by Nevada Barr
“The Devil card was in the top of the ninth.” Even in the dusky light she could see the twinkle in his eyes. She wondered if he was bullshitting her.
The ninth card represented things that came out of nowhere. The Devil coming out of nowhere was no joke. Not with Mr. Marchand in the mix. “No kidding?” She sounded plaintive, like a beggar. She said it again, better. “No kidding?”
Jason waved a dismissal. “Would I kid about the Devil?” he asked, as he turned to smile on a couple of rubes down from Mississippi or Montana.
Mr. Marchand’s blonde, Polly, stood up, and they walked away together. Red whistled softly through her teeth. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, watching Mr. Marchand was a major snooze. He didn’t do much of anything that she could tell. Just worked, and worked, and went home, and worked some more.
At the gate on the garden’s east side, the two of them turned right. Mr. Marchand’s head was bent to catch what Polly was saying, a smile-a rare thing with him-playing around his mouth.
Red pushed down on the table to heave herself from her chair. Her hands were pressed flat, fingers, fat at the base, pointed where the acrylic nails had been filed too sharp, splayed out like starfish arms. For an instant, she didn’t recognize them. Her hands were slender, the skin smooth and white. These fat, spotty, wrinkled things revolted her.
Mostly, she never thought of who she used to be, but the alien hands made her remember. A wave of self-pity washed over her; if she’d had a cyanide tooth, she’d’ve bitten down on it. Second best, she thought, and fished a silver flask from one of the plastic Wal-Mart bags that served as purse and office.
Bag lady, she thought as she took a swig. Two steps from being a fucking bag lady. The silver flask made her feel a little better, not just the hit of Jack Daniels, but the flask itself. It probably wasn’t real silver or even an antique-she’d gotten it for four dollars at the French Market, and there was a dent in it. But if she didn’t think about that, she could pretend it was like she was taking a tipple, like an English lady on a foxhunt maybe, a little snort to keep off the chill.
“Hey, Em. Emily,” she called, as she delicately wiped the mouth of the flask on her sleeve and screwed the cap back on. “Will you watch my setup for a few minutes? I got to pee.”
Emily wasn’t a friend exactly, but they’d set up next to each other in the same place for years and got along okay. Maybe that was friendship. Who could tell anymore?
“Go ahead. We’re here for the late shift.” “We” meant Emily and her best friend, Bony, an old wiener dog so crippled it had a little cart like a person’s wheelchair that carried its rear end around. Bony spent his days on Em’s lap. Em lifted Bony ’s paw and waved bye-bye.
Red took the zippered makeup bag she kept her money in from the sack beneath her chair and stuffed it down the front of her shift until it wedged against the band of her bra. If somebody made off with the rest of the stuff, it was mostly crap anyway.
For a big woman, she moved gracefully. She was proud of that. One time, when she was a lot younger, she’d gotten the bug to take ballet. She’d done real good until she’d run out of money.
Well, what had happened was she’d had a few too many before she went to class, and the bitch who taught it got huffy, and that was that. She’d been going to quit anyway. Too expensive.
Dusk had slid a couple more notches toward night. Hurrying across the garden, she wasn’t worried that Mr. Marchand or his lady friend would turn and see her. Most people didn’t see her anymore. Sometimes it made her feel bad. More often than not, it came in handy.
They hadn’t gone far, just into the River’s Edge Restaurant on the corner. They were seated at a candlelit table by one of the windows.
Red settled herself on an iron bench on the brick walkway. It was like she was in a dark theater, and they were the movie on screen, except she couldn’t hear what they were saying. She pulled out the silver flask. That never went into the bags unless she was right there with them; it lived in a pocket, and if her gown didn’t have a pocket for it, she got that iron-on stuff and made one. A girl needed the essentials.
Red had never seen Mr. Marchand like he was tonight. Narrowing her eyes against the booze, she tried to figure out if it was the candlelight or what. He looked like he’d lost a couple decades. Red took another little snort to help her concentrate and cocked her head to one side.
Not just younger. “Fuck,” she whispered. She’d hit on it. Once the thought came to her there was no doubt about it.
Mr. Marchand looked happy. It had taken her so long because she’d never seen him happy before. Not like she’d ever thought about it; she had better things to do than sit around wondering if he was happy or not. But seeing it she knew he hadn’t been like that until now. He didn’t yuk it up like some guys might, or grin, or anything. It was in his strange, quiet way. He sort of glowed happy, like babies when they’re asleep and fed.
Miss Pollyanna was doing it. He glowed at her. Or maybe reflected the light coming off of her because she was a natural glow-er. Red didn’t know quite what she meant by that but it was true. The Polly woman had that inner thing going that can’t be painted on or faked.
Ms. Polly-the-blonde-charmer didn’t know what she was getting into.
Man, was she going to have something to talk about tonight. This was big! Red laughed and tipped the flask again.
“Fuck.” It was empty. She tossed it toward the garbage can on the corner, remembered it wasn’t a beer can, and hurried to retrieve it before some junky or drunk got it.
Sydney ’s was down North Peters a couple of blocks. The store carried booze, and chips, and cigarettes. It’d take her probably five minutes, ten at the outside, to go and resupply. For a minute, she stood wondering if she dared. If they got away, it could go bad for her.
Polly laughed, and Mr. Marchand reached out as if he was going to touch her hand. They weren’t going anywhere for a while, not unless it was to somebody’s room, and Red doubted blondie was the type. She knew for a fact Mr. Marchand wasn’t.
Comforted by that thought, she deserted her post in search of refreshments. She wasn’t away long, she was sure of that, but when she got back they were gone. A waitress was wiping down the table.
“Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” she whispered as she turned around in a full circle peering through the gathering darkness, the glittering lights, and the gabbling tourists. A teenager laughed. With instinct born of experience, Red knew it was at her. Once it would have hurt her feelings; now she barely registered it.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she murmured. A mule-drawn carriage pulled away from the curb where they lined up waiting for fares and she saw them on the far side of the North Peters: Polly’s hair, the color of the moon under the streetlights; Mr. Marchand’s dark suit, a shadow between her and the traffic.
Red trotted to catch up. Years and pounds had built up around her middle, and before she’d made it fifty feet she was gasping for breath, sweat running between her breasts, but she didn’t give up. They walked for what seemed like miles but was only five blocks before they finally stopped on Decatur.
There weren’t as many tourists here as on the square. Red fought to quiet her breathing. If she kept on huffing like a hyperventilating rhino, everybody was going to look at her. Mr. Marchand took the blonde’s keys, opened the driver’s door of a silver Volvo, held it as she got in, then handed her keys back. Polly was laughing, and he looked like he didn’t know what to do.
He didn’t know what to do-that’s why he was acting like some asshole out of a Fred Astaire movie. He didn’t know people didn’t do that crap anymore; they just hooked up, and screwed, and moved on. Mr. Marchand was so stupid he was still doing the whole gentlemen-prefer-blondes routine.
And poor stupid Miss Polly was lapping it up.
Man, was there ever going to be a shitload of stuff to talk about.
11
A week passed, and the lovely Mr. Marchand did not call. Polly might h
ave called him but, though the rules in the new millennium had changed, Polly’s had not. She was not averse to making the first move; it was the second. A second date set the tone for a relationship. In a man’s world, it was necessary that he desire a woman a shade more than she desired him.
Since her marriage to Carver had imploded, Polly had not invested much of herself in the society of men. With the advent of the lovely Mr. Marchand, this was changing. Stifling a sigh, she looked out over the bent heads of her English literature class: Barbara scribbling madly, Tyrell gazing out the window, Bethany staring at the paper the way a bird might stare at a cobra.
After Katrina, New Orleans was a city without children. Schools had been shut down, the students evacuated, enrolled in schools miles-and sometimes states-away. During the last months of 2005, the adults who came back would meet in the rubble-filled streets, mops and shovels in hand, cheering one another with the phrase, “Come January.” January was the date the schools were to reopen and, like those left bereft by the Pied Piper, they waited for the children to return and save New Orleans.
Where children were, parents were: living, working, buying, selling, renovating, recreating the cycle of supply and demand the city needed to recover. Images of New Orleanians rebuilding morphed into images of Marshall Marchand re-creating the city’s historic homes, then to his sudden rare smile. Surreptitiously and undoubtedly with the same sneaky look her students wore when they pulled a similar stunt, Polly eased her cell phone out of her purse and checked to see if she had any calls. Four: one from Marshall Marchand.
Feeling like an idiot, she slipped out of the classroom. In the faculty lounge she checked her messages.
“What are you giggling about?” Mr. Andrews, the eternally sour teacher of American history, had come into the lounge.
“Hot date,” Polly drawled and batted her eyes.
He grunted.
“I wanted to show you my neighborhood,” Marshall said as they parked on a side street beneath three tall pine trees. “If you’d be more comfortable in a public place, I’d be glad to take you out for dinner.”
Polly enjoyed Marshall ’s old-world manners. She reached across the console and touched his hand lightly. “I’ll just keep my cell phone on 911.”
A look akin to pain flashed in his eyes. It was gone so quickly she scarcely noticed the spark of alarm it triggered in her.
He walked around the car to open her door. It was rather grand to sit quietly and compose one’s self while a man did manly things.
Because he was a restoration architect Polly assumed he would live in a monument to old money on St. Charles or in a classic home in an undamaged area of Metairie. But his house was in a pioneer neighborhood. The front yard of the duplex where Marshall and his brother lived contrasted starkly with the weed-filled yard of their neighbor. In the Marchands’ yard was a mosaic of brick and moss framed by elephant ears and surrounded by a wrought iron fence, the bottom brown with rust from the floodwaters.
They stopped on the sidewalk outside the garden gate as if Marshall was reticent about taking her inside. “I’ve got the top two floors; Danny lives downstairs. Below him is an aboveground basement. When the levees broke, we got twenty-six inches of water but cleaning out the cellar is a whole lot easier than gutting the front room,” Marshall told her.
A man, Danny of course, came out the front door of the lower unit and leaned on the porch rail at the top of the stairs. There was a strong family resemblance. Danny looked younger and had a less somber cast to his face; the lines of strain that fanned out from the corners of Marshall ’s eyes were missing from his brother’s and, when Danny smiled, there was a playfulness Marshall lacked.
“Who’s the lady, Marsh?” he called.
Marshall had not mentioned her to his brother. Not a good sign, Polly thought and was annoyed that she was looking for signs.
Marshall made the introductions from where they stood, outside the fence. Only when Danny invited them in for a drink before dinner did he reach for the gate. Because this was New Orleans, and Anne Rice had educated the world on the habits and manners of the undead, it crossed Polly’s mind that vampires cannot enter unless invited. A B-movie shiver passed down her spine. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant.
Danny’s home was beautifully appointed in stark, modern blacks and whites and impeccably kept. A framed magazine cover picturing him cutting a ribbon at the opening of the first Le Cure explained his wealth. He owned a chain of high-end boutique drugstores.
“I keep Marsh out of trouble,” Danny said, as he handed Polly a glass of white wine without asking what she preferred. He winked, “And you look like trouble to me.”
“I have never given anyone a moment’s difficulty,” she drawled. “Not even as a very small child.”
Danny poured a meager whiskey for himself, neat, and sat on the end of the sofa. The leather was soft and matte black, stark to look at, but luxurious to sit on. “So, how did my brother lure you into his clutches?” he said.
“He invited me to tea,” Polly said and smiled at Marshall.
“Ah, the old tea gambit,” Danny said. “ Marshall lives on the edge.”
The brothers shared an inner communion Polly had occasionally noted in the twins she had taught. Having no family-or, as she said in her archer moments, none to speak of-she held familial ties in high regard. Whoever married one brother would have to be aware that there was sacred ground between them and tread lightly.
Whoever married. She was doing it again.
Dinner was as much a surprise as Marshall ’s home had been. While she leaned on the counter in a kitchen better furnished than her own and sipped wine, Marshall made iced asparagus and seasoned sautéed goat cheese on toast. He felt her eyes on him and looked up from his work. “I cook,” he said. Apparently he’d read her mind. “I’ve also mastered the art of free-range grazing. In this town, a guy can pretty much live on the spread at special events. Kind of like a dog knocking over garbage cans but with a tux and a caterer.”
After dinner they walked. Knowledge that another hurricane season was soon to begin lent a sense of preciousness to those who had survived the last. People sat on their front porches or stoops drinking beer and talking with neighbors.
“I came here to invest,” Marshall said. “I had a notion of gentrifying, pocketing the money, and moving to a good neighborhood. Turns out this is a good neighborhood.”
He took Polly’s hand. His was warm, and dry, and callused like a working man’s. Most of the men she’d dated had hands as manicured as her own.
The neighbors were mostly black or Hispanic, and Polly remembered Ma Danko. She hadn’t thought of the old woman in years. Ma had been kind to her. To remember something good about the trailer park startled her, and anger she’d not known she harbored eased, loosening the muscles across her back.
Marshall pointed out schools, showed her homes being renovated, told her which businesses were up and running north, south, east, and west and how this ephemeral box of progress would bring the neighborhood up. The talk was dry and serious, and Polly wondered what he was afraid he would say if he didn’t talk about urban renewal.
“Did you lure me all the way out here to sell me a house?” she asked to upset whatever applecart he was pushing.
He stopped walking and looked at her. The setting sun dyed his hair red and limned the strong line of his jaw. “In a way,” he said quietly.
12
Marshall handed Polly out of his vintage truck, highly cognizant of the pressure of her hand, the way she swung her legs, ankles neatly together. He walked with her to the door but did not kiss her goodnight.
She shook his hand-just the ends of her fingers in his-not the hard pumping as of a well handle that women had adopted from their male counterparts. “I had a splendid evening, Mr. Marchand. You are a darling man.” With a glance up at him through her lashes, she turned and disappeared inside.
For a moment, long enough to savor the last whisper of
her perfume but not so long as to seem a stalker, Marshall remained on the steps. He could not remember when he’d wanted to kiss a woman as much as he did Polly. Never, he expected. The strength of his desire was why he hadn’t. He’d been afraid he’d step over the line-or swoon and make a fool of himself.
Next time, he promised, and returned to his truck. Thirty years ago when he’d bought it, it was a beat-up, old workhorse, and he’d used it as such. He still had a toolbox in the back full of carpenters’ tools, but the truck was no longer a beast of burden. It was mint: a refurbished, spit-shined, cherry-red, 1949 pickup. He didn’t take it out as much as he once had but something about Ms. Deschamps had decided him to bring her home in it. She’d loved it.
And I love her. The thought sent a stab of terror through him. “Where in the hell did that come from?” he asked aloud. It reminded him of the selling-her-a-house comment he’d made. There wasn’t a whole lot of ways a woman could take that. It was a wonder she didn’t run screaming down the street.
Marshall buckled his seat belt and resisted the urge to sit in the truck in front of her house just to be near her. He felt as if the day he’d seen her in the square he’d woken up, like Rip Van Winkle; that, until then, he’d been sleepwalking for twenty-five years. This rush of life was heady. With a cold fear that threatened to turn into panic he knew, if Polly were to vanish, he’d fall back into that self-induced coma. Or worse.
Marshall stomped the starter button so hard the old truck virtually leapt to attention. Did he think if he swept her off her feet and up the aisle quickly enough, by the time she found out what membership in the Marchand family entailed, it would be too late?
And how long could he keep lying to her? He found lying to Polly almost physically painful, even when done by omission.
Telling the tragic tale of Elaine’s dog and the freezer, he had omitted little things, like the dog hadn’t actually jumped into the freezer; its paws were taped together and its little muzzle taped shut so it couldn’t bark.
