Crescent City Connection

like a pretty good opponent.
    I’ll choose fairly
, Daniel thought.
I’ll
just try to be fair.
    He said, “I choose Pete.” The slightly bigger one.
    “You choose Pete,” his father said. “Is Pete your choice, son?”
    Daniel began to think he’d made a mistake. But what was the alternative?
    He said, “Pete is my choice,” unconsciously entering into his father’s ritualistic cadences.
    “Pete is your choice. Is that a fair choice, Daniel?”
    “I think so.”
    “What do you think, people?”
    Daniel winced before he heard the chorus of “No’s,” knowing already that no other response was possible.
    “They don’t think it’s fair, Daniel. Pete’s a good ten years older than you. You could probably lick him with one hand tied behind your back. So I tell you what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna tie one hand behind your back.”
    The Jurors shouted, “Amen.”
    Daniel thought grimly: They seem to have done this before.
    “I warned you to choose wisely,” said his father. “What do you think would have happened if you’d picked Dashan?”
    Too late, Daniel saw it coming. “We’d have had to tie a hand behind
his
back.”
    Daniel was right-handed, so they tied that one back.
    Just when the fight was about to begin, Daniel’s father stopped it. “Pete, you’ve had the flu, haven’t you?”
    “Yes, Daddy.”
    “You feeling okay?”
    “Little under the weather. That’s all.”
    “We’d better give Daniel another handicap. Wouldn’t want y’all to think I play favorites.”
    They blindfolded him.
    When it was over, his father said. “How you feel, boy? Did we knock some sense into you?”
    In fact, he didn’t feel anything except sore.
    And this morning he felt almost more depressed than sore. But when he got up, the balance quickly shifted; sharp, shooting pains made the walk to the bathroom a Himalayan trek. When he finally made it, he pissed enough blood for a transfusion.
    He didn’t flush the toilet, left it instead for someone to find.
    He was awakened by a scream. After that, he was vaguely aware of rustlings around him; comings and goings, and someone praying. His father, maybe.
    * * *
    “God won’t take your baby, Dorise. He couldn’t do that, ’cause He already took your husband, and He a merciful God.”
    So far,
Dorise thought,
I haven’t noticed
.
    But her mother was doing the best she could to keep her spirits up, and she bit her tongue.
One thing I got
, she thought,
I got a good mama.
    Her mother had moved away when she got married for the second time, but she had always missed New Orleans. She had moved back when her husband died three months ago, and Dorise had seen the way her faith had gotten her through. It was her mother who’d gotten her to go back to church.
    “Mama, I got something to tell you. I promised Jesus I wasn’t gon’ look at any man again, and I did, and now look what’s happened!”
    “Jesus wouldn’t want you to do that, honey. It’s not your fault what happened to Shavonne.”
    When her mother said it, she could almost believe it. But she didn’t really believe the other thing—that God wouldn’t take her daughter. He would if he felt like it, and then the preacher would just say it was God’s will, and she’d still be supposed to swallow that “merciful” bullshit. She knew families that had lost three or four members in shootings. She couldn’t even answer her mother. All she could do was cry, and wait for the phone to ring.
    She couldn’t understand why these FBI guys thought the kidnapper would call her. She couldn’t offer any ransom—she didn’t have anything to give. It seemed much more likely he was a pedophile who’d torture and kill her daughter—except that she didn’t put it quite that way to herself. It was just a vague crimson cloud in her head.
    It was around two in the morning when her mother finally got her to pray. She couldn’t honestly say it was comforting, but, since she was on her knees, she did find it made her want to sleep. And once she went to bed, she didn’t want to get up.
    Her mother tried to rouse her at eight, then again at nine, and at ten, finally brought her some orange juice and made her sit up. “Honey, you can’t stay in bed the rest of your life. You got God’s work to do.”
    Dorise wasn’t honestly sure she even believed in God anymore, but she wasn’t going to say that to her sweet mama. She was a grown woman, but she put her head on her mother’s bosom and her arm