Louisiana Lament

by Julie Smith

  “I feel like you’re dissing me. Like I didn’t do anything right.”

  “For chrissake, you got your period or somethin’? I’m trying to help out here.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Look, you check out Janessa’s house. Wonder if she tried to fire us because Rashad’s turned up there.”

  “I thought of that.”

  “I’m sure ya did, Ms. Wallis. I’m sure ya did. And read those poems some more. Maybe you’ll get some more ideas. Maybe they’re all lyin’ about the mama leavin’ the family. The way ya described that one poem, sounds like he’s a real mama’s boy. Maybe he does know where she is—and she’s taking care of him.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Something might be funny about that. So you want me to stay on Rashad, right? And you’ll take Austin?”

  “If it’s not too sexist or racist or anything.”

  She made another pout.

  “Oh, stop being so defensive,” he said.

  “Politically correct, that’s all.”

  “Well, it ain’t cute. You buying lunch or am I? You can if you want—to show I’m not sexist.”

  “Oh, hell,” Talba said. “Let’s flip a coin.”

  Eddie sighed. “How many times do I have to tell ya I hate it when women swear?”

  “And that’s not sexist?”

  He shrugged. “I guess I’m buyin’, then.” In fact, she didn’t require him to be politically correct, which was one of the things that made it possible for him to work with her (that and her voice)—since as a matter of fact, she was not only black and female, making two strikes against her, but also young and well-educated, making four. In his opinion, he handled all that pretty well, and when he didn’t, she didn’t rag on him too much about it. But the swearing really did get to him.

  He paid for lunch and as they made their way back to the sidewalk, she said, “Rashad’s got another friend. Writer named Wayne Taylor. You want to talk to him—being a man and all?”

  “Naah, you’re the literary light. He’s probably queer or something. I wouldn’t know what to say to him.”

  He’d expected at least a small rise, but she didn’t bat an eye. She was getting so used to him it was hardly any fun to kid her anymore.

  ***

  Talba felt groggy from getting up early, and also from the shrimp po’ boy. The last thing she wanted to do was another interview, so she took a ride out to Mystery Street to check on Janessa, on the way using her cell phone to call Wayne Taylor at UNO. A voice message said he’d be in class from one to three and in his office from three to five.

  She had plenty of time.

  She easily located her sister’s little garage apartment and listened for a moment at the door. Hearing nothing, she knocked and waited. After a few moments, she knocked again. No one answered.

  Well, she thought, I tried. She picked up some much-needed coffee at the CC’s on Esplanade, and, taking it with her, she drove to UNO.

  UNO was a public commuter college, with very few dorms, though it drew graduate students from all over, kids who just wanted to spend time in New Orleans. But, so far as Talba understood it, the undergraduate program was pretty utilitarian; most kids were there for a chance at an education that wouldn’t ruin their families financially.

  Its lakefront campus was sprawling and surpassingly ugly. It had been built in that most egregious of architectural eras, the fifties, and there were no trees big enough to soften the effect of the concrete and brick boxes that passed for buildings. But, since it truly was right on the lake—one of its boundaries was the levee—there was often a breeze blowing. Despite its ugliness, she liked the no-frills feel of UNO. Her fantasy was that its students were more interested in an education than in football and beer, and she figured you might as well have fantasies.

  Talba had made no appointment with Wayne Taylor, and since she was taking potluck, she figured she’d have to wait till he could get to her. She had a plan to amuse herself in the meantime. Nothing, she figured, impressed an author like seeing his book in someone’s hand—she could buy one and read it while she waited.

  Since the campus map didn’t mention a bookstore, she found the library, asked around, and learned the store was housed in the University Center. She got directions and headed over. To her surprise, the store seemed almost luxurious. A salt-and-pepper mix of students was killing time between classes, shopping not only for textbooks, but for the requisite T-shirts, sweats, Teddy bears, and greeting cards that every campus bookstore seemed to carry these days.

  She stepped up to the counter. “Where would I find something by Wayne Taylor?”

  “Taylor?” The clerk was a young, caramel-colored man in dreads and spectacles. He was cute. “Crazy Wayne Taylor?” The young man’s face lit up with recognition and the delight of a man who knew his job. “God, he’s a wild man. Just a sec, let me get you something.”

  She waited until he returned with two paperbacks, one sporting a swastika on the cover, which the clerk was studying. “Love story,” he said, “set during World War Two. It’s called Death Angel!”

  Talba winced at the triteness of the title. “How about the other one?”

  The clerk turned it on its back. “This one’s set in New Orleans. In Storyville. Not bad—you might like it.” Storyville was the erstwhile red light district at the edge of the French Quarter. “But I think his real talent’s screenwriting.”

  “Okay, I’ll take them both.” She had a pretty hard-and-fast rule never to read any book with a swastika on the cover—she found Nazis simultaneously boring and horrifying—but the point was to display, not read it.

  As he rang up the purchase, the clerk said, “Did you ever see Blue City? Great cop movie.”

  “His only claim to Hollywood fame, right?”

  “He hasn’t had a picture in a while, but he’s still writing. Good teacher, too. I took his screenwriting class last year.”

  “You’re a regular fan,” Talba said. “But I’m wondering something—why did you say he’s a wild man?”

  “You’ve never taken a class from him?”

  “Nope. Never have.”

  “If you had, you’d know. Wayne’s classes are not ordinary classes. You don’t know about him? People who aren’t even registered go just to watch the show.”

  “No kidding.”

  The guy shook his head. “Has to be seen to be believed, man. Can’t even be described.”

  “Oh, yeah? He’s in class now, according to his voice message. Where do I find him?”

  “Hmm. Not so sure. Want me to call the office for you?” He made the phone call, and in a moment, she was running across campus as if starring in a late-for-class dream.

  The class was in progress, but no one seemed to notice as she slipped in and joined a group of standees against a wall. She figured these were the drop-ins the bookstore dude had mentioned. A student, a short white girl in a buzz cut, short lavender overalls, and a green T-shirt was standing before the class, addressing Taylor.

  “You framed her, man. That was the lowest of the low.”

  Talba was taken aback. This was way too much like real life.

  Taylor was pale and sweating, as if he were being grilled by police instead of a kid with no fashion sense. “I didn’t frame her. The monster did.”

  “But you knew exactly who killed William—and you didn’t even speak up. You just let them hang her. You’re a turd.”

  “Thank you, Miss Brockman,” Taylor said, and the girl went back to her desk. “Will anyone else speak for Justine?” No hands went up. “No? Okay, then. How about me? Isn’t there anyone who’ll speak for Victor?”

  “You’re a turd!” Ms. Brockman shouted. “And the worst kind of coward. You just burned rubber when you saw you’d fathered a monster—like some guy who gets a girl pregnant and disappears on her.”

  It occurred to Talba that the work in question must be Frankenstein. Taylor must have set up some kind of mini-drama in which he was playing the part of Victor
Frankenstein as a device to discuss the book.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’m not all bad. Doesn’t anybody have a good word for me?”

  A kid in the back stood up. “Well, that was a good thing you did, not to let the monster have the bride.”

  “But I had to abort her to pull it off. Is abortion okay with everyone in here?”

  For a moment, no one said anything. Finally, Ms. Brockman shouted, “You should have aborted the monster, too. He turned out the way he did because you deserted him. Just like a kid whose mother’s a teenage crack whore is going to be a mini-gangster by the time he’s two and a half.”

  “Because no one will love him, you mean?”

  “Hey, that’s what abortion is all about—not bringing kids into homes where they’re not wanted. Kids who don’t get love grow up to be monsters. Literally.”

  A neat black girl rose, with straightened hair and a gold cross around her neck. “I’m sorry. In the sight of God, abortion’s never right.”

  “Oh, really?” Taylor said. “Well, what do you guys think about cloning?”

  Dead silence. Even Talba didn’t see where he was going with that one.

  “Was it okay for me to make the monster in the first place?” Taylor asked.

  “It was against nature,” the Christian girl said.

  “What about those guys cloning horses and sheep? Think people are going to be next? Maybe in twenty years, if you’re rich and you never want to die, you can just get cloned and live forever. Hey, you can even get cloned when you’re twenty-five and never get old. Is that against nature or not?”

  “Apples and oranges,” said a nerdy white boy. “Cloning’s science.” True to stereotype, he had greasy hair and wore glasses.

  “What I did was science,” Taylor said. “What’s the difference?”

  The boy who answered looked like a jock. “You made somebody really, really ugly, man. Your kid was so ugly even Lacy Brockman wouldn’t date him.”

  Titters rippled, but no way was Ms. Brockman going to take that. “Fuggeddaboutit, Boudreaux! I stick to girls—weeds out swine like you.”

  The girl who stood next wasn’t large, she wasn’t stout, she wasn’t heavy-set; she could only be described as fat. “You know, there was nothing wrong with that monster when he was born—he was a perfectly nice person until people turned him into a murderer.”

  “How so, Ms. Weber?” Taylor prompted.

  “They were mean to him because he was ugly. We put too much emphasis on physical beauty in our society.”

  A black boy stood, one who possessed quite a bit of physical beauty, in Talba’s opinion. “He wasn’t just ugly, he was different.”

  “Good, Mr. Jackson! You want to carry that point a little further?”

  “Like, maybe, I’m different from you.”

  “We’re talking about racism, I take it?”

  “You got it,” the student replied.

  “Interesting point. About that different thing. About how people shunned him and he started killing them—even people he didn’t even know—out of pure rage. What does that remind you of?”

  “Columbine,” the nerdy kid said. “I can see doing that.”

  “Okay. All right,” Taylor said. “Look at all the issues we’ve covered.” He started writing on the board—abortion, cloning, Columbine, body consciousness, societal values, racism,,nature vs. nurture, origins of crime—speaking each word or phrase as he wrote. He turned back to face the class. “Anybody still think Frankenstein is irrelevant? I believe the phrase Mr. Jackson used at the beginning of class was ‘just some musty old ghost story.’ ”

  For a moment the class was silent again, trying to decide if the performance was over, when a loud voice spoke from the hall. “Wait a minute! Stop! Nobody ever spoke for me.” And in strolled—or rather, in shambled—the monster himself, moving in the crablike fashion of everyone who’d ever played him in a movie. “I’ve killed better kids than you for a helluva lot less.” He had a great, gravelly voice, prompting one student to yell, “Hey, it’s Robert De Niro.” But in fact Talba recalled, De Niro had looked like himself in his version. This monster wore the classic bolt-head look from the original.

  “No, it’s not,” Ms. Brockman countered. “It’s Boris Karloff.”

  “Shut up,” the monster growled. “The name’s Bundy. James Bundy.”

  A few people got the “Bundy” part and cracked up, but most were still too stunned to react.

  Taylor opened his arms for a big hug. “Son!” he cried, starting towards the monster.

  “Too little too late, Vickie boy. I want you to feel my pain.” James Bundy raised both arms as if to attack the professor, who cringed appropriately, but at the last second, the monster turned to the class. “Hey, let’s take a vote—you ignoramuses think I should kill him?”

  A few shouted, “Yeah! Waste him!” but someone, probably a shill, Talba realized later, yelled, “Who ya callin’ ignoramuses?” which provided the opening James Bundy was looking for. Next followed a pointed but amusingly phrased lecture on how he, who wasn’t even human, had never had anyone to love him, nor any school to go to, had nonetheless managed to teach himself to read and had educated himself “like Malcolm X in his prison cell,” and could quote whole sections of Goethe, Plutarch, and Milton. After that, he proceeded to lay a little Paradise Lost on them, and then to ask how many of them had even read it. Zero, it turned out, and Taylor’s point was made.

  The session wound up with a few more remarks about the relevancy, both of Frankenstein and of popular culture in general, and in the end elicited wild applause, in which Talba joined happily. She could honestly say it was the most enjoyable class she’d ever attended—and she’d always been bookish.

  Once it was over, she resumed Plan A, making her way to Taylor’s office after a brief stop in the ladies’ room. When she arrived, the door was already closed. She knocked, and was told to come in. Taylor sat at his desk; the nerd from class lounged in the other chair. “Yes?” the professor said.

  “Sorry to interrupt. I wonder if I can see you next.”

  “Wait outside,” he said curtly.

  She sat on the hall floor to examine her purchases. Death Angel she hardly glanced at. The other book was called Mahogany Hall, which she recognized as the name of a historic bordello run by a black woman named Lulu White—probably one of the city’s first successful African-American businesswomen. The ragtime pianist Spencer Williams, composer of “Basin Street Blues,” had played there often. But the story’s hero was neither Williams nor White. The jacket copy said the book was about a young white man who’d been taken to Mahogany Hall by his father, for what some men seemed to think of as their initiation into manhood. In fact, the boy was changed forever, but not exactly in the way his father had imagined. Instead, he fell in love with the demimonde and became a newspaper reporter who chronicled the city’s criminal underbelly, unwittingly turning up skeletons in his own family’s closet.

  A pretty good story, Talba thought. She had time to read about twenty pages before the door opened, the white kid came out, and Taylor summoned her, frowning at seeing her sprawled on the floor.

  Taylor was about five-ten and exceptionally slim, which gave him a youthful look belied by the white in his sandy hair. She put his age at about forty, slightly younger than Hunt Montjoy. His hair was cut short, but you could see that it wanted to curl. He had hazel eyes and smile lines, and he wore a striped shirt and a tie. Very correct for a place like UNO. Aggressively white-guy, which wasn’t Talba’s thing. Still, there was something about the agile way he moved that was very attractive—sexy, even. Talba guessed he was pretty popular with the female students.

  He looked at her in a puzzled way, trying to place her, perhaps, not yet ready to admit her to the inner sanctum. “What can I do for you?” he asked finally, electing not to introduce himself. He probably thought he was supposed to know her.

  “Sign my book?” she said, and drew a smile. “Make
it, For Talba, to whom I poured out my soul.”

  “Oh, really?” The professor’s smile disappeared.

  Talba held out her hand and introduced herself. “I’m Talba Wallis. A PI, I’m afraid.”

  Taylor took her hand but he didn’t seem happy about it. “Hunt Montjoy warned me about you.”

  The more he didn’t smile, the more she did. “Thought he might have. But I don’t bite. Really. And I think you’re a good writer. Also a terrific teacher. I just caught your Frankenstein class.”

  He let his teeth show again. “Okay, okay. Flattery gets you an ‘A.’ Come on in.”

  “Wish I’d known it was that easy when I was in school. I could have made my mama so happy.”

  She followed him into his lair, and saw that, to her surprise, it was carpeted and cheerful, with natural light from a wall of windows opposite the hall. Bookshelves loomed behind his desk, and lined the wall across from the windows. A metal cabinet rested against the fourth wall. There were no pictures, but then, there was no room for any. One green plant thrived on a ledge by the windows. More would have looked better, but Taylor was a guy; probably no one had told him. Except for his desktop, the cubbyhole was surprisingly clear of papers, but she figured the cabinet was stuffed with them.

  He waved her to a chair, apparently through with the pleasantries. For the first time, she noticed a tightness around his mouth, as if he were a lot less relaxed than he’d first appeared. “Hunt said you were asking questions about Allyson and Cassie. Damn, what a waste! This whole thing’s hit us all like a sledgehammer. Hunt’s been drinking all day, I guess. He called me from Pete’s.”

  “Pete’s? The bar?” She could get that much for Eddie.

  “Yeah. Wanted me to come join him.” He paused, grimacing. “Like some of us don’t have to earn a living.”

  “Hunt’s… uh…” she left a nice long pause “…quite a character.”

  “He’s not at his best when he’s drinking.” Quickly, Taylor changed the subject. “He said Rashad’s disappeared.”