“I was never afraid of dead folk. You know that? They never hurt you. So many things in this town can hurt you, but the dead don’t hurt you. Living people hurt you. They hurt you so bad.”
I shrugged.
“This is a town where people sleep with each other, you know. We make love to each other. It’s something we do to show we’re still alive.”
I wondered if this was a come-on. It did not seem to be.
She said, “You hungry?”
I said, a little.
She said, “I know a place near here they got the best bowl of gumbo in New Orleans. Come on.”
I said, “I hear it’s a town you’re best off not walking on your own at night.”
“That’s right,” she said. “But you’ll have me with you. You’re safe, with me with you.”
Out on the street college girls were flashing their breasts to the crowds on the balconies. For every glimpse of nipple the onlookers would cheer and throw plastic beads. I had known the red-ribbon woman’s name earlier in the evening, but now it had evaporated.
“Used to be they only did this shit at Mardi Gras,” she said. “Now the tourists expect it, so it’s just tourists doing it for the tourists. The locals don’t care. When you need to piss,” she added, “you tell me.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Because most tourists who get rolled, get rolled when they go into the alleys to relieve themselves. Wake up an hour later in Pirate’s Alley with a sore head and an empty wallet.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
She pointed to an alley as we passed it, foggy and deserted. “Don’t go there,” she said.
The place we wound up in was a bar with tables. A TV on above the bar showed the Tonight Show with the sound off and subtitles on, although the subtitles kept scrambling into numbers and fractions. We ordered the gumbo, a bowl each.
I was expecting more from the best gumbo in New Orleans. It was almost tasteless. Still, I spooned it down, knowing that I needed food, that I had had nothing to eat that day.
Three men came into the bar. One sidled, one strutted, one shambled. The sidler was dressed like a Victorian undertaker, high top hat and all. His skin was fishbelly pale; his hair was long and stringy; his beard was long and threaded with silver beads. The strutter was dressed in a long black leather coat, dark clothes underneath. His skin was very black. The last one, the shambler, hung back, waiting by the door. I could not see much of his face, nor decode his race: what I could see of his skin was a dirty gray. His lank hair hung over his face. He made my skin crawl.
The first two men made straight to our table, and I was, momentarily, scared for my skin, but they paid no attention to me. They looked at the woman with the red ribbon, and both of the men kissed her on the cheek. They asked about friends they had not seen, about who did what to whom in which bar and why. They reminded me of the fox and the cat from Pinocchio.
“What happened to your pretty girlfriend?” the woman asked the black man.
He smiled, without humor. “She put a squirrel tail on my family tomb.”
She pursed her lips. “Then you better off without her.”
“That’s what I say.”
I glanced over at the one who gave me the creeps He was a filthy thing, junkie-thin, gray-lipped. His eyes were downcast. He barely moved. I wondered what the three men were doing together: the fox and the cat and the ghost.
Then the white man took the woman’s hand and pressed it to his lips, bowed to her, raised a hand to me, in a mock salute, and the three of them were gone.
“Friends of yours?”
“Bad people,” she said. “Macumba. Not friends of anybody.”
“What was up with the guy by the door? Is he sick?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “Not really. I’ll tell you when you’re ready.”
“Tell me now.”
On the TV, Jay Leno was talking to a thin, blonde woman. IT’S NOT JUST THE MOVIE said the caption. SO HAVE YOU SEEN THE ACTION FIGURE? He picked up a small toy from his desk, pretended to check under its skirt to make sure it was anatomically correct. [LAUGHTER], said the caption.
She finished her bowl of gumbo, licked the spoon with a red, red tongue, and put it down by the bowl. “A lot of kids they come to New Orleans. Some of them read Anne Rice books and figure they learn about being vampires here. Some of them have abusive parents, some are just bored. Like stray kittens living in drains, they come here. They found a whole new breed of cat living in a drain in New Orleans, you know that?”
“No.” [LAUGHTER] said the caption, but Jay was still grinning, and the Tonight Show went to a car commercial.
“He was one of the street kids, only he had a place to crash at night. Good kid. Hitchhiked from L.A. To New Orleans. Wanted to be left alone to smoke a little weed, listen to his Doors cassettes, study up on Chaos magick and read the complete works of Aleister Crowley. Also get his dick sucked. He wasn’t particular about who did it. Bright eyes and bushy tail.”
“Hey,” I said. “That was Campbell. Going past. Out there.”
“Campbell?”
“My friend.”
“The record producer?” She smiled as she said it, and I thought, She knows. She knows he was lying. She knows what he is.
I put down a twenty and a ten on the table, and we went out onto the street, to find him, but he was already gone.
“I thought he was with your sister,” I told her.
“No sister,” she said. “No sister. Only me. Only me.”
We turned a corner and were engulfed by a crowd of noisy tourists, like a sudden breaker crashing onto the shore. Then, as fast as they had come, they were gone, leaving only a handful of people behind them. A teenaged girl was throwing up in a gutter, a young man nervously standing near her, holding her purse and a plastic cup half full of booze.
The woman with the red ribbon in her hair was gone. I wished I had made a note of her name, or the name of the bar in which I’d met her.
I had intended to leave that night, to take the interstate west to Houston and from there to Mexico, but I was tired and two-thirds drunk, and instead I went back to my room, and when the morning came I was still in the Marriott. Everything I had worn the night before smelled of perfume and rot.
I put on my T-shirt and pants, went down to the hotel gift shop, picked out a couple more T-shirts and a pair of shorts. The tall woman, the one without the bicycle, was in there, buying some Alka-Seltzer.
She said, “They’ve moved your presentation. It’s now in the Audubon Room, in about twenty minutes. You might want to clean your teeth first. Your best friends won’t tell you, but I hardly know you, Mister Anderton, so I don’t mind telling you at all.”
I added a traveling toothbrush and toothpaste to the stuff I was buying. Adding to my possessions, though, troubled me. I felt I should be shedding them. I needed to be transparent, to have nothing.
I went up to the room, cleaned my teeth, put on the Jazz Festival T-shirt. And then, because I had no choice in the matter, or because I was doomed to confer, consult, and otherwise hobnob, or because I was pretty certain Campbell would be in the audience and I wanted to say good-bye to him before I drove away, I picked up the type-script and went down to the Audubon Room, where fifteen people were waiting. Campbell was not one of them.
I was not scared. I said hello, and I looked up at the top of page one.
It began with another quote from Zora Neale Hurston:
Big Zombies who come in the night to do malice are talked about. Also the little girl Zombies who are sent out by their owners in the dark dawn to sell little packets of roasted coffee. Before sun-up their cries of ’Café Grillé’ can be heard from dark places in the streets and one can only see them if one calls out for the seller to come with the goods. Then the little dead one makes herself visible and mounts the steps.