EQMM, November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "That's your story,” she said.

  "An’ what's yours, ma'am?” Mamahat asked.

  "I don't need one,” she said. “These are all fantasies."

  "If that's the case, the night watchman at Webber won't have checked you in tonight,” I said. “And the desk clerk and elevator operators at Harmon's hotel won't have seen hide nor hair of you."

  "And I suppose your fingerprints won't be on any of the vials in Harmon's medicine case,” Tom said.

  Eugenia stood, head held high, arms at her side. Her glittering green eyes scanned the faces in the room. “Oh, you weak, beautiful people,” she said, repeating Maggie the Cat's final words from the play. “What you need is someone to take hold of you—gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of—and I can."

  She took a step toward Tom, focusing on him. Detective Mamahat made a move to stop her, but Tom waved him off.

  "I'm determined to do it,” Eugenia continued. “And nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof—is there? Is there, baby?"

  She reached out and touched his cheek, gently.

  Then she backed away. “I'm ready now, Detective,” she said.

  Mamahat took her arm and escorted her from the room.

  Suddenly, everyone began to talk. “Wasn't that the damnedest...?” “She murdered him?” “I wanna go home, Jacques.” “Yeah. Let's get the hell out of here."

  As they filed out into the hall, Tom remained where he was. “I've never heard my words performed more eloquently,” he said and his eyes filled with tears.

  * * * *

  We led him from the room and out of the hotel.

  Royal Street was still throbbing with music and expectations. He stared at the passing parade. “Things are fallin’ apart in this old world,” he said. “The pressure builds up in people and they crack. People you'd never expect. Like Eugenia. So seemingly strong and capable."

  "We'll walk you home, Tom,” Megan said.

  "Thank you, my deah, but I'm still a bit too sober to be going home."

  "Then we'll keep you company,” I said.

  "That's kind of you, Harol', but tonight I shall seek the kindness of strangers."

  We watched him wander off down Royal in his tuxedo, drawing the attention of passing tourists who either recognized him as one of the world's great playwrights or pegged him for being just another wealthy eccentric in a city full of them.

  Copyright © 2006 Dick Lochte

  DEAD MEN'S SHIRTS by Julie Smith

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Art by Herbert Kearney

  * * * *

  Born in Savannah, Julie Smith's first job was in New Orleans, as feature writer for the Times Picayune. But it was the 1960s, and San Francisco beckoned. There she would work for the Chronicle, and start writing fiction. She returned to NOLA, the city where her novels are set, in 1996. She's an Edgar Award winner (and a P.I.!) whose new book is P.I. on a Hot Tin Roof.

  For Pig Man Latrelle's funeral, they had a horse-drawn carriage driven by a distinguished gentleman in tails, top hat, and white tennis shoes. They had the Rebirth Brass Band, but not playing dirges, only party stuff. And they had the damn Dead Men's Shirts, now offered as part of a package deal by the funeral homes. In recent years, they'd been renamed “Memorial Shirts” as if they were something respectable. Pig Man's whole family was wearing them, all his little nieces and nephews, every single member of his posse, the P-Town Soldiers, all his little girl-friends, and every one of his babies by different girls (definitely not women—Pig Man was only nineteen).

  Pig Man's T-shirt had his picture on it along with his birthday under the label “Thug-in,” and also the day of his death, “Thug-out.” In addition, it sported a legend informing the world that “Real Soldiers Don't Die—Now I'm With God, Up in the Sky."

  The Reverend Ray Turner Thompson, who officiated at the service, was pretty sure Pig Man was actually burning in hell and he wasn't sure he wasn't damning himself as well just by delivering the eulogy. But he managed to pull out some pap about there being good in the worst of us and God loving all his children, and then he recalled Pig Man—whom he called by his given name, Jermaine—as a cute little kid the reverend used to see at neighborhood barbeques. Lately, as neighborhood “soldiers” fell like bowling pins, he'd gotten good at that kind of thing, but it never failed to turn his stomach.

  Just about everything about Pigeon Town turned his stomach these days. The violence was at the top of his list, but not the very top. He hated the glorification of it even worse. Sometimes the Dead Men's Shirts said “Thuggin’ Eternally,” as if the good Lord had a separate heaven he kept for criminals, who got to sell drugs and blow each other away even after death. And the reverend knew these kids knew what was in the Bible; he'd read it to them himself. What the hell was wrong with everybody?

  Well, he'd had to keep his mouth shut at Jermaine's funeral for the sake of Pig Man's mama, who'd had two sons gunned down in as many years, both of whom probably deserved what they got. But just wait till Sunday, he thought. I've been sitting on my hands way too long.

  As soon as he could peel himself away from the crowd of teenage murderers and drug dealers and gangsters who shot up the neighborhood and then had the nerve to come into his church like they belonged there, he went home and began composing Sunday's sermon. On the one hand, he knew the people he wanted to reach wouldn't be in church to hear it; they only came for funerals. But on the other, he had to get some dialogue going, some buzz started. Some things off his chest.

  The thing was, he was fifty-five years old and a graduate of Dillard University as well as a respected Baptist seminary. Furthermore, he was the son of a preacher who was also college-educated. Education was what happened in his family—and also in the recent past, if he remembered correctly. People worked hard and lived good, productive lives. What had happened to that?

  How dare you come into my church, he wrote, wearing shirts that proclaim eternal thugging? Who gave you the right? And as for you parents, who gave your sons and daughters the right? This is still a house of God, and God, if I understand anything about this life, does not condone even earthly thugging, much less eternal thugging. Thugging and drugging and shooting and murder. Rape and violence and revenge. No! These things are not of God. Where is your respect, people? Where are your values? What are we teaching our children these days? LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING—BILL COSBY IS RIGHT! WE ARE FAILING OUR CHILDREN! WE ARE FAILING THEM AT EVERY LEVEL."

  He stopped to imagine the way he'd bellow out those last few lines, doing it now in his mind and finding it entirely satisfying. He needed a bridge to Cosby, though. Well, maybe old Bill didn't belong in this sermon at all. Poor parenting actually seemed minor compared to what was happening in Pigeon Town, which was a turf war between the P-Town Soldiers and a gang a neighborhood over, in Hollygrove. Jermaine Latrelle was only the latest casualty and judging by what the reverend knew about him, at least he was an actor in the drama.

  Not so all the victims. So far, two innocent people had been killed as well as three gang members. The killing continued because every witness so far—and there were quite a few—either refused to come forward or recanted after being threatened. The threat was as real as Pig Man's dead body, too.

  But this had to stop somewhere. Somebody, somehow, needed to get some cojones. The reverend changed focus on the sermon, made it even stronger.

  Are we going to stand by and let our innocent sons and daughters be gunned down in broad daylight?

  We must trust in the good Lord that we'll be safe. The good Lord and the tip line, brothers and sisters. Those who are afraid, phone in anonymous tips—and pray for the courage to come forward into the light. Those who are not afraid, come forward now if you dare!

  We've come to a time when Miss Ella Fauntleroy down there in the front row can't even sell her homemade frozen cups to the neighborhood kids. Yes, Miss Ella, I've seen you, poking your old arm out th
rough your door, holding those frozen Kool-Aid cups out to any kid brave enough to come up on your porch, too scared even to show your face.

  And I know the Boudreaux family reunion's been canceled for fear somebody's going to come shoot it up. Yes, Brother Boudreaux, I know. Y'all have every reason to be scared.

  But somebody'sgot to speak up. This killin's got to stop.

  He delivered the sermon Sunday, complete with the references to the Dead Men's Shirts, and there was hardly a dry eye in the house. True, there'd only been about twenty people in church that day, most of them—except for his daughter and his grandson—as old as the reverend himself, but he saw them nodding along with him, he heard their shouted “Amen"s. He'd touched a nerve and he knew it.

  That afternoon, just a few hours after church let out, four men in a white pickup fired into a crowd on a porch, wounding three more people and killing a three-year-old girl. Then the pickup rolled on down the road and killed two other men sitting in a car.

  When the reverend heard the news, he wept. Just put his head in his hands and cried like a baby. His wife Maureen came in and held him, no need to say anything. After thirty years of marriage, they were practically telepathic. She knew exactly what was wrong with him.

  The next day, Monday, a young girl who'd been on that porch came to him for pastoral counseling. She knew who did it, she said, she'd gone to high school with those boys, and one of her cousins was among the wounded. But she had a baby and the baby's father had been killed in a previous shooting, and even though she knew the right thing to do, she didn't think she could come forward. Was there some way he could intervene for her? Maybe tell the po-lice, but withhold her name?

  Damned if he knew what to tell her, except that he could intervene and he would. But he didn't add that that wasn't going to get the shooters convicted, that the po-lice were going to need her testimony. Confronted with a real person with a real problem, that was just something he couldn't bring himself to do. So what did he believe, he asked himself? Was he just an old bag of wind when it came down to it?

  He talked to Maureen about it and then he talked to God. And he realized that what he really thought was, things were so rotten in Denmark—meaning Pigeon Town—that he didn't really know where to start. Because this was all about the drug culture getting out of hand, so out of hand it had spawned the hip-hop culture, which told innocent kids that the thuggin’ life was the cool life, the good life. That differentiating yourself from white people was the primary virtue of the ghetto, even if it meant you couldn't get a job because you couldn't speak good English and had no education and wore jeans so baggy you looked like a clown. In fact, that you didn't need a job because selling drugs was the “black” thing to do.

  But who in Pigeon Town was going to buy that? Who under fifty, anyhow? Saying something like that would make him an object of ridicule, a black man pandering. That was the thug's-eye view, and it was so pervasive no one dared disagree. Only thing to do, he decided, was to tackle the problem from the bottom up. Start with the kids. He'd announce an outreach program he should have started long ago. He'd distance himself—for the moment—from pleading for cooperative witnesses; he'd focus on the only people in the neighborhood whose minds were still supple. Because Bill Cosby was right about the way kids were brought up these days, the twisted things they believed. Baggy pants and bad grammar didn't make you a man or anything at all except a clown. He liked that line. He put it in his next sermon, and it went over. Everything he had to say was just dandy with the over-fifty crowd.

  It's gotten to the point, he said, that if you're going to teach English in a black neighborhood, you'd better teach it as a second language. And I'll tell you what we're going to do, he wound up, we're going to do exactly that! Ain’ no kid in this hood can get a job long as he talk like a thug. He paused for everyone to get the joke and then he said, Hey, don't go away—y'all know what I meant.

  That got him a laugh.

  First thing he was going to do, he said, was start a class in standard English, right in the church, as an after-school program. And not only that, he was going to teach the class himself.

  That actually got him applause.

  But on Wednesday, the day of the first class, exactly one student showed up, his own seven-year-old grandson, Darnell, wearing baggy thug pants and a sullen face. “Mama said I had to bring him,” his daughter D'Ruth said. “So here he is. Just don't tell his daddy, you mind? Marcellus finds out, he'll kill me.” She meant her husband, the reverend's worthless son-in-law.

  "Why?” the reverend asked.

  "You know why, Daddy. It's not his scene."

  "You telling me he's got some problem with educating his son?"

  D'Ruth answered with a shrug.

  The reverend stifled the urge to ask her why she'd married him, anyhow, and turned to Darnell, who wasted no time in asking, “Why I gotta do this?"

  "You mean, ‘Why do I have to do this?', don't you?"

  Darnell looked at him suspiciously. “Whassup wi’ dat?"

  It took the reverend a moment to realize the boy wasn't smarting off, he really didn't know. So there was hope here. Ignorance beat attitude by a mile in his book. He ended up spending a reasonably pleasant hour with his grandson, and wished he'd thought of this before. Maybe it wouldn't keep the kid off the streets, but it was bringing the two of them closer, anyhow.

  So he preached about that on Sunday: the rewards of working with your kids, of helping them with their homework. All the gray heads nodded, but except for D'Ruth and Darnell, gray heads were all there were. This was going nowhere.

  That Tuesday there were two more shootings, which meant another funeral at his church. This time, the reverend noticed, the Dead Men's Shirts announced the victim's dates of birth and death with the labels “Dude-rise” and “Dude-set.” This kid, Le'Devin Miner, was also going to be “Thuggin’ Eternally,” if the shirts were to be believed.

  The reverend didn't keep his mouth shut this time. He told the story of his older son, Thomas. There used to be a famous drug dealer lived in these parts, named Rafael Conway, y'all remember Rafael? When my boy Thomas was fourteen years old, he just had to have a certain pair of shoes. What's so important about shoes? I ask you. How'd a thing like sneakers get to be a symbol of how rich and important you are? Well, my boy Thomas wanted a pair of forty-dollar Dr. J sneakers and we were too poor to buy ‘em for him.

  So Thomas asked a kid he knew worked for Rafael if he needed a little help selling pot. The kid said he'd get back to him, and the very next day, who you think came to school to pick up Thomas? In a big ol’ purple Cadillac. Rafael Conway himself, that's who. And Rafael said to my boy, “Thomas Thompson, I catch you selling drugs or even talkin’ about selling drugs, I'm gon’ put a whippin’ on you." Everyone under thirty-five gasped. No one expected that.

  Rafael Conway said, “You play football, don't you, Thomas? I'm gonna give you ten dollars for every sack you make this season."

  So Thomas says, “Why you do dat?” Now if he'd been speaking proper English, he'd have said, “Why would you do that?", but Thomas was just like all of y'all, thought it made him more of a man to talk like he'd never been to school a day in his life. So he said, “Why you do dat?", just like he didn't have a day's worth of education, and you know what Rafael Conway says?

  He says, “Listen, man, you've got a way out of here, and that's sports. Me, I'm stuck. Either I'm going to die before I'm forty or I'm going to spend the rest of my life in jail.” And then he popped open his trunk and handed Thomas a brand-new pair of Dr. J's.

  And his prophecy proved true. Five years later, he was gunned down in the courtyard at the Iberville. That was the year my boy Thomas was a freshman at Dillard.

  Now the point of all this is: That's the story not from me, not from your mama, not even from God. That's the story straight from the horse's mouth. From the biggest drug dealer this town has ever known. And the story is this: If you've got a way out, you take it; if y
ou haven't, you make one for yourself. I wish—He paused here, looking very sorrowful—I just wish I'd've been able to tell Le'Devin Miner that story. Maybe we wouldn't all be here today.

  Then he got even more sorrowful before he said, “Let us pray."

  Maureen, who'd cried while he was telling the story, congratulated him later on having the courage, but D'Ruth just looked sad at him, and Marcellus looked like he'd like to hit him with a baseball bat. Other than Maureen, nobody mentioned his sermon, except for young Junior Heavey, who came up to him (wearing pants so baggy he had to hold them up) and thanked him for it. “By the way,” Junior said afterward, “I think I remember Thomas. How's he doin’ now?"

  The reverend made himself smile and nod. “He's fine. Lives out of town now.” Yeah, he was out of town, all right—doing ten to fifteen at Angola. He'd gotten good advice and hadn't taken it. But all the same, the story was true, and the reverend fervently hoped somebody took it to heart. Darnell in particular.

  But Darnell already knew where his uncle was. He said, “How come Uncle Thomas so smart he in jail, Paw-Paw?"

  Even later, nobody called him about that sermon, not a soul spoke to him about it, not a single person except for Junior Heavey, and he was pretty sure the kid was taunting him. Maureen said they just weren't ready to hear it, but the reverend thought maybe he might have gone too far for a funeral, maybe Le'Devin's people didn't want to be reminded about how their son had died, but that was still denial in his book. He was sorry if he'd hurt their feelings, but he still felt it had to be done.

  Nobody new came to his outreach program, either, but Darnell's mama kept bringing him because her own mama would tan her hide if she didn't.

  And the turf war continued. People kept on getting killed, no matter how much it hurt the reverend to realize he couldn't do a thing about it. At his wit's end, he preached again about the need for witnesses to come forward, and thought he saw some people nodding in the back row. But not in agreement this time—they seemed to be falling asleep, all except Darnell, who was smiling and saying little “Amen"s.