All the loud music, the excitement, had driven Roux nearly to a frenzy on the back porch. She also heard the sirens before the people did. She clawed at the door and yelped and whined and barked until Delzora couldn't stand it anymore and finally let her in. Roux tore through the house, through the open front door, nearly knocking Jared and another man down the steps. She flew down the walkway and out the gate to the street. The cars were moving again and she ran alongside them, jumping and barking and threatening, mostly to catch herself under their wheels.

They heard the sirens now, coming up through the loud music, creating, along with confusion, a concussion on their eardrums and on the windows behind them. No one noticed the crack across the upper pane of one of the living room windows. Bobby put his hands over his ears and went after Roux, and as he did the line of cars came to a stop, but stopping from the rear to the front, leaving wide gaps between the cars. Next to them came a line of police cars, some of them pulling into the wider gaps. The a.s.sault of noise stopped, but gradually, an extra warning wail from a siren here and there, the radios losing volume as one after another was turned off, Dexter's last, one last moment of knowing no fear. Uniformed officers soon had all the occupants of the cars on the street, cuffed and waiting to be picked up by police vans.

Bobby had grabbed Roux by the collar, and seeing a friend of Lyle's, a cop called B.T., get out of one of the police cars at the front of the parade, walked over to him.

"What gives, B.T.?"

"Parading without a permit," B.T. said, putting one foot up on the car b.u.mper and crossing his forearms over his knee. The position reminded Bobby of Lyle; he wondered if they taught it at the police academy.

"You got to be kidding. How come they didn't arrest them in Jefferson Parish?"

"Beats me."

"What an a.s.shole." Bobby meant the sheriff of Jefferson.

B.T. knew who he meant. "Just got a big mouth," he told Bobby. He looked down the street, surveying the action as the police vans started picking people up. "Should've just done it and kept his mouth shut."

"Jesus, B.T. . . ." But suddenly they were both distracted by a skirmish at the nearest police van. In the middle of it was Dexter. Bobby recognized him, his blue leather pants and vest being hard to miss.

Dexter was struggling against the two policemen who held him and tried to push him into the van. His leather vest was ripped down the back. "You takin my car," Dexter yelled. "I ain't never gon see it again."

One of the policemen whacked Dexter across the middle with his sap. Dexter doubled over and vomited, part of it hitting the policeman's shoes. The officer cursed and shoved Dexter into the van head first.

Roux was straining against Bobby's hand as if she wanted to bolt in the direction of the skirmish. Bobby pulled her back, saying to B.T., "That's the kid who picks up my girlfriend's maid every day. Can't you get them to cut him some slack?"

B.T. stood up and turned in Dexter's direction, as if to go to him, then nodded toward Roux. "You better get your dog on home before there's any more trouble."

He sounded just like Lyle when Lyle was using his cop's voice. Disgusted, Bobby walked off; B.T. did too, but he went over to the Cadillac and began rifling through the glove compartment looking for the registration papers.

Bobby walked Roux back to Thea's. As soon as he got her in the gate, he let her go, pushing her ahead, telling her to go on.

Thea saw Jared getting out of Roux's way, putting Burgess and Janine between himself and the dog. She called to Roux and took her by the collar. "What is it, Bobby? Tell us."

Bobby, coming up the steps, said with anger and disgust, "Oh, they're arresting them for parading without a permit. Looks like they're impounding the cars too."

But he was the only one who was angry. The rest of them were let down, and their silent acceptance made anger seem the healthier, better response by far. They were defeated-surrender without a fight.

The group began to break up, Mr. Robert's helper going back inside, Jared and the other painter leaving. But as Jared started down the steps, Roux lurched out of Thea's hand and rushed to him. He lost his footing, tripping down two steps before catching himself on the side rail. Roux took advantage of this short fall to put herself right in Jared's face, so he could smell her dog's breath, feel its warmth on his skin.

Bobby grabbed Roux roughly, reprimanding her, and brought her into the house. Jared pulled himself up. He was shaking. "That's it," he said, "I ain't workin no place with no dog." With that, he struck off down the brick walkway.

"Jared," Thea called after him, and when he did not respond, she turned back toward Burgess, putting her hand up, lightly touching Burgess' sleeve. "Burgess," she said, "don't let him leave like that."

Burgess shook his head, refusing, so Thea moved to go after Jared, but Burgess caught her and held her at the crook of her arm as he'd done the night she'd tried to go after Sonny Johnson. "Let him go," he told her, pulling her back the same way he had that night and letting his hand rest there inside her elbow. "Won't do no good to go after him now."

Janine's eyes were riveted to his black flesh on Thea's white flesh, to a touch that, without having to think, she could tell had some familiarity in it. She felt the skin along her cheekbones burn. Her long curved nails bit into the palms of her hands. Burgess' hand slid from around Thea's arm. But not before Thea saw the look in the other woman's eyes.

She could not get it out of her mind, even after everyone but Bobby had left. Janine's jealousy had done something for her that no man could have achieved nearly so quickly or so easily: for the first time in many months Thea felt strong s.e.xually; she no longer felt like a s.e.xual victim, as Michael had made her feel, nor was there any of the hopeless longing she'd felt since Michael was no longer around to sleep with her. She was strong and she was driven, and here was Bobby coming toward her, his hips looking narrow inside his baggy khakis, walking in a way she'd never seen before was so s.e.xy. She took him by the hand and led him up the stairs and pushed him back on her bed. She released his belt and opened up his pants quicker than he could have done it himself.

"At last," Bobby said, and closing his eyes, he put himself in her hands.

22.

There was some satisfaction in knowing things were going to go to s.h.i.t, then watching it happen.

This thought came to Burgess after he woke in the middle of the night and lay for a while listening. He thought he'd heard gunfire, but maybe he'd dreamed it because he heard no more now and Janine slept undisturbed beside him. Of course, these days, ever since she'd gotten pregnant, Janine slept like the dead.

No, it wasn't one of his bad dreams because there it was again, a short burst of automatic-weapon fire. It was far away, the other side of the Convent, where there were still a lot of abandoned buildings, where he'd heard Ferdie was holed up, come back to the Convent, young blood claiming his territory.

s.h.i.t was happening all right: they had the Cadillac too, and that meant they were one step closer to him.

Burgess walked in on Bobby Buchanan late the next afternoon at the apartment house and found him sprawled out on the floor of the front room. He was eating a Hubig pie and drinking a Diet c.o.ke.

"Funny you should catch me trying hard not to work," Bobby said around a mouthful of pie.

"Yeah, hard work not workin, ain it."

Bobby got up. "Now, now, my man, let me show you exactly what has been accomplished here."

He started in the living room, pointing out the freshly painted walls, the polished floor, the new light fixture, though it was hanging a bit crooked, not screwed properly into the plaster. "I have to throw the I Ching and consult my astrologer before I get up on that ladder again," Bobby said.

"I send over a Voodoo woman I know," Burgess told him. "She keep you floating right up there next to the ceiling till the work's done."

"Thanks, bro. I a.s.sume she'll stick around while I put a new light in there too." He showed Burgess into the dining room and pointed at the hole above them. "Used to be a fancy chandelier there, nice piece. Wish I'd had the sense to take it out first."

"Stripped the place, did they?"

"Down to the plumbing," Bobby said.

He took Burgess through the two bedrooms, their heels on the floorboards echoing through the apartment, then into the bathroom, where he'd put in a new vanity, ornate but cheap because he didn't expect it to last long. Nothing ever did. "I guess they dropped the sink," Bobby said, telling Burgess that he'd found it on the floor cracked in half, all the pipes gone. "Plumbing's a b.i.t.c.h," he added.

Burgess looked around the bathroom with its claw-footed bathtub, the fancy sink cabinet and tiny tiles, the grout in between them stained black in the middle of the floor. It was a big bathroom, much larger than the one in the Convent. Janine would like that. He opened the medicine cabinet. "Brand new," Bobby said.

Burgess snapped the gla.s.s door closed. "How much rent you askin?" he wanted to know, and when Bobby told him, he said, "I'll take it. When will it be ready?"

"Wait a minute, that wasn't even the hard sell," Bobby said. "You haven't seen the kitchen yet-you might change your mind. It's going to take time and a strong stomach to get it done."

"How 'bout you let me off the deposit and the first month's rent and I send over a man to help you do it," Burgess said. He'd send Jared.

"Sight unseen? You got yourself a deal, my man."

They shook on it there in the bathroom, then Bobby led Burgess into the kitchen. Most of the linoleum was pulled up, exposing floorboards slick with grime around the hole where Bobby had fallen, the piece of cardboard laid over it. Bobby lifted the cardboard so Burgess could see that the hole went clear through to the ground. He told Burgess that the plumbing, all of it, even under the house, had been ripped out, not a pipe left, and showed him the holes in the walls where cabinets had hung. Over the rest of the walls, rutted like streaks of fingerpaint, were brown smears, undeniably fecal in appearance.

"It could be s.h.i.t," Bobby said, "but I prefer to think of it as the last battleground of the red bean wars."

Burgess was busy eying up the work to be done and seemed not to hear him. "We do this and be in here in 'bout a week," he calculated, then he said, "You ain seen s.h.i.t if you ain never seen the Convent."

Bobby had never seen the Convent up close, not any more of it than the edge running along Convent Street. First Burgess took him through the front part, the part they'd done over, pointing out places of special interest: Janine's apartment, the building he'd lived in as a child, the vegetable garden with some collard greens about ready to harvest. He told Bobby how his mama had grown herbs and vegetables, and flowers too, out on her balcony all those years ago and shared them with the neighbors, her thumb was so green. "That's what give me the idea for the garden," he said.

They drove slowly along the streets of the Convent in the red pickup truck, its windows down, both of them enjoying the coolness of the early evening. The putt-putting m.u.f.fler announced Burgess as if he were the ice-cream man making rounds in his musical truck through a suburban neighborhood at twilight. The kids who were still outside waved, and Burgess leaned out of his window and called to them, "You all get on inside now."

The streets in the Convent were fairly wide but scarred with potholes that Burgess avoided as best he could. The red-brick buildings were set back from the streets and grouped around large yard s.p.a.ces. A maze of cracked sidewalks connected them. But as Burgess drove deeper into the project, Bobby saw the big green s.p.a.ces give way to large tracts of desolate, putty-colored dirt; out of this loose, lifeless-looking surface, up close to the buildings themselves, grew clumps of dry brown weeds, like hair sprouting from a corpse's head.

Many of the buildings in this part of the Convent were in ruins, with windows boarded up, some of them blackened all around as if they'd been scorched. The balconies of some buildings were gone; holes gaped in the roofs. The desolate earth and the strangely scorched buildings reminded Bobby of pictures he'd seen of European cities after the war: the entire area looked as if it had been bombed.

"We didn't get a chance to get back here and fix up these buildings," Burgess said. "Don' guess we ever will now." He switched on the headlights of the truck, and as he turned a corner the lights shone for a moment on broken gla.s.s that lay like a l.u.s.trous, opalized covering of frost over the ground. The ill.u.s.tration was jarring in the midst of all this devastation and ruin, nothing to break the monotony of row after row of what could have been burned-out bunkers in a war zone. "War zone" was what Lyle had called the neighborhood where the apartment house was; it was also a phrase Bobby had seen used in the newspaper to describe the projects, not just the Convent but all of the projects citywide. It came to him now, though, not as some tossed-out descriptive phrase or a term of disgust and hostility, but because the reality was right here in front of him in all its ugliness, with all the horror of its implications.

He stared out of the truck's window trying hard to imagine how his own reality would be changed if he had to get up every morning of his life and face this barren, disconsolate landscape, live through what made it this way, what kept it this way. And he failed; he could not imagine it, could not fully grasp what difference it would make, only that it would make a profound difference, that it would change the way he looked at the entire world, that he could be exactly the person he was and yet he would not be at all the same.

Bobby glanced over at Burgess, who was scrutinizing the second stories of the buildings they pa.s.sed on his side of the street. Many of the buildings were in total darkness, obviously vacant. Streetlights, which should have come on by now, could not-most of them were broken, very likely shot out or stoned out, the darkness deliberate. Looking at Burgess, Bobby thought he was a strange one, to have wanted to refurbish a place such as this, where people who preferred darkness lived.

"Why did you take this on, Burgess, fixing up the Convent?"

Burgess, distracted by these apparently vacant buildings, said, "Seem like a good thing to do."

"That's it? It seemed like a good thing to do?" Bobby sounded incredulous.

Burgess did not answer Bobby right away. He had slowed the truck to a crawl, the m.u.f.fler gurgling and coughing, his attention caught by one particular building. But when they pa.s.sed it, Burgess turned to him, grinning broadly. "Yeah," he said, "that's it-was a good thing to do."

They reached the top of a T intersection. In front of them was another large empty dirt tract, a playground, Bobby supposed, if there were any kids around this part of the project to play in it. But even as he thought that, he saw lights in some of the distant buildings behind the tract. Burgess made a left turn and for a brief moment they were enveloped in darkness again, then something caught Bobby's eye, a light coming from one of the back buildings but now obscured by the building in front of it. It had been but a flash in his peripheral vision, but there was no mistaking what he had seen.

"Hold the phone," he said to Burgess, and when Burgess did not immediately stop, Bobby said, "I mean, whoa. Did you see that?" He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb.

Burgess backed up until they had a view down one of the cracked sidewalks. It was in a building with scorched, boarded windows upstairs, but downstairs, through an open door, they could see straight into a living room that was flooded with light from a large crystal chandelier hanging at its center.

"You remember that chandelier I told you was missing from the dining room?"

Burgess leaned over to look through Bobby's window and a rumbling began in his chest that erupted into laughter that shook the truck and drowned out the m.u.f.fler.

Bobby, his arm propped in the open window, drummed his fingers on the roof of the truck and waited for Burgess to run down. "Of course," he said, "I can't be absolutely sure that's the same one, not without a closer look."

"You want a closer look?"

"No thanks. I'll just let my imagination take flight."

"You want me to find out?"

Bobby shifted in the truck seat to give Burgess a level look. He was vaguely aware of a skinny man wearing ragged clothes, standing on the other side of the street. "You could do that?" Bobby asked, his curiosity piqued.

Burgess answered that by asking, "You want me to get it back?"

"It's up to you," Bobby said. "I hadn't planned to replace it with anything that fancy." He shifted back around to a.s.sess the incongruity. "Looks pretty good there, don't you think? Just the kind of thing this place needs." They looked another long moment.

When Burgess straightened up to drive again, the skinny man was standing at his window, right up close, leaning on the truck. Burgess was startled and just barely managed not to flinch. "What you want?" he said harshly.

The man probably wasn't as old as he looked, with his gray skin, his body emaciated from drugs. When he opened his mouth to speak, teeth were missing. "You want some rock?" he asked. The missing teeth caused him to lisp.

Burgess grabbed him by the shirt front, nearly pulling his frail wasted body through the window, his head bouncing off the top of the truck door. "Who tole you to come say that?" Burgess demanded.

"n.o.body," the man said. Burgess pulled him in harder and felt the shirt rip in his hand. Blood oozed from a gash in the man's forehead as he said miserably, "It jus Ferdie saw you pa.s.sin, no harm meant."

Burgess got closer in his face and said quietly, "You tell Ferdie I ain't dead yet." He pushed the man away. "Get on," he said.

The man backed off, holding his shaky hands out in front of him. "Didn' mean no harm, man. No harm meant," he said once again.

Burgess put the truck in gear and rolled forward, no longer indifferent to the m.u.f.fler's noise making it so he couldn't hear anything else around him. "Let's get goin," he said to Bobby. "Gets dangerous out here at night." He got no argument.

He drove through the front part of the Convent again to get to Convent Street and Bobby was glad for the sight of gra.s.s, for the buildings with lots of lights on inside them, for what looked like a normal neighborhood in spite of the sameness of it all. That's when it struck him, the enormity of what Burgess had undertaken, and how far he'd actually gotten. And that Burgess had said they weren't going any further with it.

"How come you didn't get to the back?" he asked. "How come you're not going to finish?"

" 'Cause a cop got killed," Burgess said.

Bobby didn't understand everything, but he decided that with this brief tour of the Convent he understood more than he wanted to: he asked no more questions.

23.

Early in the morning Burgess went out to the vegetable garden and picked an armful of greens. Their color had deepened and they'd doubled in size in the cooler fall weather. He knew his mother liked them best after the weather changed. He gathered them while the dew still glinted off their broad leaves, which pushed back the weeds that had grown up around them. The whole garden looked as if it could use some attention. But he couldn't do anything about that now; he was bringing his mother a peace offering.

It was quiet at Thea's house; none of the workers were there yet. He wasn't sure his mother was there yet. He knocked softly, timidly, on the leaded-gla.s.s door, and before long he saw her, her body broken in his vision by the cames that separated the panes of gla.s.s. She rocked as she walked, from one foot to the other, and as she got closer he could hear her shoes, like brooms sweeping along the bare floor.

She opened the door and peered outside around him like some kind of lookout, then stood aside to let him in. He followed her down the hallway to the kitchen. On the table was her cup of tea and the newspaper. She filled the kettle and put it on the stove.

"I brought you some greens," he said to her back.

"You bring them bodyguards with you?" she asked.

He'd known she wouldn't make it easy for him. He'd come to tell her she was right after all, and he was getting out of the Convent, but she wouldn't be accepting yet: she had to have her say first. He breathed deeply as if to fortify himself with patience before he said, "I know you don' like seein them bodyguards here, Mama. I ain brought them for a while."

"Ain't nothin but a bunch of thugs, that's what," she said. She busied herself getting out a cup and saucer, the canister of tea bags. He held his tongue but the effort made his jaw muscles ache. He hoped she wouldn't go on like this too much longer.

Upstairs, Thea had heard the pickup truck putting along Convent Street. If Burgess was coming this early, he might not show up again all day, and she wanted to talk to him. She left Bobby sleeping soundly and slipped on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She brushed her teeth and splashed some water on her face and went downstairs.

When she got into the hallway she could hear Zora talking, her voice slightly raised. "Don't matter," Zora said. "You still actin like a thug." Thea stopped where she was, shrinking back into a dark corner of the hall.

"Why you say that, Mama?" There was supplication in Burgess' voice. "You the one always said we should help our neighbors, share what we had with em. We got to act like ever'body in the Convent is a part of our family-that's what you said."