“The baby’s dead. The baby’s dead. The baby’s gone to heaven.”
“Jesus God,” Tom muttered. All up and down Philip Street fathers were returning home from work. A jeep filled with teenagers came tearing past and threw a beer can against the curb.
Six or seven pieces of Tom’s mind sailed out across the street and stationed themselves along the power line that zigzagged back and forth along Philip Street between the live oak trees.
The pieces of his mind sat upon the power line like a row of black starlings. They looked him over.
Helen took the dog out of the buggy and dragged it over to the kennel.
“Jesus Christ,” Tom said, and the pieces of his mind flew back to him as swiftly as they had flown away and entered his eyes and ears and nostrils and arranged themselves in their proper places like parts of a phrenological head.
Tom looked at his watch. It said 6:15. He stepped back into the bedroom and closed the French windows. A vase of huge roses from the garden hid Letty’s reflection in the mirror.
“I’m going to the camp for the night. I need to get away. Besides, the season’s almost over.”
“All right,” Letty answered. “Who are you going with?”
“I think I’ll take Helen with me. I haven’t paid any attention to her for weeks.”
“That’s good,” Letty said, “I really think I’m getting a cold. I’ll have a tray up for supper and try to get some sleep.”
Tom moved around the room, opening drawers and closets and throwing some gear into a canvas duffel bag. He changed into his hunting clothes.
He removed the guns he needed from a shelf in the upstairs den and cleaned them neatly and thoroughly and zipped them into their carriers.
“Helen,” he called from the downstairs porch. “Bring the dog in the house and come get on some play clothes. I’m going to take you to the duck camp with me. You can take the dog.”
“Can we stop and get beignets?” Helen called back, coming running at the invitation.
“Sure we can, honey. Whatever you like. Go get packed. We’ll leave as soon as dinner is over.”
It was past 9:00 at night. They crossed the Mississippi River from the New Orleans side on the last ferry going to Algier’s Point. There was an offshore breeze and a light rain fell on the old brown river. The Mississippi River smelled like the inside of a nigger cabin, powerful and fecund. The smell came in Tom’s mouth until he felt he could chew it.
He leaned over the railing and vomited. He felt better and walked back to the red Chevrolet pickup he had given himself for a birthday present. He thought it was chic for a banker to own a pickup.
Helen was playing with the dog, pushing him off the seat and laughing when he climbed back on her lap. She had a paper bag of doughnuts from the French Market and was eating them and licking the powdered sugar from her fingers and knocking the dog off the seat.
She wasn’t the least bit sleepy.
“I’m glad Tim didn’t get to go. Tim was bad at school, that’s why he had to stay home, isn’t it? The sisters called Momma. I don’t like Tim. I’m glad I got to go by myself.” She stuck her fat arms out the window and rubbed Tom’s canvas hunting jacket. “This coat feels hard. It’s all dirty. Can we go up in the cabin and talk to the pilot?”
“Sit still, Helen.”
“Put the dog in the back, he’s bothering me.” She bounced up and down on the seat. “We’re going to the duck camp. We’re going to the duck camp.”
The ferry docked. Tom drove the pickup onto the blacktop road past the city dump and on into Plaquemines Parish.
They drove into the brackish marshes that fringe the Gulf of Mexico where it extends in ragged fingers along the coast below and to the east of New Orleans. As they drove closer to the sea the hardwoods turned to palmetto and water oak and willow.
The marshes were silent. Tom could smell the glasswort and black mangrove, the oyster and shrimp boats.
He wondered if it were true that children and dogs could penetrate a man’s concealment, could know him utterly.
Helen leaned against his coat and prattled on.
In the Wilson house on Philip Street Tim and the twins were cuddled up by Letty, hearing one last story before they went to bed.
A blue wicker tray held the remains of the children’s hot chocolate. The china cups were a confirmation present sent to Letty from Limoges, France.
Now she was finishing reading a wonderful story by Ludwig Bemelmans about a little convent girl in Paris named Madeline who reforms the son of the Spanish ambassador, putting an end to his terrible habit of beheading chickens on a miniature guillotine.
Letty was feeling better. She had decided God was just trying to make up to her for Jennifer.
The camp was a three-room wooden shack built on pilings out over Bayou Lafouche, which runs through the middle of the parish.
The inside of the camp was casually furnished with old leather office furniture, hand-me-down tables and lamps, and a walnut poker table from Neiman-Marcus. Photographs of hunts and parties were tacked around the walls. Over the poker table were pictures of racehorses and their owners and an assortment of ribbons won in races.
Tom laid the guns down on the bar and opened a cabinet over the sink in the part of the room that served as a kitchen. The nigger hadn’t come to clean up after the last party and the sink was piled with half-washed dishes. He found a clean glass and a bottle of Tanqueray gin and sat down behind the bar.
Helen was across the room on the floor finishing the beignets and trying to coax the dog to come closer. He was considering it. No one had remembered to feed him.
Tom pulled a new deck of cards out of a drawer, broke the seal, and began to shuffle them.
Helen came and stood by the bar. “Show me a trick, Daddy. Make the queen disappear. Show me how to do it.”
“Do you promise not to tell anyone the secret? A magician never tells his secrets.”
“I won’t tell. Daddy, please show me, show me now.”
Tom spread out the cards. He began to explain the trick.
“All right, you go here and here, then here. Then pick up these in just the right order, but look at the people while you do it, not at the cards.”
“I’m going to do it for Lisa.”
“She’s going to beg you to tell the secret. What will you do then?”
“I’ll tell her a magician never tells his secrets.”
Tom drank the gin and poured some more.
“Now let me do it to you, Daddy.”
Not yet, Helen. Go sit over there with the dog and practice it where I can’t see what you’re doing. I’ll pretend I’m Lisa and don’t know what’s going on.”
Tom picked up the Kliengunther 7 mm. magnum rifle and shot the dog first, splattering its brains all over the door and walls. Without pausing, without giving her time to raise her eyes from the red and gray and black rainbow of the dog, he shot the little girl.
The bullet entered her head from the back. Her thick body rolled across the hardwood floor and lodged against a hat rack from Jody Mellon’s old office in the Hibernia Bank Building. One of her arms landed on a pile of old Penthouse magazines and her disordered brain flung its roses north and east and south and west and rejoined the order from which it casually arose.
Tom put down the rifle, took a drink of the thick gin, and, carrying the pistol, walked out onto the pier through the kitchen door. Without removing his glasses or his hunting cap he stuck the .38 Smith and Wesson revolver against his palate and splattered his own head all over the new pier and the canvas covering of the Boston Whaler. His body struck the boat going down and landed in eight feet of water beside a broken crab trap left over from the summer.
A pair of deputies from the Plaquemines Parish sheriff’s office found the bodies.
Everyone believed it was some terrible inexplicable mistake or accident.
No one believed that much bad luck could happen to a nice lady like Letty Dufrechou Wil
son, who never hurt a flea or gave anyone a minute’s trouble in her life.
No one believed that much bad luck could get together between the fifteenth week after Pentecost and the third week in Advent.
No one believed a man would kill his own little illegitimate dyslexic daughter just because she was crazy.
And no one, not even the district attorney of New Orleans, wanted to believe a man would shoot a $3,000 Labrador retriever sired by Super Chief out of Prestidigitation.
The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society
The spring that Robert McLaurin was fourteen he had a black friend named Gus who lived underneath a huge live oak tree in Audubon Park. It was a tree so old and imposing that people in New Orleans called it the President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society.
Gus had a regular home somewhere inside the St. Thomas Street project, with a mother and brothers and sisters, but for all practical purposes he lived underneath the two-hundred-year-old tree in front of Dr. Alton Ochsner’s palatial stucco house on Exposition Boulevard.
Imagine a brilliant day in early spring. It is the middle of the afternoon and under the low-hanging branches of the oak tree the air is quiet and cool and smells of all the gardens on the boulevard; confederate jasmine, honeysuckle, sweet alyssum, magnolia, every stereotyped southern flower you can imagine has mingled its individual odor into an ardent humid soup.
In the distance traffic is going along the avenue and a snatch of music floats across the street from the conservatory at Loyola University.
There is room under the tree for twenty or thirty kids on a good day. It is a perfect office for the youngest and most successful dope pushers on the river side of St. Charles Avenue.
Those spring afternoons of 1971 Robert would cut his last-period physical education class and come riding up on his bike playing his portable radio at full volume. Station WTIX would be playing a love song by Judy Collins or “American Pie” by Don McLean, the national anthem of 1971.
Gus would be curled up asleep in the roots of the tree. From a distance he looked like an old catcher’s mitt. He wore the same thing every day, a brown leather flight jacket and a pair of indefinite-colored plaid pants so worn that the lines of the plaid all ran together at the edges.
“You got any money?” Gus would ask, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with a dirty fist.
“Yeah, I got plenty. Last week they gave me twenty dollars to buy a track suit with. You want to get a mufflelata?”
“Let’s smoke first.”
Then Gus would open his cigar box, carefully remove a paper from its folder, pour the beautifully manicured dope onto the paper and roll it into a thin cylinder. He was careful, keeping his back to the wind if there was any so as not to spill a piece. He performed his ceremony to perfection, the rank aroma of his slept-in clothes rising to meet the spectacular smell of the marijuana as he lit the joint with dignity and passed it to Robert.
“How much stuff we got?” Robert asked.
“Not much. We got to find Uncle Clarence and hit him up. We hardly got enough for everyone that’s coming today.”
Roman Catholic girls in plaid uniform skirts rode by on bikes, their legs flashing in the sunlight.
“You know many of them Catholic girls?” Gus asked, making conversation.
“Yeah, I know them, but they don’t talk to me. They’re pretty stuck-up.”
“How come?” Gus said.
“They go out with older guys. See that one over there,” and he pointed out Darlene Trilling, riding by on a ten-speed; “she’s really Jewish. She loves a senior in high school but her parents won’t let her go out with him. She lives next door to me. She’s probably going off somewhere to meet him right this minute.”
“How come they won’t let her?” Gus asked.
“They’re probably afraid he’ll give her some dope or something.”
Gus started laughing his famous laugh. His face lit up like a three-tiered chandelier. He didn’t hold anything back when he laughed.
“You should have seen my momma last Saturday,” he said. “She outran a black cop. He couldn’t catch her for anything and he knows that block as good as she does. She’s fast as lightning. I’m fast like her.”
“Is she a big woman?” Robert asked politely.
“Naw, she’s little like me. One time when I got sick she put me in her nightgown. It just fit.”
The oak tree held the boys like a spell. They rolled another joint.
“Someday I’ll get a Buick and deal out of it,” Gus said.
“What if they make dope legal?”
Gus looked scared. He looked like Robert had suggested they were going to drop a bomb on the park that very afternoon.
“They can’t make it legal. The bars won’t let them. It would run all the bars out of business.”
They smoked in peace, talking about cars.
“Let’s go get a mufflelata before the other kids get here,” Robert said, stretching and getting up.
Gus hopped on the handlebars of Robert’s bike and they rode off to Tranchina’s, an Italian restaurant on Magazine Street that sells mufflelata sandwiches to go. A mufflelata is a plate-sized loaf of wop bread piled high with salami, bologna, pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, and soaked with olive salad. Gus and Robert ate out frequently that spring and this was one of their favorite meals.
“I wish we could get a cold beer to go with the mufflelata.”
“There’s no place will sell us one. I’ll steal some out of the refrigerator for tomorrow.”
“What about Darby’s, the bookie?”
“Naw, he won’t take a chance just to sell a couple of beers.”
“Well, we can get an Icee at the Tote-Sum store.”
A baby-blue Lincoln Continental turned the corner by the Chandlers’ white picket fence and nearly ran over them. They were stoned, riding along looking at the red-and-pink azaleas and didn’t see it coming. Gus managed to jump free and landed on his feet still holding the cigar box.
“Robert!” It was his mother. She had just come from the beauty parlor and her hair looked like a helmet for the Los Angeles Rams.
“Robert, come here to me.” She pulled his head into the car window. “What are you doing with that black boy?” Robert’s mother was a liberal. She never called black people niggers or Negroes even when she was mad at them.
“He’s just a kid. I was giving him a ride to the Tote-Sum.”
“Why aren’t you at practice?” Her helmet moved up and down as she talked.
“They canceled it. The coach is sick. Listen, you almost ran over us, do you know that?” He had her on the defensive. She was very sensitive about her driving.
“Robert, I’m on my way to the grocery. You be home at six.”
She drove off wearing her philosophical look. Jean-Paul Sartre couldn’t have done it better.
“That was my mother.”
“You scared of her?”
“God no. She’s scared of me. She’s afraid I’ll die like my brother. He died when he was four. He had something wrong with him when he was born.”
“Only person I’m scared of is my mother. She’ll beat the daylights out of me if she finds out I’m dealing. My cousin just got put in jail for dealing. They put him in the House of D for a week.”
“The what?”
“The House of D. The House of Detention. It’s supposed to be for over eighteen and he ain’t but sixteen but that’s where he is and he cries every time they talk to him. Somebody stole his towel the first day he was there.”
They ate the mufflelata and drank an Icee and rode back to the park and sold the rest of their stuff. Then they decided to ride down to the project and look for Uncle Clarence.
Supplies were a problem. They tried raising a crop on the back side of the levee, but the cops dug it up. They managed to bring in a small crop in Robert’s grandmother’s backyard while she was on a tour of Scandinavia with her bridge club, but that was a one-shot deal.
; They started off for the project. They rode down Tchoupitoulas Street, which runs in a crescent along the levee lined with wharves and warehouses.
It was supposed to be dangerous to go into the project, but from Robert’s elevated point of view the project just looked like a lot of old brick apartment buildings with iron balconies hanging off the sides like abandoned birds’ nests and aluminum foil on half the windows to keep out the heat.
It was late afternoon and people were sitting on the stoops talking and drinking beer. Some kids were having a war with Coke bottles full of muddy water for ammunition. Robert and Gus went up a flight of stairs in one of the buildings and Gus’s oldest sister met them at the door. She was taller and lighter than Gus, dressed in a ruffled white shirt and a short blue skirt.
“Where you think you been?” she demanded. Robert could smell her cool perfume.
“I been out on business,” Gus said. “Where’s momma?”
“She’s gone to the store and you better stay here till she gets back. She sent Uncle Clarence looking for you yesterday.”
She gave Robert a haughty look and settled back on the sofa where she was polishing her fingernails and watching a movie on television. She was studying to be a secretary.
The apartment was small and crowded with furniture. In one corner was a brass coatrack with ten or twelve different colored coats on it. It looked like a melted carousel. Robert kept staring at it, pulling in his pupils to make it look weirder and weirder.
“What’s wrong with him?” Gus’s sister demanded, pointing a newly coated nail at Robert.
“That’s Robert. He does business with me uptown. There ain’t nothing wrong with him some food won’t fix. Where’s Uncle Clarence now. You seen him?”
“He’s probably still looking for you.”
Gus liked to eat all the time when he was high. He made some peanut-butter sandwiches and they went off looking for his uncle.
They found Clarence sitting on the steps of a neighboring building drinking Apple Jack wine and flirting with a girlfriend. He was light-complected and wore a mustache and a carefully ironed African Mau-Mau shirt.
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams Page 3
