Airline travel had changed while Eli had been away. He’d done enough of it in his first year out to get used to it, but now he didn’t like flying as he once had. The surveillance, the assumption of guilt, the routine inspection, the line of adults rendered shoeless and harmless as children, it was all too much like where he’d just been. The security line this time wasn’t too bad. The first-class ticket arranged by Ted’s assistant landed him in the shortest line. “It’ll help make up for where you’re staying,” Ted had said. Plus he’d worn loafers — not on purpose but by good fortune. He’d boarded early and been handed a free mimosa, a newspaper, a pillow pristine in its plastic case.
The suited man across the aisle from him lifted his glass and said, “Everyone’s always in a good mood on their way to New Orleans. Different story coming back. At least that’s how it used to be.” He drained his glass, then shook his head. “Damn shame, damn shame. But at least there are direct flights again.”
Eli had never given any real thought to New Orleans, which perhaps was why the recent television images of the city felt as remote as news from the other side of the world. He’d wondered before, now and again, what makes some lives more mournable than others. So often it was proximity — not merely geographic but social, economic, cultural, ethnic. The more like us someone is, the more we empathize. For those more distant, it’s too bad and we’re sorry, but we rest certain that their misfortunes won’t strike us. It couldn’t happen to me.
Trite observation, he knew, but one whose truth felt close because he knew that’s what people think about those who go to prison. Even the exonerated are presumed to have done something wrong, even if not the thing. Eli had been guilty as charged, making his story an even harder sell to the sympathies of the never-incarcerated. What had happened to him could not have happened to just anyone. His fate was specific to him, and he knew better than to expect anyone to feel bad for him. He was lucky to be out. The fact that his luck could be reversed with very little paperwork by others was enough to prevent him from taking his freedom for granted. He enjoyed the hell out of his free mimosa and then gave into the resulting drowsiness.
Eli woke when the captain announced the descent into New Orleans. With his forehead pressed against the peculiar plastic of the window, he watched the city grow closer and larger. He’d never seen such a flat place, or one where the borders between what is land and what is water were so vague.
He’d expected the airport to smell like humanity — like the hundreds of people who’d camped there hoping to fly out ahead of the hurricane — but the only signs of the storm were ladders and plastic and tape, presumably from repairs being made by workers currently on break. A jazz band played in the terminal, just outside security. Old style with clarinets, a trumpet, a trombone, and an upright bass. Music Eli had heard before, probably in a movie: music intended to indicate both a mood and a place. Giving tourists what they wanted. More symbol than song.
He’d known two women once, from the old life, who’d ventured no deeper than the airport when they’d flown to New Orleans one year for Mardi Gras. “You could feel the place was evil,” they told him, explaining why they’d immediately changed their return flight and left only hours after arrival. He’d dismissed the story as nutty when he’d heard it. Now he wondered if their irrational and expensive response didn’t have something to do with the smell of the place — not a bad smell, exactly, but like something turned inside out so what should have been obscured was instead bared. An animal without its hide.
Outside he was third in the cab line and rode into the French Quarter with a driver he identified as Haitian by his accent. “You people are starting to come back,” the man said, “and this is a good thing.”
Eli named the hotel where the murder had occurred, where two of the missing Van Mieghem paintings had turned up. “You know it?”
“Sure, sure,” said the driver as he fed into thin traffic. “That’s in the lower part of the Quarter.”
Eli felt unmoored and put it down to the drastic increase in humidity as well as the flatness of the land, which offered no vantage point, no contours by which he could get his bearings. He put his trust in the cabdriver and watched the short view along the highway, which — aside from hit-and-miss damage and the sense that the foliage might overtake the man-made — was not so different from any other drive between a city’s airport and itself. Already he was getting used to the smell.
Though Eli could not name the streets unless the cab slowed enough for him to read the green-and-white signs, he knew enough to tell that they had passed the Superdome, made their way across wide Canal Street — split by streetcar tracks not in use — and penetrated the Vieux Carré.
“I’ll drive you down Bourbon,” the driver said, “just because I can. Before, it was not possible — always blocked to traffic — and I believe you take what is good from what is bad. It won’t be open for long, not if you folks keep returning and the young ones keep moving in.”
“A good philosophy,” Eli said, though it was the type of sentiment that had angered him in those early locked-up years. Make the most of it. Like hell, he’d thought, but then he continued living his life because that’s what a person does. All the clichés from the movies, because for the most part that was what was on offer: the prison library, the weight room, meditation classes, even a little drawing, though he’d never asked anyone to send him paint and was still determined never to paint again.
And now Eli made the most of the drive down Bourbon Street, its mix of open and still-shut. Stores mostly shut, bars mixed, strip joints open, the girls even standing in the doorways, trying to wave in the scant pedestrian traffic.
“Before the storm,” said the driver, “there were better girls. Not too round but not drug-skinny. More clean. The best ones left not to come back. These are the ones with nowhere better to go, plus some who came after. What’s the word?”
Eli made eye contact in the rearview mirror and shrugged. “Professionals?”
“Opportunists,” said the driver. “That is the word.”
“Making the best of what’s bad?”
The driver laughed, his eyes squinting in the horizontal rectangle of glass. “I suppose so, making the best for themselves of what’s bad for other people.”
A few blocks more and the car slowed at a curb in the middle of a block that looked deserted. “This is you,” the driver said, his hand indicating a three-story brick building with a few sad flags hanging over its short front steps. “I know what you are thinking, that Richelieu is such a grand name.”
“It’s all right,” Eli said, smiling. “This is what I expected. This is what I always expect.”
Marion
As a child, Marion had wished her parents dead, at least in make-believe. She’d grown up on stories of orphans who lived in boxcars and intrepid motherless girls with special powers. Across the happy years of late elementary school, she and her best friend had played a game called “Runaways.” They chose names — Tatum and Tara — and invented a stern older brother (Terrence) who protected them and an annoying younger one (Tommy) whom they often had to rescue from self-inflicted danger. Orphans, all of them, they’d fled a cruel aunt and fended for themselves on scavenged food and the close sibling bonds of brothers and sisters named with the same letter of the alphabet.