by Varian Wolf
He rolled down the window to show me he it was him, as if I hadn’t guessed. No one else who drives a car like that would stop to say ‘hey’ to a thug like me.
“Inconspicuous ride,” I said, leaning in through the window. I didn’t know they sold these in Chatnadooga.”
“Chattanooga. It is gently used. Are you getting in?”
“Beam me up.”
The door opened up and closed down.
He took in my new appearance.
“Jungle camouflage?”
“Warm weather clothes.”
“You did not purchase those at the shopping center.”
“There’s a Jeager’s across the road.”
He touched my hair, ran his fingers lightly over the nice, neat rows. A little smile came to his eyes, then infected his mouth.
Then we pulled away. He didn’t even complain about the burger being in his new spaceship.
We spent one more day in a hotel in Mississippi, this time a respectable one, which maybe I didn’t feel as at home in, but the SLR sure did. I sat guard again, this time with only the .40 Sig Sauer. The shotgun was too conspicuous to bring inside. I didn’t see any suspicious pussies, I watched a good bit of a Rocky Balboa marathon on cable, and I didn’t feel guilty when I stole a kiss from my inert vampire.
We hit the highway for the final leg of the trip to New Orleans. I didn’t sleep in the car this time. The landscape had gone from the dramatic inclines and declines, red rock faces, and curvy roadways of the mountains, to low, rolling, and then finally smooth bottomlands. Trees had gotten long and gangly in the limbs, grass had gotten high, and everything was lush and green and wet. I smelled the foreign aromas of pollen, marsh, and earth. I was truly amazed when I had to turn on the air conditioning to stave off the seeping balm of the South.
About ten o’clock, a smooth roar took over where the growl of asphalt had once been. We were on a bridge. A vast, dark expanse stretched out to either side of us, and ahead of us, nearing slowly, was a line of lights that stretched almost the breadth of our view. The glow of a great city was in the sky, with none of the urban sprawl characteristic of cities like Detroit to block our view.
“New Orleans?”
“Yes.”
“Is this the ocean?”
“It is Lake Pontchartrain.”
I watched the line of lights as it increased in brilliance as we drew near, reflecting in the water at its feet.
“This is a damn long bridge.”
Well it was.
“An open city,” I mused as the leviathan of lights drew nearer and I could begin to make out individual man-made structures.
“An open city,” Miguel echoed in agreement.
“Kind of like a vampire vacation spot.”
“If you will.”
“Vampire Disneyland.”
“Not as much.”
“I wonder, can you buy deep fried blood here? This is the south.”
Miguel did not answer. He had apparently decided not to grace this line of thinking with any further response.
After several minutes, longer than I had ever spent on a bridge in my life –cumulative, we reached the terrestrial –rather, asphaltum, boundaries of fair New Orleans, the gem of the South, whose sprawl loomed huge beyond the lake.
To my callow eyes, she didn’t look all that different than that other city on the water from which I had just fled. She was big and dark like Detroit, with a million twinkling eyes and big jets roaring over her and a lake lapping at her flanks. It was natural for me to look upon her and see only what I already knew, but I hadn’t yet strolled her nostalgic streets. I hadn’t healed beneath the shade of her moss-draped live oaks, paddled in her reptile-laden bayous, or heard her wise voice in the music of her gregarious people.
I had not yet seen her gaping wounds either, but I would.
The McLaren drew towards her, sleek and certain, drawn to her as immutably as the rest of the highway traffic, until at last we passed over the last of august Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans’ arms gathered to embrace us.
It was past midnight, but, even as we abandoned the busy interstate that coiled through the city like a python, the traffic was substantial. People drove fast, as they tend to in congested areas where the chances of collision are already at their highest.
We passed many hotels in our progression through the city’s concrete and steel flesh. I wondered where Miguel was taking us.
“Somewhere particular in mind?” I asked.
“We go to the old city. It is the best place to be if you are a vampire.”
We turned and turned and turned again, winding deeper in, and the city enfolded us in its arms. New Orleans started to look like New Orleans you hear about. Pavement gave way to brick in places. The buildings shrank from the sterile, imposing structures of this century to two and three-story edifices of a time gone. We passed an impressive cathedral-style church made of stone, a manicured park guarded by the arching branches of live oaks and glowing beneath the street lamps, and other imposing stone and brick buildings. Elaborate wrought ironwork-graced facades of elegant townhouses, with many-paned windows and porches dripping with potted tropical plants.
Every detail of every building proclaimed its varied heritage, screamed its rootstock in a time long departed. The city did not look American. Maybe it was European, or like some other place I had never been. I did not know it then, but I was seeing layers upon layers of history. The architecture was a schizophrenic conglomeration of the souls of those who had built it, along the way, piece by piece, the Spanish, French, Haitian, German, and Swiss. Later I would learn of how they built and rebuilt, upon virgin ground, inhospitable swampland, rubble, ashes, and upon the insatiable perseverance of a port society, fed by the riches of the Mississippi and the souls of her people. Here, buried deep beneath the coils of the leviathan of the industrial twenty-first century, was a jewel of the past, a place that still echoed the song of the city that used to be. Her charm was bewitching, and even I, jaded as I was, embittered and itinerant of spirit as I was, was destined to fall under her spell.
I don’t know if Miguel had a particular place in mind to stay, or if he just drove around until he found an appealing location, but within an hour of entering the city, we had parallel parked across the street from a large, elegant house on Royal Street. It was three stories with white siding, wine-red shutters, an inviting front porch bound by columns and a wooden railing, and an open second-story balcony. It was on a corner property, with a tall wall separating it from the perpendicular street. A lush stand of tropical-looking growth and banana trees peaked over the fence, hinting of an exclusive courtyard garden within.
Miguel opened his window halfway.
The Banana Grove, I read from the sign at its front. A larger number of cars were parked on the street in front of this house than any of the others on the street, and it was the best-maintained, excluding the big blue tarp, emblazoned with “FEMA”, draped over part of the roof. Some of the other houses looked pretty rough around the edges, with beat-up paint, tired roofs, and sinking stoops. Some of them looked uninhabited.
“That a motel?”
“A bed and breakfast.”
“Sounds fishy.”
“It’s charming.”
“Hey, check out the creepy guy sweeping the sidewalk.”
I pointed. He was rail-thin and ashen in both hair and face. He wore overalls with the suspenders hanging down to his knees, shoes about as old as the city, and a ball cap that read “Tulane.” He looked like a scarecrow come only very slightly to life. He was sweeping the sidewalk at a glacial pace, an inch at a time, with an ancient broom worn practically to the handle like he’d been using the same one for twenty years. Back…forth…back…forth…The activity seemed to occupy all of his attention.
“Is that an urn he’s holding? Like a dead person urn?”
Miguel sat ignoring me and observing the house, the quiet street, and the mostly darkened nearby houses.
“Anyone gonna be awake in there?” I asked, looking at the dashboard clock.
“There are people moving about on the first floor,” he answered.
“Is that a vampire thing? Knowing that?”
He nodded.
“Looks like there’s only one way in. Could be reasonably defensible.”
“It is not a poor choice for the purpose, but the residents are a greater boon than their domicile.”
“How so?”
“They will protect us against minimal hazards, suspicious activity and so forth.”
“How do you know that?”
“It is wise to befriend the locals proximate to one’s place of rest, for if one does, they will often afford one favor beyond courtesy.”
“Kinda like you did with me.”
“Erudite, no?”
“How you gonna slither into their trust?”
“The opportunity will present itself.”
We headed for the steps. The humid air swam around us like a hot, thick soup. Some unidentified sweet scent filled my newly cleared sinuses. I didn’t know it was the smell of the South.
Miguel raised his hand to knock.
“Peaceful little street,” I yawned, looking about.
At that moment, Miguel turned to face that peaceful street in a state of alertness that I only noticed because I was getting used to him. The peace and quiet of the night were shattered by the sudden emergence of a very large, very rotund, and very naked man from the house across the street from the Banana Grove, nearest our car.
The man catapulted down the stairs, leaving the front door reeling behind him, and skidded lightly off of the front bumper of the SLR into the center of the street where he launched into a series of inebriated pirouettes. His head was covered by curly black hair, as was much of the rest of his ample flesh, but not enough to completely conceal his madly flapping penis, which cavorted inharmoniously with his every move.
When Big Baryshnikov had finally twirled himself out of his equilibrium and onto his rump on the pavement, he reached his hands to the sky and screamed to the heavens.
“STELLA!!!”
A dog immediately started to bark somewhere down the street.
“STELLA!!!”
On the second story balcony of another house, a window opened and a woman in her nightshift poked her head out, screaming obscenities at the marauding sasquatch.
“STELLA!!!”
The lady threw a pot, which crashed onto the roof of a car parked directly beneath her, spilling earthenware shards and Boston fern in all directions.
“STELLASTELLASTELLA!!!”
Three more lovelorn cries and lights were coming on all up and down the street. Big Buck Baryshnikov proceeded as though no one, especially not his enigmatic Stella, heard his cries, even though the neighbors were all having conniptions and every canine in Marigny was trying to revive the Baha Men’s one rowdy hit.
Then, Miguel turned again to the Grove’s door, just before it burst open.
Out from the brightly lit corridor shot a young man, hard of body and fair of countenance. He made no notice of Miguel and me as he barreled past us. Perhaps his name was Stella.
The twentyish young man wore no clothing except a brilliant floral man-skirt and a pair of yellow flip-flops –one of which he promptly lost on the stair, to leave the other snapping loudly with each rapid stride. A plastic barber’s frock hung from his neck across his otherwise bare chest, and he wielded in his hand, quite menacingly, a pair of steel barber’s sheers. In his wake, the skirted man left a cloud of freshly clipped sandy-brown hair and the unmistakable toxic cinnamon odor of Goldschlager.
Bounding Bigfoot must have been especially attuned to the sound of a lone, angry flip-flop, for he turned with a start and, upon seeing the approaching Demon Barber of Royal Street, struggled to his feet and ran full tilt down the road, manhood waving in the breeze.
People up and down the street started to cheer and clap for the man who sent their histrionic antagonist a-runnin’.
Two more men came to the doorway, a tall, heavy brother in a blue bathrobe with a martini in his hand, and a more slender, more dressed man a little taller than myself. Both had neatly trimmed beards, the former with dark hair and the latter with auburn.
The slender man called after the mad barber, “Oh, honey, let him be! He’ll quit on his own!”
“He’s really serious this time,” commented the larger man, whose soft, peaceable voice seemed an ill match for a man of his girth.
“And with those scissors,” worried the other. “I’d better go after him –or he’ll be sleeping behind bars tonight.”
With that, the smaller man headed off down the street on the trail of the madness.
“You’ll never catch Hector,” the big man called behind him, leaning against one of the architectural pillars.
By now the pursuant pair was a block away and still going. The woman on the balcony cheered skirt-man on, her language still laced with colorful metaphors. Other people had appeared from their various domiciles to concur.
“Hector’s a mad dog,” said the big man over his shoulder to us as he nursed his martini. “We try to keep him on a leash, but sometimes he just lets it all loose, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Him? What about Shouting Sasquatch?” I jabbed a thumb
“Stanley?” asked the jovial man, looking at me for the first time. “Oh, he used to be an actor. He swears Marlon Brando stole a role from him that would have made him famous instead of Brando. He’s even got an Oscar on his mantel. Nobody’s really sure where he got it. But he’s harmless. He usually goes back to bed eventually.”
From the reactions of practically everyone else on the street, I gathered that “eventually” was usually quite a long time.
There was a frantic shriek from one of the anti-dynamic duo, who had been playing ring-around-the-lamppost at the next street corner. Then, they headed down a side street, the third man some ways behind.
Then the big man finally saw Miguel for the first time.
“Hello, Desperado,” he said, looking up and down approvingly. “Take what you want; the door’s open. I won’t try to stop you.”
“We are hoping for a room,” Miguel said.
“Yours or mine?” he laughed and then added in answer to whatever expression was on my face. “Just kidding. I wouldn’t dream of stealing your man, honey,” he added with a wise smirk. “But I might dream of him stealing me.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Miguel answered.
“Ooh, and you’re a feisty one! Of course we’ve got a room for you. That is, if you think you can stand the occasional outburst from our resident thespian.”
“I do not wake easily,” Miguel answered.
“And I don’t sleep much,” I added, glaring at my vampire.
“We will not be in much at night anyway.”
“All right, I got you,” the big gay Santa answered with a wink. “We don’t trust anybody who doesn’t sleep past noon around here. We figure they’re spies for the other side.”
“I promise to sleep past noon every night that I manage to return before dawn.”
Miguel matched Gay Santa’s wink.
“Then let those good times roll,” the other replied, making an upwardly spiraling motion with his martini, engaging the two olives within in a vortex, “My name’s Jonathon.”
“Manuel Mendosa,” Miguel said, and the two clasped hands. He opened his mouth to introduce me, but I preempted him.
“Annie. Name’s Annie.”
I did not offer Jonathon my hand.
“Say, is that your ride out there?”
He gestured with his glass toward the spaceship.
“It is,” Miguel answered.
“What a car! Hey, I wouldn’t park it there if I were you. You got lucky tonight, but Stanley is likely to squash it one of these nights if you leave it between his door and the street. Oh, yeah, and I wouldn’t park
it under Esmeralda’s balcony either.”
He gestured to the house next to Stanley’s, cattycorner to where we were standing. You saw what she does when she gets her panties twisted. Sometimes she throws whole chairs over the railing.”
“Where do you suggest I park it?”
“Park it in front of the Old Man’s house,” he said, gesturing to the house next door where the scarecrow had been sweeping. He was gone now. “We don’t know his name, but he’s really quiet and keeps the sidewalk really clean. And there’s usually a spot open there because he doesn’t own a car. Oh,” he added, remembering he had not completed the introductions, “You saw my housemates, Lucas and Hector. Hector’s the one on the rampage, and Lucas’s the one trying to stop him,” he said brightly.
“I’m seeing them again,” said Miguel, looking down the street –in the opposite direction from where the men had run.
Jonathon leaned around the column, peering down the street.
“Are they out there?”
Sure enough, a moment later, they appeared. Lucas supporting Hector with an arm over the shoulder, consoling him as though he was a disgruntled child, and Stanley following a little behind, skipping and frolicking back to his house and singing something blissfully to himself. Skipping does interesting things to unfettered blubber.
Lucas was holding the scissors in his free hand.
“You must have run all the way around the block!” Jonathon called.
“All the way,” Lucas gasped as they approached the stairs, “There was a patrol car over on Chartres, and I told our boy that he’d better cool it if he didn’t want to take a ride, and he came to his senses. The cop didn’t see Stanley, thank God.”
“But he keeps yelling ‘Stella’,” Hector complained drunkenly.
“And he can yell it as much as he wants,” Lucas continued consolingly, rotating Hector’s windblown frock to face front, “because we don’t want to end up in the big house because we trimmed more than just hair with our scissors. I admit old Stanley is crying out loud for a new do, but we’ll leave that case of bushwhacking to a salon. We don’t want to have a run-in with the mean men in uniform, do we?”