New Orleans Noir

camouflage but sat like a girl, on her butt with her knees pulled up to her chin. Jack met her when she’d delivered the ice.
    He turned away when she exhaled.
    “You want one?”
    “I don’t smoke.’’
    She nodded. “So they dropped us off on the high ground,’’ she said. “When was that, a few weeks ago?”
    “Last week.”
    “Last week,’’ she repeated, thinking. “And they dropped us off, like I said. On the high ground. Well, we didn’t have orders or anything. We just sat there.’’
    “All night.’’
    “All night,’’ she said. “We could hear gunshots and people yelling. Families passing us on boats and little pool floats … So anyway, I finally fall asleep and I hear something at the edge of sleep. You know how that can go? Kind of a dream but you’re awake. And it’s a trudging sound through the water and this heavy breathing. I couldn’t see anything. It was so dark I wasn’t sure if it was just in my head.’’
    “What was it?”
    “You’ll laugh at what I thought it was.’’
    “What did you think it was?”
    “Demons.’’
    “What was it?”
    “Horses.’’
    “You religious?’’ Jack asked.
    The pretty Indiana girl stubbed out her cigarette on one of the statue’s base stones and tucked back on her uniform hat. “Not at all.’’
    At midnight there was a riot. A man who’d shot at the police from the top of the hot sauce factory in Mid-City had decided to lock himself in the portable toilet.
    A few minutes before, he’d stuck his penis through one of the holes and told a female guard to “suck it’’ as he masturbated with his eyes rolling up in his head. Instead, she’d whacked it hard with a billy club and then two of the other inmates in an adjoining cell had started climbing the chain link and screaming at the guards.
    The guards were able to mace the two on the walls but the man who’d started it all had run and shut himself in the toilet.
    Jack said: “Give me the hose.’’
    Guards pulled the hose from the edge of the train platform and ran the nozzle to Jack.
    “Turn it up.’’ And he unlocked the gate and walked inside and thumbed open the toilet’s door.
    The flush of water blew the man against the back wall of the toilet and washed him outside in a long brown stream until he rolled and crawled to the far corner of the cell.
    “Goddamn!’’ the man yelled, curling into a ball. Both hands on his privates, his brown pants at his knees.
    “Turn it down,’’ Jack said.
    You wrote a report, fingerprinted them, and then tagged them. Pink for federal cases, green for misdemeanors, and red, yellow, and blue for different kinds of felonies. They were locked up, given something to eat, and then shipped on buses by gun bulls out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola the next morning.
    “Move ’em in, herd ’em out,’’ Jack always said.
    A few days before, a two-time loser had driven a stolen car to the drop-off zone at the old Amtrak station, walked up to the front desk, and asked the warden for a one-way train ticket.
    The warden, ten years on the job running Angola, asked for his driver’s license and registration, and it wasn’t but a second later that he nodded to Jack and another guard. “Yes sir. Yes sir. One-way ticket to Angola coming up.’’
    They took him to the platform and locked him in with a French Quarter street musician who’d been caught stuffing his pockets with cold medicine and NoDoz at what was left of the Walgreens on Canal.
    The next day, transport carriers and Humvees passed by the Convention Center carrying soldiers with farm-boy grins and buzz cuts. They waved and smiled in a slow, steady parade, most of them carrying cameras and camcorders aimed at all the wreckage.
    Jack watched another Humvee roll by the La Louisiane Ballroom—two skinny, goofy kids giving a thumbs-up—where the Guard held two prisoners. The officers came from Arkansas and rolled their own cigarettes and wore sunglasses like Jack.
    “Y’all got to clean this up?” Jack asked.
    “Good God Almighty, I hope to hell not.’’
    Jack eyed the mess and walked under the shaded outdoor roof. There were: folding chairs and MRE packs, spoiling milk and open Heineken bottles, inflatable mattresses, CDs, overnight cases, water jugs and suitcases, rotting food and bottles of urine and piles upon piles of garbage, a faded World War II veteran’s hat, baby blankets and some kid’s New York Giants helmet, jumper cables, unopened