Thrown-away Child

in the Straight and Narrow for those six horrible weeks when some other priests laid into me about how the boozing is a sign I have been ungrateful to pretty much everybody in my life, including myself.
    Yet here now I sit comfortably: a shitheel in a cozy Amtrak roomette compartment, on a fine leather seat
    by the window, watching the Alabama countryside speed by.
    Dusty brown rivers, lined with groves of cedar and ash, webbed in Spanish moss; back alleys of grim small towns, crowded with milky-faced kids and skinny dogs with drooling ribbon lips; the old gray treeless hills outside of Anniston, weary from strip mining, topped with gigantic wood crosses erected by some nameless zealot in the cause of Christ the Lord; ancient billboards with paint peeling off the tin—hawking catfish dinners, chewing tobacco, peanut brittle, the depravity of communism and the glory of life insurance. My personal favorite sign features a square-jawed Aryan in a denim shirt adorned with a flag pin, muscular arms folded across his chest, and the caption: BE A MAN, JOIN THE KLAN.
    Ruby’s curly head is rested on my undeserving shoulder. She gently sleeps this way, beauty nestled against beast.
    New Orleans, where I have never in my life set foot, looms in my imagination as I listen to the rhythmic clacking of the rails.
    Boozy-smelling music halls on Basin Street, aboveground graveyards full of mossy crypts with French names cut in stone, old black men playing jazz at funerals, people out on their lace iron balconies throwing beads down on Mardi Gras revelers. And saxophones, and a streetcar named Desire. I have never heard of a subway named Desire.
    New York City and all that I know for certain grows so very far, far away.
    And I am thinking, ungratefully, that I do not miss home. Everything that has happened in New York since I met Ruby has distracted or sorely tested our slow-dance together: my own obsession with the cases I Work, these having mostly to do with meek souls driven to maniacal deeds; Ruby’s cash troubles with her struggling little way-the-hell-off-Broadway theater the pain of an Irish heart; and not the least, my difficulties with Mr. Johnnie Walker.
    I count on one hand the number of sober evenings I have spent with my bride. And for the thousandth time I consider the improbability of the two of us as an item, let alone a married couple. So I hopefully tell myself, It’s good for us to be going far and far away, Far from New York City with its never-ending palpitations and the suffocating fraternity of cops. And the burlesque of Ruby and me.
    Not that I oppose the more wholesome aspects of burlesque. The art form was a great and illuminating pleasure of mine back in sweet boyhood days when I would slip past the dozing stage door guard of the Roxy Theater on Seventh Avenue. There inside—in that dim palace of female illusion, reeking of talcum and ammonia—I thrilled to the abundant charms of Cowgirl Sally and her world-renowned twin forty-eights, Lolabelle the Snake Lady, Valerie Valentine and her famous onstage bubble bath, and the angel of my adolescent dreams—Pooh-Pooh PiDieu, all the way from Paris, France.
    I especially remember the Roxy’s house comic. He called himself “Scurvy” and was doubtless the world’s worst comedian. When the audience of Times Square mutts and skels was in a polite mood, they would merely yawn at Scurvy. But woe upon Scurvy if the crowd grew restless for the matinee meat, which often happened. Sodden missiles would then be flung from all corners of the dark house, making Scurvy’s career a matter of bobbing and weaving between the gags. It is old Scurvy with his wild red hair and his baggy pants who I am thinking of as I now consider the burlesque of Ruby and me. I, of course, play the role of Scurvy.
    On our wedding day, was it not Ruby herself who saw the farcical tone that colors us? Father Sheehan pronounced us husband and wife, and I kissed my bride, and then Ruby looked around at our guests— mostly cops, including the inspector and Davy Mogaill, of course—and she cracked, “So, I see what this marriage is: a friendship recognized by the police.”
    Funny thoughts, these.
    Ruby now awoke. She shook, as if something with scales were wrapped around her neck.
    “I was dreaming about Rudolph Giuliani,” she explained, by which she meant Hizzoner the mayor of New York. “In the dream, I am having lunch with the mayor, who is dressed in one of those aluminum gray