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"How you doing, Cappie?" I said.
"Good afternoon, Lieutenant," he said, and grinned. His head was bald and brown, and he wore a gray apron. He had grown up in Laplace, next door to Louis Armstrong's family, but he had sold produce in the Quarter for years and was so old that neither he nor anyone else knew his age.
"Is your wife still in the hospital?" I asked.
"No suh, she fit and fine and out do'-popping again."
"I beg your pardon."
"She do'-popping. She pop in dis do', she pop out dat do'.You want your grape drink today?"
"No, I tell you what instead. You see that pretty lady in the yellow dress eating across the street?"
"Yes suh, I think so."
"Give her some of these roses and a box of pralines. Here, you keep the change, Cappie."
"What you want me to tell her?"
"Just tell her it's from a good-looking Cajun fellow," I said, and winked at him.
I looked once more in Annie's direction. Then I turned and walked back to where I had left my rented car parked on Decatur Street.
The beach outside of Biloxi was white and hot-looking in the afternoon sun. The palm trees along the boulevard beat in the wind, and the green surface of the Gulf was streaked with light and filled with dark patches of blue, like floating ink. A squall was blowing up in the south, and waves were already breaking against the ends of the jetties, the foam leaping high into the air before you heard the sound of the wave, and in the groundswell I could see the flicker of bait fish and the dark, triangular outlines of stingrays, almost like oil slicks, that had been pushed in toward shore by the approaching storm.
I found the Gulf Shores restaurant, but the man who ran the valet parking service wasn't there. I walked a short way down the beach, bought a paper plate of fried catfish and hush puppies from a food stand, and sat on a wooden bench under a palm tree and ate it. Then I read a paperback copy of A Passage to India, watched some South American teenagers play soccer in the sand, and finally walked out on the jetty and skipped oyster shells across the water's surface. The wind was stiffer now, with a sandy bite in it, and as the sun seemed to descend into an enormous flame across the western sky, I could see thin white streaks of lightning in the row of black clouds that hovered low on the watery horizon in the south. When the sun's afterglow began to shrink from the sky, and the neon lights of the amusement rides and beer joints along the beach began to come on, I walked back to my car and drove to the restaurant.
Two black kids and a white man in his thirties were taking cars from under the porch at the entrance and parking them in back. The white man had crewcut brown hair and small moles all over his face, as though they had been touched there with a paintbrush. I drove up to the entrance, and one of the black kids took my car. I went inside and ate a five-dollar club sandwich that I didn't want. When I came back out, the white man walked up to me for my parking ticket.
"I can get it. Just show me where it is," I said.
He stepped out of the light from the porch and pointed toward the lot.
"The second-to-last row," he said.
"Where?"
He walked farther into the dark and pointed again.
"Almost to the end of the row," he said.
"My girlfriend said you can sell me some sneeze," I said.
"Sell you what?" He looked me up and down for the first time. The neon light from a liquor store next door made his lips look purple.
"A little nose candy for the sinuses."
"You got the wrong guy, buddy."
"Do I look like a cop or something?"
"You want me to get your car, sir?"
"I've got a hundred bucks for you. Meet me someplace else."
"Maybe you should talk to the manager. I run the valet service here. You're looking for somebody else."
"She must have told me about the wrong place. No offense," I said, and I walked to the back of the lot and drove out onto the boulevard. The palm trees on the esplanade were crashing in the wind.
