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Article Excerpt
TOUGH AS HE WAS, RETIRED Detective Sergeant Alphonse Fournet admitted that he hadn't been able to handle the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"Living in Alabama for a month," he groused to Chief of Detectives D. J. Tobin. "Wunnerful folks, but how they live! Frying ham in lard. Alla time asking me what choich I belong to. They had a prayer vigil, for Chrissake, to apologize to God for pissing him off enough to hit us with Katrina. It's like that guy Cheney shot apologizing for getting in the way of the birdshot."
It was noon at Ya Momma's Bar & Grill, and succulent aromas filled the air. Tobin, who was picking up the tab, listened patiently but sympathized only to a point.
"You didn't lose your house or nothing, right, Alphonse?"
"I live in Algiers," said Fournet, as if that were sufficient explanation for his good fortune. "The west bank is the best bank. You oughta loin that, D. J., now you gotta wife and kids to proteck."
"Maybe I'll think about it. We ain't moving back in the Ninth Ward, I can tell you that. Neighborhood ain't there no more. Traneesha and the kids're still in Houston. She's got 'em in school, and--it's funny, you know? In Texas they expect kids to loin something, even in public school. I always figured public school was just a place where you put kids so's they wouldn't run the streets."
He paused for a moment while they both meditated on the alien lands that surrounded them. Then Tobin said, "Okay, we're all caught up. Now let's get down to business."
Fournet held up his right hand, palm flat, like a cop stopping traffic. "Lemme tell you sump'm foist, D. J. It's nice of you to invite me for lunch, but I ain't going back to woik, no matter what."
"What if your city needs you?"
"For what? To help catch some druggies been shooting other druggies? Gimme a break."
"Nah," shrugged D. J. "That's just the self-cleaning oven at woik. Can't say it in public, but the only useful thing those guys do is kill each other off. No, what I'm talking about is real human people disappearing. Like phht. We don't need no more of that. Besides twelve hundred and something drowned and otherwise dead, the city lost two hundred thousand live ones moved to elsewhere after the flood. We can't stand to lose no more."
At this point an elderly man attired in a dirty apron and liver spots shuffled up and deposited on the table two frosty Turbodogs and an enormous bowl of crawfish etouffee. Fournet seized a dented spoon and set to work with gusto.
"Don'tcha know those mudbugs are solid cholesterol?" frowned D. J. He was brown-bagging, and sounded envious.
"You wanna live forever, or you wanna live?"
"Traneesha wants me to be there and still breathing when the kids graduate."
"So, your wife's watching you by satellite, or what?"
After brief meditation, D. J. pushed his brown bag away and called out, "Waiter, make it two crawfish."
That afternoon, back home on Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler Drive, Algiers, Fournet discussed D. J.'s proposal with his wife, Alma. "He says people been disappearing out the FEMA trailer parks, and he wants me to check it out."
Alma muted Oprah and thought the proposal over. "Well, normally I'd say trailer trash is trailer trash, and who cares? But today, anybody can be trailer trash. If the Pope lived in Noo Awlyunz, he might be trailer trash."
Together they kicked the proposal around. What impressed Alma was D. J.'s comment on the state of the city.
"We gotta get things back on their feet," she decided. "Like it is, we ain't no city no more, we're a goddamn a-toll. Island One, everything's fine. Island Two, everybody's missing. Island Three, no island at all. This can't go on. We need our people back."
"Well, maybe I'll do it. The department's so short-handed, they even got a use for old fat guys like me."
"Right. They want you at Tulane and Broad, and I don't want you around the house supervising me like you been doing. One more piece of good advice outta you, Alphonse, I'ma put Drano in your gumbo. So get your wide butt to woik and do something useful for a change."
This connubial advice settled the matter.
On his first day as a Special Deputy, Fournet received a temporary ID, a badge, and an unmarked police car, and set out to visit a Seventh Ward trailer park housing people made homeless by the storm.
The trailers were all small and white and as alike as ice cubes from the same tray. A rent-a-cop seated on a camp stool by the only gate in an encircling six-foot cyclone fence directed him to the dwelling of Mr. Alvin Joule Palumbo.
The door was answered by an undershirted man of middle age who backed deeper into the trailer and invited the detective to follow him.
"So this is what a FEMA trailer's like," said Fournet, wedging his belly through the door. "It's uh, compact, I guess the woid is."
"F'sure," said Palumbo. "Where else can you sit on the terlet, fry an egg and watch TV, all at the same time?"
"So, you contacted the po-leece about a missing neighbor?"
"Yeah. That was a week ago. What you all been up to in the meantime?"
"Fightin' crime," said Fournet, though without conviction. "Tell me about this neighbor of yours."
"Her name's Miz Zeringue."
"Zerang," muttered Fournet, hauling out his notebook.
"Spelled Z-E-R-I-N-G-U-E. Don't ask me why."
Fournet wet the tip of a pencil stub on his tongue and inscribed the name. "So she's been missing a week?"
"More like two. I mean, nobody knows each other in this damn place, and if she hadn't been a good neighbor and brought me a bowl of toitle zoop when I had the flu, I wouldn'ta noticed she was gone at all. I went to retoin her bowl (you know how ladies are about their kitchenware) and when she didn't answer the door I put it down on the step and left. But after it sat there for three days, I got worried about her and asked the guard to check out her trailer. When we seen it was empty and her milk was sour, I called the po-leece."
He added darkly, "I think her disappearing had something to do with the thirteenth trailer."
"The what?"
"You happen to count how many trailers are in this row?"
"No. The guard just said, 'End a the row is Mr. Palumbo,' so I never counted."
"Well, there's twelve. Only the night she musta disappeared on, there was thirteen. And don't look at me like I'm nuts, neither. I'm a grownup man, I don't use dope, I don't drink...
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