Haint likes this about the French Quarter; he likes walking among the entitled and the blind and feeling their condescension toward him; he is another curiosity in a city teeming with them, an intentionally scarred and branded black man with skin that looks almost indigo, his crown of graying hair horseshoeing a balding dome that bears a front-to-back row of scars he inflicted himself with a hot razor.
“I liked your letter,” Haint says to Andrew as both men sit sweating in Coops. “You write your words tight and plain and press hard with the pen, none of this loopy shit.”
“I e-mailed you,” Andrew says.
Haint enunciates each of the next words carefully, as if explaining things to a well-meaning but disappointing child.
“I am talking. About the way. I saw it in my head. I saw your e-mail as a letter.”
Haint is one of those half-mad users whose conversation must be sifted to separate delusion from actual magic. This is often difficult.
“You press hard with the pen,” he continues. “You mean what you say’s what that says, and I keep such men close to my heart.”
He wipes his ridged dome with the greasy and formless bicycle cap he carries more than wears, then takes another bite of the jambalaya he has rendered lukewarm in temperature (if not in taste) with Crystal hot sauce that pools like orangey blood around its rim.
“Will you help me?” Andrew says.
“Another thing I like ’bout you is you don’ try and act like you ain’t scared.”
Andrew nods.
“Anybody smart’s scared of that ol’… her. Her, I mean. I didn’t even know she was real. Heard bad stories, figured they was stories. But if she is an actual actuality, and she is that old, she gonna make Marie Laveau look like a Girl Scout, home team pride aside and all. Yeah, I’ll help. But keep the book. I ain’t got no use for books and I don’t read English so good’s I got any hope of readin’ Russian.”
The part about not reading English is a flat lie. Haint reads like an Oxford scholar but hides his brilliance behind a hedge of ain’ts and cain’ts.
Andrew’s e-mail offered one of the treasures he brought home in 1983, a beautiful tome on invisibility written in the time of Peter the Great, a remarkably valuable book for reasons both aesthetic and practical.
But what Haint says next tells Andrew the hoodoo man already knows how to disappear and isn’t interested in acquiring something to barter with.
“I want that hand.”
“You already have a Hand of Glory. Hell, I heard you had three of them.”
“Not like that one. Mine open locks and turn lights on and off. Useful as hell, don’t get me wrong. But you know what that Russian hand does, don’t you?”
“Stops hearts.”
“Works, don’t it?”
“It works.”
“How do you know?”
“It works.”
“Prolly you knocked a squirrel out of a tree with it. Only you ain’t never tried on a person ’cause you ain’t like that. Me, I’m like that. That’s why you want me.”
Andrew nods. Of course Haint had heard of Baba’s lethal Hand of Glory; Haint is a collector of murders, a man who has gathered an arsenal of artifacts that take life. He is rumored to have a Turkish knife that, when used on a piece of lambskin the user has bled on, will cut or stab whatever the user thinks about cutting or stabbing, even across the sea, provided he has seen it and can picture it clearly. Years ago he carried a Polaroid camera around his neck in case he wanted to capture your image.
Now Steve Jobs has armed him with a smartphone.
If you are on Facebook, or if your image can be Googled, it is said this man can cut your throat no matter how far away you live from his warehouse apartment on Frenchman Street. Or Carondelet. Or wherever it is this week—it is also rumored that Haint’s apartment is actually in a black trash bag he can blow up into the window of any abandoned place, and leave with in minutes.
He received Andrew’s e-mail under the name hoodoohowdoyoudo@gmail.com. Until 2000, when he finally went digital, he used to get letters through a PO box under the name Sam E. DiBaron. It was the same PO box he used to arrange killings, but never for money.
Always for things.
Never yet for anything he wanted as much as Baba Yaga’s Hand of Glory.
“Can you do it?”
“If I cain’t, you cain’t.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. ’Cause I don’t have one. I don’t know if she can die, and if she cain’t, I don’t know if I can stay hid from her.”
“I did.”
“I know. That’s the only reason I’m thinking about trying this crazy shit. How’s your boudin?”
Andrew nods appreciatively.
“They don’t put it on the menu; never on the menu ’cause they cain’t sell enough for how fast it goes bad; just on special sometimes. Normally you don’t want restaurant boudin—what you want is gas station boudin somebody’s mama boiled up in a Crock-Pot out in Grosse Tête or Scott or Breaux Bridge, if you can stand them coon-asses out there. But it ain’t bad here. They know what they doin’ here. Dreddy white fella in the kitchen plays a mean fiddle, too. I’m goin’ to hear him tonight. You wanna come?”
“Love to. Thanks.”
Haint now swigs his beer and uses a thumb-struck stove match to relight the reeking stub of cigar he has rested on the crown of his bottle cap. At his third puff, a woman at the booth to the right issues a dainty cough behind a dainty hand, at which the polo-shirted man with his back to them turns and throws a disapproving glance.
It was probably this fucker who stacked Jack Johnson songs on the Internet jukebox.
Haint discreetly raps the table with his knuckle and a car alarm goes off on Decatur Street outside. The man looks doorward now and excuses himself, fumbling with his keys. As he crosses the threshold, Haint deftly snaps the matchstick between two fingers with his thumb and the big man trips, foolishly trying to break his fall with his hand. His wrist snaps audibly and he issues a gagging cry. The woman gets to her feet, her distaste for cigar smoke and shirtless black men forgotten. The waitress runs to help, wiping her hands on her apron. The dreddy bearded fellow peers out the kitchen door, and a teenaged boy begins to film the incident with his phone, ignoring his mother’s admonitions. The jukebox sputters now, aborting the song it had been playing and starting up Billie Holiday’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”
Haint keeps eye contact with Andrew throughout, puffing contentedly on his cigar. Mismatched earrings shine dully in the hoodoo man’s ears.
“Maybe you can.”
“Maybe I can,” the man agrees, his eyes twinkling.
47
Andrew has some time to kill before night comes down, so he walks around the Quarter. Construction everywhere, as usual; torn-up roads blocked off with orange webbing, tourists filtering by one another on what’s left of the sidewalk, stepping carefully around piles of shelving for this or that new store. On Royal Street, women in Mardi Gras feathers dance in the heat while cameras turn and film crewmen detour folks up Orleans, some of these pooling up in the margins and holding up phones to film or snap stills of the dancers.