“Let me crawl into bed with you,” I said, abruptly. “I don’t feel well.”
She stiffened, watching my eyes land directly where her palms gripped the bed. She sighed and plunged her hand under the mattress. “Fine, you caught me, here’s your creepy old picture.” She flung it onto the bedspread beside her. “Ain’t got the muster to fight you on it.”
I climbed onto the bed next to her and set the photograph on my lap. In a bending slant of sunlight, Amy Bellrose smiled up at me — the sharp black and white of her beside the unvaried paleness of her sister.
“Be my pillow,” Fritzi said, slurring. A Demerol murmur. She was drifting back into that brain-sticky sleep.
I pried the pail away from her, taking its place, letting her squeeze me. I nudged my shoulder against her chin. “Fritzi? Wake up. Look at this with me.” I was on the precipice of the same floating place. A detail struck me from the infinitesimal grains of grey in Amy’s face, but drowsiness pushed through me in a soft pulse, and it was with difficulty that I blinked and pinched that last piece of clarity, concentrating on the tear in Amy Bellrose’s lip where a shining pink scar would appear if sewn.
Chapter 13
OUTSIDE IT WAS muggy, and the heat so smothering that I stopped my bike to wipe sweat from my chest and forehead all the way up Esplanade Avenue. Saul did not know that I was on my way to see him; selfish as it was, I did not want to allow him the opportunity to tell me not to come.
Neither of us had gotten into much trouble, by most standards, given the severity of our escapade, as Fritzi had taken to calling it. We were restricted from seeing one another, though. The fact of our friendship was such an embarrassment to my father that Red Honey seemed to him a somewhat secondary indiscretion.
I rode up to Saul’s small periwinkle house. After a night of feverish rumination, I had decided what to say to him, but I had not until now considered what to say to his mother. I stared up at the telephone pole tilting to the left of the Chiffrees’ dirt-gravel driveway, the wires running black and swooping like strands of hair. It had been some time since I had last visited the Ninth Ward. I had come for Saul’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon themed birthday party, where Dalcour had painted our faces in frilly layers of green gills.
The street was empty, as far as I could see, other than Heloise with the bad eyes, who worked as a maid for Abelia Fay’s family, and whose son had brought her in from the shanty-laden outskirts to live with him and his wife. I ducked behind the Chiffrees’ car, to be careful, though Heloise had long been mistaking round-the-corner shadows and tall pieces of furniture for the Lafleurs themselves. Once she was inside, I skirted around the beat-up brown Chevy and lowered my bike onto the grass. I checked my braid in the car window. I spat on my fingers and attempted to slick in place several strands loosened by the wind. My mother had always said I had an absolute rat’s nest when I did not brush my hair, with intermittent curls and waves that sprung wilfully about my head and down my back. Such a state would not do for addressing Mrs. Chiffree. Above me the sky brooded and rumbled, with a dull cast of gunmetal grey. I turned my palm up to check for rain.
In the distance, sunlight flowed over the tops of blue mountainous clouds, softening their shadowed edges like snow peaks. I walked up the rickety porch steps, rain beginning to spit. Through the porch rails burst an explosion of electric pink azaleas, and the air tingled with nutmeg. I knocked through the tear in the screen door.
Sounds like one of them backwater junkies, a police officer had said of the Red Honey woman. Runnin’ from the law, I’d wager. Swamp’s where you go when you don’t want to be found.
On the other side of the door came the sound of leathery paws against wood.
“Hush it, boy!” a woman said.
The door swung open behind the dusty net of screen, and Saul’s mother stood with one shoulder hunched in a low swatting motion, trying to keep Dalcour’s collie from lunging outside.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Chiffree,” I said, then smiled at the collie. “Afternoon, Nimbus.” My voice sounded loud and out of place.
Mrs. Chiffree hastened a glance over the stretch of houses behind me. “Bonnie, what are you doing here?”
I did not know how to answer. I felt heady, and when I simply stood there with my mouth open she wrapped her whole long arm around me and ushered me in, muttering in a harsh whisper: Gone and lost your damn mind.
Inside I waited for the other arm to follow, wrap me in its usual embrace, but it did not. Her hand shifted coldly, formally to my shoulder.
“Young lady,” she said, “you better tell me what you’re doin’ here, and you better tell me now.”
Mrs. Chiffree stooped to pick up the collie, who jumped into her arms and nuzzled his snout into the crook of her neck, burying it in the ruddy-brown braids roping down to her waist. She bounced him against her hip and patted his bony spine.
“Ma’am. I came to see Saul.” I wrung my hands in front of myself. “I know I’m not supposed to.”
“You don’t know a darn thing,” she said.
My cheeks burned. The rich, citrusy scent perfuming her dress fluttered out like moths from its green folds. I kept my head low. Mrs. Chiffree had never been angry with me before — provoked, no doubt, when Saul and I were younger and knocked into lamps or showed off our selfpenned musicals in front of her and her bridge club — but never angry, never truly. This surpassed anger. She looked like she might break.
I took a step forward, when my collar twisted against my neck. Mrs. Chiffree had it scrunched in her fist. She said quietly, in a tone worse than yelling: “Start actin’ like you’ve got some sense.”
Her grip loosened but did not let go.
“Anything could have happened to him out there,” she said. “Anything could have happened to you, too, and they’d have come after my boy with pitchforks.” Her sturdy voice shook. “He’s never taken to a friend like he has with you — and that’s been good for him, with his daddy gone. I’ve given allowances. Many allowances.” She lifted her hand from my collar and curled it under her chin. “Bonnie, you can’t be comin’ around here again. You understand that, don’t you?”
I did not fully understand, but I knew that everyone from the French Quarter to the Mississippi had now learned that Saul and I were friends.
Mrs. Chiffree looked ahead to Saul’s room. “You come get me when you’re done.”
“You’ll let me see him?” I asked.
Mrs. Chiffree leaned over, and her shadow slanted at an uneasy angle in the corner of the wall. She raised her finger and pushed it, slowly, against the air. “This one time,” she said. “But you don’t come back, Bonnie. You don’t come back here again.”
Hardly aware of my feet, I walked into the living room, attached to the foyer but distinguished by its dark parquet and the jewel-toned green of its upholstery. Until at last I reached the kitchen, I felt Mrs. Chiffree’s eyes like ice cubes sliding down my back.
Saul’s bedroom was beyond his grandmother Babin’s, in the shotgun house’s railroad car design. Babin was asleep on her tautly made bed, the sour pinch of old sugared fruit rising from a bowl on her nightstand. I crept past her and lightly rapped on Saul’s door through a curtain of wooden beads.
“Saul, where y’at? Open up.”
Tuneless twangs stopped and started from inside of his room.
“Saul.”
The twang halted with a wobbly reverberation, until Saul clamped his hand against the strings. A disordered shuffle kicked its way through whatever obstruction he had forgotten to clean from his floor.
“Bon?” The door cracked open. “Did you break in?” He looked over my shoulder to his grandmother. “Why didn’t you use my window instead of Babin’s?”
“I didn’t break in, Saul. Open the door, would you? We’re going to wake the dragon.”
He closed the door behind me and gave a happy shoulder-shake on his way back to his brother’s guitar. “I see Ma’s coolin’ off, then.”
/> I bit my thumbnail and sat in the chair by his desk, brushing off his dirty socks. “Don’t count on it. Fritzi says she reckons I’ve spoiled things for good.”
Saul’s bedroom had not changed in well over a year. The walls were an assault of science fiction comics and 1930s movie posters: The Invisible Man, bandage wrapped with shallow sockets; Bridgette Helm with bruise-thick liner around her eyes and the caked-white face of a possessed china doll; Boris Karloff warped into the electrified undead.
Saul rested his elbows on the upturned face of the guitar and lightly kicked my sandal. “How’re you holdin’ up?”
“Fine, I guess.” I scanned the cracking scabs on his arms. “Your bug bites are lookin’ pretty ugly.”
“Yeah, well, you look like a vampire bit you in all the wrong places.”
I scratched the cluster of bites on my knee. I had to urge my hand away, clap it in a fist between my arm and my side. “I need to talk to you about somethin’.”
He looked warily at me. “What about?”
“You know I wouldn’t come here if it wasn’t important, and I tried with Fritzi, I really did, she won’t listen.” I dragged my fingernails across my wrist. “The girl who died,” I said, watching Saul’s immediate discomfort, “when I saw her, up close, she had something drawn on her wrists.”
“Tattoos,” he said. “Must be.”
“Wouldn’t make a lick of sense on Suzanna. And that’s not even the most important part.” I looked down at my thumb. The nerves were long dead from habitual scratching, and I had not noticed how deeply I had dug. A crescent of blood rose around my nail. “You can’t call me crazy.”
He looked over my shoulder, focused, as if there existed a hovering pocket in the air for private contemplation. I was certain he was trying to figure out a way to call me crazy without having to say it outright. “I won’t call you crazy, Bonnie.”
“Don’t you go and think it, either.”
“I can’t predict what I’ll think.”
“You’re thinkin’ it already.” I leaned back in his chair. “When we were talking to the police, I told them about that woman who attacked me.”
“The junkie,” he said.
“No, not a junkie. I’m thinking she was Amy Bellrose.”
Saul’s stern expression held. “Based off what?”
I hurried the rusting chain out from under my shirt, lifting it with a whiff of copper. The stone gave off a flat gleam in the dulled rain-weather light. “She attacked me for this.”
“To sell it, Bonnie, come on. Or trade it, maybe. People living out in the swamp are about as poor as they come.”
“She had a scar through her upper lip. I saw it.”
“Could have been anyone,” Saul said.
“That’s not good enough, Saul. People best start givin’ real explanations or stop shuttin’ down all of mine.” Saul’s face, fuzzy in the corner of my eye, looked so sympathetic I could have screamed. “This isn’t like it was with my grandmother, so don’t you even go and say it.”
“You sure?” Saul said with a taunting nod. “’Cause she didn’t listen, either, and she nearly jumped off a bridge ’cause of it.”
I placed the necklace on his desk, ran my fingers across its amber flecks. “I’m not saying that I’m right for certain, I’m just trying to understand.” I felt trapped inside one of the movies plastered on his walls, where reason caved in and nothing made sense and nobody believed me.
Saul scratched the tip of his nose with his thumb, looking a great deal like his father. “I don’t know veve all that well, to be truthful, but if you’re quiet, if you’re silent” — he threw a glance toward the door into Babin’s bedroom — “maybe Babin’s hutch could help. There are books and bottles and things she said her mama used on the top shelf.”
I could have thrown my arms around him, but I felt the mild heat of his resentment. “Thank you,” I said.
The hutch loomed over us, nearly tall enough to touch the ceiling. It was two hundred years old, possibly older, brought into the family by an ancestor of Saul’s who — along with her freedom upon the death of a sugarcane slaveowner here in Louisiana — came into possession of this peculiar ancestral piece.
Babin’s snores gurgled and strained until snagging on themselves in surprise.
“As a mouse,” Saul reminded me.
I eyed Babin’s pillowy chest, rising and falling. Then the dark syrup-brown hutch beside her. “Is it locked?”
“Never seen it locked in my life.” Saul moved quietly in front of me. His slim shoulders tightened under his striped green shirt. “She turns the latches before she pulls. I’ve watched her do it a hundred times. Here.” He cupped his hands together for me to step inside. “I’ll help you up.”
As I was hoisted toward the uppermost cabinets, their painted vines and ripe blood oranges spread before me, lush with colour, the single patch of warmth in the otherwise brooding wood. I grappled for the ledge.
“Steady?” Saul whispered against my leg.
I nodded down at him.
The first cabinet opened onto a musk of soft hickory, and was deep enough to swallow the length of my arm. Bottles of oil glimmered harsh lapis blue, and gentle lavender melting into coral, their glass thronged with stringy vines and floating herbs. I felt, through a twist in my ankle, Saul looking over his shoulder.
“Would you hurry up already?” he said, as Babin shifted, her lips caught in a sticking, unsticking motion.
“Where are the books?” I asked.
“Can’t say, maybe she moved them.”
I reached my arm into the cabinet. I slid the bottles to the side and, finding nothing, nearly closed the first door when I caught a bright patchwork hanging in the far back corner. It was cornmeal and grapefruit pink, and at the centre were sewn thick, black, jagged symbols. I moved my foot in Saul’s palms. “What’s this fabric back here?”
“How should I know?”
The lines were fluid and curled into leafy shapes and spiked stars. I thought of Suzanna, her pale arms limp in the dewy grass.
“I saw this on Suzanna’s wrists.” I tugged the patchwork from the corner and lowered it to Saul.
“That there’s veve,” he said.
“Like on Connie’s necklace?”
Babin mumbled, rolling onto her side.
“Get a move on, Bonnie, I can’t keep holding you.”
I placed the patchwork back in its corner and settled my hands onto the lowest shelf, as Saul eased my foot to the carpet. I turned to him, a fog clearing and collecting at the same time. “Why would they both have veve on them?”
His eyes were on his bedroom door. “I can’t hardly say, Bonnie. None of this is like any kind of Voodoo I’ve ever heard of. Seems like somebody’s real mixed up with the wrong idea of things.”
He touched the back of my arm, leading me to his room, but in a moment the front door in the foyer blew open. The force of it knocked Babin out of her sleep. She jolted up from her side, knocking over her tray of china.
“Delia!” she cried.
An uproar came from the living room: the clamour of furniture shoved and screeching against the hard wood, a spill of footsteps, Mrs. Chiffree’s voice urgent and messy.
Saul rushed to his grandmother. “Stay here, Babin, don’t get worked up.”
I knelt onto the shimmering teal carpet and collected the china onto its tray.
Babin gripped Saul’s shoulder as though she meant to heave up from her bed and sprint forward.
“Stay calm, Babin, everything’s all right.” Saul gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll go see what’s causing all this commotion.”
I watched her hand, strained to an even gloss, relax and wrinkle. Saul gently rested it on her lap before approaching the door.
I set the delicate tin tray on Babin’s bedside table and stood behind Saul. A small mob hunched in the middle of the room at the other end of the house, visible in the empty doorframe. A man was being carried by two
older men, one with salty stubble and the other a Maltese-white beard. The Lilavois brothers, I recognized them from their bakery on Desire. My father and I must have wandered in for beignets a hundred times.
The younger man’s face was turned from us. Weakly, he shrugged the Lilavois brothers off, twisting between the furniture to collapse on two chairs pushed together.
“Dally?” Saul threw open the door and ran through the kitchen.
Mrs. Chiffree shook her head and pointed toward him. “Baby, go to your room,” she ordered. But Saul ignored her and ran directly to his brother before arriving at a stunned halt.
Dalcour was bloodied. I peered in from the margin of the kitchen and could see, even in the dimness, his swollen eyelid a shiny violet, the red streaks drying on the new bluecheckered shirt I knew Mrs. Chiffree had bought him for his birthday, the slow disjointed nods of his head.
The taller, bearded Lilavois brother slipped off his cap and rubbed his forehead. “They was clawin’ at him down on Rampart. Leopold Lasalle and them. Tryin’ to tear him limb from limb.” He leaned over toward Dalcour and flashed three fingers. “You see how many fingers, boy?”
Dalcour’s body had to drag itself through each motion. He spread his hand from temple to temple. “Yeah, Sammy, three fingers.” Purple-red stains had crusted on his chin.
“Don’t move your jaw, baby, it’s swelling up,” Mrs. Chiffree said. “What did I tell you about hanging around Rampart?”
“It’s not that bad, Ma,” he said.
She ran her hands under his jaw. He winced as she reached the bruise below his blood-spotted eye.
“They’d have found ’em anywhere, Delia, not just Rampart.”
The smaller Lilavois brother started for the kitchen. He looked down at me with surprise, then continued to the refrigerator and rattled out an ice cube tray. “They was sayin’ he gone and did somethin’ to them girls keep disappearin’,” he called to Mrs. Chiffree. There was a sudden crack of the tray against the counter.
Mrs. Chiffree looked like she might faint. “They’re sayin’ what?”
Bonavere Howl Page 9