Thrown-away Child

found myself walking along a one-way street.
    I bought a copy of the Times-Picayune at a stand on Bienville Street, along with the skinny national edition of the New York Times to see if there was anything I was missing back home. Such as news about my other police abuse complaint—the one regarding King Kong Kowalski, the one in which Inspector Neglio was supposed to be taking personal interest. I skipped through the Times and found no such report. Neglio’s concern about rabid cops was proving no keener than Hippo’s. The difference between them was that one pushed happy pills when I broached the subject, and the other one pushed booze.
    The New York paper I tossed into a trash barrel. I kept the local bugle for its movie listings. A storm was coming, so I decided a movie house would be a good place to stay dry while killing time—and trying to forget the face of Maybe Richard, at least for a few hours.
    Huggy was probably irritated with me about leaving him dead-headed back at the power station slaughter, even though I had tucked money into his pocket, so I decided against calling him. I flagged a passing taxi and had him drop me at Joe Never Smile’s house on Crozat Street.
    I heard the old man and his dumper making their way to the front door.
    “Mind if I use your telephone?” I asked Joe when he opened up.
    “ ’Course not, come on back to the kitchen, sit down awhile.”
    “How’s things going with you and Claude digging around in all this unpleasantness?” We were settled at Joe Never Smile’s kitchen table. I had a cup of coffee and a telephone in front of me.
    “Joe, everybody says New York is a strange place, gut this city, it’s something else.”
    “You learning, son. In New Orleans there’s magic in many things, and weirdness in most.”
    I had one of those jump starts again, this one thanks to Joe Never Smile. So I telephoned Teddy the Torch at the dog pound and laid out the plan.
     
    After leaving Joe’s house, I occupied myself at an oyster bar back on Bienville by watching the local artistry of a shucker at work behind the counter who made me a plate of bluepoints. Also I drank a bottle of fake beer.
    The Times-Picayune movie page carried an ad about a revival house somewhere on Magazine Street called the Blossom Cinema, which was showing a double feature: They Drive by Night from 1940 with Ida Lupino, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, and Ann Sheridan, and The Little Foxes from ’41 with Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, and Dan Duryea. Offhand, I could think of no better company that this bill of fare.
    I asked the shucker, an amiable gray-haired guy with an ebony face and a starched paper cap, “What hus takes me to Magazine Street?”
    “Something a whole lot better than a bus take you down the Garden District way,” he said. “Walk back to Canal, catch the St. Charles Avenue streetcar to Napoleon Avenue. Then you only six little blocks away from the Blossom over to Magazine.”
    And so that was how it happened I was sitting in a Window seat of a fine old wooden streetcar. The inside was lined with ribbed maple under a clear stain, and leather straps for the standees. The outside was enameled in yellow and green.
    There were clusters of tourists in the car, hanging out the open windows and making videotapes of the mansions along the way. The rest of the crowd were bleary-eyed sheep reading newspapers or Bibles or Grishams, staring at the floor, cooling themselves with cardboard fans, listening to Walkman radios, spacing out.
    A twentysomething woman was juggling a canvas tote bag, newspaper, and purse and also trying to apply some powdery makeup to her creamy white nose and cheeks with a brush that could paint a small house. A frecklefaced guy with ginger hair and a poplin suit, about her same age, sat across from her. He stared at her, the way somebody would stare at a museum portrait. The woman picked up on this staring, not kindly.
    “What the hell are you looking at?” she said.
    “You don’t need any makeup at all.” He sounded as innocent as a divinity student. “You’re so beautiful.”
    The young woman went crimson. Hostility drained out of her, an emotional boil had been lanced. An old black lady sitting next to her giggled like a kid and stood up. She crossed the narrow aisle and said to the divinity student, “You change places with me, son. G’wan now. Sit down over there where I was; you talk some more to that sweet young thing. I think y’all going to