell by the way Ma had run hers together that she was feeling the beer too.

Pete had his guitar in his lap, flicking his fingers across the strings. “You an easy drunk.” He was smiling, the way he seldom did. “Leastways you ain’t gonna cost some man a lotta money getting you high.”

“That absolutely and completely right.” Ma bent forward, with her hands one on each knee and the elbows sticking out, like a skinny football player. “You plain got to watch that when boys come to take you out.”

“They ain’t gonna want to take me out.”

“Why not, kid?” Chris had folded his arms on the tabletop and was leaning his chin on them. His face was flushed so that his eyes only looked bluer.

“Not after they see Lena.” I lifted my eyes up from his and let them drop over where I knew Lena was sitting. I just had time to notice the way the electric light made her skin gold and her eyes gold and her hair too, so that she seemed all one blurry color. And then the whole world tipped over and I went skidding off — but feeling extra fine because Chris was sitting just a little bit away next to Lena and she was looking at him like she’d never looked at anybody else before.

Next thing I knew, somebody was saying: “Celia, look.” There was a photograph in front of me. A photograph of a young man, in a suit and tie, leaning back against a post, with his legs crossed, grinning at the camera.

I looked up. Ma was holding the photograph in front of me. It was in a wide silver-colored frame, with openwork, roses or flowers of some sort.

Pete began laughing. “Just you look at her,” he said. “She don’t even know her own daddy.”