Boulevard (6 page)

By the time he reached St. Ann, he was already picturing the rows of magazines, the glossy cover, the pimply blond at the cash register. He crossed the street, dodging one of the metal horse heads, opened the door and stepped inside. He walked down the long row of shelves past the cash register, and yes, this time it was the blond kid on the cash register. He looked about Newell's age, and Newell wondered how someone so forlorn-looking had ever landed a swell job like this one. But by then he had found the copy of
Brute Hombre
, the hairy-chested man on the cover, the harsh block letters of the title slashing him through the forehead. Shoulders like a span of bridge. Newell gripped the magazine, wrapped in plastic and sealed with tape, as though it were some sacred object. On the back another picture of this man, Rod Hardigan,
this time wearing only a pair of leather chaps and some kind of skimpy underwear, his thighs bulging, his body managing to look as if it were bursting out of itself, Newell found himself staring and wondered how long he had been standing there holding the magazine.

At the moment only a couple of other people were shopping in the store. Newell took a deep breath and walked to the cash register where Louis—the name came to him now—Louis, with a spray of acne across his nose and cheeks, and long hair that could have used a washing, a hook nose, and nearly absent lips, where Louis took the magazine from him and stared at it as if trying to remember what he was supposed to do. Louis gave Newell a slack smile as the cash register shook and spit out a price, including sales tax. Newell accepted his change and the brown bag. Louis tried to count the money into Newell's hand but kept getting lost, started over twice, finally shoved the money at Newell and said, “Here.”

From the back of the store walked the old man, Mac, whose hair appeared darker today, and Newell guessed he had probably put a rinse in it, like Flora did to her hair. “Howdy,” Mac said, “pleasant day, ain't it?”

The job had left Newell feeling friendly and even a little confident, so he spoke up. “Yes sir. But it looks like rain tonight.”

“You think so?”

“Yes sir. Later on.”

“Well, then, you better run your little tail on home,”
Mac said, pulling a pack of Camel cigarettes out of his pocket. “Before you get wet. What did you buy?”

Newell handed him the magazine in the paper bag without thinking. Some quality of Mac disarmed him, caused him to believe the request was good-intentioned. Mac looked at the cover and rubbed his jaw, scratchy with beard-shadow. “You got good taste. That one is high quality.”

“It sure cost enough.”

“You're buying quality, son. You pay the price for color printing and good paper stock.”

Newell took the bag again. Mac turned to Louis, blew smoke in Louis's face. “Hey, you pimple-face son of a bitch, did you bag up them new magazines yet?”

“I ain't had time.”

“Well, you better get time. We're going to have some customers in here after a while.”

Newell dipped his head to say good-bye, and Mac did the same, and Newell carried the magazine out of the store with a better feeling about himself, a less furtive way of thinking about the fact that he had bought a book with pictures of naked men in it. Quality, it was. He hurried down St. Ann to Decatur Street and walked straight down to Barracks. For the first time since he had come here he hardly noticed the city at all. He had rolled up the magazine in its bag and carried it in his hand like a brown baton. Forward with a brisk stride he walked, and arrived at the door to the long, dark passageway, walked through it into the loggia and up the stairs to his room.

He sat in the chair by the door to the gallery and held the bag in his lap. He slipped out the plastic bag, unfastened the tape, and pulled the slick magazine out of its wrapper.

Finding himself watching the eyes of the man in the photograph, between brown and hazel, with a translucence that created the illusion of depth, as if the man were actually seeing, as if someone were inside the photograph. The man with his heavy beard and shaggy chest, the tip of his tongue visible, touching the fullness of his lower lip, the slight look of pout, the languid slouch of the pelvis.

Inside the cover, on the very first page, under a title that said, “Rod the Rock,” the same man stood facing the camera, naked this time, with his private parts showing, so that they could hardly be called private at all any more. Newell had seen only a few penises, mostly relatives and boys in gym, none as large as this, and he stared at it, arched forward from Rod the Rock's thick thighs, Rod staring out at Newell as if inviting him to touch it, to find a way to reach into the paper and touch it.

This was different from what Newell had done in Pastel, different from fumbling with his zipper in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet having some fantasy about Little Joe Cartwright from Bonanza, and hoping Flora stayed close enough to the TV that she couldn't hear the racket he was making. Afterward, straightening the jeans on his narrow hips, he'd head off to supper where Flora waited at the table with her mild blue eyes, uncurious expression, and open can of Pabst.

Here what excited him was a fixed object, a picture, floating in space. When he read the words again, “Rod the Rock,” when he looked at the shape of the man's body, the mass of it, calling up some feeling, Newell felt himself as if he were dissolving into the picture, as if the world of that image were more vivid than the room on Barracks Street where the ceiling fan turned slowly. For a long time Newell hardly thought about where he was at all; he sat without stirring from the chair, only turning the pages, daring nothing more than to run his fingers over each page before he turned to the next, the gesture like a caress, as though he were actually laying his hands on this man's skin.

He had been breathing carefully, as though walking on a wire where the faintest breath could send him off balance; he understood instinctively, even as early as that, the need to gauge his pleasure carefully, to conserve it in order to draw it out. He closed the magazine and stood. From outside, car horns, the hooting laughter of someone on the street, music from one of the opposite balconies; he recognized the song and it made him smile, “I Need a Man” by Grace Jones.

He stared down at the magazine, frightened some by the feelings it aroused in him. He had played with one of his cousins once, in Pastel, a boy his own size named Joel, the same age as Newell, with the same family looks, but that had been only once, and Joel so resembled Newell that the act was almost like masturbation. All the rest had been only speculation, longing. He could hardly believe
what he saw on these pages; images that had been in his head all this time. It was as if he had foreseen this as his future, because he had foreseen this man, or at least someone who would pose like him, wearing nothing, or so little as to be nothing, page after page. Newell opened the magazine to the pictures on the sawhorse, the pictures in the locker room, Rod dressed in leather. The images rushed through him and he took the magazine to the bathroom with him and lay it on the back of the toilet. As powerful as the feeling of arousal was the strangeness of the moment. Newell felt as if he knew the picture-man completely, had always known him, and furthermore wanted to lie down with him and be covered by him and run hands along him and gaze into his face. From picture to picture, from page to page, the pose changed, but the expression was always the same, always fixed on the camera, always impassive, grave, self-assured to the point of arrogance; and what was disturbing was that Newell wanted him to have exactly that look. Since Rod the Rock could have anything he wanted, it was fitting he should express no desire at all, except, maybe, a wish to reveal himself again and again.

When Newell came out of the bathroom and put the magazine away, in the bottom of the wardrobe out of sight, rain was washing the edge of the gallery, sweeping down at a slant out of the sky. He had heard nothing in the bathroom except the sound of his own breathing, but now he heard low, rumbling thunder, the air heavy with moisture even inside the room. He threw open the windows,
protected from the rain by the roof of the gallery. What a sound, what a hissing, everywhere. Along the gutters in the street below the water was running a foot deep.

He turned on the lamp in the twilight and sat by the open doors watching the rain for a long time, then reading his books, first leafing through the picture book about the French Quarter, afterward picking up his paperback novel about two men traveling together back in time and the world they find there. He could relax and pay attention to the book for the first time since arriving in New Orleans, maybe because he had a job, or because he had begun the transformation he had foreseen when he was leaving Pastel. He understood his present world, the narrow room, the high windows, the torrent of rain, well enough now that he could surrender to the book, for a few hours anyway, till time to go to bed.

He called Flora the next day, Sunday, to tell her he had found a job. He caught her at home with a headache, puffing her cigarette audibly, sipping coffee, and trying to clear her throat. “Sweet Thing, I am so glad you called me.”

“Yes ma'am. Well, it's good news, don't you think?”

“Well, I hope you don't have to work in food service for very long,” she intimated. “Jesse has been in food service his whole life and look where that's got him.”

“Yes ma'am.” He understood from this that Jesse was sitting at the kitchen table too, scratching his nose or the inside of his ear, looking completely vacant, as he usually looked in the morning.

“You being careful in that French Quarter?” She pronounced
it “korter.”

“Yes ma'am. But I don't think it's dangerous.”

“You'd be surprised.”

“Really. I been walking around since I got here, even at night, and I never feel like anybody is following me, or anything.”

“Well,” she took a drag on the cigarette, “you walk around with that kind of careless attitude and somebody will drag you off in an alley one of these days, you watch. And nobody will know what happened to you.”

“Yes ma'am.”

“I know what I'm talking about. There's things that happen in New Orleans that you'd rather not even imagine.” Her words took on a curious authority over the long-distance line. Jesse must have coughed, with the cigarette smoke swirling around him in that trailer kitchen, because Flora snapped, “Go in the living room if you can't stand my smoke, you tattooed son of a bitch.”

“Are you going to church today, Grandma?”

“No. I didn't get my dress out the cleaners this week.” They had made this joke before; they both laughed and felt better, and he imagined Jesse sulking in front of the TV with his toes buried in the shag carpet. “It's a lot of Catholics in New Orleans,” Flora noted.

“I know. There's a great big church they go to. In a square right here in the French Quarter.”

“I know exactly the one you're talking about,” she said, and after a moment added, “My phone bill would
be sky high with the two of us gabbing about nothing.”

“I'll get me a phone pretty soon,” Newell promised, “then I won't have to call collect.” He waited a moment, then asked, “You heard from Mama?”

The mention of his mother put Flora on her guard, no different than any other time. “No. I don't ever know when she's going to call.”

“All right. Well, you tell her I said hey. If you talk to her.”

They said good-bye, and there he stood across from the Verti Mart on Sunday morning. Wondering why he had asked about Mama, after such a long time. Wondering what had put her on his mind.

He stopped at the French Market and bought a few apples and a carton of salt, and hurried up the stairs carrying the bag. He sat in his room and bit into the apples and sprinkled salt on the crisp white flesh, savoring the apples and salt. He lost himself in a reverie, eating all the apples he had bought and sitting there, until suddenly there was a knock at the door.

There stood Miss Kimbro, framed by the courtyard behind her, carrying something with a cord. She stepped inside and looked around and shoved the thing at him and said, “This comes with the room. You can cook with it.”

“I can?”

“Plug it in,” she said, and looked around again, as if he might have changed something, as if she were searching for some change he might have made in the room.
“It's a toaster oven.”

“That's really nice of you,” he said, and she shrugged, and he plugged the oven into a receptacle near the bathroom and set it on top of the wicker clothes hamper.

“Don't leave it on that hamper, it'll catch fire.”

He moved the toaster oven to the little table.

“Do you like the room?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“You think you'll stay here?”

“Oh, yes ma'am.”

He could hardly tell whether she heard him or not. She stepped to the bathroom and looked all around it. She looked down at the toaster oven, turned a knob at the front of it. At once the inside lit a luminous orange. “It works,” she said.

“Thank you.”

By now she was opening the door and stepping outside. She stood with the door partly closed, one eye watching him. “Anyway, I just wanted to bring up the toaster oven, I have to get back to the shop.”

“Thank you, ma'am.”

“Oh yes,” she said, and vanished.

In fact, she waited on the steps leading down to the slate floor of the loggia. She had no idea whether or not he was listening, she simply stood there, in a bit of breeze, with the sun bright and the warm breeze stirring. She had been distracted by the expression on Newell's face, as if the thought of a toaster oven terrified him, or as if the room terrified him, or the city did. She stepped carefully
down the plank stairs. She should have a carpenter look at these steps. A good, young, strong carpenter to work in the hot sun, repairing these steps. She thought Newell would like that. At the bottom she looked up again, at the closed door. She could almost hear the silence inside. Stepping into the junk shop, she stood before the whirring blades of the oscillating fan, and a breeze swept across her first one way, then another.