But one thing she did not tell Bobby, could not bring herself to tell him or anyone: she was still sleeping with Michael. He'd been in bed with her the night Aldous Untermeyer called to tell her Aunt Althea was dead and she was rich. She could not tell anyone about sleeping with Michael because she loathed and despised herself for letting it happen.

Bobby thought about telling her she'd broken his heart when she'd gone away, but before he could decide if he should, she asked about his family and he told her that his father had died a couple of years ago. "I lost my best fishing buddy," he said, and Thea could tell he was still quite sad. "I hardly ever go anymore." She asked why but he just shrugged. He couldn't tell her that being out on the boat made him feel such guilt that a case of beer couldn't wash it away. How could he tell her about the stupid, petty problems surrounding his father's death when her parents had been gunned down behind the counter of their grocery store by two black men who'd taken forty-eight dollars and fled? As for his mother, he told Thea that she was confused a lot of the time. "She forgets my father is dead," Bobby said, explaining she had Alzheimer's, advanced to the point that she required round-the-clock care.

But Bobby left something out of this story too: he didn't tell her that his mother sometimes spent hours railing at him, thinking he was her husband, for losing most of the family money; he didn't say that his mother's illness was probably going to take what was left. He was too worried to talk about that. He finished off another can of beer.

The darkness settled around them. Thea remembered how she used to think she felt the weight of the darkness whenever she sat on the porch at night but it was the weight of her grief she felt.

"I used to sit here and dream that I lived in this house with my parents," she told Bobby, her voice modulating itself so as not to drown out the sounds within the darkness but to become part of them. "We had lots of pets, all the animals I never could have because we lived above the grocery store: I put pedestals around the porch for the cats to sit on. From there they would watch the birds, who were in cages hung from the ceiling. The dogs would claw at the pedestals, trying to reach the cats, but after a while they would get tired and lie at the base of the pedestals, waiting for the cats to come down. The cats, of course, would jump from chair to chair, always out of their reach. The cats knew they could never get the birds, and after a while the dogs realized they couldn't get the cats, and finally they all lived peacefully together."

"So now you can have all the pets and pedestals you want," Bobby said. He found he wanted desperately for her to stay in New Orleans.

"I'm going to sell the house, Bobby."

So he told her about the oil bust and people forced to move out of town, out of the state, by the depressed economy. They put their houses up for sale; some of the For Sale signs had been up for over two years. "It'll take a long time to sell your house, Thea." He wasn't used to having to be persuasive. He turned in the rocker, the wicker creaking beneath him, and put his hand on her forearm. "Why don't you just live in it, at least for a while. Stay here."

Her first impulse was to cry out, I already have a life, I must get back to it! But why would she return to a job in a health-food market now that she was rich? What did she have to look forward to there? Being promoted from a.s.sistant manager to manager of the store? What else? f.u.c.king Michael once a week, if he showed up, if there wasn't someone else he'd rather f.u.c.k? She couldn't even think of anything she'd left behind that she would bother to return to get except her books, a few papers, the photographs of her parents. And Michael could ship all that to her. It was the least he could do. Some life. It could be packed in a few boxes and shipped, then Michael could take the rest of the contents of the apartment he'd once shared with her and dispose of them.

Thea was feeling a bit tipsy from the beer. "Okay," she said to Bobby. "But if I stay, the gazebo goes."

Bobby stood up. "You got it. We'll need a long rope."

They tried the garage but found no rope suitable for the task hanging from the pegs or neatly coiled in one of the cabinets, everything in the garage as neat and organized as everything in the house.

"We could try the attic," Thea said.

Bobby shook his head. "No, I know right where we can find one-my house."

The beer and their sense of purpose made Thea feel a giddy excitement. She'd missed this about New Orleans, the fun, the craziness. She didn't do very many spontaneous things in Ma.s.sachusetts. Her life there was staid. Dull. Oppressed. She was oppressed by Michael there, either by his presence or because she was waiting for him. As she got into Bobby's car she experienced a sense of freedom that was new, brand new, and it wasn't just Michael's absence, it was also Aunt Althea's. She had moved from one oppression to another and tonight she was free.

The nighttime drive through the neighborhood filled Thea with pleasure. The tree-lined streets were dark, and some of the houses tightly shuttered, but many of them were lit, their curtains pulled back to show intriguing views of interiors through floor windows, alcove windows, or in a few modernized versions, walls of gla.s.s. And many of them, as Bobby had said, were for sale.

"All these beautiful houses," Thea said. "I've never seen so many signs."

"Trendy lawn decorations," Bobby told her; then more seriously: "The enclave is seeing some troubled times."

And so was Bobby, Thea decided. He was driving his father's old Lincoln, the transmission sounding dangerously clunky, the right rear fender dented and rusting, the taillight knocked out, and when they drove up in front of his house, Thea was surprised to see that the landscaped gardens had been allowed to grow up all around it, bushes as tall as the windows, a tree limb touching the roof, a piece of gutter loose and hanging. And everything closed up tight, the house completely dark from the front.

Another car was pulled far up into the driveway. Bobby parked in front of the house next door. He came around the car as Thea was getting ready to close the door and did it for her, shutting it as soundlessly as possible. The street seemed abnormally dark and quiet, most of the houses closed up like the Buchanans'. Trees blocked much of the light from the streetlamps. Bobby took Thea's hand and led her to the driveway. Bamboo grew along one side, eight or nine feet high. On the other side, light was seeping through the closed shutters of the house. Bobby stopped at the rear of the car. "We have to be very quiet," he said, his voice low. They went single file between the car and the house to the garage.

The garage was a corrugated, weak-looking structure. Bobby unlocked a padlock and started pulling one of the doors open. It sc.r.a.ped along the concrete. He stopped immediately and cursed, a hiss through his teeth, and looked toward the house. Nothing happened. He lifted the door and opened it just enough to squeeze through, whispering, "Stay here," to Thea.

She could hear him groping around inside, hissing more curses. She was glad she could hear him because all this sneaking about and the dark stillness around her was somewhat eerie, and she began to feel anxious to leave, anxiety altering her mood, her giddiness dropping off. He returned with a thick, coiled rope, closed the door-it sc.r.a.ped again-padlocked it, and hurriedly led her back to the car.

"What was all that about?" Thea wanted to know.

"Oh, it's my mother," Bobby said offhandedly, avoiding her eyes. "She would want me to stay if she knew I was here."

"Who's with her?"

"A nurse."

"Someone comes in when you need to go out?"

He started the car, and for a moment Thea thought he wasn't going to answer her. He drove to the corner, stopped, and then he looked at her. "No, I have someone stay with her twenty-four hours a day." It sounded like a confession. Thea nodded, not knowing what to say. "I just couldn't take it anymore. I decided I didn't care about the money." That wasn't quite true, he thought, but it was true enough.

They drove a few blocks before Thea said, "It's okay, Bobby. You don't have to feel guilty."

The comedian was gone, not there for him to hide his pain behind. "I know I don't have to," he said, "but I do."

But he didn't want to talk about it; he wanted to take the gazebo down for her. He waited while she moved her aunt's Mercedes out of the driveway, then he backed in. Together they opened the wooden gates, and he backed through them, angling into the yard.

Thea watched from the porch steps as Bobby looped one end of the rope around one of the posts of the gazebo and tied the other end to the trailer hitch on the Lincoln. He slowly moved the car forward, taking the slack from the rope, then increasing the tension on it. There was a moment of suspense before the post gave. The crack of wood was a palpable shock to Thea's body.

"No!" she yelled, her hands covering her ears even though the sound had stopped. She stared at the broken post, the roof of the gazebo, its little pink turrets, pitifully tilted, and she felt dreadfully sorry for this inanimate object she had ruined to strike a blow at dead Aunt Althea.

"What? What is it, Tee?" Bobby was at her side, the car still running.

She heard his old nickname for her and she began to cry. He'd called her Tee all through high school and she had hoped it would catch on, but n.o.body else ever used it, as if it were reserved for Bobby alone. She cried because the nickname, to her, had not been a sign of Bobby's affection or of her desire to be accepted by the group, but a way to reject her aunt. She cried because she'd run away with Michael after Aunt Althea told her he reminded her of her father, though the only way he was like her father was that he refused to cater to her aunt, but Thea knew she meant he'd be the end of her, as her father had been the end of her mother, forcing her to work in a failing grocery store where eventually she was murdered. She cried because she'd never really loved Michael and because she really had nothing against this broken gazebo.

Bobby, taking her hands away from her ears, was saying, "I'm sorry, Tee, really I am. Please don't cry, Tee, I'll fix it if you want."

7.

The next morning Burgess rode over to Thea's in the Cadillac with Delzora. To drive them, Dexter had dressed up in a starched white shirt and forgone his vest. Burgess always wore a starched white shirt tucked into tight black pants, and he never went anywhere, day or night, without his wide-brimmed black felt hat and mirrored aviator sungla.s.ses.

Thea had forgotten about Burgess coming. When she got downstairs, the first thing she saw was the black hat, aviator gla.s.ses perched on its brim, on a table in the foyer. She went into the kitchen and found Burgess having tea with his mother.

He got up from the table and extended his hand. "Ms. Tamborella," he said in a baritone that seemed too big and round for his long thin body. His voice had changed considerably; she didn't recognize him at all until he smiled. It was the same smile she remembered on him as a kid, his top lip tipping upward and curving back over his teeth to show a line of dark pink gum, the smile he gave every time he won the game with the baseball cards.

They had spent a few Sat.u.r.days together, perhaps twenty years ago, when Thea used to spend every Sat.u.r.day at Aunt Althea's. She loved being in her aunt's beautiful house with its elegant furnishings. It was her palace of pretend; it was her first and most fateful step out of her humble beginnings above the grocery store. Only she sometimes wished for someone to play with, she was always so alone. One Sat.u.r.day Zora brought Burgess with her. At first they were shy with each other, as any boy and girl of nine or ten would be, and undoubtedly because he was black and she was white. Forced integration had already taken place in the New Orleans public schools, but because most white parents had immediately removed their children to private or religious inst.i.tutions, Thea and Burgess both were still going to essentially segregated schools. But more compelling than that, the integration issue had made color differences very stark indeed.

At first they played separately, Thea in the house, Burgess in the yard or on the porch. But gradually Thea became curious. She would take her books or her dolls wherever he was and play near him. Then one Sat.u.r.day Burgess brought his baseball cards. He squatted down on the porch and began tossing them one at a time at the back wall. Thea watched, fascinated by the flick of his wrist, the skimming of the card through the air, but she didn't understand the point of the game. Finally she asked him.

He said, "See how close I can get," without looking at her.

She didn't understand what he meant, but she continued to watch, getting tired of standing, squatting down beside him after a while. He asked her if she wanted to play. She wasn't any good at all at the beginning because she thought she was supposed to get the cards close to each other, and couldn't understand why he kept saying he'd won. She caught on when she happened to throw several cards right up against the wall and he had to count to see who'd won. Then she couldn't remember how she'd managed to get those cards up against the wall and had to learn all over again. She watched him intensely. Under her scrutiny, he would hardly look at her, but soon they both became adept enough at the game that he would have to count each time. When he won he would give her his wide, friendly smile. A couple of Sat.u.r.days of this and he suggested they play for money.

Thea liked the seriousness the game took on once money was involved, even though he won most of her allowance from her. She began to look forward to Sat.u.r.days all week. And then he stopped coming. When she asked Zora where Burgess was, Zora just said, "Oh, he couldn't come today, honey." Thea thought he wasn't coming anymore because of her, something she'd done.

Burgess finished his tea and went into the parlor with her. He quickly surveyed the large room. "I got two expert paper hangers can start strippin this old paper off tomorrow mornin."

She nodded slowly; this was going a bit fast. She still had legalities to finish with Mr. Untermeyer before she had access to all the money. But she heard herself telling him to give her a day or two to pick a new pattern, and he said he'd work up a price for her. She didn't ask him any of the questions she knew she was supposed to ask, about being bonded and insured, and she didn't consider getting any other estimates. She had made up her mind, almost unconsciously, something to do with his smile, that she was going to let him do the work.

They walked into the foyer. Burgess picked up his sungla.s.ses, then his hat, holding it upside down by the crown, ready to leave, when Thea thought about the wrecked gazebo. Something was going to have to be done about it; she couldn't stand to see it sitting there lopsided and pathetic. She told Burgess she had something else for him to look at outside. He tossed his hat on the table and followed her back through the kitchen, down a short hallway to the porch and, putting his sungla.s.ses on, out into the yard.

He looked at the tilted roof, the cracked post. "What happened to it?"

She stammered slightly telling him she'd tried to take the gazebo down.

He inspected the broken post more closely. Turning to her, he took off his gla.s.ses. "You tie a rope to your car?"

The idea of it was so ludicrous she had to hold her bottom lip with her teeth to keep from laughing. He looked at her squarely, expectantly, perhaps the beginning of a smile on his lips. When she nodded, the smile broke wide open and he laughed, a laugh that rippled the air two backyards away with its resonance.

Inside the house, Delzora heard her son laughing and went to a window looking out onto the screened porch and into the yard. She watched both of them laughing fit to kill themselves, standing next to the gazebo. "That Burgess," she whispered, shaking her head, thinking he could have done anything with his life, he had such charm. She left the window abruptly. Suddenly she was in a bad mood.

"So what you need?" Burgess said to Thea. "Want me to go 'head and level it?"

"No, I want to leave it up. Can you fix it?"

"I got an expert carpenter can do it."

"Okay." Now that she was looking more closely, she could see the pink paint beginning to chip and peel. She eyed Burgess. "Do you have an expert painter-paint it white?"

There was that smile again. "Yeah," he said.

The heat didn't allow too much standing around. Going back inside, Burgess stopped to size up the porch. "Nothin much changed here," he said.

"Nothing at all," Thea agreed. They stood in the midst of chintz-covered white wicker, both caught up in memories of time spent there together, both uncomfortable to be remembering in the presence of the other. Thea finally spoke. "I always wanted to know, Burgess-why did you stop coming on Sat.u.r.days?"

He looked at her, surprised, puzzled, as if he thought she might be putting him on. "You sayin you never figured that out?" He grinned, good-natured, and said, "Your auntee, she didn't think you should be playin with no black boy."

Thea wondered how she could have been so stupid.

8.

That afternoon Dexter failed to show at the Victorian house to pick up Delzora. She waited over half an hour for him because he escorted other people home besides her; maybe one of them had run late or run into trouble. Burgess had started this escort service when crime was at its peak in the Convent and people, especially elderly people, were being mugged on the street in broad daylight. All of the Convent men who owned cars were asked to partic.i.p.ate. They more or less patrolled the area, since the police didn't do it anymore, and soon crime in and around the Convent began to decrease.

As crime dropped in the Convent, it rose in the neighboring rich white district of big houses. People were a.s.saulted on the street, waylaid as they came home from parties, held at gunpoint in their beds. The problem was blamed on drugs. Some said it was the welfare system. Teen pregnancy and lack of education were also cited as factors. The property owners called meetings, established Neighborhood Watch, and stepped up the patrol of the area with off-duty policemen. No matter what they did, crime flourished, and more and more often, it seemed, someone was killed during an armed robbery. People began to hide in their houses. Those who could afford it lived behind bars. They slept within nets of security beams, behind doors wired to explode with sound. They left their electronic cells of safety in fear.

Delzora left Thea's house that afternoon in agitation, however, not fear. She was tired and she was used to her comfortable ride home in the Cadillac. She walked down Convent Street lambasting Dexter under her breath. He was getting more like Burgess by the day. Mr. Big. Mr. Important. Vain as a fighting c.o.c.k. He was probably at home, standing in front of the mirror, examining that beat-up face of his, no regard for time whatsoever. It's what came of not having an honest job. Driving for Burgess certainly couldn't be called an honest job. Nevertheless, she hoped he'd pull up at the curbside so she could give him a piece of her mind, for one thing, and tell him to spend some of that money Burgess gave him on a wrist.w.a.tch.

Delzora crossed St. Charles Avenue and walked a block farther, until she was alongside the project. She hadn't seen the Convent up close like this for some time, riding in the Cadillac with its tinted windows, her eyes usually closed, resting. She stopped. The place looked different, spruced up. Part of the yard had a lawn now, and there was the vegetable garden Burgess had told her about. It was quite large. Residents had planted it and took care of it, he said. Everyone who worked in it shared in it, as well as the sick and the elderly and single mothers. That was a good idea, Delzora had to admit. And well off the street, toward the back of this block of housing units, she could see playground equipment. He'd bought it and gotten some of the men to help install it. That must be where the new day-care center was. One woman was paid a nominal amount to run it, and the mothers who could volunteered their time to help staff it. Well, okay, that was a good idea too. And as far as her eye could see, the red-brick dwellings had been cleaned up, new windows put in where she remembered there'd once been boards, the trim freshly painted a bright green. It looked good, she had to say, but as if she and Burgess were arguing again, she was thinking, You can't fool me. The Convent gon always be the Convent, with junkies on the stairs and crack deals in the alleys and gunfire in the middle of the night. Don't matter how many drug centers you got, or how many people you teach to read, or how many painters and carpenters and plasterers you put to work, you couldn't get me back in the Convent that I wouldn't go kickin and screamin, and G.o.d willin, I won't never have to go.

One last look and Delzora continued on her way, wondering as she went what all the fuss on TV was about, talk of razing some of the projects in the city and the mayor firing the head of the housing authority, the tenants protesting. Well, she didn't care, she didn't have to care, and she didn't want to care. She lifted her head high and felt a bit superior as she stepped up her pace toward her old mold-blackened apartment house.

Dexter never did pull up at the curbside. At about the time Delzora was lambasting him, he was sitting in a straight-backed chair, his arms cuffed behind him, in a small windowless room in a police station. He winced from the bright light shining directly in his face. The long interrogation about drug activities in the Convent was wearing him down. They asked him over and over again, in a hundred different ways, who the kingpin was in the Convent. They were looking to stick somebody with the cop killing, but Burgess was clean on that. It was out all over the Convent that the cop himself had been into dealing. For all he knew, Dexter thought bitterly, when they gave him a chance to think, the police had decided to get rid of a greedy cop and take a few more brothers off the street at the same time, till pretty soon there wouldn't be anybody left. He'd lay money right now no one would ever know who killed the cop. But still, Dexter knew they weren't going to give up on him until they got something out of him. The longer it went on, the more scared he got. He groped around for something to tell them that would satisfy them enough to let him go. He tormented himself thinking it was bad luck he'd been home that afternoon. He didn't want to say anything at all. He was superst.i.tious; he knew how things like that went: once you gave them anything, the smallest detail, then the big picture was out of whack. Things changed, not usually for the better.

He was thinking along these lines when one of them strolled into the room with a big see-through plastic bag, strolled right up to him with it. Dexter started screaming. They put the bag over his head, and his mind went white with terror. He couldn't even hear what they were saying anymore. He tried to take small breaths, but too soon the thin plastic was all over his face, stuck to it with his own sweat and the force of his need for air, creeping into his nostrils, forming a vacuum seal across his wide-open mouth. He pa.s.sed out.

When he came to, they were back in his face, all over him, but he was dazed and they seemed far away, until they came at him with that plastic bag again, and he knew he had to find something to say, something to get them to stop.

He pulled his shoulders up, wanting to protect his head, a wasted effort with his hands locked behind his back. "I don't know nothin," he said. "I don't know nothin and I ain heard nothin 'cept he wears a black hat all the time."

They laughed at him, asking him, didn't he know all the bad guys wore black hats, and he began to cry, not because they were laughing, but because it was a betrayal, didn't matter how little, it was still a betrayal.

They said to let the crybaby go home.

9.

Dexter told Burgess later, "Don' wear that hat no more, man. Don' never wear that hat again."

The hat in question lay on a blond Formica coffee table in front of a red plush sofa where Burgess and Dexter sat. Janine and Sherree sat on the single bed, which was covered with an old green chenille bedspread and pushed up against the opposite wall. Overhead a milk-white gla.s.s light fixture shaped like a woman's breast shielded a low-wattage bulb that merely dampened the room with light. Burgess picked up the hat, balanced it on an index finger, and twirled it around while Dexter, Janine, and Sherree watched in suspense, as if he were performing a circus act of some magnificence.

They were all wondering just exactly what was Dexter's status with Burgess now. They were beginning to sense the change that Burgess knew was already set in motion.

Dexter didn't think he could bear to be in Burgess' disfavor. Burgess had given him something to do, a living, had given him a lift in Sherree's eyes. Now he had money, he drove Burgess' car and spent time with Burgess, he had power.

Sherree wished Dexter could be an independent man, but at least he had a job. And it was true that the job made Dexter a hot shot, made her a hot shot too. She was the envy of many a single woman in the Convent. Just to have a man these days was something; to have a man with money was something else. Of course, she wasn't sitting nearly as pretty as Janine was.

But Janine wasn't sitting so pretty in her own eyes at the moment. She looked at Burgess, his face pa.s.sive as he took in what Dexter was telling him, and felt a rush of love that quickly turned into a wave of nausea at the thought that he might not always be there. She realized that over the past several months she'd grown dependent on Burgess, and one of the lessons she'd learned, living with a mother who'd been deserted while she was pregnant, was no man is dependable.

Burgess used the momentum of the twirling hat to send it flying across the room.

"No more hat," he said. "You better find a garage for the Cadillac, Dexter. Better do it tomorrow. After that, go buy a cheap used pickup." He lifted his hips off the sofa to dig in his pants pocket. From a gold money clip he unfolded twelve hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Dexter. "We got to lay low for a while."

Dexter took the money and he and Sherree left Burgess' place, Janine's place really, and went home to Sherree's apartment two red-brick buildings away. Dexter felt strangely let down after all the high drama of the day. Burgess didn't seem to hold any grudge against him and was still going to let him drive, but he would be driving a pickup truck instead of the Cadillac. He saw the wisdom of this, but still, it was the consequence of his inability to pa.s.s out in the plastic bag as many times as it took before the cops believed he knew nothing.

"I just couldn't take that plastic bag no more," he said to Sherree. "Burgess got to know that."

Sherree was sitting at her dressing table wearing a white chiffon negligee she had danced in back when she worked at the strip joint. The way Dexter was talking annoyed her. If it was at all possible, she was going to turn him into something other than an a.s.s-kisser. "You don't worry 'bout nothin 'cept savin your own skin," she said to him sharply and struck herself on the forehead, chin, left cheek, right cheek, unconsciously using the sign of the cross to leave large dabs of nightcream on her face.

Sherree was something of an expert on the theory of saving your own skin; she was a survivor. The only home she'd ever known was the Convent. She and her two brothers were children of an arthritic mother and alcoholic father. They were victims of terrible poverty. For weeks at a time they would have nothing to eat but instant oatmeal. A pot of red beans on the stove was festive, made it seem like a holiday. The younger brother was frail and did not survive this meager diet. One winter he succ.u.mbed to the flu.

Sherree's father was next to go. He died in a barroom brawl, hitting his head on a table and never regaining consciousness. Sherree dropped out of school to take care of her mother. When her mother died, Sherree was sure she'd died of grief, mourning the death of her eldest son, who'd become a crack peddler by the time he was fifteen and was dead by the time he was seventeen, murdered, it was a.s.sumed during a dope deal.

Alone in the world but feeling lucky to have a roof over her head, Sherree decided it was time to make something out of her life, to be somebody. She wanted to seek gainful employment, but early on she realized that not being able to read beyond about a fourth-grade level was going to cause her some problems. She thought of going back to school and looked into literacy programs, but she needed to eat and pay her rent quicker than she needed to be literate.

More than anything else in the world, Sherree loved to dance. She decided she was going to be a dancer in one of the nightclubs downtown. She got a routine together that involved a lot of swishing chiffon and high kicks, but she knew that the object of the dance in these clubs was to strip down to a G-string and pasties. She didn't like the idea of this at all. In her own eyes her body was not the ideal of a stripper's body. Her chest caved in and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s tended to want to point toward each other. In clothes this made her appear to have some cleavage, but there would be no cleavage with nothing on but pasties. If the ideal breast was likened to a large grapefruit, then she would have to liken hers to small ice cream cones. She took the problem in hand-almost literally.

Without ever having heard of Gypsy Rose Lee, Sherree decided that she would become known as the most modest stripper in the city of New Orleans. Using nothing but a pair of scissors, a needle and thread, and the cheapest material she could find, Sherree made herself a white satin body suit with nylon cutouts that came up over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the shape of hands. She cut the legs of the suit at the sides to her waist, and as an afterthought added a third, smaller hand with its middle three fingers lost under the curve in between her legs. All in all, a modest little body suit, over which she wore a frilly, virginal negligee of white chiffon.