“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.
Monkey Business, the bar, encroached on the sidewalk and was almost in the street. Its warped cypress siding was painted white with a faded advertisement for Regal Beer, a defunct brand, and it even boasted a sprayed-on “X” in a circle, the red mark left by Katrina’s first responders indicating the number of bodies and abandoned pets found within.
“This is a classic joint,” Tubby said appreciatively as he got out of the car. “Do they actually serve lunch?”
“Good fried shrimp,” Raisin replied, climbing out from behind the wheel of the used red Miata his girlfriend had picked up for him. Tubby stretched mightily, afraid he might have thrown his back out just getting into the damned thing.
Coming in from the blazing sun it was dark in the bar. When his eyes adjusted Tubby beheld a comfortably familiar layout. A long bar trailed off into a back room fitted with a stage, a handful of tables. A few patrons sat at the bar or at tables, concentrating on their beers and their private conversations.
Bustling toward these arrivals came a large brassy woman wearing an x-tra large lumberjack shirt, a dirty white Stetson hat, and flip flops.
“Here they are, the old sexy dudes!” she brayed, and gave them each a crushing hug. Tubby hadn’t seen Janie for years, since way before the hurricane. Those intervening years of two packs a day had made her voice even huskier. The dimness of her professional environment had made her skin even whiter. Her merry face was crisscrossed with tiny pink veins. The beer had made her even stouter. He wouldn’t want to arm-wrestle her.
“It’s so good to see you again, Tubby,” she rejoiced.
“What about me?” Raisin asked.
“You, too, but I already seen you last week. Here it is. My new place!” She swept it all up in the sails of her arms. “It ain’t much, but we’re doing all right. Come on. Pick a table and get a seat.”
They settled in, scratching their chairs along the wooden floor.
“Jack!” she yelled. “Bring us all a drink. I’m going to have one, too.” She winked at Tubby. “This is a reunion, right, darlin’?”
The drinks came quickly. Jack was a young guy with a plaid shirt and a trim beard who looked like he had just flown in from Portland. He was in shape. A capable bouncer, Tubby speculated.
“So, what’s been going on with you, my love?” Janie asked loudly. “Raisin tells me you’re still the best lawyer in town.”
Tubby went over it – how he had fared in the hurricane, what he had been doing since, how his kids had grown up. “I had a bar of my own, too,” he told her. “Mike’s, down in the Irish Channel.”
“I heard about that,” Janie said. “Sorry I never made it over. You don’t still own it?”
“Yes, he does,” Raisin put in.
“No, I don’t. I sold it to Pinky Laparouse two years ago.”
“You’ve got a mortgage on it,” Raisin insisted.
“I do,” Tubby admitted. “But, Janie, how did you end up on this side of the city?”
“You remember Grits,” she began. Of course. Their old Uptown watering hole, where Janie had listened patiently to all sorts of troubles while mixing up passable Old Fashioneds. The storm closed it down for a while, and it also sent Janie fleeing for higher ground. She had bounced around for a couple of years taking care of her mother. Within the community of dispossessed imbibers she had met and married Bud Caragliano, ten years her senior, so she claimed.
“Ever meet Bud?” she asked. Raisin and Tubby shook their heads.
“He was a good guy, as long as he was drinking,” Janie said. “Well, anyway he used to own this little place. It took about three feet of water in Katrina. Then he got stage-four lung cancer and died. But he left this bar to me. I put together a few bucks and we got it all cleaned up. It was just a dive at first. But then the neighborhood changed.”
“Downhill?” Tubby asked.
“Hell, no!” she bawled out. “It’s a friggin’ gold mine now. This crowd you see here…” she waved at the half-a-dozen guys wearing grimy T-shirts and tool belts, “…they clear out by five, and later on tonight I get an unbelievable number of kids. They pack this joint, baby!”
“Hmmm.” Tubby tried to imagine that. The bar did have a cool atmosphere. It was dark. There was a neon Dixie Beer sign on the wall. The TV over the bar was tuned to a baseball game, and the sound was turned off. He thought he saw grass growing out of the floor over by the jukebox. Certainly traditional.
“Let me get you some lunch,” Janie offered. “How about a shrimp po-boy? We can make up other things if you’d rather. We got an eggplant mozzarella wrap, gluten free.”
“What’s gluten?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know. But I recommend the shrimp. It’s our cook’s specialty.”
“You even have a cook?” Tubby was impressed.
“My daughter Sophia. I’ll introduce you.”
Jack brought another round. Janie didn’t get down to business until the food arrived, mountains of golden crisp shrimp piled on French bread and spilling out of the plates. Pickles, tomatoes, Crystal hot sauce. As a lagniappe, the cook had sent each of them a bowl of rich brown steamy chicken and sausage gumbo.
“What’s this in the gumbo? Potato salad?” Tubby exclaimed. Indeed the soup had been ladled over the homespun alternative to white rice. “It smells delicious,” he said, enraptured. It created the perfect moment to pitch a lawyer.