“Winston Marquette!” she ejaculated. “That niggah can drank some wine. He used to come up to see me when I had a nice place. We’d drink and then he’d have me callin’ out to Jesus, thankin’ the Lord he give me a body could feel so good.”

Mary was weathered like a seaward wall that had taken every gust and squall the Gulf of Mexico had to offer. Her hair was coarse and half gray, her eyes still looking for that bottle of wine and a chance to praise Jesus. I remember taking her hand and squeezing it.

“I’m looking for Mr. Marquette,” I said. “He’s my grandfather.”

“You poor child.”

Along with pity Mary gave me a possible destination.

“There’s a gang’a big palm trees on t’other side’a the northbound railroad tracks, that’s where Crackers Street is at. If you take Crackers across the tracks it comes Algo and if you take Algo up past three cross streets you’ll see a brash blue house on your left. That there is Juanita Ferris’s house. Behind that is a dirty yella shack. That’s where the bastid Marquette used to live at. Maybe he still do.”

Everything she said was true. The cluster of palm trees, the cross streets, the ugly blue house, and then the dingy yellow one. She was right about my grandfather too—he was a bastard. He told me that I could sleep on the front porch but that he didn’t have any money to feed me or to put clothes on my back.

My grandfather and I did not get along that well, but his friend Sorry dropped by now and then to drink corn whiskey and play chess. Sorry always took the time to ask me how I was doing. After I had regaled him with my adventures and experiences he’d give me little tidbits of advice.

Sitting there across the street from the Stephanopoulos Talent Agency I remembered one day when I was tending an onion patch I kept out next to my grandfather’s place.

“What kinda onion you sow, Li’l Easy?”

“Spanish onions, Uncle Sorry,” I said. I must’ve been eleven at the time.

“You learn anything lately?” Instead of a cane the bent old man had an eight-foot driftwood staff. He leaned on it while looking down upon me.

“Me an’ Billy Ray and Raymond Alexander was runnin’ down this gulch like. First Billy did it runnin’ through these thick bushes down there. Then Mouse, we call Raymond Mouse, he ran down the same way. I was the last to go and I made it through but I guess there was a bumblebee nest down there and that big black bumblebee barnstormed me an’ hit me in the fo’head so hard that I was knocked out for fi’e minutes.”