“Spouting it? I’m writing a fucking book about it,” said the Englishman. “So, what I want to know is, who’s coming with me to the French Quarter to taste all that New Orleans can offer?”
“I’ll pass,” said the woman, unsmiling. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Jackson Anderton, from Hopewell College.”
“The Zombie Coffee Girls paper?” She smiled. “I saw it in the program. Quite fascinating. Yet another thing we owe Zora, eh?”
“Along with The Great Gatsby” I said.
“Hurston knew F. Scott Fitzgerald?” said the bicycle woman. “I did not know that. We forget how small the New York literary world was back then, and how the color bar was often lifted for a genius.”
The Englishman snorted. “Lifted? Only under sufferance. The woman died in penury as a cleaner in Florida. Nobody knew she’d written any of the stuff she wrote, let alone that she’d worked with Fitzgerald on The Great Gatsby. It’s pathetic, Margaret.”
“Posterity has a way of taking these things into account,” said the tall woman. She walked away.
Campbell stared after her. “When I grow up,” he said, “I want to be her.”
“Why?”
He looked at me. “Yeah, that’s the attitude. You’re right. Some of us write the best-sellers; some of us read them. Some of us get the prizes; some of us don’t. What’s important is being human, isn’t it? It’s how good a person you are. Being alive.”
He patted me on the arm.
“Come on. Interesting anthropological phenomenon I’ve read about on the Internet I shall point out to you tonight, of the kind you probably don’t see back in Dead Rat, Kentucky. Id est, women who would, under normal circumstances, not show their tits for a hundred quid, who will be only too pleased to get ’em out for the crowd for some cheap plastic beads.”
“Universal trading medium,” I said. “Beads.”
“Fuck,” he said. “There’s a paper in that. Come on. You ever had a Jell-O shot, Jackson?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Bet they’ll be disgusting. Let’s go and see.”
We paid for our drinks. I had to remind him to tip.
“By the way,” I said. “F. Scott Fitzgerald. What was his wife’s name?”
“Zelda? What about her?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Zelda. Zora. Whatever. We went out.
3
“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere”
Midnight, give or take. We were in a bar on Bourbon Street, me and the English anthropology prof, and he started buying drinks—real drinks, this place didn’t do Jell-O shots—for a couple of dark-haired women at the bar. They looked so similar they might have been sisters. One wore a red ribbon in her hair; the other wore a white ribbon. Gauguin might have painted them, only he would have painted them bare-breasted, and without the silver mouse-skull earrings. They laughed a lot.
We had seen a small party of academics walk past the bar at one point, being led by a guide with a black umbrella. I pointed them out to Campbell.
The woman with the red ribbon raised an eyebrow. “They go on the Haunted History tours, looking for ghosts. You want to say, ‘Dude, this is where the ghosts come; this is where the dead stay.’ Easier to go looking for the living.”
“You saying the tourists are alive?” said the other, mock concern on her face.
“When they get here,” said the first, and they both laughed at that.
They laughed a lot.
The one with the white ribbon laughed at everything Campbell said. She would tell him, “Say ‘fuck’ again,” and he would say it, and she would say “Fook! Fook!” trying to copy him. And he’d say, “It’s not fook, it’s fuck,” and she couldn’t hear the difference, and would laugh some more.
After two drinks, maybe three, he took her by the hand and walked her into the back of the bar, where music was playing, and it was dark, and there were a couple of people already, if not dancing, then moving against each other.
I stayed where I was, beside the woman with the red ribbon in her hair.
She said, “So you’re in the record company too?”
I nodded. It was what Campbell had told them we did. “I hate telling people I’m a fucking academic,” he had said reasonably, when they were in the ladies’ room. Instead he had told them that he had discovered Oasis.
“How about you? What do you do in the world?”
She said, “I’m a priestess of Santeria. Me, I got it all in my blood; my papa was Brazilian, my momma was Irish-Cherokee. In Brazil, everybody makes love with everybody and they have the best little brown babies. Everybody got black slave blood; everybody got Indian blood; my poppa even got some Japanese blood. His brother, my uncle, he looks Japanese. My poppa, he just a good-looking man. People think it was my poppa I got the Santeria from, but no, it was my grandmomma—said she was Cherokee, but I had her figgered for mostly high yaller when I saw the old photographs. When I was three I was talking to dead folks. When I was five I watched a huge black dog, size of a Harley-Davidson, walking behind a man in the street; no one could see it but me. When I told my mom, she told my grandmomma, they said, ‘She’s got to know; she’s got to learn.’ There was people to teach me, even as a little girl.
“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?”
“A little,” I said.
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 where 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 Pirates’ 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 fish-belly 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.