CHAPTER 6
IT WAS A MONTH BEFORE THANKSGIVING, TWO WEEKS AFTER HE’D ARRIVED in New Orleans, one week after the night at the camelback. He wouldn’t involve his friend, no matter how often Wages asked about the fight. Achilles had finally admitted he was ambushed in the boardinghouse, though he couldn’t remember its location. Nonetheless, Wages had put the word out. A few days before, Wexler and Merriweather had both called Achilles and left messages about “bringing the thunder.” That’s the kind of friends they were. They would have all insisted on being there, prosthetics and all, when Achilles went to Ready Pawn to take out a loan on his locket and buy an eight-round Mossberg with a clean black barrel and polished oak stock. They would have insisted on helping Achilles remove the dowel rod so that he could chamber four extra rounds. They would have helped Achilles pack the Mossberg in a big duffle on top of enough cardboard to lend the bag an innocuous shape, and cut a hole in the outside pocket so that he could fire it without opening the bag. They would have been in the car with him the night Achilles parked down the street from the green camelback and said aloud to himself, “No one is strutting out that back door. I’m going to show these motherfuckers what a real shotgun is.”
In the past few days, he’d slept often, eaten seldom, and thought much about this moment. Parked two blocks away from the green camelback, he visualized the inside of the house, and ran through the plan: He knocks on the back door. Blow opens it and finds his face mounted on the barrel like a silencer, aka the muzzle muffler. Lex answers his questions about Troy and returns his watch, or gets Blow’s head in his lap. In and out in less than five minutes and back at the quarry tomorrow night, though what he’d do there he didn’t know.
Immediately after the fight he’d been upset that he had tried to kill a man and felt nothing. As O’Ree once said, “There’s a difference between getting blood on your snout and developing a taste for it.” Having been shot at more than he shot, Achilles wondered if it was possible to develop a taste for something you’d never had. Every evening some Afghan assholes tossed a few potshots at camp, the bullets usually falling several yards short of the wall. The Americans shot back, and of course there were the two firefights, but he never knew if he actually hit anyone. You just shot until they stopped shooting back. It wasn’t like hunting, where you tracked the quarry down, bagged it, and ate it.
He rechecked the bag for the eleventh time, to ensure that the trigger was easily accessible. He would travel through the alleys to the back of the house, not that he was really worried about witnesses in this neighborhood. Even as Achilles sat there, a drunk teetered down the block, listing so severely he had to steady himself against the side of a truck. The bum’s face was pinched and worn, marked with fissures like Bud’s. Bud. Bud had better pray that Nawlins was a big enough city that he never ran into Achilles. He put his hands to the roof of the cab, near the smudge Bud had left, and said, “Hand to God. Hand to God, my ass.” He cringed at the memory of Father Levreau’s hands on his own. Why had he lacked the courage to shake him off, to shun the imposition of faith? Faith, as demanding and unyielding as the pain it was rumored to heal; faith, as costly as despair. Of all the prophets Levreau had mentioned, out of the entire Old Testament starting lineup, Achilles recalled only Jacob and Noah. Jacob he didn’t know, but everyone knew Noah: the man who built a boat in the middle of the desert and left his friends behind to be swallowed by the bitter surf.
The truck swayed — the drunk was leaning against it, fumbling with his fly. Achilles tapped his horn. It was broken. “Motherfuck, I’m in here!” Losing balance as he tried to wave, the drunk put one hand to the window, leaving a greasy palm print. If ever a city needed a Noah. Achilles slapped the window and the man staggered off, singing. A flock of pigeons launched from a nearby roof. Watching as they scattered, Achilles raised his hands as if holding a shotgun and drew a bead on the bird closest to his car, following its trajectory — a soaring arc of alabaster wings eating the night — and firing just as it lit on a sign that read St. Jude Shelter and Community Kitchen, under which a crowd was organizing itself into a line.
Achilles smelled it before he saw it. The green camelback was a burned-out shell, the dirt yard cracked, the walls of the adjacent houses scorched. The second-story roof was gone, as was most of the first-floor roof, leaving the house open to the sky. The sidewalls remained, but the front wall had crumbled except for an untouched area two feet around the front doors, where the mailbox hung unscathed, unmarked by soot or flame. He flipped the lid up. Joe, Angela, and Raymond Harper had lived there, along with, in incrementally smaller letters, Angie, April, and Amy. Charred shingles cracked underfoot along the alley. The back wall had fallen completely off and lay on the ground like a loading ramp leading into a trailer. The kitchen, dark as a shadow box, had suffered only smoke damage. A few bottles and the ashtray and the take-out containers and the dishes piled in the sink, all coated in black ash, so familiar a sight that he expected to see Lex seated there, coated too. Achilles put the duffle bag over his shoulder and ventured farther into the house. The stairway lay on the floor like a broken accordion. Achilles climbed the wall to the second floor, his fingers burning and twitching with the memory of the fight, his sore ankle groaning, his anger rising.
Two of the upstairs doorways were obstructed by a densely packed mass of heavy beams and charred shingles, impassible now, let alone aflame. The third door led into a bedroom furnished with bunk beds as well as a playpen that was a knot of sooty tubing. He almost lost his footing on a squeaky toy, three baby dolls gnarled by the heat, their legs melted together, two of the heads joined at the hair, forming one stiff plastic web. He stomped on it until one head popped off and bounced into the hallway, where it caught the slant of the floor and careened off the edge. He listened closely but didn’t hear it hit the ground. He set the duffle bag down and kicked the body, a Medusa with legs for hair, over the edge; he listened closely, but didn’t hear that touch down either, which really pissed him off.
Feeling sorry for himself, he catalogued his grievances: How could Troy be so thoughtless? If his mom believed enough to slip crosses into their lockets and keep Bibles tucked around the house, how could she pander to his father’s atheism all those years? And his father, for chrissakes, how could he die before seeing them again and leave Achilles holding this bag of shit? And if you adopted a kid or two, what was the point in forcing the papers on them? People didn’t need to know everything.
He was back in his car before he remembered the duffle bag, and pounded the dashboard in frustration. He didn’t want to do this anymore. He didn’t want to go back into that house. He knew burned houses. Plenty. He had been in burned houses, searched them, slept in them, ordered them razed and retorched. He had been the one to burn them. He had called down the thunder. He knew that if the right ordnance came knocking, even the stoutest building crumbled like cake. But he didn’t want to go back into that house and wonder again who had been trapped in those rooms. But that was stupid. It wasn’t like Troy could die in a fire: he had survived a minefield.