New Orleans Noir

All our uncles and aunts and cousins kept their doors shut to Frank—and, by extension, to me too. This was due to Frank’s light fingers. As Aunt-tee Viola said for the whole bunch of our relations, “That boy Frank, he’d steal anything but a red-hot stove.”
    But he was more than a thief, of course. Just as surely as crooks in high places got where they are because of doing some good things for people now and then. A man’s life is not so petty it can be measured up at the end as all good or all bad. Frank was plus and minus like anybody else, except for cheap schooling and black skin, which of course magnifies all minuses.
    When I recollect his plus side, I would describe Frank as a philosopher. The things he said!
    Such as things he’d whisper in the dark of night when we were boys in a shared room, me in one twin bed drifting off to sleep, Frank in his—only I can’t recall ever seeing him sleep. Frank would be sitting up, sounding out important thoughts before scratching them into a Big Chief by the light of a radio dial.
    One night it was, “It’s a damn lie they say down to Asia Baptist Church about God create us all equal. But anyhow, every life is a big deal.”
    Another night, “Since I am only a poor man walking around to save on funeral expenses, maybe I ought to find a way of doing somebody a good deed when I leave. That sound like suicide. Well, suicide is just a trick played on a calendar.”
    And another night, “I am too sad to be dangerous. I am sad as a dead bird in a birdbath.”
    The night I especially remember from back in those years came the summer when Frank turned sixteen—on his birthday, actually. Mama said he was a man now according to the law, and that a man didn’t need his mama’s birthday fuss anymore. Just about everything was a fuss for Mama by then. She had the sugar, and it was taking her down fast and furious, even faster than diabetes killed Daddy six years before.
    So Frank and I went out and had a birthday party, thanks to thirty-one dollars I’d squirreled away for the big occasion. Frank knew how to spend it, due to his knowledge of where a couple of teenage boys could purchase whiskey and the attentions of certain ladies who frequented the alley behind the Star Lounge on Senate Street.
    I remember Frank grabbing hard on my arm when a police siren sounded faintly in the distance. The party was over for some reason; I didn’t bother to ask why, as my brother was long in the habit of cringing and fleeing whenever a siren went off. I remember a party lady’s voice calling out behind us—“Where y’all going, baby?”—as we sprinted together up the alley and around over to Harrison Avenue toward home.
    It was the hottest night I have ever known, running aside. So hot the chameleons that usually skittered across the screens outside our bedroom windows were hanging loose by their sticky little toes, and I swear they panted like hounds under a porch. I don’t believe I slept any more that night than Frank did.
    In one of the tiny hours, Frank whispered something that froze the sweat on my neck. He cursed the city is what he did.
    The page where he wrote down that curse must have floated off with Katrina someplace, along with all the rest of Frank’s life collection of Big Chiefs. But I don’t need that long-lost page to remind me of what he said.
    “New Orleans be a jazzy town,” he said, “full of dead markers, a funeral urn of polished-up brass on top a flowery grave, and underneath the box going rotten.”
    So there I was in our old room in the old house—what was left of it—with all that money slipping and sliding through my shaking hands. I stepped over to a smashed-out window and took a sneaky look through a slit in the plywood cover to make sure no wrong numbers were out there in the street or the yard picking through trash or casing storm-bashed houses or otherwise prowling around.
    Up and down DeSaix Boulevard and pretty much all over Gentilly, variously wrecked homes were still waiting on overpriced contractors to show up, a whole year after that bitch Katrina. Gangs of discriminating thieves and expert metal-strippers seemed to know exactly which houses were worth their while. My suspicions were the same as the neighbors’ suspicions, what was left of the neighbors: Maybe the wrong numbers knew where to go because when they weren’t contracting, they were thieving.
    Nobody was prowling around outside.
    I stepped back to where I was