“Schmuckolas,” Norman says when he gets to Central Lockup to bail out his boys. “I got you some pastrami from the deli.”
Mario gives the old fox a hug.
“Better ask him the price of those sandwiches before you go hugging,” Hawk says.
Harold drives the van through sequences of busted neighborhoods, past a drunk rent-a-cop making out with a girl in a polka-dotted miniskirt and bums sleeping in car skeletons with Glad bags for doorways. Outside a liquor market a man kicks down a bicycle and stomps on it and walks into the store.
“Nice place,” Hawk says.
“Any place is a nice place as long as you got a bus ticket out of there,” Mikey says.
The gang hits Bourbon Street where crowds swirl around rose carts and vendors with beer holders and fluorescent shoelaces and red styrofoam hands with two-foot index fingers printed with #1. A shirtless kid tap-dances up, “Hey big guy, how about a tip?”
“Stay in school,” Hawk says, and slips the kid a folded buck.
“The city has its hands out,” Mario says, passing winos among a row of fortune-tellers, “and there’s palm readers everywhere.”
When Hawk turns, the rest of the gang’s gone except Mikey. Bright red po’boy signs flash. Music pours from clubs. Purples, reds, yellows glow against buildings. Police carts crunch oyster shells. With three bands playing at once, Hawk feels acoustically pinballed, and ducks into a bar with a red glow behind the bottles and a banner saying OPEN MIKE VARIETY NIGHT. Him and Mikey slug a tequila and Hawk feels the night taking aim toward the next salting. A singer named Tellina starts in a cappella and it’s clear she’s no crooner doing table work. When she holds a note sixty seconds, someone screams, “Dial EMS.” Mikey snaps his fingers. The woman at the next table has glorious styled hair and an open sore from her lip to her chin and only one front tooth, and a gamey arm that flops about at her side like a rubber attachment. Hawk wonders what diseases she has. She’s not old and once was beautiful.
“Would you like a bag?” an Indian cashier says in a Fast Stop, handing them oyster-flavored potato chips and a bottle of Thunder bird. “Or are you going for instant gratification?”
Wind blows straight off the water and slicks the boards. The parking lot behind them has been sealed and is jammed with network vans and charter buses. Bluish letters from the Canal Place Hotel dissolve and reform on the water. They see Mario and join him on a bench overlooking the toxic river.
“Have an oyster chip,” Mikey says.
“It’ll put ink in your pen,” Hawk says.
“But I don’t have anyone to write to,” Mario says.
Great shafts of light sweep the belly of the chalky sky, which hangs like firesmoke in an indigo sky. The clock on the three-pronged cathedral reads 4:00 A.M. Hawk feels the night coming on, the wind amplified so it rushes over itself and shuffles palm fronds. A man dressed as Colonel Sanders walks around signing autographs with a woman in a star-spangled suit selling star-spangled balloons. Lumbering delegates photograph each other between a cardboard elephant with Styrofoam tusks and a papier-mâché dummy of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat, then hand dollar bills to a seated man in dark glasses. A phalanx of cops on horseback appears, antennae out of back pockets like tails. In the spaces between police barriers there are cameras and coils of wire and mounted floodlights and a man barking orders through a megaphone.
QUIET PLEASE. STAND BACK. SECURITY. CLEAR FOR THE CAMERAS.
At the word “cameras” there’s a collective sigh. Hawk finds himself mashed against a barricade, and he looks down a line of eager faces, crews cut to squarish skulls, women with Nancy hairdos. Tots perch on their parents’ shoulders waving flags.
“We’re here from Saint Louis,” a woman tells Hawk, pressed up against him. Her husband nods.
“What are they shooting?”
“It’s Good Morning America live,” says her husband.
Just at that moment a man exits the trailer.
CAMERAS READY. READY TO ROLL. ROLLING.
The barriers strain as the crowd surges forward to see a figure in a sharp white linen suit moving in the center of a ring of lights. The man gives a papal-like wave and smiles to well-wishers.
“Oh, look,” someone gasps a foot from Hawk’s cabbage ear. “Look, there he is! IT’S BRYANT GUMBEL.”