Her unevenly recessed eyes were liquid with the warmth of her own sentiment. I had the feeling Mrs. Lujan had just taken up serious residence in the kingdom of the self-deluded and would be a long time in freeing herself from it.
I DROVE TO the rural slum on the bayou, just outside the city limits, where Monarch lived. A junker car was parked in the drive, but no one answered the door. His neighbor, an elderly black woman picking up trash from a drainage ditch, told me Monarch was in town.
“He’s working?” I said.
“His mother died. I ain’t sure what he’s doin’.”
“Died? I thought his mother was coming home from the hospital.”
“She had a heart attack two days ago. Monarch gone off wit’ his friends. They t’rowed all their beer cans in my li’l yard. Tell Monarch he ought to be ashamed of hisself, his mother not yet in the ground.”
“Ashamed why?”
She picked up a crushed beer can, threw it hard in her gunnysack, and didn’t reply.
I drove back to New Iberia and crossed the Teche on the drawbridge at Burke Street. The water was high on the green slope of the banks, the surface dimpled with rain, and black people were fishing with cane poles and cut bait from under the bridge. Then I turned down Railroad Avenue into New Iberia’s old brothel district, the one place in our town’s history where indeed the past had never become the past.
Chapter 22
JUST AS THE STREET-CORNER crack whores had supplanted their five-dollar antecedents in the cribs that had lined Railroad Avenue, Monarch Little, in his way, had kept the traditions of the red-light district alive by returning to the neighborhood as victim if not as purveyor.
It was still raining lightly when I pulled my truck under the overhang of the oak tree where Monarch used to deal dope. The weight set he had used to add inches to his arms and shoulders still sat on the hard-packed dirt apron under the tree, rusting, beaded with moisture. A kid who was nicknamed “Rag Nose” because he had burned out the inside of his head sniffing airplane glue was sitting on the backrest of a bench a few feet away, looking innocuously up and down the street, as though I were not there.
He was well over six feet tall, with a head that looked like an elongated coconut. His feet were sockless and stuffed in unlaced high-top tennis shoes.
“Seen Monarch around?” I said.
“No, suh, ain’t seen him.” He tapped his feet up and down on the bench, flexing a toothpick in his mouth, furrowing and unfurrowing his brow as though hundreds of thoughts were flying through his mind.
“Still going to your meetings?” I said.
“Yes, suh. All the time. I’m taking off for one in a few minutes.” He looked at his wrist, then realized he wasn’t wearing a watch.
“I need to find Monarch,” I said.
He scratched his head. “Yeah, Monarch be out at his house maybe, or working, or driving round wit’ his friends.”
“Your real name is Walter, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes it is,” he replied, and picked at a scab on the back of one hand.
“I don’t work Vice, Walter. I’m not here to hurt Monarch. I’d like to see him stay out of trouble. But I can’t do that if his friends lie to me.”
The soles of Walter’s tennis shoes tapped on the bench again. He looked up into the tree, then at the mist blowing across the roofs of the houses, then at the wet glaze on the little white grocery store that tried to survive in a neighborhood long ago given over to dealers and whores and kids like Walter who had permanently fried their grits. I saw Walter teeter on the edges of honesty and trust, then the moment faded and he looked down at his shoes. “Ain’t seen him,” he said.
But events were not on Walter’s side. A black woman whose street name was Sno’ball pulled a child’s wagon from around the far side of the grocery store. The wagon was loaded with twenty-pound sacks of crushed ice.
“See you, Mr. Dave,” Walter said, and was gone like a shot.
Sno’ball, so named because she was fat, coal-black, and wore white dresses, towed the wagon down the street toward a tan stucco house whose yard was strewn with garbage. The front porch of the house was wide and breezy and offered shade during the hottest hours of the day, but it was also cluttered with broken wood furniture, a rain-soaked couch, and a mattress that had been blackened by fire.
I caught up with Sno’ball. “Early for a beer party,” I said.
“Refrigerator is burnt out. Bunch of steaks in there gonna spoil,” she said.
“Going to invite me to your cookout?” I said.
She smiled and continued pulling the wagon up the sidewalk, tugging it across the slabs that were pitched and broken by oak roots that grew from a tree in the yard of the stucco house. Sno’ball’s smile and good disposition did not go with the type of work she did. She was a tar mule for Herman Stanga, a black piece of shit who should have been hosed off the bowl long ago. Why she worked for Herman was anyone’s guess.
“I need to give Monarch Little some information, ’Ball,” I said.
“I’ll tell him. I mean, if I see him.”
“Want me to help you carry the ice inside?”
“I got it.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. I hefted up two bags, wet and cold under each arm, and started up the walk toward the porch.
“Mr. Dave, we got it under control here,” she said.
I ignored her and walked up the stone steps, crossed the porch, and entered the house. Even though the back and front doors and the windows were open, the smell was overwhelming. I thought of offal, burned food, unwashed hair, feces, black water backed up in a toilet. Broken crack vials were ground into the wood floor; the plaster walls were spray-painted with gang signs and representations of genitalia; a mattress with blood in the center lay on the living room floor. I saw a half-dozen people go out the back door, their faces averted so I would not recognize them.
“Where is he, ’Ball?” I said.
“In the bat’room. He wasn’t ready for it. He didn’t have no tolerance.”
The bathroom door was ajar. I eased it open and saw Monarch in the tub, shirtless, his eyes closed, pillows stuffed around him so he would not slip below the waterline and the melting ice that covered his chest. I could see the hype marks inside his right arm.
“Brown skag?” I said.
“Yes, suh.”
“Who shot him up?”
“Himself. Monarch still a king. Don’t matter what people do to him. He was born a king.”
I opened my cell phone and called for an ambulance. While I was talking I heard Sno’ball pour a sack of ice into the tub.
“Did Herman give him the dope?” I said.
She pursed her lips and made a twisting motion in front of them, as though she were locking them with a key. “Bust me if you want. But I stayed wit’ him. You want to talk to Herman, Herman ain’t here. Herman ain’t never here. Y’all don’t like this house, Mr. Dave, burn it down. But don’t pretend y’all don’t know what goes on here.”
“What time did Monarch get here?”
“Eight-t’irty.”
“You’re sure. It wasn’t earlier, it wasn’t later?”
“I just tole you.”
