by Poppy Brite
She ran her hand through her buzz cut and breathed in the twilight air of the French Quarter and let Miss Lee go for another night. She was Eddy Sung now, and her evenings were her own.
The gas lamps were just beginning to come on, their soft yellow glow flickering on every corner. She thought of stopping off for a beer and a dozen oysters on the halfshell somewhere. The salty, briny flavor of them always drove the taste of a day’s false smiles out of her mouth. But no, she decided, she would go home and check her mail and her messages, and then maybe she would call Zachary and see if he wanted to go eat oysters. They were supposed to be an aphrodisiac; maybe they’d work on him.
Ha. She should be so lucky.
Eddy allowed herself a rueful little laugh and set off through the Quarter for home.
Zach was already throwing the last of his movable belongings into his car when Eddy arrived. She had run all the way from her apartment on St. Philip after hearing his message on her answering machine, and her face was flushed and sweaty, her breath coming in harsh shallow gasps.
But Zach looked worse. His green eyes had a feverish sheen. Beneath a ridiculous black bad-cowboy hat she hadn’t seen before, his peaked pale face was nearly luminescent in the gaslit gloom of little Rue Madison. He crammed a box of papers into the back seat of his Mustang, turned to grab another box, and saw Eddy. His face froze. For an instant he looked terrified. Then he stumbled toward her and threw his arms around her. Her heart broke a little, but Eddy was used to this; it happened every time she saw Zach.
“They got you?”
He nodded. The words I told you so hung in the air, but she would not dream of speaking them.
“How bad?”
“The warning said They know who you are, They know where you are. I don’t think They really know where I am yet or They’d be here. But They could be finding out right now. They could show up anytime.”
Eddy glanced nervously back toward Chartres Street. Except for an occasional ripple of street jazz or burst of drunken laughter, all was quiet.
“I’m taking the incriminating stuff with me. The computers, my disks, my notebooks. The place will be clean if you want to move in. If They show up and want to search, let ’em search. They won’t find a damn thing.” He looked proud, defiant, exhausted. Eddy reached up to touch her fingertips to his perspiring face. Her heart was not just breaking but imploding. He was all but gone.
“Come sleep at my place tonight,” she said. “No one can find you there. Leave in the morning, with some rest.”
He didn’t even hesitate. “I want to get as good a start as possible. If I go now I’ll have the cover of the night.”
The cover of the night. To Zach this was some big adventure. He was scared, yes—but more than that, he was excited. She could hear it in the tremor of his voice, see it in the blaze of his eyes. He was like a racehorse getting ready to run, elegant nostrils flaring, velvet flanks bunching and tensing.
She had thought perhaps one last night together … But she knew what it would have been like. They would have stayed up drinking and smoking pot and talking until dawn, maybe whipped up a batch of cayenne popcorn and watched a weird movie or two. And that would have been it. Zach didn’t mind if she leaned against his shoulder, didn’t mind a casual touch of the hand or ruffling of his unruly hair. But anything more obvious on her part—like the couple of times she’d leaned over and kissed him full on the lips—would be met with “I can’t, Ed, I just can’t.” And if she asked why, she would get the infuriating answer, “Because I like you.”
It wasn’t as if Zach were celibate or gay, either. She had seen him pick up scores of people at the clubs and bars they both frequented, and the ratio was only slightly in favor of cute young males. He always seemed to go for the good-looking and the empty-headed, preferably drunk, ideally with some absent girlfriend or boyfriend to absorb the aftershock. He had only one inflexible rule: they had to have a place to fuck. He would not take them back to his sanctuary of an apartment, would not share his nest with his bimbos. Maybe he was embarrassed for his computer to see them.
The next day—or night—he would brush them off, not in an especially cruel way, but in a manner that left no doubt that they had been nothing but caprices. It was, Eddy thought, as if Zach considered sex a biological need on the order of going to the bathroom: you didn’t form an emotional bond with every toilet you took a crap in, and when you were done, you flushed and walked away—feeling better, to be sure, but not really thinking about what you’d just done.
It raised Eddy’s blood pressure, and frustrated her, and made her crazy. Any other friend or potential lover with such an attitude would have been long since trashed. But Zachary was so sweet, so smart, so cool otherwise that this seemed an aberration, a flaw or handicap he could not be blamed for, like a strawberry birthmark or a missing finger. She supposed part of it was the hell he had watched his parents put each other through, and the hell he had endured at their hands. And she kept hoping part of it could be blamed on his age; almost any character defect was forgivable at nineteen. (Eddy was twenty-two, and far more worldwise.)
“Won’t they know your car?” she asked.
“I’ve already switched the plates.”
She glanced at the back end of the Mustang. Zach’s license plate read FET-213, which looked awfully familiar. “Isn’t that the same one you always had?”
“I didn’t switch plates on the car,” he explained patiently. “I switched them in the DMV computer. My plate is completely wiped out of existence, and I gave myself the plate of some Cajun’s 1965 Ford pickup down in Houma.”
“Oh.”
“It can’t be traced to me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Trust me, Ed! I’m making a clean getaway. I just need to get going.”
They stood awkwardly in the deepening gloom staring at each other. “You already have a key,” Zach said. “You want the extra?”
“No. You’ll need it if you come back and I’m not home.”
“I’m not coming back, Eddy,” he said gently. “Not for a long time, anyway. I’ll kill myself before I’ll let them lock me up.”
“I know.” She would not lose her composure, would not slobber and bawl, would not beg him to take her along. If he wanted her along, he would have said so.
“So—well—I can’t call here, but I’ll try to get in touch somehow.”
“You do that.” She crossed her arms over her chest, shook a few tiny braids out of her face, fixed him with a steely eye.
“Eddy …”
“Don’t you fucking Eddy me! You could have been more careful! You didn’t have to show off and take so many dumb chances—it wasn’t like you needed the money. You could have … stayed!” Now she was crying. She bared her teeth at him, narrowed her eyes nearly to slits to hide the tears.
“I know,” he said. “I know.” He took two steps forward and enfolded her in his arms again. She laid her wet cheek against the soft cotton of his T-shirt, breathed his smoky, slightly sweaty boy-smell, held his skinny body tight against her. This was how it should have been all along.
Too bad he hadn’t agreed.
“Be safe,” she told him at last.
“I’ll be careful.”
“Where will you go?”
He shrugged. “North.”
They stared at each other again, at a loss for words but not yet ready to say good-bye. Then Zach leaned down and—ever so carefully, as if touching together two live wires—placed his lips against Eddy’s. She felt the electric thrill of contact, the very tip of his tongue touching hers, and an exquisite heat exploded from the center of her womb. For an instant she thought her innards would simply melt out of her pussy and run down her thighs, so intense was the rush. But then Zach pulled back and stepped away.
“Gotta go.”
Eddy nodded, did not trust herself to speak. She watched him walk around the front of the car, slide into the driver’s seat, turn the key in the ignition. The
powerful engine leapt to life, ready to carry Zachary Bosch far away from New Orleans, far away from Eddy Sung. The horn beeped twice and then he was pulling away from the curb, red taillights pausing at the corner, then merging into the nighttime traffic of Decatur Street.
Gone.
Eddy stood for several minutes in the shifting shadows cast by the wrought-iron balconies overhead. She glanced at the door that led up to Zach’s place, touched the key ring in her pocket, then shook her head. The Madison Street apartment was much nicer than her own roach-infested closet, and she knew the rent was paid for the rest of the year. Zach hated thinking about mundane matters like rent, so he paid it off at the beginning of each year when he renewed his lease. She would start moving her things in tomorrow. But she could not go up there now, while his presence still lingered painfully strong, like a voice just beyond the range of hearing, like an atom-thin membrane between reality and memory.
She turned and walked back up Madison, turned left on Chartres, and headed for Jackson Square. The spires of St. Louis Cathedral loomed ahead, moon-pale and mysterious, stabbing like bony fingers into the purple night sky. A brick commons lay between the cathedral and the square, and kids in thrift-shop black and painted leather and torn denim were already beginning to congregate there, smoking cigarettes, passing bottles of cheap wine.
Eddy stopped at the bank machine on the corner of Chartres and St. Ann. She still had her day’s pay in her pocket, a fat wad that rubbed against her leg and made her nervous. She would deposit it, saving out thirty dollars—enough to get good and drunk. Then she might go and join the kids on the square, or she might find a dark little bar and drown her sorrows alone.
She filled out a deposit slip, stuffed her money in the envelope, popped her card into the slot and punched in her personal number, then the necessary information. She heard little wheels grinding deep inside the machine. The screen asked her if she needed travelers’ checks for that summer vacation. Finally her eighty-dollar deposit was processed and the machine spit back her card, then a printed receipt.
Eddy turned away, glanced idly at the receipt, and stopped dead in her tracks. A couple of fratboy tourists crossing the commons nearly walked into her, swore at her, and stumbled on. She ignored them, kept staring dumbly at the slip of paper. She tried squinting and blinking, but the numbers stayed the same.
She’d paid her rent a couple of days earlier, and that put the balance of her checking account at a precarious $380.82. It now stood at $10,380.82.
She’d never let Zach give her money. It was too dangerous for him, and she liked taking care of herself.
But it appeared he had left her a farewell present.
He got on Highway 90—other than superinterstates 59 and 10, which were as dull as direct-dialing a long distance call and paying for it with your own credit card, the two-lane blacktop was pretty much the only way out of New Orleans—and left the city under cover of the night. The Rolling Stones song of that name pumped monotonously in his head (curled up baby, curled up tight), an unwelcome echo from the bruised ache and white-hot hatred of his eleventh year. It reminded him that he had hardly any tapes in the car. He’d left his music, books, and movies for Eddy, since he could always get more. But he should have brought a few for the road. He’d stop and get some later, when his thoughts quieted down enough to make listening worthwhile.
He was already sick of wearing his new hat, so he chucked it into the back and raked a hand through his hair. It was tangled, dirty, and felt like it was standing up at fifteen different angles. So much the better for that popular Edward Scissorhands look.
A few miles out of New Orleans, 90 wound past an enclave of Vietnamese restaurants and stores, an exotic little Asian village set down in rural Louisiana, nurtured by the bounty of the rivers, lakes, and bayous. Though Eddy was Korean, the sight made him think of her, gave him an empty feeling somehow. He’d eaten dinner at her parents’ house in Kenner once, had been served oyster pancakes and a wonderful concoction of rice, fresh greens, seaweed, raw fish, and hot sauce heaped in a giant glass bowl and called fea-dup-bop. Zach kept hearing it as fetus of Bob, but that hadn’t lessened his appetite. Once Eddy’s mom saw he loved the turbo-hot sauce, she kept plying him with increasingly fiery tidbits and condiments until he was munching whole the deadly little red peppers she minced into her kimchee.
It was then, he guessed, that the Sungs had decided their daughter just might be able to marry an American. Not that they had much to say about any of Eddy’s actions—though they believed she was a cocktail waitress at the Pink Diamond, or pretended they did—and not that Eddy expected Zach to marry her.
He felt a twinge of unease that was as close to guilt as he ever got. He knew perfectly well how different Eddy had wanted their friendship to be. But it was impossible for him. Loving someone was okay, and fucking someone wasn’t bad either. But if you did both with the same person, it gave them too much power over you; it let them plunge their shaping hands into your personality, gave them a share of your soul.
He had grown up watching his father change his mother from a sickly-scared but harmless creature into a sadistic bitch with twisted knives for fingers and a spitting, shrieking mouth. A mouth full of broken teeth, to be sure—but all the pain she had taken from her husband she gave back to her son, a gift wrapped in cruel words, signed in blood.
And his parents had loved each other, in whatever mutually parasitic way they were capable of. He had watched their heart-ripping fights and sodden reconciliations, heard their anguished lovemaking through the thin walls of many cheap apartments too often not to believe that somehow they were passionately in love, or had been once.
There had never been room for him. Zach sometimes thought that if he had not been born, the two of them might have managed a kind of happiness together, Joe with his broken-backed dreams and his fierce intelligence tamped down by liquor, Evangeline with her bruises and black eyes and always-hungry loins. If only his mother had managed to scrape up, pun most certainly intended, the cash for the abortion she often wished aloud that she had had. If only his father’s rubber hadn’t broken—and how many times had Joe taunted him about that damn rubber? The thing was practically a Bosch family heirloom.
In the too-silent darkness Zach punched at the buttons of the radio, twisted the tuning knob. Frizzly static greeted him, then a spurt of jazz. A ripple of piano and tympani, a trembling, exalting alto saxophone. He disliked the Dixieland jazz he had heard all his life, as he did Cajun music and indeed anything with accordions or brass in it, anything that sounded like growing up in New Orleans. Such music twisted barbs into his memory, ran too deeply into his blood.
But this wasn’t New Orleans stuff. Kansas City, maybe; it sounded less frenetically cheerful, exotic somehow, musing and dreaming. He left it on.
After the Vietnamese enclave, the highway passed through an interminable stretch of beach cabins with cute names (Jimmy’s Juke Joint, Li’l Bit O’Heaven, Moon Mansion replete with a big plywood ass shining in his headlights) and private driveways that went straight down to the dark water on either side. This was the beginning of bayou country, and there was very little solid land. Zach pondered the name of his own imaginary cabin—Hacker Hideaway? Outlaw Asylum? No: Bosch’s Blues. Check all Uzis and Secret Service badges at the door.
Gradually the cabins grew sparser and shabbier; some were bereft even of their names, or bore signs with the words and crude bright illustrations worn away. Then they were gone, and the road was empty, straight, flanked by dark expanses of water and woods and shadow. He crossed a bridge that arced high above the water, saw moonlight shimmering on the surface like pale jewels.
The radio station never faded out, though Zach thought he drove fifty miles or more, past bland green vistas and ugly stretches of consumerland, K marts and QuikStops and fast-food charnelhouses shut down against the night. In one of these towns a fried human ear had been found in a box of takeout chicken, like some cannibalistic remake of Blue
Velvet by way of Colonel Sanders. Zach remembered reading the story in some tabloid out of Baton Rouge and wishing he’d thought it up himself, wondering if it were true or whether there was another prankster out there somewhere, creating urban mythology in giant digital strokes. The same song seemed to keep playing over and over, as if the DJ had set the CD on infinite replay and gone to sleep. The sax wailed and sobbed. The piano dreamed behind it.
At last he reached the Gulf Coast and began his meandering trek along it. The little coastal towns shut down after ten; there was only the long deserted stretch of white beach broken by marinas and piers, and beyond it the black expanse of the Gulf of Mexico.
His parents had brought him here once, when he was ten or so. Zach remembered smelling the salt air as they drove down, imagining the blissful caresses of the sand and water. In reality the sand had had an unpleasantly powdery feel, like ordinary playground dirt; there had been a scum of pollution at the water’s edge, a pale brown froth that ebbed and flowed with the waves. It smelled faintly of dead fish, engine sludge, chemicals gone bad.
But out past the beach the water was the color of new denim, and felt so good on his parched, abused skin. He had ducked his head beneath the surface, seal-like, and hadn’t stopped swimming out to sea until his father’s harsh hands grabbed him by the hair and wedged the back of his swim trunks up the crack of his scrawny ass.
The car swerved slightly to the right. Zach caught it at once, but the memories were starting to hypnotize him, to pull him toward the water.
A town marker flashed by. PASS CHRISTIAN, pronounced not like “Christian,” Zach knew, but like a girl’s name: CHRISTIE-ANN. He was already in Mississippi, and hadn’t even noticed. Fine old Southern mansions loomed sepulchrally along the left side of the road, shrouded in ghostly curtains of Spanish moss and the giant knurled oaks that had hung on through a hundred hurricane seasons or more. The beach on the right was pure white, shining.
