“Well, not exactly,” Cherice says. “She was outraged — ’specially since I’d been there for two days when they finally let me make the call. It’s just that outrage is her favorite state of mind. See, who Mathilde is — I gotta give you her number; every black person in Louisiana oughta have it on speed dial — who Mathilde is, she’s the toughest civil rights lawyer in the state. That’s why Charles made sure to say her name. But that white boy just said, ‘Right,’ like he didn’t believe us. Course, we knew for sure she was gon’ hunt him down and fry his ass. Or die tryin’. But that didn’t make it no better at the time. In the end, Mathilde made us famous though. Knew she would.”
“Yeah, but we wouldn’t’ve got on CNN if it hadn’t been for you,” Charles says, smiling at her. “Or in the New York Times neither.”
Wyvette and Brandin are about bug-eyed.
“See what happened,” Charles continues, “Cherice went on eBay and found Mathilde’s mama’s engagement ring, the main thing she wanted us to bring to Highlands. Those cops were so arrogant they just put it right up there. In front of God and everybody.”
“But how did you know to do that?” Wyvette asks, and Cherice thinks it’s a good question.
“I didn’t,” she says. “I just felt so bad for Mathilde I was tryin’ anything and everywhere. Anyhow, once we found the jewelry, the cops set up a sting, busted the whole crime ring — there was three of ’em. Found a whole garage full of stuff they hadn’t sold yet.”
Brandin shakes his head and waves his beer. “Lawless times. Lawless times we live in.”
And Cherice laughs. “Well, guess what? We got to do a little lootin’ of our own. You ever hear of Priscilla Smith-Fredericks? She’s some big Hollywood producer. Came out and asked if she could buy our story for fifteen thousand dollars, you believe that? Gonna do a TV movie about what happened to us. I should feel bad about it, but those people got way more money than sense.”
Right after the holiday, Marty Carrera of Mojo Mart Productions finds himself in a meeting with a young producer who has what sounds to him like a good idea. Priscilla Smith-Fredericks lays a hand on his wrist, which he doesn’t much care for, but he tries not to cringe.
“Marty,” she says. “I believe in this story. This is an important story to tell — a story about corruption, about courage, about one woman’s struggle for justice in an unjust world. But most of all, it’s the story of two women, two women who’ve been together for twenty-two years — one the maid, the other the boss — about the love they have for each other, the way their lives are inextricably meshed. In a good way.
“I want to do this picture for them and... well... for the whole state of Louisiana. You know what? That poor state’s been screwed enough different ways it could write a sequel to the Kama Sutra. It’s been screwed by FEMA, it’s been screwed by the Corps of Engineers, it’s been screwed by the administration, it’s been screwed by its own crooked officials... Everybody’s picking carrion off its bones. And those poor Wardells! I want to do this for the Wardells. Those people have a house to rebuild. They need the money and they need the... well, the lift. The vindication.”
Marty Carrera looks at the paperwork she’s given him. She proposes to pay the Wardells a $15,000 flat fee, which seems low to him. Standard would be about $75,000, plus a percentage of the gross and maybe a $10,000 “technical consultant” fee. He shuffles pages, wondering if she’s done what he suspects.
And yes, of course she has. She’s inflated her own fee at the expense of the Wardells. She thinks she should get $100,000 as an associate producer, about twice what the job is worth. And not only that, she wants to award the technical consultant’s fee to herself.
Marty is genuinely angry about this. She’s roused his sympathy for the wrongfully accused couple, and even for the beleaguered state, and he too believes the Wardells’ story — or more properly, Mathilde and Cherice’s story — would make a great movie for television.
However, he thinks Ms. Smith-Fredericks is a species of vermin. “After looking at the figures,” he says, “I think I can honestly say that you seem uniquely qualified to do a piece on looting.”
But she doesn’t catch his meaning. She’s so full of herself all she hears is what she wants to hear. She sticks out her hand to shake
Well, so be it, Marty thinks. I tried to warn her.
His production company doesn’t need her. So what if she found the story and brought it to him? He’s not obligated to... Well, he is, but...
“Marty,” she says, “we’re going to be great together.”
He shakes her hand absentmindedly, already thinking of ways to cut her out of the deal.
Angola South
by Ace Atkins
Loyola Avenue
The child was small and black, shirtless, wearing only a filthy pair of Spider-Man pajama bottoms and carrying a skinned-up football. His fingers still felt numb from holding his mother’s hand all night and he now found himself standing on top of the interstate overpass looking down at a maze of swamped streets.
For a long time now, since the morning heat started shining hard off the top of the downtown buildings, he’d been watching the man with the gun.
The man was white and wearing green, a big plug of tobacco in his left cheek. To the child, it seemed his eyes were superhuman, taking in everything in their thick mirrored lenses and occasionally shouting to a group of shackled men who sat and slept.
He kept the gun tight in both hands and would walk from the beginning of the chain of men — bearded and smelling of rotten eggs and garbage — to the end, his boots making hollow sounds on the overpass. His steps seemed like a drum over the murmur of men and families who’d found refuge on the high ground.
By early afternoon, the child stood close to the railing, trying to catch the breeze that would sometimes come across his face, his eyes lazily opening and closing, watching the waves break and shift on top of the roadway and on the parched roofs of partially sunk buildings and shotgun houses.
He felt his fingers slip from the sweaty hand of his mother and he wandered, walking and swaying, toward the man with the gun.
The boy tugged at the rough material on his leg and the man stared down at him, his silver glass eyes shining an image of a grinning child back at him.
He looked at the twin images of himself and said: “Mister, when you gonna fix our city?”
Jack Estay woke at 5 a.m. to the sound of the big yellow locomotive’s engines chugging away and keeping the entire station juiced with power. He took the twelve-gauge from his lap, stood from where he’d fallen asleep in a chair the night before, and washed himself in the lavatory.
At 5:15 he walked five men caught looting a Vietnamese restaurant (they’d been found eating dried shrimp and guzzling bottles of 33 beer) down the endless train platform and into the holding cells fashioned with chain link, metal bars, and concertina wire. In each of the sixteen cells there was one portable toilet.
Orleans Parish Prison sat filled with water, so it was the best they could do.
As Jack locked up and walked the line back to the old Amtrak station, men and women hollered and yelled. A homeless man on the way tried to piss on him, but his short quick stream stopped shy of Jack’s leg.