The Neon Rain

One hot night at the bowling alley, a group of tough kids who lived down by Railroad Avenue came in and started rolling the second ball before the pin boy could reset the rack. These were kids who went nigger-knocking on Saturday nights with slingshots and marbles and ball bearings. The Negroes in the pits couldn't do much when they were abused by drunks or bad high-school kids, but Jimmie imposed no restraints upon himself and always practiced immediate retaliation. He was picking up four pins at a time in the pit next to me, his T-shirt streaked with dirt, sweat ru

A moment later we heard a loud curse, and we looked out from under the racks and saw a big, burr-headed boy staring at his hand with a horrified expression on his face.

"Hey, podna, smear some of it on your nose, too. It'd be an improvement," Jimmie yelled.

Three of them caught us in the parking lot after the alley closed and knocked us down on the gravel for five minutes before the owner came out, chased them off, and told us we were both fired. Jimmie ran after their truck, throwing rocks at the cab.

"We'll get a paper route," he said, his face hot and dusty and streaked with dried perspiration. "Who wants to be a pinsetter all his life? There's a lot of money in paper routes these days."

Both of us would change a lot when we went to college in Lafayette, and in many ways we would begin to leave our father's Cajun world behind us. Eventually I would go into the army and be sent to Vietnam, and Jimmie would join the national guard, borrow money on the small house and seven-acre farm our father left us, and open a café on Decatur Street in New Orleans. Later he would buy into the first of several restaurants, wear expensive jewelry and Botany 500 suits and learn the ma

Didi Gee and my brother were eating in a red leather booth in the back of the restaurant when I walked in. Didi's waistline and stomach had the contours of three i

Jimmie gri

"How you doing, Lieutenant?" he said flatly. He always spoke as though his nose were clotted with cartilage.

"Pretty good," I said. "How's life, Didi?"

"Not so hot, to tell you the truth. I got cancer of the colon. They're going to cut out some of my entrail tract and sew up my hole. I got to walk around with a bag of shit hanging on my side."

"I'm sorry to hear about that," I said.

"My doctor says I either get it done or they nail me down in a piano crate. Be glad you're young." He put a meatball wrapped with spaghetti and half a slice of bread in his mouth.

"We heard some rumors about you," Jimmie said, smiling. He wore a charcoal suit and gray tie, and his gold watch and rings gleamed in the restaurant's soft light. Ever since he was a kid he had used his grin to hide guilt, to address complexity, or to deny a basic goodness in himself.

"Like they say, you hear a lot of bullshit in the street," I said.

"Mashing on Julio Segura's nuts is not bullshit," Jimmie said.

"You have to enrich a guy's day sometimes," I said.

"Some guys are better left alone," Jimmie said.

"What did you hear?" I said.

"There's talk about a heavy fall for a homicide cop."

"It's old news, Jim. I heard it first up at Angola from Joh

"Don't take it lightly," Jimmie said.

"We're talking about a very low class of people, Lieutenant," Didi Gee said. "They're part Indian or colored or something. I bought a nice winter home in Hallendale, Florida, then some Colombians moved in next to me and dug the whole fucking yard into a vegetable patch. Their kids pissed out the second-story window on my car. This is in a neighborhood you don't get into without three hundred thou. They put raw chicken shit on their tomato plants. The smell made your nose fall off."

"Why are we having this lunch, Jimmie?" I said.

"Julio Segura is real garbage. He doesn't go by anybody's rules. Not yours, not Didi's. There's lots of people that would like to see this guy canceled out. But he's still around and it's because certain other people want him around. I don't want to see you get burned finding out something that's not going anywhere."

Then Jimmie was silent. Didi Gee stopped eating, lit a cigarette, and dropped the burnt match into his empty plate.

"There's a couple of guys that used to work for me. They don't work for me now," he said. "But they hang around my places of business sometimes. They like to talk about what's going on around town. As Jimmie will tell you, I'm not interested in listening to gossip. Also, these are guys that follow their cocks. I don't spend no time thinking of what these kind of young guys got to say. To tell you the truth, Lieutenant, I've been changing my attitudes about people a great deal lately. I think it's my age and this awful disease in my colon. There are classes of people I don't want to have no association with anymore. Like these guys. If you was to ask me their names later, I'd have to honestly tell you I don't remember. I think it's a mental block when it comes to some trashy people that I've been forced to hire in my business."

"I'm not big on names these days, Didi," I said.

"Because this story, if it's true, is a horrible one and shows what kind of scum the country has been letting across its border," he said. "This colored girl was a parlor chippie for this spick that lives out by the lake. The spick-and I use that word only because he's a genuine lowlife-has got broads on the brain and is always moving them in and out of his mansion, primarily because he's a fucking geek that no normal woman would touch unless she was blind. So the colored girl moved in and the geek really had the hots for her. The girl thought it was going to be hump city from there on out. The spick lets his pet dwarf drive her shopping around town, gives her all the coke she wants, introduces her to a lot of important greasers like she wasn't just another broad with a ten-dollar ass and a five-cent brain. But the girl didn't know this guy went through his own chippies like Jimmy Durante went through Kleenex. One morning after she got drunk and threw up in his pool he told the dwarf to drive her back to the parlor. What the spick didn't figure on was ambition in a colored girl that grew up pulling sweet potatoes out of the ground with her toes.