A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  I knew what I wanted to do, which was to burn the damned pages, the ledgers and Hood’s scribblings both. I’d even gone so far as to take them out back to Levi’s burn pile, where I stood for a time trying to imagine my hands reaching out and letting the papers through my fingers into the pungent green-orange flames. Levi came out from the back of the building right then, with an armful of cotton cloth I assumed had been accidentally dyed the color of the river, dull and red and muddy. He tossed his armload on the glowing fire, and the green flames danced up and over it all. He turned to me. He was a small man, and I could look down on him and see the perfect circle of red, slick skin at the back of his head. He’d rolled his sleeves up to his shoulders against the heat of the factory, but he still had his tie knotted up neatly and hung down to the middle of his little round belly. He smiled often, and I liked him.

  “On the horns of a dilemma, I see,” he said, rubbing the singed hair of his thick arms.

  “What?”

  “Can’t decide. What you’re going to do, that is.”

  “How did you know that?” I was alarmed. Maybe the whole city knew of my task, shoved on me by a dying man. Now I could see it, every urchin and vendor and priest and waiter watching me pass by and whispering about my chances. I shook my head, it was ridiculous. Levi spoke.

  “When a man is standing by a fire with an armload of paper and hasn’t yet thrown it in, it’s usually safe to assume that he is having a problem deciding whether to burn it. The horns of a dilemma, you see.”

  A smarter man than I’d thought. A beautiful, dark-eyed woman, head covered with a blue scarf, stepped through the back door and called for Levi. He held up his hand as if to deflect the sound of her voice. His young wife.

  “My advice, and this is after years of considering the question, is that if you can’t burn the thing straightaway you shouldn’t burn it. Take it back with you, think on it some more. There’ll always be the fire, but it ain’t a place to be making decisions, and you can’t do a thing with ashes.”

  Guidance. I lay on the bed thinking about that word, and looked over to the two piles topped with neat bows. Have to do something with them, I thought. The whole room seemed to tilt toward them. I can’t live with them, I can’t be the only one. So I gathered them up, placed them gently in my adventure sack, slipped into my boots, and marched out the door toward Rintrah’s house.

  I knew Rintrah, knew him because I’d known Hood. There was a time when one went with the other. Bread and molasses, dace fish and water. They weren’t that way in the end, but there’d been a time when to know one was to know the other. Rintrah had got me my job at the ice factory, and on occasion I’d been useful to him as a cardplayer when he wanted to get money off someone or, better yet, put them in his debt. Rintrah used debts as an enlistment into his army of thieves and politicians and drunks and artists and longshoremen and society boys: once enlisted, you got to serve your time however Rintrah saw fit for you to serve it, and only then was that debt discharged. His debts rarely paid off in cash and that’s how he liked it.

  “This way I can buy things off men they wouldn’t normally think to sell,” Rintrah said. “Like convenient blindness, or stupidity, or incompetence. Convenient to me. A man don’t think to sell such things, but I depend on them. Seems right I should be able to buy them things, a body can buy any other damned thing. I need a man to be sick a certain day, I already bought that sickness when he came into my debt. I need a man not to hear something, I already bought that. I need a man to forget something, I got that in the bank. Nothing would get done if I couldn’t buy a little of the devil off a man from time to time. And believe me, my friend, this city would be a damned lousy place without me.”

  I never tired of that speech, though on the riverboats and in the saloons of my childhood and education, I’d learned the golden rule of the underground: pay your own damn way. I always had.

  I went to Rintrah as an equal and not on my knees. He could tell me what to do and how to do it. He could tell me how to get in with General Beauregard and maybe he could even tell me where to find a killer with some kind of special relation to Hood. I prayed he might help me, he and his army.

  Rintrah lived and worked out of a big and very old Spanish house on Chartres Street, just downriver of Jackson Square. Most people knew him as the eccentric fruit seller on Royal Street, but that was just his way of keeping track of the street and his affairs. From atop his fruit crate he could see opportunity, he once said to me. From atop his fruit crate he ruled all that he saw, or so he said. And when he was done surveying his kingdom, he’d pack up his fruit and push it on back to the mansion where he’d have his servants peel what was left and serve it up to him on stolen silver trays.

  A large wrought-iron gallery poked out onto Chartres from the second floor, looming over a broad, arched carriageway that led back to the courtyard far in the distance. The iron railing twisted its grapevines in its center to form the initials RK. I paused before walking under the great arch and across the clammy, waterslick cobbles of the carriageway and back into the courtyard. I’d learned that it was prudent to take a look around first. Didn’t want to walk right into the middle of something, and there was nearly always something going on at Rintrah’s that I didn’t want to know about.

  But that day there was nothing to see except for the lookouts stationed permanently at Dumaine and Chartres, and farther down at Ursulines Street. They were chameleons, the lookouts, never dressed or acting the same way twice. Today the French boy at Dumaine was wearing a sandwich board advertising a potent cure for sale at the Circle Pharmacy on St. Charles, which just so happened to be made out of ingredients Rintrah himself supplied. The other lookout, a colored boy, was shining shoes down on Ursulines, eyes everywhere but on the shoes propped up on his box. Both boys watched me steady. I turned down Chartres toward Rintrah’s house and disappeared down the carriageway into a courtyard conquered long ago by banana trees and date palms and giant yucca and vining things blaring their little yellow trumpets wherever the sun slipped past the fields of chimneys above. I had nearly pulled out my own knife to hack a path to the table I knew I would find in the middle of the jungle, a place where I could collect myself and decide what the hell I would say to Rintrah, when I heard the little man’s voice calling to me from among the fig leaves, a voice out of the wilderness.

  “Come around the other side, Eli, it ain’t grown back that far yet. Got a path on in here.”

  I walked around to the back of the courtyard where the wood balcony of the servants’ quarters hung miraculously from the adobe wall, and on it two colored girls leaned and smoked, ignoring me. I found the path and followed it until I had emerged into a small clearing containing one cypress-slabbed table and two similar chairs.

  When the garden had been well tended, every tree in its place, every orchid blooming heartily, all the potted fruit trees trimmed into globes, Rintrah had hardly ever come out into the courtyard. The courtyard had been for appearance, the courtyard had been for women and swells who preferred to do their business outside, under the illusion that they were dealing with a landed aristocrat with an unfortunate height affliction, a wealthy jungle exotic, a pasha of Chartres Street. In fact, they were doing business with a brilliant thief who would have preferred to meet in a dark cellar, drunk, and with the sound of a fiddle ribboning out devil’s tunes. But lately he’d banned anyone from touching the plants, which had responded by overrunning their sawed-off cistern tubs and their rocked-in borders, going rangy and twisted and wrapping upon every rail, pole, chair, and downspout within reach. It was an insouciant garden now, uncontrolled. I immediately understood it to be Rintrah’s sanctuary.

  He was a thick man, as most people like him are, but he had a fine nose and delicate eyes, white teeth. Dark red, nearly brown hair. His hands were powerful and crushing, and he’d spread them out on the table in front of him as if he were making an inventory. His brow slumped inward in a nearly perpetual frown, topped by thick
red eyebrows. He was wearing nothing at that moment. I chose not to notice anything unusual.

  “Don’t think I need to dress in my own damn house if I don’t want to and when I’m not expecting guests, which,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I’m not.”

  “If I had your physique, Rintrah, I might walk around as God intended also,” I said, making light of the situation with an utter lie.

  “If you had a physique like mine, young Eli Griffin, you’d have been dead years ago. You don’t got the stomach for it.”

  Which I didn’t. I sat. Rintrah shouted for some tea and sherry, and I heard one of the girls on the balcony flick her cigarette off and down onto the cobbles, where it sizzled and popped.

  “As you can tell, I’m busy, Eli, and I’m not in a visiting mood. So why are you here?”

  “Hood’s dead.”

  It was quiet then. Rintrah leaned back in his chair and rubbed his brow thoughtfully. His lips moved, he was talking to himself, having an argument. The girl brought the tray of cold tea and sherry and biscuits, and Rintrah didn’t look up at her. When she was gone on silent slippered feet, Rintrah looked back at me.

  “How?”

  “Yellow jack.”

  “Were you there?”

  “I saw him dead, yeah.”

  He plucked a fig from the limb above him and nearly swallowed it whole. He spit the stem across the table.

  “Excuse my manners.”

  He rubbed his mouth with his hand, and then rubbed his hand on his hairy chest to get the fig juice off, I suppose. He looked at me out one eye, looked away, and then squinted at me with the other eye.

  “And now is the time for you to tell me why it happened that you were there. Was there anyone else?”

  “Doctor Ardoin came later, right before he passed.”

  “That sounds about right, useless git. Who else? Nurses? Maids? Footmen? Sergeants of the guard? The governor?”

  He was snorting and frowning. He knew better than that and I told him so.

  Rintrah stood up and came around the table. He stood square before me, daring me to look, and so I did. Dark bushy hair down there, sagging old balls and an unexpectedly normal cock that looked big on him.

  “Had to look, didn’t you? Had to see what the little man’s got, hmm? Pikers like you always got to know who’s biggest, right? Who’s the big cock, right, lad?

  “I know better than that? I know a lot of things you’d pray to forget, on your knees before the Holy Mother begging forgiveness for thinking them, even. Yet you reckon you’ll come on up in here and tell me what I should and should not know. Well, I got the big cock, you follow? So be a good boy.”

  He walked back to the other side of the table and sat down, picking at a biscuit.

  “You were there with Hood and no one else?” he said.

  “For a little while.”

  “You just decided to go out and pay the General a visit? Wash his face, sing him lullabies, right?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “What’d you steal? And believe me, whatever it was, you’re giving it back.”

  “I didn’t steal anything! God no.”

  Rintrah fumbled around above his head, looking for another fig, all the while keeping his eyes locked on mine. His hand came away without a fig, but his smile made me think he’d found something anyway.

  “You took something, though, hmmm?”

  “He gave me something. It’s why I was there, he sent for me.”

  “To give you what? His empty purse? His official portrait? What would he have to give you?”

  “No, nothing like that. It was a book.”

  “You read?”

  “Yes.”

  “Surprising. Whose book? Have I read it?”

  He turned his head up toward the balcony and called for his clothes. A few minutes later down they came, shirt, trouser, vest, stockings, braces, tumbling through the blue sky and into the opening between the ficus and banana trees. His shirt, tailored and monogrammed, hung up on an orange branch and I handed it to him. I thought he’d be angry and shout and curse the colored girls to Hell, his natural response to things unexpected, but he only smiled and dressed. The same colored girl who had brought us our drinks, green-eyed, tall, and freckled, now came into his sanctum with his shoes in her hand.

  “Don’t want to trow dese, non, might hit de young friend, no?”

  “You just don’t pay no attention to the young friend here. He’s just leaving.”

  Rintrah turned back to me, sitting back down in his chair to slip on his oxfords, somehow smaller with his clothes on. “I want to know what it is. And you’re still taking it back unless you convince me otherwise. You get nothing out of that house. That was Hood’s house, but it was Anna Marie’s also, and I speak for her.”

  I doubt he could have spoken for her, knowing what I know now, but I kept that to myself. I blew the air out my cheeks and finally threw down a cup of sherry for strength. What I was about to say might help me greatly or go very badly.

  “It was his book. He wrote it.”

  “The war book.”

  “That’s what I thought, but no. Something different.”

  “How?”

  Now he was interested. He shoved the tray aside so he could see me better.

  “It’s about the time after the war. About New Orleans. About him and Anna Marie. And Father Mike. And disease and killing and penance and salvation and love and every other damned thing you wouldn’t think he’d ever thought, let alone write down.”

  “And me?”

  I had been dreading this also.

  “You’re mentioned, yes.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Now, hold on, there’s more I got to say.”

  Rintrah must keep a pistol stuck up under every godforsaken table in the Quarter, because now he had one pointed at my head.

  “Give. Now. In that bag, I know it’s there because you don’t always think things through, like what would happen if I just decided to take the thing off you. It’s a weakness, young Eli, and one of your charms.”

  Thank God he hadn’t asked for the whole bag. I went into it and pulled out Hood’s manuscript without disturbing Anna Marie’s ledgers. He didn’t need to know everything. I handed him the Hood manuscript, which he opened delicately while tossing me his pistol. Hammer rusted open, cylinder empty.

  “Truly, son, I don’t know how you avoid being robbed every single day, what with your street sense,” Rintrah said. He began to page through the book. I sat quietly there for an hour while Rintrah read. He flipped through, pausing here and there, and spent a lot of time on the last few pages of the book before looking up.

  “And you expect me to believe he gave this to you? Of all people?”

  “Why would I steal it? What the hell would I want with it?”

  “You? Big-ass hay-haired cracker idjit? Maybe you’d sell it, get you some shirts to fit them ape arms of yours, buy you a horse or two, or a lifetime of fatback. Who cares? Maybe you seen a way to embarrass a good family while you’re at it. Jealous bastard.”

  “Now hold on.”

  “And, anyway, I don’t believe for a second that Lydia would just up and let you waltz on out of there with her daddy’s things. She’s a smart girl, she’d have sent for me to sort things out. No, you snuck them out of there.”

  I wanted to hurt him, really put the screw in him, but I knew if I beat him down a half-dozen men would be there to stick their knives in me before Rintrah even hit the ground. So.

  “Lydia’s dead too.”

  Silence.

  “I had Doctor Ardoin arrange to have them both buried in Lafayette Cemetery yesterday. Next to Anna Marie. It’s done.”

  At this he slumped in his chair and stared at me without blinking.

  “Why didn’t…”

  “She was dead when I got there.”

  “Where?”

  “In her bed. She looked peaceful.”

  “You know damn
ed well it was anything but, nothing peaceful about the fever.”

  “I know. Even so, maybe she’s at peace now.”

  “Oh, to hell with that.”

  Lydia had been his special love, the first of Anna Marie’s children, his goddaughter. She laughed and screeched at his jokes and called him Mister King, respect nearly no one else bothered to extend. His thick shoulders flinched with every wave of tears.

  I knew everything, I knew what had happened to them all, I knew what was in the hearts of Anna Marie and Hood up to their very last moments. I could guess what was running through Rintrah’s head at that moment: he was completely alone now.

  What I couldn’t know, and couldn’t possibly begin to guess, is what would happen to me, carrier of the secrets.

  “Rintrah.”

  He flapped his hand at me as if he could bat me away.

  “Rintrah, I need help.”

  More silence.

  “Hood gave me very specific instructions about that manuscript. I don’t know that I can follow them. I don’t think I can. I’m not streetwise, like you say.”

  Now he looked up, wiped his face on his sleeve, and folded his hands on the table in front of him, one upon the other. There ain’t nothing better for grieving than to think there might could be something only you can do to help, and being streetwise was Rintrah’s whole life, his purpose. He could do that.

  “What instructions?”

  I told him everything: getting the war book from Beauregard, destroying it, finding the killer Sebastien Lemerle, and, at his direction, either publishing the other book or burning it too.

  When I got to the bit about the man Sebastien Lemerle, he stopped me with a shout and a fist brought down hard on the table.

  “You must have heard him wrong, Eli.”

  “He said it a few times, Rintrah. He told me to watch out for him, that he was dangerous, but he was right clear about giving him the manuscript.”