Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

Ma wasn’t interrupting him now. He went right ahead, choking on the words. “Chris boy, you fine and you brave and you ain’t run out on what you got to do. And you ain’t breathing neither. But you a man...”

Lena’s hand moved ever so slightly.

“Lena,” I said, “you all right?”

“Chris boy... you want to cross over... and you sure enough cross over... why, man, you sure cross over... but good, you cross over.”

“Lena,” I said, “don’t you pay any mind to him. He’s sort of crazy.”

In the kitchen Pete was saying: “Chris, you a man, sure... sure... you sure cross over... but ain’t you gonna come back for Lena? Ain’t you coming back to get her?”

I looked down and saw that my hand was shaking. My whole body was. It had started at my legs and come upward. I couldn’t see clearly either. Edges of things blurred together. Only one thing I saw clear: Chris lying still and dead.

“It didn’t get you nowhere, Chris boy,” Pete was giggling. “Being white and fine, where it got you? Where it got you? Dead and rotten.”

And Lena said: “Stop him, Chris.”

She said: “Stop him, Chris, please.”

I heard her voice, soft and low and pleading, the way she wouldn’t speak to anyone else, but only her husband.

Chris, dead on the other side of the world, covered with ground.

Pete was laughing. “Dead and gone, boy. Dead and gone.”

“Stop him, Chris,” Lena said, talking to somebody buried on the other side of the world. “Stop him, Chris.”

But I was the only one who heard her. Just me; just me.

You could see her come back from wherever she’d been. Her eyes blinked a couple of times slowly and when they looked at me, they saw me. Really saw me, her little sister. Not Chris, just Celia.

Slowly she pushed herself up from the bed and went into the kitchen, where Pete was still laughing.

Ma was sitting at the table, arms stretched out, head resting on them. She wasn’t crying anymore; it hardly looked like she was breathing.

“Dead and gone, man.” Pete was teetering his chair back and forth, tapping it against the wall, so that everything on the little shelf over his head shook and moved. He had his mouth wide open, so wide that his eyes closed.

Lena hit him, hard as she could with the flat of her hand, hit him right across the face. And then she brought her left hand up, remembering to make a fist this time. It caught him square in the chest.

I heard him gasp; then he was standing up and things were falling from the shelf overhead. Lena stumbled back. And right where her hand struck the floor was the picture of our father, the picture in the silver metal frame, the one Ma had got out the night Chris first came.

She had it in her hand when she scrambled back to her feet. She was crying now, because he was still laughing. From far away I could hear her gasping: “Damn, damn, damn, damn.” And she swung the picture frame in a wide arc at his laughing mouth. He saw it coming and forgot for just a moment and lifted his arm to cover his face. And the frame and glass smashed into his stub arm.

He screamed: not loud, just a kind of high-pitched gasp. And he turned and ran. I was in the way and he knocked me aside as he yanked open the door. He missed his footing on the steps and fell down into the alley. I could hear him out there, still screaming softly to himself with the pain: “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

Lena stood in the middle of the room, her hands hanging down empty at her sides. Her lip was cut; there was a little trickle of blood down the corner of her mouth. Her tongue came out, tasted, and then licked it away.

(Originally published in 1976)

Uptown

Dinner was on the table when the phone rang, and Joan just stared at me.

— Go ahead, answer it. Maybe they need you in Washington.

— I don’t want to get disbarred, I said. — More likely they need me at the Parish Prison.

I was closer than she was. It was Bertram Bijou, a deputy out in Jefferson Parish. He had a friend. With troubles. Being a lawyer, you find out that nobody has trouble, really. It’s always a friend.

— Naw, on the level, Bert said. — You know Howard Bedlow?

No, I didn’t know Howard Bedlow, but I would pretty soon.

They came to the house after supper. As a rule, I put people off when they want to come to the house. They’ve got eight hours a day to find out how to incorporate, write a will, pull their taxes down, or whatever. In the evening I like to sit quiet with Joan. We read and listen to Haydn or Boccherini and watch the light fade over uptown New Orleans. Sometimes, though I do not tell her, I like to imagine we are a late Roman couple sitting in our atrium in the countryside of England, not far from Londinium. It is always summer, and Septimus Severus has not yet begun to tax Britain out of existence. Still, it is twilight now, and there is nothing before us. We are young, but the world is old, and that is all right because the drive and the hysteria of destiny is past now, and we can sit and enjoy our garden, the twisted ivy, the huge caladiums, and if it is April, the daffodils that plunder our weak sun and sparkle across the land. It is always cool in my fantasy, and Joan crochets something for the center of our table, and I refuse to think of the burdens of administration that I will have to lift again tomorrow. They will wait, and Rome will never even know. It is always a hushed single moment, ageless and serene, and I am with her, and only the hopeless are still ambitious. Everything we will do has been done, and for the moment there is peace.

It is a silly fantasy, dreamed here in the heart of booming America, but it makes me happy, and so I was likely showing my mild irritation when Bert and his friend Howard Bedlow turned up. I tried to be kind. For several reasons. Bert is a nice man. An honest deputy, a politician in a small way, and perhaps what the Civil Law likes to call un bon pere du famille — though I think at Common Law Bert would be “an officious intermeddler.” He seems prone to get involved with people. Partly because he would like very much to be on the Kenner City Council one day, but, I like to imagine, as much because there lingers in the Bijou blood some tincture of piety brought here and nurtured by his French sires and his Sicilian and Spanish maternal ascendants. New Orleans has people like that. A certain kindness, a certain sympathy left over from the days when one person’s anguish or that of a family was the business of all their neighbors. Perhaps that fine and profound Catholic certainty of death and judgment which makes us all one.

And beyond approving Bert as a type, I have found that most people who come for law are in one way or another distressed: the distress of loss or fear, of humiliation or sudden realization. Or the more terrible distress of greed, appetite gone wild, the very biggest of deals in the offing, and O, my God, don’t let me muff it.

Howard Bedlow was in his late forties. He might have been the Celtic gardener in my imaginary Roman garden. Taller than average, hair a peculiar reddish gold more suited to a surfing king than to an unsuccessful car salesman, he had that appearance of a man scarce half made up that I had always associated with European workmen and small tradesmen. His cuffs were frayed and too short. His collar seemed wrong; it fit neither his neck nor the thin stringy tie he wore knotted more or less under it. Once, some years ago, I found, he had tried to make a go of his own Rambler franchise, only to see it go down like a gunshot animal, month by month, week by week, until at last no one, not even the manager of the taco place next door, would cash his checks or give him a nickel for a local phone call.