A nurse called from a New Orleans hospice and told Cosgrove that his father was dead. Congestive heart failure, a peaceful passing in his sleep. Cosgrove hadn’t spoken to the old man in half a decade, was surprised he lasted this long. He’d never taken care of someone’s funeral and there was no living family he could call, so he was clueless about what to do next. Too embarrassed to ask the nurse, Cosgrove took the city bus to the public library where he sat at one of the carrels and searched what to do when someone dies on the computer.
Next morning Cosgrove set out from Austin to New Orleans in his seventeen-year-old Corolla, a rattletrap jalopy with a cracked windshield and a sugar-ant infestation in the glove compartment. The back bumper was held together with duct tape, and ten miles east of Houston on I-10 Cosgrove heard grinding like rocks in a blender as the car lurched and shimmied. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the bumper rolling wildly in the road like a suicide by self-defenestration.
He drove on.
The day of his father’s burial was gloomy and windswept, scrummed with clouds like an armada of dreadnoughts. Styrofoam cups rollicked over the cemetery lawn, and tattered stick-flags snapped over the veterans’ graves. The wind kept blowing the purple drugstore chrysanthemums off the coffin, and Cosgrove gave chase among the mausoleums like a cat after a windup toy. Finally he picked up an egg-sized stone off the ground and weighed the flowers down.
When the minister asked for a eulogy, Cosgrove at first was speechless. During the sermon he’d kept waiting for a stranger to belatedly arrive. A lost cousin or forgotten acquaintance. But the folding chairs around the gravesite stayed empty.
Cosgrove got up from his chair and clenched his lips, looked down at his rented shoes. “He trusted in the Lord and kept his path straight,” he said. Something he’d heard a televangelist say the night before on the motel television. As soon as the words left him, he realized how falsely they rang. About his father, about himself. In reality his father’s path couldn’t have been more crooked, his rambling around the country like one of those wandering dotted lines they showed on movie maps. A paper trail of bad checks and attorney bills and court summonses.
That night Cosgrove walked from his motel to a bar in the French Quarter and matched three Siberian businessmen shot after shot of Basil Hayden’s Bourbon Whiskey. The last thing he remembered before his blackout was getting into an argument with one of the men about the World Cup, about which he knew nothing and didn’t give a fuck. He had someone in a headlock, and someone else had him in a headlock, and they lurched around the bar like some tangled monstrosity, knocking over tables and chairs.
End of memory.
Next morning Cosgrove woke with a blinding hangover. In a jail cell. Curled fetally on the floor.
Six or seven other miscreants shared the cell, hard-eyed men who looked like they’d been courting trouble since the day they were born. A few paced like caged animals, clutching the bars and howling declarations of innocence. Others sat with their backs against the cinder block wall, eyes shut, heads bowed like penitents.
One bulge-eyed man kept raving about “the famous lawyer Jim Diamond Brousard.” “You just call Jim Diamond Brousard,” he said. “Tell him that Ricky Hallowell is in trouble.”
Another man with a port-wine stain on his cheek had his pants pulled down around his ankles and was shitting without compunction in the corner toilet. He shot Cosgrove a beleaguered look and went about his business.
The police report read like a furloughed sailor’s escapades, a story he and his roofing buddies back home would have laughed about. Public intoxication, disorderly conduct, pissing on a jukebox, resisting arrest. He doubted only one part, that he was crying about his father when they shoved him into the back of the police car.
No, that didn’t sound like him at all.
The judge must have hated him on sight because he sentenced Cosgrove to two hundred hours of community service, a punishment insanely disproportionate to the crime. Cosgrove stayed in New Orleans because there wasn’t much waiting for him back in Austin save for a crappy roofing job, hell on earth during the summer. Some underwear and socks in an Econo Lodge drawer. His other sole possessions, a cache of childhood mementos and his birth certificate, were still in a safety deposit box in Miami, where he’d left them after a short, ill-fated stint—he’d gotten sun poisoning—as a barback in a South Beach hotel pool-bar.
He feared he was turning into a gypsy, like his father. Maybe in a new place he’d find a career, a woman, a life. He certainly hadn’t in Austin.
And his fortieth birthday, four months away in January, loomed before him like a storm front. Maybe the best way to weather the sea change was in New Orleans.
Cosgrove rented one side of a sherbet-colored double shotgun in Mid-City and got a job at a neighborhood sports bar shucking oysters. And three days a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, he showed up at eight in the morning for community service. With a dozen other offenders, deadbeat fathers and druggies and drunks, he waited outside the station in his Day-Glo vest and ragged jeans until a deputy carted them in a windowless white van to their duty for the day. Sometimes they worked in groups of three or four, cleaning graffiti with wire brushes and sandblasters in Jackson Square. Other days they worked en masse, picking up condoms and carnival beads with pointed sticks from the squalid banks of the Mississippi.
A month into his sentence, Cosgrove was dropped off in front of a derelict two-story Victorian with faded purple shutters and lopsided porch columns. It was late August and hot, sparrows keening in the gray-green oaks, bougainvilleas in moribund bloom. A bantam-bodied man with a small pinched face and a black ponytail hanging out the back of his camouflage baseball cap got out of the van with him. They stood on the sidewalk regarding the house.
“Good God Almighty,” the ponytailed man said. He had on a TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS T-shirt and frayed denim shorts two or three sizes too large, held up by a canvas belt with a gigantic gold and silver rodeo buckle engraved with the initials JHH.
The deputy, a gourd-shaped Dominican named Lemon, looked at the ponytailed man and then glanced down at his clipboard. “Hanson, is it?” he asked.
“John Henry Hanson,” the ponytailed man said. “Yessir.” He hung his thumbs from his canvas belt.
“What does it look like, Hanson?”
Hanson turned again and considered the sagging house. Paint was peeling off the clapboards in great leprous swatches and the front porch steps were spavined and weather-warped. Off to the side was a carport with a corrugated tin roof. No car, only buckets and paint cans and pallets of lumber, shovels and rakes and other gardening tools leaning against the walls.
“I’m no carpenter,” Hanson said.
“Man of your mental caliber can manage a little sanding and painting, I’m sure,” said Lemon. “You have any trouble with the hammer and nails, ask Cosgrove. He’ll tell you which pound which.”
Deputy Lemon got into the van and lurched away into the morning traffic. Hanson sidled up next to Cosgrove and watched the van turn down Magazine Street. Cosgrove, six foot two with a lumberjack beard, felt like a grizzly bear next to the little guy.
“Bet that son-bitch is on his way to fuck somebody’s wife,” Hanson said, gripping his belt buckle.
Up close the house looked even worse than from the street, beyond hope of repair. The front windows were cockeyed, many of the panes broken and covered with scraps of cardboard. Here and there the porch boards were missing, and from underneath the house the ammonia stink of animal piss wafted up as strong as poison.
Cosgrove and Hanson got to work with their scrapers. Lavender scabs of paint fell from the stanchions and motes of plaster swirled in the air. The only sounds for a while were the scratching of their tools, the rattle and groan of traffic on Napoleon. Ambulance and police sirens wailing in the distance.
When Hanson’s rhythm slowed, Cosgrove, feeling watched, glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, the man was looking at him askance.
Cosgrove asked him what he wanted.
“Not very friendly, are you?”
Other people, mostly women, had told him the same. “Why don’t you talk?” they asked. “Why don’t you listen?” Because he liked silence, he wanted to say. Because there was nothing he wanted to say and nothing he wanted to hear. At first they found his silence alluring, mistaking it for mystery, depth. But then they learned there was nothing behind it except indifference, maybe a low-grade depression.
“Just trying to work,” Cosgrove said. Already his white V-neck T-shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.
“Work. Shit. We’re a corporation now?”
Cosgrove hadn’t wanted to seem unfriendly, just quiet. The less conversation, the better. Some guys never stopped once you let them get started. This guy already seemed one of them.
“Why you here?” he asked Hanson.
“Forged autographs.”
“Who?”
“Presidents. They busted me for selling pictures with fake autographs on them in Jackson Square. Some tourist got his dick in a pretzel because I was selling signed photographs of George Washington. Went to the cops.”
“There’re no photos of George Washington.”
“Bullshit. How’d they have painted those pictures?”
They got back to work. After a while Hanson asked Cosgrove how he ended up here.
“Public drunkenness,” Cosgrove said.
Hanson shook his head and snorted incredulously. “In New Orleans?” he said. “That’s like cops going out to the cemetery and arrestin’ folks for being dead.”
The next few days of Cosgrove’s community service were much the same. In the morning Deputy Lemon dropped them off and left them to their business. In the late afternoon he returned and surveyed their work like a plantation dandy, touring the house with his hands clasped behind his back. Whether Cosgrove and Hanson put in two minutes or two hours of work, his reaction was always the same. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, “that’ll do.” Sometimes Lemon even gave them coupons. For laser tag, for free pancakes and car washes, for complimentary admission into a Bourbon Street strip club called Love Acts.
Lemon seemed to give even less of a shit than other cops in New Orleans, which Cosgrove had thought impossible.
One afternoon, about two weeks into his community service, Cosgrove finally caught glimpse of the widow. In a rose-colored terrycloth robe hanging askew from her bony shoulders she watched him querulously through the kitchen window, her snowy hair as bed-headed as a child’s.
Cosgrove, digging up a dead rosebush, leaned against his shovel. Raised his hand, half smiled.
The window blind dropped as swiftly as a guillotine blade.
That afternoon as they took a break Hanson asked Cosgrove if he knew why they were fixing the old widow’s place.
Cosgrove grunted, didn’t give a shit.
“Lady’s going to die any day now and she owes county taxes all the way back to 1982,” Hanson said. He took off his cap, stroked his ponytail. “Soon as she kicks it, state’s taking everything. Down to the lightbulbs and hinges and every aspect.”
“So?”
“So? So, her family comes from French pirates. Lafitte. Exiles from the Caribbean. Been here all the way back. Practically invented crime in this city. Practically invented fuckin’.”
Sitting on the porch step chewing on a tuna fish sandwich, Cosgrove wondered if there was a moment in the day when shit wasn’t flying out of Hanson’s mouth. He stuffed the remaining half of his sandwich back into the brown paper sack and asked Hanson how he knew all of this.
“Did a little snooping around,” Hanson said. “Came out here on my day off with a tie on and knocked on some neighbors’ doors. Told them I was from the Census Bureau. This old lady, turns out she’s a real piece of shit. Always starting hell with the neighbors. Kicking them off her lawn during Mardi Gras. Every goddamn aspect.”
Cosgrove wondered what kind of person would believe this man had anything to do with the Census Bureau. Someone blind and deaf, he suspected. Someone crazy. Someone brain-damaged.
But he was intrigued despite himself. “I don’t see how it should make one bit of difference to us.”
Hanson smiled, crooked but clean teeth. “You seem like a man who can keep a secret,” he said.
“You know nothing about me.”
“I know enough. You’re not a rat. You’ve seen me fucking around here all day and haven’t said anything to Lemon. That counts for something in my book. Money, I’m guessing you don’t have much. Otherwise a lawyer with a state school diploma would’ve gotten you off.”
“That’s a whole lot of assuming.”
“Am I wrong?”
“What’re you on about?”
“Okay, what am I on about. The old lady, I bet she’s got some treasure in that house.”