Thrown-away Child

after your bath I’ve decided to take you into the other room, Kenny. We’re going to play queen for a day.”
    “You white motherfuck! You crazy?”
    “I am stone crazy, Kenny. Beside which, I’m horny.”
    Kenny looked over to Claude, who only raised his eyebrows and said, “Man’s from New York, what can I say?” Then Kenny looked over at Joe Never Smile. Joe said nothing, he just crossed himself.
    Now it was between Kenny and me.
    “Keep off of me, you crazy motherfuck!”
    “What else did you see, Kenny?”
    “Saw the Jeep they came in, man. But they don’t see me ’cause I always sleep off aways by myself.” Kenny talked fast. I was choking off his air supply-“Saw them three white motherfucks pile out with they army clothes and they masks on and they take off the license plates before they go run over to the gang of brothers. Next thing, I hear this poppy-pop sound. Then them motherfucks be burning something. That’s all I seen.”
    I jerked Kenny’s bathrobe hard. The cigarette went flying from his hand. Joe Never Smile stepped on it. I asked Kenny, “You happen to see a number before they took the plates off the Jeep? Tell me, or I’ll lay you out on this table and do you right here in front of everybody.”
    “Yeah, I seen a number.”
    Claude put a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen on the table in front of Kenny. I lowered him to his seat. “Give it up,” Claude told him.
    We got what we wanted.
    “What you going to do with me now?” Kenny wanted to know. He looked at me, then Claude, and back at me again. “You going to toss me back where you find me?”
    “Kenny, I’m sorry for your troubles,” I said. “If you knew me better, you’d believe me when I tell you I’m talking straight with you now.”
    I touched one of Kenny’s shoulders, and felt it shiver. In myself, I felt something unfamiliar and wholly unaccountable, a sort of fatherly mood.
    “Honest to God,” I said, “I’m so damn sorry your life’s full of adversity.”
    “Mister, you don’t get it. Niggers like me, we survive adversity. It’s contempt that kill us.”
    Joe Never Smile came up beside me. He put his hand on Kenny’s other shoulder and asked him, “You got no place, son?”
    “You know I don’t.”
    “I need somebody to carry on with things.”
    “What things?”
    “Jazz funerals. You want to talk about it seriouslike, you can stay around here. You be my apprentice.” Kenny Lambert, who escaped the branding iron, got what he wanted.
     

FORTY-TWO

     
    Now comes the time in the evening where you sing for your supper, Teddy.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    A waiter approached the table to clear away the dishes. Teddy the Torch tinkled the ice in his gin and tonic and brushed a hand through his pomaded hair. The waiter paid him no mind. Teddy pouted.
    “You said you’re directing the choir over at Zeb Tilton’s church, right?”
    “That’s right. Now, Ruby, you be wanting me to tell tales out of school?”
    “If it helps Perry, yes.”
    “I’d do what I could to help him. Told you how I try getting him a job and all. Sound like you doing some kind of detective work.”
    “You could say that, Teddy.”
    “Well, go ahead, little Miss Gumshoe. Your Cousin Teddy ready to sing.”
    “Over at City Hall, when did you tell Alderman
    Giradoux about MOMS—about mutants, orphans, and misfits? Not too many white folks know about it.”
    “When you think I ever seen Hippo? I’m just working my little job at the dog pound; I don’t see no big shots.”
    “Well then, did you ever mention MOMS to Zeb Tilton?”
    “Few months ago Zeb was trying to get some outreach ministry going, yeah. He asked me and some others—that gassy old Miss Hassie Pinkney, too, I think—about the lowest-down types. I mentioned MOMS then. Lot of MOMS hanging around my old haunts in Bourbon Street, you know.”
    Ruby thought, There’s the connection—Tilton to Giradoux. “By the way, what’s with Zeb and Sister Constance?”
    “Oh, little Connie Ritchie. You remember, she’s kin to Hassie. She become one of Zeb’s little flower buds.”
    Ruby knew. She remembered her own baptism, when Minister Tilton placed one hand at the small of her back to lower her into the font and the other hand over her half-grown breasts. She never told Mama, but eventually she told her girlfriends. As it turned out, Ruby did not have the only such experience.
    “She’s very pretty,” Ruby said.
    “For a girl. She’s