He couldn’t stop thinking about those wild eyes. The ones that should’ve belonged to Myra, but didn’t.
Around about 5:45, he found himself standing in line at the Main Street Mission. They served a decent enough breakfast, and he figured, hungry or not, he’d better get some food in him before his body staged a revolt.
One of the folks in line, a young tweaker named Trinity, took one look at him and said, “You okay, Sol? You look like you seen a ghost.”
Solomon had seen something, all right, but it wasn’t any ghost. Ghosts were bullshit. The kind of thing you’d see in some cheesy chick movie, like that one with Demi Moore making clay pots and staring dewy-eyed at Patrick what’s-his-name as he professed his everlasting love.
Ghosts were all Hollywood, and Solomon was convinced that what he’d seen this morning was pure Louisiana. Not the Louisiana of po’boys and Zydeco and drunken college girls flashing their headlights at Mardi Gras. Not even the Louisiana of shrunken heads and mojo beads. But the one he’d known as a child, the one his grandfather had taught him about, where bad things lurked and faith was as much a weapon as it was a source of comfort. Where the divine vision was sometimes accompanied by the beat of a dark drum and the smell of rotting flesh.
When he was nine years old, Solomon and his little brother, Henry, used to take the caps off soda bottles, jam them into the soles of their tennis shoes, and head on down to the Quarter, where they’d tap dance for nickels and dimes.
One day, they were headed back to St. Thomas, their pockets full of change, when Solomon got distracted by a discarded hubcap, thinking it would make a pretty good tip jar.
Henry, who wasn’t quite six and had about as much sense as a brain-damaged cocker spaniel, wandered into the street without looking, and got himself hit by a police car.
Solomon looked up just in time to see his little brother go under the front bumper, tumbling beneath the car like socks in a dryer, only to be spit out the back looking as if every bone in his body had been busted.
Along with his head.
A spray of nickels and dimes littered the street around him.
The cop brought the car to a sudden stop, threw open his door, and staggered out. He had a bottle in his hand. He took one look at Henry, threw up on the side of the road, then climbed back into his car and hightailed it out of there.
A little while later, more cops showed up and Solomon told his story. Then his mama came and his grandfather, too, and pretty soon there was a lot of crying and screaming going on, most of which he didn’t want to remember.
They never found the cop who killed Henry. Never even tried, according to his grandfather. But one night, shortly after the funeral, when Papi was tucking him into bed, he kissed Solomon on the forehead and said, “Don’t you worry, boy, Henry got The Rhythm on his side now. And when those drums start beating, he’ll rise up, and he won’t stop until the world’s been synchronized and he gets the one who wronged him.”
At the time, Solomon wasn’t quite sure what his grandfather meant by all that, but he was smart enough to know that it couldn’t be good. Because in Solomon’s mind, he was the one who had wronged Henry. If he hadn’t been playing around with that hubcap, if he’d been watching his brother like Mama always told him to, then Henry would be alive and cuddled up next to him right now.
Solomon started to cry then, thinking how much he missed his brother, and he almost wished the stupid little runt would rise up from the grave at that very moment and come after him, because he was the one who deserved to die.
He cried well into the night and every night after that for almost a month. But the drums never beat and Henry never showed up. And Solomon would be lying if he didn’t admit that he’d felt just a touch of relief.
A year later, almost to the day of Henry’s death, he was staring at the Times Picayune over Papi’s shoulder when he saw the picture of a cop who had blown his own brains out in the middle of the county morgue. The cop had gone there late at night to investigate a break-in. Why he’d decided to shoot himself was a mystery to everyone concerned, but Solomon immediately recognized him and pointed him out to Papi.
Papi nodded. “That’s right,” he said softly. “Your brother did good.”
After sixty-six years living in poverty, Solomon was finally driven out of Louisiana by the bitch herself, Hurricane Katrina. The night the levees broke, he was stuck in a jail cell on a drunk and disorderly, watching from a wire-mesh window as Katrina unleashed her fury.
He didn’t know if the cops had forgotten about him or left him there intentionally, but they were long gone by the time the storm was in full bloom. Before the night was over, Solomon found himself waist deep in water, calling out for help.
But no help came.
Three days later he was still there, huddled on the top bunk of his cell, stinking of his own bodily waste, alive thanks only to sheer willpower. All the strength had been sapped out of him, but he still managed to call out every once in a while, hoping someone might be within earshot.
Then, finally, thankfully, a face appeared at the window. A kid of about fourteen. “You okay, mister?”
“Besides the fact that I’m hungrier than a motherfucker? I’m doin’ just fine.”
The kid grinned, then said, “Hang on,” and a moment later he was banging at the mesh with something solid, looked like a crowbar. It took awhile, but he managed to pry enough space for Solomon to slip through, then pulled him into the battered row boat he was piloting.
“Got me a bus,” the boy said, handing Solomon a hunk of beef jerky. “Just across the way. I’m headed up to Houston. I hear they been takin’ folks in.”
“Must be pretty bad, they takin’ us to Houston.”
“Bad ain’t the word, mister. We been fucked, and nobody gives a good goddamn.”
Solomon pulled himself upright then, taking in a full view of what he’d only been able to see a slice of from his jailhouse window. There was destruction in every direction. The city he’d spent his entire life in had been bulldozed, drowned, and left for dead.
Bodies floated in the water. Old folks. Young. Even little babies. It was only then that Solomon realized just how lucky he was.
The kid rowed his boat up a river that had once been a street, picking up a few more survivors, people looking as weak and shell-shocked as Solomon felt, all of them happy to be alive. Then the kid steered them to a patch of dry land, a debris-covered road where a beat-up old school bus was waiting.
He drove them all the way to Houston.
Every once in a while Solomon would catch the boy staring at him in the rear-view mirror. About halfway through the ride, a thought occurred to him — one that had been stirring at the periphery of his tired old brain ever since he’d seen that fourteen-year-old face in the jailhouse window:
The boy looked a lot like Henry. Or at least what Henry might’ve looked like if he’d lived that long.
Solomon could almost hear Papi’s voice.
Your brother did good.
Those words kept rolling around in his head as he let the low rumble of the bus lull him to sleep.
He never did return to Louisiana.
Reconstruction had been stalled by empty promises and government bureaucracy, and Solomon had no family left to go home to anyway. After he left Houston, he’d decided a new start was in order, so he used the few dollars a relief worker had given him and caught a Greyhound bus to Ocean City, California — part beach community, part urban melting pot.
He washed dishes for a while at a little bar and grill near the ocean called Riley’s House, but that ended when Riley burned the place down for the insurance money.