New Orleans Noir Read online

  Paul’s already up out of his chair, gets between Reggie and Wayne. Wayne’s got a short fuse. Rugby player, you know.

  Reggie backs off. “Come on, Wayne, just fuckin’ with ya.”

  Wayne forces a smile. “You’re lucky I like you, man.”

  White guys in English jerseys begin pouring into the bar, waving Union Jacks, awaiting their game. Don’t ever bet the farm on Irish football. They play like shite. Switzerland wins it, two-nil.

  Paul nods approvingly at the crowd, better part of a hundred, mostly English now. Waving flags, drinking Budweiser. “That’s a lot of English wankers,” says Paul.

  It’s an hour until England-Turkey. The front door bursts open. A collective roar, singing as if in tongues, a wall of people wrapped in red flags, pours into the bar. We’re struck numb. The brothers in the corner, by the pool table, scurry out the back door.

  Paul speaks first. “Fuck. Al-Qaeda.”

  There has to be at least two hundred Turks, singing, yelling, waving flags. None of us can move. Literally. Try to fall down, you’ll stay upright. Fuck the fire code.

  The Turks take over the pool table. They take over the dartboard. They pin Turkish flags up on the wall, over Celtic crosses, over printed lyrics to “Danny Boy,” over family photographs.

  “Fuck,” Billy says, behind the bar. “Muslims. They don’t drink.”

  Happily, not true. Like their English nemeses, it’s Budweiser all around.

  I step outside for the fresh air. Two buses from Florida, Escambia County plates, parked in the left lane of Banks, next to the neutral ground. Florida?

  More Turks are pouring out of the buses, singing.

  It’s enough for me. Across the street there’s a birthday party. Some guy’s kids. They’ve got one of those giant inflatable jungle gyms—moonwalks is what they call them—out front, the kids, six of them, all of four or five years old, catapulting themselves to the top, back down, over and over, happy as hell. Man out front, drinking a High Life, I recognize from nights at the pub.

  “Hey, man,” I holler, crossing the neutral ground, crossing Banks.

  He calls back: “The hell’s going on over there?”

  I reach his fence. “Turks. Fucking Turks.”

  “Turks? Ragheads?”

  “Well, you’d think. They all drink, though.”

  “Oh,” he says, then “oh” again, as if, well, in that case, they must be all right. “Hey, it’s Sharonda’s birthday! She’s five. She’s right there, see her? Jumping up, there!”

  Sharonda, on the descent, waves to her daddy.

  I approach the giant plastic gym. “Sharonda! Your daddy says it’s your birthday! How old are you?”

  “I … am …” She holds up her hand, giggles, counts fingers. “I’m FIVE!!”

  The girls resume their jumping, higher now, to entertain the new guest. “Hey, man,” the daddy says, never can remember his name, “have a drink, huh?”

  We go up the stairs to the front porch. Cooler in front, High Lifes. His lady’s sitting on a wooden rocker, glass of iced tea in hand. “How you doin’, baby?” she says to me.

  “Pretty good. Congratulations on your daughter’s birthday.”

  “Ohhh … I can’t believe she’s five. You got kids?”

  “No. No wife either.”

  She laughs. “’S wrong with you? You got cooties?”

  “Lots of angry ex-girlfriends.”

  We sit and watch the kids, quietly. The music coming out of the house, it’s kid music, something like Raffi. My man digs out two more High Lifes, pops the tops off, hands me one. He makes eye contact with his wife, says “Baby?” real quiet, but she shakes her head.

  Across the street, the jerseys are gathered outside the front door in shock. Most of them have palms attached to ears, phones cradled between, shaking their heads, you won’t fucking believe what’s going on here.

  A kid rides through the crowd, and I watch him lazily drift toward downtown; he fades out of sight. Kids are everywhere—street, neutral ground, sidewalk. Some are oblivious to the excitement at the pub, a few point and laugh. Makeshift hoops hang off second-floor porches, a few games of horse. The soccer jerseys stand out. Everyone’s got torn clothes, matches the paint peeling off crumbling houses.

  I slap my friend on the back and rise. “You’re a lucky man,” I say.

  He laughs. “Sometimes, man.” I catch the funny look he gives me before he turns his head.

  I wish his wife a good day, and run downstairs to the kids in their jungle gym. “Hey, Sharonda, y’all want to make some noise?”

  “YEAHHHHHH!!” The kids have been hitting the caffeine.

  “Okay, look across the street. There, see the guy in the green shirt? That’s Billy. Everybody, on the count of three, yell Hi, Billy! Okay? One, two, THREE.”

  It’s a hell of an uproar. Billy peers across the street, shakes his head and waves. As I cross the street, the kids take turns yelling at Billy again.

  “Hey, Billy, so what’s the story?”

  “Ah, mate, there’s too many fucking people in there.”

  “And?”

  He shakes his head, smiles. “What are ya gonna do? Drink faster!”

  England-Turkey kicks off. The Turks shred their vocal cords, singing. I stand in the corner by the front door. Any trouble breaks out, quick exit.

  Fifteen minutes into the game, the door swings open next to me. A bunch of the brothers who had run out after the Turkish invasion peer in. The one in front chews a plastic straw. “Shee-it,” he mutters, slams the door shut.

  Drink faster. Billy tosses me another Abita, another, crowd just as packed but becoming less relevant. Halftime approaches. Penalty awarded to England. The Turks roar indignantly, deafeningly.

  Paul moves next to me. “Christ,” he says, “all fucking hell.”

  We tense up, awaiting the kick, the goal, the angry Turks to turn as one toward us. David Beckham takes the kick, sends it high into the stands above the posts. The Turks roar again, a gift from the heavens, and they sing aloud to them.

  Paul sighs. “Thank God.”

  Halftime. We move out onto the sidewalk. There’s rain. It’s light but getting heavier. Clouds darkening. My friend across the street is slowly gathering the kids, ushering them up the steps, into the house. He looks our way, waves. I raise my bottle.

  I’ve lost interest in the game. I wander off to Telemachus Street, to my car. The brothers are out on their porch, safe from the rain, falling harder. They wave me up.

  It’s not uncommon. Most evenings I come to the pub, I park at their house, hang out for a bit, bring up some forties. Good security. Nobody’s going to fuck with my car.

  “I was just wondering who that ugly white motherfucker was.”

  “Yeah? I was wondering who the blind black motherfucker was.”

  They’ve got Juvenile pumping out of the house. He’s rapping about sets going up, the Third Ward, the UTP. The hell’s the UTP?

  Rainfall hits the roof, a clatter of buckshot. The brothers offer me a Colt 45. Shit’s strong, goes down smooth. I’m lit. One of them’s up out of his chair, rapping over the sound of the rain, smacking an invisible ass in front of him, baby, let me see you do the rodeo.

  The brothers whisper shit about their girlfriends, look over their shoulders, make sure they can’t hear. I offer up an ex-girlfriend, several months vintage. I say mine had a bigger ass.

  Nah, man, white bitches don’t have no big asses!

  Shit, this white bitch had an ass so big an astronaut could see it.

  The rain lets up, enough. I’m on the sidewalk in the drizzle, back at the pub. Paul’s outside, cigarette in hand.

  “What’s the score?” I ask.

  “Nil-nil, mate. Almost over. Hope it stays a draw. Don’t want to have to fight the Turkish bastards.”

  “Or English bastards.”

  “Right. Not sure which ones smell worse.”

  It’s the anticlimax we all craved. Fulltim
e, the Turks drift out of the bar onto their Florida buses. Some sing halfheartedly, most trudge by quickly, making rapid eye contact, then breaking it.

  Naturally, the English stick around. They’re happier. They only need a draw to go on to the next round.

  Soon, it’s just twenty of us. Shitfaced. Billy pours himself a draft Harp, leans on the bar. “Without a hitch. What a relief.”

  Quiet hangs over the establishment. The building sighs, and settles. Zombielike, we sit at the counter watching our drinks, unable to make the effort to lift them. I’ve developed a dark ring around my line of sight; tunnel vision. Too shit-faced to care.

  The front door opens slowly, then four figures pour into the room, slamming it shut behind them.

  The first thing that registers is the straw in his mouth. I notice it before I hear him. Everything appears at the end of the tunnel. He says, next to me, wet with rain, “Motherfucker, open the register!”

  Hands grab me from behind, throw me to the floor. My palm hits the ground first, my head next. Distantly aware of impact. My wallet’s ripped out of the sucker pocket.

  There’s yelling. I don’t move. I make careful observations of the grime on the bottom of Billy’s barstools. Mental note.

  Paul’s down here too. He’s looking back at me, not at the barstools. Blood’s coming out of his ear. They threw him down hard. He’s not blinking. Shock.

  Billy’s voice, from a long distance: “That’s all I’ve got.”

  I think of that scene from Apocalypse Now on the boat, when they suddenly go crazy and shoot that family. That’s what happens now. I feel the explosions in the floor, barstools clattering to the ground, specks of red like schools of fish. Hearing’s gone but for the deafening beating of my heart.

  I move my head, just enough. Blue jeans, baggy, riding low, striped boxers. The fucker who opened fire.

  There’s no conscious decision made, no preparation. I drop him. My right leg comes up in a scissor kick, behind the knee, fucker goes down. I see the gun hit the wall behind me, but can’t hear a thing. I imagine a satisfying clatter.

  I’m up. The three other dudes stand by the door, aghast. Can’t believe that white motherfucker dropped their boy. Boys, I can’t believe it either.

  Behind the bar, Billy’s slumped over the cooler, green jersey spotted with red. He blinks, but I’m not sure if there’s anything there.

  I rush the brothers by the door. They’re out ahead of me, into the wall of rain. Cold water streams across the street, up onto the sidewalk and neutral ground. They’re gone.

  Ah, but not the guy I left back in the bar. With his gun.

  Before I realize I’m running, I’m halfway down the street. Rain blows into my eyes. I’m going to fall. I’m going to trip. The last thing I’ll see through rain-washed eyes, black moth-erfucker with a gun.

  Yet there’s my car, water coming up to the rims—shit, I got this far, maybe I’ll make it. I start to fumble for the keys.

  Nah. I’ll never make it.

  The brothers on the porch. I take the stairs two at a time, and I’m up, dry, they’re on either side of me rising slowly, eyes wide, mouths moving. Something registers behind me, and their hands dart into their waistbands.

  Pieces brought up, aiming toward the bottom of the stairs.

  I turn around.

  There’s just the one, inside the gate. Straw firmly in mouth. The dude lowers his gun. For the first time, he looks me in the eye. He smiles.

  The current in the street is steady, rainwater halfway up to the knees. The man with the gun looks down, as if noticing the water for the first time, then slowly follows the current in the direction he came from. A wall of rain hits the street, and he vanishes into it.

  TWO-STORY BRICK HOUSES

  BY PATTY FRIEDMANN

  Uptown

  You only need two things to feel good at Newman School: Pappagallos that show your toe crack and a two-story brick house. Well, three things if you’re Jewish. If you’re Jewish, you have to go to Sunday school. I don’t have any of those things, but I can fake the third one. Thirty-seven out of sixty-two kids in my class at Newman are Jewish, if you count Carolyn and Shira, and strangely enough, you don’t think about them as being Jewish because they had bat mitzvahs. They also came from public school in seventh grade and are fat and don’t care. It was Carolyn, who goes to a synagogue I’ve never heard of, who told me just to say that I go to Gates of Prayer. It’s reform, but nobody’s ever heard of it.

  I keep working on my mother to buy me Pappagallos, but she says I get my shoes free and I should brag about it instead of mope. My great-grandfather owned the Imperial Shoe Store, which is on the corner of Bourbon and Canal Streets, and my grandfather gets such a deep discount that he buys all my shoes. Imperial is one of those stores that sells sturdy shoes like Stride Rites. Okay, but I don’t understand why they waited until Capezios went out of style to get them in. I can have all the Capezios I want, now that I don’t want them.

  I don’t think we’re poor, but I can’t really tell. We live in a house that’s actually old and pretty, but it’s wood and one-story so it doesn’t even matter that my grandmother pays for us to have a maid. Well, she pays twenty-five dollars a week, but after a while Rena wanted a raise, and my grandmother said no, so my father pays her extra every week, taking it out of what he would spend on dry cleaning his suit. That’s the way it is with my grandparents. My grandmother paid my tuition to Newman for kindergarten, and then she said she didn’t feel like it anymore, so I’ve been on scholarship ever since. Which means my daddy has to reveal his income every year. Newman is very low-key about it, but my mother’s not. I have to have very good grades. Which is pretty easy because this is more a school for rich kids than for smart kids, in spite of what the whole city thinks. I know for a fact that if your parents knew the admissions director when you were coming into kindergarten, she asked you which train was red and which one was black, and if you got it right, you were in. She came from a very old Jewish family and had nothing better to do than give admissions tests for Newman. She still does it.

  There’s a slumber party at Louise Silverman’s house tonight, and I’m invited. I have been at this school for over ten years, and this is the first time I’m friends with all the snobbish girls. My mother is thrilled, and I am disgusted, but I’m also thrilled, to tell the truth. Louise lives on Octavia Street, and two of the other girls can actually walk to her house. Their houses look almost the same, and I think that’s a message to me that if you want to be the right kind of person, then you should have that kind of house. Brick two-story. A plain rectangle. My mother probably thinks so too, but my father is the manager of a supermarket, and she knows crummy shoes and Rena’s twenty-five dollars a week is probably her limit with her parents.

  Louise and Meryl and both of the Lindas are failing Geometry. For a while, they took turns calling me up for homework help, then I started going over to their houses after school, and finally they quit pretending they could do anything without me. This is how I know people at Newman aren’t smart. For Monday’s homework we have to prove the congruence of the two triangles in a parallelogram. I’m headed over to Louise’s early and we’re going to work on it. She’ll just hand it over to the other three. They won’t be able to do it in Mrs. Walter’s class when she comes at them, and they won’t be able to do it on tests, and from what I’ve heard Mrs. Prescott will threaten them with public school, but at homework time they will think I’m giving them hope.

  My mother has packed me my gold silk pajamas that my grandmother bought me on her last trip to Japan. “Those girls are going to be so jealous,” she says. I think there’s a chance she might be right, though I also think that even gold silk shoes from Japan would not hold up next to nice baby-blue leather Pappagallos.

  I ask her to drop me off and not wait until someone opens the door. We have a 1956 Ford Fairlane sedan. I figure that if no one opens the door I can go ring another girl’s bell. It is better than bei
ng seen in a 1956 Ford Fairlane sedan.

  Louise grabs my arm at the door and pulls me in, which is as close as she comes to affection. “We’ll do math right now,” she says, and I think she must see that I’m excited, too, by an idea I’ve come up with on the way over. If Mrs. Silverman sees this little lesson I’ve made up for Louise, she will decide I am the best girl in all of Newman School and should be the only one Louise is friends with. She might tell all the other mothers, and then I’ll be popular. These girls aren’t like me. They definitely plan to grow up to be just like their mothers.

  While I pull my math book out of my overnight bag, I ask Louise to get me a couple of envelopes, please. She looks at me like I’ve asked her to get me cleaning supplies. This is not something she’s ever found necessary. “Mama!” she hollers, and goes running upstairs. Her mother comes down to the kitchen and rummages in a drawer in the butler’s pantry. These two-story brick houses fascinate me. They have rooms that make sense only for rich people who lived a hundred years ago, but they were actually built just ten years ago. I ask for scissors too. Louise’s maid stands at the sink watching us with her arms folded. She’s not doing anything but watching us. Her expression says she could do this geometry if someone asked her.

  My wish comes true: Mrs. Silverman watches as I cut and fold and draw straight lines and prove beyond doubt the congruence of the triangles in a parallelogram. I even cut the envelope into the shape of a parallelogram despite the fact that a rectangle is already a sort of parallelogram, because I figure Louise and her mother aren’t going to follow that extra piece of information. They are as delighted as if I’ve just guessed which card they’ve pulled from a deck. Mrs. Silverman kisses my cheek with red lips, and I leave the mark because no other girl is going to have a print to match Mrs. Silverman’s tonight.

  The maid is still standing at the sink around midnight when I pad into the kitchen to find a way not to cry. We are in our nightclothes, and everyone in her pink shortie pajamas has said how pretty mine are and has examined the little frog buttons closely so she can comment when I leave the room. Silk is so hot, and I don’t want to have perspiration stains under my arms. They will show so easily. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I really don’t. I feel sorry for Carolyn, who of course is not here. I feel sorry for the maid. I feel sorry for everybody. I must look pitiful.