My Juliet (43 page)

Lentini puts a spinning police light on the dash and begins to accelerate. He takes the car without braking through a couple of red lights and in seconds Sonny has faded to a black speck lost in a field of black specks. He disappears altogether after Lentini makes a few turns.

The city rushes past now. Entire blocks have gone by when it occurs to Juliet that they're headed in the wrong direction. “This isn't the best way,” she complains, all the more dismayed when Lentini turns from Canal Street onto North Rampart Street. “Are you taking me to Esplanade?”

“We thought we'd let you have a last look,” Peroux says.

“I don't want to see it.”

“No?”

“Please, Lieutenant. Please don't take me there.”

They drive on and she lifts her feet and kicks the back of the seat. “Don't do this to me, Lieutenant. Please. Lieutenant, please. Please don't do this to me. Please.”

When they reach the Beauvais Peroux throws an arm over the seat and faces her with a smile. “Well, how's it look?”

“Please . . .”

“Oh, they're some busy around here today. Why, look at that.”

Nerves send her bouncing in the seat, but she confronts it finally, and in that instant all the blood seems to drain from her heart.

People come and go through the open front door, none of them familiar. One pair carries her mother's wing chair out into the grass, a second a sofa, a third the desk from her father's library. Maids beat rugs with sawed-off broomsticks, sending clouds of dust floating in loose spirals. Gardeners, an army of them, trim the lawn with riding and push mowers, while others use electric clippers to prune the trees and shrubs. An ironworker is removing the name on the arc over the front gate, and the gate itself, propped open with a brick, is getting a fresh coat of paint. So too, Juliet notices now, is the house. Tiers of scaffolding stand on both the north and south sides. Crews of painters work in the fading light.

“Who's that?” Peroux says, pointing to the upper gallery.

Juliet's head snaps on a swivel. She strains to see and, yes, there really is someone standing at a window upstairs. She can see the silhouette, a shadow past lace curtains. What feels like an electric charge shakes her body and raises gooseflesh on her arms. “Oh, you,” she says, watching now through the fan of fingers covering her face. “Oh, Mama!”

But a light comes on in the room, revealing the figure to be someone else entirely.

The detectives are quiet as they start for Central Lockup, quiet as upstairs Anna Huey sends them off with a wave.

7

HIS FATHER DIES IN JUNE 1988. AT THE cemetery Agnes from the nursing home stands beside Sonny and stares at the half-filled tomb. “Do you have anyone else?” she says, reaching for his hand.

“Oh, sure. Sure, I do.”

“A man doesn't really become a man until he loses his father. Remember that.”

“I will. Thank you, Agnes.”

She puts an arm around him and he is not uncomfortable with the intimacy. She is wearing a uniform from work and she smells of the home, the boiled meals, the diapered adults. “You'll still come visit us, won't you, Sonny?” Her voice is warm and cheerful. “Can we count on that?”

“Yes, I'll come. Of course I will.”

But Sonny never visits the Maison Orleans again. And on those occasions when he happens to drive near the place he tries not to dwell on those days when his father was a patient there. In memory Mr. LaMott is forever the top salesman at Paul Piazza & Son. He has life in his eyes. And eternally he sprawls in a field of grass, gaze turned upward, as purple martins turn circles in the near-evening air above his birdhouse.

That same year Louis Fortunato marries and moves back to Bywater. It is wholly unexpected, least of all because of his disabilities. “Tell you the truth I had a pump put in,” he explains to Sonny. “All you gotta do is give me a little time and I'm as good as in the old days.”

Sonny stands as best man at the wedding. The bride, Claire Lousteau, is a caterer for a French Quarter B-and-B. She and Louis plan to adopt as soon as possible, and so together they've been trying to find a home for Frank.

“Frank?” says Sonny.

“Frank my calico. Where's your head, bubba?”

“Okay. All right.
Frank!”

At the reception the two friends stand in rented tuxedos in the formal parlor at Claire's B-and-B, spearing broccoli balls and fried crawfish with toothpicks crowned with swirls of colored celluloid, while a spirited jazz band performs “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.”

“So I call Coulon,” Louis says. “I call his office and explain the situation. He agrees to try to help us out. Says he'll post a notice on the corkboard in his waiting room. Can you believe that?”

“What a guy.”

“Yes, isn't he?”

Louis points to an old man in seersucker guzzling champagne. “Recognize him, Sonny? The one on his fifth glass already?”

Sonny does a double take.

“Think he was loaded when he killed my first one?”

Years later, it is April now, the tourist season is in full swing, Sonny and his comrades plant a tree in Jackson Square. It is a white dogwood, a sapling yet, and it enters the ground next to the magnolia across from the bakery.

A group of perhaps twenty attend, all of them fence artists but for the Vietnamese cashier from Café du Monde. Sonny, as chairman of the Jackson Square Artists Alliance, has organized the event. He's bought the tree, provided the spade, won permission from the city to dig the hole.

As it happens, he alone is aware of the tradition.

“Okay, maybe he made it up about the trees,” Sonny says in his impromptu remarks. “But it's a good story and inspiring and it's helped me through some hard times. When you look at the flowers on this tree, and I hope you'll do that . . . I hope you'll remember him. They bloom for Roberts now and they'll bloom for him always. ‘Am I worth it?' he used to say. He was talking about the people whose portraits we are commissioned to paint, but I always suspected he was talking about himself.”

Sonny shovels a spade of dirt and carefully spreads it over the root ball. “ ‘Am I worth it?' ” he repeats. “Yes, of course you are, Roberts.”

Over time fewer artists make their living at the fence, as more and more tarot card readers successfully vie with them for space along the pedestrian mall, and tourists seem more inclined to pay to have their future foretold than to have their likeness preserved. Street musicians, jugglers and fire-eaters add to the rivalry for outside dollars, and Sonny realizes that the days of the Jackson Square artist truly are numbered when Japanese visitors begin rushing past portraitists to have their palms read.

In the beginning of Sonny's career some two hundred licensed artists practiced their craft at the fence but now there are fewer than fifty, some with families to raise, but most with no other idea of what to do with their lives. Sonny's cart fades to pink, the gold lettering chips and becomes unreadable. His claim to world fame vanishes along with his dream of being rich. And yet the dealers find him. They stand some distance away as he works at his easel and watch as if for a revelation.
“So this is the boyfriend? And we passed on him, remember?”

They invite him for coffee at Café du Monde. Or would he prefer something stronger at the Old Absinthe House?

“Trying to cut back,” Sonny says, shaking his head.

They leave business cards on his stool. Goldstein, the auctioneer. Elisabeth Someone from a gallery in the Warehouse District.

“It was a long time ago,” he explains.

“But it was yesterday!”

“Sorry.”

“No more Juliets?”

Sonny shakes his head. “No more Juliets.”

He receives a letter with a postmark for the Hunt Correctional Center in Saint Gabriel, Louisiana. By now fourteen years have passed. The letter arrives in a manila envelope with Juliet's identification number and cellblock printed on the upper left side. As for the letter itself, the handwriting is a child's scrawl, though considerably easier to understand than the illegible snippets of “The Proof” that appeared in facsimile form in the
Times-Picayune
during Juliet's murder trial. In the margin she has drawn a picture of a stickman hanging from a noose.

. . . she didn't fight but I wasn't surprised. They're like that, her people. I sat in my room and finished “The Proof” while Leonard wiped down the doors and stair rails. It's funny but as I wrote those last words I understood and forgave her finally.

After we put “The Proof” where we put it I tried to take it out. I had one more thing to add. Forget the red plastic dinner plates and the Christmas tree icicles. Forget the spiders on the window and the rice on the floor. The worst thing she ever did was give birth to me.

Here the preachers come for visits, and so do the nuns. One of them, Sister Perpetua, is about our age. I imagine she was a regular person once, with regular needs. I asked her the other day what she did for love. “I sleep with Jesus,” she said.

Sonny, I sleep with Jesus too but lately I feel I need more. I'm writing to say I can have visitors. Sonny, if I promise to be good this time—well, I do promise, because I will, I will be good.

Please, darling, come to me . . .

And so, that same afternoon, Sonny leaves New Orleans headed west on I-10, Juliet's letter open on the seat next to him. Heavy fog grips the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain and slows passage across the Bonnet Carré Spillway, and Sonny drives with his headlights on, wipers thwacking at the mist. Blackbirds and orchard orioles move in the cypress swamps and ibises fish the endless canals. Sonny exits at state highway 30 then again at state highway 74, which leads him at last to a large sign instructing visitors that vehicle searches are mandatory; body searches may be conducted as well. It is the entrance to the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women.

The road twists through a landscape of such pastoral beauty that Sonny battles an impulse to pull over and paint it. Blooming flower beds and pecan trees line the winding asphalt drive; in fields all around Brahma graze with snowy egrets closely trailing. Rolls of hay, white board fences, an ancient tractor baking in the sun. And then the serenity of the scene ends as the prison comes into view. Sonny completes a turn and there it stands: an orderly cluster of narrow yellow buildings and guard towers contained by hurricane fencing topped with concertina wire.

Sonny has not yet reached the guardhouse at road's end, but nevertheless he pulls over and parks under the trees.

Down from the back acres inmates move in single file, flanked by guards in black uniforms and wide-brimmed plantation hats. Sonny steps outside and walks to the board fence. He is wearing a beret and paint-stained clothing. His hair is longer than when Juliet last saw him, and flecked with gray, but he should be easy to recognize. He is Sonny.

If her cell is in one of the dormitories on this side of the prison . . .

“Darling,” Sonny says, nearly shouting. “Come out and stand with me.”

Nothing. Not a sound.

“Please,” he says. “I need you now.”

Her name is Katherine Rillieux. They met at Jackson Square when she appeared at his kiosk and timidly asked for a portrait. A nurse at Charity Hospital whom he somehow got exactly right. The mouth as he painted it was Kathy's mouth, and so were the eyes. Her rich brown hair stayed that way when he reproduced it on canvas. Sonny refused to accept payment. “I think I'm the one who owes you,” he said.

“Just stand next to me,” he says now. “Just for a minute.”

He hears the door open and close, her feet hesitant on the pavement. “I don't know,” she says. “It's weird, Sonny. You can't possibly think she's watching.”

He puts an arm around her and kisses the side of her head, her face.

“Tell me it's over,” he whispers in her ear.

“Sonny, this is spooky.”

“Please. Kathy, please.”

“Sonny, it's over. It had better be over.”

Sonny looks out at the cellblocks and reaches up and removes his beret. He is standing at his full height, chest thrust forward.

“Can we go back to New Orleans now?” Katherine says, then leaves him standing there alone.

Minutes pass before Sonny grows embarrassed and surrenders the pose. He has made a fool of himself. “You sick, dumb fuck,” he mutters under his breath. He shouts a laugh as he puts the beret back on and wipes a lather of tears from his face. In the field an enormous gray bull lifts its head and stares.

Returning to the truck, Sonny meets Katherine's gaze past the windshield stained with the lost forms of butterflies, mosquito hawks and other dead insects from the trip over. A picture comes to him as he wades through patches of sunlight on the tall gray weeds, and as always he is unable to resist. Juliet is seventeen, and the Mississippi River moves past them as together they sit on warm boards and kiss and talk and dream. “Just be my friend first,” she told him that morning, clenching his hand in hers.

How do we survive the end of our dreams? Where does the courage come from? Sonny gets in the truck and closes the door. His hand shakes as he reaches for the ignition, and he is a long time before starting the engine.

“Is Juliet still yours, Sonny?” Katherine asks.

“I guess she never was,” he answers, eyes carefully avoiding the rearview mirror as he starts for home.

About The Author

J
OHN
E
D
B
RADLEY
has been a staff writer at the
Washington Post
, is a regular contributor to
Sports Illustrated
, and has written for
GQ, Esquire
, and many other publications. He is the author of
Tupelo Nights, The Best There Ever Was, Love & Obits
, and
Smoke
. He lives in New Orleans.