Louisiana Lament

ceremonial form, “the Baroness de Pontalba.”
    She pointed out where she’d written her official name on the FBI card, in the space asking for aliases and AKAs. “I’d prefer to use ‘Talba’ on my license,” she said.
    “You can’t do that. Ya name’s Urethra.” It took all Talba’s strength not to wince.
    Damn! Something was severely off here. The license was issued by a state board—what right did a city functionary have even to express an opinion on the subject?
    But the fat lady wasn’t the sort you argued with. Talba said, “The board might agree, I don’t know. Can’t know till I apply.”
    The woman wasn’t listening. She’d begun doing something online, holding Talba’s license and FBI cards as she clicked her way through what was evidently a Yellow Pages site. “There’s no Eddie Valentino in here.”
    The card had asked for her employer’s name and address. “I work for E.V. Anthony Investigations. Eddie’s the ‘E.V.’ part.”.
    “I’m gon’ call the state board.” The woman got up and waddled to a glass cubicle in the back of the room. Talba heard her dial and say, “This is Sergeant Rouselle.”
    This woman was a cop? That was a shocker. She wasn’t in uniform and she wore no badge. Besides that, she seemed not to have either the personality or the build for it.
Minor bureaucrat
was the way Talba’d pegged her. The sort who got off on ruining people’s days.
    Cop or no, she suddenly realized, she was about to become snarled in a bureaucratic snafu that was going to make her miss her one o’clock.
    She walked back to the cubicle and held out her hand. “Sgt. Rouselle, I think I’ll go over to Jefferson Parish, after all. May I have my license, please?”
    The sergeant turned on her, shouting, bulging eyes blazing behind dirty lenses. “You’re going to jail if you snatch this out my hand!”
    Talba backed away, “I wasn’t going to—”
    The other officer got off the phone quick and strode over to the cubicle, patting air as if to calm a child. “Now, ma’am, just calm down. Just take it easy now.”
    “But I didn’t… look, all I want to do is go. I’m on my lunch hour.”
    “I get the feeling you’re worried you’re going to get your boss in trouble. This is nothing to do with you and nothing to do with him.”
    What language was he speaking?
    Who cared?
    “Look, Officer, I’m on a schedule.”
    “Just take it easy and nobody’s going to get in any trouble.” It suddenly got through to Talba exactly what the situation was: He was telling her the sergeant really could throw her in jail if she wanted to. All she’d have to do was
say
Talba assaulted her to get her license; or had pot breath; or anything she wanted to. In a word, she was trapped.
    She sat and steamed. After about twenty minutes, Officer Rouselle waddled on out. “All right. You want to get fingerprinted?”
    Talba looked at her watch, considering. There was still time to make her one o’clock—barely—if the show could just get on the road. “Can we do it now?”
    “
Now?"
the sergeant shouted. “Can we do it now? You don’t respect my title or my position, do you? I need a little more respect out of you, missy. Hear me: you must use the same name on these cards as is on your driver’s license…”
    Talba was desperate to scream at the woman:
It's not up to you, Fat Stuff! It’s up to the state board.
But that was definitely going to get her arrested.
    It developed the sergeant could read her mind. She just stared, heaving a huge sigh. And then, still clutching Talba’s license, she picked up the phone.
    “Captain Regilio, please. Well, then, the lieutenant.” Talba’s heart thumped in a way it hadn’t since she’d gotten in a shootout the previous spring.
It’s the adrenaline,
she realized.
Damn! This petty bureaucrat has me scared to death.
    That pissed her off almost more than the rest of it.
    Then there was the problem of how the hell she was going to explain to Eddie (or her mother or even her boyfriend) that she was innocent—whatever the charge. The fact was, she did have a mouth on her. The irony was, for once she was keeping it shut. Eventually, two uniformed male officers and one white woman in shorts arrived to receive another ten minutes of Sgt. Rouselle’s rants. “I called y’all in because this woman’s trying to provoke me.”
    Suck it up,
Talba told herself.
Keep your mouth shut or you’re going to jail.
    Her teeth hurt from gritting