Thrown-away Child

did he?”
    “My parole officer, he just happened to mention the law—”
    “Don’t be telling me about no damn law. Law’s as useful to a black man as teats on a boar hog.”
    Perry could not disagree. He had no more respect for law than Cletus, but he did have considerably more fear. At the least, Perry did not want the crowd at Shug’s talking as if he and Cletus were partners. That was the very kind of talk that would float around Jackson Avenue just waiting for a breeze to blow it on over to the Poydras Street offices of the Louisiana State parole board.
    And so he walked out of Shug’s that time, leaving Cletus at the bar laughing a robber’s laugh. Perry stayed clean away from Shug’s after that, but it was no use. He ran into Cletus Tyler anyway. Of all places, they met in the dirt lane off lower Tchoupitoulas Street.
    That was yesterday, the second time they spoke— and the same day Aunt Vi told him that his cousin Ruby from New York City was coming home. Ruby and her white cop husband.
    Perry was painting the front window battens of old man Newcombe’s cottage yesterday when Cletus happened by, carrying a blue-and-white striped suitcase. “What are you doing around here, Clete?” Perry asked him.
    “This your place, brother?” Cletus set down the suitcase in the dirt. He wiped sweat from his flat forehead with a handkerchief. “Maybe you got a spare room, hey?”
    “I only help out the old crippled man stays here.” Perry wished he had not passed this information about the vulnerable Newcombe to Cletus. “Family throw you out, Clete?”
    “Shoo, I ain’t got no family. It’s no money that throw me out.”
    “Where you headed with that bag?”
    Cletus nodded his head in the direction of the levee. “Figured I’d stay down there awhile. I know a little place where maybe nobody bother me for a while.”
    “How long’s a while?”
    “ ’Til the man come say I got to be homeless someplace else.”
    “Take care.”
    “ ’Course I will.” Cletus picked up the suitcase, took a step, then set down the bag again. “Say, Perry—it ain’t likely the overseer’d hear about us getting together by the levee of an afternoon.”
    “I guess not.” And so Perry agreed to see Cletus the very next day at two o’clock.
    “Don’t fail me,” Cletus said. “There’s something I just got to tell somebody. Got to be somebody I can trust. Somebody like you, smart from books and all.“
    “I’ll be there.”
    And so here he was, smoking, staring at the river. No way could Cletus have missed him.
    Seagulls honked. Noisy schoolboys from Phillips walked along the lower path by the levee, just down from where Perry was sitting. A tugboat chuffed by.
    Perry watched the surface of the water bunch up in its wake, and the first of the waves creeping across the river his way.
    A boy screamed.
    Perry would have sworn it was a little girl screaming, so high was the pitch. But he was sure it was boys he had seen on the footpath. Guess they haven’t got the change of voice yet.
    Another boy screamed. Then another.
    Perry jumped up from the jetty so fast a cigarette fell from his mouth to his lap, burning him.
    He looked over the top of the levee and saw a boy down on the footpath with schoolbooks spilled on the ground next to him. The boy was looking up at Perry, the first available adult, and shouting, “Mister—you got to help us!”
    “What is it?” Perry asked the boy.
    “There’s a man, he’s—!”
    Another boy interrupted with a shrill, “Get the police!”
    Perry lowered himself down the jagged levee wall to the footpath, skinning his wrists in the process. Three boys waited for him.
    “What is it?” Perry asked.
    All three boys, frightened and crying, pointed to a gap in the side of the levee where a black man lay in a bloody heap, facedown and dead. Next to the body was a blue-and-white suitcase.
     

SEVEN
     

    Bless me, Father, for I am a shitheel. I make this confession:
    That priest I mentioned how I wanted to deck— John Sheehan, the department chaplain—was good enough to officially marry Ruby and me last April when we got back from the other side. After which I proceeded to honor my bride by making a weeping, drunken Irish slob of myself for the next several months in a number of New York saloons that cater to weepy Irish drunken slobs whose middle-aged hearts have been variously broken by dear old accursed Eire. As I also mentioned, this was the sloppiness that landed me