Only then did Christian notice the small silver crucifix that hung on a chain around Wallace’s neck, glinting in the dim light of the bar. “I’m afraid I’m not,” Christian told him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t belong to a church. I’m not religious.” It is possible to live too long for such comforts, Christian thought.
“Ah,” said Wallace knowingly. Christian expected him to reach into his pocket for a tract. Over the years, Christian had been given hundreds of them and had found hundreds more left on the tables, or under them. Everything from the smudgily printed, misspelled credo of a snake-handling cult from the Louisiana swamps to a lurid pamphlet called Rock Music Is Worse than LSD! Christian was curious as to what drew people to these religions; their obsession with their own mortality intrigued him, and he read all the tracts.
But Wallace didn’t offer him a tract. Instead, he changed the subject abruptly, asking, “Have you had this place long?”
Christian felt a touch of shame. He had misjudged the old man. From the looks of him, Wallace needed all the faith he could muster. The pain seemed to pour from him. He must be lonely, just trying to make conversation, and talk was part of a bartender’s job.
“Twenty years,” Christian told him.
“You must have been a very young man when you opened it.”
“I am older than I look,” said Christian, smiling slightly. His face had not changed, had grown no older, had lost none of its narrow cold beauty since the last night of Mardi Gras fifteen years ago, the night he had slept in the arms of Molochai, his belly heavy and warm with Molochai’s blood. Christian had not aged for a very long time.
“So I gather,” said Wallace dryly.
Christian paused, looking into Wallace’s face. Wallace’s expression was no different than before; the eyes were the same, the hurt, frowning eyes, the lines bracketing the mouth as weary and patient as before. Christian dismissed the remark as meaningless—the man only wanted someone to talk to. He was lonely. Religious people always seemed lonely; perhaps that explained their need to be among great crowds of people who believed as they did. Such a great comfort, to be among others of your kind, and such loneliness when there were none. How could humans ever believe themselves truly lonely when there were so many of them?
“Another drink?” Christian asked.
Wallace tossed back a second shot of Chivas, then surprised Christian by asking, “Is business always this slow?” Then, realizing what he had said, he tried to apologize. “I didn’t mean to be rude—I was only curious. It’s a nice place, a good location, the French Quarter—”
The man was babbling, and Christian realized that for some reason Wallace Creech was terrified. The empty glass in his hand rattled against the bar; the ice made cold little chinking sounds. The man seemed on the point of bolting.
Christian dumped the melting ice cubes, scooped in fresh ones, poured another shot. This one was a double, but he watched Wallace put it away with the same practiced motion, not even grimacing. Here was a seasoned drinker.
“Why are you here, Wallace Creech?” Christian asked softly. “What do you want?”
Wallace’s hand went to the cross at his throat. Then, as if trying to conceal the gesture, he ran a finger around the inside of his collar, loosening it, though the top button was already undone. “There was a girl, once,” he said. “Jessy. Small, thin. Short brown hair. Black dress. She used to come here.”
Christian felt a cold fist squeeze shut somewhere deep inside him. The fist twisted, clenched; it was wrapped around some vital part of him, tearing him loose inside. He licked his lips. His mouth tasted of sour blood. He pretended to think. “Jessy,” he said. “Jessy. Such a long time ago… but perhaps I remember. She stopped coming in fifteen years ago.”
“Was that after Mardi Gras… fifteen years ago?”
“I think so,” said Christian, and tasted the sour blood again.
“She was my daughter,” said Wallace.
Christian swallowed. He was suddenly thirsty. “And she just disappeared?” he asked. “Didn’t you call the police?”
“I didn’t, no. Jessy was wild.” For a moment Wallace’s face was a Mardi Gras mask of tragedy; then he put his hand over his eyes, frowned his tears away, and went on. “She was forever threatening to leave home, saying I didn’t give her enough money, saying I was dull. She liked to go out and drink. She was angry because I made her continue with school when she wanted to drop out. She didn’t seem to care about anything… certainly not her father.”
Wallace covered his eyes again. “A girl needs her mother, I think, and Lydia—my wife—died when Jessy was only five.
Suicide, a sin. I brought our daughter up myself, and did a poor job, I suppose. When Jessy disappeared, I thought she had run off with a boy. I hoped she would come back when his money was gone. She had such strange notions… such very strange notions… and sending the police after her would have made her hate me.”
“Why are you here now?” Christian couldn’t look at Wallace’s eyes. He stared at the silver cross, at the soft loose skin of the man’s throat behind it.
“Well… after Jessy left, I moved all her things to the attic. When I realized she wasn’t coming back, I hated to look at them. Recently I happened to think of them, and I wondered whether her old clothes might be good enough to give to my church group. They hold a yearly bazaar for the poor, you know.” Christian nodded. “While I was going through the boxes, I found an old diary. The entries mentioned you several times—and your bar. She seemed to have… feelings for you. I thought she might have told you where she was going. I’d so love to see her now.”
“I don’t know,” said Christian. “She only drank here. She didn’t talk to me. I’ve no idea where she went.” He realized that he was still staring at the crucifix and dropped his gaze to Wallace’s empty glass.
Wallace gave a heavy sigh. “I’ll have another,” he said. He stayed to drink two more whiskeys, getting drunker, wandering around the bar. He examined the stained-glass window and its blind twin, the tables scarred with cryptic patterns of initials and beer-rings, the worn crimson leather of the bar stools. From time to time he glanced back at Christian, who silently avoided his eyes.
When Wallace began staring at the door that led to the staircase and, beyond that, to Christian’s room, Christian picked up his rag and started wiping down the bar. “I’m closing up. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you with your problem.” His voice was sharper than he had meant it to be.
When Wallace was gone—he left with a quiet, swaying dignity—and the door locked after him, Christian turned to his rows of bottles and found a squat embossed bottle nearly full of luminous green liqueur. No one wanted Chartreuse, not anymore, but Christian always kept a few bottles of it in case Molochai, Twig, and Zillah came rolling into town some Mardi Gras night. They would want Chartreuse, Christian knew. Tonight he wanted it too. He wanted the swirling heaviness of alcohol to weigh his mind down, wanted to sleep deep and dreamlessly, with no phantoms to swim out of the recesses of memory, no thin little girls with shadowed eyes and thighs bloody from murderous, innocent birth.
Could he?
Christian uncapped the bottle and started to pour himself a shot. His hand paused over the glass, bony and white, cold on the cold bottle. He smelled the liqueur. A scent as fresh as the new night, as birth. The smell of altars. He wanted so badly to be drunk, to sleep. The others—Molochai, Twig, and Zillah—drank incessantly, even ate; they drowned their true natures in gluttony. But they were young. They were of a newer generation. Their chemistry was subtly different; they were hardier, their organs perhaps more thick-walled, less delicate. Christian remembered the time he had drunk wine, the time he had drunk vodka, and the memory of pain shivered up his spine. But perhaps this . . .
Christian clutched the bottle to his chest and carried it up the stairs with him, turning off the bar lights as he went, ascending in the dark. A blessing of excellent
night vision.
The Chartreuse burned going down, and Christian sat tensed in the dark, waiting for pain. But when the liqueur hit his belly, a gentle green fire began to spread through him. It was going to work this time. His strange, treacherous body was going to let him get drunk as he had never been before, and he would rest; for a time he would not have to think.
He poured himself another shot and tried to sip it. It stung his eyes and went up his nose, and he threw it back and swallowed hard to keep from coughing. He laughed quietly at himself. He was a good bartender, an excellent bartender, but he certainly did not know how to drink. After the next shot he dispensed with the glass altogether, swigging out of the bottle as he had seen the others do on that Mardi Gras night.
When the first noise floated up from the alley, Christian was drunk enough to ignore it. It was only a bump. But then there was another bump and a scraping clatter that hurt to hear, as if someone were dragging one of the metal garbage cans across the concrete. A stray dog? A bum? Christian crept to his window, which gave him a clear view of the alley and a slice of Royal Street beyond it. He cupped his hands to the glass and looked out.
Apparently Wallace Creech was still drunk too. Nothing else could account for the clumsiness with which he was going through Christian’s garbage, mostly empties from the bar. As Christian watched, Wallace let a Taaka vodka bottle slip from his hands. It shattered on the concrete, and Wallace went down on his hands and knees, trying futilely to scoop the glass up, to dump it back into the torn garbage bag.
This was too much. Wallace Creech would have to be dealt with more harshly. The alley was already strewn with broken glass, wrinkled paper bags, and other trash, but what was Wallace looking for? His daughter’s bones, picked clean and wrapped in a Times-Picayune fifteen years out of date?
Christian straightened and turned away from the window. He would go down and slip into the alley; he would bend that dry old neck back, let flow the old man’s tasteless blood—
The first spasm hit him as he was opening the door to the landing. It bent him nearly double. He leaned against the jamb, clutching himself, trying to hold in the blaze of green agony that was burning its way through his belly. This was worse than the other times, so much worse; surely the pain must be ripping him apart inside, webbing his innards with tiny bloody holes. His eyes squeezed shut, and a long shudder ran through him.
Christian moaned and twisted his head, clenching his teeth, trying not to scream. He had to get to the bathroom: it was out on the landing, shared by the other apartments on the top floor of the building. He pushed at the door. It swung fully open, and Christian fell onto the landing, clumsy and agonized, his throat bitter, his eyes hot and streaming.
“Jesus, man, Jesus. Are you all right?” His neighbor, David, was just going out. Christian rolled onto his back and looked helplessly up at David, the drop-dead suit, the hair kept pathologically short, the sunglasses he always wore, even at night. Another spasm of pain washed over him, incredibly worse than the last, and he curled around himself and whined deep in his throat. Surely the tissues of his body were burning away, dissolving inside.
Then he was aware of David’s hands under his arms, David helping him up, half dragging him to the bathroom where he bent Christian over the toilet. Something deep in Christian loosened, and all the Chartreuse came up—green, hot, churned into a foamy mass now. Christian sobbed at the sight of it and turned his head away. Thick strings of saliva webbed his lips.
“Jesus, barkeep, are you going to live? Have to close up early tonight?”
Christian managed to nod. He leaned against David. The warm pressure of David’s hand on his shoulder kept him from collapsing. He vomited again, having to force it this time. After that, he felt almost good. “I’m going out,” he told David.
“Jesus wept, are you sure? How about I help you to your room? Don’t you even want to brush your teeth?”
“No. I need a drink to kill the taste. I must have eaten something bad.”
“I’m meeting a girl. Why don’t you come and have a drink with us?”
At the mention of alcohol, Christian had to suppress a moan. The idea of having a drink with David and his girl made him feel terribly lonely. He could never do such a thing. And besides, now he was ravenous.
They walked downstairs together, and David headed up Conti toward the lights of Bourbon Street. Christian checked the alley, but of course by now Wallace was gone. All that lingered was a breath of whiskey and fear. He would meet Wallace Creech again, though, with his old tired eyes and his silver cross. Christian knew it, and he smiled, feeling the night gather around him. He slipped away toward the river.
Nothing sat on his bed, naked and cross-legged, the quilt pooled around his waist and a candle before him. He cupped his hands around the flame and kept them there until his palms began to sweat. Then he raised his hands to his face and rubbed the heat onto his cheeks. He had his music turned up loud—Tom Waits, loud and splendidly drunk tonight, wishing he were in New Orleans. Nothing wished he were too.
He looked toward the window. Outside, he could see a few lights: other windows in other houses, more houses beyond; houses with well-kept lawns and shade trees, like the one he lived in; houses with swing sets and poured concrete driveways and half-baths and redwood sundecks; streets travelled by Volvos and Toyotas picking the kids up from day care, going to the supermarket, the health club, the mall, or, if they were bored enough, the liquor store. Suburbs, stretching forever or until the end of Maryland, whichever came first. Nothing shivered, then swigged from the White Horse bottle next to his bed. He had refilled it from the supply in his parents’ liquor cabinet, watering down their bottle, but now it was nearly empty again.
He kept looking toward the window. Most of the lights had gone out. He shivered again.
Christian still wore a cloak, long and black and lined with silk, whenever he went out. Old habits died hard, if they ever died at all. The night had cooled. A black iron railing under Christian’s hand was warm, still saturated with the heat of the day, but a dark-smelling breeze wound its way up from the river, brushing Christian’s face, reviving him. Now he had nearly forgotten the burning in his stomach and the vomiting that had made his throat bloody and raw.
His step quickened. His boot heels clocked along the sidewalk. He fell to wondering how many times he had walked along these ways, how infinitesimally his steps had worn down the sidewalks of these old streets, these exotically named, haunted streets—Ursulines, Bienville, Decatur. He wondered how much of his substance he had left here, how much of his substance was made up of the dust of these streets.
There had always been New Orleans. Christian had lived in other places, far away across sunless seas, places older and darker and just as strange, with ghosts aplenty. But where else did slave spirits still lament in the Royal Street house of sadistic Madame Lalaurie, where else could one still smell the lingering sweat of a slave woman chained to a stove all the years of her life? Where else did crows flap over the crumbling ruins of St. Louis Cemetery and settle, inky and baleful of eye, on a tomb slashed with hundreds of red X’s—X’s in faded crimson chalk, X’s still fresh and glistening, X’s for voodoo curses, X’s to invoke the wrath of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen who had stayed young forever?
Christian passed a dark doorway. Inside, pale shapes moved through dull blue light. He remembered when this hole-in-the-wall had been a jazz club, when bright brassy music floated out late at night and spiralled up to the sky, when smoky-skinned women with ripe lips and red dresses stood outside smiling dark smiles at passersby. Once he had seen Louis Armstrong standing there on the sidewalk with his shirtsleeves rolled up, talking to a crowd of friends.
Christian remembered the slow laughter, the white eyes that shone out of faces blue-black with sweat, the flasks of illicit liquor raw enough to burn a hole in the guts of even Molochai, Twig, or Zillah. Now the figures that waited uneasily on the sidewalk were as white as white could be, with
eyes smudged black and ripped black clothes, little ghosts, like photonegatives of the dusky dancers who had once swirled all night to bright jazz. Now the music that drifted out of the doorway and up toward the moon was sparse and dark and strange, the anthem of all the lost children who began their lives at night, when the bars opened and the music began to play.
Right now it was sainted Bauhaus, the pale long-boned gods of this crowd, doing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” The eyeliner eyes glazed and the black lipstick lips moved in time with the words, and the children danced slowly, for their blood was thin, and they were under the spell of the DJ and the music and the night.
Christian went in. As he passed the bar, he heard a girl say, “God, how tall is that guy?” He turned but could not search out her eyes. He rose like a narrow, pale beacon above most of the children in the club, and he could look down on leather-clad, studded shoulders, on earlobes hung heavy with chains and crucifixes and tiny silver skulls, on heads of hair dyed every unnatural color possible—blue-black, orange, red, white. The club smelled of sweat and melting hair mousse and hot leather, all underlaid with the sweet, spicy smell of clove cigarettes. A veil of smoke twisted gently around Christian’s shoulders.
He stood against the back wall, not smoking, not drinking, just watching the children move, watching their faces lift and their hands flicker in the blue light. A boy came up to him and said, “Will you watch my leather?” When Christian nodded, the boy dumped the jacket on a chair near Christian and danced back into the crowd, lithe and T-shirted, his thin arms raised above his head. These children trusted one another; the adult world was obtuse and threatening, but in one another they had absolute faith. Still, a leather jacket was nothing to be left unattended. Each one was an individual masterpiece marked by its owner with intricate arrangements of studs and safety pins, arcane band logos, patches and chains.
Lost Souls Page 6