When I got back to town, I could have sworn my neighborhood bar looked a little different.
The shutters were new, I thought, not just the paint. I remembered at Christmas, seeing the lights around the window, seeing the bar stools up on the bar. A security thing? But I couldn’t find anyone to confirm that at first. My friend Heather Booth finally did.
Tonight I had a hand on the door to Pal’s and then realized I needed office supplies. In a hurry to beat 9 o’clock, I hopped in the car and sped over to the Office Depot in the 1400 block of St. Charles. I got back around 9:30 after making a soy milk detour. 6 cop cars on my street, a fire truck. Neighbors clutching themselves.
I could have scripted the conversation I had with folks before I had it. Maybe a better way to say it is that I knew the words to the song. The litany of what happened, though it turned out the what happened was a little different. “Stabbings are always personal,” the intense little bullet of a woman said, tanned, Louisiana accent, darting eyes and rectangular glasses, close cropped hair. Thus began Act II: the segragation of Us from Them. And then the stories started to fall out of peoples’ mouths. We talked about the burned car, the National Guard, the SWAT team that came when the man barricaded himself inside the bar last October. A nervous woman paced around trying to reach the mother of the woman who was stabbed. (The woman was said by those around me to be a recent former employee of Pal’s, someone who quit because of the crime.) A black woman, another down the street neighbor, said she heard the woman’s name was Nia. I was told she died, bled out, on scene, but in fact she’s “only” in critical condition now.
I walked as close as I dared — a block from my house and I still hugged my arms around myself, sweating softly, melting into the evening. I talked to the neighbors. I walked a little closer, meaning to talk to the kids who stood closer, who had been in the bar. But before I could address them I heard the sniffling of a woman texting someone and leaning against the building. A rounder face, Irish and freckled, white. “Hey, are you alright?” I said, shakily. She nodded. She was fine, enough. I was not, anymore.
