 
# The Girl With The Navy Blue Eyes

Andre Carriere

Copyright © 2013 by Andre Carriere

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.

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To My Wife

# The Girl With The Navy Blue Eyes

1. It goes something like this:

In the information age that we live in today nobody can stay hidden forever, not an American.

But first I need their names.

That will be harder.

I have to go see her.

I have to see the girl with the navy blue eyes.

They aren't navy blue, they're brown but she once told me that she wanted blue eyes like mine but darker.

She often wore a navy blue windbreaker.

Like that color, she would say.

Her eyes were just one of the many things that she wanted to change.

She thought she was shaped funny, like a bird, with little breasts and a little fanny and long arms and long legs. Only when Whitney Houston broke onto the scene did she consider accepting herself for who she was or at least how she looked.

Her past.

She wanted, like everyone who ever lived, to change her past, what had happened to her, choices she had made and situations that she found herself in.

I wonder if she would still tell me her secret.

I wonder if I would have wanted her to.

2. How many times have I played back the events of that summer?

How many times have I dreamed of how it should have been, all the many different should have beens?

In some of them I break up with her after she stops calling from Denver. In those dreams I usually wind up dating a girl who goes to a different school, losing my cherry to her at the same time that she loses her cherry to me.

In some of them I take her back to my parents' house the night of the ring dance and we have sex for the first time, not in a hotel in downtown New Orleans in December but in my own bed in my room in the house on Pressburg Street in May.

I wonder if that would have changed everything.

Instead of spending an hour making-out next to the soda machine on the mezzanine level of the Marriott on Canal Street I take her back out to New Orleans East, to a beautifully-decorated home of deep chocolate brown carpet and porcelain tiles and teakwood and a view off the back patio of a pocket woods.

We go back to my house for a drink, just like I would learn to do when I got older.

We would have both understood what was happening.

I walk her out to the blue Honda parked on the ground floor.

I tip the valet, an older black man who nods as I open the door for this beautiful young black girl.

Then out onto Canal Street and the buses blowing fumes down the center line and a thousand stereo sets competing for your attention from the cheap imports operating out of storefronts, each one's windows carrying the same boom boxes and belt buckles and brass knuckles and knives, strips of American commerce always run by foreigners and I would see these avenues on all my travels, in Miami and New York and Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Tampa and Chicago and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and Memphis and Nashville and Portland Oregon and Seattle Washington, Houston Texas and Mobile Alabama, everywhere you went in America you saw it all as one thing, a glittering cheap rip-off of something that had once contained value, meaning, belief.

In a moment we'd turn down Rampart and speed past infamous Basin Street, one block of the blues running in front of the square that honors Satchmo's greatness with an acre of concrete, dead water fountains, crack whores and homeless winos. On Satchmo's's statue was rivulets of bird shit. We warned tourists to never go there, no matter what the guidebook said.

We would burn past that sadness and as the road curved we'd follow the curve and pass the Municipal Auditorium where every year Comus met Rex to bring Carnival to its apex and where Elvis played and Bob Dylan played and U2 played when they were nobody and no one and where I'd see INXS long before their singer decided to accidentally ice himself and where a girl whose heart I utterly shattered took me to see Tango Argentina which made me long to be adored and where the girl with the navy blue eyes may or may not have been raped.

3. This is another question I have for her.

Now they're starting to pile up. Because even with one secret come other secrets, other outcomes, other dominos fall.

The names of the two guys in Denver.

The name of the one who left.

The answer to the question about what happened on Mardi Gras day long ago, the coldest Mardi Gras in 111 years, so cold we could do nothing but look for a place to get drunk, drunk, drunk for cheap, cheap, cheap.

The sun was a dull menace, a chunk of yellow spit in a cloudless sky. The wind came in from Canada with the vengeance of an abolitionist crusade. Jeans, coats, sweaters, hats, mufflers, gloves, we watched six floats pass down St. Charles Avenue, the riders frozen blocks of granite, the beads stinging your hands and face, doubloons ricocheting off the asphalt like brass from a machine gun.

Someday said that our buddy PJ was working at the auditorium so we headed over there and found him, a walkie-talkie in hand, a fistful of keys, bossing around a crew of black people in his burgundy t-shirt over five layers of long sleeves. PJ took us upstairs to a storeroom where we shared the space with a tapped keg of beer and a wall of liquor. He waved us in and then took off to manage the imminent arrival of drunken freezing Mardi Gras revelers.

We sat there and got drunk, Maginnis and Big Tits and Diane the Artist and the girl with the navy blue eyes and me.

There were people passing down the hall outside but the building was mostly empty, a few dudes working in the pantry making sandwiches, a shifty-looking dude pushing a broom.

That was the cat I would have to ask her about.

I'd say, Remember Mardi Gras 1986 when Big Tits told Maginnis that the shifty cat pushing a broom tried to grab her in the bathroom and Maginnis confronted the shifty cat and he punched Maginnis' face into the doorframe, breaking his nose and sending blood in hot dots against the pale green cement floor and I grabbed the shifty cat in a full nelson and I could have pounded his head into a range of burners, just driven his nose into the steel rails but I didn't because I didn't know what he might have done to the girl with the navy blue eyes yet and besides I am a coward who only hurts women, rarely men.

The cops came, or rent-a-cops as the girl with the navy blue eyes called them as we dragged her out of the loading dock and put her in Big Tit's car. Something had tripped in her, some cosmic warping.

But wait, before I tell you what she did next, I have to tell you what we did before, in the women's bathroom, on the floor. You can guess. That's how we were, hot like monkeys. That never changed.

So as I am bringing her home, drunk and crying and insane, blood on me, blood on her, clothes torn, makeup shot, she says that she had sex twice tonight.

What.

I pull over.

Night is upon the city that care forgot. Stoned and howling revelers bedecked in beads and wooly caps stagger down the streets. Headlights pass us in a steady golden stream of wasted energy. A stop light seems to burn like a flame going green, yellow, red.

She says that she had sex with me on the floor, that was once and that the shifty cat had sex with her on that same floor later, that was twice.

What exquisite memories I have of that night. Driving her home, I must have been screaming, screaming at her, wondering what she was saying, wondering how this had happened, wondering if I had allowed it to happen, wondering if in my drunkenness I had betrayed her, betrayed my only task as a man, to protect my woman. She suddenly grabbed the steering wheel and tried to pull us into a line of parked cars.

What are you doing, I said.

She lunged again and grabbed the wheel and this time I struck her. I am not proud of that. I make no excuse and ask only forgiveness. I told you, I am a coward. The only people I have the courage to hurt are the women who love me.

She cried out and hugged the passenger door as I drove us down Orleans Avenue past houses with low stoops and lamp-lit liquor stores and stunted skinny trees and the poverty of the human race and then crossed North Carrollton Avenue into a middle class neighborhood of broad spaces between the boulevards and old oaks and a good elementary school painted orange and everything just a short walk to City Park.

Her house, I brought her inside the house.

My god you should have seen the scene. The girl with the navy blue eyes crying and her mother getting her a cold washcloth and her sister standing in the kitchen and her stepfather, no, not even, still just her mother's live-in boyfriend, a light skinned green-eyed black man with a dash of freckles across his face.

He looked at me hard and said, Son what the hell is going on here and oh I wanted to say it all but I didn't have to, the girl with the navy blue eyes did it for me.

As her mother entered with the washcloth and her sister stood sentinel in the kitchen under a lemon yellow light, the boyfriend sat on the couch next to the girl with the navy blue eyes and he tried to touch her shoulder, whispering something like, Honey what's the matter, I'll take care of you and he put his hand on her shoulder and she recoiled as if she'd been shot.

From her throat came an ungodly sound and she said, Don't you ever fucking touch me again!

He withdrew his hand and he looked at me. Did he know that I knew?

4. Twenty years later and more I still fantasize about what I should have done.

In my dream I drive all night and arrive at her cousin's house in Houston. That's the other part of the fantasy, that the events she hinted at the afternoon before the most important game of football I would ever play, then revealed drunkenly in a movie theatre during a screening of 'Cotton Club' and then finally described to me utterly and pitifully one hot afternoon in Baton Rouge when we lay on the bed in my dorm room sweating silver into one another's arms, those events would have taken place in Houston Texas instead of Denver Colorado.

Somehow I was never able to imagine driving from New Orleans to Denver by myself, or perhaps in my fantasy I am always taking either my father's car or stealing Jackson's brother's Trans Am and I have to be back the next day.

So in the fantasy she tells me their names. She tells me their names the night that she thought it was happening again.

5. We were in Jackson's house looking, as usual, for a spot where we could screw. That night it was in the billiards room on the hard low pile red carpet next to the thick legs of the carom table. The room was dark but light from the neighbor's house streamed through the blinds giving it a noir effect as if a private dick were working deep into the night, his gal Friday brewing another pot of Joe as the minutes turned into hours turned into days.

The girl with the navy blue eyes was drunk, very, very drunk. Like most of my women she tried to keep up with my appetites though few have been able to without losing their jobs, their sanity and eventually me. When she drank she slipped into the realm of the subconscious. When she was drunk she told me things.

For example, the night the football players took the homecoming court to dinner at the Happy Buddha. We made out in City Park afterwards. She was drunk on the stuff underage kids order the first time they get served in a restaurant. Our lips were hard on each other, hands reaching under shirts and under dresses. The girl with the navy blue eyes suddenly grabbed my hand and said, Slow down, don't be like him. What, I said but instead of answering she made a little cry and then puked red all over her pretty white dress.

As we were having sex that night in the billiards room, Jackson's brother was upstairs practicing the electric guitar, accompanying a Van Halen record. Then the girl with the navy blue eyes cried out.

Stop, she said. Please, please stop.

I stopped and she curled into a fetal position. She was shaking. I reached out to touch her and she jumped.

It's me, I said. It's me.

She let me hold her. Tucking her head under my chin she asked me if I had scared them away.

Scared who away, I said.

Those guys, she said.

What guys, I said but I knew who she was talking about.

6. So in the fantasy I get her to tell me their names and then I take a car and I head to Houston even though it really happened in Denver.

I drive all night, talking to my uncle's dead man to keep myself awake.

When I arrive, Houston is just coming alive and it's Sunday morning and even the churches aren't awake.

I navigate through that hell of highways and toll roads and towers of steel and glass burning up out of the ground like lightning strikes in reverse and pass the decrepit Astrodome where Earl Campbell once made them pay and Bum Phillips was as popular as Jesus and then off the Interstate into a neighborhood of sycamores and long yards and sprinklers throwing arcs of water over the land, a spring morning and the promise already of tremendous heat.

An old man edges down the driveway, a veteran's cap on his head, a cane in his hand, the country he almost died for going to hell all around him. He picks up the newspaper and squints into the sun, another day to make the world piss him off.

A jogger jogs down the street lost in his Walkman, stoned on exercise and music, sweat soaking into his dark red shirt.

I park whatever car I am driving in front of her aunt's house, the fictitious place she stayed most of the summer of 1984.

In my fantasy I have the address from a letter that she wrote to me from here but in reality that letter was hand-delivered the day she left for Denver and I wasn't to read it until she was already gone but I read it that same night.

7. That letter changed me forever. It was perfumed and later I found out the name of that scent and for years after we had split up I would occasionally walk up to a perfume counter in a department store and ask if they had it and if they did I would ask to smell it and when the saleswoman asked me if I wanted to make a purchase I would say, No, I'm just remembering someone and they would always smile and say how romantic and sweet that was.

Because you must always remember that the girl with the navy blue eyes was my first love, the one who set all the wheels in motion that brought me to where I am today.

Her letter was written in beautiful cursive and she spoke of charms that I never knew I possessed and later I understood that love was simply someone else saying your name in a way that made you hear it for the first time. That night I looked into the mirror with her letter in my hand and said, This is me. This is who I am. Andre. I said it again and again until it was nothing, just two syllables, ON-DRAY riding into infinity. Her letter did that. Her letter spoke of the night we would spend together. For that letter I thought I was willing to wait one hundred summers.

8. But in my fantasy she mailed it from this house and so I exit the vehicle and walk up to the door. It's early Sunday and it takes more than one ring of the doorbell to get an answer. In my dream her cousin Terry opens the door, a man built like an offensive tackle. In reality Terry was squishy as a teddy bear but now he's a hero wondering who this white boy is knocking on his door at this hour. I quickly remind him that we met in the fall when he and his girlfriend came to see the World's Fair.

Oh yeah, he says, rubbing his eyes.

Then he asks me what I'm doing here and where is his cousin, the girl with the navy blue eyes.

I tell him that I'm alone, that she's probably home in bed.

He wants to know why I am here.

I tell him that I have something he needs to know but it would be better if I came inside.

He's unsure but lets me in.

The living room is all white, the carpet, walls and furniture. There's a snow white baby grand piano and white flowers in a glass vase on a glass table in the center of the room, surrounded by white sectional sofas with glass tables interspersed between white shaded lamps.

From upstairs a woman's voice calls out, Who's at the door?

Terry hollers that it's the girl with the navy blue eyes' boyfriend and the voice asks if something happened. Terry looks at me and I shake my head 'no' and he hollers up the stairs that everything is okay. The voice says, Ok, and asks for water and a Tylenol. Terry hollers that he'll get it and then he leads me into the kitchen.

He offers me orange juice which I take and drink down quickly. No matter how many different ways I imagine this scene, I find that I am always craving orange juice after a night of coffee and driving and talking to the ghost of the old black man my Uncle Foot beat to death on the streets of Washington Louisiana in the year 1957.

9. That night Uncle Foot was in the saloon on Main Street playing cards and he was losing. Ordinarily a good-humored man as well as the finest cabinet carpenter in three parishes and maybe the state, Uncle Foot, like most of the Carriere men had a drinking problem (the problem being that he was always very thirsty and there was always plenty around to drink) which would evolve into violence when he lost at cards.

Uncle Foot rose from the green felt-covered table with a rocks glass of whiskey and ice in his hand.

The saloon was loud, coon-ass music going on the juke box, a blend of accordions and fiddles and twangy singing in French. Men stood at the bar in their farm clothes, their heavy muddy boots and their low down hats, clean-shaven dark men, hunched up against progress, against the New Negro and the Old Negro, against the Beats and the City and the Governor and the Mayor and each other and God, especially against God were those raw men of the soybean earth and the flat views to Texas and the Gulf Of Mexico sending clouds of heavy rain every year as regular as an Indian monsoon, a land to ride a horse on, till fields and hunt the winged creature and the horned animals and the small vermin and the hares, a place to walk the railroad tracks with a dog and a .22, a place to brave bleak, ceiling-killing skies and suicide your last and final friend. These were a people as far from God as their women would let them go, men without fear, without country, insular, isolated, speakers of a foreign tongue, a Diaspora forced by warring nations into a wilderness not of their choice, people for whom life was inseparable from pain and suffering and celebration and good times, a guilty and blessed race these Acadians, mad for wealth and deprived of its enjoyment, gluttons for food, booze and football, eager to make the deal, the meal, the ride, the kill.

From those men arrayed against the bar one stepped forward and joined Uncle Foot as he walked through the swinging doors and out onto the only paved street in town.

It was my father, eighteen years old and only recently a companion on his older brother's prowls.

So far it had been the best of times. Foot shared his women, his whiskey and the use of his car. He took my father to all the honkytonks in Port Barre, Opelousas, Eunice, Ville Platte, Church Point, Carencro and Mamou, even to the big cities of Lafayette and Baton Rouge, though not to New Orleans which Foot never cared for. Foot introduced his younger brother to all the whores and young bucks and no-goods and cowboys and playboys and junkies he had the pleasure of running with. It was another time, the 50's, fewer cameras, more privacy, wider gaps between places, open road, gravel and shells and cheap and plentiful gasoline. It was a time when doubt was the only crime that carried a living death sentence and everyone knew that the traitors were everywhere, all around us, disguised as ourselves, good Americans, but traitors nonetheless, Communist espionage, nuclear secrets and the nobility of our cause. It was conservative and reactive and therefore exploded more keenly when the borders were suddenly removed.

Uncle Foot stood and gazed across the street at the half-wit old black man who swept the sidewalks of the town, drank white port in the shade of the post office and was now sleeping in the doorway of a shoe store.

Foot swirled the whiskey in his glass and said it tasted like shit. It seemed to him that the saloon could provide a better grade of whiskey considering how much money he just lost in there.

My father nodded, a boy of average height and build with dark hair, hazel eyes, a look of drunken innocence on his face. He agreed that the saloon oughta serve a better class of hooch.

Actually, said Foot. I kinda like it.

Well sure, said the boy. It ain't so bad after all.

Foot smiled, sipped his whiskey. When he'd drunk it all he began walking across the street. He looked neither to the left nor the right as it was unnecessary. There was zero traffic. To the right was a mild hill sloping upwards. Any car cresting it would see Foot right away. To the left was a flat strip of concrete that crossed the bayou on a WPA bride and disappeared in the darkness en route to Bunkie. There was one traffic light, a golden phallus hanging over an intersection a block down, suspended by wires, a flickering endless four-way yellow orange fire burning into the night.

Foot walked up to the sleeping, scrawny, toothless old black man dressed overalls, clod hoppers and a dirty white t-shirt. He was snoring.

This old nigger's been sleeping on the streets since I was your age, said Foot. I don't know why the hell we allow something like this to happen. We got to get rid of this kinda trash.

My father mumbled something about getting the old man a tent or something.

Hell no, said Foot. I'm saying we need to get rid of this kind of shit. You know what I'm saying.

My father wasn't sure what Foot was saying.

Foot lifted the rocks glass (he was a lefty) and hurled it with maximum force into the old black man's head.

The glass shattered and blood sprayed. The old man groaned, put his hands to his face and tried to lurch to a sitting position.

He never had a chance. Foot jumped on him with those big feet and ended it quickly. My father couldn't believe how fast a man could kill another man with just his boots but Foot was on the old man's neck, jaw and nasal passages and in less than a minute Foot had stomped the old man to death.

He leapt away as if he'd just dodged a poisonous snake, then looked at his brother, breathing hard, panting and he said, I want you to get that old nigger out of here. Get the blanket from the back of my truck. Do it now.

My father ran back and got the blanket, covered up the bloody and defaced Negro and then dragged the body away like a deflated bale of cotton. No vehicles passed and no one was out as he pulled it down a side street and past the old steamboat hotel where he once lived as a boy and the warehouse where he and three of his friends were almost buried alive in a fort they made out of cotton bales and past the mansion where lived the crazy one-armed man and down at last through the brush and the croak of bullfrogs to the edge of Bayou Courtableau where he pushed the body of the old man out into the midnight green waters. No one saw him except the ever watchful eye of the Master, witness to all our victories and all of our crimes. Unweighted, the body floated away with the slow current, a pagan offering to the web-footed and sharp-toothed citizens of the natural world.

10. In reality she was raped in the basement of her aunt's house in Denver Colorado.

The problem is that houses down south and especially Houston Texas don't have basements. Nevertheless I cannot dream my way around that subterranean circumstance and so in my fantasy I reply to Terry's question about what I am doing in his kitchen at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning by asking him if I can see his basement.

He looks at me like the crazy motherfucker that I am and says, You drove all the way here from New Orleans just to see my basement? Come on man, I was up until three o'clock in the morning. I ain't got time for this shit.

I explain that it has something to do with what I have to tell him and so he unfolds his arms and walks across the kitchen to a door next to the pantry. He opens it, flicks on a light and heads down the stairs.

There's a washer-dryer in the corner, a single naked bulb burning over the low room, pipes and wires and grey concrete, dark green low pile carpeting, a collapsed plaid sofa covered with blankets, an old stereo, a few records.

And a pool table, a pool table, there's always a pool table in these dreams and that explains why she thought it was happening again in the billiards room at Jackson's house, how she thought I was one of them, one of her rapists, and then I became me again, the hero that saved her at the last.

I look around the room that I have created in my mind.

11. One afternoon in September of our freshmen year in college I held her in my sweat-drenched arms on the single bed in my dorm room. The ceiling fan crashed in an endless blind circle but nothing could tame that heat. The sun bore down on those brick and tile buildings like an angry Old Testament god as we lay in our bed of sadness and sweaty sexual scents and I made her tell me. I said that I was going crazy imagining what happened that night, who, how many, what the circumstances were and I said just tell me how it happened. I want to know.

She lay her naked brown body against me and spoke into my chest the same way she did almost a year earlier speaking into my letter jacket on a hard iron bench while two old white women power-walked around us on the afternoon before the most important football game that I would ever play. Back then she had led me to believe that they had just gotten a 'little rough.'

A few months later she told me the harder truth while we were in a packed movie theatre watching 'Cotton Club'. I got up from my seat, walked to the men's room and punched the paper towel dispenser five times, then walked back through the lobby past a concerned and pimpled usher who had heard the sound of bending metal and was going to investigate the heap of crumpled aluminum screwed to the wall that I had left behind.

I sat in that movie theater next to my shivering teenage lover and watched nothing and heard nothing the rest of the film.

But in bed with her in the hot September heat of Red Stick Louisiana on the campus of Louisiana State University within sight of Death Valley and its promise of group hate she told me. She said that there was a party at her aunt's house, an end of the summer bash as well as a graduation celebration for Terry's girlfriend who had finished beautician school. It was unsupervised by any grownups as auntie was away and the house was filled with friends and strangers and it got loud and bottles broke and cans were crushed and people got high, oh so high. She said she was tired of all that, she'd been partying all summer long and so she went downstairs to the basement and turned the lights off and put the headphones on her pretty head and put Earth Wind and Fire on the turntable and lay there on the couch thinking of me.

How she missed me.

How things would be when she came back.

How she would tell me her secret about her mother's boyfriend and how then I would understand why she stayed in Denver all summer.

How she would explain not calling or writing (she surely would have had some kind of good explanation for that other than she wanted to imagine me waiting which I did and missing her which I did and wondering about her which I did and anxious which I was and confused which I was and lonely which I was) and then she'd come back and the last days of the last summer of high school would be all good at last.

'Reasons' was playing on the headphones when she felt that someone was in the basement. Perhaps they had seen her go down there and so they followed, creeping in the dark, making sure to lock the door behind them and there she was on the sofa in the light of the stereo's glow, green with one red dot in the darkness and they were on her.

I fought back, she said. I hurt one of them, I did but then he punched me in the face so I just closed my eyes and waited for it to be over. They hurt me. They hurt me bad. They even hurt my hiney. I called for you. When they grabbed me. I did. I said 'Andre' but you didn't come.

After a long, long while I said, How many, because at that point I didn't know.

Three, she said. But one of them left, he didn't want to do it. The other two...stayed.

That last word escaped her body in the only gut-wrenching cry that I ever hope to hear. Then she curled into me, deep against my chest, shivering with fear and pain and humiliation and shame.

12. She had called for me, called 'André' out into the darkness of the basement. What if it had it made its way out of that room, could it have found me across that landscape of zeroes that was my life? Could it have bounced off a satellite, caught a Sputnik on its last parabola around the Earth then come down, down, down into the Louisiana hot night, the last Saturday in July 1984?

Where was I?

Where could I have been found as she was calling desperately for help?

I have done the math, believe me, reconstructed exactly where I was and what I was doing because it was a spectacular moment in my young and dumb existence. I was on a double date with Jackson who had set me up with his girlfriend's best friend, a dark-haired child with tar black eyes. While Jackson went off to screw his girlfriend in her bedroom that girl and I lay on the couch and played baseball.

Where was I when that cry for help was trying to reach me?

Even as two guys were beating, raping and sodomizing the girl with the navy blue eyes, I had passed second base and was rounding third, praying hard for the home run.

13. Terry is standing there in his bathrobe looking at me.

So, he says. The basement. What you got to tell me, man?

I ask him if there was a big party here at the end of last summer.

He says yes.

I ask him if he knows what happened that night to his cousin, the girl with the navy blue eyes.

He says no.

I tell him that two guys raped her on the floor right where we are standing.

He doesn't say a word. Not right away. His face changes. Then he says, Who?

14. That's a good question, one that I still don't have an answer for. Besides the two guys themselves or three if you include the one who left, probably only she knows.

The last time I saw the girl with the navy blue eyes she smiled at me the way she did twenty five winters ago, with delight, with joy and gratitude when I showed her the key to the room I rented in the hotel where our winter formal was being held. No more grabbing at each other in the car or trying to sneak back to my house. I decided that our first time would be in a hotel room high above Canal Street overlooking the Father of Waters and the warehouse district and the Vieux Carre' laid out in the wonder and splendor that is all pasts, all futures, all possibilities. I wanted to stand at a window naked and know that in one way at least I was on my way to manhood. I wanted a woman to admire my carriage, frame and proportions as I stood there in that December light and then she would call me, call me, call me back to bed. I wanted that for me and me alone.

But so many years and lies had passed like swarms of locusts, cutting down all the crops that love will sow.

When I walked into the lobby of the Bourbon Orleans Hotel I had not seen the girl with the navy blue eyes in a decade or more.

I had been as far to the ends of the earth as my fear, funds and friends would take me and no further.

In that time perhaps she had left New Orleans twice. In the many years since high school she had gotten married, divorced and now was raising two girls alone. Time had barely touched her. She still had soft and lovely hair like a corona of brown and golden bees, still had those teeth, predatory, straight-edged weapons gleaming with an otherworldly light. Her figure was the same trim body that had slipped into and out of a prom dress. The birth mark over the left eye, somehow I had forgotten that, how a lover's small imperfection could make them seem even more lovely, more perfect, more real.

I had loved her as hard as a teenager can love, made her an ideal no person could achieve. First love burns like the sun on the hot water, merciless, exhausting, deadly. When she revealed all her poor hearts, all the trampling and pain she had endured, she became someone alien to me, a radical element, a shattered icon. And I punished her dearly for that.

But now everything was all right with us. She was happily surprised that I had called upon her unannounced at her job to say an awkward hello in a lobby of low couches and unprivate looks.

She asked about my father by name, my brother and stepmother too. This was gracious of her as my stepmother developed a dislike of the girl with the navy blue eyes that bordered on pathological. Years later when my stepmother confessed that all that time she had been sleeping with her Shrink much of those mad episodes fell into some sort of clarity but never a total understanding. It is our own guilt or lack thereof that drives every waking and sleeping moment of our lives.

I told the girl with the navy blue eyes that three years earlier my stepmother had shot her face off in the backyard.

No, I didn't. I said that she took her own life (as if she had returned a piece of luggage to the department store, which in a way I guess she did) with one of my father's guns on Christmas Day.

The girl with the navy blue eyes gave me the look, the look that always kills me, the look of total love, empathy and pity. When they give that look to me I know why I was put on this planet, to be one who feels pain in extra proportions, who cries for the wounded owl and weeps for the chopped down trees and drops at the cruelty of dead rivers, filthy hobos, the begging insane, the beautifully lonely, the rightfully imprisoned, the voluntary diseased. They always look at me and they know, boy do they, what a fucked up kind of Christmas that was.

And then they love me a little harder because they see that I too get Life's ass kickings, Life's false teeth.

I'm so sorry, she said and she meant it, god did she mean it.

We said a few more words, me about my wife, her about her girls. I didn't bring up her family because I had heard that her mother married the boyfriend and I always wondered what was lying underneath all of that and I didn't want to know anymore, at all, about who knew what, why or how.

Then she had to go.

It was great to see you again, she said.

We made plans to get together later for drinks and indeed she did call me twice but by then I was already half-wasted, drunk on whiskey as well as what I had done.

Which was this.

As we hugged goodbye, I leaned into her and I said, I know there were many lies and deceits between us and a lot of water under the bridge but I want you to know one thing: you were my first.

She pulled back and looked right into my brain cells.

How many women had I told her I had slept with before she and I got together? An insane number, well into triple digits. Tellingly, none of my many lovers attended our high school. They all lived in Canada, Mexico, Texas, Minnesota, California, Jakarta.

A look crossed her eyes. All the times I had casually lied. But also she must have seen it, I hope she saw it, saw an explanation for who I was then and how I had behaved after she told me her secrets, how torn apart I was and maybe, maybe, maybe she would understand why I cheated on her one month after we had sex for the first time.

Really?

The brush of a smile on her generous lips.

I looked into the eyes of the girl with the navy blue eyes and told her the only truth.

Yes, I said

We hugged a moment, harder than before and then I turned around and walked out of her life for what I am sure will be the very last time.

I cannot bring all of this up to her again.

15. In my dream I have those two names, names that in some ways I have pulled out of the air, in other ways have some basis in reality.

The girl with the navy blue eyes put a snapshot on the wall next to her bed in her dorm room at Louisiana State University. In the photo were two young guys dressed in their ROTC formal uniforms. One was black, wore dark sunglasses and had a Jheri curl. The other had a blonde crew-cut and was wearing aviator shades and a red beret. When I asked her who they were she told me their names and said they were friends of hers from Denver. It was a candid of two young men mugging in the summer sun, looks of friendly seriousness on their faces. I made no comment at the time. Jealousy was never really my bag and she gave me little reason to suspect that she was doing anything untoward.

Of course not only was there so much that I still didn't know about her, myself and the world, I had no clue that there was another subset of things I didn't know that I didn't know. That was the beauty of youth. The world was divided into the familiar and the unfamiliar. The familiar you had mastered already. The unfamiliar was simply waiting for your conquering stride.

16. Then one night I came by her dorm room and the girl with the navy blue eyes was drunk and crying and the photo was torn to pieces.

Those motherfuckers, she said.

So they were the ones, friends of hers apparently.

I knew she had known them, that they weren't total strangers. She had told me that while they were raping her, one of them called her a cocktease, said that she had been leading them on all summer.

That was a lie, she said, she never led anyone to believe that she wanted them to fuck her much less gang-bang her in the basement.

Maybe, maybe, just maybe the whole thing was a case of mistaken identity, that in the darkness with the music going hard and funky upstairs and the maelstrom of voices and shouts and hollering and laughter and chaos they thought the girl with the navy blue eyes was her younger sister, the girl with the very developed breasts. Because the girl with the very developed breasts was out every night all summer long, hanging at the Denny's and driving all those western motherfuckers crazy.

Yes, that was it, she said.

They didn't know it was her. Why else would her friends do that, two guys whose picture she had kept on the wall to torment her for almost an entire semester? How could they do that to her, she wondered, she wondered aloud.

I realized that I had been staring into the faces of my enemies for two months, having sex with the girl with the navy blue eyes while they watched, their eyes locked in military sternness, their stares unwavering, unblinking, shielded from the sun, from justice, from what they had done.

17. One of the them was named Eric, the other I'm not sure. For some reason, Jamaal seems right, something strong and afro-centric to go with that greasy pretty hard boy persona. Eric Wright (because he is anything but right) and Jamaal Walker because I just like how that sounds.

18. In my dream I say these two names to Terry.

What?

I say their names again.

No man, he says. Not Eric and Jamaal, there's no way they would do something like that.

That's what she said.

My cousin told you that Eric and Jamaal raped her?

Yes she did.

No fuckin' way. I been knowing those dudes since middle school. You telling me they ran a train on my cousin?

A white dude with a crew cut and a brother with a Jheri curl. Does that describe them?

He looks at me and nods. What did she tell you, he says.

She said she was down here in the dark with the headphones on. Three dudes snuck down here and jumped her. One of them couldn't go through with it, I guess, and he left. The other two, Eric and Jamaal, they stayed. They beat her, raped her and sodomized her. That's exactly what she said.

Who was the other guy, the one who left?

I don't know.

19. I don't.

Who was that guy?

Who was the one who said, Nah, this ain't for me?

Should we give him some kind of award or should we lump him in with the other two?

He didn't try to stop them and he didn't go upstairs and tell anybody, did he?

Do I put him on my hit list too?

Does he get a bullet, imaginary or otherwise?

No, he gets to live, but I would like to meet him, ask him what he was thinking, if he even remembers that night so long ago your heart would break.

Do you remember the summer of 1984, I'd say to him, probably old and fat now, his forties hard on him, his own kids in trouble, his job a hassle, his wife a bitch or dead or just a phone number at her mother's house.

Remember how young you were?

You went to the movies that summer, saw Ghostbusters and Footloose and Breakin' and Gremlins and Romancing the Stone.

And the music, do you remember the music? Hold Me Now and Beat Street and I Feel For You and I'll Wait and Let's Go Crazy and Let's Hear it for the Boy.

Did you, like me, wait for someone to come home to you, wait to see movies together, wait until waiting seemed stupid and irrelevant?

I'd like to ask him, wherever he is, if he would have done anything different, said No, this ain't cool or went and told Terry or just turned on the lights and told the girl with the navy blue eyes to put on her panties and her shorts and get out of here right now.

Was he a coward to not stop those cowards?

What would he say, how would he raise his own child, what paths has he crossed since then?

Did Eric and Jamaal brag to him about it later, laughed when they said they fucked that bitch up?

Did he feel left out?

Did he do it with them the next time because you goddamn well can be sure there would be a next and a next and a next time?

Did he?

And if he is you, did you?

20. And then Terry gets mad.

His body begins to shake, to vibrate, as if an invisible hand were agitating him in preparation to opening him up and unleashing his contents. A noise escapes from him, something like a groan and a yell, then he takes three steps and punches a hole through the wood paneling. He draws back as if he would hit it again and then stops himself and just stands there a moment with his head down, his shoulders rising with his deep and violent breathing.

Finally, he turns and he looks at me. His eyes are red, wide, glassy.

So what the fuck, he says. You drove all the way here just to tell me this shit?

No man, I drove all the way here because I figured you knew how to find those dudes.

What you gonna do, says Terry.

I'm gonna kill them.

Terry looks at me, a squint in his eye, appraising my body language, the way that I speak. Mutherfucker talking about killing somebody, he says. You got a gun?

21. This is a really good question. What gun would I have had if I had pulled this stunt back in President Reagan's first administration? At that time I could have lain hands on my Mossberg .12 gauge pump, my Ruger .22 semi-automatic rifle and my Smith and Wesson .357 magnum.

But something tells me that I would have had my father's old Police .38, the one he bought for about six bucks in a junk store downtown and restored to a state of relative usefulness. He kept it in the glove box and therefore it escaped the burglars the first time they came through the house and eighty-sixed my his guns. It was an ungainly revolver built to be used as much as a bludgeon as a firearm, the gun of choice for a million asshole cops administering curbside justice, not to mention a bunch of outgunned T-Men chasing down Al Capone's well-armed goons. Over the years my father had blued and reblued that gun, browned it, attempted to apply chrome to it, baked it in the oven, left it in the deep freezer overnight to see what would happen (nothing). It was accurate from about thirty feet away. After that you were just making noise and scaring people. My father called it his Ugnaught gun and by that he meant crude but useful, of low breeding and lower upbringing but also a functional presence in a world where art was almost dead.

It was kept in the glove box as a last defense but I once saw him use it in a manner that would have to be described in other terms.

22. We were on our way home from a Saturday morning hunting trip and we hit a roadhouse where my father drank a pitcher of beer and watched clouds of smoke rising from the burning marsh. It looked like the end of days out there with three or four blazes consuming the Earth, fire licking at the edges of the water, black smoke going grey and then rising in the moist winter air, high, high, high into the golden Louisiana sun. Those were huge skies back when I was a kid, skies like pictures in old encyclopedias of Cold War families smiling under the B-52's with sunshine and white America and TV keeping us clean. Those clouds of burning death rose into a fat-headed nimbus and looked for the world like the aftermath of atomic war.

My father felt the same way. He raised his hand and pointed out the open door behind the bar. The place was empty except for us, the bartender and two silent old men sipping beer from plastic cups.

It's the Ugnaught nukes, my father said.

He attributed those mushroom clouds to the inept work of the locals, windwhipped leathery people who subsisted on canned soup, raw oysters, cigarettes and beer.

This whole strip of Highway 90 was dead or dying, the vacation camps of the city people a long gone fantasy. That two-lane highway of curvature and death had once teemed with life and barbecues and families and family friends piling out of heavy automobiles, bags of liquor and food, boys riding bikes and girls wearing hula hoops, fishing and sunburns and Miller Time, card games and night fights and screwing your neighbor's kid.

It all happened and it was the American Dream but time and hurricanes and the wrath of man had reduced it to a figment of itself.

The Ugnaughts, my father said, they've learned to crack the atom but they have no sense of direction. They're like the Russians who can't hit anything with their ICBM's so they just make them huge, La Bomba, five hundred megatons, enough nukes to wipe out everything for two hundred and fifty square miles.

He looked at me a moment, trying to understand the world he had brought me into. Enough TNT stuck down in silos to kill every man woman and child ninety-nine times.

He looked back out the window where the marsh continued to burn. They did it on purpose, to promote new growth and the Coast Guard was usually nearby with a fire hose and crewmen in their winter blues. It was magnificent and beautiful, vertigo in your hunting boots to stand there and see those great heights of smoke that would eventually be blown to the east, Mississippi and Alabama and Florida and beyond, places that I would be blown to someday, ports and ocean towns, small deep harbors and immense intercostals waterways and even across the sea, the sea, the great and powerful Atlantic and then down through the Caribbean among green jewels and shanties and rum breakfasts and dried out Englishmen.

Through the beyond and beyond the beyond, it was all out there for me but at that moment I knew nothing, no one, was as ignorant as an unwritten book.

The bartender, a short fat bottle-blonde with jailhouse tattoos on her breasts turned on the TV and began changing the channels with a pair of pliers.

Who knows what time the Tigers are playing, she said without looking back around at us.

No one spoke.

I took aim at the cue ball and fired a shot into a side pocket. The table was scarred and bleached, cigarette burns and rings in the felt where many bottles of beer and glasses of hooch had burned their way to fame.

Nobody knows when the Tigers are playing?

She looked at my father who shrugged his shoulders and said, Saints play on Sunday.

He pointed at me.

That one works there, he said.

Works where, she said.

At the Dome.

The Superdome?

Yep, my father said.

What does he do?

Pushes ice.

Pushes ice?

Yep.

She looked across the bar at me and said, You push ice?

Yes maa'm.

What the hell does that mean?

He loads big plastic bins with fifty pound bags of ice and takes them to the concessions stands, my father said proudly. He pushes the bins up these steep fucking ramps...

She stood there with a cigarette in her hand, a cloud of smoke coiling around her head matching the one on the horizon. Sneering at the idea of pushing bins of ice or anything else that might accelerate her heart rate or fuck up her buzz, she turned her gaze upon the old men, two grey wisps under straw fedoras stained the color of ice tea.

They each had a pitcher in front of them with a plastic cup filled with ice floating in the beer to keep it cold. They were all-day drinkers, a dying breed of men who had fought in every war.

Mr. Henry, you know what time the Tigers play?

The old man on the left shook his head no.

What about you, Mr. Herbie, you know when the Tigers play?

The second old man put his beer down and slowly shook his head.

I don't pay too much attention to it anymore, he said. Nowadays it's mostly just our nigras fighting their nigras.

You got that right, said the other old man.

The bartender reached up and changed the TV channel, found Tom and Jerry being chased by a colored maid with a broom and a bulldog.

My father lurched off his bar stool, walked over to stand near the pool table and watch me practice bank shots. He had a glass of beer in his hand and a sly look on his handsome hazel-eyed, face, a touch of salt and pepper in the mustache and at the temples, heavy creases on either side of his nose and down around his mouth from smiling. He was smiling now as he spoke to me.

Did you hear what that old coot said?

About football? Yeah, I heard him.

My father shook his head in amusement.

The funny thing is, he said, there was a time in my life when I would have said something to him. 'Change your ways old man or the Lord will smite thee.' Some shit like that. Or I would have left. Paid my tab with righteous indignation and walked out, making some comment about the content of a man's character or something like that before I made my grand departure. Nowadays I could give a rat's ass. It doesn't mean that I approve of it you know.

I know.

Right. I just don't care anymore. I don't believe you can really change people. They are who they are. You just have to live the way you think that you're supposed to. Have a code, I suppose, and stick to it. Like Walter Gates. 'I'm always polite.'

23. My father has made about three friends since we moved down from Minnesota nine years ago and one of them is a gunsmith in Chalmette Louisiana named Walter Gates, the finest gunsmith in the state and maybe of all time. He sits in a little room in a little apartment with little tools and shaves slivers of metal off of the mechanism of a handgun, working down to fractions of infinite smallness and when he is done your gun fires the Walter Gates Way. To look at it is to discharge it, the action is so smooth.

Besides my father's admiration for Mr. Gates' mastery of the complexities of gunsmithery is his relentless good cheer and devotion to his wife, a true invalid in a room with the shades drawn and a death sentence for their marriage tacked to the door.

Only once, said my father, did I ever see him crack. He's such a friendly man you know. Always upbeat. But one time we were talking about something that was going on with her, I don't know what, hell I don't even know what's wrong with her but anyway he was telling me about something, a procedure perhaps and you could tell what all that time with her like that, years I'm sure, had done to him. He said something like 'Yeah, it can be hard...' and his voice trailed off. Then one second later, literally one second, he was back to the way he always is. In fact he gave himself a quick little pep talk. Something like, 'Nope, everything's fine, everything's jake.' Jeez, unbelievable. I don't think I could do it.

What was funny was that already my father was the caretaker for an invalid-my stepmother-who was going more and more insane, victim of her brain chemicals, soul guilt and deserved fears, all her medications untaken, her life in the balance between hope, death and doom. Within three years of that day in the roadhouse bar my father would be retired from the government chair he wore out at the Department of Agriculture and showing up every morning at my stepmother's office to run errands, answer the telephone and carry several guns.

On top of it all, it is Mr. Gates' philosophy-'I'm always polite'-that carries the day for my father.

Mr. Gates was home in his little apartment one night. Heard some activity in the parking lot. 'One big nigger beating the hell out of a smaller nigger. I went downstairs and stuck my .44 in the big one's back. I said to him, Sir, I want you to walk away from here right now and keep walking and don't turn around and don't come back tonight.'

My father loves that shit, even from a quasi-racist who'll say something like 'What do expect to happen when you give a monkey a machine gun?' and then turn around and say something like 'I thought about joining the Aryan Nation but they're all cowards. And besides, I've always been for the underdog.'

Full circle, my father likes to say. And 'I'm always polite.' My father likes that expression because it's a guarantee that one will act with dignity no matter the circumstances.

He gets the opportunity to try that out on our ride home.

24. We left the bartender and the old men and hauled ass down Highway 90 with me at the wheel and my father staring at the road, talking about Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, how he'd taught Bob all that he knew and that there had been nothing good in art, music, literature or anything else since 1963.

Why that year? Kennedy?

Nah, said my father but it was true. He knew it, we knew it, the world knew it.

Look out for that Ugnaught, he said as we passed a young male wearing jean shorts riding a three-wheeler down the shoulder of the highway.

In the rearview mirror I watched him fly through a shaggy yard of dead sailboats and crab nets, hit a pile of snow-white oyster shells, go airborne and come down in a a heap of dust. Then he rambled on.

Twenty minutes of staring at the death of the old fishing camps in reverse, their signs hand-painted and nailed to the mailboxes, numbers being irrelevant in a land of open and often threatening skies, marsh grass and a flat view to the end of the world.

The sign on one camp said 'We're Spending Our Kids Inheritance.'

It was a ramshackle one-story wooden house on stilts half out over the water. A pirogue on the front porch, a Boston trawler with an outboard motor covered with a plastic sheet, a dog scratching his ears, a cage with rabbits, goodbye.

Another place was titled 'Mama's Always Right' and mama was living well with three satellite dishes and four pickup trucks and a mailbox shot full of holes.

In the air was the smell of winter and fish.

Eventually we were on the last curves of the long asphalt snake that brings you into New Orleans, the old highway that once was the only entrance from the East. Years ago this was a hot strip of no-tell motels and seafood restaurants, pool halls and bars, gas stations and garages, neon and perfume and greasy kid stuff and the thrill of hitting the crazy city that care forgot.

Now all that was finished, killed dead as death by the Eisenhower Interstate that had been cut from the swamp a few miles north and modern fast causeways attached to the concrete and lemon yellow lanes painted on and wide deep safe medians and overpasses and safety and unstoppable power, New Orleans brought into the world of men.

And death to the state highways and the county roads and the one-owner motel and the family diner and the drive-in movie and the cheap gas and the perfume and the pool hall sticks all broken and pitched in a fire.

Then we were passing a perfect example, a metaphor even for the death of the old days and the old ways, a series of blue-roofed white bungalows surrounding a swimming pool with a horseshoe driveway and a flag pole and a little office with the shades drawn, the grass high, the driveway thick with weeds, the swimming pool filled with trash overflowing and half of the bungalows already being absorbed into the earth by sinkholes.

Like he did every time we passed that faded old joint my father would point and say, The Beatles stayed there when they played New Orleans in 1964.

He would say it as if it meant something to him, as if he had seen them perform in City Park Stadium which he hadn't.

It seemed strange to him, I suppose. that those demi-gods had found themselves at the edge of the eastern world, far from the French Quarter and the hordes of young women who would have torn them into little pieces, The Beatles in a motel room a half mile from my father's house in the suburb of Sherwood Forest.

Once there had been promise.

Once it had only been a matter of time before he was in London and Paris and his novels were on people's minds and Sartre was on the phone and Hollywood could go to hell, they ruined Scott Fitzgerald but they'd never touch him, an American Beckett, an American Joyce.

All that was as fictional now as the Great White Whale.

Dead was Eleanor Rigby and dead were the novels that breathed once or twice upon birth and then were smothered in a suitcase.

Dead was the American Beckett, dead was the American Joyce, cancelled out by two kids and one crazy, crazy wife.

Poor man, my father shook his head at the bungalows where The Beatles wrote one song or smoked a hundred cigarettes or shagged the colored maid or called their mothers and girlfriends on the telephones.

25. We were driving down Pressburg Street passing one story brick homes mutually exclusive in their plain and unpromising ugliness. Half of them had been built by my stepmother's now dead real estate company. It was a neighborhood that replaced a first-growth woods of pine, oak, cypress, magnolia, dogwood, hackberry and a hundred other names. It had been the edge of the wilderness and then it had been hacked down. Now the wilderness was beyond us, lingering at the edge of Bullard Road, a faceless line of trees where devil worshippers built clubhouses and buried their kills.

Agnes isn't here, my father said. Her car's gone. Humph.

Where was his wife? Out golfing, probably. Not here, that was for sure. She was hardly ever here anymore.

The poor dear.

Her life, as we would all come to learn, was a deception wrapped in a forgery and buried in a lie.

She might have been on the greens or she might have been in a bar or she might have been in a motel off the very highway we had just exited.

Keep driving, my father said. I want to get another beer. Go to the Time Saver.

He pulled out the Marlboro Man and fired one up, cracked the window and exhaled into the December air.

A noble day.

A day of low expectations and no chance of rain.

A day for the park or the zoo or a museum or a film.

Where did real families go on Saturdays?

Where was any of it going to end?

His thoughts circled the air in the car. His mood had changed, his drunkenness was gone, his buzz was inside of itself, his cares were many and his heart was weak. He was dangerous now in a way that he rarely was.

Caution had left the building.

26. I pulled in front of the convenience store, got cash from my father and the usual instructions- 'Cheap but not too cheap. None of that low malt liquor stuff. Old Milwaukee if they have it. If not, Pabst or something. You know. I leave it to your discretion my good strong boy'-and went inside.

I snagged a six-pack of Schlitz and a pack of gum and put them on the counter. As the clerk rang me up I noticed that a beat-up muscle car had blocked us in. The music from its car stereo was so loud that the windows on the store shook.

I paid and walked outside.

The driver sat behind the wheel, sunglasses obscuring his eyes, Led Zeppelin destroying his eardrums. A skinny redhead girl wearing torn clothing jumped out of the car and ran to the bathroom located on the side of the building.

My father was not a happy man. He craned his neck and looked out the rear window as I started up the Honda, put it in reverse and waited for the muscle car to move. Nothing. I touched the horn and began to inch back.

Watch it goddamn it, my father said. Don't hit the asshole.

He's not moving.

I know he's not moving. Hold on.

My father handed me the beer he'd begun to open, got out and walked towards the muscle car. He leaned down and looked at the driver.

Excuse me sir, he said, but we need to get out. Do you mind pulling forward?

The driver didn't say a word. He just reached down, turned the music louder, then looked at my father and gave him the finger.

Immigrant Song was lighting up the air as my father turned around, walked back to our car, opened the door, opened the glove box, took the Police .38 from its yellow oilcloth, closed the glove box, closed the car door, walked back over to the muscle car, pointed the pistol at the drover and said, Hey!

The driver looked over, saw my father pointing the gun at him. His mouth fell open. He reached down. The music stopped.

Excuse me sir, my father said, but if you don't move your car right now, the next time your mama sees you, you'll be in a coffin.

My father wrapped the gun back in the yellow oil cloth smelling of Hoppes Number 9 as the muscle car disappeared.

Ah, he said, taking that first sip of cold beer. That's good.

Raising one finger, and speaking to the windshield as much as to me, he said, I'm always polite.

27. So how would I have wound up with the gun?

A mistake. My father would have forgotten to take it out of the glove box like he did one morning when I was driving him to work.

He'd gotten a DUI prowling Highway 90 looking for his wife so I had the task of getting him to work each morning.

The positive was that I had a car all day.

The negative was that my father had no intention of arriving an hour early for work so I was late for school five days a week.

Each morning we'd ride from the east to the lakefront, crossing the Sea Brook Bridge, Lake Pontchartrain a flat choppy watch face stretching far out of sight, then the nice, big modern white homes along the boulevards and the wide lawns and space, paths and bird sanctuaries and a feeling of sunshine and benevolence even when the rains ripped the land.

My father liked to keep the Police .38 in the glove box if we were together but he would always remove it whenever I had the car by myself.

That morning was unusual only in that my father spotted a lead tire-weight while we were stopped in traffic and insisted that I wait while he went and got it.

Horns blowing, angry drivers whipping around us, fists pumping and there's my father in dress shoes scuffling through the broken glass and gravel to retrieve a two inch lead turd. I began to move even as he was getting back in.

Hold on goddamn it, I'm not even in the car yet!

Come on, I said. For fuck's sake there are a million cars behind us.

Don't curse at me, he said. I'm your father. If I want you to wait you'll wait.

He opened up the glove box to stash the lead that he would melt down into bullets and reload into cartridges and prime and add powder and tamp down with a press and then put them into that very gun, the Police .38 and go shoot a can or a bottle or nothing, just a dirt bank or a pile of trash.

He saw that he had not removed the gun last night when we came home from a visit to the store.

Fuck a duck, he said. I forgot to take out the gun.

He stared at it with his lips pursed and his shoulders slumped as if the gun might disappear on its own.

Well fuck, he said. I guess I'll just have to leave it in the car. I can't take it with me, it's against the law to take a gun into a federal building. Not that they would know. There's no metal detectors. Still, if I got caught it would not be good. You'll have to keep it in the car. Hide it under the seat or something. Don't go waving it ant any of your Ugnaught friends.

I won't.

I know, he said.

Each morning it would be the same routine. I would drop my father off at the yellow-brick agriculture building surrounded by experimental greenhouses on the lakefront campus.

My father would say, Be careful, wear your seat-belt, don't speed.

I'd wave goodbye, make the corner of the parking lot, take off my seatbelt and haul ass double time.

This morning two things happened that were different.

I almost killed a family of three.

I had the opportunity to kill the boyfriend of the mother of the girl with the navy blue eyes.

28. He needs a name. I can't go around just calling him that. However, I don't want to embarrass her, steal her secrets and provide them to the world.

Keep them guessing.

This is a work of fiction. The events in this book are not based on any living or deceased individuals who might want to sue me or kick me or kill me.

We'll call him Pale Eyes because he had that thing going that light-skinned black dudes have, the off-green eyes, real pretty, the kind of look that would catch a woman's heart.

Who was he, what did he do, where did he go?

I knew almost nothing, nor did the girl with the navy blue eyes. He was older than her mother, had kids from a previous marriage, drove a long woody station wagon, wore a soft white Sam Snead hat, always carried (according to the girl with the navy blue eyes) a gun on his hip, a little snubnose .32.

He had no job but seemed to do a series of random things including carpentry and handyman. He was often home at unusual hours when others were away. Vice versa, he was up late, past midnight, past two, in the car, out and about doing what no one ever knew.

He pulled in front of me as I raced through the intersection at Carrollton and Orleans.

29. I had a clear shot at the driver's side door.

Nobody would have blamed me for failure to stop or to not stop quick enough.

If it had been my dream to die behind the wheel like my father had failed to do then that would have been Valhalla, baby.

But as I told you I am a fucking coward who does not want to die and an unbuckled me in that 4banger Honda would be graveyard city.

I swerved across two lanes and slowed down, looking over at him, wondering if he would recognize me, say something, a gesture, a word.

I had that moment of anxiety when one is inadvertently spying.

I was seeing who he was when he wasn't jiving with me, calling me a hep cat when I picked up the girl with the the navy blue eyes and took her to the ring dance.

This wasn't the bad Negro who told her that it was time for me to go home.

This wasn't the dude in the other room loudly making a cup of coffee, opening a freezer for ice.

This was just Pale Eyes riding slouched behind the wheel following the jazz of his mind.

I regretted not slamming into him.

How easy it would be. She would be so happy. Kill him, yes she wanted me to. But she didn't want me to have to go to prison.

There are bad men in prison, she said.

Yes there are.

As I rode along and banged over the nearly defunct tracks of the Union Pacific railroad line that once carried gold, god and cattle to and from New Orleans, Texas, Arizona, Los Angeles and all that history and energy running down the rails made me think of old ways and the men in my family who decided that there was themselves and there was the Law and sometimes they had to agree to disagree.

I thought of the Police .38 in the glove box. I decided to kill Pale Eyes.

30. But I told you that I almost killed a family of three.

This is true.

A minute before I nearly took myself and Pale Eyes off this planet forever, I was racing alongside Bayou St. John, a placid canal with willows and oaks and golf courses on one side and white columned mansions on the other.

Four lanes of flatness and swift downshifts.

I ragged my father's Honda into the ground, running that baby like it was on rails with a soundtrack of Let's Go Crazy

And I did go crazy, my friend, this is not a lie, every moment of every day when you are seventeen years old is madness, hormonal poisoning, the utter lack of production from the incomplete frontal lobes. And insanity rode the gas pedal and insanity passed the old lady in the minivan and insanity took a curve past the garbage truck and insanity was a menace to others and himself.

One last car to pass before I reach the bridge over the Interstate with gods and men going east and west and I made the last, best move around an asstotheground station wagon and I was free, heading up the bridge with the high school football stadium on my right and the LSU Dental School rising like the Ministry of Disinformation on the left and I cast one look back in the rearview mirror at my victory and I saw it.

Saw the car I'd run off the road.

The driver's frozen face as he tried to hold the wheel steady.

The passenger's eyes like solar systems of fear.

In the back seat just a hint of shell of a cowering child.

The car, a little hatchback like mine, rutted over the grass, dust blowing behind like an army of thieves, an oak tree barely missed, came to rest at last under a crepe myrtle.

Then they were gone from my sight and I was picking up speed in the race to get to my destiny with Pale Eyes.

31. Now this is what I wanted to do.

And if I had courage, this is what I would have done.

Instead of continuing on to school that morning I follow Pale Eyes.

In my dream I don't have him go very far.

He takes a right on Bienville, his car slowly cruising down the sun-dappled street, the sidewalks torn up from the relentless live oaks like great wrestlers retired with their wounds and their malformed limbs yet still capable of strenuous activity even if it is impossible to measure and invisible to the naked eye. Brick houses with stoops set up on brick pilings under the bowl of a perfect winter sky. Few birds or no birds, few, very few, most of the sparrows gone south to Mexico and other Latin kingdoms. Just the crows, carrion birds of prey with their mighty wings like massive petroleum fingers shining oily blue in the morning sun.

Pale Eyes rides steady under the boughs of the oaks that nearly touch each other, continuing until Bienville intersects City Park Avenue, the heart of Mid-City, and there he turns.

On three sides are cemeteries, the above ground mausoleums where New Orleanians keep their most sacred treasure, the family bones. These are like giant doghouses, some kept exquiste, the off-white marble wet with dew, others have decayed and gone to the beasts, moss on the flanks, the scroll work crumbling, the message of the next world erased by the workings of this world, the dead's last address and no mail coming and no one left to visit.

It is those places where peace can breath at last, the death of all grief.

Pale Eyes turns right and continues under the oaks, passing Delgado Community College, a Greco-Roman imposture with dirty windows and sooty steps.

He parks in front of a camera store.

I pass him and pull over down the block. I watch in the rearview mirror as he gets out of the station wagon and heads inside the store.

It is 8:35 a.m.

In my dream they keep early hours.

Waiting for Pale Eyes, I pull the Police .38 from the glove box.

It's loaded.

There are another fifty rounds in a box under the insurance and registration papers.

One of my father's worst fears is that he'll get locked into a gun battle with the enemies of his mind and it's ten against one but he's got their asses right where he wants them.

Then he discovers that he's running out of bullets and they know it. They sense that he's taking fewer and fewer shots, afraid he's going to miss. At last they know he's down to one round and they rush him, trusting him to either execute himself or take out only one of them before they rip him limb from limb. He tells me these dreams until they become my dreams, the gunman afraid to keep shooting, afraid that he'll run out of ammo, afraid he'll run out of words, thoughts, ideas.

32. The Police .38 is infamously inaccurate from beyond thirty feet but I have no intention of being that far away.

Walk right up to Pale Eye's station wagon and Zap!

No time for argument or explanation, no famous last words or victory speech. That's how they always get your ass. They break the one light bulb and overcome you in the dark.

Not me, Papasan.

In the bright glow of god's helmet lamp we are going to execute your ass.

For what?

What would you call it?

Carnal knowledge of a minor?

Unlawful intercourse with an under-age girl?

How does a grown man, a stepfather to this girl, wind up in bed with her, the literal and figurative bed that she made?

How would you even begin to tell that story?

Holding a gun in your hand like you know what you're going to do with it, how would you even begin to let the world know about the connection between that unlawful, unethical, immoral, criminal action and Marty Love's touchdown?

33. His only touchdown, four years of playing high school football on a sad sack squad but he hustled god he hustled and he was a bantam weight but he could take a lick and give one and he looked like a young Einstein with long Jewish curly hair and a big nose and no speed and not much coordination but he had hustled his way to a captaincy his senior year (Coaches' choice) and he had played for four fucking years and had never started a a game until the day that Miguel Champs was late.

How on god's green earth would you be able to connect that dot to this dot two years later in front of a dream of a a camera store on a dirty trash and leaf-strewn boulevard in a city desperate for the shakedown that was coming, the utter wrath of the Lord in two enormous storm surges that would lay waste to the high and low alike and humble an entire generation of children, fathers, mothers, old women, old men?

All of that was in the city's and the people of the city's future but it existed so far into what we didn't know that we didn't know that it couldn't even be imagined much less quoted, copied, realized.

How would I, a man in his lion's years who could still put on the helmet and pads and play tomorrow if I was that insane, how can I begin to tell you how Marty Love's first and last and only start could be connected to this imagined moment and a basement in Denver and the Municipal Auditorium and a man's entire life, and not just his alone but every player in the puzzle, from Red Mark and my step-mother to my wife and my father and the 99th Name.

None could tell it all, but here's one small part. Bear with me, my dear, dear friends.

34. Of course Miguel Champs knew we'd beat New Orleans Academy's ass.

It was the one game that Ben Franklin High always won even when they sucked and this year they did not suck.

I should say 'we', but as a lousy second string quarterback I did a whole lot of nothing on game days and spent practices running unsuccessfully for my life.

Still, even I anticipated seeing some playing time against the poor Cadets who could usually only field a squad of eleven starters and four midgets.

Before the game, Dr. Dex and Lil Roy and I sat around talking about all the touchdowns we wouldn't score and all the cheerleader pussy we'd never see.

It was dusk in October when New Orleans knows no master and to revel in sin is to be one with god and man. A streetcar rambled by, the oaks swayed and the golden light caught songs in the dark leaves.

Ben Franklin High is on the riverbend, uptown among ancient homes and small restaurants and shops, a quarter mile from Tulane and Loyola Universities, the summer days and voodoo nights of Audubon Park.

Football players were loafing around the fluorescent-lit cafeteria, the wet and foul locker room and the locker-lined Green Hall, some in leg pads and cleats, others in girdles and jocks.

The smell of menthol-muscle-balm, the sound of tape being torn, ankles wrapped, Turner on his big head phones, Big Roy with his bigger headphones, the whispered sounds of Run DMC.

A word went around the cafeteria, then outside, then the Coach's' office.

Where was Miguel? The game was at seven, our call time was four, it was 5:30 now and where was Miguel?

Turner called a number in the Florida Housing Project but no one was home and even if they had been home they wouldn't have known where Miguel Champs was, a young black buck as free as tomorrow.

He was smart and funny and fast and hard, the king of high school and every man wanted to be him and every woman wanted to fuck him and when he walked he walked with style.

He was starting tailback, starting inside linebacker, kick return and gunner on the kick teams and he never left the field.

A four-year player and a three-year starter, a Captain, Miguel Champs had never missed a practice, much less a game.

But he wasn't here now and Coach called Marty Love into his office. A moment later Marty Love emerged and joined the flunkies sitting on the wheelchair ramp that had been installed for the school's first crippled student.

Lil Roy was telling everyone that he was sure Miguel Champs was up into some pussy, a girl in our class who he'd been seen with. I knew nothing from nobody and couldn't place a face to the name.

Marty Love waited for Lil Roy to finish and then he said, I'm starting. Coach just told me. I'm starting at tailback for Miguel.

For a moment our happiness for Marty Love eclipsed any worries we might have had for Miguel Champs. Even though he was a senior and a Captain, Marty Love was one of us, a second or third-teamer, a runty nutbuster who ran around getting smashed.

He'd taken his lumps for four years.

It was all new to us but we could see who he was and what he stood for. It was the job of the second team to make the first team hard, sore, angry, justified. We took our licks from the bigger men but we gave it to them too. Dr. Dex had made a few heads turn with his ball skills and his open field tackles. Lil Roy hit hard with that broomstick body and two small pumpkins for an ass. Even I was getting a few looks at linebacker, my natural position in the end.

Marty Love smiled and shook his head.

A cleaver could have cut him down right there, a thunder stone, it didn't matter.

He was starting.

Four fucking years and he'd never started a game.

He grinned and slapped dap with the black guys, taking the time to do it with style, to do it right.

Then Miguel Champs showed up and I guess Marty Love didn't know what to think.

All the brothers gave Miguel Champs hell and high-fived him as he came sprinting up the cafeteria steps.

He went into Coach's office with that usual smile of new money and fresh laundry.

He wasn't smiling when he walked out and he dressed in silence with no one around to jive with him and he got on the bus as silent as the dead motor waiting for the electric gift of Life and he sat in his usual spot in the back but no one spoke to him, no one dared. Coach looked around the bus at the team and said something about Responsibility and Leadership and then we left for Kirsch Rooney, our home field, a public baseball diamond that we leased four nights a year.

We rode through the darkness and arrived at the field to the sound of our small feisty high school band playing Let's Groove Tonight.

Normally, we would have been charged, ready to do broken dances across the wishbone of the land but instead we took our exercises in silence.

Miguel Champs was not in the front row with the captains, it was Miguel Champs in the back row with the midgets and the lardboys and the kids who wouldn't be back next season. He did his exercises like he was signaling to hell from the last train to the gospel. He threw himself into the air with each pushup, shouted louder than all the men around him, did double time jumping jacks.

And what was going on in Marty Love's head?

Strangeness.

Because even though Marty Love was at tailback when the offense ran pregame drills against a phantom defense and it was Marty Love who took the practice toss sweep and it was Marty Love in the pregame huddle looking very small among the biggest men on the team, men with chest hair and facial hair and miles of sex in their rearview mirror and dozens of touchdowns scored in their careers and the thrill and foreknowledge of what lay ahead only minutes away, the great bruising crunch and speed-laced dream that is a football game, a primitive and magical clashing of ancient ways and the need to make a man physically submit, Marty Love knew none of that because he had never played with the starters, the gamers, the ones who laid the first bricks each weekend, the beginners of the ending, the ultimate father to the monster that would be birthed and then murdered in the form of a football game.

He did not understand what was required of him.

That is all I can guess.

He did not know his role and that night his role was to be a starter and even with Miguel Champs sitting on the sideline as the NOA Cadets kicked off to the Ben Franklin Falcons Marty Love still must not have known what he was to become, a man who could say that yes, he had started at least one, one, one game for his high school football team.

He didn't know this, didn't understand and therefore was nowhere to be found when the Falcon offense huddled up on the field, muddled about in confusion and then hollered to the sideline that they needed a tailback.

Where was Marty Love?

Love! said Coach. Where the hell is Love!

Right here, Coach said Marty Love.

And there he was, he was standing right behind Coach waiting to be spotted, waiting to be overlooked until the final minutes of an almost entirely unlikely event of a Falcon blowout.

Get in there!

Marty Love, hand on his mouthpiece, all the confidence of a wind-up toy, ran a few steps towards the huddle but it was too late and BC, the Falcon's quarterback, called a time-out.

Coach grabbed Marty Love's face mask.

Love, get over here! Didn't I tell you you were starting?

Yes sir.

Then what the hell are you doing on the goddamn sideline!

Easy Coach, said Coach Chick, the fiery defensive coordinator taxed with saving Coach from having a 3rd heart attack .

I told you you were starting, said Coach in an angry tight whisper with a trace of Irish ghetto on his tongue.

I thought since Miguel was here-

Son, don't think. Don't do it. It ain't healthy. I told you you were starting tonight. Do you wanna start?

Yessir.

You ain't started a game in four goddamn years, you'd think you'd be chomping at the bit to be out there, but you ain't. If you don't wanna start, why didn't you say so. Lemme see who the hell else I can get to play tailback tonight.

Coach looked down the sideline, saw me, young, sorry and white, moved on, spotted Dr. Dex and Lil Roy, both young, gifted and black.

Belton, he said, pointing to Dr. Dex. Get out there.

Dex's eyes, man, you could have landed jets on those babies. Still, Dex wanted to go. In fact, he began to run onto the field despite his nerves and his fears.

He never got a chance.

Marty Love said, I'm starting! and ran out to the huddle.

Coach grinned and called over BC who was about to run out to the huddle.

Tell 'em I said give the ball to Love until he scores.

BC stared at Coach open-mouthed for a moment, then laughed, shook his insolent head and jogged back out to the huddle. Give it to Love until he scores.

BC leaned over the linemen with their hands on their knee pads and he called a sweep. Marty Love at tailback, Dan Shannon at fullback and Turner at the wing.

In their white pants and forest green jerseys with white numbers and white helmets and a mixture of styles of socks and a mixture of white and black cleats and a mixture of green and orange and white padding and trim on each player depending on his size and the age of his equipment, most of it from the mid-70's, they were an afterthought squad, the Falcons football team, always had been and always would be.

Nobody who wanted to play college football ever went to Ben Franklin and most kids who did attend that high school for the gifted and talented, a Mecca of science and math research, product of the Russian satellite that went into orbit October 1957 and utterly changed the face of the American educator and American child, didn't want to-or more likely-weren't allowed to play.

Nobody had ever cared about Franklin football which probably explained how Coach had managed to keep his job for twenty years without ever achieving a winning season, much less making the playoffs.

Indeed the Falcons competed in a bizarre district composed of one other city high school-Warren Easton-one high school in Chalmette-St. Bernard- and three River Parish powerhouses: Destrehan, Lutcher and St. James.

The Falcons could not hope to compete with any of those teams except for St. Bernard, a squad that hadn't won a game in years, so they scheduled local private and parochial schools who loved the easy meat as the eggheads and stoners of Ben Franklin football came to be known.

Then a shift.

A new sense of pride.

The Reagan administration was behind it, the end of the hostage crisis, the national malaise petered out, guns and stocks and red ties and sex and cocaine and hip-hop and hair metal, it all shifted in the 80's and suddenly Ben Franklin football was good.

Coach surveyed the fastest backfield he'd ever had.

Black guys, black guys, that's all he'd ever hoped for, a few black players who were both students and athletes.

There was no jive at Franklin.

Coach had no authority to pass or fail anybody no matter his time in the 40 and more than one football knucklehead had failed to keep a 'C' average and was shown the door.

Marty Love took the pitch and hauled ass for the corner.

Turner was in front of him with Dan Shannon right behind. They each kicked out or otherwise obliterated their man and Brown sealed the edge. Marty Love had miles to run. If that had been Miguel Champs out there, there would already be six points on the board. But Marty Love-slow, white and scared-was the diametric opposite of Miguel Champs-fast, black and angry-and Marty Love picked up four yards before the defense brought him down.

The offense huddled up, BC called the play, they broke and ran up to the line. The NOA defense was jumping around. BC called for the ball and handed it off to Marty Love on a dive between the center and the guard. The hole was massive, the size of a child's scream. Marty Love hit it at top speed and got four more yards.

3rd and two.

The Falcons huddled up, BC called a play, they broke and ran up to the line. Same play, a dive to Marty Love. Crushed for a loss. The Falcons punted it away.

It quickly became abundantly clear that Marty Love was not going to score unless the NOA defense had a collective seizure and collapsed to the ground.

All week the red white and blue Cadets had practiced in fear and trembling at facing #33, the man who had plowed them for 250 yards and 4 TD's last year.

But #33 was standing on the sideline in his perfect white pants, his ass busting out of the back, his dark green jersey dry, clean, no mud on his cleats, no blood on his hands, no outlet for everything that he was feeling. He stood about ten feet from Coach with his arms hanging down like whips.

No one knew when or if he'd play.

The NOA defense must have seen him over there and thought it was some kind of fucking joke, Marty Love left and Marty Love right and Marty Love up the middle.

They weren't having it.

They threw him for a loss six straight times and finally Coach got sick of shouting at the offensive line for not blocking and he told BC to run the usual offense.

BC grinned and ran out to the huddle as Marty Love limped to the sideline, blood running in a trickle down his sinuous forearms, his shins bruised, his pants skidded with grass and dirt, his helmet riding sideways.

Coach looked at him, looked at all of us and asked Marty how he liked starting.

I like it, Marty Love mumbled through a mouth of spittle, dirt and blood.

Good, said Coach crossing his arms like an Indian warlord. Because that's what starting feels like.

35. The score was a lot of points for Ben Franklin to zero points for NOA so Coach put Miguel at tailback, moved Marty Love to fullback and gave BC almost the same command as he'd given him at the beginning of the game.

Give the ball to Miguel until he scores.

It took one play. Toss sweep to the left, Miguel's favorite call to his favorite side. Brown sealed the end, Turner took out the middle linebacker and Marty Love took out the strong safety. Miguel Champs turned the corner and was gone. No one was going to catch him, no one ever could, he was running away from everything that he would never be able to leave behind, his self-worth and his reputation and his grace and his style and the legions of chicks who followed in his wake, cheerleaders and English teachers and streetcar drivers and women in automobiles who pulled up alongside him on Carrollton Avenue and promised to take him home, all of that and more, the history of the city with its death trap cabarets and its gold mine whores and its flesh bought currency and its first-born, French-raised sons and the everlasting beauty and curse of too much but not enough blackness and too much but not enough whiteness.

Miguel Champs was running away from penny loafers and Polo cologne, from the basketball court and giant jam boxes.

He was running away from all he was and all anybody wanted him to be, a Native Son gone terribly right and terribly wrong.

And as he galloped down the field away from the hapless and gutted Cadet defense, one player ran behind him, one player outhustled the hustlers, one player dared to burn all candles from all ends.

Marty Love.

Marty Love knew it would never be this good again.

So after he cleaned out the strong safety with a vicious shot to the chin, he stayed off the ground like the coaches had told him for years, stay off the ground, stay off the ground and there he was trailing Miguel by ten, fifteen, twenty , twenty-five yards.

Miguel hit the fifty and the forty and the thirty and the twenty and the ten and the five. He pulled up at the two-yard line, stopped and turned around.

Marty Love ran up hollering, Get in the endzone, get in the endzone!

But Miguel did not go into the endzone. He handed the ball to Marty Love who carried it two yards across the goal line, scoring the first, last and only touchdown of his high school career.

The referee raised his hands.

The players on the sideline cheered.

The crowd of fifty cheered.

The band struck up Smoke on the Water.

The cheerleaders cheered, for Marty Love, for Miguel Champs, for the utter glory that might one day be the world.

36. Miguel Champs came by her house around one o'clock in the afternoon when she knew no one would be home.

They made out for as long as she could stand it, a single turning into a double becoming a triple with a chance, one sweet chance for a home run.

He had it out and he almost had it in when they heard a key turn in the lock in the backdoor and longing turned to fear and he grabbed his clothes and shoes and went out a window in the bedroom.

Naked as god made him, Miguel Champs ran down the side of the house and out into the alley, the fastest hundred yard dash he ever ran in his life, knowing what they all know, all cats who messed with that girl, that her mama's boyfriend carried a weapon at all times and would not be one bit afraid to use it on a housing project nigger like Miguel Champs.

At last Miguel ducked down next to a trash bin and hastily got on drawers and t-shirt and jeans and the dark green #33 football jersey and the socks and the sneakers and then he picked up his bag and took off running again, this time for a bus and then a streetcar to Ben Franklin High where the football team awaited him and where Marty Love, who had already learned that he was starting, was dreaming of the eighty-yard run and the mule-kicking stiff arm and the runaway speed down the sideline, untouchable, untouched. Miguel Champs ran hard and fast and he made his bus and he decided not to wait for the streetcar and he ran the half mile to school, burning out all the menace that his hard dick had helped create.

37. But not all of it.

Because as fast as he was, he wasn't so fast that he was invisible and he was seen and the girl was confronted and her mother was told and a punishment was contemplated and then decided, a grounding, a long grounding, at least a month during the summer break, maybe longer and what's more, there would be a project, she would build a new bed for herself and her sister, a set of bunk beds to replace the one she had tried to lose her virginity in.

She worked, she sweated, she cut wood and hammered ten-penny nails and broke fingernails and made mistakes and made her mother's boyfriend angry and he called her stupid, stupid, stupid and she learned to hate that word, utterly despise it and she worked until the beds were complete, unfinished wood with the edges sanded and the linens on top and the floor swept and the mattress fluffed and the pillows encased and the shades down and the lights out and the afternoon long and her sister at a friend's house and her mother downtown and she was in bed taking a nap when he took off his pants and climbed in the bed with her and pulled off her shorts and her underwear and spread her legs and then the girl with the navy blue eyes said she felt something hot on her arm.

38. That's how it comes to pass that in my dream I am sitting in my father's little blue Honda with his Police .38 in my hand waiting for Pale Eyes to exit the camera store.

I should be in class right now.

Algebra II.

I'm repeating it.

Math is my downfall.

If I don't pass this class I won't graduate.

The thought of having to stick around this city one more day than I have to sucks it out of me.

I should just leave.

Who gives a fuck if he raped his own stepdaughter?

Who gives a fuck if it drove her to spend the entire summer the following year at her aunt's house in another time zone, away from him, away from me?

Who gives a fuck if she had a secret to tell, many secrets to tell, secrets within secrets with secrecy itself, things she didn't even tell herself in a dark bathtub with the lights low and her head underwater and her breathing stopped.

Even dead she would never be able to tell it all.

And who really gives a fuck that she told it to me?

No one.

It was a stupid, stupid story and none of it was real anyway, remember?

Just a bunch of lies I made up over the course of nearly thirty years.

The girl with the navy blue eyes never told me anything because the girl with the navy blue eyes didn't exist and if she did no one would have ever treated her that way. Those fine bones, those perfect teeth, the way her husky voice said your name, the way she sounded on the phone, what she looked like naked, what she looked like underneath you, smiling, lovely, crazed with the feel of your flesh.

How could anyone harm that child, beat her and tear off her clothes and thrust themselves inside her dry and hard and angry and mean and turn her over and force it into her ass, her scream, was that what motivated a person, the terror and the fright and the pain inflicted on a young and unready mind?

Who gives a fuck?

I do.

39. Pale Eyes exited the store, got in his station wagon, started it up, pulled out into traffic and cruised on by. I slouched needlessly in my seat. Pale Eyes had no clue I was on his ass. He sat behind the wheel as confident of his invincibility as the rock of Gibraltar. I put the gun on the seat, covered it with the oil cloth and then dropped the car in gear.

Here I come, baby boy, here I come.

In my dream I always send him into City Park, over the narrow gauge train tracks, past the tennis courts where one elderly couple in their whites are doddering after a fluorescent yellow ball.

He passes the colonnade on the right with its angry gray row of stoic columns enclosing a pigeon shit length of cement.

Beyond the colonnade are four stone lions gazing with infinite eyes out over the lagoon where swans and ducks crackle.

He parks down the way across from the old bandstand, a circular temple to Diana done in concrete, marble and rusty copper.

I always drive past, parking far enough away that I have to walk past the Dueling Oaks.

I suppose I use these reference points in my fantasy because they acutely remind me of my father.

When the dark days in his marriage began to ride roughshod over his soul, he would bring my brother and me out here to stare at the sky and the oak tress and the darkness. He would drink beer and tell stories as my brother ran around, stoned on coca cola and candy bars.

This place was so far from our neighborhood in literal and metaphysical terms, with the darkness and the old white lamps and the smell of lost generations and the old casino topped with red tiles and the smell of grease in the wind and my father befriended the police officer who patrolled the park, a black man with a gold earring who ignored my father's drinking as they discussed books and music, politics and race, the secrets of the policeman's world, the secrets of the white man's world.

Years later when we were sitting in park in Hattiesburg Mississippi on Christmas Day getting drunk and getting high while my stepmother, his wife, was in the act of shooting one of his guns into her mouth, we would have afternoons like that to recall.

The beer, the sadness, the wasted opportunities, the staring at the fading horizon like the last man watching the last sunset of the world, a desolation that can never be adequately described, only survived.

Perhaps that is why I bring Pale Eyes here.

Here is where everything that doesn't end or begin can at least be said to have a name: Redemption.

Redemption for one thing, one set of values, action at some perhaps dreadful price. Murder, premeditated. In Louisiana you will fry. In my dream I pretend that don't care.

I park the car yards from the spot where she told me the first clue about Pale Eyes and I take the Police .38 and I walk past the Dueling Oaks where men once stood at dawn with their courage, honor and matched flintlocks and dared the other to show an unsteady hand.

I cross a small bridge over a branch of the lagoon and then I am walking right towards his car, in the blind spot, he'll never see me.

Bang, bang, bang and the deed will be done.

But I can't.

Even in my fantasy I am an utter coward.

I cannot will myself to even imagine spreading his brains, even if I had a clean getaway and a two day lead. Nothing can compel me to waste a human life, even as foul a devil as Pale Eyes.

So instead of shooting him I keep the piece in the pocket of my letter jacket, walk up to his car and I knock on the driver side glass. He looks up, a bit startled for a moment, then he rolls down the window. He has a sleeve of photos in his lap, another woman, not his girlfriend, not much in the way of clothes.

He gives me his hep cat smile as he quickly puts away the pictures, saying, Son, ain't you supposed to be in school right now?

Yessir, I say because I am always polite. I was on my way to school but I saw you driving and I followed you here.

This checks him. He leans back in his seat. His hand is out of sight but I know what it is doing, where it is or soon will be.

Why did you follow me here, he says.

Because I wanted to tell you something.

What you wanna tell me, he says.

Just, that I know.

There's a long pause as he looks at me, man does he look at me. Then he says, You know what?

I won't lie to you. I would be shitting if that was really happening. Even in my dream I feel my fear rise. But maybe I am not 100% chicken shit, maybe I would have stood my ground, looked him right in the face, right in those eyes, eyes that were on her when he put it in and eyes that looked down and saw what he was doing, what he had done, became the one, the first but not the last and certainly not the best but still the first, the first one to get that view and there could be one or none or a hundred more but there could only and ever be the first one and it was him.

I would have smiled to hide my murderous fear and I would have said, You know what I'm talking about. You definitely know what it is that I am talking about.

And then I would leave, not another word or a look back or a worry or a doubt. I have a math class to get to and boy am I late. But this time, I don't speed.

40. I look at a version of Terry that doesn't exist, standing in the basement that doesn't exist in a house in Houston that doesn't exist and I say, Yeah, I got a gun.

Well, I know where those bitches live.

Are they close by?

Pretty close. Eric stays by himself in an apartment. Jamaal lives with his mom.

Will you write down the directions for me?

Man, I'm going with you. We takin' these fools out together.

Cool.

Okay, gimme five minutes and I'll meet you outside. We take your car, alright?

Alright.

Terry and I slap dap and then hug. We separate after a moment and both of us take a last look around the basement, lit up like an interrogation room with that one white bulb dangling from the ceiling like an electric radish.

I wonder why she didn't tell me, Terry says.

41. I asked her that too. She lay in my arms, rocking, moaning with pain at the memory of that night.

I was scared, she said. They had guns. They said they would hurt me if I told anyone.

And there you go. The greatest unreported crime.

A young woman I knew once told me that she didn't know any girls who hadn't been raped. None of them had ever reported the attack.

The girl with the navy blue eyes didn't.

She didn't get up from the floor and put on her clothes and go to a telephone and call the police.

She didn't end the big celebration of laughter and weed and booze in the summer of 1984, Big Brother in bed with Twisted Sister, think-speak as dated as the Yellow Kid, proles sleeping homeless in abandoned cars, everybody watching MTV.

She didn't sit in a police station and name names.

She didn't submit to a rape kit.

She didn't have to tell anybody if she had been drinking or using drugs.

She didn't have to tell the police that she knew them, that they were her friends, her buddies, the good guys who didn't smoke pot or get in fights.

She didn't have to tell them how wrong she was, that she had become one of their merit badges, a black patch with a red lightning bolt, earned for raping a black bitch.

No, she didn't deal with any of that.

She went upstairs and took a bath, lying in the panicked water clouded with wisps of blood wondering if she was pregnant or diseased.

Did she cry?

Of course.

She must have cried and cried for what had happened and what she had done. From the fat to the fire she had gone, running away from one rapist only to be gang raped.

How could this have happened she wondered?

She must have spent miles and miles of time on that question before arriving again at the same conclusion as before.

She blamed herself.

42. There was a cow and it lived the life of a cow being raised for its beef, grazing the grassland of Nebraska or Iowa or Illinois until it was black and white and fat all over and it was led with its sisters to a truck where it rolled its eyes and gazed through slots at the industrial age. Then it was unloaded off that truck onto a platform where it was led in a row to its date with destiny, to a man wearing a glassfaced helmet covered in a leather apron splattered with billions of brain cells. He would place the cool metal plate against the cow's panicked forehead and pull a trigger and release pressure on certain mechanisms that would now plow forward into the cow's skull, brain mass and nerve centers, almost instantly snuffing out life.

Yet the key word might be 'almost' for even a cow might have a last thought, one final glimpse at the abyss before the abyss become meaningless and the cow might not have had any novels to finish or films to produce or even one last letter to write to one dear friend, no, none of that but perhaps the cow, like every being that ever lived, might have simply have asked itself how the fuck did I get here?

Then the cow would be stripped of hide head and hooves and hung from an assembly line where men from south of the Rio Bravo armored up like the old days and wielding knives like a samurai master would attack each carcass, carving up the good cuts and the better cuts and the best cuts until it looked like the piranha had attacked.

And watch your ass when you're in there because blood runs hot in Latin veins and when those short squat demoniacally fast black haired sons of Aztec and Tlasclan and Zapata square off with their two fisted blades it's a battle of mini titans across the factory floor, knives flying and the clash of steel and shouting in Spanish and blood, always, always blood.

And from that cow comes a hunk of meat which will be wrapped in cellophane and sent to a Safeco or an A&P or a Ralph's and there it will sit on display until a hand appears from the sky and selects it from the others and places it in a cart next to the canned limas and the frozen peas.

Then home in a sack and unpacked and stuck in the freezer to wait and wait like a man doing time for an uncharged crime. And then one morning the meat is removed from the freezer where it had sat next to ice packs and a pool of orange slushee that resembled pahoehoe lava and the meat grows warm and soft and is at last unwrapped from the white butcher paper and the clear cellophane and then lain on a young woman's bruised and swollen face. There the meat stays, lives its final existence cooling the agony of a fist meeting her flesh and the meat, if it could have listened, would hear the girl with the navy blue eyes explain how she got a black eye from walking into a wall.

43. I'm sitting in the car when Terry comes out of his house carrying a red plastic gas can.

He's wearing a dark grey hooded sweat-shirt, baggy jeans and sneakers. When he gets in the passenger seat I ask him what the can's for. He swishes the contents around and says, I'm gonna burn little Eric's ass up.

Nothing to say to that even if it is a dream.

I fire up the Honda and follow his directions out of the mellow sycamore neighborhood and onto a business corridor, a weed-filled median between two sets of traffic. Everything, of course, is graveyard on a Sunday morning, just Ronald the Clown pitching hotcakes and poached egg sandwiches, the donut shop where three squad cars are pulled into a ring, windows down, crew cuts and a mustache here and there, all white guys except for a hard shiny black gleam behind silver mirrors, a shiny pinch of pepper in a bowl of salt.

The sun is doing the morning thing on an undeveloped field where fog rises.

One last tall tree holds out against the bulldozers and the backhoes, a white oak of a noble spread, enough to accommodate a medieval fair under her boughs or a meeting of the gospel choirs of three Baptist churches or the hooded Klan of five counties or all the children from every bayou, swamp and rotten suburb, together under a tree of plenty, of harvest, of dreams. Gone in the rearview, the ancestral lone tree I dream about nine or ten times a year.

Like the call for help from the girl with the navy blue eyes, that vision has sustained me, taken over when I thought I could not go on.

Terry is having me turn down a street lined with decaying apartment complexes, each done in someone's Hollywood imagination: Shakespeare/Tudor, Jefferson/Colonial, Pancho Villa/Spanish, Madame Guillotine/French Empire, the parking lots littered with forgotten cars covered in withering plastic sheets, the stained shutters, the missing eaves, the rotten lattice work, all of it crying for the arsonist's hand.

Riding down the street are three kids on bicycles, like a vision from someone else's dream, perhaps my father and his friends. All three bicycles are old-fashioned with banana seats and long handle bars and the boys steer with one hand while firing toy machine guns with the other. The guns make the sound of gunfire but the boys make their own sounds too, the gat-gat-gat of the water-cooled Maxim and the bap-bap-bap of the M-16 and duh-duh-du of the .40 caliber Pig.

Two chase one down the empty street under trees of falling red orange and yellow leaves.

The pale cement is littered with these lovely, upturned boats, each a monument to a sunset from the year it has just seen. The boys ride among the leaves, two chasing one, the thrill of their utterances, the sound of their drama.

We follow slowly behind, watching them weave in arcs and semi-arcs, blazing a bold set of paths through the leaves like Goodnight and Loving cutting a trail through hostile lands.

But then a shift, the boy in the lead is distracted, is it us, have I come up on them too close?

Whatever unnerves the boy, the gun is his undoing for as he loses control of the bicycle he resists letting go of the toy gun and is unable to protect himself when the handlebar slips and the rubber-tipped handgrip dangling with strings of white is driven into his solar plexus with sudden and ferocious force.

Then gun, boy and bike are all sprawling, the child rolling in the street, his face a mask of shock, the wind knocked into the world and out of him.

His friends pull up and watch him roll and clutch and gasp for mother's milk.

I ask Terry if we should stop.

Hell no, he says. Serves that little fool right for not watching where he was goin'...turn here.

We park and get out of the car. I've got the Police .38 in the pocket of my letter jacket. Terry frowns.

Too easy to identify, he says. Lose the jacket and and put the gun in your pants. Good. Now follow me.

I do.

I do that.

Even in my dreams I am a coward, unable to pull a move like this off without a bigger or older or more experienced dude. Terry leads us into the courtyard of a faux Spanish three story apartment complex with a seedy, half-empty swimming pool in the center. The ground is littered with beer cans, a diaper, empty bags of chips. Off to the side is a laundry room where a dark-haired woman folds her clothes while a small radio preaches the gospel in Spanish. She doesn't look up when we pass but her child, a little boy sitting on the floor playing with a silver cowboy pistol, watches us go by with open-mouthed amazement, the innocent always able to recognize malevolence moving through its orbit.

We take the stairs up three floors and walk past several apartment doors before Terry stops in front of #32. The two is missing but the wood is pale where it was once screwed to the door.

Let me run this show, says Terry Don't start shooting' until I say so. Cool?

Cool.

Terry knocks on the door, three hard raps. Nothing. He goes for it again. The knocks echo down the hall. From behind a door is the sound of an alarm beeping, then cancelled. A TV is mumbling, an unintelligible voice trying to sell or tell us something unintelligible. The air smells of mildew, fried meat and bleach. Still no answer and Terry is about to knock a third time when the door suddenly whips open.

Standing there is a white dude, somewhat below average height wearing boxer shorts and a look of hangover on his face. He's got a good build and a few tattoos on his arms including a red shield with a black lightning bolt and a black shield with a red lightning bolt. He rubs his eyes and looks blearily at Terry. He barely sees me I'm so secret, so invisible.

What the fuck man, he says. What the hell time is it?

Time to get up, says Terry as his fist meets Eric's face.

In my imagination Terry knocks Eric flat onto his back with one punch, then he steps inside the apartment.

I follow.

Eric is lying on the floor of the foyer. To the left is a small kitchen. Directly ahead is the living-room with a screen door and a balcony that overlooks the swimming pool. There's a huge TV, a dirty white leather couch, a dirty white leather love seat, a low glass coffee table littered with porn, ashtrays and video game consoles, all crowned with a tall red bong.

As I gaze around the apartment Terry kicks Eric in the head. When Eric covers his head Terry kicks him in the ribs.

Run on train on my cousin, you little bitch, says Terry. I'll kill you bitch, I will kill you deader than fucking dead!

No, says Eric, twisting and writhing on the white linoleum floor. No man no!

Yeah, bitch, yeah! You and Jamaal! And some other bitch! Who the fuck else was it went down there with you!

Where man where!

In the basement bitch in my mama's house last summer! You know that shit's true!

No man I swear I didn't do it it was Jamaal dude I told him not to but he did it anyway bro I'm so fuckin' sorry.

Terry stands over Eric with the red plastic gas can in his hand. He pops open the cap, tilts the can, starts pouring gas all over Eric.

Eric screams and Terry kicks him in the mouth. Terry caps the can and pats his pockets. Still staring down at Eric he says to me, You got a light?

Nah, man, I don't smoke.

Check in the kitchen, see if this fool got any matches. Where's your lighter you littler stoner motherfucker?

I duck into the kitchen as Terry steps over to the coffee table. With a full view of the living-room and the porch I watch, almost disinterestedly, as Eric leaps to his feet. He sprints to the screen door and without breaking stride smashes through it and dives over the edge of the balcony. From down below there's a thump, a pause and then the scream of a person who is looking at their body bent and broken into strange new ways.

Terry and I step out onto the balcony and gaze over the side.

Eric is about two feet from the edge of the swimming pool, convulsing in pain. Bone and tissue and blood are floating in the water.

A door opens downstairs and a head pokes out, there is talking in Spanish and then the door closes.

Let's blaze, says Terry. I was hoping the little Rambo motherfucker would kill himself but this'll have to do.

Yeah, I guess so.

It'll be a long, long time before he thinks about pulling that kinda shit again.

On the way out I start to mop up the gas on the floor.

Don't worry about it, says Terry, opening the door, a stark white ray of sunlight cutting across the wet and bloody tiles. It's just water.

And then we're gone, down the stairs and out to the car and back onto the streets of Houston Texas.

I catch sight of an ambulance bubbling down the boulevard and turning towards the apartment buildings but other than that, no sign of the authorities, no cops looking for a blue hatchback with Sportsmen's Paradise plates.

In my fantasy no police officer can save the day, no hand of the law can intervene at the last moment. Those are dreams for the writers of star-driven capers that appear on our televisions, Starsky and Hutch catching the serial rapist just as he's unbuttoning his trousers, Beretta tackling the runaway arsonist with gas can in hand, Charlie's Angels breaking up a bootlegger's ring. No, in my state of self-amusement I have to have some hand in it myself, though I seem unable to do anything more violent than pass over a gun.

44. Which I what I do when we arrive at Jamaal's house. Terry hefts the .38 in his hand, unaware of its deficiencies, impressed by its weight. Writers in gun magazines would say you were severely under-gunned toting that puppy, but six rounds of a .38 from any distance won't feel too good. Terry aims through the windshield like some prohibition gangster, one eye squinted up, a look of grim satisfaction on his face.

All right, he says. Let's do this. Same as last time, you follow my lead.

Ten-four, good buddy.

Terry smiles. Over and out, he says.

We exit the car and approach the front door of Jamaal's mother's house, a one story dark brick bungalow on a street lined with the same. Thick St. Augustine grass, evergreen shrubbery, a cross on the door, this is a house of god and hospitality. You can smell the ham frying before we ring the bell.

Try to look like you're fixin' to go to church, says Terry.

Church.

Yeah, he says. You'll see.

The front door opens to reveal a stout black woman in a dark blue dress with tiny white polka dots. On her breast is a miniature clutch of violets. Her lips are purple and her eyelids are blue.

Good morning, Mama Lynn, says Terry. Sorry we didn't call first but we was in the neighborhood and wanted to see if Jamaal wanted to go to church with us.

She smiles like she just poured the Good Lord a cup of coffee as Terry introduces us and we shake hands. She says that she doubts Jamaal will be getting up before noon but we're free to try. Terry heads for Jamaal's bedroom as I amble to the kitchen with Mama Lynn.

She stands at the stove with a fork in her hand, slices of pink meat turning brown. The sizzle is like the sound of rain. The fan going above the flames sucks the smoke up the chimney like a jet engine losing altitude.

Mama Lynn asks me if I go to school with Jamaal.

No ma'am, I'm just visiting. I'm from New Orleans.

New Orleans! That crazy place.

Yes ma'am.

You know they took my purse in broad daylight?

No.

Umm-hmm. Right down there on Canal Street during the Mardi Gras. Took my purse and took off. I said that was enough for me. I went one time and ain't been back since. You like it there?

Yeah, it's all-right.

Nodding sympathetically, she looks up to say something but instead she stops and her eyes widen, her mouth falls open and she drops the fork.

I turn around to see Terry escorting Jamaal into the kitchen with the pistol pointed at the back of Jamaal's head.

Oh my god, says Mama Lynn. Oh my god, what in the name of the Lord is going on? Terry what on earth are you doing?

Mama Lynn leans against the stove. I reach over and turn off the flame and then pass her a stool.

I'm sorry to scare you Mama Lynn, says Terry. But Jamaal has something that he wants to tell you and I couldn't think of a way to get him to do it unless I put a gun to his head.

Oh my god, what is going on here, she says. Jamaal, what is he talking about?

She clutches at her spray of violets and begins to breathe in shallow pants.

Tell her, Jamaal, says Terry. Tell her before you give your mama heart failure. Tell her what you done. Tell her.

Jamaal is tall, dark-skinned with a Jheri curl, his greasy hair pulled into a bun and wrapped in a plastic bag. He looks like he might have come from the grocery store that way, a new Jamaal ready to be popped open. He's wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts, has a good build, a handsome though worried and frightened face. Over all, he's a well-made man. Why he would want to go around raping young girls is anybody's guess.

In a wavering voice he begins.

Mama, he says. I got something to tell you. Something I did. Something bad. Something real bad.

What you did honey, says Mamma Lynn, calming somewhat now, her instinct to love and protect her son overwhelming her fear. Tell mama what you done.

I, says Jamaal. I mean we, me and Eric, we...

His voice trails off. Maybe he can't say it. Maybe the perpetrator of one of the most abhorrent acts can never allow himself to say it, to admit who he is and what he does. Men who call themselves murderers get reelected year after year. No man calls himself a rapist except for the ones locked away in a mental cell in the bottom of the penitentiary of the soul just east of hell and they aren't to be feared, they are to be pitied as they writhe in their thoughts, unable to escape their voices and even they, they, the pilferers of small children and old women, of the most vulnerable and the most weak, even they call themselves predators or serial exploiters but never, never do they say, 'I rape.'

But Jamaal does. Shaking with fear, looking down at the clean white linoleum floor he says that he and Eric raped a girl.

What, says Mama Lynn.

We raped a girl, says Jamaal.

Oh my lord, says Mama Lynn. Oh sweet Jesus.

She raises her hand to her breast and lowers her head. When she looks up again her eyes are wet. She exhales deeply and dabs at her face.

Why? Why, Jamaal? Why on god's green earth would you ever do a thing like that?

Jamaal hangs his head. He has nothing to say. Behind him Terry's face is serious, his lips thin.

Who was she, says Mama Lynn.

Terry's cousin, says Jamaal.

You did a thing like that to your best friend's cousin, says Mama Lynn. My Lord. My Lord. What's her name?

I don't remember, says Jamaal.

You don't remember, says Mama Lynn, her voice touched with pain. You don't remember. You done ruined some poor child's life forever and you don't even remember her name.

With no small effort, Mama Lynn rises and makes her way across the kitchen.

She stands in front of her son, a heavy tub of a woman facing her long limbed boy.

She reaches up, puts a weathered, calloused hand on his soft, beardless cheek.

She lifts his head to look into his eyes.

She appears to be searching for something there.

Where is he, she says. Where's my Jamaal? I don't see him. I don't see the boy who would help his grandfather make biscuits every Sunday morning. I don't see the boy who stayed by his grandmother's side for three days until she passed. I don't see him. Where is he? Where'd he go? Where did you take my Jamaal?

Standing there like a totem pole under the relentless gaze of his mother's love, shame and pity, Jamaal shits himself. Moaning and sagging, his knees buckle and he goes down, down, all the way down, collapsing onto himself.

Mama Lynn takes a step back and shakes her head.

Lord have mercy child, she says. You done messed up my floors.

45. After this, there is a feeling of great release and accomplishment as if we had singlehandedly stopped the James Gang or beaten our cross-town rivals in the game of the year.

Even in my mind and my imagination I feel better, knowing that again, for perhaps the one hundredth time, I have imagined that Cousin Terry and I were able to mete out some type of frontier justice, hanging-judge style.

Nobody died because we don't believe in the death penalty, we believe in corporal punishment and humiliation and shame and then forgiveness and healing and the end of all such behaviors, all such revenge.

We know in our hearts and minds that behind almost every rapist is another rapist, someone who put hands and organs and mouth where they weren't wanted, had someone's else's pleasure put upon them and into them and all over them, in the name of god and family and the ways and means of men. It doesn't forgive it or allow it, that acknowledgement and that understanding, because always, always there is free will.

We believe that the human species can evolve within one generation, break the cycle, no longer be triggered into the past.

We believe that we must love ourselves despite what was done to us and what we did. Only by embracing the beauty amidst the horror of the past can we be cool with what's happening right here, right now.

And then and only then can we have a future to look forward to, a stronger, wiser, better time.

It is why I do this to myself year after year, tapping away at the keys, writing in coffee shops and pool halls, diners and bars.

It explains all the bad car wrecks that I have left behind me, literal and figurative.

The women who loved me and paid for it with their tears.

It explains two years before the mast, running drugs into Miami for kicks, watching a man fall from a speedboat and drown.

It explains the drive across the continent in old cars, broken and dying vehicles overpowered or underserviced, gassed out German, American and Japanese jalopies, each one more fragile and violent than the last. No man who ever lived had more bad car karma than I and somehow you could imagine that it was all tied into those few months of high school, of hearing someone's darkest hours and never doing anything about it or being able to do anything about it.

There wasn't and never would be any drive to Houston Texas or Denver Colorado or even an Internet Search to dig up the bones of a night way back in Reagan's first term.

I tell you this story, my only story, my greatest story, to help myself understand, to understand what to do with the knowledge, to understand what to do with her special gift.

In my yearbook the girl with the navy blue eyes wrote how grateful to me she was, for my love, my humor and for being the one that she could tell her secret to. I often wondered which of the many secrets she meant but now I know, she meant them all.

Nobody can control love and who they fall in love with.

Nobody ever said losing your mental cherry would ever be anything other than pain.

You'd wish for love the whole rest of your life if you could, watching summer after summer go by like migrating birds, always holding out for a return to excellence, to someone you might have been before, before, before it all piled up upon you like an inherited debt, some relic from the Age of Enlightenment when they buried Benedict Arnold with a price tag on his head.

No, my journey has been a journey of raw wonder and stupidity, dumb decisions, shallow victories and a clattering against the walls of sanity, propriety and trust.

How have I gotten this far on so little, so long?

What cool friends did I leave behind in a quest for something that could never be found?

What permission shall I ever give myself to no longer be a keeper of yesterdays, a waster of tomorrows, a prisoner of today?

46. I take Terry home and then hit the road.

But first we get high.

Terry has me stop at a convenience store and he goes inside and buys us each a tall-boy Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull. We sit in the parking lot, drinking cold sips of molten steel, saying little, listening to the radio. It's the spring of 1985. You can't listen to the radio for ten minutes without hearing Tears For Fears. Sure enough, just as Terry fishes a joint out of his wallet, that distinctive tinkling of strings begins like walking through a garden of mobiles and then the guitar, bass and keyboards all combine into Everybody Wants to Rule the World.

Terry doesn't ask if I smoke, simply assumes that I do but I don't and almost immediately I'm hacking my ass off.

Terry laughs and says, You don't get off until you cough.

If that's true then I'm getting off like a motherfucker.

'Welcome to your life,' the man sings. 'There's no turning back. Even while we sleep, we will find you acting on your best behavior...'

Once upon a time that was the song of the year. It certainly felt relevant for a while, the plight of the individual in hand-to-hand combat with the plight of the world. That singer could have been talking about me trying to save the girl with the navy blue eyes from all that ever happened to her and all that ever might happen again. He could also be speaking a message to the Great Powers, to the men with their fingers on the buttons, the buttons that would launch the planet into a new, human-free future, a place where trees will fall in the woods all over the world and they will make zero sound because there won't even be the memory of a person to hear it.

That's what was in the air twenty-four and seven back in 1985 but we didn't think it was unusual, didn't realize how it was killing us one day at a time, didn't understand what it was doing to our sense of the future and that the ultimate conclusion that many of us reached, black, white, it didn't take sides, was that we would have no future.

'All for freedom and for pleasure,' the man sings. 'Nothing ever lasts forever, everybody wants to rule the world.'

Sitting there next to Terry in my imagination, I feel that I have done something useful, worthy and good. I wonder if I will tell the girl with the navy blue eyes what I have done or if it will matter.

Would she want revenge?

Sure.

Am I the only one who would ever be able to act upon what she told me?

Sure.

Does it matter that I never did anything, never told anyone except you and the rest of the world?

I don't know and I'll never know.

I'll just keep hearing 'André' floating on the wind from time to time, season to season and every July.

It has sustained me for all these years, kept me going through moments of doubt and uncertainty, moments when I questioned whether I had any right to crowd the planet.

I still don't know, don't have any good answers.

She told me things.

I guess I needed to know them but I'll never be sure why.

It's enough now to take a toke off the roach of my imagination with a view of a battered boulevard lined with dead and dying businesses, insurance and auto parts and drug stores and clothing stores and notions shops. It's enough to sip that frosty brew and believe in justice, hope, good fortune and time. Enough to think that you will always be the bearer of stories, secrets, closet lies and counter-lies.

You'll never ever know where you're going. You can only trust that you will know what to do when you get there.

47. Who wants to be famous?

The question hangs in the air.

Thirty young men are gathered in the cafeteria. The October sun cuts through the metal screens over the windows. A fly cruises through the room leaving an invisible trail behind. The sound of a streetcar clattering down Carrollton Avenue. The call of one student to another as they exit the Green Hall.

No one answers the question, at least not right away. We sense a trick. Coach is leering at us with his arms crossed, a phony smile on his face like when he's just praised you for fucking up.

He asks it again. Who wants to be famous, he says.

Still no takers.

What about you, Jackson, he says. Don't your parents write soap operas? I'll bet you wanna be famous.

I don't care about any of that stuff, says Jackson.

No? What about you Maginnis? You got a loud mouth. You should go into politics you got such a loud mouth. I'll bet you wanna be famous.

Embarrassed, Maginnis lowers his eyes and fiddles with the tape on his wrists.

What about you Carriere? You're always in the hall with your sunglasses on and that stupid straw in your mouth. I know you wanna be famous someday. Tell me I'm wrong.

I consider my answer. I know the old fart is up to something. He's burned me before with his false camaraderie and the fatherly smile. But it's true, fame is what I want more than anything else. Even way back then I knew I wanted to be known for something, some permanent mark, some record that I was here. Perhaps I hoped I would be the last white cornerback in the National Football League, perhaps I thought I'd bring New Orleans a Superbowl Crown. All I knew was that I never wanted to be forgotten, washed away like sidewalk chalk.

Sure, I want to be famous.

Coach's smile gets larger, more wicked, more sarcastic.

You do, do ya? Well listen up. I'm gonna tell you how you can become famous. All of you. You wanna be famous? Lose tonight. You hear me? Lose tonight's game and you'll make every newspaper in the country. Hell, I believe you'll make the USA Today. What do you think Coach Chick?

I wouldn't be a bit surprised, says the diminutive Sicilian, decked out in green coaches' shorts, a tight white polo shirt and an orange baseball cap. They're gonna come at you for four quarters so you better be ready to play.

Coach holds up the Times-Picayune sports section.

I know most of you all saw this already but for those of you who haven't let me share it with you. Let's see here, where is it? Okay, here we go, listen up. 'Small Schools Upset Special of the Week: The St. Bernard Eagles are 0-19 over their last nineteen games but look for them to celebrate a Homecoming victory over the Ben Franklin Falcons who are 2-4 and on a two game losing streak. Final Score: Eagles 24, Falcons 10.'

Coach takes off his bifocals and lets them dangle in front of his white Guyabera.

Well gentlemen, he says. There it is. I been coaching this football team for twenty years and I ain't never seen them call a game one way or another for this little pissant football team. Until today. But there it is, in black and white. You guys have been picked to lose to a team that hasn't won a football game in over two years and if that happens then I guarandamntee you that you will be famous.

With that he dismisses us to go eat or shit or jack it or chew our nails for an hour or so before we load up the school bus and ramble on down to Chalmette for the most important football game that I will ever play.

48. Waiting outside the cafeteria is the girl with the navy blue eyes wearing her navy blue windbreaker, blue jeans, white sneakers and her honeyed and magnificent smile. This is our deal, to walk among the old houses and the trees of uptown, hearing the streetcars racking up the tracks and the steam ships beyond our eyesight over the levee that holds back the mighty Mississippi. We hold hands and think of ourselves as an old married couple.

This afternoon our footsteps lead us down Hampson Street past the ice cream parlor and the video game joint and the tiny jewelry stores that sell large chunks of silver, diamond and gold to well-preserved uptown women, past the sandwich shops and the pizza parlor until we reach a small park on the corner of Dublin Street.

Thirty feet wide and one block long, the park is bisected by a serpentine sidewalk, dotted with a few royal palms and sycamores, furnished with a half dozen wrought iron benches. We curl up together on one of these and she huddles in under my letter jacket though the weather is warm. The sun is sliding down over the emerald levee, yellow leaves are dropping from the trees, the sound of a crow cawing down the block, a flutter of pigeons taking flight, a ship's horn blowing over the horizon warning away fellow travelers. We are talking, she and I, as a pair of older white women power-walk on past, giving us the look that interracial couples learn to ignore.

As many times as I have played this story out in my mind, I can never recall exactly how we got on the subject of last summer. Perhaps because we had never spoken about it and I had only received the barest hints of what she was dealing with at home. Marty Love's touchdown meant nothing to me then.

That afternoon she leans into my chest and she holds me close. She whispers my name, tells me that she loves me. She mentions a couple of guys that she knew. Something happened but she isn't clear and it's very vague.

They roughed her up, she says.

She does not use the word 'rape' or even intimate that this is what happened but the thought of someone being cruel and inflicting harm on this fragile bird makes me see shadows in the corners of my eyes, dark reckonings, ancestral blood going bad.

Revenge is in the Carriere main line, going back to my great Uncle Felix, the Sheriff of Washington Louisiana, who, in revenge for a sucker-punch pistol-whipping, ambushed the three Frere brothers just across the street from the old saloon, wiping out an entire line of men, killing off that family clean and permanently, then fleeing to Texas where all bad asses go to start anew.

Yes, even then I wanted to rule the world, kill my enemies, destroy what I could not understand.

I hold the girl with the navy blue eyes to my chest as the power-walking white women pass by on their endless laps giving us the look that says this is what comes of interracial dating.

49. Down by three points just a few minutes ago, Maginnis singlehandedly saves the game and our season by snatching an option pitch out of the air and out-running 21 other men 95 yards to the endzone. Now the St. Bernard Eagles have the ball on our nine yard line and it's fourth and goal. Coach Chick hollers from the sideline to watch #45. An offensive guard converted to fullback, #45 has been running over and through us for 58 minutes, dragging players for extra yardage, refusing to go down until seven or eight men are on top of him. He's taken the ball in for one score in the first quarter and another in the third.

Now it's time for the defense to rise. It was all we'd been good at all season, holding other teams to few yards and fewer points. The problem was the quarterback who threw interceptions like he was shaving points for the Mob. That was me, of course. The only place where I could do the team any good was on defense where years of playing second string had taught me how to out-hustle and out-hit larger and faster men.

Jackson and I took our positions at inside linebacker. The Eagles quarterback was in the shotgun flanked by #45. Maginnis got a jump on the snap and came in fast like he'd been doing all game. #45 gave him a chip shot and then circled to his right. Maginnis crushed the quarterback but not before he floated the ball to #45, who caught it at its highest point and then turned upfield.

I had read the play from the very start, saw #45 barely hit Maginnis when they had been rocking each other for four quarters, saw the quarterback set his hips to make the soft and easy throw, saw the offensive line pull back, then jump forward. I saw it all and at once I was on the move.

I was never fast and I was never big.

When they timed me in the forty they usually shook their stopwatch when I was finished because they thought that it was broken.

But when I put on the helmet and the hip pads and thigh pads and shoulder pads and the socks and the cleats I was about as fast as any man out there, could usually get their firstest with the mostest and I'd hit you like your horse had been shot out from under you.

I locked down on #45, in his dark blue jersey and the white pants stained with mud, blood and sweat, saw that fat head like a block of basalt atop a mountain of flesh, saw the nimble feet kicking up clods of dirt.

I heard the cheerleaders scream and the off-stage grunts and groans of the linemen thudding into each other, the rising noise of the crowd as the fullback picked up steam and crossed the line of scrimmage, the eight, the seven, the six, the five.

We met at the four.

He made no effort to juke me or cut back or make me miss, he simply lowered into me that checkerboard facemask and those 240 pounds of Chalmette beef. The sound of our collision made the crowd gasp.

Will you forgive me if I say that at that moment I wanted to kill him? I had played the entire game like a survivor of a tornado who finds himself on a whitewater raft. Players and coaches and the band and the ball and the scoreboard had merged into one symbolic billboard rising up alongside the highway of my mind.

#45 went sideways, stumbling, falling, knocked off-balance by the sheer ferocity of the hit. From the ground I saw his body contort with all of his power to counteract Newton's Third Law. Then Jackson was belting into that subnormal son-of-a-bitch, knocking him out of bounds.

The final horn blew a moment or two later. We had made liars out of the Times-Picayune and would remain as anonymous as ever to the USA Today. As we walked off the field, Coach Chick smacked the side of my helmet and gave me a pat on the ass.

That's the way to play football son, he said.

50. In my mind I am back on the road and heading towards home. What's done is done. Secrets have been revealed, action has been taken. The past will never be undone but at least it feels different, less haunting, less strange.

I sit in a small room in a safe place far from havoc and compose my thoughts. But at the same time I am also a much younger man.

I leave Terry at his house with a dope-ass handshake that makes me feel blacker than Shaft and then I'm piloting my father's little blue Honda out of the Bayou City and home to the Bayou State. Outside Houston are immense flats of rice fields, pea soup green in the spring sun. A biplane dips to spray poison upon the wet rows that stretch in silver lines to the horizon and beyond. All is a flat nothingness except for the rare copse of trees hidden in plain view, the last gathering of elders before the final blade falls.

This is a lifeless land out here, bereft of humanity except for the odd trailer-home on the frontage road, inevitably a collection of motor vehicles in the yard and an array of satellite dishes on the roof. I wonder about those refuges from the modern world each time I pass, imagining an obese veteran of a foreign war ploughed into the sofa watching daytime TV. I wonder also whether my own mother is lying on her side in just such a place, still hooked on the old crimes and the left behind lies. Somewhere in the world is that poor impoverished creature, a victim of the sixties, long hair and free love. Those are other mysteries for me to pursue, other actions that will have to happen.

I am a person filled with the absence of good deeds and good behavior. It is up to the poor wordsmith in me to attempt some type of redemption. I'll never get out of any of this alive.

And so I steam east into the hot morning and the hot day. I am exhausted from the tension and the hours awake, the lies I have told and the truth that has set me free.

Beaumont rises in a weary wave, its lone tall building an abandoned hotel, the myth of the west as dead as the passenger pigeon. Nothing to stop for and no reason to arrive and I leave Beaumont behind and keep apace with the heavy truckers hauling ass across America and the families piled into wagons with faces pressed against the glass and a weary woman asleep in the passenger seat.

Orange Texas passes in one glimpse of a chemical plant whose byproducts have turned the landscape all around it an ugly misfortune as if the plague came through followed by locusts followed by vultures followed by nukes. The pine trees have been japanned an oily black, the grass has been crystallized, even the gravel on the roadside has a chemical shine.

Then the Sabine River and Texas is only a memory, a tomorrow that won't ever happen and a present no more.

I glance over and see the old black man that my Uncle murdered, lounging in the passenger seat. He has a cigarette going, sunglasses on, worn overalls and snow-white hair. He's seen the quick and he's seen the dead and to him there's no difference but the smell. He says little, listens to all. He's a gentle reminder that I still have stones to unturn, dogs to feed and ancestors to burn. I can't let my feelings and my own past cowardice get in the way. I have to decide who I am and make that my mantra, my message, my prayer.

Lake Charles, a hell under the cover of a black night is a vacationer's paradise by day. The frightening, two-lane, insanely narrow bridge that takes one over the estuary is nothing to my glad heart now. I rock the little fourbanger at maximum speed wanting to go airborne, wanting to be free. I am old and young all at once and don't care who catches me, who sees me, who's on my tail. I see the lake spread out reflecting the ribbon of blue sky, I see the bathers on the shore in their colorful clothing, smell the roasting pig and the corn on the cob. I want to believe in that pleasant yesterday when we knew so little and wanted so much. I want to make you happy once more.

51. But there's one last thing to do, one last set of experiences to describe.

If you've come this far with me it won't matter to you whether what I tell you next is true or false, real or imagined or a combination of both.

If it happened to me all the better and if it happened to you, you who are also a teller of tales, a keeper of secrets, a store of old ways, then I say thank you for giving it over to me so that I may make it come back.

So maybe it is years later. Maybe it's you and you are hitchhiking across this great beast of a nation. You find yourself alongside the Interstate in Portland Oregon, wet and greasy and the drizzling shits. Your hair is long, your vision is steamed, your slender sinuous body is running on weed fumes and the whisper of LSD.

When did you bathe last, when did you eat?

Where is your mother, father, brother, friend?

Somewhere else to be sure.

You stand there with your hand out and you don't think of me because you don't know me, have not met me yet. I myself might pass you by in your dirty Army overcoat and backpack and too-ready smile. Yeah, I'd let you get wet in the wet driving rain because cats like you are usually trouble, needy and desperate and pitiful and insane. I wouldn't stop and I don't but someone else will.

Like those two guys in the beat-up Chevrolet who pulled over in the dankness and a hand flew out the window and waved and you ran to their car, jumped in the backseat without a word.

Remember how relived you felt, all your past transgression seeming to vanish with the appearance of this one car.

Who was driving?

Do you remember their faces, their names, the look in their eyes?

After everything would you be able to identify them, know them from a stranger, pick them out from a lineup, ID them in a morgue?

Well, one was fat and the other was skinny. That's what you would say. The fat one drove. The skinny one sat in the passenger seat and fucked with the radio. They didn't talk to you when you first got in. The fat one was waiting to see what the next song would be. By the way he was staring at the dial you knew what the deal was, what they were cruising on and how long it had been. Tweakers, man, you could not walk ten feet in Oregon without bumping into a tweaker and here they were again, piloting a beat-to-shit white four-door across town, the backseat black with filth, the floor and seat littered with fast food trash and beer bottles, porno magazines and wet clothes.

Find some Zeppelin, says the fat one.

Fuck Zeppelin, says the skinny one. I'm tired of that old crap.

The fat one punches the skinny one hard in the meat of his shoulder, driving his body against the door.

Never say that in this car, says the fat one. Never fucking say that around me. I should kill you for even thinking that. Fuck Zeppelin? Fuck you.

The fat one turns in his seat and acknowledges you.

You like Zeppelin, says the fat one.

They're the best.

Fucking A, says the fat one and you two punch each other's fists. Where ya going friend, he says.

You tell him that you're heading for the coast but you'll go as far as they're willing to take you.

The fat one says they're heading across town, just fucking around. For a few bucks in gas money they'll be glad to take you to the Sunset Highway, get you a little closer to home.

Sure, you say.

No need to tell them that you have no home and if you do it's in Louisiana where your father and your stepmother live, still alive, the two of them and still only minimally insane. But no need to go into that, to lay out all your purchases, all the places you've been since you walked away from home and sank into your dreams.

Just nod with the music because the skinny dude has found a station playing a song and it's a good one, Radar Love, and as the fat dude merges into traffic and punches that monster sucking gasoline across lanes filled with wet debris, water dripping in the window and the ceiling hanging down like a collapsed tent, you howl with the music and the skinny guy, his arms covered in jail-house tattoos howls with the music and the fat boy leans over the wheel and howls, howls, howls with the music.

No more speed, he says. I'm almost there.

And these are your brothers and this is where you belong. When the skinny dude passes you an acrid stinking joint issuing a filthy film of wet smoke it is the crowing moment, the last of the Mohicans, a better and stranger time.

Then you're off the Interstate and on the thick mud streets looking for gas and snacks. The fat dude pulls into a Mobile station with flaming red Pegasus rising over the rooftop ready to take flight.

A horse with wings, says the skinny dude, laughing.

They head inside for beer as you put a few small dollars into the tank.

At an adjacent pump is a good-looking blonde gassing up a silver Mustang. She ignores you, ignores the world, filing a nail. Just as she's finishing up, the fat dude and the skinny dude exit the minimart and head for the car. She's pulling away as they're getting in and the fat dude fires up the Chevy, drops it in gear and takes off. Instead of heading back to the Interstate he follows the girl in the Mustang. She stops at a light. The Chevy is one car behind her.

What are we doing, you say.

We're following that chick, says the fat dude.

Yeah, I see that. Why? Do you know her?

Do we know her, says the fat dude. Ha, that's a good one man. Hey dude. Do we know her?

Nope, says the skinny dude. But we're gonna know her and she's gonna know us.

What are you guys talking about?

The light changes and the Mustang advances down a street lined with quiet businesses closed down on this Sunday night.

We're gonna get that bitch, says the fat dude.

What do you mean, 'get her'?

I'm gonna hit her car. When she gets out we're gonna grab her, throw her ass in our car, then take her someplace and fuck her. You can help, dude. It'll be fucking great. We do this shit all the time.

What.

Yeah man, says the skinny dude. Three dudes always makes it easier. With only two, sometimes the bitches get hurt.

Yeah they do, says the fat dude.

Yeah they do, says the skinny dude. They sure do.

What the fuck are you guys talking about? Are you fucking serious?

Hell yeah, posse, says the skinny dude. Serious as a heart-attack.

The fat dude and the skinny dude laugh and high five. The Mustang turns off the boulevard down a street lined with warehouses.

Perfect, says the fat dude. Bitch couldn't have picked a better street if she tried.

The Chevy is closing ground.

Let me out, you say. Let me the fuck out of this car.

What, says the fat boy, punching a button on the radio.

Let me the fuck out of this car! I'm not doing this shit with you guys.

Yeah you are, says the skinny dude, fooling with something in his lap.

No I'm not!

Yeah you are, says the skinny dude, turning in his seat to point an automatic pistol at you. You're doing this with us dude or I'll shoot you in your fucking face.

Yeah you will, says the fat dude.

Yeah, I will, says the skinny dude. I sure will.

Zeppelin. Immigrant Song. The fat dude howls and punches the gas. The skinny dude rocks in his seat with the car's momentum and smiles at you, a sick and deranged grin, those blue eyes lined with veins, those joyous happy eyes having the time of their lives. The Chevy will be making impact in ten seconds.

Close your eyes and visualize. Like the good guy in the movies, like the hero on TV, you know what to do and how it must be done. You've seen it a thousand times and seeing it is imagining it and if it can be imagined then it can be done. You sweep your hand in front of you, knocking the pistol into the back of the fat dude's head. Bang and the gun goes off, the driver's window shatters and the engine moans. The fat dude's foot plants onto the accelerator. The Chevy swerves suddenly and horribly to the right, jumps a curb, roars down the sidewalk and slams into a telephone pole. Boom and all three of you fly forward, the fat dude into the steering wheel, the skinny dude into the dashboard and you into the back of the seat.

For a moment there is only the steam of the engine, the clacking of the windshield wiper blades and Immigrant Song.

You put your hand to your face.

Blood from your nose but no teeth missing, no eyes poked out.

In your other hand is the gun.

The fat dude is snoring into the steering wheel.

The skinny dude is a broken mirror crumpled onto the floor.

You grab your bag, push open the door, get out of the car and take off. Limping down the street you spot a storm drain gushing with water. You toss the pistol in the drain. Bang, a flash of light and it's gone. You take one look back at the wrecked car and the wrecked men inside the wrecked car. There's no hope for them and nothing that you can do or would want to do. You turn away and head back the way you came.

52. A snail is crossing the sidewalk, a fat handsome devil with a swirl of convulsions upon his portable home. Your foot just misses his fragile headquarters. You stop, pick him up and as the snail retracts in instinct and fear you place him safely on the curb where he may continue his paralyzingly slow mission towards the next encounter, the next stranger, the next secret to keep.

The End

# About the Author:

Raised in New Orleans, Andre Carriere is an educator as well as the Artistic Director of the Doghouse Theatre. He currently lives with his wife, dogs and cat in Los Angeles.
