by Chris Wiltz
“Well,” Diana said, “her youthful exuberance bores me out of my mind. So does watching you play pool,” she added.
“But you've never watched me play pool!”
“That hardly matters.”
Her hauteur always brought out the tease in me. “Let me get this straight. You're bored if we're not dressed to the teeth and dining in some elegant restaurant, or undressed and in bed. Is that right?”
But as soon as I said it, I realized it was essentially true. That's the way it had been for the nearly two months we'd been seeing each other.
She let half a block of silence pass before she said, “Yes, that's right. I suppose it does sound a little selfish,” she admitted.
“And maybe a little boring?”
She didn't answer that. I parked in the closed gas station next door to Robert's. Maurice's car was nowhere in sight. I didn't want to fight, and I certainly didn't give a damn about playing pool with Nita. I left the keys in the ignition, fully intending to tell Diana that as soon as Maurice and Nita arrived, I'd take her home, that I'd much rather be in bed with her than leaning over a pool table. I put my hand on her neck, underneath her hair, and pulled her toward me.
She resisted, huddling in her fur as if she were cold. Her voice was icy. “Would you please be kind enough to call me a taxi? I'd like to go home now.”
Instead of telling her I'd be happy to take her myself, I said, mostly kidding but not totally, “You know what, princess? You're being a royal pain in the ass.”
She popped me in the face with the flat of her hand. I think she was as surprised as I was. We just stared at each other for a few seconds, then I got out of the car and went into Robert's, heading straight for the phone hanging on the wall at the end of the bar. I could feel her standing behind me before I finished dialing the number of United Cab. I gave the dispatcher Robert's address, turned around, took Diana by the arm and headed out the front door to Claiborne Avenue.
I smoked a cigarette and wouldn't look at her. When the cab pulled up, I opened the back door and stood there.
She didn't get in immediately. I knew she wanted the last word, but I was surprised when she said, in the best Mae West tradition, “Why don't you come on over when you're finished?”
I waited until she pulled her slim, elegant legs inside the taxi, handed the driver ten bucks, and closed the door.
She must have considered the fight a draw.
I could say that my concentration wasn't good or that the scene with Diana had unnerved me, but the truth is Nita was that good a pool player. The first game, I suggested eight ball because that's what most women like to play. She merely nodded and set the cue ball up to break. The strength of her break was impressive. She sunk one ball after the other. She won before I had a chance to play. She suggested nine ball, and won fair and square.
I decided I was going to take her to Grady's one night and make a bundle off Murphy and the boys. I wouldn't pretend she wasn't really good or act as if I were trying to indulge her. I would tell them the truth right from the beginning. I knew it wouldn't matter; they wouldn't believe me anyway.
4
The Emerald Lizard
So that's how I came to be propped up in bed with a Scotch, expecting a call from Diana. Instead, it was Jackie Silva who called.
When Jackie said she might as well be in China if she was in Westwego, in one way she was right: to a lot of people in New Orleans the West Bank is on the other side of the world. It would be considered a fate worse than death to have to live there. If threatened with death, however, they might consent to live in Algiers, which is part of New Orleans. They would tolerate it because in some sections Algiers still looks like New Orleans, with raised, high-ceilinged homes, camelbacks, doubles, and structures with a lot of architectural gingerbread. Otherwise, these people think the rest of the West Bank has no character. It's nothing but suburbs, shopping centers, and convenience stores.
But to the people from the West Bank, the West Bank is the Best Bank. To them New Orleans is too crowded, too dirty, too expensive, and too scary.
Algiers aside, the rest of the West Bank is part of Jefferson Parish and, with two exceptions, is patrolled by the Jefferson Parish Sheriffs Office. Those two exceptions are Gretna and Westwego. In both cases, the people from those towns got together and incorporated, electing their own mayors and city councils, forming their own police departments, and sending their own representatives to the legislature. In Gretna this action seems understandable. Gretna covers a large area and a lot of people live there. In Westwego, it's something else. I can't give you an exact explanation, but maybe I can give you a feeling for the way it is. I have a friend who was born on the West Bank and lives in Marrero. He thinks the people from Algiers are snobbish because they're part of the Big Town, but he grew up being told not to associate with anyone from Westwego. I guess the people from Westwego always felt they were different, separate from everyone else across the river, and decided to make their separation official.
I'm a good New Orleans boy, so I'll admit to a certain prejudice against the West Bank. You know, sort of an “Our team is the best team” attitude. But I grew up in the Irish Channel, and a lot of people on the other side of Magazine Street were told not to associate with anyone from the Channel. I know the West Bank is different from the East Bank, but I also know that no matter which side of the river we plant ourselves on, our roots grow deep. In the end we're all from the same hot bayou country. Also, I like the names of the towns across the river—Algiers, Gretna, Marrero, Avondale, and farther down, Crown Point, Barataria, and Lafitte.
Okay, so Westwego doesn't sound so picturesque. Nevertheless, I was on my way to Westwego.
The afternoon after I talked to Jackie, I drove out to Jefferson Parish and took the Huey Long bridge across the Mississippi. I ended up at the traffic circle in Bridge City, which I followed around until I got to the road that shot off to Westwego.
I was completely out of my normal territory and used a map to figure out that Highway 18 eventually became Sala Avenue and then 4th Street where the lounge was located. According to the map I was on the Old Spanish Trail. This gave me a sense of adventure. Then I was on River Road, which runs right up against the levee that does its best to keep the mighty Mississippi in check. I went past a part of Avondale Shipyards. The hulls of ships and tugboats looked surreal, their keels seeming to cut deep into the earth from a distance. I was so busy taking in the scenery that I missed my turn and had to go back.
The Emerald Lizard was a plain, one-story, weather-beaten frame building with a couple of incongruities. One was its front door, a piece of black glass, with The Emerald Lizard written on it in a bright flowing green. The other was the sign, an emerald green lizard studded with small lightbulbs. It looked, too, as if lightbulbs would flash on and off at night so you could see the throat of the lizard puff up. I wasn't sure I considered this inviting, but, what the heck, the black door was open even though the lounge was closed, so I went on in.
Inside was almost as black as the door, even on this sunny, though somewhat hazy, afternoon. My eyes adjusted to the darkness enough for me to feel as if I'd entered a womb carpeted in green and black. It was on the floor and the walls, a green mottled with black, bright enough to seem lush, dark enough to be romantic. Close and warm and stifling.
That was all I noticed before Jackie came from behind the bar, where she'd been standing with a man. She came toward me, across the dance floor, walking that slow, sensuous, provocative walk, smiling that intimate, conspiratorial smile, and twenty-two years melted away like a sweet meringue on the tongue.
The changes in Jackie seemed mostly a matter of style. She no longer tortured her hair into an ornamental shrub the way girls used to. Instead it was curly now, soft curls rolling and tumbling from her crown until they fell to her shoulders and floated gently there. It was blacker now than it used to be, so black that the smooth curve of a curl here and there glinted blue from somewhere de
ep inside like a kaleidoscope of blue stones that moved and changed as she moved. Her lips were a rich cherry red instead of those iridescent pinks and lavenders, and she didn't wear nearly as much eye makeup as she once did. Her eyes were shadowed with a hint of green to go with the green in the sweater she was wearing, the emerald green of the Lizard.
But as she came closer I could see there was a hardness to her face, a set to her mouth and a puffiness around her eyes. Either she hadn't been sleeping too well or she'd been drinking too much or both. The puffiness, though, couldn't disguise those slanted, seductive eyes. And her crooked smile still ended in two crescent-shaped lines, but the lines cut a little deeper now. So much the better—I'd always liked them.
Jackie took both my hands and we kissed lightly on the mouth. She stared at the scar on my face that ran from my left eyelid down to the lower tip of my ear, an arc like the marking on a tabby cat. It caused my eyelid to droop a little, and on the whole gave me a rather sinister look that might come in handy if I ever needed to scare the pants off anybody. It still scared the pants off me to think about how I got it. Jackie released one of my hands, and I thought for a moment she was going to trace the scar with a fingertip, something some women seem to like to do. I involuntarily braced myself so I wouldn't flinch away, but she didn't do it.
“Knife?” she asked. I nodded, not anxious to go into the gory details of late one night in a dark alleyway. She followed up with, “Was it a woman?”
Jackie, it seemed, had not lost her ability to kick aside preliminaries and get into the more penetrating questions.
“Is that what you'd go for,” I asked her, “the eyes?”
“Hell no,” she said, “not unless I was ugly.”
I smiled. “Why don't you tell me about Bubba Brevna,” I suggested.
Still grasping my hand, she led me to the dance floor, a light oak parquetry, one end of which was covered over with a crude numbered board.
Her hand flew out toward the board, boomeranged back and landed on her hip. “He's running chicken drop contests on my dance floor.”
She told me that one day when she wasn't there, two of Brevna's hoods, the Impastato twins, had arrived at the lounge, paint cans in hand, and told the bartender they had permission to paint the board.
“If they had permission, it was from Brevna, not me,” she said indignantly. She said the paint was barely dry when they showed up that evening, built a wall of beer cases around the board, took bets on the numbers, and threw a chicken out on them.
“Have you ever felt sorry for a chicken,” she asked me, “everybody yelling at it to crap on their number?” Her voice had gotten so hoarse that some of her words were soundless. She wiped under each eye with a finger. I'd never thought that Jackie would be so emotional, not, at any rate, about a chicken. She'd been pretty tough when we were kids. But that's not what she was upset about.
“I mean,” she said, “does this look like that kind of place?”
Now that my eyes were fully adjusted to the dimness, I looked around some more. Tall furry black chairs surrounded gleaming black tables. Across from where we were standing was another level, raised a step off the dance floor and separated from it by a low iron railing. There was more tables and furry chairs, and also black upholstered booths with green carpet on the wall behind them. All in all, a very intimate setting. A little too intimate for me. Even though the place was empty, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Above us the ceiling was draped, tentlike, gold spangles on white. A disco ball hung from the central point of the tent.
Jackie called out to the guy behind the bar, “Hit the light, Jeffrey.”
The ball began to revolve slowly, colored lights sending out rays reflected off its mirrored pieces. I thought this sort of lounge decor had gone out in the early seventies. Of course, this was New Orleans, the West Bank yet, everything so slow and lazy that things caught on several years after leaving the rest of the country.
The decor was dazzling, claustrophobic. I imagined the lounge full of people. I could see couples overcome on the dance floor, twosomes suffocating from all the fabric on the booths and walls, the flaming tent falling on the helpless, bedazzled patrons.
I looked back at Jackie. “Not the sort of place for a chicken,” I told her.
A tear edged its way over one of her bottom eyelids. She wiped it away. Her hoarse voice cracked with the effort of staying dry-eyed. “The Impastatos say they're running the chicken drop contests to help me pay off my debt.”
As I said, the Jackie I remembered had been tough, self-confident, aggressive, and sometimes abrasive, but there had been a vulnerability about her, too. Somehow that vulnerability came through mostly in her voice. She was older and it was deeper, which is why I hadn't recognized her right away on the phone, but it was still sexy as hell, even when she was talking about a chicken drop contest. The voice was somewhat of a contradiction, sex and toughness and vulnerability all at once. It wasn't a fragile voice, but it told you she was fragile.
I put my arm around her shoulders. She leaned into me easily, still fighting tears, and put her arm around my waist.
“Thanks for coming,” she said, her voice not much louder than a sigh. “I feel better now that you're here.”
The guy behind the bar hadn't been doing much besides throwing a couple of light switches and watching us. His name was Jeffrey Bonage. He was probably in his late twenties and he stood behind the black-and-gold marbleized Formica bar with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He was skinny, too skinny, his shoulders rounded and his chest caved in, his neck a little too long. His face was thin, but nice looking, his eyes big and watchful. His not quite blond, but not quite brown hair was clipped short, and I could see the back of his head with its crimped waves reflected in the smoky gold-veined squares of mirror behind the bar. His movements were crimped too, jerky. When Jackie introduced us, he moved an elbow away from its close hug against his body to acknowledge me.
Jackie asked me what I wanted. I said I'd have a beer and she told Jeffrey to bring us a couple of Dixie Longnecks. We went to sit in a booth toward the front of the lounge. Jeffrey accommodated us by turning on a small spotlight above the booth.
“I'm not a cop anymore, Jackie.”
“I know. I've kept in touch with Reenie off and on through the years.”
I hadn't known that. I nodded. “So how much do you owe Brevna?” I asked her.
“I borrowed ten thousand dollars from him. I thought I'd be able to pay him back in a year or two except I didn't count on the oil industry going bust. Most of the people who live in Westwego are tied to oil in some way or another. The ones who can are getting out. People are going bankrupt, losing their houses. They're probably drinking more, but it's cheaper to drink at home.”
Jeffrey put a cardboard coaster, a Dixie, a napkin, and a glass down in front of each of us. He poured Jackie's beer and stood a couple of steps away from the booth, his hands jammed in his pockets. Maybe he was awaiting further instructions, or an invitation to sit down. Jackie paid him no attention and didn't stop talking.
“I got behind on my payments,” she said, “and now I owe him more than I borrowed. I'm paying fifty percent interest.”
If you're wondering why I didn't choke on the mouthful of beer I'd just taken, it's because interest rates like that are not unusual for privately financed high-risk businesses like barrooms. If you want to open a neighborhood bar anywhere in New Orleans and don't have the capital, you wouldn't go to a savings and loan or a bank unless you didn't know any better. I'd heard of amusement company operators and liquor and cigarette wholesalers forming silent partnerships with lounge owners or lending money outright. Part of the deal was they put their vending machines and games in the place to help pay off the debt. Brevna apparently put in chicken drop contests.
Jeffrey slunk off in the direction of the bar and I asked, “What kind of business is Brevna in?”
“He says he's a fisherman, but he thinks he's the Carlos
Marcello of the West Bank,” Jackie said sarcastically.
Marcello had been the reputed Mafia boss of New Orleans at one time. He had survived family wars, a 1938 marijuana conviction, and deportation only to be imprisoned on a federal racketeering conviction at the age of seventy. He was currently making a fuss from prison, demanding his social security benefits.
“Marcello always gives his occupation as tomato salesman,” I said.
“Yeah, he probably has a few trucks parked around town selling tomatoes off their rear ends. Bubba has an interest in some fishing boats out of Lafitte.”
“I don't know, Jackie. There's too much in a name. The idea of a Mafioso type named Bubba is ridiculous.”
“This is the West Bank, Neal. Bubba has a gang of small-time hoods who burn cars for insurance money. They pimp, they gamble"—she pointed toward the numbered board—"they specialize in bargain-basement intimidation. They do anything their walnut brains can understand well enough to vilify.” The words rolled off her tongue.
Jeffrey returned and put a black suede cigarette case studded with rhinestones on the table.
“Thanks, honey,” Jackie said and treated him to one of her lopsided smiles.
“Does Brevna do this kind of high-risk financing as a business?” I asked her.
She flipped a hand and said hotly, “I don't know. I don't know what the hell he does. Lately he's been trying to figure out ways to help me make more money. He's got Godzilla running whores out of here now, and of course the inventive Impastatos can always find something new and exciting to do, like two-dollar limit poker games in my office while they stuff the chicken for the next contest.”
“Calm down, Jackie.” She was angry and I could see she was set to rave on. “Who is Godzilla?”
“The nation's first brain transplant,” she sneered. “He makes the Impastatos look like Einstein. He makes my bouncer look like Peter Pan. Next to him, Helen Keller was talkative.”
