“What’s up?” he asked.
“The Secretary of State in town to make a speech at the World Trade Center,” one of the protestors yelled.
Pedestrians on Canal Street hustled about their business. Ladies shopping in flowery hats and white gloves were clustered outside the big department stores. Businessmen in seersucker suits and wingtips lit cigars as they walked and talked deals.
The demonstrators attracted more than a few stares because they were loud, but no one in the noontime crowd was particularly threatening. Most of the protestors were serious-looking short-haired kids. Only a couple wore colorful, grubby attire, cowboy boots and torn jeans, with fringed vests covered with protest buttons. But they made the populace aware of the intensity of their feeling and purpose. They had rallied around what they called the White Supremacy Monument, a tribute to the overthrow of black Reconstruction rule, which commanded the middle of the wide neutral ground.
Tubby’s impressions of this day had been made a little opaque by the passage of time, but he did remember a United Cab driver who shook his fist out the window and called them Pinkos. A Lucky Dog vendor pushed his cart through the protest, trying to get into the French Quarter. Tubby certainly recalled being told to take note of the three muscular men, Beatle haircuts and pressed jeans, standing across the street in front of a sprawling concrete municipal building made in the shape of a flattened white mushroom. They were joking among themselves, trying to look hip.
“Cops?” he asked.
“Chief Giarrusso’s finest,” he was told.
A block away, uniformed policemen abruptly marched into the intersection and stopped traffic to make way for a caravan of black limousines.
“That must be Kissinger!” a protester cried.
The street blockade set off a din of blaring car horns. Three blocks full of trapped vehicles maneuvered this way and that trying to get across the neutral ground on which the demonstrators stood so that they could make U-turns.
The protesters continued waving their signs and yelling for attention, but the general mayhem drowned them out. Tubby could recall the deafening uproar of the peace chants, the jeers, the sirens and horns, all the car exhaust, the heat.
Maybe that’s why he didn’t notice the car full of hecklers idling alongside them until one of them hurled a tomato. It spattered on one of the kid’s sign and dribbled onto his new faded madras shirt.
“Hey, what!” the protester objected and shot a bird at his assailant, a person who was only a blur in the back seat.
“Assholes!” the demonstrator’s girlfriend screamed, and more projectiles came out of the car.
“Communist bastards!” someone shouted.
Suddenly there was a bright flash and a pop from the back of the car.
The boy dropped his sign and looked down at his chest in dismay. Blood was bubbling out, a red ribbon following the buttons of his neat shirt, dripping over his belt. His knees buckled.
Everyone was screaming. The car lurched forward and bucked the curb. It swerved across the streetcar tracks, scattering people, and blasted away from the scene on Canal Street.
Tubby dropped to the pavement and tried to stuff his own shirttails into the boy’s wound. As bystanders fled, the three undercover cops ran between cars and excitedly inspected the victim. The wounded boy squinted at the relentless sun and closed his eyes.
A new crowd formed, trying to see what had happened.
Tubby’s attempts to staunch the flow of blood failed miserably. His hands were covered with it. He looked up at the cops helplessly.
“Poor Parker!” one of the girls wailed.
It seemed to take a long time, but an ambulance finally sirened its way through traffic. It carried the pale demonstrator and two of the cops away and left everyone else milling about on the curb, except for one of the young women whom the police pushed to the sidewalk and arrested for trying to claw her way into the ambulance. The other cop dragged her around the corner.
Tubby and Dan ran the dozen blocks to Charity Hospital while the remnants of the demonstrators dispersed, presumably in search of sympathetic doctors and the free lawyer the street people used. When Tubby and Dan eventually found the Emergency Room, they were told to sit in the Pine-Sol-smelling waiting area with the gasping sick people and all the crying kids with broken arms. Finally they were called up to the desk by a white-bonneted nurse who informed them that their friend was dead.
“Did he have any family?” the nurse asked.
Tubby and Dan looked at each other sadly.
IV
Tubby most often avoided thinking about the human condition. He had not been too sure about his own for months. He now found himself in Naples soaking up the sunset, and he didn’t have a clue what he was doing here. Once upon a time his aim had been true. Turn that sundial back ten or fifteen years, and he had known exactly what he was doing.
In those days he was a quick-thinking New Orleans lawyer on the make, and he was succeeding at it. He had scored big in the Pan Am airplane disaster and opened his expansive and expensive office on the 43rd floor of the Place Palais Building in downtown New Orleans, with its custom millwork and a splendid conference table. He had a slick and aggressive partner in Reggie Turntide, who could bring in rich clients. And he was married to his redheaded college sweetheart, Mattie Berkenbaum. They had an excellent family, consisting of three happy little girls.
Then it all started to unpeel, one layer at a time. Inexplicably, Mattie announced that she was moving out to find more space for herself. Actually, it was Tubby who ended up moving. Mattie got the nice house on State Street and most of the time she got the kids. Then his partner Reggie disappeared. Dan Haywood reemerged briefly in his life but soon was senselessly, terribly, shot dead during the great Mardi Gras flood. Tubby distractedly ran his fingers through his blond hair for another minute and soaked up the sun.
After that, all the violence and corruption in New Orleans began to shove aside, in his mind, the city’s alluring beauty, color and pageantry. Tubby began to sense the existence of a criminal web, woven by a toxic spider, a truly evil presence, a crime czar. So obsessed with this evil force did Tubby become that he could almost smell it. The quest to find the Czar took him deeply into the city’s underworld and now, even with the brutal elimination of the high and mighty Sheriff Mulé, he couldn’t say for certain that the menace had been exterminated.
Then came Katrina, the big one, that turned the world as he knew it upside down. He still couldn’t fathom how it had happened, but the storm had changed everything. Along with the mountains of old refrigerators, water heaters, wet sheetrock and backyard junk hauled away by the government went the assuredness that the carefree city would always be the same: that there would always be a Schwegmanns; that the Nevilles would always play “Hey Pocky Way”; that Ninth Warders would always fill the nosebleed seats in the Dome; that sleepy sunny days would always sashay along, very sweetly, in four-four time.
And paradoxically, as a result of all that loss and destruction, Tubby found his love for the city returning.
So what the heck was he doing in Florida, the land of the Everglades and orange juice fudge? He was here with his rich girlfriend, of course, though she was a bit larcenous. He was on the rebound, or resurface. His last love, Hope, with whom he had survived Katrina, had succumbed to a long illness that had too quickly consumed her completely. In all candor, it was probably too early for him to be dating ladies, but Tubby had been down in the dumps and wanted cheering up. And he was not a monk.
Back in Louisiana, his daughters were all doing just fine in his opinion. Debbie, his oldest, still married, was the vice-president of a start-up investment company, and had a 12-year-old basketball player at Newman named Arnie, but called “Bat.” Christine, who had had a miserable time during Hurricane Katrina, was now a paleontologist at LSU and lived with a girlfriend. Collette, the youngest, had never strayed far from home. She was currently on her third fiancé, a rap performer who claimed to be from the Dry Tortugas. All in all, just fine. They possibly didn’t need him, hard as that was to believe. But he found that he was starting to miss them and the exuberance of the city.