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Wheels Of Transport
After driving north across a big hunk of eastern America in a high performance BMW, landing in NY, training to DC, and flying back to NO on AirTran, I am let off by the cab driver in front of my boarded up blighted property on Rocheblave (Row-shuh-blave) street. My beat to shit school bus yellow 85 Dodge pickup truck is a welcome if not slightly pitiful sight. The same can be said of my dwelling. But it is good to be home such as it all is even if yesterday (Saturday) set a new temp record for September (101 F), and the sky is hazy with polluted heat, and I'm pretty well tired of this hottest summer in the history of mankind. You know it will end, this heat, but it's still so oppressive so late in the season you have to convince yourself and act out a future of cheery optimism you don't really feel.
The Rocheblave house was not broken into while I was away so I decide to prolong my vacation away from this awful summer climate by camping out with a Stephen King novel on my old bed by the AC window unit on Dumaine, even spend the night.
Shelton comes in with one of his friends, a polite, well-dressed kid, and welcomes me back. He comes in and out a couple of times, pausing once to tell me my mother called while I was away and said my niece's new husband had his heart transplant. I had received the news by email from a sister-in-law and had talked once to my mother while on the road, but I thanked Shelton for his effort to remember an important message. He seemed relieved to be done with it as he had been holding the information for over a week. Later he said, "Mr. Jim, you remember I told about those friends of mine got shot? The one died and the other was in a coma."
Shelton knew more than two of the young people murdered in New Orleans this summer so I paused before answering, trying to figure which ones he might be talking about. He went on to tell me the one who was in a coma came out of it recently and was in the neighborhood this week. "Brandon (that's the kid who threw the eggs at the house for which I blamed someone else) cut his hair, " Shelton said, "and he remembered me, so that's good, huh?" Shelton seemed unsure. "Do you think he'll be all right, Mr. Jim?" I was thrown off a bit by the question so I stalled by asking one myself. "Is he in a wheelchair?" I asked that because I have seen many a warrior put to wheels around here and I can picture him at the corner by the barbershop, telling, and being told tales. Shelton answered, "No he's got one of them," and he pantomimed a walker.
"A walker?"
"Yeah, do you think he'll be all right?"
"Yeah, he'll be all right, he'll be fine," I opined with certainty, wiping a bead of sweat from my brow.