Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

Words flow across the tiny cramped pages, spinning a tale of how the tack, pounded in at an angle just so, remains static until the curve heading out onto the freeway, where the wheel turns and the bike leans and the head of the tack finally hits the pavement, driven deeper. Bang! The tire has blown! Out of control, the motorcycle is down. Rich is sliding. My God! My God! His helmet pops off and bounces across two lanes of freeway traffic. The motorcycle is spinning now; Rich’s protective leathers begin to tear, leaving black marks on the pale concrete, hot and lumpy like a black crayon dragging across sandpaper. Leather is rasped away; flesh meets the road. Crayon marks turn from black to red. The driver of an eighteen-wheeler, high on methamphetamines, barrels down the highway, unaware of the man and motorcycle spinning toward his speeding rig. Look out! Look—

“Lover Girl? Have you been in the garage?” Rich’s murmuring voice, always pitched a decibel or so lower than the threshold of human hearing, thus forcing the unfortunate listener to say “What?” several times just to make audible something not worth hearing anyway, wisps down the short hall between the garage and the kitchen, where Jeannie sits at the counter.

“The garage? No. Why?” she calls as his rubber-soled slip-ons shuff-shuffle down the hall.

The pages. She shoves them into the Osterizer and pushes Puree . Jammed. A pint of milk. Bingo. Pasta. “Thankyoubabyjesus.”

Rich’s bald head on its Ichabod Crane neck pokes around the corner. “My things. In the garage. Did you touch them?” Rich hates her to move his things.

“No, sweetheart.”

“Dinner?” he asks, eyeing the Osterizer.

Jeannie nods, too scared to talk.

Rich settles on a stool, his pale bulbous eyes fixed on her. Under the blue stare Jeannie pours the mixture into a casserole dish with pasta and sauce from a bottle and sets the oven to three-fifty.

Rich likes it. “Happy tummy,” he murmurs as he eats, eyes glued to Fear Factor contestants on the television gagging down pig bowels in cockroach sauce.

GDMFSOB , Jeannie chants in her mind as she surreptitiously makes herself a ham-and-cheese sandwich and takes it to bed.

Rich stays up till three, as he often does. Jeannie has learned to sleep. She knows if she tiptoes down the hall like a curious child on Christmas Eve night and peeks in the piled mess he calls his office, Good Old Rich will be hunkered in front of his computer screen, bald head nestled between hunched shoulders like an ostrich egg in a lumpy nest, watching the X-rated cavortings of what he insists is not pornography but Adult Content Material.

Sleep is good.

Plotting is better.

The next day, armed with information from the library’s computer — so there will be no history on her own — Jeannie cultures botulism. It is surprisingly easy and naturally deadly. Perfect. Bad salmon. The GDMFSOB loves salmon. She doesn’t. Perfect. Until she gets hold of the pen and out it comes: Rich reeling out of the marital bed, dragging himself to the bathroom, Jeannie pretending to sleep as his calls grow ever weaker. She dialing 911, but alas! Too late! Weeping prettily as she tells the kind, attractive, young policeman how she took an Ambien and can’t remember anything until, gulp, sigh, she woke to find this. Mea culpa, mea culpa, but not really...

Damning, damning, damning, the words rattle over page after page.

Shuff-shuffle. The bald pate, the watery blue eyes. “Sketching a new sculpture?” Rich is oh-so-supportive of her work. He needs the money for his lifestyle.

“Sketching,” Jeannie manages as she snatches up the pages.

Rich turns on the television. It’s Thursday. Survivor is on Thursdays. Rich never misses Survivor .

“What’s for dinner?”

“Salmon.” Perfect but for the incriminating compulsion.

The Osterizer: olive oil, pesto, onion.

“Dinner is served.”

“Lover Girl, the salmon smells funny. Did you get fresh?”

“Fresh.”

“The pesto is great. Happy tummy.”

Over subsequent days Jeannie drips acid on brake lines and writes, melts off the tips of his épées and writes. Osterizes and seasons and serves.

And Rich lives. Thrives. Like the cat who came back the very next day. Jeannie cannot get her hands on an atom bomb.

Damn .

Nothing .

Damn .

Rich is hunkered on the sofa eating lasagna of hamburger, cheese, and the pages detailing how she greased the feet of the extension ladder before asking him to take a look at the chimney, when Jeannie realizes that, as a murderess, she’s a bust. Rich is protected by angels. Or demons. Or stupidity.

Suicide returns as an option. She can’t love. She can’t leave. She can’t live.

Damn .

Guns are too messy. Hanging too painful. Pills. Being with Rich for eight years has driven her to a veritable cornucopia: Ambien, Effexor, Desyrel, Xanax — all good traceable drugs. Surely if she takes them all at once...

The nagging of Big Brother on the forty-two-inch TV whines into the bedroom, where Jeannie, tuna sandwich untouched, sits in bed, sixty-two pills in pink, white, and yellow cupped in her palm, bottled water on the nightstand. Usually she sleeps nude, but tonight she has put on a nice pair of pajamas: discreet, modest. Lord knew how she might sprawl and froth. Better to be on the safe side.

Suicide.

So be it .

Rich had won.

Jeannie tips all sixty-two pills into her mouth and reaches for the water.

“Lover Girl?” Rich stands in the bedroom door. He looks peaked, as Jeannie’s mother might say.

“What?” she mumbles around the deadly sleep in her mouth.

“Unhappy tummy,” he moans.

He runs for the bathroom. Jeannie spits out the pills.

“Haven’t taken a dump in days,” he calls genteelly through the open bathroom door. Rich never closes the bathroom door. In fact, he makes deposits while she showers, brushes her teeth, suffocating, stifling deposits.

“Oh,” she calls with mechanical sympathy.

Two days later Rich is dead. Jeannie dials 911.

“Impacted bowel,” the coroner tells her. “Was your husband eating anything unusual?”

“Murder,” Jeannie might have said, but she didn’t.

(Originally published in 2006)

Ninth Ward

I grew up in the Big Sleazy, uptown, off Magazine, amongst live oak trees and gangsters and musicians and bougainvillea the Christian Brothers said was put there to remind us of Christ’s blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.

My best friends were Tony and Miles Cardo. Their mother made her living shampooing the hair of corpses in a funeral parlor on Tchoupitoulas. I was with them the afternoon they found a box of human arms someone at the Tulane medical school left by the campus incinerator. Tony stuffed the arms in a big bag of crushed ice, and the next day, at five o’clock, when all the employees from the cigar factory were loading onto the St. Claude streetcar, him and Miles hung the arms from hand straps and the backs of seats all over the car. People started screaming their heads off and clawing their way out the doors. A big fat black guy climbed out the window and crashed on top of a sno-ball cart. Tony and Miles, those guys were a riot.

Tony was known as the Johnny Wadd of the Mafia because he had a flopper on him that looked like a fifteen-inch chunk of radiator hose. All three of us joined the Crotch and went to Vietnam, but Tony was the one who couldn’t deal with some stuff he saw in a ville not far from Chu Lai. Tony had the Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars but volunteered to work in the mortuary so he wouldn’t have to see things like that anymore.