“How somebody gonna waste this?” Lionel says, reaching into the weeds of the cracked sidewalk and picking up a nail file. Each step he takes causes pain, and bending his knees about kills, but Lionel loves to find things. He keeps walking, passes the Charbonnet Funeral Home, and remembers his mama running a file across her nails. Lionel would paint; she would blow the polish dry. He smells the remover she used to clean her cuticles and feels her dry nails on his bare back. Lionel sucks on the back of his teeth. The saliva on his tongue tastes like her fresh-squeezed lemonade.

A car horn startles him. They can’t even let an old man cross the street, he thinks. Lionel coughs and gasps in front of the stoop of his old house. He hangs his cane on the railing. It’s not his anymore, not since Allstate told him they didn’t cover flood damage. Lionel sits and tries to catch his breath. Stray cats peek out from behind trashcans, looking up at him with needy eyes. His new landlord won’t let him keep Mingus there, and his old cat looks skinnier each day.

“Hold on, Mingus,” Lionel says, taking napkin-wrapped chicken bones out of his pants’ pocket. “Rest of y’all too.”

Miss Katie opens her door and pulls closed her robe. “Who you talking to?” She shields her eyes from the sun. “You gone crazy?”

Lionel sneaks the bones back into his pocket. Miss Katie’s staring, so he pulls out his rosary and rubs the red thread his mama tied extra wide for each Hail Mary. Lionel don’t think he’s gone crazy yet. Miss Katie’s the one gone crazy.

“I’m about to string them damn cats up,” Miss Katie says, slapping a wet towel against her door. “They don’t quit playing in my garbage.”

“They ain’t trying to bother nobody.”

“I’m a bring you out some breakfast,” she says. Miss Katie closes her door.

Lionel taps his feet on the step below him and tries not to think about the pain in his knees. Mingus sits in his lap, purring. “I’m a get you some food,” he says, rubbing his old cat’s clipped ear.

The social security check he receives each month barely covers the chicken bones he brings Mingus, and, now, three other kittens run around with the same spots of brown. They have friends too, friends that Lionel can’t deny when they sit and beg like stray dogs trapped inside cat bodies.

Lionel’s palms look different where the skin bends; there are white lines, deeper than those he used to get after sitting in the bathtub for too long. The darker flakes around the lines remind him of the paint that chips from his mailbox when he reaches in to check for a letter from Dontrell. Lionel takes the file from his pocket. As he scrapes dead skin, he can hear Seraphin yelling in Spanish, waking his workers. He knows Seraphin only means to help. The yelling makes him think of his preacher and how he gets worked up at the people and sweats on his robe. Lionel remembers things his preacher has said: Everything happens for a reason; God never puts two people together so that only one of them can be helped. Lionel knows that Seraphin brought a world to him that he never would have been able to see on his own. Seraphin fed him mixiotos with lamb and told him stories about trying to survive all through the United States. He stood up for Lionel when the other Mexicans told him he couldn’t sit at his old house anymore.

If he stares hard enough across the street, the paint job fades, the Mexicans leave, and the roof loses a few shingles. In this space of old, he sees the love that was the Jones family—Paul Jones yelling at his five kids, “Get your asses ready for school. Now!”

Lionel digs at the skin on his hands, wishing that this past, where everybody talked and drank and ate together, still existed.

Two teenagers with earthworm-sized dreadlocks walk down the sidewalk with a bicycle. The one pushing speaks gibberish that Lionel can’t understand.

“How you kids doing this fine morning?” Lionel asks, leaning down from the stoop.

The shorter one glares at him and says, “Mind your business, old man.”

His partner scowls at Lionel while gripping his belt buckle, holding up his pants like he’s got something under there. If Lionel’s mama had ever heard him talking to an elderly like that, she’d have whooped his ass, but maybe that bike tire flattening put the frowns on their faces.

The Mexicans come out of the house. Lionel moves aside and lets them pass. Must be about fifteen of them, and there seem to be more and more coming each day.

Lionel tells them, “Hola.”

They say, “What’s up, Mr. Lionel?”

Some of them look real tired and red-eyed. The ones in their early twenties run through the streets, chasing each other and hiding, like America is just a game they’re playing. Lionel wants to get up and run. He wants to play soccer. What he needs is a little job. When he turns his head, his vision seems wrong: he sees hundreds of cats struggling along the sidewalk.

Lionel smiles at two teenage girls carrying backpacks. “How you beautiful babies doing?”

They look down at the sidewalk like they’re deaf. He knows they’re not deaf. That’s just their path in this life.

Seraphin walks out to the porch. “What you doing, my friend?”

“Got to clean off the dead,” Lionel says.

“How your hands dead? You no working.”

“I do whatever somebody give me.”

“You go with my wife, amigo. She taking you the Wal-Mart. She speaking with them.”

If he had a job, maybe he could buy some gifts for his grandbabies and get some of that cat food with the tops that pull off like the old beer cans.

Miss Katie brings toast and eggs on a paper plate. Lionel makes the sign of the cross. He sits in silence for a minute. Then he gums the eggs slowly and watches the Mexicans ride away.

 

Lionel wants to get up and go to church but his head hurts. One of these days he’s supposed to go and start that new job at the Wal-Mart. Nights keep killing his morning spirit. He feels so much better in the evenings when he drinks his beer, like all his cares and worries are taken away. He don’t think about Dontrell in Colorado. He don’t worry about Mingus. He knows that if he gets up and goes, he’ll feel a lot better. There’s something about his preacher’s words that do the same thing the beer does. His words make Lionel believe that everything is going to be all right.

A black and white photo next to his bed shows him and his twin brothers Bony and Fat Tony when they were kids. Lionel stands in the middle, his older brothers looking proud of him as he holds the turtle he caught at City Park that day. They always found animals. When Lionel was nine, doves came and made a nest on an oak branch right outside the boys’ window. Waking on those days used to excite him. Bony always pulled the sheets off the king-size bed, and once Tony and Lionel stopped yelling, they always thanked him. It sure was something watching the Mama and Papa take turns sitting on those eggs. Lionel tried to scare them a couple times, pounding on the glass of the window, but these birds had no fear.

Lionel picks up another framed photo—Dontrell standing in front of a mountain in Colorado with his mother— and he remembers the night the two of them left. Almost twenty-five years later, the image haunts him. Every time Lionel sees a blinking street light he’s reminded of Dontrell’s squinty eyes and that last night when they kept flicking open and closed.

If Lionel gets up and goes to church, he’ll light a candle for Dontrell. He’ll light a candle for Mama and Papa and Bony and Tony and everybody who’s gone already, but he don’t want to move. His bed feels so cozy. Not that it’s cold outside, but there’s always that initial exit from the dream world into his own. He likes to live in the dream world; in it everybody’s there.

Lionel tries to look past the vines and yellow flowers destroying the tree outside his window. Seraphin’s wife Damaris yells up to him. He shouts back, “Uno menudo.” It takes longer to find the right hole on his belt because his waist keeps getting smaller. Lionel has to stop a couple times on his way down the steps.

“Hola,” he tells Damaris, putting his cane in the backseat. He gets in. “The door no closing.”

“You must holding,” she says.

He grips the handle as the car bounces down Claiborne Avenue.

“I am very sad baby cat die,” she says. “He looking like a baby Mingus.”

“Thought you don’t like cats.”

“You feeding him-I no like him, but then the car, it come, and I am very sad for baby cat.”

The silence makes Lionel feel uncomfortable. He’s relieved when they pull into the parking lot.

Inside Wal-Mart, his boss walks toward him with his toes pointed in. Mr. David sounds like one of those sissy boys Lionel sees around the neighborhood sometimes. He says Lionel’s name wrong, like it’s three words: Li-o-nel.

“It’s all yours, Lionel,” Mr. David says. “You know where the bathrooms are if you need to go.”

Lionel hopes that he don’t need to go. He came to Wal-Mart one time and saw an old man leaning against a walker in the pharmacy. The man was crying. His seersucker pants had a wet spot running down his leg to a yellow puddle on the floor at his feet. Lionel should have hugged him, but he didn’t. He stood there, staring; he couldn’t help himself..

Two women walk through the automatic doors pushing a basket.

“Welcome to Wal-Mart,” Lionel says. “How you beautiful babies doing?”

“Good, you?” They smile.

“I’m pretty good,” Lionel says.

They pass. A warm vibration rushes through Lionel’s chest. Maybe that’s why old folks like this job so much.

Mr. David puts his arm around Lionel’s shoulder. He says, “Lionel, I know you’re trying to be friendly, but instead of beautiful babies, how about you try this, ‘Welcome. How are you ladies doing today? May I help you with anything?’”

A group of teenagers wearing Katrina Relief T-shirts walk past the potted plants. Lionel smiles and nods. “How you doing, children of God?”

The kids say hello. Mr. David comes up, and Lionel thinks he’s going to congratulate him. “Lionel, I know you mean well.”

“I do. I made those children smile.”

“And that’s good.” Mr. David fools around with a price tag gun. “We have some rules here. In the handbook. Me, personally, I got no problem with God, but Wal-Mart has a strict policy. It’s under the section about separation between church and corporation.”

“But….Them street cars a corporation. I seen advertising just the other day. Be a Christian.” \

Mr. David talks slowly. “Please, just say, ‘Ladies, welcome to Wal- Mart.’”

Lionel thinks about telling Mr. David to take the walnuts out of his ass and live a little. Instead, he says, “Yes, sir.” He rolls the words through his head like balls in a bingo blower. Lionel’s focusing on the two bikers walking through the door. He’s thinking gentlemen. He can see they’re gentlemen, but he’s got Mr. David’s voice trapped in his head. “Hi, how are you ladies doing today? Damn….I’m sorry. I….””

“Don’t worry about it,” one of the bikers says with a big smile beneath his moustache.

 

Today’s the Fourth of July. The cashiers hand out free flags at the Wal-Mart. Lionel sticks two in the back of his Saints cap before he goes home.

Damaris turns to him on the way out. “I no seeing Mingus yesterday,” she says.

“I snuck him in,” Lionel says, “keep an eye out for the landlord.”

“Maybe you find different casa.”

Lionel laughs. The Mexicans have taught him things he never even thought about knowing, like fuerte and amor and viva New Orleans.

Lionel don’t mind silence anymore when he’s riding with Damaris.

He thinks of the homeless under the overpass. Not everybody gets to go to the Wal-Mart and talk to nice people. When he comes home these days his pillow feels a little bit softer than it did the night before. Lionel feeds Mingus fancy can food, and the two of them curl up in his bed and watch black and white movies on cable TV.

Damaris pulls in front of his house. Lionel gets out and ties the passenger door to a hook in the glove box.

Finches fly around the tree in his front yard. Mr. David told him that as soon as one comes, the rest will follow. Lionel told Mr. David that he didn’t want any pigeons to take the birdseed from his finches, so Mr. David recommended this special bird feeder with these little posts that stick out on the side. Those lazy pigeons can’t fit their stupid feet on the posts. If they try, they’ll fall off.

Lionel walks from his house toward his old stoop. The sun shines so strong that he tries to stare at the ground. Under the I-10 overpass, he feels dizzy and needs to sit. He’s thinking that he’s hearing sirens in the distance and voices of people he hasn’t seen in years.

 

A crowd gathers in front of the Charbonnet Funeral Home. Lionel can’t see just who the people are. He walks easier now; the sun don’t bother him. Lionel looks for his reflection in a gold sousaphone but all he sees are people swaying to the somber music. The Treme Brass Band plays “A Closer Walk with Thee” while two pale gray horses stand at attention. Six men lower a casket from the carriage. Lionel thinks, “If I falter, Lord, who cares? Who with me my burden shares? None but Thee, dear Lord, none but Thee.”

A woman in a red dress climbs onto the lowered casket. She cries and screams. Then she looks out to the crowd, raises her arms to the sky, and dances like her body needs to move, like the music bypasses her mind and controls her bones. Her face takes shape in Lionel’s brain, and he seems to be the only one noticing her. Once he realizes that he’s watching his mama, he reaches up to the hem of her dress. The cotton feels soft on his calloused hands. The sun seems so bright—so bright that maybe his eyes are failing him—but he don’t feel hot. He can see his Pops standing next to a picnic table in Tuba Fats Square, swaying with his Gilbey’s gin, tapping a drum stick against an almost empty bottle. Bony splashes Fat Tony in a puddle, and all of them are young again. They pull Lionel into the water. He squeezes between their bodies, and they hold him tight.

Lionel jumps onto Fat Tony’s shoulders and claps as they pass abandoned houses. He bats at oak branches and reaches down to people who drowned in the flood. Mama and Papa dance in front of them. The crowd passes through his family.

Mr. Seraphin’s leading all the Mexicans around, handing out plates of fish tacos that he grilled on the sidewalk out front. Dontrell’s there with his kids, sweating like they never seen a New Orleans summer before. The entire procession stops near the stoop of Lionel’s old house. Miss Katie looks beautiful in her black dress, bouncing the way only babies and old ladies can dance. Seraphin hands her a taco. Miss Katie kisses his cheek and drops a chunk of fish down to Mingus.

A little girl shakes the cowrie shells tied at the ends of her hair. She licks a red sno-ball and dances just like Miss Katie. “Whose cat that is?” the girl asks.

“Old Mr. Lionel,” Miss Katie says. “Used to sit right there.”

The girl says, “Old Mr. Lionel give me a praline once.”

A little boy pulls on Miss Katie’s dress. “I know Mr. Lionel. He a funny old man, Mr. Lionel.”

Lionel don’t know everybody, don’t even know if they knew him. Sometimes people just come for the music, and some of them don’t even know who the jazz funeral is for. Don’t matter. Those horns blow because it’s time to go. It’s time for the horns to blow. The crowd follows the brass, and Lionel follows them, riding on Tony’s shoulders with his arms raised and singing with the crowd: I’ll fly away oh glory. I’ll fly away (in the morning). When I die, hallelujah by and by…I’ll fly away.