Carnival

by Kory M. Shrum

  Maybe that was what she heard in his voice.

  “When do you go to Venice?” she asked instead.

  “Tonight,” he said. “For three nights at most. Vittoria…”

  The hair rose on the back of Lou’s neck at the way he said her name.

  “She’s very challenging,” he said with a tender laugh.

  “Have a good trip.” She regarded the beautiful pistols in her grip, preparing to end the call.

  “Wait, Lou.”

  Lou put the phone to her ear again. When she thought he wasn’t going to say anything else, he finally added, “I hope I see you in Venice.”

  * * *

  Lou decided to take the Browning pistols with her to check on Fish. She crossed to her kitchen island and unhooked a small latch tucked beneath the lip of the counter.

  The side sprang free and Lou descended the steps into its darkness. Even years after building this room, it still smelled of sawdust and soft pine. She breathed deeply, loving the scent.

  She found the string overhead on the first try and pulled, illuminating her hidden storeroom.

  Guns lined the shelves neatly. A belt of grenades hung from a hook on the wall, as well as her father’s service vest. She touched it tenderly, without realizing she’d done so, as she reached out for a box of 9mm bullets. She loaded both Brownings.

  She considered the weaponry lining the shelves but decided the guns would do.

  It was early in the day, which made it harder for her to move around. But daytime also meant less chance of serious trouble. A flamethrower, grenades, or heavy artillery of any kind simply wouldn’t be feasible.

  Night was easier.

  Upstairs, with the island sealed again, Lou put the Brownings in her shoulder holster. She placed one on each side. It was true she was ambidextrous when it came to shooting. She’d trained hard on both sides of her body, but she favored her right. She slid the leather jacket on, covering the guns, and added her mirrored sunglasses as a finishing touch.

  Stepping into her dark linen closet, she breathed a nervous sigh. Even after all this time, after more than fifteen years of hunting men, she still got excited. It didn’t even have to be the killing moment. The stalking, the watching—all parts of the chase were enough.

  No one else would notice the electricity in her fingertips, or the way her heart sped slightly in her chest. But she did.

  She was most herself when in search of something. There was no denying it.

  She leaned against the bare wall, smelling the cedar sachet she’d thrown in the bottom of the converted closet. She reached out and touched the rough wall, feeling wood grain pull at her fingertips. Her nails caught on the end of a brace, one of the four that used to hold up shelves before Lou removed them.

  She closed her eyes, focusing on that compass inside her. She willed it to hone in on Fish. After a moment of cool darkness, a sense of floating in black waters, the tug came. A pin was dropped in the map of her mind and she felt the currents of those waters shift direction like rounding a river bend.

  She let go of her hold on the world, parting the shadows around her, and slipped through. When Lou found herself in the solid world again, her little closet had expanded by three or four times its size.

  The only light in the room came from beneath the crack in the door. Lou stepped toward it, groping at the wall until she found a light switch.

  A bathroom sprang into view. A single toilet beside a safety bar was in the left corner behind her. Adjacent to that sat a white sink beneath a mirror. Smeared soap creased its corners.

  Lou pushed the door open a crack.

  It was a hallway full of shuffling bodies. Teenagers opened and slammed lockers. Books were shoved roughly into backpacks.

  In the sea of bodies, Lou spotted Fish. He stood a head taller than most of the teens. They parted around him like water around a boulder.

  Surveying him there, shoulder to shoulder with a brunette girl, pointing out something in the textbook she held open in her palms, Lou understood why her compass had selected this bathroom.

  Light from the hall’s windows struck him in all directions. It sprang from open classrooms and the fluorescents beating down from above. There was no way she could’ve gotten closer to him.

  Fish reached forward to turn the textbook’s page. Lou didn’t miss the way his shoulder brushed the girl’s. Nor did she miss the nervous smile that reflexively crossed the student’s lips.

  Even from where she hid in the bathroom, Lou saw the gauze peeking out from under his light purple dress shirt.

  What do you tell them, Fish? she wondered. Oh, that? It’s nothing. I cut myself working in the garage. Or perhaps to his little wife, I’ve been pretending to make your kitchen island for six months so that I have an excuse to stare at my precious photographs. It’s better than slitting this pretty girl’s throat, isn’t it?

  How many monsters simply walked the world as this man did? Hidden in plain sight, in classrooms or offices or marital beds.

  Fish licked his lips, laughing at something the girl said. Lou understood the look in his eyes and was certain that she was one of the few people in the world who knew it for what it was. Hunger.

  You’re playing with your food, Fish.

  Lou’s head throbbed. Her fingers itched to pull her gun. She became hyperaware of a thunderous pulse in her throat and her own gnawing hunger in her guts.

  She wanted him. She wanted to take him right here and now to her own special place. She wanted to hurt him, watch him cry, watch him beg.

  We’re playing a different game, King had said.

  Lou hoped Fish was about to lose.

  There were signs he might. His polished edges were wearing away, visible in the deepening dark circles beneath his eyes. His once clean and clipped nails had been recently chewed. The thumb in particular looked savaged, the cuticle red and pulled back.

  Does anyone else see these things? Or is it only me? And then, He’s trying. He’s trying to hold himself back.

  And who was she to judge? Hadn’t she been pacing her apartment just an hour before?

  Do you think his craving is stronger or weaker than yours? a voice asked. It sounded suspiciously like Aunt Lucy’s voice of reason. Aunt Lucy’s kind patience was enough to tug at her heart. It was enough to stunt the hunger building inside her. And it was typical of Lucy to bring compassion to any moment like this. Do you like how it feels when you’re that restless?

  The crack through which Lou surveyed Fish’s world suddenly widened.

  A teenager in hot pink pants stepped back, surprised.

  “God, lock the door!” the girl huffed. Her bright eyeshadow creased with her scowl. As her eyes roved Lou’s body, the scowl only deepened. “This is the handicap bathroom, lady. Are you even—”

  Lou pulled the door shut but didn’t lock it. Instead, she hit the light switch and was gone.

  16

  A sharp voice pulled Mel from her thoughts. “Mr. Rushdie can see you now.”

  A receptionist with bushy eyebrows regarded Mel over his computer. His gelled hair was slicked back from his face and his gaze was indifferent at best. Mel wondered how long this one would last, as it seemed that Rushdie had a new receptionist every time she visited the cramped little office downtown.

  Mel rose from her seat in the waiting area and threw a nervous glance at the three fake plants against the far wall before reaching the mahogany door at the end of the room. It opened before her fingers could clasp the handle.

  “Ms. Durand.” The balding man extended his liver-spotted hand toward her. “Come on in now.”

  “Thank you for making the time to see me.” Melandra sidestepped through the narrow doorway into the cramped office so that the lawyer could close the door behind her.

  The desk sagged with stacks of file folders one on top of the other. Some stacks looked quite precarious, on the verge of tumbling onto the floor. The filing cabinets behind the desk, all as tall as she was, looked no
better. Some of the drawers didn’t even close. Tabs protruded from them at unkempt angles like crooked teeth.

  “I understand you want some legal advice about your business and husband.” Rushdie shuffled past her, his head half-tucked like a turtle’s. One of his shoulders hiked up, giving him an uneven walk just short of a hunchback.

  “Please sit down,” he said when he came around the desk and found her still standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, wringing her hands. “We’re all friends here.”

  Mel forced a smile and obediently perched on the edge of one of the stiff chairs.

  Rushdie seemed to sense that further encouragement was needed. “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

  She licked her lips. “My husband”—God, she loathed to say the word—“just got out of prison, and now he’s here in New Orleans.”

  “Is this a happy reunion?”

  “No,” Mel freely admitted. “No, not at all.”

  “You’ve seen him?” Rushdie was searching the papers on his desk, looking for something.

  “A few times. He’s been trying to…harass me into giving him money and says he is entitled to part of my business because we’re married.”

  Rushdie settled on a piece of paper, lifting it closer to his bespectacled eyes. “Is this the gentleman you came to me about in ninety-nine?”

  “Yes,” Melandra said. Though she thought the word gentleman was a gross and inaccurate description for Terry.

  “He was already in prison then?” He eyed Melandra over his thick spectacles. His mouth hung open in a heavy pant.

  “Correct.”

  “And your little shop is something you built while he was in prison.”

  Mel tried not to stiffen at the patronizing “little shop” comment. Maybe it wasn’t much to this guy, but she’d worked hard to get her business off the ground and keep it off the ground.

  Rushdie leaned back in his chair. “I remember you cancelling the divorce proceedings in ninety-nine, but if you’ve changed your mind and want to pursue divorce, we can certainly begin those proceedings now. And we can make the case in court that you’re a good, hardworking woman who doesn’t deserve to give half her livelihood to such a man. It helps that he was in jail for so long. It will be easier to paint the picture of why you shouldn’t have to share. But Ms. Durand, they’re going to ask why you didn’t divorce him sooner.”

  Of course they’ll ask, and what the hell am I supposed to say?

  Rushdie arched his brows. “Did you still love him, perhaps?”

  The attorney’s slow, southern drawl gave the impression of mock sympathy.

  Mel straightened. “No.”

  Rushdie nodded as if he’d expected this. “All right. Did he threaten or coerce you into staying? He has the history of violence against you, does he not? And let me be honest here. Even if that’s not the story, we might want to embellish, if you know what I’m saying.”

  Mel wasn’t sure how much Rushdie remembered from the murder trial that eventually led to Terrence’s incarceration. So she briefly retold him the story.

  She began with the affair, with the hickeys on his neck and finding his parked car outside Sholanda’s trailer on many a night when Terry said he’d gone to the bar.

  What she didn’t say was how she’d gone to the trailer herself one morning. After she’d waited in the gravel drive for fifteen minutes, working up the courage to knock, Sholanda had opened the door first. The woman had known perfectly well who Mel was. She’d offered her sweet tea in a plastic tumbler and waited until Mel managed to ask in perfect calm, “Do you love him?”

  Sholanda said that she did.

  “Even though he did that to you?” Mel had pointed at the black bruise spreading across Sholanda’s right cheek.

  “Even so,” the girl had said. And Mel felt like she’d never understood another person so deeply in her life than she had in that moment.

  And Melandra—God forgive her—didn’t mind the affair.

  For one, she was no longer the target of Terry’s drunken assaults. Years of being forced onto the mattress or struck across the face, shoulders, and back had slowed from every day, to weekly, to monthly, until nothing at all. He still took her money. He still pawned anything of value that she didn’t carefully hide away. But that felt like such a minor insult after everything else.

  Mel left Sholanda’s trailer that day without having drunk the tea, and it was the last time she saw the woman alive.

  A year later, Terry beat the girl to death. She’d been four months pregnant with his child.

  To all this, Rushdie only shrugged. “Has he hurt you since he’s got out of prison?”

  Mel shook her head. Though she thought of the snarl on his face as he’d thrown her into the wall outside her shop and the way he’d grabbed her wrist before that.

  Rushdie sucked his teeth. “Too bad. But we can still make all the arguments. It’s really just a matter of how well we prove your virtue and his indecency. The good news is that he’s got quite the track record of indecency. We only have to hope that he doesn’t try and play the reformed card.”

  He reached for the cigarettes on his desk.

  He paused, rolling his hound-dog eyes up to Mel’s. “Do you mind?”

  “Not if you give me one.” Mel’s bangles clanked on her wrist as she reached forward.

  Rushdie grinned. “Why yes, of course. I think my office might be the last public place in the whole state of Louisiana where smoking is allowed.”

  Mel smiled, accepting the cigarette offered.

  “Here now,” he said, coming out of his seat with the lighter in one hand.

  Mel leaned forward, letting him light the end of her cigarette.

  Something about the scene reminded her of Grandmamie’s porch. Of some hot summer day, or at least, it seemed like all her days in the parish bayou were hot summer days.

  She’d just finished collecting the chicken eggs as she was told to do, dumping them carefully from a faded apron into a basket by the front door.

  “You missed one,” Grandmamie had said from her place on the porch step. She’d pointed a crooked finger at a patch of high grass in the yard. “There.”

  Of course, her grandmother was right. Grandmamie was always right.

  “After supper you make sure those chickens end up back in the coop now. Latch that door tight.” She flicked her ash. “I’ve seen them racoons running around here. And a fox too. Can’t have them eating our girls, now can we?”

  Mel had been watching the thin gray smoke rise from the cigarette between the old woman’s fingers. “What are them like?”

  “What are what like?” Grandmamie asked. Her dark eyes narrowed. She glanced at the cigarette. “This?”

  “Yeah. You’re always smokin’ them. Do they taste good?”

  Grandmamie laughed. It was a dry, cracked sound, like leather left out too long in the sun. “No, they don’t taste good.”

  “Then why you smoke ’em?”

  “Because I’m stupid. And stupid people do stupid things.”

  “Can I try it?” Mel said.

  “You want to be a stupid person too?” Grandmamie cackled. Her eyes regarded Mel in that steady, sure way of theirs. “If I let you take a puff, will you promise not to smoke them ever again?”

  “What if I like them?”

  “Do you promise?” Grandmamie grinned. “Yes or no, girl?”

  “All right,” Mel said, already sensing some sly trick to the promise. Grandmamie had had a way of running her crooked fingers through her short gray curls when she was up to mischief.

  Mel came forward, leaning to take her promised puff on the cigarette.

  Grandmamie clucked, snatching it back. “Don’t wrap your whole damn mouth around it like that. Just a bit of lips. Heaven.”

  Frowning, Mel tried again, feeling her braids slide over her shoulder as she leaned forward. The plastic beads clinked together.

  She inhaled and felt the white-ho
t burn of the smoke hit her throat. It spasmed, giving over to ragged coughs.

  Grandmamie smiled her slyest smile yet.

  “That’s….awful,” Mel managed between choked gasps.

  “Remember that next time you want one. They’ll kill you. Turn your insides black. Make you cough until you hurt. Stain those pretty teeth yellow.”

  Mel tried to nod, to say she understood, but she couldn’t stop coughing. Tears streamed from her eyes.

  Finally she realized the sound stinging her ears was her grandmother’s laughter.

  “You knew it would hurt me.” Mel wiped at her eyes and spat on the ground. “So why you’d let me do it?”

  “Ain’t no use telling you something once you get it in your head. You’re just like me that way.”

  Mel remembered the regret and weariness in Grandmamie’s eyes when she’d said that. But there had also been tenderness Mel didn’t understand until she was much, much older. Years after Grandmamie had died, and Terry had gone to prison.

  “You’re doing that thing you do,” Mel had said, straightening. She pushed her braids back from her face and glared at her grandmama. She spit on the ground again, hoping that would get the taste out of her mouth. It’d been like eating dirt.

  “What’s that thing I do?” Grandmamie paused to pluck a piece of stray tobacco off her tongue. Mel mimicked her, thinking maybe that was how she got rid of the taste.

  This only made her grandmother laugh harder. “You ain’t got no tobacco in your mouth. Show some sense.”

  “You’re the one letting fourteen-year-olds smoke!”

  Grandmamie gave her a warning look. While she had always been kind and patient, backtalk was not tolerated. “What’s ‘that thing I do’?”

  “Where you is tellin’ me somethin’ and not tellin’ me somethin’ at the same time.”

  “I suppose I am.” She flicked her ash again, watching it fall onto the porch step before wiping it away with her sandal. “Come over here and hear the truth then. You’re old enough.”