Thrown-away Child

eyes—sat on porches fanning themselves in the wet heat that had risen with the sun. Alleyways were clogged with hulks of broken-down, rusted, burned-out cars.
    Oaks and sycamores had been planted in rows all through the project, sealing the decrepitude of poverty in shadows. This cover no doubt comforted busloads of tourists who came to see the famous cemetery on Basin Street. Tourists would not mind seeing decrepitude amongst the dead, but would surely feel uneasy seeing it amongst the living.
    According to a smudged sign on the sexton’s stone shed, it was ST. LOUIS CEMETERY NO. 1. The sun shone bright and full upon this necropolis of brick and limestone and marble. Row upon row upon row of tombs, some painted in colored chalks, some bearing garlands of flowers or dusty black-and-white photographs of the deceased encased within. As my taxi passed the cemetery, I read aloud the Latin blessing for the dead on a nearby tomb, Requiescat in pace. Rest in peace.
    “That’s one place I ain’t never going inside of,” Huggy Louper said, crossing himself as we passed by the cemetery gate. I felt obliged to do the same.
    “Why not?” I asked.
    “Ever hear about Marie LaVeau?”
    “No.”
    “She just about run the life of half the people of this town once. Voodoo queen, she was.” Huggy gave a nod of his head toward the last post of the cemetery gate as we rounded a corner into one of the shady streets. “Her tomb’s in there since just before the First World War. She still gets her regular visitors, and lots of tributes are dropped down in front of her tomb— chicken feet, hair tied up in string, tongues of dead cats, that sort of voodoo-hoodoo stuff. Some folks say, Marie don’t like what you done or what you got away with, she can still do you wrong—don’t matter a lick she’s dead all them years.”
    I heard Huggy’s strange question again, the one he asked on the day I arrived in this strangest of towns. What’s worse: living with a bad conscience , or knowing the peace of mind that comes from being hanged for what you done?
    “Are you saying that you believe you got away with murder?” I asked.
    “Don’t it seem to you like everybody’s haunted by something they don’t talk about?”
    “I’ve noticed.”
    “Well, here’s Crozat,” Huggy said, abruptly stopping the conversation, along with the taxi. He parked at the head of a long huddle of row houses identical to the ones in Mama’s St. Bernard project, only worse off. Iberville’s houses were all crumbled brick with bashed-in green fire doors and a street full of condoms and crack vials.
    Huggy seemed anxious to get me to where I was going and to get himself out of the project. “Any particular address, or you just want the corner here?”
    I pulled out Claude’s slip from my shirt pocket. “I’m looking for the house where somebody called Joe Never Smile lives. You know where that might be?“
    “I guess I sure don’t know a house along this here street by the name of who lives in it.”
    ‘‘That’s all right, I’ll just walk along and ask.“
    “Mister, you got to be crazy.” Huggy turned from ne front of the taxi and looked me up and down, from my Yankees cap and blue chambray shirt to my creased khakis, clear down to my brand-new Nikes. “Lord a’mighty, I suppose you think we all just dripping molasses and saying howdy down here. Think you can go where you please when you please, so long’s you smile and tip your hat to folks on porches.”
    I opened the taxi door and stepped out onto Crozat Street, saying nothing.
    “Believe one thing Huggy tells you about New Orleans, my friend,’” Huggy told me, holding his hand out the window for the fare. “Things ain’t always as they seem.”
    I assured him, “I believe anything but the obvious.”
    Then I headed down Crozat Street wondering about a guy called Joe Never Smile. I figured I could at least walk up and down until I spotted Claude’s car. Or smelled it. I looked at my wristwatch. Twelve minutes before seven.
    The only traffic on the street was a yellow school bus that slowed to a stop at the far end of the block to pick up a knot of waiting girls and boys. Then the bus rolled on past me, mashing transmission gears and exhaling a cloud of oily fumes. Earnest black faces filled the bus windows. I waved at the sleepy children, a few waved back.
    I tipped my cap to the first old lady I saw on a porch, a large woman in polka dots sitting there with her legs