Thrown-away Child

could do to finish half a salad. But here it was only three in the afternoon and she was famished.
    With the idea vaguely in mind of a restaurant she used to enjoy almost every day some years ago, Ruby strolled from City Hall across Canal Street and into the Quarter. She found herself on Dumaine Street, where she had briefly lived in a tiny apartment full of big mice. Her halfway house, she called it, halfway between Mama’s house and the Big Apple.
    Ruby’s Dumaine Street days lasted three months, during which time she discovered that it was not possible to earn a living as a nondancing, nonsinging black stress in the New Orleans theatrical world. She made ends meet by dressing herself up every day as Raggedy Ann—complete with rouged cheeks, licorice whip eyelashes, and a fright wig—and serving hamburgers and milkshakes to tourists at a restaurant called Anything Goes. With that theme very much in mind, she ultimately left for New York, where after three months of Manhattan residency she discovered it was not possible to earn a living as a nondancing nonsinging black actress.
    Ruby paused for a moment in front of her halfway house. She looked up at the second-floor balcony, and the shutters that covered the single window of her mousy old flat. She had painted those shutters violet— for Mama—and they were still violet, though faded so badly over time that only Ruby knew their secret color.
    She walked on, back along Bourbon Street to Toulouse and a restaurant called the Café de la Paix, the very place she had picked up her croissant habit. She skipped the main door of the restaurant and instead entered a narrow side alley that was full of coffee and pastry smells. The alley opened up to a walled patio in the back, with brick flagstones and tables and chairs in the shade of tulip trees. Ruby ordered a muffeleta sandwich and a tall glass of lemonade. Then when she was still hungry, a dish of butterscotch ice cream with strong coffee.
    Things were never rushed at the Court of Three Sisters, especially out on the patio. And so Ruby opened the looseleaf notebook on her table and read over the entries she had made at City Hall—for the third or fourth time, she had lost count. Then she flipped those pages and read over her summary of Perry’s journals.
    She felt a little disappointed. What would Hock say? At City Hall, she had found what he suspected she would. But what of it? A district attorney could indict a ham sandwich, that was true. But did any of this add up to even a ham sandwich?
    Extracurricular justice. What did Hock mean when he said that to Perry on the telephone?
    Slap! Maybe a news peg?
    Ruby closed her notebook and went to the pay telephone inside the restaurant. “Janny,” she said when she reached her sister at WDSU Television, “Mama and I caught your report on Channel Six this morning. About MOMS and all. I just want to tell you, I’m proud of you. I think you’re great.”
    “That’s you, Ruby?”
    “Yes, Janny. Now listen. How would you like the follow-up to end all follow-ups?”
     

THIRTY-NINE

     
    This time it happened near the old railroad tracks at Elysian Fields, where Paris Avenue cuts under the viaduct.
    Where Ruby told me the story of a raw December day of 1960—-she and Janny and Perry following Mama Violet through the dump, like three ducklings, and Ruby’s daddy lying in bed at home, delirious and dying. Mama with much bravery in her face and little in her pocketbook, making her way past jittery tramps and fallen women, picking trash so that Christmas would not be just another day. Mama Violet making a toyland out of a dump, finding a little boy-doll for my Ruby to love...
    Where twenty black men lay dead.
    Their greasy clothes were ripped to shreds by what any cop in the country knows as the work of TEC-9 semiautomatic fire. Rain had washed most of the blood away, but not all. They had been laid on their backs after they died, shirts and coats ripped open to expose their chests. Each had been branded: a mutant, an orphan, a misfit.
    Rats and snails and snakes had feasted on the dead men’s faces. Stray dogs waited nearby for the rest, teeth bared, howling. New Orleans cops were gathered, too.
    I walked through the mud and rain, behind a rise of piled-up garbage bags that hid the corpses from the view of anyone passing along on Paris Avenue. I counted off the bodies. A young fresh-faced cop with rain dripping off his red neck and his hat and shield wrapped in