A little boy, just three years old, stood alone in a battered tenement of the St. Thomas projects in New Orleans. Just blocks from million dollar homes and a couple miles from the drunken oblivion of Bourbon Street, the project was a little slice of the Third World right in the heart of America. The philanthropic aspirations of past generations rose darkly as a sad reminder of present failings.

There were holes in the walls. The ceiling sagged down in the middle. The floor was bare concrete stained by decades of spills and worn smooth like pebbles in a stream. From a distance, the exterior looked like the bombed out buildings in a World War II documentary. Ghosts of soldiers (in black and white) sprinted across the barren expanse of the courtyard.

In the apartment next door, long unlivable and abandoned except for those wretched few squatters too poor even to afford the modest accommodations of St. Thomas, a family of nutria, rats the size of dogs, had taken up permanent residence. They stank of the disease that rotted patches of their flesh. Their scratching and shuffling could be heard throughout the night.

The little boy's father, a drug dealer, was rarely home except to bring food. The father wasn't a bad man, wasn't negligent except as necessity dictated. His business was quite successful and kept him away much of the time. At night he stumbled in, weary from a day of dealing with the various breeds of lush who came to him for a fix, with a hot meal for the boy. They ate together silently, then played checkers. The boy usually won.

The mother had disappeared when the boy was one. She deserves little consideration, as the boy would never stop to think of her. Even as a man, he was never given pause to wonder who she was. It was just one regret lost amidst countless others.

The boy was staring at the wall, dingy white. He knew each spot of dirt, each discoloration. Every day he noted the minute changes of the water stain near the ceiling. The slow drip was the only thing to mark the passage of time.

Daylight flooded the room as the front door flew open. The boy's eyes adjusted quickly. He didn't recognize the man in the doorway. The stranger screamed an incoherent sentence as his hands fumbled along the wall leaving greasy stains on top of the stains that were already there. As he stepped into the room, no longer backlit, the boy could see the stranger's eyes. They were empty, like the eyes of the rats next door. The boy thought of the man as dead.

Five minutes passed. The stranger leaned on the wall glancing nervously around the room, but never noticed the boy. Heroin flowed through his veins as much as blood. Violent tremors shook his body every few seconds. Eventually, his eyes focused, and he noted the boy as part of the room, no different than the chairs or table. The boy, for his part, didn't move.

Slowly, coherence took hold in the stranger's brain, and he sorted the boy into a category separate from furniture. With his brow furrowed quizzically above his empty eyes he moved towards him.

The boy wasn't frightened or even concerned, but walked deliberately to the kitchen with the stranger a few steps behind. He climbed onto a chair, opened a drawer, and pulled out a steak knife, rusted and missing half its handle, but relatively sharp. As the boy turned around, the man was reaching forward. With a natural grace and adeptness at violence that would give shape to the darker half of the boy as a man, he slashed the top of the stranger's wrist. Too screwed up to even realize he was injured, the man stared impassively at the blood flowing out of his arm, dripping in globs to the floor where it would leave a stain in the shape of a walrus. The boy again felt the emptiness of the other's gaze. He flipped the knife so that the blade faced him, slid it into the side of the stranger's neck and pulled it out of the front, slicing the windpipe in two. The stranger gurgled briefly and collapsed.

The boy hopped off the chair and wiped the knife on the dead man's khaki pants, leaving one more streak among many on the worn fabric. He slid the handle of the knife into his belt loop and walked out of the apartment. Out of the St. Thomas projects, never to return.

*****

Little kids tap-danced on every street corner, hoping for loose change from the tourists they both admired and loathed. The kids smiled broadly, showing crooked teeth discolored by negligence. They tapped their shoes (upside-down bottle caps pressed into the heels and toes) to frenetic beats that wearily mimicked the energy of youth. The clicks were swallowed up in a thousand other sounds.

Music is a monster that roams invisible down every street in the French Quarter. It changes shape, and moans with a different voice from the doors of a hundred clubs and bars. The individual vibrations find purchase in the alleys and under the dirty awnings. They merge together into this monster, but like most monsters, this one is not so scary as it sounds. Lonely, perhaps. Longing.

A boy, seven years old, talked in whispers to the music. The lowing beast answered in a voice only a few can hear.

“Would you like a piece of this beignet?” asked the boy.

The music answered, “I'm not much of an eater.”

The boy ate the beignet, concentrating on the music's breathing. A nearby harmonica made the music gasp.

“How long have you been on the street?” asked the music.

“Long enough for it to be home.”

“Home is an impossible concept, for someone like me who exists in movement.”

“Everyone moves. Home is just the place you think of when you think of not moving.”

“Then that's home.” Music pointed an invisible finger.

The boy followed the finger to a bearded old man, playing a saxophone on the street corner a block away. His instrument case lay open before him, starving for money. The man's features were hard, like the wrought-iron balcony above him. He could have been a permanent feature of the architecture on Toulouse Street. The boy realized he had passed the old man many times without ever noticing him.

“Go on over,” said music.

“When will I get to talk to you again?”

“Sometime, I'm sure, but you shouldn't be so lonely from now on.”

Saying goodbye was not something the boy had ever learned to do. Later in life, as circles looped inside of circles, it would be a social flaw for which he was grateful.

Music drifted away through the stinking streets, and the boy walked slowly towards the old man. As he got closer, he heard the song. Up Jumped Spring by Freddie Hubbard, though the boy didn't learn the title until much later. A carefree waltz. Celebrating something the boy couldn't imagine. He couldn't tell from where in the man's tired old body the song came.

He leaned on the brick wall and listened.

Every day for three years, the boy leaned on the wall and listened. The songs changed. Anthropology, Moment's Notice, Yes or No, Paul's Pal, Joy Spring, Four, Invitation, Along Came Betty, Have You Met Miss Jones, Bemsha Swing, Nostalgia in Times Square and couple hundred other songs that spoke of places so far and distant from New Orleans (despite having their roots quite firmly in the city) that the boy couldn't reconcile them with any reality he knew.

The boy never spoke to the saxophonist once in the thousand days he spent listening. Even when the boy arrived on the corner bloodied and bruised from one of many fights, the old man never seemed to notice. The music was all that flowed between them.

People who regularly passed down the street took to calling the boy ‘little busker,' though he never even tried to play an instrument. For the locals, the strange silent boy, the little busker, had become part of the architecture.

On a cold afternoon, on his way to listen, the boy was jumped by a kid he had fought the previous day, but this time the kid had four friends brandishing knives. Pulling out an old steak knife, worn from years of questionable use, the boy disabled his attackers, leaving bright red gashes on four of the boys' arms, an breaking the leader's leg with a kick. He gathered the knives his opponents had dropped, all considerably nicer than his own, and folded the nicest of the bunch, putting it in the pocket of his dingy jeans.

Through the humiliation and pain, one of the kids said, “We'll fucking kill you if we see you again.”

“I doubt you'll see me again,” replied Busker.

He walked towards the street corner, shivering a little in the cold. Along the way he tossed the three other knives he'd taken into a dumpster, and found a crumpled napkin to clean the blade of his old steak knife.

Rounding the corner he stopped in front of the old saxophonist just in time to hear the last few bars of Up Jumped Spring. Looking down the sidewalk, never at the man, he tossed the steak knife into the eager jaws of the saxophone case. From the corner of his eye he thought he saw the slightest of smirks break the stony features of the old man's face, then Busker walked away.

Death would visit Toulouse Street years before Busker could return.

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Next: Interlude 1 - The Beach