On Archimedes Street (4 page)

“Looks a little small for you.”

“I got it when I was a kid. But it should still work. I got this idea when we were backhopping blindfolded.” He started looking at titles on his bookshelf. “An eccentric production of
Hamlet
, where Hamlet delivers all his soliloquies while jumping on a pogo stick. What do you think?”

“That you’re certifiable.”

“Haw! Haw! Haw!” He grabbed a book and the pogo stick and raced down the stairs. “C’mon, Flip! We’ll be on the patio, Say-Say,” he yelled to his mother.

I
N
THE
adjoining mansion, Frenchy Saint-Paix was consumed with curiosity as he spied through his window on the pogo stick shenanigans. Dutch he dismissed with loathing and contempt. He’d never forgive that big bully for locking him in the utility closet, among other things. That hulking blond guy, though, was another story.

Five six, stick-thin, seventeen, and hormone fueled, Frenchy had lately become keenly aware of his deficiencies as a male specimen.
Who would want me?
Nonetheless, his hormones urged him to get a better look at the blond überspecimen, even if he had to deal with Dutch to get it. He slipped out of his garçonnière, a private apartment in the colonnaded house, and headed for the patio next door.

The pogo stick, meant for a child, listed under Dutch’s giant frame. “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable/Seem to me all the uses of this world!” Dutch was boinging erratically on the patio tiles, pogoing obliquely instead of straight up and down. “‘Fie on’t! ah fie!’ What comes next?”

Say-Say observed this through the window over the sink. She smiled indulgently. This was puredee Dutch, and only Dutch. The boy was notional. She silently prayed that Flip would feed him the next line. It was zaniness like this that drove all Dutch’s friends away.

Flip glanced at the book. “’Tis an unweeded garden….”

“’Tis an unweeded garden….” The rubber tip of the pogo stick skidded on a patch of crabgrass between the patio tiles, and Dutch went sprawling. Frenchy, lurking behind a pink oleander, snickered. Say-Say flew out of the kitchen and headed straight for the patio.

“The soliloquy is too long. We should do just the end part, with ‘O, most wicked speed to post.’ Maybe start at ‘Frailty! Thy name is woman!’” Dutch, lying on the patio tiles, rubbed his knee, already scraped from the earlier stunting.

“The pogo stick is too short, you mean, for a big baboon like you.” Stepping from behind the oleander, Frenchy declared his presence.

“Dutch! Are you all right?” Say-Say wrung her hands. “Why aren’t you wearing a helmet?”

Dutch glared at Frenchy. “Hey, runty midget. Baboon, eh? I’ll get you for that, you know.” Dutch rose and slapped the patio dust off his shorts. “Flip, meet the Frenchman. Frenchy, meet Flip.”

“Hi, Frenchy.” Flip extended his hand. Frenchy took it, and the contact stunned him into awkwardness and reticence. It was like shaking hands with a god, with Thor.

“You try it, French. The stick is meant for a waif like you.”

“No, I—”

“Yes.” Dutch manhandled Frenchy onto the pegs of the pogo stick.

“Dutch! Careful! He needs a hel—”

“He’ll be fine, Say-Say. Stop clucking.”

“If anything happens to him, Paule will kill—”

“I’ve got him. I won’t let him fall.” Flip stepped behind Frenchy and reached with his huge hands to surround Frenchy’s torso as he stood on the pegs. The hands thrillingly cupped his pecs.

“Let’s go for the money shot. ‘O, most wicked speed to post.’”

Then Dutch grasped the side of Frenchy’s hips to stabilize him from the front. Frenchy was acutely aware of Flip’s hands over his nipples through the thin fabric of his hand-tailored shirt. He looked at Dutch with suspicion, though.

“Ready? One, two, three!” Dutch gave him a sinister grin. “O, most wicked speed to post; O, most wicked speed to post; O, most wicked speed to post….” They bobbed him up and down on the pogo springs. Frenchy’s clothing rubbed against his body as they bounced and held him. Thor held him innocently, Frenchy knew, but he fantasized sexual intention in the friction. He looked down at the big hands, so beautifully shaped. The golden hair on the forearms was an erotic touchstone for him. He imagined being in those same arms but facing his caresser. The friction was becoming increasingly titillating.

Frenchy was hard, and he was sure Dutch could see. But he didn’t care. It was like jacking off, but with full-body strokes. He didn’t even need to scrunch his legs. They were moving the stick for him. He let himself relax into the delicious sensation, grateful Flip couldn’t see the front of his pants. Dutch was sneering at him, a glint in his eye. He looked down at Frenchy’s crotch.

“Faster, Flip! ‘O, most wicked speed to post; O, most wicked speed to post….’”

Dutch’s gaze was evilly on his. If they kept it up, he was going to come, and Dutch, and only Dutch, knew it.
Damn him.
Dutch angled himself so Frenchy’s crotch lightly brushed Dutch’s hard thigh. This tiny bit of extra friction was going to send him over the top. Frenchy kept his eyes open, but they were glazed and unseeing. “O, most wicked speed to post; O, most wicked speed to post…” again and again and again. His nipples were erect and almost painfully sensitive, and his heart raced against the hand on his chest. He finally couldn’t help himself. He realized he was about to come, and he tried to hide it by making his body rigid as he shot. Dutch smirked. His senses returned.
Now Dutch will stop and step away, letting Say-Say and Thor see the hard evidence of my humiliation. I hate you, Dutch.

But Dutch didn’t. He kept up the “O, most wicked speed to post” until the friction against the cloth became painful and his erection wilted.

Dutch looked down with a knowing expression on his face. “Ooooo-kay! That’s enough!” He leaned down and whispered into Frenchy’s ear. “Got you good, you little sissy.”

Thor picked him up off the pegs and set him on the ground.

He had to make a dash for his garçonnière before everything became obvious. “I feel dizzy. I’m gonna lie down.”

“Frenchy, are you okay?” Say-Say called after him worriedly. Ever since the leukemia, she’d fretted over the health of the neighbor boy, the child of her best friend. What a time poor Paule had had of it! But Frenchy was already gone.

Later, as Flip was leaving, he stopped to thank his hostess. What she told him shocked and unsettled him.

“He’s always been this way. Notional. Gets these wild ideas. But he’s so good, really. Just has an oddball sense of humor. He needs a friend, Flip. He really likes you; I can tell. Will you give him a chance? If you knew him, you’d know that he’s made out of glass. Don’t break him, please. Please, don’t break my beautiful son.”

Flip didn’t know
what
to say or think.

Chapter 2

E
D
HAD
hit bottom. Sleeping rough in a French Quarter alley had not been a good idea, nor had getting so drunk he’d puked all over himself. Officer Ratto had made it plain that Ed had to get the fuck out of Orleans Parish and stay the fuck out.

Thank God he’d been covered in his own puke when he was put in the drunk tank, because that had saved his ass from getting raped. Not that the drunk tank had been full of leering slobs with steel teeth like in jail flicks. Just sorry-ass, dejected losers like himself, or maybe much older versions of himself. It had been enough to scare him sober.

He felt better now. Showered, shaved, fed, and clothed courtesy of the Little Sisters of the Poor, he stopped to pray at Saint Aloysius. As he knelt and bowed his head, he thrashed it out with God and the saints, rehearsing every turn and decision that had brought him to this sorry pass. Every one of those turns had been correct, he now saw—clearing out his bank account, leaving by night, ditching his car, and cutting up his driver’s license—each the logical and inevitable result of that first wrong turn—refusing to confront his precocious sixteen-year-old accuser. “But who would have taken my word over the word of that cherubic angel, looking all of eleven years old?” he demanded silently of the saints, and their silence had been his answer.

“Mother Cabrini, intercede for me,” Ed whispered hoarsely. “Help me deal with the drink. Lead me to a job where they won’t ask too many questions. I’m down to my last seven dollars and change. And I know I only call on you when I’m in trouble, and I’m sorry about that.”

He lit a candle and, as he was leaving, a priest approached him. “Trouble, my son?”

“There’s always trouble, Father,” Ed answered.

“Can I help?”

Ed pondered the priest. “Yes,” he said finally. “I need two things: I need to get out of Orleans Parish, and I need a job. I’m new here. Where can I go that’s not Orleans Parish, and how can I get there for less than seven dollars?”

The priest hesitated and looked at Ed speculatively. “The West Bank is your best bet. But not Algiers. Algiers is in Orleans Parish, even though it’s on the other side of the river. Gretna is the closest. It’s in Jefferson Parish. Go to the foot of Jackson Avenue and catch the Gretna ferry there. It’s only fifteen minutes away. As for the job….”

“Don’t worry, Father. I’ve put Mother Cabrini on it.”

The priest smiled, and it was the first friendly face Ed could remember seeing in a long while. It was a good sign, and he felt some of the weight ease up.

E
LWOOD
WAS
desperate. The kitchen was still crawling with casseroles from the neighbors, and MeeMaw already in the crypt for six days. Now the lawyers would start talking about the estate. And the envelopes and bills were piling up.

He wasn’t all that sad about MeeMaw. She’d had a long life—
he’d
probably never see eighty-three—and she’d died painlessly in her sleep. But only now did he fully appreciate how much he had depended on her, and not just for food and a sense of family, as he had thought he would. No, there were other, more pressing, things.

Recalling what MeeMaw had been harping on for the last few months of her life, he sat at the kitchen table, picked up a pen and his green notebook, and began writing in it with great concentration. He kept at it for twenty-five minutes until he finally decided that was enough for one day.

He moved over to the piano, also in the kitchen. Elwood then drew himself up and looked at the ceiling as if for inspiration, poised his fingers over the keys, and started a furious sequence of chords and dissonances, most of them heavily pedaled. Wailin’ Elwood wailed into his music: “
Whooo
you gonna ax? Tell me dat. Now who you gonna
ax
? Tell me
dat
.” Larceny, as he always did whenever Elwood “sang,” howled raucous accompaniment and pawed the air. “I hate the fack dat…. I hate the fack dat…. I hate the fack dat…. I hate
dat fack
!” And he trailed his fingers off the keys in the tenuous tinkling Elwood always used to end his weird—some people said inspired—impromptu compositions.

“Ain’t no use, Lawsony,” he said to his dog. The tail was a-wag and the ears intently at attention. “I need some help, and dat’s a fack. An’ I’m just gonna have to get over myself an’ ax for it. Right now.”

He walked out of the shotgun single he had shared with MeeMaw on Archimedes Street and headed west to the hardware store. An ecstatic Larceny bounded after him.

“Hey, Doodie,” said Elwood to the proprietor of Gretna Best Hardware.

“Wailin’ Elwood the Tree Man,” said the skinny owner. Age had turned his skin from coal to a dusty, dark-gray flannel. “Sorry to hear ’bout your MeeMaw.”

“Thank you, Doodie. She had a good life and died peaceful.”

“She were a great lady and will be missed.”

Elwood was grateful that Doodie left it at that. The old biddies had talked his ear off after offering their condolences, reminiscing about his grandmother’s glory days, long before Elwood had ever been born.

Elwood braced himself. He needed help, and he reminded himself he had to ask for it. “Doodie,” he said, “I need me a Help Wanted sign.”

“Got two kinds. ‘Help Wanted’ plain and ‘Help Wanted Inquire Within.’”

Elwood considered. “Dat secon’ one.”

Chapter 3

“M
AMAN
, I’
M
not so sure I like M. Avelallemant,” confessed Frenchy to his mother. She sat in an ivory slip at her dressing table, preparing to go out for the evening with this same M. Avelallemant. Frenchy loved to see his mother get dressed up; when she really set out to impress, she was spectacular. Her understated and beautifully cut clothes made any woman who stood next to her look like a painted clown by comparison. Maman rose and grabbed an atomizer from the vanity, then sprayed into the room a mist of the specially resurrected
Secrets of Suzanne
, an extinct perfume from her grandmother’s time. She waited a second and then walked through the mist. Most of the wildly expensive perfume sank into the Aubusson rug. Maman wanted only a hint on her skin, Frenchy knew.

“What is so wrong with M. Avelallemant?”

Frenchy frowned and turned to look out the window in Maman’s dressing room. He could see that oaf Dutch Abbott on his ridiculous orange bike cycling into the curved path bordering the broad parterre of the house next door. Maman came to stand by his side.

“How beautiful Dutch Abbott has become!” she said. “Remember how scrawny he was, nothing but stick arms and legs and a giant Adam’s apple?”

“I hate him,” said Frenchy. Just at that moment Dutch happened to look up and saw Mrs. Saint-Paix and Frenchy standing at a neoclassical window framed by green shutters so dark they seemed black. A forest of columns, Ionic on the first floor and Corinthian on the second, flanked the porches that engulfed the huge white pile of a house. “Hey, Frenchy! I mean Pogo. Hey, Miz Saint-P.”

Frenchy gave a tight smile and Maman waved. “‘Frenchy’? I guess ‘Frenchy’ has stuck.” Maman’s eyes danced.