He didn’t kid himself that he gave the money to the dancers for redemption. He owned-up to the failures and sins of his life, for now and forever. Not vocally so others could look at him and say ‘ahh, a martyr,’ but inside where the truth lived. Even the contempt he felt for the derelicts he tried to study objectively, hoping to find the source, the well-spring of this demon.
Analogies beckoned. Didn’t some ancient Indian tribes feel self-compelled (of course through social conditioning, he cautioned himself) to cast themselves away from society when they became a burden upon it? For some groups it had been common practice for the old and infirm to wander away from villages in search of a spot to quietly succumb. Some majestic idea from their society printed it upon their psyches. Ebenezer laughed considering these so-called ‘primitives.’ How could that be said of a people bowing honorably away from their worlds, sustained in their knowledge life would go on for those that followed. Their blood would continue. Regardless of what happened to their bodies after death. But somehow, modern, formalized religion (despite its exquisite tapestries to the contrary) still clung to life at all cost. Ebenezer pondered this insecurity. In most cases survival instincts ruled over all else, but wasn’t reason the very thing that separated man from beasts and fish? Wasn’t that also what the sooth-sayers preached?
He imagined this line of reasoning pointed to the root of why he gave money to the tap-dancers. Even immersed in such populace poverty, with handfuls of dancers competing for scraps at every corner and gutter, they still held onto their vitality. That was the triumph of the human spirit, and he hoped his found money helped contribute to the continuance of the dance in some small way.
*
It would take fifteen minutes to meander his way to the Ripcord, and that was just fine because the day was smooth and pleasant. The sun burned high, breaking off clouds into streaming tendrils, and only minutes before he’d craned his neck to watch a group of brown pelicans cut their angle across the pale heavens. Almost a quarter to four and time to sink a couple of shooters before heading over to the Square to watch the night come on.
Afterward he’d traipse to his place on Ursulines Street, a little two-and-a-half room flat on the second story of a French-Colonial style building erected by a disgraced architect at the turn of the century. The buildings surrounding it were much older (the fact being, the one that’d stood where his flat now stood, had gone up in a torrent of flames in an 1847 blaze), but the newer masonry had cracked and filled with scraggly fern and ghostly white lichen, lending an air of brotherhood and congruity with the neighboring architecture. There was a communal patio situated in an open-air courtyard which he seldom used, preferring instead the solitude of his iron-railed balcony. True masculine economy spoke of his furnishings, seemingly taking a back seat to the profusion of movie posters and actor’s photographs which covered the walls. Ebenezer had put his collection of war-time memorabilia in his bedroom several years before. He got no satisfaction in memories staring him constantly in the face. At least not his own. Some men did but Ebenezer tried to live in the present, he told himself, mindful of the past but not a prisoner of it. Again, a question of objectivity surfaced in his mind. His United States’ military pension was fully capable of caring for his needs, so he used his time now to ramble. To ponder and think. His sight being too tenuous for driving, he’d sold his Chrysler last year around Christmas (only now fully aware how bad his timing had been; who the hell had extra money then, especially for an old clunker?), and the cab drivers knew him well.
Several nights before when Maggie had shaken him awake in the wee hours of the morning, he’d found a crumpled ten dollar bill in his hand. He remembered getting drunk and telling a story (which one, he had no idea). Some kid his lone audience. It was hard to remember everything, but getting paid to do what he loved didn’t sit well. The money seemed to undermine his intentions. He rubbed his head, finding all that remained of the kid was a sense of sadness and foreboding. Ebenezer seemed to recall talk of a dying sister. There was not much else to go on.
And still, the kid had given him ten bucks. Mystifying.
Ebenezer still had the lone bill. It would not go to the black dancers this time. He’d made up his mind to search out the kid if he could, and if so to give the money back. Maybe even tell another story in the process. Of course, they sometimes stretched a fair piece of the imagination, but there were times (times that were not so infrequent these days) when even Ebenezer couldn’t absolutely be sure himself.
Chapter 10
The following Thursday afternoon and Billy’s shift was almost over. He burned the last few minutes tidying up the supply closet on the third floor. The nightshift Housekeeping supervisor was always bitching behind Billy’s back, and Billy felt (at least for the time being) that attention to detail was more beneficial than confrontation. He’d straighten up both the closet and the stuffed-shirt asshole in his own good time. Besides, time went by faster when spent busy.
As he replaced an already opened box of staples at eye level he checked his watch, knowing to the second how long it took to reach the basement time clock. He shoved the rest of the things he held in his hand as far back on the shelf as he could manage and turned out the light. Then he meandered over to the bank of elevators and punched the Down button. He was wary because he’d seen the Material’s Management superintendent sniffing around an hour earlier, and hoped to avoid the man. That ass-sniffer had actually taken time one day to roast Billy’s ass for squeezing two minutes. Two fucking minutes! Billy hoped a clean getaway was in the works today. The familiar metallic ding announced the elevator and when the doors opened Billy jumped inside, thankfully alone.
When the elevator reached the Basement the double doors slid back on quietly greased tracks. Billy stepped out, cautiously scanning the area. The time clock on the wall near the janitor’s closet clicked dryly of its own incessant boredom. Dammit! Three minutes to go. The elevator usually stopped on at least one floor on the way down, so perhaps that’s what had thrown his timing off. Regardless, he ripped the time card loose and slotted it into the machine, not willing to stand in the open as a sacrifice. The mechanism snapped, tattooing a blue impression for the people in Payroll. Keep the three minutes, Billy thought to himself as he replaced the card. Today it was not worth it; he had to get outside. Adeui, Hotel Dieu, he thought comically. Recently, some brilliantly creative mind had worked the proper channels to rename the old building University Hospital, but to Billy it’d never be anything but the Hotel Dieu. For God’s sake, it was the only thing that had had any charm in the whole damn place! Now, even the name was a memory left to grow smoky and yellow.
He didn’t bother with the elevator back to the lobby. Standing in the stairwell he hurriedly flung the blue Maintenance uniform shirt (with its slipshod, stenciled William scrawled across the left breast), off his back and between his knees. Just as quickly he donned the colorful, yellow Tommy Hilfiger shirt he’d been carrying over his shoulder and stuffed the tail into his jeans. He felt a job should not necessarily a man make, and every day, upon leaving the heavy doors behind, he actually felt his ‘true’ self emerge. A self that simply bided its time resting and thinking while the body concerned itself with making a living, however scant and sometimes precarious that living proved to be. And in this emerging state of mind Billy reached the Employee’s Exit, the day’s drudgery already fading like a ripple on a smooth, glassy lake. Tomorrow was payday! He’d call Elizabeth later in the evening, try to set up something for the both of them for Saturday or Sunday.
Stepping outside he cursed the weatherman. The sun sat heavy and fat above the Huey P. Long Bridge off to the west, and the heat it sent (wrapped in thick sheets of perpetual humidity) seemed capable of breaking down an iron ball in due time. Clouds were no more than whispered thoughts today. Billy spat on the concrete. Funny, he thought. The weather idiot had guaranteed rain! That’s why he’d left the motorcycle at home, leaving early to catch the fucking bus! When
was he ever gonna learn?
The Bus Stop was little less than a quarter mile’s walk, so it wasn’t that. But the humidity…and the route; that was a different story. It wasn’t so bad in the morning, before the sun came up. But the afternoon was different. The prison yard was harder then.
Having no choice, he began to walk.
Shortly afterward, he rounded the curve in the One Way section of Toulouse, and saw the twenty-foot high fence ringed at the top by hundreds of yards of glistening, stainless steel concertina wire. Farther back was another fence, sizably smaller and considerably less forbidding. However, it also carried a sharpened, steel crown and a sufficient electrical charge.
There were usually three guards positioned at points along the block-long expanse of razor-wire fence, and Billy knew one or two of them by name, some of the others only by a noncommittal nod as he walked by. “What’cha say, Danny?” he prompted, passing the one who always smiled, seemingly oblivious to the situation on his side of the fences. The black man’s face broke in a broad grin as he sliced one hand across the air at thigh level, dapping across the distance. The walk along the fence line took about a minute, but that minute always had a way of stretching and sticking, never satisfied to subjugate itself to one of the multitude of other useless instances which missed out on the chance for becoming real memories.
This was because Billy always watched the prisoner’s faces as he walked.
Most were tightly sealed, breathing, sullied vaults with keys long since broken, misplaced, thrown out. But on occasion he would spy one that intrigued him, someone in possession of what Billy regarded as an ‘innocent’ face. And when this happened it would leave him wondering (off and on as the day passed) what such a man had done to usher himself down.
Billy walked, squinting through his glasses (trying not to appear obvious) at the faces. Although the group assembled outside today did not inspire any new contemplations (their numbers were few considering the heat), they did collectively happen to shake loose a memory, long dusted and junked, which used a morbidly seductive energy to reinvigorate and bloom. The memory was almost seven months old, involving a middle-aged Hispanic man. Billy guessed it had happened on a week-end because the memory was ringed with a tinge of pleasantness, an initial light-hearted air. And then the beating.
As Billy recalled, the only reason he’d first locked eyes with the convict was out of a very vague tilt of the man’s hand in Billy’s passing direction. Not much different from the one the guard had just given him. It had struck Billy as odd because none of the cons had ever taken the time to acknowledge his presence except when an occasional angry expletive searched him out as a passing scape-goat.
The man’s face had been resigned, as if he’d just let out a breath and was pausing before taking another. His docile eyes were sad but also mesmerizingly intense, hardly surprised even, when the four other Mexicans had run upon him, inflicting brutal injuries with a stack of five-pound free weights before the guards came to a somewhat belated rescue. As Billy watched in disgust, the prisoner had twitched spasmodically until he was spirited away on a gurney, by which time he’d been completely still. Billy had noticed ever since the incident there was an absence of free weights in the yard.
The power in the memory came not from the attack but from a tiny, throw-away article he’d noticed embedded in the sprawl of The Times Picayune two days later. “Prisoner Dies in N.O. Penitentiary Infirmary” summed up in lines barely surpassing the title. The name of the dead had been Hispanic, but nothing else in the way of clues. Just another no-good, no-name, down. Pruning complete. Because Billy had known, without ever having to see a picture or reading any garish details of the assault; he had known entirely.
Since that day he’d unconsciously found himself frequently involved in the game of finding the person behind the eyes. Not just on the prisoners, but also people he passed on the street, strangers he came into contact with every day. He searched for personal mysteries, perhaps in the attempt to explain the tenacity of one certain circumstance in a person’s life to serve as a point upon which all subsequent ones hinged. What had been the quality that commanded his attention that day? Had it been a conscious endeavor on the condemned prisoner’s part? Billy still had no answer. Now, passing along the chain-linked expanse for the hundredth time since, Billy found himself searching out that face on the impossible chance that he would be proved wrong.
But he wouldn’t because the man was gone. Though it did little to stop the wonder.
What had been the man’s crime? Billy’s memory pegged him as small, slightly built. Maybe even a touch effeminate; the flick of the hand; Billy’s double-take. And he’d lived out his final days behind bars housed with killers, rapists, and countless other fiends. Had he been capable of that too?
Perhaps, but that was hardly important. The brutality of his death had not formed the sore in Billy’s head. That sore sprang from the feeling that something had been stolen from him that day by the prisoner. And however selfish it seemed, it did not matter. The unexpected feminine movement of the hand had caught Billy off guard. And therefore he’d gotten the full strength of the Look the man had manacled upon him, a look of coming disaster; but underlying the general chaos there had also been a calmness expressed across the blistering concrete. For just a moment their individual and strange lives had entwined (perhaps as the prisoner wished them to), and in that moment the doomed inmate had gained something for himself at a great cost to Billy.
The old man’s story had ushered back this feeling anew. Billy knew the price unsuspecting circumstances could exact.
And even though Billy couldn’t honestly blame the dead convict, he did consider himself slightly cursed because of him. Billy trembled at the thought of a complete stranger gaining some weird solace from him (simply from the act of eye contact), seconds before his life ended. And for some unknown reason, the con had chosen Billy to furnish this last spark. This memory brought the void of death very close and personal. He bore the new weight of his sister’s illness like a yoke choking him with every step.
Chapter 11
Elizabeth sat by herself in the park, watching the many worrisome, complaining squirrels pester one another into mild frenzies, tearing frantically around the trees as their tiny claws shredded bark. Their tails vibrated both agitation and playfulness as one or another would stop momentarily before suddenly making another mad scramble around the trunk. Then, perhaps a dusty tumble before resting again. Their simplicity was a marvel, sweetly comforting as Elizabeth sat in the shade of the mossy live oaks. Theirs was a peculiar, innocent, and free place in time. Not the ‘freedom’ of civilization and its conventions, but real freedom: simplistic purpose. At least it felt somehow more pure than her own, she mused.
But how long were their lifetimes? She didn’t know, but felt safe to hazard a guess. Say, between five to ten years; it couldn’t be much more or less. And in that time, no history; their generations simply rolling one onto another: an endless, unshakable cycle. Ancient and useless to ponder, simply living with no need for futile explanations. She smiled as her inner philosopher painted these unknown lineages.
She leaned back and weaved her fingers together behind her head. The voice was right. No sense not living for the day! Every brooding second was one more lost to Time, a soundless slap in the face left to sink in the void.
She reached into her purse and extracted a small, crumpled paper bag filled with roasted peanuts. She turned it around in her hand, keeping one eye on the increased activity in the trees around her. Keen ears made full stomachs. And she did have time, dammit! How long would it take her to earn their trust?
She held out a peanut, pinched gingerly between thumb and forefinger. One of the dust-wrestling pair called off the exercise and stood up, immediately sizing up this new turn of events with his now equally interested partner. But nothing further, just four inquisitive eyes and two twitching noses. Elizabeth tossed the nut and it landed near a clump of sawgr
ass near the indistinct bank. Both heads twitched in unison as four eyes sought out the now-hidden treasure. They began the search at once.
She pulled out another peanut. How long would it take her to win their trust?
It really didn’t matter.
Chapter 12
On the boulevard side of the same park, Ebenezer lounged upon one of the wrought iron benches. He usually haunted the paved, brick sidewalks on and around Jackson Square, but earlier in the morning he’d hailed a cab at the corner of Corondolet.
He loved the drive down St. Charles, easily the most beautiful avenue in the South; adorned with stately, centuries’ old live oaks rooting among million dollar mansions. Neighborhood-flavored corner stores and moldering shops wafting out such tantalizing smells that any run-down exterior seemed all the more mighty and uplifting to the spirit because of its nose-pleasing envelope. And down the way, along with the slow traffic filtering through, Audubon Park nestled snuggly off to the side; and just adjacent, Audubon Zoo. Ebenezer figured if the sun remained as passive and majestic for another hour, he’d mosey down and see the animals. He loved them all, even the filthy-ugly condor vulture which had caught his attention one visit by repeatedly rubbing its scraggy bald head across its dinner: a dead and bloated assortment of guineas pigs. Its very grotesquerie proved fascinating.