The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

by Otto Penzler

  He tried to help me take my mind off the pain, joked about how I’d been “bathed in fire.” “Speak us some tongues, Esau,” he egged me. (And yeah, that really is my given name, so now you know why I tell everyone to call me Creole, even though I ain’t one.) Didn’t take me to no doctor, though. Didn’t see no doctor ’til the day we got home and Momma took one look at my singed face and mostly scarred skull and that was the only time I ever saw my folks have it out. I remember Momma sayin’ something about Daddy bein’ stupid to think God would heal this one and I remember the slap (“Don’t doubt Him and don’t never doubt me”) and two hours later at Sisters of Mercy I remember me and Momma both getting bandages. To this day I still got no eyelashes and the crown of my bald spot is crinkly like pudding you left in the fridge for two weeks.

  I said all that just to say this: the second time I was on fire was two weeks ago. Chase, this guy I’d been buying from, swore to me he had some China White. Got it right cheap, he said, and me being a regular, he’d lay some off to me discount. So I got me a big idea that if I could buy low and sell high I’d be on the road to redemption. And deep down, Faith always wanted a stock broker. So I got a big stash from Chase on credit. Figured to peddle some and pay back inside a week. Only I sampled a little before I sold the first gram. It cooked up nice and I had visions of sugarplums dancing in my head as I loaded up the needle. Dreamin’ about showin’ up at Faith’s doorstep with about ten grand in my pocket. Dream didn’t last long after the spike though, and this damn sure wasn’t China White.

  If this were the movies, I’d tell you I knew the smack was bad the second I pushed the plunger. But that wasn’t the case. I watched the little pink cloud float into the liquid, like crimson fingers reaching from my veins to grab hold of the fix and draw it inside. I love that moment, when you know the high is coming and nothing that’s happened up to that very second has any bearing and everything in front of you is going to be fine as wine, right as rain and all that shit. People who don’t get it will ask: who would do that, stick himself in the arm with a needle. But I ask you: a moment when absolutely your whole prior existence is (as Daddy would say) washed away and all your tomorrows are sunshine and peppermint — man, who wouldn't do that? I hear smack use is at an all time high, but I maintain it’s still the best kept secret in sanity.

  So it was maybe four, five minutes after I sunk the spike before I knew I was in trouble. I was just drifting along but I could hear a buzzing, like a mosquito you can’t quite find who keeps whispering: “Here I come; gonna get you; won’t feel me ’til I slide out your skin and skit away, taking a piece of you with me and poisoning you in the bargain.” Heard them kind of skeeters plenty of times on Daddy’s summertime beach retreats.

  Then the buzzing was like the muted roar of a teakettle just coming to boil, only instead of roiling, my blood began to simmer and spit, like fatty meat on a bonfire. I know I tossed my head to and fro a good bit — shaking a condemned madman’s no no no this can’t happen to me— because my neck muscles still hurt. And then the fire was there.

  I wish I could describe it as an unfolding flower, the bloom of pestilence reeking revenge or a black blossom tinged red with wrath, yawning in rage. It would be much more poetic than the truth, which is that one moment I was in the void, the next I heard the buzz, and then I had porcupines rampaging through my veins. Porcupines wielding rusty, gas-powered chainsaws. They started from everywhere, spontaneously filling my world, commandeering every nerve ending in my body so that even blinking seemed to slice my eyeballs open with acidic papercuts. You would think a pain like that would have an epicenter, but it was like Daddy talked about God: there was the void, and then the void was filled, and if you blinked you missed it, and if you hadn’t blinked you’d missed it anyway, but just because you didn’t see it happen didn’t mean it hadn’t.

  It was a hell of a thing to have my subconscious manning the controls while my body was begging for some action — any action — that would end the turmoil. Call 911, slit my wrists — the latter seemed a better option since the relief would come faster. I love my subconscious; I love its view of the world and the way it’s able to draw analogies between vastly segregated and seemingly incongruous events; I love its detached realization and the way it fails to marvel at its most striking discoveries, its passive and uncaring genius for observation. But as the captain of the sinking ship that was my body’s pyre, it sucked. It convinced me that the smack had intelligence, was contriving to wrest control of my body, poppies become animate. And so in the heat of battle, I shook my stash into the toilet and flushed it away, a $4,500 turd.

  Chase showed up four days later (the day after Fat Tuesday, or what we in the Quarter call I-Did-Wfta£-Wednesday) looking churlish and victorious, like he’d just done the head cheerleader in the back seat of her boyfriend’s car. He wanted his money. I told him how I’d spent fourteen hours doing my best Joan of Arc and another twenty-four cramped up like a diver shot from the abyss to the surface by a nuclear cannon. How I could not have sold that smack to anyone and lived. Accused him of cutting it with Drano when the accusations got to flying.

  “Yes, that’s very interesting,” Chase conceded. “But if I thought you were sincerely accusing me of intentionally misrepresenting product, I’d cut your balls off and serve them in your famous paella. Geoffery could make it Macanudo’s house special, or sell it as a take-out dish — sack in a sack.” And he spat on my floor. On the carpet.

  “Hey, Chase, that’s great.” I was surprised by something I hadn’t felt in a very long time, I think since that camping trip when I survived my post-torching weekend on nothing but raw determination. After that, I figured I was pretty damn close to invincible. But I recognized the feeling right off anyway: I was scared. A man who will spit on your DuPont Plush-Lite is liable to do anything. “Only I lost my job when I was too racked to even pick up the phone to call in sick for two days.” You no-show at a restaurant in New Orleans during Carnival, you pretty much forget about asking for your back pay, much less your job.

  “Damn, Creole, that’s a fucking pity. I will so miss that blackened mustard chicken.” He tisked at me the way the bad guy always mocks James Bond when he’s got 007 chained to the wall and the laser aimed at his pecker. Only I didn’t have no belt buckle grenade launcher to counter with. “Now what we gonna do, huh?”

  He was on me so quickly, the knife blade fat against my throat so fast, that when I recovered enough to compose a thought, it was: Damn, let me see you do that again in slo-mo. I never saw the knife come out, or actually felt the blade under the plump of my adam’s apple. Too much adrenaline to feel anything but the air pumping in and out of my lungs. But I heard the telltale click of a butterfly being flicked open and the finger holes secured. There is no more menacing sound, not even a gun being cocked or a round sent home in the chamber. Any pussy can point a pistol at you and play chicken. But a man who’ll put a blade to your throat so tight that a hard pulse in your vein will slice you open for him, that’s a man who means business. That’s a man who’s ready to get dirty.

  “Let me lay it out for you, Creole,” he whispered. It was an intimate sound, the tone of voice I’d use only with a woman I’d already seduced, the sound of a man rounding third and heading for home knowing full well the center fielder has booted the ball to the wall. “I owe Lazarus for that stash, you owe me for that stash. I don’t pay Lazarus back tonight — To-Fucking-Night — and you’ll be finding pieces of my teeth and fingernails in your andouille. Well, I’m not about to be sausage fodder, so you better stop fucking around and tell me you laid the shit off at the restaurant, or at Carnival or at your fucking grandmother’s nursing home.” His hands were shaking so wildly I could hear the cold steel clatter of the butterfly handle as it rattled between his fingers.

  I kept waiting for my life to flash before my eyes, but all I got were non-sequential glimpses, like someone had tossed a couple photo albums into the air and I was watching them randomly flo
at down. I saw Faith, and Emily our daughter, but not as we were bringing her home, or the way her little fingers encircled mine the first time I held her, or the way Faith’s soft lullaby voice used to greet me when I stumbled home at the two a.m. feeding, smelling like hickory with crawfish guts still under my nails and the raucous combination of reds and smack coursing through my brain. No, instead I saw them leaving me for Faith’s mother in Baltimore. I saw myself in the kitchen at Macanudo, but not stuffing bell peppers with trout and jambalaya, or being called out to visit so many tables the first night

  I introduced my black seared catfish in a pecan crust. Instead, I saw myself being initiated in uppers and rush and crystal-meth — anything to keep the energy flowing — by Geoffery, head chef to my sous-chef, Eve to my Adam. And I saw my brother, who pushed me into the fire and without a word convinced me to blame my own clumsy stupidity. My mother, who would later die at the hands of my father. My father, who would later die at the hands of his fellow inmates, held down and beaten to death in the shower with bars of soap cradled in towels, slings like the one David used to slay Goliath. These pictures floated by me in only a second. Failures all, except for my mother, who had dedicated her life to seeing after her children until they were big enough to see after themselves, and who had made it — though only just. And it was most likely her memory that saved my life. Her, and the way she’d stayed my father when he was in a temper.

  “Chase,” I said, but I had to say it twice because the first time my voice was gravel dry and choked with the fear that if I strained my vocal cords too hard I’d slice my own throat. “Chase, I can’t pay you what I don’t have. That stash was shit. Damn near wiped me, swear to God, and I flushed it. Let me find work, the Columbia or even Antoine’s if I have to stoop to that, but I’ll pay it off. I’ll even explain it to Lazarus if you want. But Christ, Chase, you kill me and you’ll never get your money.” An appeal to logic that would have done Momma proud. She’d talked Daddy down from many a rage with that kind of thinking.

  And praise the Lord and pass the pipe and all that shit if Chase didn’t back off with the blade. He shook his head and laughed the way Eva Braun must have after completing her vows, knowing how futile the whole arrangement was. “Shit, Creole. You’ve fucked me and didn’t even give me the reach around.” He got up off the floor and paced a bit, and after a minute, when he hadn’t spat again, I collected myself and tried to do the same. I stumbled a bit moving from horizontal to vertical, and suddenly was aware how badly I was jonesing. I hadn’t fixed since my smack inferno and was so badly in need that I briefly considered asking Chase to raise my credit limit.

  “Look, Creole, you’re a good customer, and I can’t get blood from a stone. I’ll talk to Lazarus. We’ll work something out. You’ll pay me back and you’ll cater me a party or something and we’ll call it square. Eh?”

  He offered his hand and I took it, two whores bequesting their words of honor. He pumped firmly and locked my eyes with his as he added: “And one more thing.”

  In my relief I’d felt like the kingfish who dives deep enough to outrun the line on the reel, so relieved that I’d lost track of the knife. Our eyes stayed locked as I felt the blade glide through the oft-burned skin and gristly sinew of my little finger. My mouth widened in a shocked O as I heard the blade crack into bone and wind its way around the knuckle, like a seasoned butcher’s knife carving tender baby back ribs away from tougher, more muscular meat. His free hand dropped the bloody blade and held up my own pinky finger for my examination, his other hand still pumping my remaining four fingers in some perverse gentlemen’s agreement.

  “I’ll give this to Lazarus, a token of your sincere intentions, eh? Come see me tomorrow at the Quad. Don’t disappoint.” He stuffed my finger in his shirt pocket and left me a man bleeding from so many different wounds that, had I a needle to do up with, the spike would have simply deflated me, releasing only air from my veins.

  There was one other snapshot I saw floating non-sequentially from the heavens while waiting for Chase to make me Isaac to his Abraham. I wasn’t going to tell you about it, but what the hell; ain’t no way out but through and all that shit. It was the fight I had with Faith the night she was packing to leave. I told her that if this is what it came down to, I would quit. Cold turkey, no rehab required, the thought of her taking my little daughter away was all the therapy I needed thank you very much.

  “No, Creole, you won’t, not if we stay. That’s just it.”

  “Bullshit,” I tried to rage, but by then the only wind in my sails was fueled by reds and opium and three hours sleep. It was hard to sound convincing, even to myself. ‘You’re all that matters to me.” She stopped packing long enough to cradle my face in her hands just so. It was a melancholy, sympathetic gesture full of the sorrow of what could have been. Should have been. “If I threaten to leave, you’ll quit for a day, maybe even a week. But then when I’m still here, it will be too easy to go back to it. You keep thinking you aren’t hooked because if someone put a gun to your head and said ‘quit’ you could. But that’s never going to happen. Life is the little decisions that you make, the choices that keep you from becoming so divided against yourself that someone has to put a gun to your head. So choose for yourself, not for Emily, not for me. Choose for yourself the same way you’d pick out breakfast cereal. And maybe we can work from there.”

  She was right only to the extent that there was a weapon involved, though it was a knife and not a gun. The rest of the scenario she had dead wrong, including, sadly, the path I’d choose.

  The Quad was the Student Union courtyard at Loyola where I’d first met Chase and the sympathetic poison he pedaled. By then I’d been designing specials at Macanudo for two months, doing the sous-chef’s job while the sous-chef was doing Geoffery’s wife, burning seventy, sometimes eighty hours a week and serving hickory grilled shrimp Chippewa over jambalaya cakes with crowder peas and artichoke Monte Cristo while everyone else was just doubling up the saffron in their crab bisque and gouging tourists like stuck pigs. Geoffery was so fired up over the reviews he was getting, he kept springing for meth and tear drops and anything that would keep me going. And me with a new baby in the house on St. Philip Street needing a new roof or a new slab every six months, I was willing to sell my soul for way less than thirty pieces of silver.

  One of the busboys at the restaurant knew what hopped-up shape I was in and said he knew a guy who had something that was good for what ailed me. Despite spending ninety percent of my waking hours inside Geoffery’s kitchen, I'was still enough in touch with the outside world to know that taking a second pill to cancel the first was stupider than forgoing the first one altogether. But by then Geoffery had busted his wife and the sous-chef job was wide open and Emily was graduating from four ounces six times a day to eight ounces sixty times a day. Most men believe that chefs are pussies, complimenting each other’s fairy hats and tasting one another’s sauce, if you know what I mean. But the restaurant business

  — especially the New Orleans Jackson Square restaurant business

  — is cut-throat. You put that many cut-throat guys in that small a space around that many knives and that much fire, it gets easy to understand why stimulants are a major food group.

  I wish I could believe that my habit was Geoffery’s fault, or Chase’s, or even Faith’s. God knows I told all three that plenty of times. Even more — for whatever this says about me — I wish you would believe it. But I would have found my way there somehow, like it was written in my genes, always coursing through the very veins it would later pollute. I came to drink early — I can remember sharing a flagon of filched communion wine with my brother, hiding behind the Cornstalk Fence on Royal and goofing on the tourists; I think I was eleven — and I smoked my share of grass in high school. Probably smoked several people’s shares. About the time Daddy’s inmates were revoking his sentence I got into psychedelics and became real acquainted with the subconscious that would betray me so miserably just a fe
w days ago. Met Faith at a Michael Doucet and Beausoleil show at Tulane where we shared a sugar cube communion. I guess you can follow the line of progression from there.

  But many times in the past few months, ever since Faith lost hope and took Emily with her, I’ve wondered why I was unable to right the ship when I knew I was navigating not by the stars but by the black spaces in between. My wife, never shy to be third on a quaa-lude, gave it all up. Geoffery pumped me full of speed but never touched the stuff. Even Chase claimed never to sample his wares. My only answer is: sometimes a man quits trusting his strengths and starts trusting his weaknesses. His weaknesses are more apt to be dependable.

  I met Chase at the Quad the next day, a heavy rouge gauze wrapped around my right hand. My filleting hand, it occurred to me. I was in a bad way. Weak from blood loss, jonesing to kill all after almost five days (holy shit, five goddamn days and it was getting worse? Who ever beats this shit?) without doing up. Fuck sleepless in Seattle, I was Neurotic Needing Narcotic in New Orleans.

  We went for a coffee in this beatnik coffee shop where my hand was the only thing not dressed in black. I tried to feel Chase out by saying: “Hope you’re buying. As you know I’m in poor shape financially.” Which was true to the extent that I had no money (I told Faith to clean out the checking account when she left; never knew so much money could assuage so little guilt; rationalizations are the most expensive commodity on earth) and no income. I did, however, still have my house. A street-level pastel stucco right on St. Philip Street, between Bourbon and Royal. Great sub-tropical hanging garden on the front porch and a friendly courtyard in the back.