Exquisite Corpse (5 page)

The pain-besotted skeleton in the hospital bed had once been Mignon Devore, daughter of an old uptown family, former Queen of Comus, ostensible beauty. She had married a rich boy from Texas and brought him home to get richer. Ensconced in a Gothic mansion on St. Charles, she had put up with Lysander's mistresses as long as he didn't open bank accounts in their names. She had consumed quantities of Pernod, an ersatz form of absinthe that was equally loathsome but legal. She had paid little attention to her only child. She had entombed her husband in style, and she would fill an equally handsome place in the family crypt.

When the cancer was discovered marbling his mother's temporal lobes like the fat on a particularly tender cut of beef, Jay had installed her in Charity Hospital rather than the posh private place where Lysander had died of the same cancer five years earlier. Mignon didn't want to go; she was terrified of the place and scandalized by the thought of dying there, so Jay figured she would go faster. It was an act of mercy, a small evil for the greater good.

He was halfway across Jackson Square, heading toward Café du Monde for a cup of au lait, when he heard sneakered feet running up behind him. Jay turned so quickly he surprised himself. Tran stopped, uneasy surprise flickering across the fine planes and hollows of his face.

“I was just wondering,” he said, and stopped. Smiled. Toyed with the hem of his shorts, exposing the smooth skin of one knee. “I was just wondering if you'd like to go to that rave with me. I mean, to take pictures or something,” he added as the surprise registered on Jay's face.

“To take … ?” Jay felt his heart racing, apparently trying to batter its way out of his chest. He imagined it bursting through bone, smacking wetly into Tran's face, leaving a streak of lurid maroon across those perfect rose-almond lips. “Uh … what exactly happens at a rave?”

Tran grinned and rolled his eyes. “Better ask what
doesn't
happen. It's strictly bring-your-own-drugs, but you can get smart drinks, energy shakes, all kinds of legal mind candy. Almost everyone is on 'shrooms or X, so it gets pretty touchy-feely.”

“Well …” Jay hated the very sound of the word
rave,
the picture it painted in his mind of a fleshy festival edging out of control toward delirium. He saw a clubful of adorable kids babbling in tongues, perhaps foaming at the mouth. “It doesn't really sound like my kind of thing. I don't enjoy hallucinating in public.”

“Yeah, I know people like that.” The boy nodded sagely, as if he had tallied countless opinions on public use of psychedelic drugs—and maybe he had. Many of the Vietnamese families in New Orleans were Catholic, and after a childhood spent memorizing taboos, Catholic teenagers were often the wildest of all.

“But I
would
like to take your picture,” Jay said. “Come by sometime. Here …” He took out a pen and a small notebook, jotted the address.

“Thanks.” Tran pocketed the paper, favored him with a last sweet smile, and disappeared into the swirl of tourists, Tarot readers, street musicians, and assorted Quarter rats. God, he was pretty. But he was also a local kid, Jay reminded himself. He could take local kids' pictures, maybe, but nothing more.

Jay decided to walk along the river before having his coffee and heading home. The air was cooler up here on the levee, suffused with a clear near-sunset light. Jay stared down at the surging, glowing river as he walked. It was so mighty and so polluted; doubtless it had been the carrier and deliverer of more poisons than one factory could ever be. But no one called the Mississippi a murderer.

It was forty years now since Byrne Metals and Chemicals opened in Terrebonne Parish, spanking new, marvelous as plastic, ready to help usher south Louisiana into the atomic age. At first his father's factory had been a boon to the impoverished area, creating jobs for people who were too old or weak to make their living off the bounty of the swamp. It didn't seem to matter that the factory was pumping waste water into the same waters that nourished that bounty. The swamp was immense, boundless; surely it could absorb whatever went into it. It had the bayous to drain into, and beyond that the whole Gulf of Mexico.

But as the years went by, more able-bodied men and women began turning up asking for factory jobs. It seemed there weren't as many fish, fur animals, or gators in the area as there had once been. The crawfish were as plentiful as ever, perhaps more so, but they throve on any kind of sludge. Many of the remaining animals were sick or small. To an untrained eye, the swamp still teemed with rich life. But the people who lived there could see it dying.

Then they began dying too. A citizens' group alleged that people within a fifty-mile radius of Byrne Metals and Chemicals got cancer at fifty times the usual rate. There was a rash of babies born with gaping craniums, half-formed faces, stunted brains or no brains. There was a nasty incident involving a Cajun who'd been laid off from his job in the solvents division after eighteen years' service. Diagnosed with intestinal cancer a month later, the man had rammed the factory gate with his pickup truck, then parked in the yard, pulled
out an ancient double-barreled shotgun, and started blasting away. A security guard had most of his left leg blown off before he was able to put a slug in the Cajun's brain.

Mignon's older brother Daniel Devore had stepped in to help. He had a gifted tongue with the politicians and reporters, and a talent for juggling facts. He also had a proclivity for the young male hustlers who haunted Burgundy Street past midnight in the lower Quarter. Eventually he set up his favorite in a slave quarters apartment and spent three or four nights a week down there. When Jay moved to the Quarter years later, the ex-hustler was still around, having been generously remembered in Daniel's will. A faded pastel blond, schooled in the ways of the Quarter but no longer able to make the grade, he managed to lure an occasional boy back to his apartment by flashing a bankroll. Jay observed him from afar, fascinated by the knowledge that that bankroll was steeped in the blood of the swamp his father had poisoned.

A calliope was shrieking “Dixie,” insanely loud, very near. He realized he had walked all the way up the wooden riverwalk to the steamboat landing. The brightly colored boats towered over the dock, all wooden scrollwork and glittering brass, the
Natchez,
the
Cajun Queen,
the
Robert E. Lee,
big gaudy wedding-cake boats. He imagined one of them tipping over, spilling its human cargo into the toxic soup of the river.

He reached inside his jacket and touched the manila envelope. The feel of it against his heart was reassuring.
Nuke,
Tran had told him. One hundred doses of top-grade LSD. He'd take four or five, put the rest in the freezer. He had all sorts of treats in there.

Jay walked back to Café du Monde for the cup of au lait he'd been wanting. The very air beneath the old green awnings was luscious with fried dough and powdered sugar, a sweet miasma that always lingered here. The aromas of the café intertwined with engine exhaust from Decatur Street and the grassy smell of dung from the mule-drawn carriages
that parked in front of the square collecting cartloads of tourists.

The afternoon was beginning to shade into evening. Thousands of birds circled over Jackson Square in the clear twilight, preparing to roost. Their erratic song, the saxophone player on the sidewalk, the crowd's chatter, the rumble and blare of passing traffic on Decatur Street: all were part of the French Quarter's festive eventide. Jay chose a table by the iron railing, where he could watch the circus. The chicory coffee tasted rich and strong, the milk frothy and sweet.

He became aware of a presence near his elbow. A boy stood on the other side of the railing, puppy-dog gaze melting over Jay like warm butter. He wore the costume of young drifters everywhere: bandanna wrapped around a close-cropped head, ears and nose studded with metal, army jacket a work of art done in safety pins and black marker, Doc Martens that had seen serious street time. His face was strong-boned, unwittingly angelic. He was perhaps eighteen. Perhaps.

“Will you take me home?” he asked Jay. “I wanna be your pet. I don't eat much and I'm very affectionate.”

Jay sipped his coffee, cocked an eyebrow. “What if you urinate or defecate on the floor? I might have to put you to sleep.”

“I'm housebroken,” the boy assured him earnestly.

There was hunger in his face, plain and sharp; but it was unaccustomed hunger, the hunger of a kid spending his first weeks on the street, missing his parents' well-stocked kitchen. That was the kind of hunger Jay liked; strong enough to make them incautious, but not so strong that their muscles were wasted. He ordered the boy a café au lait and a plate of beignets.

“Now seriously,” said Jay, watching the boy pour an endless stream of sugar into his coffee. “What about this pet business? Are you going to let me put a leash and collar on you? Do I get to chain you up?”

“Sure.” The boy grinned through a mouthful of beignet. Powdered sugar spangled his lips, his chin, the front of his
black T-shirt. “Anything you want. Just let me curl up at the foot of your bed.”

Jay wondered why such an exotic pup was begging for scraps at his back door. He looked rich, he supposed, but not
that
rich. Nowhere near as rich as he really was. In New Orleans, where robbery and murder were as common as afternoon rainstorms, only the tourists wore wealth like a sign plastered across their foreheads.

“You might even get your own pillow,” he said. “Been traveling long?”

“Just a couple of months.”

“Where you from?”

“Maryland.”

“What's it like there?”

A diffident shrug; might as well ask what it's like on the moon. “Sucks. You know—boring.” The last of the beignets disappeared down that hungry pink gullet. “So, uh, you wanna take me home?”

Jay leaned forward and put his face close to the boy's. “Let's get a few things straight. If you want to be my pet, then
be
my pet. Sit until I'm ready to go. Heel when I walk. Roll over when I say so. And when I pet you,
lick my hand.”

He reached out and smoothed the boy's hair, slid his fingers down the side of the boy's face, over the soft hairs at the ridge of the jawbone. Just as he was about to pull away, the boy turned his head and took Jay's first two fingers into his mouth, lipped them softly, rolled them over his tongue. The inside of his mouth was as soft as velvet, as warm as fresh blood.

From the corner of his eye, Jay saw an elderly tourist couple at the next table staring as if hypnotized. He could not make himself care, could scarcely move or breathe while that wet heat caressed him.

“Just call me Fido,” said the boy.

T
he sky over Chef Menteur Highway was tinged lavender with the first traces of dawn. Tran drove past the crumbling architecture of half-vacant strip malls and bottom-end motels, past the awesome neon planet that was the beacon of the Orbit Bowling Alley, past a sleazy rainbow of cocktail lounges and dirty bookstores still gamely angling for the night's last human dregs. Soon Tran's little Escort was speeding through green country, lush expanses of water, reeds, and grass dotted with occasional small houses. East New Orleans was an odd mix of the tranquil, the trashy, and the wholly exotic.

Tran was twenty-one, born in Hanoi to parents who escaped the country three years later, during the mass exodus of 1975. Somewhere in his ancestry was a dash of French blood that lent his shoulder-length black hair a crisp wave, underlaid his smooth complexion like almondflesh tinged with peach, and lent a faint golden cast to his dark eyes. His only memories of Vietnam were of hushed voices late at night, someone hurrying him down a street illuminated with tiny colored lights that shimmered and blurred in the humid air, the raw sap smell of machete-cut greenery. Sometimes he thought he recalled other things—shells exploding in the distance, the silvery hulk of a jetliner—but he could never be sure whether these fragments were memory or dream.

Because of a man his father had known in the American army, the family was able to settle in New Orleans without passing through the mud and concrete horror of the refugee camps. His birth name was Tran Vinh. When his parents enrolled him in American kindergarten, they reversed the order of his names so that the family name would come last, like an American child's. And they elongated his first name to Vincent, which he hated and had never answered to, even at five. His family still called him Vinh. To everyone else he was Tran. In English, the short sharp syllable suggested movement (transmission, transpose) and the crossing of boundaries (transcontinental, tranquilize, transvestite), both of which he liked.

Tonight Tran had swallowed acid and ecstasy until the lights and the video and the barrage of sound ran together in a gaudy candy-colored blur. At the rave there had been a smart bar where girls in green lamé whipped strange powders into allegedly IQ-raising concoctions that tasted better than Tang. There had been kids in full riot gear and flowered helmets, kids armed only with water bottles and baby pacifiers, kids who looked like Dr. Seuss characters on mushrooms. Which was no big surprise: they had all grown up with Dr. Seuss, and many of them
were
on mushrooms.

Tran wore a loose knee-length dress covered with giddy loops of purple and red. He'd kept his shorts on underneath, so that when he got home he could tuck the dress into their waistband and it would look like a shirt, sort of. His eyes were smudged with greasy black liner, badly applied, which made him look even younger and slightly insane. He'd gone to the rave alone and had a wonderful time. These days, that was something to be proud of. He hadn't been getting out much in
the past few months. When you knew you might run into someone you didn't want to see, it was so easy to stay in your room reading, writing in your journal, listening to music, brooding over old love letters.