“I’ll meet you up ahead,” he says and goes off down Pearl.
“Long way from home,” I say to the woman, and wonder at the strange destiny that has brought her here, the drugs, the wrong decisions, the bad luck, the desperate poverty. How far am I from her lot, how far any one of us?
The woman stands quietly for a moment, clutching the shirt. “Yes, suh, long way from home,” she says in a cracked voice. “Never thought I’d come up North like this. I’m not from New Orleans proper, mind you, born Algiers way. But we moved ’cross the river when my mama die. Lived with my grandpap. He used to play squeeze box and slide trombone in a band in the Quarter. The old M’ssippi’s red as mud or green sometimes, depending on the rain. Not like this one …” She waves the shirt toward Manhattan, floating in light across the gulf, immune, unreachable. “No, suh, this here river’s got a black heart, black as night.…” She trails off and looks me in the face, her eyes milky and sick in the dim light. “Don’t you miss New Orleans?”
I nod, feeling an odd pang. “I do. I’m not from there. But I do miss it.”
“People are nice down Louisiana way,” she says. “They got time, you know? You ought to go back. Lots of pretty girls down there for a lucky young man like youself. I can’t go back. But what about you?”
It’s a question I don’t care to answer. I end up buying the shirt for five dollars, and the two women fade back to their unimaginable life under the bridge.
“What were you talking about with that creature?” Geoff says when I catch up a block down, ragged shirt clenched in my fist.
“She gave me some good advice,” I say, and leave it at that.
15
TONIGHT THE projects glow out the back window of the apartment, lit up like a pirate ship, and there is a funny sweet scent hanging in the hot air, a scent like a woman’s perfume. The scent lingers for a few days, moving from room to room, and I puzzle over its source until I realize it is a phantom odor, the work of the ghost. I don’t mind the scent that much—it smells of freshly washed skin and clean hair and magnolia blossoms and verbena—but there is something about it that reminds me strongly of Antoinette, and this is bad for my disposition.
Suddenly my life seems unbearable. I cannot remember a happy day, a happy hour, a minute when hope seemed anything other than a torment. Then I think about calling Antoinette in New Orleans two thousand miles away, but I do not call her. What good would it do? We would have a friendly conversation, as we do every now and then, laugh a bit over old times, and afterward I wouldn’t sleep for days.
But the smell only gets sweeter and stronger and more familiar, and the longing gets worse, and Antoinette’s presence becomes more palpable than the ghost’s in the apartment, and I place a call in an hour of the afternoon when I know she will not be home, just to hear the phone ring in her apartment in the Faubourg Marigny. I haven’t been back to New Orleans in ten years. In New Orleans I was happy. The world seemed a benevolent place, and I was in love. This last decade has been hard, a series of struggles and disappointments, failed relationships, and dead ends.
After this foolish call, there is no helping myself, so I take a six-pack of Koch’s Golden Reserve up to the roof and stretch out in the lawn chair I keep up there for such melancholy purposes, and I pull my old New Orleans Saints cap down low over my eyes and abandon myself to memory.
Part Two:
NEW ORLEANS AND THE PAST
Today, as the sun sets over Brooklyn, I am thinking of New Orleans. I am thinking of the iron filigree A and P and cupid’s bow woven into the railings of the Pontalba Apartments, I am thinking of the river moving brown and sluggish in the rain and the green sky over the city. I am thinking of Antoinette. We are lying beneath the mosquito netting in her four-poster together, and we have just made love. It is hurricane season. Ominous yellow light glows through the louvers of the shutters, and out along the Faubourg Marigny the whine of traffic is thin and hollow like sound effects in a play.…
1
IN THOSE days Molesworth and I lived in a peeling pink shotgun house on the corner of Mystery and Fortin, dead against the chain-link fence of the Fairgrounds. It was a dissolute little place, with a weedy backyard mostly full of a rusted 1949 International Harvester pickup that belonged to one of Molesworth’s city cousins. There was one small bedroom, a miserable kitchenette with a two-burner gas stove new during the lifetime of King-fish Huey Long, and a sticky-flued fireplace that never did much more than belch smoke during the tepid Louisiana winters. At one end of the narrow living room, a dirty bay window overlooked the cracking asphalt of Mystery Street.
Through some leverage I can’t remember now, I got the bedroom and Molesworth installed himself on the fold-out couch in the living room. But within days of moving in, he had taken over, his stuff everywhere, even in the bathroom and kitchen: unread textbooks and dirty underwear and beer bottles and cigarette butts and roach clips, yellowing piles of the Times-Picayune; and the occasional cheap porn magazine whose grisly black-and-white photos displayed from all vantages some of the ugliest naked women I had ever seen. After a week I gave up cleaning after him, and we lived in typical undergraduate squalor, dishes piled up in the sink, garbage rotting in bags on the back porch. We had been roommates freshman year at Loyola, one of those odd pairings of fate that can change the course of a lifetime. When given the choice as sophomores to move off campus, Molesworth found the house through his cousin, and we split the rent of $180 a month, which included water and electricity. That seemed expensive to me then. Everything is expensive to a student.
For the next three years all we did was drink. I remember hangover mornings late for class, loudspeaker from the Fairgrounds announcing the third race a distant booming, and the thud of the horses and the bright silks of the jockeys in my shallow dreams. Drinking was Molesworth’s hobby and his passion. Other men have golf or racquetball or building ships in bottles. Molesworth liked to sit in bars and drink. He collected bars as others would collect stamps. No establishment was too mean or too far out of the way. It was impossible to live with Molesworth and not join him on his drinking expeditions. Like all men with a passion, he could be very eloquent and very persuasive; but he was no alcoholic. Drinking was not a thing he liked to do alone or in secret.
Somewhere along the way he acquired a battered old British Land Rover, similar to the one in the sixties television show Daktari. An original open-sided, right-hand-drive model, it possessed an ill-fitting canvas top and cloudy plastic windows that snapped over the doors. When it rained or the temperature dipped below fifty, we had to take the spark plugs out and heat them in a frying pan on the stove. In this rickety, uncertain vehicle we bombed all over New Orleans and surrounding parishes, looking for the right draft of Jax and bourbon side at the right price.
Because I had tested out of a good dozen basic requirements as a freshman, I finished my B.A. a semester early, but a scholarship and considerable stipend offered by the history department induced me to stay at Loyola for graduate school, and life continued much as before. More bars and late nights and the trumpet calling the thoroughbreds to post in the bleary calm of noon just beyond my window. If I ever came to own a racehorse, I vowed, I would name the beast Tylenol.
Recently I found among my papers a partial list of the bars we visited, scrawled on the back of a cocktail napkin: Clayton’s, Laffite’s Westpark Grill, The Arabi Ale House, St. Bernard’s, The Broad Street Tap, Tad Bourbon’s Bourbon Street, The Loyola Blue Jay, The Sazerac House, Feret’s, Tchoupitoulas Inn, Bar Les Reves, The Natchez Parlor, The Paris Lunch, Mulaudon’s Café, The Seminole Trail, St. Claude’s Cocktail Hour, The Happy Time, Club Tomorrow, The Academy Grotto, Cafe Girod, The Melpomene Café, Claudelle’s Toledano Street Saloon, Harry’s Louisiana Emporium, The Irish Channel, The Gin Mill, Beauregard’s Rest, The Contreras House Bar, Prytania Station, McDonough’s Pelican North, McDonough’s Pelican South (Lakeside), The Louisiana Drinking Society, The Pup and Oyster, Mad Jack’s Bayou Get
away …
The list goes on. The rest is unreadable, blotted out by the round, telltale stain of some dark and spirituous liquor many years gone. There is much to be learned of life from Louisiana bars. A whole education for the liver, of course, but also something else that cannot be qualified. The grace that comes drunk at 4:00 A.M. slumped in a booth with a sly blonde from Gretna you didn’t know two hours before; the moment before last call when anything seems possible.
2
AT MIDNIGHT, in the middle of a rainy week toward the end of my first year as a graduate student, Molesworth took me to Spanish Town.
Spanish Town was a new bar opened the month before by a friend of Molesworth’s from Bayou Dessaintes. It stood alone in a rutted street of warehouses near the river where Tchoupitoulas runs into the levee at Felicity. A brick arcade went the length of the facade, and a row of Harley-Davidsons glistened in the rain out front, all chrome and bulbous gas tanks. Dark figures loitered there beneath the arches, their cigarettes glowing a threat or a promise, as lightning bugs are said to hover over unmarked graves across the fields of the South. From the open doorway, curtained off with cheap plastic beads, the thump and jangle of zydeco blared at top volume out across the levee.
The barroom seemed rough and half finished. A bucket of pitch and a stack of two-by-fours stood in the entryway, and the familiar beer piss stench of redneck bars had yet to overwhelm the smell of caulk and paint. I had half expected castanets, sangria, flamenco, but there wasn’t anything at all Spanish about Spanish Town. Instead it was the sort of dive for badass boots and brawling swamp trash. A half-varnished old bar full of cherubs and carved mermaids, gilt rubbed off their scales, rose improbably at the center of the large, airy warehouse space like a wooden fort on the prairie. The blue pelican flag of Louisiana and an eight-by-fifteen-foot Elvis rug hung from pipes in the ceiling.
There was a fair crowd for a Wednesday, all pushed up against the rail. I settled at a table near the door, and Molesworth came back from the bar with two bottles of Jax. He handed over my bottle and settled heavily into the chair, which creaked under his bulk. Even then he weighed more than twelvestone.
“I’ll grant you one thing. That coonass has got a good thing going here, but he’s got it going for all the wrong reasons.”
“Which coonass are you talking about, Molesworth?” At times he could be quite obscure.
“I’m talking about that coonass Dothan,” he said.
Dothan Palmier was Molesworth’s friend from the bayou, the owner and founder of Spanish Town, a mysterious tough character I had heard stories about but never met.
“That sombitch had a nice little place out on the bayou and a nice little business cutting up stolen Porsches and selling them for parts to Mexico.” Molesworth leaned forward, resting his forearms as big as Popeye’s on the table, beer dribbling off his red beard. “Plus he sold a shitload of dope to the locals. Cajun homegrown, good stuff. He had these fields on islands out in the middle of the swamp. Dug channels around them and filled the channels with alligators. Man, what a setup!”
“So maybe he wanted to go legit,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“You’re not getting it. Dothan sold his share to his brother, came on down, and opened this whole damn bar, just chasing a woman. If that isn’t the worst reason to do anything.”
“Beautiful?”
“Not to my tastes, but decide for yourself.” Molesworth jerked his head. “Dothan’s got her behind the bar these days.”
I looked over but could only see the leather and plaid-shirted backs of the drinkers. “Everyone needs a weakness,” I said.
Molesworth grunted, knocked back his beer in what seemed like a single gulp, and went back for another round. I sipped mine and considered. I was living with a man who kept the company of thieves and drug smugglers. His presence at Loyola was perplexing. He was in his sixth year now and showed no signs of finishing soon. He had always seemed too loud for the staid Jesuit school, and his grades were not up to snuff. I asked him once how he had managed to get admitted with a tuition waver. It was one of those arrangements Louisiana is famous for: Apparently, his uncle, the pastor of a seedy little church in Plaquemines, had some dirt on Bishop Mulready of Orleans Parish who held a prominent seat on Loyola’s board of visitors.
Five minutes later Molesworth came back with two Dixies and motioned me to a door in the far dark corner. In shadows back there stood a stuffed grizzly which I hadn’t noticed before, reared up on its hind legs, claws out, teeth bared. From beneath the door, a thin line of yellow light.
“Get up,” Molesworth said. “Let’s go talk to Dothan.”
But as we passed along the fringes of the crowd, a howl went up, and a young woman stepped from behind the bar onto the tin counter-top. She wore a white rose tucked between her breasts, a tight red dress that fell two inches above her knees, and black cowboy boots. She flicked her cigarette toward one of the wooden mermaids with something like contempt and began to dance up there to the song just coming on the jukebox. I recognized it, a lively number by Papa Languenbec and his Cajun Allstars about a boy who loves his mother to distraction, full of accordion and fiddle and bawdy double entendre sung in a nasal, incomprehensible Cajun French.
I paused just within reach of the bear’s paws to watch her dance. Beyond the arcade windows of the facade, where bales of cotton once steamed in the summer heat of another era, it had stopped raining, and there was a sort of green halo above the river. Framed against this faint illumination, the young woman swung her hips and swung her thick black hair from side to side and stamped her black boots into the tin of the counter in time to the music and shook what she had to shake, which was God’s own plenty. She had duende. She put the Spanish in Spanish Town.
The rednecks and bikers at her feet whistled and cheered and threw money and pounded the bar with fists the size of ham hocks. I thought of the perfect frenzy of John Singer Sargent’s Gypsy Dancer, and bareback riders, and circus acrobats dangling high above the sawdust in sequined tights. Her bare skin was covered with a thin sheen of sweat. A tiny fleck touched my lip when she flung out her arms.
Then I felt Molesworth’s hand heavy as the law on my shoulder. He pulled me around and shook his head.
“Is that her?” I said, but I couldn’t keep the wobble out of my voice.
“What do you think?”
“Christ, how could you say she’s not beautiful? She’s—”
“I didn’t say that, Coonass.” He cut me off. “I just said she wasn’t to my taste, which means I don’t fancy a shotgun between the eyes.”
I followed him reluctantly through the door and into a vast unfinished kitchen area, flooded with fluorescent light. Steel pots big as bathtubs sat here and there. A huge exhaust fan and two stoves still in crates were pushed at angles to the wall, packing material strewn all around. I tripped over an open box of spoons as long as my arm.
“Dothan’s going to do a little bit of catering,” Molesworth explained. “He’s thinking about exporting some of his jambalaya to sell up North. Chicago or New York or something. You know how they go for that sort of thing up there.”
Dothan Palmier sat hunched at a card table in the cramped office going over the accounts with all the pencil-biting intensity of a ten-year-old doing math homework. A thin gun slit of a window gave out on the levee and the lights of Marrero across the river. He looked up narrow eyed when we came in and closed the big red ledger.
“Hey, Dothan,” Molesworth said. “How’s it going, you old coonass?”
“Lyle,” he said. He stood up, shook Molesworth’s hand, and gave a grimace that passed for a smile. He wore tight black jeans, pointy cowboy boots curled up at the toes, and a plain white shirt, sleeves rolled over thick biceps like a farmer’s son showing off his muscles.
Molesworth introduced us, and I stepped forward, and we shook hands. His hands were oversized from heavy work, hard, and scarred. The tattoo of a python curled out of the jungle o
f wiry black hairs on his left wrist and beneath the gold band of his watch. He was probably thirty-five, attractive in a dark, sideburned Cajun sort of way and short, about five feet six inches. But something else made him hard to ignore; a dangerous, unpredictable quality. He seemed coiled tight as a spring.
Dothan brought a bottle of Early Times and three lowball glasses out of a battered file cabinet near the window and poured a shot in each.
“Good-looking place you’ve got here,” Molesworth said, and raised his glass. “Let’s drink to that.”
“I’ve got a long way to go, shit, check the wreck out there.” He waved toward the kitchen. “Don’t want to jinx it. Better drink to you finishing up that schooling of yours before the end of the decade.”
Molesworth shook his head and laughed, a deep, rumbling sound from the belly. “No way,” he said.
“Wait,” I said, “let’s drink to the beautiful girl behind the bar. She’s amazing.”
They both looked over at me. Molesworth seemed stunned, his jowls sagging like a St. Bernard’s. Dothan studied me for a moment, unblinking, expressionless.
“You mean Antoinette,” he said quietly.
“He don’t know, Dothan,” Molesworth cut in. “He don’t know for shit.”
“It’s all right,” Dothan said. “She is a beautiful woman. Any fool can see that.”
“Well, then”—I raised my glass—“to Antoinette …”
We drank. Dothan drained his glass and, after a minute or so of strained chitchat with Molesworth, turned back to his account books abruptly. “If you boys will excuse me,” he said.
Molesworth and I went down through the kitchen and out into the bar. “You’re a real coonass,” he said when he was sure we were safe. “That old boy stuck a knife in a man in a club in Chalmette for less than what you did back there.”
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