BIX GOLIGHTLY DIDN’T like the way things were going. Not with the squeeze on Purcel, not with this nutcase kid Grimes attacking an ex-nun, not with the general state of cultural collapse in New Orleans. If you asked him, Katrina was a blessing in disguise, hosing out the projects when nothing else worked. This artsy-fartsy renaissance stuff needed to get washed off the streets, too. What did poets and sidewalk painters and guys blowing horns on the corners for pocket change have to do with rebuilding a city? “It’s a publicity scam run by these Hollywood actors whose careers are washed up,” he told his friends. “We shipped out the boons and got hit with half the panhandlers in San Francisco. You ever been to San Fran? I went into a steam room in a part of town named after Fidel Castro, which shows you what kind of neighborhood it is, and there were two dozen guys having a Crisco party. The door was jammed or something, and it took me almost half an hour to fight my way out of there.”
For Bix, the city was a safe and predictable place when it was under the supervision of the Giacanos. Everybody knew the rules: Tourists got what they wanted; any vice was acceptable in the Quarter except narcotics; jackrollers had their sticks broken, by either the Giacanos or NOPD; no bar operator double-billed a drunk’s credit card; the hookers were clean and never rolled a john; pimps didn’t run Murphy scams; street dips or anybody washing Jersey money at a cardhouse or the horse track got their thumbs cut off; no puke from the Iberville Projects would strong-arm a tourist in the St. Louis cemeteries unless he wanted to see the world through one eye; and child molesters became fish chum.
What was wrong with any of that?
Before Katrina, Bix owned a corner grocery store on the edge of the Quarter, a seafood business across the river in Algiers, and a car wash in Gentilly. The grocery was looted and vandalized and the car wash buried in mud when the levees burst, but to Bix these were not significant losses. His seafood business was another matter. The gigantic plumes of oil from the blowout in the bottom of the Gulf had fanned through the oyster beds and shrimping grounds all along the Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama coastline. Not only had Bix seen his most lucrative business slide down the bowl, he’d lost his one means to declare his illegal income, such as the two big scores he’d pulled off in Fort Lauderdale and Houston, one jewelry heist alone amounting to eighty grand, less the 40 percent to the fence.
How do you end up with that much money and nowhere to put it besides a hole in your backyard? Now Waylon Grimes had busted into the house of an ex-nun and poured scalding water on her, and the Times-Picayune had put the story on the front page. The more Bix thought about Grimes, the angrier he got. He picked up his cell phone from the coffee table and went out on the balcony of his apartment, dialing Grimes’s number. The evening sky was pink, the wind warm and cool at the same time, the palm trees on the apartment grounds rattling drily. He should be out on the town, dialing up a lady or two, having a dinner in a café on St. Charles, not dealing with all this grief. What had he done to deserve it? Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a maroon Caddy with a starch-white top pass through the intersection.
Grimes picked up. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Guess.”
“Who is this?”
“Who is this? Who do you think, asshole?” Bix said.
“In case it’s escaped your attention, I’m not feeling too good, and I’ve already told you what happened, and I don’t need any more of your bullshit, Bix.”
“Did I hear right? You don’t need my bullshit. If an elephant is sleeping, you don’t take a dump on its head and wipe your ass with its trunk and stroll off down the street.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think I just saw Purcel’s car go through the intersection.”
“It was you who threatened Purcel’s family, not me.”
“The point is, I wasn’t gonna do anything.”
“How is Purcel supposed to know that? Most people around here think you got brain damage.”
“Where are you?” Bix asked.
“What do you care?”
“I want to give you your cut on the Houston job. Are you at that fuck pad you got?”
“You said the fence hadn’t paid you.”
“He just did.”
“It’s true you bit off the nose of the psychiatrist at Angola?”
“No, it’s not true, you little bitch. My cellmate did. You want to know what I’m gonna do if you don’t clean up this mess?”
“Speak slower, will you? I’m taking notes on this so I can send Purcel a kite and tell him what you got planned for his family.”
Bix’s hand was opening and closing on the cell phone, his fingers sticking to the surface. “You got twenty large coming. You want it or not?”
“Change your twenty large into nickels and shove them up your nose. While you’re at it, go fuck yourself, because no broad is gonna do it. I heard some guys in the AB say you were queer bait and on the stroll at Angola. Is that why you never get laid?”
Before Bix could reply, the connection went dead, and he found himself squeezing the cell phone so tightly he almost cracked the screen. There was a pain behind his eyes as if someone had hammered a nail into his temple. He tried to concentrate and rid his head of all the energies that seemed to devour him from dawn to dusk. What was that word people were always using? Focus? Yeah, that was it. Focus. He heard the wind in the palm trees and the sound of the streetcar reversing itself for the return trip up St. Charles Avenue. Music was playing in a café over on Carrollton. Then a Hispanic gu
y who looked like a pile of frijoles came roaring around the side of the building on a mower that didn’t have a bag or muffler on it, the discharge chute firing a steady stream of grass clippings and ground-up palm fronds and dog turds against the walls. Screw focus, Bix thought.
“Hey, you! The greaseball down there! Yeah, you!” Bix shouted. “Hey, I’m talking here!”
The driver, who was wearing ear protectors, smiled stupidly at the balcony and kept going.