Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (22 page)

“You can't change anyone's life,” she said. “You can't erase anyone else's karma.”

“But—” I began.

Constance stopped me, shaking her head. “All you can do is leave clues,” she said. “And hope that they understand, and choose to follow.”

B
ACK IN MY ROOM
that afternoon, I called Leon.

“Was your uncle abused as a child?” I asked.

“Huh,” Leon said. “Abused? No. I mean, him and his dad weren't close, but I don't think it was abusive. And his mom was kind of cold, but—”

“No,” I said. “Sexually. Sexually abused.”

“Oh, God,” Leon said. “No. I mean, not that I know of. God, no.”

We hung up. I called Mick and told him what I'd found out. As we talked I threw the I Ching.

“Jesus,” Mick said. “Jesus. Out of everything I would have guessed.”

I added up the coins and checked the book. Hexagram 55: Lonely smoke.

“I know,” I said. “That's the thing about the truth. It's just like your car keys—always in the last place you look. Did Vic ever prosecute Andray?” I asked. “Or try to?”

“No,” Mick said. “I looked into that right away. Never.”

Smoke without a fire misses his sister. The wise man follows the smoke to its spark. A lonely king cannot rule his people. Love spoils the rice and sours the clouds
.

“Are you there?” Mick said.

“I'm here,” I said.

“So what do we do now?” he asked. “I mean, do you think
this is why he was killed? I've been going through all his financials, and I think—”

“Forget about his financials,” I said. “This is it.”

“What do you mean? You mean Lawrence—”

“Not Lawrence,” I said. “But this is it—this is the mystery. It has to be.”

“How can you be sure?” Mick asked, always suspicious. “I'm never sure of anything,” I said. “But I'm fairly fucking certain this, uh,
proclivity
of his has something to do with why Vic was killed.”

“Well, I still think I should keep going through his records,” Mick said. “You never know—”

“You do whatever you want,” I said. “I'm gonna go try to get an alcoholic in Congo Square to be my friend.”

I was on my way out the door when Leon called back.

“Hi, Claire,” he said.

“Hi, Leon.”

“So, I was thinking—my mother never left me alone with Vic.”

“Never?” I said. “Never ever?”

“Never ever,” Leon said, sounding a little queasy. “I mean, that doesn't mean—it doesn't—I remember once she made a comment like, oh, Uncle Vic doesn't know anything about kids. Something, you know, totally innocent.”

“Not even once?” I said. “Not even if she ran out for cigarettes?”

“No,” Leon said. “If she had to go somewhere she took me with her. Always. Not even once.”

Most people who've been abused as children never hurt a fly. But of all the people who hurt flies, almost all of them have had their wings broken themselves.

She knew. Leon's mother knew.

T
HAT EVENING I WENT
to Congo Square for the last time. I didn't try to be friendly or work any disguises. I didn't try anything at all. Instead I just sat in the square and watched the men ignore me. Jack Murray was at his usual place at the picnic table. I took three packs of cigarettes with me. I was robbed of the first one in ten minutes.

“Got a cigarette?” the man had said to me. He was at least fifty, wearing clothes that hadn't been washed in a year.

“Sure,” I said.

When I took the pack out of my purse to give him one, he snatched the whole thing out of my hands and walked away. I suppose I could have killed him, but it hardly seemed worth it. Cigarettes are cheap in Louisiana.

I heard someone laugh. I turned around and saw a woman sitting in the grass behind me. She was as regal as a president, holding a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor, a bright green wrap on her head, sitting under a tree with all her possessions in a shopping cart next to her, laughing at me.

I turned back around.

My next visitor was another old man, forgotten long ago, in the shabby trench coat all hard-living men acquire somewhere in between jail and the Goodwill, the liquor store and the halfway house.

“You got a dollar?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Sorry.” I should have thought to bring small bills and change with me, but I hadn't.

The old man lunged for my purse. I pulled back and put a hand on his chest. The men at the picnic table, including Jack Murray, watched, bored.

The black alligator purse had been Constance's. Supposedly it had been custom made for Constance in Paris by Mademoiselle herself. It was bigger on the inside than on the outside and could get almost anything through an x-ray machine or a Geiger counter. It had pockets inside pockets, secrets inside secrets. The solution to approximately seventeen mysteries could be found in this purse at any given moment. In a jam it could unfold into a tent and I could live in it until circumstances improved.

“No,” I said to the man.

He swatted at my hand and kept fighting.

“Stop,” I said. “Really. Stop.”

He pushed my hand away and went for my purse again.

“Seriously,” I said. “Come on. I don't want to hurt you.”

The woman behind me laughed again, more of a cackle. The man and I squirmed around for a few minutes, not exactly fighting but wrestling our way toward my purse.

“Come on,” I said. “Just go.”

“Gimme that purse,” he panted, getting winded.

“No!” I said, annoyed now. “Go away!”

But he didn't go away. Instead we squirmed around for another minute, and then I lost patience. I stood still and pushed hard to get a little space and then kicked him in the hip with my left leg, and as he contracted toward the pain as I knew he would, being just a man made old before his time and not much of a fighter, I smacked him in the face with my right hand and then with my left.

I didn't hurt him too bad. Not physically. But he seemed wounded in some other way. He stood and looked at me with his mouth open, looking crestfallen.

“Fuck YOU,” he said, looking hurt, as if I'd started it. Everyone was watching us now.

“Fuck YOU,” he said again.

“Okay,” I said softly.

He stood and looked at me for another minute. Maybe he was expecting some kind of resolution. I didn't give him any. Finally he shambled off.

I went back to doing nothing for a while. I figured I'd come here every day for the rest of my life if that's what it took. I was glad I wasn't pretty anymore. It was so much easier to do things like this without being pretty. I'd come here every day and beat people up until Jack Murray talked to me. True, I'd go through a lot of cigarettes, but at least I'd keep in shape. I'd studied martial arts for years—Constance had insisted on it—but I hadn't been to the studio in ages and my chops were way down. Constantly being mugged, I'd get my high kicks back. I was absorbed in a daydream of actually doing this, living in the park for the rest of my life, when a bike stopped in front of me. On the bike was a boy. He was white, with dirty-blond dreadlocks, and tattoos on his face. His kind seemed to have made a mass migration to New Orleans lately, apparently under the impression that New Orleans didn't have
enough
jobless, antisocial ne'er-do-wells of their own fighting for scraps.

“Got a cigarette?” he said.

I heard another cackle behind me. I turned around to see the regal woman's face, ruler of all she surveyed.

“Boy, you fucking crazy,” she said. She had a slight Gullah accent, probably from the Georgia Sea Islands. “You go on and get out of here.”

The boy on the bike laughed. “I ain't scared,” he said.

“Then you one stupid fuck,” the lady said. She cackled loudly, and this time I cackled along with her. The boy left and we kept cackling.

“You want me to tell you something?” the woman said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “You go get me a little bottle and I'll tell you something.”

I jogged across the street to a grocery store and got her a forty. When I came back she was sitting on my bench. I sat next to her and gave her the bottle.

“Now tell me something,” I said.

She took a long sip of the malt liquor. “You a crazy bitch,” she said.

We both cackled again.

“I already knew that,” I said. She took a sip from the bottle and then handed it to me. I had a drink and gave it back. After a while I took a joint out of my purse, lit it up, and handed it to her.

“Bless your heart,” she said with a smile, and handed the bottle back to me.

We started cackling all over again. I couldn't have said what exactly was so funny, but something was.

“You a crazy bitch,” she said affectionately.

“I told you, I know that,” I said again. We cackled.

We passed the liquor and we passed the joint and cackled until the sun went down and the moon came up. When the first forty was dead I ran to a store on North Rampart and got us another, and when that was gone I ran and got us another.

“Bless your heart,” the woman, whose name was Sandra, said over and over again. “Bless your heart.”

We drank and smoked and talked about childhood and about men and about liquor and drugs and work and birds. Jack Murray ignored me until, when the sun was coming up, I looked over and saw he was gone.

V
IC WAS SITTING
in his chair. His chair where he watched the birds. He looked out the window with a soft, dreamy look on his face. In between his chair and the window was the foot of the bed. Lying the wrong way on the bed, with his head at the foot, was a boy, or young man. He had long dreadlocks and dark skin. I couldn't see his face.

I wasn't sure if he was alive. Maybe sleeping.

I looked back to Vic. Tears were running down his face. He looked through the bedroom to the terrace. It was empty. No birds today.

I heard a howl. Vic was sobbing. He let out a scream.

The sky turned black outside. It started to pour, great lashes of rain sweeping into the bedroom, lightning shooting into the living room.

Vic cried and wailed. His pain was tangible. It knocked me down like a wave, crushing me. The storm whipped the house, tearing it to pieces.

I woke up screaming.

I
'D JUST FINISHED
my coffee the next morning when my phone rang.

It was Kelly. I picked up. She didn't say hello or hey or how are you.

“Tell me about the dream,” she said.

I told her about the dream about Tracy at the bar with Andray. I wasn't sure what it meant. Dreams are slippery things. There's no easy translation from that world to this one.

“What was she wearing?” Kelly asked.

I told her.

“Huh. How old was she?”

“Our age. The age she would be if . . .”

“Huh.” That was all she said about it. “While I've got you on the phone,” she said, “do you remember the name of the boy, the boy hanging out by the keg at the, at a, at a Broadway-Houston party on—let me see, hmm, wait, I dropped it. Shit.” I heard some papers rustling. Then I heard the phone fall to the ground and a crackle as she picked it back up.

“December 30, 1984,” she said. “He wore jeans and a black T-shirt and black creepers. About five-seven-and-a-half, dark hair. Oh, and he had a little star tattoo on his elbow. Near his elbow, sort of on the side of his arm. I think the last time you saw him was at Julian's on June 11, 1986. The pool hall,” she clarified, in case I'd forgotten. I hadn't. A Broadway-Houston
party was a kind of party kids had in the eighties, and maybe before: they would rent one of the dance studios near the corner of Broadway and Houston in Manhattan, buy a few kegs, and charge other kids four or five dollars to get in. Julian's was a pool hall on Fourteenth Street. One of the soda machines dispensed beer at night.

Now the corner of Broadway and Houston was some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Julian's had been torn down long ago to build brick-façade housing for NYU.

I heard a gunshot in the distance.

“Julian's,” I said. “I'm thinking.” Tattoos were relatively uncommon in New York City back then, especially on young people. When we did our first tattoos on our wrists—a K for Kelly, T for Tracy, C for Claire—some people didn't know what they were. They thought they would wash off.

“I think I do remember him. I think his name was Oscar. No, no. Oliver, maybe? I don't know his last name. I'm pretty sure he lived in Manhattan. Maybe Queens. Definitely not Brooklyn. He had a lot of friends from Stuyvesant but I don't know if he actually went there. For some reason I'm thinking Bronx Science. I don't know why.”

“Known associates?” she asked.

“Huh. Hannah. You remember that girl Hannah? Livie. Todd. Nakita. Rain. Rain from Stuyvesant, not Rain from Midwood.”

“Known to frequent?”

“Julian's pool hall. Maude's. Cherry Tavern. Blanche's. Sheep's Meadow—I remember seeing him there at least once.”

“Anything else?” she asked.

I thought for a minute. Another gun responded to the first, a semiautomatic, pop-pop-popping in rapid succession.

“He was cute,” I said. “He dated this girl, a mod girl. She had red hair, long hair, bangs.”

“Like Manic Panic red?”

“No, like a dark strawberry blond. Not natural but almost a natural-type color. Almost. Sometimes she wore a black and white checked miniskirt, a checkerboard check. She wore that with black tights and creepers, the tall ones.”

“Two and a quarter inch?”

“Maybe even three inch,” I said. “And she had this white leather jacket. This great vintage white leather coat with black fake fur collar. The kind of fake fur that's like a stuffed animal. It was a man's coat from, hmm, '73, '74, something like that. It was very sharp.”