by Amy Conner
“Oh.” This woman must be a hell of a good friend, holding on to Starr’s twenty thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money, even though twice that amount probably won’t be enough to see her through the legal Armageddon she’s going to be facing with Bobby and Judge Shapley. I keep this discouraging fact to myself, though, and drive another ten miles before I ask her another question, one that’s been in the back of my mind ever since earlier this afternoon at the condo.
“So who was it you were supposed to be meeting tonight?” I ask, feeling playful. “You know—the guy on the phone?”
“Nobody,” Starr answers. There’s a tone in her voice warning me not to push this.
I do anyway. “Nobody?” I repeat. “Oh, come on, Starr. You can tell me.”
“Okay,” she says. “Since you’re so damn nosy, it was somebody who told me he maybe could help me out with my situation. He sure doesn’t want his name dragged into it, though.” Her profile in the dashboard’s glow is sullen. “Look, Annie—don’t make a big deal, ’kay? It’s not like he’s going to do anything for me anyways. Let’s not talk about it.”
I digest this cryptic explanation. Who could it be? And why is Starr acting like this is some Vatican state secret? I’m never going to tell anyone anything. Once we pick up her money and get back to Jackson, I’m praying my part in this midnight expedition never sees the light of day, so it’s not as though I’m dying to go around town gossiping about this mystery man of hers. This just seems . . . off, somehow, maybe even sort of insulting that Starr doesn’t trust me with his name. I wish I could smoke a cigarette. I always think better with a cigarette, and I’m not sure what to think about all this secrecy.
As I mull this over, Starr reaches for her purse and rummages around inside it. With a rustle of plastic, she unearths a jumbo pack of Slim Jims. Troy perks up and sticks his head between the front seats. I think he’s drooling an unobtrusive, little-dog inquiry.
“Here.” She opens the package and tries to hand me one of those meat sticks. “I bet you didn’t eat before you came to get me.”
“I can’t have Slim Jims!” I say, even though my nose twitches at the rich, greasy aroma. Get thee behind me, Satan, I think with a shudder. “Do you know how many calories are in that thing?” I complain. “Junk food. Besides, eating those cookies this afternoon means I can’t have anything but vitamins and lettuce until Friday.”
“You serious?” Starr’s voice is aghast. “There’s something bad, bad wrong with that, sugar. What’re you supposed to do tomorrow? Sit around with an empty plate while the normal folks load theirs up with turkey and all the fixings? Doesn’t anybody ever tell you to eat?”
“Du likes me fine the way I am,” I say defensively. “And my mother’s never said a word to me about my weight. I bet she’s happy I can still fit into my deb dress. Anyway, so long as I put some food on my plate, I can push it around for an hour and nobody really notices.”
“I can’t believe it. That’s terrible.” Starr shakes her head. “It’s like you’re starving yourself so you’ll look like a twelve-year-old or something. What size are you, a two?”
“A zero.”
Starr makes a disgusted noise. “A zero. So you’re trying to disappear, then.”
“I just like to fit in my clothes, that’s all,” I say quickly. “And I’ve seen what happens if you let yourself go.” If you can’t be pregnant, you sure can’t be fat, says the rosebush voice. Who’d want you then? “So if you don’t mind, I’ll pass on the Slim Jims.”
“Huh.” Starr’s mouth twists in wry concession. “Then I guess you won’t want the Reese’s cup either. Here, Troy, have some yummy grease.”
With a genteel snap of his jaws, the dog takes my Slim Jim and nearly swallows it whole.
We crossed the state line an hour ago, trading the gentle hills of Mississippi for the flatlands of southeastern Louisiana. The miles fly by now. At a quarter to nine, we’re crossing over the Bonnet Carré Spillway with ten miles to go before we hit the city limits.
New Orleans appears to the southeast as a golden arc on the black horizon, its skyline floating above banked clouds of fog and light, and in spite of my nagging suspicion that this trip is going to turn out to be a really bad idea, I can’t help but feel my spirits lift at the sight of the city.
I’ve always loved this town. I love its improbable, tattered buoyancy, its insatiable appetite for all good things and more than a few bad ones. Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved wandering the shadowed, mysterious streets of the French Quarter, loved sitting by the Mississippi River and watching the great ships of the world cleave those terrible, fathomless currents. The challenging grace note of a solitary jazz trumpet flung like a dare against the evening sky; a long, cold drink in a short, dark bar while the rain courses silver tears down the face of the marble dryad on a hidden courtyard—oh, Lord, if I was ever going to run away from my life for real, I might run to New Orleans. It’d be a sight more effective than hiding underneath the duvet and a whole lot more fun.
We’re crossing the last elevated mile over the marsh before we get to the city limits, and I ask Starr, “Where do we find this friend of yours with the money?”
Starr thinks for a moment; then she says, “Get off at the exit at St. Bernard Avenue. I’ll tell you how to get to the racetrack from there.” She shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “I can’t hardly wait. I need a bathroom.”
I glance at her in the flat glare from the interstate’s rows of lamps. “You really have to go again?” Here’s an aspect of pregnancy I’ve never imagined, being at the mercy of your own bladder. For me, being with child has been on a par with walking through the gates of Mecca in holy ecstasy, the culmination of an endless pilgrimage through the desert wastes. I haven’t given much thought to what Mecca would be like if I ever got there.
“It’s chronic.” Starr winces. “Like I said before, I wouldn’t do anything different, but I wish someone had told me about this part when I forgot to take my pills. I’d have bought stock in Charmin.”
We’re coming up on the exit. I brake the car and glide down the ramp to the stoplight on St. Bernard. The neighborhood is dark, the streetlights’ hazed glow muted by the fog and the massive oaks’ heavy-leafed limbs. I check again to make sure the doors are locked. I’ve never been to this part of the city before, and this doesn’t look like a good neighborhood. It’s a far cry from the Quarter, for sure.
“Where next?” I ask, trying not to sound apprehensive and almost succeeding.
“Turn right.” Starr guides me down St. Bernard to Gentilly Boulevard, then from there into an even more poorly lit rabbit warren of narrow one-way streets with exotic names like Crete and Trafalgar. The small shotgun houses here are crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in the darkness as though they’re keeping an eye out for trouble, and a couple of times Starr tells me to reverse the car and go back because we missed a turn. I’m starting to freak out when, finally, rows of cinder block and sheet metal buildings appear to our left. Starr points to a gate up ahead in the high, barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence.
“We’ll go in here.” In the back seat, Troy puts his feet up on the window and whines at an alley cat slinking under a dilapidated house. “Shit, I forgot,” Starr says, dismayed. “The dog. The guard’s not going to let us bring the dog onto the backstretch. Quick—stop the car.”
I pull over to the right-hand side of the street, in front of a house with foil-covered windows and a cement shrine to the Virgin hunkered down next to a junked car on cinder blocks. “He’s a little dog,” I say. “Maybe the guard won’t see him.”
“Can’t take that chance.” Starr shakes her head. “Take your coat off and cover him up with that. Let me do the talking.” I struggle out of the mink, and Starr drapes it over the dog. “Be good, Troy Smoot,” she warns. “Lay still.”
I drive the car through the gates onto the river-sand road leading to the backstretch. A tall, black man in a khaki uniform steps out of the guard booth, s
hining a flashlight inside the front seat. I roll the window down. The night air, substantially warmer and more humid than that of the freezing truck stop back in Mississippi, fills the interior of the car with smells of wet dirt and horse.
“Evenin’, ladies,” the guard says. His security badge gleams in the glow of the flashlight. “Little late for visitin’, ain’t it?”
“Hey, Bone Man,” Starr says, bright as a rhinestone tiara, flashing him that too-white smile. “Remember me?” She leans across the console into the light. The heavy cabled sweater stretches taut across her breasts and with that single move Starr manages to transform herself from a pregnant woman who desperately needs a bathroom into a sexy chick in a BMW.
“It’s Starr, honey. I’m back!”
The guard, Bone Man, chuckles. “Well, well. So you are.” He tips his hat back on his head and gives her the once-over, the smile never leaving his face, but I don’t think much gets by this man. “Heard you were marrying a rich Mississippi lawyer, wasn’t going to have time for us working folk anymore.”
Starr flashes that smile again. “Now, Boney, you know I never, ever forget my friends,” she purrs. “Speaking of friends, this here’s my oldest friend in the world—Annie. Annie, say hey to the Bone Man.”
“Hey,” I manage. In the back seat under my parka, Troy thumps his tail and the guard shines the light over my shoulder. I say hastily, “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise, ma’am.” The look the security guard gives me makes me feel like he knows exactly how I look in my underwear. I feel the hot blush spreading upward from my collarbones and have to force myself not to shrink out of the light.
“Always good to meet one of Starr’s friends,” Bone Man says, clearly enjoying this.
“We’re here to see Bette,” Starr interjects.
Bone Man cocks his head to one side. “What you wantin’ with Bette? Ever since that little spic she shack up with went and took that spill, broke his leg, and gone back home to Miami, she been in a bad way—just ’bout murderize a person, you so much as say good mornin’. Not like Bette ever easy, nohow. All them hormoneys she take.”
“Oh, Annie and me, we got some catching up to do with ol’ Bette,” Starr says. “I already called and let her know we’re coming by for a visit.”
Of course, I’ve never met this woman before in my life, but I smile up at Bone Man, too, nodding like an idiot while inside I’m ready to strangle Starr. I thought my sole responsibility was to chauffeur her to New Orleans and back again, and now I’m supposed to “catch up” with murderous Bette, she of the out-of-whack hormones? Starr didn’t care to share this information beforehand, I seethe to myself. Why? More secrets?
“Well, Bette’s trailer be where it always be,” the Bone Man says with an affable smile, “just behind the cafeteria. Y’all pass a good night.” With a wave to us, he steps back inside the guardhouse.
I roll up the window and pull the BMW through the gates before I turn to Starr and demand, “Honestly, why’d you tell him that? I’m not going to talk with anybody in a trailer tonight. I’m going to wait in the car while you get your money and then we’re hightailing it back to Jackson!”
“Hush,” Starr says, sounding like she’s preoccupied. “Just turn here and park behind that semi.” She points into the dark at a big, battered horse van with Virginia plates. Beside it, a good-sized Airstream trailer is backed up to the eight-foot fence surrounding the Fair Grounds. To the left of the Airstream is a low cinder block building with yellow-lit windows. It must be the cafeteria because the trailer’s practically on top of it.
“You can wait here if you want to,” Starr says. “But you should come on in. I, I . . . think you and Bette would have an awful lot to talk about.”
“I can’t imagine,” I say, feeling mulish. I slam the car into park, turn it off, and fold my arms. With a shrug, Starr gets out.
“Think on it,” she says, her hand on the door frame. “She’s kind of... well, somebody you should meet.” She waits for me to answer. When I don’t say anything, she shrugs again and walks away into the night.
I can’t go in there, I think, watching Starr climb up the steps of Bette’s Airstream. There’s no telling what kind of person lives in a place like this. Hell, there’s no telling what you might catch in a place like this. The wide, old-fashioned travel trailer is lit up like an oil rig, decorated with strings of multicolored Christmas lights and Japanese lanterns draped across its aluminum roof and curved sides. Silk palm trees in pots flank the fold-down steps: it’s hard to tell in the dark, but I think they’re hung with plush monkeys and plastic parrots. A healthy pile of black garbage bags spills pink silk magnolia blossoms on the ground around the lacquered Chinese-red bench positioned underneath a window that’s tastefully curtained with a Confederate flag. It appears the Airstream decoration process is a work in progress.
Starr knocks and waits for a minute. The door opens, and a Myrtistine-sized woman wearing a bathrobe stands backlit, hair in rollers, her fists on her considerable hips. There’s an excited exchange, Starr goes inside the trailer, and I’m alone out here in the dark. I lock the doors again. Minutes pass. Emerging from under my mink, Troy Smoot pokes his nose under my arm. I can’t imagine what he could want, but after my scare at the truck stop, I’m sure not going to take the chance of letting him run around loose behind the racetrack. Maybe he just wants out of the car. I decide I can handle it, if I’m careful.
“C’mon, dog. Let’s go have a smoke while we’re waiting.” I pick Troy up, unlock the door, and get out, holding him in my arms. He doesn’t weigh much and licks me under my chin. “Yeah, I like you, too, but don’t get any big ideas. We’re not going to be here long.”
Across the night, a light east wind carries the nearby music of guitars and a happy, loud chorus singing some kind of repetitive Mexican song. This fiesta is coming from inside the cafeteria next door. Troy’s nose twitches at the smells of frying meat, cumin, and onions on the wind. It sure sounds like they’re having a good time in there, whoever they are. I glance around in the darkness, lit only by the Christmas-light-festooned Airstream, but Troy and I are alone out here.
What’s keeping Starr? Shifting the dog in my arms, I try to read my watch: I think it’s 9:15. If we leave in the next ten minutes, I could almost beat Du home. I mean, how long can it take to collect twenty thousand dollars, say good-bye, and go? And if Starr and Bette are such old friends, then why didn’t she tell me about this damned special relationship when I asked before? Secrets again, Starr and her secrets.
But Troy’s getting heavy. I’m going to go sit on the spindly red bench under the Airstream’s Stars-and-Bars-hung window and smoke a cigarette. Nudging a garbage bag of magnolia blossoms out of the way with my boot, I plop down with a sigh.
Damnation. I remember I left my purse in the car. I debate going back to get it so I can have that cigarette, then decide it’s probably better if I don’t. What if I dropped an ash on one of these plastic bags of silk flowers and set the whole tacky mess on fire? The guitars across the way finish with a flourish, in one of the nearby barns a horse whinnies a coda, and in the lull I realize there’s a conversation going on behind the window overhead—Starr’s voice and a husky contralto that sounds weirdly familiar. She’s in there “catching up” with Bette, I think irritably. Starr’s been gone a long time, and I really do need a smoke: it’s been hours since I had one.
“Come on, Troy, I’m going to go get that cigarette.” I go to stand up and find that I can’t. To my disbelief, my ass is stuck to the bench like it was glued to it.
“What the . . . ?” I exclaim to Troy. I turn to look over my shoulder and smell the flat plastic smell of wet paint. Ol’ Bette or somebody else must have just painted this bench and the night’s humidity has kept it from drying. My entire backside and sweater have to be covered in Chinese-red lacquer, and now I’m one with Bette’s bench.
Furious now, I try to get up again and for an unbelievable moment the b
ench gets up with me before it tears free of my paint-covered behind in a ripping sound. The bench lands upended with a thud on top of the bags of magnolia blossoms. I’m cussing a blue streak and holding a now-wriggling Troy and simultaneously trying to get a look at the seat of my jeans to see how bad things are when the trailer door bangs wide open.
A mountain of a woman descends the rickety stairs in an avalanche, her arms swinging. “Who the fuck’re you, vandalizing my property?” Each metal step screams for mercy under her enormous bunny slippers.
“Hey, I only sat on your bench . . .” I begin, stupefied at this vision of trailer doom advancing upon me. This is Starr’s friend?
“Who said you could sit on my goddamned bench?” the mountain bawls as she closes the distance.
I back up a step—who wouldn’t?—and my feet get caught up in one of those damned garbage bags. I fall over backward in the dirt like a load of spilled gravel. Troy Smoot jumps out of my arms and dashes up the steps into the trailer between Starr’s legs as she appears in the doorway.
“Hold up, Bette!” Starr cries. At her feet the dog is barking a lunatic chorus.
“Shut up,” Bette snarls over her shoulder. She looms over my sprawled body and announces, “Now you’re gonna get it.” Pushing the sleeves of her bathrobe higher on her tattooed arms, she bends down and grabs the front of my cashmere sweater, and even with the acre of makeup covering that brutal face, oh my God—I know who this is, I do.
“Buddy Bledsoe?” I squeak, shielding my face with my arms. “It’s me, Annie Banks. Please don’t hit me!”