The Hanged Man's Song

the head, man,” he said. Then, “Guns are bad.” I left not knowing whether he meant that guns are evil or that guns are desirable—getting old, I guess.
    >>> WE DECIDED to set up a base—a bolt-hole if we needed one—at the Baton Noir Motel in Metairie, a nice place with a good dining room and a friendly attitude toward multiracial convocations. I’d spent a month there before buying my New Orleans condo, and a couple of weeks while I sold the place.
    After checking in, I went to a map program in my laptop and we pulled up the kid’s address and a map. As I was doing that, LuEllen clicked on the TV and a few minutes later, while I was writing down directions to the girl’s house, she said, “Hey! Hey! Look at this! Look at this!”
    She was watching the same story I’d seen in the convenience store. The anchorwoman was saying, “. . . denies that any such execution took place and that the photo may be a composite. The person called Bobby says that the officer in the photograph is Captain Delton Polysemy of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces then stationed in Yemen. Fox News has learned that there is a Captain Polysemy, but his current assignment and whereabouts are not known. Presidential Press Secretary Anton Lazar said that the President is aware of the photograph but had not seen it, and said that further comment would have to come from the Department of Defense. Lazar said that the U.S. government does not support summary executions, but repeated that there is no evidence that any such execution had taken place and that the photograph may be a composite . . .”
    >>> “AH, MAN,” John said. “He’s gonna have every fuckin’ federal agent in the country chasing him.”
    “But they still don’t know it’s not Bobby,” LuEllen said.
    “We might have to tell them,” I said. “They’ve got some ideas about Bobby, and people who might know about him. If this shit keeps up, they’ll start knocking down doors under some Homeland Security pretense. A lot of good guys could go down.”
    “Maybe you,” LuEllen said, looking at me.
    “I think I’m okay,” I said, but I was a lot more worried than that. I’d been working for a long time, and there were dozens of people who had ideas of what I’d been doing with my time, in addition to the painting. “We really gotta go see this Rachel Willowby.”
    “Wait, wait, wait,” LuEllen said. “You said, tip them off on Bobby being dead. We gotta think about that. That might be an idea. If they believe he’s dead, they’ll look somewhere else. Problem solved. Mostly.”
    “Maybe—but we don’t have to do it right now,” I said. “Let’s think about it.”
    >>> IF YOU get off the main roads of Louisiana, back in the marshy ground, you find the worst poverty in America—worse than some of the South Dakota Indian reservations, which is saying a lot. Rachel Willowby’s address came down to a crumbling concrete-block-stucco triplex, painted a harsh limey green, a dusty place with sick-looking thorn bushes in front of the windows asburglary deterrents. The neighborhood was marked by oil-stained driveways and crumbly carports full of junk and junkers, old and fading gang symbols on the sides of stores and service shops. Black kids with tough, calculating eyes looked out of their cars at us as we drove through. They put us down as cops. “No car,” John said, as we drove past the Willowby place. “Her folks may be working.”
    “If she’s got folks,” LuEllen said from the backseat. “The place looks deserted. And if she had to get a laptop from Bobby, there can’t be much money around—you can get a used one for almost nothing.”
    “But it’d have to be a priority,” John said. “Might not be a priority with her folks.”
    “We’re stalling,” I said. “What do we do?”
    “What we do is, we go in. Right now. It’s our best shot,” John said. “We know she goes to school, but she should be home by now, and there’s no car.”
    “All three of us?” I asked.
    John said, “Really, the best combination would be me and LuEllen, ’cause I’m black and could be a cop and LuEllen could be a social worker—but you’re the one who knows the computer shit, so you gotta come.”
    “Man, I love this. I could do this for a living,” I muttered. I made a U-turn, drove back past a kid in a striped shirt and shorts, who had a bicycle helmet on his head, and who shook a finger at us and then laughed.
    “That kid worries