The motel offered a carbohydrate laden bonanza. Chance retrieved two waffles, two pastries, and two cups of milk. Paul sat at one of the tables. As he approached the table, Paul twitched his eyebrows, “Good afternoon, nice to see you can get up before, ah, one PM.”

Reaching into his shirt pocket, Chance handed Paul the urn letter, “You gotta read this. I found it in Dad’s urn.”

Paul’s face was part confusion, part surprise. “What? You found it where? Why didn’t we see this yesterday?”

“It was stuck to the underside of the lid. I just threw the whole shebang in the bag. Whatever, check it out.”

Chance enjoyed watching his older brother’s face as he went through the note. Alas, at the end, he was disappointed.

Paul put the yellow sheets in the middle of the table, and pinched his nose. “Just more of Mother’s nonsense, if you ask me. She was always a bit melodramatic.”

Chance put down his milk, “You don’t find that very interesting?”

Paul put his glasses in a shirt pocket, and grimaced, “We didn’t have a weird life. Come on. Pop was just a rotten provider, and given to disappearing – or getting arrested. What’s so hard to understand about that?” He scowled, “You’ve never accepted Pop’s arrest – that he was in fact, guilty.”

Chance squirmed in his chair. His appetite gone. This was an old argument. “What’s to accept? He was a hotel burglar, and he copped a plea.” His voice didn’t ring with conviction.

Paul’s expression softened. In some ways, Chance would always be younger – in a childlike way – than his years. “Yes. If any  part of our lives can be said to be screwed up – it was from that point forward. Especially after the way the police trashed the house.”

The vivid memory of that night struck Chance. That nightmare came totally out of the blue. He was in high school, and had performed in his high school band’s Christmas concert. After waiting until 9:30 pm for Dad to pick him up, he finally telephoned to find out what had happened.

His brother had answered the phone. “Where the heck is Dad? I’m stuck here without a ride!”

Paul spoke slowly, sounding strange, “We can’t get you, Chance. The police are here, searching the place. Dad’s been arrested.”

Chance sighed, another of Paul’s irritating practical jokes, “Come on! I’m stuck over here on Claiborne without a ride. It’s almost 10 o’clock. Will you come and get me? Please?”

“Chance, I’m serious. The police are here, going through the house with a search warrant. We can’t leave here until they’re done.”

“Oh come on, Paul, that’s ridiculous! If the police are really there, put them on!”

To his total surprise, a muffled noise came from the phone, and then a stranger’s authoritative voice came on the line. “This is Lt. Holland, New Orleans Police Department, who am I speaking with?”

Chance almost dropped the phone, “Um, I’m Chance Martin. I live there. Dad is supposed to pick me up tonight. I was in the Franklin band concert tonight.”

“Well, assuming your ‘Dad’ is Bruce Martin, you’ll be waiting a long time.” Chance waited for the officer to continue, but all he heard were more indistinct, muffled noises.

“Um, I can’t get home! I’m over here on the East Bank, and don’t have any money for the bus.”

Chance couldn’t think properly. The world had turned sideways on its axis, and was threatening to spin him off.

“I’m not through here, and it’s not our job to ferry people.” Click.

The bastard hung up! Chance stared at the phone’s mouthpiece, part anger, part amazement. He searched his pockets: thirty-five cents. He was marooned in a very bad part of town, and would have to use NOPSI very late at night. Thirty-five cents would get him downtown, but with no where near enough money to get across the river. The Canal Street ferry stopped at 10pm, but even if he could catch it – he’d still be a hell of a walk to get to the apartment at the far end of General Degaulle.

It took until 3:30 in morning – on a school night – before Chance finally made it home. He was exhausted, having walked the last five miles beyond the end of the bus route. Riding on no less than five buses on both sides of the river, begging bus drivers to accept his transfers and begging for money once from a withered old black woman, who probably thought he was going to mug her if she didn’t cough up.

It had been a totally humiliating – and dangerous – experience. New Orleans was a rough town, and no place for a high school student, to wander about in the middle of the night.

That last walk, in the relatively cool December evening, had been the most difficult. Each street light was an individual goal to be perceived, achieved, and passed. But each also brought him closer to the distorted and dissonant destruction that he sensed awaited him.

Impossibly, his darkest imaginings could not match reality’s grotesque spectacle.

The apartment was totally destroyed. The couch had been completely shredded, its cushions looking like ruptured pustules leaking white stuffing. The living room TV lay smashed on its side. Clothes were strewn about everywhere. The cat box had been dumped into a corner in the dining room.

Paul sat on the old speaker cabinet, discarded beer cans strewn amongst the wreckage. The refrigerator contents were strewn about – its cord cut. Several kitchen cabinet doors were missing or hung at crazy angles, their hinges bent or broken.

A dull sensation of familiarity seeped into Chance’s dazed mind. He had seen destruction like this once before. When the tornado had hit their apartment complex in Baton Rouge during that stupid hurricane. The scene before him now had that same flavor of mindless turmoil, of unchecked power bent on destruction.

“What happened here? What’s going on? What happened to Dad? Where’s Mom?” Chance was afraid to sit down. The dining room chairs resembled broken matchsticks. The lounge chair was nothing more than stuffing and strips of cloth. Their mother’s hospital bed – in the living room – had its mattress wedged between it and the window. Its pillows’ contents were heaped in a pile in one corner. This was worse than the tornado. At least then, much of the contents had been sucked out when the roof lifted.

Paul looked up from the floor, bleary eyes a watery red and waved his arm to encompass the room. “Compliments of the New Orleans Police Department.” Paul tossed piece of folded paper in Chance’s general direction, and took another drink of his beer.

The paper was a search warrant, and had something to do with Pop.

The older brother’s slightly slurred voice droned on. “Pop’s in jail. He was arrested for burglary. At some hotel in the Quarter.” Paul talked in a monotone, in the manner of giving a report, completely devoid of emotion.

“Mom?”

Paul waved his beer, then looked puzzled when it spilled. “She’s still at Charity. Can’t get back from there, either.”

“Can’t you go get her?”

The chuckle that came from Paul’s throat was painful to hear. There was no mirth or happiness in it. The sound was like what a troll would emit after spying a new victim.

Paul looked up, his face was sad, and he was clearly fighting back emotions that threatened to overtake him. “They took the Mercedes, too.” He burped, a surprised look came to his face. “Guess what?”

Chance tapped his toe impatiently and scowled. “What?! What?”

Paul lifted the beer can as if toasting the irony of their situation. “It was stolen! Can you beat that? Stolen like, three years ago. That piece of crap! Why couldn’t Pop at least steal a decent car?”

He staggered up, and shuffled toward the bathroom, kicking clothes and garbage out of the way to make a path.

The rest of the night until dawn was an unending series of galling discoveries. In his room, Chance’s amateur radio transceiver was smashed to pieces. Every single tube deliberately crushed. Posters, pictures, and signs on the walls were ripped to pieces. Several light switches and wall sockets were cracked and hanging, leaving holes in the drywall.

Chance almost cried when he spotted his chess shelf dumped into the middle of the floor; jaggedly broken down the middle. Both chess trophies were cracked in half. His prized set scattered haphazardly on the floor.

The only morsel of grim satisfaction was the realization that the police bandits had had to wade through his closet full of dirty clothes. Hygiene is not a teenage boy’s strong suit. Most of the clothes were inherited from Granpa, who’d died six months before. Paisley prints and double knit pants that were too short. They wouldn’t be missed.

Under his bedroom window, below the scattered QSL cards and chess books, a label maker had its aluminum tape pulled out several inches. On the label, printed three times, was “LT J T Holland”. It appeared the intrepid police lieutenant had attempted to pull off the aluminum label but couldn’t work the cutter. Chance glared at it. It was almost as if the police had left a signature, proud of the destruction they had wrought.

The next few days, matters deteriorated, if that was possible. The evening news had a video segment, showing his father, in handcuffs, walking into the jail while a police spokesperson announced that a nefarious hotel burglar had been caught. Dad looked straight at the camera, very briefly, then glanced away, his cuffed hands raising up, as if to try to shield his face from the lights.

Two days later, Chance, Paul, and their mother visited Dad in jail, for the first time. He was in the city lockup off Broad street, behind the court house.

Only one person at a time was allowed to enter the single row of seats permitted to visitors. Mom went first and stayed a very long time. When she finally came back, her eyes were red rimmed with grief and tears, her face a mask of sorrow. Her eyes would not connect with Chance’s.

Paul was next. Five minutes later, he came back. His expression a mixture of anger and confusion.

“The guard said that Dad’s time was up.” He looked at his little brother. “Sorry, Chance.”

Neither Mom nor Paul would discuss what they had said and heard, except in vague generalities.

On the bus, groaning its way back toward Charity Hospital – where Mom was in nursing school – Chance tried to talk about the situation.

“What about bail? Can we get him out?”

Mother honked her nose in a tissue and shook her head despondently. “It’s $50,000. We don’t have that kind of money. We don’t have any collateral, either.”

Certainly not now. Everything in the house was gone or smashed.

“What about Uncle Andy? Can he help?”

Again she shook her head, her expression bleak. She looked at Chance. Her blue eyes were puffy, surrounded by red and pink, and the dark smudge of mascara. “Bruce said not to call Uncle Andy or Grandma for help.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” Chance flared with anger.

She reached out and took his wrist in her hand and grasped it with surprising ferocity. “Your father was very clear, Chance. He does not want to waste money on bail. Money we can’t afford to divert to it.” Her voice trailed off. “They don’t have it anyway.”

“But…,” he began.

“I’m sorry, Chance. Your father was very firm. We must pull together, somehow.” She released his wrist and gripped his hand, as if for support.

Outside it began to rain. The water made horizontal streaks across the long windows. Large drops fluttered in the wind, like synchronized marbles until the bus stopped, when they would magically transform into vertical streaks and disappear.

The whine of the bus’s transmission, the roar of its engine, and the high pitched hissing sound the wheels made as they swept through the water was no match for the internal cacophony dominating Chance’s mind. The questions that would not stop. The answers that would not come.

Still the insults would not stop. The next day, the Times-Picayune had a short story on page three: “Quarter’s Burglar: ‘Dashing’.” It detailed how Pop was well known to the staff at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on Bourbon street. “A frequent guest, Mr. Martin would arrive in his trademark Mercedes-Benz, carrying a briefcase and single overnight bag.”

What a twisted, sick, joke.

The apartment complex evicted them from the apartment. Mom quit nursing school and came home to pick up the pieces of her smashed family.