Nine Lives Read online

  Dadá passed when Ronald was eleven, and it was left to Mama to see to it he come up a man. She watched from the screen door the day husky Euliss Campbell came round to bully, and called Ronald inside. “Either you beat that boy,” she said, “or I’ll beat you.” From that day on, Ronald was more likely to get a whipping for not fighting than for fighting; she’d rather have him bruised than fearful. As for the white world, she’d come home from doing day work for the white ladies a block away on Tennessee Street and tell him: Look how I do. I do their work, but I don’t sing and dance for them.

  MAMA WAS ONLY five feet tall but solid as brick, and she strode his world like a colossus. But on the night of September 9, 1965, Hurricane Betsy whipped in across the Lower Ninth Ward, and Ronald watched her confront something bigger than she was. They all huddled together on the couch, screaming to drown out the wind, feeling the shudder and crack of their wooden bungalow in their bones, keeping their eyes on the TV till the room went black and the picture shrank to a glowing pinpoint. Then came the pop and hiss of the oil lamp and its pale yellow halo. Larry banged through the front door, voice cracking, “Water in the street!” and a dark parabola emerged under the door and stretched across the living room—Ronald would remember that as long as he lived. They crossed Deslonde Street, shoulder deep in inky black water, faces bent low to the stinging wind, and clawed their way up the steps to the Alexanders’ second-floor apartment. When Ronald awakened in the sunshiny calm of the morning and looked out the window, there was the roof of their home poking through a shimmering floor of green water and a family of mallards swimming calmly around it. Mama, sobbing on the Alexanders’ sofa, looked to Ronald half her normal size.

  The weeks after Betsy were a miasma of heat, discomfort, and irritating little injuries from exposed nail heads and sharp linoleum edges as the family struggled to set the house right—gobbling cold suppers on the porch, sitting hunched up on nail barrels. Mama never stopped moving, as though standing still would allow despair to reach up through the floorboards and drag her under. It was usually well past dark when she’d turn off the hissing oil lamp and they’d retreat across the canal to rented rooms at the Crescent Arms on Poland Avenue.

  Lawless Junior High had flooded with the rest of the neighborhood, so Ronald spent most days riding around the ruins on the back of a city-owned flatbed, loading up sodden furniture, fallen oak boughs, and floppy sheets of lath coated in wet plaster. The city paid him ten dollars a day, but he’d have done the work for free; it was better than hanging around the wrecked house, mining mulched clothes from the bottom of a closet, or pulling up wet carpet under Mama’s grim stare. With no radio, the silence in the house was awful.

  Ronald knew the people across the canal looked down on the Lower Ninth Ward, with its hogs and unpaved streets and its hodgepodge of square bungalows and skinny shotguns on brick stilts. It was as far downriver—as far down the social ladder—as you could go in New Orleans. That Betsy had broken only the levee into the Lower Ninth Ward had only confirmed the rest of the city’s sense of superiority. Well, he told himself, we just got to live with that.

  IT WAS THE RUINED two-story house across from Ronald’s that opened the biggest hollow in Ronald’s chest. The Alexanders hadn’t yet shown up since leaving the storm, and Ronald didn’t know when, if ever, he’d see his buddy Pete.

  The Alexanders had moved in to that upstairs apartment when Ronald and Pete were in first grade, and the two boys had always had their best adventures together—stringing tin-can telephones between their houses, tying towels around their necks to become superheroes, digging machine-gun nests up under Mrs. Butler’s star jasmine, and, lately, trying to get up next to that girl Janice who whooped and hollered in the Morning Star Baptist choir like Aretha Franklin herself.

  The Alexanders were different—city people, Sixth Ward Creole Catholics a little lost among the vegetable gardens and chicken coops of the Lower Ninth Ward. Pete’s mother, Miss Geraldine, didn’t linger on the sidewalk talking to Mrs. Payton or Mrs. Williams the way Ronald’s mom did. She kept to herself, upstairs. At first, she didn’t much like dark-skinned Ronald bulldogging up her front stairs to bang on the door, and she’d unhitch the screen with a reluctant sigh to let him in. As for Pete’s dad, he worked at Godchaux’s Department Store on Canal Street and came home every night with two quarts of beer—not Dixie or Falstaff, but Miller in those dazzling clear bottles, like a white man in a commercial. Every now and then a two-door Ford would pull up to the Alexanders’, and a white man wearing a porkpie hat and sunglasses would climb out and walk right up the front steps and inside—Miss Geraldine’s uncle. To Pete it was the most normal thing in the world to call a white man kin.

  Pete himself had copper-colored skin, wavy hair lying in oiled squiggles along his scalp, and the long straight nose of his Cherokee grandmother. There was none of the sugar plantation in Pete Alexander, none of the earnest country ways of the Lower Nine. He was sly and crafty, with a jazzy way of moving and veiled street smarts. He liked to play with hair, of all things. One day Ronald had let Pete straighten his, and when it was done, it lay across his skull like a Rampart Street gigolo; Mama had about died from laughing. Hair was a way to a girl’s heart, Pete always said. Let me do Janice’s, and I’ll be halfway there.

  Ronald couldn’t remember a day without Pete Alexander in it. By third grade, Miss Geraldine was as good as Ronald’s second mother, and if Ronald went home crying from one of Miss Geraldine’s whippings, Mama sent him out back for a switch to give him another. The hole they left in his life was bigger than the gap in the levee. Every day since the storm, Ronald checked the Alexanders’ house for signs of life a dozen times. But since the morning of the flood, the two-story house loomed over Deslonde Street as silent as a tombstone. The Alexanders were gone, maybe back forever to the Sixth Ward.

  No cars moved along Deslonde Street. Easy chairs and sofas that Ronald recognized from paying calls with Mama lay sodden on the curbs. Flower gardens had been flattened, and the air was a heavy green musk, not healthy and alive like pond slime but dank and mildewed, foul with gasoline. Deslonde Street smelled like death.

  Before Betsy, life had rolled by on a great, slow-moving wheel—every pebble, every live oak, every fiddling cricket as familiar to Ronald as his own hands and feet. Now that world was gone. He’d been sleepwalking before. He was awake now, but it was too late.

  JOHN GUIDOS

  COR JESU HIGH SCHOOL

  1965

  John Guidos Jr. wanted nothing more at fifteen than to be invisible. Unfortunately, he was big—with a heavy square head and blocky across the chest. So he compensated by staying quiet, speaking only when spoken to. And he prayed a lot.

  His was an all-Catholic world, and Hurricane Betsy had given his parents, his priest, and the brothers at Cor Jesu High School a lot to talk about. Was the storm divine retribution against the sin and squalor of New Orleans? And if so, why had God chosen to wipe out the homes of those poor colored people in the Lower Ninth Ward and leave standing those dens of iniquity in the French Quarter? The consensus was to accept the storm as evidence of God’s infinite grace and mercy, which was fine by John. He didn’t like thinking too much about sin. He wondered constantly about his own.

  He was built for football, and he enjoyed it. Football let him hit people, a much more comfortable means of communication than speaking. It was the locker room that made football hard. He never knew where to put his eyes. And the talk—tits and pussy and wet dreams—kept his burning face turned into his open locker.

  “Faggot” was another word that got thrown around the locker room a lot. He had a pretty good idea what it meant, between the locker room talk, paragraph 2357 of the catechism with its talk of homosexuality being “contrary to natural law,” and Leviticus 18:22 calling it an “abomination.” If he was a faggot, he was going to hell. But as he walked up Elysian Fields Avenue toward his father’s store after school, John wondered if it was really true. No matter how man
y times he ran all the pieces over in his head—which was constantly—he couldn’t make them fit. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t some third thing, something neither the catechism nor Leviticus knew about, something maybe even unknown to God. A memory forced itself up: one of the wicked nuns from St. Louis King of France Elementary School gliding among the desks like an iceberg, tapping a wooden yardstick on her open palm. She’d caught a couple of the boys fighting at recess and as punishment had dressed them in the plaid skirts and hair bows of their female classmates. The other children had laughed and taunted as the boys sobbed in shame, but John had felt an unexpected rush of envy. He’d slammed the door on the monstrous feeling, and had brayed like a donkey along with everyone else.

  A BELL TINKLED above the door of his father’s store as he entered. Dad, thin and colorless but absolutely erect, was helping a customer, turning a glass poodle upside down to look for the price. John threaded his wide body between shelves of porcelain figurines and delicate three-legged picture frames, and moved behind the counter. Instead of a cash register, Dad used an old-fashioned wooden drawer cut with depressions for pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. John sorted through them, looking for rare coins. He turned over a Kennedy half-dollar, peering at the edge; it was one of the all-silver originals—1964—the last silver coin minted to the U.S. government. He took two quarters out of his pocket, looked them over to make sure they were ordinary copper-alloy coins, and dropped them into the proper bowl. The smell of scented candles made him queasy; he couldn’t imagine breathing it all day.

  Dad drove them home in silence, from the rundown streets of Gentilly to the immaculate lawns and ranch houses of Metairie, concentrating on the road as though it was the only thing he’d ever thought about. “School okay?” he said finally.

  “Yes, sir.” Dad liked the “sir”; he’d retired not long before as a lieutenant commander in the Navy.

  “Got any weekend plans?”

  “No, sir,” John said, and caught a flicker of disappointment on Dad’s face. John’s solitude, and his lack of interest in girls, worried him. They pulled into the driveway at 1921 Poplar, and Dad walked straight into the open garage and took his gardening apron off a peg.

  John went inside, where Mom was setting the kitchen table. On the wall, a full-color, foot-tall Jesus writhed upon his cross. Through the window over the sink, John could see Dad pacing a row of zucchini like an admiral inspecting his seamen. The garden stretched behind him—hummocks, mounds, and ditches laced with green hose, alive with green leaves and yellow blossoms, covering an entire lot, as orderly and weed-free as a photograph in House & Garden.

  The garden kept Dad sane. He’d been captured by the Japanese in the Philippines four days after Pearl Harbor and had spent four years in one of their camps. All that had kept him alive was a patch of squash and tomatoes he’d hidden in the underbrush; he’d weighed eighty-eight pounds at the end of the war.

  “We have parent-teacher conferences with Jim tonight, so you’ll be on your own after dinner,” Mom said. John’s racing heart drove blood to his face. Dad and Jim came in, and they sat, bowing their heads and folding their hands in the same motion.

  “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen,” they mumbled, and without another word worked their way through the roast and potatoes. Jim scattered his Brussels sprouts around on the plate, but Dad noticed and with the point of his knife silently indicated that he’d better eat those up. John gave his father no such trouble, but dutifully ate everything on his plate and then went to work on the dishes while his parents and Jim got ready to leave.

  As soon as the car disappeared down Poplar, John pulled his hands from the sink and hurried back to his parents’ room, unbuttoning his shirt as he went. His mother kept her bras in the top drawer; his favorite was the light blue one with the cotton rose between the cups. Size 38C; he could barely get it around his broad chest. He kicked out of his pants and punched his thick legs into a pair of panties. He opened the closet door and, seeing himself in the mirror, closed it quickly. He walked up and down the hall, trying to relax into it, trailing a fingertip along the wainscoting, pivoting sharply, like a model. He ran his hands over his muscles, under the bra, down his legs. Then he took the jar of Vaseline from the bathroom and walked back to his bedroom, shutting off the light as he went. By the time his parents and Jim came home, he was sitting at the kitchen table with his math book open and a glass of milk at his elbow, thoroughly engrossed in geometric proofs.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” John said to the priest behind the screen next morning before school began. The blurry profile nodded. “I, uh, took a coin from my father’s cash drawer.”

  “Yes.”

  “I took the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I had impure thoughts.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well, my son. Put something in the poor box. Say three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers.”

  The poor box was made of sheet metal and painted light green. It hung on the wall, to which it was attached by a short chain. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” John began, running through the two prayers, three times each, as easily and thoughtlessly as exhaling. He put his hand in his pocket. Out came the silver half-dollar, a quarter, and two dimes. He put the half-dollar back in his pocket and slotted the other coins into the poor box, examining the edges of each to make sure that they were the new, copper-filled kind, the kind that weren’t very interesting.

  ANTHONY WELLS

  There was something different about my family; I knew it when I was just a little bitty boy. I could see it in my daddy, the way he moved, you feel me? He had an easy way of moving, like he didn’t take being colored too serious. We were living up in the San Fernando Valley, and it wasn’t all that long that Negroes could buy houses up there. Black man had to be careful because that door was opening just a crack and you didn’t know when it was going to slam shut on your ass. We had the nice house and new Buick and all that. Daddy had him a good job by Lockheed, airplane mechanic—what brought my parents out during the war. They raised us nice. Had a big house, TV, nice clothes. Got us all roller skates one year; I remember that.

  Same time, though, across the freeway over by Van Nuys Boulevard, they weren’t having any of that shit. They were hanging on their porches drinking malt liquor and just being niggers, you know what I’m saying? Their houses were all shackety, trash all up in the street. It kind of looked good to me, being just a little boy and everything. Just hang out on the street. Be a man. I used to lie in bed and hear the sirens from over that way and think, ooh, that’s the cops-and-robbers life.

  What tripped me out was that Daddy wasn’t all one thing or the other. He’d go off in the morning to work and come home at night, like Rock Hudson and Doris Day or some shit, but he also could be just as cool as the niggers on Van Nuys Avenue, you know what I’m saying? He liked going to this nasty two-chair shop on Van Nuys that had a sawed-off up under the cash register. I saw that with my own eyes, first real gun I ever saw. Daddy’d sit in that chair like a king on his throne, talk to everybody.

  Of course, Daddy’s daddy was a white man, but he wasn’t raised among them. His daddy’s family didn’t want nothing to do with him. Come up in New Orleans—in Pigeontown, part of the Seventeenth Ward. “They’d kill you on those streets as soon as look at you,” is what Daddy used to say. He was tough, but he was smart-tough. He had them hands, man. Big hands. But I never saw him use them on another man. I don’t know how he did it. That was Pigeontown, he’d say, Pigeontown, New Orleans. You didn’t have to go all in with one type or another in Pigeontown; you didn’t have to choose between Uncle Tom and a sawed-off.

  You hear about Compton and East L.A., but the Valley got plenty nasty. It’s all spread out out there, there’s lots of places you can get caught in the middle of nowhere, all by yourself, without y
our people around. Too far over that way you had to mess with the low-riders; too far over that way and it was cracker motherfuckers. I’m coming home from my girlfriend one night and these four big white dudes jump out and try to jack me up. I’m fast. I can go, and I went. Tell you what I did, though. We had these cap guns my dad used to buy us. They were heavy in those days, made of metal. I had this one, the Fanner 50. Cowboy gun. I drilled out the barrel and packed it with match heads. Then I filled it up with screws and glass and shit and stuffed a wad of paper in the end to keep everything from falling out. Make sure you wrap your hand in a towel so you don’t get all fucked-up and then load in a cap and let it go. FOOM! Man, that thing went like thunder, big old flame jumped out the barrel like this big, and little bits of shit flew everywhere. I kept that bad boy with me, and next time some motherfuckers tried to jack me up, I let them have it, like FOOM! Man, they screamed like girls, all four of them cut to shit ran off crying to their mamas. Tell you what, though. Nobody ever fucked with me again. You put a zip gun up in someone’s face you’re a bad motherfucker in the Valley.

  I never saw my daddy with a gun in his hand. Never even saw him use his fists. He knew how to ease through and get what he wanted without pissing anybody off and without putting his own ass in danger, you know what I’m saying? You go at something from one angle, and then another, and then another until you find the way in, till you find a way that works. That’s the New Orleans way. You get what you want without sweating yourself or anybody else. You make it your due.