A Job in New Orleans by Nils Gilbertson

from TIGHTROPE: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series

I picked up the gun from an old man in a balcony apartment one block up from Bourbon Street. He smoked a joint and didn’t say much. Better that way, I thought. Jazz guitar, tuning up, reverberated from the whiskey bar downstairs.

I pressed the magazine release and fingered a nine-millimeter round. “Any suggestions for ditching the gun?”

The old man only grinned, his face like a weathered mask.

The bar downstairs was mostly empty. My only companions, beyond the bartender, were the jazz trio and a balding man tending to a double whiskey. Guitar rang and the drumbeat mimicked the rhythm of my chest. I double-checked the address, the instructions, and tried to forget the holstered piece underneath my coat. “Wild Turkey, rocks,” I said. I tried to escape into the music. Walking on a Tightrope by Percy Mayfield. A tightrope—I knew the feeling. A place where there was no standing upright; the only choice was which way to fall.

The bartender was pregnant and smiled at me as though I deserved it. After serving my drink, she went to the balding man a few seats down.

“Another one, darling?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Double?”

“What the hell.” He sucked an ice cube from his drink as she fetched another. After she served it, he took a slurp of whiskey and made a gesture like a half-hearted prayer. “I love this town,” he said to the bartender. “My wife loves it even more.”

“And you came without her?” she asked.

He took another sip. “She passed. We’re here on our last trip together.” He gestured toward a small urn on the barstool next to him.

The bartender’s face curled downward. “I’m so sorry to hear it.”

“Thank you,” he slurred.

“When was it?”

“Four months ago.”

She poured him a glass of water without a word.

“She loved it here,” he said. “She loved the oysters, the cocktails. We came twice a year.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He stared at the ice, disappearing, in his glass.

The bartender served my drink, and I drank.

“Where you in from?” I asked him.

He looked at me. “San Francisco. You?”

“Great town,” I said. “Hell of a price tag, though.”

He grinned. “You ever hear of rent control?”

“Sure.”

“My wife and I pay $1,800 for our apartment in the Mission. Been there twenty years. You know how much the new couples moving in pay?”

I shrugged.

“Near five grand.” He chuckled. “A nice place, too. My wife used to say that they’d have to drag us out of there in body bags.” His smile disappeared, and he turned back to his drink.

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“I brought her ashes,” he said, placing his hand on the urn. “Our last trip together.”

“They staying here?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not. She’s with me either way.” A red-cheeked, watery-eyed smile.

I finished my drink and stared at a fly on the wall and listened to the jazz trio play, each melody plucking my nerves like a guitar string. But even in the darkened barroom, there was light. In the corners and crevices, there was so much light it would blind you.

I paid my tab and wished the man good luck. His eyes, half closed. Tired. Too much to forget.

I walked a few blocks toward Jackson Square. The gates were locked, so I sat on a ledge and peered up at St. Louis Cathedral. It was quieter than Bourbon Street, the rhythms of night, piercing staccato of drunken revelry only a few blocks up, like sirens in the distance. The breeze like God’s whispers. Stained glass glowed, judging, yet loving. The gun heavy under my coat. Still, the light soothed me. Its glow, accompanied by the drink in my veins, insisted that all could be forgiven. All evil could be repurposed for good.

People crossed my path. Drunken groups of men and women, their merriment like little bursts of chaos. Then others who had long passed that stage, the joyous chaos devolved to an inescapable stalemate of addiction. A truce with the Devil in a burning field.

“My man,” I heard.

I looked up.

“You got a stem?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

He grunted and moved on.

I watched him go. As he went, others came. I bowed my head, but not for too long, because I didn’t want to miss any of them. The balding man—his dead wife—the bartender and her baby—anyone.

“I love them all,” I whispered. “I love everyone. Everything.”

Something in me cursed that it was a lie. I checked my watch. It was almost time. A dirty, goddamn lie.

The whiskey, I thought. It’s only the whiskey. The familiar poison breeding synthetic passions—passions I had been trained to feel—exaggerated by the glow of the stained glass, illuminating the cross so far upward that it strained my neck to look upon it.

So, I looked down.

When I did, my phone lit up. I didn’t read it.

Instead, I walked until I found water. Swells like goodness itself coming to wash away all I had done—all I hadn’t.

I imagined the balding man, standing at the water’s edge, sprinkling her ashes. I imagined everything after, too. His walk back to the hotel, the ride to the airport, the lines, the flight. Only to return home without her.

I imagined crossing the river on a tightrope. The inevitable fall.

I tossed the gun and the phone into the Mississippi. They sank in the inky water. I turned back to the lights of the French Quarter—the sounds, the revelry—and returned to everything I had ever loved.

---

Nils Gilbertson (www.nilsgilbertson.com) is a writer and attorney living in Texas. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Rock and a Hard Place, Mystery Magazine, Cowboy Jamboree, and others. His work has also been published in various anthologies, including Mickey Finn: 21^st Century Noir and Prohibition Peepers. Nils’s story “Lovely and Useless Things” was selected to appear in both The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2024. His story “Washed Up” was named a Distinguished Story in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022.