by Blake, J
Here were exhibits both living and preserved. Each in its own cage were a snapping turtle with two heads, a bulldog bitch with only one eye and solid bone and fur where the other should have been, a three-legged duck, a rattlesnake with two tails and each tail with its own set of rattles, an albino horny toad white as milk. There was also a pair of long benches on which stood rows of glass containers, some no bigger than a canning jar, some the size of a pony keg, and each held some human body part preserved in whiskey, the smell of which was strong in the tent. Several of the jars contained eyeballs. John found himself entranced by a jar holding a single eye as light-blue as summer sky. And then Edward was beside him and looking at the eye too and whispering, “That’s just exactly the color of Maggie’s.” John looked at him and Edward’s brow knit and he said, “What?” and John was surprised to realize he was glaring at his brother. He shrugged and looked away.
“That there’s the eye of a girl stabbed to death by parties unknown,” somebody behind them said and they turned to see the derbied man who had been attending the tent door. “That’s what the feller said who sold it to me. Feller had no idear what happened to her other eye. Did you boys know that a person’s eye will hold a picture of the last thing it sees before death? It’s a true fact. You look real close into that eye and you might can see the face of the man what kilt her. Can be hard to see it, but it’s there, all right. Looked in there real hard myself and if my own eyes aint tricking me I do believe the feller had a full beard and wore a muleskinner hat. Hard to see clearly though, so I figure she mighta had her eyes pret near half-closed while she was dying.”
Edward snorted in derision and moved on to look at a pair of green eyes in another jar and the derbied man shrugged and followed after, saying that those belonged to a fine New Orleans lady who’d drowned herself in the Mississippi when she learned her beau, even as he was en route to her on a steamer, had been killed when a boiler exploded. John lingered at the blue eye and felt a great urge to bend down and peer closely into it. But he was as much afraid of what he might see there as he was loathe to have Edward laugh at him for a fool, and so he went instead to look with his brother at a pair of eyes nearly blood-red with black pupils so wide only the barest rim of brown iris showed. The derbied man said they were of a convicted murderer who’d gone to the gallows swearing he was innocent.
They came to a line of larger jars containing little babies. One wasn’t fully formed and had webbing between its tiny fingers and a lump of flesh between its legs and it was hard to say whether it would have been a boy or a girl. Another was a normal-looking baby boy but for the ragged hole in its belly and back. The derbied man said the child was about ready to be born when his daddy who was a hat-maker went crazy one day and shot his wife twice, once in the head, once in the belly, the second shot naturally killing the baby too.
There were containers with fingers and ears and tongues, some with male appendages. One jar contained a foot which the derbied man said he bought from a fellow in the north country. The man had taken an arrow just above the ankle and the wound got infected so bad his only choice was to die or cut off the lower half of his leg, which he did. “He thought to give that foot a decent Christian burial,” the derbied man said, “but he figured if he did that he’d really and truly have one foot in the grave, and it give him the chills to think on it. But he didn’t want to go around with the foot in his saddle wallet, either, knowing that soon’s as the thaw came it would go to rot. I’m proud to say I give him a good solution to his problem. I told him it’s be a lot better fate for that foot to travel around in my wagon. He sold it to me in a wink when I told him that so long as that foot stays in that jar of whiskey, he’ll always have one foot out of the grave, even after the rest a him’s dead and buried.” The man laughed with his head back and mouth wide, exposing his mostly broken black-and-yellow teeth.
They came out of the tent in time to hear the call for final entries in the shooting contest. Standing shots at a plank target set againt a tree at a distance of fifty yards for the prize of a steer. In addition to more than a dozen of the locals, several of the keelboaters had signed up to shoot. At Edward’s insistence John joined the competition too. He won the shoot handily and then sold the steer at bargain price to the first man to make him an offer.
16
They glided through the pass and into the open water of Lake Borgne under a bright morning sun. Pelicans crowned yellow and white banked and plunged into shimmering schools of mullet and resurfaced with their baggy mandibles pulsing with fish. The crewmen poled easily across the lake and then through a connection of canals, and on an early Sunday afternoon marked by brilliant blue sky and a scattering of high clouds as white as ginned cotton they entered the Mississippi.
It was the brothers’ first look at the great river the boatmen called the Old Man. They stared dumbly at its immensity. Craft of every description plied the wide reach of its muddy surface. Steamboats the size of city buildings poured enormous plumes of black smoke from their stacks as their huge wheels churned the water white. There were tall-masted schooners and handsome sloops and sleek lighters and old flatboats and makeshift rafts and here and there a skiff hardly big enough to hold a pair of boys.
The crew laid shoulder to the poles to advance the boat against the current. As they rounded a bend the river traffic grew even more congested and the Vieux Carré hove into view. Whistles shrilled and bells jangled and horns blew long and hoarsely. They poled toward the cargo docks beyond the Place d’Armes, the weathered drill field marking the heart of the Old Quarter. The boat swayed in the wake of a passing sternheeler and every blast of the big boat’s horns rippled up the brothers’ spines. Music and shouting and laughter carried out from the Quarter. The air was enlaced with a mix of exotic smells.
“Take a good breath there, lads,” a redhaired boatman named Keeler said as they leaned hard on their poles and paced toward the stern. His big chest broadened as he inhaled long and deep. “Can ye smell it? I don’t mean the cookpot stuff, but what’s just under it. A bit like warm buttered shrimp set amongst fresh roses. That’s Narlens pussy on the air, boys. Dixie City gash. The finest on God’s good earth.”
They worked the boat into the cargo moorings at Tchoupitoulas Street and there they tied up. The brothers helped to unload the vessel and then walked their horses over to a livery across the street where they put up the animals and stored their outfits and arms except for their bootknives and the snaphandle which Edward kept in his pocket. They stripped to the waist and washed up at a pump and took their coats from their bedrolls and were brushing them with damp cloths when Keeler strode up and said, “Step lively, lads. It’s a fine frolic we’ll have, aye!” He had put on a clean shirt and river jacket and slicked down his hair. With him was a lean and looselimbed mate named Allenbeck.
They intended to go directly to a fine Old Quarter bordello of Keeler’s highest recommendation, a house well-stocked with prime high-yellow whores, but Allenbeck insisted they stop in at a tavern for a quick nip to fortify themselves for the walk to the Quarter and the rest of them said why not.
Before they got halfway down Tchoupitoulas Street they had been in four different honky-tonks and two fights. The first fight started when Allenbeck began crowing that he was kin to the snapping turtle and weaned by a momma wolf and could out-fight, out-fuck, out-dance and out-drink any man on two legs on either side of the Mississippi. A barrel-shaped muleskinner stepped up and said, “Oh yeah?” and knocked out a front tooth with the first punch. Allenbeck jumped up and let a high-pitched battle cry and in an instant they were rolling and grappling on the floor and the drover sank his teeth into Allenbeck’s shoulder and Allenbeck was clawing for his eyes to try to gouge them out and Keeler said it was time to move on and hammered the drover on the head with a heavy beer mug in order to dislodge him from Allenbeck’s shoulder. They grabbed Allenbeck off the floor and the four of them scrambled out of there. The next fight was between Keeler and a steamboat
stoker, and a Keeler punch sent the stoker backpedaling through the door of a gaming room to crash into and overturn a poker table laden with money. So clamorous was the ensuing donnybrook that it drew spectators and participants from a block away. The brothers and the boatmen slipped away through a side exit and ducked into a tavern two doors down and laughed heartily over steins of beer and glasses of Monongahela rye as the smash and roar of the fight echoed outside in the street.
The sun was red and low when they finally strolled into the teeming Quarter and past a pair of city constables who gave them a wary eye. The night air was piquant with cayenne and perfume, woven with the undersmells of sweat and swamp rot. An empty pillory stood before the Cabildo on Chartres Street and Keeler said no white man had stood in it in the last twenty years but niggers still sometimes found themselves pinioned in it by their hands and neck with a sign on their backs to tell the passing world the nature of their crime. While Keeler bought a fresh bottle of rye in a tavern, Edward stepped into an arms shoppe and purchased a pouch of .44 balls and attached it to his belt.
Although the city had by now been American for more than forty years, the Quarter’s architecture remained chiefly Spanish and its character distinctly French. The smooth locutions of French idiom entwined everywhere with the harder growl of English, the rasp and hiss of Spanish, the grunts and gutturals of tongues so alien they seemed not of this world. “It’s the thing I hate about this town,” Allenbeck said. “All these fucken foreigners and their fucken babble.” To the brothers the city was in many ways reminiscent of Pensacola, only bigger and louder and more Negroid.
The house to which Keeler led them was on Orleans Street. As they drew near it they heard a frenzied pounding of primitive drums and spied a mass of people gathered in a large open area a little farther along on the other side of the street. “Congo Square,” Keeler said. “The city lets the niggers get together here every Sunday and do their voodoo jigs from back in Africa. Used to be they had to do it in secret, but the dancing gets them all worked up, don’t you know, and on dance nights they’d end up fighting and fucking in public all over town. Easier to keep them in control if they’re all in one place.”
The brothers wanted to have a look, so the four of them crossed the street and shouldered their way to the front of the crowd and only narrowly avoided fights with those who objected to their pushing. The crowd was chiefly male, though some of the better-dressed men had women on their arms. There were dozens of dancers in the center of the square, men and women both, whirling and jumping to the beat of the drums, falling to their knees and leaping up again and flailing wildly, chanting in unintelligible tongues, eyes wide, teeth bared. Spectators swayed to the drumbeat and directed each other’s attention to this dancer or that one.
“Hey boys, lookit there,” Allenbeck said, nodding toward a woman the color of raw honey dancing nearby between two muscular barechested men as black as coal and pouring sweat. The woman was statuesquely beautiful, tall and narrow-waisted, with full breasts and rounded hips and rump. She was obviously naked under a thin white shift that clung wetly to her skin, to her long thighs and cloven swell of buttocks and nipples like chunks of coal. Edward’s pulse quickened as he watched the woman drop to her knees with her head thrown back and eyes closed and long hair tossing. She spread her legs wide and her hips were thrusting with wild urgency to the tempo of the drums. She ran her hands up her gleaming thighs and the hem of the shift rode to her hips and she slipped a hand under the bunched dress and stroked herself hard and her lips drew back on her parted teeth and her other hand went to her breast and pinched the jutting nipple. One of the dancing men positioned himself directly before her with his hips swaying and she put a hand to his manhood bulging starkly in his tight pants and he snatched her to her feet and dug his long fingers into her buttocks and pulled her tightly against him and they writhed loin to loin and the onlookers whistled and howled.
Edward could not distinguish between the pounding of the drums and the beat of his own blood. His throat felt tight, his genitals heavy and swollen. He turned to Keeler and said, “Let’s get in that house.” Even his tongue felt thickened. Keeler laughed and said, “I’m right ready meself, lad.” John was grinning like a dog, his eyes aglitter.
The crowd had deepened around them and as they shoved their way out of it Allenbeck bumped hard against some hardcase and there was a brief exchange of blows. Then they were across the street and down the block and in the parlor of Miss Melanie’s House of Languor.
Minutes later Edward was in a small dimly lighted room with a young quadroon girl of spectacular physique whose lips were pulled into a permanently sardonic smile by the white scar across the right side of her mouth. She fixed a look on his mutilated ear for a moment but made no remark on it. She slipped off her chemise and stood naked before him on smooth long legs, her breasts full and dark-nippled. His trousers had not yet cleared his knees when his ejaculate spurted across three feet of space and spattered her mocha belly. The startled girl burst into laughter and said, “Hooo! You the readiest boy I ever did see!”
It was house policy that once a man delivered his load he had received due service, and if he wanted another go he had to pay again. Edward dug the money from his belt purse and handed it to the smiling girl and she relayed it to the floorwoman patrolling the hall. She then helped him off with his boots and pants and drew him into bed and gently pushed him on his back and mounted him. He started to protest that this was no way for a man to fuck but she bent forward and put a nipple to his mouth and began slowly rotating her hips and Edward ceased all complaint. Two glorious minutes later he came like a trace chain was being yanked through his cock. The girl held him close and stroked his hair and called him a sweet baby.
Suddenly there came a thunderous boom that rattled the window shutters and Edward bolted upright. The girl giggled and pulled him back to her breast and said he surely was new to New Orleans if he didn’t know that was the curfew cannon that fired every night as the order for slaves to get home.
17
A half-hour later they were back on the street and passing the bottle of Nongela among them and telling each other about the wonderful girls they’d been with. Edward asked John how his girl had been and his brother rolled his eyes and grinned widely. Keeler kept saying, “I tole you boys it’s a fine house, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you?” and they all kept saying yes he surely did tell them, yes indeed.
They made their loud happy way over to Canal Street and bought a fresh bottle of Nongela at a tavern and headed west and got lost and all of them cursed Keeler who was supposed to know his way around the town. On Poydras he regained his bearings and led them along South Liberty and even from the far side of the Protestant cemetery they could now hear the timbre of unchecked revelry and smell whiskey and perfume on the night air. Past the cemetery they turned onto Girod Street and entered The Swamp, the most notorious strip of saloons and brothels and gambling dens in the whole notorious town.
“It’s any kind of fun ye want here, lads,” Keeler told them, shouting to be heard above the din of music and laughter and cursing and threats. “But hereabout they’ll slit your throat for the penny in your pocket and that’s no lie. It’s a dozen killings a week at the least, so keep your wits about. The police won’t come round here and for damn good reason. They’ll likely put a torch to the whole place one day.”
In a public house abounding with unidentifiable reeks and the clatter of dishware they ate a supper of sausage and peppers with red beans and rice. Having done with their meal they repaired to The Hole World Hotel, a sprawling two-story edifice a little farther down the street. It was the sort of hotel, Keeler said, where a man could buy damn near anything he could think to want. “If they aint got it,” Keeler said, “they’ll send somebody out to steal it for you. For a price, naturally.”
The place was packed, hazed with pipe and cigar smoke, raucous with laughter and bellowed conversation, with squealing fiddles and plinky piano mu
sic, with singing and strident argument and the calls of card dealers. On a narrow stage along the wall opposite the bar a sextet of girls in red velvet dresses danced and kicked their legs high to show their frilly white bloomers and each time they turned and thrust their derrieres at the audience and yanked their skirts up over their rumps they inspired whoops and whistles and were showered with coins.
“French dancing!” Keeler shouted, nudging Edward with an elbow. “Aint it fine!”
They pushed through to a rude plank bar and ordered glasses of Non-gela and tankards of beer. “Say now, lookit yonder!” John said. He directed their attention to a nearby table on which lay a muttonchopped man with a horribly mutilated face. Even from where they stood they could tell he was dead. The barkeep told them the fellow had been caught trying to switch dice at the table and then taken outside to be taught a lesson.
“Poor fella didn’t, ah, survive his moral instruction, you might say,” the barkeep said with a smile. “Right cheeky bastard. Said he wasn’t doing anything the house wasn’t. ‘Got to cheat when you play with cheaters,’ he said. He’ll lay on that table as a warning to other tinhorns till somebody takes his place or he starts smelling too bad to put up with and then they’ll take and throw him in the river. It’s almost always somebody on that table, you bet.” He explained that the house ran the craps, faro, blackjack, and roulette games, but the poker tables belonged to the players.
When Alienbeck asked if the place had girls the barkeep laughed. “Does the river have catfish, why don’t ye ask?” He pointed to a pair of curtained doors in the rear of the room. “The one on the left’s the kitchen, see, so unless you’re wanting to fuck a bowl of beans it’s the one on the right ye want to go through. It’s a little foyer, like, and a fella sitting there. You pay the gent and he’ll send ye on up to the good mother upstairs. If you like them special young it’s the stairway to paradise. You won’t find them younger than they got here unless you rob the cradle and that’s the God’s truth. There’s one seventeen and she’s a crone, practically. Most aint but fifteen. Hear tell they got two in the other day and neither one yet thirteen years old. I’ve not had the chance to check them out meself. Had a fella here a while ago saying ‘Twelve!’ like it’s a bit too young for it, but I figure it’s like the Mexicanos say: If they’re old enough to bleed they’re old enough to butcher.”