Author Bio

FERRIS WAYNE McDANIEL

BACK THE OTHER WAY
      
      
      
      
      

From atop the old, abandoned First World War naval base, you can see the entire New Orleans skyline; the train tracks that run from here in the Ninth Ward, down Chartres, into the French Quarter, and beyond; Cape Knox, a ready reserve vessel that can be mobilized within five days but that’s been stationary since I rolled into town; the docks across the street from the barbecue joint where some people I know sometimes give me leftover brisket; the docks where they’re building a one-day cruise terminal for upper-middle-class families; the docks leading to the walking park, which runs along the river, where yuppies power walk and hipsters skateboard and old people sit on swings and watch tugs, steamers, and freighters maneuver that big river bend, where a boat, some of the other transients tell me, once ran into the Riverwalk Mall, long ago, before I was here; and the West Bank, which looks like a leap away from where I stand, with its church tower with the bell that chimes loud and clear across the water; and Delilah’s house, somewhere down there in the mix on Piety Street. Then there’s the little wine bar right down below me, on the corner of Chartres and Poland, where people from all over wait in a line down the block just to get in, where the sounds of jazz ring up to me over the industrial canal, which overflowed during Katrina; the little wine bar, where sometimes they’ll give me a cold bottle of water on the house after I’ve spent all day stripping copper at the base and other times tell me to get the fuck out.
       You’d think whatever department of the Navy was using this building, when it was given the order to relocate to Virginia, just up and left and never looked back. Conference rooms are still littered with tables topped with glass and luxury conference chairs and collapsed ceiling tiles. Every once in a while, I find a shooting target with the print of a man pointing a gun at me, and I get spooked. I’ve picked up a collection of empty bullet shells and keep them in my pocket because I like the sound they make clinking together, it calms me, and the way they’re both ridged and smooth when I finger them.
       And the copper, all that copper left behind. It won’t last forever, but it’ll last a while, so long as me and the other transients hide real good when the city police show up and search the place, because they know what we’re doing in here. We load the copper in an old rusted green Chevrolet and offload it to this old man who lives over the canal in Arabi. I save most of what I make, in a place the other transients won’t ever find, and I still have enough money to wash my clothes at the laundromat inside Melba’s Restaurant, while I eat cheap red beans and fried catfish. I can even afford a monthly membership at an all-night gym down on Chartres, where hardly anybody visits at night, which is when I use the showers and sometimes sleep but only if I know whoever’s working won’t bother me. There’re a lot of people in this town who’re still nice, who still know how to pronounce all the street names.

***

My father used to drink whiskey after my brother, Levi, died. He’d get real mean, and I know that’s about as cliché as it gets, but it’s the truth in the South. He was a good man before, but when my parents got the call informing them someone had shot up me and my brother’s school, that Levi received a fatal gunshot to the head, well, he turned to bourbon.
       I’d skipped school that day. When the bus let me and Levi out, I ran down the street to a gas station to meet my girlfriend at the time, so we could fool around at an out-of-use silo.
       My father never turned physically violent, he just ran his mouth, fought with my mother about little things, like if she forgot something negligible at the grocery store, and he wouldn’t even bring it up at the moment of her folly, he’d mention it later, drunk in his recliner, with the bottom of his white socks dirty and loose-fitting, all the lights turned off in the living room, and the movement from whatever show we watched on television, something we did a lot of after Levi died, flickering our shadows in blue light at the corners of the room.
       Only reason I didn’t drink was because of how much I hated him when he did, but I was still messed up in the head by then, probably still am now. Maybe I’ve just been sitting with it longer and have adjusted, but on the night my father and mother started howling at each other, threatening divorce, after fifteen years of perfect marriage, I didn’t care anymore. They’d stopped mentioning my brother by then. It was like he was never born, like he never made us all laugh almost every single night at dinner. I stole all the money they kept in a bank envelope in my father’s underwear drawer and left without my cell phone. Haven’t spoken to them since.

***

I love when Delilah cooks us breakfast in her skimpy pearl-colored slip dress, her breasts little mounds underneath, the lace trim of the dress’s V-neck taunting me to press my lips against her chest, where the veins show through all delicate, like her skin’s made of wax paper.
       I squeeze oranges I plucked from a tree in her backyard for our breakfast, and she tells me again I shouldn’t have stolen them. Her yatty, widowed landlord counts each one, and they all belong to her.
       “I’d kill your landlord before we don’t have fresh-squeezed orange juice for breakfast,” I say.
       “Ezra,” she says. The way she says my name feels like home. “You wouldn’t hurt a fly. Pull that toast out of the oven.”
       Delilah tops each slice of toast with an over-easy egg, slices of avocado, nutritional yeast, and hot sauce she made herself. The orange juice is thick, and its perfect sweetness makes concentrate a sin.
       “I got you a present,” I say.
       “Why?” she asks.
       I hand her the package, wrapped in brown paper, and any idiot would know it’s a book, but it’s not just any book, it’s a rare edition of The Sound and the Fury from Faulkner House Books in the Quarter.
       “How’d you afford this?” she asks.
       I stuff my mouth with toast and flash a goofy smile because I don’t like lying to her.

***

The other transients say this base housed 25,000 people who lost their home during the Great Depression. The transients also tell me a story their crank dealer in the Upper Ninth told them about how during Hurricane Katrina, there was a whole convoy of people looking for high ground while the city drowned. They came upon the base and were met by military personnel clutching assault rifles. When the group asked if they could stay in the base, the military personnel explained the base was being used to house stray animals separated from their owners, and the group grew rowdy, yelling and cursing the military personnel, saying there was plenty enough room in the base. The military personnel raised their rifles and suggested the group keep moving.
       Who knows how true the story is, but maybe if it’s told enough times, it might as well be.
       Now private developers working with the city plan to renovate the base into a multi-purpose facility with a government disaster control agency, apartments for those government workers and citizens alike, a laundromat, and maybe a grocery store, if any grocery store finds it worthwhile, profit-wise, to build in the neighborhood, which lost half its population after Katrina on account of how the double shotguns that previously housed four to eight people were bought for cheap after the storm and converted to double-wide single shotguns with only two to four people living inside. Or, in some cases, they’ve been converted to shitty dive bars with ironic names like Okay Bar or Poor Boys Lounge, where all these aloof, young service industry people, like the ones who work at the wine bar below the base, shoot pool and drink cheap beer and complain about the double they’re scheduled for the next day.
       The other transients have this hobby, if you can call it that, where they go into the wine bar, which serves dishes they’re always making fun of, like bacon wrapped dates and steak with strawberries and spoonfuls of deconstructed olives, which, to me, seem quite tasteful and innovative. Whatever transient goes inside buys the cheapest beer and lingers, seeking out a mark, who they watch throughout the night, and once the mark leaves, they leave, following the mark down the street, where sometimes other transients are waiting, and where they proceed to beat the mark with a knapsack filled with broken bricks until they’re bloody. The transients snatch whatever money or jewelry or cell phones they can carry and haul their score back to the base to divvy.
       I try not to be around on these nights because when they come back smelling like animals with these wildfires in their eyes, the vileness in their cackling starts to sound a lot like liberation if I let myself listen too long.

***

The boy who went into me and Levi’s high school and murdered eleven teenagers was my best friend, Damon. If he hadn’t killed himself after his rampage, I might’ve killed him.
       My brother was the smartest person I knew, and the kindest. He cried when those stupid commercials about adopting abused animals came on the television. He had plans to study computer programming in school. He said it was the language of the future, that every profession would need coders, that he wanted to transform the industry from something novel and sexy into something as common as coal miners were back in the day.
       When I’m stripping copper, I think of Levi and his computers and how they’re all filled with copper. My mind wanders into the future, when society no longer burns hydrocarbons. Everything’s electric, copper inside everywhere, copper inside people, copper my hands have touched. Copper wars will be fought in countries like Ghana and Kenya, copper, copper, copper, that lustrous surface that warps one’s reflection into a grotesque bulbous image with eyes two different sizes, and I think about Levi taking apart his computer just to put it back together, and copper, copper, copper, all this copper, not mine for the taking, but I strip it anyway, and I’ll keep stripping until there’s none left, and then I’ll have to find something else to do, and the boundlessness of the future becomes too much to fathom.

***

Delilah’s always asking me why we can’t spend a night at my place, and I’m always telling her I have lousy roommates, which is only a partial lie.
       Sometimes before we start stripping copper for the day, I walk down to the coffee shop where she works that markets itself as a fourth-wave beanery. Every time she gives me a free latte with a foam heart in the center, which just about makes me melt, only because it’s her doing it.
       The coffee is unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. There’s no way I’d ever pay the six dollars for it, though other people do every day. I sit in the corner of the shop, watch the people file in and out, making small talk with Delilah, trying to flirt with her, which boils my blood, but I wouldn’t dare get confrontational at her workplace and try not to get confrontational anywhere. I wonder what these people do for a living, whether they budget their daily six-dollar coffee into their lives, or if it’s such a staple of their day they don’t even account for it.
       People with laptops and smart phones and nice hair styled with product. They sit alone or they sit alone with people they’ve come inside with, all of them scrolling on their phones. I picture bright orange salmon fillets in place of their phones, and this makes me laugh. Some people talk about how the Lower Ninth is the new Williamsburg. Gentrification is a hot topic here. Toss that word out, and you better settle in for a half-hour conversation. They blather about how New Orleans is the premiere city of the American culinary scene. They sigh and gasp over who’s being nominated for whatever James Beard Award, roll their eyes as they claim a James Beard Award is bullshit, all politics, whoever you know, and I want to get right in their faces, so close you can only slide a sheet of paper between our noses, and scream at the top of my lungs, no words, just sound, long, wailing, droning reverberation that’ll put us all into a state of hypnosis, until I stop and the world is a different place.
       Every time Delilah gives me coffee on the house, when she says with her head on a slight tilt, “Don’t worry about it, coffee’s on me,” I put up a fake fight.
       “Come on,” I say. “Just once.”
       “Not going to happen,” she says.
       I smile and kiss her on the chin and make plans to see her for dinner, at her place.

***

One night, shortly after I showed up in New Orleans, I was drinking two-dollar beers at a bar down the street from the naval base when a black guy about my age stumbles in, eyes large as Pink Lady apples, hand down his pants, begging everyone in the bar to hide him, to protect him from the snakes and alligators. The bouncer, this other, larger, black guy who thinks it’s still edgy to brag about smoking pot, grabbed this guy by the collar and shoved him outside.
       I followed the guy, asked him what was going on, and quickly gathered he was either on a heavy dose of something hallucinatory or schizo or maybe PTSD. I promised I’d get him back to his house, if he’d tell me where he lived, but he had no clue where he was. He zigzagged down the sidewalk without me, toward St. Claude. I followed him, asked him again what was going on. He stopped, stiffened up, told me they were crawling up him, they were inside his pants, they were going to suffocate him, the snakes, the snakes.
       “You have to reach down my pants,” he said. He pulled the front of his slacks away from him, to make an opening. “You have to get the snake out of there.”
       I told him, “I’m not putting my hands down your pants.”
       “Please!” he shouted. He couldn’t look down. Droplets of sweat formed on his forehead like ornate, crystal jewelry.
       I pretended to reach my hand down and pull a snake out and told him it was gone now, so
       we’d better get moving, and he obeyed. Eventually he led me to his apartment building. We slipped inside the gate as an older man left. He flashed me this look like, What’re you doing with this kooked-out brother, white boy?
       Halfway up the steps, the guy collapsed and insisted he wouldn’t go inside his apartment. I looped my arms under his armpits and hauled him up the steps, down the hall. I took his keys and tried three of them before opening the door and pushing him inside.
       “Stay with me,” he said. “Protect me. Please.”
       I considered it for a moment, considered snatching anything valuable: money, electronics, kitchen gadgets I could give to Delilah, but I decided against it, because the guy looked like he was watching the Grim Reaper glide down from the sky to scythe his soul, and I was scared of him. He screamed for me to stay, shrieked that someone was coming to get him, and I could still hear him roaring as I hurried down the breezeway, then the steps, and through the outside gate to the street.

***

 One time, when Damon slept over at our house, I woke up in the middle of the night to piss, and he wasn’t on the pad my parents had made for him on the floor. I checked the living room, the bathroom, and the kitchen, but he wasn’t there. I looked out into the backyard but didn’t notice anyone. Finally, I tried my brother’s room. The door was locked. I thought I heard muffled voices on the other side.
       “Levi,” I whispered. “Let me in. I can’t find Damon.”
       When the door opened, it was Damon who stood in the threshold before me. The light in the room was off. Damon was sweating, trying to catch his breath.
       “What’s going on in there?” I asked.
       “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I tried to wake you up, but you wouldn’t.”
       I called out Levi’s name over Damon’s shoulder, but he didn’t answer. I heard the movement of a body in a bed, knew he was awake.
       “I woke up to piss, and you weren’t in my room,” I said. “I was worried.”
       “It’s okay, buddy,” Damon said. “I’m here now.”
       We took turns pissing and returned to my room. We talked about video games until Damon didn’t answer anymore. I figured he was sleeping, but I stayed awake for another hour, to make sure he stayed that way.
       I’d forgotten all about it, even after the shooting, until one night, while I was sleeping in the shower at the gym. I was woken up by the grunts of two men, and when I caught them doing what they were doing, they split and acted as if they were simply showering at three in the morning. I left and strolled around the city until the sun came up.

***

Delilah tells me if I don’t show her where I live, then I can count on never seeing her place again. I make up excuses, but she’s heard them all before, and I figure our relationship is actually getting serious, so maybe when I show her, she’ll be accepting and forgive me for keeping this colossal part of my life hidden from her— yeah, I think, keep telling yourself that.
       We hold hands and walk down Poland. I do whatever I can to stall: point out shotgun houses with pretty facades, stop to pet stray cats, pull her close to me and kiss her neck. Each time, she takes my hand and pulls me onward.
       When we get to the corner of Poland and Chartres, in front of the wine bar, the door guy tells me I’m not fucking getting anything for free tonight, so get lost.
       “What’s he talking about?” Delilah asks.
       “That’s my buddy,” I say. “Just giving me a hard time.”
       “I didn’t know you came here,” Delilah says. “Why haven’t we come? It looks so cool.”
       “We will,” I say. “Promise.” I stand on the corner, staring down Poland, then Chartres, scratching the back of my head.
       “I’ll call the fucking police,” the door guy says. “You know we’ve already told you and your group to stay out of our sight. It’s bad for business to have cops showing up looking for people squatting in that base.”
       Delilah stares at me hard. “Ezra?”
       A train comes barreling down the tracks that cut this corner off from the rest of the world at Royal Street, the rumbling is deafening, and I shout at Delilah that I don’t have a home, and she shouts back at me, confused, and I point at the naval base, and the train blasts its horn. Delilah frowns. We stand there on the corner, the door guy glaring at me, and wait for the train to pass, so I can get the fuck out of there.

***

I often wish it was me who’d been shot by Damon instead of Levi. I know how cliché this sounds, too, but it’s the truth. I wonder if my family wouldn’t have fallen apart if Levi was around for my parents instead of me. I wonder what Levi would say about that, if he weren’t already dead, if he would also claim he should be shot before me but in his heart of hearts wish the situation would never arise because he knows his life is worth more than mine. Or maybe I wasn’t always this bad, and I’ve just forgotten.

***

A few weeks after Delilah says we can’t see each other anymore, I spot her with this guy, who’s dressed in nice ironed trousers, a white shirt, and thin little tie with a silver clip. They step into the wine shop on the corner. I approach the other transients and tell them tonight I want to go inside and pick a mark, and they get so giddy about my participation they pool enough money for me to buy some nice liquor.
       I dress in my cleanest clothes and slip inside with a group of strangers and find a corner in the courtyard under a canopy of low-hanging wisteria, across from Delilah and this prick she’s with. As the night passes, I tap my feet to the jazz music, these Django Reinhardt wannabes, and return to the bar over and over, drinking gin cocktails garnished with fresh herbs, until the string lights in the garden begin to blur as if underwater, and the music grows oppressive, the night darker, people standing to dance in front of the stage, the prick with his arm around Delilah, their knees touching under the table. She never sees me, or at least if she does, she pretends not to, and once they’ve eaten and split a bottle of wine, they walk out together.
       I stalk them from a distance, and they tell each other good night at the corner, knowing Delilah never brings anyone home on a first date, and I trail this prick, at least ten strides behind, my hands in my pockets, casual, fingering the cold bullet shells, and the crickets buzz around the thick, humid night. Sweat trickles down my abdomen, chills me, and the prick rounds the corner at Royal Street, where I know for a fact there are zero street lights, where I know he will fumble for his keys to his car or his bike lock, and I think about all the kids at school who ever called Damon a queer, because that’s what kids did back then, and what went through Levi’s head the moments before he died, and I think about my parents, wondering whether they divorced or stayed together after losing both of their sons, and how when I first came to this city, I felt like things might turn around, like I was Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, and now I know, even though I’ve always been aware, that those boys are fictional, those boys wouldn’t know what to make of the world we live in today, and I know, feel it as sure as the blood humming through me, when I round this corner, where that prick awaits, head down, unsuspecting, high off touching and smelling Delilah’s perfect hair, I know when I round this corner, I won’t ever be able to go back the other way.