RIP

 by D.K. McGill © 2007

 

  

Walker was like everyone else. He never thought anything like this would happen. Not to his fighter.

  

But, late in the first round, Big Cat stunned Rip with a jab - just a jab – and Walker stood flatfooted behind the turnbuckle, his beady little eyes wide, his pale pink face flushing. Even his ears were red.

Cat followed the jab with a right cross that staggered Rip but didn't quite knock him down.

Next came a flurry of punches; blood flooded from Rip's nose and the cuts around his eyes. Nobody had ever seen him bleed like that.

Now, of course, everyone knows they should have stopped the fight. Stopped the fight, left the gym, left New Orleans.

But nobody really thinks it's going to happen. Not to a fighter like Rip, who bragged that he barely trained at all, who seemed to live on whiskey and beer.

  

There was one final left, an uppercut that sent Rip on a counterclockwise reel. His last conscious thought in the ring was how glad he was that the face he'd been searching for wasn't ringside as the sweat and blood spun off him and landed in the faces and laps and beer of everybody in the front two rows.

  

"What's wrong with you, niggah?" a fair-weather fan yelled from the back. But Rip never heard it. By the time his face crashed into the canvass, he was out.

 

****

 

  

He wouldn't wake up, no matter how hard the trainer and the doctor worked. Blood flowed from his nose and his left ear. His breathing slowed, then stopped. His pulse disappeared.

Doc was about ready to pronounce him when, suddenly, he sat bolt upright on the table -- his top half sprang up like a mousetrap. Everybody fell back and stared at him. And he stared back, as best he could through eyes that were almost swollen shut.

  

Got to take you to the hospital champ, they told him. Got to take you to Big Charity. But he wouldn't move. Anyone tried to touch him he'd brush them aside with his big right hand like they were nothing.

  

"Where's Ganny?" he said, finally.

  

"Ganny left town, Rip," Walker said.

  

Ray, the corner man, opened his mouth to explain why, but stopped when he saw how Rip slumped a little upon hearing that Ganymeda wasn't near.

Rip lowered himself back down on the table and didn't even flinch when Doc stuck the needle in him.

"He looks near dead," Ray said. But his chest rose and fell. He had a pulse, Doc said.

He was asleep. They were pretty sure.

They left him alone, just for a minute, while Walker and Ray and Doc went to talk to the sports writer and the ambulance guys got the stretcher. But he was gone when they got back to the dressing room.

"Somebody needs to find him," Ray said. "There's a storm coming."

"Shit, he'll be OK," Walker said in his clipped Texas accent. "Them guys on TV always make it sound worse than it is."

 

  

****

  

Stumbling up the Bywater side of the St. Claude drawbridge, Rip didn't remember leaving the gym. He was barefoot, wearing only his bright gold trunks and a shiny black robe with his name stitched on the back with periods between the gold letters so that it read like an epitaph instead of a name. (Walker had said it would intimidate opponents.)

  

The bridge was up. He stood there, weak-kneed and thought about how he used to do road work here, running all the way from the house on Caffin, across the bridge, past the shotgun houses and Creole cottages of Bywater, to the gym near the wharves. On those steamy mornings, ghost noises drifted up from the fog covering the Industrial Canal: ships' horns, thrumming tug engines, the groans of the shifting loads on the barges.

  

Should've done more roadwork for this one, Rip thought. Should have been ready.

  

The bridge creaked back down but he didn't move. He struggled to think, struggled to stand, his eyes shut against the pain. Drivers yelled and blew their horns but the sounds were as faint as a mosquito's hum. His head throbbed and he couldn't feel his left arm, which dangled at his side.

  

"I'm calling 9-1-1!" an angry driver yelled.

  

Nine-one-one.

  

The words cut through the noise. Nine-one-one meant police. Fuck that.

  

He opened his eyes, stumbled sideways and felt his way along the railing, up and over the canal and down the other side of the bridge into the Lower Ninth Ward.

 

****

  

All but blind, Rip kept the steady stream of Saturday night headlights on St. Claude within sight while he paralleled the route along the side streets to avoid the police. Once he reached St. Claude and Caffin it would be easy to find home, the house he shared with his aunt and his brothers. Sometimes, after a fight, Ganny waited for him there on the front porch. Maybe she'd be there now. Maybe she hadn't really left town.

  

But nobody answered his knocks at the house on Caffin and Ganny wasn't waiting for him. He found a note taped to the front door, but he couldn't see well enough to read it. He put it in the pocket of his robe as he walked around to the back.

 

****

  

Wolf didn't recognize Rip at first, greeted him at the back steps with barks and growls before getting a good sniff of him and licking the useless left hand. The dog followed Rip as far up the steps as the chain, anchored at the base of his aunt's lemon tree, would allow.

  

Rip bent down and stroked the top of the big black mutt's head while the dog licked his face. Then he straightened up, felt for the key hidden on top of the door jamb and let himself into the kitchen.

  

He didn't bother with the light. He guzzled down a bottle of spring water from the refrigerator and froze for a moment as the flashing blue strobe of a passing police car flashed from the window down the hall.

When all was perfectly dark again, he pulled open a drawer and felt around until he found his brother's old revolver. He dropped the gun into his pocket, with the note, lumbered upstairs to his room and fell onto his bed, which for some reason had been stripped bare.

****

  

Rip drifted in and out of fitful sleep as he strained to hear familiar sounds: Saturday night laughter; brass or bounce carried on the wind from JoJo's bar.

  

Instead, he heard hammers and nails and car engines and screeching tires and, once, a doleful cry from a faceless woman: "Go? Go where? I ain't got no place to go!"

  

Light rose, then fell again. Rip writhed on the sweaty mattress for hours until, as the first fat raindrops hit the roof, the delirium and fever and pain gave way to a dream.

  

He was at JoJo's on a hot afternoon. The jukebox was loud, so it could be heard over the air conditioner. The room was cool and dark.

  

Rip sat at his booth, facing the entrance, waiting. Sunlight blazed through the door each time it opened, revealing only silhouettes in the doorway and casting long shadows on the floor. Heads turned and eyes squinted into the sunlight each time the door opened. But nobody could recognize anybody in that light.

  

Except Rip. He recognized Ganny, as he always did: the outline of her curves, the way her fingers caressed the door as she pushed it open, her first tentative step as her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  

"How'd you know it was me?" she asked.

  

"Because you're a goddess," he said, smiling the smile people only saw when she was around. "Anybody should be able to recognize a goddess."

  

He recited the lesson in mythology she had taught him on the night they met, the night he had made fun of the names black women gave their babies: "You're Ganymeda, goddess of youth, cupbearer to the other gods, tender of wounds."

  

Instead of a glass, Ganny put a bucket on the table as she sat across from him. She leaned forward, as though to kiss him, but she instead dipped her fingers into the bucket and touched them to his lips. Water. Ice cold water. It made him feel cool.

  

Then, from nowhere, a dirty towel plopped into the bucket. Ganny disappeared, Rip's fever rose and a bell rang. JoJo's dissolved into the ring and Big Cat was moving toward him.

  

Each time Big Cat landed a punch Rip re-lived the pain and re-heard the shouts from the beered-up crowd. The shouts went from inarticulate howls of surprise each time Rip got hit to desperate half-hearted encouragement for him to shake off the daze and start fighting.

  

Next came loud curses of disillusionment and, finally, demands that Big Cat finish the job. Jeers. Shouts for blood. Rip's blood, which began splattering onto the canvass in little drops, then bigger, fatter drops and then pencil-thin streams from his nose and ears and the cuts around his eyes and even his pores. He became a fountain of blood. He sat down on the canvass to steady himself but the canvass spun and tilted while his blood flooded the little Bywater gym. The sea of warm, sticky crimson rose around him like a liquid wall. It lifted the horrified onlookers higher and higher as they panicked and flailed until their noses pressed into the ceiling. Their jeers became screams.   

  

Women and children screamed, too. Even babies. He'd seen none of them at the fight but in his constantly recycling fever dream he heard the cries of mothers and babies over and over again. They pleaded to be saved, sometimes howling like scared animals, their cries occasionally drowned out by the roar of invisible machines.

  

Rip could do nothing. The gym filled up and the liquid walls of red that surrounded the ring began to break down and the flood surrounded him. He lay down on the canvass, ready to surrender to the flood as it covered him. But he didn't drown. He drank it in against his will, and breathed it in and out.

  

As much as he'd ever wanted to win, he now wanted to give in to the flood. But he was Rip, as tough as they all said he was. Maybe he could be beaten but he couldn't die. He could only sleep, deeply, even amid the screams that slowly faded, even as the machines roared on and on and on.

 

****

  

Sunlight poured through naked roof beams. Rip stretched. He felt no pain. He was neither hungry nor thirsty. He still couldn't feel or move his left arm, but his full hearing and sight had returned.

  

A gray-brown crust covered him - bare feet, gold trunks, black robe and all. As he stood, bits of it flaked off of him like fish scales.

  

He felt the weight of the gun in his right pocket and he remembered the note. He fished it out but it was brittle and yellow with nothing on it but blue stains.

  

Rip looked around the room and decided that he had been asleep for many years. Furniture lay ramshackle on the floor. The room itself tilted like a funhouse, and the walls were leopard-spotted with black patches topped by an inky black line, like a bathtub ring, a foot or two above the floor.

  

The shutters and glass were gone from the front window at the high end of the room. He walked up to it, grasped the sill to steady himself, looked out.

  

Someone's refrigerator sat suspended on sagging power lines over a landscape of overturned cars, toppled trees, tables, sofas, chairs, pieces of roofs and walls. Sycamores and oaks lay on their sides, half submerged in gray water.

Maybe there had been a war, Rip thought.

  

Across the debris-strewn street, the grill of Clarence Cason's 1965 Impala smiled out from under what looked to be Dorothy Gale Johnson's house, which had been picked up from down the block and dropped into Clarence's front yard. To the right of the car, a pair of old-fashioned red Converse All-Stars stuck out of the shallow water at the ends of a pair of mottled black-brown legs.

  

Seeing the dead man's legs sticking out of the water stirred a sad realization that washed over Rip like the blood of his dream.

  

He hurried down wobbly stairs and clambered over pieces of shattered furniture that had collected at the low end of the house, against the back door in the kitchen. He pushed debris aside, pulled open the inner door and unlatched the iron security door, which dangled on its hinges as he hopped down into shin-deep water.

  

Something had knocked the house forward and away from the back porch, which stood a few feet ahead of him. Beyond it was the lemon tree, its leaves dry and brown, its fruit shriveled. The top of an iron stake was still visible, sticking out of the water at its base.

  

Rip waded slowly to the front of the steps. He bent over and put his good hand in the water, pushing aside pieces of soggy wallboard and shingles until he found the chain.

  

He pulled until Wolf's head emerged – skin and hair shrinking away from bared teeth, eyes shut tight, nostrils permanently flared.

  

Rip froze, unable to bring himself to give this grotesquerie one final pat good-bye, unable to let go of the chain. It wasn't until he heard a distant mechanical roar, like the one he had heard in his dreams, that he finally let the chain slowly slip through his fingers. He looked up and saw giant helicopters on the horizon.

Terrorists, thought Rip. Or maybe the police.

  

Instead of running, he pulled the hood of his robe over his head, knelt down in the water next to the steps and stayed very still, so he'd look like just another pile of dirty clothing from above.

 

****

  

A budding loneliness took root in Rip. Since awakening he'd seen one dead man and one dead dog. No mosquitoes, roaches, squirrels, pigeons or rats. Rip was the only thing alive.

  

He wasn't thirsty or hungry. His only desire was to see people. His aunt, his brothers. Walker, Ray, Shorty. His boys at Jo Jo's.

  

Ganny. Most of all, Ganny.

  

Shorty's place would be closest. It was next to the levee, near JoJo's.

  

But the closer he got to the levee, the more like an unfamiliar war zone everything seemed: More empty foundations, more houses collapsed in the middle of streets, more stretches of gray water.

  

In the distance he saw a giant brown hulk of rusty metal and as he drew closer he realized it was a barge from the canal. He'd never seen one out of the water before. It had crashed through the flood wall and was sitting atop a crushed house.

Shorty's house wasn't there. JoJo's wasn't there. Not much of anything recognizable was.

  

Rip's foot snagged. He looked down and saw the point of a large brown nail poking through the top of it. It neither hurt nor bled. He yanked free and kept walking until he heard the helicopters again. Then he pulled up his hood and sat down in a puddle of water. He would wait like this until the sun went down.

 

****

  

Rip was surprised at how black a night could be. There were no streetlights, just dim moonlight. As he started walking quietly up the St. Claude bridge, he could see that the skyscrapers downtown still stood.

  

A police car and a camo-painted Army truck were parked atop the bridge, both facing the Bywater side -- as though they meant to stop people from entering the Lower Ninth Ward and never expected anybody to come out of it. The men in the cars slept. Rip felt invisible as he glided past them in the darkness.

  

Another police car sat at the foot of the bridge, blue strobes flashing, headlights pointed down St. Claude Avenue. He felt the comforting weight of the revolver in the pocket of his robe, but he began to worry. He hadn't taken it out of his pocket since before he went to sleep. And that, he was certain, was years ago. He stepped tentatively down the bridge, rubbing his fingers over the gun, wondering if it would fire. He got closer to the police car, uncertain if there was anyone in it.

  

Less than 20 feet away from the car, in one bright blue flash of the strobe, his eyes met those of the cop in the driver-side rearview mirror. The cop was out of the car instantly, pistol drawn. "Don't move," the cop shouted, but Rip plunged his hand down into the pocket to grab the revolver. He could feel it tangle in the lining of the pocket, feel it falling apart like a cheap watch, hear the pieces clinking like loose change as he saw a muzzle flash and felt something hit him in the lower left abdomen, spinning him slightly, knocking him to the ground.

  

The cop was over him in a second, both hands on the still-smoking pistol. Flashlights and more strobes blinded him and he heard the static and pops and filtered voices of police radios. "Don't move, fuckhead," somebody shouted.

  

"How bad's he hurt?" someone else asked.

  

"I don't know," the cop said. "I thought I hit him but there ain't no blood."

 

****

  

"Good thing I recognized you, Champ," the cop said. Rip was in the squad car. The front seat.

  

"I might have shot again if you hadn't fell. Shit, you're lucky I missed this time. I shoot pretty good, Champ."

  

"Ain't a champ no more," Rip muttered. His right forearm lay across his waist and he kept rubbing his fingers over the hole in his left side.

  

"You shouldn't make sudden moves like you made back there, Champ," the cop said.

  

As the squad car hit potholes and rolled over debris, Rip could clearly hear the pieces of the disintegrated revolver clinking in his pocket but the cop apparently heard nothing.

  

The cop was a Creole-looking guy with light brown skin and wavy dark hair. It took a while for Rip to recognize him as the cop who did off-duty security detail at the Bywater gym where Rip trained and fought. He was a friend of Walker.

  

"How'd you survive, man?" the cop asked. "I mean, it was a hell of a storm. I ain't ever seen anything like it. It knocked the hell outa Lower Nine. Lakeview and Gentilly, too. The water, it tossed them houses around like they was just little doll houses. And it was some nasty shit, too, that water was.

  

"But you know what it was like, huh Champ?. You were there. You must have seen it all."

  

"Don't remember," Rip muttered.

  

"Well, ol' Cat hit you pretty good," the cop said. "But you must remember something. I mean you're still walking around. Where were you? What did you do?"

  

Rip stared straight ahead. They were on Elysian Fields now, heading through the Faubourg Marigny toward the French Quarter.

  

"What did you eat? What did you drink, Champ?" the cop asked.

  

Rip listened to the hum of the engine and over it the roar of helicopters still sweeping over the city, just like in his dream.

  

"Slept," he said.

  

"You slept? For 20 days?"

  

"Just slept," Rip said. "Just slept."

  

"If you say so, Champ," the cop said, cutting up Burgundy to Esplanade.

  

"I couldn't get Walker on the phone," the cop said. "Phones still don't work for shit around here. But I know where he is. They're getting the juice back on in the Quarter tonight. He's at Kathleen's Pick Your Poison on Decatur Street.

He helped drive in a truckload of ice and some beer.

  

"You know Walker," the cop added, giving Rip a wink. "The whole city may have gone to shit but he's gonna be where the pussy is."

 

****

  

"Look!" the cop said as they swung onto Decatur Street. "Electricity!"

  

A few blocks ahead, street lights and neon signs flickered. There were knots of people on the dimly lit blocks. Rip could see lots of camouflage and lots of red T-shirts.

  

"National Guard and Corps of Engineers," the cop said. "And Mexicans. Lots of Mexicans. The city's already full of them and it's supposed to be shut down. Nobody's supposed to get in. But the contractors are getting in and so are the Mexicans."

  

They pulled up in front of Kathleen's Pick Your Poison Lounge. The cop got out first and walked up to a window. Rip stood behind him.

  

"Engineers and Mexicans," the cop said. "And a few uniforms. National Guard, I guess."

  

Kathleen's was a typical Decatur Street dive, long and narrow with a bar running front to back and a narrow runway behind it. A young, bored looking blonde in pasties and a thong rubbed her crotch against a brass pole in time to the music, while everyone clapped and cheered. Between the bar and the runway, handing out drinks, was a matronly middle-aged woman, the owner, who kept her back to the runway at all times, as though she could somehow pretend she wasn't really running a strip joint.

  

Walker sat at the bar, dividing his time between staring at the stripper and talking to a big man in a crisp white shirt and blue jeans. The big man's back was to the window but Rip could see who it was. Walker was talking to Big Cat.

  

Rip moved to the entrance. Gradually, all eyes turned to the huge dark figure filling the doorway.

 

Big Cat's expression remained as cold as it had been the night he KO'd Rip in the ring. Walker's eyebrows flew up to his hairline and he took on that same beady-eyed bewildered expression he'd had that very same night.

****

 

  

"Man!" Walker said. "I thought you were dead! I sent the cops out looking for you. Somebody said they'd seen you crossing the bridge after the fight. Where the hell did you go? What the hell did you do? Where have you been?"

  

"Sleeping," Rip said.

  

"Sleepin'? You kiddin' me? What are you? That guy in the fairy tale?"

  

Rip ignored the question. They were facing each other on the sidewalk. Walker's back was to the wall.

  

"Ganny," Rip said. "You know where she is?"

  

"That woman of yours? I ain't heard. Houston, probably . Most of New Orleans is in Houston now. "We tried to tell you she left before the storm. I guess we should've left, too. But, hell, it was almost two days away. We had a lot of money tied up in that fight. Who thought anything like this would happen?"

  

Rip swayed a bit but didn't fall. Walker walked over to a pickup truck where men were unloading ice chests and crates of beer and soft drinks and bottled water. He grabbed a pint of water and brought it to Rip.

  

"Here," he said, twisting off the cap and handing the bottle to Rip.

 

 

Rip took the bottle with his right hand and started to lift it to his lips. But he hesitated, glanced into the window at Big Cat again, then at Walker.

 

"She'll come back," Rip said. It almost sounded like a question.

 

Walker's eyebrows flew up again. "Come back? Come back to what? Ain't much of New Orleans left to come back to."

 

Walker stared at the sidewalk for a moment, then up and down the dirty street. "There wasn't much holdin' this town together anyway, as far as I'm concerned. Now, there ain't nothin' left. Not for me, anyway.

  

"Shorty's dead, Rip. They think he drowned in his goddam attic before the house collapsed. And Ray's gone crazy. I mean for real. They had to take him up to that nuthouse in Feliciana Parish"

  

Rip kept looking up and down Decatur Street, seeing familiar signs and buildings but not one familiar face, other than Walker's. And there was something different about Walker, too.

  

"I told Ray I'd look after the gym. Help him rebuild it. But, hell, between you and me, it ain't worth rebuilding."

  

Rip stole another glance through the window at Big Cat, then looked at Walker again. "Where you gonna go?" Rip asked.

"Back to Texas," Walker said. "With Cat. Cat and me are going to Houston. I can get him some fights there." There was something defensive in his voice.

  

"He's a big dumb Spic but I can make some money off of him."

  

"I can still fight. You made some money off me," Rip said. He was surprised at the sound of his own voice. He didn't sound confident or cold or dangerous. "You made some money off me," he said again, wanting to reassert himself, but it came out sounding more like a plea than a boast.

  

"I didn't make nothin' off you," Walker said. "I should have. But then you went and got yourself knocked out. You win that fight and we hit the big time. We'd a had a spot on that next big card at the Arena. But you went and got yourself knocked out and then the Arena flooded and now I'm getting shed of all of you – this stupid town, the stupid mayor, you – drink some water, goddamit. You look like your dead and don't know it."

  

Rip was not used to being talked to this way but decided now was not the time to do anything about it. He touched the bottle to his lips and took a sip. Feeling the ice cold water suddenly made him aware of the night's steam heat. He took another sip and felt something warm trickle out of his ear.

  

"Yeah, I'm getting' shed of all of you," Walker continued. His voice was angry now, but the look on his face was one of surprise, like he wasn't sure of what was coming out of his own mouth.

  

Rip turned the bottle up and let the water slip down his throat for a few seconds. He stopped, gulped in a breath of air and turned the bottle up again. The aches and pains of fight night returned and his robe seemed to be sticking to his left side, just above the waste. He looked at his bare feet and saw red oozing out from the nail wound, mixing with the gray muddy sweat trickling off the robe. More blood poured from the wound in his side, soaking through the robe and running down his leg.

  

Walker paused for a moment, to take in the sight of Rip suddenly sweating and bleeding.

  

And crying. When Rip finished the bottle and let it drop to the sidewalk there were tears filling his swelling eyes, running down and mixing with the blood.

  

All of this seemed to embolden Walker. He resumed his tirade, saying what a fool Rip was. How he drank and gambled away everything. How he wasted time on that woman with the ridiculous name.

  

Then he said what fools all the Lower Nine niggers are. That's what he called Rip: a Lower Nine Nigger. He was smiling when he said it. Like that's what he'd really thought all along.

  

Rip felt his knees start to buckle but somehow he held himself up while Walker kept talking about all the Lower Nine niggers and how they got what they deserved. They were bloodsuckers, he said. He was sick of all of them with their stupid nigger talk and their goddam rap music and their welfare and their funny names. Like that bitch of his. "What was her stupid-ass nigger name? Ganeetra? Or Ganquita? What was it again?

"You niggers give your babies such stupid fucking names!"

Rip's left arm came alive then. It tingled for a few seconds and then shot straight out and the great big hand pressed against Walker's neck and rammed the back of his head into the wall of the building.

 

"Ganymeda!" Rip yelled. "Ganymeda!" With every shout of every syllable his head throbbed, but he kept screaming.

  

"She's a GODDESS!" he yelled. "Her mother is a teacher. Her father is a teacher and she is a GODDESS!" The left hand's strength diminished a bit and Walker‘s head slid down a little and Rip could see a smear of blood on the wall.

  

"A goddess!" Rip said again but then his left arm died and the hand dropped from Walker's throat and he could hear a muffled gasp as Walker began to breathe again. A woman screamed. There were heavy footfalls on the sidewalk. The flickering neon lights began to spin, fade, disappear. Rip couldn't see or hear any more and he felt as though he were floating.

  

By the time his face crashed into the pavement, he was gone.

 

Bio: D. K. McGill, 50, is an Alabama native who has lived in New Orleans for 23 years. He has worked as a radio, newspaper, and wire service journalist for 30 years. His short story "Closure!" about a Louisiana execution, can be seen in the current issue of The Write Side Up magazine.