Big Easy Bonanza

still no judge in sight.
    “I got her to throw out the no title, no brake tag, and no insurance,” Tubby told him, “but you’ll have to pay a hundred and twenty-five dollars plus costs for no license tag.” Adrian’s friends were impressed.
    “That’s good,” Adrian said. “I brought two hundred dollars with me just in case.”
    “What you do is pay your lawyer first. Give me the two hundred dollars.”
    “What do I pay the fine with?”
    “They’ll give you time. Go to the back and work it out with the lady. Pay me the two hundred dollars. And get some real insurance. The city attorney back there likes you. She caught your show and loved it, but there’s a price for fame. You can’t let down all the people who are getting behind you. Monster Mudbug is the kind of guy who has insurance.”
    “I see that, Mr. Tubby. I can’t be getting into legal hassles all the time. I gotta think about my fans. There’s a lot of young people who look up to me.”
    “Right, Adrian. You gotta be an example to them.”
    “Sure. Thanks for everything, Mr. Tubby.” They said goodbye and parted ways.
    How did I ever get into this line of work? Tubby asked himself as he pushed open the glass doors to the world outside. He gave a couple of bucks to the young lad who was watching his car and got a barely perceptible nod in return. He wasn’t sure, but it looked to Tubby as though his wheel covers had been shined.

FOUR
    Monique was a small-town girl. She had come to what to her was the big city of New Orleans from Evergreen, Alabama, home of a million slash pine trees and a Holiday Inn. She was running away from home at age twenty-three.
    The immediate goal was to get away from Ned, her ex-husband, who liked to punch her about once a week while they were married and periodically came around for similar recreation after they got divorced. She got started on her escape after he almost ran her off the Interstate one night with his four-by-four pickup truck, pushing her onto the shoulder, saved only by an exit ramp which appeared just in time. She swerved up it and took refuge under the dusty vapor lamps of an all-night convenience store, leaving Ned to clip the signpost and navigate his drunken way north. Then she shook and shook, waiting for her mother to get her landlord to come and escort her home. She stared at the pretty faces beckoning from the shiny magazine covers on the rack by the phone and decided that her only hope for a real life lay in flight.
    As soon as she was convoyed back to her trailer she dragged out her most precious belongings and threw them into her dented, still-not-paid-for Rabbit. She dropped the keys to her mobile home in the manager’s mailbox, drove out to Interstate 65 and turned south, for no reason but that Ned lived five miles to the north in Owassa and she was taking no chances on running into him again that night. A long two hours later, when only eighteen-wheelers and other lonely pilgrims were on the highway, a slender corridor through dark miles of uninhabited and forbidding pine forests, she stopped for gas and cigarettes in Mobile. Mixed in with the truck fumes she could smell the salt in the air. The road east went to Pensacola, where she and Ned had once taken a beach trip during their brief courtship. The sign to the west said New Orleans. She had never been there. It sounded a lot better than anyplace she had ever gone with Ned. If she didn’t find something there, like safety, a place to work, or romance, then she could just keep going to Texas, or maybe even California.
    “How many hours is it to New Orleans?” she asked the sleepy-looking man behind the counter.
    “About three, if you don’t stop,” he said. “Are you planning on going all the way through tonight?”
    “Yep.” She made up her mind.
    “You reckon that car of yours will make it that far?” he asked.
    “It had better,” she said, pocketing her change.
    “I’m just pointing out, ladies have to be careful at night. There ain’t much out there but dark for the next hundred and forty miles.”
    “Thanks, I’m not worried,” she said. And the surprising thing was she really wasn’t worried. “Couldn’t I walk a hundred and forty miles?” she asked herself as she settled back behind the wheel.
    Coming over a high-rise bridge into the city at daybreak took her breath away. The tall buildings, rising up in the new sun, the graceful outline of the suspension bridges over the Mississippi River,