Down on the Batture

Homicide

- 120 G Homicide Lisa calls out,“Be safe,”as we walk out the door.We take it idly, the dog and I, but Lisa means it. There have been some shootings lately, and a neighbor mowing his lawn last weekend ran over a loaded pistol. I say,“We will,” over my shoulder but what I am really thinking is that we are safer out on the batture these days than any other place in the city. I mean, a venue where nobody carries any money and most people you come across have absolutely nothing to steal. Someone is going to try to rob Ms. Bear? It is Friday evening and a busy one down by the levee at Cooter Brown’s. Several dozen trucks and pickups are spread out on the crushed limestone along the railroad tracks, a few up on the grass. Across the street from Cooter’s the Daiquiri Shop is also in full swing, the commuters loading up on the hard stuff before heading out to the interstate and the drive home. The daiquiri establishment used to have a drive-in service that passed containers of rum and fruit juice the size of milk shakes through the car windows, several per vehicle, but the federal agency that hands out highway money frowned on the practice and the fun stopped. Now you actually have to get out of your car. Ms. Bear stops to sniff at the tires and any food that might have fallen out of car doors, and I take a quick inventory. From the look of the vehicles, the testosterone index is hovering between orange and red. On one row a single passenger car is surrounded by a phalanx of Pathfinders, Trackers, Trailblazers, and other vehicles to destinations that only real men can get to like Tundra and Yukon, - 121 Homicide to say nothing of Silverado. Where, we assume, there are no other such vehicles to be found.We find a new one, Bravada, which must have turned into an accolade when I wasn’t looking, and there at the end, the Armada, which has always made me pause. Does anyone remember what happened to the Armada? I think about matching the names of these vehicles with their drivers and seeing exactly who it is these days Pathfinding the big Bravada across the Tundra to Silverado. Most likely a mom at WalMart . At first blush, these are rather innocent illusions. Until one comes to the gasoline they swallow and what we do to the rest of the world in order to get it. At this point innocence gives way to real places, wasted landscapes, and fires in the night. We mount the levee and enter our other world, heading down towards the sand flats under the power lines. I have slipped Bear’s leash. She is padding around the tree line and her eyes are lit like Christmas morning, so many smells and rustles. Lisa’s “be safe” has triggered a chain reaction in my mind, however, and I am going with it. There is a lot of homicide floating around New Orleans , random, casual, an ad hoc guerilla war. Five shootings on a recent weekend, and they were not an anomaly. The following Monday someone killed a minister and his wife because a relative of theirs—not them, a relative—was going to testify as a witness to yet another killing. This morning’s paper, along with the usual shootings, reported the verdict in the homicide trial of a rap star with the apocalyptic name of C-Murder. The decision was apparently so difficult for the jurors that they dissolved into trauma and vomiting, despite the testimony of two eyewitnesses. One of the witnesses, granted, was a hoodlum. But you rarely have Christ’s apostles to testify in a street shooting. Many years ago, a young man then, I was prosecuting a murder case in the District of Columbia against a drug dealer with the more user-friendly street name of Rabbit. His partner was called Beaver, and the full team included such luminaries as Bootnose, Knuckles, Twitty, Blood, Fat ’n Nasty, and Big Joe Cunningham. Normally, when people messed up the dope, used it instead of selling it, Mr. - 122 Homicide Cunningham took them out to the interstate median strip at peak traffic flow and put his fighting dogs on them. They had nowhere to run. But it seems that a...