I have had some thrills in life, but nothing beats walking out of jail and seeing your girl there. Mary.
Tall, slim and twenty-two. The prettiest smile. But the smile wasn’t fully lit. Something had gone sour.
Naturally I suspected that she hadn’t spent the last three weeks alone. But I thought maybe I was
just being paranoidenal. The Orleans Parish Prison will do that to you.
We went home. The awkward feeling passed. How could I worry about Mary? She bailed me out.
Worked her ass off to do it.
She started getting dinner together. And I hit the couch. How great to have a couch, instead of a
bunk. Even if the couch was in a little rented shack behind another house.
Then around five o’clock I see this guy park a red VW bus in the driveway and head for our door.
Tall and easy-moving. Trouble. Walking up to the door like he’s just going to make himself at home.
Mary saw him through the screen door. “Hi Muke!” she sang. “Guess who’s baaaaack!
The guy stepped in the door. Big but skinny. Had that squared-up look of a college boy. But he
was dirty, his long hair stuck into a faded bandana.
“Remember Will?” Mary hopped across the room and slid onto the couch next to me. Laughing.
“My old man?”
“Whoa,” he smiled. White even teeth. He pointed at me. “Be right back.”
And he was right back. Holding up a six-pack of Jax. “I just got these. Had ‘em in my cooler on a
new block of ice.”
I remembered this Muke from right before I left. He came to New Orleans from California or
someplace and made friends with Eddie, who lived in the front house. Eddie must have told him he
could park his van in the driveway. That’s where he slept.
The guy set the carton of beers on the coffee table in front of me. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks, brotha.” I shook his hand. When you been where I’d been, you appreciate appreciation.
And you know the proper order of things, and the importance of a show of respect. But what was he
headed for when he first walked in the door? He didn’t expect to see me.
We sat there in the front room in the breeze from the window fan. Mary took the third beer after I
and the guy had popped ours. “I’ve been letting Muke take a shower here, cuz he fixed the sink for
me.”
“Just needed a washer.”
“It wouldn’t stop turning on.” Mary caught herself and giggled. “Or couldn’t turn off! You know
what I mean.”
Muke grinned. “Jes’ helpin’ out.”
Mary went into the kitchen. So he was just after a shower, not Mary? She sure perked up when he
walked in. She never mentioned this big dog sniffin’ around when we were talking through a grate the
last three weeks.
I looked out the window. Fear and indecision had me feeling unsteady. Outside, the late sunlight
slanted against the wall of the big house. I could see Phil sitting in the kitchen, just across the tiny lawn
that separated our little shack from the big house.
The big house faced Magazine Street, in a neighborhood of cypress trees and live oak, small stores
and bars. The upstairs had been blown out by Hurricane Betsy, maybe five years ago. Nineteen Sixty-
five? Sixty-seven? No one bothered to repair it. So the house just sat there, the yellow walls peeling.
Phil’s parents owned the property and Phil lived in a little kitchenette at the back of the first floor. His
job was to watch over it, which he did about as well as a psycho could who had to pop Thorazine to
keep from being the King of France. Eddie the unemployed oil rig diver lived in two rooms in the
front. And Mary and me in the back cottage.
Muke was talking. He had a job with a crew of spades remodeling a house near here. I asked him
what he made.
“Two dollars an hour,” he shrugged. “Easy work, but dirty. Low-key. Things move along kind of
stately.” About what you’d expect from a pack of New Orleans nigras. Muke took the other three beers
out of the carton and placed one in front of me and one in front of Mary before he opened the last one
for himself. “You want me to ask my boss?”
“No,” I said. “I got something better going. I heard this story in the place. Some cat got busted
walking out of a dope deal in the Quarter. He climbed a trellis over a fence and managed to bury a
cookie tin full of twenties in a garden. I know where that garden is.”
They both stared at me, their beer cans sweating.
“At first I thought it was just jailhouse talk. But the day before I got out, the guy who told the
story? He got shivved. The story is real. The money is there.”
Mary lost her smile. “Please don’t tell me.”
I looked at the dude. Muke. “What do you think?”
He gulped his beer loudly. “I don’t know.”
It came to me in a second-beer flash, even as I told it. I can be accidentally brilliant like that. If I
could get Muke alone, I could figure out if he screwed my woman. Later on, Mary’s reaction would reveal
first, did she screw him—in case I was still in doubt. Second, was she sorry, third, was she still loyal to
me? That’s three things, but really only one. Like God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
The guy left. Mary and I sat on the couch in the dark while the sounds of night came in the window.
She cried a long, deep cry. She wouldn’t say why. I couldn’t hate her. No matter what.
“I got laid off at the store.” An engine roared in the street. “So I had to get the job at that dive.
Two months rent due now.” Someone banged a lid on a garbage can. “Phil’s father came around.”
My arms folded her in. Soft and lavender. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get the car back.”
“Forget the car.” I smoothed her hair. “That rollin’ wreck. You did enough just getting me bailed.
Forget the car.”
It was three weeks ago. This cop hung around Louisiana Avenue, and I’d run into him before. I had
been dealing a small amount of weed and speed to an El Salvadorian there who sold it in the
neighborhood. This cop made me a few months ago, but he could never get anything on me and it
pissed him off.
So I was driving the old Continental down Magazine Street at Louisiana, and he pulled me over. I
mean right there. I was just going to the drug store to buy some toothpaste and some smokes. He
dives behind the seat of the car and comes up with a brown glass vitamin bottle. Inside, forty-some
white crosses. It floored me for a second, but then I realized those pills ain’t mine. The mother had
planted them on me.
After all the shit I done, to get busted by a cheating cop. Smart, but a greasy-nose cheater. So
into jail I went. And to the impoundment the Continental went, never to return.
I kissed Mary. “I know it’s been rough. You did the time with me. I can never forgot.”
She laid her hands on my chest. “You can’t go breaking into houses.”
“I’m not. It’s in a garden. The people don’t even know the money’s there, and it doesn’t belong to
them. And the guy who told me is dead.”
“How will you ever find it?”
“It’s at 515 Dumaine. In the soft ground, by the hose. I know this. I can almost picture it.” The
squirrel who told me the story of the money tin had put me through a long guessing game about the
location. I understood he was just toying with me out of boredom and ego. And I only played the
game out of my own boredom and ego. But he had just enough detail that I thought maybe the story
wasn’t complete bullshit.
I had not planned to look for the money, until suddenly I had a need to toy with someone.
We had dinner, and then Mary led me to bed. I thought it important for her to say when on that.
Of course I’d been dyin’ for it. She ended up crying again, trying to smile through tears, her cheeks
boiling pink. All the tears confused me.
About ten I left her asleep and dressed in the front room.
I walked over to the driveway. Muke was lying on the foldout bunk in the back of the van, with the
side doors open. When he popped his head out I said, “You want to do this?”
“Well,” he grinned. “I’m willing to check it out. That couldn’t hurt.”
He drove us to the Vieux Carré and parked a few blocks away, down by the tracks on Peters Street.
Lower Dumaine Street was quiet, no tourists around. 515 was two-storied with an iron balcony, like I’d
pictured it. But 515 did not have a front garden. 523 looked right. Something about the depilorated
pink stucco. I tried the latch on the gate. Not locked. Then we went to a bar for beer.
“I think that’s the place. It’s got a flower bed along the walk. How I pictured it.”
He sipped. “We got no shovel.”
“You don’t have anything in the car? Tools?”
“Wrenches and stuff.”
“But there’s no one home. Now is the time. We’ll find something. Shit, I’ll dig it with my hands.”
We drank a beer. Another. Pool balls clacked in the back of the room.
“Thanks for helping Mary,” I said.
“No problemo. Did she tell you that she let me stay at your house one day? I had this god horrible
toothache. I couldn’t work, or even move. She let me stay on the couch. It was a hot day. I woulda
been a broasted chicken in that van.”
“S’okay. I’m glad she helped you.” Yeah, friendly indeed they’d been getting.
Muke had given me no reason so far to suspect that he’d poked Mary. And on his placid sunburned
face I saw no fear of me being a dangerous guy who just got out of jail. I needed to raise the bet. “Did
you notice some guy coming around?”
He shrugged. “Around your house? Nobody. Not that I ever saw. But I wasn’t there a lot.”
“There’s this one guy from her home town, Morgan City. Named Stebo. Ex-boyfriend I say, though
Mary won’t admit it.”
Muke shook his head.
“Good. Guy gets on my nerves. Like he’s got something on her. She lets him hang around, just to
be polite, I guess. Next time he shows up he might go home with a crowbar in his skull.”
Muke rasped a chuckle. He told me about this old girlfriend who ran out on him in California and then
did it again in Colorado. He was getting tuned up as we drank. Chatty. Even a little hilarious. But still
not scared of me, that I could see.
`”It’s tough to be in jail,” I said. “With a pretty girl like Mary at home, and I left her there
pretty flat.”
“It’s got to be tough.”
I leaned toward him as if I didn’t want the bartender to hear. “I was afraid she might go back to
turning tricks.”
His eyes darted away from mine. “Tricks?”
“For money. That’s what she was doing when I met her.”
“No way. She’s such a girl-next-door.”
“Yeah. But she knows how to use what she has. I made her stop. But it was too late. She had
herpes.”
“Her peas?”
“It’s a fungus. You’ve heard of it.” But I could tell by the way he straightened up that this was
news to him. Left jab, right hook. “She gets these sores all over her pud. If you get it, it won’t make
your pecker fall off, but it’ll make you wish it would.”
`He laughed, but not because it was funny. “But does that mean. That you and her don’t...”
“There’s times we don’t do it. Other times the rash goes away, but the fungus is always there. But
I don’t have to worry. I’m immune. A few people are. Maybe you are.”
His pink ears turned pinker. “Well, I don’t know.”
“You’re born with the immunity. You either have it or you don’t.”
Muke ducked his head. “I haven’t been around that much. Round, round, get around, I don’t get
around. Just the one girlfriend, really. Banged her bowlegged though.”
And there you had it, sports fans. After what I told Muke, it bothered him having to confess he was
practically a virgin, not that his crotch might start itching intolerably. So I found him innocent.
Therefore, when Muke said he hadn’t seen anyone around Mary, that was probably true, too. It made
me happy.
“Well?” I swirled the last inch of my beer.
“I’m getting brave. We better do it before I shoot past brave right to stupid.”
I laughed. Pretty funny guy. I guess I could see how he got to park his van in the driveway, and
use my shower.
We went back to 523 Dumaine, opened the gate, and slipped inside. The house was dark, and some
tropical shrubbery along the front fence protected us from passing eyes. A couple of bent steel patio
chairs clustered in one corner. Moss in the cracks of the bricks softened our steps.
I found a small garden spade on the porch, and poked around with it a little in the soft dirt between
two bushes. Then Muke took the tool and dug a little more energetically.
“Wait! Djew hear that?” He handed me the shovel and bent down to feel around in the dark hole.
Right there, holding the shovel, him with his back to me, was when I would have brained him and left
him to his fate if I thought he’d screwed Mary. But I was glad I didn’t have to do it. Mary never turned
tricks. She’d give it away, and probably had at some point to that coon-ass dishwasher Stebo. But
apparently not to Muke. I had put my man Muke to the test, and because he passed, there was no
reason for me to not trust Mary.
So this had become a hoot. Maybe we would find a box of money. When he thought he found
something, my heart raced for a moment.
Just then the light went on in the curtained window to our right. I pressed my hand on Muke’s back
and hissed.
He looked up. “Shi-i-i-it,” he breathed.
Muke raised himself quickly and silently, while I lay the shovel on the ground. I pushed some dirt
back in the hole with my foot. We tip-toed out and ran away laughing like seventh-graders.
I had to stop to breathe. “What did you find?”
“What?”
“In the hole,” I gasped.
He shook his head. “Dunno. Piece of tile.”
I had to laugh. “I think we better call it a night.” Since I had no treasure, and damn little
besides, Muke bought a bottle of cheap, sweet wine and we drank it. Then he bought another.
In a pukey-smelling dive on St. Ann he said, “I want you to know, I never touched Mary.”
That’s when I knew that he had done just that. He had sensed my suspicion before, and then
sensed that I’d been convinced of his innocence. The beach boy had fooled me. But then he’d fooled
himself. And me without a shovel in my hand. Now I had to keep him with me a while longer. I smiled
my least wolfy smile. “I know you didn’t, or you’d be itching by now.”
Muke chuckled jovially. Then I knew that he not only knew about herpes, he thought he knew more
about it than I did. And he thought he knew that Mary didn’t have the fungus.
“Hey,” I said. “You’ve been buying all the drinks. Let me do something for you.”
“Okay, bro.”
“Here.” I held out a yellow tablet. “This will mellow you nicely.”
“It’s not a downer, is it? I can’t handle those at all.”
Oh please, step into my left hook. “Nah, it’s synthetic THC. Like trippy grass.”
Muke took it out of my palm. “What about you?”
I held up another tablet, popped it in my mouth and took a big swallow of beer. Palmed the pill, of
course.
Muke laughed merrily at my derring-do, and took the pill. Down the hatch with Phil’s Thorazine. One
of these takes Phil from ready to jump off a building to, can’t get out of his chair. I’d hate to see what it’
s going to do to the Sundance Kid, here, especially aided by beer and wine.
When we finished our beers, I steered Muke outside. “Look here. I’ve got something else. A special
treat.” We staggered to Bourbon Street, down to a special bar, where a trio of trannys took my boy
into the restroom. He was looking at me laughing as they led him away, all chiffon and pink lipstick and
female hormone shots. I heard some whooping from in there.
I had to leave. I’d hate to see what happened when the Thorazine kicked in. Waking up face down
in the toilet of a French Quarter gay bar at nine in the morning, might be the best he could hope for.
Sometimes I’m deliberately brilliant.
Tall, slim and twenty-two. The prettiest smile. But the smile wasn’t fully lit. Something had gone sour.
Naturally I suspected that she hadn’t spent the last three weeks alone. But I thought maybe I was
just being paranoidenal. The Orleans Parish Prison will do that to you.
We went home. The awkward feeling passed. How could I worry about Mary? She bailed me out.
Worked her ass off to do it.
She started getting dinner together. And I hit the couch. How great to have a couch, instead of a
bunk. Even if the couch was in a little rented shack behind another house.
Then around five o’clock I see this guy park a red VW bus in the driveway and head for our door.
Tall and easy-moving. Trouble. Walking up to the door like he’s just going to make himself at home.
Mary saw him through the screen door. “Hi Muke!” she sang. “Guess who’s baaaaack!
The guy stepped in the door. Big but skinny. Had that squared-up look of a college boy. But he
was dirty, his long hair stuck into a faded bandana.
“Remember Will?” Mary hopped across the room and slid onto the couch next to me. Laughing.
“My old man?”
“Whoa,” he smiled. White even teeth. He pointed at me. “Be right back.”
And he was right back. Holding up a six-pack of Jax. “I just got these. Had ‘em in my cooler on a
new block of ice.”
I remembered this Muke from right before I left. He came to New Orleans from California or
someplace and made friends with Eddie, who lived in the front house. Eddie must have told him he
could park his van in the driveway. That’s where he slept.
The guy set the carton of beers on the coffee table in front of me. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks, brotha.” I shook his hand. When you been where I’d been, you appreciate appreciation.
And you know the proper order of things, and the importance of a show of respect. But what was he
headed for when he first walked in the door? He didn’t expect to see me.
We sat there in the front room in the breeze from the window fan. Mary took the third beer after I
and the guy had popped ours. “I’ve been letting Muke take a shower here, cuz he fixed the sink for
me.”
“Just needed a washer.”
“It wouldn’t stop turning on.” Mary caught herself and giggled. “Or couldn’t turn off! You know
what I mean.”
Muke grinned. “Jes’ helpin’ out.”
Mary went into the kitchen. So he was just after a shower, not Mary? She sure perked up when he
walked in. She never mentioned this big dog sniffin’ around when we were talking through a grate the
last three weeks.
I looked out the window. Fear and indecision had me feeling unsteady. Outside, the late sunlight
slanted against the wall of the big house. I could see Phil sitting in the kitchen, just across the tiny lawn
that separated our little shack from the big house.
The big house faced Magazine Street, in a neighborhood of cypress trees and live oak, small stores
and bars. The upstairs had been blown out by Hurricane Betsy, maybe five years ago. Nineteen Sixty-
five? Sixty-seven? No one bothered to repair it. So the house just sat there, the yellow walls peeling.
Phil’s parents owned the property and Phil lived in a little kitchenette at the back of the first floor. His
job was to watch over it, which he did about as well as a psycho could who had to pop Thorazine to
keep from being the King of France. Eddie the unemployed oil rig diver lived in two rooms in the
front. And Mary and me in the back cottage.
Muke was talking. He had a job with a crew of spades remodeling a house near here. I asked him
what he made.
“Two dollars an hour,” he shrugged. “Easy work, but dirty. Low-key. Things move along kind of
stately.” About what you’d expect from a pack of New Orleans nigras. Muke took the other three beers
out of the carton and placed one in front of me and one in front of Mary before he opened the last one
for himself. “You want me to ask my boss?”
“No,” I said. “I got something better going. I heard this story in the place. Some cat got busted
walking out of a dope deal in the Quarter. He climbed a trellis over a fence and managed to bury a
cookie tin full of twenties in a garden. I know where that garden is.”
They both stared at me, their beer cans sweating.
“At first I thought it was just jailhouse talk. But the day before I got out, the guy who told the
story? He got shivved. The story is real. The money is there.”
Mary lost her smile. “Please don’t tell me.”
I looked at the dude. Muke. “What do you think?”
He gulped his beer loudly. “I don’t know.”
It came to me in a second-beer flash, even as I told it. I can be accidentally brilliant like that. If I
could get Muke alone, I could figure out if he screwed my woman. Later on, Mary’s reaction would reveal
first, did she screw him—in case I was still in doubt. Second, was she sorry, third, was she still loyal to
me? That’s three things, but really only one. Like God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
The guy left. Mary and I sat on the couch in the dark while the sounds of night came in the window.
She cried a long, deep cry. She wouldn’t say why. I couldn’t hate her. No matter what.
“I got laid off at the store.” An engine roared in the street. “So I had to get the job at that dive.
Two months rent due now.” Someone banged a lid on a garbage can. “Phil’s father came around.”
My arms folded her in. Soft and lavender. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get the car back.”
“Forget the car.” I smoothed her hair. “That rollin’ wreck. You did enough just getting me bailed.
Forget the car.”
It was three weeks ago. This cop hung around Louisiana Avenue, and I’d run into him before. I had
been dealing a small amount of weed and speed to an El Salvadorian there who sold it in the
neighborhood. This cop made me a few months ago, but he could never get anything on me and it
pissed him off.
So I was driving the old Continental down Magazine Street at Louisiana, and he pulled me over. I
mean right there. I was just going to the drug store to buy some toothpaste and some smokes. He
dives behind the seat of the car and comes up with a brown glass vitamin bottle. Inside, forty-some
white crosses. It floored me for a second, but then I realized those pills ain’t mine. The mother had
planted them on me.
After all the shit I done, to get busted by a cheating cop. Smart, but a greasy-nose cheater. So
into jail I went. And to the impoundment the Continental went, never to return.
I kissed Mary. “I know it’s been rough. You did the time with me. I can never forgot.”
She laid her hands on my chest. “You can’t go breaking into houses.”
“I’m not. It’s in a garden. The people don’t even know the money’s there, and it doesn’t belong to
them. And the guy who told me is dead.”
“How will you ever find it?”
“It’s at 515 Dumaine. In the soft ground, by the hose. I know this. I can almost picture it.” The
squirrel who told me the story of the money tin had put me through a long guessing game about the
location. I understood he was just toying with me out of boredom and ego. And I only played the
game out of my own boredom and ego. But he had just enough detail that I thought maybe the story
wasn’t complete bullshit.
I had not planned to look for the money, until suddenly I had a need to toy with someone.
We had dinner, and then Mary led me to bed. I thought it important for her to say when on that.
Of course I’d been dyin’ for it. She ended up crying again, trying to smile through tears, her cheeks
boiling pink. All the tears confused me.
About ten I left her asleep and dressed in the front room.
I walked over to the driveway. Muke was lying on the foldout bunk in the back of the van, with the
side doors open. When he popped his head out I said, “You want to do this?”
“Well,” he grinned. “I’m willing to check it out. That couldn’t hurt.”
He drove us to the Vieux Carré and parked a few blocks away, down by the tracks on Peters Street.
Lower Dumaine Street was quiet, no tourists around. 515 was two-storied with an iron balcony, like I’d
pictured it. But 515 did not have a front garden. 523 looked right. Something about the depilorated
pink stucco. I tried the latch on the gate. Not locked. Then we went to a bar for beer.
“I think that’s the place. It’s got a flower bed along the walk. How I pictured it.”
He sipped. “We got no shovel.”
“You don’t have anything in the car? Tools?”
“Wrenches and stuff.”
“But there’s no one home. Now is the time. We’ll find something. Shit, I’ll dig it with my hands.”
We drank a beer. Another. Pool balls clacked in the back of the room.
“Thanks for helping Mary,” I said.
“No problemo. Did she tell you that she let me stay at your house one day? I had this god horrible
toothache. I couldn’t work, or even move. She let me stay on the couch. It was a hot day. I woulda
been a broasted chicken in that van.”
“S’okay. I’m glad she helped you.” Yeah, friendly indeed they’d been getting.
Muke had given me no reason so far to suspect that he’d poked Mary. And on his placid sunburned
face I saw no fear of me being a dangerous guy who just got out of jail. I needed to raise the bet. “Did
you notice some guy coming around?”
He shrugged. “Around your house? Nobody. Not that I ever saw. But I wasn’t there a lot.”
“There’s this one guy from her home town, Morgan City. Named Stebo. Ex-boyfriend I say, though
Mary won’t admit it.”
Muke shook his head.
“Good. Guy gets on my nerves. Like he’s got something on her. She lets him hang around, just to
be polite, I guess. Next time he shows up he might go home with a crowbar in his skull.”
Muke rasped a chuckle. He told me about this old girlfriend who ran out on him in California and then
did it again in Colorado. He was getting tuned up as we drank. Chatty. Even a little hilarious. But still
not scared of me, that I could see.
`”It’s tough to be in jail,” I said. “With a pretty girl like Mary at home, and I left her there
pretty flat.”
“It’s got to be tough.”
I leaned toward him as if I didn’t want the bartender to hear. “I was afraid she might go back to
turning tricks.”
His eyes darted away from mine. “Tricks?”
“For money. That’s what she was doing when I met her.”
“No way. She’s such a girl-next-door.”
“Yeah. But she knows how to use what she has. I made her stop. But it was too late. She had
herpes.”
“Her peas?”
“It’s a fungus. You’ve heard of it.” But I could tell by the way he straightened up that this was
news to him. Left jab, right hook. “She gets these sores all over her pud. If you get it, it won’t make
your pecker fall off, but it’ll make you wish it would.”
`He laughed, but not because it was funny. “But does that mean. That you and her don’t...”
“There’s times we don’t do it. Other times the rash goes away, but the fungus is always there. But
I don’t have to worry. I’m immune. A few people are. Maybe you are.”
His pink ears turned pinker. “Well, I don’t know.”
“You’re born with the immunity. You either have it or you don’t.”
Muke ducked his head. “I haven’t been around that much. Round, round, get around, I don’t get
around. Just the one girlfriend, really. Banged her bowlegged though.”
And there you had it, sports fans. After what I told Muke, it bothered him having to confess he was
practically a virgin, not that his crotch might start itching intolerably. So I found him innocent.
Therefore, when Muke said he hadn’t seen anyone around Mary, that was probably true, too. It made
me happy.
“Well?” I swirled the last inch of my beer.
“I’m getting brave. We better do it before I shoot past brave right to stupid.”
I laughed. Pretty funny guy. I guess I could see how he got to park his van in the driveway, and
use my shower.
We went back to 523 Dumaine, opened the gate, and slipped inside. The house was dark, and some
tropical shrubbery along the front fence protected us from passing eyes. A couple of bent steel patio
chairs clustered in one corner. Moss in the cracks of the bricks softened our steps.
I found a small garden spade on the porch, and poked around with it a little in the soft dirt between
two bushes. Then Muke took the tool and dug a little more energetically.
“Wait! Djew hear that?” He handed me the shovel and bent down to feel around in the dark hole.
Right there, holding the shovel, him with his back to me, was when I would have brained him and left
him to his fate if I thought he’d screwed Mary. But I was glad I didn’t have to do it. Mary never turned
tricks. She’d give it away, and probably had at some point to that coon-ass dishwasher Stebo. But
apparently not to Muke. I had put my man Muke to the test, and because he passed, there was no
reason for me to not trust Mary.
So this had become a hoot. Maybe we would find a box of money. When he thought he found
something, my heart raced for a moment.
Just then the light went on in the curtained window to our right. I pressed my hand on Muke’s back
and hissed.
He looked up. “Shi-i-i-it,” he breathed.
Muke raised himself quickly and silently, while I lay the shovel on the ground. I pushed some dirt
back in the hole with my foot. We tip-toed out and ran away laughing like seventh-graders.
I had to stop to breathe. “What did you find?”
“What?”
“In the hole,” I gasped.
He shook his head. “Dunno. Piece of tile.”
I had to laugh. “I think we better call it a night.” Since I had no treasure, and damn little
besides, Muke bought a bottle of cheap, sweet wine and we drank it. Then he bought another.
In a pukey-smelling dive on St. Ann he said, “I want you to know, I never touched Mary.”
That’s when I knew that he had done just that. He had sensed my suspicion before, and then
sensed that I’d been convinced of his innocence. The beach boy had fooled me. But then he’d fooled
himself. And me without a shovel in my hand. Now I had to keep him with me a while longer. I smiled
my least wolfy smile. “I know you didn’t, or you’d be itching by now.”
Muke chuckled jovially. Then I knew that he not only knew about herpes, he thought he knew more
about it than I did. And he thought he knew that Mary didn’t have the fungus.
“Hey,” I said. “You’ve been buying all the drinks. Let me do something for you.”
“Okay, bro.”
“Here.” I held out a yellow tablet. “This will mellow you nicely.”
“It’s not a downer, is it? I can’t handle those at all.”
Oh please, step into my left hook. “Nah, it’s synthetic THC. Like trippy grass.”
Muke took it out of my palm. “What about you?”
I held up another tablet, popped it in my mouth and took a big swallow of beer. Palmed the pill, of
course.
Muke laughed merrily at my derring-do, and took the pill. Down the hatch with Phil’s Thorazine. One
of these takes Phil from ready to jump off a building to, can’t get out of his chair. I’d hate to see what it’
s going to do to the Sundance Kid, here, especially aided by beer and wine.
When we finished our beers, I steered Muke outside. “Look here. I’ve got something else. A special
treat.” We staggered to Bourbon Street, down to a special bar, where a trio of trannys took my boy
into the restroom. He was looking at me laughing as they led him away, all chiffon and pink lipstick and
female hormone shots. I heard some whooping from in there.
I had to leave. I’d hate to see what happened when the Thorazine kicked in. Waking up face down
in the toilet of a French Quarter gay bar at nine in the morning, might be the best he could hope for.
Sometimes I’m deliberately brilliant.
JAXON SQUARE
by Webster Street
by Webster Street
