Paul took a deep breath, wiping his dripping forehead with tiny paper napkins. “Which is why you will help me.”
“It is?”
“Because helping me is the easiest way to deal with me.”
“Paul, look—”
“J.D., you can do this.” He reached over and took my arm. He was still incredibly strong. “I’m asking for your help, J.D.” He looked at me with a clear-eyed intensity that I remembered from when I was a kid and watched him play high school football. He’d be on the sidelines with that same look. I nodded.
“What can I do?” I asked.
He relaxed. “I’ve got me a little independent expenditure group. Okay, it’s not my committee, because that would be illegal and I don’t do illegal shit since that little gambling fuckup, but let’s say that I am aware of a group of concerned citizens who have organized a little independent expenditure committee and that little committee, though full of goodwill and a desire to serve the public good, is a little short of resources. You can get some resources into that committee, and while you are doing it, make sure they don’t step on their dicks and waste the goddamn money.”
“Who’s running this independent expenditure committee?”
“Tobias Green.”
I had to moan. “He’s still alive?”
“And thriving, more or less. At eighty-five.”
“How can you trust that guy?”
“He is a great American who is supporting my campaign because he realizes that the tragedy of high utility rates assails minorities in disproportionate numbers.”
“You do have the rap down.”
He smiled. “It is an honor to be on the same side as a true civil rights hero who was a comrade-in-arms with our crusading civil rights father.”
“You better move a little to the right,” I told him.
“What?”
“Because I’m going to throw up any second.”
“I knew you would grasp the concept.” He looked very pleased with himself. He reached down and picked up the photograph that had spilled out of the envelope that Ginny had brought to me. The small black-and-white Brownie snapshot with the white deckled edges was worn and creased, as if it had been carried in someone’s wallet or purse. It showed a strikingly handsome couple, a big man in his mid-fifties in an elegant suit and rakish hat, his arm around a much younger woman, large-breasted, with long brunette hair hanging over her shoulders like a shawl. And with them were three children. One of them was me, nine years old, peering out at the world with a confused, hesitant look. Next to me was Paul, at thirteen already big for his age, bursting out of his white T-shirt, and, next to Paul, a toddler in a torn Mardi Gras bib.
“This is the only picture of all three of us together,” I said. “The only one I’ve ever seen.”
“Just one big happy family, huh?” Paul chuckled. “Well, except Mom didn’t make the photo…”
Our mother had separated from our father when I was about six. Moved back in with her parents and died when their fancy sailboat went under out in the gulf. Paul remembered her, I figured, but he rarely talked about her. Me, I didn’t really remember. Not much anyway.
He got up, leaving me with the photo, then came back to toss a business card on the table. It was a glossy card with images of large-breasted women touting a strip club called “The Body Shop.”
“That’s Tyler’s place,” Paul said.
Sitting in that ridiculously hot bar, I tried to conjure up my favorite image of our father: a large man sitting at his typewriter wearing his Marine aviator’s flight helmet, typing like mad to finish his column. There would always be a bottle of George Dickel nearby, and he would dictate the column to an imaginary flight control officer on deck in the imaginary carrier below. The trouble with this state isn’t that we live in the past, it’s that our past wasn’t worth living in in the first place. Great rants, Dickel rants, rants that were funny sometimes, sad others, but rants that always managed to piss off somebody. It was every Tuesday night, when the column was due for the Thursday papers. One thing Paul would tell me about our mother is how she always said she was raising children in a world that ended every Tuesday night.
“Hello, J.D.” The voice was deep and startling and one I remembered very well.
I looked up and saw a tall, painfully thin black man who looked ancient. He was smiling.
“Do I look that bad?” the man said in a wonderfully resonant voice. It was a voice from my childhood.
“I guess I look that bad,” he said, and his smile broadened. He put his hand out and covered mine. This was something I remembered as well: a gentle touch, though his hands were rough and large.
“I’m old and sick as a dog,” Tobias Green said. “But they ain’t buried me yet. Come on, I got something to show you.”
—
It was a storefront just off Canal, not far from the abandoned casino. A large banner read CITIZENS FOR JUSTICE, and the space was filled with cheap furniture and kids in their twenties. It was like a campaign, but the kind of campaign I hadn’t done in years: a grassroots, bootstrap operation where the yard sign budget would be greater than the media budget, and there probably wouldn’t be any television, just digital, and then only if they were lucky. I liked this kind of place; it was where I had started. When I defied my father by working for a Republican running for the New Orleans city council, back when I was twenty or so and still at the University of New Orleans, we had worked in an office just like this. We got killed in that race, and it pleased my father immensely. He hated Republicans—which, if I was honest, was part of the reason I’d ended up working that side of the fence.
“We called the air conditioner repairman the first week,” Tobias Green told me. The space was stifling hot with a battery of old fans stirring the dead air. “He left laughing after a few minutes. Told us we didn’t have no air conditioner to repair. Still charged us forty-two dollars fifty for the call.” Tobias Green chuckled, a raspy sound that turned into a deep cough. Several of the workers looked up, concerned. He pulled out a wrinkled handkerchief and coughed into it, wiping the corner of his mouth assiduously. He was still a proud man.
“Tobias,” I asked, “just what in the hell do the Citizens for Justice actually do?”
“I am shocked that the son of the great Powell Callahan even has to ask that question.” He was smiling.
Tobias took my arm and led me into the small, glass-enclosed space that was his office. There were pictures on the wall of Tobias Green with every Republican president since John F. Kennedy. And a large one of Tobias and my father taken at the Republican convention of ’68 in Chicago. They were wearing what looked like identical snap-brim hats and seersucker suits. It was as remote and strange as a Victorian lithograph.
“He was a great one,” Tobias said.
“He was an alcoholic who couldn’t keep his hands off any woman in a six-mile radius.”
Tobias laughed. “We’ve all had our problems with women.”
“Are you talking about me?” I asked. “I got dumped. I never screwed the babysitter.”
Tobias held a finger in front of his lips. “Sssshhhh,” he whispered. “We must give great men their respect.”
“Hey,” I said, “you don’t have to worry about me. I’m holding the party line. Straight down the middle. I’d talk to Paulie, if I were you. He’s the one who seems to want to start talking about family secrets.”
“Soon to be Commissioner Callahan, then governor,” Tobias said. “A great one in the making.” He paused for a second. “You asked about Citizens for Justice. We’re a grassroots activist organization working for the oppressed in our community.”
“What does that really mean, Tobias? Who’s paying you?”
“We were involved with the gaming industry for a while.”
I laughed.
“The gaming industry is a great employer of minorities and supports the minority community.”
“You mean they paid you a ton of mo
ney.”
“They were appreciative of our commitment.”
“Tobias, I love you. You delivered votes when there was a pro-casino initiative on the ballot.”
“Exactly.”
“And now?”
“We’re expanding into utility rates.”
Ahh, what a scam. This was too good. “Utility rates?”
“High rates oppress the poor, Brother Callahan. That I assure you. We are very desirous to support your brother’s campaign for public service commissioner. We are confident he will represent the little people when he’s on the commission.”
“Right,” I said. “Of course. But you are running a little short of funds.”
“J.D.” He sighed. “I can make you only one promise.”
“What?”
“If you help your brother, you will feel better about your life.”
I started to object, but he held up his hand.
“You should go see Tyler,” he said.
“How bad is he?” I asked.
“Bad? How do you mean bad?”
“Nuts, for instance. Crazy racist skinhead nuts. How’s that for starters?”
Tobias sighed. I was shocked that he actually looked pained. “I have always believed that Tyler had a good heart.”
“So that jackboot-wearing, skinhead, neo-Nazi shit was just his way of getting attention? Is that it?”
He shrugged. “He has love in his heart.”
“Yeah? You think so?”
“I will always stand up for your family.” He said it with solemnity, like he really meant it. But that was the thing about a guy like Tobias Green. He had been acting for so long it was hard to tell where the real person began and the act ended.
“Yeah? Well, maybe you’ll get your chance,” I grumbled.
Tobias reached out and grabbed my arm. He looked hard right in my eyes. “Your brother needs help, J.D. He’s had a rough time. If he can win this race, it will get him back on track.”
“Rough time? Like I’ve been on a cruise or something?”
“You were always the chosen one, J.D.”
“Me? That was Paul, for Christ’s sake. He was the big football star, oldest son. He owned the world until he went and screwed it all up. Me, I was a geek.”
“Paul and your father were very much alike, J.D. Both were warriors on a great battlefield, and once the battles ended, they were lost.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Tobias. A lot of people did the right thing in the civil rights days and then went on and didn’t fall apart and put their families through hell like Powell Callahan.” Tobias sighed and didn’t seem to be listening. It was always that way with Tobias. He was so accustomed to just talking that he had forgotten how to listen. I leaned in close to him. “After all the women, all the times ignoring it, that’s what broke my mother. You know that. He screwed the babysitter, Tobias. She was fourteen. Tyler’s mother was fourteen. The great civil rights hero, my father, wasn’t just a cheater, he was a child molester. And I’ve got a nutjob half brother. He’s out there, and he never really had much of a chance.”
Now Tobias had heard me, and he looked so sad I thought he might start crying. “It’s a terrible thing not to have any battles left to fight.” He looked around at the dingy office and the scurrying kids. Then he straightened himself up and tried to smile. “But the Lord works in mysterious ways. We soldier on.”
He hugged me. I could feel his skin moving over his bones.
“I’m praying for him, you tell Tyler that,” Tobias Green told me as I was leaving. “If you see him, you tell him I’m praying for him.”
“Right.”
“We are all sinners, J.D. We should never forget that.”
“But don’t you think some of us are more sinners than others?” I asked. “Don’t they have a scale for measuring just how sinful a sin is?”
“You three brothers be good to each other, you hear? You all you got in the world.”
“That’s a depressing thought.”
I left him shaking his head and eyeing, with more than casual interest, one of the attractive young women working for the Citizens for Justice.
Chapter Four
ON THE WAY TO THE STRIP CLUB, I called Eddie and told him I’d be gone for an hour or so.
“What the hell, J.D., we’ve got a delegate-counting meeting in ten minutes and then a final walk-through at the Dome. The bastards are adding security.”
“I know,” I said. “I went there after I saw the veep last night. It’s a shit show. Look, I just have to do something. It’s stupid family stuff.” I could have come up with some elaborate lie for Eddie, but we had been through too much. And he probably wouldn’t believe me anyway.
There was a long pause, and I could see Eddie holding his phone, pacing. He always paced when he was on the phone.
“Just tell me one thing,” he said. “Does this have to do with Sandra?”
“Jesus, no. Why the hell would you think that?”
“Why? Because you still have a thing for her and she saw you last night after the bombing and for Christ’s sake, J.D. You don’t think I know you better than yourself? Are you giving her some kind of scoopy scoops thinking it’ll impress her?”
“Christ.” I sighed. “I would do something like that, wouldn’t I?”
“For Sandra, hell-goddamn-hell yes.”
I laughed. “You do know me.”
“Better than you do,” Eddie said.
“That’s not what I was going to do. But now that you brought it up, I think I will,” I said. I hung up while he was starting to shout into the phone. “J.D.!”
Sandra answered on the first ring. “Bitch? That Ginny girl called me a bitch?” Then she laughed. “I can’t believe you are calling me. I’d like to think it means you are done hating on me, but I’m a big girl, so I know you’re really calling because you want me to do something for you. So what is it?”
I almost hung up. But goddamn, she was so dead-on. “Off the record?” I asked. It was so weird to be asking a woman I’d lived with if we were off the record, but there were rules between reporters and campaign operatives, and sex and love past, present, or future didn’t change the rules. It was what you learned in politics, particularly with reporters.
“Oh, good,” she said, with that excited tone she got whenever she thought there might be a story, “you do have something. Yes, of course, OTR.”
“In about an hour, the vice president of the United States is going to be making an unannounced drop-by at the Ochsner Hospital to see the bomb victim.”
“Does anybody else know this?” she asked immediately. I knew she would. Every reporter did. If you told a reporter like Sandra that it would cost her one of her kids for an exclusive, her reaction would be, “Can I pick the kid?” But of course Sandra didn’t have kids, which I admired about her. “Who the fuck would want me as a mother,” she’d said the one time I asked her about it. I was so relieved by her answer that I never brought it up again.
“No, just you.”
“Thanks. Keep it that way.” She hung up.
“Bitch!” I yelled, banging the steering wheel. Why did I do this?
I found the club on the road to the airport in a stretch that I’d always found as depressing as any in America, a messy collection of dingy convenience stores, off-brand gas stations, tattoo parlors, and massage parlors. The Body Shop stood out like a UFO that had landed by mistake on Airline Highway: it was huge and brightly painted, with a flashing neon sign that towered over the strip.
I drove by three times before stopping, trying to make sure a reporter wasn’t following me. It was doubtful, given the general laziness and pack mentality that pervaded the press covering an event like the convention. But there was always the remote chance that some hotshot had read All the President’s Men one too many times and actually taken the initiative to shadow Hilda Smith’s campaign manager for the entire convention. It was also possible that dear brother Paul had already put a w
ord in some reporter’s ear.
I parked in the rear, out of sight of the road. The asphalt of the parking lot felt sticky, as if on the verge of melting and swallowing me whole.
Inside it was twenty degrees cooler, a dark world of time suspended. Music blared, a medley of nineties hits. A large white man in a black turtleneck and blazer guarded the door.
“Where’s Tyler?” I asked.
The big guy, who was perhaps thirty but looked older, with the overdeveloped muscles and thinning hair of a heavy steroid user, looked down at me with heavy eyes, a look that made it clear he was not interested in just another guy who wanted to see Tyler. Everybody wanted to see Tyler.
“Name?” he asked, in a thick country accent. This was not a New Orleans boy, probably from north Louisiana or maybe Mississippi.
I paused, thought about lying, and then just said, “Tell him his brother is here to see him.”
“That the truth?” he grunted, and looked almost awake for the first time.
“You get a lot of people here claiming to be Tyler’s brother?”
He stared at me for a long time, then grunted again. “Ha. Ha.” He turned away to watch a pair of dancers walk by. One, a tall Asian woman, winked at him. She was easily one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.
“I thought the women at these clubs were supposed to be skanky,” I said to my new friend.
He turned and did his long-stare thing. This was something he was quite good at, actually.
“Man, you can’t be Tyler’s brother if you that ignorant.”
“I’m the slow one of the family, that’s all. Look, I really am his brother and really do need to see him.” This time I put twenty dollars in his shirt pocket.
He took the money out, looked at it. “Wow,” he said flatly.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I mumbled, handing him two more twenty-dollar bills. We were in the midst of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression in a town that had unemployment through the roof, and I couldn’t get some good-ol’-boy thug to let me talk to my own brother for twenty dollars. What the hell was happening to this country, anyway?
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