Andrew’s shirt is good and soaked by the time he gets to his former apartment on St. Ann, a small second-floor flat now annexed to the Sanson boutique hotel. He stands below it and looks up, noting how much neater and more inviting it looks now. Hanging plants cascade from the balconies thereof in majestic gouts of green. A woman in a turquoise bathrobe stares unashamedly down at him, a sort of bright balcony house cat drinking something red from a clear plastic cup. Her colors go so well with the aqua stucco behind her that she might have been paid to hold that post.
“Afternoon,” he says to her.
She raises her glass and inclines her head slightly, with the gentility of diurnal inebriation.
He misses his Vieux Carré flat but cut it loose after Katrina. He wasn’t really coming here often enough to justify the expense, after all, and it’s normally not too hard to find a hotel.
Normally.
• • •
He heads south again, then left on Bourbon, right on Frenchman.
The Frenchman voodoo shop sits beneath a wooden sign depicting a bat in an eighteenth-century powdered wig. The bat holds a tiny skull in one foot and a tarot pack in the other, echoing the American eagle motif with its olive branch and quiver. Miss Mathilda, an enormous black woman in an Indian-print dress, advises a pinch-faced man in a tweed suit.
“Now, this kind of service is not cheap because it is real. Do you understand me, sir? This is not a joke.”
She cuts her eyes to Andrew when he enters.
The man in tweed does, too.
She winks at Andrew, looks back at the man, actually uses her finger to turn his face back toward hers. He suffers this. She goes on.
“You will need to bring me film of your father, plus one or two personal effects of his, preferably things he handled frequently.”
The man looks at Andrew again.
Miss Mathilda says, “He’s a friend, we can speak in front of him.”
She can barely contain her smile.
She turns the man’s face once more with her finger, swallows him with her eyes.
“In two weeks or thereabouts we will receive the tape and call you. About the tape; it must be VHS.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you have VHS footage of your father?”
“Doing what?”
“Anything.”
“Christmas. Is Christmas okay?”
“We love Christmas at the Frenchman voodoo shop.”
“But I only have one copy. And nobody makes VHS anymore.”
She plucks a business card from between the teeth of a cat’s skull.
“This man on Tchopitoulas does. Ring the bell downstairs. And don’t be alarmed if he answers in his boxers. Just between us, he’s a little touched, but he’s the best man in the city for vintage electronics.”
“How do I . . .”
“Know it’s real?”
She uncurls a finger, points a black fingernail with a triangle of diamond chips in it like stars. Points at a red door hung with testimonials.
“That room. You’ll watch it the first time in that room. If your father does not speak to you, you will not be charged.”
His eyes dance over her face, looking for the scam.
“I won’t?”
“Of course not. I told you, this is the real thing. We have no need to cheat anyone.”
“Three thousand even? No tax?”
She nods.
“Where does the tape go?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Is this legal?”
She smiles broadly.
“My friend, nobody has ever asked me that before.”
• • •
When the man leaves, Andrew and Miss Mathilda bear-hug each other, laugh together, talk.
“How long are you here for, pretty man?”
“Not long.”
“You smell like hoodoo.”
“Guilty.”
“And boudin. Have you been eating boudin?”
He nods.
“Where’s mine?”
He shrugs, smiling. She’s younger than him by a decade but always makes him feel twelve. He resolves to bring her boudin when he leaves.
“But how about that? That guy. You think he’ll want a trapdoor?”
“Could be.”
“What a coincidence. Walking in just then, I mean.”
“Not as much as you might think.”
“How so?”
“My dear Mr. Blankenship, I offer your service several times a day most days. To anyone who lingers at the altar of the dead with hope or sadness in their eyes. And of course to anyone who buys a candle to light or hangs a photo. Look how many!”
The tin tree standing over the waxy altar blooms with pictures of the dead. Incense lingers.
She goes on.
“It’s just that so few people have that kind of money now. Even for parlance with the blessed dead.”
“I’m doing all right.”
“If you were doing all right, you wouldn’t have given up that sweet little apartment.”
He blinks twice, squints like he does when he’s about to ask a favor.
She anticipates him.
“Seeing a friend, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Gun show this week,” she says.
“Uh-huh.”
“Hotels all booked.”
He’s ashamed of his poor planning.
“That’s right.”
She fishes around near the register.
Holds up three brass keys as if fanning three cards.
“Pick.”
48
Andrew opens the door to room 373 of the Brass Key Apartments, his left hand flipping up a dead wall switch, his nostrils flaring to take in the damp air. Hot and dark. It smells of nylon stockings and stale semen, the nosegay of adultery, but why shouldn’t it? Adultery is his business here, too.
He crosses to the AC unit beneath the window and turns the knob, glad to hear it sputter on. The air coming from the crosshatched mouth is dog’s-breath warm, though, and turning the loose temperature knob all the way into the blue only cools it marginally. A drop of sweat milky with salt runs down his nose and disappears into the vent.
He tries the window and it refuses to rise, so he braces himself and pushes up hard. Painted shut. A young couple on the street below whinnies self-conscious laughter, and he laughs, too, as he imagines himself pawing at the glass at them like a dog stuck in a hot car. His guayabera is beginning to stick to his back again.
Across the street, a balding man in suspenders and a blood-soaked shirt looms behind a filthy window, fanning himself with a fedora. His look suggests mild curiosity, incongruous with his recently cut throat. A ghost. So many of them here. Andrew suppresses the urge to wave and turns from the window.
Lights from the bars on St. Louis wash the room in red light that recalls the engine room of a World War II submarine, even through the flimsy curtains. He sits on the futon and feels the cord of the table lamp until he finds the switch, which he is immediately sorry to have pushed. Now the gaudy purple and gold wall hanging, bearing the obligatory fleur-de-lis, pounces at him. Now he sees the truly impressive cum stain on the futon cover, as big as a map of Cuba. He has the impression its author is a minor league baseball player, but has no idea where that comes from.
He notes a filmy glass ashtray near the lamp and decides to give the window another try before he lights up.
Brace.
Strain.
Window still shut.
Drop of sweat in the eye.
An idea comes to him then.
He is reluctant to bother Haint again, having left him at the Tin Shack to listen to the fiddler’s second set, but Haint is the best man he k
nows to solve this problem; the only one who might be able to do it remotely. Miss Mathilda gave him the key, but she will already be settling down to sleep, having read her autistic girl an article from Scientific American or Popular Science.
He texts Haint a photo of the window with the message:
Painted shut. Hot as fuck. HOG?
Less than a minute passes before the “Ring of Fire” ringtone goes off and he sees Haint on his screen. He enables the camera. Haint is drunker than hell, holding a dead cat by the neck with one hand. He holds a tiny, gnarled claw-hand in the other. Haint gestures with the claw-hand that Andrew should point his phone’s camera at the window.
“Tap tap,” his phone says, and Andrew taps the phone twice on the glass.
A chip with a crack for a tail appears in the pane as though a small rock has hit it. Flakes of paint fly as a seam gouges itself furiously in a square circuit defining the frame, as though the window is unzipping itself, as though a very strong hand wields an invisible putty knife. The whole assembly shudders and the window pops, easing itself up an inch. Andrew pushes up with his free hand now and the window opens as if on greased rails.
Air comes in, not cool air but fresh.
He turns the phone’s screen faceward to thank Haint, but the man is dancing in the candlelight of his mobile brick apartment, slow-dancing with his limp cat and kissing its dead mouth, holding the Hand of Glory up in the other. Etta James plays tinny and small through the phone’s speaker.
“Good night, Haint,” he says, and the man dips the hand in his hand twice in acknowledgment.
Andrew hangs up and sits back on the futon, well away from the map of Cuba. His cell phone tells him it is 12:22 A.M.
He lights a Spirit and inhales gratefully, blowing smoke in a drowsy billow toward the window that yawns subtropical night on the other side of the room.
Althea.
She will be here in eight minutes if she keeps her word, but she never keeps her word.
• • •
“Did you find a meeting?” she asks him as they lie on the damp bed. He is still panting. She is already toeing around in the sheet-nest for the panties she will be slipping back on soon.
It is nearly three A.M. and she will want to welcome her man home after his shift. Then sleep from morning until nearly five P.M., when she will make some weird vinegary salad with apricots or strawberries or pomegranate seeds and run off for three hours of teaching Kundalini, Hatha, and hot yoga, if she is still doing that.
“Not here,” he says. “I’m not in town long. Like a day.”
“But you’ve been to one recently? A meeting?”
“Last night.”
“Good. So you’re feeling strong?”
“Don’t start that,” he says, instantly regretting it. Telling Althea not to do something is like pressing the accelerator to stop a car.
She takes a small bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of her tin purse and sips it, straddling him and bending down to put her lips to his. He turns his head away.
“C’mon,” he says, “it isn’t funny.”
“Who said it was?” she says, swigging again, loading up with a mouthful she will now try to squirt between his lips.
He jabs his thumbs roughly just under her armpits and wiggles, causing her to laugh and cough, whiskey spattering from her mouth and down her chin. She tries unsuccessfully to catch it in a cupped hand.
Pleased, she bends to kiss him and this time he allows it, her shag of curly brown hair engulfing him along with her riverbed scent while the forbidden taste of booze rides her tongue into his mouth.
And just like that it is awake again.
The big electric animal under his skin that doesn’t understand the word no.
You’re in trouble.
He breathes hard, wanting to take the whiskey bottle from her and swallow until a big warm pond pools around his heart, but he concentrates on her tongue. It is a dirty tongue, always coated with something; it feels the way your skin feels when you shower somewhere with soft water, always slick, always filmy.
The Jack Daniel’s bottle lies on the bed, its handsome black label and the good feel of it in his palm only a scoot and a reach away.
Fuck your way out of this.
Andrew looks down past the twin hanging cones of Althea’s breasts to where her belly rolls, pale above her dark bush and only just beginning to dimple as she approaches her fortieth year.
He begins to harden again, flicking her oily nakedness with the top of his shaft.
“Hmm,” she half growls, reaching down for it, but he dumps her off him and holds her down. She snakes her legs around him now, high up around his ribs, and wiggles, waiting for him.
Definitely still teaching yoga.
He hardens to three quarters.
Closes his eyes and sees Anneke.
Wanting me, naked and eager.
Except that Anneke already loves me.
Just not sexually, “as a wife loves a husband.”
Or the raven’s beak would kill her.
As surely as cancer is killing her father.
Stop sabotaging this, you need this.
Why?
What happens when you get too old to hide in a cunt?
And it’s just you alone with you.
Andrew opens his eyes, sees the beautiful, eely woman beneath him; he flares his nostrils and takes in the punk aroma of her excited sex. Althea has a strong smell, but mild and sweet compared to the rusalka. He closes his eyes again.
Karl Zautke is dying.
Anneke is relapsing.
She needs you, and you’re here.
Opens his eyes.
“You don’t love me, do you?”
His own voice surprises him.
Althea brays a laugh, then shakes her head slowly and wickedly at him.
“I love my husband,” she says. And she does. She loves her husband so much, in fact, that she will strap him down when he gets home from the bar and tell him in luxurious detail about her unprotected sex with her gris-gris New York lover. He will want her to ride him while she is still full of his rival, emasculating him until he is half sobbing, and then, when it’s over, turning mommy on him, cleaning him off and cradling him until sunrise. You would never look at the big, dangerous-looking bouncer with his bald dome and huge biceps and think, This guy only gets hard when he’s being ground down, but that’s how it is.
“I know. I just wanted to hear it.”
“Stop talking,” she says.
He stops talking.
He puts a coin between her eyes that lets him think thoughts into her head, and he shows her a dream where she is raping men on a Persian slave galley—she yowls so hard at the end of it that one of the neighbors accompanies her vocals with the percussion of shoe on wall.
Someone outside and below claps.
49
Andrew emerges from his bathroom, carrying the little duffel he took to New Orleans. No baggage claim, no bored security guards watching you walk past the point of no return; fuck you, Homeland Security. The day a user decides to go terrorist is going to be a bad day indeed.
His phone, temporarily confused, and perhaps insulted, by the rapid shift from Central to Eastern Time zones, resets itself and chimes the arrival of a text message it had temporarily misplaced.
Anneke Zautke
Dad’s on the way out. Don’t come. I’ll keep you posted though. Sorry & thanks. God damn this anyway.
Und zo.
He goes upstairs, sits on the edge of his bed, and peels off his Old Gringos. The warm, animal smell of his own feet hits him—it was so hot in the Quarter—and he notices a hole that will soon allow his big toe to peep through his sock.
Time to get rid of these.
Knot them together and give them to the dog to chew.
>
Only the dog isn’t a dog now.
As if summoned, Salvador knocks at the door frame, keeping politely out of sight, the clack of wood on wood startling the tired magus.
“Come in,” he says, almost adding boy.
Isn’t a dog.
Then what the fuck is he?
A monster. You’ve turned him into something unnatural, as you do with everything. He should be a handful of ashes on the breeze. He should be chasing rabbits in Elysium.
Will you put Karl Zautke’s heart in a basket and make him wash your boxers, too?
Salvador walks in, the Etch-a-Sketch he uses to communicate hanging by a leather cord around his wicker neck. The knobs turn themselves, and black-on-gray letters appear.
“Closer, Sal, I can’t see.”
The automaton lopes close, the knobs still turning.
TV IN DOWN.
GARLIC CHOP IN BOWL.
WHO COOKS?
Salvador has cleaned up the media room and put in a new television.
He chopped garlic because, even though he doesn’t know what Andrew wants to eat, it will certainly contain garlic.
“I’ll cook. Thanks.”
Boy.
I can’t even scratch your ears now.
The picture frame cocks, Salvador Dalí’s head now at a quizzical angle. He wants further orders. Just like a border collie, happier with a task.
He always asks who cooks even though Andrew hasn’t let him near the gas range since he caught himself on fire two years ago. But he’s not afraid of fire, not afraid of anything except displeasing his master.
What else has he got?
Me.
He just has me.
• • •
Andrew stands up, puts on the orange running shoes Anneke teases him about, and grabs a tennis ball from the closet. They go into the backyard. For the next half an hour, Andrew throws the ball and the wicker man sprints on his synthetic legs to grab it, scooping it with his wooden hands as nimbly as an outfielder, then throwing it back to his master. When it goes into the brush, Salvador turns his framed head sideways so it doesn’t drag branches.
The Necromancer's House Page 14
