Thrown-away Child

good old Louis Armstrong Park.” Then she played a record of a guy with a gritty washboard of a voice, singing something called “Baby, I’m Itchy but I Don’t Know Where to Scratch.” Louper laughed again, only now it was more like a sneer. He said, “Well, ain’t that just the appropriate tune for this particular discussion?”
    I listened to the music as Louper took the taxi for a turn onto slow-as-molasses St. Bernard Avenue. We passed by a lot of crayfish stands—spelled craw fish— and little stores selling Jax beer in cans to big-bellied men, and Sno Balls and Moon Pies to barefoot kids. I assumed we were someplace near the housing project with the same name as the avenue. My boxers bunched up some more.
    Like I said, the taxi’s air-conditioning was useless. Maybe this was what had seized up Ruby’s tongue. So I finally rolled down my window in hopes of a breeze. But this only made me feel crowded in a strange way, like I was in a casket with damp earth packed in close.
    “If you want to hear,” said Louper, “I don’t mind telling you how things come to a bad end for Ory and me.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “I kil’t her.”
    Silence in the taxi, until I asked, “You murdered Orangadade Terrell? Your big blond beauty…?” I was in New Orleans for innocent purpose. I had not bargained on hearing somebody’s criminal confession. Ruby opened her eyes.
    “No, huh-uh—I’m saying I had to kil’t her.” Sure enough, the lady DJ with the magnolias in her mouth then played another appropriate tune, Leon Redbone’s rendition of “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Louper now turned the taxi off St. Bernard Avenue to Milton Street.
    Ruby sat up straight, dug her fingers into my arm, and whispered, “We’re almost home.” She sounded which was not like her. But then Ruby was not sounding so much like Ruby lately. Maybe now it was because of what Huggy Louper was saying about killing his razzle-dazzle wife.
    “My lawyer, he explains to the jury how legally speaking it wasn’t no murder involved,” Louper carried on. “See, one horrible day I walk into the house unexpected like—with all fours, I’m walking, according to the beast in me—and how d’you suppose I catch my wife and my ex-buddy Elmo right in front of my face?”
    “Flagrante delicto?”
    “Yuh...” Louper was a little stunned, as if I might have been his only passenger that day to say something to him in the language of ancient Rome. “Being that you know Latin, you some kind of lawyer up there in New York? I guess you ain’t a priest since you’re married.”
    “No, I’m not an attorney. I don’t even understand the law the way I’m supposed to. It never made any sense to me why a rich guy and a poor guy are equally forbidden to steal bread.”
    “Oh, I see.” Louper yawned. “Anyways—my lawyer he says to the jury that exact same Latin gibber you just said. This was after I testified in detail as to how I seen it was with Elmo and Ory that horrible day.”
    “Compromising?”
    “I sure’s hell guess so! Elmo’s still wearing his khaki bus driver shirt and his rubber-soled shoes, but there’s his pants flung across’t my TV chair and he don’t have no drawers on his pink ass. And oh my God, my Orys just plain buck naked—’cept for these little blue panties snagged ’round one of her ankles. What’s the Latin what-do-you-call for that again?”
    “Flagrante delicto.”
    “Yuh. Or like we say ’round here, Elmo was taking the skin boat to tuna town.”
    “So, under the circumstances—?”
    “Well, godammit, I run to the front closet, took down my squirrel rifle and commenced to blasting ...” Huggy Louper stopped to sniffle, sounding as if he at least half-regretted doing what he did on that compromising day. Then he continued. “Ory’s yellow hair flopped down back of her shoulders like she was a tin duck at one of them carnival shooting galleries. That’s all she wrote. Elmo survived, but he don’t walk right these days, since he’s missing half his hind end.“
    “And you were acquitted?”
    “Sure I was.”
    “That’s some lawyer you had.”
    “You best believe it. He’s powerful damn good. Hippocrates Beauregard Giradoux— esquire. Hippo, they call him, on account of his size.”
    Ruby and I looked at each other. I seemed to be asking and she seemed to be answering: yes, the very same Hippo who foreclosed on the cottage.
    “Hippo don’t take on a whole lot of cases, what with parish