My Juliet

by John Ed Bradley

  She thinks maybe he helped her up the stairs and she thinks she remembers Sonny saying something to Leroy and Leroy looking up from his red hots and his TV. She thinks she remembers Sonny saying when he finished putting her to bed he’d come back down and write a check for what she owed and Leroy mentioning how his boss had a policy against hookers in the building and perhaps it was time Miss Beauvais take it on down the street.

  But then maybe it was a dream. Maybe what she thinks she remembers she only imagined.

  Juliet would like to wake up if only the sleep would let her. And then the door opens a crack and an eyeball looks in. It’s who else and when he sees she’s presently indisposed he quietly closes the door behind him. “Oh, please,” she says. “Daddy! Daddy, don’t go . . .”

  She follows him out into the hall and glimpses the black form his shadow makes stretching along the length of the stairwell as he descends to the lobby. She chases after him taking two steps at a time and speaking his name and the moment she throws the door open Leroy spins around and holds a finger in her face. “What are you following me for? You’re naked.”

  “Oh, please.”

  He guides her back to the stairs. “You’re not bad-looking and everything but let me give you a piece of advice, lady. Always leave something to the imagination.”

  “You opened the door to my room. You looked inside. That’s against the law.”

  “Call the cops. I was checking on something.”

  “What?”

  “The maid knocked and you wouldn’t answer. Your door was locked with the chain. We needed to see you wasn’t dead.”

  “Maids,” Juliet says. “Goddamn maids are about to ruin my life.”

  The desk clerk looks at her standing there, not even bothering to cover herself with her arms. “Ask me, baby, you seem perfectly capable of doing that yourself.”

  Back in the room she finds a wedding band on the bedside table. She wonders if she’s in the wrong place, some other person’s room, then she recognizes the ring as the one belonging to her mother. There’s a note next to it and she reads by the slatted light from the streetlights pouring through the blinds. “Mr. Harvey told me to tell you he’d have your check shortly, to call his office with an address where they should send it. Anna Huey says she thinks it’s three hundred dollars . . .”

  Not bothering to finish, Juliet squeezes Sonny’s letter into a ball and throws it across the room. “Don’t even know you’re going to jail,” she says, talking to the empty space.

  She puts some clothes on and goes back down to the lobby.

  “You remember where I parked my car?” she says to Leroy.

  “You had a car?”

  “I think I remember having one. A rental.”

  The news is on. Leroy turns down the volume. “What kind was it?”

  “Yellow Ford Mustang convertible.”

  “I didn’t know they even made those anymore. So how would I know where you parked yours? What I got to wonder,” and he’s nearly shouting now, “how somebody like you can pay for a rental car when this hotel’s got to get your boyfriends to pay for your room. I bet you money you didn’t so much rent that car as borrowed it.” She doesn’t respond and he says, “You know what happens when you keep a car past time and don’t return it? They consider it stolen. They come and find it and charge you with felony theft.”

  “Is they the cops or is they the car place?”

  He seems to have said all he means to, because he doesn’t answer.

  “Morris Barstow is my lawyer, by the way,” she says. “His office was shocked to learn about my clubbing. They’re doing the paperwork now. We’re going to bring a lawsuit and Mr. Barstow promises me a check.”

  Leroy stares. “Ask me the only promise you got coming is an early grave, lady.”

  At last she remembers where she parked the Mustang: a metered spot on the street at One Shell Square, right at the foot of the building. But when she returns to the place, after hopping a downtown streetcar, the thing is nowhere to be found. She takes a stroll around the block but it’s gone, all right. “Motherfuckers took it,” she says to a businessman who seems to be waiting for a cab. “Second time since I been back they did that.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Motherfuckers towed it.”

  She starts on foot in the direction of the French Quarter. They can have the car, they want it that bad. They took her house. What’s a yellow car compared to a house? “Vast my ass,” she says out loud, momentarily forgetting that the meeting at Nathan Harvey’s adjourned hours ago.

  When she reaches the cemetery the party man is standing in the same place in the same clothes and the same puffed-out drawers. “You see what I mean by hourglass?” she tells him. “I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

  “When I turned it over it only ran for like a minute. But I’ll call it whatever you want. Hourglass, two-hour-glass . . . shit.”

  “Leonard paid you your money?”

  “Who?”

  “The male white likes to act black.”

  “Yeah. Uh huh.”

  “So he paid you?”

  “Right.”

  She digs in her pocket and retrieves her mother’s wedding ring and only now does she notice the inscription inside the band: yet another man promising forever. “What could you give me for this?”

  The boy inspects it then leads her past an iron fence into the cemetery and deep in the tombs washed a milky blue by the lights from the housing project nearby. He stops about halfway in and digs around under a wire flower basket and pulls out a clear plastic sandwich bag with less than half of what she and Leonard got before. “This is the best I can do,” he says. “Maybe if you had some diamonds in it.”

  She takes the bag, halfway surprised he’d give this much. “Let me ask you something,” she says in a little-girl voice. “Could you give me some more if I gave you the best, most amazing fellatio you ever had in your whole, entire life?”

  The boy shakes his head. “I don’t eat Mexican.” He takes off in a trot through the tombs.

  Sonny drives to the Napoleon House for a drink and something to eat. Even as he’s walking through the door he’s placing an order with Louis: a tall glass of Crown, a dressed shrimp poboy, a double order of French fries and bread pudding minus the rum sauce. Sonny doesn’t feel like talking, and come to think of it he doesn’t really feel like eating.

  Sensing his friend’s desire for privacy, Louis stays away until the crowd thins and there’s no one else to talk to, no one else to bug.

  “Just for the record,” he says in a voice too loud to ignore, “I found another Frank.”

  “Who?” Sonny, distracted, was watching beef gravy congeal in his plate.

  “You whack an old vet on the neutral ground and don’t remember?” Louis doesn’t look up from his order pad. “This one ain’t Siamese, though. It’s calico. That means two things.”

  “A calico is one of those cats colored three different ways,” Sonny says.

  “That’s one thing. Now guess the other.”

  “Don’t make me do that,” Sonny says. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “A calico is almost always a female. So if ever you see a strange cat with three colors you can impress whoever you’re with by remarking as to how it’s a female.”

  “You think it would impress whoever I’m with to go up to a strange cat and lift its hind leg and inspect its genitalia?”

  Louis doesn’t answer, doesn’t laugh. He puts the check on the table and glances back at a couple of tourists who just entered the room. “You’ll never guess where I found him.”

  “You just said all calicos are females and already you’re calling her a him.”

  “Coulon, the vet on Esplanade. He had a sign in the window for baby kittens.”

  Sonny puts his fork down and pushes the plate away. “Don’t fuck with me, Louis.”

  “I went in and Coulon’s assistant has maybe five left and I pick the one I want and the
n Coulon walks in from the back through these saloon doors and we shake hands and he thanks me for coming in. Then guess what he says next?”

  “I’m tired of guessing. All I ever do when I talk to you is guess.”

  “He says, ‘So what are you going to call it?’ And before I can think to stop myself I say the name. I look at him and I say, ‘Frank.’ I’m halfway out the door by now, and when I swing back around our eyes meet. It must be hell getting old. There’s no way he made the connection.”

  “Louis,” Sonny says, “tell me you’re not being serious.”

  “I just kept walking. I left with the cat and brought him home and showed him the windowsill where the original Frank always sat. Then I went to Popeye’s and got him some fried chicken livers, gave him a bowl of buttermilk and some ice cream and a peanut butter cup, showed him where the litter box was, demonstrated how to use it. Did everything possible, in other words, to make him comfortable. Are the cops going to come and arrest me? No. Am I worried about it? No. Settle down, Sonny. What’s the fun of pulling off a crime if you can’t go back and visit the scene?”

  Sonny just now remembers something. He tugs at Louis’s sleeve. “Roll it up.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, roll it up, roll up your sleeve.”

  Louis puts his pad on the table and does as he’s told.

  “Now roll up the other one,” Sonny says.

  Louis complies after hesitating a moment. He holds his arm out to Sonny, the wounds coated red with Mercurochrome, the scabs yet to form.

  “Does Frank think you’re one of those claw poles covered with carpet?” Sonny says.

  “Yeah, well, it has been a problem. I should enroll him in obedience school. I’ve already tried spanking him with newspaper. They hate the noise, the sound of the paper. It’s not the spanking that makes them stop.” Louis rolls his sleeve back down and buttons the cuff. “Look,” he says, “she has no idea it was me. It happened too fast and I went incognito.”

  Sonny pushes his plates over to the other side of the table. He finishes off the Crown and hands the empty glass to Louis. “The cops are going to come by to see you,” he says.

  “The cops? That’s crazy.”

  “Did you whack Miss Marcelle, too, Louis?”

  “Come on, Sonny. Shit.” Louis looks around to make sure no one is listening. “I can’t believe you’d ask me that. What’s wrong with you?”

  Sonny puts twenty dollars on the table and leaves the restaurant. Outside a heavy rain has begun to fall and gullies of white water wash down from the rooftops and splash in the streets. Against the haze an occasional umbrella, colored stripes amid the gray. Sonny and Louis stand side by side on the banquette under a metal roof extending to the curb. “Dr. Coulon’s going to call the detectives who’ve been investigating what happened to Juliet’s mother,” Sonny says. “I’m sure they’ve already interviewed Juliet. Next they’re going to want to talk to you, Louis.”

  “This is goddamn amazing.”

  “They’re going to arrest me. Lieutenant Peroux and his partner, Lentini. First I’m going to Parish Prison then I’m going to trial and then I’m going to Angola. Will you come and visit me, Louis? Will you promise to do that?”

  “Asshole. You’re an asshole, Sonny. You’re an asshole for saying that. First of all, Juliet cannot identify me. There’s no way she knows it was me. And, second, I bet that old man, that vet . . . ? I bet he’s had a hundred patients named Frank. Over the years, anyway. There’s no way he puts the new Frank together with the old Frank.”

  “When you talk to them put it all on me, Louis. Say whatever you want.”

  “Sonny, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why would I betray you like that?” Louis’s chin trembles and his eyes begin to water. His leg has never been so quiet. “You got a cigarette, Sonny? Give me a cigarette.”

  “I don’t have any cigarettes and you don’t smoke. Go back to work, Louis.”

  Sonny starts across the street for the hotel parking garage where he left the truck.

  “A cat scratches my arm and you make the leap you’re going to prison,” Louis says.

  “I’ll understand whatever you tell them.”

  “I remember nothing,” Louis says, his voice broken by sobs as he chases after Sonny in the rain. “Do you hear me, bubba? I remember nothing. . . .”

  The top of the bag is pinched closed and Juliet pulls it open but too hard and the wind comes up and carries the powder into the night and out toward the housing project. It’s hard to know whether to scream or to cry and in the end she does some of both.

  She takes the sandwich bag and stuffs her face in it and inhales deeply and smells a smell that could be Clorox. She inhales a second time then tours the cemetery turning over flower baskets and concretecast urns and whatever else isn’t bolted to the ground. She finds a couple of dirty syringes and holds them up to a streetlight. Both are empty.

  “Is this my life?” she says to the small oval photograph of a woman under glass on one of the tombs. “It’s not your life. Is it mine? Please just tell me if it’s mine.”

  She waits at the gate for the better part of an hour and when at last the party man comes walking around the corner he isn’t alone. His friend is himself a boy but a bigger one and when they’re close enough she cups her hands around her mouth and says, “Somebody ain’t very professional about how they put said items in said bag. Said customer is pissed.”

  “There ain’t no science to loading a bag,” the first boy says.

  “You proved that. It all flew out when I tried to get it open.”

  “Find me another ring and maybe we can rectify the situation.”

  She’s about had it with the little shithead, and the other one, mean as he looks, doesn’t frighten her at all. “You ever hear of the Beauvais on Esplanade? For your information, and you should think about this . . . I’m one of them people.”

  The boy is quiet, confused.

  “An actual Beauvais,” she continues in a proud voice.

  “Your name is Actual?” He glances at the other boy. “Hey, Tee, her name is Actual.”

  The bigger one nods as if he knows a few of those.

  “I just want another bag,” Juliet says. “Is that asking so much?”

  She figures it must be, because they walk off and leave her there.

  It takes her ten minutes to reach Leonard’s weekly/monthly. The old man at the desk stops her as she’s starting up the stairs. “Leonard left.”

  “Leonard left?”

  “Leonard checked out.” He clears a wad of phlegm from his throat and spits in a paper cup. “Last thing he told me, he told me you came by to tell you he was sorry for everything.”

  Juliet comes back down the stairs and stands in the open door of his office. “How do you know it’s me to tell that to?”

  The man puts his spit cup on the floor and spreads his hands out in front of him. “He said tell the girl with the white hair and the big taters he was moving back home. That means his daddy’s house in the Garden District. Leonard comes from money, you know?”

  Juliet looks out at the street, the headlights cutting the darkness. A sightseeing buggy clatters past, its guide wearing a white tuxedo and a top hat. “Not as big as the Beauvais,” she says. “Not as old, either. Don’t even come with that shit.”

  “What was that, honey?”

  When she looks back he’s putting a fresh pinch of snuff in his mouth. “Why would he leave like that,” she says, “so much in a hurry and all?”

  “I got to believe it was them two parents that convinced him.”

  “His parents?”

  “Well, the ones that drove up in the Jaguar and parked out front. I gave them his room number and they went right up. It was funny seeing a pair like that in this place. They left a smell in the building like Saturday night at the Blue Room. Anyway, I could hear them letting him have it. Everybody could. It got kind of loud.” Clearly the man is relishing the chance to share t
his information. He rocks back in his chair and puts his feet on the desk. With both hands he holds the spit cup at his waist. “The daddy, this is Leonard’s daddy, apparently he’s some big lawyer, friends with the governor, the type of person they put his bust in the lobby of a building. Anyway, I can hear Leonard trying to argue, then the mother starts to cry and it’s like cats screwing out on the windowsill. It’s terrible. The father’s yelling now. Leonard’s going to come home or there’s going to be an intervention. Leonard’s going to Loyola, get his degree, stop this Buddy Bolden fantasy. Leonard’s going to be a responsible adult. Leonard’s not going to embarrass them anymore. That man has plans for the boy, I’ll give him that.”

  “Leonard,” Juliet says sadly.

  “They left with him in the backseat, staring out the window like he’d been sentenced to life at the state penitentiary with no possibility for parole. I never liked Leonard, he had some bad habits and some worse friends, but to see him like that like to break my heart.”

  Juliet knows the feeling. Her own heart seems to have stopped beating in her chest.

  “Leonard,” the old man says, “off on his way to be somebody.”

  The crime scene tape has been removed, the lawn groomed, the lower gallery swept clean. But little else about the Beauvais has changed since Sonny’s last visit.

  He stands at the gate trying to absorb all that he can of the building’s immortal façade: the windows hung with green plantation shutters, the double doors framed by open-flame gas lanterns, the giant ferns and ivies swinging in the breeze. Behind Sonny on the avenue traffic rumbles past, throwing light that streaks across the pale wicker furniture.

  “Why, if it ain’t Sonny LaMott!” a voice calls. And there suddenly is Anna Huey, a solitary figure in the dusk, moving toward him past the crape myrtles. “Hey, sugar. I thought that was you.”