Evening
When I’m with Fran, I think of her mother. I don’t need that. I sit alone in the kitchen while Fran sleeps and punch my temples until my head feels like it will explode and thoughts of Mrs. Lee shatter into bits. I think of Gene and what he would say.
The last time I saw him, he was standing in front of a Church’s Chicken near Gillham Plaza and 31st Street. It was hot and the wind blew trash and some napkins were pinned against Gene’s knobby white knees. We said hello and he offered me a ride but I told him I had my car. I’m getting some coffee, I said.
When I went back outside, he was still there. I looked at him and he gave me a knowing wink like we were both in on something no one else would understand. I don’t know what that might have been. But I’m thinking now he might have done some awful things in Korea besides killing gooks and letting their bodies freeze, and I think he saw in me the ability to do some awful things too, and then Fran’s mother died and he was proved right. I’m just saying. I don’t know. Gene didn’t say and I never saw him again.
Next day
Okay, Mike, I’m outta here, Tim says. After one more.
I’ll do one more too, Mike, Lyle says.
What you say?
Fuck you, Bill.
Lyle and Tim stand and walk outside to smoke. Melissa follows them tapping a number into her iPhone. Heidi looks at me and smiles. She asks Mike for a cigarette. Watch my purse, she says. Then she goes outside too. Mike puts two bottles of beer on the bar for Tim and Lyle. I wave him off when he looks at me. I feel all hemmed in. The beer congests me. It’s difficult to breathe.
I’ll pay up, Mike, I say.
Evening
In bed Fran rolls over with her back to me, her head on my right arm. I grit my teeth. Her touch sends shock waves through me and I get all jittery. I edge away from her. She says she has called her mother a few times but no one answers. It’s not like her, she says. Her mother doesn’t have an answering machine so Fran is going to go by the house in the morning.
That settles it. I’m out of here. When Fran leaves for work I’ll be right behind her but headed in another direction. It will still be dark. I’ll take 39th to Broadway and hang a right by the Walgreens and drive into downtown. A few blocks east, I’ll see the glow from the Power & Light District keeping the sky open like an illumination mortar, and I’ll cross the Broadway Bridge and get on I-29 north until I reach I-90 and then it’s a direct shot west to Montana and wherever.
I feel my arm falling asleep beneath the weight of Fran’s head. I curl it to get some circulation and realize I could choke her no problem. I drop my arm and slide it out from beneath her head and punch my temples with both fists until the pain overwhelms my thoughts.
I kick off my blankets; get my legs out from under the sheets. I long for a breeze. I imagine Fran’s mother at the bottom of Troost Lake. I think of Tim’s puppies and then I think of Kandahar and of other things I’ve seen. My head throbs. I shut my eyes against the room closing in on me, get up, and go sit in the kitchen. I find my knife, hands shaking. I start tossing it but can’t establish a rhythm.
I drop the knife, think of Gene and of dead Koreans calling to him. I imagine he is sitting in his car miles away parked beneath a streetlight unable to sleep. Moths bounce against the windows. Flies strike the windshield. Beetles scuttle across the hood. I tell him that when I was a boy, my friends and I would drop grasshoppers into empty trash barrels and then we’d scream into the barrels and listen to our voices ping-pong against the sides like shrapnel, crumbling antennae, wings, legs. We’d pluck the grasshoppers out barely alive and bury them. I see them now, their jaws working furiously, filling with dirt. Hear the crunch-scrape of seeking mouths sucking air.
LOOT
by Julie Smith
(Originally published in New Orleans Noir)
Mathilde’s in North Carolina with her husband when she hears about the hurricane—the one that’s finally going to fulfill the prophecy about filling the bowl New Orleans is built in. Uh-huh, sure. She’s been there a thousand times. She all but yawns.
Aren’t they all? goes through her mind.
“A storm like no one’s ever seen,” the weather guy says, “a storm that will leave the city devastated… a storm that…”
Blah blah and blah.
But finally, after ten more minutes of media hysteria, she catches on that this time it might be for real. Her first thought is for her home in the Garden District, the one that’s been in Tony’s family for three generations. Yet she knows there’s nothing she can do about that—if the storm takes it, so be it.
Her second thought is for her maid, Cherice Wardell, and Cherice’s husband, Charles.
Mathilde and Cherice have been together for twenty-two years. They’re like an old married couple. They’ve spent more time with each other than they have with their husbands. They’ve taken care of each other when one of them was ill. They’ve cooked for each other (though Cherice has cooked a good deal more for Mathilde). They’ve shopped together, they’ve argued, they’ve shared more secrets than either of them would be comfortable with if they thought about it. They simply chat, the way women do, and things come out, some things that probably shouldn’t. Cherice knows intimate facts about Mathilde’s sex life, for instance, things she likes to do with Tony, that Mathilde would never tell her white friends.
So Mathilde knows the Wardells plenty well enough to know they aren’t about to obey the evacuation order. They never leave when a storm’s on the way. They have two big dogs and nowhere to take them. Except for their two children, one of whom is in school in Alabama, and the other in California, the rest of their family lives in New Orleans. So there are no nearby relatives to shelter them. They either can’t afford hotels or think they can’t (though twice in the past Mathilde has offered to pay for their lodging if they’d only go). Only twice because only twice have Mathilde and Tony heeded the warnings themselves. In past years, before everyone worried so much about the disappearing wetlands and the weakened infrastructure, it was a point of honor for people in New Orleans to ride out hurricanes.
But Mathilde is well aware that this is not the case with the Wardells. This is no challenge to them. They simply don’t see the point of leaving. They prefer to play what Mathilde thinks of as Louisiana roulette. Having played it a few times herself, she knows all about it. The Wardells think the traffic will be terrible, that they’ll be in the car for seventeen, eighteen hours and still not find a hotel because everything from here to kingdom come’s going to be taken, even if they could afford it.
“That storm’s not gon’ come,” Cherice always says. “You know it never does. Why I’m gon’ pack up these dogs and Charles and go God knows where? You know Mississippi gives me a headache. And I ain’t even gon’ mention Texas.”
To which Mathilde replied gravely one time, “This is your life you’re gambling with, Cherice.”