Thrown-away Child

clattering to the sidewalk. Maybe did not bother retrieving them.
    I crossed over to where Claude Bougart stood alongside his car and asked, “You see that kid with the wagon?”
    “Sure I do.”
    “He’s wandering around the city on a school day, doesn’t even know his name.” Claude and I watched Maybe Richard as he neared the corner. I asked, “Any idea where he’s going?”
    “Boy like that who don’t belong, chances are he’s headed for his day-time hiding place. Boy like that’s got to sleep by day, make his way in life by night.”
    ‘‘Some life. What do you do about it around here?”
    “Tell me what you’d do about it, Detective.”
    “Run him through juvenile.”
    “What do you know? That’d be the exact same thing I’d do. If we had a juvenile division cared about black boys being in school, such as schooling is. If I figured that boy had at least his mama at home if I figured that boy even had a home.”
    Bougart’s expression was a blend of amusement and long sufferance. At least he was not laughing at me. So why did I feel like I was wearing baggy pants and a rubber nose?
    “Jesus, Claude—what chance does he have?“
    “Same as the rest. The chance to pay us all back some day of reckoning.”
    Maybe and his clanking wagon turned at the comer. He never gave us two cops a backward glance. I watched Maybe and my Yankees cap slide into the shadows of Iberville.
    “Shame on me,” I said as the boy vanished. “There goes something I see every day and want to forget.“
    “What is it you want to forget?”
    “The moral equivalent of a slow-moving car with a shooter riding shotgun.”
    “You shouldn’t be putting something on your shoulders don’t belong there alone, Neil. You ain’t any blinder than most, and you ain’t any stronger.”
    I wanted to reply to Bougart’s flat view of myself. It somehow seemed very important to have him think better of me. But anything I thought about saying-such as, But, I’m a cop !—I wisely reconsidered.
    “Tell you how I figure the truth of the boy’s sorrowful situation.” Bougart paused. He lifted a packet of Pall Malls from the pocket of his uniform shirt, opened it, and lit one for himself. I declined the invitation to join him. Bougart sucked in smoke and exhaled a cloud of blue. “There’s all kinds of treacheries folks practice without believing they’re doing any harm. Good and respectable type of folks. Like for instancy here I’m smoking this tobacco, knowing it’s poison.”
    “As a nun you’d be lousy, Claude. At least the kind of nuns I grew up with.”
    “How’s that?”
    “You shouldn’t be so quick to minimize treachery.“
    “For instance?”
    “A boy’s not the same thing as a cigarette butt.“
    “When he’s poor he sure is.”
    And what could I say to that? The way he talked, Bougart was like a crack handball player: he stepped up to the line and served a lazy ball, at the same time plotting out his next two or three hard, lean returns to win him the score.
    I thought back to last night and the way he had talked then, spooning me bits and pieces of a complicated mystery, complete with a puzzling acronym, MOMS; the way Officer Claude Bougart, disenchanted New Orleans cop, finessed me into involvement in a case he had been warned off by Alderman Giradoux and Deputy Commissioner Geary.
    Then it came to me: Bougart saw the opportunity of turning me into a tool, to do the work that he himself could not so easily do. I could not fault him for doing this to me. How many times as a cop have I myself made somebody into a shovel?
    “By the way,” I asked, “you were going to let me know calibers?”
    “Ugly kind—nine millimeter, high-velocity expanders. You want to tell me why that interests you?”
    “I went looking for Perry Duclat, three guys in a Jeep shot at me.” Claude did not look particularly alarmed. “I picked dumdums out of the ground. Nines.”
    “They could have nailed you if they wanted.”
    “You figure it’s a warning?”
    “Sure as hell is. You ever hear about anybody in the path of a street-sweeper live to tell the story unless he allowed to live?” Claude took a last puff on his cigarette, then tossed down the butt. It sizzled out in some pavement beer. “I expect it’s illustration to the dog story.”
    “How did Hippo’s warn-off go exactly?”
    “I guess you do got the right to know about all the red flags likely to get thrown down on this job. Hippo he says anybody