Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Self-defense.”
“What?”
“How I learned to cook. When I was a kid, we ate all this wonderful stuff, what people started calling soul food in the Sixties, corn bread, greens, pig tails, black-eyed peas, grits, salt meat. My parents were depression people, country folk. But then as urbanization kicked in full force, as the country grew more prosperous and all those wonderful progressive products hit the stores, little by little that wonderful food stopped showing up on the table. Canned peas and ground meat now. Biscuits out of cardboard tubes. You wouldn’t think they could, but things got even worse when my mother went to work-she’d waited till I was in junior high. She was getting sicker by then, too, steadily falling away from the world. Food had never mattered to her. Now she’d bring home this stuff from the grocery store where she worked, TV dinners, mixes, prepackaged foods of all sorts, and that’s what would show up on the table. When she did cook, she fried-a true Southerner. Or laid things out in a pressure cooker and turned them into something unrecognizable to sight or taste.”
Mrs. Molino’s hand, putting down her cup, continued across the table to my own. Nothing sexual in this for all her attractiveness, despite the physicality vibrating the very air around her. Simple human warmth, rather. She was one of those to whom connections came easy.
“I spent a lot of time later on, after I left home, reading cookbooks, just trying to puzzle my way through the basics. Wore a groove in kitchen tiles going back and forth from cookbooks to counter or stove.”
Since we’d missed the reservation at Commander’s, at my suggestion we’d gone instead to Jessie’s, a neighborhood bar and grill of the sort that abounds here and almost nowhere else. There was a huge, wraparound old bar and only five or six small tables in the back for food service, but far more people came here to eat than to drink. The door rarely closed all the way: one customer caught it coming in as another, toting sacks, went out. Weekends, people lined up two or three deep at the bar having a Jax, bourbon or rum and coke as they waited. Jessie was a twig-thin albino with knobby joints, six-foot-four and 120 pounds tops, hair clipped short and so colorless it disappeared under lights, maroon eyes. His catfish po-boys, dressed with shredded lettuce, homemade pickle and his own remoulade, were the stuff of legend. I’d seen children in high chairs being fed pinches of these sandwiches by their parents. They’d probably grow up, move to Texas or Iowa, and need to be weaned. Decompressed, like deep-sea divers.
The coffee was almost as good. This, in a city that takes its coffee seriously. Local legend had it that Jessie added a spoonful of graveyard dirt to each pot. Things like that made you consider how essentially pagan New Orleans could be. Citizens here still keep track of solstices, favor Halloween and All Saints’ Day over Christmas.
“You and Deborah’ve been together awhile.”
I nodded.
“Is this it, do you think?”
“I suspect so. She’s never been one to make arbitrary or tentative moves.”
“Then I’m sorry, Lewis.”
I was about to say more when Don stepped through the doorway, glanced around, and walked towards us, followed in short order by Rick Garces.
“I’m going to assume you’re looking for me, and didn’t just stop by for a catfish fix.”
“Nah. Roast beef’s better, anyway.”
“So how’d you find me?”
“You mentioned you were meeting with Dr. Guidry-”
I was fairly certain I hadn’t, but let it pass.
“-so I swung by. Mrs. Molino here-”
“Catherine: Don Walsh, Rick Garces. Both old friends.”
“-left her destination with the housekeeper, in case she was needed.”
“Good to see you, Rick.” We shook hands. “Been some time. Why do I remember you as smaller?”
“Probably because I was. And it’s all your fault. You took me to that Cuban restaurant the first time, now I can’t stay out of there. Jose has a Cuban coffee working, sandwich soaking up grease on the grill, before I’m through the door. Then afterwards the damn fool brings me flan on the house. And I’m damn fool enough to eat it.”
As we spoke, Catherine had discreetly gone off and borrowed chairs for them both from other tables. Embarrassed, as much from not noticing as from her ministry, they sat.
“And what does Eugene think of that?” I asked. Eugene had enlarged, cropped and framed my favorite photo of LaVerne, a snapshot Rick took just before she died, when she’d stuck her head in his door at the Foucher’s Women Shelter where they both worked to ask Rick about a client.
“More of you to love, is what he says.”
“Good man.”
“You bet he is.”
I went back to the window behind the bar to tell Jessie we needed four coffees when he had the chance. Steam from the grill wreathed his face. “Ever think about getting some help in here?”
“You volunteering?”
“I could get the coffees.”
“You do that. And while you’re at it, see who else needs a refill. Pot must be scraping bottom ’long about now too, so maybe you could pour in some water, drop in a filter. Then fill the sucker up-to the top-with French Market.”
“Sure, just tell me where you keep the dirt.”
“Come again?”
“Forget it.”
I did what he asked, pulled a battered ancient Coke tray out from under the counter and used it to carry four cups of fresh coffee back to our table. Santa with a squat bottle tilted into his beard, sixty dollars or more at any flea market. Catherine, Don and Rick were in spirited conversation.
“You can set up systems to provide basic needs. Service, employment, housing. No problem there. But what do you do about incentive? Much as we’d like it to, Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t just kick in like an afterburner.”
“Same dilemma as at the heart of socialist and communist forms of government.”
“Right.”
“Whereas capitalism tends inevitably to monopolies and centralization of wealth,” Don said.
I stared at him.
He shrugged. “Lots of spare time these days. I’ve been reading some.”
“Because motivation has to come from within,” Catherine said.
“Does it? There’s no greater motivator, for some, than wealth accumulation. Status. Both of those are external counters. Meanwhile, what seems an evergrowing percentage of our population has no motivation.”
I sat listening, watching the steady exchange of customers through the door. When finally the tiniest hairline of a break opened in the conversation, I said, “God I hope the bell rings soon.”
“Anyone know who this man’s with?” Rick asked.
“So what are you guys doing here?”
Don’s eyes met mine. Again I thought: lands and grooves of my own life, my own years, on someone else’s face. “Rick and I were having lunch last week-”
“At Casa Verde.”
“Right.”
“Sandwich, coffee.”
“Three coffees, maybe four.”
“Four coffees?”
“Hey. Small cups.”
“And flan,” Rick said.
“Of course.”
“He wanted to know how you and Alouette were doing, how the baby was. Somewhere along the way-”
“Third napkin, as I recall.”
“Good grease.”
“Absolutely.”
“-I mentioned the letters she’s been getting.”
“He also mentioned the unexpected contact you’d had with Alouette’s father. I went home and the more I thought about that, the odder it seemed to me. What did he want?”
“To find someone, he said.”
“But then he didn’t want that anymore. And why you? With his means, he could hire a battery of folks to do a search.”
“Even people who actually find who they’re looking for,” Don put in.
“Very funny. I assumed it was his roundabout way of trying to make contact with Alouette.”
“Maybe …”
Jessie materialized beside the table, carrying a platter. Enough food on there to feed everyone in the Desire projects.