Thrown-away Child

spotted the slogan on Huggy’s card, printed beneath his name: NOT HONEST, BUT RELIABLE. If Hugh P. Louper were a politician, I would vote for him.
    Huggy dropped me at the corner of Chartres and Piety streets, which according to his tone of voice he considered suspicious. “Peculiar destination for a tourist.” He lit a cigarette as I stepped out of the taxi and surveyed the pot-holed street with its commercial lots gone to weedy craters, some ragged men off in the distance picking up cans and bottles, the occasional passing Jeep. Huggy asked, “Want me to wait on you?”
    I told him no. Huggy shrugged his shoulders and drove off. I stood there looking for several minutes, trying to imagine a saloon now gone with the wind.
    There was something that looked like a cage on the bleak horizon. Twisted steel bars that contained the burnt lumber of an old building about the size of a suburban garage. Nobody had to tell me. This was Perry Duclat’s burrow.
    I walked around the side of the caged building, and a sloping steel shed came into view. As I neared the shed, I swore I could feel a pair of desperate eyes boring in on me. I have learned to trust such instincts.
    I stopped. We were all alone there in the scabid range of a cast-off precinct of New Orleans, and so I called out, “Perry, I’m Ruby’s husband—Neil Hockaday... Your Aunt Violet sent me ... I won’t harm you, I want to talk.”
    Nothing.
    I called again, “Perry, I can help...”
    Behind me, some two hundred feet off, there was the sound of a vehicle idling at the curb. I turned and saw faces in a Jeep. Two faces, maybe three, blurred by a shimmer of haze in the setting sun. Whatever, nobody seemed to be paying attention to me.
    I walked clear around the building toward the shed, until the Jeep was gone from sight.
    I was close enough to whisper now. “Perry?“
    “Don’t come no closer!” The voice came from inside the shed. I saw a small opening between corrugated steel panels. On the other side of that hole was a frightened eye. The voice held as much fright as the eye, and warned, “Back off, I got a gun.”
    “I only want to talk.”
    “Going to shoot your motherfucking white po-lice ass you take one more fucking step!”
    So he knew me. And knew that I was a cop.
    “It’s only you and me, Perry. If you had a gun, you would have used it by now.”
    Big talk. I stayed right where I was.
    “Going to fuck you up, motherfucker!” Perry’s rising voice told me I had won the bluff. “Fuck you up real good!”
    “How? You plan to hurt my feelings again about my mother and me?” If I was dealing with an armed man, I should have heard a gun cocking by now. Which I did not, and which gave me much relief. “Your Aunt Violet says you didn’t kill Cletus Tyler, and I believe her. A couple of cops came around looking for you. Pigs, both of them. Know what I mean, Perry?”
    “All kind of pigs already mess up my life.”
    “I’m not a pig.”
    “What you want, man?”
    “Violet wants to know what you’re up to.”
    “Tell her I’m sitting here in the hole of time.“
    “Doing what?”
    “Tell me what you doing married to a black woman.”
    “One day I told her I loved her; she said the feeling was mutual. We did what lucky people do in that situation. You’re not so lucky. So what are you going to do about it?”
    “Try to resolve two things pressing my mind.“
    “You want to come out of that shed and talk to me face-to-face?”
    “No.”
    “What do you have to resolve?”
    “A duty to remember that’s agitating against my longing to forget.”
    “Sure you can afford the time for philosophy right now?”
    “Pigs going to find my ass sooner or later. They going to claim I done my cellie for some reason they make up. Then they going to fry them another nigger. So what? See, I don’t worry about that. I use my time to resolve a certain piece of old business. That’s what I decided after a lot of thinking.”
    “You need a lawyer?”
    “Shoo! Lawyer’s nothing but a white man sitting in the toll booth at the bridge where anybody want justice got to cross.”
    “All right, all right.” He had a point about chasers. “What’s this old business?”
    “Just you go on back to Gibson Street. Tell Aunt Vi I’m going to do something about Zeb Tilton to square what he done to Uncle Willis and her. Tilton one nigger ain’t no better than a damn lawyer in a toll booth. You got that?”
    “Zeb Tilton, toll booth. Got it.