He found a hole in the floor of nigger heaven and slipped back
down through or he rose up out of nigger hell. No, I’m not mistaken about this. He was skirting the edge of the lake and I followed him down around to where the yards run out and the land turns to swamp, followed him, my goddamn shoes cracking through ice into three inches of water, and he disappeared into the mist.
I don’t remember nothing else after that, who called an ambulance or why. I woke up here in this damned hospital bed with the shakes. Nothing a couple boilermakers won’t fix if that damned doctor will ever show up and let me out of here. I tried to leave of my own accord and discovered that my room is locked. You think you live in America and then something like this happens to you.
Y
ou pick up 1–55 South close to Jackson, Mississippi, and you’re in New Orleans before you know it. It was foggy crossing Lake Ponchartrain, eerie knowing there was black water all around beyond the concrete railing. I stayed behind a truck all the way through Metairie, so it wasn’t bad.
New Orleans, as they say, is an old whore of a city. I first heard about it on a Boy Scout camp out when I was twelve. We sat around the fire in the woods, and the leader told us about the French Quarter and Cajun children dancing for coins and things that went on in upstairs rooms when the bars closed down that made a boy a man. That made me always love New Orleans despite the fact that I had never been there. You just say New Orleans, and I’m twelve, hanging out by a campfire with some guys and there’s an older fellow’s voice lulling you to sleep with vaguely sexual promises awaiting you way down yonder.
Watching New Orleans start to glow up out of the fog on the bridge after driving through snow and rain and ice all day was an oasis for my mind. I had already waked up snowbound in that motel east of Jackson, Mississippi, before I came to the full consciousness that I was seriously going after her. Last night, heading out of Alabama, I only had one electrified sensation. I was bringing her home. I was hell bent, fighting blowing snow, and my determination
would be stronger in the end than all her objections. This trip was one pulsing round-trip Alabama-Texas-Alabama and my indisputable destination was my own driveway with Lily on the seat beside me. This morning in that Mississippi motel room I had time to consider my mission in greater detail.
I get uneasy in motel rooms anyway. No matter how decent, and this one was average, I can’t shake the feeling that hundreds of people have laid on my bed, maybe thousands—dying old people, married people screwing away their road boredom, salesmen and hookers and crummy little affairs and families with kids leaving their scents and their germs and God knows what else behind. There’s not a motel maid in the world who can sanitize all that, not at least to my satisfaction.
I felt trapped in that room watching the falling snow. It was a trap of my own design. Going after Lily had made one thing clear. Underneath all my crazy love for her, my twisted need to imprison and make love to a woman who found my touch unbearable, was a little cold fact.
I saw life as pointless long before I met Lily, and I sometimes wished to die beyond all moral and rational belief to the contrary. I chose Lily because she was bigger than all that. Lily was the only shield I ever had that worked, the only protecting thing I ever knew that could hold back that terrible, cold truth that life has no bearable purpose or reason. So what had started as an impulsive leap of faith had winnowed itself down into a matter of my life and death.
Then New Orleans was all around me like a sudden fortress or a wall against the dark thoughts of the day I had left behind me in Mississippi, and farther still, Alabama, the sad night wind by the empty lake, the getting up and going to work, the cold morning coffee sitting on the kitchen table in the quiet house when I came in at night, the same sock on the bathroom floor ten days in a row.
New Orleans drifted past like an accommodating hussy with a name like Harmonia—impervious and inviting and French and lovely and staid and humid and away. It drew me in. It asked nothing, offered everything. Or so it seemed when I had left the car at the Royal Orleans and let Bourbon Street pull me where it would.
Every face behind every bar, every beckoning iron stairway beside every facade, every blue note that drifted out of every joint along the strip, seemed to know me better than I knew myself. The Quarter was a town inside a city, a broken kingdom of shadows and tourists and torn dreams.
It was a place where the thick walls of stone churches kept God safe and deep inside away from its forbidden streets. It woke a thousand longings, all of them Lily. Or so it seemed to me that night as it pulled me and I let it, because the ache in my chest had diminished.
I sat in a filthy basement bar and made mindless conversation with men from New York and Russian sailors and one affable guy whose hand rested on my knee as we talked. You could actually peel the seconds off a minute in that town. I walked up and down a dark narrow street of old French houses jammed one on top of another and turned back up another when I hit the boulevard. I’m not a drinker, but I’d had a few that night. I was flying. I was ready.
She was standing on the corner of Dauphine and St. Louis streets in front of a jumbled-up little grocery store with giant boxes of cheap detergent piled so high you couldn’t see inside it. Her hair was long and thick and brilliant yellow orange. The blue streetlight made a corona of green around it. Her skirt was short and her long mahogany legs rose like a narrow fountain out of her silver high heels. Her eyes took possession of me across the street a half a block away.
“Baby, run around the corner and get me a pack of Kools, will you, baby?” Her voice was like a feathered lasso dropping over my head and tugging at my torso.
“Which corner?”
She pointed, and I walked past a large red brick five-story house and down some steps into another crummy basement bar.
“They were all out of Kools,” I said. She had a wide face, a broad little nose. Her pink lips parted revealing perfect white teeth that added up to a smile that didn’t give a shit. I’m neither a smoker nor a man of the Word, but I followed the urge to open the Marlboros and place one between her lips, and then I was fumbling because I
didn’t have any matches, but she opened a tiny shoulder bag on a chain and handed me her rhinestone encrusted lighter. I lit one for myself, I suppose, because that’s what a twelve-year-old Boy Scout on his first excursion to the Quarter would do. She exhaled, tweezing a shred of tobacco off her lower lip with two long neon pink fake fingernails.
“Willie got the van parked in the alley over here. Let’s get this shits over with. Verline wants me to tell her fortune, wants me to say it ain’t so, but she ain’t bled in two months. She half crazy like it some big deal because she’s afraid it’ll turn out half black and her old man will kill her.”
“It’s forty,” she said as Willie climbed out of the back of the van. Nice looking man, tall and thin and solid. Expensive leather jacket, creased jeans, nice shoes. I handed him two twenties. I thought he’d be a whole lot more menacing. We did it half-dressed. Then I was standing back outside the van.
“Willie, I’m going on up to Verline’s.”
“We need two more, Shasta.”
“Aw, fuck that shit,” she said, and then she asked me what I was looking at and told me to get the fuck out of there. There was something low and mean about the way she said it that gave me a funny twinge. I had an inkling that I wasn’t done with her.
When you live with Lily, you live prepared. I’d been salting twenties and fifties in a hollow bedpost ever since we came to Alabama. So when I lit out from there, I had over five thousand cash. I left half of it in the hotel safe. I hid another thousand in the room. I put the rest in my front pockets in case somebody got my billfold. I sunk my hand down in my pants and dug out a wad and handed Willie five hundred dollars.
“That make it right?” Willie told me I was beautiful. Nobody ever told me I was beautiful before. I told him I’d take her back to the Royal Orleans with me for the night.
“You screw-faced honky shit! Them motherfuckers ain’t going to let
me
in no fucking Royal fucking shit Orleeen!
“Mother fuck, man”—she was talking to Willie—“I’m tired. Verline
waitin’ on me. What kind of shit are you pulling? He’s a sicko. I ain’t stayin’ out here all night with this shits!”
Willie told her she was and told her to take a cab back—wherever back was—and then he took off in the van, but not before he told me I was beautiful again.
Shasta sat on the curb and lit a Marlboro, took a puff, then stomped it out. “What’s this dried shit you got me smoking?”
I asked her if she was hungry. “No, man, I ain’t hungry.” She was mine. She belonged to me.
“It’s cold out here,” I said.
“It’s wintertime.”
“I didn’t think it would be this cold in New Orleans.”
“That’s because you one ignorant motherfucker.” I took no offense at her rage. I liked the way she talked.
“I like your hair,” I said.
“Thirty-nine ninety-nine, and you get to keep the stand, but it ain’t shit.”
“Seriously. Are you hungry?” I was figuring to order room service.
“If you serious, then you take me to Antoine’s.” Everybody from up home came back from New Orleans talking about Antoine’s like it was the Garden of Eden. It felt close to midnight. I doubted they’d still be serving. I was sure they wouldn’t serve her.
“Probably closed.”
“You probably give that junkie your last dime and you fixin’ to shoot me. Show me your piece.”
“I don’t have one. I don’t even like to go deer hunting.” That was true about hunting. But I had a gun packed in my suitcase.
“Well, you one messed-up something.”
She said Antoine’s served until two. I couldn’t figure her eating at a place like that. How did she know? She picked that up right away.
“I catch my last trick out of Antoine’s when they close the bar. This pussy has rubbed the seat of every limousine in town.” She said it with so much pride, I felt kind of impressed. She caught that too. It softened her a little.
“You go around to the back, show ‘em your money, they’ll slip us into a private room.” She knew a couple semi-high-class hookers who had been in that way.
When we passed back by the St. Louis Grocery Store, there was a cluster of drag queens in gowns. Two of them were screaming and waving long, frosted fingernails at each other. A couple of them called Shasta by name and one called me a cute number. That really made me feel like a twelve-year-old Boy Scout. My right hand drew instinctively into a fist, but Shasta slapped it open before any of them saw.
“They’ll pluck out your eyes and roll ‘em down the gutter before you can say, ‘Mother.’ ”
She got the time from a cop on the next corner and that’s when I learned about New Orleans and time because he said, “Ten-fifteen.” I had been in town less than four hours, checked into a hotel, showered and shaved and changed, walked at least five miles, talked to at least twenty people in ten different bars, taken some sorely needed relief from a whore in a van, and now I was taking her to dinner at world renowned Antoine’s.
I tested my head, but Lily wasn’t there. Lily was a name, and when I closed my eyes I couldn’t visualize her or the house on the lake. I was betweentimes.
I spied a ten dollar bill on the pavement along Bourbon and my hand went for it, but Shasta’s foot came down on my wrist and she swooped it up and crossed the street and handed it to a Cajun woman she called “Millie” who stood beside a limbless man in a large wicker basket.
She had it right about Antoine’s. They took us into a little dining room like it was no big deal. It had a couch along one end and the door locked every time the waiter went out, and we had to unlock it with a buzzer under our feet.
She got pissed when they didn’t have Champale and, MBA or not, I couldn’t make a lot of sense out of the menu. We let the waiter choose for us. He brought us a bottle of wine in a silver bucket and she drained the bottle before I could down my first glass, so we ordered another one.
“What’s the story?” She was much more animated now. She was younger than I thought by about five years. Prettier. I wished I’d paid more attention to that back in the van. It might have been better.
“Beg your pardon?”
“You ain’t no Romeo. We done did our thing. You got some kind of trip to lay on me and I’d appreciate it if you’d get started. I’m tired.” The way she said “tired” it sounded like “tie-yud.”
“I bother you, don’t I?”
“Shit,” she said, and rolled her eyes. She was eating ribs. Mine was chicken. Obviously the waiter wasn’t about to waste their gourmet stuff on us. She was looking me over, studying me, reaching back into that vast encyclopedia of human experience she had written with her line of work, trying to find me.
“What do you see?”
“Trouble.”
“How so?”
“Let me see your hand.”
“You charge extra for fortunes?” Even I knew it was a bad joke.
“I don’t know fortunes. I read people.”
“What am I? A novel or a short story?”
She dropped my hand. “Honey, they wouldn’t put you on late night cable access.”
We stopped at a store on the way back to the hotel and bought her a six-pack of Champale and three packs of Kools. She put a scarf over her head and put my jacket over her shoulders and stood close next to me as we crossed the lobby. It was after eleven, but the lobby was crowded and nobody said a word.
As quick as we got into the room, she flipped on the TV to catch the last ten minutes of
The Tonight Show
. She kept glancing back at me on the other bed to see what I was doing. She switched off the TV and opened a bottle of Champale.