Night Watchman (The Tubby Dubonnet Series Book 8) (3 page)

Unaware that his recruit had become troubled, the Tulane counselor, true to his word, got Tubby into the university.

The French Quarter spirits he had known so briefly scattered to the winds. He got a postcard from Dan explaining that he was enlisting in the National Guard to “subvert from within.” He got into the Guard based on a recommendation from his state representative in Canton, Mississippi. One of the girls moved off to the Blue Ridge Mountains where life was simple and pure. His friend Raisin Partlow stayed in touch. He dropped out of his Mississippi college and was immediately drafted and sent to Vietnam. In his Tulane dorm Tubby received regular letters from Raisin, who was fixing helicopters near Danang in Vietnam. The consistent theme, repeated over and over, was “Don’t the fuck even think about coming over here, whatever you do!”

But Tubby, the small town boy, thought he probably should go over there. He was supposed to join the ROTC as part of his school financial package but, wouldn’t you know it, someone burned the Tulane ROTC building down the night the Chicago 7 came to town. One problem solved.

School started going poorly. He became involved with a sophomore English major. In the ways of the time, what initially attracted him was that she had breasts like ripe cantaloupes, a comparison that came easily to him, having grown up on a farm. She was, however, very depressed as a general rule, not about the war or anything like that, but about her relationship with her father, her mother, her sisters. She would drink wine, then come over to Tubby’s room and cry. This had a chilling effect on his libido, which in turn depressed him, too. So he broke it off.

Events began to spin faster and faster. Dan was expelled from the Guard as an undesirable, and then went “undercover,” he said, to organize for some union. Most of the Tulane undergraduate students began to seem preppy beyond belief, or were too far into drugs to appeal to Tubby. Spirits low, he gave vent to an irrational burst of anger at a teacher about some interpretation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The professor, feeling physically intimidated, kicked him out of class. In retaliation Tubby quit school.

In a split second he was drafted. Right before his induction ceremony, Raisin came home.

“What the fuck did I tell you, man? Don’t go there!” he insisted over Heinekens at Fat Harry’s. Beer had become legal for 18-year-olds.

“Of course I’m going,” Tubby said angrily. “What else am I supposed to do?”

Two weeks after he crossed the line, leaving aimless civilian life behind, the peace accord went out the window, and the National Liberation Army raced south. In the middle of his basic training at Fort Polk, Saigon fell.

Tubby never left the country. In fact, he never left New Jersey. Due to his size he spent what was left of his two years of national service as a Military Police trainee. As an MP, he guarded the tarmac at Fort Dix and got to salute planeloads of men, those upright and those laid flat, coming home from various parts of the globe. In his country’s service he also competed on the Army’s wrestling team, and he got every muscle in his body bruised and torn by far better athletes than the blond boy from Louisiana. After beating the crap out of him they gave him the name “Tubby”. He was cool with that. They called themselves much worse things. Then he was discharged.

Raisin, Dan Haywood, and Tubby all came home with at least one thing in common. All three now knew there was definitely one thing that they never wanted to do again. Be in the Army. A noble calling, but…

Tubby’s Greyhound took him back to his hometown of Bunkie. A month later he was readmitted to Tulane. Only this time around his course in life was straight. With his muscles and bones mending, and his tuition paid by the government, Tubby began to see the point of getting educated. He met another English major named Mattie, and they started sleeping over at each other’s apartments. Tubby made the grades and graduated. Then he went to law school, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The boy who couldn’t work the mimeograph machine for the anti-socialist youth group didn’t take his mother to church. That was just an excuse. Instead he went home and crawled into bed where he stayed for two entire days. He told his mother he was tired, and she made him pay the price. She served him
sopa de pollo
and rubbed hot chili powder on his chest. She fed him
nonni fruit
and massaged VapoRub into his feet.

He had not been in the car that day, the day when they shot the war protester, and he hadn’t even known it had happened until he went to the meeting. The matter-of-fact way it was reported to the group horrified him.

“You’re missing your classes,” his mother prodded him. “Here, have some soup…”

Yes, he was missing classes. He was supposed to be carrying a full load at the University of New Orleans, and he was blowing it. Why had he ever gotten involved with this group? They were totally
loco
.

But of course he knew why he went to those meetings. His father spent all of his time listening to Cuban and Miami radio on the shortwave. Dad was so embittered by the revolution that he had barely been able to work for fifteen years.

“Our shoe store is sitting right there, right where we left it,” he told his son. “It was my father’s store. It was my store. I have the keys, and we could walk right in tomorrow. It is the place where you were born. It is yours now, Son, just as soon as we go back.”

But the boy had his doubts. He couldn’t remember anything much about Cuba, except for grainy mental photographs of a pink stucco house shrouded by green banana trees. And he remembered a fearsome red parrot who followed him from room to room defecating. His mother had given him birthday parties and invited lots of friends, but he wasn’t positive that they had ever happened in Cuba. Maybe it was later, in Miami or later still in New Orleans. She gave him parties like that to this day.

His father didn’t seem to be in any of these mental pictures. Maybe it was because his father was actually or figuratively always working in that damn store. Now Pop stayed home all the time and was eternally sad. He wasn’t a lot of help when it came to planning his son’s future.

The boy saw a career for himself in banking, or in advertising maybe. His father just wanted the family to go back to Cuba and sell shoes.

The boy’s girlfriend dropped by on the third day.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

“I’m very tired and sick,” he said.

She checked to be sure the mom wasn’t looking and then gave him a quick kiss on the lips and a firm squeeze on his crotch through his jeans.

“Get up and go to school,” she said. So he did.

He caught the bus out to the lakefront the next morning and returned to class, but it wasn’t really over. The group had killed someone. The frightened student looked for FBI men in the shadows of every oak tree.

It was an unspeakable relief, as the days went by, to find no mention whatsoever of this crime in the newspapers. No TV. No nothing. None of his fellow conspirators reported anything that would concern any of them.

Yet over the course of a month he had lost eleven pounds worrying.

In time, however, the event faded into the past. In spite of this, he stopped going to the meetings. He explained to the group that his mother needed help around the house, since his father was always so sad. They bought that. By plodding through every day and applying himself, he eventually got his degree and went out in search of a career. Except at family gatherings, Cuba and international socialism rarely crossed his mind.

But as life went on there was still that little, deep, scared place in his head.

It was on the flight back from Florida to New Orleans that Tubby again started thinking about that murder. He wasn’t sure why, since forty years had passed. Maybe it was the more recent senseless killing of the young man, Trayvon Martin, but, for whatever reason, he couldn’t get it out of his head. He wondered whether anything had ever been done about it. He knew that he had never been questioned by the police.

In a strange way, his grown-up personality had been shaped by that bullet. Not all of his personality, of course. Before that had been a hazy stretch of undemanding days in Bunkie, and after that there had been the army, graduate school, a family, clients by the hundreds, all with stories to tell, lost loves, tragedies, and mysteries galore.

But with that gunshot had come a glimpse into the terrible and final way the world could treat people, and the way it would keep right on treating people if nobody stepped in.

Tubby could never claim that he had spent a career championing the cause of the downtrodden. Like most lawyers, of course, he had saved his share of widows, orphans and fools from tragic fates, but the fact was that he had charged what the market would bear and made a pretty good living at it. He appreciated being one of the chosen few— the ones who could go past the swinging courtroom gates and approach the bench. He got to knock back a big heap of crawfish with a judge now and then. Not everybody could do that. But he had always been skeptical of the system itself, even though he was a part of it. It was troubling at this time of his life to ask what he was doing with that exceptional power. What of significance, that is?

Such heavy thoughts bothered Tubby. They didn’t bother him so much for their content but just because he didn’t like to have to deal with heavy thoughts. Somehow, however, Naples’ detached beauty had brought them up against his will and now he was stuck with thinking them through.

The warm embrace of New Orleans’ humidity hit him as soon as he walked out of the terminal and flagged a cab. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was in full command of the heavens. The air conditioner in the cab wasn’t working.

“Sorry, man,” the driver apologized. “It sure ain’t no picnic driving this old heap.”

In the back seat Tubby tried to remain absolutely motionless, despite banging against the door as they bounced down New Orleans’ corrugated streets. The heat caressed him through the opened windows. His heavy thoughts kept him company all the way down the Earhart Expressway.

“Been raining any?” he asked the cabdriver miserably.

“Not since July. But no hurricanes yet,” he was told.

What sustained the passage was the vision of his shady house Uptown. When the cab finally got there and crunched to the curb, Tubby had his wallet ready. He paid the fare plus a tip, got his bag from the trunk, and inhaled deeply. There it was— the familiar and restorative smell of gardenias and soggy grass, coffee brewing and very close, the Mississippi River.

The house within was just as he’d left it two weeks before. He locked the front door and pushed down the thermostat, which made the air conditioner shudder on. Then he found himself a bottle of bourbon in the kitchen and fixed himself a big icy drink.

Home at last!

He sat on a kitchen stool to enjoy the solitude and quiet, looking out the window at his overgrown backyard full of red azaleas in full bloom. Why had he ever left?

He let his mind drift.

Parker, who the hell was he? What kind of person could he have become if he had lived? But really, who cared about him? Tubby was surprised that he did. What the hell was ever done about that murder?

He was still on his first cup of Community coffee in the morning when the phone in his jeans started to vibrate.

“Hey, Man, are you back in New Orleans?” It was Raisin.

“Yeah. I just got in last night. How’d you know?”

“Because you called me last night and left a message? You don’t remember?”

“Uh…” No, he didn’t. Must have been somewhere between the third and fourth belt. It had taken quite a lot to put himself to sleep, after all that strenuous travel from Florida. All those heavy memories. He worried about whom else he might have called.

“You asked if I wanted to have lunch today,” Raisin continued. “I was out with Sadie at the Maple Leaf listening to Joe Krown and never heard the phone ring. But the answer is yes.”

Tubby had to dig deep to remember who Sadie was. He had been full of energy a moment ago but now, reminded that he had over-indulged the night before, he felt disoriented. Oh yeah, she was some sort of engineer at Shell, recently relocated to New Orleans from Holland. Raisin had met her at the tennis club and managed to make a good impression, as he usually did when wearing whites.

“Good. We’ll meet. I’m going to the office this morning and see if I still have a law practice. That probably won’t take very long. Where do you want to go?”

“How about out in the Bywater” You remember Janie, the bartender at Grits? I think I may have a client for you.”

Which is how they ended up at Monkey Business on St. Claude Avenue, way across the tracks. It was in one of the older parts of town, a neighborhood of shotguns hugging the Mississippi River levee, full of roughnecks, gospel-singing grannies, longshoremen, mamas in green spandex at the bus stops, po-boy shops and lots of fried chicken, noodle, and beer joints. And lately, artists, urban planners, filmmakers, and start-up entrepreneurs had moved in, creating the newest outer fringe of hip culture in New Orleans.

Tubby’s detour to the office was uneventful. Cherrylynn, his long-time secretary, had kept up with the phone and emails for the past two weeks with her usual competence. Quite honestly, Tubby hadn’t really been working his law practice for a couple of years, so her job wasn’t full-time-interesting nowadays. In fact, he was considering bringing in a young lawyer to keep her occupied and to handle the business that Tubby fancied he could generate if he really put his mind to it. In the interim Cherrylynn had been taking afternoon classes at Loyola University studying philosophy, politics, and economics. Only thirty-two more credits to a college degree.

He had also picked a very good time to go on a Florida vacation. To say that August was a slow time at the courthouse would be an insult to stoned sloths. There were summer days when you couldn’t find a member of the judiciary anywhere in the building, not even at their normal midday rendezvous presiding over raw oysters and Trout Meuniere at Mandina’s.