Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

“Thinking about Tony?” I say.

“Got a card from him last week. The postmark was Mexico City. He didn’t sign it, but I know it’s from him,” Miles says.

He lifts his strap undershirt off his chest and wipes a drop of sweat from the tip of his nose. His shoulders look dry and hard, the skin stretched tight on the bone; they’re just starting to powder with sunburn. He takes a drink of water from one of our milk jugs, rationing himself, swallowing each sip slowly.

“I thought you said Tony was in Argentina.”

“So he moves around. He’s got a lot of legitimate businesses now. He’s got to keep an eye on them and move around a lot.”

“Yeah, Tony was always hands-on,” I say, avoiding his eyes.

You know what death smells like? Fish blood that someone has buried in a garden of night-blooming flowers. Or a field mortuary during the monsoon season in a tropical country right after the power generators have failed. Or the buckets that the sugar-worker whores used to pour into the rain ditches behind their cribs on Sunday morning. If that odor comes to you on the wind or in your sleep, you tend to take special notice of your next sunrise.

I start looking at the boat and the water that goes to the horizon in all directions. My butt hurts from sitting on the spine of the house and the shingles burn the palms of my hands. Somewhere up in Orleans Parish I know there’s higher ground, an elevated highway sticking up on pilings, high-rise apartment buildings with roofs choppers can land on. Miles already knows what I’m thinking. “Wait till dark,” he says.

“Why?”

“There won’t be as many people who want the boat,” he says.

I look at him and feel ashamed of both of us.

A hurricane is supposed to have a beginning and an end. It tears the earth up, fills the air with flying trees and bricks and animals and sometimes even people, makes you roll up into a ball under a table and pray till drops of blood pop on your brow, then it goes away and lets you clean up after it, like somebody pulled a big prank on the whole town. But this one didn’t work that way. It’s killing in stages.

I see a diapered black baby in a tree that’s only a green smudge under the water’s surface. I can smell my neighbors in their attic. The odor is like a rat that has drowned in a bucket of water inside a superheated garage. A white guy floating by on an inner tube has a battery-powered radio propped on his stomach and tells us snipers have shot a policeman in the head and killed two Fish and Wildlife officers. Gangbangers have turned over a boat trying to rescue patients from Charity Hospital. The Superdome and the Convention Center are layered with feces and are without water or food for thousands of people who are seriously pissed off. A bunch of them tried to walk into Jefferson Parish and were turned back by cops who fired shotguns over their heads. The white-flight crowd doesn’t need any extra problems.

The guy in the inner tube says a deer was on the second floor of a house on the next street and an alligator ate it.

That’s supposed to be entertaining?

“You guys got anything to eat up there?” the guy in the inner tube asks.

“Yeah, a whole fucking buffet. I had it catered from Galatoire’s right before the storm,” Miles says to him.

That Miles.

Toward evening the sun goes behind the clouds and the sky turns purple and is full of birds. The Coast Guard choppers are coming in low over the water, the downdraft streaking a trough across the surface, the rescue guys swinging from cables like anyone could do what they do. They’re taking children and old and sick people out first and flying without rest. I love those guys. But Miles and me both know how it’s going to go. We’ve seen it before — the slick coming out of a molten sun, right across the canopy, automatic weapons fire whanging off the airframe, wounded grunts waiting in an LZ that North Vietnamese regulars are about to overrun. You can’t get everybody home, Chuck. That’s just the way it slides down the pipe sometimes.

A guy sitting on his chimney with Walkman ears on says the president of the United States flew over and looked down from his plane at us. Then he went on to Washington. I don’t think the story is true, though. If the president was really in that plane, he would have landed and tried to find out what kind of shape we were in. He would have gone to the Superdome and the Convention Center and talked to the people there and told them the country was behind them.

The wind suddenly blows from the south, and I can smell salt and rain and the smell fish make when they’re spawning. I think maybe I’m dreaming.

“Tony is coming,” Miles says out of nowhere.

I look at his face, swollen with sunburn, the salt caked on his shoulders. I wonder if Miles hasn’t pulled loose from his own tether.

“Tony knows where we are,” he says. “He’s got money and power and connections. We’re the Mean Machine from Magazine. That’s what he always said. The Mean Machine stomps ass and takes names.”

For a moment I almost believe it. Then I feel all the bruises and fatigue, and the screaming sounds of the wind blowing my neighborhood apart drain out of me like black water sucking down through the bottom of a giant sink. My head sinks on my chest and I fall asleep, even though I know I’m surrendering my vigilance at the worst possible time.

I see Tony standing in the door of a Jolly Green, the wind flattening his clothes against his muscular physique. I see the Jolly Green coming over the houses, loading everyone on board, dropping bright yellow inflatable life rafts to people, showering water bottles and C-rats down to people who had given up hope.

But I’m dreaming. I wake up with a start. The sun is gone from the sky, the water still rising, the surface carpeted with trash. The painter to our boat hangs from the air vent, cut by a knife. Our boat is gone, our water jugs along with it.

The night is long and hot, the stars veiled with smoke from fires vandals have set in the Garden District. My house is settling, window glass snapping from the frames as the floor buckles and the nails in the joists make sounds like somebody tightening piano wire on a wood peg.

It’s almost dawn now. Miles is sitting on the ridge of the roof, his knees splayed on the shingles, like a human clothespin, staring at a speck on the southern horizon. The wind shifts, and I smell an odor like night-blooming flowers in a garden that has been fertilized with fish blood.

“Hey, Miles?” I say.

“Yeah?” he says impatiently, not wanting to be distracted from the speck on the horizon.

“We played with Louis Prima. He said you were as good as Krupa. We blew out the doors at the Dream Room with Johnny Scat. We jammed with Sharkey and Jack Teagarden. How many people can say that?”

“It’s a Jolly Green. Look at it,” he says.

I don’t want to listen to him. I don’t want to be drawn into his delusions. I don’t want to be scared. But I am. “Where?” I ask.

“Right there, in that band of light between the sea and sky. Look at the shape. It’s a Jolly Green. It’s Tony, man, I told you.”

The aircraft in the south draws nearer, like the evening star winking and then disappearing and then winking again. But it’s not a Jolly Green. It’s a passenger plane and it goes straight overhead, the windows lighted, the jet engines splitting the air with a dirty roar.

Miles’s face, his eyes rolled upward as he watches the plane disappear, makes me think of John the Baptist’s head on a plate.

“He’s gonna come with an airboat. Mark my word,” he says.

“The DEA killed him, Miles,” I say.

“No, man, I told you. I got a postcard. It was Tony. Don’t buy government lies.”