Madeleine's Ghost (10 page)

Five minutes later Molesworth came back with two Dixies and motioned me to a door in the far dark corner. In shadows back there stood a stuffed grizzly which I hadn't noticed before, reared up on its hind legs, claws out, teeth bared. From beneath the door, a thin line of yellow light.

“Get up,” Molesworth said. “Let's go talk to Dothan.”

But as we passed along the fringes of the crowd, a howl went up, and a young woman stepped from behind the bar onto the tin counter-top. She wore a white rose tucked between her breasts, a tight red dress that fell two inches above her knees, and black cowboy boots. She flicked her cigarette toward one of the wooden mermaids with something like
contempt and began to dance up there to the song just coming on the jukebox. I recognized it, a lively number by Papa Languenbec and his Cajun Allstars about a boy who loves his mother to distraction, full of accordion and fiddle and bawdy double entendre sung in a nasal, incomprehensible Cajun French.

I paused just within reach of the bear's paws to watch her dance. Beyond the arcade windows of the facade, where bales of cotton once steamed in the summer heat of another era, it had stopped raining, and there was a sort of green halo above the river. Framed against this faint illumination, the young woman swung her hips and swung her thick black hair from side to side and stamped her black boots into the tin of the counter in time to the music and shook what she had to shake, which was God's own plenty. She had
duende.
She put the Spanish in Spanish Town.

The rednecks and bikers at her feet whistled and cheered and threw money and pounded the bar with fists the size of ham hocks. I thought of the perfect frenzy of John Singer Sargent's
Gypsy Dancer
, and bareback riders, and circus acrobats dangling high above the sawdust in sequined tights. Her bare skin was covered with a thin sheen of sweat. A tiny fleck touched my lip when she flung out her arms.

Then I felt Molesworth's hand heavy as the law on my shoulder. He pulled me around and shook his head.

“Is that her?” I said, but I couldn't keep the wobble out of my voice.

“What do you think?”

“Christ, how could you say she's not beautiful? She's—”

“I didn't say that, Coonass.” He cut me off. “I just said she wasn't to my taste, which means I don't fancy a shotgun between the eyes.”

I followed him reluctantly through the door and into a vast unfinished kitchen area, flooded with fluorescent light. Steel pots big as bathtubs sat here and there. A huge exhaust fan and two stoves still in crates were pushed at angles to the wall, packing material strewn all around. I tripped over an open box of spoons as long as my arm.

“Dothan's going to do a little bit of catering,” Molesworth explained. “He's thinking about exporting some of his jambalaya to sell up
North. Chicago or New York or something. You know how they go for that sort of thing up there.”

Dothan Palmier sat hunched at a card table in the cramped office going over the accounts with all the pencil-biting intensity of a ten-year-old doing math homework. A thin gun slit of a window gave out on the levee and the lights of Marrero across the river. He looked up narrow eyed when we came in and closed the big red ledger.

“Hey, Dothan,” Molesworth said. “How's it going, you old coonass?”

“Lyle,” he said. He stood up, shook Molesworth's hand, and gave a grimace that passed for a smile. He wore tight black jeans, pointy cowboy boots curled up at the toes, and a plain white shirt, sleeves rolled over thick biceps like a farmer's son showing off his muscles.

Molesworth introduced us, and I stepped forward, and we shook hands. His hands were oversized from heavy work, hard, and scarred. The tattoo of a python curled out of the jungle of wiry black hairs on his left wrist and beneath the gold band of his watch. He was probably thirty-five, attractive in a dark, sideburned Cajun sort of way and short, about five feet six inches. But something else made him hard to ignore; a dangerous, unpredictable quality. He seemed coiled tight as a spring.

Dothan brought a bottle of Early Times and three lowball glasses out of a battered file cabinet near the window and poured a shot in each.

“Good-looking place you've got here,” Molesworth said, and raised his glass. “Let's drink to that.”

“I've got a long way to go, shit, check the wreck out there.” He waved toward the kitchen. “Don't want to jinx it. Better drink to you finishing up that schooling of yours before the end of the decade.”

Molesworth shook his head and laughed, a deep, rumbling sound from the belly. “No way,” he said.

“Wait,” I said, “let's drink to the beautiful girl behind the bar. She's amazing.”

They both looked over at me. Molesworth seemed stunned, his
jowls sagging like a St. Bernard's. Dothan studied me for a moment, unblinking, expressionless.

“You mean Antoinette,” he said quietly.

“He don't know, Dothan,” Molesworth cut in. “He don't know for shit.”

“It's all right,” Dothan said. “She is a beautiful woman. Any fool can see that.”

“Well, then”—I raised my glass—“to Antoinette …”

We drank. Dothan drained his glass and, after a minute or so of strained chitchat with Molesworth, turned back to his account books abruptly. “If you boys will excuse me,” he said.

Molesworth and I went down through the kitchen and out into the bar. “You're a real coonass,” he said when he was sure we were safe. “That old boy stuck a knife in a man in a club in Chalmette for less than what you did back there.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” I said. “In any case a woman like that is worth a little trouble.”

“Now you're talking crazy,” Molesworth said, and turned hulking toward the street door.

“Another round,” I said. “I'll buy.”

Molesworth hesitated for an instant, then shrugged and made a place with his bulk at the rail. He was a practical man. He would accept a free beer from the devil himself.

A few minutes later Antoinette came down to our end of the bar, a cigarette, half ashes, curled in the corner of her lip. Without removing it, she leaned across and kissed his fat cheek.

“Hello, Lyle,” she said.

Molesworth nodded. “Antoinette.”

“What can I get you gentlemen?”

“Hell, this coonass is buying,” Molesworth said. “Make mine something fancy and expensive, from the blender.”

“All right, a Frozen Bastard … what about you?”

She passed her eyes over me in a quick evaluation. I sat back, a little surprised. New Orleans is like London; you can place any native within a
street or two if you know what to listen for. I had expected deep bayou, like Dothan's Lafayette Parish drawl, but what I heard was polished, urbane: St. Jerome's Academy for Girls, the Garden District, and summers on a forty-five-foot Camper-Nicholson in the Gulf.

“Well?”

“Frozen Bastard,” I croaked.

Then she smiled unexpectedly and did a quick pirouette to the blender down the bar.

We all have our moments. There are those rare nights when reach exceeds grasp and the implausible becomes as real as the coins in our pocket. When Antoinette brought the drinks—two embarrassing pink concoctions with paper umbrellas and pineapple slices—I made a few offhanded cracks, and she laughed and lingered in banter as Molesworth brooded next to me like a disgruntled genie. Down the bar rednecks waved twenty-dollar bills, trying to catch her attention. She was the darling of the place, the resident deity. She ignored them, had all the time in the world. Outside the obvious symmetries shared by all beautiful women, there was something familiar about her face. Then it hit me, a stroke of genius.

“In the Presbytère,” I said, actually snapping my fingers, “the Louisiana State Museum …”

“The museum's in the Cabildo,” she said, “but what about it?”

“They've got these historical paintings, you know. One I remember—a pretty young woman in a white dress, circa 1825. God, she looks just like you. She could be your sister. I can't remember the name. But …”

Antoinette seemed impressed. “I know the one you're talking about,” she said. “I've got a photograph of it on the wall in my apartment. They found that painting stuffed at the back of the attic in my aunt Tatie's house on Esplanade in the Vieux Carré. Loaned it to the museum when Aunt Tatie went off to the old folks' home. The woman in the painting is some ancestor. We're Creoles, one hundred percent. My mother's family's been here for always. Had plantations downriver, the whole deal. A couple of people have told me there's a resemblance, but I don't see it.”

“It's the eyes mostly. She's got the same eyes. What color are your eyes?” I reached for her hand suddenly and leaned close across the bar.

Antoinette was startled, but she did not pull away. “Sometimes blue,” she said almost in a whisper, “sometimes gray. Depends on the mood.”

“No,” I said. “They're the color of rainwater.”

There was a pause, my nose a half inch from the smoldering end of her cigarette. Molesworth groaned audibly to my left. Antoinette's hand felt cool and small in mine. She disengaged gently and stepped back.

“Your friend here is drunk, Lyle,” she said to Molesworth. “Drunk but cute. Bring him back when he isn't so drunk.” Then she turned to the clamor at the far end of the bar.

“You are one dumb sombitch,” he said when she was gone. “I wash my hands of the consequences,” and he made a hand-washing gesture.

I laughed, something like joy in my heart, and tipped up my Dixie and drank, and I tried not to mind when Molesworth gave me a sharp elbow in the ribs and I turned to see Dothan standing just outside the doorway to the kitchen, a dark figure beneath the paws of the bear in the hard yellow light.

I
N MATTERS
of the heart, luck is everything. I have never been a lucky man, which is to say circumstances conspired in my favor once, then never looked my way again.

Two weeks after Molesworth took me to Spanish Town, I happened across Antoinette in the museum in Gibson Hall at Tulane. A dull gray sky stretched tight as a drum over Audubon Park, palm trees along St. Charles drooping listlessly against it. It rained; then it didn't rain; then it rained again. There is nothing to do in such oppressive weather, impossible to concentrate, so I wandered over to look at the yellow skulls and Indian relics in their dusty glass cases. The museum is a strange, unkempt
little place, not much visited and full of mismatched oddities: dingy bones of mysterious provenance, the perfect glass beads of the Mound Builders, two Egyptian monkey mummies from the Middle Kingdom, codices written on human skin, and gold ornaments stolen by the conquistadors—perhaps by stout Cortez himself—from the bloody cities of the Aztecs.

Antoinette stood before a case of Aztec artifacts in an unseasonable sleeveless flowered dress, shivering, her hair in wet curls down her back. There were bruises on her bare arms, and when I got closer, I saw she was soaked through to the skin.

“Antoinette?” I said.

She turned toward me with a zoned-out stare. Her pupils looked dilated. I had been back to Spanish Town twice since the first visit, each time making a point to talk to her, but I could see she did not know my face.

“At your bar,” I said. “I've been in a few times—”

“Dothan's bar.” She frowned, an edge in her voice. She was too sedated to show any real anger, but I felt a wicked thrill when I considered that something might have happened between them.

“Are you all right?” I stepped closer. “Is there something wrong?”

She ignored the question and pointed at the case. “Check this stuff out,” she said. “It's really wild.”

Behind the thick glass, a large obsidian blade, strands of gold wire still wrapped around the haft, lay on a strip of red velvet. I read the tag and shuddered.

“The Aztec priests used it to cut out the hearts of their sacrificial victims,” she said in a dull monotone. “They believed that the sun was a feeble old man who needed human blood to survive and rise the next day. So they'd force the people to line up at the base of those stone temples, thousands of them. Then, one by one they'd be dragged up to have their hearts cut out with that bit of polished rock. Then the priests would roll their bodies down the other side, where acolytes would flay the skin and wear it like a coat, until it rotted. Shit, imagine having your heart cut out while you were still alive. You'd be able to see them lift it over your head
—this bloody hunk of meat—in the last split second before your eyes went black,” She turned to me, expecting a reasonable response.

“Gruesome,” I said, making a face.

“No. Not really. Hell, I would have gone voluntarily. I think it would be a good thing to have your heart cut out. Who needs a heart?”

“Everyone needs a heart,” I said as if talking to a child.

She shook her head and opened her mouth to speak but instead leaned forward and put her hands and her forehead flat against the glass and gave a small moan.

“Oh, man,” she said. “This is bad. I'm coming down. Fast.” Then she began shivering in quick little spasms. I touched her bare shoulder and felt the spasms go through her like electric shocks, and I became alarmed. Her teeth began to chatter. I put my books on the floor and took off my coat and put it around her shoulders and stood there for a moment in the dim light of the museum, unsure of what to do next. From a case nearby the black monkey faces of the mummies leered at me through the glass and from across the distance of three thousand years.

“We've got to take you to a doctor or something,” I said at last.

She clamped her jaw shut in an effort to stop the chattering noise. “No,” she said. “This has happened before. It's just a bad trip. Listen, you've got to help me get home. Will you help me get home?” Then she pushed off the glass and stood woozily on her feet for a second before she slumped back into my arms.