Paid in full, courtesy of the Great State of Louisiana, which would rather settle a wrongful death case than have the security procedures of its penal institutions scrutinized by the courts and the media. Half a mil for me, half for the ambulance chaser, instant French Quarter. God bless Mommy and God bless Daddy.
Over his double espresso, Chase told me: “Your debt has been cleared.” He kept glancing around and smoking so fast that he’d light a new cigarette before the last one was half gone, even though it was obvious the clientele were all deep into their Kerouac and having narcissistic, homoerotic fantasies about Neal Cassidy. I waited as he sipped, knowing — as a man who trusts his weaknesses must know — that I had merely exchanged one debt for another. “Lazarus was not happy, not at first. This is a pretty liquid business, you know? IOU’s don’t buy shit from the Haitians, and little fingers are funny but they don’t pay bills. Yours went in his garbage disposal by the way.” He puffed heavily and glanced about, letting me take that in. I tried not to react, but I was five days sober and easy to read.
“There’s a ship in Biloxi,” he continued. “Finnegan, ever heard of it?” I shook my head and felt the drawn skin of my cheeks tight against my face. “Gambling boat, big business. Lazarus tried to buy a big stake in it and got cut out, guy by the name of Gabriel Arentino, ever heard of him?” I shook my head again and looked at my chicory mug. “Well, that deal’s not closed. If Gabriel Arentino were to suddenly rescind his offer, Lazarus would be the high man. Lazarus badly wants to be the high man. For forgiving your debt, Lazarus wants you to convince Gabriel Arentino to have a change of heart.”
“Change of heart how?” I croaked dryly, not sure how a cook with a high school diploma was supposed to argue asset allocation with an apparently large-living financier, afraid maybe I knew the answer.
“Change of heart, you know.” His eyes worked the room again while he blew as much smoke as he could, as though the clouds of tobacco would render him inaudible. “Like change from beating to still.”
“Jesus, Chase,” I moaned. “I’m bad off. I’m battered and I need a fix. I can’t do that shit, I can’t even believe I’ve come to the point that someone would ask me. I’ll just sell my house and pay you off. Gimmee a couple weeks.” And to be honest, I felt good. I’d heard former rummies talk about hitting rock bottom, how only then did they truly want to stop. And I thought maybe I’d actually gone deeper than rock bottom, that I was at mantle bottom and would have to ascend to get to rock bottom. But I was wrong; I was still in free fall.
“It’s much too late for that, my friend,” Chase grinned, and I saw something I’d never seen before. He claimed not to use what he sold, and that was obviously true of smack. But his yellow toothed, fangy, triumphant expression was the overconfident ecstasy of a speed freak. In a flash of recognition I saw how he’d overplayed my role in his debt to Lazarus, how I owed not only my soul but Chase’s as well to a small time gangster with delusions of grandeur.
Chase said: “Lazarus knows about Faith. About Faith and about Emily. About Baltimore.” And my subconscious created a new picture to float past me, even though by this time the process had become like something out of Clockwork Orange. I saw a monster I’d never met grinding my baby in his garbage disposal, and laughing as his champagne kitchen counter top and his peach and bone checkerboard linoleum were bathed in her blood.
I walked all the away home from the Quad, heading up Royal to the Quarter so I’d pass the LaBranche House. I stood on the corner and tried to take in the enormity of the front gate, which twisted halfway down St. Peter into the late February dusk. I wondered about the people who’d built it originally, New Orleans patriarchy and all that shit. A family home that had been passed from father to son for almost two centuries. How could that be when I couldn’t even hold my family together for three years? How could Henri LaBranche run a plantation and an export business and raise a family close enough to erect two cathedrals and preserve their name through a war with England, a war with Lincoln, and all the wars any family fights against itself? What a fucked-up proposition a family is. How can one man be a father, a husband, a worker, a creator? It isn’t possible to fill all the roles everyone expects of you without losing yourself in the process. You keep giving away pieces of yourself until all you have left are the parts no one wants, not even you.
I spat on the sidewalk in front of the grand mansion — not as cool as spitting on the carpet, but as close as I was likely to get — and moved up Royal toward home. I had never imagined it possible to feel as hopeless as I felt and keep going on anyway. Who is weaker, the man who gives up in the face of defeat or the man who marches into that defeat hoping to lose anyway, just to get it all over with? Chase had convinced me that my estranged family would truly be in danger if I didn’t kill Gabriel Arentino. Having them killed wouldn’t get him his gambling ship, but at least the word would get around: Don’t cross Lazarus! Damn Chase for lying about my debt. Lazarus no doubt thought I’d brought down a small savings and loan fronting for horse I couldn’t afford. Nevertheless, having accepted the bargain, I’d talked Chase into giving me two syringes worth. And then I promised to pay him back for them.
With the sun down, I packed a gym bag with what I thought I’d need to kill a guy. I was a little bit proud of myself for holding out against the heroin. Two needles under my roof and I hadn’t used either. I got everything ready first, knowing that despite how badly my brain was squirming without the drug, I’d be much more useless once I’d scratched the itch.
When I had it all together, I went into the bathroom to do up. It was an old habit from the days when Faith knew but didn’t want to know and I sure didn’t want my daughter to see. Guilt is the great inhibitor, they ought to use it instead of those silly government warning signs. We could all smoke “Your Kids Are Watching” menthols and drink “Little Timmy Junior Sees This” lite. And speaking of light, the one in the bathroom just couldn’t make the grade, not as jittery as I was and as drawn in as my veins were. It was as though they knew they were on the verge of a victory; another week in hiding and they would never be invaded by the liquid devil again. So I tied up in the bathroom and then walked to the breakfast nook where I fixed under the ten-bulb chandelier, best spot in the house.
Finished studying the map of veins in my arm, I commenced to studying the map Chase had given me. We’d done the whole exchange right there in the Quad coffee shop, Chase passing his wares to me inside a hollow book. It was his way of out ironying the ironic students whose seriousness made their self-righteousness an annoyingly convenient foil. Just another dude in black sharing some Sartre or Kant.
While I was high, my subconscious conjured an alternate future in which I got aboard the Finnegan and gambled the house so broke that Gabriel Arentino couldn’t pay me. In a supremely satirical moment, I cashed in the favor that I owed Lazarus via Chase and forced Gabriel Arentino to kill himself.
Chase made mention of a firearm he possessed — untraceable, he claimed — but I declined. Daddy’s Colt was secure in my top nightstand drawer. There ain’t many places you can pay a third of a mil for a one-story flat and still need a pistol by your head to sleep soundly, but the Quarter is one of them. I remember how Daddy loved to hunt, how he took me to the woods near DeSoto National Forest when I was eight to track deer (this would have been a year before David did his John the Baptist on me). I remember how we made camp and roasted weenies over a fire belching with knotted pine and Daddy taught me how to count points on a buck. And I remember how, so early the next morning it may as well have still been last night, an eight pointer crossed our path while we were calling turkeys.