New Orleans Noir

a little mischievous boy, then pulled her close and kissed her. It was like a third-grade kiss behind the magnolia tree in the school yard.
    “Don’t be silly, Jimmie Lee. You’re too good for me.”
    She looked into his handsome brown eyes under the luminescent, almost full moon. He wiggled his eyebrows in his comical, precocious way. They both started laughing. The more they laughed the funnier and funnier it seemed. They laughed harder and harder there on the street at the corner of Dauphine and France in the Bywater, where before the storm, teenagers from the projects used to die with regularity from gangland drive-bys—neighbors would wake up and find a dead body on their lawn. Yet they laughed. A few blocks away across the Industrial Canal was the Lower Ninth, where the frail had floated in their attics, unable to breech their roofs during the storm. Laughed and laughed. They hugged long and hard.
    “Let’s go to a hotel and use their pool,” he said.
    “You got one in mind, Jimmie Lee? It’s 3:00 in the morning.”
    “We could go swimming in the river.”
    “Are you out of your mind?” The undertow was notoriously fierce. The Mississippi was like a snake that swallowed its prey whole.
    He pulled out a joint. “Well, how about we smoke this in my car?”
    I walk along the street of sorrow
    The boulevard of broken dreams
    Where gigolo and gigolette
    Can take a kiss without regret
    So they forget their broken dreams*
    She could hear the phone all the way up the stairs. She was coming home from waiting tables at Elizabeth’s Diner near the levee. The voice on the phone wouldn’t stop crying. A tugboat captain, the voice sobbed, reported a body caught on a floating tree near Poland Avenue Wharf in the late morning.
    Her instinct was to get drunk. She listened to her instinct. She parked her bike at the corner of Lesseps and Burgundy and entered BJ’s, an old neighborhood dive bar, and proceeded to wallow. It was a skill she was good at. Several of the colorful older regulars had disappeared since the storm, but there was always another drunk to spring up and take the vacant barstool. She sat at a table away from the new faces.
    A great many drinks later, the welcome feeling of indifference washed over her. Indifference over losing electricity every other day. Indifference over having to ride the bus for miles to find a decent grocery store. Indifference over nobody knowing what they were doing or how they were going to do it. She reckoned New Orleans as the best loverboy in the neighborhood who all the husbands cornered and mutilated while the wives wailed.
    “Why are you crying?” He was dripping wet, his sparkly brown eyes mischievous. She jumped up and held him. Hard. He smelled of Old Man River.
    “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do. Everybody thinks you’ve drowned.”
    The strains of a brass band reached a crescendo. The bar door opened and a second-line entered loudly, marching drums, trumpets, tuba, trombones, good-time people swaying with the good-time music, customers smiling, waving their drinks as they danced.
    “See what you’re missing?” she yelled to him over the cacophony.

    She looked long and hard in the bathroom mirror and didn’t like what she saw. I wonder if I’ll die tonight , she thought, and sat on the toilet. Now that’s a sign you’re wasted , she mused, when you actually sit on the toilet at the Abbey .
    Back in the bar, the jukebox was screaming a Tom Waits song about the end of the world. She spied Wyatt nursing a cocktail in the corner and sauntered over.
    “That really sucks about Jimmie Lee,” he said after hugging her.
    “Don’t tell anybody,” she whispered in his ear, “but he’s in hiding.”
    Wyatt looked at her, incredulous.
    “He’s too embarrassed.”
    “You mean it’s a hoax?”
    “Just like Tom-fucking-Sawyer.”
    Wyatt grinned ear to ear. “I’m going to kill him!”
    They laughed and drank with renewed vigor. They drank all night long and made out at the bar. She’d already slept with Wyatt. He had been number forty-six or so.
    By the time they decided to part company the next morning, it was already humid and scorching. The thought of her air conditioner still on the blink prompted her to order an ice-cold cocktail in a to-go cup. She remembered the pill someone had given her the night before and popped it in her mouth. As she walked down the street, she heard the low purr of a muscle car. It stopped next to