Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  You can sleep during Lent.

  More than buying and selling was going on, too. Men strolled from barroom to barroom along the mud street, whiskery savages who came down from Kentucky and Tennessee with the keelboats, in their homespun shirts and heavy boots, pistols and knives at their belts. River traders, some of them—or the thieves and pirates who adopted that name—indistinguishable from the ruffians who made up the occasional wildcat military expeditions organized to help South American guerrilleros or dictators in the rebellion-torn nations of the south for a price. Slave-smugglers, some of them, bringing in Africans against the laws of the United States and the vows of the British Royal Navy, and trappers from the wild lands of northern Mexico, in their buckskin shirts and leggins with their squaws walking silent at their heels. Here and there Indians from those lands could be seen as well, black-haired and watchful-eyed, or staggering drunk and debased; Mexicans with silver conchos on their low-crowned hats. Every second building along Tchoupitoulas Street seemed to be a tavern, doors and windows gaping and the sickish-sweet stink of tobacco—smoked or spit— vying with the smoke of the steamboats, the stench of untended privies, the fetor of spilled or vomited whiskey and beer.

  As January and Hannibal proceeded upriver, the reek of the cattle-market and the slaughterhouses overwhelmed these other smells, and black buzzards hunched watchfully on eaves or fenceposts. “I wish they wouldn’t look at me that way,” complained Hannibal, and coughed. “Like creditors, or one’s family after someone’s blabbed about the contents of one’s will. At least one can disinherit one’s family.”

  “I’m not sure,” said January, and pointed to a big bald-headed bird on the limb of an oak—the buildings hereabouts were thinning, and becoming progressively more rude as they left the town behind. “That one looks like a lawyer to me.”

  “Tu as veritas, amicus meus.” The fiddler bent to pick an empty bottle from the sedge-choked ditch and flung it at the bird, which swayed back a little on its perch, wings spread like a witch’s cloak. Then hopped from its place and pecked at the black glass. “Now that you mention it, he does indeed bear a startling resemblance to my father’s solicitor—Droudge, his name was. If he swallows the bottle, I’ll know for sure he’s the very man, garbed in a clever disguise.”

  To their right, inland from the river, a man shouted. January had been aware for some minutes of the sullen rumble of voices, the occasional hoarse oath. The vacant lots here had blurred into stretches of marshy woodland, and it was hard to see exactly what was taking place, but January guessed. He felt he’d been born knowing, and his stomach clenched. He’d been aware, too, that he and Hannibal were not the only pair of men—one white, one black—to be making its way into this seedy neighborhood. At least two or three other couples of like composition waded through the weeds along the edges of the muddy streets, and in every case the black member of the pair was younger, taller, and fitter than his companion.

  The sound of yelling spiked, with wild howls of encouragement.

  January knew exactly what was going on.

  Neither Kate the Gouger nor any of her boarders were at the filthy collection of sheds that comprised her establishment. Hannibal poked his head through the door of the ramshackle bath-house—which more resembled a woodshed, with a couple of crusted tin tubs on the bare earth and an open firepit in a shed at the back—then re-emerged with a shrug. Behind the main building a sort of cabinet did duty as Kate’s bedroom, with a kitchen, a privy, a huge pile of cut wood, a murky-looking cistern, and another long dormitory shed grouped a few yards off. Nothing moved except a skinny cat sneaking along the roof of the dormitory, her purposeful air boding ill for any who might nourish hopes for a rodent-free night. Since the mob gathered around the fight was only a hundred yards or so up a nameless muddy street, in a clearing past a line of tupelo trees, it was obvious where everybody was.

  January felt as if everything in him had shrunk to a cold knot of iron.

  In Paris, during the tumults that had led up to the expulsion of the last Bourbon king, his friends used to say, It’s only a riot, and they’d joke at his unwillingness to go along and see the fun.

  The snarling anger of mobs always made him shiver, like the scent of smoke on the wind. If you were raised black in New Orleans, it was second nature to turn around and walk the other way. Fast.

  The fights were being held under the auspices of the Eagle of Victory saloon, one of the last buildings of the town on this side. One of the first, indeed, to be built on what had been the fields of a sugar plantation: through the stringers of cypress and loblolly pine, where other lots had been cleared, January could see piles of lumber or stacks of bricks marking someone’s good intentions. This section of the Faubourg St. Mary was a wasteland of old fields cut across and across with new streets—sodden tracks for the most part—and overgrown with elephant-ear and the skinny remnants of degenerate cane. Just past the Eagle of Victory’s unpainted walls, men shoved each other for a view, a solid wall of backs: greasy buckskin sewn with porcupine-quills, blue or gray or black broad-cloth and superfine. Slouch hats, fur hats, tall hats of silk or fine beaver. Most of the yelling was in English, with the hoarse inflection of Americans. “Kill him! Kill him, goddammit!” “Get up, you black fool!”

  Against the saloon’s rear wall a man lay on a blanket on the ground. Bruises stood out even against the dark mahogany of his skin. A barechested and shivering boy in his early teens knelt beside him, sponging away blood from chest, arms, thighs with his own shirt. As January and Hannibal passed the boy looked around desperately, as if seeking help or advice or merely the permission to seek it, and January walked over and knelt beside him. “May I?”

  The boy nodded, offered him the shirt, and smeared the tears from his face.

  The man’s eye had been gouged nearly out of its socket, his left ear bitten half away. His breath was shallow; when January pinched his fingernail, the nailbed stayed pale.

  “He be all right?” the boy asked, watching fearfully as January gently massaged and kneaded the engorged flesh of the eye back to something resembling its proper position. “He got blood in his piss.” He handed January a gore-smudged bandanna when he held out his hand; January made a pad of Hannibal’s handkerchief and tied it over the eye.

  “Much?”

  The boy shook his head. “Michie Marsan’s Lou kicked him in the nuts. Kicked him like a mule.” He looked around as someone roared with rage in the thick of the crowd. A moment later a savage storm-gust of cheering made January’s skin creep. The boy said, “He done as best as he could. Just Big Lou was bigger. Lots bigger.”

  And probably didn’t want to end up lying on the ground leaking blood any more than this man did. January carefully manipulated the bruised and swollen genitals, ascertained that the swelling was minimal, that there didn’t seem to be hematomas deeper in the groin. The downed man was clearly a fighter, with scars on his cheeks and belly-muscles like a double row of fry-pans.

  “Get him under a blanket.” He fished in the pocket of his shabby corduroy jacket for a half-dollar. “One of the whores should have one to sell you. He needs to be kept warm. Get rum or brandy to clean that ear. Get him out of here as soon as you can.”

  The boy nodded, wiped his eyes and his nose again on the back of his bare arm. “We got to wait on Michie Napier. He got Charlie in there fightin’ Big Lou now.”

  Lucky Charlie.

  “Do what you can.” January stood, and patted the boy’s bony shoulder.

  Behind him a man said, “You’re behind the fair, friend. You want to get your boy ready if you’re going to get him in against Big Lou.” January turned. The man was an American, dressed like a tradesman in a rough wool jacket and pants and a calico shirt. He spoke to Hannibal with a friendly matter-of-factness, sized January up with polite approval, and added, “What’s your boy’s name?”

  January opened his mouth to express a sentiment both unwise and inappropriate for a man of color, be he ever so free,
along Tchoupitoulas Street, and Hannibal cut in with “Plantagenet. Hal Plantagenet. A bawcock and a heart of gold. Let’s go, Hal.”

  January went. The frenzy of shouting died abruptly into a sated growl and the tight-clotted wall of backs opened abruptly into a myriad of little groups. Men counted money into each other’s hands, men joyfully relived each hold and throw and bludgeon, here and there men cursed furiously. (And how much would people lay on YOU, fat man, if you and that scrofulous weasel you’re screaming at started hammering each other naked?) January glimpsed Vincent Marsan, towering in his tobacco-brown coat, gloves, and waistcoat all en suite, illuminating the finer points of the match to Harry Fry with explanatory jabs of a sardonyx-headed gold toothpick. A few feet away, an older slave, a tough little man who was clearly a trainer, kneaded Big Lou’s shoulders while the fighter slumped on a broken crate with his forehead on his knees. Blood glistened on a shaven scalp. He looked exhausted, uncaring; an iron mountain of a man with strips of pickled leather wrapped around his enormous hands. January glanced at the angle of the sun above the curtain of trees and wondered how many more men Big Lou would have to fight before he could go home.

  Other men crowded around, obscuring the scene. Hannibal said, “Ah! A lovely being, scarcely formed or molded / A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded,” and wove his way to Kate the Gouger, a nondescript, hard-faced girl with red hair skinned back into a dirty knot on the back of her head. She was handing around a brown glass bottle, saying “. . . better at my place over yonder past the trees.” She shot a swift glance toward the Eagle, wary of its owner’s prior claims to customers on his property. “Pussy’s better, too.”

  “Yeah?” demanded a squat cut-throat whose long brown hair crept visibly with lice. He spit—there was enough tobacco underfoot to send up a smell that rivaled the piss-stink of the bushes all around the clearing.

  “Sure enough.” Kate blew a cloud of cigar-smoke in the man’s face. “ ’Cause it’s me! I’ll take on the lot of you and have you beggin’ for mercy!”

  The men whooped and laughed and slapped her narrow buttocks, and said, “Well, we’ll just come along and see who begs for mercy!” Then there was a shout as the milling crowd coalesced. Heads turned, and the men crowded back to where Big Lou was squaring off again, leaving the Gouger momentarily alone. She looked after them with contempt and weary calculation in her hard brown eyes.

  “Poor bastards,” remarked Hannibal, and she glanced over at him and grinned, broken-toothed, like a wolf. “Don’t know what they’re getting into.”

  “Thought you was playin’ for the op-ree.” She stuck a black-nailed brown hand down her uncorseted bosom to scratch one shallow breast. Most of the small-time madams of her sort in town usually wore cheap Mother Hubbards—good-time dresses, the free colored of the lower sort called them—but Kate had rigged herself out for the fights in a faded frock of red calico rotting away under the armpits, and a skinning-knife the length of January’s forearm sheathed at her belt. She was probably, January guessed, not more than twenty. “You missed good fightin’ this afternoon.”

  “Well, and so I am playing for the opera.” Hannibal bent to kiss Kate’s hand with the same reverent attentiveness he’d lavished on Consuela Montero’s. “But I couldn’t forgo a few moments of your delightful company.” Kate made a simper and pushed him, like a schoolboy shoving a mate, but for one instant January saw the look in her eyes: shy pleasure that someone had called her delightful. That someone cared.

  “You gonna get yourself in trouble one day,” she said, and under its hoarseness her voice was the voice of a girl. “You come around sweet-talkin’ every girl.”

  “Then I’ll rely on you to rescue me.” Hannibal pressed his hand to his side, fighting a cough. “Kentucky Williams tells me you had a couple of heroes staying at your place who might have been hired for an alley job last Thursday.”

  “Gower boys.” The Gouger nodded briskly, once. “Buck an’ Bart. Sounds like a couple hounds, don’t it? Came down on a flatboat with a load of corn, spent all they daddy’s money on forty-rod an’ quim, you know how it is. Hangin’ around my place, tryin’ to make five hundred dollars choppin’ wood. Then all of a sudden Bart comes in, pays me what they owe—this is Wednesday around supper-time. They pack up their plunder. Stuff’s still in my attic. I ain’t no thief. ’Sides, it’s just a couple shirts an’ a powder-horn. Bart come in Friday mornin’, begs me for some medicine an’ bandages an’ sech truck. Looked like he been in a fight, cheek all bust to hell an’ swole up, mud an’ blood on his shirt. Last I saw him.”

  “And his brother?” Hannibal produced a bottle from his coat pocket, took a sip, and offered it to her.

  She shrugged, and drank like a thirsty sailor.

  “How tall is Bart, m’am?” asked January.

  She glanced up at him.

  “You see, m’am, we both play for the opera, and it looks like somebody might have hired Bart and his brother to go after different people in the company. Go after ’em and kill ’em.” January carefully graded his English to the same roughness as hers. He had long ago learned that nothing intimidates and alienates so much as elegant speech. His English was, most of the time, as excellent as his French, but the music of speech was a hobby of his: fortissimo to pianissimo, Paris-perfect to the “mo kiri mo vini” of the cane-patch. “We don’t know who they’ll go after next”—he glanced worriedly at Hannibal—“nor who hired ’em nor why. We ain’t gonna get Bart an’ his brother in trouble, m’am. We just need to know.”

  Mollified, the girl said, “Bart’s about six foot. Buck’s bigger, near your height.”

  “They both got beards?”

  She looked surprised at the question—a clean-shaven man on this part of Tchoupitoulas Street was usually either a pimp or a gambler—then nodded. “They’s both kinda blondy. Not real blond, but like Kentucky,” meaning, since the remark was addressed to Hannibal, Kentucky Williams, their mutual acquaintance. “Bart asked me to listen around for somebody takin’ a boat upriver next week. I said I would.”

  Hannibal and January traded a glance. Then January said, “If we was to leave a note with you, m’am, to give Bart when he comes in, would you do that?”

  She thought about it, glanced at Hannibal again, and nodded. “I’ll do that.”

  “Thank you.” Hannibal kissed her hand again. “If the heart of a man is depres’t with cares / The mist is dispelled when a woman appears. We shall be deeply in your debt.”

  Madame Bontemps was still sitting in the parlor when January returned from the levee. It was now late afternoon—nearly five—and the harsh rays of the sinking sun showed up the chips and stains in the stucco of the house, the cracks where resurrection fern had taken greedy root. As January started to go down the passway to the yard, his landlady’s flat voice grated out at him from the street window: “That woman with the spectacles was here.” In six weeks of residence, January had yet to hear Madame Bontemps refer to Rose by her name. “I told her not to wear them. They bring bad luck. That woman in the veil this morning, she doesn’t wear spectacles, and you see the kind of luck she’s had.”

  “That’s true,” agreed January, coming back to the parlor’s French door. It was far easier to agree with Madame Bontemps than to disagree and continue any conversation, and he wanted to have at least a short nap before meeting Rose for supper. “Did she leave a message? A note?”

  The woman thought about that, rocking her body in her chair, lips pushing in and out like dry kisses. She had a tea-cup on her knee. The saucer covered its mouth and her hand pressed down the saucer. January didn’t want to think about what she might have trapped inside.

  “It isn’t right that women should write,” she declared at last. Which meant, January knew, that he’d have to search the privy for the scraps of whatever Rose had slipped under his door. “I told her that. I told her I saw the Devil, too. She didn’t believe me. But he was here last night. He waited beside the house until it started t
o get light.”

  January, who had nodded agreement again and started to walk away, stopped. Cold stillness gripped his chest. “Beside the house? In the passway, you mean?”

  Madame Bontemps nodded, still rocking. In his mind, January heard the crack and rustle of a stealthy foot, first in the wet, leafy dark of the labyrinth, then in the shadows along the Bayou Road. Saw Marguerite lying beneath an oak-tree, blood dotting the strawflowers tangled in her hair.

  “What did he look like?” he asked, and the unguessable reverie in Madame’s dark eyes sharpened to scorn.

  “He was invisible,” she said, as if explaining the obvious to a stupid child. “He looked like the Devil.”

  Meaning it had been pitch-black along the side of the house. Meaning there might not have been anyone at all waiting there for him to come home by himself.

  Seeing that nothing else would be gotten out of the landlady, January turned to go. Too much to hope, he thought, that the visitor—if there had been one—had left a scrape on the moldy bricks that paved the passway and the yard, or had dropped a glove or a signet-ring or a letter bearing his seal.

  He wasn’t sure which of the American town’s numerous heretical Protestant establishments counted Shaw as a member, or what he could tell the policeman if he went to him. I think we were followed after the Trulove reception last night? I think Madame Scie was attacked in the woods by someone who may or may not have been at Bichet’s illegal gathering?