T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

But before that happened, shamed that his wife saw him piss his pants, he might accuse her of infidelity and stone her, or only cut her nose off if he felt generous. Were he the stonemason in Konar, he might slit her throat with an ornate Khyber knife. He might throw petrol on her hair, light a cigarette, take a few deep drags, toss the cherry at her bound feet.

But Bud wasn’t in Afghanistan. He wasn’t the unfortunate host of a squad assigned to stabilize his country. He was only Unky B, an old man who needed to get back to his granddaughter. He was in New Orleans with Achilles who, after learning that Bud didn’t actually know any of the people who had lived in the house, lost all his steam. Achilles who, after punching Bud once in the neck and forcing him into a headlock, felt his own voice break as he whispered Shhh, it’s just like sleeping. Achilles who, after tearing up as Bud curled into a ball at his feet, his medallion in the dirt, helped him up, dusted him off, and drove him back home so Unky B could finish reading Babar’s Little Circus Star. Achilles who sat there in the park, in the car, in the dark, for almost an hour, was suddenly tired, amazed by the things he had seen so far in his short life, wondering why he was such a coward and where the other Achilles was when you needed him, who even now heard Troy, saying, I could have come alone.

Troy had never needed him, as he made clear after the Khost suicide bombing. Achilles discovered a dead teenager in the shadow of a roadside stand at the edge of the blast radius, reclined against the wall like he was napping, his embroidered Kashmiri hat covering his eyes, one sandal on, dusty feet akimbo, a half-eaten piece of bread in his lap, his body unblemished, save for the flies at his open mouth and a brilliant red dot on his left temple. One slender nail must have caught him dreaming. The wall behind him, the ground, his clothes, were all unmarked, nothing else showing any sign of debris from the explosion, as if he wasn’t even in the blast radius. Achilles wondered if he had been killed elsewhere and placed here to make it appear that he was a bombing victim, but the dirt was undisturbed by tire tracks or brush marks, except a single trail of footprints leading to and from a small brick kiln almost a hundred yards away, which explained why his hands were caked in mud. Achilles leaned in for a closer look.

“He picked the wrong side of the building to take a break on,” said Troy. “Smells like he’s been here for a while.”

Achilles nodded. He hadn’t heard his brother walk up.

“But they smell like motherfucking dogs when they’re alive.” Troy scanned the horizon, and then the ground in the immediate area, looking for tracks. “Poor fucker. I’d want to go out fighting. Maybe for a regular guy this is the best. You spook him?”

“No,” said Achilles. When an army had suicide in the arsenal, the rules changed. In past weeks, three Americans had died trying to help wounded Afghans who had been booby-trapped. So, they only spooked the injured, giving a prick or prod, from a safe distance, if possible. Sometimes they used sticks, sometimes they just tossed rocks. If alive, they called the medics, maybe. The locals sorted the dead.

Achilles took aim as Troy threw one, then two rocks at the feet. The kid yawned and sat up, stretching as the ladybug at his temple flew off. They watched him return to his kiln, dragging his feet, his shadow trailing in the dust behind him.

“Why didn’t you shoot him?” asked Troy.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was the spook,” said Troy. “I thought he was fucking dead.”

The kid was at the kiln, stirring mud. He propped the lid open with a stick and lowered in a brick, shielding his face with his free hand. He saw them staring and waved.

Achilles waved back.

“I guess it’s not too late,” said Troy, looking around.

“Fuck that. You’re kidding, right?”

Troy wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man, but he was right. They could have shot him and gotten away with it. Achilles kept seeing that ladybug flutter off. He should have fired. What if Troy had died? He’d have to continue on, even though he’d no longer have a purpose for being there. No one had to explain what it meant when Humvees crawled back with black bags tied on the roof like kayaks. He couldn’t imagine riding back to camp with his brother strapped overhead like excess luggage.

Troy walked off in the direction of their squad, busy overseeing the locals clearing away the rubble. “I could’ve come alone.”

Achilles had called hospitals looking for anyone with the names the Harpers had given him. He was, he hated to admit, officially at a dead end. Troy would have handled it better, extracted information from Bud. Troy would have screwed Ines the night they met and already moved on to one of those cougars he was into. Maybe after seeing a picture, he would go after Ines’s mom. As he said, The daughter is the mother’s business card. Troy would have it all locked up. But would Troy have spent so much energy looking for him?

ACHILLES THE DOGGED, SHE SOMETIMES CALLED HIM. AT OTHER TIMES, Achilles the Determined. When he corralled the men into a line, Achilles the Enforcer. After walking toward gunfire and breaking up an argument at the corner, he was Achilles the Brave. He would have applied these same attributes to Ines. He often watched her from across the room or down the hall, waiting to see her flinching, to catch her stepping back when a homeless man approached, to find her rubbing her palms against her pants after shaking hands. She never did. She lived her politics. He couldn’t find a chink in the armor of this strange white woman who said she loved the world and lived like it too. The only creeping question, and one that he didn’t really want to think about but had to consider as a possibility, was that she was interested in him only because he was black. He knew not to ask. Merriweather always said, Asking a woman why she likes you is like asking her why she’s with you is like saying she shouldn’t be. But after meeting her mother, how tempted Achilles was to ask, even though at that point he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

His curiosity was peaked when, on Ines’s bookshelves, he discovered The Delesseppes in the New World. On the back cover was a family tree that ended with Ines. Before he could open it, she angrily slapped the book out of his hand, rebuke in her eyes. Respect my privacy! But the damage was done. America was only a chapter in her family’s history. The names alone were stunning. Rich, stately names. French names, Old World names. New Orleans had so many names: the Big Easy, Nawlins, Nola, the Crescent City, the Boom-Boom Boomerang, Mardi Gras City, Birthplace of Jazz, Sin City, Voodoo City, Hot Chocolate City, the Lucky Charm. Ines’s family had even more exotic appellations: Gautreaux, Beauvais, Jaquillard, Larmeau, Mouleroux, Villemeur, going back at least three centuries. By the time he met her, Achilles knew that Ines’s mother wouldn’t like the name Achilles Holden Conroy. He was right. She even scowled as she said it, as if between her front teeth — as sharp as guillotines — she’d caught a bitter black currant. Was it a Creole name? She didn’t think so. A-sheel , as she pronounced it, was a Cajun name. “I knew some Cajuns in the lower Ninth Ward. They sure could throw a party.” She gazed wistfully at the ceiling for a moment. “They were brothers. One was named A-sheel. ” She pointed to his table tent for emphasis.

It was almost two months after he’d first walked into St. Jude and his first time meeting her immediate family, which consisted of her mother and her uncle Boudreaux, who lived together in the Garden District, as far from the Ninth Ward as Paris was from Algiers. The Delesseppes family home was a stately stone Georgian mansion, constructed in 1806, when they migrated from Toulouse. They’d brought from France a Mopani dining table so vast that when they were sitting alone, Achilles called Ines on her cell phone to ask how she was doing. Fine, with you here. Intricately patterned tapestries and family portraits labeled like museum pieces lined the dining room walls, joined during the meal by a staff of white-coated, white-gloved attendants who, between courses, stood in the shadows of the room as still and silent as tombstones. Achilles was seated across from Ines. Mrs. Delesseppes sat opposite Boudreaux, where she could see the portrait of her recently deceased third husband hanging over her brother’s head. “Two lawyers and a doctor,” she said. “Not necessarily in that order.”