“I’ve never had reason to ask them,” Petal said.
I said, “Picture me with the bar of soap later, washing out my mouth.”
“Things are just different,” she said, “when you have a child.”
[27]
Those days, my job was very pleasant, a pleasant kind of going around, snapping pictures of various landscapes, wandering through buildings, and over parks, observatories, school grounds, scouting the neighborhoods, learning all the dope, sitting in on things. The agency shouldn’t have paid me. I could have done all that for free. They should have asked how my day went. Perhaps, very carefully recorded my answer. Then they should have said, “Super. Great. Thanks a big bunch. Stop by again tomorrow and we can have another chat.”
[28]
The Way You Look Tonight
Thigh Holsters are good when you want to Open Carry. A holster on the thigh puts your gun under your hand. Most have pop buckles for instant access.
In Louisiana, you do not need a permit to Open Carry.
In Louisiana, you may Open Carry at any time in your vehicle.
You must be 21 to purchase a gun in Louisiana. However, a gun that was a gift is legal.
In Louisiana, the minimum age for Open Carrying is 17.
CHAPTER 2
[29]
TO LUCIEN, I SAY: “You’re always asking me these difficult questions. They’re difficult and they are several. And while I’m standing here, let me ask you. Are there more things you haven’t divulged to me? Like that you’ve had the wrong name.”
“Ah, don’t believe so. No,” he says.
“Well, I knew that you’d say that. But concentrate now. What else haven’t you told me?”
“I’m trying to think,” he says.
“And?”
He says, “I do keep the dogs. Seven dogs. If that doesn’t have to be a secret.”
“They’re your dogs?”
“Yes’m, they’re mine.”
“Live dogs that live with you. Seven in number.”
He says, “There are seven. Unless my grandma narrowed it down to six.”
“Who’s your grandma? I mean, where are your folks?”
“Uh, deceased,” says Lucien. “But it’s not ’cause she’s my grandma that I live with her.”
“Right, whatever that means,” I say.
He says, “My clothes. That’s something you don’t know about. I spend all my money on clothes.”
I’m smiling, and instantly not smiling, regretting the two seconds I was. I thought Lucien’s wardrobe involved clothes he just had.
I thought maybe he’d spent the night at a friend’s, borrowed pants and shirts, wore them thereafter. Or that he’d gone on a road trip, stopped by a trucker’s place, grabbed the last items on the rack. I thought perhaps he took control of a neighbor’s clothes after the neighbor evacuated. Or that he might have inherited clothing from a cousin who lost a lot of weight.
[30]
“I don’t like how paranoid you’re getting,” I say to my husband.
“Well, in order to think that, you’d have to be scrutinizing my every move.”
“This here is what I mean,” I say.
[31]
Crawling on all fours over there by the coffee table is Saunders, the Sack twin of my husband, Save. Saunders is perhaps merely looking for a contact lens. I’m certainly not going to ask him. He’d engage me in an answer. Besides which, he probably doesn’t know.
[32]
’Round Midnight
Over 70 percent of New Orleans musicians remain displaced.
Many of them are living in their cars.
Friends who gutted the flooded homes of fellow musicians reported a terrible loss of instruments, including hundreds of ruined grand pianos.
[33]
I’m not going to be able to manage with these people and the things they do.
Collie, for example, my niece, was this morning a little girl, wearing a smock and her carrot hair in two long braids, come to visit her grandmother. Then the grandmother whisked her off and took her someplace where clothes are turned pink and braids chopped and heads shorn and left looking like sprouting pineapples.
I could smack that grandmother unconscious and roll her out into the yard. She could stay out there a good while, pondering the harm she’s done.
Petal has arrived to pick up the kid.
She stares straight ahead after experiencing a view of the haircut.
I say, “Let us sit down here and smoke bags of dope at the dining table.”
The room twinkles around us with snowy linen and crystal-dripping chandeliers.
“One thing you could do is kill your husband,” I say. “He deserves it for being her son.”
“I was already going to, for other reasons,” Petal says.
“Adam?” she asks, halfway changing the subject.
“Exists,” I say with a nod.
“So, where are they?” she asks. “They should be down here, shouldn’t they?”
I shake my head. “I can’t speak for all wives about all husbands. Only for me, about mine. He is far too fucked to participate in this situation.”
The dope is burning a hole in my pocket. I keep offering it but nobody takes me up.
The room, the chandelier light, the sad face on Petal, the sounds of the night coming on, the smells from the gardens around this palace, my longing, her longing.
[34]
The mother appears with a handsome silver teapot and pours from it without speaking to us at all. Her mouth is fresh with crimson lipstick. Her hair’s tucked behind a calfskin band. Her eyes shift left and right below her lowered lashes.
She introduces a platter with ice chunks, lettuce leaves, a thousand Gulf shrimp.
I close my eyes and rest my head on the back of my chair. She’s here now and there’s no more use in thinking. She’s brought enough tension and misery to last the three of us for hours.
[35]
“Good Night Nurse in the fourth,” Saunders says. “Lady’s Man in the fifth. Definitely. In the sixth, Wild Lightning. Then, some of these others, I still haven’t decided. Cosmo! Any fucking race he runs.”
“What about Soldier Boy?” Petal asks. “I thought you were so impressed with him.”
“Nah.” Saunders shakes his head. “Not anymore. I went down there and took a look at him last time. ’Cause, you know, I had won big money.”
“We both went,” Adam says, angling his chair so he can face Saunders. “To see Soldier Boy. You don’t remember?”
“Yeah, O.K., it was both of us.” Saunders nods. To Petal and me he says, “Utterly psychotic.”
“I mean the horse,” he adds, because