Going Bovine

by Libba Bray

The guys fall in behind us. We pick up speed. So do they. We turn on Rampart Street. They turn on Rampart Street. Maybe they’re just headed the same way we are. Or maybe we’re about to get our butts handed to us on a platter.

  “Oh, man, we are so dead, so dead, so dead.”

  “Just be cool.”

  The door opens on a little house. Light and party sounds spill out onto the sidewalk. The tallest woman I have ever seen steps in front of us. She’s about six foot seven in heels and dressed like a parade float. Her eyes are made up with sparkly blue eye shadow and false eyelashes, and her hair is red, curled, and piled up on top of her head like a piñata. Big hair. Big jewelry. Big hands. Whoa. Really big hands. She’s holding a cigarette between those mammoth fingers.

  “Hey, honey, where’s the fire?” she asks in a deep voice.

  I look behind me, but the guys we thought were after us have set up shop on a different corner. They’re practicing dance moves under a streetlight, laughing when one of their crew messes up. They’re about as threatening as a boy band, and I feel like a colossal, paranoid tool for getting so worked up.

  “Since y’all standing here you might as well make yourselves useful. Y’all got a light?” the lady asks.

  “Gonzo,” I say. “Matches.”

  Gonzo hands the matches to the lady, who purses her lips and cocks a hip. “Sugar, you’re supposed to light a girl’s cigarette, not throw the matches at her. Didn’t your mama teach you anything?”

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “That’s all right,” she says, and lights her own cigarette. Jesus, she’s big. Gonzo comes up to her kneecaps, and I only reach her waist. “What’re you two lil’ scouts doing out here? Baby, this idn’t a good neighborhood. I got knifed bad out here one time.”

  “We’re looking for the Horn and Ivory,” I tell her, pointing to the matchbook cover. “It’s supposed to be here on North Rampart.”

  “Not for about four million years, it ain’t, honey. It moves around. Always has. You have to know where to look.” The lady peers down at us through her cigarette-smoke haze, sizing us up. “Now, how come you wanna go to the Horn and Ivory?”

  “We want to see where Junior Webster used to play,” I say.

  The lady’s eyes widen. “Junior Webster. I haven’t heard that name in a long, long time.”

  Somebody yells down from the balcony. “Miss D! We need more beer!”

  “Get it yourself, honey! I’m busy,” she shouts back. “And, uh, how exactly do you think you’re gonna get into the Horn and Ivory—if you can find it on your own, that is? Y’all not old enough to shave.”

  “Yes we are,” Gonzo insists, his little manly pride deeply wounded.

  She rubs a finger across Gonzo’s smooth cheek. “Um-hmm.”

  “We don’t want to drink. We just want to see the place where Junior played. My friend Eubie told me I had to if I was ever in New Orleans.”

  “Zat so?” She takes a good long look at us through her exhaled smoke. “Did your friend tell you how to find the Horn and Ivory?”

  “No,” I concede.

  “Uh-hmm, um-hmmm.” Miss D says, like it means something. She drops the cigarette to the sidewalk and crushes it daintily with that huge, basketball-player-worthy foot. “Can’t have you going back with nothin’ to tell, can we? Don’tchoo worry, cher. Miss Demeanor’s gonna get you in to see Junior.”

  I don’t know what she means by that. Eubie told me Junior Webster’s dead. Maybe she means she’ll get us in to see the club.

  “Well, come on, then, churren.” Miss Demeanor sashays down the sidewalk, and we fall into step behind her.

  “Man, you sure are tall,” Gonzo says.

  “Yeah, baby. I surely am.” She laughs out loud.

  “Gonzo,” I whisper a minute later. “I’m pretty sure Miss Demeanor is a guy.”

  “Right. I knew that.” But I can see that he didn’t, because now he’s trying to steal a look at her, to make sure.

  Any other place in the world, we’d be a real spectacle, but I’m coming to realize that the more you stand out in New Orleans, the more you actually blend in. It’s like a circus of a town. Within a block or so, we’re back in the nonstop party that is Mardi Gras.

  A bouncer calls out from a shadowed doorway. “Hey, Miss D, where y’at, dawlin?”

  “How I always am, baby—fiiiine!” She laughs when she says it, and he laughs, too.

  Miss D leads us off the chaotic, crowded street and down a private, narrow alley that dead-ends at an elaborate double gate that’s exactly like the one we saw on the Morpheus float, with one side completely white and the other etched with the outline of a trumpet symbol. Just beyond the gate is a red door.

  “The Gates of Horn and Ivory,” Miss D says. She opens them up and then gives three quick knocks on the red door, followed by a pause, and then a fourth knock. A little window in the door opens. A pair of eyes appears.

  “You know me?” she says.

  The eyes move up and down, yes.

  “So you know I’ve always been a good friend to this club.”

  The eyes nod again.

  “I need a favor. These here my nephews come all the way from …” She looks down at us. “Backwater. They want to see the Horn and Ivory.”

  The eyes dart over in our direction, take in the state of us for a good long time. They move slowly back to stare at Miss Demeanor.

  She sighs, throws her hands in the air, heavenward. “I know. Bless ’em. They’re my ugly sister’s kids.”

  The eyes don’t even blink.

  “The little one’s doing that last wish thang. He’s got cancer of twelve different organs. Some you ain’t never even heard of. We’re all just broken up about it.”

  She purses her glossy lips. The window remains quiet.

  Miss D points a finger. “Okay. Okay. But you mess with his last wish and he’ll come back to haunt yo’ ass.” The door doesn’t budge. Finally, Miss D holds up the matches. “These boys got business with Junior, cher.”

  The little window closes, and the door opens.

  “Thank you, baby,” Miss D says, leading the way.

  I don’t know who let us in, because there is no one standing at the door when we go in. It’s like it’s opened all by itself.

  “Miss D?” I start. “How come you told him we have business with Junior?”

  “Well, don’t you, cher?”

  “But isn’t Junior Webster … dead?”

  She smiles. “Not last time I saw him. Course, it’s hard to say exactly when that was. Come on, now. Let’s catch him while we can.”

  I’m thoroughly confused, but there’s nothing to do but follow Miss D wherever she’s leading. We go down a hallway lit with red bulbs. Miss D opens a door that leads to another, smaller door that leads to a little tunnel we have to crawl through on hands and knees. It opens up in a kitchen. Miss D saunters past chefs in stained aprons who take no notice of us. She pushes a button and we step into a small elevator that wriggles up jumpy cables to another floor. This time, the door opens into a big, smoky nightclub. People in fancy clothes and harlequin masks crowd around small tables lit by red Chinese lanterns. The dance floor is crammed with people swaying, spinning, swinging out and back. This place is live. Crazy, wild-man music blares from a jukebox in a corner. Everything about it is fast and unpredictable—the piano runs, the percussion, the guitar riffs, and over all of it is a trumpet swooping up and down and all over like a giant bird in the sky till my heart’s beating right along with it. The song makes me want to run and shout, kiss girls and ride motorcycles through the desert. It makes me feel really alive, the way Eubie says music should.

  “That’s Junior you feel,” Miss D says, like she can read my mind. She leads us backstage. A burly bodyguard in a suit and sunglasses, wearing an earpiece, stands guard outside the curtained door.

  “Here, baby, you wait with me,” she says to Gonzo.

  “How come I can’t go in?” Gonzo sounds pissed.
<
br />   “He only sees people one at a time,” she says, hands on her hips. “I’ll take you up front and get you some nut mix. They got good nut mix.”

  I hear Gonzo say, “I could be allergic to nuts,” as Miss D drags him away.

  The bodyguard lets me in and closes the door behind me. I’m in a little vestibule lit by a red lightbulb. On a side table, a dozen of those white candles you see in old churches burn, leaving bubbling trails of wax down their sides. Above the table is the watercolor painting of Junior and the black hole that was on the cover of the “Cypress Grove Blues” LP Eubie showed me in his shop. There’s a big white ring in the center of the painting just like on the album. Some Mardi Gras beads hang from a thumbtack. And there’s a picture taped to the bottom right corner. I blink when I see it, because I swear it looks like that same picture of Eubie in his harlequin mask on Bourbon Street.

  “Somebody there?” a gravelly voice calls out.

  I push aside a curtain. The room has nothing in it but two chairs beneath a single lightbulb. Junior Webster sits in one of the chairs, shining his horn. He looks about a hundred years old. His black skin’s dark and lined and ashy in spots, like a pair of beautiful leather shoes stained with snow. He wears the same suit as in the poster, with the same straw hat and black sunglasses.

  “Come on over and take a seat,” he rasps. “I won’t bite.”

  “You’re really Junior Webster?” I say, sitting next to him.

  Junior chuckles. “All my life.”

  “Nice to meet you, sir.”

  “Nice to meet you, too, Cameron.”

  “How do you know—?”

  “In time, in time. Everything’s connected, my friend, and we got a lot in common.” Junior tucks his horn under his arm. He takes my hands in his. The insides of his wrists are marked by thick scar tissue. “You’ve seen ’em, haven’t you?”

  “Seen what?” I say, thinking he means the scars.

  “Not what. Who.” Junior’s lips peel back from his shiny teeth. “Fire giants.”

  My mouth’s gone dry. “You know about them, too?”

  Junior nods slowly. He drops my hands and goes back to shining his horn. “Oh yes, my friend. I know ’em. Nasty things. You steal a look at ’em and you ’bout feel you could burn up with your fear. A glimpse of another world beyond this one here. Them fire gods are bad news, all right, but they’re not the worst of it. They work for the big guy.” He leans close. “The Wizard of Reckoning.”

  The name and the way he says it raise goose bumps on my arms. “Who’s that?”

  “You seen him. In your dreams. Maybe on a stretch of road in the middle of the night.”

  “The guy in the black space-suit armor with the helmet and sword?”

  Junior purses his lips. “That’s what you see, then that’s him. Don’t always look the same to ever’body.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Somebody who ain’t from around here. Somebody who don’t like bein’ put off. Somebody you gotta tangle with at some point, whether you want to or not. Him and them fire bullies been trying to get my horn for years and years.”

  “Why do they want your horn?”

  “All my passion’s wrapped up in the notes. That’s not just air I’m blowing through this mouthpiece, sonny. It’s my soul. Someday he’s gonna come for me, and I’m gonna blow like I never blown before, and we’ll see if it’s enough. You lookin’ for Dr. X, that right?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I met him myself one time. In the hospital, after the war. Yes sir, you and me got a lot in common.”

  “Wait—how do you know about all this? How could you have already met Dr. X if Dulcie said the wormhole just opened up—”

  “Time and space don’t always play by the rules you think they do, son, and Dr. X bent a lot of rules,” he answers. “I met him then. You looking for him now.” He taps the tips of his fingers together. “All connected.

  “Enough with that talk. I wanna show you a little something. Take my arm.”

  I help the great Junior Webster from his chair. He may look frail, but there’s a lot of strength in that arm. I’ll have to tell Eubie about it when I get back.

  He drags one leg when he walks. “Got this limp in the war. Went over to play for the troops. Silly songs, mostly. Dance songs. Get-you-some kinds of songs. You feel me?”

  I nod.

  “I saw things there, such things. Things a man hopes never to see.” He shakes his head. “When I got back, I spent a year in the VA hospital. Nerves, you understand? Not right in the head. I didn’t play a note for three years. Just couldn’t. Some part of me was lying out there on those fields with my friends, dead. Then one day, I picked up my horn, and when I started playing, the sound was all different. Blood on the notes. Heart. Soul. Every bit of me coming out this horn. I didn’t hold nothin’ back. And that was that.”

  “That was that?”

  “I learned how to live changed.”

  I don’t really understand what he’s getting at, but he seems like a nice old man, and I feel sorry that he lived through what he did.

  “We goin’ over to that corner,” Junior says. As we get closer, I can see another pair of gates attached to the wall. They’re just like the ones we came in by, like the ones on the Morpheus float, except that these don’t go anywhere. They’re just art. Smack-dab in the middle of the wall is a big red button. “You gotta open one of them gates to get at the button.”

  Something about the way he says it makes it sound like a test. “Does it matter which one?”

  “It’s your choice, son, not mine.”

  That doesn’t do anything to make me feel less anxious. After a quick, silent game of eeny-meeny-miny-mo, I open the white gate.

  “Hmmm,” Junior says. “All right, then. Go on. Push the button.”

  As soon as I do, there’s a whirring noise that makes me jump. The ceiling opens up. Above us is a plush black night twinkling with stars. It reminds me of a planetarium, one of those optical-illusion skies that you know can’t be real, it has to be a projection on a 360-degree screen, but you swear at the time that you could just blast off into space from your chair. It’s that real.

  “Ain’t that a sight? With all the things we know and learn, we still ain’t touched the big mysteries—where we come from, where we go next, why we even here. And when something truly miraculous happens, we run and hide in our caves. We deny.”

  Junior Webster puts the trumpet to his lips, and blows a few bars of “Cypress Grove Blues.” He stops and inclines his head toward the fake sky like he’s listening for something.

  “The scientists say most galaxies got a black hole at their center. They suck up matter, those black holes. Just gobble ever’thing right on up, don’t matter what it is. That’s what we know. What we can observe. But the scientists, they can’t observe what happens inside a black hole—not directly, you understand—because the gravitational pull is so strong there ain’t a thing that can escape it. Not you. Not me. Not this here horn. Not even light. Only one thing comes out of a black hole, and that, my friend, is sound. Music. As things get pulled right on in to it”—he lowers his voice to a whisper—“that black hole sings. Do you feel me? It sings in an octave no human being could ever hear, but it does sing.”

  When he puts the trumpet to mouth this time, the song comes alive. The sound is a force pushing on me; the notes make me dizzy. I could swear the screen-sky is revolving slowly and that we’re drifting toward it. And right in the center is a dark pinpoint getting bigger with every note.

  “Mr. Webster?” I say, but he’s lost to his playing. I feel like a little kid at the planetarium, like I want to close my eyes and sink down in my seat till it’s over. But Junior’s angling his face toward it. The solid dark is bearing down on us from above and around. There’s no escaping it. I feel like I’m moving toward that black hole, like I’m being pulled right in, and it is freaking me the hell out. Junior’s got a strange look on his face;
I can’t tell if it’s terror or awe.

  “Sing,” he says quietly. “I’m ready. Go on. Lay that note on me.”

  The hole’s so big that the sky’s almost completely dark. Stars zip past us into the giant maw of that greedy, cosmic hole and disappear completely, and even though I know it’s just an illusion, I’m afraid I’ll be next.

  But Junior just laughs at the darkness in the sky.

  “You hear that?” he asks. “B-flat, I think. B-flat! You a tricky one, but I believe I be catching you later, baby.”

  He lifts his horn again and blows hard, and even though I don’t hear anything, I know he’s made some kind of sound. Immediately, the pressure I felt is gone. The sky ceiling fades to a morning blue. It’s nothing but a ceiling.

  There’s a knock at the door. The bodyguard opens it a crack.

  “They’re ready for you, Mr. Webster.”

  “Thank you. I be right there.”

  “You said you met Dr. X once before,” I say. “Do you know where he is now? Where I can find him?”

  Junior Webster purses his lips. “I might could help you with that. But first I got a show to do. You play any music, Cameron?”

  I shake my head.

  “Music opens your soul, makes you ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  He smiles big. “Exactly.”

  I follow Junior Webster into the completely packed club. As Junior passes, people reach out to touch him. This is what they’ve been waiting for, a chance to hear the famous Junior Webster and his magic trumpet.

  Gonzo manages to squeeze his way through. He falls in beside me. “Dude, I’ve been waiting, like, twenty minutes next to a bowl of toxic nut mix trying not to breathe in. What happened with Junior Webster?”

  “He’s gonna tell us where to find Dr. X. But he’s got to play his set first.”

  Junior leads us to a stage beside huge doors that open to a balcony. Down below, it’s a surreal sight—throngs of revelers in wild costumes dancing and swaying in the street, waiting for Junior to blow.

  Miss Demeanor grabs the mike. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Horn and Ivory Club is proud to introduce the one, the only, Mr. Junior Webster.”