The Last Girls (10 page)

Morning. Morning on the bayou. Morning on Frenchman's Bayou, the hot pink dawn fading ever so slightly now as Vanessa . . . no, Jewel . . . no,
Jade
turns the rusty key in the ancient lock of her grandmother's dilapidated mansion set on its own tilted hummock in the spreading steaming (teeming? No, just used it) alluvial world of the swamp. Strange birds cry out in warning as they swoop low over the black water. A lizard races up a weathered porch column like a bright green streak. Behind her, the putt-putt-putt of enterprising developer Jean St. Pierre's motorboat grows fainter and fainter, then disappears. Oh, she should not have angered him! She should not have been so haughty. She should have accepted his offer of aid, should have allowed him to accompany her into the deserted house despite all those warning signs (the lingering touch, the eager moist gaze) that told her his interest was more than entrepreneurial. Jade stomps a delicate foot in frustration which only mounts as her shoe goes right through the rotten boards and disappears forever into the secretive black water. She leans down awkwardly to free her delicate foot from its painful vise.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle!”

Jade almost jumps right out of her creamy skin! Who can it be, out here in this godforsaken swamp in the middle of nowhere? Jade twists
around to see, hot breath catching in her throat at the first glimpse of Adrian Batiste. It is as if he is a part of the swamp itself, a force of nature, a natural man. He sits low and easy in the water in his sleek pirogue. His chiseled face is dark and commanding; his eyes flash silver. A man as wild as his surroundings despite his loose open shirt and that ridiculous rakish hat—honestly, a pimp's hat!—which he sweeps off now, inclining his head in the mockery of a bow. His shoulder-length black hair gleams in the rising sun.
“Dis-moi qui tu es, mignonne. Dismoi ton nom.”
His voice is husky.

Jade pulls herself up to her full five feet four inches with as much dignity as she can muster, aware that the tight skirt of her Chanel suit is riding up her thighs and that her stockings are in shreds.

“I do not believe I have granted you the right to address me with the familiar pronoun,” she spits at him.

His lazy grin is scornful.
“Pardon,”
he says, still with the French accent. And then, in heavily accented English, “My name is Adrian Batiste.” He pronounces it Ah-dree-ahn. “My family has lived here in Frenchman's Bayou for seven generations. And you must be—”

“Jade Cameron,” she says.

“Ah! I knew your
grand-mère,
a lady without peer.”

“Indeed. Well, she has left me her house, in fact she has left me this entire island, and I've come to decide what to do with it.”

“Then I am zee man for you.” In one fluid catlike motion our hero has tied up the pirogue and sprung onto the porch. He kneels to retrieve her foot from its splintery trap, his touch like fire on her instep. “I will tell you what to do with zis property,
mam'selle—rien!
It is to say—nothing! Theese property belong to the birds and the feeshes and the other wild things of the earth, eet must remain as eet is, a sanctuary . . .”

With all the strength she can muster, Jade kicks free of his hard, capable hand and stomps her little foot indignantly. In the back of her mind, she replays Pierre's suggestion for Creole Corner, the planned,
gated community that could make her a very wealthy woman. “I will be the one who decides what to do with my own property! Now, get off my grandmother's porch!”

But the audacious Cajun is in no hurry, lounging insolently against the rail. “Ah,
ma petite,
well do I remember all the eve-e-nings I spend here avec your
grand-mère.
How she loved music, old Marie! I come to fiddle jus' for her,
‘Jole Blon.'
How she loved to dance . . . She was-a something, your
grand-mère.
You resemble her, I tink.” Without warning, he reaches out to stroke Jade's cheek with a caressing finger.

“Ooh! That does it! Get out of here!” With both hands, Jade pushes at his well-muscled overwhelmingly masculine chest—the old rail breaks—and now he is splashing in the black water. Furiously he retrieves his hat, claps it down over his dark, streaming locks, hoists himself into the pirogue and glides out into the bayou, silver eyes shooting sparks like bullets back at Jade.

“Au revoir!”
His voice is harsh, yet warm. “I will see you again,
mam'selle
.” It is a threat as much as a promise.

The calliope cuts into Anna's creative frenzy; the deck shudders beneath her feet. As always, time has gotten away from her. That fugitive thief, he has stolen most of her life. But she doesn't begrudge him a minute of this afternoon, for
The Louisiana Purchase
promises to be every bit as successful as the rest of the Confederacy series:
Tupelo Honey, Rainy Night in Georgia, Angel from Montgomery, Carolina on My Mind, Stars Fell in Alabama, The Tennessee Stud, The Missouri Compromise . . .

Anna puts down her pen, pours more cognac into the tulip glass, and goes to stand on her private deck. Sure enough, high-rise Memphis is receding from her eyes, turning into a toy town, though commercial enterprises still line the shore. The whistle blows twice. The engine throbs. The
Belle of Natchez
moves out onto the water like a dream.

Without warning, Anna's mind slips back to that other, earlier embarkation on the
Daisy Pickett
. She stood at the rail then, too, gripping it so tightly that her fingers hurt, laughing like crazy as Baby kept banging the champagne bottle against the corner of the raft, and it just wouldn't break . . . but no. Anna pulls that particular curtain closed in her mind. She has trained herself not to revisit certain times in her life, for obvious reasons. Pain serves no function at all—as opposed to, say,
romance
. And Anna wasn't even herself then, not yet, she was just some earlier trial version of Anna, a dreadfully mousy little hillbilly from West Virginia, now deceased. Anna can scarcely remember that girl, and considers it just as well. She hopes the others on this trip won't insist on resurrecting her.

Forget the past, let the dead be dead, and live each day as it comes. This is Anna's message, saying her mantra on the deck: feeling the breeze in her face as the
Belle
picks up speed, watching Tennessee slip farther and farther away, smelling that old river smell which still threatens to send her right back—
damn it
—to Paducah, while the manic calliope shrills in her ears and the cognac burns down her throat . . . feeling,
feeling
this moment for all she's worth. This is Anna's message:
be here now
. And that Huckleberry boy is really not such a bad idea for a hero, not at all, though most heroes are brooding and dark, of course, and a freckled towhead would certainly be a departure . . .

Mile 730
West Memphis, Arkansas
Saturday 5/8/99
1800 hours

H
ARRIET AND
C
OURTNEY
sit at a round table on the upper level of the Paddlewheel Lounge, sipping giant steamboat stompers—billed as the Drink of the Day—which have turned out to be sweet, icy, and bright orange, appropriately enough, as the sun sinks lower and lower over Arkansas. From here they have a fine view down into the bandstand area and out back past the great red paddle wheel as it turns up the muddy wake.

“Heavens!” Courtney fishes around in her stomper, removing all manner of fruit and other tropical debris. “This drink is enormous.”

“That's okay,” Harriet says, sucking it down through the straw. “I need it. I'm terrified.”

“Oh, come on.” Courtney smiles warmly; she's decided that she really likes Harriet, such a character.

“This music is so loud,” Harriet says as the albino Little Bobby Blue launches into a tinny version of “Frankie & Johnny” on his honky-tonk piano. Then she leans forward. “Is
that
Anna, do you think?” She indicates an elegant woman coming up the curved staircase, but no, the woman turns back to laugh with the man behind
her. Anna will be alone. The bar is filling up, good thing they grabbed this table.

“I have never seen so many fat people in one place.” Courtney surveys the crowd. “And they're so tacky.” She would think that the price of this trip would make for a certain, er, level of traveler, but this is clearly not the case. There's a tattooed, potbellied man at the bar in a red tank top, for instance, chasing his beer with little shot glasses of something vile, laughing too loudly—certainly not the type one would expect to find on a cruise that cost nearly three thousand dollars. Surely he'll change for dinner . . .

“Well, it's the
river,
I think,” Harriet says. “There's such a romance to it, the idea of going down it, I mean. Why, back in Staunton, when word got out about this trip, people I scarcely knew started coming up to me at the bank or the drugstore or just anywhere, all kinds of people, dying to talk about it. A lot of people have always wanted to do it, I think. It's sort of a universal fantasy.”

“I suppose so.” This music
is
loud; these people
are
fat. Courtney is not sure she'll be able to bear it for a whole week. Though on the other hand, she can't wait to tell Gene about it. It's really his kind of thing.

“Harriet?”
But this large woman with the actressy voice bears absolutely no relation to the schoolgirl Anna with her little nasal squeak.

“Anna?”
Harriet leaps up to hug her. To their own surprise, both women start squealing in exactly the same way they did after every break and every vacation at Mary Scott when they were girls. Courtney can't help herself either. She stands up and squeals, too.

“My God, I just can't believe it!” Catherine Wilson has let her long hair go gray; it curls around her broad, tan, smiling face. She approaches them with a big bearded man in tow, and then they all have to squeal some more. The bartender sends over five big orange stompers on the house.

“Those look lethal,” says Russell Hurt, Catherine's husband. This is not the husband they were expecting.

“They're pretty good, though. I think they have ice cream in them.” Harriet is really getting into hers now.

“Jesus.”
Russell heads for the bar.

“He just wants a martini.” Catherine leans forward to grasp Anna's plump, jeweled hand. “My God, Anna. It's been so long, hasn't it? And you're so famous now. What does it feel like?” Catherine was always direct.

Anna purses her plummy lips. Her big glasses have shaded lenses, even indoors; you can't really see her eyes. “Well, it's a burden, of course, yet it's quite gratifying all the same. But it has been a
lot of work,
believe me!” Her lip starts to quiver.

Catherine squeezes her hand some more. Russell comes back to stand behind his wife's chair and raise his martini. “To you!” he addresses them all. “To the girls of the
Daisy Pickett!
”

“The last girls,” Harriet adds oddly, involuntarily, causing everyone to glance at her as they drink. “I mean, they'd call us
women
in the newspaper if it happened now.”

“To the last girls, then,” Russell Hurt repeats, chuckling. “That's good.”

“Could you take our picture?” Courtney asks him. “Before you sit back down, I mean.”

“Sure.” Russell puts his drink down on the table, taking Courtney's expensive camera from her. He backs up a pace or two while the women bunch together.

“It's all automatic. Just push that little green thing,” Courtney says.

Russell focuses. “Got it! Okay, girls, say ‘Fortune 500' . . .” The flash goes off.

They will be red-eyed and happy in this photograph, with Courtney poised and expectant on the left; Catherine on the right, head thrown back and laughing, down to earth and natural as ever; Anna in the middle, sitting among her jewelry and scarves and fringes like a foreign idol, smiling mysteriously; then Harriet, whose wide-eyed
grinning face pops up behind the others like a hand puppet, like a joke. Later Harriet will look again and again at this picture, just as she looked hard at Anna that afternoon, searching for any trace of the sweet serious friend of her youth. Maybe if Anna just weren't wearing so much makeup or so many clothes . . .

“Thanks.” Courtney takes the camera back from Russell, already envisioning this photograph in her
Belle of Natchez
album. She'll call it, “First Day Out for the Last Girls.” Courtney scoots her chair back to make room for Russell next to his wife, whom he clearly adores, touching her hand constantly, unnecessarily. Hawk never did this, not even when they were young. “So tell us,” Courtney asks them brightly, “how did you all meet?”

“Well . . .” Russell hesitates. Catherine nods at him. “Okay. I was deputized by the other guys in my law firm in Birmingham to buy some kind of sculpture for the courtyard in our new office building. We wanted something local—we like to support local artists. I'd been struck by this huge concrete figure I'd seen over at the public gardens; it was sort of a woman, reclining, and sort of a planter. You know, ferns. They had several of them, actually. One was placed half in and half out of a stream. It made a little waterfall. I think that one was some kind of mythological animal or something, wasn't it, honey?”

“No,” she says. “I just made it up.”

“You're a sculptor now?” Courtney asks. They all look at Catherine, who looks down at her bare sandaled feet.

“Hell yes, she's a sculptor.” Russell seems surprised that they don't know this. “Shit, her work is everywhere, you've probably seen it, you just didn't know it. She's a very well known artist.”

“Oh, Russell, come on. It's just stuff for the garden. Yard art,” she tells them. “I really got into it after Steve died.”