Thrown-away Child

sleepy, but otherwise showed little wear after the long rail trip. The heat brought a sheen of dew to her face, nothing a cool breeze could not relieve if there was any such thing. I myself was not so freshly arrived. My Yankees cap was sponge heavy on my head, and every time my shoulders moved I felt sweat flow down my back and dribble into my boxers. I needed fresh clothes, something in a glass over shaved ice, and a short nap in a tall tub of cold water. All of which made me more anxious than usual to escape the train station.
    Train travel these days is a stone pity, by the way. Saying that makes me sound like a codger, I know but I am only stating the obvious. I remember as à kid seeing New York’s glorious old Penn Station for the first time—the real one with columns of sunlight in slanted beams streaming across a marbled floor through delicate windows arched high above a graceful web of iron rafters. I thought I was inside a cathedral. Passengers owned intelligent faces, and they all wore hats and carried books or newspapers to read. The huge station clocks were works of art; the announcer’s voice was as exciting as anything heard on the radio serials.
    Then one infamous day came the striped-pants boys. Ever in grubby quest of profit, they had a cathedral of transportation torn down. In its place, they slapped together a vast stall full of mooing and oinking. There are not so many intelligent faces around the new Penn Station.
    So this train station in New Orleans was every bit as inhuman as the dump that replaced my Penn Station of a fonder day. There was not a lady in the place with a decent hat on her head, although quite a number were pleased to be showing off multicolored plastic hair rollers. White Southern gents were the worst spectacles with their raggedy mustaches, golf shirts, gimmie caps, shorts, and hairless legs. The only reading matter I saw anybody carrying around was USA Today, which is to journalism as Robert Waller is to literature.
    Outside the station, the fetid air and the exhaust of idling taxicabs did nothing to encourage a better mood. We climbed into the back of a taxi equipped with air-conditioning vents so puny they failed to put out sufficient breeze to lift the grass skirt of a plastic hula dancer dangling down over the dashboard on an old string of Mardi Gras beads. The driver, on the other hand, was full of breeze.
    According to the Orleans Parish hack license framed in tin and bolted to the back of the cabbie’s perch for us passengers to see, his name was Hugh P. Louper. Into the edges of this frame were inserted little calling cards for the taking, one of which I did, since a mackerel pedals a bicycle about as well as I drive a car and Ruby is no help, since she does not even own a license.
    “You call me Huggy if you want, sir, ma’am,” the driver said to us as we settled carefully into a backseat of sticky vinyl. From “Huggy” I would receive a foretaste of the second spooky thing a Yankee such as myself learns about New Orleans.
    He asked us where we wanted to go, and Ruby told him, “The St. Bernard projects—3810 Gibson Street.” Hugh P. Louper seemed to know just where to head.
    “Where y’all from?” Louper talked like he had a catfish sideways in his mouth. He used the rearview mirror to give us the once-over. I gave him back the same, and thereby saw that Hugh P. Louper was a wiry, pasty-skinned guy of about sixty with a pair of cords on the back of his fuzzy neck that stood out in a number-eleven formation.
    “New York,” I said.
    “Man-o-man, that’s a far piece. How come y’all didn’t fly down on the aero-plane?”
    “My wife prefers the scenic route.”
    “You two... you married?”
    Ruby touched my arm and shot me a warning look hat said something along the lines of Don’t rile him, he’s probably a Kluxer. My damp boxers bunched.
    ‘‘Married, right.”
    “I had myself a wife once’t upon a time.” Huggy Louper sounded sadder but wiser, which did not strike me as the way a Kluxer would sound. “It all come to a poor end, though.”
    “How so, Huggy?” I had to ask. As Ruby has pointed out, I always have to ask.
    “Well, sir, now there’s a story.” Louper fired a cigarette, and the dead air of the taxicab clouded up in a pale blue stink. “Ain’t a long story. Marriage gone lousy don’t never take much time to tell.”
    “Driver?” Ruby had a hand to her throat and was coughing. “That