by Les Goodrich
Slim moved about the store and Tanner followed. The gentleman moved matted maps encased in acetate and tilted up books. He flipped through a few pages of maps stacked on a table, then bent to look through the low flat drawers of a flat file cabinet.
“Here we go,” he said and he slowly pulled out a single sheet and slid it to the table top. Tanner looked. “It’s a very old map so, no, you may not take it. But you can take a picture or whatever you kids do.”
Tanner studied the map. He read the French lettering. “Plan Et Projet. De La Nouvelle Orleans. August nine, Seventeen sixty-three.”
“Yes, yes this is the original city grid. Laid out by the French, as you can see.”
“Thanks but I’m sure they have newer maps of the place.”
“Yes, yes, but not like this one. See these black squares? Here.”
Tanner looked closely. “These?”
“Yes. Each of those means the alley has an opening there. So for example, between this row you can go through. But this one is a dead end. See. And here you could cut through this side lane and go through to this end here.”
Tanner looked with keen interest. “And these are still accurate you think?”
“They should be. The reason they’re marked at all, is because the sand in certain locations was fortified to build the city buildings. These alleys and spaces were left open because to build in those unfortified spots would be dangerous. Would lead to sink holes. So no buildings or walls are put here. In fact even the streets must be brick there to allow for proper drainage. I’d bet money these openings are still accurate.”
“Thank you as always,” Tanner said and he snapped a few pics with his phone.
“My pleasure Mr. Tanner. My pleasure,” Slim said and he was lost in the map and his mind wandered New Orleans and he recalled a younger spring there filled with jazz, fresh bread, girls dancing in the street, and sweet French wine.
Chapter 14
Around the Bend
On the sailboat Tanner sat at the dinette table, various tools, wires, crystals, and oddments spread out before him. He gripped the long, hair-thin copper wire with needle nose pliers and threaded it into a minuscule hole in the tip of his wand. Gingerly he fed the wire deeper. No bends, no kinks, he thought. Keep moving, come on. With great concentration he proceeded. At last he saw the tag end emerge from the hole in the handle base and he relaxed. He grabbed the wire tip with the pliers and pulled gingerly until four inches were exposed.
At the tip end he measured the protruding thread and cut it at exactly eight inches. He picked up the double-terminated epidote shard and turned it to inspect the Uruz rune he had etched into its base. It was the rune of universal power, and the primal creative force. He took up the diamond file and continued the work of scoring a perfect ring around the bottom of the crystal, just under the rune. He blew the fine dust away and cleaned the shard with pure water and shook it to dry.
Carefully he wrapped the protruding copper wire around the scored ring seven wraps, then peering through the magnifier lens on his goggles, he executed a symmetrical spiral wrap and subsequent barrel wrap to finalize the attachment. He prayed that the twist would fit into the wand hole and it did. He used the pliers again to pull the wire from the handle end, and the epidote shard was pulled snug into the wand tip.
At the wand base he expertly wrapped the copper wire in a spiral around the wand handle. The final wraps were barrel style and he tucked the last tip of the wire into a channel he had cut to slip it behind the wraps. He took up the hot glue gun and produced a bead of hot glue to cover the wraps on the handle hilt. He blew at the glue. He looked at the overall result. He made notes in his journal under the heading Wand Power Amplifier Design #4.
He finished packing for the trip, mixed a rum and pineapple juice, and took it out onto the deck. He pulled his jacket tight against the cold air and sipped the drink under an indigo sky littered with stars. A gentle breeze slapped lanyards against the aluminum mast and the familiar notes calmed his mind in such a way as he didn’t even notice. He propped his feet against the opposite cockpit bench and leaned to see if he could glimpse the angle of the anchor line but he could not. He could tell by the way the boat swung with the wind that the anchor was fine so he didn’t get up.
He heard water gurgle and swirl at the stern and looked with some surprise to see Shay the mermaid emerge from the black water. She dipped her long hair back then raised up to rest her crossed arms on the dinghy side where it was tied at the back of the boat.
“Hi handsome,” she said. “Buy me a drink?”
“Shay! Yeah, be right back.” Tanner went in and made Shay the same drink he had. She was fully lounging in the dinghy when he returned, and he pulled the dinghy rope to bring her closer to hand the drink off.
“I’ll come up there if you don’t mind,” she said.
“Be my guest,” Tanner said and stepped back. He watched her lift and spin with a graceful leap and turn herself on her hands into the cockpit seat. She rested her glorious tail to hang over the stern and sat like a marine pinup girl sipping the drink. Tanner sat across from her.
“I was drying on the breakwater beach and saw you out here. I sleep up there sometimes.”
“So glad you came over. How’s it going?”
“Great. Have you guys figured out the Aradia witch spell yet?”
“I know the girls are working on it.”
“Cool. Tell Jordan to meet me at the long dock on the full Moon when the tide peaks. I wanna hear about it.”
“Jordan and I will be gone then. Hey if you want, I could tell Brit to meet you. I know she’s working on the spell with Thistle.”
“Yes, do that. Where are you guys going?”
“New Orleans to catch a bad guy.”
“Another adventure huh? Cool. New Orleans you say. That’s on the Gulf. I’ve never been that far around. The Gulf of Mexico is not my scene.”
“Are mermaids over there though?”
“Oh yeah. I met a merman from the Texas coast once. You know, he had a Texas accent. Craziest thing to hear. Mermaids go all the way up the Mississippi River too, but I hear it’s a bit muddy. I heard you guys saw a pelagic mermaid in the Keys. Jordan told me. What was her name again?”
“Coral,” Tanner said.
“She was great and strong. And fast.”
“She was,” Tanner said. “And her tail was green, yellow, and blue like a dorado. She helped us many times.”
“When I was young my mother told us stories of pelagic mermaids who swam with the big sharks and lived in the open oceans. She told us the story of a mermaid named Grace who hunted great fish in the gulf stream. Grace rode a thousand pound marlin and carried a sword of steel stolen from a pirate captain.”
Tanner and Shay finished their drinks and in time she wished him luck on his trip and rolled into the water and was gone. Tanner climbed into his bunk.
He loved the sound of gentle waves when they slapped the boat hull in the night and he heard gurgling in the black water around him. He imagined the fantastic creatures in Shay’s stories and he thought about Shay and her beautiful form and the boat gently rocked him to sleep.
On shore and a few miles north Jordan tried to figure out a way to mute text messages and calls from James without fully blocking him, but eventually she gave up and muted her phone altogether. She gathered what she thought she would need for the trip and she packed her bags into the night.
She added wood to her fireplace at a slow but steady rate of one log every hour and by the time she was ready for bed the house was warm and much of it was from the tall brick chimney that radiated a warm glow into the high ceiling. Warming the carriage house with the single fireplace was an art and she had learned to build the heat up slowly then go to bed with a deep collection of hardwood coals. If you did it right the fireplace would burn and not smoke for a solid six hours and by the time the coals died, the chimney would remain warm long enough to pull the smoke out the entire night
.
If she happened to get up to use the bathroom in the night, she could add one more log, and in this way keep her place warm all night and have a fire burning in no time upon rising the next morning. Her sleep however, was a restless one and the morning found her drinking espresso and setting up Luna for a few days alone.
“You’re staying in here while I’m gone,” she said to the cat. “I know you won’t like it, but it’s better than being tormented by Nettle. You guard the loft.” With that she was down the stairs with her bag, two coffees, and off to pick up Tanner.
She drove through the cold morning fog along the waterfront and saw Tanner waiting on the seawall near the tour boat docks.
“Are you awake?” Tanner asked climbing into the Jeep.
“Nope,” she said and they drove out of town and the chilled morning fog lingered until the busier US1 where the faster traffic seemed to have blown it away. Jordan sipped coffee from the tumbler and nodded her head sideways to the console. “That’s for you.”
“Awesome thanks,” Tanner said and he lifted the cup, slid the lid opened, and cautiously sipped to test the heat. “Real good. Did you know Brit is a quester?”
“Everyone knows that.”
“Since when?”
“Since she can meditate without trying and see ghosts all over the place.”
“But no one ever talks about it.”
“Carol thinks she needs time to grow and doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it.”
“What am I around there? Chopped liver? Low man on the May pole, last one to know?”
“Maybe Carol figured you knew already.”
On the road they talked more about the store and the people they both knew and some about the trip ahead of them. Tanner told Jordan about talking to Shay and how she wanted to meet up when they returned.
The Sun was up behind them when they joined steady traffic on the flat of I-10 and headed west across the panhandle along the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico.
Rolling tan pastures and sullen cattle stretched to the north and water stood motionless in the irrigation ditches. Those narrow ankle-deep tracks became more numerous in the drier fields west of Pensacola and their long glossy fingers lay like polished steel bars arranged in preparation for some giant building project.
By noon heavy clouds as dark as soot had moated the horizon and deep within their curtained halls silent lightening conjured abstract shapes from the grey and pillowed sky and foretold rain soon to envelop them.
The rain was much longer coming than first they imagined and those slate-colored clouds looked like folded and creased oilcloth arranged to simulate mountains in some theatrical backdrop. The Jeep moved along and the lands raced under them.
“And you wonder about all of these cars,” Jordan said related to nothing spoken so far. “And everyone in them with their own ideas and their own destinations. Their own worries. And each car a tiny world and all the things most important to those within it are the most important things on the planet to them, and not one other carload knows or cares, or much thinks about it.”
Tanner nodded. “And all these cars like cells of blood, and the roads like veins. And every driver imagines themselves to be separate from the traffic and yet they are nothing if not the traffic itself. Flowing like blood. Or electrical signals. All wired together and each affecting the other. Interdependence. And as we drive there are ants that must cross this road in places and for them, to do so, is heroic and chaos and madness and those who reach the far side tell stories of a vast plane of stone where roaring beasts laid to waste their lost companions by the thousands.”
Jordan’s eyebrows raised. “And as we travel, we pass towns where people we will never know will live and die and their children will live and grow and have children of their own. And the streets of those towns and the people within will be their world but we will know nothing of it whatsoever but to see the same exit sign that means so much to them, and means nothing to us but a marker of the time. We pass restaurants and the kids who work in them have their own dramas and their own hopes and their own problems and dreams and we will never know their days in the restaurant, which come to hold the very repetition of their existence. As we hurry along to our own destination, about which they could know nothing, not even rumor, and even if we were to explain it all to them, they would scarcely believe it. And perhaps we would scarcely believe the stories they would tell us.”
“Right,” Tanner said. “And hundreds of years ago settlers crossed this very road in wagons and the locals were none too happy to see them in many cases but they rode still just as you and I ride today. Perhaps into hostile lands. And the farmhouses they set up were mere dugouts and the cattle hardly fit to be called cattle at all and the grass less so to be called grass. And the men prayed for boys to be born to become more men and help with the work that had no end, and the women prayed for a single restful day and they endured hardship unknown to us and in the end the men were dead by letters or telegrams or no news at all. They were dead by war bullet, or native arrow, or pistol shot in a two-dollar card game. They pushed west because it was the only direction left to go and when they came to the ocean some stayed and some washed back.”
Jordan’s mind raced. “And as the cowboys moved west, house cats moved with them and they befriended the cats who lived among the Native American tribes and they learned of the Native American spirits and legends and there were cats that settled the west for city cats to follow and they have their own heroes. Famous cat trackers and storied cat rangers and cat soldiers who fought in the hills ahead of cat tribes that followed in their safely trodden paths and from high rock peaks, scout cats stood and watched wagon trains lumber west along dusty trails far below.”
“Really?” Tanner asked and together they laughed.
“And in Florida?” Jordan asked just to hear what Tanner might say.
“And in Florida there are Seminoles who never surrendered, and ghosts who never left, and witches who never hid, and pirates who never hung, and sharks as big as boats, and sunken treasure never found.”
“And mosquitos as big as hummingbirds,” Jordan said and Tanner laughed. “Music,” Jordan said and she clicked on the stereo and they listened to old southern rock, and new wave, and an hour of house music mixed by a DJ Jordan had seen in Orlando.
They first saw the rain hit the ground where it stood across the as yet bone-dry roadbed and waited there like a spectral wall and one by one the cars ahead of them vanished into it. Jordan turned off the music, pulled on her headlights, Tanner pulled on his jacket, and together they dove headlong into the driving water and it rained like that all the way to New Orleans. The Jeep tracked the wet roads well and the top was mostly dry. Only once did a drip begin to blow into Tanners face but an adjustment to the window zipper fixed it. The temperature dropped or became more clammy and Jordan concentrated on the road through the wipers and the glass where it frosted at the edges.
The Sun found them again when they exited the interstate and with a few twists and turns they made their way into the French Quarter. Jordan followed Carol’s directions as described by Tanner from his notes and they eased along to find Pirate Alley at Saint Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square. The city gleamed from the recent rains and above them on both sides balconies dripped, and from them wet Christmas decorations sparkled.
They passed a group of young boys where one played a trumpet and two sang and all three of them danced. They passed scores of walkers on the sidewalks. They passed cars of every make and age. Even cars from the fifties rumbled along the brick streets among them. A woman walking four dogs. Policemen on horseback. Doves on a rail where they cooed. And they passed a woman selling some savory treat from a cart and they saw there was a line for her around the corner and from the cart steam curled and swung and they drove through it and it smelled of ground beef and cinnamon.
They picked their way along the roads and found what they thought was the French Quarter. They tr
aversed a few streets and found one Tanner pointed out and turned on it. Jordan was forced by the stop and go traffic to keep her eyes on the car ahead and she missed many sights. She relied on his directions and in this way they moved deeper into the town.
“Turn left on the next street if you can. That should get us close.”
They did and that street was Orleans Street and at its far end they saw, there in the Sun like a glittering castle, the imposing form of the Saint Louis Cathedral.
“The house is near that Church,” Jordan said. “We made it.”
“Good job driving,” Tanner said and they made their way along, glad to be off the big roads, and glad to be in New Orleans.
Chapter 15
Lay of the Land
The three story pink row house at the address Carol had noted had been built in 1840 and it’s white trim contrasted the black wrought iron balcony rails. Each story held three tall windows framed by white shutters and three dormer windows peeked out from the slate mansard roof. The row house was wedged between two other such houses on the narrow alley and all faced the lawn and facade of St. Louis Cathedral. Jordan looked down the alley from the corner in front of the church.
“It’s right there, but we can’t drive on that street. I’m gonna go around the block and get that spot behind us.”
She rounded the corner and parked in the spot on Orleans Street facing the cathedral lawn. They walked across the street and up to the row house front door and knocked.
Josephine Lemort opened the door and she swept her flowing purple silk gown with an extended hand and gestured to the inside.
“Welcome and come in,” she said and Tanner followed Jordan into the room filled with antique furniture cuddled about a cozy burning fireplace. Ancient portraits gazed from the walls and a tall case clock ticked away the seconds. “I’m so pleased to have you here. We have much to discuss but you are tired from the road. Collect your things and I will show you to your room.”