I parked at Decatur and Esplanade behind the French Market, smelling the strands of garlic, dried red pepper, and fish on ice sold there as I hooked Annie onto a leather leash. We walked down Decatur underneath a metal overhang and past a couple of Italian delis and a store that sold Christmas ornaments all year. Cajun Santa. An alligator Rudolph.

I heard hard hammering and the buzz of a saw. The air inside the open door smelled of sawdust and burned wood. On his knees by a miter saw, I saw Curtis, all wiry and mullet-haired, smoking a cigarette and cutting down a tongue-and-groove board.

He smiled up at me, the cigarette pinched between his front teeth. He shut off the saw and stood, shaking the shavings from his coveralls and bending the bill of his Styrofoam hat. The hat asked: GETTIN’ ANY ?

I shook his hand. He was playing some Journey on an Emerson cassette player that was held together with duct tape.

“Travers, I heard you was up in Mississippi.”

“I just got back,” I said. “Finished up the project.”

“What was it?” He said wuzzit in that redneck drawl. New Orleans was a long way from Curtis’s north Louisiana home.

“Researching the early days of Sonny Boy Williamson. Found an old partner of his who was the only man I ever met that could take a leak and walk at the same time.”

“How’d he stop from pissin’ on himself?” Curtis asked.

“He didn’t.”

He walked over to a cooler and cracked open the top of a Bud Light. He asked me if I wanted to join him and I said I was cool. I knew it was going to be a very long night.

The hammering in the other room stopped. A large-framed white woman wearing a jogging bra that could’ve comfortably held a third-world country came in and grabbed the beer from his hand. She swigged it, looked at me, and blew out her breath, foam still on her chin.