Orfeo (22 page)

As though in tacit agreement, Orfeo shook himself out of his anguish though his eyes remained red. “I’ll get them for what they did,” he said.

“No you won’t, love,” she told him softly, stroking his cheek and looking deeply into his face, holding him with her expression. “Earl’s suffered like the rest of us. Like you said: it’s the end of the world. A new one starts now.”

“I don’t know how you can be so sure,” he replied. “I’ve never seen such... obsessiveness.”

“You should look at yourself in the mirror, sometime,” she smirked, sitting down beside him, enjoying the warm touch of his body.

He paused, enjoying her presence in return, before asking: “You said first by fire, then by flood. Baptiste...” His face went into a spasm as he said the name, guilt washing over him. “Baptiste told me that Hades had burnt down before—is that what you’re talking about?”

She sighed and nodded before leaning her head against his shoulder. “Yes. It was a long time ago—when things were... well, when things were different between me and Earl. I’d spent a lot of time with him. He was exciting, dangerous, and I was young and stupid. He was so different to everyone and everything I’d ever known.

“Anyway, I was in Hades, in his private quarters, out of my head—as I so often was. I’d been using a candle to cook up shots and I’d fallen asleep. I was on my own and a fire had started: I only woke up when Earl found me and dragged me from the room.” She shrugged. “The flames grew even more intense when he opened the door, and he pushed me out in front of me. I think he tried to close it, to stop the flames from spreading, but when he held me he was caught in a
back draft. It burnt up his arm...” Her voice trailed away but Orfeo said nothing.

“The screams were terrible,” she said quietly. “After that, I couldn’t bear to see him—not because of what he looked like, or anything like that, but because I knew that what he’d suffered was all my fault. He... he couldn’t accept that.” She gave a weak smile. “Perhaps it was all my fault. I know how you feel about Baptiste, but I really did cause Earl to suffer. I think being burnt was the least of it.”

“Did you love him?” Orfeo asked at last.

By way of reply she smiled and lifted a hand to his face, staring into his eyes and watching him carefully. She shook her head. “No,” she replied very quietly. “I never loved anyone till I saw you.” Leaning forward, she kissed him softly on his lips.

After they had made love, gentle motions that bound them together in a soothing ecstasy, she watched him as he opened some of the tins and passed a bottle of water. The food was crude but Ardyce felt she had never eaten anything so delicious.

“How much have we got left?” she asked.

“Enough for another two days, perhaps,” he replied. “Food isn’t so much the issue. We’re running out of clean water.”

“Do you think help will come?”

Orfeo stared out of the window thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he answered finally. “From what I can gather from the radio, there are a couple of camps set up, for refugees. A lot of people couldn’t get out. I guess we’ll have to go there—we can’t depend on anyone finding us here, not for a while at least.”

She nodded at the logic of this. “How do you think we can get out of here? The water still looks deep.”

“It is, but I think there’s enough wood down in the factory—even a couple of floats—that will serve for a raft. We can try and get to the superdome.”

“Is that where the army is?”

“I’m not sure about the army, but there’s some help there.”

She thought about this for a while, then looked down at herself with a shy smile.

“Pleasant as it is for us to play Adam and Eve,” she remarked. “I’m pretty certain that parading around New Orleans like this will bring us some unwelcome attention.”

He grinned at this. “Don’t you worry. I’ve got it all worked out. I’ve been busy while you were sleeping.”

Horse sat on the one good empty seat that he could find in a row that had been broken or occupied by a few of the many thousands of people who had sought refuge before the hurricane. Although the worst of the storm had passed, conditions inside had been deteriorating badly since all those people had arrived, most of them black or elderly (or both) and all of them scared to leave as news came in about how badly the city had been flooded. A few couldn’t believe that anything could be worse than what they were experiencing now, but Horse would have told them otherwise if he had been able. It was much worse. He had seen it.

When Katrina had broken above the city he had been caught in the screaming winds and torrential rain while hunting for Ardyce and Orfeo. In those devastating moments, which had probably been less than an hour but felt more like a lifetime, he’d experienced for the first time in his life the utter terror of insignificance, the realisation that he was nothing more than meat and bones in the face of the destructive forces of nature. Those few inches extra, those few more pounds that were the legacy of his forefathers counted for nothing against winds that tore through the streets at more than a hundred miles an hour.

His forefathers. That made his face distort, somewhere between a smile and a grimace. He had nothing but loathing for his father, while his mother was nothing to him, but perhaps deep down there was a feeling of something more profound toward the Chitimacha who had lived here long before white men came bringing their black slaves. For all that his stature made him slow and his mutilated mouth made him unable to sleep, Horse was no fool: he did not offer himself false consolation, as the elders had done on the reservation, that the Chitimacha would remain long after the white man was gone. Horse had always been a man to look to the future.

The reservation. He had not thought of the place in Charenton for years, and then only with contempt. The few hundred people who lived there were caught up in some fake museum likeness of how they should appear to the outside world,
fossilizing old, forgotten traditions in the hope of squeezing more money out of grants and handouts from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And for those such as Horse who were sons of alcoholic, feckless fathers and weak mothers, his memories were of painful squalor and degradation.

And yet, sitting here on a shabby seat looking up at the large holes that had opened in the high dome above his head, a sudden vision of the oaks and cypress trees filled his vision. He had always looked to the future, had always known from an early age that he would leave for the city and make his own way through life. But surrounded now by the
stink and chaos of humanity, more squalid than anything he had known as a child, those visions of the reservation began to look more appealing.

How the hell had it come to this? It was Earl’s fault, of course, but as a seed of blame began to flower in his mind Horse closed that down immediately. As a young man he had shown disloyalty but that way had led him to despair and desperation. He took pride in his own devotion to Earl: no one was more loyal, as he had demonstrated vividly by cutting out his own tongue after a drug deal that he’d bungled. It had been the only time he had ever failed the boss and he had willingly paid the price, so much so that Earl never doubted him again.

But things had changed recently. It had been since Ardyce had come back to Hades. Finally achieving what he most desired had unintended consequences for Earl—that much was clear, nor was it disloyalty for Horse to admit the truth when it faced him so plainly. Earl had started hitting the juice harder after they brought the woman back, and Horse was sure that he was also using some of the heroin intended for Ardyce.

Yet even that was nothing when he had returned, gasping and sodden, into the nightclub, his search not only fruitless but simply impossible in conditions that no man was meant to endure. Papa was already there in Hades, ignoring the dozens of fools who remained behind, unwilling or unable to find shelter anywhere else. Of Snake there had been no sign—before or after, a fact that made Horse sad. In the end (a fact that would have come to a surprise to many) he did not share her sadism, but they had been a good team, particularly when their lust for each other had proved unsatisfactory and could be put to one side.

Of Snake there had been no sign, and Papa—wily, calculating, untrustworthy Papa—had nodded when he’d seen Horse standing there, drenched and reduced in size by the waters and winds that had hammered him. By contrast, Papa’s clothes were barely spattered, and Horse doubted that he had actually conducted any form of search.

“This is stupid,” Papa had told him. “Let’s go up and try and convince Earl that we need to get out of here.”

After Papa spoke, Earl flew into a rage, slapping the older man across his face and knocking his hat to the floor. The look on Papa’s face as he bent to retrieve it was murderous and for a second Horse thought that he would have to kill Papa, a prospect that filled him with deep unease. But the other man made no move and Horse held himself back.

“What do you fucking mean?” Earl had screamed. “I want her back here and I want that fucking nigger dead!” Papa, cool and collected once more, had refused to argue but simply said that they would have to wait to conduct a search once the hurricane had passed and things were calmed down.

But things only got worse. When Hades began to flood and the few denizens who remained began to scream, demanding to be let up into the apartments high in the ceiling, Earl had stared in amazement for a while, listening to garbled, intermittent bursts of radio noise. “They burst,” he whispered to himself over and over. “The fucking levees burst.” At last, coming to his senses, he ordered Horse and Papa to barricade the doors and not allow anyone through. The next morning, they had found corpses littering the stairs and corridors as they waded to a door that opened in an upper floor of the adjacent warehouse. Hades had never before deserved its name so well.

Even amidst such devastation Earl still had favors that he could call in, and it was a police helicopter that arrived for them shortly afterwards. The cops wanted to take them out of the city, but Earl refused, a fact that made their rescuers look at him as though he was insane. There was no doubt in Horse’s mind: he
was
insane, yet Horse had no desire to go elsewhere. He had chosen his path and he would follow it to the end.

Instead of escape, they were brought to the Superdome where thousands of people had come to shelter. Earl wasted no time setting Papa and Horse to work, appropriating food supplies and water for themselves. He had believed that Orfeo and Ardyce would be here, and his anger when he could not find them among that human chaos led him to fume with rage. He couldn’t wait, he had to find her, and so after only a few hours he had left again with Papa to search the city. Horse’s task was a simple one: he was to remain here and, if they showed up, take Ardyce captive and kill Orfeo.

Horse shifted a little uncomfortably at this. Murder itself did not give him much cause for concern, but he could not forget the singer’s voice on the night when the hurricane broke and even his withered conscience could not deny the wrongdoing in this. Yet that disturbed him less than the memory of Ardyce, the little moth. Killing a body was easy enough—even necessary at times—but in the weeks she had been a prisoner in Hades he had watched her slowly destroying her soul. That touched Horse in ways he would have previously thought unimaginable.

Nonetheless, his task was to wait and, among the filth and stink and despair, Horse waited. Unlike Earl he was nothing if not patient.

As he pondered these thoughts, sounds of shouting tugged at his attention but he ignored them. There was always somebody shouting—or crying—though the few groups of youths who tried to form themselves into gangs found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer misery of the Superdome. Earl would have easily been able to extort all that he wanted from these poor people had he so wish. With his boss gone, however, Horse felt no need to impose his will.

Again there was shouting, but this time something about the voices made him look up.

Down toward the pitch he could just make out three or four youths pulling at two other figures, a white woman and black man. They were dressed in some sort of jumpsuit, but it was when the cap the woman was wearing fell from her head, exposing her copper-red hair, that Horse’s heart leaped into his mouth.

With no further hesitation he pushed himself to his feet and began to shove his neighbors out of his way. Some of them started to protest, their cries stifled immediately as they looked at the determined features of the silent giant as he passed by.

“Do you think this suits me?” Ardyce had asked when Orfeo handed her the old boiler suit, holding it against her smooth skin. She then dipped her head and sniffed it, grimacing at its smell. “Euw! I don’t think I’ll bother.”

Orfeo couldn’t help but laugh at her expression of disgust, but then looked at her more sadly. “It’s not really your color,” he remarked, “but we need food and we need water, and I think the best place to find it’s going to be at the Superdome—where there will be at least a few hundred desperate people. Somehow, I don’t think seeing a stunningly beautiful woman naked is really going to help our situation. Anyhow, maybe the stink’ll keep them off.”

She raised an eyebrow at this. “Why, sir,” she remarked ironically, “and here was I thinking you were blessed with a silver tongue.” She sighed and held the garment at arm’s length, her body lithe and supple as she regarded it seriously. “You’re right of course. Let’s get this over and done with. Perhaps I might even be able to get a decent bath before long.”