City of Refuge by Tom Piazza Page A

cap and a pair of beige pleated slacks. He cut a figure in the neighborhood, liked looking good when he went out. An elder statesman, but still young enough to take care of himself and others. It was a hot, sunny afternoon, and he walked past the houses with pleasure, the familiar houses, wooden shotgun houses, brick houses, cinder blocks, but mostly classic wooden shotguns. Most—even the poorest—had some little decoration, touches of individual sensibility, a hand-carved sign over the door reading THE JOHNSON’S, or a fanciful flower grotto set inside a truck tire, or a couch outside on the porch. It was home, this neighborhood. One man, whose name SJ never could remember, was grilling something on a little hibachi in his driveway and called out to SJ “Ready in five if you hungry, J.” He passed the house of a man everyone knew only as Mr. Joe and saw the chickens the man kept in his yard behind his waist-high hurricane fence. Up on the corner of Tennessee Street and North Derbigny he waved to two women he knew, who were sitting out on some steps as he approached.
    “I was saying to Jawanda,” one of the two, named Delois, said, without preamble, “I always like seeing you because you pulled together.” She smiled up at SJ from under a bright yellow, crotcheted hat. She was missing her two bottom front teeth.
    “Look like GQ ,” the other one, Jawanda, said. She wore a tight-fitting black top and her hair was in curlers.
    He leaned on the iron railing on the steps going up to their small porch, where they had a cooler out.
    “How is Marvin coming along?” SJ asked.
    “See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Jawanda said, taking a big slug off her beer.
    “He supposed to be rotated out,” Delois said, “but now I don’t know. They got him on extra rotations.”
    “That’s what I’m talking about.”
    “See, that ain’t right. When your time up is supposed to be up . Reserves ain’t supposed to be but one goddamn weekend a month. And Marvin on his third rotation straight through.”
    SJ lifted his cap with one hand, ran the other over his smooth scalp and replaced the cap. “They trying to fight a war like there’s no war going on. They need to put in the draft again.”
    “What good the draft gonna do, J?” Delois said. “They just need to get out of that motherfucker…”
    A man in his fifties walked up to their little group, wearing an oversized black T-shirt with the words GHETTO CASH on it over a picture of a gun. “Allright,” he said, and SJ put out his hand to the man, who took it in an old-fashioned soul handshake, forearms at right angles and thumbs pointed upward. The man had graying hair and a goatee and eyes that slanted downward slightly at the sides, giving him a look somewhere between laughing and crying. He and SJ had been in Vietnam at the same time.
    “Shan-DRA,” Delois yelled to someone in the distance. “Tell Tee-Bo get out that street.”
    “What the draft does,” SJ said, “is if everyone had to send they son or daughter over wouldn’t be no more war in Iraq.”
    “Yeah, you right about that,” the man, whose name was Alfred, said.
    “How’s your mama?” SJ said. “She doing allright?”
    “The diabetes got on her,” Alfred said, “and they amputated her leg. She in a wheelchair. But she allright. She steady getting stronger. When she start hollering about she want her hair done I’ll know she allright.”
    “Are you going to move her for the storm?”
    The man shrugged. “She won’t go. She stubborn. Don’t want to leave the house.”
    “Where Lucy at?” Jawanda said.
    “I don’t know,” SJ said. “She’ll probably come by later. Lucy’s on her own clock.”
    “I know that’s right.”
    Down the block children played in an inflatable house filled with brightly colored plastic balls. At the far end was a platform with a couple of turntables, and some of the neighborhood young men were playing hip-hop over the speakers. Up and down the