Thrown-away Child

with things the way they are nowadays... well, I figure it ain’t fitting for me to be cold like all the rest.“
    “Cold?”
    “Meaning the way folks shun the tragedy boys, even when they drop dead. Folks just box them up, say some prayers, stash the ash somewhere, and move on.”
    “But Joe Never Smile, he takes them in.“
    “Sure I do. Even dead boys need they daddy.”
     

     
    All three of them—two in the front buckets, one sitting cross-legged in the Jeep’s small backseat—were riding along the pot-holed street in the late morning. They wore combat boots, olive drab military fatigues, and plastic Hallowe’en masks. Guns bounced in their laps.
    One man was a jolly pirate with a gold earring, the second a smiling hobo with a plastic cigar butt built into protruding plastic lips, the third a beaming faerie princess in a rhinestone tiara. Their dime-store masks were too small to span their foreheads and did nothing to cover up their jowls. Consequently, a lot of pale, puffy skin was showing around the edges of each disguise.    H
    The driver (Hobo) slowed down to a crawl. A red-white-and-blue U.S. mail van raced past, operated by a man with a ponytail and a Walkman radio oblivious to a Jeep full of men in children’s masks. Hobo swiveled around to make sure traffic was clear in both directions. Then he gunned the Jeep’s engine and ran it up over the sidewalk, around to the back of a weathered building with a caved-in side wall. It took several minutes for all the dust to settle.
    The collapsed building that hid the Jeep from notice by passers-by was once upon a time an upcountry-style juke joint. Its owners gave it an extravagant name, to impress the city clientele: Di Moin Qui Vous Laimein> which was Creole for Tell Me Who You Love. A musician called Antoine Domino used to be a regular.
    After playing rhythm and blues piano and singing for tourists in the Quarter, Antoine liked to let his hair down among his own kind, in the black neighborhood where he grew up happy and well fed. And so in the tiny hours of most mornings, he would would drop by the Di Moin, as people called it.
    True to his nickname, Fats Domino would order double and triple portions of his favorites: the house gumbo, the trout po’boy, the oyster roll in Tabasco sauce. Whenever he was around, the other patrons could tell what day of the week it was just by looking at the Cadillac out on the front curb. Antoine owned seven Cadillacs, which he alternated according to a daily color code.
    For many people—including the three men now climbing out of the Jeep, racking their guns, sneezing through their Hallowe’en masks, brushing off dust— Fats Domino and his joyful music were the hazy innocence of long, long ago. Cadillacs had fins way back then; William McKinley was the last president somebody managed to kill, with probably only one person in a hundred able to name the assassin; and some noisy Negro up in Newark called LeRoi Jones was able to shock people by writing, “I am not interested in being a murderer, but then I am not interested in being a dier, either; I am not going to kill you, but I am not going to let you kill me.”
    The man who had occupied the cramped backseat (Faerie Princess) was last to emerge from the Jeep. Like his comrades, he carried a TEC-9 semiautomatic assault pistol fitted out with a barrel extension and silencer, encased in a hard plastic stock and butt for hip firing—the so-called street-sweeper, favored by drug gangs in the city’s housing projects and terrorists elsewhere in the world and capable of firing thirty-six rounds of hollow-point bullets per magazine clip. Additionally, two bits of hardware dangled from his belt, like a pair of bulky swords. On his one side was a skinny two-foot length of steel with the bottom end twisted into letters, on the other a portable acetylene torch.
    Faerie Princess said to Hobo and Pirate, “You boys about got your balls up and ready for this here?“
    “Ready!” said the other two in gruff unison.
    “All right then.” Faerie Princess held up an arm, cocked as if he was holding up a checkered flag at a speedway. “Get ready.”
    Faerie Princess stepped out from around the old juke joint to where he could peek at the street again. He clanked as he walked. A couple of cars drove by. When they were gone from view the arm chopped downward, and Faerie Princess barked, “Move!” Hobo and Pirate bent their knees and scuttled— serpentine-style, as