Thrown-away Child

cigarette…”
    “Ma’am?”
    “Would you mind losing it?”
    “Oh, a’course I will, pretty. Pardon me all over Dixie for making you choke.” Louper held the cigarette out the window and tamped out the lit end against the yellow-and-blue taxi door, then tucked the dead butt up over an ear for later. “Disgusting habit. Honest to gawd. Trouble with old Huggy, I got a lifelong habit of being disgusting.”
    Louper had himself a raspy smoker’s laugh at this. Ruby thanked him for his consideration and she coughed once again, lightly. I looked across the seat and noticed, again, her tiredness.
    “You were saying?” I asked Louper. “About your lousy marriage?”
    “Oh yeah, my missus... Orangadade Terrell” Louper pronounced this Oh-RANG-ga-dade.
    “Unusual name.”
    “Yeah, it come inspired by a billboard. Orange dade’s mama, she could only read and write some. The day Mother Terrell’s pregnant belly burst some men happened to put up a sign in a vacant lot in the neighborhood, over to Gretna. The sign was for a of soda pop. Mother T’s in her birthing bed spittiing out her little girl, and the view out her window’s that billboard. She thinks it’s mighty beautiful what she sees - a big old picture of happy people prancing through a grove of orange trees.”
    Ruby guessed, “Drinking Orangeade soda?”
    “That’s right. Only Mother T, she don’t pronounce it quite right.”
    “Your wife,” I asked, “did she have any trouble with that handle?”
    “Kids are cruel little bastards. They used to call her Oranga tang . You know, like the hairy ape.” Louper shook his head with true sympathy. I decided the man was no Kluxer.
    “What did you call her, Huggy?”
    “Called her Ory.”
    “Nice.”
    “She was a sure enough big blond beauty, by the way.” Huggy Louper whistled. “And didn’t she know it!”
    Louper had to stop the car for a red traffic light, which served as a natural pause in his story. We were passing through a neighborhood of frame bungalows in various stages of disintegration. There were starved palm trees in the front yards, and dogs lying in heaps under falling-down porches, too tired to snap at the flies swarming around their snouts. The light turned green. We rolled through the intersection. “Yes, sir, Ory was a razzle-dazzle beauty. My soul, but didn’t Huggy catch himself the beautiful fever…”
    Louper paused. I glanced out my window. Over toward a corner newsstand was a group of rail-thin young black men hanging around with nothing to do but suck beer bottles. Their female companions wore shorts and sandals, and little cotton blouses that bared their navels and provided only the scantest coverage to breasts with nipples as big and hard as carpenters’ thumbs. Louper swiveled his head around. “Sure you can handle hearing about the fever, mister?”
    I said I was sure. Ruby lay her head back and shut her eyes. She folded her hands across her stomach.
    “Us two was sweeter’n peaches and cream there for a month or two.” Louper turned back so he could watch where he was driving. “Then a’course after the burning heat passed there was lots of days I’d only say was barely toler- a table. Then the whole thing just went all dismal like.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Turned out, Ory was loose as my teeth after a taffy apple. You know how that’ll craze a man to ferocity.” Louper looked into his rearview mirror, and offered Ruby something by way of an apology. “Ma’am, I am only speaking the Lord’s truth. We’re just animals, after all. Us men are savage, snorting beasts. Nothing personal, but women ain’t so much better. Give you a simple telltale sign of what I’m talking about: men and women don’t run around on all fours these days, right? But we sure as hell get around with all fours. I mean, you ever in your life seen anybody walk without swinging their arms? Animal nature, see my meanin’?”
    Ruby mumbled something that I took to mean that she wanted no part of a dialogue on the animal kingdom.
    Huggy Louper reached for the dashboard and clicked on the radio, recessed below the plastic hula dancer. I heard part of the local weather report, enough to know that a storm was rolling in off the Gulf of Mexico. Then a lady announcer with a magnolia-soaked voice said, “Hello, my dear sugars-wherever y’all are. You’re listening to WWOZ—New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Radio, coming sweetly you from our studios right here in Congo Square,