by Sean Stewart
Joshua Cane, she thought, exemplified the kind of poverty that knows better—an excellent silk shirt, custom-tailored, with several tight, careful mends and two replaced buttons which didn’t match the originals but were intended to. His shorts were newer, made out of the rough modern denim they spun here in Galveston from Amarillo cotton. Below the shorts his knees and ankles were bony. The soles of his sandals were made from tire rubber; the nylon straps had been cut from abandoned car seat belts.
He stepped aside and waved her in, looking at the nasty bloodstain on her leg. “Is that serious?”
“It looks worse than it was. Stupid accident with a broken bottle.” Sloane dabbed at the stain, then stopped as her fingers came up red and sticky. “Oh, yuck.” She looked up. “Do you have…? I mean, could I—”
“There’s a bathroom through that door, to your left.”
“Thanks.”
The bathroom was tiny and mildewed. Like most people too poor to have running water, Josh had a big water barrel next to his bathtub. An old plastic milk bottle with the top cut off served as a dipper. Sloane’s stockings were stuck to her legs with dried blood. She took off her dress and stood in the tub, sloshing tepid water over her thighs. It seeped into her cut and began to sting furiously. Yikes! Salt water! Of course, a common man wouldn’t be using freshwater to bathe in after four weeks of rationing. Joshua Cane didn’t enjoy the privileges of living at Ashton Villa. Sloane felt like a spoiled rich girl.
There’s a reason for that, Miss Gardner.
To her relief his towels were clean and didn’t smell much. She dried off quickly and put her dress back on. There was a tiny bloodstain on the hem. That she could scrub out later, or cover in trim, but the stockings were a dead loss. When she returned to the front room, Joshua was behind the counter of his pharmacy, grinding away with his mixing bowl mortar and golf club pestle. “What are you making?” Sloane asked.
“Chili paste arthritis liniment. You remember Ham? His dad’s hands hurt him pretty bad these days. Wanted to get this done before my morning rush,” Josh said sardonically.
“You’re doing this for free?”
“The Mathers are good as kin. I owe them more than the occasional jar of liniment,” Joshua said. “What can I do for you, Ms. Gardner?”
Sloane grinned. “Raised by your mother, were you?”
“What?”
“Only sons brought up by women of my mother’s generation call anyone ‘Ms.’”
“I can stop.”
“No, don’t. It’s quaint.” Sloane laughed. “Lovely old-fashioned manners. Really.” She held up the damp remains of her stockings. “I wasn’t sure what to do with these.” Besides walking through the streets with them bloody and ripped in my hands, that is. Maybe I should just leave them gaily flung over the back of the armchair in the parlor for Mom to find. Sloane shuddered. “They’re ruined, but I didn’t know where—”
“If you’re throwing them out, I could use them.” Sloane cocked one eyebrow and gave him an arch look. It was a new expression for her, one that had come with the mask. “Not to wear,” Joshua added hastily. “To strain my tinctures through. Something finer than cheesecloth would be very useful from time to time.” Sloane plopped the damp pile of wet silk on his counter. “So how was your night at the Mardi Gras, Ms. Gardner?” Josh said.
Sloane froze.
“You smell of cigarette smoke,” Josh explained. “We haven’t had tobacco on the Island in ten years. That was the last good money we made. Even my mom didn’t mind charging an arm and two legs for that poison. Only time we ever got a Denton in our store. Sheriff Jeremiah’s first wife came in desperate a few times before cancer got her.”
“You’re very smart, Mr. Cane.”
“Hasn’t made me rich, Ms. Gardner.”
“Call me Sloane. Please.” She stuck her hand over the counter. He smiled, put down his pestle, wiped his hand on his denim shorts and shook. His fingertips were hard, as she had remembered. All that grinding.
“Were you up all night?” Josh asked.
“I’ve been a bad girl, I’m afraid. As if there isn’t work to be done.” As if Mom doesn’t need me now more than ever.
She had meant to see Momus and clarify their agreement, that’s why she had put on the mask in the first place. But it was so strange in Mardi Gras, there was so much music and dancing, it had taken her a while to get her bearings. She had been caught up, somehow, in a wonderful party at the Bishop’s Palace—only it wasn’t the real Palace, where Randall Denton now lived, but a different, magical one where it was still February 2004 and there were cars in the streets and all the air-conditioning you could desire and marvelous exotic foods she hadn’t tasted in her whole life. And water! All the water you could drink, and Coke, and wine, and beer that wasn’t made from rice—anything you could imagine. They had lived like kings, before the Flood. They were still living like kings in Mardi Gras. The last night of the old world, playing on forever.
Sloane blinked. She had almost drifted off to sleep on her feet.
Josh turned and ran his fingers along one of the shelves behind his head, then pulled down a mason jar full of dried leaves. “Damiana. A mild stimulant and antidepressant, one of the few useful plants that grows wild here. The Mexicans use it all the time, call it hierba de la pastora. Not that anyone cares. This is what passes for medicine these days. They used to think it was an aphrodisiac.” He glanced up. With the tingle of the Mardi Gras still in her blood, she gave him a sly smile. Odessa would have been proud of that look, she thought. You naughty flirt.
He grinned, unscrewing the jar’s lid. “You look like a good sneeze would knock you over. Can I give you a little something to pick you up? I’m thinking your days aren’t a lot of fun right now.”
“Not too much fun, no.”
“I lost my mother a few years back,” Josh said. “Diabetes.” He took out a small handful of damiana leaves and closed up the jar. “I hope I die of a heart attack,” he said. “It’s bad when you can see it coming from so far away.”
It was quite unbearable to listen to him try, in his awkward way, to comfort her, when instead of trying to save her mother all she had done last night was drink and dance. Sloane smiled her practiced smile. “We’re just trying to take it one day at a time.”
Joshua nodded, as if this meant something, as if it wasn’t just mechanical bullshit of the kind she dished out all day, every day. “Did you happen to drink much last night? No, forget I asked. What I mean is, you’re probably a little dehydrated. Let me make you a sip of tea.”
He showed her into his kitchen and she followed, knowing she shouldn’t, knowing he probably didn’t have the money or the water to be wasting on her, knowing she should get back to Ashton Villa before she was missed. Instead she sank into a chair at Josh’s kitchen table while he boiled precious water to make her a cup of damiana tea. The guilt she felt at having abandoned her mother to go dancing in the Mardi Gras all night didn’t make it any easier to face returning to that dim parlor with the closed drapes and the wasted figure on the bed. The tea tasted strange, minty and a little bitter, but she was grateful for its warmth. After a few sips she crossed her arms on the table in front of her and put her head down to rest. Joshua Cane reminded her of Deputy Kyle Lanier, she decided, drowsing. Physically they were both small, but more importantly each carried the sense of poverty like a grudge. The difference was that Kyle had been poor as a child, Josh well-to-do. Kyle was always running away from his past, where Josh Cane couldn’t let go of his.
She realized she must have fallen asleep when a clatter woke her. Josh was putting a bowl and spoon in front of her. It felt as if hours had passed, but it must have only been minutes. A moment later he returned with a pot full of rice porridge and began ladling out a portion for her. “Brown sugar or molasses?”
“Sugar,” she said, and then worried she had picked the more expensive alternative, and wondered what he would think of her if he knew she didn’t know. Sp
oiled rich kid. Sloane watched a lump of brown sugar turn liquid, a dark stain spreading into the porridge. Her whole body recoiled from the thought of food, but she didn’t want to seem rude or shame him so she blessed the porridge and forced herself to eat everything in her bowl, washing it down with sips of bitter damiana tea.
A rooster shrieked and strutted in the backyard. Joshua sat across from her, stirring molasses into his porridge. Damn. Bet the molasses was cheaper. When Ham had brought her here the first time, the apothecary had smelled of the pepper and yeast and sulfur he worked with. Today his clean shirt and pants both smelled faintly but pleasantly of early morning ironing.
“Thanks for this,” Sloane said, holding up her cup of tea.
“Witch-doctoring,” Josh said briefly. “Which reminds me, don’t go picking your own damiana and drinking it by the quart. It’s also a mild laxative.”
Sloane laughed. “Thanks for the warning. Do you get a lot of customers?”
“No. I’m…my mother and I had a reputation for being unlucky,” Josh said.
After an awkward pause Sloane said, “Thank you for the tea, and your help.” Careful of his pride here. “I’d like to pay you.”
“I wasn’t trying to get your sympathy.”
Sure you were. “Of course not,” Sloane said. “But I can afford to pay. You are allowed to be as proud as a Gardner, but not prouder. You can look offended while getting paid, but I won’t let you avoid payment entirely. Deal?”
He eyed her sardonically. “Deal…No, on second thought, I want something more. I want to know what it’s like in the Mardi Gras.”
It was Sloane’s turn to flinch. She sipped her tea. “I’m not sure I can tell you. I’ve never really been there.” He started to say something, but she shook her head. “I mean, it’s not really me, it’s someone else. Sly goes to parties. Sly plays dice, Sly drinks and dances. Sloane…Sloane is a good girl. She has to get up in the morning. Organize appointments. Take Mother to the bathroom.”
“Sly?”
“That’s what I call her. I mean, myself. When I’m over there. I don’t use my real name, not in Momus’s kingdom.”
“Why Sly?”
If you saw the mask, you would know. Sloane shrugged.
Joshua finished his rice porridge and cleared the table, putting the dishes in his small sink. “How much time have you been spending over there?”
“Not much,” Sloane said quickly. “I’ve only been there twice. Well, three times.”
“Mm,” Josh said, looking at her.
Sloane couldn’t meet his eyes. “Joshua? Please…please don’t tell.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I would be so ashamed.”
He said, “I know what that feels like.”
Then Sloane did something she never could have done before she had put on the mask. She joined him at the sink, holding his eyes with her own, and took his hand, and sealed their bargain with a touch. The trace of a smile flickered over Joshua’s face. “Let’s not tell the others,” he murmured. She looked quizzically at him, but he shook his head. “Your secret is safe with me, Ms. Gardner.”
“Sloane? Please?”
“Sloane.”
She squeezed his hand and then released it and finished her tea. “Thanks. I needed that.” On aching feet she allowed him to see her to the front door. One more time, she thought. I’ll go back just one more time to see Momus. After that, never again.
SHE walked home through the poor sections of town on the south side of Broadway, praying under her breath that she would not meet anyone she knew. Even though the day was hot she felt much too exposed in her short cotton dress, especially with her legs bare. What possessed me to wear a mid-thigh hem! There’s only one explanation, she thought morosely. My mind is being controlled by a god who likes fat legs.
Her luck almost held. She came cautiously up 23rd Avenue and hung back behind a fat palm on the west side of Broadway, waiting for a moment the street was nearly empty. Then she hurried across, eyes downcast, and slipped through the front door of Ashton Villa.
“Up late again,” said Sarah, the senior housemaid, materializing from the gloomy foyer. “And a night like your poor mother had,” she added disapprovingly.
Oh, God. “Is she worse?”
Sarah shrugged. “Ask the nurse,” she said pointedly.
“Sarah, you don’t have to…”
“Don’t tell on you, is that what you mean? I have my own work to do,” Sarah said, and without waiting for an answer she headed back to the kitchen.
TWO hours later Sloane sat beside her mother’s wheelchair, awake by virtue of willpower and damiana tea. Her eyes felt like scoured glass. The damiana hadn’t actually made her feel wakeful, just jumpy and nervous. She desperately longed for sleep.
They were sitting at the smaller table in the dining room, the circular one carved from Italian oak. Polished cabinets and tallboys around the room held Miss Bettie’s silver, fifty place settings for a seven-course meal. Twenty matched chairs in the Elizabethan style, with blue velvet backs and cushions, sat around the formal cherrywood table that occupied the center of the room. Sloane found herself wondering how much of Joshua’s house she could buy with the money it had taken to commission just one of the carved walnut cornices that hung over every window in the room. Similar thoughts wandered through her mind as she pretended to listen to her mother discuss Krewe business with Jim Ford and Jeremiah Denton.
Sheriff Denton was a quiet, intelligent Southern gentleman with the neat grey mustache and beard Sloane had seen in photographs of Robert E. Lee. He had Lee’s weary grey eyes, too, that had looked, unflinching but at great cost, at too many years of grief and toil. Jeremiah was the one Denton of his generation viewed with universal respect. Jane Gardner had coaxed him into accepting the nomination for sheriff when Sloane was still a girl. Now he was serving his third term.
Sloane quietly shifted Jane’s wheelchair so her mother could see both men without strain. “Well, Sheriff, the bad news is that the drought’s hit Beaumont. Jim tells me they’re going to have trouble bringing in the summer rice crop.”
“Even if they do, the price is going to go up, up, up,” Jim said. He brought out the Sony laptop he had carried to work every day for as long as Sloane could remember and put it on the table. Flipping up the screen he said, “Let me show you some numbers.”
Over the next hour the heads of the Krewe of Momus pored over their options. They discussed alternative foods, considered how best to increase pumping from the artesian wells across the bay that supplied the Island’s water, and argued the value of rationing. Everybody stopped frequently to wish for rain.
It was a crucial conversation, desperately important to the Island’s immediate future. Sloane followed hardly any of it. It was boring and she was exhausted. Each time she grimly set out to follow an argument or idea, her concentration slipped away like a minnow between her fingers. Instead she found herself staring at the way the lamplight gleamed on Jim Ford’s bald spot, or her mother’s fingers, so pitifully wasted and thin. She remembered those fingers resting over her own as her mother patiently taught her to type at the Compaq desktop in her playroom. Cut into that memory were others from her recent nights in the Mardi Gras: snatches of song, the sight of a laughing mouth, bubbles winking in a champagne flute.
How fearless they are, she thought, as the sober debate murmured on around her. Desperate they might be; but like all the members of her mother’s generation, they didn’t feel the malice of the drought. It was impersonal to them, an annoying accident of weather. They should be making sacrifices to it, or begging for help from the Sea. Instead they continued to act as if mankind alone of all creation had volition and purpose. As if the rest of the world was nothing but a clockwork, a blind machine, badly made and crotchety, which they were supposed to regulate and repair. They can’t help it, she reminded herself. It’s how they were raised. But how any thinking person could hold so naive a view in a world where Vi
ncent Tranh could be gone to Krewes, where Momus ruled his kingdom from an amusement park two miles away—that seemed like something worse than naiveté to Sloane. That felt like dangerous pride and pure blind folly.
“Sloane? Sloane?” She blinked. Jeremiah Denton was talking to her. “Is something wrong with your momma?”
Jane Gardner’s eyes were wide, her lips grey. She was struggling to speak. “She can’t breathe!” Sloane said. “Get a doctor!”
LATE that night in Sloane’s bedroom, the little blue Dresden clock that had belonged to Miss Bettie’s shy sister, Matilda, struck two. Sloane lay on her back staring at the pale white blur of mosquito netting around her bed. Her purse lay on top of her hand-painted French satinwood dresser. The mask was in her purse. From downstairs came the faint sound of a piano. Miss Bettie’s ghost. Sloane had heard her play every night since bringing home the mask.
Her mother lay in the parlor downstairs, taking oxygen through a rubber mask. It had been very close that morning, very close. Sloane had tried to give her mother mouth-to-mouth, but in her panic she had done it wrong, forgetting to pinch her mother’s nose shut, and the air had all escaped. By the time she realized what was happening the nurse had come and pushed her briskly aside.
The taste of her mother’s mouth still sat horribly on her lips.
Sloane sat up, pulled aside her canopy of mosquito netting, and walked softly to the French doors that opened onto her balcony. In her stepfather’s Galveston the party would be in full swing. But here in the real world the Island lay like a dead animal in the hot night. Gaslight lanterns burned in the better neighborhoods; the rest were dark. Far away, a few yellow lamps moved slowly over the Bay; night fishermen, out for squid or skate.
Her mother’s mouth had tasted old, her lips soft under Sloane’s lips. No lipstick, of course—Sloane hadn’t been there to put it on that morning. The nurse hadn’t thought of it, and Jane Gardner wouldn’t ask a stranger to do something that personal. Sloane couldn’t think of a day in her mother’s life she hadn’t worn lipstick. It was part of her armor.
