Jesus Out to Sea

“Tony knows where we are,” he says. “He’s got money and power and connections. We’re the Mean Machine from Magazine. That’s what he always said. The Mean Machine stomps ass and takes names.”

For a moment I almost believe it. Then I feel all the bruises and fatigue, and the screaming sounds of the wind blowing my neighborhood apart drain out of me like black water sucking down through the bottom of a giant sink. My head sinks on my chest and I fall asleep, even though I know I’m surrendering my vigilance at the worst possible time.

I see Tony standing in the door of a Jolly Green, the wind flattening his clothes against his muscular physique. I see the Jolly Green coming over the houses, loading everyone on board, dropping bright yellow inflatable life rafts to people, showering water bottles and C-rats down to people who had given up hope.

But I’m dreaming. I wake up with a start. The sun is gone from the sky, the water still rising, the surface carpeted with trash. The painter to our boat hangs from the air vent, cut by a knife. Our boat is gone, our water jugs along with it.

The night is long an

d hot, the stars veiled with smoke from fires vandals have set in the Garden District. My house is settling, window glass snapping from the frames as the floor buckles and the nails in the joists make sounds like somebody tightening piano wire on a wood peg.

It’s almost dawn now. Miles is sitting on the ridge of the roof, his knees splayed on the shingles, like a human clothespin, staring at a speck on the southern horizon. The wind shifts, and I smell an odor like night-blooming flowers in a garden that has been fertilized with fish blood.

“Hey, Miles?” I say.

“Yeah?” he says impatiently, not wanting to be distracted from the speck on the horizon.

“We played with Louis Prima. He said you were as good as Krupa. We blew out the doors at the Dream Room with Johnny Scat. We jammed with Sharkey and Jack Teagarden. How many people can say that?”

“It’s a Jolly Green. Look at it,” he says.

I don’t want to listen to him. I don’t want to be drawn into his delusions. I don’t want to be scared. But I am. “Where?” I ask.

“Right there, in that band of light between the sea and sky. Look at the shape. It’s a Jolly Green. It’s Tony, man, I told you.”

The aircraft in the south draws nearer, like the evening star winking and then disappearing and then winking again. But it’s not a Jolly Green. It’s a passenger plane and it goes straight overhead, the windows lighted, the jet engines splitting the air with a dirty roar.

Miles’s face, his eyes rolled upward as he watches the plane disappear, makes me think of John the Baptist’s head on a plate.

“He’s gonna come with an airboat. Mark my word,” he says.

“The DEA killed him, Miles,” I say.

“No, man, I told you. I got a postcard. It was Tony. Don’t buy government lies.”

“They blew him out of the water off Veracruz.”

“No way, man. Not Tony. He got out of the life and had to stay off the radar. He’s coming back.”

I lie on my back, the nape of my neck cupped restfully on the roof cap, small waves rolling up my loins and chest like a warm blanket. I no longer think about the chemicals and oil and feces and body parts that the water may contain. I remind myself that we came out of primeval soup and that nothing in the earth’s composition should be strange or objectionable to us. I look at the smoke drifting across the sky and feel the house jolt under me. Then it jolts again and I know that maybe Miles is right about seeing Tony, but not in the way he thought.

When I look hard enough into the smoke and the stars behind it, I see New Orleans the way it was when we were kids. I see the fog blowing off the Mississippi levee and pooling in the streets, the Victorian houses sticking out of the mist like ships on the Gulf. I see the green-painted streetcars clanging up and down the neutral ground on St. Charles and the tunnel of live oaks you ride through all the way down to the Carrollton District by the levee. The pink and purple neon tubing on the Katz & Besthoff drugstores glows like colored smoke inside the fog, and music is everywhere, like it’s trapped under a big glass dome—the brass funeral bands marching down Magazine, old black guys blowing out the bricks in Preservation Hall, dance orchestras playing on hotel roofs along Canal Street.

That’s the way it was back then. You woke in the morning to the smell of gardenias, the electric smell of the streetcars, chicory coffee, and stone that has turned green with lichen. The light was always filtered through trees, so it was never harsh, and flowers bloomed year-round. New Orleans was a poem, man, a song in your heart that never died.

I only got one regret. Nobody ever bothered to explain why nobody came for us. When Miles and me are way out to sea, I want to ask him that. Then a funny thing happens. Floating right along next to us is the big wood carving of Jesus on his Cross, from the stucco church at the end of my street. He’s on his back, his arms stretched out, the waves sliding across his skin. The holes in his hands look just like the petals from the bougainvillea on the church wall. I ask him what happened back there.

He looks at me a long time, like maybe I’m a real slow learner.

“Yeah, I dig your meaning. That’s exactly what I thought,” I say, not wanting to show how dumb I am.

But considering the company I’m in—Jesus and Miles and Tony waiting for us somewhere up the pike—I got no grief with the world.