When the service ended, Major Notz offered his niece a cup of hot chocolate at the Croissant d’Or, but Felicity declined. There was to be an elaborate repast for Grandmère’s soul at the Autocrat Club, and she wanted to stay at the cemetery for a while to tend to her other dead.
Stacked in layers in their crypts like ancient loaves of bread eternally baking in the tropical sun were the people Felicity came from. Family legend had it that the bricks used to build the tombs came from the French Opera House, which had stood at Bourbon and Toulouse Streets and was destroyed by fire in 1866. “Our bricks are filled with music,” Grandmère had said once, in a rare lyric moment. In New Orleans the dead led quite a lyrical existence, and were always present. Unlike the dead elsewhere, it was not possible to bury them in the ground—the water table was less than a foot below the surface. Felicity had heard of coffins floating out during floods and returning to the houses of their kin, who hadn’t had them properly entombed.
At the bottom of the crypt was one Monsieur Robert Armant. She gazed at the eroded angel and the rusted iron cross on his marker, then took out a lace handkerchief and began to carefully scrub the name on the stone. Reasonably satisfied with the amount of grime she had removed from her great-great-great-uncle’s grave, she next paused on the name of one Louis-Philogène Duclos, a more distant relative, whose begrimed inscription carried this ambiguous note: Ci-gît Louis-Philogène Duclos, Enseigne dans les Troupes des Etats d’Amérique, Fils Légitime de Rodolphe-Joseph Duclos et de Marie-Lucie de Reggi. Né le 18 Août 1781. Décédé le 4 Juillet 1801. This side of the tomb was smothered in leaves. A banana tree was growing straight out of its back. A bunch of black bananas threatened to fall on her ancestor at any moment. The ambiguity of the grave marker rested in the single word légitime, which signaled to anyone cognizant of New Orleans ways that Louis-Philogène had been the product of a Creole mistress’s liaison with a French nobleman. Questions of legitimacy were debated to this day in Felicity’s milieu, though, blessed be Saint Expedite, the intensity of the debate had diminished in the recent past.
Felicity had never attempted to hide her origins. Her café-au-lait skin was lighter than that of her Italian or Jewish friends, but she had never resorted to the easy palliative of the passe-blanc, passing for white. It was difficult to maintain her identity, and had she left New Orleans, she might have lost the incentive for doing so. But she had lived all of her young life with her grandmère in the neighborhood where she was born, a faubourg once called the Mistresses’ Quarter. The faubourg retained the sadness of its former inhabitants, beautiful light-skinned women who had spent their lives watched over by anxious matriarchs, awaiting the rare visits of their married, aristrocratic lovers. Weeping willows hid the low, well-kept houses leaning into one another like veiled sighs. Grandmère’s home, now hers, was a nineteenth-century building with a shady porch where Felicity, a little girl in a hammock, sometimes thought she could hear the monotonous plaint of a young woman going crazy behind the cypress beams. The sadness of the house seeped into her, and she kept it at bay by reading, reading, reading, endlessly reading the books the major brought her. Felicity thought about that young woman’s lament now. She found her present situation akin to that of the light-skinned girl who had been bought at an Octoroon Ball by a rich man and virtually imprisoned in the house in the bloom of her youth. True, no one had chosen Felicity in this fashion, and her leash was much longer. Still, there was something helpless in the way her life had unfolded.
The last grave Felicity stopped for was new. She embraced the tomb drunkenly as if it were a man. It had been a man. Her man. Her love lay buried here in Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 with veins full of poppy juice. HE MADE SWEET MUSIC, the chiseled epitaph said. He had indeed. She’d paid for the inscription herself, and the words had been all hers. But Felicity didn’t listen to his kind of music anymore. She had buried the tapes of Miles’s brilliant piano improvisations in a trunk locked with seven locks, buried under a house that had another house on top of it. And she had shipped the trunk and the houses all the way to China, just to make sure. Now she went to the Rubyfruit Jungle, trying to persuade herself that she was a dyke who preferred, musically speaking, the killing din of Dada technorap to the uncertainties of jazz. This was deliberate musical genocide.
Done with her dead, Felicity drove to the Autocrat Club, where Grandmère’s kin were mourning over mountains of food provided as part of the funeral package by the Treme Social & Pleasure Society, which had also interred her. Grandmère had faithfully paid dues to the club for forty years in anticipation of this occasion. Felicity made the rounds, hugging frail old folks and shaking hands. Then she got herself a plate of pork roast and a bowl of étouffée and ate at a back table watching Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin glad-hand the crowd like a politician. When Mullin made his noisy celebrity exit, Felicity got up and followed him.
Reverend Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin drove angry. It was already evening. He headed out of New Orleans down the river road, driving his gold Caddy west past the smoking cauldrons of Hooker Chemicals, Dow Chemical, B. F. Goodrich, E. I. Du Pont, Union Carbide, Texaco, Exxon, Uniroyal, Nalco Chemical, Freeport-McMoran, and Rubicon Chemicals, glowing in the night like a party of devils along the Mississippi. They were his rosary beads, his Mardi Gras necklace.
He could feel the coming of the Rapture in his bones. The ascent of the faithful to the Kingdom of Heaven was imminent. They would be taken from their homes, cars, or wherever they might find themselves. The Rapture, the prelude to the End. It was so delicious he could taste it.
The fate of those left behind after the Rapture did not concern Reverend Mullin, though he allowed himself the wicked enjoyment of imagining it. He saw the unbelievers crashing into one another on roads full of the abandoned vehicles of the risen. He saw airplanes fall to the ground after the Christian pilots ascended. He saw them burning in their houses, unattended by the firemen now in heaven. He saw them scrambling in the wake of the righteous. Let them. The Lord would sort them out, wheat from chaff.
As he rolled past the smoking behemoths of Louisiana’s chemical corridor, he could see like Jesus right into the pitch-black hearts of the doomed and abandoned—the atheists, the agnostics, the media vultures, the Satanists, the blasphemers, the pope’s miracle seekers, the soft-slippered morticians of dying secularism. Although he couldn’t place her precisely in any of the general categories, Mullin saw clearly the face of the dykey girl who’d shamed him at her granma’s deathbed in front of doctors and nurses. She may have been in a category all her own, a sexual deviant with a reserved spot in the Lake of Fire.
But something was bothering the reverend. His followers had become restless of late, impatient for the End, eager for the Rapture. He had to give them dates for the End events, but he wasn’t going to do it until all his schedules were met and Lord Jesus spoke to him.
As the flaming towers of oil refineries flashed past, Reverend Mullin savored the brilliance of his plans. He would eventually give believers the date by which to put their affairs in order and give themselves wholly to Jesus. After that, in a matter of days, God’s plan would unfold as foretold.
Mullin maneuvered the Caddy into the parking lot of a shabby motor court and beeped his horn. A girl-child sauntered out of a doorway, looked casually around, and then got in the car. Innocence had mostly fled the world, but here it was, in the depths of this cauldron of vice, shining unbent and unbruised.
“Did you bring me rock?” asked the girl. This was the third time that the preacher had sought her out. The first time he only wanted her to take off her shirt, and he’d paid her $10. The second time he had asked her to masturbate. After her awkward performance he patted her head and said, “Don’t fear me, child. I am the rock,” And she, in her innocence, had said, “Then bring me some rock next time.”
But Reverend Mullin had forgotten. “I’m no purveyor of drugs, child,” he said indignantly. “I’ll give you a healing rock instead.” He reached into the
glove compartment and took out a Mexican marble egg he had bought in the French Market.
“Carved straight from the rock at Mount Golgotha!” he assured her. “Filled with the Lord’s healing spirit.”
“Bless it,” demanded the waif, laying her palm on his thigh.
He mumbled a few words and passed the silver cross over the egg.
“Show me before I give it to you,” he demanded.
She showed him. No more than thirteen, fresh as a dawn over the bayou, with skin as smooth as an unshelled pecan, she pulled up her dress and showed him the smooth horizon of a hairless mound. A thin fissure ran from the top of it to the dimples in her ass.
She reached for the egg.
“Find it, child,” he asked.
The girl touched herself clumsily, and desire and gratitude surged through the evangelist. He felt his hardness through the black gabardine of his trousers. I am watching a doe munching on a sapling, he thought as her long fingers pulled back the flesh of her tiny pirogue and tossed about the little seed of her pleasure. Oh thank you, Lord, for the flower before me. And for the flower in me.
When the girl made a little moan of pleasure and withdrew a moist finger from her innocent film, Mullin leaned forward and took that finger in his mouth. With his other hand, he dropped a business card between her legs.
The girl picked it up and read: Angel Choir of the Heavenly Abode of the Utmost Deity and Paradisiacal Tabernacle, Inc. And there was a phone number.
“Call, child,” he said, “and you’ll get singing lessons and a job in the world’s greatest choir. You’ll sing the world to a beauteous and fiery end.”
He was ready to pay her the usual ten bucks—the most he ever allowed himself to spend—and go off without complaint. He had recruited another soul among the fallen and was a little more like Jesus, therefore.
The girl was actually grateful. She did have a nice voice and wanted to sing. She did not want to be a whore. In gratitude, she wanted to give her benefactor something extra. She asked to “see” his. It was so innocent a request, so filled with the sticky memory of childhood, Mullin was flooded with sweetness. He unzipped his fly and extended his engorged member to the girl’s gaze. She lay a hand upon it. Neither one of them heard the repeated click of Felicity’s Nikon only a few yards away in the parked Plymouth van.
On the way back to the city, Felicity stopped for gas. When she pulled out of the Shell station, she thought that she recognized the brown, round face of the Pakistani in her rearview mirror. But then the red Olds fell back a couple of cars and she wasn’t sure. Being followed had so far been only a theoretical possibility in her budding detective career. Of course I’m being followed, she thought optimistically; it is the essence of the work. I follow, so I may be followed. Dictum. She repeated this mantra to herself, glancing anxiously in the rearview mirror, but she didn’t see the red Olds anymore. She was disappointed then. An unfollowed girl dick. Story of my life, she thought.
And then she saw the Olds again, two cars behind. Life, she told herself, is quite simple, until it becomes complex, then simple again. Why should I be surprised that my instinct is right? Mullin is a reptile, and as such he stands for a principle, the reptile principle. Her reptile radar was flawless. And what is a reptile? she asked herself, making a surprise left onto a suburban side street. The big red car followed.
A reptile is that which slithers while practicing the opposite of what it preaches. Most people lie, even Grandmère, bless her pure hard heart, but they lie innocently, as it were, out of necessity or self-preservation. A reptile lies with wicked pleasure; it spews oil as it lies; it creates conditions for evil. The Olds was now right behind her.
The road she had taken cut through the heart of a vast Caucasian enclave, the repository of the decades-long white flight from the old city of New Orleans. This relatively new boulevard, crowded with Home Depots, Wal-Marts, Taco Bells, and Burger Kings, was already cracked and uneven, shoved up by the unsteady mud below. The Olds was still with her, and she could see its occupants quite clearly. The Pakistani was wearing shades. The driver had stripped down to a T-shirt that revealed two densely tattooed arms.
PI Felicity wasn’t carrying her gun—there hadn’t been much point in taking one to a funeral. What did these goons of Mullin’s want with her? Why did they follow their boss to his dirty little assignation? If I were a reptile, thought Felicity, would I have myself followed and observed in the act? Maybe Mullin was such a perverted reptile that he couldn’t even enjoy filth without being watched. Or else these two had followed Mullin without his knowledge, for their own vile reasons, and had simply stumbled onto her. In that case, the creeps might not be out to get her. Maybe they just wanted the film.
Felicity pulled into the gravel driveway of a house that sat on cement blocks in a futile effort to avoid the next flood. An American flag jutted out above a door with a David Duke for President sticker on it. An RV that must have cost three times what the house did sat majestically in the front yard, bearing the sticker IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS RV WILL BE UNMANNED. The Olds came to a crunchy stop behind Felicity.
She waited as the two men got out simultaneously and walked toward her car. They were nearly there when the door of the house swung open and a bare-chested man bounced out and began firing a shotgun at them. Felicity ducked, and buckshot shattered her windshield. The bad guys ran back to their car and backed out, gravel flying. Felicity did the same. This time she followed the Olds, which was doing a determined eighty-five down the two-lane road.
In the parking lot of the Clearview Shopping Mall the Olds came to a screeching stop in the shadow of Home Depot. Felicity was right behind it, squinting through her shattered windshield. She nearly hit the rear bumper before she, too, stopped. A man pushing a shopping cart full of flowerpots so large they obstructed his view bumped into her as she jumped out of the van.
“America!” muttered the Pakistani, slamming the heavy door of the Olds behind him, “Everything bigger than anything! Flowerpots taller than a man!”
“Motherfucker!” Felicity called out in her toughest voice, rubbing her bruised flank. “Why the fuck were you following me?”
The Pakistani looked to his mate, an ex-con, who was still behind the wheel, hands limply out, cool as a cucumber with shades.
“You have something that belongs to us.” He opened the door and got out. He was short, but the snakes tattooed up and down his arms rippled on solid muscle. “We saw you snappin’. We want the film.”
Felicity grabbed her crotch in a classic American gesture of contempt: “Here is your film!”
That was a language the goon spoke, because he grinned, but the Pakistani did not understand. “Vulgarity!” he said. “America! Everything as vulgar as it looks!”
“Watch it, towel head!” said the ex-con. “This is my country. I’ll stick a flag up your ass!”
“Good idea,” said Felicity.
“So whatcha gonna do about it, gumdrop?”
“I tell you what I’m gonna do …” Felicity had spotted a security guard and waved him over.
The guard unsnapped his pistol holster when he saw Felicity waving at him and advanced toward the group. “What seems to be the trouble?” He was a fat black man—a baseball cap said SECURITY.
“These men, Officer,” Felicity said matter-of-factly, “are making lewd propositions. This one”—she pointed to the Pakistani—“suggested that he would like to perform an unnatural act with the American flag.”
The guard, his hand on the butt of his pistol, said gravely, “This is the parking lot of Home Depot. That’s America, you unnerstand? You get your goddam foreign ass outta the Home Depot parking lot or I’ll shoot your sorry curry ass.”
“Yes, Officer,” said the tattooed one, “I agree one hundred percent.”
The pair reentered their vehicle. The thug said to Felicity, “I’ll be seein’ ya.”
“I don’t think so,” said Felicity.
When the Olds cra
wled out of the Home Depot parking lot, Felicity thanked her savior and offered to buy him a beer; he would have accepted if he hadn’t been working. They settled instead for a modest snack of dried shrimp and Hubig’s cherry pie, purchased right at the counter of the giant superstore. Large men were solemnly purchasing tools, doors, ceilings, roofs, entire houses. Felicity and the security guard sat on two paint drums to eat and conversed a little.
“It’s like a church in here,” Felicity observed between bites of cherry pie.
“That it is. People pray hard, lookin’ for the sink drain and the doggy door. They walks around lost, and then they finds what they was lookin’ for. It’s all they can do to stop theyselves singin’ hymns.”
“America.”
“Hallelujah.”
For a moment, filled with awe, girl dick and security guard sat in a silent salute to their country, and the Cathedral of Home hummed with the praise of the consuming masses. Now and then Wynonna Judd’s voice could be heard bouncing off the lumber on the high shelves, shattered at intervals by the ecclesiastic chant of “Assistance needed on aisle four!” Felicity was almost happy. Perhaps what she needed was not a great mission or a phony glamour profession but to lose herself amid the purposeful people at Home Depot. Maybe she should find a husband here in the solid potbelly of America and have a couple of kids and remodel the rec room. Maybe the perfect anonymity of a burb would fill her holes. She peered into that future and saw herself sitting with a mug of decaf in a bright kitchen, nodding sympathetically as a litany of troubles poured out of her next-door neighbor. The pie smelled done and the Russians were knocking at the door, asking for work.
“Where do you live?” she asked Security, finding him as likely a husband as she could think of.
“At the airport,” he said. “I have another job. I’m a redcap.”
Messi@ Page 6
