Thrown-away Child

closed in fear, but he at last found in himself a defensive movement. He flailed his heavy arms, as if trying to swat away some huge insect.
    She squeezed her legs tight against his chest, pinning him to the bed. “Hippo, my darling love... My darling! ... Hah!”
    Dangling from a silver chain hanging down her veiny white bosom was a scabrous lump of red pulp, something that looked like a rotted bell pepper—waving back and forth crazily from one breast to another as she rode the big man struggling below. She slapped his face. His eyes popped open.
    “Look at the cockscomb, my darling!” she cawed, cupping her wrinkled breasts, bouncing them up and down in long, ring-studded fingers. She shimmied over him, smacking his face repeatedly with the blood-swollen flesh of a dead cock rooster.
    Hippo grasped wildly at the cockscomb with both hands, but never managed to close his fingers over the thing, to tear it off its chain and cast it away. Instead, a scream coursed up from his heaving chest, through his throat and out his mouth...
    She would come to describe it as a horrible echo more than a scream. As if the bedroom walls were canyon rock instead of plaster, as if some demon inside her husband was running for his unholy life. She would come to describe the hiss of his dying scream as the sound of chicken thighs sizzling in frying oil. ’Bout the sound he going to make... You ain’t never going to forget that sound! And why would she ever want to?
    Later that morning, another hospital in New Orleans would make another diagnosis of sudden death, this time cardiac arrest.
    When she learned the outcome, Ophelia Dabon expressed the more pungent view of what happened to her employer: “Hex done pulled the heart right outta one evil white man.”
     

FORTY-SEVEN

     
    Among other things I’ll tell you about when I get home, I’ve been doing a lot of serious thinking down here in New Orleans,” I said. I was drinking coffee in Mama’s kitchen and talking to Davy Mogaill on the telephone. “About the department, and also about Mogaill and Hockaday, Private Investigations.“
    “Who’re you going to be pleasing, lad? The inspector or myself?”
    “It’s better we talk when I’m back. I can’t hear you so well now anyway.” Not with a half-dozen kids running in and out of the kitchen helping themselves to sodas in the refrigerator. Uncle Bud, meanwhile, was padding around in his holiday frock popping open Dixie beer bottles for everybody but me. Mama and the other women were clustered around the stove, debating the finer points of preparing a proper Creole roux and dishing up plates of turkey and sweet peas and yams and white gravied mashed potatoes. Out in the parlor the television set was buzzing with football.
    I had been sitting there myself a couple of minutes ago with my stomach pooching out over my belt after taking seconds on the turkey and potatoes. “Can you hear me all right, Davy?”
    “Aye, I can make out you’re in the family way. That’s a lucky man, Neil, having folks around you on Thanksgiving Day.”
    Poor lonesome Davy Mogaill, I thought. I asked him, “What’s been happening about King Kong Kowalski?”
    “He’d be a man deserving of justice...”
    Mogaill said something more, but I could not make it out over the Thanksgiving racket. I stuffed my free ear with a finger. “What’s that about Kowalski?“
    “Enjoy your holiday. But come home soon, lad.” The phone connection to New York broke at Mogaill’s end. I thought I heard him laughing before the click that ended our talk. It was just as well. Ruby was calling me from the parlor.
    “Come on out here, Hock—you’ve got to see this!“
    “Oh, Ruby just yelling on account that lying mayor coming on the TV again,” Mama said as I moved away from the phone. She gave a wicked stirring to something in a pot that steamed her face. “Politicians, they just love a big football audience to spread they fertilizer far as they can sling it.”
    There had been so many City Hall press conferences since Sunday I had lost count. Reporters from all over the state—as well as from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and even a correspondent from Le Monde of Paris—were likewise encamped at the headquarters of the beleaguered New Orleans Police Department. In responding to the media, the mayor and his police commissioner (and golfing pal) employed every cliché in their respective arsenals.
    They were appalled by the scurrilous conduct of