“How much for a pint?” he said.
“Two dollars.”
“You don’t have any that comes in glass jars, do you?”
“We only sell bonded whiskey here,” the clerk said.
“Give me the pint.”
The clerk put the bottle in a paper bag. Avery stuck it in his back pocket and picked up his groceries and went out to the highway.
He sat under a pine tree and ate lunch. There were brown pine needles spread over the grass. He opened the sardines and picked them out with his pocketknife and ate them with bread. He was still hungry and he wanted to eat the lunch meat, but he would have to save that for supper. The sun was very hot now. He threw the empty can to the side of the road and wiped his knife clean on the grass. He took the pint bottle out of his pocket and cut the seal off. He unscrewed the cap and drank; he felt the whiskey hot in his stomach. It tasted good after so long. He took another swallow and put the cap back on and replaced the bottle in his pocket. He wrapped the rest of his groceries in the paper sack and got up and stood by the shoulder of the highway to hitch another ride. Three cars passed him by, and then he caught a lift with a salesman who was going all the way to New Orleans.
He got into the city late that night. The salesman gave him directions to an inexpensive rooming house and dropped him off on the lower end of Magazine. Avery walked through the dark streets of a Negro area until he found St. Charles. He caught the streetcar and rode downtown to Canal. He stood on the corner and looked at the white sweep of the boulevard with its grass esplanade and palm trees and streetcar tracks, and the glitter like hard candy of the lighted storefronts. The sidewalks were still crowded, and he could hear the tinny music from the bars and strip places. He walked down to Liberty Street and found the rooming house the salesman had told him of. It was an old wood building that had a big front porch with a swing. It was one block off Canal and three blocks from Bourbon, and the Frenchwoman who owned it kept it very clean and she served coffee and rolls to her tenants every morning.
He took a room for the night, and in the morning the woman brought in his coffee on a tray. She poured the coffee and hot milk into his cup from two copper pots with long tapered spouts. She wore a housecoat, and her hair was loose and uncombed.
“Will you keep the room for another night?” she said.
“I’m looking for a job. I’ll stay if I find one,” Avery said.
“Your name is French. Tu parles français?”
“I understand it.”
“D’où tu viens?”
“Martinique parish.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Anything. I’m going down to the docks today,” he said.
“My husband is a welder on the pipeline. He can get you work.”
“I’ve never worked on a pipeline.”
“You can learn. He will teach you.”
“Where is he?” Avery said.
“He is eating breakfast. Finish the coffee and you can talk with him.”
Avery met her husband and drove to work with him. He got a job as a welder’s helper on a twelve-inch natural gas line that had just kicked off and was to run from an oil refinery to the other end of the parish. He worked with the tack crew, cleaning wells, driving the truck, and regulating the welding machine. He liked the job. Each morning they went out on the right-of-way that was cut through the woods and marsh, and the joints of pipe would be laid along the wooden skids by the ditch; he followed behind the truck with the electric ground that he clamped on the pipe to give the welder a circuit and with the wire brushes and the icepick in his back pocket that he used to clean the joints; the welder would bend over the pipe with his dark goggles on and his bill-hat turned around backwards and his khaki shirt buttoned at the collar and sleeves, and the electric arc would move in an orange flame around the pipe, and there was the acrid smell of tar and hot metal and the exhaust from the heavy machinery.
He stayed on at the rooming house, and sometimes in the evening he went down into the Quarter and ate dinner in an Italian place off Bourbon Street, then he would walk through the narrow cobble lanes and look at the old red and pink stucco buildings and the iron grillwork along the balconies and those fine flagstone courtyards with the willow trees and palms that hung over the walls. At night he could see the back of Saint Louis Cathedral with the ivy growing up its walls under the moon, and there was the park in the square across from the French Market where the bums and the drunks slept under the statue of Andrew Jackson.
One night he found a small bar on Rampart where the band was good and there were no tourists. He had been drinking since he had gotten off work. He sat at the bar and drank whiskey sours and listened to the band knock out the end of “Yellow Dog Blues.” The drummer twirled the sticks in his hands and played on the nickel-plated rim of his snare. The man on the next stool to Avery was having an argument with the bartender. He was dressed in sports clothes, and was quite handsome and quite drunk. He had thin red hair and blue eyes and a pale classic face like Lord Byron’s. He didn’t have enough money to pay for his drink. He turned to Avery.
“I say, have you a dime?” he said.
Avery pushed a coin towards him.
He gave the dime to the bartender with some other change.
“The fellow was going to take my drink away,” he said.
“You’re spilling it,” Avery said.
“Spilling?”
“On your coat. You’re spilling your drink.”
“Don’t want to do that.” He wiped his sleeve with his hand. “My name is Wally.”
“I’m Avery Broussard.”
“You look like a good chap. Do you want to go to a party?”
“Where?”
“On Royal. A friend of mine is giving a debauch.”
“I wouldn’t know anyone.”
“Of no importance. The literary and artistic group. We’ll tell them you’re an agrarian romanticist. Do you have a bottle?”
“No.”
“We’ll have to get one. The artistic group asks that you bring your own booze.”
They left the bar and went to a package store down the street.
“Do you mind making it Scotch?” Wally said.
Avery went in and bought a half pint.
“Good man,” Wally said.
“Are you English?” Avery took a drink and passed the bottle.
“Who would want to be English when they can belong to the American middle class?”
“You sound English.”
“Went to school in England. Drank my way through four years of Tulane, then tried graduate work at Cambridge and was sent down. Acquired nothing but a taste for Scotch and a bad accent. Now make my home in the Quarter writing.”
“Pass the bottle,” Avery said.
“What do you do?”
“Pipeline.”
“I say, we’re emptying the bottle rather fast.”
“Have to buy more.”
“I’m stony broke. Hate to use your money like this.”
Avery took a long drink.
“Mind if I have a bit?” Wally said.
Avery gave him the bottle. He leaned against the side of a building and drank.
“I think I’m tight,” he said.
“Where is the party?”
“Royal Street.”
“We’re going the wrong way,” Avery said.
They turned the corner towards Royal. The half pint was almost finished.
“You have the last drink,” Wally said.
“Go ahead.”
“Your bottle.”
Avery drank it off and dropped the bottle in an alley.