Then I was seeing something I couldn’t be seeing, but there it was. Blink your eyes and it’s gone; blink again, there.
I saw me. I was living right there in the middle of the swamp, on a houseboat. Older. But this was the best part: my body was all muscled up and I looked like… Hannah!
Was this a vision? A road not taken? Or a flash-forward.
Blink, there. Blink, not-there. Blink.
No doubt about it, that was me, strongly muscled and ready to go. Had any woman ever lifted a thousand pounds?
Blink.
Blink.
Blink, there still.
The bus moved on, but this other self floated over the swamp. How could she-me loom so large?
The phrase from Durrelclass="underline" Unhappiness is the enchanted potion. That was my idea of glamour, all drugs and cigarettes and late hours and too much mascara—not this firm body so incredibly radiant with health.
The power in those biceps, the gold snake bracelets ready to burst.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“City of New Or-leans!” the driver sang out, sounding happy for the first time.
I opened my eyes to raw thrill and an aftershock of nausea. Once off the bus, I was set in motion.
Alone.
Alonso slept on next to me, his carved Indian profile shaded by his cowboy hat.
We weren’t at the station yet and the window revealed exciting trashy stuff: dark-skinned women with short skirts and tight, bright tops, bits of bead and feather braided in their hair. My hair would look good like that. Men stood around in the streets, angled forward, butts pushed out, smoking cigarettes up close to their faces and nodding, nodding. A great white fat woman sat on the stoop of a rickety house, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag.
I slicked my greasy locks back of my ears and ran a Kleenex over my face to sop up some of the grease. My sunglasses covered up the raccoon bit around my eyes. Bending my head down to the opening of my shirt, my nose caught the updraft from the pit area, and it wasn’t exactly good news.
All that was left was prayer. To you, I concentrated in my mind, so that my eyelids ached. Whatever, Whoever. Help me. Except a plea like that might attract help you couldn’t reckon with. Amended version: Help me to realize what will be will be. And so forth.
Buddha.
Allah.
Jesus.
I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn’t be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict—the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow idea.
The bus jolted to a halt inside the dingy station, and before Alonso had a chance to wake up or tell me where to meet him or any of that jazz, I was history. My wide shoulders were always useful at effecting a rapid exit.
When I crossed through the terminal and stepped out on the street, the smell and breath of that smoggy, heavy air was pure Proust.
Bus exhaust, sweat, wisteria, hair oil, brown sugar cooking, gin, evil weed.
Whew! It added up to Eau de Sex. And the odor was right there, waiting in the streets or inside your body, either one.
I recognized Canal Street to my left, so that was the way to go. Even though it was getting on toward twilight, the sun was still full and wet on my head. My hand on my duffel was already sticky.
My pores sang: This is it!
My heart, though, felt sorry.
But my skin and the energy won over—anything goes! My sweat and body oil were oozing out like the sap of a tough young tree.
Canal was a busy street, and the openness of the boulevard, in contrast to the narrow streets that fed onto it, stood out bright. Sunglasses weren’t enough against the glare, light gone crazy in the refracting heavy air. I joined the bustle of people crossing over to the other side. Over to the Quarter. Look right and there was the mighty Mississippi—you couldn’t see it because of the levee, of course, but you could see the tops of the docked ships and smell the crude oil and vegetation. Not exactly the bracing breeze of the Pacific. Look left and who knew what was up that way—slums? Tenements? Mysterious alleyways where people’s throats were slit in the dead of the night for obscure reasons. In bizarre patterns.
In a city like this, your mind started working that way.
I turned onto Bourbon Street, entering into the dark of the Quarter, the sunlight and open of Canal transformed instantly into dank and dim. Like some kind of yin-yang demo. This was no landscape for blondes, and the idea popped into mind to dye my hair black before I tackled the problem of Deane.
But then the voodoo shop was before me. The short intervening block of strip joints and hurricane bars had seemed so impressive when I was a child. Now it was just so much tawdriness. And there was that too-familiar building.
The nape of my neck tingled and my arms skittered as if cockroaches were running up and down.
Okay, I told myself, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll just peek in the old window and see if anybody’s around. We won’t go in yet; that’s premature. We’ll simply stroll up to the glass, take a casual look-see, nothing suspicious.
And there was Deane, standing behind the counter, which was covered with gray moss and artifacts. Hand on one hip, eyes focused nowhere, she sullenly smoked a cigarette. Her hair was long and dead black. She was wearing a purple velvet shirt with a Nehru collar and her face was so made-up that you couldn’t see any actual skin.
Other than being older, tougher, and more colorful, she was the spitting image of me.
Okay, now what?
You’d think a little more cunning would have been involved in tracking her down. I was so surprised that my surprise hardly left room for me to feel anything else. Actually, there was also a sense of disappointment—I’d expected to have to use shrewd acumen and clever reckoning, and the whole deal was handed to me right on a platter.
I turned on my heel and fled down the street.
My idea was a shower, a change of clothes, and some time spent looking over the new information in my dream journal. I didn’t want to fare forward; I wanted to farewell.
With that in mind, I rapidly found myself back on Canal Street, in the last of the sunshine, and then I found myself a room in the Ramada Inn. There wasn’t a Holiday Inn close enough.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I opened my eyes to body-heaviness, clean skin, mournful waves of self-pity, and jitters, the oh-boy-something’s-gonna-happen kind. The ice in the Coke on my nightstand had mostly melted but I slugged it down anyway, sweet wateriness and the barest taste of caffeine. Then I just lay there a minute, head throbbing wonderfully, and the whole dilemma—alone in a hotel room in a strange city—struck me as marvelously adult. The one thing missing was the melancholy whine of a saxophone, where some forlorn musician leaned on the fire escape of his New Orleans shack and longed to give wings to the depth of his soul.
Wow!
The clock on the nightstand said ten-nineteen. My first impulse was, Oh, it’s too late to go back to the voodoo shop tonight, she’s waited almost seven years so she can wait another twelve hours, but just the same I got out of bed and put on the dress intended for the occasion: my white lace mini.
Various opening approaches ran through my mind:
“Hey, sis, long time no see!”
“The jig’s up, sweetheart.”
Or, simply, “Remember me?”
And then I felt what was in my heart: “Take care of me.”
I sighed. It was very unlikely that Deane would want to take care of me—one glimpse of that sullen face convinced you that no way had she changed. That was not the visage of new leaves turned, not the countenance of responsibility. In other words, that was not the mug of someone who was just dying to have her kid sister land on her doorstep, unless said kid sister was carrying money or drugs, and said kid sister was out of drugs and down to her last hundred bucks.