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No Motives, No Suspects
When I returned from Dallas--I was very good there and improved on recent behavior by not losing patience with my mother who through no fault of her own is losing small pieces of her mind and large chunks of her short term memory--I was pleased to find my New Orleans residence intact and apparently not victimized by any sort of unlawful invaders. Some of my newspapers--those that were not used by my housesitter to line her cat's litter box--were rolled up neatly by my pallet on the floor. I glanced at headlines for a few minutes while a few blocks from here one man grew angry enough to kill another man.
An older brother had brought me to the Dallas airport while it snowed and snowed and snowed. It had been snowing steadily for seven hours but it would not stick to the ground. My mother was suspicious that we, my brothers and I, were conspiring to gang up on her and force her into an old folks home. We were conspiring no such thing but since she brought it up, one brother and I talked about it at length over lunch at an all you can eat Sushi Bar on Greenville Ave., the day before I left in the snow; the day before one man pulled a gun from his pocket in the 2500 block of Palmyra, here in New Orleans. I like Sushi okay. The red snapper really did taste like raw fish.
Another brother, he lives in Kansas, was in town, coincidentally, on business (or so he said. I suspect he is a government agent), and he was doing my mother's taxes when I arrived by cab on Saturday. The TV was on, loudly (we've agreed to leave my mother alone on the issue of a hearing aid), and first thing I see--ignoring my mother who is saying to me "look who's here," and my brother, who may be a government agent, and is the one mom is referring to as being "here,"--is Hollis Price on the free throw line sinking two for the fourth ranked OK Sooners. "Hey, I know that kid," I said, and go on to explain how I followed him in high school all the way to the state championship game in Lafayette, Louisiana three years previous. It was actually his first off the bench teammate, Eddie Green, whom I was following, but truly, who cares? My mother, who is purely kindhearted, said, "oh, reallly?" My brother, practiced at the art of deception (which is a line from a song, right?), said, "Oh yeah?," and went back to form 1040A. This was four days before the "incident" on Palmyra.
My 84-year-old mom had organized 20 years worth of my correspondence from Austin, Brenham, Yoakum, and Liberty TX, NYC, Great Falls, VA, Eugene OR, Seattle, Bushy Fork, NC, and New Orleans, and it's not that much, into a couple of folders, which I read through to kill the time. Some of it fueled memories which made me tired to think about it. It's all in that dresser I was going to pick up with my truck during Christmas, but didn't. As it turned out, I learned this over Sushi, my mother spent Christmas alone. Kind of defeats the purpose of having six children, 15 grandchildren, and 3 great grandchildren (and she started late), I am thinking. I must spend Christmases in Dallas from now on. Maybe it was a lack of Christmas cheer that caused the one man on Palmyra to shoot the other man three times in the head, point blank, leaving him a lifeless sack of flesh in the middle of the street, while I unpacked from my trip to Dallas. By the time I drove by an hour and a half later on my way up Dorgenois to Tulane, the street was empty, and quiet. There was no evidence of life, or death