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They got on an access ramp that took them up onto State 288 and headed toward the tall other worldly towers of downtown. The Lincoln banked through the turns of the interchange southeast of the center of the city and glided over Chinatown as they cruised along State 59 going north. To their left the skyline of downtown changed, turning on its axis as they streamed past it, crossing over Buffalo Bayou and onto the Eastex Freeway before they plummeted down into the darkness of the Fifth Ward, down to Jensen Drive.
The Fifth Ward was a place with a past. It was all past. There was nothing else left. Along Lyons Avenue and Jensen Drive memories are about all that remain, kept alive by a few who still remember those sweet times in the ward, back when the streets were crowded with churches, stores, barbershops, and homes, theaters, hotels, and night clubs. The times when almost everybody had a job, the streetcars ran, and Saturday Night got its name. Summer suppers in the dining rooms of the Pullman or Lyons Hotel, a good table by the opened windows looking out on the evening streets. Nighttime jumping at the Up to Date Dance Hall or the fabulous Club Matinee (with dice in the back) where Cab Calloway and the Duke played when they came to town, attracting the high rolling whites from the other side of the Southern Pacific. Movies at the Roxy and the Deluxe.
All gone.
This part of the ward was mean now. Sullen poverty and hope lessness were lovers here, coupling among the winos under the freeway, in the boarded up bars, in the gutted hotels where ghosts crouched in musky garbage, slipping needles in their flaccid veins, in rancid little rooms with pink shaded lamps where succubi transcended dreams and spread their dark thighs in grim reality. It was the end of the line. You couldn’t go any farther down. It couldn’t be worse.
“There’s a place on the right down here,” Ellis said. “Rita’s Little Can-Can. Our man has a woman who works there. It’s the blue neon.”
The Lincoln was crawling, almost there, pulling over against the boarded-up storefronts. Before they got to Rita’s, three or four girls moved like a swarming shadow from the sidewalk and stepped in front of the car, banging on the windows.
“Heyl Hey! Ooo-weeee! Looka this ca’! Honey! Honey! Letcho winda down!”
A girl moved into the headlights and pulled up her skirt. She backed away, showing what she had. A girl at Ellis’ window was banging on it with a key.
“Hey! Hey! Honey!”
Ellis rolled down his window.
The girl wore chalky lavender lip gloss and for some reason smelled like kerosene. She wore a shiny red dress with spaghetti straps. Her nipples punched against the water thin material. She stuck her head in the window.
“Heyl Ooo-weeee! White boy! You boys wanna Oreo? Zis you ca’, white boy? Nigga got a suit on too! Yall wanna Oreo job? You not gonna fine nothin’ else like it.”
“No, no,” Ellis said. “We’re looking for somebody.”
“Who?” The girl popped open her eyes. “Who! Who-who-who!”
“I got to put the window up,” Ellis said. He pushed the button. “Heyl” the girl said. “Who-who?”
“Debbie!” Ellis said in frustration.
“She gone,” the girl shouted.
“What?”
“She gone!”
“Where? When?”
The girl in front of the headlights had put her skirt down and pulled open her blouse. She waggled her shoulders.
“I’m going on,” the driver said. “Shit.”
A couple of the girls had begun bouncing the rear of the car, pushing up and down on the trunk.
Suddenly the back door behind the driver opened and a girl tried to get inside. The driver whirled around and shoved her out so hard she reeled backward and skidded across the pavement as he slammed the door, rocking the car. He punched the automatic lock. The girls fell away from the car, screaming and screeching like harpies, then moved back in, kicking the fenders, yelling “Mutha fucka! Mutha fucka!” in a madness of atonal falsettos. The driver gunned the car.
“Hold it, goddamnit, you’ll kill her,” Ellis yelled. The girl in the red dress had half her body in the window and let out a single bloodcurdling scream that made the driver flinch and slam on the brakes. The harpies came after them, tight dresses pulled up so they could run, teetering on spike heels.
“Lemme ina ca’!” the girl in the red dress screeched, extracting her head from the window.
Ellis pushed open the door, and she dove in over him as the driver gunned the Lincoln and pulled away from the screaming swarm.
Ellis pushed the girl across onto the seat and jerked her up straight between them like a doll.
“She-it! You crazy fuckas,” she said. She tried to pull her skimpy dress down from where it had bunched up around her hips, but she couldn’t. She put her plastic purse in her lap. “Whatta you guys wont?” The driver had gotten as close to his door as he could and she was looking at him, big-eyed, and smelling of kerosene and something that reminded him of toilet bowls.
“I told you,” Ellis said. “Debbie.”
“Debbie!” The girl snorted. “What about me? I’m hea!”
“Look,” Ellis said. “How much you charge?”
“Fo’ what?”
“Anything.”
“Both? Oreo type?”
“Shit!” Ellis said. “Look, we don’t want sex. We want to talk with Debbie, and we’ll pay you to tell us where she is.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“Lemme see it.”
Ellis dug into his wallet and handed her the money.
“You know how many Debbies they be aroun’ hea?” she said. “Sheit!”
“You said you knew her,” Ellis said.
“Hey, I jus’ wanna ride in this fancy ca’. I neva been in nothin’ like
this.” She looked around grinning, thinking they were going to like the joke.
The driver whipped the car over to the curb, and Ellis opened the door, grabbing the girl by the arm.
“Hey! Hey! Which one? Which one? I knows ‘em all. All of ‘em.”
“This one works at Rita’s. Real skinny.”
“No tits?”
“Right.”
“Got a ruby in her nose?”
“Right.”
“Less go on,” the girl said. •
Ellis closed the door, and the driver moved the Lincoln back into the street. They rode a block, the girl moving some of the knobs on the dashboard, turning on the stereo, fiddling with the stations.
Ellis watched her a minute and then said softly, a cruel edge to his voice, “You’d better hump, honey.”
“You ain’t gonna talk with her.”
“Why?”
“She fuckin’ day-id!”
The driver snapped his head around at Ellis.
“What happened to her?” Ellis was incredulous.
“Cansa.”
“Cancer?”
“Yeahhhh. Ina wound.”
“Her wound?” the driver said. “Her wound?”
“Wound! Wound!” the girl shouted, hitting her stomach.
“Womb,” Ellis said.
“Jesus.” The driver rolled his head and looked out the window.
“Okay, okay.” Ellis turned toward the girl. “When did this happen?”
“Lass nigh’. Ova ta Ben Taub. She had it long time. Fuckin’ up and down this street ‘swat did it. Place kill ya.” She shuddered.
“You know her boyfriend? Boney?”
“Maybe.”
Ellis went to his wallet again. “Another twenty-five. That’s all I’ve got”
“Lemme see it.”
Ellis handed it to her.
“Boney be livin’ with Debbie’s sista. He was. Maybe a coupla otha places.”
Ellis looked at her. Suddenly he grabbed her face in his big hand and jerked it around to him.
“We’ll be glad to pay you to help us find him, honey,” he said through a cool smile. “You find him, and we’ll add a hundred to what you’ve already got. But you mess us around, and we’ll sew your twat closed with steel wire. Understan’?”
She looked at him wall-eyed, her lips pooched out between his thumb and forefinger.
She nodded, not breathing. He gave her face a quick squeeze for emphasis and let go, flicking her head around forward again.
Sobered a little, not quite so saucy, the girl took them back down Jensen, farther down into the belly of the beast, down into the place called Pearl Harbor west of Gregg where the devastation of decay was vengeful. On Green Street, a few blocks from an expressway interchange, they stopped at a lonely little stucco house. The vacant lots on both sides of the house were garbage dumps. One side, seemingly designated as a bottle boneyard, glittered like mounds of diamonds in the blue light of the expressway.
The girl got out of the car and teetered over to the house, her spike heels giving her false footing among the garbage. The door was open, and its rusty screen was folded down at an angle like a tent flap. A pale light from a television flickered off the walls and somebody came to the door. They talked for a while, and then the girl came teetering back through the garbage.
“We gotta go ta Worms,” she said. Ellis put her in the front seat between them again.
They took a back way, passing under the shadow of the columns that held Interstate 10 above the sad reality, past haunted houses and vacant lots and more mounds of smoldering garbage, old refrigerators, car tires, barking dogs, distant radios.
It was a duplex on Worms. Two black brothers sat on the fenders of an old Plymouth parked in front. Hangin’ out. Ellis let the girl out and stood outside the Lincoln while she approached them, teetering, her ass sticking out like she had something wedged in it. She talked to them. One of them laughed. One of them said something about titties. Ellis saw her motion toward them, saw their eye whites flash in his direction. She came back.
“We gotta go ta Mystic,” she said. She was smelling sweaty now, the night heat, the tension. She had grown bad tempered. She had to tell them how to get there. Almost to Denver Harbor, almost to Lockwood, they turned left off Lyons.
An old man sat on a car seat that had been dragged under a chinaberry near a corner of the house. He was drinking jug wine. A car with the back door open sat a few yards from him and the radio was going. Ellis could barely make out the prone forms of a couple lying down in the seat. He saw something white. They didn’t bother to move when the girl got out. She talked to the old man while Ellis listened to the couple grunting. She nodded, listened, nodded again. She came back around and got into the car.
“We gotta go ta New Orleans. Not the one’s hea. The end’s down ta Gregg.”
The driver swore, and she shot him the finger as she crawled in beside him. She wasn’t enjoying it either.
They were back close to Pearl Harbor now, and the smoky stench of the garbage fires seeped through the air conditioner. They passed a washeteria, an opened doorway with music coming from the inside, a voodoo-hoodoo shop. The street was devastated. They turned right on Gregg, then left on New Orleans.
“Slow up,” she said. She was leaning forward, peering through the windshield as the Lincoln crept along the dark street. “I cain’t recall,” she said huskily, almost to herself. “Go on down, almos’ ta De Chaumes.”
The Lincoln hit a chug hole, and the driver swore under his breath again.
“Hea,” she said.
“Which one?” Ellis leaned forward.
She pointed to a rotting frame house that sat on blocks. There was a little porch with a railing. An oil drum lay on its side in the front yard beside a tricycle with two wheels.
“He be in thea,” she said. “That old fucka back ona ca’ seat say he got a gun.”
They parked across the street and down one house. Both men got out of the car, got the girl out, and locked it. They waited until their eyes were used to the dark and then crossed over. They stopped in the deeper shadow of a mimosa and decided how they were going to do it. Both of them were sweating. Neither one of them felt like they knew what they were doing.
The driver crouched as low as a big man can get and headed between the houses, disappearing in the clutter of junk in the back yard. Ellis gave him a minute and approached the porch. He could hear the television, could see its pale light flickering across the linoleum floor. He waited to see if he could make out if there was anyone in a position to see him if he approached the door. There wasn’t, and he moved up the steps, putting cautious pressure on each board, afraid it would cave in or flip up and make a noise that would give him away. He eased across the wood floor of the porch to the screen door. He stood back from the door a little. Listened. Knight Rider. The sound of a car roaring at high speed, a robot voice talking.
“Boney.” His voice was not loud. He wasn’t sure anyone had heard him. “Boney, my man.” He made sure his voice had the black inflections. “Boney,” he said, and reached out and jerked open the screen door with his extended arm.
The shot sounded like an explosion, and he saw the flash reflected off the glass of a picture hanging on the wall. A woman shrieked, a long sustained sound of hysteria, and he heard the man running, heard the back screen door slap open, and then the incredibly loud whump! By the time Ellis raced through the house, past the naked woman on the broken down sofa, and burst out the back door, Boney was on his hands and knees on the ground throwing up. His white jockey shorts glowed in the black night.
“Oh, goddamn!” the driver said. “Grover. Goddamn, I thought he’d shot you.”
“I’m all right. What happened?”
“I hit him with a board when he came out.” He was emptying out the gun.
Boney couldn’t stop throwing up. A dog barked frantically a few houses away. Yap, yap, yap. He wouldn’t stop.
“We’d better get the hell out of here,” the driver said. “Somebody’ll call the police. That sounded like a cannon.”
They got on either side of the sick man, grabbed his arms, and started dragging him around the side of the house. His legs wouldn’t work; they just trailed across the garbage. They could smell the vomit as they towed him through the dust across the street.
When they got to the car the girl was gone.