The Axeman's Jazz

if Linda Lee had been there, no one had seen her.
    Oh, well, it was a good place to start—kind of got the blood up. Cosimo’s was a thought, the Absinthe Bar, the Napoleon House; probably not a hotel bar, and no place with a cover. Would she have walked all the way to Snug Harbor and Café Brasil? Probably not. Even keeping it fairly local and fairly selective, eliminating the hotel bars and obvious tourist traps, it was going on two o’clock and she’d chewed off her lipstick by the time she hit the Abbey. Shit! Claude was working. With utter amazement, she realized she hadn’t thought of him in months.
    “Skip! Whereyat, babe?” He leaned over for a kiss.
    “Beat. Can I have a Coke?” He got her one.
    “Haven’t seen you around, dawlin’.” Not a word of reproof. And why should there be? He probably hadn’t thought of her in months either. He was six-five, and had a gorgeous mustache and the cutest butt in the parish. Who knew how many women he had, not counting his wife.
    “Fell in love.”
    “Nice guy?”
    She nodded. “It’s more than I can say for you.”
    He laughed loudly, showing teeth like piano keys. There were times when she simply hadn’t been able to resist him. “You got my number, honey.”
    She showed him the snapshot. “Do you know this girl?”
    “Uh-uh. I don’t think so. Something happen to her?”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “I don’t know. A lot of weirdos out there.”
    “Any in here?”
    He rolled his eyes. “Don’t get me started.”
    “Sure you don’t know her?”
    He stared at the picture again. “Not really—she’s not that different-looking. You know?”
    She knew. The whole idea was crazy. She didn’t even know what night to ask about. “Listen, I gotta go.”
    “Take care of yourself.” She could have sworn she saw affection in his eyes. All those months they’d been sometime lovers and it had never occurred to her they were friends. She guessed they were.

THREE
    SONNY GERARD ORDERED a second gin and tonic, strolled out to the patio, and came back in, sitting once again at the bar. He rubbed the knot between his shoulders with his left hand, wondering when the gin was going to start working. It was a great muscle relaxant, but that wasn’t the whole point—he also wanted to obliterate his feelings, to be in a place where no one knew him and he knew no one, where he could play Clint Black on the jukebox and lean on the machine if he wanted to, letting the bass pulsate through his fingertips, turning him into somebody else. Somebody simple, somebody with a dozer hat and love of country-western music, somebody with a girlfriend named Rae Lynn and nothing to do but drive a truck or work on an assembly line.
    He could pretend here. Here nobody knew about all the stuff he was supposed to be; it was like a secret window he could open and get a breath of air. He did it about once a month—told everybody he knew he had an emergency with someone else, like a teenage girl who says she’s sleeping over at a girlfriend’s when she’s somewhere she shouldn’t be.
    It was a one-time Quarter tourist bar turned neighborhood hangout—now so ordinary nobody Sonny knew was ever going to wander in for any reason, even slumming. He never spoke to anyone when he came here, just had a few drinks and listened to the kind of music he was supposed to hate and didn’t think about a goddamn thing most of the time.
    Tonight he was thinking all too hard—about what it would have been like to be born in Lafayette or Natchitoches or even Slidell, into a blue-collar family without a care in the world except making some kind of crummy salary, just enough to get along, and maybe going to church on Sunday to make up for drinking too much and cheating on his wife.
    What could it have been like to have a childhood in which he didn’t have to make all A’s, then didn’t have to keep up a 3.8 average, get into the best fraternity, get into med school, get the prettiest girl, all that stuff you had to do if you were Sonny Gerard? He wondered if other people who were born not to be ordinary thought about it at all. About what a burden it was. What a pain in the ass.
    He thought about it all the time. Did the triumphs outweigh the effort of it? Yes. They did. That was why he kept it up—that and the fact that he truly wanted to do what was right. It would have been nice if he’d never known about it—his life as Sonny Gerard. If he’d been born Joe Blow and the