Madeleine's Ghost (31 page)

I push a finger against his meaty chest. “Molesworth, I want my six hundred dollars!”

He looks me up and down, considering, then shakes his head. “No way,” he says. “Not till I see that phone bill. Itemized.”

“Look at this place,” I say. “You're making money hand over fist! This crowd drinks more than six hundred dollars in a half hour and you can't afford to pay what you owe me? You miserable cheapskate!”

I am resolved. His red, jowly face sags for a moment. He blinks away toward the band, winding into the last song of their set, and blinks back. There is a slightly hurt expression in his piggy eyes.

“That why you came all the way down here, Coonass?” he says. “To get your goddamn money?”

“Actually I'm visiting Antoinette.” I gesture toward the bar, where she is already holding court, surrounded by three handsome, muscular men, with a fourth on the perimeter.

Molesworth frowns. “Never learn, do you? That woman's like an albatross around your neck. You're the Ancient Mariner of Love!”

“My money.”

He sighs and motions to a huge brutish-looking man sitting on a stool at the end of the bar. The man is wearing a bandanna around his head and a leather jacket with no sleeves. A sideways 8 is tattooed on his shoulder—the infinity symbol.

“Yeah, boss?” he says to Molesworth.

I look up at him. His head is larger than life.

“Puddin', give this coonass here six hundred dollars,” Molesworth says with a pout.

The man mountain called Puddin' takes a wad of hundreds from his pocket, counts out six, and hands them to me impassively. Then he lumbers pack to his post at the bar.

“Puddin's my walking cash register,” Molesworth explains. “Anything over a twenty. The man's safer than Fort Knox.”

The bills feel nice and crisp between my fingers, and I am placated. “So how you doing with the place, Molesworth?” I say.

He shrugs. “I'm not complaining. But I can't talk now. Stick around. I'll buy you a beer when things quiet down a little around here.”

“When's that?”

“Seven
A.M.”

A
SATURDAY NIGHT
spent in a good crowded bar is like a whole century of history in microcosm. The evening divides itself up into eras and events: There is the fight you witness between two Jefferson Parish bruisers over an undiplomatic comment, the twenty-minute conversation with the blonde who might know someone you know from Tulane, then the conversation with her roommate, a redhead who has definite opinions on the political situation in China. Then, blonde and roommate forgotten, there's a group from your hometown at a table in the corner and trips to the photo booth and more pitchers for which no one seems to pay, and the dark waning toward another bleary morning.

At 5:30
A.M
., I find myself at one of the tables outside with a crowd of men and women I do not know, watching the sun rise out of the bayou to the east.

“There it comes,” a woman says as the first glow clears the tree line. “Yeah,” a man says, “happens every morning just like that.”

“Not quite,” another man says. “The sun rises at a slightly different time each morning and the light is different depending on the season.”

“We've got a budding physicist here,” someone else says.

“Yeah,” the first man says. “Ask Mr. Science.”

“Fuck Mr. Science,” the physicist says. “Here it is.”

And it's true. The sun has filled the horizon in the short space of this conversation, and the water is gold and red with it, and there are more birds than I have ever seen rising from the swamp into the morning sky.

Then the table clears and there's the sound of powerboats from all around and the stench of diesel fumes and the light splash of paddles. The place is clearing out. A few minutes later I am joined by Antoinette.

“Where've you been since four-thirty?” she says.

“Out here watching the sunrise. You?”

“Ran into some people I know from New Orleans.”

She sits heavily beside me and takes my hand, palm up. “I'd read your future,” she says, “but I'm drunk. Can't read the future when I'm drunk.”

I look over, and her eyes are swimming in alcohol. “That's all right,” I say. “I don't want to know the future.” Then our eyes meet and we are both drunk and it is morning and the sky is clear and beautiful.

“Uncle,” she says. “I give in,” and we are leaning toward each other and her lips are very close when Molesworth picks this moment to interrupt.

“All right, kids,” he says. “Time for breakfast.” He steps up carrying a cork-bottomed tray set with an odd array of fixings. I see Tabasco sauce, tomato juice, Cajun spices, onions, eggs, lemons, tequila, a bottle of Benedictine, glasses, and a few other odds and ends. He sits heavily on the wooden bench and proceeds to mix three complicated drinks. The end result looks like a Bloody Mary with a brown layer of brandy at the bottom. I can smell the tang of tomato juice and the tequila and lime from across the table. At last, with a flourish, he breaks a raw egg on top of each and hands out the glasses.

“Voilà,” Molesworth says, looking from Antoinette to me and raising his glass. “Shall we say, to love?”

Antoinette gives a lazy smile. “Why not?” she says, and, smiling still, downs the concoction in one long quaff. I almost gag on the egg, and then there is the spiced burn of the tomato-tequila mixture, followed too
quickly by the smooth warmth of the brandy, but at the end of it I feel fine. This is a drink like a long and arduous journey after which you feel glad to be home again. My head and sinuses clear suddenly. I take a deep breath, amazed. For the moment I am not drunk or hungover.

“My God, what was that?” I cry.

Molesworth smiles mysteriously, his huge red face puckering up like a country ham. “That's old Molesworth's Cajun restorative, patent pending,” he says.

“You've got to bottle it,” I say. “You'll make a fortune.”

“I thought about that,” he says. “But the secret is this”—he leans close—“the ingredients must be absolutely fresh and natural. Stick it in a bottle, and the zing is gone.”

“Yeah, that was great, Lyle,” Antoinette says. “But I've got a restorative of my own.” She produces the pillbox from her little square purse, but before she can pop one of the yellow pills into her mouth, Molesworth snatches it away. He's quick for a man with such meaty hands.

“What is this shit, honey?” he says, examining the yellow pills.

“You know,” Antoinette says.

“Get them from Hash Davis?”

Antoinette nods, a bit nervous.

“You shouldn't be eating anything that bastard mixes up,” Molesworth says. “You'll be having babies with two heads, let alone the more immediate consequences.” Then he tosses the box over the side into the tea-colored waters of the lake.

Antoinette is quiet for a moment. Then she snaps her purse shut and stands with the aggrieved dignity of a southern matron whose honor has been offended. “Lyle, you are a bastard,” she says through her teeth.

“You been talking to my daddy,” Molesworth says.

“You didn't have to do that,” she says. “I am not an innocent high school girl or an addict,” and she walks, stiff-backed, into the bar toward the bathroom, screen door slamming in her wake.

“Sorry, Coonass,” Molesworth mumbles to me when she is gone. “She's better off without that shit. We had some fast-living college girl in
here writhing all over the floor last month from those things. A bad batch. The chick almost swallowed her tongue. One more incident, and I'm turning Hash over to the state boys.”

“You don't have to apologize to me, Molesworth,” I say. “I was tempted to get rid of those pills myself, except—”

“Yeah, except you let her run you around like a pig with a ring through the nose.”

“You're a pessimist.”

“Unh-huh. Just be careful you don't waste the second half of your life on that woman. You already pined away the first half.”

A half hour later Antoinette emerges and, without looking right or left, marches down to the airboat, its prop thumping into life at the mooring.

I stand up. “This is me, Molesworth.”

“Yeah.” He lumbers up, huffing, and we shake hands.

“Well …”

He looks over his shoulder as if in consultation with an unseen deity, then back at me. “Don't give me that shit, Ned,” he says. “It was only a matter of time. I'll be seeing your ass for the rest of your life.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it's in your blood.”

“What?”

He grins. “This,” and gestures toward the lake and the sky and the bayou beyond the dark fall of water, and the cypresses and live oak trailing with Spanish moss, and the whole state of Louisiana receding into the grainy blue distance to New Orleans, just waking up now by its coffee brown river, in the sun.

A
NTOINETTE DOESN'T
say a word. We are on the dirt road in the Saab, bumping through the bayou to the highway. Her Italian sunglasses reflect the trees and the sky. I cannot make out her eyes.

“O.K., maybe Molesworth shouldn't have thrown away your pills like that,” I say, “but you're too old to be playing around with drugs like a kid.”

She makes a small, strangled noise in response, and I look over to see that her hands are trembling on the wheel.

“Are you all right?”

“Shit!” she says, and suddenly her lips are splotchy and parched-looking. Then she begins trembling in earnest. She lets go, and I reach over quickly and take hold of the wheel.

“No, it's O.K.,” she says, but I steer the car onto a grassy patch shielded from the road by a cluster of pine. The sun comes down thick and full of pollen through the leaves, and there is the heavy croaking of frogs from the swamp. Just beyond the Saab's glossy hood, an algae-covered tributary of the Nezpique gulps and bubbles.

“I swear I'm going to kick the pills,” Antoinette says as we come to a halt. “But not like this. This is too damn hard.” Then she reaches under her seat and takes out a Ziploc bag containing an aspirin bottle full of the yellow pills. She fumbles with the childproof cap and cannot get it open.

“Please,” she says. It's almost a whimper.

“All right,” I say. “Give it here.” I open the bottle for her and watch as she knocks out two pills, brings hand to mouth, and swallows. In a minute or so the shaking subsides, and she leans back and stares up at the blue sky through the leaves. Finally, face slack and lazy, she turns to me.

“Don't look at me like that, Ned,” she says. “I'm not as bad off as I seem. Look in the glove compartment. I've kept careful records.”

“Records?” I fumble in the glove compartment and pull a small datebook out from behind the spare signal bulb, maps, tire warranties, and other junk. In the datebook each day is marked with a series of red x's.

“Start with April and flip to August,” she says.

The x's, six and seven a day in April, dwindle to two or three in August.

“Those little x's are the pills,” she says. “I'm trying to do this thing gradually. I don't want to rely on some clinic detox and then relapse a year later. And I don't want any Prozac. This is something I need to do myself. I'm going to clean out and stay clean.”

I consider this plan. “Why do you do them?” I ask quietly.

“Oh, the usual reasons,” she says, with an airy wave of the hand. “Because there's not enough going on in my life. The days—they're long, they drag. All those minutes.”

“Maybe you should get married,” I say. “Children. I hear they have a tendency to take your mind off things.”

“Ha,” she says, but then she is serious. “There is no one. No one like that.”

“Come on,” I say. “Not a single eligible man?” A cracking sound comes from nearby. I look up to see a woodpecker, his throat blue, his wings scarlet, drilling a hole into the nearest tree. He stops, blinks at me with beady bird eyes; then in a second he is gone, a scarlet and blue flash in the greenness.

“There are plenty of men sniffing around as usual,” she says, “some of them quite beautiful to look at, but no one I can talk to. I've been celibate for eight months now, if you want the truth. And you know how hard that is on me.…” She takes off her glasses and looks at me, and her eyes are dark gray today, and there is sunlight on her face.

I feel something snap inside like a twig. “Aw, hell,” I say, and reach for her. Her lips are rough, and her mouth tastes sour, but in a minute her breasts are in my hands, and when I push up her skirt, I find that her thighs are wet.

“Yes,” she breathes, “please, yes,” and it is awkward across the gearshift, so she climbs over and straddles my hips and lowers herself onto me, her knees pressed into the leather of the passenger seat, her arms around my head, and her breasts and her hair smelling of cigarette smoke and faintly of perfume, and her ready smell, which comes back to me now, pungent and familiar. It is over far too quickly, but I am there again soon, and we climb into the backseat and struggle out of our clothes and go at it the old-fashioned way, she moving beneath, solid and warm as sand, as the hot sun dapples through the leaves in light and shadow on my back, and all the years in between, the long, melancholy years, melting away like a bad dream.

F
OR OLD
times' sake, we get a room at the Bienville House in the Quarter. We make love beneath the starched sheets as businessmen and conventioneers congregate in the lobby below, and the noise of the bars and clubs along Bourbon reaches us, a carnival whisper through the thick plate glass, and the river shines dull and heavy with the mud of a continent beyond the low tops of the buildings. I make love to her, then I make love to her again, then I fuck her, because she asks me to and there is a difference, and afterward we lie slick with sweat, cooling in the blast of the air conditioner, two bodies tangled up in the sheets and in the past.