Madeleine's Ghost (30 page)

“No, they always did it,” Mama Rivaudais says. “I remember very pretty young men in dresses in the street in the thirties, when I was a girl.”

“I honestly don't see the male fascination for panties and bras,” Jolie says, and is about to say more but goes in to check on the baby.

“I'm telling you it's really just in the last few years,” Charles-François insists. “I grew up in New Orleans, I should know. It's getting worse.”

“Shit,” Manon says. “The Quarter's always been like that. Full of perverts.”

“O.K., Mr. Historian,” Paul says to me. “What's the historical perspective?”

“On?” I'm a little confused.

“On the homosexual cross-dressing thing,” he says a bit aggressively.

I take a drink of my Louisiana Lemonade. “Well, the ancient Greeks were into boys, even Socrates himself, at least according to Plato. And from a certain perspective, I think you could say they wore skirts. The chiton is a sort of skirtlike garment.”

“Something a little more modern,” Paul says.

I think for a moment. “O.K., here's something—during the conquest of Peru in the 1500s, the conquistador Pizarro and his men came across a peaceful jungle tribe in which the women dressed like men and the men dressed like women. In those days, dogs terrified the Indians, and the Spaniards traveled with a pack of ravenous mastiffs, kept just this side of starvation. The tribe sent two emissaries to greet the stern conquistadors—a tough-looking woman carrying a shield and spear, and a simpering man with his face painted and wearing feathers in his hair. Pizarro took
one look at this pair and set the dogs loose. The whole tribe was torn to pieces.… Is that the sort of thing you had in mind?”

For a few seconds there is another openmouthed silence. Then the sound of Antoinette's laughter. I smile innocently and go back to my lemonade.

A
T MIDNIGHT
Antoinette comes down from the other side of the patio and kisses me on the cheek, an unsettling gleam in her eye. “What's that for?” I say.

“That's for you being you,” she says. Then after a beat she leans close and whispers, “I'm bored to death with this family shit. Let's get the hell out of here.”

“Where are we going?”

“A bar,” she says.

We slip unnoticed off the patio into the darkness as the husbands debate the finer points of their 401 (k) plans. The Saab is parked top down, leaves on its seats, around the side with the other expensive vehicles. Antoinette turns the key, the engine ticks into life no louder than a clock, and we crunch slowly over the shells and out onto the bayou road. It feels like we are escaping a minimum-security prison where the wardens are friendly and the food is good. When we are at a sufficient distance from the fishing camp, she lets out a whoop and cranks up the radio. Cajun music is all we can find in this vicinity, and I recognize the song by Papa Languenbec and the Cajun Allstars that was playing the first time I saw her dancing up on the bar at Spanish Town so many years ago. It seems a sign, though I'm not sure of what. Immediately I regret the notion. I have become as superstitious as Molesworth.

Antoinette reaches across me to the glove compartment, and her breasts brush my arm. “Excuse me,” she says, and takes out her small
black purse. She snaps it open in her lap, pulls out the pillbox, and pops a couple of the yellow pills into her mouth.

“Here,” she says, and hands the box to me.

“What do you want me to do with this?” My impulse is to throw it over the side.

“Take two of them,” she says.

“You're crazy,” I say.

“Are you tired?”

“Not really.”

“Well, you will be tired soon, and I don't want you to get tired. I don't feel like sleeping tonight, and I want you to stay up with me. I haven't seen you, really seen you, in years.”

“I'll stay up without the pills.”

“You won't.”

We pass out of the tangle of bayou now and into the regular shadows of the orange groves. The moon is rising toward its zenith above the river. “Please,” she says, and puts a hand on my thigh.

I take two of the pills. They don't kick in until we are bombing up the Belle Chasse Highway. Then it feels like I am floating, and the lights of oncoming cars trail like streamers across the neutral ground, and the sound of the wind is the sound of many voices in my ear, and everything is moving very fast and nothing matters anymore.

“Whoa,” I say. “There's more in those pills than speed.”

Antoinette smiles a lazy smile from the driver's seat. She doesn't seem to have her hands on the steering wheel. “I still keep in touch with a few folks from the old days,” she says. “Dothan's crowd. That old boy Hash Davis, the chemist who made the nasty-ass LSD I used to eat like candy. Now he's come up with these things. Yellow Pollys, he calls them, after his wife, who is a light-skinned black woman from Tallahassee named Pauline. It's a pinch of speed mixed with a smidgen of something hallucinogenic. Not much more potent than your average martini. But you've got to balance them out with alcohol. They're designed for that. Beer's in the backseat.” She jerks her thumb over her shoulder, and I see a six of cold
Abitas in Papa's Styrofoam cooler. Also, nestled in the shadows behind the seat, my shoulder bag.

“It's my stuff,” I say. I pull up two beers from the cooler and hand her one.

“Yeah,” she says. “I took the liberty of packing for you. We're not going back.”

“How far is this bar?”

“Don't you worry about that.”

“What about your parents? I didn't get a chance to thank them—”

“Just sit back and relax, O.K.?” Antoinette says, and slugs down half the beer in a single open-throated gulp, lights of the highway refracting through the brown glass.

I sag back into the seat, resigned, and let the gravity and the forward motion and the yellow pills take me where they want to go. At a certain point Antoinette's hand finds my thigh again and stays there, a warm, insistent pressure. She drives carelessly with the other, one-handed at incredible speeds. We inch eighty-five, one hundred, coming up behind tractor-trailers, flashing the high-beams and blasting by into the night. In two hours we are halfway across the state on 90, through Paradis and Lafourche and Thibodaux and Morgan City and Calumet. Then we are through Broussard and upon the lights of Lafayette, its streets crowded with pickups full of drunk Cajuns at this late hour of a Saturday night, the bars open till dawn. Then we are through the city, and there is the great summer stink of the swamp all around. We glimpse houseboats on the bayou, little more than shacks floating on fifty-gallon oil drums, and there is the sound of an accordion drifting up from somewhere in all that vast darkness.

At last Antoinette points to an exit sign that says “LA 10—Bayou Nezpique, La Flange Landing—15,” and we break off and follow secondary roads, and then the secondary roads become gravel, and the vegetation closes in densely on both sides. In a few minutes we come to an open flat of hard red clay upon which about fifty cars are parked, mostly pickups, though I spot a new BMW and a Cadillac or two. Beyond this makeshift parking lot, there are reeds and the moon glittering over a lake clotted with
more reeds and the small humps of muddy islands. On the air, which smells slightly of sulfur, there is again the sound, faint as hope, of distant music. The clock on the dash reads 2:37
A.M
. in green digital letters.

“Come on,” Antoinette says. “Let's go get drunk,” and she hops over the side, spry as a gazelle.

“My bag,” I say when I am beside her. “Shouldn't we lock it in the trunk?”

She shakes her head impatiently. “This isn't New York, boy,” she says. “It's Louisiana. Cajun country. Folks are honest out here. Quit your worrying.”

I shrug and follow.

At the water's edge there is a cement wedge of a boat landing and a tin hut manned by a shriveled-looking local. His face, revealed in the light of a storm lantern, is lined and weathered as an old saddle.

“What about the next boat?” Antoinette says.

The old man looks up at the moon hanging over the lake as if the answer resides there.

“Be along,” he says, and spits a dark splot of tobacco juice onto the ground.

We wait, crouched down by the reeds. Antoinette steadies herself by a hand on my shoulder.

“How do you feel?” she asks, turning toward me, her eyes shining out of the darkness.

“Fine,” I say. It is true. The pills and the beer do balance each other and heighten the senses. Details emerge, sharp and hyperreal: A hermit crab shies into his shell in the reeds; Antoinette's lips stand out dark as a wound against her skin; a soft wind blows against the outer edge of my ear.

“About the pills,” Antoinette says, “I don't want you to worry too much. I'm going to get off them. This weekend is sort of a last gasp. I used to take twice as many as I take now.”

“Jesus,” I say to the night air. “How many was that?”

“I don't know. I used to eat them all the time. I used them to get off the coke about eight months ago. There was this guy, Victor. I didn't really like him, but he had a lot of coke. I met him at the bar at Mike's on the
Avenue. He wore these expensive Italian suits and he had a lot of coke, and we would snort and then he would fuck me. We never made love. He was the last in a long line of assholes. Then something happened, and I just got sick of him, of everything. Sick to my soul.”

“What happened?”

Antoinette is silent for a moment, and she is about to answer, but there is a sudden flat wind through the reeds and a loud whirring like the sound of a large fan.

“Here she comes,” the leather-faced local calls from his place in the shack, and we stand and move down the landing. It is a flat-bottomed airboat, propeller facing out behind. The pilot sits up on an elevated chair like a line judge in a tennis match. A single spotlight sweeps the water. I have only seen such a craft in childhood movies about docile bears and the Everglades. A few minutes later Antoinette and I board and clutch on to each other as the airboat backs up and roars out through the reeds and over small, muddy lumps of islands in a straight line toward a light glowing on the horizon. It is a harrowing ride. Goose bumps rise on Antoinette's bare arms, and her hair is whipped back in the wind.

Soon our destination becomes clear: The light is a roadhouse up on stilts at the center of the lake. It is a sprawling, ramshackle affair, with a gallery all the way around, and a large open patio set with bare wooden tables full of men and women drinking and eating. Pirogues and outboards are tied up to the dock and along the railing. There is the sound of Cajun dance music and the rise and fall of many voices. At about fifty yards the airboat pilot switches off the propeller, and we glide the rest of the way up to the dock. He is a lanky fellow in blue overalls and a blue baseball cap. He wears clear goggles to protect his eyes from the wind.

“That's it. I'm off,” he says. “You people are stuck here until dawn, unless you want to swim back.” Then he tosses a rope over the piling with a twist that seems shorthand for a real knot and heads up the dock to the bar. Antoinette and I crawl carefully onto the rough wood and sit on the edge to catch our breath.

“I've been out here a dozen times,” she says, “and every time that ride scares the shit out of me.”

I am too stiff to speak. Above the peopled hum of the bar I hear the dull stutter and pop of a gasoline generator. The blue tinge of carbon monoxide fumes floats in the air.

“You ready?” Antoinette says.

In the window neon script announces Cold Beer, Crawfish, Crabs, and Good Times. Another sign says
SUCK THE HEAD
with an exclamation point that winks on and off. Inside, the bar is packed three deep to the rail. On the other side of a low wall, a dance floor of red and white linoleum squares is full of two-stepping couples. A three-piece zydeco band—accordion, mandolin, and stand-up bass—reels away on a triangular bandstand in the corner. The walls are covered with stuffed fish and outdated hunting paraphernalia, including a duck punt the size of a cannon. In a less sensitive age this blunderbuss would be filled with anything—bits of scrap metal, nails, gravel, even pennies—and used to knock entire flocks out of the sky. I shout over the music into Antoinette's ear.

“What is this place?”

“Yeah, great!” she says, not hearing.

The crowd is heavily Cajun. Their black hair and high cheekbones betray the dark hint of other races: Choctaw Indian and field slaves escaped from plantations 150 years gone. But I also see other types: preppy couples from Baton Rouge in J. Crew ensembles; LSU college kid hipsters in recycled sixties thriftwear; even a businessman or two, tie loosened, briefcase lying amid a clutter of beer glasses on the table.

I spot him from across the room at the waitress station. One hand holding up the wall, his bulk is bent down over a petite waitress who stands, face tilted up, eyes wide, like some small hapless mammal in the hypnotic gaze of a python. A full tray of beer bottles is propped uneasily on her hip.

“Look who's here,” I say into Antoinette's ear, and gesture. She nods and signs that she'll get the drinks and goes up to the bar.

I push my way through the crowd and stand to one side. It's the usual spiel. I can tell by his body language. I've heard it all before, in countless bars across the Lower East Side. Will they sleep with him or not? But this one is resisting. She shakes her head no. He tries a different tack.
He is wheedling, which is usually fatal, but now he has an advantage. He is the boss. This could go on forever. Finally I cup my hands around my mouth and bellow, “Molesworth!”

Molesworth jerks around, annoyed. If he is surprised, he doesn't show it.

“I'm busy here, Coonass,” he says, as if he just left me yesterday. Then he turns again to the waitress, but she has taken this opportunity to slip back to her section. “Dammit! You ever hear of timing?”