Thrown-away Child

paintbrush, actually. I used it to dig down into the bullet holes.
    I recovered a pair of 9-millimeter expandable hollow-points, still warm, and shoved them into my hack pocket. Somebody was firing slugs that could have opened up spaces in my chest the size of Volleyballs.
    “Come on out of there, Perry,” I called. I looked from the shed back out to Chartres Street, knowing I should leave fast.
    “Hell no! They after a white man like that, I ain’t about to leave here ’til it’s full dark. Go on with you. You got your business, I got mine. Go on, just go tell Vi what I say.”
    “What about you? Where are you going?”
    “That’s my worry. Looks like you got a worry all your own.”
    I had to leave Perry with something to chew on before walking off, and maybe myself as well. “You say you want to square accounts with this preacher?“
    “That’s what I say.”
    “Then you and me, we’re on the same side.“
    “Shoo, what you talk about?”
    “Think about it, Perry. Call me at the house sometime.”
     

EIGHTEEN

     
    When Claude Bougart experienced his first jazz funeral he was six years old and living with his family in the dirt lane off Tchoupitoulas Street, ten houses down toward the levee from the Flaggs. On a hazy Thursday August afternoon in the 1950s, a musician neighbor everybody called Smoke was afforded the greatest dignity available to a black man in those days.
    Did not Claude’s own daddy say as much? As he held tight to his little boy’s hand throughout the loaning, musical procession, the elder Bougart wept °penly, unashamedly, like all the other black men. And he said to his boy, “Your finest day is when they % you away.”
    To Claude, young as he was when he first heard them, those words sounded historical. As a schoolboy, Claude loved history class the best, especially African 'story. He would eventually read about Ile Gorée, off he coast of Dakar, where his father’s father’s father’s ather’s father was shoved aboard a ship, in chains; where his people were robbed of their lives, to begin their zombie existence of work and sleep and whippings, and pitifully few fineries—among these jazz, the music of freedom, and the blessed day of death. These lessons absorbed, Claude Bougart fully knew the curse of his father’s words; how they connected a black boy in New Orleans of the 1950s with ancestral slaves minted at Ile Gorée in another century.
    Neither did Claude Bougart forget the other details of that first funeral day.
    Two sable-colored horses, draped in white lace that surely cost Smoke’s widow twenty dollars at least, pulled the hearse up Tchoupitoulas toward Jackson Avenue to a little storefront church that Reverend Zebediah Tilton had started up. Driving the hearse was an old man with dark, rough skin. Everybody called him Joe Never Smile due to his reliably cheerless disposition.
    Joe Never Smile lived alone in a small house near Basin Street, adjacent to St. Louis Cemetery Number One, which he naturally found convenient. He was always hired for jazz funerals because his horses were so impressive.
    “Look at them horses,” said Claude’s daddy, pointing to the laced team. “See how they crying?”
    It was true. As the hearse carrying poor old Smoke passed them by, Claude and all the mourning neighbors and friends saw four big horse eyes streaming with tears. Very impressive. Of course, Miss Hassie and her flapping mouth told anybody who would listen that Joe Never Smile had smeared onion juice in the horses’ eyes. Some people believed Miss Hassie, others did not.
    Out of respect for the family’s loss, the musicians walking along behind Joe Never Smile’s hearse doffed their derby hats to the widow in her black veil and all the other family members and friends and neighbors by her side. They gave a solemn wave with their instruments as they stepped along, never cracking a smile nor blowing a note in praise of Smoke’s life until the proper time, the moment when Reverend Tilton would bring a close to his service by saying, “Brothers and sisters, now we’ve reached the end of a perfect death...”
    After which the music and food would come, in great abundance and exuberance. All this was quite gaudy and high-spirited and brimming with raw emotion. But, still, everybody knew it was a dead man lying up there on Joe Never Smile’s hearse, and that his widow was hurting bad that day, and that she would hurt for some time to come. Claude Bougart’s