Not wanting to go two out of three falls with the traffic, I grabbed a cab back downtown and had the driver drop me off on Canal.
A crowd was gathering on the sidewalk in front of Werlein’s, doubled by its reflection in storefront glass among black pianos and shiny brass horns. I walked over, hearing about me a flurry of commentary, query, invective.
“Never knew what was coming.”
“I seen it, seen it all.”
“Bad blood ’tween ’em, had to be.”
“Just like that, and its over.”
“Anybody call the police yet?”
One man-both were black-lay on the sidewalk in a mirrorlike pool of blood and urine. There was a sucking wound in his chest where the bullet had smashed its way in; each time he tried to breathe, the fabric around it, though blood-logged, fluttered. Then light went out from behind his eyes and his shirt grew still. He was done with all this.
Another man of about the same age stood over him with the gun hanging limply at his side, saying over and over to himself what sounded like “I done tried to tell him, I done tried to tell him.” As though (I thought, walking on toward the Quarter), speechless and dumb for years, he had found at last a way to speak, to say the things he wanted.
Years later, as I stood in Beaucoup Books reading a poem in one of the magazines I skimmed from time to time there, that scene, something I’d never again thought of in all those years, came back to me full force. Once again I could see the shirt fabric flapping, the reflection of the crowd in the windows, the peace in both those men’s eyes. You must learn to put your distress signals in code, the poem read.