The Chosen

by John G. Hartness

  “Big Daddy’s.” Apparently, neither Bourbon Street nor Eve had changed since the last time I had seen them. Bourbon Street still housed as many strip clubs as jazz clubs, and Eve still worked hard to surround herself with as much of humanity’s filth as possible.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against strip clubs, and some of my favorite conversations throughout the years have been with strippers and prostitutes. I’ve always appreciated their unvarnished view of the world. They have a level of honesty you just don’t find in “legitimate” society, and every once in a while, I’ve needed that type of honesty.

  However, I instantly knew that Eve wouldn’t be working in a top-notch strip club; she’d be working the seediest dive on the street. I also knew that at some point before we left New Orleans, I was going to end up hitting somebody again. There was only about a fifty-fifty shot that it wasn’t going to be Eve.

  I knocked back one last shot of Patron, looked over at Jason—after a certain number of bottles, I tended to move into a first-name relationship with my bartenders—and asked if we had any cash left. He looked over the tab and brought me four twenties. I handed them back to him along with a couple of unflattering pictures of Ben Franklin.

  I headed through the door and into the sunlight just as Robert Earl Keen started to sing, “Sherry was a waitress at the only joint in town.” I chuckled and thought about the truth in Keen’s song.

  The road really does go on forever, and this party might be just getting started.

  Chapter 13

  It’s not a long ride from Tyler to New Orleans, but when you have to make a couple of pit stops, and more than a couple of puke stops because of a two-day bender, it can be a seriously unpleasant trip.

  Michael and I drove, while Emily and Myra did their best impersonations of plague victims in the back seat. Cain followed on his bike.

  Cain and I had consumed nearly twice as much as they had, but we weren’t precisely normal, if you’ll recall. We only get about as drunk as we want to, and we can shake it off pretty quickly when necessary.

  Finally, about nine hours into a seven-hour trip, we rolled into the Crescent City. I’d never spent a whole lot of time in New Orleans, but I’d been there once or twice. I had nothing against the town; it just felt like too much old for me, and I had enough memories of old running around in my head without shaking them loose by walking through the French Quarter.

  Cain pulled even with my window as we rolled off the interstate, and yelled, “Follow me.”

  We meandered through the Quarter until we pulled up to a small house on Royal Street, just off Jackson Square. Cain pulled his bike into a narrow alley and gestured for me to park on the street in front of the house. We all trooped up a flight of rickety stairs, then into a second-floor apartment.

  “Welcome, dear pater, to my humble abode,” he said grandly as we entered his slightly shabby, yet somehow chic living room. A sofa somehow managed to be threadbare and classy all at the same time, a feat I’d never managed personally, and a couple of mismatched lamps tied the whole room together. The walls were decorated with black and white photographs of people in various ages, all taken in and around New Orleans. Emily wandered the walls as if in a museum, while her mother made a beeline for the sofa and curled up into a sweaty, exceedingly hung-over ball.

  “Cain, these are amazing,” Emily murmured. “It’s like you took a picture right into their souls and hung them up on the wall. Like this one here, I can almost see this woman crying for her lost little boy even though she’s smiling at a street musician.”

  “You know, baby sister, there are some cultures that still believe a camera can steal your soul and trap it in the photograph. I think it’s the opposite, really. I think the camera can set free a part of your soul that’s trapped in the everyday and let it loose to be miraculous. Turn around.” She did, and Cain was holding an expensive-looking digital camera. He snapped her picture before she finished turning and grinned at her. “Gotcha! Now I’ve got a little piece of Emily-soul to carry around with me and stick on my wall.”

  “You ass, you could have given me a little warning.” She went over and punched him on the arm. “Well? You’ve gotta at least let me see it so I can tell you to delete it.”

  “Oh no, baby sister. You can see it, but I’m not deleting it. This is the most time I’ve spent with a sibling in a long time, and I want something to commemorate the moment.” He smiled, but there was a heaviness in his eyes, and in the moment, it gave us all pause. Myra broke the silence by getting up off the couch, bolting down a dark hallway, and opening doors until she located the bathroom. She finished the performance by being noisily sick with the door open.

  “That’s Mom. She always knows just what to say.” And just like that, all the tension flowed out of the room. Emily slid her head under Cain’s arm just as if they’d been raised as siblings and snatched the camera out of his hands. She thumbed the controls expertly until her photo came onto the tiny screen.

  “Wow.” Her voice was very small, and she looked suddenly nervous as she stared up at Cain. “Is that what I really look like?”

  “The camera doesn’t lie, baby sister. You’re beautiful.”

  “But, I’ve never been pretty.”

  “You’re right. You’re beautiful. I might have mentioned that. Have I developed a stutter after all these centuries?”

  “But, it’s not right. I’m not like that. I don’t take good pictures; that’s not me.” My curiosity got the better of me, and I wandered over to look over her shoulder at the image. Cain had caught her just as she turned around, hair flying slightly, with a touch of backlight making it look even more golden than normal. Her mouth was open a little, teeth just barely showing in a pixie grin, and her eyes twinkled in light I never saw in that apartment. She was, in a word, beautiful.

  Don’t get me wrong. Emily is a pretty girl, and in the right setting, maybe even men who aren’t her father would consider her beautiful. However, after a drinking binge, nine hours on the road in the Texas-Louisiana summer, and a total of maybe three hours sleep in as many days, she wasn’t at her best.

  In Cain’s photo, she was everything she could ever be on her best day. He had captured the absolute essence of Emily and distilled it into a single digital image. It was both breathtaking and a little scary.

  “Damn, Cain. That’s an amazing picture. That’s the kind of thing photographers wait their whole life to capture, and you did it without even thinking or trying twice. You’ve got a gift, son,” I said.

  “Well, he has had a while to practice,” Michael chimed in from where he’d perched on the arm of the sofa.

  “Good point,” I admitted. “So, other than to admire your skill in photography, which is considerable, and to allow Myra to vomit in your toilet, which is admirable, why are we here?”

  “Well, I thought we could rest up here, and then you and I could go looking for Mom later tonight when the clubs open.”

  “You don’t think they’re open now?”

  “They are. She’s not there yet.”

  “How do you know? Never mind. You know. More to the point, does she know you’re here?”

  “We’ve talked from time to time.”

  “Is she all right?” I couldn’t look at my son’s eyes. I walked across the living room and out onto the tiny balcony, which was just big enough to hold two wrought-iron chairs and a round table for two. I bypassed the chairs and leaned my elbows on the railing.

  He followed me outside and leaned next to me. “She’s okay, Dad. At least, she’s okay for Mom. You know how she is.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “She’s bitter and angry all the time, and she gets into fights with clients and sometimes gets guys so mad they punch her and throw her into the street half-naked. She runs through jobs like I go through clean socks, and I don’t think she’s happy unless she’s miserable.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I did. She’d been like that ever since I brought
Abel’s body back from the field where Cain had left him. I carried him to the center of the Garden and buried him under the Tree. Yeah, that Tree. It wasn’t the Garden anymore, and it wasn’t really the Tree anymore, either, since our Father had withdrawn his presence from us, but it had still been the oldest Tree we’d known, so it seemed somehow appropriate. I had dug a deep hole and buried my son there, and when I finished shoveling dirt back in on top of his lifeless form, I turned around and saw that I was alone.

  Eve had stayed gone for several days, and when she came back, she was different. The loss of our two sons in the same day had changed something fundamental in her, and it wasn’t long before we went our separate ways. We traveled the world for centuries, our paths sometimes crossing, but never for very long.

  There I was, after thousands of years, ready to make nice and play happy family again. Oh, and there was our long-lost son, the one that she kept in touch with and I said I’d never touch again except to strangle. Yeah, I could see it was gonna be a long night.

  Chapter 14

  I sat around my son's apartment for the afternoon, and we danced around each other like so many fathers and sons have done since almost the dawn of time. Myra slept most of the afternoon, Michael wandered through New Orleans’s numerous churches, and Emily looked through Cain's photographs until well into the night.

  At about eleven thirty, Cain stood up, looked at me, and headed toward the door. I stretched the kinks out of my back and followed him.

  Myra stepped into the living room and stood in the hallway. "Do you want me to go with you?"

  "No. It's probably going to be a scene of biblical proportions, if you'll pardon the pun, and I don't think the presence of the mother of my most recent child will help soothe the savage breasts of the mother of my first children."

  "You know the original quote was about music. And there was only a singular breast, right?"

  "Yeah, but given the establishments where we're looking for her, I figured the more the merrier." I tried to keep it light, but I knew she could see in my eyes that I wasn't looking forward to it.

  "She'll forgive you. I did."

  "Yeah, but I had only left you for a couple of decades. Multiply that times a hundred or so, and that's the kind of grudge Eve's toting."

  "It'll be okay," she lied.

  "I know," I lied right back, and we shared that rueful smile people shared when they knew they were selling a great big steaming pile, and they knew the other one wasn't buying, but it was what they were expected to say and do, so they did it anyway.

  "Wow. You guys are cute. Aren't they cute, Cain? Was he this cute with your mom?" I turned and saw Emily standing next to Cain at the door. A Red Hot Chili Peppers tank top that verged on the obscene was stretched across her chest, and a tattered pair of jeans tapered down to a pair of bright red cowboy boots.

  "What are you wearing? And where do you think you're going? If you think you're going with us, particularly dressed like that, you've got another think coming, young lady." I only got all Ward Cleaver with daughters of a particular age range, namely from about six months to sixty-five years old.

  "They're called clothes, new-found Paternal One. They took the place of fig leaves a while back. And I'm going with you."

  "No, you're not."

  "Yes, I am," she said simply, as though there were no conceivable argument.

  "Emily, how should I best put this? Oh, hell no, you're not. I am not taking my youngest child into a strip bar on Bourbon Street at one thirty in the morning."

  "One: why not? It's not like it's the first pair of tits I've ever seen. In case you didn't notice, I have a pair of my own, so they're less than impressive to me. And Two: you are my father, and the father of the human race, and for that I respect you, but you don't get to play dad after missing twenty-plus birthdays, then randomly showing up on a stolen Harley in the middle of the afternoon. So pick your jaw up off the floor, and let's roll. I've got a feeling you're going to need me tonight, for moral support if nothing else." I closed my mouth with an audible snap and walked over to the door.

  I looked back at Myra and Michael. Myra had made her way into the tiny kitchenette and was leaning on Cain's fridge, smirking at her daughter, and Michael sat in an armchair with an inscrutable expression on his face. I hated inscrutable angels.

  "You two going to suddenly decide to come along, too?" I asked.

  "No, thank you. I've still got some recovering to do. I'm not as young as some people who drank with you two degenerates."

  "I'll pass. I can happily avoid delving into the absolute gutter of humanity." With Michael's endorsement ringing in my ears, we headed out.

  It was a nice enough night, and Cain and I were big enough to make ourselves not look like prey for anyone with less-than-honorable intentions between his apartment and the ongoing party of Bourbon Street.

  Big Daddy's might not have been the sleaziest place in the Bayou, but it wasn't exactly a champagne room, either. With a huge sign on the street advertising "LIVE SEX SHOW" and proclaiming it "TOO EXTREME TO SHOW - COME INSIDE," it wasn't making much happen on the subtle side of life. I went to a street vendor beside the strip club’s entrance, bought a huge beer in a disposable cup, and chugged it down. Sometimes, liquid courage was the only kind I could muster, but I’d take what I could get.

  Big Daddy’s was decorated in typical strip club chic, dark so you wouldn't notice the stretch marks and the occasional needle track, with multi-colored dark carpet to hide the presence of blood and other fluids. A couple of small side stages and one long runway dominated most of the center of the room. A bouncer who looked as if he ate small children with bacon for breakfast stood by the door and checked IDs. I didn't know where Cain got his, but my fake IDs had always been immaculate and ridiculously expensive. Emily was the only one of us with a real government-issued ID that had her actual birthdate on it, but Bluto spent a lot more time trying to look down her shirt than he did checking her age. We took a table in a corner, and I noticed that Cain made it a point to check for escape routes and to sit with his back to a wall.

  "Paranoid, son?" I asked as the waitress took our drink orders.

  "Sometimes it's a good idea to know where your exits are. Check that. It's always a good idea to know where your exits are. And a guy I used to play cards with taught me not to sit with my back to a door."

  "Really? You were there? Then?"

  "Yeah. It wasn't pretty. Got Hickok droppings all over my favorite jacket. Some things just don't come out of suede."

  "What are you boys talking about?" a voice said in my ear. Not a particularly euphonious voice, but obviously female. I looked up to a flat-chested stripper with a face like a horse. Before I could tell her to buzz off, she had wormed her lace teddy-wearing way onto my lap where her bony ass immediately started to dig deep into my left quadriceps. Our drinks arrived, and two twenties mysteriously turned into eight singles, like they do in strip clubs, and I tossed a couple of those back to the waitress as I tried to jostle the bony-assed stripper off my knee.

  "We were just having a little conversation, honey. A private conversation." I hoped she'd get the hint and find a drunker target. She was either desperate or brutally dense because she didn't budge.

  "Well, my name's Emerald. What's yours?" horse-faced girl replied.

  I glared daggers at Cain, who leaned back in his chair, smirking at me, and Emily, who was smothering her giggles in a Cosmopolitan.

  The night was not going well, and it started to spiral absolutely out of control when I heard the DJ announce, "And n-o-o-o-w, on our main stage, pl-e-e-a-s-e welcome… Eve!"

  The woman I first gave my heart to, the woman I'd loved since the beginning of the world, the woman I helped create the human race with, stepped out onto a runway to shake her mostly naked body for an audience of drunken rednecks, swamp rats, and frat-boy douchebags.

  Chapter 15

  My heart stopped when she stepped out on that runway, and not just because
I had seen the first love of my life again after innumerable years. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Eve was hot. The years had left us largely untouched, and when she walked out from behind the shimmering silver curtain, I went back to the first day I ever saw her.

  The sun always shone in the Garden, even when it rained. It had been a sunny afternoon when she stepped out from behind a tree and said, "Adam, I presume?"

  "Huh?" I'm always eloquent when surprised.

  "You must be Adam."

  "Huh?"

  "Well, obviously I'm intended to be the brains of this operation. I'm Eve, and Father sent me here to be your partner."

  "Huh?" It was taking a minute or two to sink in, obviously.

  It's not like Eve was the first woman I'd ever seen, or the first woman that had ever been. That would be Lilith, and that didn't go well. I don’t mean to say Lilith wasn't perfectly pleasant, but we were never partners in any real sense of the word. We occupied the same space, but we weren't ever what you could call together.