Boulevard (2 page)

He visited a few of the shops in the lower Quarter, pretending to browse like a real customer, a store full of used books, including some books by Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson for a quarter apiece, a store full of old postcards and glassware, stores full of Mardi Gras masks and costumes, places such as he had never imagined, though he kept a poker face and acted as if he had seen it all before. He ambled along Barracks, nearing Decatur Street, when he walked into a shop near the corner, which turned out to be a junk shop, tables and shelves of junk everywhere you looked, and the ceilings must have been
twenty feet at least, wall-papered with dark paper that had stained even darker with age. A sign had been lettered onto the front window by a careful hand, and the sign, in contrast to the building, was bright and well kept. “Hendeman's Rare and Used,” the sign read, but what? Everything, apparently, including old ashtrays, a wooden baby carriage near collapse, several wooden buckets, jars of beads, masks hung on the walls and piled on the shelves. Across the room behind a counter a woman was watching him. She had broad shoulders and hips and a narrow waist, and was dressed in a light, flowered dress with a buff-colored sweater wrapped around her. A large cat prowled the counter near her elbow, fluffing against her hand, till finally she shoved it away in irritation.

She was as handsome as a man, he thought, when he was close enough to see her face. Square-faced, high cheekbones, a strong jaw, full flaring lips, heavy eyebrows, her hair done up in a loose bun. “Are you looking for something?” she asked in a pleasant, husky voice.

“Do you have a phone book?”

She lifted a white-covered directory to the counter and set it in front of him. “Do you want the phone?”

“No ma'am. I just need to look up the address of the YMCA.”

“Well, that's on Lee Circle,” she said, “I can tell you that.”

“Lee Circle?”

“Yes. You take the streetcar uptown, and you get off at Lee Circle.”

“How do I know it's Lee Circle?”

“Because it's a circle,” she said, “and you know who Lee is, don't you? Robert E. Lee.”

“Oh.” He was distracted, opening his map to see if he could find the place.

She found his map to be amusing, he could see by her smile. She had some papers she was looking at, and she went back to doing that, correcting something with a pencil. After a while she asked, “You're looking for a place to stay?”

“Yes ma'am. I been looking all day. All the ads in the paper.”

She smiled at him, started to say something, changed her mind. Then changed her mind again. “Most people in the Quarter don't put an ad in the paper if they have a room to rent.”

“Why not?”

“Because they don't have to. And anyway, they would be afraid of tourists. Or out-of-town people. Most people from the Quarter would put out the word to their friends they had a room, and wait.”

“Well, there's ads in this paper for rooms,” Newell fanned the paper up and down, “but there's not a single place that's fit to live in.”

She shrugged. “The YMCA is nice. You won't mind it.”

“I know.”

After another moment, she walked into her office, a door behind some filing cabinets, and he figured she was tired of talking. He looked up “YMCA” anyway and wrote the number on a scrap of paper. He closed the
phone book and laid it down, and as he turned away her voice stopped him. “Do you have a job?” She had put on a pair of glasses and had a ledger in her hand. She set the ledger on the counter and opened it to a page and started to make entries in it.

“No ma'am. Not yet.”

“Most people aren't going to rent you a room if you don't have a job.”

“I can get a job. It looks like there's a lot of restaurants and places around here. I can do something. I worked in a grocery store in Pastel. And I graduated from high school.”

She wanted to smile, he could tell, and he supposed he had said something foolish. “Well, I'm sure you'll be fine,” she said.

He headed for the door without thanking her, thinking she was making fun of him, but again her voice stopped him. She was looking at him with her hand on the cat's back, smoothing its fur.

“I have a room, upstairs.”

He stopped and turned. There were no stairs anywhere in the room.

“Would you like to see it?”

He nodded.

She sighed and closed the ledger. Unlocking a drawer, she pulled out a ring of keys and put them in her pocket. She led him outside to the street, then unlocked a narrow door next to the store. This door, which looked like a tall piece of fencing, opened to a narrow passageway that
led to the interior of the block. He followed her to a courtyard full of green, the sound of water running somewhere; he could see a fountain through a pair of archways, to the right of which rose stairs, and she led him up those to a narrow doorway. She gestured to another door down the gallery from the one she was unlocking, “There's an apartment there, somebody's living in it. This next one is the room that's empty.”

The room was tall and narrow, with a single casement window at the front, and a set of narrow French doors leading to the balcony that ran along the front of the building. A ceiling fan hung from the ceiling, and when she flicked a switch on the wall it began to turn slowly. At the back of the room, behind a white door, stood a bathroom with a bathtub, a sink, and a toilet. High up in one wall of the bathroom was a window, admitting dingy light. The two rooms seemed dark to him, but the main room was clean and big enough, with a bed in it, and a wooden wardrobe, a chair, a small table, and a small refrigerator with a lamp on top of it.

“The last fellow who lived here skipped out on the rent,” she said. “He had owed me for two months. And he had a job.”

“It's a nice room,” Newell said.

“My husband used it for an office, when he was an astrologer.”

Newell had no idea what to say. He wandered in the room and felt the money in his pocket and wished. When he turned around, she was watching him.

“If you can pay me two months rent in cash right now, I'll let you move in,” she said.

“How much is that?”

“Two hundred fifty dollars a month. That's five hundred dollars.”

This was nearly all he had. But he pulled the money out of his pocket at once and counted five hundred dollars into her hand.

“You pay me the rent in cash on the first of the month, beginning with July,” she said. “I keep this second month's rent in case you skip out. You can have these last few days of May for nothing.”

He had less than a hundred dollars left. In a month he would have to give her two hundred fifty dollars more. If he didn't, she would keep his extra two-fifty and kick him out in the street. Looking at her, he had no doubt she would do exactly that. The thought left his mouth dry. But he nodded and said, “That's fine.”

“Come downstairs and show me some I.D.”

In the shop, where ceiling fans were creaking overhead stirring the cobwebs on all the bric-à-brac, he showed her his Alabama driver's license and his library card for the Polk County Public Library. He also showed her a picture of Flora in front of the trailer on the outskirts of Pastel. “She's my grandma.”

“So if I find you dead in that room up there one morning, she's who I should call?”

The question unsettled him some, but he nodded. She wrote down Flora's address and phone number and gave
him a receipt for his five hundred dollars. That was when he learned her name was Louise Kimbro. He had expected her to be a Hendeman, because of the store window. She gave him keys and showed him which was which. “Jiggle the handle on that toilet,” she said, “or it'll run all day. And don't leave the lights on when you go out. And be careful you lock that balcony door.”

He took the keys and hurried away, thinking he could reach the bus station before too late, to fetch his bag. Tomorrow he would look for a job. He had already forgotten about Louise by the time he reached the door, and she stood watching him. Something about him reminded her of Arthur. She liked Newell's looks, his dark hair and watery green eyes. She liked his thin, pale body standing in the doorway, looking out at Barracks Street as though it were a moonscape. She liked something about him that she could never have described, something languid and lean. Back in the junk shop she listened for his footsteps on the stairs beyond the wall and slipped the rent money into an envelope and stuffed it into a filing cabinet in one of the rooms behind the junk store.

Later, when Owen brought the delivery truck to load her Thursday deliveries, she realized what it was she had recognized. Newell had Arthur's voice, the same gentle, drawn-out vowels, the same note of music in the speech. But the revelation was fleeting, since, along with the truck, Owen had brought his daughter, Millie, a ripe, pretty thing, and Louise never could keep her eyes off that girl.

Newell rushed to the bus station as fast as he could, through the boiling afternoon heat, partly out of excitement at the prospect of unpacking in his new room, and partly out of a sense of panic that he had spent all the money he had saved, so quickly, just like that. He should have rented a room by the night at the Y till he found a job, that would have been more prudent, wouldn't it? Because now he had only thirty days to find a job and earn enough money to pay the rent on time. Now he had less than a hundred dollars to his name.

As long as he was walking with the distractions of the French Quarter, of Canal Street, around him, he could stop thinking about how poor he was, he could stop being afraid he would end up homeless on the street. He fished the key out of his pocket and opened the locker in the bus station, where several buses were idling at the gates, loading passengers for destinations everywhere a person could imagine. He had enough money left, he could take the bus home again, now, while it was safe.

When he set the duffel on the bare mattress of his new bed, he realized with a thud that he would have to buy sheets. He had brought none. Looking around the room, he realized he would have to buy a lot of things, including nearly everything that he took for granted in a bathroom. His money was bleeding away from him, dollar by dollar. Why hadn't he thought of this when he was packing, when he could have swiped a bar of soap from Flora, and some towels, even a set of sheets?

He had brought his clothes and his cassette tape player
with the five tapes he had managed to buy during high school. He had brought his high school diploma and his birth certificate, which Flora said he was sure to need when he got a job. The clothes fit neatly into the wardrobe, which had drawers at the bottom, with plenty of room to spare. The cassette player he put on the table beside the bed. This was the whole of his unpacking. When it was done, he sat in the chair for a while, looking at the room, feeling short of breath.

He counted his money. A little over ninety-five dollars. He had to have soap and toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant. He had found a blanket in the bottom of the wardrobe, and it smelled pretty clean, so he figured he could make do with that for a while, since he had no idea how much sheets would cost, or pillows, or anything like that. He was lucky there was furniture in the room at all, he supposed, feeling a bit foolish to have brought so little money, to have been so naïve as to think the move would be so easy.

The proportions of the room, the simple bed and table, chair and dresser, pleased him, however, and he could look around and know that this was where he lived now, with an address, with a lock and keys. All he had to do was find a way to pay for it.

Spreading out the newspaper, he studied the want ads. He felt better when he saw listings for restaurant jobs and hotel room service jobs, cashiers and clerks, work he figured he could do pretty easily, if only he could convince somebody to give him a chance. He marked some of the
places he wanted to apply tomorrow, after consulting the map to make sure he could find them, and since he was living near downtown he was within walking distance of nearly all the jobs he read about.

He folded up the newspaper and counted his money again, then went downstairs. He stopped in the junk shop to ask Louise where the best place was to buy what he needed, and she told him how to find the A&P on Royal Street. He found it easily and wandered among the cramped shelves. The store was crowded, people were stepping around each other constantly, and Newell found himself caught up in the game after only a few moments. So many men, in particular, here. Young men in flannel shirts and tight jeans. In tight T-shirts with the sleeves cut away. Young men with beards, sideburns, moustaches, chest hair bristling out of their shirts. Men of all colors and sizes, sliding among the canned goods and displays of produce. Buying liquor, which shocked him. In Alabama you could not buy liquor at a grocery store like this. He had come to a new world, for sure.

He spent more money than he meant to, nearly thirty dollars. With his bag in his arms, he walked down Royal Street, gas lamps lit at the doors of buildings, high balconies hovering above, the sidewalk uneven. The street was a wall of buildings, fences, and gates, and he had the feeling that all this was to hide what went on inside these buildings, these courtyards. Over the tops of fences he could see the backs of houses, many with smaller buildings running perpendicular to the back. These must be
what were called slave quarters—he'd seen a slave quarter apartment described that way in the classifieds. Rooms where slaves had lived. Devorah, his friend from high school, might have lived in one of those rooms, in those days.

Every stranger's face he passed seemed mysterious in some way. By the time he reached his room again, his heart was pounding from the newness of it all, the beautiful shapes of the buildings, the uncomfortable feeling when he looked at the slave rooms, contrasted with the graceful twists of wrought iron, the Spanish moss draped over a brick wall, the glimpse of an interior garden, a fountain singing behind a closed wooden gate. A city full of everything, bad and good. He had done the right thing by coming here, he was sure of it, no matter how risky. Even if he failed, even if he ran out of money and had to go home, he was right to try.