He lurched and stumbled, and when he caught his feet up on the threshold of the door he saw that the Cadillac was in flames, singeing the outstretched limbs of an oak tree, fouling the air with a gasoline smell. There was another explosion, flames leaping higher, and the crowd on the sidewalk fell back to the outside walls of the Solar Club, pushing Dexter inside again. He began to struggle, pulling at people, blindsiding them, thrusting them out of his way until he was on the street and as close to the Cadillac as he dared get. He stood there trying to figure out what to do, eying the fire hydrant, his whole body poised for action until he figured out there was nothing he could do, and that's when he noticed the fire-blackened gasoline can behind the front wheel of the car. He looked from one side to the other, as if he expected to see the face of the culprit leering out of the crowd at him. But Dexter knew that he, or they, would not be there. They would have run back into the bowels of the Convent already, back to their own ruined piece of turf after leaving not him, but Burgess, their message.

The flames shooting up from the car kindled all of Dexter's frustration, all of the helplessness and rage that had been suffocated by grief over the past days. A storm of fire broke out in him, leaping from his mouth. "f.u.c.kin nightmare!'' he shouted, his hands balled into fists, his arms rigid at his sides. He turned to the crowd behind him. "This is a f.u.c.kin nightmare!" he cried. "My life's a f.u.c.kin nightmare!"

He could hear voices all around him. They were voices of a.s.sent, the word nightmare rippling across the blur of faces in front of him. He could no longer pick out individuals; he could not put voices and faces together. He saw them all as one.

"Nightmare!" he shouted again and he heard its echo coming from the ma.s.s before him. He shouted again and again, waiting to hear his shout repeated, until his voice and theirs rose into a chant of "Nightmare, nightmare."

He pushed around them, moving perilously close to the burning car, the flames reaching out to take him but repelled by his leather suit. The chant continued and followed him as he walked down Convent Street toward the river. He kicked at cans and bottles that littered his way, but there was not enough satisfaction in their careening off to the side. He picked them up and began to throw them, and the crowd followed his lead. Gla.s.s shattered on the sidewalk and the street; cans landed on front porches and bounced off car windows.

It still was not enough. Dexter began to pick up stones and pieces of brick. He stuffed his pockets with them until the leather was stretched with hard points of rock and metal. When the leather would not stretch to take more he picked up the bottles he saw until his hands were full too. The crowd stopped and stuffed their pockets as he did. They did this all the way to St. Charles Avenue, where he and the faceless ma.s.s behind him stopped traffic as they crossed.

Across St. Charles their chanting vandalized the atmosphere of quiet, it swelled under the canopy of oaks. Hedges protecting manicured lawns were broken under their feet, and branches were stripped of their leaves by so many pa.s.sing bodies.

Dexter threw the first stone. The sound of breaking gla.s.s instantly turned into a scream, the unnatural, high-pitched whoop-whooping of a burglar alarm. The crowd abruptly stopped its chanting as it moved, a frenzied, roiling ma.s.s emptying its pockets into the windows of the giant, once-formidable houses now screaming in dissonant pitches and asynchronous rhythms from their sharp-edged wounds.

Sound filled the inside of Dexter's head as helium fills a balloon. It seemed to lift him off the ground and whisk him along, for he could no longer feel his feet hitting the concrete sidewalk. His head pounded each time his feet hit the ground, but that they were his feet could not penetrate the coc.o.o.n of noise around him, the constant blast against his eardrums, eradicating everything else, all feeling, all understanding, so that he could not distinguish the shrieks of the alarms from the wail of police sirens; he did not notice the crowd splintering off behind him. Someone grabbed at him but he slid through the grasp. He was unstoppable in his weightlessness, impregnable in his coc.o.o.n. He was carried along until recognition stopped him and his feet were on the brick walkway in front of those fancy gla.s.s doors he watched Burgess' mother go in and come out of every day, and with the recognition came the idea that Burgess wasn't watching out for what was going wrong in his own backyard because he was messing around with those white people too much.

Dexter's pockets were empty. He cut across the lawn and squatted down to remove one of the bricks from the zigzagged border in front of the azalea bushes. He stood and hurled the brick at the leaded gla.s.s. The lead stopped it from going all the way through and it thudded on the wood floor of the porch. He stopped and picked up another. He threw the bricks until all the tiny gla.s.s panes were broken and the lead was dented and pitted and wrecked out of shape. He threw a brick through each of the long uncovered windows. He was aiming for a gas lamp when a voice over a bullhorn broke through his anger and he turned to see a line of guns pointed at him.

30.

Mr. Robert finished nailing plywood across the front of Thea's house and left for the day. With its plywood patches the house was graceless, awkwardly large. Shutters hung at odd angles to the boarded windows; Mr. Robert had removed some of them altogether. A few rusty mailboxes tacked to the side of the door and the house could have pa.s.sed for a deserted tenement: danger, no trespa.s.sing.

Thea paid Mr. Robert for the week and watched the old carpenter walk up Convent Street toward St. Charles. Despair and a gray, wintry sky covered the neighborhood. The big houses were boarded up, their lawns were trampled and muddy. The street was littered under the canopy of oaks. It was dark and dank and dirty. In less than a quarter of an hour the landscape had been dreadfully altered. Thea went back inside reluctantly, the gloom here more depressing than the ugliness outside, with no light coming in through the long windows or being cut into cheery patterns by the leaded gla.s.s doors. The gla.s.s could be replaced, new doors milled, but what, she wondered, could replace her feeling of violation, of the unfairness of it all. She could understand Burgess' friend's rage but she could not understand why he had picked on her house and personally attacked it; her.

She went down the hallway, stopping when she reached the door to the library. It was nearly finished; Mr. Robert had started varnishing the wood. She looked at its beauty coldly. The pleasure she had felt viewing it only yesterday seemed to have gone through the broken windows last night. It was the same with the rest of the house: the comfort she had begun to feel as its owner was gone, replaced with the old ambivalence, though the ambivalence was grounded not in whether she could make the house hers instead of Aunt Althea's, but in whether she wanted the house at all if it could be ruined for her so quickly, so easily. These big grand houses, they became so all-consuming, so all-important. They demanded constant attention and more money than anyone ought to spend on more s.p.a.ce than anyone needed. And yet the city would be a lesser place without them, and Thea happened to be one of the people with the time and money to spend to keep one. Perhaps, she thought, one needed to be born to it, groomed for it, like Sandy. For Sandy it was a birthright; she had no ambivalence; for her it was not a frivolous way to spend time.

Thea went to the back of the house where Zora was ironing, her Sat.u.r.day ch.o.r.e. She had told Zora she didn't have to come anymore on Sat.u.r.days, but Zora had said she preferred to. For Thea, moving back to New Orleans had meant adding too many contradictions to her life, and for the moment, all of them were summed up in this woman who stood at the ironing board, ironing the sheets Thea slept on at night, as if anyone needed to sleep on ironed sheets, though of course, crawling in between them after a long day was a sensation of unmatched luxury and comfort.

The doorbell rang and Zora, through habit, put the iron upright to go answer it. Thea waved her back saying she would get it. She went to the front and turned on the hall light, but it only accentuated the gloom in the side rooms. She switched on the chandelier. Whoever was at the door began to pound on the plywood covering it. There was such a flimsy sound to the wood, such an urgency by the pounder, that Thea felt a stab of fear in her stomach. She did not like that she had to open the door to someone she could not see, though of course, if she could see, she could be seen.

"Who is it?" she called, turning her head to the side so her ear was up close to the plywood.

"Lyle."

Thea jerked back, startled, he sounded so close to her, nothing but half an inch of plywood between them. She opened the door. "Bobby's not here, Lyle. He's gone to check on his mother." She remained in the doorway, not inviting him in.

"That's okay," Lyle said, "I'll catch him later." He moved toward her, coming in anyway, so that she had to either stand there and block his way or let him in. She let him in.

The fear was still there: no relief that it was a familiar face, one wearing its usual scowl, his eyes like old dull varnish staring at her from underneath it. So why was she still afraid, as if she were opening the door to someone who might harm her, yet deliberately standing aside, letting him in? She closed the door after him, shutting them both inside.

"I see you had a rough time of it last night," he said, his eyes darting off to the side to the violation that had been done to the house. Thea nodded. "It's a d.a.m.n shame," he said, "the way we all have to live boarded up in our houses one way or another." This was not social chitchat for Lyle. He said it angrily, but in his flickering eyes the anger was betrayed by fear. This was not the old Lyle talking, the one who made her stomach clench with apprehension because she didn't take his advice when he told her to get a security system, yet her stomach was clenched. She took a small, involuntary step backward. He closed the distance between them with a small step of his own. Now he looked at her so intensely that she had to force herself not to move away from him again. "I think you may be in some danger," he said to her. "That's why I'm here-I'm afraid for you." And indeed, Thea could see he was afraid, so afraid he was frightening. Just what Zora had said that day about Jared. Lyle was so afraid that his fear was reaching out to her, infecting her.

She couldn't help it; she stepped back again. "Why, Lyle?" she asked him, trying to speak levelly, not let her voice give away her fear.

"It's Burgess Monroe," he said, his voice lowered. "Is he here?" His eyes flicked away again.

"No."

"Monroe's the one who's been running all the drugs through the Convent."

"I think you've got that wrong, Lyle."

"No I don't. It was the Cadillac, all along I knew it was the Cadillac, and when Sandy said you told her Monroe owned it, I went straight down to the precinct. But I don't think they're going to move on it." He laughed nervously. "They've got enough problems down there right now, all that civil rights violations c.r.a.p. They said they'll send a car around as often as they can."

"I see," said Thea; she saw that they meant to keep their distance from Lyle.

"It's not good enough. The one who did this to your house"- he nodded in the direction of the boarded-up windows-"he works for Monroe."

"I know that."

"Did you know that he did this to your house, to all these houses, because the Cadillac was set on fire last night by some hooligans from the project? They yell civil rights violations, then they do something like this." He regarded her with that stony policeman look of his. The old Lyle was back. "Do you know how to reach Monroe?"

"No. He won't be coming here anymore. He told me to start paying the carpenter myself."

His eyes darted, this time to the back of the house. "Is his mother here?"

Thea seemed to have no control over herself. Her eyes darted as his did, in Zora's direction. "No," she said, and thought there was no way he would believe her.

But he was nodding, taking her at her word. "I want you to have this," he said, his composure fully restored. He put his hand in his jacket and produced one of his small, oily-looking guns. "I'm not so sure he won't be back."

The sight of the gun pushed Thea backward another step. "I don't want it, Lyle."

"I know you don't," he said, his voice softer now, stroking her. "None of us does." Talking to her as if she were a child. "I want you to be able to protect yourself if you need to."

"Why would Burgess . . ." she began, but her voice caught on his name.

"Thea, you've gotten yourself too involved with them"-she was a bad child now-"and the sad thing is they sometimes turn on those of us who have been kindest to them."

She blurted, in horror, "I haven't been kind to him."

"I know you don't think you have," he said in his avuncular tone.

She nearly staggered with fury. "The one who did this," she gestured wildly at the boarded doors, "maybe he saw you here."

He wasn't hearing her anger directed at him, her accusation. He shook his head. "He doesn't know me," he a.s.sured her, and he stepped closer. "Here," he said, holding the gun so she could see. "This is how you remove the safety." He clicked the safety off. "Then you just aim and shoot." He smiled.

Thea backed away from him. She was up against the lower part of the stairway, the banister and wood spindles behind her. She forced herself to be calm. "I don't want it, Lyle. I don't want any guns in this house."

"I know, Thea. I know it's because of your parents, but it's an unrealistic view now." His voice was as oily as the gun. He closed in on her; he was right on her, taking her hand, trying to put the gun in it. "Here, I want you to hold it, feel it." Thea tried to jerk her hand away but he wouldn't let go, his fingers holding her wrist.

"Look," he said. "The safety's back on." He clicked it on. "See?"

She closed her hand into a fist so he couldn't put the gun in it. "Back off, Lyle."

"Oh come on, Thea," he was smiling down at her, "it won't hurt you. Watch. The safety's off." He held it in front of her eyes, clicking it. "Now it's back on." He pointed the gun at the ceiling and showed her that the trigger would not pull back. "See? There's nothing to be afraid of."

But Thea's heart was pounding. "It's easy, Lyle," she said, and he smiled and nodded. "It's too easy. Your solution's too easy." His smile started to disintegrate. She opened her hand, his fingers still wrapped around her wrist, and held it out for the gun. "But it makes you feel you aren't helpless," she said, "is that it?" and his falling smile lifted. He nodded again and put the gun in her hand.

He let her wrist go. "Feel the weight of it," he said and moved away from her, off to the side. "Now, hold steady with the other hand and aim."

She brought her other hand up and held the gun with both hands. "It makes you think you have the power to do something," she said, "but it only makes you more afraid." She aimed the barrel right between his eyes.

"Not at me," he said sharply and tried to duck out of the way.

Thea followed the point between his eyes. "Everything keeps on going the way it is," she said beading hard down the barrel to the bridge of his nose, "There's no end to the madness."

"Stop it, Thea," he commanded and moved toward her.

She clicked the safety off. He stopped. "See? The safety's off, Lyle." He stood dead still in front of her. "Now get out of my house."

He swung a hand toward her and tried to smile, the corner of his mouth shaking. "Thea . . ."

"Out, Lyle," she said, and when he did not move immediately, she yelled, "Out!" He hesitated only a fraction of a second before he walked quickly to the door, fumbling at it, turning back to look at her, jumping when she yelled, "Out!" at him again and continued yelling, "Out, out, out!" Until he was gone, the door slamming behind him, his footsteps pounding on the porch.

Thea did not lower the gun right away. She wished she could see him going across the porch and down the steps so she could be sure he had left, that he wasn't creeping back, standing right on the other side of the flimsy plywood, waiting to surprise her.

Finally, she let the gun down. She rushed to the door and double-bolted it.

31.

Burgess returned to the Convent, to hiding, to coded whistles, to bodyguards. He began wearing his black felt hat and mirrored aviator sungla.s.ses again. And one more time, black hats became the fashion statement to make in the Convent.

The police raids stopped because of the ongoing investigation into civil rights violations, and once again the police avoided the Convent as much as they could, answering calls slowly and reluctantly, as they had before the cop killing. But the media remained curious as the front part of the Convent appeared to be a prosperous, tight-knit community while guns and drug wars ruled in the back. The line between the two areas, a street known as Purgatory Alley, was as closely patrolled by the drug dealers as the border between two hostile countries. The residents who were considered safe enough to interview and who agreed to talk continued to deny the Bishop's existence, though they also continued to say that if he did exist, then it must be the Second Coming.

Burgess saw what he had to do and kept the money coming into the Convent. It was becoming more and more difficult given his cloistered existence. He kept to the confines of the apartment as much as he could. Janine became his eyes, his ears, his legs, as if he were a blind man. And Janine saw what she had to do to keep the programs running and make them self-sufficient. Burgess tried to get Dexter to continue the contracting work, but Dexter appeared to be a lost cause, broken, unable to do much other than sit out in the Convent yard with the rest of the broken men, watching their neighbors and talking big.

Whenever Burgess had to venture out to conduct business, he chose from a variety of cars so that he would not become identified with any particular vehicle. One evening, a cold clear night in January, Burgess and one of the two men who went everywhere with him left the apartment through the back. They waited at the top of the stairs until the second man pulled up in a car in the back alleyway.

The car carrying Burgess and his two bodyguards traveled the length of the alley, sh.e.l.ls and gravel crunching under the tires, and turned right on one of the Convent streets. As it turned, a car coming from the opposite direction accelerated suddenly. It sped by Burgess' car, and there was a burst of automatic-weapon fire. The car swerved, the tinted windows were shattered, and the guard in the back fell screaming on his side across the seat. He'd taken a hit in the neck. After that the guards never drove anywhere without Mac-10s across their laps, ready. It didn't do any good if the guns were under the seat.

A few weeks later, Burgess and one of the men again waited at the top of the stairs for the car to come down the alley. Leaving this way had become their habit. None of them was thinking that perhaps it wasn't good to fall into such habits.

It was twilight, another cold night, and a soft drizzle was just beginning, the kind of rain that would keep up for hours, steady and relentless.

Burgess and his man ran in the rain to the car, their collars turned up, their feet splashing in muddy puddles. They put their guns across their laps, and the driver pulled slowly down the alley, turning into the bordering street. Several yards ahead a small boy, running hard to get out of the rain, dashed across the pavement.

"f.u.c.kin little Herbie Reginald," grinned one of the guards. "Look at 'im scoot."

This time the ambush came from the rear. The car, headlights dark, moved up on them fast, and as it accelerated, it skidded on the slick wet street. It fishtailed, then the driver gave it more gas. Tires squealed. On the sidewalk the boy slowed down, turning to see what all the commotion was.

"The f.u.c.k out the way, Herbie," the guard muttered irritably even as he clambered at his weapon.

Then the car was upon them, swerving alongside. Muzzle flashes licked at one another from both vehicles. For perhaps five seconds the night roared. There was a lot of sloppy trigger work, marks were missed, a fender was pitted with a line of bullet holes, and one bullet strayed off target to find Herbie Reginald as he stared open-mouthed at what was taking place before him.

Janine's legs ached. She put Lucilla to bed and when she stood she thought she could feel the veins popping out behind her knees and around her ankles. She would have looked down to see but there was no seeing past her huge belly. She couldn't wait to submerge herself in a warm bath.

She climbed into the tub awkwardly and lowered herself slowly, so big and heavy and tired it was as if she'd been carrying a fragile mountain around with her all day. Her arms felt heavy as she lifted them to wash her hair. Burgess came into the bathroom and watched her slow, tired movements. He knelt down on the floor next to the bathtub and took the shampoo bottle from her. He washed her hair and put some of the lather on a big sponge and washed her back. He came up around her neck and down her front, over her swollen b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her large stomach, her legs, her feet, washing and stroking away the tiredness. When he finished, she leaned back, her eyes closed, to soak there awhile in the fragrant bubbles of the shampoo. Burgess pushed himself up on the rim of the tub and left the tiny, humid, too-warm room.

He went into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. Ever since the death of Herbie Reginald he'd been overcome by bad feelings. A lot of it was grief and guilt, but there was something else too. He couldn't seem to stand being with himself any longer, not alone, not with the thoughts he had, trapped inside his own head. He couldn't have told anyone exactly what he was thinking that made him feel this way. He didn't know what to call it or what to do to make it go away. He couldn't even sleep to escape it, waking many times during the night, his body in a cold sweat, his head aching. If he was still running, it was no longer from anyone, nor out of fear of being caught. He was strangely unafraid, as if the fear had left him and spread like an infectious disease throughout the Convent, as if he could only be free of it once he had given it all away, spread it around, thick and palpable and feeding on itself. No, if he was running, it was from something deep inside himself, some seething turmoil that had nothing to do with the hard choices still to be made-leave or stay; kill or be killed. Yet it was about choice, choices that had already been made, a long time ago when it had been so easy and didn't require so much thinking. He still couldn't think about it. But he could feel it: self-loathing that ate away at him, demanding satiation-or something, he didn't know what.

Slowly he became aware that the smell of Janine's shampoo was being replaced by the odor of garbage left too long. It was a smell strong enough to move him out of this place of misery and carry him into the kitchen to bundle up the rot and take it outside.

The guard met him at the back door, his gun coming up, his hand reaching out for the bag.

"I'll do it," Burgess told him. The man started to protest. "You can see better from up here," Burgess said.

The guard held the gun with both hands and scanned the area as Burgess went down the stairs to the long row of galvanized cans flanking the alley. He opened one after another only to find them full. After the first few he began banging and clattering their lids back on to keep their ripeness out of the air, breaking the silent night with a growing fury until finally he was able to push the contents of one down enough to stuff in his own pungent bag. He slammed the lid over it.

Once the noise stopped, he heard the guard, halfway down the stairs, frantically, hoa.r.s.ely calling his name, but Burgess didn't look back. A car was turning into the alley. The guard started calling again, louder now. Burgess, blinded by the headlights, took a step backward toward the stairway. As he did, the car stopped behind the building next door, then pulled into one of the driveways to turn around. It rolled slowly back toward the entrance to the alley. Burgess stepped forward to get a better look at it, and they opened up, firing straight through the back window, gla.s.s exploding in a rain of white light. Then tires were spinning on the gravel and the car shot out into the street. They were gone before the guard could get all the way down the stairs to where Burgess had collapsed next to the row of garbage cans, his blood pooling between them, running along the edges of their round bottoms.

There were many such murders in the housing projects these days. Burgess' death became just another one, his way out of the world as unheralded as his way in.

32.

Delzora walked along Convent Street, her body shifting heavily from one foot to the other. It was early in the morning, still pleasant before the sky turned hard and white in the heat of the day. She left the sidewalk and went into the Convent Street Housing Project, her feet in their Chinese canvas shoes kicking up little puffs of dust as she cut across the dry dirt yard toward the vegetable garden. She was on her way to work at Thea's house, but for the past several months her routine most days included this early morning stop at the garden. She found her place in between the rows and took from her bag a small mat. She laid it down on the ground to cushion her knees as she knelt and began her weeding. Her fingers pulled deftly at the weeds that pushed their way up around the newly sprouted tomato plants, the tiny green eggplants, the summer squash. She made small piles of them along the row, moving her mat just ahead of them as she went.

She wouldn't try to do too much this morning. One of the old women in the project had taken sick and Delzora wanted to look in on her before she went to work. There was not much to be done other than try to make her comfortable; the woman would die soon.

She had surely come full circle to be here again, even if she still refused to live here, come to keep this vegetable garden alive, to keep vigil over the sick and dying. And to keep watch over the children when Janine needed her. One thing she and Janine saw eye-to-eye on, and that was watching those two young ones as much as they could themselves. Delzora still wondered if everything might have been different had she been able to watch Burgess more herself. She wondered if everything might have been different had Althea Dumondville allowed her to bring him with her to work on Sat.u.r.days, or might have been different had she never brought him.

These days when she found herself wondering about such things, it would always lead to thinking about the child that Thea and Bobby were going to have soon now, a child she would be spending more hours a day with than she would her own grandson. She would try not to let the thought in, but always it would slip by before she could catch it-the kind of life their child would have only a few blocks away from her grandson growing up here, in the Convent, in this place she had tried to escape.

She rocked back, putting her weight on her heels. Her hands, covered with dirt, rested on the front of her flowered shift. She looked all around her, at the familiar red-brick buildings, their green trim bubbling and peeling, screens that needed mending, the yard nearly all dirt again. A lot had happened to get her back here, yet the sad thing was, nothing much seemed to have changed. The Convent looked the way she always remembered it, as if Burgess had never existed. The city still beat on much as it always had, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, the old and the young, the fear and the hate and the drugs, and the kids who were going to go bad no matter what.

Nothing had changed but everything had changed. It had changed during one small pause, like a skipped beat in a piece of music, a brief time when things had been different, when people had been tied together with a common thread of hope instead of drifting off by themselves in despair.

Delzora didn't believe in despair, but it sometimes crept on her slyly, trying to attach itself to her through her memories: visions of Burgess, a headstrong young boy running across this very yard; or Burgess and Thea out in the gazebo, the girl looking at his scar; or Burgess giving her the greens from this very garden, his wet shirt against his dark skin, the feelings between mother and son angry, unforgiving.

She looked up at the sky turning brighter and harder, and pushed the despair away. Everything changes but nothing changes. There was nothing to do but keep on doing what had to be done. Delzora moved her mat along the row, pulling at the weeds again and thinking, It's a shame what we all do to each other, a terrible, terrible shame.