by Pete Hamill
“See you, bub,” he said, and then drove away, a crazy white man who listened to nigger music and thought Jews were weird. I took a breath and started across the empty street.
My heart stopped.
Two Shore Patrolmen in dress whites were standing in front of the newsstand. Their backs were to me. They were looking at the newspapers and I suddenly imagined myself on page one, along with Sal and Max and Maher and Dunbar, all of us charged with manslaughter. Bigger than our pictures was the photograph of the dead Marine.
I turned around and walked slowly away from there. Down the side streets. Left. Right. Left again. Expecting to see the Shore Patrol hurrying after me. Expecting a jeep to come screaming around a corner. Sweat poured down my face. My hands were wet. Up ahead, I saw a heavy black woman in a violet housedress come out on the porch of one of the houses. She had a yellow rag over her head and a cigarette clamped in her mouth. She was barefoot. I slowed down to a stroll, trying to look cool, as she bent over for a milk bottle. There was a cardboard sign in the window behind her. Rooms.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Which way’s the main drag?”
“You mean Gubmint Street?”
“The one with the big live oaks.”
“Ova yonduh. Bout three blocks.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“What the hell you doin roun heah?”
“Tryin to get to New Orleans.
“You look tebble.”
“Just tired.”
“You tahd, you betta sleep, white boy.”
“Gotta go.”
“Ah gotta room, you needs it. One dolla.”
She flipped the cigarette into the street.
“No, I better get to New Orleans.”
“Mah bruvva-in-low, he be goin that way this aftanoon …”
“Can I get a bath?
“That be a quota extra.”
I woke up soaked in sweat. I could see wallpaper peeling above me in the small cramped room. Beside the bed, a green painted bureau was greasy with heat. Old cooking smells hung in the air. I pushed my hand under the pillow. The wallet! I’d placed it there before falling off to sleep. Now it was gone. I sat up straight, my heart pounding. My clothes were draped over a chair. Then I looked at the door, thinking that I might be trapped here, locked in, my money stolen, like a traveler in one of those old fairy tales who went to spend a night at a country inn and ended up as meat pie.
I went to the door.
And sighed in relief.
It was open. I could see a landing and stairs going down to the first floor. I closed the door and got down on my knees to look under the bed. There was the wallet. The money was still inside. For a moment, the wallet and money had been the most important things in my life; now they seemed without any value. Now I would have to gather myself and start moving again. AWOL. Over the hill. Into the scary world.
Then there was a knock at the door and I jumped.
The door cracked open. I tensed.
And saw the black woman.
She had a large yellow towel for me and a pitcher of ice cubes and lemonade.
“Yo baff is ready,” she said. “Next door.”
“Thanks.”
“You look ready too,” she said and smiled.
“Your brother-in-law here yet?”
“Oh hell, boy, I dint mean you looks ready for him. I mean you looks ready fo, oh … somefin else.”
“I better just take a bath and go.”
“You sho?”
The brother-in-law’s name was Roderick. He was thin and knuckly and forty-two-years old and he had a load of pipe to deliver to Pascagoula. I didn’t know where Pascagoula was, but he sure did. And he wasn’t happy about going there.
“Anything I can do,” he said, “I stays outta Mississippi. They crazy ovuh there.”
“What about New Orleans?”
“Oh, that’s a different matter, all-to-gether. They crazy too. But crazy diffrunt.”
There was no radio in the one-ton truck, which Roderick said he’d bought as war surplus in ’46. We drove in silence through dark pine forest which gave way to groves of what Roderick said were pecan trees, drooping in the heat. We cut down a two-lane blacktop toward the Gulf. A breeze began to rustle the trees and I could hear a clacking sound. Roderick said it was the pecans. Smacking each other in the wind like a million castanets.
The sound of the pecans followed us most of the way to Biloxi. When we came into the town, Roderick said nothing. This was Mississippi and he damn well didn’t like it. Directly in front of us, planted in the middle of the highway, with the eastbound and westbound lanes swerving around it, was a giant whitewashed lighthouse.
“You think they planned this lighthouse this way?” I said.
Roderick laughed.
“Hell, no. This used to be the water. All this be landfill we drivin on.”
To the left now was the Gulf. Charter boats, docks, bait shops, food stores, souvenir places, a long crowded white beach that seemed to go for miles, and beyond the beach, out in the water, about five hundred shrimp and oyster boats riding at anchor. It looked like a postcard and I wished I could get out of the truck and enter the postcard and have a vacation the way ordinary people did. The streets were packed. Girls in bathing suits. Rednecks. Cops. Air force guys from Keesler. What looked like college boys. Their bodies were tanned and oiled and some of them were gliding in and out of the motels and all of them were white.
I looked at Roderick.
His eyes were fixed directly ahead of him on the slow-moving traffic.
Then the honky-tonks were gone and giant white mansions rose on a bluff: rich, smug, defiantly facing the sea. They all had tall white pillars holding up the roofs, like great houses in Civil War movies, and vast rolling lawns, and on the distant porches I could see tiny people in rockers watching the road and the ocean and the horizon. Biloxi vanished and Gulfport appeared, quieter, with a divided highway and palm trees and more grand houses, but no bait shops or charter boats or oiled blondes drifting to motels. I saw some odd-shaped trees. For the tung nuts, Roderick said.
“Years ago, buncha crazy peoples all tho’t they get themselfs rich wid de tung nut. Befo that, they tho’t the same wif the awnges. When I’se a boy, they’s awnge trees all up and down the damn coast. But the awnge trees died and so did the tung nuts. So now peoples still gotta make money the way they always done. Fum the damn Gulf. Fum the big blue water.”
Roderick drove quickly through Gulfport. The light was almost behind us and the Gulf looked large and scary. We could hear the ding-dinging of buoys and see the fishing boats cleaving through the water as if going to battle. Then up ahead we could see giant shipyard cranes rising off the flats, looking odd and disjointed against the lavender sky. Signs appeared, directing trucks with deliveries for the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation to make the next left. Roderick pulled over on a wide shoulder. Marsh grass swayed on both sides of the road. A sour smell rose from the baking earth.
“Ah don’t go no futhuh,” Roderick said. “You gotta git you the rest of the way to New Awlins on you own.”
“Thanks for the ride,” I said. I felt clumsy. He held the wheel with both hands. “It sure is beautiful country along here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it sho is.”
I walked about a mile and saw a gas station with a small seafood store attached to the office. I bought a pound of shrimp for a dollar and crossed the highway and sat down on a damp log. I peeled the shrimp and ate quickly and wanted more. Thinking: They know I’m gone now for sure. I imagined Donnie Ray calling Red Cannon and asking if I was locked up somewhere and Red saying, Locked up? Hell, no. He came home with me on Sunday morning.
I was AWOL.
They’d come after me for that.
And maybe worse.
Maybe murder.
I finished the shrimp and looked back at the gas station across the road. The sun was now gone. A b
lue ’49 Chevy was parked at the pump with an Air Force sticker in the rear window. Two guys were at the Coke machine. Another came around the side of the building where he’d obviously just taken a leak. A tiny man in coveralls was gassing up the car. One of the three young men went into the shrimp place. I walked over.
“Hey, can I hitch a ride with you guys?” I said.
The tallest one squinted at me. He was wearing a starched sleeveless white shirt and chinos. He went around to the driver’s side, and started to get in, without giving me an answer. The other one paid for the gas. The third came out with a large bag of shrimp.
“Where you goin?” the tall one said.
“New Awlins,” I said, trying to pronounce the words the way Roderick did. Not New Or-leeens.
“You got a couple of bucks for gas?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Get in.”
They were all enlisted men, stationed at Keesler, and were starting a ten-day leave. All were from Texas and they were going home. Dave, the tall one, was from Austin, and he drove as if trying to establish a speed record. Harry, who bought the shrimp, was from Fort Worth. Jake was from Dallas. He was the crew’s paymaster and after I got in beside him in the back seat, I gave him three bucks. As Dave drove with ferocious concentration, passing trucks, dodging oncoming cars, the others pulled the shells off the shrimp and threw them out the open windows into the steaming air and then passed around a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“Have a belt.”
“I better not.”
“It’s Mister Daniels.”
“I got some business in New Awlins. I don’t want to get there plastered.”
“Suit yisself.”
It was hard to see them in the dark. I huddled in the back seat in a corner behind the driver, feigning sleep or staring into the darkness. I was Miller from Miami but I didn’t want them to know me, to catch me in some dumb little lie. The bottle moved around. I thought: Be sharp, be cool. Get drunk and you’ll lose control. You’ll get caught. You’ll see a brig before you see New Orleans. Before you find what you’re looking for. And you can’t tell these guys. They’re not your friends. They’re just Air Force guys going home.
We stopped five times. Someone had to piss. Someone wanted sandwiches. Someone had to puke. Once I came suddenly awake as the car swerved, spun around on the empty road, came to a coughing stop. Dave had almost rammed a wandering cow.
“Open range!” Jake shouted. “Bounty hunter!”
We got out and they all laughed and passed around the bottle and this time I took a slug. The bourbon was hot, burning, good. We all pissed into the dark.
Then a vast swarm of mosquitoes found us, thick, dense, silvery in the moonlight, filling our noses and mouths, and we were slapping our faces and arms and running to the car. Dave pulled away, cursing and slapping, the windows wide open to blow the rest of the mosquitoes out. My arms and neck were bumpy from bites. Harry said we should rub whiskey on the bites and Dave said that was a hell of waste of good bourbon and Jake said, Well, let’s try it a little. I didn’t do it. Where I was going, I didn’t want to smell of bourbon. I didn’t drink anymore after that.
The night air smelled different now: hot, salty. I saw patches of black water, then great open swatches like lakes, with shanties up on stilts over the water. We crossed a steel drawbridge and then we saw a sign. Chef Menteur. Two gas pumps, some fishing shanties and a bar.
“Goddamn, a real metropolis.”
“Named after a chef!”
“You know you in Louisiana now.”
“Wuddint that the Pearl River?”
We all went into the bar. I was hot and thirsty, because of the bourbon. Inside, there were two guys playing a shuffleboard machine and a red-haired woman behind a small bar. She looked up when we came in. She was wearing a lot of makeup and her tits were too pointy to be real.
“You boys old enough to drink?” she said.
“We’re old enough to die in Korea,” Dave said, laying two singles on the bar.
“Then you’re old enough to drink,” she said and smiled and gave her tits a little shake.
There was a crude map on the wall between the two windows, with a sign above it saying: DON’T ASK WHERE YOU ARE. YOU’RE HERE. The arrow pointed at Chef Menteur. We were on a kind of island, and at the western end there were a lot of little streams called the Rigolets and a half dozen places marked SWAMP. Using the map as a guide, I looked out in that direction. In the distance, the sky was glowing. I turned to the barmaid.
“How far are we from New Awlins?” I said.
“You’re in it, boy.”
Chapter
69
Whooping, hollering, calling to women and drinking from a fresh bottle, they dropped me off on the corner of Canal and Rampart and then sped away. In all the years since, I’ve spent too much time showing up in strange cities at night. None of them have ever looked to me the way New Orleans did that first time. I stared around me and for a long strange moment felt as if I were home. There were office buildings, all brightly lit, souvenir stores and camera shops and jewelry joints, restaurants and huge hotels and big-assed women with yellow dresses and pairs of cops smoking cigarettes in doorways. Just like New York. And there were trolley cars. That’s what did it to me, reached out, hugged me, promised me the salvation of the familiar. The trolley cars: their steel wheels clacking on steel rails, squealing as they turned from a side street into Canal, the conductors ding-donging their warning bells. They were the older cars, made in part of wood, with square Toonerville Trolley faces, the kind that ran along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, not the streamlined gray trolleys that now raced along the Seventh Avenue line. And I thought: I’m a long way from home.
And thought again: I’ll be all right.
So I started to walk. New Awlins. Almost midnight. The heat still rising off the sidewalks. The gutters soft from the blaze of day. I needed a place to stay but I knew the big hotels were beyond me; I just couldn’t spend that kind of money or risk a demand for identification. And I sensed that if Canal Street was like Times Square, then the Shore Patrol would be around here somewhere, picking up strays. I had to get off into the side streets to where ordinary people lived and there’d be a boarding house with no questions asked, a hideout where the Shore Patrol was never seen.
Suddenly I was at the river. There were people on line, waiting for a ferry marked Algiers. A line of cars too. Algiers? Jesus. Wasn’t that in North Africa? I walked past the waiting lines, out to the edge of the ferry slip and looked down.
The Mississippi.
Black and glossy and moving slowly.
I heard a deep voice behind me.
“Help you, son?”
I turned and saw a cop staring at me. Old guy. Maybe fifty. Fat. Pouchy eyes. His face shiny with the heat.
“Uh, no, no, I’m fine. Why?”
“Oh, just we get a lotta jumpers along here. Dey stand here and den dey go in da water and dat’s all she wrote.” He was closer now, looking into my eyes. “You aint thinkin of doin nuttin foolish, are ya?”
He sounded like Becket. Or Brooklyn. I smiled, trying to look like the All-American boy I wasn’t.
“Hell, no, officer. I’m just lookin for a boardin house. I’m headin for California. Start a new job out there next month.”
“Where in California?”
“Uh, San Diego. Ever been there?”
“Durn da war. I gotta sister in Santa Barbara. She loves it out dere. Me, I like here. Da food out dere—hey, eat before ya go.”
“What about that boardin house?”
He scratched the side of his cheek and then pointed me toward Decatur Street, where, he said, there were plenty of rooming houses. The fastest way was through the railroad yards, but I’d better be careful of the trains and the hoboes.
“The other way to get to da same place is go back down Canal, right here, to, say, Charters Street. Den cut right into the French Quarters, into the Voo Kuhray. On da ri
ght. You keep goin to Jackson Square and make another right over to the waterfront and—”
There was a sudden squeal of brakes, and the sound of rammed metal. Two cars angling for position on the Algiers ferry had smacked into each other.
The cop hurried over. I drifted back down Canal Street. At Chartres, I turned right. The street was narrow and badly lit, with high rough walls rising on either side and cobblestoned streets and a sickly rotting odor seeping from somewhere, as if the heat were boiling sewage beneath the streets. There were several winos sitting on the sidewalk, their backs to the walls. All white. One of them came over to me. His eyes looked scraped. His skin was loose. He put a hand on my flight bag and grinned. In the dim light, he had almost no teeth.
“Whatchoo got there, boy?”
“Hands off,” I said.
He jerked on the bag and I pulled it away and shoved him. He whirled and faced me, both hands poised, a blade in his hand.
Shit.
The other winos didn’t move. They didn’t even seem very interested.
This is stupid. This ain’t why I came here.
I backed up.
I don’t want to die this way. I don’t want to die at all. I have to find my loving woman.
The wino said, “You got somefin you wanna do, boy?”
I turned and ran.
Along Chartres Street, then right, then left again. I ran for a long time, until I got brave enough to look behind me and saw steam rising on the empty streets but no wino with scraped eyes. I slowed to a walk. There were more little bars, with yellow light spilling onto the sidewalks. Scraps of music filled the air. Distant Dixieland. Bebop. Black music. The notes came from here and the bass lines from there. I imagined people dancing in hidden rooms. I was very hot.
Then I saw the OTEL.
The H was out in the red neon sign and the place had no other name. It was on a corner. The front door was open, so I went in. There was a small lobby, with fluorescent lights on the high ceilings and a fan beating slowly and doing nothing to the thick hot air. A fat whore sat on a couch watching TV. There was no reception counter, only a booth, like the kind you see outside movie houses. A thin man with yellow skin looked up at me. He had a cigarillo stuck in his mouth.
