Taltos

by Anne Rice

  Maybe Bayou witches are just plain dumb, Mona thought. They can stand over the graves of monsters and never know it. Of course, none of the other witches in this family knew it either. Only the woman who won't talk, and Michael, the big hunk of Celtic muscle and charm standing beside Rowan.

  "You and I are second cousins," Mary Jane had said to Mona, renewing her approach. "Isn't that something? You weren't born when I came to Ancient Evelyn's house and ate her homemade ice cream."

  "I don't recall Ancient Evelyn ever making homemade ice cream."

  "Darlin', she made the best homemade ice cream that I ever tasted. My mama brought me into New Orleans to--"

  "You've got the wrong person," said Mona. Maybe this girl was an impostor. Maybe she wasn't even a Mayfair. No, no such luck on that. And there was something about her eyes that reminded Mona a little of Ancient Evelyn.

  "No, I got the right person," Mary Jane had insisted. "But we didn't really come on account of the ice cream. Let me see your hands. Your hands are normal."

  "So what?"

  "Mona, be nice, dear," said Beatrice. "Your cousin is just sort of outspoken."

  "Well, see these hands?" said Mary Jane. "I had a sixth finger when I was little, on both hands? Not a real finger? You know? I mean just a little one. And that's why my mother brought me to see Ancient Evelyn, because Ancient Evelyn has just such a finger herself."

  "Don't you think I know that?" asked Mona. "I grew up with Ancient Evelyn."

  "I know you did. I know all about you. Just cool off, honey. I'm not trying to be rude, it's just I am a Mayfair, same as you, and I'll pit my genes against your genes anytime."

  "Who told you all about me?" Mona asked.

  "Mona," said Michael softly.

  "How come I never met you before?" said Mona, "I'm a Fontevrault Mayfair. Your second cousin, as you just said. And how come you talk like you're from Mississippi when you say you lived all that time in California?"

  "Oh, listen, there's a story to it," said Mary Jane. "I've done my time in Mississippi, believe you me, couldn't have been any worse on Parchman Farm." It had been impossible to crack the kid's patience. She had shrugged. "You got any iced tea?"

  " 'Course we do, dear, I'm so sorry." Off Beatrice had gone to get it. Celia had shaken her head with shame. Even Mona had felt negligent, and Michael had quickly apologized.

  "No, I'll git it myself, tell me where it is," Mary Jane had cried.

  But Bea had disappeared already, conveniently enough. Mary Jane popped her gum again, and then again in a whole side-mouth series of little pops.

  "Awesome," said Mona.

  "Like I said, there's a story to it all. I could tell you some terrible things about my time in Florida. Yeah, I been there, and in Alabama for a while, too. I had to sort of work my way back down here."

  "No lie," said Mona.

  "Mona, don't be sarcastic."

  "I seen you before," Mary Jane had said, going on as if nothing at all had happened. "I remembered you when you and Gifford Mayfair came out to L.A. to go to Hawaii. That's the first time I was ever in an airport. You were sleeping right there by the table, stretched out on two chairs, under Gifford's coat, and Gifford Mayfair bought us the best meal???"

  Don't describe it, Mona had thought. But Mona did have some hazy memory of that trip, and waking up with a crick in her neck in the Los Angeles airport, known by the snappy name of LAX, and Gifford saying to Alicia that they had to bring "Mary Jane" back home someday.

  Only thing, Mona had no memory of any other little girl there. So this was Mary Jane. And now she was back home. Gifford must be working miracles from heaven.

  Bea had returned with the iced tea. "Here it is, precious, lots of lemon and sugar, the way you like it, isn't that right? Yes, darling."

  "I don't remember seeing you at Michael and Rowan's wedding," said Mona.

  "That's 'cause I never came in," said Mary Jane, who took the iced tea from Bea as soon as it entered the nearest orbit, and drank half of it, slurping it and wiping it off her chin with the back of her hand. Chipped nail polish, but what a gorgeous shade of crape myrtle purple.

  "I told you to come," said Bea. "I called you. I left a message for you three times at the drugstore."

  "I know you did, Aunt Beatrice, ain't nobody who could say that you didn't do your level best to get us to that wedding. But, Aunt Beatrice, I didn't have shoes! I didn't have a dress? I didn't have a hat? See these shoes? I found these shoes. These are the first shoes that are not tennis shoes that I have worn in a decade! Besides, I could see perfect from across the street. And hear the music. That was fine music you had at your wedding, Michael Curry. Are you sure you aren't a Mayfair? You look like a Mayfair to me; I could make let's say seven different points about your appearance that's Mayfair."

  "Thank you, sweetheart. I'm not a Mayfair."

  "Oh, you are in your heart," said Celia.

  "Well, of course," said Michael, never taking his eyes off the girl even once, no matter who spoke to him. And what do men see when they look at bundles of charm like this?

  "You know when we were little," Mary Jane had gone on, "we didn't have anything out there, we just had an oil lamp and a cooler with some ice in it and a lot of mosquito netting hung all over the porch and Granny would light the lamp every evening and ..."

  "You didn't have electricity?" Michael had asked. "How long ago was this? How long ago could it have been?"

  "Michael, you've never been in the Bayou Country," said Celia. And Bea gave a knowing nod.

  "Michael Curry, we were squatters, that's what we were," said Mary Jane. "We were just hiding out in Fontevrault. Aunt Beatrice could tell you. Sheriff would come to throw us out periodically. We'd pack and he'd take us into Napoleonville and then we would go back and he'd give up on us, and we'd be in peace for a while, till some goody-two-shoes passed by in a boat, some game warden, somebody like that, and called in on us. We had bees, you know, on the porch for honey? We could fish right off the back steps? We had fruit trees all around the landing then, before the wisteria got them like a giant boa constrictor, you know, and blackberries? Why, I'd just pick all I wanted right there where the road forks. We had everything. Besides, now I have electricity! I hooked it up myself from the highway, and I did the same thing with the cable TV."

  "You really did that?" asked Mona.

  "Honey, that's against the law," said Bea.

  "I certainly did. My life's far too interesting for me to ever tell lies about it. Besides, I've got more courage than imagination, that's always been the case." She drank the iced tea with another noisy slurp, spilling more of it. "God, that's good. That's so sweet. That's artificial sweetener, isn't it?"

  "I'm afraid so," said Bea, staring at her in mingled horror and embarrassment. And to think she had said "sugar." And Bea did hate people who ate and drank sloppily.

  "Now, just think of it," said Mary Jane, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth and then wiping her hand on her denim skirt. "I'm tasting something now that is fifty times sweeter than anything anybody ever tasted on earth until this very time. That's why I've bought stock in artificial sweetener."

  "You've bought what?" asked Mona.

  "Oh, yeah. I have my own broker, honey, discount broker but that's the best kind, since I do the picking most of the time anyway. He's in Baton Rouge. I've got twenty-five thousand dollars sunk in the stock market. And when I make it rich, I'm draining and raising Fontevrault. I'm bringing it all back, every peg and board! You wait and see. You're looking at a future member of the Fortune Five Hundred."

  Maybe there was something to this dingbat, Mona had thought. "How did you get twenty-five thousand dollars?"

  "You could be killed, fiddling with electricity," declared Celia.

  "Earned every penny of it on the way home, and that took a year, and don't ask me how I did it. I had a couple of things going for me, I did. But that's a story, now, really."

  "You could be electrocuted," said Cel
ia. "Hooking up your own wires."

  "Darling, you are not in the witness box," said Bea anxiously.

  "Look, Mary Jane," said Michael, "if you need anything like that, I'll come down there and hook it up for you. I mean it. You just tell me when, I'll be there."

  Twenty-five thousand dollars?

  Mona's eyes had drifted to Rowan. Rowan was frowning just a little at the flowers, as if the flowers were talking to her in a quiet and secret tongue.

  There followed a colorful description from Mary Jane of climbing swamp cypresses, of knowing just what electric wires to touch and not to touch, of purloined work gloves and boots. Maybe this girl was some kind of genius.

  "What other stocks do you own?" asked Mona.

  "What do you care at your age about the stock market?" asked Mary Jane with blithering ignorance.

  "Good heavens, Mary Jane," Mona had said, trying to sound as much as she could like Beatrice, "I've always had a great obsession with the stock market. Business to me is an art. Everyone knows that about me. I plan someday to run my own mutual fund. I assume you know the term, mutual fund?"

  "Well, sure I do," said Mary Jane, laughing at herself in an utterly agreeable and forgiving manner.

  "I have, in the last few weeks, already completely designed my own portfolio," Mona said, and then she'd broken off, feeling dumb for having been baited like that by someone who probably was not even listening to her. Derision from the firm of Mayfair and Mayfair was one thing--and it would not last long--but from this girl it was another.

  But the girl had really looked at her, and stopped just using her for a sounding board, while taking little peeping glances in between her own hasty words.

  "Is that so?" asked Mary Jane. "Well, let me ask you something now. What about this Shopper's Channel on TV? I think this is going to go over like crazy? You know? I've put ten grand in the Shopper's Channel. You know what happened?"

  "The stock's nearly doubled in the last four months," said Mona.

  "You got it, that's right, now how did you know that? Well, you're some strange kid, aren't you now? And I thought you were one of those uptown girls, with that ribbon in your hair, you know, that you always wore, and going to Sacred Heart, you know? And I figured you wouldn't even talk to me."

  A little pain had flared in Mona at that moment, pain and pity for this girl, for anybody who felt that cast out, that snubbed. Mona had never in her life suffered that lack of confidence. And this girl was interesting, putting it all together on her own, with far less nuts and bolts than Mona had.

  "Hold it, please, darlings, let's not talk Wall Street," said Beatrice. "Mary Jane, how is Granny? You haven't told us a word. And it's four o'clock, and you have to leave soon if you're going to drive all the way back--"

  "Oh, Granny's fine, Aunt Beatrice," said Mary Jane, but she had been looking straight at Mona. "Now, you know what happened to Granny after Mama came and got me and took me away to Los Angeles? I was six years old then, you know. Did you hear this story?"

  "Yeah," said Mona.

  Everybody had. Beatrice was still embarrassed about it. Celia stared at the girl as though she were a giant mosquito. Only Michael seemed uninformed.

  What had happened was this: Mary Jane's grandmother, Dolly Jean Mayfair, had been slapped in the parish home after her daughter left with six-year-old Mary Jane. Dolly Jean was supposed to have died last year and been buried in the family tomb. And the funeral had been a big affair, only because when somebody called New Orleans, all the Mayfairs drove out there to Napoleonville, and beat their chests in grief and regret that they had let this old woman, poor Dolly Jean, die in a parish home. Most of them had never heard of her.

  Indeed, none of them had really known Dolly Jean. Or at least they had not known her as an old lady. Lauren and Celia had seen her many times when they were all little girls, of course.

  Ancient Evelyn had known Dolly Jean, but Ancient Evelyn had never left Amelia Street to ride to a country funeral, and no one had even thought of asking her about it.

  Well, when Mary Jane hit town a year ago, and heard the story of her grandmother dying and being buried, she'd scoffed at it, even laughing in Bea's face.

  "Hell, she's not dead," Mary Jane had said. "She came to me in a dream and said, 'Mary Jane, come get me. I want to go home.' Now I'm going back to Napoleonville, and you have to tell me where that parish home is."

  For Michael's benefit, she had now repeated the entire tale, and the look of astonishment on Michael's face was becoming unintentionally comic.

  "How come Dolly Jean didn't tell you in the dream where the home was?" Mona had asked.

  Beatrice had shot her a disapproving look.

  "Well, she didn't, that's a fact. And that's a good point, too. I have a whole theory about apparitions and why they, you know, get so mixed up."

  "We all do," said Mona.

  "Mona, tone it down," said Michael.

  Just as if I'm his daughter now, thought Mona indignantly. And he still hasn't taken his eyes off Mary Jane. But it had been said affectionately.

  "Honey, what happened?" Michael had pushed.

  "Well, an old lady like that," Mary Jane had resumed, "she doesn't always know where she is, even in a dream, but she knew where she was from! This is exactly what happened. I walked into the door of that old folks' home, and there, slap-bang in the middle of the recreation room, or whatever they called it, was my grandmother and she looked up at me, right at me, and after all those years she said, 'Where you been, Mary Jane? Take me home, chere, I'm tired of waiting.' "

  They had buried the wrong person from the old folks' home.

  The real Granny Dolly Jean Mayfair had been alive, receiving but never laying eyes upon a welfare check every month with somebody else's name on it. A royal inquisition had taken place to prove it, and then Granny Mayfair and Mary Jane Mayfair had gone back to live in the ruins of the plantation house, and a team of Mayfairs had provided them with the basic necessities, and Mary Jane had stood outside, shooting her pistol at soft-drink bottles and saying that they'd be just fine, they could take care of themselves. She had some bucks she'd made on the road, she was kind of a nut about doing things her own way, no thank you kindly.

  "So they let the old lady live with you in this flooded house?" Michael had asked so innocently.

  "Honey, after what they did to her in the old folks' home out there, mixing her up with some other woman and putting her name on a slab and all, what the hell are they going to say to me about her living with me? And Cousin Ryan? Cousin Ryan of Mayfair and Mayfair? You know? He went down there and tore that town apart!"

  "Yeah," said Michael. "I bet he did."

  "It was all our fault," said Celia. "We should have kept track of these people."

  "Are you sure you didn't grow up in Mississippi and maybe even Texas?" Mona had asked. "You sound like an amalgam of the whole South."

  "What is an amalgam? See, that is where you have the advantage. You're educated. I'm self-educated. There's a world of difference between us. There are words that I don't dare pronounce and I can't read the symbols in the dictionary."

  "Do you want to go to school, Mary Jane?" Michael had been getting more and more involved by the second, his intoxicatingly innocent blue eyes making a head-to-toe sweep about every four and one-half seconds. He was far too clever to linger on the kid's breasts and hips, or even her round little head, not that it had been undersized, just sort of dainty. That's how she'd seemed, finally, ignorant, crazy, brilliant, a mess, and somehow dainty.

  "Yes, sir, I do," said Mary Jane. "When I'm rich I'll have a private tutor like Mona here is gettin' now that she's the designee and all, you know, some really smart guy that tells you the name of every tree you pass, and who was president ten years after the Civil War, and how many Indians there were at Bull Run, and what is Einstein's Theory of Relativity."

  "How old are you?" Michael had asked.

  "Nineteen and a half, big boy," Mary Jane had declared
, biting her shiny white teeth into her lower lip, lifting one eyebrow and winking.

  "This story about your granny, you're serious, this really happened? You picked up your granny and ..."

  "Darling, it all happened," said Celia, "exactly as the girl says. I think we should go inside. I think we're upsetting Rowan."

  "I don't know," said Michael. "Maybe she's listening. I don't want to move. Mary Jane, you can care for this old lady all by yourself?"

  Beatrice and Celia had immediately looked anxious. If Gifford had still been alive, and there, she too would have looked anxious. "Leaving that old woman out there!" as Celia had said so often of late.

  And they had promised Gifford, hadn't they, that they would take care of it? Mona remembered that. Gifford had been in one of her hopeless states of worry about relatives far and wide, and Celia had said, "We'll drive out and check on her."

  "Yes, sir, Mr. Curry, it all happened, and I took Granny home with me, and don't you know that the sleeping porch upstairs was just exactly the way we'd left it? Why, after thirteen years, the radio was still there, and the mosquito netting and the ice chest."

  "In the swamps?" Mona had demanded. "Wait a minute."

  "That's right, honey, that's exactly right."

  "It's true," Beatrice had confessed dismally. "Of course, we got them fresh linen, new things. We wanted to put them in a hotel or a house or ..."

  "Well, naturally," said Celia. "I'm afraid this story almost made the papers. Darling, is your granny alone out there right now?"

  "No, ma'am, she's with Benjy. Benjy's from the trappers live out that way--real crazy people, you know??? The kind that live in those shacks all made out of pieces of tin, and windows from salvage and even cardboard? I pay him below minimum wage to watch Granny and to cover the phones, but I don't take out any deductions."

  "So what?" said Mona. "He's an independent contractor."

  "You sure are smart," said Mary Jane. "Don't you think I know that? I was actually biting my lip on another little tidbit right at that point, you know??? That Benjy, bless his heart, has already discovered how to make some easy money in the French Quarter down here, you know?? Peddling nothing but what God give him."