Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

Baby gets up to leave. But his mom yells at him and makes him sit his rear back in that chair right this instant. He’s a target, she says, and Baby feels she’s right. The Latinos have been dishing out hard-core payback. Curtis Thompson, the running back at Baby’s school, got whacked in the knee with a galvanized-steel pipe the other day. Curtis is out for the season, and with him any shot at the state championship. They say he never saw the guys who did it, but they had Spanish accents. Nobody’s safe, thinks Baby. Baby’s mom thinks she can protect him by sending him to the barber. His hair makes him look like a maniac, she says.

But Baby’s Afro is a matter of pride for him. It’s a fuzzy crown that radiates out six inches, going from black at the scalp to reddish brown at the tips. Like a halo made of rabbit’s fur. Most of his friends think it’s pretty cool. It counteracts the freckles.

One thing at a time, says the Pie Man to Baby’s mom. Baby follows the Pie Man’s lips. The way they form words. Inner-tube round one second, then flat like a pair of rotten bananas. The Pie Man says he knows Baby doesn’t want to go back on full house arrest. The Pie Man says Baby’s free lawyer, Mr. Bates, already told them Baby was out of chances. The Pie Man looks at Baby as if expecting a response, which Baby doesn’t give. Baby stares at those bananas.

The Pie Man tells Baby to get up because it’s time to go to work.

Baby looks out the window. Orange traffic barrels flank a Do Not Enter sign at the end of the block.

“Nope,” Baby says. “I ain’t doing your slave work. If that means I’m stuck inside, then so what?”

Baby’s mom sprays air freshener at him. She tells him she’ll turn him in herself if he doesn’t get that haircut. And he better be home before the streetlights come on. If he’s more than a half-inch from the front door by then, the SWAT team will come after him, she reminds him for the umpteenth-and-a-half time. She kisses him on the forehead and leaves.

The Pie Man says he’ll bring Baby to the barber now but doesn’t get up from the couch. He continues to stare at the empty space behind Baby.

“I’ll get ready.” Baby rides his skateboard to the bathroom where he straps on his Chuck Taylors and a pair of brown plaid shorts before climbing out the window.

The outside of Lawrence D. Crocker Elementary isn’t much different from how Baby remembers it growing up. Lots of brick walls and stucco pillars. Plenty of rectangles. Gravel lot. The narrow Plexiglass windows were faded opaque even before Baby and his friends went here, but the interior is totally different since Hurricane Katrina turned it out. Dried gack coats the tile and baseboards. Green paint curdles from the floodwater pox. Rivulets of rust and mold syrup drool down the walls. Waterlogged books, tiny chairs coated in sludge, poster boards covered in blue-black fungus. The dump smells like anchovies pickled in urine.

Baby hasn’t cut his hair but figures skipping the job would be going too far. He does skateboarding tricks on the retaining wall outside of the school, knowing it will be some time before the Pie Man puts his brain on and figures out to come. But the van appears at the street corner within minutes. The clunker has one headlight and Nobody Starves When the Pie Man’s Around scrawled in faded orange letters across the side. Ever since the Pie Man decided he’s Baby’s pops again, he’s begun following Baby around in that death trap even when they’re not working.

The Pie Man used to sell gumbo ya-ya, greens, and bread pudding at barbershops and car washes. Sometimes he makes pies — pecan, apple, and sweet potato — all with his own two hands. Baby can tell the Pie Man had been real proud of his business selling catballs to the citizenry. Baby chuckled when he remembered the web video he’d seen of a stupid toothless cat doing its best to gum a mouse to death. The mouse kept plopping out — pissed, but pretty much okay. The Pie Man said he got shut down when the health inspector caught him selling reconstituted meat. Baby asked him, reconstituted from what? Meat mostly, said the Pie Man.

Now two-by-fours and tangled wires choke the van’s bay. The Pie Man must have had breakfast, thinks Baby, because he looks sober. He managed to button his jacket right and comb his flattop so that his head looks like an eraser.

“Why can’t they just bulldoze this hole and start from scratch?” Baby skates toward the Pie Man, who is unloading sledgehammers in the lobby outside of the cafeteria. Sanchez’s tools were used for assembling things. Baby learned, to his own amazement, how to hang a door. It was harder than it looked, Sanchez told Baby, because you had to make many little decisions to get the right fit. Baby imagines swinging one of those sledgehammers at Sanchez’s head, watching it roll across the ground like an eight ball after contact.

The Pie Man shrugs and tosses his jacket on a wheelbarrow. He has ink on his bicep. An eagle, perched above an earth and anchor, flaps its wings whenever the Pie Man flexes.

“You ever shot somebody?” Baby says.

The Pie Man slings a wide shovel onto his shoulder and says he shot two people.

“Did they die?”

The Pie Man shrugs.

They work their way into the library, where red wall pennants form a frieze near the ceiling. Bookcases lean at odd angles, having dominoed during the flooding. All the books are on the floor, mush. As little boys, Baby and Chaney filed these books for the librarian as punishment after starting a food fight. Today, the books look like cream of wheat.

They both died, says the Pie Man, but he’s not entirely sure about whether he killed the second dude. The second dude he shot was an insurgent with his finger on a trip wire. The whole convoy unloaded on him and any one of them might have gotten the kill shot, he says. Or, he tells Baby, maybe the hajji died of fear.

“What about the first one?” Baby asks.

The Pie Man shovels books into the wheelbarrow on top of his jacket. He says it was his friend Freddie Lane, the first person he met when he enlisted. He murdered Freddie dead. He tells Baby he’s not sure if either situation matters because at war it’s legit to kill, but if you kill one of your own you’d better have your reasons clean as a fresh latrine, which is what the Pie Man had. Freddie had flipped the fuck out and tried to mow down the boys in the mess with a fifty cal. The Pie Man capped him from behind with his M240, which took Freddie’s arm clean off above the elbow.

The Pie Man says Baby and his boys shouldn’t be so ready to go settle scores with that Spanish guy. Baby can go any way he wants, but that doesn’t mean he has to. The Pie Man says he should just sit on his hands. Baby notices a corroded picture of Nat Turner clipped to one of the wall pennants.

“People will roll you, if you let them,” says Baby as he points a finger from the Pie Man to himself. “I’m done getting rolled, you heard me?” Baby straightens to his full height. “We getting him tonight.”

The Pie Man pops a pill and says he can’t argue with that much. He says he can’t argue with much of anything except that the VA could stop screwing around and send him better medication. The Pie Man’s face is scrunched up again like he’s confused. He says he ain’t slept since Kirkuk.

“What made you join the Marines?” Baby asks.

The Pie Man says it seemed like a good way to go. They needed a chef, and he needed a job for the future he had mapped out. A fair exchange, he thought at the time. But he never baked a single pie in the military. When he came home, he’d forgotten how to. Whether you get Sanchez or he gets you, the Pie Man tells Baby, you end up in the same place.