The Darling Budds

New Site

2010-04-25T21:58:00.000-07:00

We're over here now:

TheDarlingBudds.com

Note that the page that's online now is just a temp page...coming very soon in a full-featured site with audiobook and ebook downloads, a fan forum, and more.

Forty-Six

2010-02-10T13:15:00.000-08:00

Previously: After a late-night encounter with Lucas Budd, Emily and Michael snuck into the Budd house. After hearing his tale of an epic set-up at the hands of his friend Jerome Johnson, the two agreed to help Mr. Budd clear his name. Their first assignment was to get a mysterious document from Harry Sebastian, David's dad.

Emily and Michael couldn't put it off any longer: it was time for them to visit Harry Sebastian. So they made plans to hang out with David and then, on the damp evening of a wet Wednesday, they entered the Sebastian house through a side door, the one with the security keypad that every Gangmember knew the code for. David wasn't expecting them for another half an hour yet.

On their way to Mr. Sebastian's office, they passed through a hallway that Valerie Sebastian, David's mom, had apparently set up as an impromptu art gallery. The interior design of the large Sebastian house was ever-changing, and neither Michael nor Emily had ever seen this display before. The hallway lined with photographs of Lillian and David in romantic poses

These pictures were used in advertisements for Surroundings, Mrs. Sebastian's French Quarter "lifestyle boutique." Lillian had been appearing in the ads for about a year and a half, and David had started posing with her in the last six months or so.

David wasn't a bad choice for the ads: he was very pretty, and his blond hair and delicate features made him look more like Lillian's twin than Alexander. But he also looked like a teenager in a way that Lillian didn't, and everyone wondered why Valerie didn't use Lillian's boyfriend, the more mature-looking Michael, whose olive skin and dark curls would have contrasted and complemented Lillian's look.

The photos, in gauzy black & white, were blown up and placed inside heavy but plain wooden frames, then lined down the hallway at exact intervals. The ads, Valerie said, weren't just pictures, they were a story: here was a young beautiful couple in love and living a lifestyle that others dreamed of, a lifestyle that could be purchased at Surroundings.

Emily and Michael couldn't help but slow down and look at the pictures as they passed. They missed Lillian, they missed David (even though they were about to see him), and they missed the promise that these pictures represented. Michael, his languid and distant mask already in place, looked impassively at each one, but Emily shook her head as they moved down the hall.

"This is really sick," she whispered. "It's like David's mom is trying to prove something to guests. 'Of course my son likes girls...and here are the photographs to prove it.'"

Michael, of course, said nothing.

The last photograph in the hallway, the one leading out into a tastefully minimalistic sitting room, was the best of the series, and the one that was used most often in Valerie's ads. Lillian, wearing a modest blouse ($79) that exposed nothing, not even the hollow of her throat, sat on a brown leather settee ($1999), with David on the floor between her knees. Lillian's burgundy skirt ($215) was lifted demurely up to her knees and, leaning forward, she had slipped her hand down the front of David's partially-unbuttoned tuxedo shirt ($185). With eyes closed softly, David rested his cheek against her forearm, his mouth slightly open.

The focus of the shot, though, was Lillian's face, and the look of undisguised longing she gave the viewer. Without showing anything more than her shins, the photograph was almost indecent: her eyes were hooded and dark, her bangs fell across her face, and her full lips—clearly moistened moments before by her tongue—were parted and expectant. You could almost hear her breath, shallow and quick from desire.

It was an arresting image. The other pictures in the series were good photographs, but this was a classic. Valerie knew it: she ran the ad so often that she had to go out of her way to continue carrying the products featured. The photographer himself knew it: it was currently on the front page of his website, the first image visitors would see. Even random adults knew it: a modified version of the picture—with David cropped out and Lillian turned into a flatly colored illustration—was spotted by one of Litta'Bit's friends on a flier to promote a local club's DJ night.

At school there was the rumor that this picture had gotten Lillian discovered by an international modeling agency. It was said that she would soon be departing for New York, London, Paris, Munich. The truth wasn't nearly as exciting: a local talent agent had merely called to ask if she would consider modeling in ads for other New Orleans businesses. Lillian had declined.

Michael looked briefly at the photograph, then turned away. To anyone else, it would have seemed no different from the cursory, almost dismissive, inspections he'd given the other pictures, but Emily could tell that he didn't want to linger in front of this one. She saw the fleeting darkness come over his features, like the shadow of an airliner slipping quietly across the unchanging ground below.

Of course it hurt him...of course it did. When you saw the photo you sighed because the image seemed so tangible and real that it was easy to imagine, if only for a second, that lovely Lillian was speechless with desire for you. But only Michael, and Michael alone, had ever actually seen Lillian look like that. And now she was gone.

For just a second, as they left the hallway, Emily put her hand on the inside of Michael's arm. He didn't react, but he didn't pull away like he normally would have while in character. She squeezed his arm through the cotton of his thin button-up shirt, then let her hand drop. Following Michael across the sitting room, she felt sad for him (of course), and she felt jealous of Lillian, but she felt something else, too: pride in her ability to know when Michael was hurting, and in her ability to soothe him.

They paused at the bottom of a staircase and looked up at David's bedroom. It was only six-thirty, and he wasn't expecting them until seven. From behind his door they could hear softly muted drum machines. Michael nodded at Emily, and they continued on to Harry Sebastian's office.

They found David's dad on the couch, his feet propped up on the front of his desk. His tie was loose and his collar button was undone, and he was wearing house slippers styled to look like large oversize basketball shoes. An unlit cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. There was a stack of manila folders to his right and one open on his lap, but Harry Sebastian ignored them. He slowly shuffling a deck of cards and staring absently out the window.

"Yeah?" he said, the cigarette bobbing up and then back down. He didn't look over.

"Harry?" Emily said, because he had never allowed them to call him Mr. Sebastian. "Do you have a second?"

"Oh, shoot." Harry dropped his feet and set the cards on the small table by the couch. "Mike, Emmy! How are you? I thought you were David. He's the king of sneaking up on me while I'm working. Just between the three of us, I'm thinking about making him wear a bell when he's in the house."

"That's a great idea. You know how much he loves accessories."

Harry Sebastian threw back his head and laughed, his fedora almost tipping off. "Ha! That's great. He's in his room, I think, if you guys want to go on up..."

"Actually..." Emily said, looking quickly over her shoulder at Michael, who nodded at her, "we're here to see you."

"Oh! Well, come in, come in." Harry gathered up the files and looked around for a place to stack them, finally placing them on the side table, under the deck of cards. "We'll make it official, then: you guys sit over here, I'll take my place behind the desk like a real lawyer."

Michael and Emily came into the office and he shut the door behind them. The rest of the house was carefully designed by Valerie and her swarm of interior decorators to function as a backdrop for Surroundings' photoshoots, but Harry's office was the chaotic heart of the home. It belonged to him and him alone: every flat surface held precarious stacks of law journals and old notebooks and manila folders. Unframed movie posters (Animal House, Caddyshack, The Big Lebowski) and all-but-unused calendars from the last few years were scattered along the walls. The desk was a little too big for the room, but it held piles of opened mail, dirty coffee mugs, handheld video games, a broad assortment of paper scraps, and photos of David and Valerie. An Ole Miss bumper sticker and two receipts were taped to the wall beside his chair. Harry swore he knew where everything was, that he had a system.

"So, what's up?" He walked behind the desk but didn't sit down. His hands went to the back of his old faux-leather chair. "Speeding ticket, fender bender? Um...DUI?"

"No, no. Nothing like that." Emily glanced over at Michael. "Lucas Budd sent us. He says you have something of his."

"What?" Harry looked from Emily to Michael. He closed his eyes and opened them again. "What do you mean?"

"He said you'd be expecting us."

"Not us," Michael added, in the slow, bored, and slightly dreamy voice he used in public. "But someone."

Again, Harry looked at both of their faces, one at a time. His eyes drifted up to a spot somewhere on the wall behind them and his face grew pale.

"No. Oh no." Patting his pockets slowly, softly, he pulled out his pack of cigarettes. Only after he took one out did he seem to distantly realize he already had a cigarette in his mouth. He put both of them back in the pack. "Oh, Lucas, what have you done?"

His unsteady hand came up, crossed over his face, and he slowly removed his fedora. It dropped to his desk.

"He told us to say orchid," Michael said.

Harry glanced over at him, a scowl just behind his face. "Of course he did. Lucas loves all that cloak and dagger garbage. Orchid," he spat out.

Neither of the teenagers spoke.

"Is...is David involved?"

"No," Emily said quickly. "No, of course not."

Harry Sebastian sat down slowly behind his desk. He picked up his fedora for a second, then put it back down. "I don't...I don't know what Lucas promised you two, but you have no idea what you're playing with. No idea."

"Mr. Budd was framed."

Harry nodded. "Maybe he was, Michael. Knowing Jerome, there's a real good chance of that. But maybe he wasn't framed...Lucas was always a mysterious dude. And you know what? That's not even the point. Here's what the point really is: you two have no business getting involved in this. You're just...kids, you're in over your head. Please, for me...you have to just walk away."

"We made a promise," Emily said. "We have to help him."

"No…no. You have to help yourselves. And that means you get as far away from this as you can." Harry Sebastian blew air through his lips. "I hate to play, like, the parent card, but do you know how close I am to calling your folks?"

"Please don't. We trust you."

"I didn't say I was.” Harry looked over at Emily, almost hurt. “Listen: you can't believe Lucas, even if he's telling the truth. He's...he's the best lawyer I’ve ever seen. He'll convince you of anything. I mean, for God's sake, did he even tell you what this was about?"

"He told us he'd been framed by Mr. Johnson," Michael said. "And we needed to pick up a package from you to help him and his allies."

"His allies? Okay, maybe. But did he tell you what's in the package? I mean, do you guys think you're here to pick up, you know, evidence, something that’ll expose the conspiracy to the world? Or do you think it’s proof that he's innocent, at least? I mean, did he even tell you what was in the package?"

They didn't answer.

"No, of course he didn't. But I bet it didn't matter at the time because Lucas made you feel like you were part of a…secret fellowship, right?"

"That's not fair," Emily said.

"I don't mean it as an insult, Emily. I fell for it myself. That's why you're in my office right now." Harry looked at the ceiling for a moment, silently moving his lips. “It's nothing like what you think it is. It's not evidence, it's not proof. It's just a contract for a shady real estate deal, one that involves Lucas and Jerome. Not the only one they were involved in, probably not even the shadiest."

Michael sighed, as though the conversation bored him. "If it's so minor, why does Lucas care?"

"Because if Lucas gets the contract, he'll have a weapon to use against Jerome, even though he'll go down hard, too." Harry leaned forward. "But don't mistake me. The contract isn't why I'm scared for you...the fact that you're going against Jerome is what scares me. Have you guys been following the scandal at the S&WB?"

"A little."

"So this guy, Andrews, is being investigated for massive kickbacks. Which is fine, because he's guilty as hell, and everyone's known it for years. But a few weeks ago at a dinner--at a private dinner--he made a little joke about Jerome being behind the recent shake-up on the School Board. Just a joke...I don't even know if there was any truth to it. Hell, Andrews might not have even known if it was true."

"What did Mr. Johnson do to him?" Emily asked him.

"Nothing at all. Except this: behind the scenes, he let it be known that the Johnson Machine was no longer protecting him. That's it. Without the Machine behind him, the NOPD and the SBI and the Mayor's ethics committee moved in." Harry Sebastian pointed at each of them with his hands. "One joke, that's it. And what you guys are doing...it's not a joke."

Emily swallowed and looked over at Michael. He still had a slightly condescending half-smile on his face, but there was a hollowness to the expression. She looked back over at Harry.

"What's the contract about?"

He shook his head. "Who cares what the contract was about? Haven't you been listening to me?"

"But shouldn't we know what this is about, if it's so minor? I mean, maybe you're right and the contract is so nothing that we shouldn't risk messing with Mr. Johnson over it. But we won't be able to make that decision if you don't tell us what it's about."

"Young lady, let me know if you decide to apply to law school. I'll write you one hell of a recommendation letter." Harry Sebastian did something they weren't expecting: he laughed out loud, one quick barking Ha!

He cleared his throat. "Okay. There was some land. It was way over on the Westbank, almost out of the city, in the part of town where all the Vietnamese immigrants live."

"Like where Litta'Bit lives?"

"Sure, yeah. Right near there. It wasn't much, just a few empty acres of scrub land. But to some people...well, back before the Vietnamese moved in--like just after the Civil War--this land, it was given to former slaves. And the children and grandchildren of these slaves, they went into the city and invented jazz, they moved out to the country and invented the blues, and they went deeper into the bayou and invented zydeco. They invented New Orleans."

Harry paused for emphasis. His inner showman was overcoming the reluctance he'd felt to tell them about this.

“So one Vietnamese lady basically owns that entire part of town, and she decided she wanted to build some McMansions on the land, so she got City Council to support her. There were two exceptions: Councilman Lucas Budd and Councilman Jerome Johnson. They fought the development for weeks, even tried to get a memorial or a museum put on the land. But they lost...which was crazy, right? Because they never lose. So now there's this Vietnamese lady that nobody even knows anything about, and she just beat The Johnson Machine in head-to-head combat. Well, let's just say her stock rose quite a bit."

Emily started to say something, but then she seemed to think better of it.

“So one evening Lucas Budd and Jerome Johnson come over, and they’ve got someone with them: the Vietnamese lady. And they want me to look over a contract. Not a legal contract, just a little document they made to cover a partnership." Harry opened his hands, as though showing them the final reveal of a magic trick. "That's right: they were all in on it together. Lucas and Jerome fought the development while at the same time pulling strings on the Council to make sure it happened. That way they maintained their integrity, got their way on the Council, and helped make the Vietnamese lady a player in New Orleans politics. That's how deep Jerome thinks about stuff like this."

"But why?" Michael asked, glancing out the window. "A bribe?"

"Yeah, that's what I assumed at first, but when I read the contract over, I realized it was more than that: they weren't just helping the developer: they were the developers. They were investors, equal partners with the Vietnamese lady. This contract was a private agreement to keep them all honest. And they needed me to be a witness, since they obviously couldn't get it notarized. I mean, this was a document that tied Lucas and Jerome into some pretty serious ethical violations. Like prison serious."

He paused and raised his eyebrows. Outside, there was a slow rumble of thunder in the distance, and all three of them chuckled a little at the effect. Rain began hitting the windows again, one drop at a time.

"So. There were three copies of the contract: one for them, one for her, and one for me. And it wasn’t even a contract really…it was mutual blackmail. Both sides know that the other has the evidence to destroy them."

Emily raised her hand a little, then looked embarrassed. “Three? Why not four? One for Lucas and one for Jerome.”

“You don’t understand how closely tied the two of them were…they considered their alliance as a single unit. It’s possible that Jerome was pulling strings even then to cut Lucas out, but it’s just as likely that it never occurred to them to get two copies. Whichever it was, I verified that all three copies were identical and watched them sign it. You see, Emily, like you I wanted to feel like I was important enough to be a part of something bigger than myself. Like I was one of the secret conspirators, you know?"

"That's not how we feel," Emily said, but Michael interrupted her.

“How much did they offer you?”

Harry Sebastian looked over at Michael for a long time. "Three percent. It doesn't sound like a lot, but trust me, it was."

An arched eyebrow. "You turned them down?"

"I turned them down. I have enough clean money to last me for a good long time, I don't need dirty money on top of it. So I made a joke about them owing me one and watched them sign the contracts. The Vietnamese lady has one, and--since Lucas needs my copy--I'm guessing Jerome has the third one. I have the backup."

"Why doesn't Mr. Johnson try to get your copy, too?" Emily asked.

"I'm not entirely sure, but I have a few theories. Maybe he really did have nothing to do with Lucas Budd's arrest, and he knows that even if Lucas tries to sell him out to save his own butt, Lucas has no proof. Or maybe Jerome just has more important documents to worry about. I'm not naive enough to think that this was their only backdoor deal, just the only one I was asked to be a part of. And finally, maybe he just doesn't think Lucas is a threat and he’s let his guard down. Because frankly: is he a threat? I mean, no offense, but he has two teenagers out running errands for him.

"But the real reason? He doesn't have to get it. He thinks I won't do anything with it, because he knows I'm scared to death of him. After this thing with Lucas—assuming he did it, of course—the whole city is jumping at shadows. I mean, he straight-up destroyed Lucas.…took away his career, his reputation, his family. You have to understand, this was a message to everyone in New Orleans, especially anyone thinking about running against him for mayor. And the message wasn't just 'Look at what I can do'…it was 'Look at what I'm willing do.'”

Outside, it was raining again, the soft drops hitting the office window and streaking down the glass. “Just now you said that Mr. Johnson doesn’t think that you’ll do anything with the contract,” Emily said softly. “Does that mean you will or you won’t?”

Harry Sebastian looked up at her, his lips tight and thin. He made a fist, like he was going to hit his desk, but he put it back down slowly. “That’s what you just got out of all this? Listen to me: if Jerome was capable of doing this to Lucas, a guy he’s been friends with since grade school, think what he’d do to you, no matter who your daddy is. This isn't a game, Emily, this isn't putting on suits and mixing cocktails and acting all constipated. This is real.”

Harry took a deep breath and relaxed his fist. “Please, honey: walk away. I don’t care how deep into this you guys are, you can still get out. I can protect you…I’ll keep the contract, let Jerome know that if anything happens to either of you I’ll send it to every reporter in this area code…”

“You’re scared,” Michael said.

“You’re goddamn right I am. Haven’t you been listening? Jerome can-”

“No, not of Jerome. Of Lucas...you're afraid of letting him down. And you're afraid of letting go of the contract. It's the only power you have in this.”

“Please. Lucas doesn’t want this to come out any more than Jerome does.” Harry stared down at his desk and breathed loudly through his nose. Finally, he looked back up at them. “You know that this won’t just affect Lucas and Jerome, right? If it comes out, it’ll take out both of them, sure, but what about your friends? I mean, what about Robert?”

“And Litta’Bit,” Emily said. “Her mom is the other partner, right? The development, it's where they live?”

“She…yes. She is. So why are you doing this? None of us even know if Lucas was framed or not…you could be ruining the life of your friends to help a…a drug-addicted closeted pedophile.”

Emily’s voice was low, barely audible over the rain, but she didn't break eye contact with him. “Because if we help clear this mess up, the twins will come home.”

Harry closed his eyes and started to speak, but he didn’t say anything. He turned away from her and stared out the window across the room.

“And if you can’t help us," Emily said, "we’ll go to Ms. Hunyh. We thought we could trust you, we thought you’d be someone we could count on. But you’re not. This doesn’t even concern you, and you’re still not going to help us.”

Michael glanced quickly over at Emily, his eyebrows raised, but she shook her head at him, just a little.

“That’s fine, though. It’s okay. We were expecting it, really. Mr. Budd said this was a long shot anyway, that you probably wouldn’t come through when push came to shove.”

“Enough.” Harry turned back to her. “I see what you’re doing…just stop it. I never said I wasn’t going to help. I just wanted both of you to understand what you were getting involved in, and give you…give you the chance to get out. I’ll turn over the envelope. I won’t get in the way of your little adventure. But--fuck me, I sound just like a Dad--but I want you to know that I’m just so...disappointed in both of you.”

Neither of them spoke. Michael looked away, and eventually Emily did, too. With a sigh, Harry Sebastian pushed himself up from behind his desk.

“Stay here. The envelope isn’t in this room, it’ll take me a second to get it.” He walked around the desk. When his back was to them, Michael moved his hand over and quickly squeezed Emily’s for just a second.

Harry Sebastian opened the door, but he didn’t leave the office just yet. He paused in the doorway, then turned back to Emily and Michael with a desperate look.

“I’ll give it to you…I don’t care what you two do. But you promise me this: don’t you dare get David involved. Do you hear me? You leave my boy out of this.”

The rain continued to fall. “We promise,” Emily whispered.

Harry Sebastian looked into each of their faces once more, then turned and left the room.

Next Week: Litta'Bit counts to ten...

Forty-Five

2009-12-13T17:46:00.000-08:00

It was her Rest Day, so Josephine didn't get up to run. Instead, she stayed in bed until she heard her mother go next door to Beaumonde at 8 am. She took a shower, one much longer and hotter than her usual morning shower--out of dread, however, not self-indulgence--then dried her hair thoroughly and put on the gray pencil skirt and plain white blouse she'd laid out the night before. It was time to look for a summer job.

She'd spent an agonizing ninety minutes putting together an appropriately simple job-hunting outfit. As a member of The Gang, Josephine had a closet full of thoroughly elegant and Proper outfits, and exactly none of them were suitable for dropping off job applications. Thanks to the efforts of the Budds, Josephine's wardrobe was perfect for a femme fatale in a '60s Italian spy movie, but not so great for a teenager trying to get hired at a smoothie place.

After getting dressed, Josephine went through the stack of papers she'd printed out the night before. She had resumes and cover letters, each carefully printed on heavy cotton paper, as well as the detailed itinerary she'd made for her day. Josephine had mapped the day out so she could hit the stores in the most efficient order: she'd start with the boutiques on Magazine Street, then move to the tourist places in the Quarter, and finally head out to the malls in the suburbs. This was probably the scariest thing Josephine had ever done, but having a plan seemed to make it a little bit better.

Her mother had left the keys to the car on the kitchen counter, along with a note--Abundans cautela non nocet--and Josephine checked everything one last time before she left: her clothes, her resume and cover letters, her hair, her hesitant traces of makeup. Unfortunately, she couldn't find any reason to put it off any longer, so she breathed deeply a few times and spoke to the mirror.

"You're going to do this," she said softly, then again louder: "You are going to do this. Don't be such a little bitch." This was a favorite phrase of her sister Catherine, deployed against her friends, family, and boyfriends whenever she felt that their courage didn't match up to her own superhuman taste for adventure. Josephine in particular was a frequent recipient of this taunt, and it had inevitably become part of her internal monologue.

She squared her shoulders and prepared herself to meet the terrifying tasks that waited for her. She hated meeting new people and couldn't stand talking about herself, and she'd be required to do both for just HOURS. However, Josephine was resolved to cure her summer boredom. She had to do this...she had to prove to herself she was capable of doing it.

So she got in her mother's Jaguar--this was Josephine's thirteenth time driving a car by herself, but she tried not to think of that as an omen--then she drove five blocks down to Mahogany, the Magazine Street home decor boutique that was first on her list.

•

A few hours later, Andre was on the patio of his house, finishing up his pre-run stretches. Andre wasn't a big fan of stretching: he He found it humiliating and, besides, he had a hazy memory of reading somewhere that research had proved that it wasn't actually very effective anyway and was probably one step above a folk remedy. (But mostly: stretches were hard and Andre was bad at them.) Now that his aunt was out of town, he'd whittled his before-run stretch routine to a handful of dispirited reaches and twists.

He'd made it four days as a a non-runner. During those four days, he sat around the house, wondering what he'd done all day before his aunt made him start running. But this morning as he was getting dressed (more out of habit more than necessity) he discovered that his black jeans, which had gotten microscopically less snug over the last two weeks, were now infinitesimally tighter again. He knew this was just a psychosomatic effect based on guilt, and he spent twenty minutes convincing himself that it was all in his head before finally giving up and just going running.

It was the heat of the day. Birds shifted uncomfortably on their branches, but had no energy to sing. A young black guy walked by, head down, an entire white t-shirt thrown limply over his head. Andre had a choice: he could run farther Uptown, passing out of the Garden District and behind Touro Hospital before turning around at Napoleon Avenue; or he could head towards Downtown, through the Lower Garden District, and into the Central Business District as far as Canal Street and the beginning of the Quarter. His aunt preferred the Downtown route because the scenery changed more often. Andre, though, preferred to go Uptown because there wasn't as much traffic or as many people to see him struggling along.

Today Andre felt like changing things up a little, so he headed towards Downtown. However, one block later, he remembered that he'd have to pass by a wretched outdoor summer concert series in the CBD. The "Hump Day Lunch Break," they called it, where cubicle ghosts could listen to weary nth-generation New Orleans music for an hour while slowly pushing Lunchables into their faces. So instead of going Downtown, Andre turned around and began jogging towards Napoleon Avenue, changing the course of both his jog and his summer.

Months later, he'd think about how such a simple decision--jogging Uptown instead of Downtown--had created such a profound effect on his life. He would wonder what other opportunities he'd missed out on, and what tragedies he'd unwittingly avoided, by making similar arbitrary choices. Andre knew such conjecture was banal in the extreme, but still, he couldn't help but think about it, when so much had changed in his life because one July afternoon he jogged one block, turned around, and jogged the other way.

But such philosophical thoughts weren't on Andre's mind that day, however....all he could focus on was not passing out. After a four-day break from running, he was having a rough time with his pace. Over the last few weeks, he'd worked up to jogging three blocks straight and walking one, but that Wednesday, after twenty minutes on the road, he was struggling to make it even two blocks before slowing down to a stumble. His breath was ragged, and he knew his running posture was embarrassing.

He tried to get into the stance his aunt had taught him: back straight, head up, forearms parallel with his waistband, thumbs all but touching his hipbone as his arms moved. Once he got his posture more or less correct, he began to focus on his breathing. Aunt Marissa had taught him to breath in a little on his first and second strides, then exhale on the third and fourth: in in, out out. He would count each step in his head, which not only helped him breath but helped him clear his mind, which seemed to be crucial to a good run. ...in in, out out...in in out out...in in out out...in in out out...in in out out...shit!

Up ahead of him, three blocks away, Josephine Brooks sliced around a street corner, sprinting at full speed directly towards him. Her long legs seemed to cover yards with each stride. It looked like she was leaving divots in the asphalt as she pushed off the ground.

She hurtled straight towards him, and would be standing where he was in seconds. Her hair was loose, galloping behind her as she ran. There was wildness in her eyes.

•

The first store on Josephine's list was Mahogany, a home decor boutique a few blocks from her home. Josephine parked across the street from the store and watched customers enter and leave. She wanted to wait until the store had no customers, so she didn't have to stand around, feeling awkward, until finally someone was free and she could ask to speak to the manager.

It took about five minutes before it seemed like the store was empty, and during that time, she proofread her resume for the hundredth time. With horror and disgust, she realized that, under Skills, she'd left out an Oxford comma. She considered going home and reprinting all of them, but she knew in her heart that this was just an excuse to put job-hunting off for another day. And that was no good, she knew it. So instead of fixing the typo, she minutely adjusted the paper clip holding the cover letter to the resume, took a deep breath, and walked across Magazine Street to Mahogany's front door.

...I'm Emily charming a stranger...I'm Litta'Bit flirting with a boy...I'm Lillian cocking an eyebrow and destroying the world ...

There was nobody in the store. Not just no customers, but no salespeople either. Josephine didn't know exactly what to do. She considered leaving and coming back later, but she forced herself to walk into the store and pretend to look at a collection of geometric bud vases arranged on a table.

There was laughter from the back, and Josephine looked up, as though caught. She could hear two women talking in the room behind the counter. Josephine shuffled to another table, this one displaying candles and tealight holders. She breathed deeply and tried to concentrate on the merchandise. There were too many mirrors in this store.

One of the ladies from the back walked by the door and saw Josephine. She was older, maybe thirty, and could have been the manager that Josephine needed to talk to. "Oh, hi...I didn't know you were out here. Can I help you with something?"

Josephine looked up at her, a $65 candle in her hand. She had heard what the lady had really said. Not "Do you need a hand finding something?" but "Can I help you?" As in: "What are you doing here? You don't belong in here."

Josephine glanced down at the floor and put the candle back on the table. "No. No thank you. Just looking around."

The saleswoman stayed behind the counter, so Josephine pretended to look at a beaded pillow. It felt like the lady was suspicious, watching her closely, but Josephine didn't dare look up to see if this was true. She wondered if she should buy something; she was afraid that the woman thought she was stealing. Oh my god, I come in to apply for a job and I end up arrested on suspicion of shoplifting...

But Josephine couldn't summon the courage to go up to the counter--and also there didn't seem to be anything for sale under thirty dollars--so she just mumbled a goodbye and escaped out onto the street.

Okay, so that was a disaster. But, as she got in the car, Josephine told herself that the first store was just a warm-up. She was still getting a feel for her task, and the next store would be better, and the next store would be better than that, and soon she would be an expert. It was like running: one foot in front of the other.

But when Josephine arrived at the next place on her list, a high-design clothing store that looked like an art gallery, she just parked in front, watched the customers come and go, and never got out of her car. She told herself she didn't like the sort of people she saw shopping there--frightening college girls who cut their own hair--but she knew this was just an excuse: she was still upset about what happened at Mahogany and too scared to go in.

So she drove down Magazine Street, stopping in front of the next three stores on her list but not once making it out of the car. Soon she found herself circling Whole Foods again and again, trying to force herself to go in and ask for an application. She was crying a little now, the thin tears probably ruining the whisp of eye makeup she'd put on, and she knew it was no good, no good, no good. She had failed herself again.

She slunk off into the deserted residential side streets and found a place to pull over where no one would pass by and see a young girl wiping her eyes in the front of her mother's Jaguar. She sat sniffling in the almost-silence of the air conditioner's hum. Josephine hit the steering wheel once, then again, then two more times, crying out with a frustrated yelp with each blow. She was useless, she was worthless, she needed to dry her eyes and prove that she could do this. But even as she yelled at herself to get it together and try again, she knew she wouldn't be able to. Job-hunting was over.

She didn't even need to a job, anyway, and if she wanted one she didn't have to hunt around. She could just ask her grandfather or David's mom or even Andre--through his father--to give her part-time work, and any of them would. The idea of picking up the phone and making that phone call had been appalling last night, but now that she was parked on a side street, crying, with a resume half-crumpled on her lap...well, it was still appalling, but she couldn't quite remember why.

But that wasn't the point. It wasn't about the job, it was about being bored, bored beyond boredom. And it wasn't even about that, either: mostly she had wanted to prove to herself that she could do this, that she could meet people and hold her own in a conversation, the way the rest of The Gang could. The way normal people could.

Alexander often joked that Josephine needing therapy, but in fact Josephine had been to see therapists before. The first time was a couple of sessions when she was a kid, after her father died. Then, three years ago, Josephine dedicated herself to mastering her diabetes through diet and exercise, and her mother--fueled by Catherine not minding her own business as usual--began to worry that Josephine actually had an eating disorder, and asked her to talk to someone "just to be sure."

Josephine carefully planned for the meeting, and went in nervously clutching her workout schedule, food diary, and fitness plan. It wasn't necessary: the therapist, himself a runner, knew that it was possible for a teenage girl to be focused on being fit without it being a symptom of a troubled body image. He chatted with her a bit and confirmed that Josephine just wanted to stay healthy, for healthy reasons, and was going about it in a healthy way. All he asked was that she meet with her pediatrician, because most nutrition books are written with adult, not teenage, metabolisms in mind.

Josephine was relieved, so relieved in fact that she didn't even notice that the therapist had gently steered the conversation towards the non-fitness aspects of her life. Later, she realized how sneaky he'd been: he could tell that Josephine was uncomfortable talking about herself, so he faced away from her a little, never making eye contact, and only asked oblique impersonal questions, as though they were just chatting about a theoretical teenage girl they both knew. Without even realizing she was doing it, Josephine began cautiously opening up to the doctor in a way she did to no one else, except sometimes David. She talked about how she felt about her friends, and her feelings about her mother and her relationship with her sister. But what Josephine really wanted to ask him about was why she was so shy, why every interaction with another person left her ashamed and flushed and hatefully disappointed in herself, why she always stammered and hyperventilated no matter how much she wanted be a normal girl in a normal conversation. But she hadn't been able to ask him any of this...she was too shy.

Josephine looked at herself in the rearview mirror of the Jaguar, at her red eyes and wet cheeks. She didn't cry very often--this was the first time since her mother and Catherine had gotten into a huge fight on the day before Christmas Eve--but when she did, she could never stop herself from looking in the mirror, to see what she looked like when she wept. It was upsetting to see, but there was also something deeply satisfying about it that she never understood.

There was nothing in her mother's glove compartment to dry her eyes with. Buried under some papers in the console was an individually-wrapped maxi-pad that Josephine briefly considered using--it was certainly absorbent--but she quickly decided that this was too hinky. Besides, what if somebody walked by and saw her wiping a sanitary napkin across her face?

She chuckled shakily at this, swiping her cheeks with the back of her hands, then pulled the car out onto the street. She knew what she'd do: she'd go running, get in an extra sprint workout, even though it was her Rest Day. Yes. Running always made her feel better. When she sprinted through the neighborhoods of her city, the world became sculpture, and the people just statues, and she alone was alive and moving. She wasn't Josephine when she ran...no, wait: she was Josephine. She was the real Josephine, the one she was scared to be the rest of the day, the one who could speak up, the one who looked at the world and what she faced and responded not with a blush or a stammer but with a shrug and a "Fuck it."

This plan to find a job had just been another attempt to prove that she could be that girl, that better Josephine, all the time. She had tried so many times before in her life and had always disappointed herself: two summers ago, in LA with her sister; last summer with Leonard. Now this summer with job-hunting and her other idea, the one about Lucas Budd and Emily and Michael. She's already failed at the first, and she was too frightened to do much more about the second than obsessively jog, every day, past their houses.

Still driving, she began sobbing once more, this time much harder. Her tears, which had been just a mist before, gathered and rolled down her cheeks. There was a sound coming from her throat, but she didn't know she was making it. Josephine didn't stop driving, she didn't pull over, she just drove on through the back streets towards her home. She was weeping so hard her chest hurt...she had failed again. There was another, more perfect Josephine buried inside of her, and she had failed again to help her find a way out. How much longer could she stay in there, how many more times could Josephine fail her, before she turned her back and retreated into nothing?

•

Luckily for Andre, he was just in front of Pedo Priest Park, so--after a half-second of panic, he ran out of the street and hunkered down quickly behind the statue in the center of the park. He was pretty sure Josephine hadn't seen him, but he wasn't certain. She been about three blocks away when she cut around the corner, and it's not like she'd be expecting to bump into Andre out jogging in the street. He just had to wait here until she passed, and then a few minutes more just to be certain, then he could sneak home and never go running again. He tried to listen for the sound of her feet as she flew past, but St. Charles was a couple blocks away, and there was too much traffic to hear her.

The weeks he'd been running, it had never occurred to him that he'd run into her on the street like this. She ran early in the morning, he ran in the afternoon, and he was pretty sure she took a different route than he did. Of course, now that he was hiding, shivering, behind a statue and waiting for her to pass, he realized how empty and useless all of those arguments were, and how foolish it had been to put his faith in any of them.

(As he ran, he would sometimes mull over a cherished scenario in his mind about what it would be like to run into her: it would be at the end of the summer, after he could jog for miles and miles without walking, and she'd see him and stop in front of him and then they'd jog together at last, and every morning from then on, it would be their little secret that no one else in The Gang needed to know about. It was ridiculous, he saw, and it pained him to think about the time he'd spent while jogging, thinking about it.)

She couldn't see him...not now, not yet. He was crouched painfully behind the statue, trying to steady his breathing and his heart from the interrupted run and also from his nerves. The statue he hid behind depicted a kindly African-American priest counseling a young boy and girl who were on their knees praying. It had been built in a simpler time, when all it represented was a lovely monument to a beloved clergyman. However, it was now a favorite of New Orleans teenagers because seen through cruder modern eyes, the statue from a certain angle seemed to depict a lewd act made all the worse for the beatific expression on the priest's face. Andre, though panicked, looked up and read, for the first time in his life, the dedication at the bottom of the statue:

In loving memory of
Father Fitzwilliam Johnson
1936-1985
"Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven."

Fitzwilliam Johnson. "Holy shit," Andre whispered. All these years smirking at The Statue Of Pedo Priest Park and he'd never known that it was one of Robert's ancestors. He wondered if even Robert knew.

Andre relaxed a little. Clearly Josephine would have passed by the park by now, but he'd wait, his back to the statue's granite base, just to be sure. Andre sighed, shaking his head. How demeaning...hiding behind this statue like a child. He turned around and dropped slowly to the ground.

Josephine was standing at his feet. Of course. She must have circled around and came up the back of the park. Meaning that she'd been standing there for just minutes, not saying a word, as he hugged the granite and waited for her to pass by.

Andre didn't react, or at least he tried not to. When he turned around and saw her Sauconys on the grass before him, he didn't look up at her, just shrugged, as though he had been expecting her to be there. "Hey, Josephine," he said.

"What are you doing?" There was a edge to her voice that he'd certainly never heard before. He wanted to look up, but he made himself just shrug and continue looking down at the grass.

"Oh, you know...it's a nice day, thought I'd get out of the house, go sit on the ground for a while." He plucked up some grass and sprinkled it back through his fingers. "Hey, you'll never guess who this is a statue of."

"Why are you dressed like that? Are you making fun of me?" Now her voice sounded shocked, hurt, and Andre had to look up at her.

He knew it was beyond corny to say "all he could see was her eyes," but for now at least it was true. Later he'd notice her thin workout clothes, and the way her whole body--up from the legs, through the shoulders, and down to the arms--still swayed in the soft subtle rhythm of a run, as though she were weightlessly navigating undetectable currents of air. But right now her eyes held his attention. Andre had often seen Josephine appalled, had occasionally saw her mortified, but he'd never seen her devastated, he'd never seen her fierce. It was too much, he wanted to look away again, but he didn't dare.

"What? Why would you say that? Josephine..."

"Why are you dressed like that?" Her mouth was thin, colorless, and set in place with anger or dismay or both. "I just jogged by your house a few minutes ago. You saw me. You saw me and you put on those clothes. You want to make fun of the way I run."

"So I see you three blocks away and hide behind Pedo Priest? That's, like, the worst prank ever." He swallowed and looked up, over his sweaty glasses, and into the blurry cloudless sky beyond. Andre shook his head at her, softened his face. Sarcasm was his native language, but he knew this was no place for it. "Josephine, listen: I've been running in the afternoon. I'm a...I'm a runner now, I guess. Remember my Aunt Marissa? She visited me a few weeks ago and made me start running and I somehow failed to give it up unlike, you know, everything else in my life. I wasn't, I swear I wasn't, making fun of you in some bizarro way."

Josephine's mouth relaxed just a little and she blinked down at him. "Why do you want to run?" Her voice was no longer hurt, but it wasn't her own voice, either.

"Because...Jesus, you want me to say it? Because I'm, I'm chubby, okay? And I don't want to be anymore."

"Why else?"

"Why else...? Isn't that enough? Because it's the one athletic thing I've ever done in my life that I actually sorta enjoy." Andre said, and Josephine just waited. "Because it makes me feel good. Not when I'm doing it, but afterwards. Like I've accomplished something, like the day hasn't been a waste."

Josephine looked down at him for a long time. Even silent, she wasn't herself. He'd never seen her like this...even her body language was different, more forceful. Finally, she asked him again, only a little softer: "Why else?"

Because I wanted you to find me and be proud of me. "Because, I don't know, because I was bored. The twins are gone, probably forever, let's admit it, and The Gang's broken up and...and Emily and Michael are hanging out together, and Robert and Litta'Bit of course, and you and David. It's like everyone has somebody to be with except me, and I'm stuck down in my basement all day. So I run."

"You were bored," she whispered with a dry chuckle. She looked away, watching a bread truck pass by, slowly swaying on its axles from the uneven pavement of the New Orleans street. Josephine worked her jaw back and forth a little as she watched it pass; it was a small action, but one so foreign to her. Who was this girl standing above Andre?

He snuck a look up at the rest of her. Her shorts were loose, tiny, high-cut on the sides, exposing most of her lean thighs. The white cotton sports bra was basically just a headband with straps, and it was tight across her thin chest. Andre didn't understand: this was a girl who got wide-eyed and flustered if the twins made her wear a top with a neckline, yet when she ran she was pretty much nude. He could tell this wasn't a one-day outfit, either, because her skin was a deep tan everywhere he looked. Josephine had long hair, and it was loose on her shoulders and back. This was the first time he'd ever seen her hair down...it was longer and thicker than he'd imagined. Other girls pulled their hair back when they ran, but Josephine, who always wore a ponytail no matter how much the girls in The Gang begged her to take it down, let it loose when she ran.

This is important: when Andre looked up at her, he didn't see a modest introvert suddenly revealed as a secret beauty. Josephine wasn't a flower waiting to bloom...she was plain. Andre knew this was a brutal thing to admit, but it was true (and besides, it hadn't mattered to him in years.)

Josephine wasn't ugly, she wasn't even unattractive, especially after the girls did her makeup and forced her to wear the clothes that they'd picked out for her. But she would never have the profound effect on boys the way that Lillian did (breathless yearning and desperate poetry), or the way that Emily did (mad crushes and hopeless daydreams), or the way that Litta'Bit did (boners).

This was about something deeper. Above him, even though her lean and muscled body was on display, Josephine was no longer shy or awkward. She was casually aggressive in the way she held herself and in the way she talked to him. He didn't understand.

Josephine turned back and looked down at him, still on the ground at her feet. A sort of furious peace had come over her face. She chuckled again and shook her head slowly. "Okay, fuck it. Let's go."

"What does that mean?" he whispered. He'd never heard her curse before; in fact, he'd never heard her laugh before...

"Let's go...come on. You want to run, and I'm a runner, and it makes no sense, the two of us not running together. Get up."

Andre struggled up to his feet, embarrassed that after a month his gut still got in his way. "Are you sure?"

She ignored him, cocked her head towards the street, and began walking out of the park. The slightly curled ends of her hair swung gently between her shoulder blades."Okay. Today, we're gonna walk one block, jog one block."

"That's how my aunt started me, too, but I'm up to jogging three blocks, walking one."

Josephine shielded the sun from her eyes with her hand. "How long?"

"Not long...forty minutes on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Twenty-five on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

Josephine nodded. "Okay, well, if you're running three blocks at a time for forty minutes, you're ready to let loose. So we're going to change things up a little. Today's your long day?"

"Yeah."

"Good. That watch has a stopwatch on it, right? Okay, the idea is simple-" Her shoulders dropped. "What?"

"I'm not laughing at you! I promise. It's just, I don't know, something about the way you said 'the idea is simple'...you sounded like Alexander just then."

She actually rolled her eyes at him--another new facial expression!--but he saw something else playing at the corner of her lips: a proud, shy grin. "Pay attention: we're gonna start running, and when we do, you start your stopwatch. We're gonna run for forty minutes today. Whenever you want to stop, just stop. We'll walk as long as you want. But when you're walking, your stopwatch is stopped. Okay? I don't care how long it takes you, you owe me forty minutes of running today."

"That's a lot of running."

"It's okay. You have all afternoon, all evening, all night if you need it. We'll get there."

"Fantastic." Andre laughed. "I quit."

Josephine turned back to him and raised her hand to touch his arm, but lowered it again before reaching him. Her posture changed just slightly, and there, peeking through, was the Josephine he knew. Andre didn't know what had brought about today's change in her, but he saw now that it was slipping away. Already her eyes began cutting away when she spoke, and her voice was losing the definition it had a few minutes before.

"Andre, listen," she said softly. "You want to do this, right? And...and you've tried to do it on your own, but you've never been able to. So...you have to fight, okay, you have to fight to make it real this time, no matter how easy it would be to go back, because this might be your last chance. Failure isn't an option, Andre, it's a...it's a lifestyle, you know? You're seventeen already, and I'll be seventeen in a couple of weeks. We're about to become the people we're gonna be for the rest of our lives, and we have to fight to make sure that person is someone we want to be. So, if you fight, I promise I'll fight, too. And we can, you know, we can fight together. Okay?"

"Okay." He swallowed, and looked away from her. The world around him shivered from the heat rising off the pavement. "Um, I was just joking about quitting."

"Good." She smiled a little--bashful now--and turned her back on him again. She began walking slowly, waiting for him to pass her. "Then let's run. You set the pace."

He passed her. "Okay. I usually walk a block or two first."

"I said run." She was forcing her voice to be light now, even carefree. In the corner of his eye, he saw her raise her hand, hesitantly at first, but then with more confidence. She pinched the fat at the back of his arm and twisted hard, the way only someone with a sister could. "Run."

"Ow!" Andre began trotting a little, rubbing the back of his arm. He looked around to see if anyone else had heard him yelp, but no one had: they were the only two people in the world. "For Christ's sake, Josephine."

Josephine raised her hand again. Andre ran.

Forty-Six >>>

Forty-Four

2009-07-03T19:59:00.000-07:00

Detective Ron Maglione lingered in the elevator bank of The Citadel Center, a 50-story skyscraper standing just to the side of New Orleans' downtown business district. He yawned into the palm of his hand.

The concierge had summoned the upper floor express elevator for him, but it was a busy Thursday afternoon and there was a wait. The concierge must have seen Maglione discreetly flash his badge at the security desk in the lobby, because he brought Maglione away from the rest of the people waiting with him and placed him, alone, in front of a set of doors. He wanted to tell the concierge he didn't need his own elevator, but the guy staring out at him from the corner of his eye, his face blank with fear and certainty, like a jackrabbit powerless to flee the hawk-shaped shadow growing swiftly larger around it.

The concierge probably had a thimbleful of coke in his back pocket—minus a sniff or two, judging by the sweat around his collar—and was convinced that Maglione was here to place a large hand on his shoulder, whisper to him about not making a scene, and lead him gently out of the lobby.

Instead, Maglione just yawned again and continued waiting. On a better day he might have tried to talk to the guy, amuse himself by stoking his paranoia a little, but he was tired. He didn’t just work long hours, his work was spread throughout the day and into the night, so that even six hours of sleep was a luxury.

Sometimes Maglione felt like he’d been tired since the day he got out of the academy, certainly since he’d made detective. Maglione tried to think back to any point in his adult life when he’d felt truly well-rested, and the only time he could remember was more than a decade ago.

Maglione had been off on a Sunday night, driving home from the video store, when he passed a Domestic Disturbance on the sidewalk near the Stop 'n' Shop on Claiborne, right out in the open. A guy—dark but not too dark: maybe mixed race, maybe Latino—was slapping the everliving shit out of a black girl, and she was barely defending herself.

“Unbelievable,” Maglione said out loud, more exasperated than incredulous, and pulled the unmarked Caprice Classic over beside them. (God, how Maglione missed those old boxy Caprices, the last truly great American car.)

He got out of his car calmly and patted his pocket to make sure the extra key was there, then locked and closed the door with the engine still running, a habit his father had taught him.

“Mind your own business, pardner,” the man said, but Ron Maglione didn’t answer him. Everything in the world felt right, like he was following a script only he knew. The man didn't flinch at all, too busy cussing him to see the beautifully delivered roundhouse Ron Maglione deployed against his face.

Maglione had been a semi-professional boxer before joining the police force, but few of the punches he’d ever thrown in his career had felt as good, as solid, as that one. He felt the jaw break under his knuckles, knew the man was out cold even before his head had finished snapping back. Even back then, Ron Maglione’s job required so few duties that could be described as purely good and useful, but surely this was one of them.

He turned back to the girl. He knew his lines: he’d put her in the back of his car, call in the arrest, then take her statement and offer to get her a ride to her family or a shelter. He expected—like a chump, like a damn rookie—her gratitude. “Blimp,” she said, just as she pushed a distressingly long fingernail file into his abdomen.

Maglione staggered back. The black plastic handle, all that was visible of the file, became covered in thick blood. His blood. He stopped himself from pulling the blade out. It hurt on the inside.

“Why’d you do that?” he asked in shocked surprise.

“Fat.”

He stumbled his way back to the driver’s side, tried the door and found it locked, then dug into his pocket for the key. There was blood on the door handle, blood on the jeans he wore only on his days off. This pair was new, he’d only worn them twice before, and now they were ruined. Number one rule of dealing with Domestics: separate them first. Separate them first.

Ron Maglione pulled out onto the deserted street and, picking up the suddenly slick microphone, called in to the overnight uptown dispatch.

“Hey, Ronnie Sweater,” Charlie said back. “I thought it was your night off.”

“Charlie, it’s a 10-8, a 10-8.”

Charlie sucked in his breath, and when he spoke again all emotion was left behind. “All right, everyone clear the air. This is a 10-8. Repeat, clear the air immediately. Come back, Ronnie.”

Maglione nudged the Caprice back into his lane. He remembered the times a 10-8 had come in while he was at the station, how everyone froze, staring to their radios to hear what had happened to the injured officer, then flew madly towards him. “Delachaise and Claiborne, proceeding…west, I guess. I got a 36-something…I can’t remember the codes. I been stabbed, Charlie. This girl, she stabbed me.”

“Oh, Ron…you got stabbed? Pull over, I got units all around you. Jesus Christ. Is it still in you? You didn’t pull it out, did you?”

“It’s okay, Charlie. I’m six blocks from the Baptist Hospital. Call the emergency room, let ‘em know I’m coming. I’ll be there in a minute.”

All around him, in the distance, he could hear sirens firing up. Every member of the New Orleans Police Department within a five mile radius was screaming towards the Baptist. What a pain in the ass, Maglione thought with half-closed eyes. Charlie mumbled something urgent to an operator, then came back. “You with me, Ronnie? Where you at now?”

The steering wheel was hard to hold on to, and blood was pooling under his lap on the seat, making it feel like he’d wet himself. “Claiborne and Milan. I’m almost there.”

“You’re slurring your words, Ron. Look, just put it in park, right in the middle of the street. I’ll have someone there in seconds.”

Maglione doesn’t remember the rest of the trip, but he somehow made it to the Baptist Hospital and up the emergency ramp, bouncing like a pinball off the sides twice before coming to a stop. When the paramedics got him out of the car, he’d asked the ER doctors “Can I pass out now?” and, after getting their permission, drifted off.

He woke up a day and a half later. The fingernail file had nicked an artery and then, when he sat down in the car, pierced his bladder. The dirt from under her fingernails had caused an infection that they were still fighting. “Nobody give this girl a real weapon,” was the most common joke.

They never found the girl or the guy, hadn’t even known what to look for or where to look. And Ron Maglione was in trouble again, of course, back then he was always in trouble: for not calling it in beforehand, for not following Domestic Disturbance procedures, for not calling for back-up, for excessive force (even though the only proof they had of this was his own story), for driving on a public street in his condition, for damaging his patrol car and the hospital. He even had to pay to have the blood in his car cleaned out.

But Ron Maglione didn’t care that much. All he knew was that he got to sleep for 36 hours, and then spent a week in the hospital dozing off and on with no beeper, no phone calls, and no alarm clock.

The infection cleared up, but he was kept in the hospital a few more days for observation, and the nurses kept slipping him a sleeping pill every night with a wink. He suspected he was being kept at the hospital so that his superiors could finish dotting the Ts and crossing the Is of his official reprimands.

Towards the end of his stay he awoke to find that he had two visitors—one white, one black, both in suits—sitting at the small table by the window. The clock said 6:30, and outside the sky was bruised with color, but Maglione had lost track of day and night and didn't know if he was seeing the beginning of a sunrise or the last evidence of a sunset.

"Detective Maglione," the black man said, looking up from the copy of the Times-Picayune he'd been looking through. He had an efficient smile and a voice that simulated warmth. "You're awake, good. You're not in any pain, are you?"

"No. No, sir." Maglione recognized him, of course. It was Jerome Johnson, Mayor Thomas' right hand man. He'd just announced his candidacy for City Council about a month before.

The white guy, Assistant District Attorney Lucas Budd, had been reading from the free Bible that had been sitting for a week, untouched, on the dresser. He held up a finger and began to read. "'And out of the desert came Ron The Baptist, preaching Repent ye, and turn away from sin. The axe is laid unto the root and every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit will be hewn down, and cast into the fire. The day of reckoning is close at hand.’ So what do you think? It's a lot catchier, right?"

Johnson nodded over at his associate and smiled thinly. "He's trying to give you a new nickname."

"Yeah, what is this people are calling you? Ronnie Sweater? Because you sweat a lot? It's disgusting."

Maglione closed and opened his eyes. Lucas Budd and Jerome Johnson were in his hospital room, arguing about his nickname. He was pretty sure he was hallucinating, but he played along. "No, no...it's because of my last name. Maglione is Italian: ‘Sweater.’ Like the clothes."

Budd shrugged. "Okay, fair enough. But still, it's unpoetic. 'Ronnie Sweater,' it doesn't scan right. The syllables are all wrong."

"So he's trying to get people to call you Ron The Baptist instead." Jerome Johnson tugged at the fabric of his pant leg.

"It’s about more than the nickname. It’s about respect. Look, Detective...all the guys out on the street, I've been talkin' to them, you know what they're saying? They're saying you were out on your night off, you saw some creep beating on a woman, and you took care of business. The patrolmen, the other detectives? They got a lot of respect for that. You even drove yourself to the hospital. That's real police." He pronounced it the way cops did: real PO-lice. "And now you're up here in the hospital and the big boys, the ones who haven't been at a crime scene in years, they want your head on a platter for it."

"Like John The Baptist," Jerome Johnson explained.

"Exactly. Now, a lot of your colleagues don't think it's right, and I don't think it's right, and Jerome here doesn't think it's right either."

Jerome Johnson hit the newspaper softly against his slacks, and nodded once in agreement, his lips firm with conviction. "You know, Detective Maglione, when Lucas and I were in law school we'd go over to the boxing matches across the river. We saw you fight a few times."

"Did we ever. You're tough, Ron...and more important, you're tenacious. What was that fight where you got knocked down, what was it? Eight times?"

"Just seven. Against Joe Dumaine."

"That's right, Lapalco Joe. You just kept getting back up. They should have called the fight after the third time...after the seventh the whole crowd was chanting 'Stay down'—we thought we were watching a suicide—but then when you got back up all of us, even Jerome here, went so nuts I thought the roof of the Civic Center was going to come off."

Maglione nodded for him. "Thank you, sir. I don't remember anything after my fourth trip to the mat."

"Doesn't matter. What matters is you got back up. You didn't win the fight, but by God you were on your feet when they announced it."

Jerome Johnson started to speak, then stopped himself, pursed his lips, and started again. "Lucas and I are here today because that's a character trait that we’d like to see more of in the NOPD."

"Look, we'll cut to the chase. I know a lieutenant was by here earlier in the week, detailing exactly what was going to happen to you once you got out of here. Well, you can forget about that. It's off the table."

Ron looked from one to the other. "What do mean? Why?"

Jerome Johnson laughed for the first and only time during his visit. "You have a lot to learn, Detective. When City Hall tells you to forget about something, you don't ask 'why.'"

"Ron, we took care of it, that's all you need to know. We don't need guys like you putting themselves on the line and then getting shit on for it. You walk out of here tomorrow, the next day, it's like nothing happened. You were on vacation for a week. We couldn't get you a hero's citation, but this is good enough, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you."

On the table was a manila file folder that Jerome Johnson picked up and showed to Ron. "We've been looking through your service record, Detective. You won't be offended if I say that it's not terribly distinguished, will you?"

"No, sir, not at all. I've messed up a bunch, and I'll probably mess up a bunch more."

Johnson nodded deeply. "That's good, that's good. Own your shortcomings." He opened the folder for a moment, then let it fall shut again. "Of course, it wasn't all your fault, was it? A lot of this…wheel-spinning has to do with your talents being wasted."

"Exactly," Lucas Budd said. "A man with your qualities, your abilities, checking pawn shops every week for stolen merchandise? Quote-unquote investigating car thefts? It's not right."

Maglione didn't say anything.

"So we created a new position for you, you start it in a week. Right now we're just calling you a Special Liason, but we'll come up with something better, especially if Jerome finds a way to get elected next month."

Johnson crossed his legs. "We're not pushing you, Detective...you can say no if you want and go right back to your old job. But the sort of work we have in mind requires a special touch, and we think you've got what we're looking for. All we ask is that you think about it."

"I don’t have to think about it. Do whatever you need to do to make it happen." Maglione’s voice was thick. The sleeping pills in his system were making him groggy again, turning all of this slippery and insubstantial, and he clenched his teeth so he didn't have to yawn in their faces. "Besides, I owe you guys now, right?"

The last thing he heard before tripping heavily back into sleep was Lucas Budd laugh out loud. "See, Jerome? He's a quick learner."

The next morning Maglione was discharged and he waited in the sunshine in front of the Baptist hospital for the patrol car he'd requested, wearing the clothes his sister had brought him. The conversation hadn't been a dream; his partner told him that a bright shiny transfer order, signed by Mayor Thomas himself, was waiting on his desk. Ron Maglione smiled to himself, even though he had no idea what his new job entailed. He smiled because the sun was out and glowing on the maples and he felt fully-rested, totally awake, and ready for whatever was awaiting him.

And that had been fifteen years ago.

The express elevator's doors slid open and revealed the Law Offices Of Harry Sebastian in all its casual glory. Every time he visited Harry's office, Maglione questioned the choices he’d made in life...the exact response Sebastian's downtown office was designed to elicit. The elevator up to the 43rd floor opened right in his lobby, and as the doors slid open visitors saw three things all at once:

First was the office itself, which made the business look less like a law firm and more like a successful advertising agency's converted warehouse offices. The walls were exposed brick, decorated with tasteful black & white photographs of New Orleans artifacts shot in extreme close-up: a pile of Mardi Gras beads, a Hubig's pie wrapper, an old Meyer's Pharmacy sign. Overhead, exposed pipes ran between thick wooden beams that had been sanded and stained a dark reddish brown.

It was like no other law office you'd ever been in, and this was exactly what Harry Sebastian, who styled himself as being like no other lawyer you'd ever met, was going for. Maglione knew Harry had paid a lot of money to get this effect, too; the office looked like a loving renovation, but it was all expensive artifice. This was the 43rd floor of a mirrored skyscraper, it's not like the walls were really brick or supported by wood timbers. The bricks were probably an inch thick at most, and the heavy beams were actually hollowed-out timbers attached to the ceiling with hidden screws.

(Maglione, who could never quite turn off the cop part of his brain, realized these empty beams would be a pretty genius place to hide contraband. If his business here today went really south, he'd have to remember to add the fake ceiling beams to the eventual search warrant.)

The next thing visitors noticed when stepping off the elevator was the receptionist's desk, which was so big and elaborate that it was more of a wooden fortress. It enclosed the receptionist completely in low carved walls, accessible only through knee-high doors. In a previous life it had been a 19th century clerk's station in a courtroom before being discovered in an Lake Charles antique store by Harry's wife and meticulously restored by a team of antiquarians. A specialist came by once a month to check the finish and to polish the wood until it shined so brightly it could cast a shadow.

Harry's receptionists were always precise and efficient young ladies, maybe two years out of college, with delicately thin eyeglasses and haircuts that looked like a stylist trimmed each individual strand one at a time. They were all frighteningly good at their job, routing office visitors and phone calls with the smooth grace of a Tai Chi master. The faces changed every year or so, but each new receptionist took the departed’s place seamlessly, as though she inherited the experience and knowledge of all her predecessors instantly.

Maglione had no idea where Harry found these girls or where they went after they left his law firm, because he never saw women like this anywhere else in New Orleans. He tried to picture them away from that desk and he never could. He decided they were part of a secret sisterhood, selected at birth according to arcane methods then raised in the dark secrets of the Receptionist Arts. They spent ten years traveling from front desk to front desk of whatever elite businessman could afford their cabal's pricy services, then retired back to the shadowy nunneries of their Order to spend the rest of their lives training the next generation of receptionists...

Damn, I should write this stuff down.

"Good morning, Detective. Is he expecting you?" He'd never seen this one before—a redhead whose lovely face had less pigment than Maglione's inner thigh—but of course she somehow already knew everything about him. Then again, it wasn't like Ron Maglione could ever go undercover: everything about him, from his sports coat to his haircut to his broad-shouldered thick-gutted physique screamed police detective at top volume.

"No, no, just in the neighborhood."

"I'll let him know you're here."

There were two other men in the waiting area with him. One was a young guy, probably a Tulane kid spending the summer in town, with the sour and arrogant look of the hungover. The other was a middle-aged black guy with his arm in a sling, who glared at the hardwood floor of the lobby, mouthing a slow but constant stream of silent words. Here was DUI and Personal Injury, the twin pillars of Harry Sebastian's empire.

Ron turned his attention away from them, though, drawn into the third feature of the lobby every visitor was struck by when they first arrived: the incredible view of the city offered by the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the far wall of the entire office.

The Citadel Center was a few blocks off to the side of New Orleans' central business district, so the view of the other downtown skyscrapers was remarkable: they were just far enough away that they didn’t block out the vista, but so close that there was no way to ignore their massive size.

Two of Harry's employees passed in front of the window, both of them flipping through printouts as they walked, neither of them even looking up to see the city spread out beneath them. Maglione spent all of his days down in the streets below, and he couldn't imagine ever getting so used to this view that he would ever walk right by it without at least glancing out. You can get used to anything.

He moved past the reception area and stood up against the window. Directly across the street from the Citadel Center was the Superdome, and from this angle the sheer size of the thing was tremendous: the white canopy of the dome swelled up just beneath his feet and took up almost a quarter of the view. Maglione's baby sister had been born on the day the Superdome opened, all those years ago, and her baby book held the two never-used tickets his father had spent almost an entire paycheck on. Instead, he had to watch the game at the hospital, feeding dimes into a B&W set with ten-year-old Ronnie on his lap, but he always said it was the best game he ever attended.

Beyond the Dome was the huge Crescent City Connection bridge, as tall as many of the downtown buildings, high enough to let ocean-going ships pass under its span on the way up to Baton Rouge. It was three o'clock on a Thursday, and the Mississippi River was busy with freighters and tugboats and ferries, and it glowed bright gold in the afternoon sun despite the filth underneath.

Traffic was just starting to pick up down below him. Maglione watched the cars poke around, stopping and starting, and he saw how modern and clean New Orleans looked from up here, just another 21st century American city. From up here it looked like a real city...from up here you'd never guess that it belonged to neither this century nor this country: built in a swamp on the banks of the most dangerous river in America; susceptible to hurricanes, tropical storms, tornadoes, floods, and fires; infested with rats, thumb-sized cockroaches, toxic caterpillars, alligators, and nutria; surrounded by noveau riche hillbillies and God-fearing shitkickers who would push the city into the Gulf Of Mexico if they thought Louisiana could survive without the tax revenue; and ran by genuinely evil mofos who’d gladly burn the whole thing down themselves if they thought they could get either votes or profit out of it.

Maglione closed his eyes but resisted the temptation to put his forehead against the cool glass. He didn't mean it, he didn't mean any of it. He loved New Orleans, he was just in a bad mood because of what he was about to do. And he was tired. He was always tired.

High heels clicked behind him as the receptionist returned to her desk. Harry Sebastian, wearing suspenders, was standing in the hallway with his trademark fedora was pushed back on his head. "There he is...Ron The Baptist."

"Hey, Harry."

Harry's eyes narrowed and his voice got raspy. "What are pennies made of?"

"Copper."

"What kind?"

Maglione chuckled. "Dirty copper."

Harry clapped him on the back, smiling broadly. Their exchange was dialogue from some old gangster movie, Maglione couldn't remember which one, with James Cagney or maybe Spencer Tracy. Harry had shown him the clip on YouTube during one of Maglione's earlier visits to the office, and now he wanted to recite it every time they got together.

On the way back to Harry’s private office, they passed more of Harry's employees, young lawyers in jeans and tennis shoes. Harry took great pride in running a casual office with no dress code, where everyone—including himself—was on a first name basis. Maglione saw, however, that the "no dress code" culture was just as strict as any other. There were no suits, no ties, but also no shorts and no t-shirts. For an office without a dress code, everyone looked surprisingly similar: all the lawyers wore immaculate jeans, collared shirts with the sleeves rolled, and brown or black lace-ups. There was a dress code, just not one that was ever spoken of.

Despite the casual atmosphere, though, Harry's law firm was well-known in the legal world of New Orleans for being fiercely competitive and dispiriting. The work wasn't exciting, and could even be depressing as hell, so Harry preferred to hire fresh young lawyers more than willing to spend eleven hours a day in a cubicle fighting on the phone with insurance companies. Every spring Harry hired something like the top 90% of Tulane Law graduates; the best of them eventually became trial lawyers, the rest were gotten rid of to make way for the next class. A judge once told Maglione there were only two kinds of personal injury lawyers in New Orleans: those who worked for Harry Sebastian and those who'd been fired by him.

"How's your bride? Her business doing well?" Valerie Sebastian, Harry's wife, had a "lifestyle boutique" in the Quarter that sold clothes, jewelry, and home decor to other Notable Wives like herself. Someone had broken into the store just before Christmas, and NOPD barely investigated, just said it was probably a couple of addicts and scratched out a police report for her insurance claim. Maglione helped Harry out and did a little extracurricular snooping, even though he secretly thought the NOPD's lazy guess was probably the correct one. He discovered, to his genuine surprise, that the robbery was an actual whodunit: there WERE two addicts behind it, yeah, but one of them was Valerie's assistant manager, who had planned the break-in, carried it out with her boyfriend, and did an almost flawless job of making it look like a random smash ‘n’ grab. Almost.

"Oh, Val’s place is doing gangbusters business, let me tell you, Ron. Last month was her most profitable one yet...she was only in the red by about three grand." Harry shrugged. "Look, she has something to do, she's not in my hair all day, and I catch a healthy tax break on her losses every year...trust me, the money I sink into that place is money well-spent."

They were inside Harry's windowless private office now. The big office from all the late-night commercials—Harry sitting on the edge of his desk with the Superdome behind him as he tore up an insurance company's insultingly paltry check—was only used to impress colleagues, business partners, and the more lucrative of his clients. Harry did most of his work in this smaller office off to the side, which held a desk and a couch and was as sparsely decorated like a dorm room.

Harry gestured to the couch, but before Maglione sat down he half-turned and pushed the door to the office closed. If Harry noticed, he took it in stride. "How about that nephew of yours, is he keeping it under the speed limit?"

About a year before, Maglione's nephew had somehow gotten a ticket way across the lake in Mandeville, where Maglione didn't have any favors owed to him (or at least none that he wanted to call in over a speeding ticket), but Harry made a single two-minute phone call and the ticket vanished.

"Well, I've been driving a white hatchback around, if that tells you anything."

Harry shook his head. "You're kidding me."

"The goof got arrested for street racing. Can you believe that...racing a Honda? It makes no sense. And, hey, you wanna know the worst part?"

"What's that?"

"The little creep lost the race, and I had fifty bucks on him."

Harry laughed, and leaned back in chair so he could prop his feet up on the desk. "Hey, Ron, you want anything to drink? I got a mini-fridge right beside you that's pretty well stocked up."

"Nah, I appreciate it, but I'm only here for a second."

"So what's up?"

"Oh, it's nothing, I just wanted to give you a head's up about something." Maglione fished a few index cards out of his jacket pocket. "And don't worry about it, because I already deaded it. But you know that task force that's doing the Lucas Budd investigation? They recorded a phone call the other night from Lucas—I mean 'recorded' like they wrote down the time and duration of the call, not, you know, recorded. Anyway, they looked up the number he called and it was a cell phone registered in your name."

Harry was a good lawyer, Maglione had to admit: he didn't flinch or even react much, aside from furrowing his brow a little.

"How do they know it was actually from Lucas?"

"Yeah, that's exactly what I said, too. You know these task force guys: teach a bunch of jock traffic cops how to trace a phone call and all of a sudden they think they're in the CIA."

"I don't know what to tell you, Ronnie, other than I haven't talked to the guy since...gosh, I don't know, that Gaudioso fundraiser back in March, maybe?"

Maglione laughed and shook his head. "Hey, look, I know you're not in a conspiracy with Lucas Budd. Hell, even if you were, it's none of my business. That's not what this is about. I just wanted you to know that, one, it popped up and, two, I squashed it."

Harry nodded deeply at the detective on the couch. "And I appreciate it. But I'd still like to get to the bottom of it. Are you sure it was my personal phone?"

"Nope, and that's exactly what I told them, too. 'Both of these guys are successful lawyers, they probably have fifteen cell phones each that are registered in their names. Who knows what number the guy called. These dumb fucks don't understand anything about relay towers, didn't stop to find out where the call actually originated from. I said, 'Look, Harry's kid has been friends with the Budd kids since they were in cribs together. Maybe that pretty little Budd girl is in Lafayette feeling lonely, decides to call the Sebastian boy and get him to drive out to Lafayette for a quickie, we don't know.'"

Harry chuckled. "Could be, could be. He hasn't mentioned hearing from the twins, but it's possible."

"The point is, there's a million different innocent reasons. It doesn't matter...I made it a dead issue. I'm not here to get to the bottom of it, I'm just here because I figured you'd want to know it happened."

Harry Sebastian brought his wingtipped feet down from the table one at a time. Slap...slap. "Well, Ron, I want you to know that I truly appreciate it. I owe you one."

Maglione waved it away. "It was nothing. I watch out for my friends."

Friends? Later, this would be the only thing he regretted: the two of them had a history together, Harry had done some secret business for Maglione's bosses in the past, and they enjoyed each other's company. They were friendly, but they weren't really friends, and invoking the word in the middle of this crummy business was a low blow.

"I'm just doing everything I can to protect the innocent on this one. This Lucas Budd case is a monster—a hungry monster—and when it goes to trial it's just going to devour everything in its path."

The two of them were standing up now. Harry seemed distracted. "Yeah, it's gonna be a bitch all right."

"And anyone with even the slightest connection to Budd, especially after his arrest, is just going to get demolished, no matter how big they are. The word going around is that the FBI is about to get involved…we might have our fun and games down here, but once shit goes Federal we're all on the hook."

Harry Sebastian nodded, looking at Maglione's face but not quite looking into his eyes.

"So when a whisper about someone I know starts going around, you better believe I'm gonna put that to bed with a quickness. Especially someone like you, Harry, who I know has the good sense to stay the fuck away from Lucas Budd at all costs, you know?"

Harry kept nodding, lost in thought.

"You know what I mean, Harry?"

The lawyer blinked slowly and made eye contact with Maglione. "Yeah, I know what you mean," he said in a low voice.

"I'm glad to hear it."

But Harry Sebastian was a natural lawyer, and he was his old self again almost immediately. He squeezed Maglione on the shoulder as he walked him to the door of the office. "Listen, thanks for watching out for me, again. I really do appreciate it. I don't want the people you're working for to think I have anything do with this."

Maglione paused in the doorway, pushing index cards back into his jacket. "The only people I’m working for are the people of New Orleans.”

Harry smiled at this, the corners of his mouth going sour. "Keep saying it, Ron. Maybe we'll both start to believe it."

Maglione walked back to the reception area alone, feeling loathsome, with his hands pushed deep into his jacket pockets. He slowly rotated his jaw from one side to the other.

He couldn't really say why he felt the way he did: it hadn't taken him long to figure out that Harry wasn't really in league with Lucas Budd, and what little he was involved with had just been scared out of him. That was good news, right? It meant one less potential confederate for Budd and it meant that Harry, the guy he'd just called his friend, was safe.

But still...but still, as Maglione walked back down the brick-lined hallway, he couldn't help but think that these kind of tasks were too delicate for his clumsy paws. This Budd business was no damn good.

"Have a good afternoon, Detective," the blonde receptionist said as he passed, not looking up from her Day Planner.

Maglione turned back to her. "Hey, can I ask you a question?"

"Of course." She looked up and smiled, straightening her glasses. Most people, a detective starts asking them questions and it's like you just sent them to the principal's office. Not her, though...her face was as open and innocent as the winter sun.

"It's Saturday night: you wanna go out, you wanna have a little fun. Where do you go?"

"I'm sorry?" She tilted her head to the side, still smiling, probably thinking this was the setup for a joke. In ‘sorry’ he heard a slight Midwestern rounding of the vowels; maybe Wisconsin, maybe Minnesota.

"Don't worry, I'm not asking you out, I'm just wondering...look, you gotta buy groceries, right? Where do you go?" His voice was too loud, he realized too late. "How come I never see you at Schweggman's? How come I never see you at gas stations, banks, bus stops?"

Now she was confused, looking over her shoulder with a slowly fading smile. A young lawyer, around 25, looked up from the copier and drifted closer to the desk, maybe about to come between Maglione and the receptionist.

Maglione squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. "Listen, forget it. I was out of line. I'm investigating a...case, a girl about your age. I thought...never mind. Sorry."

"Good luck, Detective."

"Yeah, thanks." He was already turned away, moving towards the elevators now. "Keep Harry in line for me."

Thank God the elevator was fast. He waited only about ten seconds, the whole time refusing to turn around while the "what was that all about?" glances shot back and forth. He heard the young lawyer say "huh," with a wary laughing voice, but Maglione kept looking straight ahead until those doors opened.

He just needed to get some sleep. That was all, just some sleep. He pressed Lobby and left this world of glass and steel behind, descending back to the streets where he belonged.

Forty-Five >>>

Forty-Three

2009-06-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

After his run and after his shower, Andre wrapped himself in a towel, surrendered to his recliner, and vowed again that this would be the last day he was ever going to jog.

In the end, it came down not to the running but the runners. That day, he'd gone to the park to jog, thinking it would be a nice change of pace, but had instead found himself in the midst of Serious Joggers. He hated their shiny clothes and he hated the way they talked to each other, their faces open and bright as though they were both so proud of being able to carry out entire conversations while effortlessly working through an array of stretches.

And when they ran past Andre on the track--and all of them, even the slim and sturdy retirees, passed Andre--they slid around him with their heads erect and their bodies steady, like foxes moving across a distant field. None of them loped and gasped, none of them gradually pulled their arms up to their chest and dropped their heads as they ran until they resembled an elderly T. Rex, none of them made deals with themselves about how, if they ran another thirty seconds, they could walk for a minute. And when the run was over, none of them pushed their faces into the lukewarm flow of the nearest water fountain, then sit in their Volvo with the air conditioner on high before their hands stopped shaking enough to let them drive home. No, they just took discrete sips from Nalgene bottles and immediately began more inane stretches, before waving discreetly goodbye to their friends still running.

No, Andre would never let himself become a Serious Runner.

Eventually, without getting out of the recliner, he rooted around on the floor for his laptop and continued working on an essay he'd started that morning for This Toilet City, his blog.

There's the widespread belief that the director's later work is a betrayal of his earlier aesthetic. Some might even say that perhaps he'd been forced to embrace shallowness as a defense mechanism after getting too close to the true stuff of life in his earlier films. But after you strip away the facile generational indentifiers of those earlier works—the soundtracks, the ready-made angst, the near-religious belief in the strict immutability of the caste system--you find that the shallowness has always been there. Indeed, commodifying shallowness has been his one artistic touchstone.

Andre wrote a few more paragraphs, but he grew disgusted by the way his chest—as plump and hairless as a cherub's—was illuminated in the crisp bluish light of the screen. Though he'd returned from his run over an hour before, he found that he was still too hot to put on clothes, so he found an undershirt and a pair of boxer briefs and got back to his blog.

He hadn't posted on This Toilet City since before his aunt had arrived a few weeks before. Well, nothing serious, anyway…there were always dumb pictures to caption and links to exceptionally contemptuous news articles to post. But he hadn't actually written one of his mini-essays for the site in a while.

Even though his aunt had left a few days before he was still too busy to write. His father had torn the house apart, undoing a lot of the work that Andre and Aunt Marissa had spent two long weeks accomplishing. Ordinarily, Andre wouldn't care—the house only looked presentable once a year, when his aunt visited—but Emily and Michael were coming over, and he didn't want them to see what his father had done.

He'd only had three days to get the house back in order, so he came up with a shortcut: they were going to be watching a movie in the home theater his father had built a few years ago, before The Troubles, so Andre would just leaned a path from the back entrance of the house, through his bedroom and family room, up the stairs and down the hall to the theater. Everything else got pushed behind closed doors.

Andre had finished the work of clearing this trail earlier that afternoon, then surprised himself by continuing to clean more than was necessary by putting the dresser back together in the guest bedroom and righting the dining room set. And then he'd surprised himself even more by pacing around the house, restless and punchy with hours to go before Emily and Michael's arrival, until he'd finally admitted to himself that he wanted—no, needed—to go for a run.

"However, counterfeiting earnestness is not yet a crime. His films are entertainments, harmless diversions for harmless people. His characters might be cardboard, with the sort of clear-cut emotional motives one never sees in real life, but they clearly resonate with his fans, who perhaps identify with his characters' desires for a substantiality and depth that is beyond their ability to achieve.

"But one of his films has an ending—or rather, lacks an ending—that sends a message that is far from harmless. In fact, I don't think I go too far by saying that this ending has ruined the romantic expectations of a generation of filmgoers."

Andre looked at the time. Crap, they would be there in twenty minutes, and Emily was usually on time. Why was it always like this with him? Even when he was running way ahead of schedule, he'd always find something to distract him until, like always, he'd end up throwing everything together at the last minute.

He pushed himself up out of the recliner, a move that had been getting harder these last few months as his gut expanded, and was now made even more difficult by his sore and stiff legs. Andre looked around for clothes to wear, and chose of course black jeans, a black t-shirt, and a pair of black Doc Martens. The muscles in his legs were so tight that he had to get down on the floor to get his boots on. Maybe stretches would help.

Starting at the back entrance, Andre shuffled through the house--almost bowlegged with stiffness--making sure everything was in its place. He went through the den, past his room, up the stairs, into the foyer, across the living room, down the east wing hallway, just past the spotless guest bathroom, and into the home theater. Good.

He had meant to clean a few more rooms in this hallway--it looked weird having all the doors leading up to the theater closed--but he'd run out of time.

Andre listened at his father's door and heard deep crunchy snores. Just before his jog, he'd made his dad a frozen pizza, which Reuben Meyer had barely touched, and for dessert he'd let him have a handful of his favorite sleeping pills. Andre didn't want him up and wandering around while his friends were over, and allowing his father to take a few extra sleeping pills on Movie Night had become Standard Operating Procedure since February, when Reuben's whiskey dinner had worn off halfway through "His Girl Friday" and he'd almost stumbled into the theater looking for a drink. Thank God that Andre's ears were tuned to the exact frequencies of his father's shuffling gait, and he had been able to turn his father around without anyone else in The Gang seeing him.

Back downstairs now, and into the garage. In the corner was a stack of boxes from a wholesale beverage distributor, the same company that supplied Reuben Meyer's theater chain. The boxes had been delivered two days before, and Andre hid them by rolling the three family bikes in front of them. His father, repulsed by all physical exertion, would never dare approach the bikes, so this was all that was really required to keep the boxes.

Andre pulled bottles up one at a time out of the topmost box until he found some gin, then dug around some more until he found a bottle of vermouth. He'd already stocked the little bar at the back of the theater with tonic, ginger ale, and olives, but he hadn't wanted to leave liquor out in the open until the very last moment.

As he climbed up the stairs--one at a time, wincing with each step--Andre tried to think of anything else he needed to do before Emily and Michael arrived, and came up with nothing. Maybe make popcorn? Traditionally, Movie Night was accompanied by an antipasto or a selection of cheeses, usually brought over by David or Robert. Popcorn wasn't unheard of, but it was rare. (Alexander, no doubt, considered it common.)

Halfway up the stairs, Andre's cell phone beeped twice. Balancing both bottles in the crook of his arm, he fished it out of his back pocket. running late, the message from Emily read. b there son

A few blocks away, in the living area of Emily's little cottage, Michael stretched back on a large overstuffed chair. Emily, straddling his hips, squinted at the screen of her cell phone, her lower lip between her teeth, until she was sure that her message to Andre had gone through. As soon as the miniscule check mark appeared beside the cartoon envelope, she flung the phone across the room and continued demolishing Michael with kisses. Before the phone had even stopped bouncing on the cushion, Emily had her mouth in the hollow of his throat, and he had again run his hands under her short full dress, holding her hips at first but then touching her back, his palms on her waist and the tips of his fingers against the muscles of her spine.

Emily slowly straightened up again and gazed down with hooded eyes at Michael beneath her, fully dressed but with his shirt unbuttoned to his chest. Both of them were breathing heavily at exactly the same time, inhaling and exhaling to a rhythm that existed only for the two of them.

"All right," Emily whispered. "Okay. We have to get up now."

Michael ran the back of his finger up her bare arm, watching his nail leave a trail of goosebumps in its wake. "Okay."

"Okay." They looked at each looked through the semi-darkness of the cottage, but neither of them moved. The same invisible rhythm pulled them together without either of them moving first: Emily leaning forward to find his mouth, and Michael pulling himself up to meet her.

It went on like this for a while. Let's skip ahead.

Emily stood before the large full-length mirror that leaned beside the cottage's long-unusable fireplace and tried to fix her hair.

"I swear, Michael, this whole thing with us has probably doubled the amount of time I have to spend on my hair. And the amount of money, too. Someone should totally invent a product that gets rid of this 'I've just been ravished' look. I'd buy a case of it." She caught his eye in the mirror. "And with you around, I'd have to."

Michael leaned forward and kissed the back of her head. "I don't tend to be the one doing the ravishing."

"Oh, you do a pretty good job." But it was true: when they tumbled together, Michael was rarely the aggressor. He was an enthusiastic, passionate, and inventive participant, but Emily always set the pace and he never tried to take more than she offered him.

It would be easy to just say he was a Proper gentleman, but even though that was part of it, there was something more. No, David Sebastian's wildest dreams weren't coming true: he clearly liked girls and all that, but it was as if he had never learned the boy vs girl dance of Two-Steps-Forward, One-Step-Back.

It was sweet and sorta gallant, the way he respected her even as he undressed her and brought his hands and mouth to her skin, but it could be frustrating, too: despite ending many of their evenings damp and out of breath, their physical relationship was pretty much still rated PG-13. Emily didn't really mind--him moving this slow with her was charming and romantic and, she had to admit, exciting as hell--but still...what was the point of a summer fling if you never got flung?

Michael turned his back to her, looking over his shoulder at the wrinkles on the back of his shirt. My boys and their clothes. She pecked his cheek and took his hand, led him to the foot of her bed. "Michael…we need to talk."

Michael frowned a bit. "Emily, honey...what more can we say about it?"

They had found the shoelace tied around Emily's handlebars a few nights before...it was the signal they'd agreed on two weeks ago with Lucas Budd: when they saw the shoelace, they knew it was time to take the first step of his plan. It was time to visit Harry Sebastian.

Ever since receiving the signal, Emily and Michael had talked about little else. They both more or less agreed that they would end up going through with it--though each of them reconsidered daily, leading to another conversation--but actually doing it, as opposed to just talking endlessly about it, was daunting. Taking that first step made it all real, made them co-conspirators, and they both admitted they were nervous. Days had passed.

"What? No, that's not what we have to talk about. (Although I guess we sorta do need to talk about that, too.) I just meant we need to talk about where we're going to sit tonight."

"What do you mean?"

"In the theater. We have to think about where we're sitting."

In the middle of Andre's house was a large home theater, but describing this room as just a "home theater" is misleading; lately, anyone with a tacky big screen TV and a handful of speakers calls their den a "home theater." But this was an actual miniature theater inside of Andre's home, installed by the same crew who maintained his father's chain of cinemas. In better days, The Gang had spent almost all of their Sunday evenings there.

"I don't know...on one of the sofas, I guess." The floor was divided into four steppes, each one holding a couch, a couple of loveseats, or a few recliners.

"No, Michael, listen: we have to be careful. We have to plan stuff like this out or we'll ruin everything. Okay, usually you and Lillian sit on your sofa, and Alexander and I have our loveseat, and Andre is always in his easy chair. But what about tonight…are we going to sit in the same places, but by ourselves? Are the three of us gonna share that big couch on the second level? Or are we gonna sit in three separate chairs, all spread out?"

Michael thought about it, then shrugged. "Are we?"

"I don't know. But that's not even really what I'm talking about. Tonight's going to be torture. All I'm gonna want to do is look at you, touch you, kiss you. God, Michael, the way I feel when I'm with you...anyone who even glances at us should be able to see it, as clear as if we were wearing t-shirts that say The Two Of Us Are Crazy...you know, Crazy About Each Other." Her voice got small. "This is new for us, Michael. Promise me you'll be careful...and I'll do my best to be careful, too."

Michael looked at her, almost gravely, but he didn't speak. The cottage and the world outside was so silent now she could hear the hum of her bathroom light.

"Okay, look," Emily said, "I'm sorry I implied that you'd ever wear a t-shirt with writing on it-"

"I know what you're saying." His voice was low and he didn't look away from her eyes. "I do, I know. I've been worried about it all night. Andre's smart...maybe not about stuff like this, but he's smart regardless. And we don't have to guess whose side he'll be on if he figures this out."

Emily nodded at him.

"But Emily...this might be new for you, but it's not new for me. I hid the way I felt about you for years. I'm not some master thespian, but I think I did a pretty good job, remember?" Michael's lips grew thin, he raised a single eyebrow, and his face became as distant and beautiful as the moon on winter mornings. "I can do it again."

He kept it up until both his eyebrows were high on his forehead, and his lips were sucked fully into his mouth, and his eyes rolled up as his eyelids fluttered. Emily shook him, pleading with laughter for him to cut it out, and finally his face melted and he kissed her cheek and throat with smiling lips. She ran her hands lightly down his back, her fingertips mapping the terrain of his wrinkled shirt.

"Okay, we have to go, we're like an hour late," she said at last, and Michael rose from the bed with only two more kisses. Emily fetched the spray starch from her bathroom, and returned just as Michael was tucking his shirt in. She sat on the bed, right behind him, and straightened out the back of his shirt. She didn't need to, Michael's tucks were always flawless. She misted the spray starch across his back.

This had become their ritual over the last few weeks...after their time together, Emily would lovingly tug and smooth the wrinkles from Michael's clothes, "making him decent again," they would joke.

When she was done, she stood in front of him in the full-length mirror and met his eyes. "How do we look?"

"Not guilty, your honor."

Emily frowned a little. "I don't look forward to you being cold to me again. Even if it's just for a few hours."

"I'm not looking forward to doing it." He took her into his arms, his palms going naturally to her tummy. His hands were always so warm, so warm, and she could feel them through the light fabric of her dress. He looked over her shoulder at her mirrored reflection, and she rested her head back on his chest because, really, what's five minutes more when you're already an hour late?

He whispered in her ear. "When you were getting ready and you caught me looking at the back of my shirt, I wasn't thinking about the wrinkles. I wasn't. I was thinking about how I got them. And I was thinking about how, maybe one day, I'll spend the afternoon getting ready, and I'll put on my favorite linen suit, the one that wrinkles if you just look at it too hard, and I'll put on a crisp cotton shirt, one that I have to spend half an hour ironing, and I'll fix my hair until it's just right, and then I'll come over here and without even taking off my jacket I'll take you to bed and roll around with you."

"Michael," Emily said, her voice soft.

"I know. We have to go." His voice was even lower now, his beautiful lips brushing against her ear. "But listen: later, much later, after we're done for the moment, we'll get up and I won't touch a thing. I won't fix my hair, and I won't fix the tuck of my shirt, and I won't smooth down the back of my jacket." His voice barely more than a breath now. "And then we'll go out, take a cab to the Quarter. And we can go into a restaurant, or a hotel bar—a tourist place, but nice—somewhere nobody who goes to school with us will be. And everyone who sees us, all those strangers…they will know. They'll know why my clothes are so wrinkled, and they'll know why my hair is swirled in the back. They'll know what I've been doing. And they'll know...they'll know it was you."

Finally, something like an hour and a half late, Michael and Emily showed up. Neither of them apologized for the delay or even mentioned it, which Andre knew they learned from Alexander--"Establish enigmas, not explanations," was one of his many personal mottos; everyone in The Gang knew he'd stolen it from someone else even if they were all too lazy to Google it--but still: damn, ninety minutes late? The twins would never have tolerated it. They'd only been gone a month and the old ideals were already fading away.

(Though Andre had to admit that to Alexander, the word "punctual" had a rather fluid definition. At a dinner party, twenty minutes late was punctual. At a cocktail party or a school dance, an hour late was just about right. But nobody was ever late for Movie Night...I mean, c'mon.)

Andre, sitting the family room, watched through gauzy curtains as the Mini crept up to the gate. All the Gangmembers knew each other's security codes, and within a minute the Mini was crunching to a stop just outside the window. Andre fought the desire to get up and greet them at the door. He was looking forward to seeing them, to seeing anyone, but Andre had no plans to become some dull "get up and greet you at the door" type.

Emily and Michael approached the back entrance of the house, but then paused slightly, and Andre thought he could hear a quick muffled exchange just outside. Finally, tenatively, Emily knocked on the door, her thin bracelets clinking against the wood on the offbeat.

"What the fuck?" Andre called. "Come in, for Christ's sake, come in."

He made himself sound grumpy and put-upon when he said it, but in fact it struck him as the saddest part of his summer so far: Emily's knuckles tapping cautiously against the door, when only a month before anyone in the Gang would have walked in without a second thought.

The door opened and Andre, for an extra beat, kept pretending to read the section of the paper he'd been holding. But then, looking up, he was unable to stop himself from smiling as Emily bounced into his family room. She had this way of entering a room as though she'd been carried in by a huge translucent bubble that eventually burst to reveal a grinning Emily, surrounded by hearts and stars and rainbows.

"Andre!" She threw her arms around him before he was even able to get all the way up out of the couch, and the both stumbled back towards the cushions.

Michael came in then, entering the room as he entered all rooms, as though the world had a secret choreography and only he knew the steps. He made walking out of a hallway a display of grace and beauty, and he arched his eyebrow at all the other stumblers.

Emily sniffed the air and widened her eyes. "Wow, Andre, your place smells so clean."

"Well, you know...since it's me and my dad I have to keep on top of things or it would start smelling like a frat house before the end of the week." Actually, though, what Emily was smelling was the lemon mop water from a few hours before.

Michael nodded once at Andre, with something like a smirk of approval, an expression only Michael could pull off, and do so in a way that was equal parts heartening and maddening.

"Andre Meyer," Michael said, in his chummily formal way, and held out his hand for a handshake. At first Andre thought he was presenting his hand for inspection. Take a look at this perfect specimen.

"Oh. Hey, Michael." Andre shook his hand, but he did something wrong--his grasp fell short or he didn't rotate his wrist right or something--and Michael's firm grasp found only Andre's fingers, the way a Victorian gentleman greeted a lady. It happened like that all the time for Andre.

"You look good, Andre. You look...well-rested?"

Andre had no idea if he was being made fun of (I like to sleep in, is that a crime?) so he just rolled his eyes and turned back to Emily. She was removing that night's DVD from her thin clutch, which wasn't actually that much bigger than the DVD case itself.

"I can't believe you have your own personal copy of this." They were going to watch Pretty In Pink, and Andre held the case as though the movie might somehow get on his fingertips. "This isn't from NetFlix?"

"It's my mom's...not that I wouldn't own it, you snob. I wanted Michael to see it. I called him Duckie on the phone the other day and he had no idea what I was talking about."

"Duckie? I can understand if you called him Steff, but..."

"Be nice," Emily said."EvenifItotallyagreewithyou."

Andre led them up the stairs towards the theater, still looking at the DVD box. "Gosh, I would have thought this would have been a Criterion edition for sure."

"You're right, Andre, forget it. Let's just watch one of your favorite nine-hour Polish suicide notes instead."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."

They were passing through the upstairs living room now, and Emily caught sight of a magazine stack on a side table. "Oh, hey, it's Laura."

The top magazine of the stack had Laura Brennan-Spade on the cover. In fact, all of them had Laura Brennan-Spade on the cover, and Andre cursed himself for leaving them out. "Yeah, my Aunt Marissa left those here when she left." He hurried along, praying that Emily wouldn't want to look at the top magazine and then discover the rest of the pile. Not there was anything unseemly about him having them. They were his research.

"You know, she’s going to be here in a few weeks. Uncle Sammy’s visiting for a weekend.”

“Oh yeah? It would be cool to see him again.”

“It would? You’re always bellyaching about how bad his music is.”

“No, no. I talked to him at your birthday party. He’s a good guy.” Andre opened the doors to the theater and found the light switch. "So. John Hughes, Pretty In Pink. Considered one of his masterpieces, and there's the widespread belief that Hughes' shallow later work, like Home Alone or that one about the baby, is a betrayal of movies like this one. Some even suggest that he'd had to embrace this shallowness after getting too close to the real nature of life in his earlier work. But if you strip away the facile generational indentifiers of Sixteen Candles and most especially the tremendously overrated Breakfast Club...if you take away the soundtracks, the boring angst, and Hughes' unshakeable belief in the kind of high-school caste systems that only exist in the movies, you find that the shallowness has been there from the beginning. You might say it's his aesthetic calling card."

Andre had been loading the DVD into the wall-mounted control center as he'd recited all this, and glanced over now to find Emily and even Michael looking at each other and then back at him, with shy grateful smiles and blinking eyes.

"What?"

Emily quickly pecked his cheek before he could protest. "We've just missed you, Andre. That's all."

He waved it away, an annoyed look on his face and the cliche of her lips' tingle still on his cheek. "Yeah, yeah. So, uh...I made a-" so embarrassed now to actually say it "-uh, a popcorn bar, with melted butter in this little mini-Crockpot thing and there's salt and powdered cheese and, let's see, chili powder and curry powder and cinnamon and some other stuff. Michael, you can pick whatever you want as a topping. Emily, as usual, you can dump a little bit of everything on yours."

"You know me so well. But since when do we have popcorn? Geez, used to be the worst we'd get would be, like, a cheese platter. Or some samosas from Taj Mahal."

"Used to be people didn't show up ninety minutes late for movie night."

Michael, as inscrutable as always, filled up the air-popper with kernals and pressed a couple buttons, his fingers moving deliberately on the machine as though he were playing a delicate Chopin sonata.

Emily's eyes brightened. "Oh, hey, remember that night Litta'Bit brought those incredible Vietnamese dumplings she'd made with her grandmother?"

"Yeah...I'm pretty sure those were pot-stickers she got at a Chinese takeout place on the way over here." Andre frowned at her from behind the leather-topped bar in the corner. "I mean, she didn't even put them in a different box."

"I know. But still, it was a nice gesture."

Andre, without asking, made a gin and tonic for Michael and a martini with extra olives for Emily. He had read somewhere that, years after meeting you, Frank Sinatra might not be able to remember your name, but he would always remember your drink. Andre would never be confused for Sinatra, but he had his aspirations.

He glanced up at them as they mounted the first level of the theater. "Oh, hey. I just moved three chairs together for us. I figured we didn't want to be spread out on a bunch of couches."

For himself, he poured a bottle of ginger ale into a highball glass and added a single large ice cube. (Earlier that day, while cleaning, he'd filled a silicone muffin pan with water and used it as an ice cube tray, a trick he'd learned from David's dad.) He swirled the ginger ale around in the glass, as though mixing it with a fine rye whiskey.

Andre brought the tray over to his friends and Emily fished out one of the olives and chomped on it loudly for laughs, then made a show of delicately washing it down with a sip of her drink.

Andre laughed for her, but he saw Michael stare at her coldly and then look away. What an ass.

They popped popcorn.
They covered it in butter and spices.
They refilled their drinks and dimmed the lights and found their way to their seats. What more is there to say? They watched a movie. Let's skip ahead.

After the film ended, they moved back downstairs, to sit in Andre's family room. Long ago, it had been the favorite room of Andre's aunts and uncles when they were children, and they gathered there every evening to do homework and practice the clarinet and build model airplanes as their mother worked on her needlepoint and their father rattled the paper. Only Reuben hid away in his room, reading Theodore Sturgeon and Jack Vance paperbacks.

Decades later, after Reuben and his family took over the mansion, the family room was where the Meyers would have Movie Night throughout Andre’s childhood. For Andre’s family, though, Movie Night was pretty much every night, and by the age of ten, Andre listed The Dark Crystal, Time Bandits, and Howard The Duck as his favorite movies, he had tried unsuccessfully to stay awake with his parents for 2001 and Tarkovsky's Solaris on too many occasions to count, and he could recite Roy Batty's dying words from memory. Fleischer’s Superman shorts and Flash Gordon serials were his babysitters, Dr. Who re-enactments were a favorite family vacation pasttime, and Andre trick or treated in a homemade Muad'Dib outfit.

Then more time passed, and the family room became one of The Gang's favorite hangouts, a place to meet up before a party or after a night out without worrying about parents or siblings. Though Andre complained when they arrived, complained while they were there, and complained on his blog after they left, he liked being the person The Gang came to.

But all those memories were lost in time now (like tears in rain), and Andre haunted the downstairs most nights the way his father haunted the upstairs. The family room was now just the place he went when his bedroom felt too cramped, a place with a TV where Andre could fall asleep as the early morning pre-news shows began transmitting to the still-dark world.

Emily sat cross-legged on the floor with Michael beside her, but Andre, who knew what he looked like when he sat cross-legged, was above them on the couch. He had the overhead light off, claiming he never used it. But in fact he always used it, and the one lamp he had on instead was far too weak for the room, giving their conversation about the movie the air of a campfire chat.

"Well, I guess the movie was made in a different time," Emily admitted. Michael had been confused about why Duckie was considered a lovable underdog when he spent the bulk of the movie indulging in behavior that, in this more enlightened age, would be considered repulsive at best and sociopathic at worst.

"An innocent era, before stalking laws..." Andre offered. "But the Duckie situation is really central to the movie, and seems to be almost completely misunderstood by the movie's fans."

"What do you mean?" Emily asked.

"Well, there's this almost-universal idea that Hughes should have ended the movie with Andie and Duckie getting together. As I'm sure you know, it was even the original ending of the movie. But...Michael, why haven't you ever tried to hook up with Emily?"

"What?" Michael, who up to that moment looked like an artist's model posing silently for a figure study titled Listening To His Friend Speak, looked up with a jerk. Andre saw something in his eyes that he had never expected to see: true and graceless terror. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, she's a pretty girl, you guys know each other, people claim you're an attractive guy. Sure, both of you are dating someone, but they're both out of town...why not go for it?"

Something wild flashed behind Michael’s eyes. He blinked furiously once, twice, three times. "Because...um."

"Because you're not attracted to her?"

Michael focused his eyes and set his jaw. He was back. "I'm wildly attracted to her, Andre, you know that. I fee the same way about Josephine and Litta'Bit. But, aside from the fact that I'm dating Lillian, I just don't feel romantic about her."

Andre nodded. "You're right, you're right. That's a much better way of putting it: you don't feel romantic about her. My point is, you can't force that feeling. Andie just doesn't feel romantic about Duckie, and all the fans hoping it could be different can't change that.

"In the movie they play the whole thing for laughs. But real Duckies aren't funny, they're not harmlessly moonstruck. They're miserable. They're desperate. 'Why doesn't she love me? Why doesn't she love me? I'm her best friend, I'm always there for her, I'm always letting her cry on my shoulder when yet another jerk dumps her. I'm doing everything right.' And he never understands that it's already too late. To her he might as well be gay…no, not gay: he might as well be a eunuch. Sexless. Castrated.

"I'm not blaming the Andies. Far from it. Andie wants to have a normal relationship with Duckie, a real relationship, but instead he put on a pedestal she never wanted to be placed on, and now instead of just being his friend she's forced to play the role of the unattainable girl that Duckie will always be chasing fruitlessly forever.

"Duckies say that Andies only date jerks, and Andie know that it's true. But if she were honest, she'd say that at least jerks are straightforward about what they want from her. Jerks are honest about their intentions—brutally so—and Duckies are liars. I don't think that's too strong of a word. They pretend to want friendship when they really want nothing of the sort.

But of course, Andies don't want to be with jerks. Andies want to be with Duckies...just ask them, they’ll tell you. 'My dream boyfriend is a little nerdy, kind of awkward, but he's always there for me and we know everything about each other.' Then, when you point out their nerdy awkward best friend who's been crushing on them for years, they're like: 'Um.' They all want to date a Duckie...they just don't want to date their Duckie.

Andre looked up into the lamp, touching the hem of the shade with his fingertips. "People talk about how Hughes ruined the ending by having Andie and Blane get back together. But I think the ending is one of the few things he got right. The ending says: look, if you think that Duckie and Andie would end up together in the end, you have a lot to learn about how the world really works."

It wasn’t long before it was the middle of the night. Eventually, Emily eased herself down onto the half-lit carpet of the family room, pulling her legs up to her chest and smoothing down her skirt in the back with her free hand. Inside her white pumps her toes wiggled extravagantly.

"Are you falling asleep?" Michael asked in a flat and affectless voice.

"No...I'm just getting comfortable." Emily opened her eyes wide in attention, looking up at Andre and then Michael. "Keep talking, I'm listening," she said, and it surprised neither of them when, within minutes, her eyes closed and her lips parted in sleep.

Michael and Andre chatted for another half hour or so, about...what? Later, after they were gone, Andre couldn't say. Michael had a way of making conversation that was so impersonal that it ceased almost to exist, as insubstantial as the breath that formed the words. He remembered only that they has spoken about the upcoming school year, and Andre's classes, and there had been an awkward moment when Andre asked if he'd heard from the twins. Michael admitted he hadn't, then quietly asked the same question of Andre and got the same response. Neither of them spoke, and finally Michael turned towards Emily's sleeping body.

He placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing once, and Emily woke up like a child, happy and silent and smiling broadly up at Michael before she came fully awake. "I wasn't asleep," she mumbled, sitting up with a hand on her hair.

Andre walked them out--a hug from Emily, a shoulder-clap from Michael--and stood in the doorway as they got in the Mini to depart, holding the highball glass with the last of his ginger ale. He leaned against the doorframe, one leg crossing the other, and swirled the lonely, quickly melting, ice cube around the bottom of his glass.

He could hear them talking softly as Michael opened the driver's side door for Emily--a little showy, that, and not strictly Proper--but he couldn't make out what they said. Andre had learned something that night, something he was still putting together in his head. That frantic look in Michael's eye, when Andre asked him why he'd never hooked up with Emily...there was no mistaking it: the mask had slipped for just a second, and underneath it Andre could see the real Michael, the Michael who was madly in love with an Emily who had no idea.

Or did she? The reason they'd watched Pretty In Pink, she said, was because she'd called him Duckie…was that a reference to his pointless affection for her? If so, that made Andre particularly satisfied with his damning lecture about real-life Duckies.

"Fascinating," he said to himself out loud, then immediately felt like such a douche for doing it he scrunched up his nose. Still: there were people in the Gang that would be VERY interested to hear about this. It was just up to Andre to decide who to tell first.

The car's headlights came on, framing Andre in the doorway with his glass in his hand. He didn't wince or look away, just continued looking at Michael's now-darkened form in the passenger seat. Above his head he could hear the first mosquitoes of summer headbutting the porch light.

As the car pulled out, Andre raised his glass at them, as if toasting their departure, and let them see him take a last drink from his glass. He hoped it looked louche and Continental. Only he knew the glass was empty, offering only the smallest trickle of melted ice.

He waited until he heard the gate close behind the Mini before he came back inside. There was no forced relaxation any more; Andre was frantic now. He leaned into the bathroom long enough to chuck the ice cube into the sink and abandon the glass on the sink by his toothbrush and sports watch. Then he hopped down the hallway, kicking off first one boot then the other, pulling off his shirt and walking out of his pants. Then he was back in his bedroom in just boxers and an undershirt, the way he’d started the evening, with a comet-trail of clothes behind him in the hallway.

His laptop was on the recliner, and he lifted it up just long enough to take its place, then cracked the computer opened and waited for the barely audible buzz of the hard drive waking up. The screen flashed on and the cursor blinked in the Notepad document Andre used for This Toilet City entries.

Okay: think. Think. Start from the beginning. How did you start it?

The belief that the movie should have put Andie and Duckie together in the end...

Not quite. Again.

The idea among fans of the film that Andie and Duckie should have ended up getting together is rampant.

Shit. Shit! Stay calm, you'll remember it.

To fans of the film, there's an almost-universal idea that Hughes' only misstep was in ending the movie without Andie choosing Duckie over Blane. Indeed, it was the original ending of the film...

Forty-Four >>>

Elizabeth Huynh Has A Secret

2008-09-02T21:26:00.001-07:00

If things had gone differently, Elizabeth’s story would be really boring, all about how she has to struggle to reconcile the freedom of American teenage life with the conventional role expected of her by the older generation and this book would probably end with her and her beloved grandmother making a traditional Vietnamese meal or writing a family history or sewing some quilt and then everyone involved would learn a valuable lesson and begin to respect each other and I'd win the Newberry.

But, luckily for you, that’s not what Elizabeth is about. Here’s the short version:

After the war, many Vietnamese refugees were moved to the outskirts of New Orleans, because its geography and climate most resembled their homeland. As they settled into a fragile but close-knit community, their families began joining them, and the Vietnamese slowly became a fixture in New Orleans. None of these immigrants had much money at first, but it was probably inevitable that at least one of them—through willpower and business savvy—would rise up to take full advantage of their new situation.

This was Elizabeth’s mother, Nhung Huynh, who put together a partnership and bought her first convenience store only three years after arriving from Vietnam. A year later, using her profits from the store and a couple real estate holdings, she bought out her partners and invested in a Vietnamese restaurant, a video store, and a few other local businesses.

When baby Elizabeth was born, her mother forbade any of her visitors to speak anything but English in front of her, and in fact this was all she spoke to the baby despite her difficulty with the language. Often, a business meeting at the house would struggle along for an hour, as everyone fought to express their thoughts in English. Finally, the baby would be put down for a nap, and Elizabeth’s mother would take everyone out on the patio, where the meeting could be wrapped up in Vietnamese in about three minutes.

By the time Elizabeth was in grade school, her mother either owned, had a stake in, or controlled most of the businesses in the area of New Orleans where the Vietnamese lived. Elizabeth’s classmates were dropped off in cars bought from her mother’s used car lot, wearing school uniforms from one of her mother’s stores, and carrying lunches that were leftovers from one of her take-out restaurants.

It was also in grade school that Elizabeth realized it was kinda weird that her and her little brother Jason didn’t seem to have a father like the other kids in the neighborhood. After about two weeks of thinking about this, Elizabeth realized that the man she had always called just Uncle—a former business partner of her mother’s—probably wasn’t her uncle after all. None of her friend’s uncles spent the night in their mom’s bedrooms a few nights a week.

At the beginning of junior high, Elizabeth discovered that the most popular girls in her almost-all-Vietnamese school had a certain style about them. As far as Elizabeth could tell, the secret to being popular at her school was to dress like a slutty five-year-old and act adorable, self-absorbed, and totally air-headed. Like Hello Kitty if she were a stripper from the future.

Her mother’s daughter in many ways, one of Elizabeth’s outstanding traits is a stunning capacity for adaptability. Once Elizabeth discovered what kind of girl became popular at her school, she recreated herself as the most perfect example of the species.

Soon enough, she was the alpha-female of the seventh grade, but she found herself growing lonely. It turned out that most of the girls Elizabeth had assumed were just pretending to be superficial and frivilous weren’t pretending so much after all.

After a while, she realized that their parents, after working so hard to establish themselves in the new country, considered it a luxury to let their kids relax a little and be normal teenagers. Elizabeth thought this was the new American Dream, something that should be inscribed on the Statue Of Liberty: “Give us one generation, and your kids will be just as shallow and vapid as ours.”

But Elizabeth wished she could meet someone who was like her, really like her, who understood what it took to rise to the top and stay there. And, then, over Christmas break of seventh grade, she got her wish.

Nhung Huynh’s business interests had grown to the point where they were no longer exclusive to the Vietnamese community, and she began getting acquainted with curious members of the New Orleans elite. At her Christmas party, Elizabeth was introduced two people who were just what she’d been hoping to meet: a sorta cute and really interesting boy named Alexander and his tall, quiet sister Lillian. When she met them she could hear her future shifting and groaning as it rearranged itself, like the sound of stagehands changing a set in the dark just before the curtain rises.

Later that night, after she was caught making out with Alexander in a guest bedroom, Elizabeth was grounded indefinitely. But it was only a few days later that her mother let her ride along in her Honda as she collected her rents for the month. Nhung Huynh got some food from one of her restaurants and took her to a small park near an apartment complex she owned.

While they ate, Elizabeth’s mother told her haltingly that for the first time in a long while, she felt like she was in over her head. The Americans she was dealing with now—white people who had been rich for hundreds of years—had their own way of doing things that confused and frustrated her.

At the Christmas party, everyone was nice to her, but she could tell they were appalled and (even worse) amused by their smallish house and tacky furnishings. Her turquoise dress, covered in rhinestones, was perfect for parties in their neighborhood, but when compared to the simple dresses of the American women she stood out. Even their cars in the driveway made her aging hatchback look like a jalopy.

She explained that, up until recently, she had kept a low profile to keep her community’s trust. It was hard enough being a successful single businesswoman; she couldn’t be perceived as throwing her money in other people’s faces. So she had a medium-sized house not far from everyone else’s, and she drove a beat-up car, and she sent her kids to the local public school.

But the time for that was over: everyone knew who she was and they knew that she owned a piece of almost everything. And now that she was starting to get involved with New Orleans politicians and businessmen, she needed help fitting in with them. What she needed was someone who was completely American to tutor her in the country’s ways. “And who better for the job than my favorite American?”

“Me? I’m your favorite American?”

“No, the man in the moon. Of course you!”

Elizabeth thought about this. “What about Jason?”

“Him too.”

Later that day, they bought a used Jaguar with cash and a new wardrobe from JC Penney’s. Elizabeth tried to get them to go to Macy’s or Sak’s Fifth Avenue, but her mother told her that there was no way she would set foot in a store full of “highway robbers.” Baby steps, Elizabeth told herself.

They ended the day with a manicure, pedicure, and haircut at a salon that was technically closed for the evening but stayed open for the owner and her daughter. Elizabeth’s mother said that they had to look their best for the weekend, when they would go to a New Year’s Eve party at City Councilman Johnson’s house.

“He’s a very important man...a good friend for me to have.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“You’ve never heard of anything, with your face stuck on a cell phone and typing on the computer all day long!”

“I was just saying I hadn’t heard of him.”

“Well, someone you have heard of will be there: Mr. Alexander Budd. So look extra-pretty...that’s an order, mister!” She winked at her daughter.

“Really? I thought you hated him.”

“Hate him? He gave me a wonderful Christmas gift. By corrupting my innocent daughter—Ha ha! That’s a good one!—he put his father in the position of asking me for forgiveness.”

“Oh.” Elizabeth thought about this for a few seconds. “Wait, you’re saying the whole thing gave you a kind of...political advantage?”

“Exactly! Okay, now you’re catching on!”

“Then why was I grounded?”

“Because you almost ruined my Christmas party!” Elizabeth’s mother said, but she was smiling when she said it. “You weren’t grounded for kissing that boy.”

“But I thought-”

“No daughter of mine will ever get in trouble for kissing boys. Especially a boy with a rich and powerful daddy!”

“Mom...” Elizabeth said, embarrassed.

“Hey, look where it got me!”

And so, by the second half of seventh grade, Elizabeth was a frequent visitor to the Budd household. City Councilman Budd had entered into a political alliance with Nhung Huynh—who held sway over an unexploited resource of Vietnamese voters—and he was happy to have her daughter over whenever she liked.

It was Alexander who gave Elizabeth her nickname. He pointed out that when her mother—who spoke perfect English by now, but with a heavy accent—called her by her name it sounded more like “Litta’Bit” than “Elizabeth.”

The nickname stuck because Litta’Bit was quite petite...she was, indeed, a litta’ bit of a girl. (Her mother pointed out, though, that she wasn’t that small by Vietnamese standards, only when placed next to “American monsters.”)

In eighth grade, Litta’Bit transferred to St. Odo's, the private junior high the Budds went to, and she became part of the group, along with Andre and Robert, who would were the founding members of The Gang. Quickly, with the twins’ help, her previous mallrat style was replaced with one more fitting a whites-mostly private school.

She was around the twins all the time, but she never quite became Alexander’s girlfriend. He made out with her from time to time, but he made out with other girls, too. Mostly, he seemed more interested in her being the perfect accessory for his outfits. He would call her every night and help coordinate their looks.

At the beginning of their freshman year at Beaumonde Acadamy, Alexander spent a lot of time with Litta’Bit, and she thought that things were finally getting serious with the two of them. Then, during Fall Break, he didn’t call her and was never around when she called him.

On their first day back to school, Litta’Bit met the newest member of The Gang: Emily Hammarskjöld, who had just moved back to New Orleans after spending most of her life at a boarding school in Manhattan. Alexander, without a trace of guilt or apology, introduced Emily as his girlfriend.

Litta’Bit was crushed. That afternoon, when she finally got Alexander alone, he told her that things hadn’t changed between them at all. He had never meant to lead her on, and if she had misconstrued the nature of their relationship, he was sorry but it wasn’t his fault she’d gotten the wrong idea. It was just kissing, after all.

A few weeks later, a still-miserable Litta’Bit was visiting the Budds when Alexander proposed that she start dating Robert Johnson. She was told that Alexander had already approached Robert with the idea and he had agreed to it, so all Litta’Bit had to do was give her consent.

Litta’Bit thought about the offer for a few seconds. And then she thought about slapping Alexander’s face and walking out. But in the end, she told him that if he was going to be dating Emily, then it didn’t matter to her if she dated Robert or Andre or David or even Lillian.

This was close enough to a ‘yes’ for Alexander, and he told her that he would work out all the details. Then they spent the rest of the evening making out in Alexander’s room. After all, Litta’Bit told herself, it’s just kissing.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted Litta’Bit and Robert to be together. The Gang was happy for them, and told her it was a perfect match. Nhung Huynh was overjoyed to learn that Litta’Bit was dating the son of City Councilman Johnson. Even Jason, her younger brother, was excited that Robert would be coming over more often. (Jason knew his crew would be so jealous to find out that he was hanging out with an actual black guy. He soon discovered, though, that he knew way more about hip-hop than Robert.)

Everyone was happy, that is, except Litta’Bit. Robert was handsome and gracious and attentive and just about everything she could want from a boyfriend, with one exception: he wasn’t Alexander.

Bored and heartbroken, Litta’Bit began flirting with other boys. She flirted with Andre, she flirted with Michael when he joined The Gang, she flirted with David constantly just for the practice. She would even flirt with Josephine when they were alone together, but mostly because it made Josephine sweaty and awkward and this cracked Litta’Bit up.

Her flirting came easy to her after years of practice in junior high, and she was always amused by the effect it had on guys. Puberty had been very good to Litta’Bit, and by junior year what she lacked in height she made up for with...other attributes it would be unseemly for me to describe. Suffice to say that she made her male teachers uncomfortable.

By the end of junior year, Robert was talking about how their three-year-anniversary was just a few months away, and Litta’Bit realized that she had never intended on being with him for three months, much less three years. She knew she wanted something different, wanted it desperately, but she just didn't know what exactly it was.

The ghost of her better life circled constantly behind her back, but it always fled when she turned back to catch a glimpse, and she never saw its face.

Litta’Bit knew that she hadn't ever really fit in with the rest of The Gang. Sure, she was really close to David, and Emily and Michael and Josephine were always nice to her. And she had a special secret bond with Andre. Oh, and she had a healthy regard for Robert.

But mostly, Litta’Bit felt that she always stood apart from the rest of her friends. She had a role to play—everyone’s Asian best friend, the black guy’s girlfriend—and she gave it her all. But deep in her heart, Litta’Bit knew she was different from everyone else.

Forty-Three >>>

Forty-One

2008-08-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

Josephine had followed Mr. Budd for a few blocks, zig-zagging behind him on the side streets as he walked down St. Charles. She’d jog down Prytania, one block parallel to St. Charles, then pop up every few intersections to make sure his dark ambling figure was still headed down the broad avenue. Once she saw him, she’d descend back to Prytania again. It meant she’d have to run two or three blocks for every single one that he walked, but he was a slow walker and it worked out about right.

After a while, she realized that she’d passed, and been passed by, the same white hatchback a couple of times, and that she’d been seeing this car in front of her the entire time she'd been following Mr. Budd. She fell back and watched the car circle the block a few times ahead of her, then pull off. It was weird: it was a young man’s car, with neon lights around the license plate and flashy rims, but the driver was a real Dad, the custom steering wheel looking dainty in his large thick hands.

She didn’t know what to make of his aimless driving. At first, she’d thought maybe the guy was looking for drugs or a prostitute or something, but that didn’t make any sense in the Garden District. Then she thought about how he’d passed her twice already, and she got scared for the first time since leaping across Beaumonde’s fence. He was still ahead of her, and showed no interest in coming back, but suddenly the weight of her situation settled around her: she was almost-17, alone after midnight on one of the busiest streets in the city, wearing flimsy little running shorts and a synthetic T-shirt. She shivered once and then ran on.

Eventually she saw Mr. Budd go into a convenience store, so she cut over a block and sprinted behind the store, then returned to St. Charles a few hundred feet away, so she could watch Mr. Budd come back out. Just before she turned the corner onto the avenue, though, she saw the bumper of the white hatchback. With a yelp she turned around and snuck away, then came back up farther down the street.

The man was idling underneath the shadow of a large elm tree, almost hidden from sight. He sat with one elbow cocked out the window, and the other stretched out across the small interior of the car. Josephine realized suddenly that he hadn’t been following HER…he was following Lucas Budd, the same as she was, and he kept bumping into her.

The thought made her somehow even more nervous than before, and she kneeled down beside the large brick wall of a church and tried to get her thoughts together. Who would be following Mr. Budd? Okay, a reporter, for starters, but the guy didn’t look like one. If the stories about Mr. Budd were true, he might have a drug dealer following him, but he didn’t look like a drug dealer, either. (Like you know what a drug dealer looks like!) And didn’t some kid supposedly flee into the night when Mr. Budd was arrested? So maybe he was that kid’s dad, though that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense.

Josephine waited for a car to drive by, then she leaned around the corner and took another look at him as he was illuminated in the passing headlights. She could only see the back of his head and the sports coat that was tight across his broad shoulders and a little baggy in the arms. The man tapped out a lazy rhythm on the passenger side headrest. He had a professional, almost placid, calm about him; he seemed to be someone who was comfortable with spending a lot of time on the side of the road, watching and waiting. With a start, Josephine realized what the man was.

Oh. Duh!

A few minutes later, she was still trying to decide what she should do when she heard the dual-exhaust of the hatchback start up with a puttering roar. Josephine peaked around the corner. Mr. Budd was out of the store, his backpack stuffed full now, and the policeman was just pulling onto St. Charles to follow him again.

As Mr. Budd made his way back through the deserted Garden District towards his house, he was followed by the policeman in the hatchback, and the policeman was followed by Josephine. As far as Josephine could tell, Mr. Budd didn’t realize that a white car with its headlights off was coasting behind him from a few blocks away, the pavement crackling softly under the tires. And the man in the white car didn't see Josephine slipping from hedge to fence in the darkness behind him.

Mr. Budd began to get careless, walking sometimes off the sidewalk entirely and into open street. As he got closer to the house, he eventually gave up the idea of jumping fences. The policeman, too, seemed to be getting bored and anxious; he stopped circling the block and just hopscotched down the street behind parked cars. Only Josephine kept vigilantly to the shadows, working hard to stay out of the policeman’s rearview mirror and far enough away from Mr. Budd that he wouldn’t hear the echo of her running shoes on the pavement.

A couple blocks away from the Budd house, the policeman turned off on a side street and escaped through the dark residential neighborhood without Mr. Budd noticing. Josephine halted for a second, thinking maybe this was when a bunch of official police cars would surround Mr. Budd, putting him in handcuffs and saying the jig was up or whatever policemen said.

Nothing happened, though, and she continued following Mr. Budd as he walked on through the moist night towards his house. Then, just before he was in front of his block, he turned the corner and went deeper into the heart of the Garden District. The policeman must not have expected this.

She followed him closer now without the cop between them, but she had to be more careful, too. Luckily, it's called the Garden District for a reason, and many of the front yards had shadow-giving trees looming heavily over the sidewalk. Mr. Budd stopped once, digging in his backpack for something, before continuing on and making one last turn.

Now, looming above both of them, white against the dark blue night sky, was the giant Mercer Mansion, Emily Hammarskjold’s home. Josephine suddenly felt sick to her stomach, and she didn’t know why.

Mr. Budd slipped the socks back on his hands and was about to go over the low fence when he glanced over at the gate that led to the workman’s garage. Trying the latch and finding it unlocked, he slipped through and closed it behind himself. Josephine squatted down and snuck behind a car in another house’s driveway.

That weird guard dog trotted around the corner and did a literal double-take when he saw Mr. Budd in the backyard. The moment hung ripe between the two of them. The dog ran towards him and Josephine cringed, but all he did when he reached Mr. Budd was rub himself against the man’s legs like a housecat, almost tripping him up.

Mr. Budd went down on one knee and gave the dog long strokes down its strong back. He dug in his backpack again and brought out what looked like a hot dog, which he fed to the Doberman as he patted his flank. And he stayed there on the ground with the dog for a long time, maybe five minutes, certainly longer than he needed to if all he wanted to do was placate the animal. The dog rolled on his back and offered up his belly, which Mr. Budd scratched and rubbed with his sock-covered hands.

Josephine was still uneasy about why he was in Emily’s backyard, and finally Mr. Budd pulled himself up and gave the dog one last nuzzle between the ears. He crept over to Emily’s cottage, where a weak lamp lit up the bedroom window.

Josephine, nervous now, looked at the yard around her. There was a large ornamental goldfish pond just a few feet to her left, and it was surrounded by softball-sized rocks. She wanted to be holding one. Josephine prayed this night wouldn’t end with her throwing a rock at Alexander and Lillian’s father, but she knew she would if Mr. Budd tried to get through Emily’s door.

But Mr. Budd didn’t go to the door, though. He stopped at two bikes that were leaned against the side of the little cottage, chained together. He had some kind of string in his hand, long and black, and he tied it around the handlebars of Emily’s heavy cruiser. The dog watched him, silently curious, and was rewarded with more nuzzling when Mr. Budd was done.

After he’d slipped back through the gate and down the street, Josephine crept across the street and stood at the fence. It was a shoelace that dangled down from the Emily’s handlebars, but she couldn't understand why he'd done that.

The guard dog had followed Mr. Budd down the length of the block as he walked past the Mercer, but now he came back over and stared up at her through the fence.

“Bad dog,” Josephine whispered.

She pressed the back of her hand up to the fence so the Doberman could sniff it and eventually give it an experimental lick, but Josephine didn’t really notice. She was slowly turning something over in her mind as she stared across the moonlit grounds at the two bikes, one chained to the other. Emily's cruiser nuzzled against a yellow ten-speed with brown grip-tape there just underneath the buttery light of Emily's bedroom window. A breeze she couldn't feel caused the shoelace to trace a miniscule figure eight in the air.

Josephine knew who the other bike belonged to.

She looked at the two bikes for a moment more, then moved away. It didn’t take her long to catch up with Mr. Budd. She found him just as he was about to jump his next door neighbor’s fence and creep across the backyard.

Josephine stayed on the corner, hiding around the corner of a house, then peeking out at the two guards in front of the Budd's. It was a man and woman, both of them in their NOPD outfits, and they were both sitting in folding chairs reading the newspaper by the light of the garage.

The jangle of the backyard fence was so loud Josephine could hear it faintly on the corner. There was no way the two guards, so much closer than her, didn’t hear it, but neither of them reacted. Eventually, though, the woman looked over at the man, who nodded deeply with a grin, never taking his eyes from the paper. The female cop turned away from him in her seat and opened her cell phone. Her face glowed blue in the dark, and she sent a quick text message before returning to the paper. The male guard nodded at her again without looking over.

Josephine waited a few minutes, but the night stayed quiet and still, so she slipped away from the corner and jogged back to her house. She took off her shoes at the door, tiptoed up to her room, and had been in her bed ever since, listening to the sound of her heart as it echoed through her limbs. Now that she was home and safe, she thought about what she’d just done and it scared her much more than it had when she’d actually been doing it.

She had seen a lot following Mr. Budd, but now she didn’t know what she should do with her new information. Or if she should do anything, actually. She didn’t even understand a lot of what she’d seen, and what could she do by herself, anyway? She needed to sleep on it, but sleep, which had been Josephine’s most consistent summer companion, had now abandoned her.

She couldn’t turn her mind off, couldn’t stop her eyes from scanning the dim Martian landscape of her bedroom ceiling. Josephine's alarm clock was so bright that she’d had to tape a piece of construction paper over the face so it wouldn’t keep her awake. She flipped the paper flap up: it had only been forty-five minutes since she got home from following Mr. Budd. God, it felt like she’d been there on the bed at least three times as long. She knew she wasn't going back to sleep that night.

But then suddenly she was sleeping, and it had come over her so quickly she didn’t realize she’d drifted off until she struggled awake, whispering an idea to the dark. She knew now what she could do with what she'd seen tonight. And she knew she couldn’t do it alone.

Elizabeth Huynh Has A Secret >>>

Forty

2008-08-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

In his summary reports, Detective Ronald Maglione would often refer to "a solution suggested by a technology consultant," which delighted his superiors and made them feel like they were getting their money's worth. In reality, though, the "technology consultant" was usually just this kid the computer place had sent over to hook up his internet a couple years ago. They'd gotten to talking—Maglione had gone to elementary school with his uncle—and the kid gave him his number. Now the kid ("Doug") helped him out occasionally, and one day in the future when Doug was caught peeing outside of a bar, or holding a dime bag, or just looking at a stressed-out patrolman the wrong way, Maglione would help him out in return.

After that night three weeks ago when Bellecastle and Karlinoff had visited Lucas Budd, Detective Ronald Maglione went to visit Doug at the computer store, asking him if he knew of any sort of sensor you could buy that would detect when a door had been opened. He was imagining a complicated array of light beams and tripwires, the sort of thing you had to order out of the back of a gun magazine and have sent to a P.O. box.

Instead, though, Doug dug around on the shelves and found a little battery-operated wireless doorbell, the kind that rings a separate electronic chime every time someone opened the door. "You see them a lot at small businesses on Magazine Street." Ten bucks and it was his. That night, Lawler and Maglione played around with it and figured out that the chime would still pick up a signal from about a hundred feet away, so Maglione snuck around to the back of the house and just super-glued the little sensor to the back door.

For the past two weeks, then, instead of going home to a beer and SportsCenter, Maglione had ended his days around the corner from Budd’s house, finishing his paperwork by his dome light's weak glow, with the doorbell chime setting on his dash. He knew his Crown Vic would have been too conspicuous, so he confiscated the souped-up white hatchback his step-sister’s kid owned. He'd gotten the kid out of jail when he'd been busted racing it in the street like a fucking loon, and now he was getting paid back.

But the days slouched past, and Budd didn’t have any visitors or try to leave. Maglione was even considering giving up his nightly watch, but tonight the doorbell had finally gone off, scaring the absolute shit out of Maglione. The chime was a lot louder than he thought it was.

Maglione slipped out of his car and peeked between the houses. He saw Lucas Budd, wearing a backpack and with socks on his hand, sneaking through his backyard and climbing awkwardly over his neighbors’ fence.

“For Christ’s sake,” Maglione whispered, then got back into his car.

It had been a little difficult to follow him at first, since Lucas Budd mostly avoided the streets and crept through the backyards of his Garden District neighbors. But Maglione knew what he was doing—he'd tracked guys a lot stealthier than Budd before—and he'd only lost track of him a few times. After a while, he saw the general direction that Budd was headed, and he was able to follow him from a safer distance.

It helped that there was a full moon, and that the July night was deserted. No cars ran through the residential streets, and it seemed like the entire neighborhood was already in bed. He only saw one other person: a young girl jogged past him, eyes straight ahead, as he sat in someone’s driveway with his lights off. She could have been a college student, but she looked younger. He wished he could show her some of the savage shit that went down in the city every single night…she might think twice about doing something as boneheaded as jogging at midnight.

Actually, as she passed him, Maglione had a wild paranoid flash that it was Emily Bellecastle, and that all this time Budd had been watching him. He fell back from pursuing Budd and passed her twice. It wasn't her, of course. This girl was taller and skinnier than the Bellecastle girl, and her hair was long and brown instead of shorter and reddish. He was just tired and excitable, that's all.

Maglione didn’t know why, but his boss hadn’t wanted him to follow-up on the Bellecastle and Karlinoff leads. Maglione had made an attempt to contact each of them—he wanted to give them a little talking-to, maybe scare them away or at least find out what business they had with Budd—but when he told the guy he was working for what he had tried to do, he was told in no uncertain terms to leave them alone. Maglione didn’t understand, but he didn't pursue it. He had realized long ago that the need to understand the motives of his superiors would only hold him back in his line of work.

Maglione followed Lucas Budd all the way to St. Charles Avenue, where Budd stopped to put on a baseball cap and pull it low over his eyes, then Maglione watched him walk down to the Stop ‘n’ Start on the corner. Maglione couldn’t follow him in, of course, so he sat way back, under the shadow of a giant elm halo'd by the streetlights lost in its branches, and watched him as best he could through the distant store's window.

Later, Budd came out and tried one of the pay phones, but he quickly hung up and moved to another one. Maglione watched Budd talk on the phone for about five minutes, and Budd eventually got a bit animated, glaring at the ground with the phone cord wrapped up carefully around his hand. After hanging up, Budd picked the handset up again and held it in his hand for at least a minute, but put it back without making a second call.

Maglione followed Lucas Budd as he headed back into the Garden District, and in the direction of his house. Budd was lazier on the way back, only cutting through a couple of yards, and Maglione was lazy, too, often just driving a few blocks behind him with the lights off. Finally, anxious to get back to the Stop ‘n’ Shop, Maglione made sure that Budd was home or at least definitely headed that way, then doubled back to the gas station.

The pumps of the Stop ‘n’ Shop were empty, but a green sedan with an Enterprise rental sticker on the bumper was in the parking lot. Maglione got out and, as he locked up the car, patted his pants and jacket for the usual check: keys, wallet, badge, gun. Pat pat pat pat.

Inside, three tourists—clearly back from a night on Bourbon Street—were making a big show of how shocked they were that the Stop ‘n’ Shop didn’t sell alcohol. They stared at each other, open-mouthed. “Dude, I thought every place in New Orleans sold liquor.”

The young Syrian guy behind the counter looked like the sort of guy who always had a bunch of handbags he was trying to sell out of the back of his car. He was wearing a pristine white tracksuit, and on the counter was a pair of chromed sunglasses with lens so lightly tinted they were certainly almost useless. He shrugged in the way that only young immigrants working an overnight shift in their family’s business can shrug. “What can I say?” His voice sounded more Jersey than Middle East.

Maglione pretended to look at an old People magazine while the clerk gave the tourists directions to the Stop ‘n’ Shop up on South Claiborne that sold liquor. The way Maglione understood it, the Stop ‘n’ Shop kingdom was divided among two sides of a large Syrian family. One half of the family was composed of good Muslims who refused to sell alcohol at their stores, and the other half were bad Muslims who didn’t care. As frustrating as it was to go out of his way for a six-pack when his day ended, Maglione had to really respect the good Muslims: just imagine how much money they were missing out on by not selling alcohol in a 24-hour gas stations in New Orleans. He didn’t know much about Islam, but talk about putting your money where your mouth is.

After the tourists left, whooping, in their rented sedan, Maglione set the magazine down and looked over at the kid behind the counter. “You know, I got stabbed at that gas station once. The Stop ‘n’ Shop on Claiborne? Well, it wasn’t a Stop ‘n’ Shop then, I think it was still a Franky’s, but yeah…stabbed right in the gut. No lie.”

“Oh yeah?” The kid looked at him with an almost-perfect stare of total disinterest. He should think about going to the police academy, he’d be perfect.

“Yeah. Hey, you remember that guy with the beard who was in here a few minutes ago, maybe twenty minutes? With the cap pulled down real low on his face?”

“Yeah...?”

"Great. Did you happen to recognize him?"

The kid folded his arms and stared at him. Maglione knew that with jobs like this there were only two kinds of customers: the kind you could ignore, and that kind that would try to fuck with you. He could tell that the clerk was about to place Maglione in the latter category. "No. Why, should I have?"

"Nah, not at all. But hey, listen...you don’t happen to remember what he bought, do you?”

The kid stuck out his lower lip and nodded deeply. “Yeah, I remember. He bought nuna.”

“Nuna?”

“Yeah, none ‘a your business.”

“Hey! That’s funny. I’ll have to remember that.” Maglione’s laugh was genuine. He really would try to remember that one…he could think of a lot of scenarios where it would come in handy. Still chuckling, he reached into his jacket for his badge. “Here, let me show you what I have in my pocket.”

Soon enough, he had not only a list of what Budd bought, he had an actual photocopy of the receipt. Nothing too exciting: a carton of smokes, some Kool-aid mix, a bottle of tonic water. A chili dog. A packet of shoelaces. Oh, and some ephedra pills. That was slightly interesting.

Maglione hadn't wanted to pull out his badge, it always ruined whatever sort of rapport he'd developed. He hated all those TV shows where the cops are interviewing some guy who's still working away at his job, even ignoring them, like he gets questioned by homicide detectives every day. In the real world, as soon as the badge comes out, people either get really defensive and start lying for no reason that they can understand, or they become overly-cooperative and willing to turn in their own family if they thought it would help.

The clerk wasn't that bad...working overnight at a convenience store, he was probably around cops about six hours a day, and had gotten pretty used to them. But still, Maglione hated to make the conversation official like that. The guy had a tough job, and it was stressful enough already without Maglione messing him around.

"Did he buy anything that wasn't on this receipt?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, for example, I got this neighbor from Guatemala...good guy, real good guy. Sometimes when I'm going to the store, he has me buy him a calling card. I noticed the other day that calling cards aren't rung up on the register, they're written down and the money is put in a cigar box under the counter."

"Oh. No, he didn't get a calling card. He asked me to give him change for a dollar, though. Four quarters."

"Of course, for the pay phones. Right." Maglione dug into his pocket and came out with a handful of scribbled-on index cards and a few of his official business cards. "Hey, thanks for your help. I mean it. Here, keep one these cards. Give me a call if you ever need me—you know what I'm saying?—and I'll see what I can do."

The Syrian held the card in both hands and looked down at the business card. "Thank you. Thank you, I will. I hope you catch the guy," he called, with a nervous laugh.

Outside, Maglione dug around in his step-nephew's car until he found a couple of quarters, then went over to the pay phone. He paused for a second, trying to remember his own cell phone number, then dialed himself. A few seconds later, his phone was ringing in his jacket, and he hung up, pocketing the two quarters again.

Back in the car, Maglione jotted down the pay phone's number on one of his index cards. He pulled out onto St. Charles with his cell phone up to his ear. The phone answered on the third ring.

"Is this Pat? Leslie?" All the women who worked overnight in the communications room sounded identical: like they'd stayed up all night smoking cigarettes instead of sleeping.

"It's Leslie."

"Hey Leslie, it's Detective Maglione."

"Mag-LEE-own?"

He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Leslie, it's Ron The Baptist."

"Oh, hey Ronny, I didn’t recognize your voice...how you been?"

"Leslie, honey, if I felt any better they’d have to lock me up. Listen, I got a favor to ask you."

"Let me guess: it’s the kind of favor that doesn’t come with paperwork."

"Leslie, I promise, as soon as you get to work tomorrow night, all the paperwork will be right there on your desk, all of it back-dated and signed, and on top of it will be a heaping bag of Angelo Brocato's cannolis."

"Well, you really know the way to a woman's heart, Ron, I'll give you that. What do you need?"

Maglione tried to stay in his lane as he fished around on the passenger seat for the index card. "I need the last twenty or so calls made from this number. It's a pay phone, you ready?"

"I'm ready." She typed in the digits as he gave them to her, then was quiet for a second. "All right, you got them."

"Okay, I'm ready." Maglione got up on the interstate, headed towards his townhouse in the Metairie suburbs.

"No, I mean you got them. I just emailed the list to you."

"Oh."

"You gotta get with the 21st century, boy. I tell you what." She coughed out a laugh. "You got names and billing addresses on most of them. It's not perfect, but it'll do."

"Thank you, darling. I really appreciate it."

"Thank me with the Brocato's. I want one for each of the girls ‘cause they’ll squawk when I bring them out, and I want two for me."

"You got it.” Keeping one eye on the road, he scribbled brocato's on the index card on his lap. “But I'm disappointed in you…I thought the knowledge that you’re helping me keep the streets of your beloved city safe from the criminal element would be thanks enough."

On the other end, Leslie whooped with laughter. "Maybe they should lock you up, Ronny. You gettin’ delusional."

Forty-One >>>

Thirty-Nine

2008-08-13T20:54:00.001-07:00

The Sebastian family has a secret, and David’s parents protect this secret with a strict vigilance. David has been sworn to silence—“It might seem completely natural to you, honey, but other people just wouldn't understand”—and though David’s other attempts to keep a secret have ended disastrously, he’s never told anyone yet, and none of his friends are ever allowed to go up to the third floor. He explains that the only thing up there is his parent’s bedroom and a storage room.

Of course Valerie’s parent’s know about it, but they seem uncomfortable with the very idea, and Harry thinks that his father-in-law treats him differently since he’s found out. As though he’s somehow less of a man. Valerie tells him he’s just imagining things, but he can tell by the way her father shakes his hand.

(Harry’s own parents died when he was in law school, hit by a drunk driver. At least once a year, one of the local magazines will feature a profile of Harry Sebastian, Louisiana’s highest profile personal injury lawyer, and the writer will always mention the death of his parents as though this is the hidden key to understanding how Harry got where he is. Harry, of course, finds this simplistic and a little offensive, though he cheered up recently when his son remarked that this makes him seem darkly driven by a need for justice and vengeance, “just like Batman!”)

So this is the family secret, then: for the entire duration of their 23-year marriage, Valerie and Harry Sebastian have never shared a bed. The third floor contains two bedrooms and two bathrooms, one for each spouse.

The secret, like all family secrets, probably seems banal to those who don’t have a stake in actually keeping it a secret, and the Sebastians may come across as ludicrous or overwrought by trying to keep it hidden. (In fact, if many of their married friends knew about the Sebastians’ sleeping arrangement, they’d probably even be jealous of them.) But neither Valerie nor Harry relish the idea of explaining to anyone why they choose to sleep apart.

They’ve never actually had to defend their decision to others, though, thanks to their caution. But both of them are born arguers, and they’ve made a hobby of defending it to each other:

“It’s just weird that we’re expected to spend a third of our lives trying to share a small mattress with another person.”

“And you sleep so lightly, and I toss and turn.”

“Plus, you’re so cold-natured, and I can barely stand to have a sheet on me.”

“It makes perfect sense. But you know what most people would say if we told them, right?”

“Oh, of course. It wouldn’t even be what they’d say, it would be the way they’d look at us. Like we’re living a loveless marriage. No passion, no spontaneity.”

“As if having a sex life depends entirely on being forced to share the same bed every night.”

“’Hey, pal, we love sex so much we have two separate rooms for it.’”

“Exactly.”

“And that’s not counting the sun room and the bathrooms and the pool and my office and the kitchen and…”

“Okay, now you’re just being gross.”

They've become obsessed with proving to themselves that even though they have separate rooms their relationship is just as hot-blooded as any other. They’ve entered into a competition with an imaginary opponent, “the average couple.” Last year, Valerie read in Cosmo that their nemesis the average couple was intimate two times a week. Since then, one of them had visited the other’s room three times a week in retaliation. (They recently agreed that this had become almost like a quota; now the number of visits fluctuates between two and four times a week.)

Even after twenty-three years of marriage, Harry still got a thrill from the sound of his wife’s bedroom door opening, and her bare feet padding across the hallway, and finally her fingertips rustling softly against his door, almost inaudibly, until he got out of bed and found her standing in the soft light of his doorway with a slightly bashful grin, looking up at him with her hands clasped in front of her.

He’d visited her earlier in the week; tonight he’d found her in his bed, reading one of his case files, when he came upstairs. Later, as they dozed, Harry’s cell phone began to ring on his nightstand.

“Who’s that?” his wife mumbled. She’d turned away from him, one hand had reached back and clutched his thigh.

“Beats me.” The caller-ID said Pay Phone. This wasn’t unusual; he was more of a businessman than an attorney these days, but he still had a lot of people call him from the NOPD overnight lock-up. He didn’t recognize this pay phone’s number, but this was his private cell phone, and almost no one had this number. “I better take this. Hello?”

The voice on the other end sounded like it came from somewhere beyond the land of the living. “Hello?”

“Yeah, hello?” Harry got up and found his robe.

“Can you hear me?” The line crackled a few times, then the voice suddenly became clear. “Is that better? This phone cord, I think it has a short in it. You can hear me?”

“Yeah, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear. I just gotta hold this cord all screwy. You know how hard it is to find a working pay phone now that everyone has a cell? They don’t even fix ‘em any more.”

Harry’s wife pulled the covers up over her shoulders, then over her head. He frowned at his phone. “Uh, who is this?”

“Harry, it’s Luke.”

“Luke?”

“Come on, brother…Luke. Lucas Budd.”

Harry said the first thing that came into his head. “Oh, fuck you.”

He quickly parted the blinds and glanced out into the street. There were no suspicious cars parked out front. Not yet, anyway. He was being ridiculous and paranoid, of course, but then again…

Harry stepped out of the room hurriedly and pulled the door shut behind him. He cupped his hand around the mouthpiece. “Do you have any idea the sort of shit you could bring down on me? What are you thinking, calling me?”

“No, it’s okay…it’s a pay phone. We’re safe.”

Down the stairs, there was a glow under David’s door and softly muffled voices could be heard. How long did it take to trace a call? Harry wanted to say thirty seconds, but maybe that was just on Law & Order. He stepped into his office and closed the door. “Jesus Christ, Luke…”

“Hey, guess what I played the other week? You’ll never guess: Liar’s Dice! God, remember how we used to play that for just hours back at the Delta house?”

“Who…who were you playing with?”

The line crackled a few times, then came back. “Damn it, hold on. You still there? Listen, I didn’t call just to chit-chat. I need your help, Harry. Dearly.”

“I can’t imagine how I could possibly help you.”

“You know people. You can help us organize a…a resistance, Harry.”

“Oh, Jesus, Luke…Jesus, Jesus." Harry sat down heavily behind his desk and put his forehead into his free hand. "You’re not fighting this?”

“I am.” Lucas Budd said this softly, then cleared his throat. “You best believe we’re fighting it. And you’re gonna help us. Come on, it’ll do you good. How long has it been since you’ve actually been in a courtroom…ten years? Fifteen?”

“Who’s this ‘we’ you keep talking about?”

“I don’t have time to get into all that. But we’re fighting back, and we need your help. The sort of help you gave Meyer.”

Harry felt irrational anger blossom up into his chest. “For fuck’s sake, Lucas…Reuben Meyers was a DUI and an vehicular manslaughter charge. The ‘help’ I gave him was making maybe two phone calls. You think this has anything to do with that?”

“Hold on.” The sound of the phone call grew muffled. “Sorry…a patrol car was passing by.”

In spite of his cooling anger, Harry had to chuckle darkly at this. “Fuck me, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. Shit.”

“Listen, you don’t want to help me, fine. I’m not going to give you a guilt trip. But you have something of mine, and I’m gonna need it back. You still have it, right?”

Apparently Lucas Budd still knew how to hit people where it hurt. “Luke, buddy…you throw that contract in his face and Jerome is gonna take you apart. Like, biblically…to the seventh generation. Use your head, man. You think you’re toxic now? You’ll be dreaming about when you had it this good.”

Lucas Budd sighed angrily. “Do you have it or don’t you? That’s all I’m asking.”

“You know you’re just as dirty as he is in that deal, right? It might take him out—I said might—but it’s gonna blow up in your face just as bad. And that’s not to mention the innocent bystander, here. Do you really want to do this to-”

“Do you have it?” Lucas Budd roared. Or don’t you?”

“Yes, I have it. Jesus.”

“Good. Sorry. Just hold on to it. I’ll be sending a couple of…a couple of resistance fighters by to get it from you.”

Harry, behind the desk, looked up sharply. “Oh no you’re not.”

“Relax. They have the perfect alibi. You know them, but you won’t even realize who they are until they get there.”

“I’m telling you, Lucas, you’re not sending anyone over here…”

“Will you relax? You haven’t changed since college, I tell ya.” The line went dead for a few seconds. “Look, that was the robot telling me my time’s up. Just hold on to that envelope for me, you hear? I’ll take care of the rest.”

Harry didn’t speak for a moment, then said just “Okay.”

“Great. Thanks…and I mean that. And Harry? I’ll talk to you when I talk to you. Kiss Val for me.”

It sounded like he was about to hang up. “Lucas!”

“…yeah?”

“For the love of God, Luke…these guys aren’t fucking around any more. Be careful.”

He could already hear the smile in Lucas’ voice. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, and then hung up.

Harry Sebastian sighed, then cursed again and went over to the window. He watched the dark street in front of his house, half-expecting the unmarked police cars to pull up at any moment. None of them did, of course, so he moved over to another window and stared down into the pool at the angular reflections of the lights sparking in slow-motion against the side.

Twenty minutes later, sure now that his overblown fears about the phone call were just that, overblown and unrealistic, Harry slipped his cell phone into the pocket of his robe and stepped out into the quiet dark of his house.

He passed David’s door and listened for a second in passing. He could hear Elizabeth Huynh saying something like “-and it just kept going on and on...” Robert Johnson, Jerome’s kid, had been there earlier, too, but apparently he’d left at some point…the only people he could hear in the room now were Elizabeth and his son.

Other parents might be suspicious to find their son behind closed doors with a girl past midnight…unfortunately, Harry knew he had nothing to worry about. David was probably braiding her hair.

(Once, he’d walked in on them found Elizabeth face-down on the bed, topless, with his son straddling her hips. David was holding a stencil to her back and he had a small paintbrush hanging from his mouth. On a saucer beside them set a small bottle of henna. They’d both looked up at him with thoroughly innocent faces. “What?” David had finally asked.)

Down on the first floor, Harry Sebatstian didn’t turn on any of the lights. He didn’t need to…the lights from the landscaping were bright enough to find what he was looking for. In the larger of the two guest bedrooms was an antique trunk with a wide sliding drawer on the bottom. It wasn’t exactly hidden, but with Valerie’s cashmere throw tossed over the trunk it wasn’t exactly obvious, either.

Harry Sebastian eased himself down to his knees and pulled the throw off. The drawer had a keyhole on the front, but it was fake. Actually, there was a catch on the back of the trunk, just a little sliding latch, that released the thin drawer so it could be opened.

The manila envelope was towards the center, buried under a few other things he didn’t want to leave out in the open. He angled the envelope so that it would catch the weak glow of the outside spotlights. It was blank, of course, except for two signatures, Jerome Johnson and Lucas Budd, right over the flap. No one could open and reseal the envelope without messing up the signatures. That was the theory, anyway.

After they were done signing the envelope that day six years ago, Harry glanced across his desk and suggested that maybe they shouldn’t have used their real names. They both agreed, but everyone was too lazy to go back out to the receptionist’s and get another envelope.

Harry knew exactly what he should do with the enveloope. He should take it out on the patio and light the grill and just toss it in. Wash his hands of the entire mess. It would probably be the best thing he could do for Lucas, actually, as well as the people he had helping him. If they even existed.

But instead, as he always knew he would, he put the envelope carefully back into the drawer.

Forty >>>

Thirty-Eight

2008-08-12T18:34:00.000-07:00

Josephine Brooks was bored.

Again.

Still.

Actually, she wasn't just bored, she was (as she was tempted to write in her journal every day) bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored.

Her days were too long. She woke up before sunrise to jog, then spent the rest of the day in the empty house, reading or writing in her journal but mostly just sitting around, wasting the summer. Her mother was busy preparing Beaumonde for the upcoming school year, but even if she'd been at home more it wouldn't have necessarily been much better. Who wants to spend the summer hanging out with their mom?

And then, to make things even worse, a few days before her sister Catherine had called from Los Angeles to deliver her "big news." She had been hired to work as a PA on a movie that was filming in New Orleans, and in August she'd be home for "a few weeks, maybe even a month or two." Oh, fantastic.

At least the disgust and annoyance she’d feel when her sister arrived would be a break from the boredom. The night before, Josephine had picked up her cell phone and stared at it, thinking of calling someone in The Gang and asking if they wanted to...what, exactly? Josephine didn't know, she just wanted to do something. She considered calling David, but now that his trip to Chicago was only two weeks away he was radioactive.

Then, in the middle of the night--just before she had to get up for her run--David had actually called her. He had to deliver something to Andre (he wouldn't say what) and he wanted her to ride with him.

"At two in the morning?" she asked in a whisper.

"Oh hell yeah."

Josephine always slept in her running clothes, so all she had to do was put on her Sauconys, untied, and sneak down the street to his driveway.

Andre lived only about ten blocks over, and the errand hadn't taken long at all. On the way, David played a dance song he was in love with over and over again and talked about his upcoming trip, which he had apparently planned in great detail. Josephine waited in the car while he ducked into Andre's garage with his package. He hadn't asked her to come in with him, which has fine by her. She paused his iPod so she wouldn't have to hear that song for the fourth time, and instead she listened to Mrs. Sebastian's Prius humming softly in the dark.

Just a few minutes later, David got back in, restarting both his new favorite song and his discussion of the trip, and drove them home. Josephine wanted to ask him to take her somewhere, anywhere, but she couldn't think of how to say it and so she hadn't said a word. He'd pulled up in front of her house and pretended to make out with her until she pushed him off, squealing, and jumped out of the car.

And that was it, the only big adventure of her summer: going for a twenty-minute car ride with David at two in the morning. Exciting stuff.

She couldn't get back to sleep after that, so she just stayed up until it was time to go jogging. The run had been pitiful, of course, and all day she had been exhausted and even more out-of-sorts than she usually was. And then, to top it off, her mother had gone out to dinner with Roger and another couple, and Josephine had fallen asleep heavily on the couch, only waking up when her mother came in at eleven. So now her sleep was thrown off for another night, and the next day's jog would be ruined as well.

After saying good night to her mom, Josephine put on her running clothes and went out on the back deck to do her nightly stretches. She left the lights off because her mom's window--just now going dark--faced the back of the house, and because the bugs might not bite as badly. There was an almost-full moon struggling to stay above the neighboring houses.

Josephine eased herself down to the wooden deck and crossed her legs, then bent over at the waist as far as she could, putting a hand under her knees to pull herself as far down as possible. The muscles of her lower back pulled taut. She counted to thirty, relaxed the stretch, then leaned forward again.

Because she had to get up so early for her run, she was usually asleep by nine, so to be awake and outside stretching at eleven pm made her feel miserable. She must have gotten the "early to bed" gene from her mother, who just that evening had come in complaining about being kept up that late. On the other hand, Josephine's father was well-known for staying up deep into the night when he was working on a project. Her sister Catherine was the same way.

Josephine straightened up and opened her legs out, forming a wide V. Her next stretch involved leaning forward as far as she could, stretching her fingers out in front of her. She always did her stretches in the same place on the deck, and when she did this stretch there was a certain knot of wood she aimed for every morning and evening. With the lights off, she could only barely see the dark spot a few feet in front of her. If she looked to the side she could just make it out, but it disappeared when she looked right at it.

But she never leaned forward, never reached out towards the elusive knot with outstretched fingers. Instead, she stifled a yawn and shook her head, then stared out across her backyard, just sitting there in the purple dark. At first she considered the summer jobs she was still planning to apply for, but eventually she became lost in thought, or rather, lost in no-thought, and the stretches and jobs were forgotten. Later, she would suspect that she may have drifted off, fallen asleep with her eyes open. She didn't know how long she sat there, watching the moon rise and the trees refuse to budge in the sodden air, but she finally stirred when the dogs of the neighborhood began barking, many of them muffled by patio doors and all of them ignored, and when the man lifted himself clumsily over Josephine's back fence.

She swallowed hard, too shocked to do much else, and carefully scooted her butt backwards on the wood deck, towards the shadow of the house. The bearded man, wearing sweatpants and a shirt that was too large for him except over the gut, seemed to be coming right towards her, until he stopped about fifteen feet from the deck and looked around the yard, then squatted down in the shadowy grass.

Josephine made a low sound in her throat that she couldn't control, but the man seemed to be too far away to hear it. He was wearing mittens, and he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist, then cleaned off a lens with one of the gloves. No, wait...they weren't mittens, they were dress socks. It was hard to make out, but there seemed to be maybe another sock rolled up inside, too, over each of his palms.

The man put his glasses back on and didn't move, except to tilt his head to the side. The dogs, one by one, gave up their barking.

Josephine slowly moved her palms down to her side and flexed her forearms. When this man stood up, if he took a step towards her she could be up and through the back door in seconds. There was a phone by the door, and knives in the kitchen. With a torturously cautious movement, she bent one knee to make it easier to jump up and back.

The man in the yard didn't seem to notice. He was still squatting in the yard, but he was intently studying the fence that separated the headmaster's residence from Beaumonde Academy. He seemed to be looking for something.

Neither of them moved for many minutes. The sound of her heart beat in her ears.

Suddenly, the man looked up and over her, the full moon reflecting fully in both lens of his glasses, so it looked like his eyes were pools of mercury. Josephine caught her breath. He tilted his head to the side, listening as a car drove past the front of the house, then he turned back to the fence. He hadn't seen her.

He hadn't seen her, but she had seen him. Josephine recognized him now as Lucas Budd, the twins' father, now bearded and skinny (yet also somehow paunchy) but undeniably him.

Mr. Budd leaned forward and tore up a few blades of grass with his woolen padded fingers, then sprinkled them out on the ground. Josephine wondered if he even knew whose backyard he was in. And she wondered if she should speak to him--the idea made her want to pee--or if she should continue hiding in the dark.

Before she could decide, though, Mr. Budd pushed himself up, shaking one leg and then the other, and walked quickly around the side of her house, hunched over at the waist in a concession to the concept of sneaking. Josephine listened closely, and she heard him trying to open the gate that connected Josephine's yard with the grounds of Beaumonde Academy. It would have been hidden in deep shadows from the house, and it had taken him a few minutes of squatting in the grass to find it.

Mr. Budd continued trying to get the gate open, but there was a small latch that had to be moved. It was hard to find in the daylight, much less the middle of the night. A few of the closer dogs began rumbling and pacing at the noise. Finally, he got the gate open.

Josephine always made a point, during the school year, of going out her front door and entering school through the main entrance. But her mother went through the gate several times a day, and Josephine knew that it squeaked loudly. Mr. Budd evidently discovered this on his own, because soon the hinges to cried out loud enough that all of the dogs in the neighborhood began barking again. A calico cat that Josephine hadn't seen scrambled off her back fence and disappeared under one of the neighbor's garden benches.

The gate squealed again, this time a few octaves higher but much shorter, and there was the sound of the latch closing. Josephine glanced up at her mother's window, but no light came on, no curtain parted.

Mr. Budd came back into view, hugging the shadows of Beaumonde's auditorium, as he snuck through the grounds of her school. Something caught a streetlight and flashed silver; Josephine realized that he was wearing a backpack, and the light had hit a piece of reflective tape. (She caught herself wondering where in the world he'd found a backpack...there was no way the twins would have knowingly allowed it in their home.)

At the back of the school was a large garage, where trucks could make deliveries without blocking the street. Leading up to the garage was a long paved entranceway, a bit more extensive than a driveway but not exactly an alley, which emptied out onto a side street. Mr. Budd seemed to be headed for this.

There was a low fence, hip-level to a ninth-grader, separating the school grounds from the drive. And the end of the school day, many students would make sure that Dr. Hayes wasn't around, then carefully lace their fingers between the pointed ends of the fence and vault cleanly over to the pavement on the other side. It saved them the hassle of going all the way through the school again, and it was an easy jump.

Well, easy for a teenager. Middle-aged men in the middle of the night seemed to have a bit harder time with it. Mr. Budd placed his sock-covered palms directly on the top of the fence, pulled himself up until he could swing his feet to the top, then jumped noisily to the other side. The dogs went bonkers.

Mr. Budd loped down the drive. He held back long enough to let a white hatchback pass on the main street before he slipped out and down the sidewalk.

Josephine realized that she was still crouched on the deck, her muscles tight and ready. She relaxed and looked up at her mother's window again. She needed to go inside right then and tell her mom what had just happened. That would the smart thing to thing to do. That would be...

That would be totally boring. Josephine pursed her lips. She pulled herself up by the banister, paused a moment with her back almost parallel to the deck, then swung slowly through the railings and landed softly in the grass. (The maneuver had come so easily to light and muscular Josephine that she had barely realized she'd done it, though surely any spectator would have whistled approvingly at the move, if not resorted outright to profanity.)

She ran her foot back against the grass, supposedly to see how slick it was, but really so she could rid herself of the last traces of nervousness. She took off at a sprint, covering the thirty yards of her backyard in seconds.

Somehow her feet knew exactly when to jump. In the light of the next day, examining the distance and height she'd covered, then she would felt anxious and even a little sick to her tummy. But tonight her body was in charge, launching her into a silent slow roll, almost a sideways somersault, over the chest-high fence.

The jump wasn't perfect--she had too much momentum going into the landing, and her fingertips grazed the grass as she dipped low to right herself--but it was good enough to get her over the fence and on her way.

She continued her spin until she was facing the right way, took a stuttering half-step, then took off again without a pause. She sprinted towards the fence at the end of the yard, her stride lengthening until she was flinging herself forward with every step. She reached the low fence, and with a grunt she stepped up and hurdled over it, one leg out before her and the other curled back almost behind her.

The night held its breath as she flew, then the slap of her soles landing safely on the pavement echoed damply in the hedge-lined corridor. Josephine ran a few more steps, shaking off her speed, then turned back to look at the two fences she had just silently cleared. A very unjosephinian grin bubbled up to her face, and she coughed out exactly one half-laugh, equal parts joy and nerves and adrenaline and fear.

Oh hell yeah.

She went to the end of the drive and looked out cautiously for any cars. In a city of waiters and bartenders, late-night jogging wasn't unusual, but New Orleans DID have a curfew for teenagers, and until her birthday in two weeks she had to be at least a little bit careful.

Down on the corner, Mr. Budd had stopped to go through his backpack. Josephine held back behind a large fern and saw him strip the socks off his hands, then pull out a black baseball cap that he pulled down low, almost to the top of his glasses. He turned the corner, slinging the backpack over a shoulder, and was gone.

Josephine looked back up the dark drive, over the two fences, and at her house sitting shadowed in the distance. She caught her breath, then turned away and stepped onto the sidewalk.

Thirty-Nine >>>

Thirty-Seven

2008-08-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

The Fourth of July weekend was over, and now that it was the middle of the week the crowds at the airport had thinned out. Aunt Marissa was able to get checked in faster than they expected, and since her flight didn’t leave for another hour and a half, they walked together through the the different little overpriced airport shops.

“I hate I didn’t get the kids anything,” she said, setting a plush crawfish back into its menagerie. “But seriously, they have enough toys for ten childhoods. Dr. Ray spoils them so bad.” It may have said Dr. Delray Garris on his business cards and bus stop ads, but everyone just called him Dr. Ray, including his wife, his mother, and himself.

Over on the magazine racks was an issue of Redbook with Laura Brennan-Spade on the cover. “We’re Made To Feel Broken”: A Revealing Interview About The Heartbreak Of Infertility. Setting a clear look of disdain on his face, Andre picked up the magazine and flipped through the pages, hoping to find the “exclusive preview of her new best-seller.” There might be some pictures from her modeling days.

“You know what would be so nice?” his aunt said. “If you would listen to me when I talked to you for the last ten minutes of my visit.” Apparently she’d said something that he’d missed.

“Sorry.” He put the magazine back on the shelf. “Do you wanna get some food?”

“What were you just looking at? Do you need tips for dealing with menopause?”

“It was nothing, I was just flipping through it. Christ.”

Marissa touched Laura Brennan-Spade's face on the cover. “Her books are so good. Have you read them? Dr. Ray has them in his waiting room and every time I go over there I end up just sitting there and reading like fifty pages.”

“Uh, yeah: no, I haven’t read any of her books. I’ll add them to the list.”

They moved back out into the airport. A flight from Charlotte had just landed, and exhausted passengers streamed up out of the concourse. On the bench in front of Andre a young couple sat, both of them heavily asleep. The man had a straw cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes, and moved his lips slowly as if in prayer. His girlfriend or wife clung to his arm, her mouth slightly open, and twitched occasionally as though she dreamed of chasing or being chased.

Andre and his aunt drifted over to another little shop, this one selling ceramic figurines depicting jazz musicians playing on the street in some mythical French Quarter. The salesperson was off in another corner, and both Andre and his aunt muttered an “oy” under their breath at the same time.

Their two weeks together had been pretty rough, but nothing compared to the slow-motion agony of this final hour. By now, Andre had a pretty good feeling that he'd had passed the unspoken test that was the real purpose behind her visit, and it was excruciating to know that he was so close to getting rid of her, to being free for the first time in what felt like forever. In a way, though, he almost relished the unbearable wait…he savored it, drank it in, tried to memorize it, so that when she was finally through the metal detectors and gone he’d feel that much lighter.

Andre examined a little statue of an alligator playing a saxophone in the bayou moonlight, and Aunt Marissa reached out and pinched his belly.

“I swear to God, Andre, I can’t believe how much slimmer you look after only two weeks,” she said. (This wasn’t actually true—she couldn’t detect any change in his gut at all—but despite all appearances to the contrary, Marissa Meyer believed in positive reinforcement.) “And you seem so much healthier. You’ve got your color back and those dark circles under your eyes are gone.”

This last bit was true, and Andre had noticed it himself, but he still didn’t want her talking about it. He smirked and turned away.

She’d been feeding him health food and processed low-calorie low-fat substitutes. And the portions! So small he always left the table hungry. Also, she'd made them go jogging every day over the last two weeks, to Andre’s never-ending shame and disgust.

That first week, they'd walked one block and jogged the next. The first few days had been miserable, and Andre would collapse, sore from his shoulders down to his calves, into a deadly sleep each night.

The second week, though, he’d discovered that for the first five minutes or so he could actually jog for two blocks before needing to walk. And afterwards he wasn’t nearly as wiped out as he’d been just a week before. He’d still felt awful, of course, sweaty and panting, with his glasses stuck slickly to his face, but he’d also felt good in a way he’d never exactly experienced before. Nor ever would again, thank God: jogging had been a fun little experiment, something to break up the monotony of his aunt’s visit, but now he was only fifteen minutes from never having to put on a pair of running shoes again.

“You’re going to stick with it, right? In just a couple of months you’ll look and feel so much better.”

“Of course.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah, I promise.”

The night before, Marissa had prepared a one last homemade meal for Andre and his dad, grilled salmon and steamed vegetables. After being roused by both Andre and his sister, Reuben Meyer had finally lurched out of his bedroom and sat, slumped over, at the table. His skin looked ashy, and he seemed a bit more out of it than usual. He stared down the food on his plate for a long time, flinching at the sight of it, before finally looking up at his son with a desperate look.

A few days before, Reuben had finished the last of the liquor Andre had secretly stockpiled for Aunt Marissa's two-week visit. There were still enough pills to get him through the rest of Marissa’s stay, thanks to Andre’s careful budgeting, but Reuben had been dry for almost four days by the time he joined them for this final dinner. He ate nearly nothing, simply chopping up the salmon with his fork and stirring it around on his plate to make it looked like he’d been taking bites. Occasionally he’d put a little fish in his mouth and chew it cautiously before swallowing with a look of great effort.

Finally he looked up, and with a small voice asked his sister if he could be excused. Andre thought it served him right for not being able to control himself, but he was also worried that this last meal had bought both of them a one-way ticket to Phoenix. His aunt didn’t say anything, though, only nodded her head and watched Reuben trudge his weight back down the hall to his bedroom. Andre cleared his throat and told her he was glad her flight was late the next day so they could get one more jog in, but she’d only smiled at him and continued eating.

“Oh, shoot...I forgot about your new insurance papers.” Aunt Marissa said, digging into her briefcase-style purse. The two of them had gotten into the security line together. There was still plenty of time to spare, but they’d already been in all the airport shops and they could think of nothing else to do.

“That's okay, you can fax them to us.” Andre counted the people in line. Twenty-two more inspections and he would be on his own again.

“No, wait...I have them, never mind.” She pulled two folders out and flipped through them. “I had Dr. Ray forge your signatures. He did a pretty good job, too. The hands of a master surgeon and all that.”

Andre began to grow nervous. If Aunt Marissa was going to drop a bomb on him, tell him she was looking into bringing him and his father to Arizona, it would be now, just as she was preparing to leave. Andre felt like he’d done a pretty good job of getting the house in order and making it seem like everything was running smoothly, and going jogging with her had helped a lot, too. But still, it was a totally fucked situation and he knew his aunt could go either way.

His dad had been better that morning, awake and aware as his sister was packing to go away. This was thanks to David Sebastian: the night before, long after Aunt Marissa had gone to bed, David sneaked over to the house with an emergency bottle of gin from his mother’s bar. Andre had given it to his father just before he'd left for their final jog, and by the time they got back, his dad was noticeably better, and even wanted to go along to the airport. He fell fitfully asleep in the living room before they could leave, though, and his sister said goodbye to him only by touching the hair on his head for a moment.

Now that there were only a few people between them and the security check, Aunt Marissa was listing the things she’d forgotten to tell him, or had told him only ten times already. “Only jog five days a week…take the weekend off. I know we did fourteen days straight, but that was because we didn’t have a lot of time together. Every week, add an extra block or two where you run instead of walk, and you’ll be jogging for half an hour straight in no time.”

“I will. I have the little notebook you gave me to keep track.”

“That’s right. And don’t eat a lot of crap. Slow down, chew your food. You eat like someone has a gun to your head. Put your fork down between bites, okay?”

Andre nodded at her, smiling and even squeezing her shoulder. Suddenly his nervousness had made him gregarious. “Okay. I promise.”

There were only a few people left in line, and Aunt Marissa looked back over her shoulder and then at Andre. “Well…okay. I guess this is it, then.”

“Yeah.”

She shifted her bags up onto her shoulders. “Let’s see if I can get my arms around that chunk of yours.”

He laughed for her, feeling suddenly magnanimous in his relief, and took her in his arms. “Thank you for everything,” he said, patting her back. “I really appreciate it.”

His aunt didn’t say anything, and held the hug for longer than he expected. A few people slipped past them and through the metal detector. Andre was surprised to feel her shudder once, then hold him even tighter. And when she pulled away, her eyes were red and wet and she searched his face with love and sympathy and worse.

“Andre, I…I just worry so much about you.”

Andre held her out at arm's length, his hands on her small shoulders, and smiled broadly. “What? No…I’m fine. Really, I am.”

“Okay.” She passed a hand quickly under her eyes. “All I want is for you to feel better…you know that, right?”

“I know. And I do feel better. I feel great.”

Andre watched his aunt move through the security check, her shoes in her hand, then off down the concourse, and he really did begin to feel as great as he claimed. Aunt Marissa turned back once and raised a hand at him, then went around a corner and was gone. A little ping of guilt echoed in his heart when he saw her final sad and worried goodbye, but he ignored it. He was free. He had passed. Yes, Andre felt great.

In fact, he felt so good that he left the airport, drove to the closest sandwich shop, and a ordered a large roast beef po' boy. With extra mayo and extra gravy that he could dip his fries in.

A couple hours later, just as the sun was setting, Andre keyed into his house and discovered his father still in the chair he’d fallen asleep in, but awake now and apparently waiting for him.

“Where have you been?” his dad asked, narrowing his eyes at Andre. “You should have been home hours ago.”

Andre shut the door and went up the four steps into the living room. “Like you even know what time it is. Quick, what’s today’s date?”

Reuben Meyer made a strangled sound in his throat and, reached out for Andre, kicking his feet out when he did it like a petulant prince. A small torquise vase fell off the nearest side table, hitting the carpet and refusing to break. “Don’t you…don’t you dare…you’re already in it, sir, so I wouldn’t make it worse. What did you do with my bottles?”

“I didn’t do anything with them. You drank them all, remember?” Andre was a bit…worried was too strong of a word. Concerned. His father had his surly moments, but he was never violent. Even now, though, his anger seemed rehearsed, like he was reciting lines from a movie about an alcoholic dad. A lifetime of reading shitty novels had given Reuben Meyer shitty dialogue for every occasion. “Of course you don’t remember.”

His father didn’t say anything, just fixed Andre with a sick look and breathed through his mouth. “I want you to go down to K&B and get me a bottle.”

“For fuck’s sake, Dad, I’m seventeen. I can’t just walk into a store and buy you liquor. Do I even have to ask if there’s any of that gin left over?”

Reuben Meyer eyed him suspiciously behind his thick glasses. “What gin?”

“Never mind.” Jesus Christ, arguing with his alcoholic father. It all felt so cliché, so movie-of-the-week…so low-class. “The delivery guy comes tomorrow, you can hold out that long.”

The food distribution company that supplied his father’s theaters dropped off a shipment of liquor every week, supposedly for all the society functions the Meyers were always throwing.

Andre started to go down to his room—one of his jackets was on the stairs for some reason—when he had a change of heart and opened the paper bag he’d carried in with him. After sitting on the levee with his roast beef po boy (Andre had been disgusted to find that he could only eat about a fourth of it) he drove over to where an older friend, another New Orleans blogger, worked. He gave the guy twenty bucks to run into A&P for a bottle of anything. The friend had been happy to do it, said it reminded him of being a high schooler himself, but the whole thing made Andre hatefully depressed: the condescension, the idea that it was for Andre himself, the fact that he couldn’t explain the real reason he needed it.

Andre had wanted to hold off as long as possible on giving the vodka to his dad, maybe even keeping it in reserve in case this ever happened again, but his father’s demeanor made him think he shouldn’t wait. Hopefully it would put him to sleep until the morning, when the delivery came.

His father reached up for the vodka, his feet coming up off the floor again. Andre pretended to give it to him, then yanked it back. His father made a pleading little whimper and reached out harder. Andre offered it again, and again pulled it away. Finally, on the third try, he tossed the bottle into his father’s outstretched hands.

Reuben Meyer tore at the screw-top’s plastic liner with his teeth, then cracked the cap of the bottle. He looked around for a glass and, not finding one, picked up the small vase he’d just knocked to the floor.

Andre chuckled in spite of himself and took the vase away from his father. “Just drink it out of the bottle, dad. Geez.”

After the first swallow his father relaxed back into the chair, gasping, then took another long drag. “Gin? Vodka? You know I drink whiskey.”

“Well, dad, it’s not like I had a whole lot of choice in the matter.” His friend had bought some kind of special vodka that he wanted Andre to try, as though he were Andre’s wise older brother, inducting him into the secret rites of adult drinking. Andre had acted kind and receptive during the lesson, the whole time wishing with a passionate sincerity that the guy would burst into flames.

His father took a third drink, sighed, and pointed his finger at him. “I don’t want you hiding my bottles from me anymore, you got that? I had to tear the house apart to find this one.”

The jacket on the stairs. “You had to…” Andre quickly went down a hallway, and it was true: his father had ransacked the entire house looking for the bottles that he himself had already finished. All the cleaning that Andre had done, all the work that Aunt Marissa had put into the house, was scattered in the doorways and piled in corners by his father’s search.

“Fuuuck.”

He drifted down another hallway, breathing slow and ragged. Everything that had been in one guest bedroom, even part of the mattress, had been thrown through the doorway. Downstairs, a cabinet in the family room was overturned.

Andre found his room in shambles, his desktop computer on its side but still working. The drawers of his nightstand hand been pulled out hurriedly; Andre looked in a panic through the bottom drawer, but the framed picture of him and his mom hadn’t been hurt.

“You idiot...you asshole!” His fists went up to his eyes and the world went dark red for a few seconds. Andre stormed up the stairs, two at a time, and headed towards his father. Reuben Meyer, mid-drink, saw his son’s face and shrank back in fear, but didn’t entirely take the bottle from his mouth.

Andre didn’t smack the bottle away, breaking it against the wall, and he didn't smash it across his father’s head, and he didn't make his father watch as he slowly poured the vodka all over the carpet. He stopped himself before he did any of that. Instead, he grabbed the end of the bottle and lifted it higher, so that the vodka spilled over his father’s gasping face and down his throat and shirt. “Do you know what I’ve been doing? I just saved your ass from rehab, you stupid fuck.”

His father sputtered wetly, holding the half-empty vodka bottle against his chest, but Andre turned to stalk back downstairs. Something soft hit him on the back of the heel. It was the small vase, and his father had his glasses off now and was staring at him with wild eyes.

“You treat me with respect, mister.” He tried and failed to pull himself up out of the chair. “You hear me? I’m your father.”

Andre knocked him softly back in the chair, barely pushing him at all, then went down the stairs without a word.

His father yelled after him. “There are gonna be some changes in this house, yes sir there are. Some big changes.”

Alone now in the wreckage of his room, Andre put the drawers back into his nightstand. The top drawer got stuck going in and he banged forcefully against it, again and again before tearing it back out with a choked sob.

He sat on his bed and sighed wetly once, twice, and a third time. His glasses came off for a second and he wiped hot tears away from his eyes. It would take him weeks to fix the house, and Emily had called the other day, to ask if she could bring Michael over for a movie this weekend. The house would still look like a robbery scene. He’d worked so hard, too. It wasn’t fair.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Andre sniffled twice. He kicked off his shoes slowly, then walked out of his jeans, pulled off his shirt, and entered his bathroom wearing only his underwear. The bathroom was also destroyed, the medicine cabinet pulled from the wall, but his jogging shorts and muscle shirt were still in the hamper. His running shoes had been knocked behind the toilet, but he fished them out and laced them up. He slipped out the side door of the house, and through the gate, and ran away one step at a time.

Thirty-Eight >>>

Thirty-Six

2008-07-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

When Emily came downstairs after her picnic with Michael, she found her mother in the breakfast nook with a small tray of cucumber sandwiches, a deck of cards, and two small metal gadgets that looked a bit like stubby stopwatches. Belinda Bellecastle seemed to be waiting on her, and brightened up when Emily passed by.

“There you are.”

“Hey.” Why did her diction and posture always desert her the second she saw her mother?

Belinda nodded at the finger sandwiches. “I made us a snack before we go over to Grandma and Grandpa’s.”

“I just had a picnic. And we’re going to Grandma and Grandpa’s to eat dinner.” Sitting down at the small table, Emily took one of the shiny devices. She cut the deck of cards: a seven of diamonds.

“Somehow I don’t think that’s gonna stop you.”

Emily took a bite of a sandwich triangle. “You mustn’t say things like that to a 17-year-old girl. You could give me an eating disorder.”

“This is America, Emily. Everyone has an eating disorder.”

Belinda Bellecastle cut the cards as well and turned up a three of clubs. The low card meant she would be the dealer for the first round. She gave Emily and herself six cards, then turned up a starter card, which was the ten of diamonds.

“Michael brought us the new Forbes…Dad slipped to number 39.”

“I knew those dotcom people were no good.” Belinda frowned for a second, then laid two of her cards off to the side. “My god, has it really been a year already? I feel like the last list came out yesterday.”

Emily put two of her cards aside as well, then laid down a face-up four in front of her. “Four.”

Belinda put down a three. “Seven.”

“Five is…uh, twelve for three.” Emily picked up her metal counter and clicked the button on top three times, giving herself three points. She’d discovered the counters in one of the many second-floor storage rooms a few years ago, and walked around clicking them aimlessly for a week, trying to think of something fun to do with them. Finally she realized that her family could use them to keep score in Cribbage instead of the more traditional wooden pegboard.

“Clever girl,” her mother said, then put down a jack. “Twenty-two. So how was your picnic?”

“It was okay.” Emily shrugged and didn’t look up from her hand.

“Very enlightening.”

Emily groaned. “I don’t know, it was fine. What else can I say?” She placed a five down on the table. “Twenty-seven.”

“Go. It’s a shame that none of your other friends could make it.” She smiled innocently over at her daughter. “Too bad it was just you and Michael.”

Emily ignored her and played her last card, a four. “Thirty-one for two and one more for the go.” Click click click.

“Of course, we’ve seen quite a bit of Michael these last couple of weeks, haven’t we…?”

Emily rolled her eyes violently. “We’re just hanging out, geez. He and I are both in the same boat now that the twins are gone. Go.”

Belinda gave herself a point for the go, then played a nine and ten and gave herself another point. She fixed her daughter with a stern look. “Emily. I am extremely disappointed in you. No daughter of Bonnie Belle has any business being this bad at lying to her mother. We’re going to have to ask those gypsies for our money back.”

“We’re just friends, Mom, I swear. Okay? Could you get off my back about this?” This wasn’t the first time her mother had made leading comments about Michael, and it wasn’t the first time she’d overreacted and immediately regretted it.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to say anything. I’ve seen the two of you together.”

Emily looked up sharply, only to find her mother smiling slyly.

“I meant your body language, dear.” Then, nodding at Emily’s hand: “What do we have?”

With a quick sigh, Emily spread her cards out in front of her. “Three four five for three, three four five for six, fifteen for eight and fifteen for ten. Oh, and a pair for twelve.” She clicked her counter twelve times.

“And I have…let’s see, nine ten jack, another nine ten jack, and a pair…and one for his nob. What is that? Nine?”

After scoring the crib—a perfect nineteen—it was Emily’s turn to deal. They played the next hand without talking about much…Belinda Bellecastle hated to lose, and she was behind by seven points. She had a better second hand, though, and the score was tied by the time she had to deal again. But instead of handing out the cards, she set the deck down and narrowed her eyes at her daughter. Emily dreaded what was coming, and prepared herself.

“Now. Two weeks ago I told you to go have an adventure this summer, and I gave you a deadline of two…Emily, what are you doing?”

Emily exhaled slowly, relaxing all of the muscles she had been tensing as she held her breath. “Stress relief,” she mumbled.

“Well, it’s been two weeks. I don’t have to know what you’re up to…in fact, I forbid you to tell me. The best adventures are the ones that would horrify your parents. Or your children. But I have to know, because your time is up: have you started an adventure?”

Emily was trapped and she knew it. If she admitted that something was going on, her mom would never let it go. But if she denied everything she’d have to succumb to her mother’s plans for the rest of the summer.

“I…might have started…a little something. Yeah.”

Her mother raised her eyebrows. “I thought so. You wicked child.”

“It’s just a summer thing, it’s not…you know.”

“Those are the best kinds of adventures!”

Emily slumped down in her seat, surprised to find that she was smiling just a tiny little bit. “Okay, that’s all I’m going to say. Period.”

Belinda ignored her. “I have to say, whatever your adventure is, it must be a good one. Even your dad was saying that you’ve been smiling and laughing and generally acting goofy the last couple weeks.”

“Really?” Emily prayed that she wasn’t blushing.

“Oh, totally. I don’t blame you though, he’s hot. I’d have an adventure with him any day.”

Emily groaned. “Ugh, now I have to go vomit and call the cops. Deal the cards.”

Instead, her mother slowly shuffled the deck one more time. “Well, just be careful. Getting knocked up is a terrible way to end a summer adventure.”

“Mom…! We’re not sleeping together.” Yet. “I didn’t even say that’s what it was, okay? Can we just drop it already and play the game?”

“Does he love you , Miss Bellecastle?” she asked, but Emily ignored her. "Did you hear what I said, Miss Bellecastle? Does he absolutely adore you?”

Emily fought down a shy grin and pointed at the deck of cards. “Shut up and deal.”

Thirty-Seven >>>

[Photo by Soon Van.]

Thirty-Five

2008-07-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

Two weeks passed, and Michael and Emily moved, with touches and kisses, out of their guiltless friendship and into the summertime compromise they had created. Now that they’d spent that first night together, it became easier every time they arrived in each other’s arms, and soon they were in the giddy early days of what neither of them called love.

Michael’s father was serious about him taking the summer off, and Emily’s days were endless, so most evenings Michael would arrive home from Emily’s cottage just before night became morning, only to be woken up only a few hours later, after his father left for work, by Emily scampering up his fire escape and into his room. She’d often wear sunglasses to protect her blissfully sleep-deprived eyes from seeing the brightness of the daytime world, and vice versa. Michael, who had awoken at the sound of her feet on the metal stairs, would pretend to be asleep until she slipped off her shoes and into bed beside him. She’d tickle and play-bite until he could feign sleep no longer and opened his eyes to her laughter, her embrace, her Emilyness there in his bed and his arms.

They prepared a picnic for the Fourth of July: Michael got a few yards of kelly green gingham out of Underhill Men’s Clothing Haberdashery fabric warehouse and, working at his sewing machine, fashioned a blanket large enough for the two of them. He also borrowed a large wicker basket from his father, who carried wine and cheese in it when he took women on picnics of his own. Nicolaus Karlinoff had given him the basket with a broad wink that Michael pointedly ignored.

Emily prepared the food. Well, she sat on a stool in one of the downstairs kitchens and paid careful attention as Cindy, the family chef, prepared the food. To be fair, Emily had started out making the meal on her own, but Cindy nervously hovered over her and made so many suggestions that eventually they swapped places. As she worked, Cindy delivered a monologue on all of the intricate details of this deceptively simple meal. Emily was to memorize this spiel for Michael so he could fully appreciate everything that had gone into the lunch, then Emily was to report back on his delighted reactions. Like all artists, Cynthia Autry’s needs were basic: unconditional, unending praise and love.

Now the picnic was half over. They had already enthusiastically eaten the pan-bagnats, a kind of pressed tuna sandwich from somewhere in France…no matter how hard she tried, Emily had of course forgotten most of the details of Cindy’s lecture. They had also picked at what Michael had called the “avant-garde” potato salad, though they ate quite a bit more of it after had Emily produced the small bottle of Tabasco she always carried in her purse.

Emily stretched out with her head in Michael’s lap, enjoying the bright warm sunshine. A sandal dangled lazily from her big toe as a gentle, unending breeze caressed both of them. They slowly ate from a little bowl of fresh raspberries, of course feeding them to other occasionally then feeling slightly embarrassed at the cliché. The raspberries were meant to be sprinkled on the homemade mango sorbet that still waited in the basket, but it looked increasingly unlikely they would survive that long. A line of ants, straight from a cartoon, marched across the blanket and into the picnic basket.

Michael brushed the bangs from Emily’s face and kissed his fingertips, then touched her forehead. “I can see your secret face,” he whispered.

Emily sighed happily and eventually answered. “What do you mean?” Without realizing it, she had apparently been nodding off.

“When we’ve been really close, like in bed? After a while I start to see a different face, one I don’t see when we’re out in the world. I guess it’s because we’re so close together that your eyes seem bigger than usual, but whatever, I don’t want to make it too scientific. I just know that it’s one of the things I really like about all this, getting to see your secret face.”

Emily smiled up at him, and closed her eyes. She snuggled her face up against his belly. “If I said that you make me deliriously happy, would you call me a total cheeseball?”

“You know I would.”

She bit softly at him through his light cotton shirt, and he grabbed her gently by the shoulders to hold her back. “You’re always biting me.”

“It just so happens you’re incredibly biteable.” She leaned forward, loudly chomping at him, but he laughingly held her off.

Gormenghast, the family’s troubled guard dog, perked up his ears at the sight of his mistress being wrestled with. He stood up, turned two circles, then sat back down.

“Gormy, seriously.” Emily said. “Some guard dog.”

At the sound of his name the Doberman trotted over happily, his nails clicking against the hardwood floor, in search of leftovers. Emily began tossing herself back and forth, as though Michael were roughing her up.

“Gormy, help me…this dusky immigrant is having his way with me! His Mediterranean passions have been in enflamed and he’s quite beyond reason! Only you can save me!” In response, the dog leaned over and gave a cautious sniff to the plastic ants lined up across the green blanket.

“Pitiful.”

The beginning of July was much too hot to even consider having a picnic outside, so Michael and Emily had set up their picnic in one of the larger rooms on the third floor of Emily’s home. When the Mercer Mansion had been a teacher’s college, this had been the gymnasium, where old-timey exercises were performed by old-timey women in long heavy skirts. These days it mostly sat empty, though Emily’s father would run laps around the perimeter whenever it was raining too hard to ride his bicycle along the levee.

The front of the room was completely dominated by three cathedral-like windows, and Michael and Emily had placed their blanket, with her mother’s Pilate mats underneath, in the center of the afternoon sun. The room was too large and under-used to keep air-conditioned, so Franz, the gardener, had brought two very large box fans from the workshop and placed them about ten feet away. Amused by the scene Emily and Michael had created in the gym, he’d gathered potted ferns and flowers from around the grounds and surrounded the blanket with them.

Michael picked up one of the plastic ants and inspected it. “Why do you have these, anyway?”

“Oh, a few years ago, when I was still in New York, my parents held a haunted house here for all the kids of my dad’s employees. He was Dr. Frankenstein, my mom was…Mrs. Frankenstein? The one with the cool hair. So anyway, one of the rooms on the second floor is full of Halloween stuff. Like plastic bugs, for example.”

“Ah.” Michael looked around and found his leather satchel. “Hey, speaking of your dad, when I went in to my dad’s shop for this fabric-”

“Ew, was that creepy guy there?”

“What? No.” A couple weeks before, a large red-headed man had come into Underhill asking for Michael. Sam, his father’s right-hand man, was a naturally suspicious and dismissive man; he took one look at the man’s blazer and claimed he’d never heard of Michael Karlinoff, but Nicolaus Karlinoff was out of the office for the day.

Around the same time, Emily’s mother said that a man called the house phone and asked to speak to Emily “Belly-castle.” For a few days, Emily and Michael had fed each other’s paranoia about these events and their meeting with Lucas Budd, but the man—if he’d even been the same person in both cases—didn’t make another appearance, and they soon forgot about him.

Neither of them had heard from Lucas Budd since their meeting, but he’d told them to wait three weeks before attempting their first mission, and they still had another week to go.

Michael pulled a magazine from his leather bag, the newest issue of Forbes. On the cover was a line of middle-aged female CEOs in business suits, smiling at the camera and holding brushes that dripped red paint. The headline of the magazine read The Richest Men In America, but Men had been crossed out with red paint and sloppily replaced with People.

“Oh yeah…I forgot that this came out in July.” Emily flipped through the pages. “My mom always has to go buy it at Walgreen’s every year and then hide it ‘cause Dad…well, he’s Scandinavian, you know?”

“I can’t remember what page it is, but he’s tied for number 39.”

“Uh-oh. He was at 37 for a few years in a row. Time to start tightening our belts around here.” Emily looked up at Michael and smiled warmly at him, for no other reason than he was there, then returned to the magazine. “Oh, here it is. Where was this picture taken?”

“It’s his downtown office, they just flipped the negative for some reason, and it’s a weird angle.”

“Oh yeah. Don’t tell him I told you this, but back when his investment firm had a softball team a few years ago, they made him a jersey with the number 37 on the back.”

“That’s cool.”

Emily was reading the short article that accompanied the picture. “Oh man, these stories always want to make it sound like a Rags To Riches story…it drives him so crazy. I mean, his father owned a natural gas company and a bunch of coal mines, or something. It’s more of a Riches To Insane Riches story.”

Michael reached over and fiddled with one of the ferns beside their picnic. “I guess I had no idea just how much money his firm made. I, uh, did the math while I was waiting for the streetcar…I wanted to see what your dad’s hourly wage was. I was bored, I don’t know. And the number was so big it just made no sense, so I figured it out to the minute, then the second. Did you know that if your dad was walking down the street and saw a $100 bill on the ground it would actually cost him money to stop and pick it up?”

“Trust me, he’d pick it up. Have you seen his car?”

Michael shrugged. “It’s just weird, I guess…I mean, I always knew you guys had a bunch of money, of course, but then to see a magazine calling him one of the richest men in world…?”

“Country, in the country. There’s a big difference. You just pissed off a lot of dudes from Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong.” She looked over at him, her head tilted to the side. “Did this really freak you out?”

“What? No…not really. It was just sort of a shock, you know?” He smiled at her, then picked up her hand and kissed each of her knuckles, one by one. “It didn’t weird me out or anything.”

“Good.” She closed her eyes with a grin as he pecked each of her fingernails. “You still have to buy me beignets tonight. You know that, right?”

“Sounds good to me.” Later that evening, after Emily went to her grandparents’ and Michael went to the Underhill employee cookout, they were going to ride their bikes downtown to see the fireworks.

Emily picked up the magazine and finished reading the article with a sigh. “They always have to mention that lawsuit, like it has anything to do with anything.”

“Yeah, I saw that. You know, everyone always talks about it, but I don’t guess I even know what it’s all about.”

“It’s really boring, are you sure you want to hear it?”

Michael checked his watch. “I don’t know…I only have about three hours.”

“You jerk.” Emily poked him in the chest. “So…when my dad was younger, he was married to another lady and they had three kids. They’re all in their thirties now. And…well, I hate to make it sound simplistic, but even though they’ll all be super-rich for the next twenty generations, they’re afraid that my mom is gonna somehow steal their inheritance. When my parents adopted me fifteen years ago, they filed a lawsuit to guarantee that a certain retarded percentage of his estate went to them no matter how much he wants to leave to me.”

“Oh. Does it have something to do with you turning eighteen soon?”

“To them that probably has something to do with it, yeah. But their big beef is the fact that I’m adopted. Now he has another heir, and one that isn’t even a blood relation.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Well…the glib answer is that we’re not that far from the Middle Ages, and that bloodlines still count. Also, I guess they see my adoption as my mom stealing my dad away from them without fulfilling the one job requirement expected of a Much Younger Wife: actually sleeping with him. Which is really a stupid idea because my parents have sex all the time.”

“Really?” Michael cocked an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”

Emily held up her hands and closed her eyes. “I know, okay? I know. Please don’t make me relive the specific traumas of sharing a house with two parents passionately in love.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She shook her head, then did an exaggerated shudder. “Anyway, the fact that I have my mom’s last name isn’t just some feminist thing: technically, I’m not even my dad’s adopted daughter. I’m not sure how this is gonna stand up in court one day, but on paper, anyway, my mom adopted me fifteen years ago by herself while she just happened to be married to my dad.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. And there are like fifty other things that I won’t even get into, like how I’ve never spent a dime of my dad’s money on anything. All my school clothes, the tuition at Beaumonde, even my allowance: all of it comes from my mom’s trust fund and my grandpa. And all of this so she can be above suspicion to my step-brothers and step-sister, which of course only makes them even more suspicious of her motives.”

“Of course.”

“And the really stupid thing about all of this...hey, am I boring you?”

Michael looked up. “What? No way. The only inheritance drama in my family was who had to take my Aunt Nevena’s dogs when she died.”

“Well, let me just add quickly that the really stupid thing about all this is that my mom is a Bellecastle, you know? Okay, sure, compared to my dad’s money that basically makes her lower-middle-class, but still: she and I could pretty much live off my grandfather until the year 3000 before we’d have to start clipping coupons.”

Outside, a few early fireworks were being let off in the street. “Your dad doesn’t seem like someone who would put up with all this.”

“He doesn’t. It’s, like, the only thing my mom and dad fight about. He wants to adopt me and change my name to Hammarskjöld and everything else, but my mom thinks that if she’s fanatical about staying above suspicion, then one day they’ll start to trust her. The other family is so eager to believe the most fucked-up conspiracies about my mom’s motives, but they’ll never buy the simple explanation: she just loves him.” Emily shrugged. “All I know is it sucks that, with all this talk about inheritance, I have to think about my dad dying all the time.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Emily tilted her head up and Michael kissed her waiting lips once, soft and lingering, before she put her arms around his neck and their mouths became eager. His legs were open and she was curled between them, pulling him down into her embrace by his neck and his shoulders, sometimes his hair. His arms supported her, and one palm rested heavily on her tummy. He could feel the flesh just beneath her thin shirt rise and fall slightly as she sighed happily in his arms.

Over the last few weeks, they had surprised each other with their ability to go from civility to passion within seconds. Every lull in conversation held the potential to be transformed instead into a clinch, a devouring.

Within a few minutes, among the ferns and flowers of their indoor picnic, their hands and clothes had begun to cross the line of plausible deniability; if anyone had come in they wouldn’t be able to separate in time, to adjust their garments into an approximation of innocence. Slowly they moved apart, fixing their hems and collars with shy giggles and expectant gazes. The rest would have to wait until after the fireworks.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Emily whispered.

“No.” Michael shook his head. “Not just one. I want all of them.”

Her eyes softened for a second, and she smiled at him before continuing. “I think I know what that lawsuit is really about.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But…I don’t know. Okay: I was already one year old when my parents got married, right? And my dad had been divorced for ten, fifteen years by that point. I think maybe…I think I might be his kid, from some relationship he had before he met my mom.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. It just makes a lot of sense. I don’t have any proof or anything, which means I might as well be fantasizing about my dad being Darth Vader or killed by Voldemort or whatever. But if I’m his legitimate daughter, it explains why the lawsuit is such a big deal, you know?” Emily shook her head. “I’m probably just daydreaming, though. Hey, can I keep this magazine to show my mom?”

Michael shrugged. “Sure. I brought it so you could have it. Besides, I don’t think they’re going to miss it…there are always a ton of magazines in the men’s bathroom at Underhill.”

“Ew, Michael!” She flung the magazine away from herself. “You brought me a magazine you found in the bathroom?”

“So?”

“You totally gave me cooties!” She jumped on him and they play-wrestled for a few minutes, Michael trying to keep her from biting him again, until Emily was straddling Michael’s lap, holding his wrists softly as she purred in his ear, “There’s only one cure for cooties, you know…”

Michael raised his eyebrows. “Kisses?”

“What? No, not kisses, you boy. I was thinking sorbet…get the spoons.”

Thirty-Six >>>

Part Two: July

2008-07-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

Few Changes Expected In City Councilman Budd Situation
Embattled Politician Remains Out Of Public Sight; First Trial Begins In October

When City Councilman Lucas Budd was arrested for drug charges in May, the story sent shockwaves through the city and was even briefly featured in the national press. The hard-working former Assistant District Attorney could occasionally be a firebrand, but Lucas Budd was well-liked by journalists, other politicians and, more importantly, most voters. Many considered him “one of the good ones” and he was widely seen as a potential front-runner in the upcoming mayoral elections.

Then came the May 28 arrest, when NOPD officers pulled over a wildly swerving car on the outskirts of the French Quarter and discovered inside a young shirtless male who quickly fled the scene, as well as large quantities of various illegal drugs and an allegedly deranged Lucas Budd, who had to be physically restrained during the arrest.

Even in a city long familiar with political corruption, Budd’s arrest was shocking. For more than a week, local television news shows featured almost constant coverage of the Lucas Budd situation. The story, however, yielded few additional developments. Within hours of his arrest, Budd had been released into the custody of his attorney and retreated to his large Garden District home.

Since then, little has changed. Budd has released no statements of any kind and remains cloistered in his home. He has yet to appear at any City Council meetings since his arrest but has not resigned his seat. His attorney, Marvin Dapp, appeared in absentia at Budd's preliminary hearings and entered a plea of not guilty to all charges. Visitors to the Budd household are turned away by two city policemen and told that Mr. Budd is receiving no guests.

With no fresh developments in the story, the city and the media have moved on. Attention has since turned to the growing scandal at the Sewage & Water Board, as well as recent allegations of misuse in Mayor Cope’s discretionary spending budget.

But though Lucas Budd’s arrest may be gone from the front pages, it’s far from forgotten in New Orleans’ political circles. When Budd finally emerges from his seclusion, he’ll discover a political reality far removed from the one he left. With almost no supporters, and a move by the Louisiana State Bar Association to disbar him, Budd’s career would appear to be in shambles.

A recent Times-Picayune poll found that 77 percent of respondents thought that Budd should resign his City Council seat and let the city move on. When asked if they would still consider Mr. Budd for mayor, almost none said they would, and it was reported that many initially thought the pollster was joking.

Budd’s fellow politicians have been particularly eager to distance themselves from Budd. A recent campaign ad for one of the increasingly-heated State Senate elections featured a photograph of the candidate’s opponent with Lucas Budd at a charity poker tournament. Both of the men are smiling, cigars in their mouths, with large stacks of play money and poker chips spread out before them. The controversial ad--denounced by many as “mudslinging”--was recently pulled from the air.

The only vocal supporter of City Councilman Budd has been, ironically, the man who was assumed to be his toughest rival in the mayoral race: City Councilman Jerome Johnson. A childhood friend of Lucas Budd, Johnson has defended him publicly many times since the May arrest.

Johnson was recently successful in getting the City Council to halt proceedings to remove Budd from his seat. “This man has plead innocent at his hearing and is yet to be found guilty in any court. When the day comes that he is found guilty, we’ll do what we have to do. But until then, we cannot punish an innocent man. It’s not the way we do things in New Orleans, and it’s not the way we do things in America.” Earlier attempts to censure Budd have similarly failed.

Johnson’s actions may have put him at odds with other members of the City Council, but many voters view his defense of an old friend in a far better light. “Now, I may think Lucas Budd is guilty as [expletive],” Jake Thomas recently wrote in his widely-read political blog Mid-City Musings, “and for all I know, Jerome Johnson does, too. But darn it if sticking up for his friend in the face of overwhelming odds isn’t more than a little heartwarming to this jaded old cynic. We should all have friends so loyal.”

When reached for comment, Councilman Johnson replied: “I certainly appreciate Mr. Thomas’ remarks, and I’ve enjoyed his Internet website many times in the past, but as I’ve said before I like to think I’d be pursuing this matter just as diligently if Lucas were my most hated rival. This issue goes beyond friendship: we simply can’t make a move against him until he’s been found guilty by a jury of his peers. I don’t want to sound too overblown here, but I’m not just defending a friend, I’m trying to defend the democratic process.”

Most recently, Johnson was successful in getting the first of Budd’s many trials moved from September to late October, after the sure-to-be-tumultuous mayoral election. Johnson says: “September will be the height of the election season, and trust me, the people of New Orleans are gonna be sick to death of politics. And in the middle of all that, you’re going to ask a politician to stand trial on corruption charges? How could he possibly get a fair trial in that environment?”

It’s entirely possible Budd may stay secluded in his home until the day of his first trial. If so, one thing is certain: he will emerge into a vastly different world than the one he left. However, WWL senior political consultant René Parquette writes in an email that we shouldn’t count Budd out just yet:

“The situation certainly looks very grim for Mr. Budd, but this is New Orleans, and as we all know anything could happen over the long hot summer. By October, it will have been a full six months since his arrest, and a lot will have happened in the city. We’ll certainly have had other politicians ousted on corruption charges in that time. We’ll also have a new mayor, and the smart money says that it’ll be his old friend Jerome Johnson."

Parquette continues: "I don’t think anyone seriously believes he'll find a way to get out of this, but let’s face it: Lucas Budd has surprised us in the past.”

New Orleans Times-Picayune
Sunday, July 2
Reprinted by permission.

Thirty-Five >>>

Part One in PDF

2008-06-29T16:20:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody, this is Johnny. I've put together a PDF of the entire first part. Go here to download it. I'm sure you have a ton of questions, so I put together a FAQ:

Why would I want something like this?
I seriously have no idea. But a couple of you have asked for me to post PDFs of each chapter, so maybe this is a good compromise.

And I guess if you wanted to print out the first book and read it on paper, having this file would be pretty useful.

Also, you could send this file to your friends or post it on your site in lieu of a link to the website. Actually, let me make that a bit more explicit: you have my permission to share this PDF in any way you want, provided that the contents are unchanged.

Does this file have anything I haven't already seen?
Not really. The cover is a goofy homemade book cover I made a couple years ago out of a scanned Roald Dahl book., but there's no bonus material or anything. I just bundled everything together, formatted the text, and converted it to PDF.

Actually, I've revised some of these chapters a little since making the PDF, so is there stuff in it you haven't seen? Yeah, a whole bunch of typos.

How long did it take you?
Oh my god, all weekend. What an enormous pain in the ass.

Maybe you should have used that time and energy on actually producing some new chapters.
Yeah, I know.

Dude, you used zShare? What are you, a fifteen-year-old pirating your l33t warez?
I know, I know. I just don't have any server space right now.

Again: click here to go to zShare and get the PDF compilation of part one. Also, I've been keeping a so-called "author's blog" where I post stuff that might be of interest to fans of The Darling Budds. Every week I also post a new song to go along with the new chapter.

Thirty-Three

2008-06-20T12:19:00.000-07:00

Detective Ronald Maglione pulled his unmarked Crown Victoria into Lucas Budd’s wide paved driveway. At the end of his headlights sat Officer Lawler and Officer Guidry, looking at a laptop that still had the factory stickers on the lid. Probably watching another movie for time and a half pay. The two men looked up at him as he pulled in, then went back to what they were watching.

It was 11:30 Sunday night. Maglione had stayed late at the station because Sunday night was one of the few times he could be left alone to finish his reports. Because he was a hefty guy with bright round face and a loud voice, everyone always assumed he was more gregarious than he really was. If he sat down behind his desk, within seconds someone was sure to be sitting on the edge of it, telling him some bullshit story.

Maglione ran a hand down his face and, suddenly remembering an appointment, pulled out the cheap electronic organizer he’d gotten at K-Mart a decade back. He picked at the tiny calculator keys and angled the dull green screen towards his overhead light: no, thank God, he had to be in court next Monday. He might actually get a full five hours of sleep tonight.

He finally opened the car door, leaving the car running. Maglione hoped to only be at Budd’s for a few minutes. He pushed himself up out of the car, tapped his pocket for the spare key he always carried, then locked the door behind him. Only when the car door shut did Lawler and Guidry even look up again.

“Hey, boys. You keeping yourselves cool out here?” Even at midnight New Orleans still ached with the day’s diminished heat. Maglione glanced over at the Budd house. The place looked dark, though he thought maybe he saw a faint glow up on the third floor. It sounded like the auxiliary air conditioner might be running up there, too.

“Yeah, we’re doin’ alright,” Lawler said, with a grin that was meant to seem upbeat but instead broke like a threat across his large solid face.

Ken Lawler was quick, friendly, and would be a genuinely good cop if he ever actually put his mind to it. Unfortunately, he was born in the body of a backcountry bruiser: he was six-foot-three and solid, with thin golden blonde hair that he parted in the middle, giving himself a perpetual look of menacing naïveté. Justin Guidry, on the other hand…

“Naw, boss, you got us sweating for good! We meltin’ out here, boy.” Guidry closed his eyes and wheezed out a snicker or two.

Guidry looked like a perfect policeman, every captain’s wet dream. With his upright posture, wiry frame, and tight crew cut, he seemed like an efficient and hardworking officer. He even had the facial expression down; with his tight lips and half-closed eyelids, he gave off a military air of practiced control.

And then he would open his mouth and ruin the illusion. Guidry was from some one-store swamp town, where every issue between men was solved with a quick scrap in the dirt. What was at first taken for a look of silent competence was in fact a sizing up, Guidry’s nervous system determining if he could whup you, or if you could whup him, and in either case how bad the whuppin’ was likely to be.

Because of the way he looked, Guidry was frequently awarded with special details, at least until the captain in charge quickly discovered that instead of the super-cop they thought they’d picked up they’d gotten an abrasive raspy-voiced fuck-up, an alpha Cajun who tried to settle everything with chest bumps and sucker punches.

Maglione had never really thought about it, but seeing the two of them side-by-side in the dark, it occurred to him that maybe Lawler and Guidry had been born in each other’s bodies by mistake. With Guidry’s body, Lawler could have become the respected cop he should have been, and not shuffled off to guard duty assignments like this. And with Lawler’s thick frame, Guidry could have conquered his bayou town and acquired a harem of baby mommas. But instead, he became a big city cop who drove his superiors so crazy they begged Maglione to give him this secluded overnight shift where he couldn’t cause too much trouble.

Maglione shook his head. “Well, you two only gotta sweat a couple more hours. Martin and…Umbro, I think, will be here at two. It was quiet tonight?”

“More or less,” Lawler said. “That backdoor was unlocked what I got here at six, so I called Greco and she said it had been locked when she checked it last night at two. So who knows what’s going on there.” Lawler hoisted his large shoulders up and then slowly lowered them, in a fascinating attempt at a shrug. “Oh, and the kids came by.”

Maglione was making a note about the door on one of the blank index cards he always kept in his pocket. “Kids?” he asked, distracted. “What kids?”

“The Budd kids. The twins.”

“Yeah,” Guidry smirked, “that real cocky asshole and his sister. Wish he’d come back, too, I tell you what…”

Maglione waved a hand at him sharply. “Wait. You meant to say that Budd’s…Lucas Budd—his kids were here tonight? Did you let them in?”

“Yeah, of course. You said family only, right? They just walked right in, so it seemed dumb to-”

“Okay, okay, let’s hold on a minute.” Maglione pinched the bridge of his nose. So much for getting sleep tonight. “Back it up. Describe the kids for me.”

Lawler furrowed his considerable brow. “White male, approximately 17 or 18, dark hair and a dark complexion. White female…”

“Reddish brown hair,” Guidry cut in, “freckles…about yay tall. A nice rack.”

“She’s jailbait, you pervert.”

“Oh, like you didn’t notice…”

“Both of you shut up. Stay right here.” Maglione walked back to his car, a different curse accompanying every step. In his backseat was a cabinet’s worth of folders, envelopes, and file boxes.

Three minutes of digging, with his pen light in his mouth, and he found what he’d been looking for: a small beige pamphlet, maybe twenty pages long, with a large crest on the cover. It was last year’s Beaumonde Academy facebook, with grainy black and white photos of all five hundred students. He quickly flipped through it—there were a lot more neckties than he was expecting—and eventually found the Budd children. They were both blondes. Damn it.

“Here,” he said, walking back over to the bright light over the garage. “Find the kids you saw tonight. See if they’re in there.”

The two cops bent over the little book and looked at the photos, squabbling about when to turn the pages. It was laid out youngest to oldest, and the two slowly went past every freshman, then every sophomore, without a word.

“Look closely,” Maglione urged them. “These pictures are a year old, and teenagers change their hair every few minutes.”

He was starting to think they might not be Beaumonde students when, only a few pictures into the juniors, Lawler and Guidry pointed at a photo and said “That’s her” at the same time.

Maglione wrote the girl’s name down on a new index card and frowned at it. Her name looked familiar…something in the news about a custody battle, maybe? No, not that, but close.

The two found the boy’s picture one page over. Maglione wrote the name down, but this one didn’t mean anything to him. He cursed again anyway. He had a long night ahead of him, and it started with a phone call he really dreaded making.

Ronald Maglione stared at the index card in his hand and sighed. He didn’t know who they were or what they were doing here tonight, but life was about to get very interesting for Emily Bellecastle and Michael Karlinoff.

End Of Part One

Part Two >>>

Thirty-Two

2008-06-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

Michael’s room was dark, with only a tilted square of yellow light pinned up against the far wall. Emily’s crumpled New Yorker remained alone on the mostly-made bed, waiting in the silence of the empty house.

A jangling came up the stairs, followed by a nervous giggle and a shush, and then the bedroom window slid up cautiously. Michael stepped into the room cautiously, and looked around as though never having been there before. Emily gave him his hand as she stepped over the sash and joined him in his darkened room. Neither of them spoke.

The two of them waited, for what they didn’t know, together in front of his bed. Michael still cradled the fingers of Emily's right hand. They could see each other through the pale gauze of the neighbor's strong back porch light. The room held its breath: they could step into each other's arms now and embrace, there in the dark and without another word. It would be nothing—a simple journey through six inches of empty air—to change everything forever, to meet the other with kisses and touches and more.

But neither of them moved, though both of them wanted to. The moment grew impatient and then slipped away and was gone.

Michael finally turned towards his desk, and Emily looked around the room, finding the lamp beside his bed. Bending at the waist, she switched it on, then turned back to him in the buttery light of the small lamp.

“I don’t like bright lights,” she mumbled, not meeting his eyes. She smoothed out the front of her top. Emily was still wearing the clothes she had worn that hot afternoon, a thin and loose tunic top over small white shorts, and now, close to midnight, she felt underdressed and bashful.

“The lamp is fine,” he said, and then neither spoke again. Both of them looked around the room, and occasionally caught each other’s eye.

“It’ll be fun,” Emily finally said, in a quiet voice. “It’ll be an adventure.”

“It makes sense.” Michael nodded at her. “If we’re gonna hang out this summer, we need to…do this. You know, at least once, to get it out of our system.”

Emily frowned, but said: “Exactly. Oh, and Michael? Don’t get some idea that this is about what happened with the cop and you protecting me. ‘Cause that’s too gross to even think about: all throwing myself at the alpha male who, like, backed down a competitor. Okay?”

“Okay. I promise,” he chuckled, then struggled to find something to say. “So…yeah..”

“Here, sit on the bed with me.” Emily took his hand and they perched on the foot of his bed together. “I’ll tell you a story.”

“Alright,” Michael whispered. “What about?”

“Um, about the first time I ever saw you. Ever really saw you, I guess.” She smiled at him. “It was about two years ago, I think. Remember, after you joined The Gang and Josephine had told me all about you and your real story…remember how I avoided you?”

“Of course.”

“I was totally devoted to just being as mean as I possibly could be. Ignore you when you talked, walk away if we were alone together. Well, you remember.

“But then…in the spring I was in a classroom after school had let out. I think maybe I had talked to Dr. Gaughan about something. But the room was empty, it was just me, and I was watching everyone leave school. A rainstorm had blown in from nowhere just as everyone was leaving, and people were freaking out. The underclassmen were running for their parents’ SUVs, the upperclassmen were running for their own cars, and all of them had their books, their school books, up over their heads. Like this, you know, to protect their hair or their clothes from the rain.

“And then I saw you just walking away from the crowd, down to your bus stop. Everyone else was running, trying to get to a car, but you were going the other way, just walking through the rain. With the collar of your jacket popped up, I think. And you didn’t have a book on your head…you were cradling something in your jacket, being careful to keep it wrapped up. You passed right by the window, and you adjusted your jacket, and I saw what you were protecting: your books. You were the best dressed kid in school, you had this wardrobe that just blew everyone away, but you didn’t care about that…you were just trying to keep your books dry.

“It was like…yeah, it was like the first time I really saw who you were. And that’s when I knew that I had to find a way to be nicer to you.”

Michael didn’t speak for a minute, then shook his head slowly. “I don’t remember that at all.”

“I know you don’t,” Emily whispered, then smiled up at him through downcast eyes. She blinked twice, very slowly.

Michael raised his hands and placed them gently on her shoulders, pausing just a second as his fingertips first brushed the thin fabric of her top. When he spoke, it was in a low but almost faltering voice. “Emily, tell me this isn’t about the twins.”

“It’s not about the twins. It’s not. It’s about Michael and Emily.”

“Okay, then. Okay.” Then, in an even softer voice: “I always knew it would be you.”

“That’s what you said Thursday night,” she whispered.

“It was true.” Michael moved his arms down to touch her bare arms and then her soft waist. “It still is.”

They traversed the last impossible inches between them and then they were in each other’s arms. He could smell her shampoo, and she breathed in the last traces of yesterday’s aftershave. Emily clung to him with hands both firm and tender, leaning across to hold him in her arms and to be held by him in turn.

They moved up onto the bed without truly letting go of each other. Emily brought her face up into the warm expanse of his throat, and gently touched a button on his cotton shirt. The world was brand new, and when Michael reached back to turn off the lamp he invented the night and the darkness. He turned to Emily so she could find the notch of his shoulder and settle into it.

Nothing happened that night. No clothes were removed, aside from four separate shoes dropped heavily to the floor one at a time. They lay side-by-side for hours, quietly touching or whispering in the dark, sometimes so low the other couldn’t even hear the words but loving anyway the sound of the whisper. When Emily finally, reluctantly, prepared to go back down the fire escape, they parted with the only kiss of the night, soft and warm on the other’s cheek, as they pressed their bodies close one last time.

But something had changed, there in the dark. When Michael first turned the bedside light off, he turned back to Emily and she found him, pulling herself beside him and into the space where her body fit against his. For a moment they were still Michael and Emily, two friends who had found themselves sharing a bed. Then, like exhaling, they relaxed into each other. Each body found a way to accept the other, and it was then, that moment alone as they sunk softly together, that they became something else.

“This is nice,” Michael whispered. It was an ending, and it was a beginning. They were together now.

Emily’s hand moved across his chest and found the slit between two buttons of his shirt. She slid her middle and ring fingers through the fabric opening and rested her fingertips against his warm chest.

“That’s nice, too,” he whispered again. They could both feel the steady beating of his heart.

Thirty-Three >>>

Thirty-One

2008-05-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Robert Johnson yawned extravagantly, then placed one of his guitar cases on the made-but-rumpled bed. He reached into his desk drawer and brought out three notebooks. Two were exceedingly plain, with extra-thick beige covers, and were originally intended to be used for laboratory notes. The third was black, and was lined for music composition. In fact, it was only black because he’d hidden the ugly cover—filigreed with various notes and the words Music Tablet in a brush font from the 50s—with black electrical tape.

This last notebook was always a vague source of guilt for Robert, as he’d found that blues guitar didn’t entail as much music composition as he’d originally thought. In fact, he didn’t think any of his mentors, men in their 70s who’d never had a job that didn’t involve a guitar, could even read music. Robert had barely used ten pages in the four years he’d owned the notebook, but he still carried it with him whenever he set out to practice. It had become a totem.

Robert had spent almost all of the Saturday night before with his girlfriend, while his sister waged her slumber party throughout the downstairs rooms of his house. At five a.m., as the first hint of the whispered rumor of daylight appeared in the bayou sky above Westwood Village, Robert forced himself to leave Litta’Bit’s sleeping pantied body and get dressed slowly to leave. He didn’t wake her as he left, only placed his hand heavily on her remarkably warm back and felt her slow breath fill the small hollow of her chest.

He had to at least make an appearance at his uncle’s, so he snuck out, more out of politeness than necessity, with his hard-soled shoes in his hand. Jason Huynh was still fighting his way through a video game in the still-dark living room, and his eyes, glazed by twelve hours of polygons and pixels, fixed on Robert’s with an uncomprehending stare before moving slowly back to the plasma screen above the mantel of the false fireplace.

After the long drive back into the city, Robert parked his mother’s BMW on the now-bright street in front of his Uncle Tony’s downtown condominium. Fifty years before, the building had been a large brick warehouse, holding cargo from the Wallace Martin & Sons Shipping Concern. Now, it was just known as the Wallace Martin, and the sales team made a point to tell potential tenants how the building was situated in the middle of the “thriving downtown arts district,” but in fact no real artists could possibly afford the luxury condos in the renovated warehouse.

Robert slipped quietly into the condo, but found all of the lights on, and his uncle’s bedroom empty. He hadn’t had to leave Litta'Bit’s side after all…his uncle hadn’t come home for the night. There was a note on the kitchen counter, telling him to eat whatever he wanted. Robert found a mostly-empty refrigerator, so he ate only three slices of Swiss cheese and drank a glass of water. He went into the guest bedroom and messed up the sheets, then remade the bed. With a couple of hours to kill, he dozed in front of Meet The Press, then showered, wrote a thank you note, and met his mother and sister at Mass.

After church, both Robert and Miranda were exhausted and cranky, but Tabitha Johnson insisted they eat brunch with her in the Quarter, then visit their grandparents in Gentilly for the afternoon. They finally got home late in the afternoon, and they both snuck away to their rooms and fell asleep on top of their covers.

And now it was 8:30, and Robert found the house quiet and dark, with the only evidence that he wasn’t home alone a sandwich on a tray by his nightstand and a light under his mother’s office door. He looked outside, and though he knew the sun had only just set, the night he saw seemed beyond any sort of time. No cars moved on the street, the houses of his neighbors were dark, and everything he knew seemed suspended in the damp air of the summer dark. It was a good time to try to write a blues song.

Under his bed, Robert had a shoebox that held a collection of candles, in various small jars and votives. He pulled this carefully out, the glass inside clinking nervously, and added it to the growing pile beside his guitar.

A quick glance in the mirror: the pants would do, his shoes were fine. Robert untucked his sleep-tousled shirt. He rolled up the sleeves and unbuttoned it to reveal the white t-shirt underneath. Over to the top of his closet for one last touch, a brown fedora given to him by David’s father after he saw him perform at a Beaumonde Academy talent show. Harry Sebastian was famous for his hats, wearing a different one in each of his ubiquitous TV ads, and he felt that Robert needed a fedora to be a real bluesman.

Downstairs with full arms, then through the French doors and into the landscaped backyard. The city was silent, not even traffic could be heard in the heavy night. Waking up after dark had thrown off his internal clock, and he felt like the last man alive, like he was living in amber.

He chose the patio table farthest from his mother’s office window, and pulled out the sturdy wood chair. The seven tealights were lit with the silver Zippo, plain and Proper, that every male member of the Gang carried. He opened the two beige notebooks to their appropriate places, but the black notebook stayed closed.

Robert sat down in the chair, adjusted it, then opened his guitar case and carefully lifted up the acoustic Martin 000-15 he’d bought used on eBay with his birthday money a few months before. He tuned the guitar, strummed a chord, and cleared his throat. He pushed his fedora back on his head. Time to write a blues song.

The backyard was quiet and still. Robert eventually strummed a chord again, then re-tuned his guitar. Okay.

Robert had been taking lessons in blues guitar since he was 12, five years now. His Uncle Tony felt it was an injustice for a young man to be named Robert Johnson and not know how to play the blues, so he’d given him a child-sized acoustic guitar and used his political connections to strong-arm the more famous living Delta bluesmen into teaching his nephew how to play it.

Perhaps in a heartwarming movie the old men would have eventually warmed up to the young man, who would display a true talent for the music in spite of his privileged upbringing, and both the veteran and the rookie musicians would have learned valuable lessons from each other. In real life, though, the men had never been particularly close to Robert and seemed to see him only as an obligation, or a paycheck, or further proof that the rich folk would always be imposing on the poor folk. Uncle Tony’s less-than-subtle methods hadn’t helped matters: one of Robert’s tutors, for example, had discovered that his club’s trouble renewing their liquor license had gone away the second he agreed to take on Robert as a student.

Robert’s most recent mentor was Little Barry Black, a man reaching into his 70s, who was famous for his weekly Thursday night shows at a small bar on the fringes of Uptown. Whenever celebrities came to town, there was a fair chance they’d end up at one of Black’s all-night shows, and if they were musicians they’d always be pulled up onto the stage. Barry Black was also known as a tireless supporter of young talent, and a lot of professional musicians in New Orleans will tell you that their big break came when, at a young age, they were asked to sit in with Little Barry Black during a Thursday night set.

Robert had never been invited to one of Black’s shows, much less brought onstage.

Little Barry Black was never particularly encouraging of Robert, and he seemed distracted during most of their lessons, and he never asked him a single question about his life, but he wasn’t mean or dismissive like some of the other old men. He frequently told Robert, in a curiously dispassionate voice, that he was impressed by how hard he worked. But best of all, unlike every other tutor Robert had ever had, he didn’t try to tell Robert that he needed to truly feel the blues deep down in his bones, or whatever. In fact, he seemed hateful and dismissive of the very notion: “All this hogwash about how you have to live the blues before you can play the blues. Shit. Hard work beats inspiration seven days a week.”

At some point Barry Black decided that Robert was about as good at playing guitar as he could be at seventeen years old. Like a lot of teenagers whose dedication to grueling practice outstripped their experience or even their talent, Robert was already a skilled mimic, able to copy any song or style played for him just a couple of times. The only thing he needed to refine his technique was time, all those decades of playing that still awaited him. Black had reassured him that eventually his own style would emerge…it would just take elbow grease, which Robert seemed to have in pretty good supply.

So instead, he decided to focus on Robert’s non-existent songwriting. Barry Black had been surprised to hear that Robert’s other teachers had never asked him to write a song. “I think the feeling was that a rich boy like me didn’t have anything to be blue about,” Robert told him, paraphrasing a bit but expressing the essential point.

“Shit, like the blues is a club and we decide who gets in and who don’t. Boy, you’re seventeen…that’s the bluest age of them all. You a big old man, but your parents still treat you like a kid. You got brothers and sisters running around, driving you plum crazy. And, hell, it feels like your pecker’s about to bust right through your pants. You got a girlfriend, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“She lay down with you as much as you want her to?”

“Well, in any relationship there’s a give and take…”

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about. You know why they call them blue balls? ‘Cause your balls got the blues.” He coughed out a laugh, then another one. “The hell a rich boy can’t have the blues. Did they not see that you black? I don’t care how rich you are, you probably got about five hundred songs in you today, just about that right there.”

So Little Barry Black gave Robert a homework assignment: actually write a blues song. He was told to just use a standard 12-bar blues so that he wouldn’t obsess about the sound. Robert was to dig down and write about something that mattered to him, then come back in a couple of weeks and play it for him.

That was a week and a half ago. Since then, Robert had tried to write his song a few times, but he hadn’t been terribly successful. The whole process was incredibly stressful, and Robert was pretty sure that wasn’t the point.

After his last failed attempt at writing a song, Robert had opened one of his notebooks and, at the top of a page, made a list of potential topics for the blues, including:

Women, trouble with
Money
“Drink”
Women, lack of
Jesus / The devil
The blues itself

Then he filled out the page with a list of famous first lines, as a way of getting himself started.

I was born by the river
in a little old shack

My papa was a rolling stone
he never gathered no moss.

And so on. Robert spent two days in the pantry with his iPod and the second notebook, listening to songs and compiling an extensive list of the rhymes he heard. He had an idea that blues musicians had standard rhyming templates they could fall back on while composing. Robert realized this academic approach seemed a bit ridiculous, so with a rueful smile he named this list Blues-like Word Rhythms.

And don’t be mistaken: Robert was fully aware of how silly he was being, out in the backyard with his notebooks and his fedora and his candles. But as a Gangmember, he also knew how inspiring it could be just to look the part, how a simple change of wardrobe could change one’s perspective. “Fake it until you make it,” Andre had said a few days before, when in a moment of extreme personal weakness Robert had called to tell him about the challenge he was having.

Robert, lit by candles in the Sunday darkness, began playing a standard blues riff, letting the music get settled in his hands. He glanced over at the list of rhymes, but nothing came.

“Well, I woke up this morning-“ he began, in a faltering voice, then stopped. (He’d never been given singing lessons either.) He waited, still playing, for the riff come back around. He decided to warm up by singing the beginning of the only blues song he’d ever written. It was a class project for tenth grade English, and Andre had helped him with the words:

Ophelia likes good looks,
And Portia likes brains.
But old Lady Mack-Beth
Is only concerned with stains.

Okay, that was good, he felt himself loosening up. He looked over at the list of rhymes again, and waited for the riff to restart.

Now I got an Asian mama-

No, wait, hold the phone. He stopped the riff then started it again.

Now my baby is Asian,
And my best friend’s a Jew

Okay, good, keep it together. Let’s see: Jew, blue, new, screw…

Now my baby is Asian,
And my best friend’s a Jew
But what’s that got to do, mama,
When it comes to me and you?

This was a start, definitely. He continued playing the riff over and over, mumbling this stanza a few more times, then adding a chorus from Blind Willie McTell:

I got the bluuuuues, so bad
And it’s the worst ol’ feeling that a good man ever had.

He was just about to try another four lines when a car pulled softly into the driveway, the headlights bright against the stone wall to Robert’s left. He continued playing his song, and the car didn’t kill its engine for almost a full minute. He couldn’t see the SUV from where he was sitting, but Robert could picture his father inside of it, collecting his briefcase and making a few final phone calls, maybe wadding up the fast food bag from his Baton Rouge trip.

Eventually the car was turned off, and the driver’s side door opened, then closed. Robert played a quick solo, then rejoined the riff. The side gate opened slowly, and the dark shape of his father was outlined against the light from the street. The workers were off on Sundays, and no one had turned on the outside lights. On this moonless night, the secluded backyard was dark, with Robert’s candles the only oasis of light.

Jerome Johnson, closing the gate softly, reached into his jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. One last smoke before he went inside to bed. Glancing at his sheet, Robert saw town / running around, so he thought for a second, cleared his throat, and began to sing.

My papa’s a roller
He runs half the town
But he comes a’ runnin
When Mama comes around…

I got the bluuuuues, so bad…
It’s the worst ol’ feeling a good man ever had.

Jerome Johnson chuckled softly as he stepped away from the garden gate, approaching his son slowly. An unlit cigarette dangled precariously from his lips. Smoking was his only vice, barely tolerated by his wife, and Robert always secretly believed that he only smoked so that one day, when he quit, people would say in astonishment: “He smoked for twenty years, and gave it up just like that.”

The shadows from the candles obscured Jerome Johnson’s face as he reached out for Robert’s Zippo. A spark and a flame, and his father’s face was illuminated briefly: far from handsome, but sturdy, well-lined, with downturned eyes that somehow seemed both stern and sad at once. The Zippo was snapped shut and Robert looked away, towards his notebooks (tear/hair) and tried to come up with a line. His father watched him in silence, taking one and then two drags of the cigarette.

They say he’s a scion
They say he’s an heir
But he ain’t worth nothin’
When Mama’s on a tear!

I got the bluuuuuUUUUUES, so bad
And that’s the worst ol’ feeling a good boy ever had.

Jerome Johnson laughed again, the coal of the cigarette tracing red hops in the air. He reached out gently and adjusted his son’s fedora, pushing it farther back on his head. There was another chair by the patio table, and he pulled it off to the side and leaned back, his legs spread, and watched his son play the guitar for a while as he smoked.

Maybe others would have sat at the table with Robert, or placed the chair directly in front of him, but Robert knew his father didn’t want a performance; he wanted to watch his son perform. A minor difference, perhaps, but one that defined Robert’s father for him. Robert had a lifetime of memories—of dinners, of cocktail parties, of charity fund-raisers—that featured his father, off in a corner or by a window, watching everyone else and occasionally approached by guests for a discrete conversation away from the crowd. From a young age, Robert knew that the most important person in a room wasn’t the one everyone listened to, but the one that everyone talked to.

Papa thinks he’s a stone
What don’t collect moss,
But let Mama catch him,
She’ll show him who’s the boss!

I got the bluuu-uuu-uues, so bad
I said it’s the worst feeling that this man ever had.

Jerome Johnson chuckled softly as he exhaled a lungful of smoke. The massive shadow of the house covered the top of his body, so that all Robert could see when he glanced over was his father’s cheap suit, bought off the rack at a large warehouse in the suburbs, then altered for his tall thin frame. His father wasn’t blind to style—he always complimented the expert tailoring of Robert’s bespoke suits—and it took Robert a long time to realize that his father’s wardrobe was as carefully cultivated as Alexander’s: his hundred-dollar suits sent the powerful unspoken message that he was as honest, hard-working, and unpretentious as his constituency.

Robert continued to play, trying to come up with one final stanza. His father’s cell phone chirped softly in his pocket, but he just squeezed his pant leg, silencing it.

Now my mama is chocolate,
My girlfriend Vietnamese.
But when those girls come knockin’
Me and Papa fall to our knees.

I got the bluuuuues, but I’m glad
that I’m not half as bad off…as my poor ol’ dad!

Robert did a lazy run through the chords of the riff, then went into a lengthy but casual solo. As his father bemusedly clapped a few times for him, Robert couldn’t help but think: holy shit, I just wrote a song. Okay, it was totally rough and didn’t really make a lot of sense and the subject of having a rich and powerful father probably didn’t have the universal appeal one looked for in a classic blues song, but still: that song didn’t exist five minutes ago, and now it was out in the universe.

Jerome Johnson’s cell phone chirped again, and again he silenced it, but now he stood up and walked the chair back over to the table. Robert was finishing his relaxed solo and easing back into the riff, and his father placed a large hand on his son’s shoulder and squeezed firmly.

“You sound good, son…you sound real good.”

He patted his shoulder once more, then took the half-smoked cigarette from his mouth and placed it carefully in Robert’s. He stood back and looked at the effect, nodded deeply, and went into the house.

Alone now in the dark, Robert tried to play through his song again and discovered he’d already forgotten half of it. The cigarette smoke distracted him, and made him want to cough, but he ignored it. In fact, as he played, he sucked in a mouthful, held it between his cheeks, then let it trickle out slowly. He let his father’s cigarette dangle low and sad in the corner of his mouth, curling smoke up towards the brim of his fedora.

Robert had to admit it really finished his look.

Thirty-Two >>>

Thirty

2008-05-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

Ten minutes later, Emily and Michael were in the darkened foyer of the Budds’ house. The walls, red with a golden trim, were now muted, lit only by the light of a distant streetlight. Emily moved a fern to the side and peeked through the thin curtains beside the door.

“What are they doing?” Michael asked, his voice low, sitting on the stairs behind her. Mr. Budd had insisted that they leave quickly, and Michael didn’t want him to know they were still there.

“Watching a movie on a laptop. They keep rewinding an explosion over and over and rewatching it in slow motion.”

“Really?”

“No. But that would be hilarious. What time is it?”

“Probably ten ‘til.”

There was a large ornate vase by her feet, that now held only a single black umbrella. “I didn’t know you had cousins.”

“What?”

“You told Mr. Budd that your cousins had a pool table.”

“Oh, they’re not really my cousins. There are about ten Macedonian families in New Orleans, and we all know each other. So I just call them my cousins…you know, like you and all your uncles.”

“Oh.” Emily turned around. Michael sat with his feet apart, his hands clasped between his knees, looking at the a single square of light on the hardwood floor. “Michael…we just got played, didn’t we?”

He brought his eyes up to hers slowly, and she looked away, frowning. “I don’t know. Probably. You notice how he had us sit on those boxes, so we’d be lower than him? And he kept asking us simple questions, like ‘You understand?’ so we’d get in a rhythm of agreeing with him. That’s called a ‘yes ladder’…getting us to say ‘yes, yes, yes.’”

Emily half-smiled. “It’s a little freaky you know about stuff like this.”

“I read a book about being a better salesman once, I don’t know why. Oh, and at the end, all of a sudden he’s out of time and he has to ‘be straight with us’ and make his offer and we had to let him know if we were going to help right then. You know?” He shrugged. “There was probably other stuff I didn’t catch.”

She widened her eyes. “Oh my god, we totally did get played! Let’s go back up there and tell him we changed our minds. There’s no way I’m going to help him now.”

“Well, just because he was, uh, guiding the conversation doesn’t mean that he was lying or manipulating us. I mean, he’s been in politics for twenty years, talking like that is probably second nature at this point. He may not have even realized he was doing it.”

Emily frowned at him, then glanced at the ceiling and rolled her eyes.

Michael shrugged. “I think you made the right decision. If we don’t help him, there’s a chance the Budds might not come back. If we do help him…well, the Budds still might not come back. But at least we’ll have done something, right?”

“That makes sense. I mean, yeah, that was pretty much what I was thinking when I told him we’d do it.”

“Also, the first thing he asked us to do is nothing: we should go visit David anyway. Litta'Bit, too. And if he asks us to do anything we’re not comfortable with, we just say no. What’s he gonna do, tell our parents?”

“Exactly.” Emily sat down on the stairs beside Michael, then knocked his knee with her own. “You know, I wish you’d said anything while I was deciding. Or even looked over at me.”

“I didn’t want to sway you.”

“I know, that’s what I’m saying. I wanted you to sway me. I didn’t know what you were thinking and I just felt really alone.”

Michael looked over at her. “I said before we got out of the car that I’d be with you no matter what. I wanted you to make up your mind, and then I’d support your decision. I told you: we’re in this together.”

Emily laughed. “I don’t know if this is an ESL thing or what, but we’re in this together doesn’t mean what you think it means. I don’t need a bodyguard, Michael, or someone who will just back me up no matter what. Okay?”

He nodded. “Okay.”

“You got me?”

“I got you.”

“You understand?”

“Stop it.”

“It’s fun! You know?”

“I should have never said anything.” He pointed his chin towards the window. “What are the guards doing? If that guy is coming here at eleven, we need to get going.”

Emily got up and looked through the blinds again. The two were still engrossed in watching a movie. “They’re making out. Maybe they won’t notice if we tip-toe out. Hey, you know what? We should totally do that breath thing before we leave.”

But almost as soon as Emily had turned her back, Michael had moved to the door. He was already untucking his shirt just a bit, relaxing his posture. “Let’s roll, yo.”

“Michael, wait. I’m not…” But he opened the door and, with a lazy stride, tumbled out on to the porch. “…ready,” Emily mumbled.

She followed him out nervously, locking the door behind her and pulling it shut. Michael, with half open eyes, threw an arm over her shoulder and steered her towards the Mini. A few loping steps later, he dropped his arm and, glancing over at the guards, nodded his head at them.

They were almost to the car when the smaller of the guards walked over to stop them. The blonde guard looked up, a little concerned, and joined his partner.

“You know, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t search that bag. Your father is a druggie, you know.” Behind him, the blonde frowned but didn’t say anything. The guard squinted out a grin. “Allegedly, I mean.”

Michael smiled over at him. “Come on, man…be cool.”

“Be cool, huh? You’re telling me to be cool? Tell you what, why don’t I just frisk her? See if she’s hiding anything under that little dress.”

Emily had just glanced down at her purse, to find her keys, so she didn’t fully see what happened immediately afterwards. By the time she looked up, Michael had lost all of his pose and had moved between her and the cop, staring down at him with angry eyes. He held one low hand out, another barrier between him and her.

Everything was over almost as soon as it began. The blonde cop put a hand on his partner’s shoulder and pulled him back roughly. “Every single time with you,” he mumbled.

“You just come on back, bro…just come back any time you want,” the smaller cop was yelling.

Michael hadn’t moved, and the blonde turned back to him with a scowl. “Would you two get out of here? Jesus Christ.”

“You feel froggy, you just jump on over here, boy.”

“Shut up. You know how sick I am of this junkyard bullshit?”

Emily and Michael got into the Mini and backed out. The last thing they saw was the blonde sit back behind the laptop, shaking his head.

Neither of them spoke, and Emily just made turns at random before finally pulling into the parking lot of a convenience store. A police car pulled in behind her, and she froze, but it was two different policemen. They parked and went into the store.

“I’m sorry,” Michael finally said, in a low voice. “I should have ignored him…he was just barking. I guess middle school taught me nothing, huh?” He sighed. “And not two minutes after you told me you didn’t want a bodyguard.”

“No, Michael, no. It was…noble.” Emily had run through a list of inappropriate but perhaps more accurate words before settling on that tame adjective. “Thank you.”

“Well, still. We need to keep a lower profile than, uh, starting fights with off-duty cops.” Michael had left his cell phone in the console of the car when they went in to see Mr. Budd, and now there was a red light flashing on the screen. He picked it up and glanced at the screen, then called his voicemail on speakerphone.

Emily whispered over at him as the phone rang. “You know, in corny old books whenever Italians or I guess Mediterraneans get angry it always says ‘their eyes flashed.’ But it was totally true, your eyes were flashing, it was-”

Michael glanced over at her, a look of exaggerated annoyance on his face, as the message began. It was from his father, telling him that he had gone out to dinner and would be out late, and that Michael shouldn’t wait up for him.

“Oh man,” Emily giggled, as the message ended, “I hope I never get used to that. ‘Don’t vlait up.’ Oh, do you think he’s with that woman from Thursday?”

“Could be. We don’t really talk about stuff like that.”

“We have to stop him, Michael…he vants to zuck her blod!”

“Okay, okay.”

Emily backed out of the parking lot and pulled up to a red light. “So you can stay out late tonight? Oh, you have to work tomorrow, don’t you?”

“No, I’m mostly done with that, aside from filling in for people here and there. My dad wants me to ‘enjoy the summer.’”

They were driving now under the heavy oak trees of Uptown, getting closer to Michael’s house. Emily stole a glance at him. “You mean, he wanted you to…have an adventure?”

“Well, I don’t know. Something like that, I guess.” Michael looked over at her and laughed a little. “I don’t think this is what he had in mind, though.”

They had pulled up in front of Michael’s dark stone house. “So, you can hang out for a while?”

“Tonight? Sure, I guess. Do you want to see what the rest of the Gang is doing? We could have a midnight reunion.”

“Actually, um…” Emily tucked some hair behind her ear and laughed once or twice. “Do you, I don’t know…do you want to go up to your room and fool around?”

“Absolutely.” Michael laughed and looked over at her, smiling broadly. (Something about his smile, though, gave her courage; he seemed too eager to look like he was laughing it off, just in case.) He was quiet for a few beats, his smile settling into a shy grin. “Wait…seriously?”

Emily bit her lip, then nodded her head softly. “If you are.”

Michael glanced past her, into the street, then looked back at her face. “Yeah, okay,” he whispered.

Emily smiled and looked down at his hand. She reached over to take it, and he met her halfway. His hand was warm and large, surprisingly rough at the fingertips. Her hand seemed to fit in his palm by design, and he held it as though it was something that had just been born. “I guess we should go inside, then,” she said softly.

But neither of them moved, there in the moonless summer night. Not for a long time.

Thirty-One >>>

Twenty-Nine

2008-04-11T18:43:00.000-07:00

Downstairs, Michael found Mr. Budd still sitting with his hands on his knees, as promised, and telling Emily a story about…something. Emily’s body language was relaxed, and she was watching him with a slight smile.

“So I looked at Jerome and I looked at Tabitha, and I said, ‘Well, if the two of you are having the steak, then I guess…”

“…I’ll have the lobster.” Emily said the same time he did, and they both chuckled. “Come on, that one’s older than you.”

Mr. Budd, still laughing, looked up and saw Michael watching them from the stairs. “Oh, thank god,” he said with a laugh, moving his hand from his knees to the glass of whiskey on the table. “How long does it take to grab a couple of games? I was about to get DTs down here.” He took a decent-sized drink of the whiskey and set it back down on the table. “Seriously, you two were about to watch me wrestle snakes.”

Emily looked up at Michael as he joined them and gave him a wink. “Mr. Budd was just trying to pass off stories from the Milton Berle Joke Book as his own.”

“She’s a tough cookie, Michael. Those kill at city council meetings.”

Emily had apparently fetched the cards and Yahtzee from the living room while he was gone. Michael put the two games down beside them, and Mr. Budd surveyed their options. “Well, what should it, then?”

Emily shrugged. “Yahtzee’s fine.”

Michael pulled the lid of the box off and got out the score sheet. “There’s like a hundred dice in here.”

“Nobody likes an exaggerator, Michael. (Yes, young lady, I know: pot, kettle.) There are only twenty dice in there. My wife is the Yahtzee fan in the house, and the rest of us play every few weeks to amuse her.”

Emily and Michael caught each other’s eye. It was hard to imagine The Darling Budds participating in Family Game Night, but it apparently happened.

“At some point, Lillian mentioned that the game was basically solitaire for four players, and there was nothing aside from a shortage of dice to stop us from playing at the same time and then comparing final scores. My wife loved the idea—never mind that all four of us silently rolling dice somewhat defeated the idea of playing a game together—because it allowed her to get more games of Yahtzee in before we got bored and turned our attentions to gin rummy or, more likely, liar’s dice.”

“What’s liar’s dice?”

Mr. Budd looked at both of them incredulously. “Really? You don’t know liar’s dice?”

Emily and Michael shook their heads.

“Hold the phone…forget Yahtzee!” Mr. Budd suddenly left the table, headed for the kitchen. The two were alone for a moment.

“You were okay, down here alone?” Michael whispered.

Emily nodded. “I was fine. He’s just lonely…imagine Alexander locked up for a month and you’ll understand.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

Lucas Budd came back with three Mardi Gras cups, which are cheap plastic tumblers thrown from floats to commemorate different parades. Every pantry in the New Orleans area holds at least a dozen. “Okay, look, this game has exactly three rules…”

It was a simple bluffing game that involved declaring how many of the dice under all of the players’ cups showed a particular number. Other players could challenge this…if the original statement was a lie, the liar lost one of his dice. If it was true, the challenger did.

They learned the game in about forty-five seconds, then listened as Mr. Budd rhapsodized about the epic games of liar’s dice that had been played at his fraternity twenty-five years before. Eventually they began playing.

Lucas Budd had no sympathy for the rookies, and slaughtered them five quick games in a row. Emily eventually caught on enough to give him a serious challenge, and began winning every other game. Michael, all things considered, was curiously bad at the game. His bluffs were almost always called, and he was out of every game before either of the others.

Even though it was a simple, repetitive game, they played for an hour or so. Lucas, as he now insisted they call him, was enjoying himself immensely, and his odd behavior at the beginning of their visit was all but forgotten now. Emily and Michael—who had been almost as isolated as him—were having a good time, too. They were hanging out with a Budd again.

The Gang’s parents treated their kids’ friends well and rarely condescended to them. But they were still parents, and even David’s dad could be the adult in the room when necessary. Lucas, though, as he played the dice game, was something else entirely: he treated them not just as teenagers his kids knew, but as friends. He taunted them, he mocked their defeats, and he got genuinely (though good-naturedly) upset when they beat him. It was as though they had met a new student at Beaumonde disguised as a strung-out middle-aged dad. (Emily idly wondered if his previous standoffish behavior, back before the scandal, was really an attempt to not give into this side of his personality.)

Eventually, they played so many games that the black dots of the dice began to swim in front of their eyes, and the cups were pushed away. Lucas’ whiskey had been forgotten during the game, but he now took a sip from the glass and sighed happily.

“So, let me see, I think I came out on top by four games.”

“Come on, you weren’t keeping track…”

“Oh, were you? Then how do you know I wasn’t?” He peered over the table at the slim watch Emily wore. “I guess we better get down to business…you guys have to be out of here by eleven. I got a junior high kid coming over later and we’re gonna party.” He cleared his throat, then took another drink. “That was a joke.”

“What sort of business?” Michael asked, putting the dice back in the box.

“Well, obviously it involves the predicament you’ve found me in. I don’t mind telling you it’s a little delicate, though. Here, let’s go back into the other room.”

In the family room, the fire had burned down to bright coals, and the air conditioner unit—running on top of the already strong central air—had made the room chilly. Lucas reached up over his head and turned it off, exposing his hard swollen belly as his t-shirt rode up. “We should have brought chairs in…just pull those two boxes over. They’re full of papers, they’ll hold you.”

He took a seat in the leather chair they’d found him in, a few hours before, then pulled the electric blanket back across his legs. Emily and Michael sat on two overstuffed file boxes at his feet, the dull red glow of the fire across their faces.

Lucas looked at his hands, then on each side of his chair. He’d remembered the blanket, but not his drink. “Damn,” he whispered softly. And then he took a deep breath, yawned, and began to talk.

Before we get into this, I want you to remember that we’re talking politics…and not just politics, but Louisiana politics. And not just Louisiana politics, but New Orleans politics. Understand? Amateurs mess around with lobbyists and bribes and whatnot, but down here we’ve moved far beyond that. We’ve refined corruption into an art.

What I’m trying to say is, the first lesson is to not take it personal. I…well, I need to tell you something about the father of one of your friends. But we can’t hold the child responsible for the sins of the parent. You don’t hold Andre responsible for what Reuben did, do you?

Of course not.

So if I tell you something about…about Robert’s dad, you’re not going to take it out on Robert, are you?

No. No way.

Good.

Where to begin? I’ve known Jerome Johnson since before we were your age. We went to St. Odo’s together, then Beaumonde, then Tulane and Tulane Law. I know him better than I know anyone. And now we’re both on city council together.

I’m good at what I do. I have an aptitude for it, and I like doing it. But believe me when I tell you that Jerome is operating on a whole different level. Have either of you ever played pool?

I’ve played before. My cousins have a table.

You win by knocking the balls into the pockets, right? And that’s what most people try to do. But every now and then you’ll play with someone who isn’t just concerned with the shot he’s trying to make…he’s also trying to get the cue ball into position for the next shot. Look, this is a terrible analogy, but you understand what I’m saying, right? I just knock balls into the pocket, but Jerome is always lining up the next shot, and maybe even the one after that. You understand?

Yeah.

Between the two of us, we control enough of the city to take the mayor’s office next year. Jerome had the black vote, not to mention the entire Johnson Machine behind him. I had the rich white Uptowners in my pocket, and when it came to sheer numbers, we knew Huynh would get the Vietnamese at the polls in a big way. Hell, maybe more than once. Together, we could have taken over the city in a cakewalk. There’s just one problem with that, of course.

What?

Well…you don’t run for mayor together. Sure, everyone would have known that Lucas Budd For Mayor, or vice versa, would have meant Budd and Johnson…but at the end of the day, one man’s name would be on the ticket, and one man would get the big desk, and one man would be ordering new business cards. Jerome wanted to be that man.

So…he did what he had to do to get me out of the picture.

You’re telling us this was a set-up?

Of course it was a set-up. Jerome knew I had enough support that he had to make it as bad as possible. So: gay sex, underage gay sex, drugs, you name it. He couldn’t just throw a hooker at me and get some pictures. He had to make it indefensible, so no one could stand up for me. Have you ever heard the term ‘scorched earth?’

Yeah.

That’s exactly what he did. Burned my career to the ground and salted the soil. Nobody would dare stand up for me now. On the news they call me “controversial,” but that’s wrong…”controversial” implies that they are two sides, that people are arguing about it.

But, hey, don’t take it personal. Hell, I feel honored to be his target. It’s nice to know that he respected me enough to throw everything he had at me.

What can you do about it?

Nothing is what I can do about it, at least as far as he’s concerned. He’s already lining up his next shot. You know, I lied just now when I said that no one would stand up for me…he’s been standing up for me, and looking like the bigger man for it. Genius. Did you guys see that article in the paper about the speech he gave last night?

I was gonna ask you about that.

Did you see how the speech ended? He started out defending me, but by the end what was he really talking about? Forgiveness. Forgiveness. You see? If I’m quiet, if I don’t fight back, everything goes away and he makes a big deal out of forgiving me.

So if I’m good, if I sit here alone in this guarded house with my phone bugged and my internet mysteriously out, then one day the charges won’t stick, maybe the evidence wasn’t collected right, and I’m allowed a disgraced retirement. Or a trip to rehab followed by a tearful reunion for the cameras. Forgiveness. And maybe, if I’m very very lucky, he’ll even put me in charge of the meter maids.

That’s what he wants, anyway. For me to be quiet.

What do you want?

An excellent question. What do I want?

Well, Jerome’s support is hardly unanimous…there are plenty of people in this state who want to keep him out of City Hall. Some of them don’t want to see the Johnson Machine back in power, and maybe some of the hillbillies up in Baton Rouge just don’t want to see another black mayor. A lot of them were counting on me to get the upper hand. Well, you see how that went.

But that resistance to Jerome is still there…if I fight back I’ll have a lot of allies ready to join me. He wants me to give up, to stay silent. But maybe I’m not quite ready to slink away yet. Maybe I feel like getting a little ornery.

What could you do?

Well, like I said, no one can defend me in public, so the only way I can fight back is to prove he set me up, and that he did it just to consolidate his power. My lawyer says there are already people out there getting evidence.

But we gotta be quiet about it right now, and we have to protect ourselves. Believe me, when Jerome finds out he’s fighting for his life, it’ll be like a nuclear bomb going off at City Hall. Nobody will be safe. And it’s naïve to think he’s already hurt me as much as he can. I still have a wife. And I still have kids.

Ah, shit, look at the time. I didn’t want to just spill it all out like this, but we’re cutting it close. Look, there are…places that my allies can’t get. People they can’t be seen talking to. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but Jerome has a lot of people reporting back to him. You guys just met a couple of the more obvious ones.

I’m gonna lay it on the line: a few of your friends’ parents have information we need. Not information about the set-up, but information that can protect us from Jerome when push comes to shove.

And, well…I need you guys to get it for me.

I see how you’re looking at each other. I’d be skeptical, too. But it makes sense…there’s a chance that anyone close to me is being watched, and that includes your friends’ folks. But nobody would suspect the two of you. And it’s nothing dangerousm you’ll just be picking up an envelope here, a disk there. They’ll either know you’re coming or won’t be too surprised.

Which parents?

We don’t have time. Listen, I know you guys wouldn’t do it just for me, I’m not that gullible. But the sooner this mess is over, the sooner the twins can come home.

Geez, you guys gotta get out of here. I wish we had the luxury of going over this in detail, I really do. But Ron The Baptist shows up most nights around eleven, and I need you to be long gone by then.

Who’s Ron The Baptist?

He’s the guy in charge of the guards out there, I’ll explain later. Look, guys, we’re out of time. I’ve been honest with you, I laid everything out in the open. I can fill you in on all the details the next time we meet, but for now I gotta know:

Are you in? Or are you out?

Thirty >>>

Twenty-Eight

2008-03-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Half an hour later, Michael and Emily sat, their feet touching, at the small dining room table with Mr. Budd. In front of each of them was an untouched glass of lukewarm tap water. In front of Mr. Budd, though, was an empty cereal bowl surrounded by polka dots of chicken broth.

The two had watched as Mr. Budd took a pot out of a pile of dirty dishes and filled it with water. After he put this on the stovetop, he rooted around in a cabinet and found two packages of ramen noodles. He put one packet on the kitchen counter and pounded it with his fist, then opened it up and poured the broken noodles into the pot.

The other package he opened tenderly, sprinkling the square of dry noodles with the powdered broth, then ate raw like a large hors d’oeuvre.

By the time he was done eating, the pot on the stove was boiling. He poured it all into a cereal bowl and ‘ow! ow! ow!’ed over to the breakfast nook, where he messily devoured the second half of his meal.

Now he was done, absent-mindedly reaching under his shirt to rub his round belly. Though it looked like Mr. Budd had lost a lot of weight in the weeks since the scandal broke, his belly was bigger and almost swollen.

“Sorry if I freaked y’all out back there. I get loopy when I don’t eat for a while. What do you call it? Hypoglycemic? I don’t know.”

“How long had it been since you ate?”

“Well, my so-called lawyer drops off food for me once a week, and that’s on Tuesday, and today is...huh.”

There was a bar directly behind his chair with a few bottles on it. As Mr. Budd talked, he reached back behind him and felt around with his twisted hand. He finally found a Southern Comfort bottle and gingerly lifted it over to the table.

“Your parents wouldn’t mind if I had a drink in front of you, would they?”

Emily laughed a bit louder than she meant to. “If our parents knew we were here, I don’t think you drinking in front of us would be their biggest concern.”

Mr. Budd winked over at Michael. “You got a live one here, big guy. You better watch out.”

“Us? We’re just friends.”

“Yeah, I know. Who said anything different?” He gulped down the rest of his water and refilled half the glass with whiskey. “But you’d be blind not to see what my son sees in her. Smart, quick, as pretty as her mama...she’d eat a boy like you alive and you’d love every second of it.”

Emily sat up straighter in her chair. “Okay, Mr. Budd—and don’t take this the wrong way—but you’re getting kinda weird again.”

Mr. Budd stroked the hair on his chin, which was no longer stubble, not yet a beard. “Indeed I have. Luckily for us, I’ve got just the remedy for that.”

He leaned forward in his chair and very slowly extended his hand across the table towards Emily. She leaned back and towards Michael at exactly the same rate. Gently grabbing her glass, Mr. Budd straightened up and splashed some of the water into his whiskey.

He reached back over and put her glass down, then began to take a sip of his drink. But just as he brought the whiskey up to his mouth, he seemed to notice something and set the glass back on the table. He grabbed Michael’s glass and topped off Emily’s water, so that the two water levels were equal again.

He took a deep drink, actually smacking his lips afterwards, then leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Well, the kids took most of the board games with them, but Alexander left Sorry! and The Game Of Life up in his room. Knowing my son, that was probably some sort of cruel joke at my expense. We also have Yahtzee and a deck of cards in the living room and probably Candy Land packed away somewhere.”

Michael cleared his throat. “Yeah…the thing is, I don’t think we really came over to play board games with you.”

Mr. Budd sighed. “Michael, I know that. I’m not crazy, all appearances contrary-wise. And I do have something to say to both of you. But I’ve been stuck in this house, alone, for three weeks. Everyone I know has abandoned me. The only people I get to talk to are my lawyers and, occasionally, one of those goons who allegedly are out there to protect me from people getting in. But considering what a great job they’re doing-” he extended his palms towards both of them “-then you might surmise that they are, in fact, here to keep me in.”

“I just meant...”

“Shh-shh-shh. Now...I miss my wife. I miss my friends, even the ones who are responsible for this mess. But most of all, I miss my kids, who just happen to be a boy and a girl almost exactly your ages. I understand that I’m asking you to make a great personal sacrifice, but could you possibly see it in your heart to play a few board games with a lonely old man?”

Michael glanced nervously over at Emily, then back at Mr. Budd, who had never stopped staring at him. “I...I’ll go upstairs and get them.”

“I’ll come with you,” Emily offered, standing up quickly.

“Why don’t you stay down here with me? We’ll catch up on old times.”

Emily looked over at Michael, who said, “I think that, sir, maybe she should...”

“Don’t the two of you read the paper? Or watch the news? I supposedly...I allegedly...only like young boys, remember? Now, run upstairs and I’ll sit right here with my hands on my knees. The games are in the top of Alexander’s closet. When you come back downstairs, I’ll still be here and my hands will still be on my knees. Scout’s honor.”

“Okay, um...” Michael stared at Emily, who shrugged at him. “I’ll be back...thirty seconds, I promise,” he said.

He left the kitchen and they heard him going up the staircase at the front of the house, two at a time. Emily brought her eyes from the ceiling down to her boyfriend’s dad.

He smiled at her, then rolled his eyes. Emily, for her part, did her best impression of her father when he was talking to a business associate: with no emotion on her face, she turned her head to the side, blinking occasionally like an curious alien.

“You know, Emily, when I heard that door open downstairs I wasn’t sure if it would be you or your parents coming in.”

“They’re waiting in the car.”

Mr. Budd laughed out loud and made a show of placing his hands squarely on his knees. “Emily, I need—eyeball, knee…get it?—I need your help. But look, it wasn’t my intention to scare you last night, I swear.”

“Well...I’ll just have to take your word on that.”

“Now, don’t be like that.”

Emily didn’t respond. In addition to her father’s stubbornness, she also had a little experience dealing with a Budd...if you don’t give them anything to work with, eventually they’ll settle down. “We’ll talk when Michael comes back. He and I are in this together.”

Mr. Budd shrugged extravagantly. “Hey, whaddya say we relax the two-hands-two-knees policy long enough for me to take a drink?”

Emily slid down in her chair a little and sighed. “You did promise on your Scout’s honor, Mr. Budd.”

“Point taken. You can call me Lucas.”

“I think I’ll pass.”

Mr. Budd was staring sadly at his glass of whiskey. “Hmm, I should have gotten a straw before Michael left. Hey, you wanna hear a funny story? Completely true, I swear to God…”

Alexander’s room was mostly unchanged. The bed wasn’t made, and his desk was missing its laptop, but it mostly seemed like Alexander had just stepped out a few minutes ago, instead of it being almost four weeks. However (and Michael was prepared to admit that he was perhaps imagining this) there seemed to be an essential something missing from the room, even though at a glance there wasn’t much gone. He was reminded of a doctor, one of his father’s customers, who had told Michael during a fitting that you can always tell the difference between a person who was sleeping and a person who was dead, no matter how peaceful they looked. Something inside of them had gone away.

One of the heavy red curtains was twisted and pulled back on itself. Michael tugged it free and straightened it up, then turned towards the closet. There was a small brass plate over the door knob with a simple inscription: The best is good enough. Michael had had that made for him at Christmas.

At school there were always jokes about the size of Alexander’s closet, how it must be the size of a department store, a warehouse, a hangar. In reality, though, it was just a normal-sized closet, maybe four feet long. There was a large dresser in the room, and a few occasional items were kept in a flat Rubbermaid container under the bed, but the fact was that Alexander didn’t have the hundreds or thousands of garments that the rest of Beaumonde imagined he must have.

He was ruthless about thinning out his wardrobe. His sister had devised a clever way of dating the last time he wore any item of clothing, and if he had gone more than three months without wearing it, he got rid of it. Another reason his closet wasn’t stuffed and overflowing was that he never bought flashy items that would go out of style: his wardrobe consisted mostly of timeless clothes, impeccably made and perfectly fitted, that he could combine endlessly depending on his mood.

About half the closet was missing. Alexander had taken all of his lightweight suits and most of his cotton dress shirts. The tie rack mounted to the inside of the door was all but empty. The heavier wool suits had been left behind, as well as the thicker shirts. On the floor of the closet were most of his shoes, though Michael saw a few gaps where four or five pairs had been.

Laying among the shoes was a blue and white repp tie that had apparently been dropped during packing. Michael picked it up, intending to hang it up on the tie rack, but instead he folded it loosely and pushed it in his back pocket.

He grabbed Sorry! and Life, then shut the closet door with his foot. He looked around the room one more time and walked out into the hallway. Pausing at the top of the staircase, he glanced over at Lillian’s dark bedroom, then back down the stairs. He could hear Mr. Budd telling a story, though he couldn’t quite make out the words. Eventually, Emily chuckled, and it sounded authentic, and Mr. Budd laughed as well. “I swear to God,” could be heard.

Michael, with one last look back at the stairs, pushed the door to Lillian’s bedroom open and looked around the dark room. He knocked softly on the door-frame. “May I come in?” he whispered.

The light from the hallway was enough to see that, if Alexander’s room was mostly unchanged, Lillian’s room was literally unchanged. He expected her to walk in behind him, ask him why he was standing there in the dark. There was always a line of perfume bottles on her mirrored vanity; now the line was gap-toothed and missing three scents. Other than that he couldn’t see a change to her room.

Her laptop, too, was gone, but Lillian almost never had her laptop out in the first place. She preferred to keep it in her bag, only using it in bed and propped on a lap desk. Like Edith Wharton, she had told him once, who would write her books in bed, flinging the pages to the floor to be collected by the maid.

By the window was an antique sewing machine in walnut, the kind that folded down, out of sight, into a flat-topped cabinet. The twins had discovered it at a shop on Magazine street, and convinced Litta'Bit to haul it over to their house in Snoopy’s Head. The machine itself had broken half a century ago, and Michael spent a Saturday afternoon taking it out of the cabinet for her. (Lillian handed him tools like a surgeon’s assistance an instant before he realized he needed them; Alexander watched him in uncharacteristic silence, mystified by the process.) Left behind was a small writing desk, with four very small drawers perfect for pens and pencils, to which Lillian added a small brass library lamp from the 20s and an Art Deco desk pen that had been her great-uncle’s.

Lillian always kept a small stack of her delicately monogrammed stationery on the desk, weighed down with a small glass jar of ink for the desk pen. However, both the ink and the pen were mostly decoration…the pen worked, but it didn’t have the fine line that Lillian preferred. Instead, she used a slim fountain pen, completely chromed and streamlined, that Michael had given her for her seventeenth birthday. A single sheet of paper had been removed from the stack, as though Lillian were about to compose a letter, and Michael was surprised to see the silver pen, uncapped, laying diagonal across the page

He set the games down on the wooden chair by the desk and turned on the desk lamp. There was writing across the top of the page, in Lillian’s thin flowing script:

Dearest Michael~

it read, and then nothing more. Michael brushed the pen to the side and took up the paper, looking at the otherwise blank page as though the words she meant to write would appear. He even looked on the back of the page, but it too was blank.

He stared at the words in the yellow light of the lamp for a long time, until a new round of Mr. Budd’s muted laughter shook him from the spell. He touched the top of the page to the bottom, about to crease it through the middle, when he reconsidered and set it back on the desk where he’d found it. Michael capped the silver pen and placed it, not on top of the page as before, but to the side, parallel with the paper’s edge.

He went turned off the lamp and went back down the stairs, without looking back.

Twenty-Nine >>>