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it like my shit fall apart instantly. Like you carrying a grocery bag and the bottom fell out. Cans rolling all up and down the street—cabbages and shit…”
    In the distance they heard a familiar sound, a blunt tut-tut-tut. They got quiet for a moment to see if there was anything else coming. Although all manner of gunfire was common, you always stopped to listen where it might be coming from. SJ said, “That sound like it by Holy Cross.”
    Another moment and Lucy said, “Look here, you heard about Joseph back in jail again?”
    “Joseph from the East?”
    “No, Samuel, Joseph you used to call Squatty.”
    “I am surprised to hear he’s still alive.”
    “You want to hear about a dumb motherfucker? He taken some lady’s purse uptown, and then he taken the bank card and use it and forgot he needed the secret number, right? So the machine keep the card and he starts tripping and calls the service number on the machine complaining about he can’t get the card out. On his own goddamn cell phone, Samuel.”
    “That’s how they found him?”
    “No; police saw the nigger at the bank machine in the wrong neighborhood and decided to see what was he doing and he just run, left Shontay sitting right there in the car with the motor running.”
    “They arrested her, too?”
    “No, they let her go.”
    This made SJ think of Wesley again, and he remembered the Saints tickets. One of SJ’s customers had given him two tickets to the next night’s New Orleans Saints game at the Superdome. The Saints, the great Lost Cause of their city. SJ wasn’t that much of a football fan and he had been assuming he would give the tickets either to Bootsy or to Roland from his crew. It occurred to him now that they might be an incentive for Wesley to show his face again, and he mentioned this to Lucy. He knew that Lucy often knew how to get in touch with her son even if she didn’t let on to SJ.
    “I’ll let him know if I talk with him, Samuel.” SJ knew also that his nephew played football on Sunday mornings at Joe Brown Park, and he asked Lucy if Wesley would be there on Sunday. “One thing Wesley don’t never miss is football,” she replied.
     
    How much anger was a man supposed to carry around?
    On his knees, by his bed, one hand over his eyes. The nightly wrestle, the quarrel, the accounting demanded.
    Lucy’s questioning had unsettled him. His own daughter, Camille, would tell him he needed to find someone to keep him company, cook for him, soften and brighten his days. But he was used to doing for himself—cooking, laundry, cleaning…It was an echo of the discipline of the army, the one good thing about the army. Introducing someone else into the equation at this point was more than he could manage. And when he had dated a woman he couldn’t escape feeling that he was being unfaithful to Rosetta. He kept her pictures around, her vases and little things, fetish objects. He could not accept her death. Everyone said you had to accept God’s will, but in SJ’s heart he accepted nothing. Accepting things as a fact of life was different from accepting them in your heart.
    The injustice of her being taken from the world weighed in his heart like an anchor. He had taken care of her as she wasted away. She never cared for expensive clothes or fine jewelry; she was without envy of others. The other women in the neighborhood turned to her instinctively for advice, even women ten years older than she was. She had a fine, long neck that he liked to kiss, and when she got sick he used to brush her hair. No amount of “It’s God’s will,” and “She’s gone to a better place, SJ” from her friends and from Father Moreau could make it all right. Nothing could redeem it for him. The only thing that helped, at all, was working with his hands—building, making. He managed himself and his business, but something had gone out of life for him, perhaps permanently. Functioning in the face of any injustice disfigures you. If it