Knowing it couldn’t last, knowing one afternoon was all he’d have in New Orleans, Keller made the most of it. He walked down streets at random, taking in the older homes, some of them virtual mansions, others quite modest. They all looked good to him, and he did something he hadn’t done in years, let himself imagine what it would be like to live here, what sort of life he might lead if he bought one of these houses and spent the rest of his days in and around it. It wasn’t a terribly exotic fantasy, and a month ago he could have achieved it readily enough. But a month ago all he’d wanted to do was live out his days in New York, and that was out of the question, and so was this. His net worth was now limited to the cash in his pocket and five Swedish stamps he couldn’t sell, and he could no more afford to buy one of these houses than he could risk giving up the highway and settling down.
Still, it was something for his mind to play with while he walked these streets and looked at these houses. He’d want one with an upstairs porch, he decided. He could easily picture himself sitting in a white wooden rocking chair on just such a porch, looking out over the street, maybe sipping at a glass of — what?
Iced tea?
He pushed aside thoughts of Dot — her porch, her iced tea — and walked on. On St. Charles Avenue, where the streetcar used to run in the days before Katrina, he stopped at one small restaurant for a cup of coffee and a bowl of seafood gumbo. He sat in a booth, and the waitress who brought him his meal commented cheerfully on his Homer Simpson cap. After she’d left his table he took the cap off and set it on the seat beside him. He was tiring of Homer, and wondered if the cap had outlived its usefulness. Keller’s picture had stopped showing up on the newscasts, and the papers had tired of running it, so maybe his face was less likely now to set off alarms in people’s head. But they still noticed Homer, you couldn’t help noticing Homer, and after they’d noticed the vivid yellow embroidery, maybe their eyes would be drawn to a face they’d otherwise glide right past.
The gumbo was terrific, the coffee a substantial cut above what they handed out through the drive-up windows. He’d almost forgotten that food could be a pleasure, but New Orleans, a city that was about food as surely as New York was about real estate and Washington about politics, had refreshed his memory.
He had just about made up his mind to leave the Homer cap behind, but it was on his head when he walked out of the café. He was still wearing it an hour later when he felt hungry enough to eat again, and stopped at a hole in the wall, just a counter and stools opposite a grill. There were hooks in the wall behind the row of stools, and people hung their jackets and such on them, and he took off his cap and hung it up. He had a magnificent plate of red beans and rice and smoked sausage, and another cup of good coffee, and when he’d finished and was ready to go he found that another patron had walked off with his Homer cap and left a New Orleans Saints cap in its place.
Interesting, he thought, how decisions had a way of making themselves if you just got out of their way. The Saints cap was adjustable, of course, as just about all ball caps seemed to be nowadays, but he didn’t need to adjust it. It fit perfectly just the way it was, and he settled it in place, gave the brim a tug, and walked on.
There was a twenty-four-hour drugstore on St. Charles, and it even came equipped with a drive-up window. He didn’t need it to be open all night, and he couldn’t see the use of a drive-up window for a drugstore unless you were picking up a prescription. But he’d been showing his face to all of New Orleans already today, so why not push his luck and see what they had that he needed?
Specifically, he was looking for something that might help him deal with his hair. He wasn’t quite ready to risk visiting a barber, who could hardly be expected to cut his hair without taking a long hard look at him, and would only look longer and harder when Keller asked for a change in hair color.
What he really wanted was something to make him look older. If he could dye his hair gray, well, that would be ideal. The photo, taken during his visit to Albuquerque, showed a man with dark hair and a younger face than the one he wore now. With a little gray in his hair, and the hair trimmed into more of an older man’s cut, he’d look less like his picture, and less threatening as well.
He found a kit containing an electric clipper and a couple of different interchangeable blades, all of which according to the hype on the package could be used to “create easily at home all of the latest hairstyles available from the world’s most exclusive barbers.” That sounded a little optimistic to Keller, who was prepared to settle for less from the contraption.
There was a bewildering selection of products to color the hair, some specifically for men, others marketed to women. Keller wondered how the dye was supposed to know the sex of the person using it, or why it would care.
Every possible hue was represented, including blue and green, but the one thing he couldn’t find was gray. If you already had gray hair, every manufacturer had ways for you to deal with it. If your gray hair had a yellowish cast to it, you could try this product; if you wanted to bring out its hidden blue highlights, whatever they were, you could try that one. Or you could get rid of the gray and restore your hair’s natural color, two mealy-mouthed ways of describing the process of dyeing your gray hair some color it could no longer manage to be on its own.
He couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let you dye your hair gray, although he was beginning to believe that he was the only person alive that wanted to. He wound up picking up a packet of a product for men promising to get rid of the gray and restore the natural color to a head of light brown hair. But would it do anything if you applied it to hair as dark as his own? He was dubious, but figured he’d buy it, anyway.
And he bought the clippers, too. If all else failed, he could use them to take his hair right down to the scalp. Then all he’d have to do was keep his cap on, and at the end of ten days or two weeks he’d have a nice short buzz cut.
Walking along, aiming himself in the general direction of where he’d parked the car, he wondered if he’d actually taken the cap of the fellow who’d walked off with Homer. Suppose his cap had been swiped by someone who’d walked in bareheaded, and Keller had turned around and stolen some other fellow’s cap in return, essentially robbing Peter to get even with Paul.
That was something he could live with, something that didn’t figure to weigh too heavily on any celestial balance sheet, but what if the cap’s rightful owner spotted him walking down the street?
Well, he was on his way out of New Orleans, so that became less of a likelihood with every passing moment. Besides, the article in question was a Saints cap, and half of the city seemed to be similarly attired. The team had had a good year, had done far better than anybody expected them to do, and the whole country had elected to see in their performance the resurgence and regeneration of the city itself. If the Saints could make the playoffs, the reasoning seemed to hold, then certainly New Orleans could get over a dinky little thing like a hurricane.
Homer Simpson had set him apart, even while it made his face less recognizable. The Saints cap did every bit as much to conceal his face, but did so by bonding him with the people among whom he walked.
He grinned, gave the brim a tug.
The street he was on was called Euterpe. The first time he saw the street sign he’d been unsure how to pronounce it, though he could have narrowed it down to a couple of likely choices. Then he encountered other parallel streets with names like Terpsichore and Melpomene and Polymnia, and they didn’t quite do it, but then Erato and Calliope turned up and he worked it out. He knew from crossword puzzles that Erato was one of the nine muses, and it seemed to him that Calliope, in addition to being a steam instrument you might encounter on a carnival midway, was another. And that was why Euterpe had been faintly familiar, because she’d turned up in a crossword puzzle once or twice herself, and that meant you pronounced it You-Tour-Pee, with that long e on the end of the word, as in all those Greek names, Nike and Aphrodite and Persephone and, well, Calliope.