IT WAS NINETY-EIGHT DEGREES in the shade in New Orleans, a record-breaking day in August.
Nora Jane Whittington sat in a small apartment several blocks from Jody’s Bar and went over her alternatives.
“No two ways about it,” she said to herself, shaking out her black curls, “if Sandy wants my ass in San Jose, I’m taking it to San Jose. But I’ve got to get some cash.”
Nora Jane was nineteen years old, a self-taught anarchist and a quick-change artist. She owned six Dynel wigs in different hair colors, a makeup kit she stole from Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre while working as a volunteer stagehand, and a small but versatile wardrobe. She could turn her graceful body into any character she saw in a movie or on TV. Her specialties were boyish young lesbians, boyish young nuns, and a variety of lady tourists.
Nora Jane could also do wonderful tricks with her voice, which had a range of almost two octaves. She was the despair of the sisters at the Academy of the Most Holy Name of Jesus when she quit the choir saying her chores at home didn’t allow her to stay after school to practice.
The sisters made special novenas for the bright, lonely child whose father died at the beginning of the Vietnam War and whose pretty alcoholic mother wept and prayed when they called upon her begging her to either put away the bottle and make a decent home for Nora Jane or allow them to put her in a Catholic boarding school.
Nora Jane didn’t want a decent home. What she wanted was a steady boyfriend, and the summer she graduated from high school she met Sandy. Nora Jane had a job selling records at The Mushroom Cloud, a record shop near the Tulane campus where rich kids came to spend their parents’ money on phonograph records and jewelry made in the shape of coke spoons and marijuana leaves. “The Cloud” was a nice place, up a flight of narrow stairs from Freret Street. Nora Jane felt important, helping customers decide what records to buy.
The day Sandy came into her life she was wearing a yellow cotton dress and her hair was curling around her face from the humidity.
Sandy walked into the shop and stood for a long time reading the backs of jazz albums. He was fresh out of a Texas reform school with $500.00 in the bank and a new lease on life. He was a handsome boy with green eyes as opaque and unfathomable as a salt lake. When he smiled down at Nora Jane over a picture of Rahshaan Roland Kirk as The Five Thousand Pound Man, she dreamed of Robert Redford as The Sundance Kid.
“I’m going to dedicate a book of poems to this man’s memory,” Sandy said. “I’m going to call the book Dark Mondays. Did you know that Rahshaan Kirk died last year?”
“I don’t know much about him. I haven’t been working here long,” Nora Jane said. “Are you really a writer?”
“I’m really a land surveyor, but I write poems and stories at night. In the school I went to in Texas a poet used to come and teach my English class once a month. He said the most important writing gets done in your head while you think you’re doing something else. Sometimes I write in the fields while I’m working. I sing the poems I’m writing to myself like work songs. Then at night I write them down. You really ought to listen to this album. Rahshaan Kirk is almost as good as Coltrane. A boy I went to school with is his cousin.”
“I guess I have a lot to learn about different kinds of music,” Nora Jane answered, embarrassed.
“I’m new in town,” Sandy said, after they had talked for a while, “and I don’t know many people here yet. How about going with me to a political rally this afternoon. I read in the paper that The Alliance for Good Government is having a free picnic in Audubon Park. I like to find out what’s going on in politics when I get to a new town.”
“I don’t know if I should,” Nora Jane said, trying not to smile.
“It’s all right,” Sandy told her. “I’m really a nice guy. You’ll be safe with me. It isn’t far from here and we have to walk anyway because I don’t have a car, so if you don’t like it you can just walk away. If you’ll go I’ll wait for you after work.”
“I guess I should go,” Nora Jane said. “I need to know what’s going on in politics myself.”
When Nora Jane was through for the day they walked to Audubon Park and ate free fried chicken and listened to the Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives debate the Republican candidate over the ERA and the canal treaties.
It was still light when they walked back through the park in the direction of Sandy’s apartment. Nora Jane was telling Sandy the story of her life. She had just gotten to the sad part where her father died when he stopped her and put his hands around her waist.
“Wait just a minute,” he said, and he walked over to the roots of an enormous old live-oak tree and began to dig a hole with the heel of his boot. When he had dug down about six inches in the hard-packed brown soil he took out all the change he had in his pockets, wrapped it in a dollar bill and buried it in the hole. He packed the dirt back down with his hands and looked up at her.
“Remember this spot,” he said, “you might need this some day.”
Many hours later Nora Jane reached out and touched his arm where he stood leaning into the window frame watching the moon in the cloudy sky.
“Do you want to stay here for a while?” he asked, without looking at her.
“I want to stay here for a long time,” she answered, taking a chance.
So she stayed for fourteen months.
Sandy taught her how to listen to jazz, how to bring a kite down without tearing it, how to watch the sun go down on the Mississippi River, how to make macrame plant holders out of kite string, and how to steal things.
Stealing small things from elegant uptown gift shops was as easy as walking down a tree-lined street. After all, Sandy assured her, their insurance was covering it. Pulling off robberies was another thing. Nora Jane drove the borrowed getaway car three times while Sandy cleaned out a drugstore and two beauty parlors in remote parts of Jefferson Parish. The last of these jobs supplied her with the wigs. Sandy picked them up for her on his way out.
“I’m heading for the west coast,” he told her, when the beauty parlor job turned out to be successful beyond his wildest dreams, netting them $723.00. He had lucked into a payroll.
“I’ll send for you as soon as I get settled,” he said, and he lifted her over his head like a flower and carried her to the small iron bed and made love to her while the afternoon sun and then the moonlight poured in the low windows of the attic apartment.
Robbing a neighborhood bar in uptown New Orleans in broad daylight all by herself was another thing entirely. Nora Jane thought that up for herself. It was the plan she settled upon as the quickest way to get to California. She planned it for weeks, casing the bar at different times of the day and night in several disguises, and even dropping by one Saturday afternoon pretending to be collecting money to help the Crippled Children’s Hospital. She collected almost ten dollars.
Nora Jane had never been out of the state of Louisiana, but once she settled on a plan of action she was certain all she needed was a little luck and she was as good as wading in the Pacific Ocean. One evening’s work and her hands were back in Sandy’s hair.
She crossed herself and prayed for divine intervention. After all, she told herself, robbing an old guy who sold whiskey and laid bets on athletic events was part of an anarchist’s work. Nora Jane didn’t like old guys much anyway. They were all wrinkled where the muscles ought to be and they were so sad.
She took the heavy stage pistol out of its hiding place under the sink and inspected it. She practiced looking tough for a few minutes and then replaced the gun in its wrapper and sat down at the card table to go over her plans.
Nora Jane had a methodical streak and liked to take care of details.
“The first nigger that comes in here attempting a robbery is going to be in the wrong place,” Jody laughed, smiling at Judge Crozier and handing him a fresh bourbon and Coke across the bar.
“Yes, sir, that nigger is gonna be in the wrong place.” Jody fingered the blackjack that lay in its purple velvet sack on a small shelf below the antiquated cash register and warmed into his favorite subject, his interest in local crime fueled by a report in the Times-Picayune of a holdup in a neighborhood Tote-Sum store.
The black bandits had made the customers lie on the floor, cleaned out the cash register, and helped themselves to a cherry Icee on the way out. The newspaper carried a photograph of the Icee machine.
The judge popped open his third sack of Bar-B-Que potato chips and looked thoughtful. The other customers waited politely to see what he had to say for himself this morning concerning law and order.
“Now, Jody, you don’t know how a man will act in an emergency until that emergency transpires,” the judge began, wiping his hands on his worn seersucker pants. “That’s a fact and worthy of all good men to be accepted. Your wife could be in here helping tend bar. Your tables could be full of innocent customers watching a ball game. You might be busy talking to someone like that sweet little girl who came in last Saturday collecting for the Crippled Children’s Hospital. First thing you know, gun in your back, knife at your throat. It has nothing at all to do with being brave.” The judge polished off his drink and turned to look out the door to where the poll was going on.
Jody’s Bar didn’t cater to just anyone that happened to drop by to get a drink or lay a bet. It was the oldest neighborhood bar in the Irish Channel section of New Orleans, and its regular customers included second- and third-generation drinkers from many walks of life. Descendants of Creole blue bloods mingled easily with house painters and deliverymen stopping by for a quick one on their route.
Jody ran a notoriously tight ship. No one but Jody himself had ever answered the telephone that sat beneath a framed copy of The Auburn Creed, and no woman, no matter what her tale of woe, had ever managed to get him to call a man to the phone.
“Not here,” he would answer curtly, “haven’t seen him.” And Jody would hang up without offering to take a message. If a woman wanted a man at Jody’s she had to come look for him in person.
There was an air of anticipation around Jody’s this Saturday morning. All eight of the stools were filled. The excitement was due to the poll.
Outside of Jody’s, seated at a small card table underneath a green-and-white-striped awning, Wesley Labouisse was proceeding with the poll in a businesslike manner. Every male passerby was interviewed in turn and his ballot folded into quarters and deposited in the Mason jar with a pink ribbon from an old Valentine’s box wrapped loosely around it.
“Just mark it yes or no. Whatever advice you would give your closest friend if he came to you and told you he was thinking of getting married.” Wesley was talking to a fourteen-year-old boy straddling a ten-speed bike.
“Take all the time you need to make up your mind. Think about your mother and father. Think about what it’s like to have a woman tell you when to come home every night and when to get up in the morning and when to take a bath and when to talk and when to shut up. Think about what it’s like to give your money to a woman from now till the day you die. Then just write down your honest feelings about whether a perfectly happy man ought to go out and get himself married.”
Wesley was in a good mood. He had thought up the poll himself and had side bets laid all the way from The New Orleans Country Club to the Plaquemines Parish sheriff ’s office.
There was a big sign tacked up over the card table declaring THIS POLL IS BEING CONDUCTED WITHOUT REGARD TO SEX OR PREVIOUS CONDITION OF SERVITUDE. Wesley had made the sign himself and thought it was hilarious. He was well known in New Orleans society as the author of Boston Club Mardi Gras skits.
The leading man in the drama of the poll, Prescott Hamilton IV, was leaning into Jody’s pinball machine with the dedication of a ballet dancer winding up The Firebird. He was twelve games ahead and his brand-new, navy blue wedding suit hung in its plastic see-through wrapper on the edge of the machine swaying in rhythm as Prescott nudged the laws of pinball machines gently in his favor. He was a lucky gambler and an ace pinball-machine player. He was a general favorite at Jody’s, where the less aristocratic customers loved him for his gentle ways and his notoriously hollow leg.
Prescott wasn’t pretending to be more interested in the outcome of the pinball-machine game than in the outcome of the poll that was deciding his matrimonial future. He was genuinely more interested in the pinball machine. Prescott had great powers of concentration and was a man who lived in the present.
Prescott didn’t really care whether he married Emily Anne Hughes or not. He and Emily Anne had been getting along fine for years without getting married, and he didn’t see what difference his moving into Emily Anne’s house at this late date was going to make in the history of the world.
Besides he wasn’t certain how his Labradors would adjust to her backyard. Emily Anne’s house was nice, but the yard was full of little fences and lacked a shade tree.
Nonetheless, Prescott was a man of his word, and if the poll came out in favor of marriage they would be married as soon as he could change into his suit and find an Episcopal minister, unless Emily Anne would be reasonable and settle for the judge.
Prescott was forty-eight years old. The wild blood of his pioneer ancestors had slowed down in Prescott. Even his smile took a long time to develop, feeling out the terrain, then opening up like a child’s.
“Crime wave, crime wave, that’s all I hear around this place anymore,” the judge muttered, tapping his cigar on the edge of the bar and staring straight at the rack of potato chips. “Let’s talk about something else for a change.”
“Judge, you ought to get Jody to take you back to the ladies’ room and show you the job Claiborne did of patching the window so kids on the street can’t see into the ladies’,” one of the regulars said. Two or three guys laughed, holding their stomachs.
“Claiborne owed Jody sixty bucks on his tab and the window was broken out in the ladies’ room so Jody’s old lady talked him into letting Claiborne fix the window to pay back part of the money he owes. After all, Claiborne is supposed to be a carpenter.” Everyone started laughing again.
“Well, Claiborne showed up about six sheets in the wind last Wednesday while Jody was out jogging in the park and he went to work. You wouldn’t believe what he did. He boarded up the window. He didn’t feel like going out for a windowpane, so he just boarded up the window with scrap lumber.”
“I’ll have to see that as soon as it calms down around here,” the judge said, and he turned to watch Prescott, who was staring passionately into the lighted TILT sign on the pinball machine.
“What’s wrong, Prescott,” he said, “you losing your touch?”
“Could be, Judge,” Prescott answered, slipping another quarter into the slot.
The late afternoon sun shone in the windows of the bare apartment. Nora Jane had dumped most of her possessions into a container for The Volunteers of America. She had even burned Sandy’s letters. If she was caught there was no sense in involving him.
If she was caught what could they do to her, a young girl, a first offender, the daughter of a hero? The sisters would come to her rescue. Nora Jane had carefully been attending early morning mass for several weeks.
She trembled with excitement and glanced at her watch. She shook her head and walked over to the mirror on the dresser. Nora Jane couldn’t decide if she was frightened or not. She looked deep into her eyes in the mirror trying to read the secrets of her mind, but Nora Jane was too much in love to even know her own secrets. She was inside a mystery deeper than the mass.
She inspected the reddish-blond wig with its cascades of silky Dynel falling around her shoulders and blinked her black eyelashes. To the wig and eyelashes she added blue eye shadow, peach rouge, and beige lipstick. Nora Jane looked awful.
“You look like a piece of shit,” she said to her reflection, adding another layer of lipstick. “Anyway, it’s time to go.”
On weekends six o’clock was the slow hour at Jody’s, when most of the customers went home to change for the evening.
Nora Jane walked down the two flights of stairs and out onto the sidewalk carrying the brown leather bag. Inside was her costume change and a bus ticket to San Francisco zippered into a side compartment. The gun was stuffed into one of the Red Cross shoes she had bought to wear with the short brown nun’s habit she had stolen from Dominican College. She hoped the short veil wasn’t getting wrinkled. Nora Jane was prissy about her appearance.
As she walked along in the August evening she dreamed of Sandy sitting on her bed playing his harmonica while she pretended to sleep. In the dream he was playing an old Bob Dylan love song, the sort of thing she liked to listen to before he upgraded her taste in music.
Earlier that afternoon Nora Jane had rolled a pair of shorts, an old shirt, and some sandals into a neat bundle and hidden it in the low-hanging branches of the oak tree where Sandy had planted her money.
A scrawny-looking black kid was dozing in the roots of the tree. He promised to keep an eye on her things.
“If I don’t come back by tomorrow afternoon you can have this stuff,” she told him. “The sandals were handmade in Brazil.”
“Thanks,” the black kid said. “I’ll watch it for you till then. You running away from home or what?”
“I’m going to rob a bank,” she confided.
The black kid giggled and shot her the old peace sign.
Wesley walked into the bar where Prescott, Jody, and the judge were all alone watching the evening news on television.
“Aren’t you getting tired of that goddamn poll,” Prescott said to him. “Emily Anne won’t even answer her phone. A joke’s a joke, Wesley. I better put on my suit and get on over there.”
“Not yet,” Wesley said. “The sun isn’t all the way down yet. Wait till we open the jar. You promised.” Prescott was drunk, but Wesley was drunker. Not that either of them ever showed their whiskey.
“I promised I wouldn’t get married unless you found one boy or man all day who thought it was an unqualified good idea to get married. I didn’t ever say I was interested in waiting around for the outcome of a vote. Come on and open up that jar before Emily Anne gets any madder.”
“What makes you think there is a single ballot in favor of you getting married?” Wesley asked.
“I don’t know if there is or there isn’t,” Prescott answered. “So go on and let the judge open that goddamn jar.”
“Look at him, Wesley,” Jody said delightedly. “He ain’t even signed the papers yet and he’s already acting like a married man. Already worried about getting home in time for dinner. If Miss Emily Anne Hughes wakes up in the morning wearing a ring from Prescott, I say she takes the cake. I say she’s gone and caught a whale on a ten-pound test line.”
“Open the jar,” Prescott demanded, while the others howled with laughter.
Nora Jane stepped into the bar, closed the door behind her, and turned the lock. She kept the pistol pointed at the four men who were clustered around the cash register.
“Please be quiet and put your hands over your heads before I kill one of you,” she said politely, waving the gun with one hand and reaching behind herself with the other to draw the window shade that said CLOSED in red letters.
Prescott and the judge raised their hands first, then Wesley.
“Do as you are told,” the judge said to Jody in his deep voice. “Jody, do what that woman tells you to do and do it this instant.” Jody added his hands to the six already pointing at the ceiling fan.
“Get in there,” Nora Jane directed, indicating the ladies’ room at the end of the bar. “Please hurry before you make me angry. I ran away from DePaul’s Hospital yesterday afternoon and I haven’t had my medication and I become angry very easily.”
The judge held the door open, and the four men crowded into the small bathroom.
“Face the window,” Nora Jane ordered, indicating Claiborne’s famous repair job. The astonished men obeyed silently as she closed the bathroom door and turned the skeleton key in its lock and dropped it on the floor under the bar.
“Please be very quiet so I won’t get worried and need to shoot through the door,” she said. “Be awfully quiet. I am an alcoholic and I need some of this whiskey. I need some whiskey in the worst way.”
Nora Jane changed into the nun’s habit, wiping the makeup off her face with a bar rag and stuffing the old clothes into the bag. Next she opened the cash register, removed all the bills without counting them, and dropped them into the bag. On second thought she added the pile of IOUs and walked back to the door of the ladies’ room.
“Please be a little quieter,” she said in a husky voice. “I’m getting very nervous.”
“Don’t worry, Miss. We are cooperating to the fullest extent,” the judge’s bench voice answered.
“That’s nice,” Nora Jane said. “That’s very nice.”
She pinned the little veil to her hair, picked up the bag, and walked out the door. She looked all around, but there was no one on the street but a couple of kids riding tricycles.
As she passed the card table she stopped, marked a ballot, folded it neatly, and dropped it into the Mason jar.
Then, like a woman in a dream, she walked on down the street, the rays of the setting sun making her a path all the way to the bus stop at the corner of Annunciation and Nashville Avenue.
Making her a path all the way to mountains and valleys and fields, to rivers and streams and oceans. To a boy who was like no other. To the source of all water.