Rain curtained the Sunshine Bridge. Windless, the sheets fell straight down, heavy, gray. James Eloi Trosclair, Jet, could barely see farther than the hood of the old Cadillac. He hoped for dry sanctuary in Donaldsonville.
The river was lost in the bright-gray rain somewhere far below him. No green fields, no long green levees. He could not even see the profusion of chemical plants which rusted the bridge with their caustic fumes.
There was a blue throbbing in the frontal lobes and behind his eyes before he saw the defunct toll booths and the sign Lafitte's Landing with a portrait of the famous privateer in a jaunty hat. An apparition, and a provident one. Jet badly needed a landing.
It was an old two-story house raised to three stories by a brick ground floor. In one of the highest windows, the curtains parted. An unseen hand. Jet found a parking place and, by then, the curtains were again together. He put a copy of The Times-Picayune over his head for a dash to the brick verandah.
Cognac warmed him from inside out, but the chill was still upon his skin. There were frissons, gooseflesh all up his arms and down his spine. He ordered prime rib; and, after the waitress went into the kitchen, he relaxed. He opened the receptors of his supra-consciousness and immediately came up with the name Emma.
The manifestation was above him. The associated compulsion was very strong. Mentally, he reviewed the files from the Donaldsonville area. His office at LSU in Baton Rouge was littered with reported phenomena from all parts of the state. Though the southern regions were the most active, he knew each dossier practically by heart. He ticked off the three or four from the area, and this was not one of them.
Although the restaurant was comfortably air-conditioned, he took off his coat and draped it over the back of his chair. That way they would know he was still in the building. The waitress would assume he had gone to the rest room.
Jet made his way upstairs, following the spirit compulsion like a dog follows a scent but delicately, subtly, the way one walks softly into a sickroom. Before the final stairwell door, there was a gigantic potted plant as barrier. The door, however, was unlocked. He grunted the plant to the side and opened the door. The air was stifling hot on the stairwell, but suddenly and surprisingly cool on the top floor. Fresh as winter.
The curtains at a northern window fluttered in a stiff wind off the river. Yet, the glass was down against the rain. He put his hand against the pane. The wind was from within the house.
There was the feeling that something small, a child or a cat for instance, was hiding somewhere just beyond the narrow walls. No renovation had been done here. The madrier, oak beams, peeked through the old, paint-peel siding of the walls.
The rooms were small. Each had a window. The impression was that of a fortress or a watchtower. He walked into each room. There were pasteboard boxes of restaurant equipment and old advdertisement flyers scattered on the floor, but the area was basically bare. Against one hearth there leaned an old, mirrored mantelpiece, curiously clean of dust. His instinct was to lean it forward to look behind.
Two statues in the fireplace. Both of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, bases buried in the ashes of a long-dead fire. He leaned the mantle back against the hand-fired bricks and sat on the floor, his back against it.
Several deep breaths fueled his lungs with oxygen. Hyperventilation was an aid to this kind of concentration and the energy burned off very fast. He closed his eyes and saw her face. A young woman, hardly more than a girl with dark French eyes and hair and coffee-colored skin.
Slowly and distinctly, he said, "Emma," but the vision faded. He did not move. He was not disappointed. This often happened. Now he heard the sound, the shushing of taffeta against the worn boards. The clunk, clunk, clunk of something hard against the wood.
Revulsion filled him. Legless men in the French Quarter rolling to their begging spots on platforms like those mechanics use to roll under cars, an image from a Nelson Algren drama. This was the impression the sound transferred to him. At first, he dared not look.
He heard the thing cross to him, pause before him. A whiff of alcohol. Rum.
It went round him to the window with the breeze. His senses reached the phase of ethereal acuteness. He heard the rustle of soft hair and threadbare clothing. Jet waited patiently, politely.
"Emma," he said again, finally.
"Monsieur."
Jet took the cue and spoke French.
"How are you called?" he asked.
"Why … Emma, Monsieur, as you called me."
"And your father's name?"
"One does not say."
"And your mother?"
"Not worth remembering."
Jet heard the wind flap billowing the curtains. Then he heard the flop of lifeless meat, like a roast dropped to a marble cutting board. Clunk, retreating to the other side.
"Emma Laffite," Jet tried, picturing in his mind the original, the family's spelling of the surname, the way he had read it many times written in the pirate's own hand, as a signal of authenticity, kinship. The random shot scored. Sound stopped. He slowly opened his eyes.
The girl was dressed in black taffeta, calloused hands against the boards, one clutching the rum bottle. On arms bent like the forelegs of a bulldog and as stout, she leaned. Her twisted legs dragged after her in folds of cloth. Her upper spine was twisted as she turned back toward him.
"Who speaks my father's name?"
"Jacques Eloi Trosclair, a friend," he said.
She harrumphed, turned from him, dragged herself across the floor. The sight was hideous. Like a dog crushed by steel-belted radials pulling a lifeless nether half with forelegs straining. At the far wall by the window, she pulled herself upright. She stood propped against the wall, gripping the curtains. Her body was horribly twisted, hip thrust out.
Jet did not move. He scarcely breathed. She stood for a long time watching the old west bank River Road. Then she let herself fall, dragged herself back to the other side. Again, she paused beside him. She looked at him sullenly, as though expecting something.
"Monsieur," she said coldly, as though demanding an apology.
"Please pardon me, madame, I..."
"Mademoiselle, if you please," she corrected.
"Mademoiselle Laffite ...."
"My father's name is not spoken here! I thought you understood."
"Pardon, I ..."
'"Pardon, pardon'," she mimicked. "You Americans are disgusting. That is your word for amnesty, is it not, 'pardon'? Your word? Your word, indeed! What good is your word? Any of you? Gentlemen Americans, hainh! Contradictions in terms. Your so-called pardon is no good to me."
"If it please you ...."
'"Please me?' Why, nothing pleases me. Nothing except ...."
"Yes?"
But she merely looked coldly upon him. Then she resumed the dragging of her twisted limbs. She struggled to the window beside him. She pulled herself up again by the sill and stood on stiffened legs, balanced on a crooked spine.
The rain lessened and the added light gave her face a glow which nearly made it live. Years of anger and pain etched a somewhat sultry look to her mouth and eyes. She turned that look upon him.
"You Americans come here for spite?" she asked.
'"Spite?"'
"Yes, spite," she said. "Americans are offal."
Jet did not reply. Neither did he take offense. His silence softened her. She flopped to the floor and dragged herself closer. She pulled herself up on him, weightlessly, her fingers not even wrinkling his clothes.
Her eyes were round and wet scant inches from his own. The manifestation filled, now. Firm to the sight. Her voice was thick, grief-thickened. The anguish of eternity.
"I wait for him, monsieur," she said. Her chin quivered and dipped as though swallowing the bitterness of the decades. "I want for him."
"For whom, mademoiselle?"
"But … the savior of course," she said. Then, her face contorted into a wicked grimace of ironic humor. "The savior!" she shouted, Le sauveur!, then cackled like a hag. She tried to drain the rum from the bottle but could not. As fast as she guzzled, the clear liquid was replenished.
Her face flushed. Her eyes teared up in a mixture of anguish, mischief and seduction.
"Our Savior Jesus Christ?" Jet asked.
'The savior," she said, "of New Orleans, monsieur."
She cackled again. She looked up into the bare rafters and cried out a little animal cry of pain. Then she cackled yet again.
"American honor," she said, "merde. Your great Jackson, he called the unmentionable one a bandit. To be shot in the street, along with the great Pierre. You may mention Captain Pierre's first name but not his last. The great sea rover was in jail awaiting a hangman's noose. The British were everywhere. Jackson sick with fever. No flints for the rifles. A child could have taken New Orleans, monsieur, just walked right in. Yes, yes, I know. I was not there; but those who were there told me of it and they had no reason to lie, I assure you, about the unmentionable one."
She gathered herself more steadily on the lifeless limbs beneath her.
"The savior was in hiding here, in this house. Hiding, monsieur. Never for him to face the cutlasses and cannon while the shark fins circled for their snack of human garbage. Not him, monsieur. Not the savior. He was a coward, our savior. His courage was the courage of ledgers and investments, not blood and gunpowder and the hangman's noose.
"Yet, he loved his brother. He loved both of them. He was tired, you see. Too tired and too intelligent. An intelligent man has but one choice. Options are open only to the ignorant, the intelligent see only one way, the way of best advantage. And they act.
"So it was not on courage that he acted, monsieur, but on sheer intelligence. They smuggled him to Algiers, to my grandmother's house. There, he met with Livingston. A politician and a businessman dealt with one another. New Orleans and America were not saved by generalship nor even the great gunnery of Napoleon's own student, my Uncle Dominique. And neither was it saved by the flints and powder. No, no. A politician and a businessman trading in a dark freedwomen's house. Yes, yes. That saved your precious misfit country.
"But we must not think, monsieur, that the battles between businessmen are less exhausting than those of soldiers and sailors and savages. When Livingston left, the savior sat like a man beaten down. Droop-shouldered, hands lifeless in his lap. He had gambled everything. He gave up his beloved Baratería to the British guns. To save his brother? Yes, yes, of course. In the hopes of a haven? He was no fool, monsieur. He knew that Claiborne would not relinquish his persecution. What he really wanted was respectability. The savior wanted respect, monsieur." She cackled. "Is that not funny? Why do you not laugh?"
Jet said nothing. Her eyes flashed on him, exactly the way a campfire suddenly flares when moisture in a branch explodes.
"My mother ..." she said, "hardly worth remembering ... my mother cared for him that night, loved him that night and for the rest of her days, monsieur. She was hardly more than a child herself, yet she undressed him as though he were the child. She bathed him. She put him to bed. As she was leaving, he softly called to her. There at the door, she shed the homespun shift and came to him. She slid between the sheets with him. She slept with the savior, bore his body and his child, monsieur, bore me into a ruined world.
"Respect? Merde! How could he hope for respect? A bloody-handed pirate fathering children out of wedlock with a recently freed black pickaninny! In that town? The New Orleans that he saved, set up to smash the British on the Battlefield of Chalmette? He'd more easily conquer hell itself, monsieur."
Now she looked away calmly, as though something had been accomplished and slid again to the floor, glanced at the bottle with rancor but did not let it go. Limply, she let her arm pound the base against the boards. Now the tears did flow.
"They ran him out, monsieur," she wept. "The savior was not saved. He went far away, promising to return, promising to send for us. My uncles, they sent money. Sometimes they sent little gifts. But he never came, monsieur. We waited, but the savior never came. The messiah abandoned us, monsieur."
She paused.
"The legs?" Jet asked.
"An accident of drink, monsieur," she said, holding the bottle high and swishing the rum against the sides. "Nothing of consequence."
"So you wait for him."
"Do we not all await the savior?" Her tongue ladled irony but like quicksilver her mood changed. "I hope to see him."
Jet summoned all his strength. It was time.
"Say it! Say his name!" Jet demanded. She responded immediately.
"Laffite!" she screamed into the rafters, "Papaaaaaaaa! ! ! !"
She was gone. Jet's muscles were cramped and he was weary. He worked the kinks from his legs on the way down the stairs.
The rain had stopped and, though the clouds had not yet broken blue-veined to the sky, the restaurant was brighter for the light of the windows. Everything was in order. His steak was not yet waiting. Often, in those endeavors, time is meaningless.
Jet darted into the restroom. In the mirror, he saw the reflection of the strain beneath his eyes. He washed his face and hands, reflecting, feeling the refreshing cool of water.
Outside at his table, the proprietor himself was setting down the steak. The plate was hot and he held it with a towel. Jet sat down ravenous. He cut into the meat.
"We had to reheat it, couldn't find you," the proprietor said. He was dressed in a white waiter's jacket with a double row of buttons. "It might be a little less rare than you wanted it."
Chewing hungrily, Jet said, "Sit down, please."
The proprietor sat beside him. He was a young man with a sun-reddened face and clear, brown eyes. The shock of black hair was like an afterthought.
"My name is James Eloi Trosclair," Jet said, "parapsychologist at LSU. I've been talking to your ghost."
"Emma?"
"You know her name?"
"Oh, yeah. We get psychics in here from all over the country. Every psychic that walks in gets vibrations off of her. I didn't believe it until about five or six of them told me the same name and everything. Nobody ever talked to her before, though."
"Do you want to get rid of her?" Jet asked.
"Hell, no. She keeps the help off the third floor and down here where the work is."
Jet smiled, chuckled, cut into the steak. Unveiled sunlight burst through the window. The rain was done.