New Orleans Noir by Julie Smith

Author:Julie Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Anthologies, ebook
ISBN: 9781936070398
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2007-04-01T10:00:00+00:00

LAWYERS’ TONGUES

BY THOMAS ADCOCK

Gentilly

I hope that the one of my relations who come across this gift find a very exlent use for it since the old bag I hereby confess to steal it from was a lowdown evil person who actually deserve what I imagine they going to do to me up to Angola after they catch up to me, which is stick me with the ugly needle and put me down like a cat …

Maybe there was ten thousand dollars’ worth of “gift” slipping around in my hands, maybe twenty. A sheaf of beautiful green-gray bills fluttered to the floor, along with Frank’s last letter to anybody. I stared at etchings of dead presidents on paper money. But all I could see, really, was the memory of my brother’s face, how it so often wore the expression of a mutt dog expecting to be cuffed.

My brother wrote letters practically every day of his life, always on lined paper torn from the Big Chief notebooks he bought from Bynum’s Pharmacy. Frank bought Big Chiefs like other people buy newspapers and chewing gum.

I picked up his letter from the floor.

Probly you going to come across this here loot, Wussy Wally. You being the onlyest one of our so-called family ever care to be buzzing around my bizness …

He always wrote in jet-black Sheaffer Skrip fountain pen ink. His handwriting was strangely elegant; surely that would seem most odd to those who didn’t care to know anything about Frank besides the worst thing about his record in life.

He called me “Wussy Wally” only when it was just the two of us. I imagine Frank believed his little brother would be embarrassed otherwise. So I was properly Walter, or sometimes Walt, when anybody else was around.

I considered the private name a gesture of my brother’s affection and gentleness. For indeed, I did care to know about the thoughtful dimensions of an angry man’s life.

Frank was right. Nobody else cared anything about him beyond keeping him far away. All our uncles and aunts and cousins kept their doors shut to Frank—and, by extension, to me too. This was due to Frank’s light fingers. As Aunt-tee Viola said for the whole bunch of our relations, “That boy Frank, he’d steal anything but a red-hot stove.”

But he was more than a thief, of course. Just as surely as crooks in high places got where they are because of doing some good things for people now and then. A man’s life is not so petty it can be measured up at the end as all good or all bad. Frank was plus and minus like anybody else, except for cheap schooling and black skin, which of course magnifies all minuses.

When I recollect his plus side, I would describe Frank as a philosopher. The things he said!

Such as things he’d whisper in the dark of night when we were boys in a shared room, me in one twin bed drifting off to sleep, Frank in his—only I can’t recall ever seeing him sleep.

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