Chapter 2
THE CENTERPIECE OF my story involves a likable man by the name of Jude LeBlanc. When I first knew him he was a nice-looking kid who threw the Daily Iberian, played baseball at Catholic High, and was a weekly communicant at the same church I attended. Although his mother was poorly educated and worked at menial jobs and his father a casualty of an oil-well blowout, he smiled all the time and was full of self-confidence and never seemed to let misfortune get him down.
I said he smiled. That’s not quite right. Jude shined the world on and slipped its worst punches and in a fight knew how to swallow his blood and never let people know he was hurt. He had his Jewish mother’s narrow eyes and chestnut hair, and he combed it straight back in a hump, like a character out of a 1930s movie. Somehow he reassured others that the earth was a good place, that the day was a fine one, and that good things were about to happen to all of us. But as I watched Jude grow into manhood, I had to relearn the old lesson that often the best people in our midst are perhaps destined to become sojourners in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Ordinary men and women keep track of time in sequential fashion, by use of clocks and calendars. The residents of Gethsemane do not. Here are a few of their stories, each of them touching, in an improbable way, the life of a New Iberia kid who grew into a good man and did nothing to invite the events fate would impose upon him.
ON FRIDAY, August 26, 2005, Jude LeBlanc wakes in a second-story French Quarter apartment, one that allows him a view of both the courtyard below and the spires of St. Louis Cathedral. It’s raining hard now, and he watches the water sluicing down the drain-pipes into the beds of hibiscus, banana trees, and hydrangeas below, pooling in the sunken brickwork that is threaded with leaves of wild spearmint.
For just a moment he almost forgets the ball of pain that lives twenty-four hours a day in the base of his spine. The Hispanic woman whose name is Natalia is fixing coffee and warm milk for him in the tiny kitchen off the living room. Her cotton sundress is dark purple and printed with bone-colored flowers that have pink stamens. She’s a thin woman whose strong hands and muscular tautness belie the life she leads. She glances at him over her shoulder, her face full of concern and pity for the man who roaches back his hair as Mickey Rooney did in old American movies she has rented from the video store.
When she hooks, she works with a pimp who drives an independent cab. She and her pimp usually find johns in the early a.m. along Bourbon and take them either to a private parking lot behind a burned-out building off Tchoupitoulas or a desiccated frame house owned by the pimp’s brother-in-law on North Villere, thereby avoiding complications with their more organized competitors, most of whom enjoy established relationships with both cops and the vestiges of old Mob.
Natalia brings him his coffee and warm milk and a single powdered beignet from the Cafe du Monde on a tray. She draws the blinds, turns the electric fan on him, and asks, “You want me to do it for you?”
“No, I don’t need it right now. I’ll wait until later in the day.”
“I don’t think you got no sleep last night.”
He watches the rainwater feathering off the roof and makes no reply. When he sits up on the rollaway bed, tentacles of light wrap around his thighs and probe his groin. Natalia sits down beside him, her dress dropping into a loop between her knees. Her hair is black and thick and she washes it often so it always has a sheen in it, and when she takes it down on her shoulders she is truly lovely to look at. She doesn’t smoke or drink, and there’s never a hint of the life she leads in her clothes or on her skin, not unless you include the tracks inside her thighs.
Her face is lost in thought, either about him or herself, he’s not sure. To her, Jude LeBlanc is a mystery, one she never quite understands, but it’s obvious she accepts and loves him for whatever he is or isn’t and imposes no judgment upon him.
“Can I do something else for you?”
“Like what?”
“Sometimes I feel I don’t ever do you no good, that I can’t give you nothing,” she says.
“You fixed breakfast for me,” he says.
She changes her position and kneels behind him on the rollaway, rubbing his shoulders, clutching him briefly to her, resting her cheek against the back of his head. “They got drugs in Mexico the pharmaceutical companies don’t allow on the market here,” she says.
“You’re my cure,” he replies.
She holds him, and for just a moment he wants to release all the desperation and hopelessness and unrelieved sense of loss that have characterized his life. But how do you explain to others that a false Gleason score on a prostate biopsy can result in so much damage to a person’s life? Most people don’t even understand the terminology. Plus he does not wish to rob others of their faith in the exactitude of medical science. To do so is, in a way, the same as robbing them of the only belief system they have.
The Gleason scale had indicated that the cancer had not spread outside the prostate. As a consequence the surgeon had elected not to take out the erectile nerve. The positive margins left behind went into the lymph nodes and the seminal vessels.
Natalia flattens herself against him, pressing her loins tightly into his back, and he feels desires stirring in him that he tries not to recognize, perhaps secretly hoping they will preempt the problems of conscience that prevent him from ever escaping his own loneliness.
He gets up from the rollaway, trying to hide his erection as he puts on his trousers. His Roman collar has fallen off the nightstand and a tangle of animal hair and floor dirt has stuck to the bottom rim. He goes to the sink and tries to clean it, rubbing the smudge deeper into the collar’s whiteness, splashing it with grease from an unwashed pot. He leans heavily on his hands, his sense of futility more than he can hide.
Outside, the velocity of the wind is fanning the rain off the roof in sheets. A flowerpot topples from the balcony and bursts on the bricks below. Across the courtyard, a neighbor’s ventilated wood shutters rattle like tack hammers on their hinges.
“You going to the Ninth Ward today?” Natalia asks.
“It’s the only place that will have me,” he replies.
“Stay with me,” she says.
“Are you afraid of the storm?” he asks.
“I’m afraid for you. You need to be here, with me. You can’t be without your medicine.”
She calls it his “medicine” to protect his feelings, even though she knows he’s been arrested twice with stolen prescription forms and once with morphine from an actual heist, that in reality he is no different from her or any other junkie in the Quarter. The irony is that a peasant woman from the Third World, one who works as a prostitute to fuel her own addiction, has a spiritual love and respect for him that few in his own society would be willing to grant.
He feels a sudden tenderness for her that makes his loins turn to water. He puts his mouth on hers, then goes out into the rain, a newspaper over his head, and catches one of the few buses still running down to the lower end of the Ninth Ward.
Chapter 3
OTIS BAYLOR PROUDLY calls himself a North Alabama transplant who is at home anyplace in the world, New Orleans or New Iberia or wherever his insurance company cares to send him. He’s effusive in manner, generous in his giving, and devoted to his family. If at all possible, he refuses to judge others and to be marked by the prejudices of either his contemporaries or the people of his piney-woods birthplace, where as a boy he witnessed his father and uncle attend cross lightings in full Klan regalia.
In fact, Otis learned the insurance business from the bottom up, working a debit route in the Negro and blue-
