Burn

by Nevada Barr

  She gave it a slow twenty count to let him get far enough that he wouldn’t hear the lock unlocking, then let herself out onto Ursulines. He was a block and a half away, heading toward the river. Anna closed and locked the gate behind her, then crossed the street to make herself less obviously connected to Geneva’s house and followed.

  At Bourbon, Jordan turned right and disappeared from sight. Anna jogged half a block and turned right as well. Bourbon smelled faintly of vomit and urine, but, according to Geneva, it was positively aromatic compared to before Katrina. One of the good things the storm heralded was a cleaner French Quarter.

  The street was well lit by streetlights that mimicked gas lamps from the turn of the twentieth century and by light spilling out of bars and shops. All was made deliciously lurid by neon.

  It wasn’t crowded, but there was a sufficiency of people and noise. Anna didn’t worry about being noticed tailing Jordan. Not many people were wearing masks—Mardi Gras had come and gone—but there were a few. Two large-bottomed women in shorts and flip-flops had on cat masks. Feather boas were fairly common. There was a peculiar hat here and there. Three young men were talking and laughing around the front of Lafitte’s, one shirtless wearing black leather short-shorts and a pirate hat with a great white plume, one in a black leather miniskirt that complemented his tattoos and silver pumps, and the third in khaki pants, loafers, and a madras shirt.

  Anna, in red feathers and black sequins, did not stand out.

  Jordan was all in black: shoes, trousers, and a long-sleeved shirt with a collar. That much she’d ascertained from the dimmer view on Ursulines. Now she could see that the clothes were nice—at least compared to the garb he wore when he was hanging with the gutter punks. The pants were clean-looking and not too wrinkled, as was the shirt. He wore a black leather belt and black running shoes. His hair had been slicked back and greased—or was still wet from the shower. That, combined with the smudge of beardlet beneath his lower lip and the crown of thorns, gave him the look of Druggie Number Two in a B movie.

  New Orleans residents tended to avoid Bourbon. The famous street was always in party mode. Locals looking for a bar open late or just mingling for the fun of the night scene came, but, for the most part, the party was for out-of-towners. Maybe at one time New Orleans had been a hotbed of sin. Now it was merely tolerant of it. Bourbon was about the only place that overt, commercial sin could be found, and much of that was “sin lite,” more show than anything. The draw was the nudity and the booze and the illusion of walking on the wild side. Or maybe Anna had seen too much of the world. Maybe for normal people, pole dancing and pasties, thongs and booze and lap dances, were the wild side.

  The street was home to the city’s strip clubs, Larry Flynt’s, Rick’s Cabaret, Crazy Horse, and others less well known and less well funded. Jordan passed the higher-end joints and turned into a black rectangle of doorway in a seedy-looking building sporting the signs LIVE GIRLS LIVE and LIVE SEX ACTS.

  Better than dead girls dead and dead sex acts, Anna supposed. Still, it struck her as prurient and adolescent, not a fitting lure for a grown person. Here, she was in the minority. Beside the door was a box, like a speaker’s lectern, with a handsome young barker extolling the virtues of the establishment to passersby. On the front of his box was a list of prices for drinks and other services offered within.

  Anna stopped in front of the barker. He was a lovely creature with wavy hair the color of old honey and a smile full of fun and fine orthodonture. “Hello, beautiful,” he said cheerfully. “Please tell me you are going to add a touch of class to our humble establishment tonight.”

  “I am,” Anna said. “How much do I pay you for the privilege?”

  He laid his hand over his heart and looked stricken. “Darlin’, do I look like a man who extorts money from lovely ladies? For you, free.” Then he added conspiratorially, “There’s a two-drink minimum, ten bucks a drink. Don’t waste it ordering water.”

  “I won’t,” Anna assured him.

  He winked and said, “Our girls won’t be able to take their eyes off you.”

  “That’s the idea.” Anna winked back. It was good to be a lesbian for the evening. Had she thought of it, she would have played that aspect up, though she really couldn’t think of how. Butch haircuts and men’s clothes were a bit out of fashion. Sedans and children in soccer camp were closer to the mark. Then again, that might merely be the age group of Anna’s girlfriends.

  These thoughts trailing as she stepped out of the night into the greater darkness of LIVE GIRLS LIVE, it occurred to her that a life spent in the woods wearing a duller shade of green than Robin’s merry men was not particularly good training for what was new and happening in the rest of the world.

  The club would have had to work hard to be any seedier. From the facades of the higher-end pole-dancing establishments, Anna guessed they had some of the amenities: carpet, mood lighting, and tables with matching chairs. Not the LGL. The room she’d stepped into was maybe twenty by forty feet and had been painted black—floors, walls, ceiling, stage, all flat black. Before this stunning transformation into nothing, it had been pinkish beige. Where the paint was peeling or had been scraped from the plaster walls by chair backs or bored customers, the previous incarnation showed through like bits of decaying flesh through a shredded burka.

  Along the left-hand wall was a bar, also painted black. Jordan was behind it, his face a smudge in the gloom, tying a black apron over his clothes. There were no bar stools, and the bar itself was short and narrow and looked to be constructed of plywood.

  To the left, six feet from the bar, creating a bottleneck in the middle of the long room, was the stage, also flat black, also built of plywood or something as cheap and uninteresting. Two silver poles were the only setting, one near either end of the three-and-a-half-foot-high, six-by-fifteen-foot rectangle. There were no entrances, no fly space, and no curtains. Just the box and the poles and two performers involved in the “live sex acts” part of the evening.

  An athletic young man, dressed in leather cuffs and skintight black pants, had his feet and hands on the floor, face to the ceiling, creating a bench of his midsection. Astraddle the bench, in a tiny blue-and-white pleated skirt, like a much abbreviated Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform, bare from the waist up, a woman in her late teens or early twenties bounced as if she were engaged in sex with the bench. Her thighs were taking the brunt of the action so she wouldn’t drop her weight—which was not inconsiderable—on her fellow actor. The woman had a baby face as empty of emotion as a badly made doll’s. The man looked so bored, had Anna ever wondered where the phrase “the old bump and grind” came from, she did no longer. Given the stunning lack of enthusiasm with which they went through the charade, she was unsure whether these live sex acts would indeed prove more appealing than dead sex acts. Or if there was even a difference in the LGL.

  Relief swept through her, so sudden and unexpected it was unsettling, and she thanked any gods still standing that Paul wasn’t with her. She found the proceedings sad and distasteful. Paul would have found the dehumanization of the girl and her bench almost intolerably painful.

  On her end of the stage, the furniture in the sitting area consisted of thirty-inch wooden cubes for tables, each with a few molded black plastic patio-type chairs kneeing up to them. There were five of these clumps. Two were occupied by college-age men with too many beers on the table and too many under their belts. A third was the temporary home of a balding middle-aged man as intent on the simulated sex act as the boys were on their beers. His clothes were the ubiquitous khaki pants and polo shirt. His stomach rested on his splayed thighs, his crossed arms on his stomach. The flesh of his face, dragged down by fast food and disappointment, was formed into an expression Anna could only describe as equal parts misery, ecstasy, and guilt.

  No, she corrected herself with a second look, not ecstasy, avidity.

  Sitting down at the empty table farthest from the bar, Anna adjusted her mask and
set about getting to know Jordan.

  Looking disgusted, he was wiping down the bar with a rag, scrubbing industriously at places his predecessor had left sticky. When he finished, he folded the rag into a neat square, then began picking up and fiddling with things that were invisible to Anna. As she watched, and her eyes adjusted, she realized he was gathering up black cocktail napkins and arranging them in neat fans. That done, he looked up, noticed the newcomer, and came out from behind the bar, moving toward her corner, his hands rubbing one another in the black of his apron.

  For an instant, Anna thought he’d recognized her. Then she noticed the paucity of waitresses. He stopped by her table and said, “Two-drink minimum, drinks are ten dollars each.”

  “I’ll take a Coke,” Anna replied in a voice an octave lower than she customarily used. Either it fooled Jordan or he didn’t care who she was or what she did on her time off.

  “It’s still ten dollars,” he said.

  “That’ll be fine.”

  Jordan turned, continuing to rub his hands in a tortured homage to Pontius Pilate. Back behind the bar, he stooped; a light paled his face, then winked out, and he rose with a bottle of Pepsi in his hand. He returned to her table, put down a black napkin, set the Pepsi carefully in the middle of it, and said, “You need to pay for the drinks up front.”

  Anna pulled a money clip with several twenties from her pocket and peeled one off, plus a couple of ones for his tip. Ten percent. Usually, Anna overtipped. To work her way through college, she’d waited tables, and she believed if one couldn’t afford a tip, one couldn’t afford to eat out. Whatever Jordan was into, she suspected it wasn’t something she wanted to help bankroll, but stiffing him would have called too much attention to her. Servers noticed people who stiffed them.

  Pocketing the tip and closing his fist around the twenty, he went back to the bar, put the money under the counter, and began scrubbing the bar again, though neither drink nor food had touched it in the interim. Not once did he look at the stage.

  The bench man slid from beneath the schoolgirl. Both clumped down stairs on the far side of the stage, wove their way between more box tables, and disappeared in the back. They were replaced by a handsome black woman in her midthirties wearing a high school marching band outfit—sans pants—and high-heeled red gladiator sandals. She took the stage as if she meant to do something with it and nodded at Jordan, who turned his back and put a CD in a portable player.

  “House of the Rising Sun.”

  Anna couldn’t remember ever walking through the entertainment district of any city in America where she didn’t hear that song leaking out of at least one barroom.

  After a few gyrations the band uniform came off with a ripping of Velcro. Jordan showed no interest in anything but compulsively cleaning his small corner of this dirty world, an activity Anna wouldn’t have expected of him, given the way he smelled and looked in his free time. It reminded her of the clean lilac scent of his little black dog. Perhaps he’d learned to compartmentalize his filth in order to allow himself to live with it.

  Compartmentalization was even better than denial. It was how the Baptist preachers who stopped at pullouts on the Natchez Trace to have anonymous sex with other men on the way home from church to family were able to live with themselves, the way brokers and bankers could defraud the public and continue to consider themselves righteous members of the community. People did it all the time. One compartment was not allowed to touch the other. Internal peace was maintained. To a point.

  The woman on the stage had worked through bra and panties and was down to G-string and pasties. The boys with the beers were taking notice, and their excitement and noise level had increased accordingly. The balding man in khaki was intermittently staring and then closing his eyes as if the intensity of the sight were too much to take in for any length of time.

  Jordan disappeared into the back for a few minutes, carrying bottles to tables beyond the stage. Everything served, Anna noticed, was in the original bottles: one-shot airplane-sized bottles of hard liquor, one-glass bottles of cheap wine, Pepsi, bottled water. Not even twisting the tops off, Jordan set them on his endless supply of black napkins. The bald man had a plastic glass with ice in it for his tiny bottle of bourbon. He must have requested it to make this night even more special.

  A shape loomed from the darkness behind Anna and became corporeal in the plastic chair at her elbow.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  Anna adjusted her mask so she could see. Being flamboyantly incognito had its drawbacks. A woman of about her age, maybe a little older, early fifties, with the corded arms and seamed face of someone who did hard manual labor for a living, sat smiling at her with crooked teeth and a lascivious gleam in her eye.

  “Hey,” she said. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Betty.” Anna couldn’t resist the rakishness of the smile and the hard-knuckled, calloused hand. Rakishness, in a blackout room full of sad addictions, was positively refreshing. Naughtiness: the kind of misbehavior that still retained humor and fun.

  “Anna,” Anna said, taking the proffered hand. It crossed her mind to give a fake name in case Betty spoke of her to Jordan, but she didn’t. If she did blow her cover, it wouldn’t be a disaster. Indeed, it might be good for Jordan to know there were other eyes than those of the snake loa watching him.

  Betty crunched Anna’s knuckles in a steely grip. “I give,” Anna said easily. “You’re the strongest.”

  Betty looked nonplussed for a moment, then laughed, a happy cackle. “Believe it or not, that wasn’t intentional. I work over at the docks. It’s my job to crate and uncrate perishables depending on if they’re coming or going. Bad news, good news: I got arthritis starting up in my knuckles, but there isn’t a pickle jar in America I can’t open.”

  The dancer left the stage, moving remarkably gracefully on the six-inch heels, and hip-chucked her way from table to table. The college boys laughed and flirted, and she laughed and flirted back until they had tucked a handful of bills in the string of her thong; then she undulated to the bald bourbon drinker’s table and gyrated while he, looking even more miserable than he had earlier, tucked a twenty into her G-string, the backs of his fingers lingering against the skin of her belly till she wormed away.

  “That’s Tanya,” Betty told Anna, gesturing at the dancer with the neck of her Budweiser. “She is too good for this dump. Way too good. You’d think Larry’s or Rick’s would snatch her up.”

  “Maybe she’s the wrong color,” Anna ventured just to see what happened.

  “Could be. She’s my girlfriend.”

  “Congratulations,” Anna said. “I’d like to meet her.”

  “Oh, she doesn’t know she’s my girlfriend. Not yet,” Betty said. “Right now she just thinks I’m a fan, but I’m growing on her. Like Paul Newman in that old movie? I grow on people.”

  She was growing on Anna. There was something so straightforward and good-humored about her that Betty felt like the only piece of genuine earth in the assorted filths of the club. Tanya wriggled her way past the long arms of the college tables toward where Anna and Betty sat.

  “Shoot,” Anna said. “All I’ve got is a twenty.”

  “Give it to her. You look like you’ve got dough,” Betty said.

  “Easy for you to say,” Anna grumbled. “You get union wages.”

  As she dug out her money clip again, she felt Betty’s hand trace lightly over her right buttock.

  “Hah!” the dock worker crowed. “Calvin Kleins. Fork it over. My girl works hard for her money.”

  “And here I thought you just liked me,” Anna said and peeled off yet another twenty.

  “Nope. I’m a one-woman woman,” Betty said. She snatched up Anna’s twenty, added one of her own, and tucked it into Tanya’s G-string. “You doing okay, baby. Any of these goons bothering you?”

  “They wouldn’t dare,” Tanya said.

  Betty laughed. “That’s my girl!” The dancer gave her a bump on the should
er with her hip and left to work the far side of the room. “Tanya tells customers she’s paying her way through college on the pole, but she isn’t. Tanya’s got a son in college, Tulane. She strips because she digs it.”

  “Cool,” Anna said, to prove she was listening. “What do you know about the bartender?”

  Betty slammed her beer down on the black cube that served as their table and stared balefully at Anna. “Okay. You can tell me you’re straight. I can live with that. But you tell me you’re straight and interested in that little peckerwood and I’ll go sit with bald boy over there.”

  “My interest is purely malicious,” Anna assured her.

  “That’s all right, then,” Betty said.

  “Why do you call him a peckerwood?” Anna asked curiously.

  “If I tell you, will you take off that ridiculous mask?”

  “What the hell,” Anna said. The thing kept slipping down her nose and blocking her vision anyway. She pulled it back, threaded her braid out through the elastic band, and laid the mask on the cube.

  Betty looked at her, squinting a little in the odd dim yet glaring lighting design of house and stage. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” she pronounced at last. “For an old broad, you’re a stunner.”

  “Thank you,” Anna said dryly and took a swallow of her Pepsi. “Peckerwood?” she nudged. The bench rider was back. She wore the same schoolgirl mini but had added a man’s tie for some reason. As she worked the pole, Anna’s attention was caught by the girl’s middle and her breasts.

  When Betty raised her eyebrows at Anna’s sudden interest in the stripper, Anna said, “I’d bet a month’s salary that child is pregnant.”