ONE OF THE BARTENDERS at Mandina’s, Mario, a young guy Jack Delaney knew pretty well, said, “You stick the thing right into the person, like you’re stabbing him?”
“How else you gonna do it?”
“You poke the guy all over?”
“No, once you put the trocar in it stays in the same place. You change the angle. See, what you’re doing is aspirating the viscera. You hit the liver and it doesn’t give, you know the guy was a boozer, had cirrhosis.”
“I could never do that. Jesus.”
“You get used to it.”
“You want another one?”
“Yeah, with three olives. Then I’ll switch.”
“Man, I could never do that.”
“There free-lance embalmers that come around, trade men, they get about a hundred a job. What do you think? Make thirty to forty grand a year.”
“Not me,” Mario said, moving off.
Saturday afternoon the plain, high-ceilinged café was nearly empty, too far up Canal Street for tourists. Mullen & Sons was only a block away. After a funeral Jack and Leo would come in still wearing their dark suits and pearl-gray neckties, sit at a table, and gradually begin talking, polite to each other until, oh, man, the relief that would come with that first ice-cold vodka martini going down. Jack’s with anchovy olives, Leo’s a twist of lemon. Leo’s eyes glistening as he’d look up at the black waiter with the beard who had been in that movie Pretty Baby and called them the funeral dudes. Leo would say, “Henry, why don’t you do it again, the same way. Would that please you?” Leo settling in. “It would sure as hell please us, Henry.” Then later on have the artichoke soup and the oyster loaf.
Mario came along the bar with the martini, placed it on the cocktail napkin in front of Jack.
“What I don’t understand, how you can do that every day of your life. Fool with dead people.”
Jack picked up the martini, about to say that for one thing the dead never complain or give you a hard time. But he stopped and thought a moment and said, “I don’t know. I really don’t.” He sipped the martini, put an olive in his mouth, chewed it a few times and took another sip. Jesus, was that good.
“I heard you don’t put any panties on the women, when they’re in the casket.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“I don’t know, I just heard it one time.”
“We dress ’em right down to their socks. Shoes are optional, but everything else.”
Mario picked up Jack’s glass to place it on a fresh cocktail napkin. “You ever get like a real good-looking girl, I mean with a great body, you know, and you have to do all that stuff to her?”
“Now, it doesn’t sound so bad, uh?”
“I still wouldn’t do it.”
“You know what the worst is? You look at a body that came in, all of a sudden you realize, Jesus Christ, the guy was a friend of yours.”
“Brings it home, uh? Somebody you know.”
“Even if you haven’t seen the person in a while. Like this guy today. I see him lying there, I don’t believe it. Not only is the guy dead, he’s eight years older than the last time I saw him. You know what I’m saying? He’s a different person. I look at him, guy named Buddy Jeannette, I know him but I don’t know him. I don’t know where he’s been, what he’s been doing.”
“What’d he die of?”
“See, the thing is, this guy wasn’t just an old friend. This’s a guy when I met him, the first time I ever talked to him, it changed my whole fucking life from then on.”
“Guy was what, like a priest?”
“He was a hotel burglar.”
“No shit.”
“You know I did time.”
“You mentioned it once, yeah. Three years.”
“Well, before that, when I met the guy… Wait, I have to tell you something else first. Right after I got out of school I worked at Maison Blanche, in the men’s department, and they’d use me in ads. They said I was a perfect size forty and I had good teeth and they said they liked my hair. But I quit ’cause it was a bunch a shit doing that, all that standing around in the lights. Now, this time I’m talking about…”
“When you met the guy?”
“Yeah, eight years ago. Now I’m thirty-two years old working for the Rivé brothers, barely making two hundred a week.”
“They come in here. Emile and Brother.”
“I know they do. They’re my uncles… Anyway, this particular night I come out of Felix’s, there on Iberville, had my oysters, couple of beers, and this woman stops me on the street. She wants to know if I’ve ever done any modeling. I go, ‘Yeah, you know Maison Blanche?’ I can tell she’s from out of town, the way she talks. She says they’re here from New York doing catalog layouts for Hollandia sportswear-that’s the one with the little tulip on the shirt-and she’ll give me a thousand bucks for four days. Just like that. The thousand guaranteed plus overtime. But the way she’s looking at me, touching my hair, I get the feeling she wants to do more than take my picture.”
“Yeah, was she nice?”
“Attractive, very stylish, wore dark-tinted glasses all the time, and had the whitest skin I ever saw. She was maybe forty-two or three.”
“That’s not too bad.”
“Her name was Betty Barr, she was the advertising manager. Only the other models and the photographer and his helpers all called her Bettybarr, like it was one name. I don’t know why but I had trouble with that, so I didn’t call her anything. We’d start in the morning and shoot all day, outside, at different locations. Jackson Square, naturally, Audubon Park, the lighthouse on the New Basin Canal, the docks down at Lafitte, Jesus, with the Cajun shrimpers standing there watching. Here we are posing, this group of us, like we’re happier’n shit to have these outfits on, warm-ups, rugby shirts… This other guy, Michael, who never said one fucking word to me, it didn’t seem to bother him at all he looked like an asshole. You see the shrimpers making remarks. Or the girls, it didn’t bother them, they were kids, sixteen, seventeen…” Jack touched his glass. “Why don’t you hit this again. Just vodka.”
Mario stepped down the bar to get the bottle and Jack remembered the girls. The girls had no trouble becoming an instant part of it, slouching into poses with deadpan expressions or smiling or looking surprised. They fascinated him, their studied moves, girls being models, nothing else, able to lose themselves in their poses. He said to the girls, an aside, “You imagine a guy wearing this?” And the girls said, “Really.” He liked them when they were posing and they liked him when he wasn’t.
Mario returned and poured and Jack said, “We’re out by Tulane, I have these real bright green fucking pants on with a pink shirt, the little tulip on it, and right there on Saint Charles Avenue these South Central Bell hardhats are digging up the street. Naturally they start making remarks, yelling different things. My regular job then, hauling around those goddamn organ pipes, I worked as hard as those guys any day. But I can’t walk over and tell ’em that. See, that’s bad enough, but then Bettybarr gets an idea, comes over and cocks this straw hat on the side of my head. I go, ‘Excuse me, but you know anybody who wears a hat this way?’ She goes, ‘You do.’ Sunday, the last day, we’re shooting on the top deck of the Algiers ferry, riding it back and forth. Everybody on the boat was up there watching us. I see these two clowns drinking Dixie beer out of longneck bottles and I know right away I’m gonna have trouble. They come around to my side, I’m standing there grinning at the camera in this all-white outfit, and they start making these kissing-sucking noises, you know, and ask me if I’m dick trawling or what. Just then Bettybarr comes up to me with a yachting cap and I think, Oh, shit, here we go. She’s about to cock the hat on my head and I say to her, ‘Excuse me.’ I turn to the two morons with the Dixie longnecks and tell ’em, ‘I hear one more fucking word somebody’s going over the side.’ Bettybarr looks grim, like she’s frozen, with no expression at all. She says, ‘That’s it for today. Pack it up,’ and gets us all down below.”