Nick

by Michael Farris Smith

  Judah had arrived in the early night, needing to get away from the apartment and the saloon and the room below. Inhaling and going numb and sleeping and then waking hours later and doing it again. The deep clouds that had blanketed Frenchtown had begun to separate and the moon peeked through a cloudbreak and shined down into the window above Judah’s body. In the moonglow the haze seemed to thicken and it shifted methodically and gracefully as if orchestrated.

  The front door of the house opened and closed and there were footsteps down the hallway and then voices from another room. There was a short exchange and then more footsteps and then the new visitor found a space and settled in. A wind pushed against the house and howled through the cracks and crevices and Judah turned in his sleep.

  As a boy he had taken sick one winter and his mother had been certain he was going to die. She sat by his bedside all hours of the day and night and if she slept he didn’t see it. Every time he woke, she was there watching him. When he was awake she talked to him and read to him. Taught him to play poker and go fish. Sang songs her grandmother had taught her to sing. Gave him medicine at the exact intervals that the doctor had instructed her to give it. His father would come into the bedroom randomly during the day, leaving the saloon to come home and see about him and to try and get his mother to take a break. She only ate when she tried to get Judah to take some soup or nibble on some thinly sliced ham and the only time she moved her chair away from his bed was when she slid it over to the window and lifted it open and smoked a third of a cigarette from the pack she kept hidden from his father.

  He wasn’t going to die then and he never was in such danger but she couldn’t be convinced otherwise. She had seen too many other mothers lose their children and she had lost a baby sister and there was an imminence of heartbreak that she carried with her that she had always been ready to battle. She sat at his bedside and watched him as if her eyes alone carried a healing power and when he regained his strength and came out of the bed she carried herself with the air of victory as if she had taken the black angel into the back alley and beaten it into submission with a rolling pin. Now he was a busted and bleeding thing. And he was dying this time.

  The night hours passed and the moonlight disappeared and returned, disappeared and returned as the clouds pushed into different skies. Out across the Gulf the sun showed itself on the early horizon and promised a shadowfilled day. Judah lifted his head as a slit in the wall allowed a spear of light into the room and when he opened his eyes he saw the image of his mother and he lifted his hand for her to hold it. She reached for him but then she disappeared and his hand fell to the floor.

  The sunlight slashed and he rolled on his side. He didn’t want to hurt anymore and wondered why he was allowed to come back. Why it couldn’t have ended there with his past life still something that he ached for. His head rested against the floor and the light fell across his body and that was when he saw his deliverer. The one that he believed could help him do what he wanted to do. Kneeling next to him and taking his hand. Helping him to his feet. Lifting him and carrying him out into the sunlight and forgiving him all of his sins.

  39

  Colette stood in the middle of the floor with her hand resting on the back of a chair, one of only two pieces of furniture in the bottom floor room of the building she had moved into after the fire. A round wooden table was in the corner and a bottle of pastis and a bottle of water and a short glass were in the middle of the table. Both the second and third floors were divided into four rooms. Only half the rooms had beds and the rest of the furniture, wobbly end tables and bureaus with missing drawers and one-door armoires, had been collected from the street. The plaster flaked from the walls and the ceilings sagged and there were stairs on the staircase that were better to step over.

  She had eight girls before. Out of those eight, three were dead in the fire, one tried to come back and work but her arm was badly burned from the wrist to the elbow and Colette sent her away. The other four returned ready to make up for lost time but Colette told them it was over for now. I need time to do it the right way.

  Outside the streets were slick with the damp and weeklong freezing and few passed. It was past midnight and her stomach growled as she waited to see if he would show up. At twilight she had given a kid a couple of coins and had him deliver a note to Judah’s saloon. A note to Nick. It said I need to talk to you and it gave her address and she was going to give him until the cathedral chime sounded one a.m. and then she was going to make the latenight visit she knew she had to make.

  She moved over to the table. Sipped from the bottle of water. When she closed her eyes she saw herself bound at the wrists and tied to the bed in the darkness. She saw him close to her. Felt him breathing in her face. She saw the child in the quilted bundle and she saw John LaFell trucking the bundle around in the wagon. Crippled by grief. Behind her eyes the house blazed in a brilliant spectrum and the writhing bodies flew from the windows and landed at the foot of her subconscious in flaming piles. She realized that what had come between her and Judah had now leaked out and spilled onto others. There were times in every day when her body and mind began to shut down on their own and allow her to drift, but then images from her burning house and from her captive days would surface and she was awake again.

  It was about resilience and scorn, she decided. And that was plenty to keep her warm. But it was also about money and that’s where Judah had gotten her. The fire had taken everything. Just as he had planned. She sat at the table as a man in a heavy overcoat came to the window and stopped, the tip of his cigarette a red dot against his black figure. He leaned close to the window and peered in and his breath fogged the glass. He then reached for the doorknob and turned but it was locked. He stepped back. Looked up and down the building, back and forth along the street, and then walked away.

  I need to talk to you.

  She didn’t know what she needed to talk to him about or even why she had written the note but she found herself anxious. Waiting on this man she had caught watching her for days from the street before coming into the brothel and then sitting at the end of the bar with timid and cautious eyes. As if he was afraid of what may happen to him while he was there. Eyes she understood better now after having spoken to him in the St. Mark’s sanctuary. Realizing he had been over there. That’s how they look, she thought. Their eyes are there but they are not there. Sunk back from their sockets and adrift in some opaque ocean of memory. Maybe that is all there is between him and Judah. Maybe that’s why he is caring for him. Maybe they understand one another, she thought. But she could not help wondering if there was more to it. If she was missing something. And this was the thought crossing her mind when the single chime sounded the hour.

  She stood and bundled herself and inside her coat she felt around and took out a small silver flask and she unscrewed the top and took a drink. Then there came a knock. Nick stood in the door window with the note in his hand and he held it up as if to provide proof as to why he was here. She unlocked the door and he stepped inside.

  “Are you sure this note is for me?”

  “It has your name on it.”

  She extended the flask to him but he didn’t take it.

  “Where have you been?” she said.

  “Deciding.”

  “Deciding what?”

  “If I was going to come here.”

  She took a long stroll around the bar. Drank again from the flask. Nick looked down at his feet and then moved his eyes around the nearly empty room.

  “I’m curious,” she said. “When you came into my place, you didn’t want anything to drink and you didn’t want a girl.”

  He shook his head.

  “What do you want?”

  “Are those the only two choices?”

  She smiled a little. She had been so long dressing up and selling depravity in Frenchtown that she had forgotten there were options. She wanted to ask him again. What do you want? But she looked at him. His roaming eyes not wa
nting to meet hers and his hands shoved down into his coat pockets and she believed he carried the look of perpetual wonder, a childlike expression of trying to understand the complexities of all that moved around him. It was not the face of the men and women she dealt with. The faces of lust and then more lust. She wanted to ask him. What do you want? But she knew he would not have an answer.

  “What are you doing with Judah?” she asked.

  “You know.”

  “What does he tell you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He tell you any secrets?”

  “It’s difficult to talk when your mouth is full of blood.”

  His eyes stayed on her then and he changed. The childlike expression gone. She now saw a man who had survived. A man who was capable. He stared at her and in the empty room where she imagined there would one day be music and dancing and bottles knocking against tables and young women telling happy men what they wanted to hear there was a bottomless silence. She stared at him and he stared back and she saw herself. Alone and without a goddamn clue.

  He moved toward the door and she came from around the bar and told him to stop. She wrapped her scarf up around her chin. Dropped the flask into her pocket. Moved past him and opened the door.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  “I thought you said you wanted to talk.”

  “We did. Now we’re doing something else.”

  “I’m not going with you to see Judah.”

  “No shit.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’ve got an errand to run.”

  “It feels late for errands.”

  She took him by the shoulders. Turned him around. Nudged him across the threshold and said enough of your schoolboy bullshit. You know as well as I do some things can only be done while others sleep.

  40

  They walked across Frenchtown to Canal Street and boarded a streetcar that was empty but for them and another who slumped and slept. The car moved through the chilled and empty night. Away from the Quarter, the city slept a deep winter’s sleep. While the streetcar rocked, Colette talked to Nick and explained where they were going and why she needed him there. I’m going to walk into a room full of men with the money to fix what all I got broken. It’ll look better if somebody is with me. Somebody they don’t recognize. Act like you got some kind of interest in what’s going on and just nod and agree with me whenever it feels right. She kept waiting on him to ask why he should do this. Why he should be out in the middle of the night with a woman he didn’t know going to a place he didn’t know and agreeing to do whatever she was asking him to do but he only sat with an agreeable, almost dumb expression. As if she were speaking some language he did not understand but found mildly entertaining.

  She continued instructing him until it was time to warn him. You’re going to find out about the real Judah. I know you don’t want to. But you’re going to. You can believe whatever it is you want about Judah but I’m going to stand on my side of it all and fight like I know how to fight. That’s all there is to it. It might do you some good to know him better anyhow. You need to understand who you’re helping to keep alive.

  “You need to understand who you’re helping to kill,” Nick said.

  “I do know.”

  “You think you know. He thinks he knows. And you’ll both die that way.”

  The streetcar stopped at Jackson Avenue and they exited. Grand houses lined each side of the street, two and three story houses with balconies with wroughtiron railings and brick walkways leading from the sidewalk to the front steps. Magnolia and oak trees nestled together and stretched from house to house like a natural tapestry and gas lamps burned from front porches. Grainlike flecks of ice danced in the nightbreeze as they moved in the solemn dark, turning right on the next street and walking several more blocks until they came to the house on the corner of Prytania and Second. The house was painted crimson and a headhigh brick wall stretched out and closed in the backyard and a single light shined in an upstairs window. Colette opened the front gate and stepped into the yard and Nick followed. She walked to the front steps of the house, palm trees lining the walkway, and they followed the path around to the left where a heavy iron door opened and allowed them behind the brick wall.

  Behind the house was a pool that had been drained for the winter. Trellises lined the walls, covered in vines that blossomed with purples and yellows in the spring but lay like a bed of skinny sleeping snakes in the dead month of December. Along the back of the yard stood the pool house. It was a small house with big windows and many small panes and a bistro table and chairs sat on a patio next to the French doors. White curtains covered the length of the windows and from behind the curtains the lights glowed and the gathering of men was right where she thought it would be.

  They moved through the shadows to the pool house door and she slid her arm around his and tugged her scarf down and said remember what I told you and stand up straight. She then pulled her scarf above her nose and opened the door and she and Nick stepped inside. The men at the table looked up in alarm from their cards and cash and Scotch as the light was thrown upon them, her smart eyes catching them from above the scarf. The cigar smoke clouded the room and Colette cut her eyes across each of the four men. Then she moved her hand to her face and pulled down the scarf and there was an exhaust of relief when they recognized her and one of them said holy damn shit and another lifted his glass and drank a shot of nervous release.

  William Pitot was the only one at the table still wearing a tie and he stood up and moved around the room and he held out his hand. She took it and he said get in here and shut the damn door. It’s damn near too cold to drink. The others knew her, but not like William. They all nodded and greeted her and wiped the Scotch from their mustaches.

  “How’d you know we were here?” William asked.

  “It’s the second Tuesday of the month.”

  “Jesus. You remember that?”

  “I remember plenty,” she said. “This here is Nick.”

  The men nodded to him and Colette took out her flask. The man to her left pushed a pack of cigarettes and matches toward her. She took one and lit it and stared at the pile of cash in the middle of the table and the stacks of cash in front of each man.

  “I hope you’re lady luck. I ain’t doing so good,” William said. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. She noticed he had gained some weight. And his hair was farther back and his beard was thicker and grayer.

  William smacked his lips and watched her with bloodshot eyes. She had only been in the pool house for minutes but she knew that the question was burning them all behind the pleasantries, that it had burned them all from the instant she opened the door and interrupted the night. What the hell is she doing here?

  “I guess you know what happened,” she said.

  “Which part? The part about you being stolen and tied up or the part about the fire or the part about the shooting?”

  “All of it.”

  William cut his eyes at Nick. Pursed his lips in an expression of trying to decide.

  “He’s all right,” she said. “He wouldn’t be with me if he wasn’t.”

  He looked back to her. Smiled again.

  “I figured you left town,” William said. “Probably wouldn’t be the worst thing considering all.”

  “I ain’t leaving town. This is my town. Always has been. You should know that. If anybody is leaving it will be Judah.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know he burned down my house.”

  “I don’t know it. I have heard it said.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s not the same thing as everybody else knowing it,” he answered. One of the men stood from the table and walked to the other side of the room where there was a sofa and coffee table and he stood behind the sofa smoking his cigar.

  “He did it,” Colette said. “And he didn’t just do it to me. He burned up three of the women
and he burned up a kid and God knows what else or who else.”

  “I said I know about it all.”

  “Then do something.”

  “How about we deal you in and you slow down.”

  “I don’t need to slow down. I need you to do something.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  The other two men stood and moved away from the table. William raised his cigar and pointed at Nick.

  “I don’t know him,” he said. “And we’re not talking about this with somebody in the room I don’t know.”

  “I told you he was all right,” she answered.

  “You heard me.”

  Colette turned to Nick and asked him to wait outside. He glanced around the room at the eyes on him. At the eyes on her. He wanted to grab her arm and say let’s go but her bent brow said she wasn’t leaving until she got whatever it was she wanted. He opened the door and slipped out into the cold. She closed it behind him.

  She then moved closer to the table. Peeled off her gloves. Dabbed out her cigarette. Unwrapped her scarf. Dropped the flask into her pocket and took off her coat. Her hair fell down the sides of her face and neck like ribbons and she arched her back and rubbed her fingers low across her throat and they all watched with wolfeyes to see if she would keep going. Instead she sat down in a chair across from William.

  “I want to make you a deal,” she said.

  “We already made one. And now it’s ashes.”

  “A new deal.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.