James Burke: Creole Belle

Out of either pride or denial of her circumstances, Alice had not installed a security system in her house or sheathed her windows with bars specially designed to imitate the Spanish grillwork that was part of traditional New Orleans architecture. She walked to Mass and rode the streetcar to work. She shopped at night in a grocery store three blocks away and wheeled her own basket home, forcing it over the broken and pitched slabs of concrete in the sidewalks. On one occasion, a man came out of the shadows and tried to jerk her purse from her shoulder. Miss Alice hit him in the head with a zucchini, then threw it at him as he fled down the street.

Her friends were few. Her days at the convent had been marked by acrimony and depression and the bitter knowledge that insularity and loneliness would always be her lot. Ironically, the first sunshine in her adult life came in her newly found career as a secretary for an alcoholic private investigator whose clientele could have been characters lifted from Dante’s Inferno. She pretended to be viscerally offended by their vulgarity and narcissism, but there were occasions on an inactive day when she caught herself glancing through the window in hopes of seeing a betrayed wife headed up the street, out for blood, or one of Nig Rosewater’s bail skips about to burst through the door in need of secular absolution.

These moments of introspection made her wonder if a thinly disguised pagan might not be living inside her skin.

On the day after Clete Purcel went to New Iberia to tend his office, a sudden thunderstorm had swept ashore south of the city, bringing with it the smell of brine and sulfa and a downpour in her neighborhood that flooded the streets and filled the gutters and yards with floating leaves. The clouds were bursting with electricity when she got off the streetcar on St. Charles and walked toward Magazine, the thunder booming over the Gulf like cannons firing in sequence. The air was cool and fresh and had a tannic odor that made her think of long-standing water poured from a wood barrel. She felt an excitement about the evening that she couldn’t quite explain, as though she were revisiting her childhood home in Morgan City where the storm clouds over the Gulf created a light show every summer evening, the wind straightening the palms on the boulevard where she had lived, a jolly Popsicle man in a white cap driving his truck down to the baseball diamond in the park.

When she walked up on the gallery of her small house and unlocked the door, her cat, Cedric, was waiting to be let in. He was a pumpkin-size orange ball of fur with white paws and a star on his face who left seat smears all over her breakfast table and was never corrected for it. He ran ahead of her into the house and attacked his food bowl while she turned on the television in the living room and filled the house with the sounds of CNN and a family she didn’t have.

She filled a teakettle with water and lit the gas range and set the kettle to boil, and put a frozen dinner in the microwave, and glanced out the side window at a man in a hooded raincoat walking down the alley, his shoulders rounded, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his red tennis shoes splashing in the puddles. He disappeared from her line of vision. She picked up her cat, cradling him heavily in one arm, and tugged playfully on the furry thickness of his tail. “What have you been doing all day, you little fatty?” she said.

Cedric pushed against her grasp with his hind feet, indicating that he wanted to be bounced up and down. For some unaccountable reason, he changed his mind and twisted in her arms and jumped onto the breakfast table, staring out the rear window at the alley. Alice peered out the window and saw a neighbor lift the top of his Dumpster and drop a vinyl sack of garbage inside.

“You’re a big baby, Cedric,” Alice said.

She heard the microwave ding and took the preprepared container of veal and potatoes and peas out and fixed a cup of tea and sat down and ate her supper. Later she lay back on a reclining chair in front of the television and watched the History Channel and fell asleep without ever realizing she was falling asleep.

When she woke, the thunderstorm had passed and flashes of electricity were flaring silently in the clouds, briefly illuminating the trees and puddles of floating leaves in her yard. Cedric was on the rear windowsill, flicking a paw at a raindrop running down the glass. Then someone twisted the mechanical bell on the front door, and she slipped off the night chain and pulled open the door without first checking to see who her visitor was.

He was black, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with a goatee that looked like wire protruding from his chin. He wore a dark rain jacket, the hood hanging on his back. Through the screen, she could smell his body odor and unbrushed teeth and the unrinsed detergent in his clothes. Under one arm he was clutching a cardboard box that had no top.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I’m selling chocolate for the Boys Town Fund.”

“Where do you live?”

“In St. Bernard Parish.”

She tried to see his shoes, but her line of vision was obstructed by the paneling at the bottom of the door. “There’s a white man who picks up you kids in the Lower Nine and drops you off in neighborhoods like mine. You have to pay him four dollars for each chocolate bar you don’t bring back, and the rest is yours. Is that correct?”

He seemed to think about what she had said, his eyes clouding. “It’s for the Boys Town Fund.”

“I can’t give you any money.”

“You don’t want no candy?”

“You’re working for a dishonest man. He uses children to deceive and cheat people. He robs others of their faith in their fellow man. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, turning toward the street, his gaze shifting off hers.

“If you need to use the bathroom, come in. If you want a snack, I’ll fix you one. But you should get away from the man you’re working for. Do you want to come in?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I ain’t meant to bother you.”

“Were you in my alleyway a while ago? What kind of shoes are you wearing?”

“What kind of shoes? I’m wearing the kind I put on this morning.”

“Don’t be smart with me.”

“I got to go. The man is waiting for me on the corner.”

“Come see me another time and let’s talk.”

He looked at her warily. “Talk about what?”

“Anything you want to.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll do that,” he said.

After she closed the inside door, she looked through the side window and watched him walk up the street under the overhang of the trees. He did not stop at any of the other houses. Why had he stopped at only hers? She stepped out on the gallery and tried to see down the sidewalk, but the boy was gone. Maybe he had gone up a driveway to a garage apartment. That was possible, wasn’t it? Otherwise… She didn’t want to think about otherwise.

As she chained the door, she heard a Dumpster lid clang in the alley and the subdued thunder of rap music from inside a closed vehicle and a tree limb scraping wetly across the side of her house. She heard Cedric run across the linoleum in the kitchen.

“Where are you going, you fat little pumpkin head?” she said.

She glanced in her hallway and in her bedroom and in her clothes closet, but Cedric was nowhere to be seen. Then she felt a coldness in the wall that separated the guest room from the bath. She opened the door and stared numbly at the curtains blowing from the open window, one from which the screen had been removed.

She turned around in the hallway, her heart beating hard, just as a man in a purple ski mask and black leather gloves and red tennis shoes stepped out of the bathroom and swung his fist into the middle of her face. “You’re sure a stupid bitch,” he said. “You live in a neighborhood like this without a security system?”