“As the Acadians became Cajuns then Cajun-Americans, they began to lose their words and ways: forgetting the French word for the thing in their hand or fixing crawfish étouffée from a can. Yet the music, they kept that. They kept the fiddle too, but now they played with split-tongue harmonicas and push-button accordions, and they sang in English with hard lyrics and a manic pace. The change in tempo and words made them no difference, long as they could play. Still, something was lost. Maybe for good. One thing’s for certain: that language is gonna die. All the gumbo ya-ya of Cajun talk is dying. Soon, there’ll be no one alive with that tongue. And I ask you: how will we receive Communion then?”
—Beausoleil Canard on KJUN Radio
“If the swamp was whiskey and I was a duck,
I’d dive to the bottom and take me a suck.
But, hey, I ain’t no duck,
So, c’mon buzzard and pick,
Pick a hole in this sad old lonesome head.
Pick, buzzard, pick
Keep on picking ’til I’m dead.”
—“Acadian Two-Step”
Louis “La La” Lejeune
“Don’t tell anyone,” he said, before he told me the story.
My father’s tales starred cheats, thieves, and priests, and he figured at thirteen I was old enough to hear one of his favorites. It began like this: once he knew a long-nosed priest who got bounced from so many parishes that he wore running shoes instead of clerical loafers. Père Renard, or Father Fox, as the kids called him, operated church bingo like a game of casino craps, barking out numbers and taking much more than petty change as bets. At the end of a good night, he might walk out with a wad of sawbucks, a set of cast-iron pots, the keys to a riding lawn mower, and a couple of roosting chickens, to boot.
Father Fox never got busted for the bingo, though. What arrested him in the end hung from both arms. That priest possessed a magic set of hands, the kind that could sink anything in the soil—a sorry-looking seed, a dried-up root, or an old bulb from a dead plant—only to watch it sprout overnight like a Cajun version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Lilies at Easter, of course, irises too. Marigolds, crèpe myrtles, even a magnolia tree. Yet another plant raised a stink, a tall thin weed with leaves like tangled palms. Ladies in mantillas fanned themselves to a fury when they heard the priest not only grew marijuana behind the rectory but sold it to their teenagers through the lattice of the confessional.
After the word spilled on his unholy church business, rumors filled the air about Father Fox and his long-fingered hands, which possessed another kind of magic. Those ten fingers divined their way into the purses of older women and the pants of younger boys. During Mass, heads nodded as he broke the sacred host but not in reverence for the liturgy. As my father put it, all those lace-headed ladies nodded in disbelief. Who had let un renard fou out of another troubled house and into their own den? When would the bishop or the pope strip his black cassock right off him?
Father Fox just sniffed at the air with his long nose and ignored the birds circling overhead. He blamed the gossip on the idle words of another priest, another parish. Or he shrugged away the rumors like any false merchant or true politician. One of his favorite quotes came not from the Bible but from Louisiana’s longest-running governor, a man who also might be found at a game of craps.
“The only way I can lose,” he boasted before election season or a court session, “is if they catch me in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.”
In the end, that governor got nabbed in a casino scheme then sent to the coop, while the priest got trapped in a drug sting then bounced free after a call to the bishop. Parishioners claimed even if Father Fox got nailed to a cross, he’d hotfoot his way to freedom and a profit. Hell, he’d sell tickets to his own wake, stuff his coffin with loot from the rectory, play poker with the devil, fault God for any debt, and still take bets on his resurrection. After all, if anyone knew the wages of sin, it was a priest.
As my father finished the story, he slammed his beer down, opened his mouth wide and let loose a wild howl of laughter.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he said as he opened the door.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said in a hush. My voice sounded singsong, birdlike, even in my ear, as I hesitated at the threshold of the confessional. The priest was on the wrong side of the booth, the side where the penitent would enter. Where would I sit? Where would I kneel?
“Don’t tell anyone,” the priest said again, as he held out a hand to muzzle my mouth. His black cassock parted to expose a crooked pant leg. His fingers stretched in the air while that leg shifted. In the dark of the booth, the velvet curtain whispered and the wood bench whined. The gruff voice of the priest grunted in my ear, and his eyes blazed before mine. “A secret,” he commanded, tapping his shoe on the floor. Then one more sound: a zipper. His hand pulled me to his waist, fingers slipped into my mouth. The cassock tangled up in his pants, and he crouched to step out of it, like an animal shaking off an extra skin. His long nose sniffed at the air around me.
What I had to confess: impure thoughts, lust for other boys, nightly self-abuse. I let a boy yank down my pants and rub against me under the bleachers, it was true, I locked lips with a yearbook picture of the football star and prayed he’d lay me on the field, I lingered in the gym shower until my skin turned red and the boy at my back tugged off then turned away, and I laughed aloud at the word “homo,” as if it was the punch line to a joke not aimed at me.
In the confessional, though, there was no punch line, no joke. There was only a half-naked priest with furry red patches and yellow eyes daring me to leave the booth, betting I’d stay. “A secret,” he repeated. His eyes shone like mirrors, as if waiting for me to drop to my knees like a real penitent. Did he count on me to play along because he was holy? Because I was homo? By thirteen, I knew how the story went. I’d learned the theater of church and the gamble of faith. I’d learned to take the host between my teeth, to let it sit on my tongue and let it melt there. I’d learned to genuflect, to kneel, and to pray for a reason to kneel. And I’d learned once already the hard blessing of a priest’s hand on my legs, the heat of false mercy and the fire of mean grace. That other priest had opened his arms in the confessional too, had held a finger to his mouth, then pointed that same finger in catechism, joking with the boys about my swishing hips, my flapping hands and stammering lips. A secret, I understood, was a cross. Sooner or later, you were nailed to it and the only way free was down.
So when the priest sunk into his chair and parted his legs, at first I rose. My back arched and my shoulders widened, while I lowered my mouth down to his waist, shut my lips tight, and summoned my own kind of magic. He jerked his hips and grabbed my ears as I sank lower and lower, my face buried in his skin. Then a light burst in my eyes, and I rose up again. My arms spread to the walls, wide as wings, my head scraped the vault, high as a hawk, my mouth split open and I finally answered him with a loud and sharp tongue.
“One may keep a secret,” I said, “but not two.”
He opened his jaw, flashed his teeth and sank back on his legs, as if to leap up, but my mouth split open again and this time I said, “No need to tell anyone what everyone already knows.”
Suddenly, the priest gekkered and gasped before his nose shriveled into his face, and his fingers drew into his hands, and his arms and legs grew smaller and smaller in the confessional, small enough that his whole body fit on the kneeling rail. From there, he bowed his head and offered to sell his lush fur for a pardon, his lavish tail for a prayer. Then he reversed himself and denied all sin, calling out accusations and excuses in a low growl, his tongue a flame of fire. It was the true beast, it was the false lamb, he said, it was not him. He faulted his red pelt, his sharp teeth, and his curled fingers. He faulted his long pointed nose and the odd perfume of boys. He faulted his tongue and the maker of his tongue until his voice hoarsened into a howl empty of all words, just a choking sound and a dimming echo.
In the end, the priest disappeared in a foam of yeast and wheat, a desecrated host. Through the lattice of the door, a terrific peal of thunder rang over the pews into the organ of the choir room. The pipes bellowed the chords to a hymn sung for the Fraction of the Eucharist. I ran first toward the sound and the light raining through the stained-glass windows then out of the church and into the empty parking lot before saliva shot across my teeth and I spat a medallion, shiny and round, in a crack of pavement. In that spot, a lily shot up, a stargazer with gold filaments, a bright orange stigma, and a crown of purple petals. At last the church bells marked the hour, and I headed home with a fire in my chest, a new story in my head, and a wild chorus of laughter rising in my wake.
Down in the tail of the parish, where the bayou emptied all its secrets, I grew certain my grandfather lurked, waiting for me to find him. Since I’d only met him once before he disappeared, the odds were long that I’d ever catch his scent or follow his trail. Yet by thirteen, I was hell-bent to try.
Unlike most men in Acadiana, my papère claimed neither a medieval French name nor legal standing in any court. No paper certified his birth, no deed titled his property, and no child carried his name. He harvested no crop, from the land or the gulf, and never carried a wallet, much less cash. Sabine not Cajun, Pentecostal not Catholic, he stood on the other side of any wall. Yet for a while, as part-time minister and full-time traiteur, Rex held a world in his hands. He controlled the revival tent and the medicine cabinet. He ruled the roost and the range, cooking up food and faith in the same cast-iron skillet. He knew no rules and saw no reason to stay on one plot of land or in one kind of body.
His legend filled my head as I grew up, from the stories Mama told me at night. His restless eyes saw further than any man’s; his wild hair ran longer than any woman’s. His skin was dark as roux and rough as cypress. From Mama, I heard how he could raise a soufflé in the kitchen of a moving train and a spirit in the body of a half-dead man. From others, I heard how he could lift the blood in any woman and a flaming dove in the air. Then too, he could lie with steady eyes and summon hell on the dance floor with a fiddle under his chin.
In tale after tale, he’d vanish through the Vermilion into the mouth of the gulf only to shift shape and reappear in a new body. One time: with a crew cut and clipped nails, he surfaced reed thin, clean-shaven, atop a gray mare. Another time: with a bushy ponytail and brawny arms, he showed a beard down his chest and trailed a mangy bluetick coonhound. Every time: a cloud of mist rose about him, the kind that blurred the horizon at the marsh and made dawn look like dusk.
To hear people tell it, my grandfather was a one-man band. His skin was a leather drum; his lungs were accordion bellows. He made music with nothing but a single cattail and a set of wet lips. What’s more, he wrestled a brown bear for breakfast and barbecued a green gator for lunch. He raised a wood-shingled home on the bayou in less than a month and took it down with hot breath and a match in one day. Afterwards, he slept in a duck blind—or claimed to—hunted from a pirogue, and was seen indoors only if there was an open bar under the roof. The Last Outlaw, they called him.
The tales of Rex were sometimes comic, always strange. Once, a jealous woman paid him to toss a bag of gris-gris at Missy Possum’s Parlor of Beauty & Sociability. Prone to excess in everything, by the light of a full moon Rex covered the entire front porch of the little tin shack with gutted and plucked black chickens, plus thirteen bags of stinkweed. After cleaning the mess all the next morning, Missy set about rinsing, rolling, and drying her clients’ hair. But when the towels were lifted, two of the women found themselves as bald as the chickens that Rex had hung from the porch, while one was left with a green tint on her hair no amount of bleach could lift or dye could cover. The green-haired woman kept asking everyone in sight how such a grand tataille could be let out of his cage. She seemed shocked that any man could find his way to a beauty parlor, much less tell the difference between peroxide and bleach, dye and lye. Yet the two bald women expressed no surprise at all. Each was already well-acquainted with Rex’s voodoo spells, being joined with him still in a state of holy—and apparently illegal—matrimony.
When the deputy arrived with a warrant at Rex’s front porch, it took three men, a fishing net, and a tow bar from a pick-up truck to haul him away. The women each raised an open mouth to the sky, sure this time he’d been nailed for good. Down at the station, though, the cops swore the net arrived with nothing but the smell of briny shrimp and empty pink shells. In the middle of the sea foam, there was a hind claw with a bit of meat stuck to it, though no one could say what kind.
Maybe that story, and the others, were meant as postcards from a world losing air. A world where living food petrified, untouched, and dying music echoed, unheard. If light was fading on Cajun men, it had burnt out—utterly and completely—on their darker kin, the mixed-blood Sabines, who only lived in folklore now. The Sabine legend was a gray monument razed by time, and my Sabine grandfather was left a relic. The more time accelerated, the more bizarre the stories ran, the more impossible and the less credible. The less holy too. Who could have faith in a man charged with befoulment of beauty parlor water? Who could worship a giant man dragged away by three cops and a tow bar before shrinking to the size of a shrimp and slipping out to sea? Who could believe in a half-French, half-Indian, all-powerful man who had finally and fully vanished, leaving not so much as a footstep or a fingerprint?
Or maybe the stories were cautionary tales. Don’t-turn-out-like-that tales. After all, from my grandparents’ time to my parents’, both Cajuns and Sabines had turned themselves from one kind of people into another, speaking English instead of French, buying food from a shelf, clothes from a rack, leaving bayous and farms for cities and towns, counting bills in a wallet instead of points on a buck. Most practiced the same religion in the same church, but with less fervor and a low fire. Even then, they had to accept a new creed and throw off an old one, and they had to watch for the odd yearling with its head turned around backward.
The oldest faith Mama knew was in Rex. She’d seen him only half a dozen times since he was dragged away from her childhood, but she kept vigil every Sunday. Even though she pledged Catholic to marry a pure Cajun, for years Mama tuned into the Most Holy Ghost Revival Hour before donning a mantilla for high noon mass. She clapped her hands like thunder and shouted a line or two of gospel, while letting her head snap from side to side. In those Pentecostal moments, she dropped the stern forehead, the worrisome brow. Her hair remained a dark corona yet her whole face brightened. Either she summoned the past or warded it off, I couldn’t tell which, but what seemed old and familiar to her looked new and fantastic to me. You could clap yourself into a spell? You could chant yourself into a whole other self?
Soon as the Most Holy Ghost Revival Hour ended, Mama shut it off with a determined click. Then she fixed one last bobby pin to the lace on her head, and fixed her face into the look of a Catholic parishioner.
Divine Redeemer, with its severe steeple and bishop’s throne, only ran by one script, with no claps and no chants and no one turning into anyone else. It had pipe organ music, no rocking choir, and the priests wore starchy gowns and stiff lace, not open collar shirts and belted trousers. Everyone ate pressed wafers and drank grape juice and walked in straight, orderly lines and sat in straight, orderly pews. No one, not one person, sweated. No one fell out of a seat or spoke a single word, except on cue and in unison.
“See,” Mama said, “How you look matters.”
I knew what she meant: the pews up front bore brass plaques with the names of attorneys, surgeons, politicians, and farm bureau chiefs. Men who ran the city and the parish, all of Acadiana and at least this part of Louisiana. All Catholic, Mama reminded me, and all in their pews every Sunday. No Pentecostal ever sat in the mayor’s seat. No Sabine ever rode on the king’s float at Mardi Gras. Not even my grandfather, not even with a name like Rex.
Mama nudged me into those lines, pressed my white jackets, knotted my blue ties, creased my short pants, and polished my black shoes. She combed my hair, sometimes ironing out stubborn curls with a hot clamp. Whether inside the Catholic church or outside the Catholic school, I looked ready for an official First Communion photo, even at the age of thirteen. All her grooming brushed away the Sabine, the coppery reds that ran from my papère to her to me. Maybe I had none of my own father’s ashy blond hair, but—when kept out of the sun—my skin lightened enough to pass for full-blooded Cajun. Still, I knew I didn’t fit my skin, knew I was no straight, orderly Catholic boy.
Early one Sunday, Mama got a long distance call and pulled not just the receiver but the entire phone with its coiling cord into the bathroom, where her sobs rang out against the porcelain and the chrome and the beveled mirror.
“Gone?” was all I could hear her ask, “How could he be gone? Gone gone gone?”
She stayed in the bathroom the rest of the morning, with water running and running, and I walked paces outside the door. Long after she put down the receiver, Mama kept talking in half-sentences and broken thoughts. At times, her voice sounded muzzled with a towel then it exploded into a long chain of moans. Just before noon, the knob turned and she stepped out with a different face, her brows more arched, her lips more drawn, and her eyes a blaze of shadow and light. She stood still for a moment with only her fingers shaking at her side. I wanted to link my hand in hers, but she looked past me to the opposite wall. A picture hung there, her father in his Sunday revival finest, clutching a Bible in one hand and a set of beads in the other. His hair and skin glistening with sweat.
Right then, in the unlit hall without a radio or record playing, Mama raised her mouth to the ceiling and sang out loud. She clapped the beat then shouted the chorus to “I Married Jesus” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” As her voice rose higher, the specter of her father rose out of that picture and into the air before us, thin and gray and only barely visible. With Mama’s voice rattling the air, he jigged a leg and waved a stick to beat time. He didn’t look at either one of us. He just stared straight ahead, like a dead-eyed bogeyman. Yet he shook with secret life. For all I knew, if Mama touched his ghostly body, he might explode into song—just like that—with a flame dancing over his head.
Instead, he disappeared from the hall soon as Mama stopped singing and closed the door to her bedroom. When I looked back at the picture, my papère hadn’t moved, but the beads snaked around his hand now, and the Bible had cracked open, and his shoes hovered above the ground.
After that, the Most Holy Ghost Revival Hour fell out of rotation in our house, and Mama fell out of clapping and shouting and even sometimes fell out of high noon mass. The house seemed to fill with invisible figures, and the church seemed to shrink everybody to a dot in an infinite line. Mama’s late-night tales stopped, and the TV grew louder in the living room, with laugh lines and canned applause, followed by breaking news and urgent forecasts. Papa worked in an oil refinery until long past dusk, ate from a cellophane-wrapped bowl Mama left in the microwave, then headed for his garage of solitude to sink his hands into a car engine or lawn mower.
At first, I performed my own disappearing act, into book after book, eating the pages for dinner, for lunch, for breakfast. Then I conjured my own tales of Rex. I mussed my hair in the mirror, loosened my tie and clapped my head with my hands, twisting my hips and singing to a transistor and the back of a brush. When no one burst through the door and whipped me with a belt, when no one hauled me by my hair to kneel on the kitchen floor, when no one—meaning Mama, only Mama—let loose a hot line of Holy Scripture over my head, I took it as a sign and shook all caution from my body. Crossing one leg over the other at the knee, dangling a wrist in the air.
Finally, I performed my own first spell as I rose out of Mama’s closet, wearing a cameo brooch on a belted jacket and a cloud of mousse in my freshly dyed hair. I kept my chin steady, or tried to, as I walked under the octopus-armed chandelier and across the shag carpet. The air was insulated with cotton, and all the furniture sat motionless, as if no one had sat down or stood up all day. Every surface of the house acted like a seal, letting not a single sound loose. Then I slid out a high-backed chair and took my place at the dinner table.
All at once, the silence not only broke but my mother’s hands flew at me. Her hands shook and clapped again and again, on my head, on my hot cheeks, on my neck and arms and legs and up and down my back, as I rolled onto the ground and she shouted a streak of words ripped not from the Bible or any book I knew. The words smoked and steamed and rattled and burst around us until the TV sounded a news alert and the holy breath left my mother’s chest in heavy clouds. After each breath, I thought I heard her cry a name, her father’s name. That night, I awoke while walking in the middle of the hall, saying his name myself. What did either of us think he could do? What kind of prayer was his name?
If he’d been sitting at the dinner table when I twirled into view, Rex might’ve clapped his big paw on my back to welcome a fellow changeling, a fellow outlaw. Yet for unending days after, my mother wrung her hands and worried over a scourge even her holy father could never heal. He’d become a ghost, but her son was more haunting. Sure, her father had poisoned a beauty parlor and shifted his shape right out of her life, but her son dyed his own hair and painted his own face—along with the nails on his hand. Black eyeliner, black nails. And what kind of voodoo was that?
Afterward, I witnessed Mama’s own shape-shifting, even more than it had before. She straightened her hair with fuming chemicals and ironed the stray curls around her ears. She avoided the sun, smeared a pale cream on her face, and rinsed her hair with lemons. She hung up her dotted cotton dresses and closed-toe shoes, and wore belted pantsuits, cork-wedged sandals, and a silk headband. Her neck grew longer, like a swan, and the few dresses she wore rose well above her ankle now. She dangled a cigarette from her lips and a few swear words too. She still flared her nostrils when I smudged ash on my eyelids, but she let me dress myself for school, for church, let me aim her hot dryer at my hair until it ran wild. Soon, her gospel albums were shelved, and she spun New Orleans funk on the turntable at night, singing the nonsense lyrics out loud while she waved her hands to the ceiling. During one song, she raised a fist and punched at the space where my father should’ve been dancing. Where some man should’ve been dancing.
Other times, though, she’d drop the diamond needle on a record, and her feet would come to life. A woman’s blue voice, gravelly and low or crystalline and high, testified about her troubles, and Mama rocked along—leg to leg and hip to hip—until her hands found their way to the kitchen where the healing happened.
She couldn’t summon her father back home, I knew, couldn’t raise his spirit anymore. Now that he was gone, there was no holy fire left. Yet with the crack of an egg and the twirl of a spoon, she whipped up a chiffon pie, a sheet of pecan pralines, a row of cream-filled éclairs. Or else beignets light as air. She knew every one of her père’s tricks in the kitchen, how to stir a gumbo without ruining the roux, how to cook a root to cure the flu, how to raise pockets of dough into hallowed pastries and holy clouds of powdered sugar. In the late afternoon, with the waning sun, with my father still away at work, Mama served gold-lined plates of treats to her only son. Any trespass was forgiven, any penance forgotten. Her every move in the kitchen was a religious rite. And I would lift my ears, listening to her tell stories and recite recipes, converted by each word into her apostle. The whole world had shrunk for her, I could see. The distance was short between a meal and a memory, but over time it also got shorter between grace and grievance. On the right rare night, Mama’s delicate fingers placed a gold-lined plate of goodies before my father too, and his face beamed with light.
She conducted other kinds of healing. A soft pass with a cayenne poultice over my arm sealed a wound or erased a bruise, a gentle press on my forehead with a kerosene cloth lifted a rash or settled my nerves. When she told a wild joke or a madcap story, clouds of powdered sugar moved through the air like healing ghosts.
It was all a confection, her faith, and any shift in the ingredients could make it rotten or sweet. A phantom father. A make-believe husband, a son in make-up. A holy song no longer sung. Or a copper sheet filled with cut-out shapes and a cast-iron skillet lifted over a fire. She was her father’s daughter but had her own secret name: Evangeline. She was the only heir to his power and the only testament to his legend. Crescent-shaped pastries, half-moon cookies, shell-shaped cakes, and there it was: a whole world in her hands.
Like a morgue, no matter the blistering pavement or the bulb red temperature outside, the classroom remained a cold chamber. Windows frosted inside with tiny stalagmites of ice rising around the edges. Books stiffened like frozen meat and made slapping sounds when the covers shut. And chairs all stuck in place, screwed down by the alabaster man in front of the room.
“Morphodites and Bedlamites,” our junior-year English teacher shouted over the heads of the class, while a cloud of white smoke billowed out of his mouth.
Mr. Hedgehog, as we called him, was a prickly short-limbed monster who wore a frock coat no matter the weather and wielded a baton like the conductor of a manic orchestra. He brought the baton down on our essays as if they were hideous scores of sheet music. He beat on the covers of books as if they were hidebound drums. More than once, he beat on the back of a pupil’s hand. Then, lightning quick, he’d snap out the words: “Just a love tap!” His tongue practically hissed against his teeth.
Before we were born, he often told us, before we were “dirty thoughts in our dirty parents’ minds,” our city had been the site of famous riots, with fire hoses, street bombs, and bloodhounds. At the start of one long hot summer, “the Blacks just rose up,” he said, “and the South fell down.”
He taught English but rewrote history with every book we read. His baton slapped my desk and sometimes slapped my hand too when I corrected a fact or a date. About the riots, he had the year right, but the city and state were wrong—and there was something else wrong too. He spoke the word “Black” as if it was the sound you made at the first bite of a wretched meal.
During exams, he paced the aisles with his baton, bringing it down on the head of the student who reached for an eraser or a bottle of whiteout. He saw any answer but the first as evidence of cheating and any stray ink on the page as evidence of guessing, more vile than cheating. He saw closed eyes as the work of moles and crossed-out words as the mark of worms. He saw errors in us all and even foresaw our end, as he put it, “scratching out the days like birds on a shrinking shore.” What exactly he meant, we couldn’t figure out, except that it sounded like the last line of a novel. Maybe one he wrote? Like a lot of our teachers, he hated teaching, hated especially teaching his subject and dropped reminders of his once promising writing career before the Great Sacrifice he made for us all. He trusted no book and told us how every author got it all wrong except one. Dizzy with opium and teenage girls, with salty air and sailors, with jazz and martinis, with gunpowder and arms, every American writer wrote a pack of lies, he said, except the one who came on like a liar—with a fake name and the full costume of a fake Southern gentleman. When we read the Only Great American Novel, our teacher fondled the ribbon tie he wore and, at each dramatic plot twist, brought one of the tips into his mouth for punctuation.
“Can’t depend on nobody but your slave,” he told us when we reached the sidewinder ending. “That, mes enfants, is the moral.”
When I raised my hand with a correction, he delivered a sharp love tap to my knuckles with his baton and said, “Not this time, smarty pants. This time you let it stand or dance those prissy feet right back to the counselor’s office!”
No else said a word, frozen in their seats, frozen in time, so I let my hand fall. In the next row, another student sat stiff but angled his head around to look me dead in the eye. Boogie, the sole senior in our class, almost never looked up from his desk and never raised a hand. Yet on the field, his wide hands tore through the air to catch pass after pass and run play after play. “Best Offensive Player in Acadiana” the papers said, “Best Running Back in Louisiana. He had another title on campus too: “Best All-Around Black.” Black and white students sat in the same class but on different student councils and for different award ceremonies, long after that long hot summer and long long after Reconstruction. To most, that was just a fact, no question. So when Boogie wouldn’t pose with his Best All-Around Black trophy, the other students chalked it up to vanity.
“Too big a star for us already, Boogie,” they teased, but our teacher put it another way.
“Maybe he’s holding out for valedictorian,” Mr. Hedgehog said. “Now that’d be a plot twist!” Then he clapped the air in applause.
Boogie was barely passing English, barely passing all his classes, even though, rumor had it, his college test scores set a campus record. Teachers constantly found him dozing in his seat—when he showed—or drawing odd shapes instead of writing answers for fill-in-the-blank exams. For multiple choice or true/false, Boogie placed an X in every box, and for essays, he wrote with backward letters in a cursive hand that caused our English teacher to wrinkle his nose.
“Give a jock a pen,” Mr. Hedgehog said, “and he uses it like a rip saw.”
When he taught Civics, his other subject, he called us “miscreants and reprobates” and pronounced “civilization” like it was a congenitally contracted disease. Close contact with Mr. Hedgehog, we were sure, would be worse than any STD. He’d leave you bloody with quills.
We were riding across the Atchafalaya Basin, Boogie and me, down one of the longest bridges in the world, eighteen miles of concrete rising over muddy swamp. The water below looked nearly black, but it was covered in patches with a green overgrowth that looked like the hide of some prehistoric creature. Through the patches, tall gray trees rose up, bald and spiny, the skeletons of a day when cypress was cut down like reeds. They looked like old debutantes, those trees, with their branches spread out for a waltz and their trunks arranged in billowing rows of pleats. The whole picture was frozen in time, except for the quivering nose of the car and the quick tongue of the running back next to me. For that moment, I had no idea where we were headed and little idea of where we’d been. As if the swamp itself gave us permission, we lifted right out of the car, right out of high school and the roles we played: the football star and the quiz kid, the stag and the fag.
Nearly dizzy from the night heat, I struggled to remember how Boogie ended up in my car. Already painted a Jenny Woman at school, I’d openly set my sights on studying the cheerleader stunts. During the game, I couldn’t tell a route from a sweep, but I knew every step of an arabesque. All season, I followed our football team to away games, this time to a school in Assumption Parish in a town called Confederate. I secretly hoped to join the cheerleaders, to sit on the bus next to the players and their broad backs and wide grins. In the locker room, I might’ve been taunted for the direction of my eye, but in the bleachers I could stare openly at the boys in padded shoulders and tight lace-up pants. And when they lifted each other off the ground or delivered slaps to backs and rear ends, I could throw my hands together with the cheerleaders and yell each player’s name out loud.
After the game in Confederate, I’d sat at a red light, yards behind the school bus, while tumbles and twirls ran through my head and a circle of players huddled before my eyes. Without warning, the passenger door opened and Boogie sat down beside me. He said not a word. He just looked straight ahead until the light turned green.
On the long drive back, he pumped me with questions, and to each one, I lied. Yes, I drank every lewd shot he could name. Yes, I smoked this, snorted that. Yes, I yanked it in the lockers, in the bleachers. Yes, I’d nailed a girl, nailed her good, nailed her again and again. I hadn’t done any of it, not yet, but I knew the signs of a test, and I knew how to score an A. Still, I didn’t know where the test would end. Suddenly, Boogie looked me in the eye and asked, “Ever stick it in a guy?”
I stammered and pretended to look at traffic, not ready to switch on the truth.
“A guy ever stick it in you?”
My eyes stared at the school bus ahead, and my tongue thickened.
“Ain’t any different,” he said. “A hole is a hole.”
The words hit the windshield and burst like fruit. No one had ever talked to me like Boogie, like I was another player on the field. His talk made my ears burn and my head throb, but his voice wasn’t the only one I heard. All around, I heard the furious sound of pent-up laughter. The laughs slipped out of the cracked windows of the school bus ahead, crammed with the rest of the football team, the pep squad, and the cheerleaders. The players rose and fell in shadows against the window with pantomime movements and quick jerking arms. The cheerleaders beat time with their gloved hands, and the pep squad opened their mouths in unison. They looked like they were cheering Boogie and me from the back of the bus, but I knew they weren’t. Already the rumors were starting, already the talk was hitting the air like splinters of glass, clear and piercing. What was Boogie doing with that fag?
I opened my mouth and laughed, a tinny nervous laugh. Boogie laughed along, his eyes shining like copper pennies in a fire. Did either of us know what the hell we were doing together?
To avoid any more of his questions, I started asking Boogie some of my own. Why didn’t he talk in class? I’d seen him write down an answer when Mr. Hedgehog called a question, but Boogie never spoke it out loud. Why?
“Don’t play by the rules,” he said, “when the game is rigged.”
“But what about your grade?” I asked.
“Got that in the bag.”
“How?”
For a moment, Boogie fell silent, his face set in concentration. Whether from the stadium bleachers or the seat next to him, his sturdy body looked built for the game, built for running, catching, and tackling men on a wide field. Yet up close his face looked delicate, like a guy about to play a cornet, with a shadow around his eyes and a worry on his lips. Did he have the breath ready? The notes right?
“Oh, I’ll pass,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Wanna see my study guide?”
I gripped the steering wheel and nodded yes. What would he show me?
The bar was named after one of its lewd shots: Between the Sheets. Only everybody called it Sheets. “Don’t skid the Sheets,” I heard one guy say to a burst of laughter—before a cloud of silence moved overhead. Once Boogie passed through the door, a hand went up in my direction, palm forward. Then a string of eyes lit up, feet spread, and nostrils flared. No one said a word, but I heard them clearly. “What is it you want?” Drinks rattled in glasses, and a funk song throttled the floor. “What is it you want, white boy?”
Suddenly, I wasn’t just the fag. I wasn’t just the queer quiz kid. Here, I was white before all. Even with the red flashes of Sabine skin, even with the wild bush of hair, I wasn’t black. At Sheets, there were only two options, no choice, the same as Boogie’s award at school. Other people may have argued about prairie Cajuns and swamp Cajuns. Other people may have argued about pure French and Sabine French, Creole and mulatto, quadroon and octoroon. Here, there was no argument. Everything was clear as black and white, and I was the pink-eyed opossum in the room.
In the static of the moment, a hand on my shoulder jolted me into a chest-exploding gasp. When Boogie shouted “Boo” into my ear, and I jumped, the rest of the crowd laughed then turned back to pound the bar for more shots. “Slippery Nipple!” “Screaming Orgasm!” “Cocksucking Cowboy!” they hollered, and the names echoed in my head. Down at the end of the bar, Boogie introduced me as “little bro” and told everyone I was there to help with his studies. The guys in jerseys scoffed but looked at me as if a quiz kid might have some use after all. First time at Sheets, first time as “little bro,” I thought. What was next?
Most of the guys towered over me, and their hair rose even higher in geometric shapes, flat tops, blunt sides, sharp tips, sometimes with angular lines cut through the hair and to the scalp. Or else their hair fell in a sheen of loose curls. The cloud of pomade filled my nose like musk, and I would’ve played little bro to any guy in the room. None of them laid a hand on me, though. None grabbed my shoulder. Instead, they barked at the girls in shiny spandex and chunky gold necklaces and grabbed at the air left in their path. Just past the bar, the dance floor filled with couples jerking hips to songs about freak-a-zoids, robots, and neutron bombs falling from the sky. The whole place shook when a growling singer commanded them to “tear the roof off the sucker” and hands testified when a voice shouted about a black First Lady, but the dance floor really turned to riot with a song about an atomic dog. All at once, everyone shouted “dogcatcher” and bared teeth at the mirror ball as if it was the moon. The glistening bodies and surging beats drove the heat way up until bottles exploded and the guys in jerseys rained forty-ounces of beer over Boogie’s head, and I suddenly remembered they won, our team won, and Boogie’s name would splash all over the papers again. With fiery eyes, he schooled everybody on his moves and boasted of going pro faster than any rookie in history. His voice roared in a way it never did in class, and his hands looked wider than ever as they arced the air. Right then, I wanted to be the hips jerking next to him, the knees dropping to the floor, and the feet twisting into the ground. I wanted to be his freak-a-zoid little bro.
Instead, I was the hands on the wheel leaving the bar, taking directions from Boogie as the car winded through a neighborhood nearly as crooked as the bayou next to it. Lights from another car blazed in the rear view mirror then vanished before blazing again. Houses leaned in and out of view, most with a steep pitched roof and long galley porch. Then Boogie pointed his finger at the only Victorian house I’d seen in Lafayette, with millwork like tattered lace and a small domed doorway. On the steps, he grinned at me, and I grinned back. What would he show me now? At Boogie’s first knock, a voice shouted “Entrez” and he pushed the door open with one hand. The night was hot and damp, but the house was cold and dry, with vents blowing from the floor. A single light clicked on at the end of the hall. Boogie walked straight ahead with sure steps, but I held back and eyed the street. When I heard the hum of a car engine, I slipped inside the house, feeling for the wall and blinking at the dark until my hands tipped over a coat rack. As I set it back, I could barely see the outline of a frock coat. I froze. Now I knew Boogie’s study guide. It wasn’t any spandex girl at Sheets and it wasn’t ever to be me.
Down the hall, Boogie’s hands flagged me toward an open door. His face beamed like a fugitive with a free boat and a way out. On the bed, a man’s bare ass rose in the air, while a white silk nightshirt pooled around his face. Could he see me? I worried. Could he see anything? A chill had me rubbing my arms until Boogie laid his hand on my shoulder.
“You first,” he said.
My hands dug deep into my pockets, and I shrank into my shoes then shook my head. So Boogie dropped his pants and jumped right onto the bed and right into Mr. Hedgehog, thrusting his haunches back and forth with his teeth bared and his head aimed at the ceiling. Outside, the moon shone like a disc of ice, white and cool and quiet. Yet inside, a grunting sound came from the bed, and it wasn’t Boogie. The sheets were twisting and a set of hands were shaking and Mr. Hedgehog started to scream. A shrill sound tore out of his throat and rang overhead. In the window, a face eclipsed the moon. First one, then half a dozen guys in jerseys stared straight at the bed, straight at Boogie riding Mr. Hedgehog. They’d tailed us here, the football players, and now they crowded the window with flared eyes. Boogie didn’t stop, though. He didn’t see them, so he kept thrusting into our teacher while his teammates kept moving their mouths until a loud word rose up, then two: “Dog! Gay dog!”
At that, Boogie’s head whipped down and caught sight of the players in the window. Suddenly, he was the dead-eyed guy in class again, wordless and blank. He slipped out of Mr. Hedgehog, slipped off the sheets and onto the floor. Then Mr. Hedgehog fell too, clawing at the air and gnashing his teeth. He tore a chunk off Boogie’s shoulder and anointed his own skin with the blood. Then he curled into a ball and started moaning about headlines and reputation and a wrecked career.
Boogie’s eyes flickered back to life, and he bolted down the hall, out the back door and hit the ground running. The players howled into the air, shaking the houses awake, then revved their car and left a hot streak on the road. I should’ve busted through the window and emptied my chest to the night. I should’ve torn the roof off the house and chased the players with a mad fury. I should’ve run after Boogie and hollered his name to the moon. But I dropped to the floor and tucked tail, lower than any dog and stiffer than any opossum.
Yet when the cops showed, I found my feet and a story, however wrong or full of lies. I told them Mr. Hedgehog had lured me to his place with the promise of an A and a shot at a trophy. I told them he had pounced on me in his nightshirt and had shoved my face into a pillow. I told them he had a seizure in bed and had fallen to the floor. The teacher stayed silent as a corpse in a morgue. What could he say? That the promise went to a black boy? What could he do? Point his baton at the truth? No, he kept his thin lips shut while I told the cops my sidewinder of a story and Boogie ran free, with his long legs and his strong back leaving not a trace on the ground or a scent in the air.
Behind closed eyes, I followed his moves. He ran all the way down the street to the end of the bayou and right out of this city, right out of this state, right out of history, as far away as his feet could take him. Come winter, he wore a second hide, wrapped himself in a cloak of wool and slept under the northern lights. No one’s dog, he studied the sky and redrew the constellations. No shepherd to heed, no flock to fold, he cut a crisscross path in the snow like a guide for the outlaw and the wayward, the outcast and the misfit. When I finally reached him, he shaded me in the sun, warmed me in the moon. Under his cloak, we lay together, and no one could tell the black sheep from the white or the field of stars from the dome of night.
The show was set to begin, signaled by strobe lights, smoke machines, and a red flasher lifted from a cop car. Feathers irritated the air as if in search of a head to dress or a sleeve to drape. Synthesizers accused the dancers of sin, and in answer they raised their hands up to the mirror ball. In a bar full of sweaty men and powder-faced boys, everyone wore a guilty face.
On a pillar near the makeshift stage, a poster announced memorial services for “our angel,” a teenager who died at the end of a bat. In the picture, he was a slip of a girly boy with a slinky boa around his neck and a tilted fedora on his head. I recognized the face but not the painted-on beauty spot. He’d been in the class ahead of me and vanished from campus before the end of the term. Rumors flew in the air yet nothing landed in the papers, not even at school. He got called a lot of names in the locker room but never “angel.” Unlike me, he didn’t deny those names, even when bestowed with a fist. I should’ve spoken up, risen up, but I sank like an empty sack.
Now I wanted to trace his movements, so I headed to the bar where—rumor had it—the angel boy had performed. On my third night in a row, I sat staring at the poster, at that beauty spot, when a bartender’s shaker banged against glass. The crack rang in my ear, and my body shook as if it’d been hit. One of the powder-faced boys offered me a whiff from an amber bottle. The chemical burn made my nose flare and my eyelids twitch, so the boy handed me a damp hankie and told me to hold it to my mouth and suck as if my ever-loving life depended on it.
“Spirits for the spirit,” he said.
Once I huffed, my ears picked up sounds all around me. Through the blur, I could hear two queens conduct a trial for the angel boy’s murder. One blamed a breeder, the other blamed rough trade, but both agreed the cops would never find the basher, would never try.
“When it comes to a dead queen,” one said, “those pigs bury their head in the mud and lose all scent. Trust me, there will be no justice, Mary, and no mercy.”
“Fuck mercy,” the other declared, “This queen seeks vengeance.”
Then the avenging queen turned his quiff my way with a proclamation.
“If one angel falls,” he said, “another will rise.”
After a deep huff on the bottle of poppers, I saw the vision in his eyes. He’d be that rising angel, his quiff streaked from a bottle of peroxide and a knit halter top stretched tight as cellophane against his breasts. He’d race out the bar with a pistol in hand. Jump in the open window of a white hatchback, throw the stick shift into gear. Speed through the gravel parking lot, take turn after turn as if his wheels were greased for the ride. He’d hang his head out the window, laugh at all the flat-chested boys. Weren’t their nipples little pimple titties? Weren’t theirs eraser-head tits? Weren’t his tits better? They’d win him dates with the barback, the bartender, the bouncer. All the studs and gigolos on the sidewalk, all the ex-quarterbacks and jocks in the alley, wouldn’t they stand back in amazement now, in absolute awe, for his surely were top-shelf, gold star, blue ribbon, head cheerleader, most-popular-boy-at-the-bar breasts. Before the crowd, he’d cock a gun in the air like a flaming blow dryer and shoot a turbo-charged inferno at any basher in the street who dared take a bat to a queen again.
The rush of the bottle left my head, and I saw the angel of vengeance as he now was: a petite wasp-waisted figure in a black velvet jacket. He looked right at me, tossed back a gold shot, then slapped a hand down on the worn oak.
“Senior year,” he said, “that little angel never even finished school. Where’s the mercy in that?”
He shook a hand at the ceiling before bringing it to his chest.
“In my senior year,” the avenging angel said, cutting an exclamation mark in the air with his finger, “they voted me Most Likely to Suck Seed. Positively clairvoyant. After a couple of jocks delivered the award with their fists, I ended up with false teeth that pop out for a blow job. False tits would just complete the set.”
He pointed toward his wigless head, a sign to call him he, he said, not she. He was en route to full-time she but didn’t have the dough for a trip to Mexico and a pair of silicone pillows. Until then, she was only she when she made herself up.
“Miss Carriage,” he extended his hand like a favor. “Some poor twinks think me gruesome, like I mean dead fetuses and weeping women. Get this straight: I do not mock women. No ma’am. I respect women. It’s men I mock. Men in robes. Men in suits. Men in every costume they drag out of the closet.”
His hand still graced the air. It seemed I should kiss it but he suddenly withdrew the offer. His nose flared and a yellow ring blazed around his gray eyes.
“The problem is these apolitical homos. They have no sense of justice, much less a miscarriage. Where’s the justice when you get arrested for what you put in your mouth, honey? I ask you: is it not your own damn mouth?”
He answered himself with a “YES” that hissed in the air and stretched into two syllables.
“And where’s the justice when you get bashed for what you put on your own face?”
Even though Miss Carriage was not made up, his eyebrows were plucked into commas and his lashes lengthened into quote marks. His hands were groomed too, with clear polish, so that every gesture shimmered in the black light. The tip of one finger drew an imaginary line up and down the bar.
“In Lafayette, these Cajun queens slip a De or a La into their name and think they’re French aristocracy and thus not subject to sodomy laws, conduct codes, hateful bashers, or even—Goddess forbid—AIDS. The dizzy fools are heir to nothing, certainly not Stonewall, but they lord it over the joint with eyebrows supercilious and elbows akimbo. Moi, I’m not looking to rule nobody but myself.”
He tossed back another gold shot.
“Teach, yes, but rule, no. And testify, always. I made that poster, and I will make these queens remember their history even if I have to shout it every night from the bottom of the urinal.”
After hearing I was a junior at the high school where he graduated and where the latest angel disappeared, Miss Carriage announced that his Lady Cub Scout Class was officially in session. By the end of the night, he had warned me away from anyone in a uniform—whether cop or cleric—and had schooled me into a new vocabulary. Basket, bear, bottom, butch. Trick, trade, troll, twink. Each word had its own operating instructions. Breeder=Straight. Trade=Straight to Bed.
“Never turn trade for cash. Money cheapens everything, honey.”
He narrowed his eyes and flared his nostrils.
“Get drugs instead. The only currency you can slam, smoke, sniff, snort, or shoot straight up your starfish.”
Miss Carriage was older, nearly thirty, and the price for his tits had gotten bigger while his purse got smaller. At this point, he said he was just stuffing dreams down a crawfish hole, but as long as he was dreaming he might as well have the look of an angel—or a female private dick.
“Truth be told, I’m already a girl with a gun. And I see crime up and down this bar. Don’t you?”
Miss Carriage never asked how I got into the bar (fake ID) or how many times I’d been (twice). He asked few questions he couldn’t answer himself.
When my eyes finally turned back to the stage, a drag queen in a nun’s habit held a paddle over a priest’s rear end while four cowboys spurred imaginary horses and kicked their heels in unison singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“One of these days,” Miss Carriage exclaimed, “I will work that stage over!”
“You don’t perform?” I asked.
“Honey, every utterance is a performance. But if you mean lipsync for dear life before a dead mic to a set of musty show tunes, then the answer is a round NO. I’ve got better uses for this set of choppers.”
A week later, we stood in a circle-shaped bar hidden under a huge cantilever bridge in the Louisiana state capitol. To get there, we had to drive over not one bridge but two, the first an endless ribbon of concrete running through murky swamp and the second a sky-high arch spanning the muddy Mississippi. A trip out of town, Miss Carriage had predicted, would shake up our spirits.
In the bar, a hulking drag queen named Miss Teary de la Place pushed around an empty shopping cart while singing old girl group songs and pantomiming “fellatio” on a long black rubber tube. Up and down, her plump lips traced the length of the tube, her wild tongue shot out lyrics, and her wide hips swung in alarm. Overhead, the only art on the walls hung in a massive frame: a golden-maned lion entering a brawny man who lay prone on the grass. The man’s haunches were raised, lips open, mustache wet. His eyes turned toward the ground, but the lion offered the painter a tender look and not one man who saw it didn’t sigh. The Lion’s Den, the place was called.
“Now every den mother must feed her pride,” Miss Teary landed the punch line, after belting out a tough-knuckled song called “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game.”
Miss Carriage rolled her eyes, muttered “suffering fools,” and darted for the bar.
The men, and they were all men with ribbed tanks and roper boots, knew the words to all the songs. They waved colored hankies in the air and passed around a bottle of poppers with a screw-top missing. Everyone put a nostril to it; some put two. Round and round the bottle went, and with each huff, I slipped out of myself and the spirits slipped inside. The scent of solvent rose out of the bottle in a vapor that burned away memory. Where you were, the calendar year, the state capitol, the church of your parents, right from wrong, the location of your feet, your own first name, all went like a match in a quick flame.
More memory on fire: the painted face of the angel in the poster. That beauty spot. The brush of rouge.
In a flash, the vapor vanished every thought and magnified every sensation. The furry prickle under your finger nails, the shimmering floaters orbiting your eyes, the loud odor of underwear nearby, all beat with the throttle of the rising floor and the surging heat of the air in your chest. The vapor lifted men off the floor and spun them on their heels, lifted the bar and spun it like a careening carousel. Sounds popped, blood rushed, and for the expanse of a twelve-inch house remix, amyl nitrite lifted every queen out of mourning and made every man into a mindless beast.
With another huff, my chest started to spasm again, and my eyes went black. When they opened, Miss Carriage was nowhere near. I was in a back room of the bar, with the synthesizers muffled and the lights out. My lashes grew heavy and long like feathers and my hands went limp at my sides. My fingers disappeared altogether. My feet kept folding under, while my lungs swelled until I thought they might burst. A few times, I raised my voice but no words fell out, just a gasping sound. My uproar attracted a lion, not the one in the frame but Leon, the long-haired barrel-chested bar owner, who dangled an ornate strand of Mardi Gras beads before me, the old kind made of milky glass.
“Let me have a taste,” Leon purred into my ear. When I shook my head “no,” he dropped his belt and wrapped the beads around my neck.
“My bar,” he said, biting my ear.
“My rules,” he said, biting my nipple.
Then he shoved a hankie in my mouth and shoved my face to the floor. Behind me, he dropped his belt, and the sound of a zipper ripped the air. His legs doubled under mine; his hands raced over me. The whole time, he groaned as if someone had him in a headlock. He made choking sounds as if someone had a pair of hands at his throat. He mumbled a smear of French words and chewed at my hair while his whole body trembled and shook. Before he finished, he hacked off a lock with a pocket knife then bared his teeth.
“A perfect little fairy bird,” he said.
He squeezed his hand like a gun and put the barrel in my mouth. “And, mon ’ti cher, I do love a blackbird gumbo.”
Then he threw down the beads. “Fair trade,” he said.
Maybe I was only seventeen, but Miss Carriage had taught me the price of trade, and I knew he had yet to pay.
The next night, back in Lafayette, I snuck into a bar tucked behind a cinder block wall in the back of a nearly abandoned shopping mall. A vinyl store called Raccoon Records had the only open doors by day, and by night the Goth-boy clerk spun dark wave tunes at the bar, the kind no drag queen sang. The electronic beat got the men thrusting their legs in and out on the floor. All around, there were mirrors but the fog kept blocking out the faces so that each dancer was just a pair of legs in the dance or a pair of arms in the air. In and out, they strutted and preened like cranes along the gulf daring each other to take flight first. Fantasy II in Exile, the sign over the bar said.
“What happened to Fantasy I?” I asked the Goth-boy DJ before he went down on a longneck and threw the bottle back with nothing but his teeth. A black cross dangled from his ear as if moved by a tremor in the air.
“It got found,” a tall guy in spiky hair and white face powder said. There was a silver lightning bolt near his eye and rhinestones where his brows should be. He parted his blue lips. “And any fantasy found is a fantasy killed.”
Then he marked the air with a snap and turned back into the fog.
Later that night in his garage apartment, Treats teared up over the lost angel. He was a cousin, distant, but a cousin. Just a boy. Once, he’d taken the stage at Fantasy II draped in nothing but a French flag singing a song by a petite woman known as the Little Sparrow. The queens sneered at his snarky rendition of “La Vie en Rose” and at the safety pin in his ear, but Treats applauded with abandon and dubbed his little cousin a punk diva. He also nursed his cousin through his first STD, a round of syphilis.
“War wounds,” Treats called it then, “think of it as Purple Hearts, Toot. You’re practically a hero.”
Afterward, Treats had meant to stitch up a pink camouflage dress but never got around to it. He swore he had swatches somewhere and towered before the open chest in his studio, pulling out combat boots, tartan kilts, graphic tees, black boas, books on the Beats, and a poster for a show by a factory of artists in New York.
“Nothing,” Treats turned to me. “Not a single swatch. Nothing left, sweetie.”
The thought seemed to weigh his face down. His hands pulled at the skin and the white powder rubbed off in streaks, making his look redden. His green eyes flared but not at me. He stared over my head and went silent before opening a hinged kit of trays filled with brushes, wands, tubes, and scissors, all ordered in alert rows. They looked like weapons for doll-sized vigilantes. Yet with the powder gone, there was no vengeance in Treats’ face. He was younger than Miss Carriage by a decade but already seemed more bowed. Out of the bar, his spiky hair and studded gear became more costume than uniform. With a battery of sponges, his skin darkened into Sabine brown, the burnished color of Cajuns who lived deep back in the bayous. His eyes dimmed too as he flourished a hand, like a magician, over his face.
“It’s not drag,” he said, “but war paint. Life, that’s the real drag.”
Then he tossed a boa my way and shimmied out of his chair before popping a pill into his mouth.
“And that’s why the gods gave us speed,” he said.
The thought put a light back in his eyes, as he swore that one hadn’t lived until one had been to a party on the Mississippi and that’s exactly where he’d take me next week. “The Cockfish,” he declared, “will make you a man. Or a girl. Your choice, really.”
Legend had it, Treats supplied the amber bottles, the white lines, the black beauties, and hormone injections from across the border to half the queens in the state capitol. So I figured Miss Carriage would ride shotgun for another trip over the two bridges to Baton Rouge. The Cockfish was a floating party—“a moveable feast!” as Miss Carriage put it—staged on a former naval ship. When we crossed the plank, I spotted Treats on board, already scouting for business.
“What a lark!” he trilled in the air with an exaggerated smile, as if to convince himself. “What a rush!”
His eyes shut for a long moment before opening again with a piercing look. When he caught sight of Miss Carriage, he genuflected then rose into the towering figure of a royal purveyor, though one with blue lips and a lightning bolt at his eye. He put a hand to his heart and boasted of selling only sunny drugs, “the kind that push your face to the sky, sweetie. Who wants to fall into a crack?”
As he made his pitch, his eyes flitted about in search of a customer in need.
Miss Carriage squeezed my hand. Tonight, she was in need but “lacked funds,” as she put it. And she was most definitely she, in a white wedding gown with a biker belt cinched at her wasp waist and a blonde crown of a wig. She was fighting off a mood, and I didn’t need to ask why. The cops hadn’t even opened a case on the angel boy yet. No one knew who did it. No suspect in sight. And the motive? They chalked it up to panic defense, especially since the body was found a few hundred yards from a cruise bar.
“Panic,” Miss Carriage said, “is an offense not a defense. I ask you: how does a dead boy get accused of his own murder?”
Her shoulders shook, and I squeezed her hand back.
“Now,” she said, pursing her lips, “time to hunt for a patron. Some flush gent to fund my party favors and put a twirl in this girl.”
Then she gave Treats a knowing look and studied his duffel bag. In the background, the lyrics to a song about a sex dwarf spun round and round. Treats closed his eyes then plunged a hand into the bag.
“Listen,” he said in a near whisper, “we can’t dwell in the dark forever.”
His back straightened out of its bow.
“And Lord knows, the best drugs can shake everything into the light.”
He placed a white pill in Miss Carriage’s palm.
“Ecstasy. The name says it all.”
The look on Miss Carriage’s face brightened for once, her lips spreading into a wide grin. She almost never showed her teeth, everyone knew. Though she told anyone with ears about the bashing that left her with dentures, she’d learned to smile through tight lips and to talk with more tongue than teeth. Even in Baton Rouge, other queens knew her story, knew how she breathed fire in a bar raid once and led the march to a parish prison to demand the release of an inmate with AIDS. Miss Carriage rarely let go, rarely stopped fighting, so her grin lit up Treats’ face too. He grinned right back, his teeth flashing in the strobe lights. And when Miss Carriage offered an I.O.U. Treats refused it with a finger snap.
“Legends twirl for free,” he said.
Mostly, Treats operated on a bartering model, with all forms of payment accepted, including finger snaps and party invites, and no line of credit—or favor—denied.
Not the case with The Lion’s Den owner, who sold crystal and crank to the rest of the queens in Baton Rouge, the ones who twitched to industrial beats. For that, they rushed to his side and clung to his sleeve.
“Leon has a horde of fans,” Treats allowed, “a whole legion.”
Yet he whispered doubts about the bar owner and his shady business practices. No one knew where he got his money, for one. And instead of credit, Leon took score. He also took twinks and turned them into trade, Treats warned, looking at Miss Carriage but aiming the warning my way. I pretended not to hear, so Miss Carriage carved an exclamation mark in the air before my eyes.
“Lions and tigers and bears, they’re all here and all ready to pounce, so hold onto your basket,” she stared me down.
After chaperoning me into an R-rated movie the night before, a movie featuring a dance called the Time Warp and people shouting lines at the screen, Miss Carriage declared me her ward, especially at a party where not everyone “ate from the same mushroom and drank from the same tea.”
Yet it didn’t take long until Miss Carriage left me for the bar. She knocked back two gold shots in a row then set her eyes to “cruise control.” In the middle of the old battleship, a burly guy in a black funeral gown thrashed about to the sound of a drum machine with a stuffed dove wired to his wrist. Behind him, a sign said No Disco! but with a K added in pink lipstick.
“Clever,” Miss Carriage said in a rare moment of approval before joining the dance. “After all, I like a good double-entendre.”
The sleeves of her gown were capped in white feathers. She raised them to testify to the beat and turned her eyes skyward while I went in search of collecting my pay from a long-haired beast.
Down in the bowels, I passed the nun and priest from the “Bohemian Rhapsody” number, only now the nun had grown a beard and the priest had grown breasts. The priest asked me to open my mouth, then he placed a tab on my tongue. When I asked what, he told me to embrace the mystery. I pushed aside Miss Carriage’s warning about clerics and swallowed.
An hour later, the angel boy appeared before my eyes in several places at once: in the parking lot with a shoe missing, a sleeve torn, and an elaborate strand of beads around his neck; in the back of somebody’s car with his face shoved to the fogged-over window and a set of claw marks overhead; in the middle of the dance floor frozen while everyone else did the Time Warp. My head flared into a full bonfire now, with memories false and true rising in spires all around. My eyes watered, my throat tightened, and my ribs throbbed me into a spasm. In the fever of my vision, every time a light flashed, the world began anew. The boy’s face flashed too, with the beauty spot opening like a small flower on his cheek. I wanted to cry out his name but kept stammering my lips.
Then, when the flashing stopped and the light went steady, I saw it: a set of dentures on the floor in the hall outside the boiler room. They were dim yellow but perfectly formed, like they were made for a singer to open before a microphone. Only there were no sounds coming from the hall or the boiler room, just a rumbling overhead. In a near stupor, I started knocking on every cabin door, busting up more than one coupling, driven with burning nostrils and a flame quickening in my head. I bolted back up to the deck and pushed my way through the crowd looking for a trail of white feathers. Yet there was no sign of Miss Carriage anywhere, not a single plume.
Until I heard an odd but familiar sound coming from the galley. A kind of choking and an ugly smear of French words. When I threw open the door, Leon had Miss Carriage on her back and a billystick in his hand. He’d come dressed as a cop, complete with a shiny badge. Miss Carriage was handcuffed, and her wig was knocked off. A bruise shone on her neck, and a line of blood trailed from her ear. She stared at me with fixed eyes, and I stared back with a shaking head. In the haze of the moment, the Lion ran past me toward the door. Without her teeth, Miss Carriage kept her lips tight. My own tongue stuttered and failed to get out a word. Yet a sharp sound ripped right from my throat, like a war cry.
For a moment, the dance music halted, and feathers hung in the air. Doors flew open, all ears turned to the galley, and out of nowhere Miss Teary de la Place burst into the room. When she caught sight of Miss Carriage, her shriek echoed mine. Her chest rose, her wig shook, and she yelled “LEON!” long and loud as a siren wailing over the whole ship.
In a rush, a flock of queens raced across the deck to answer Miss Teary’s call. They soon figured out the whole story and resolved to find the beast who’d struck Miss Carriage. The music started up again, and the leather daddies, cowboys, and jocks turned back to dancing, but the queens turned to riot. They hurled empty rocks glasses, loaded beer cans, and extra large high heels across the deck. They threw glass vials and amber bottles. They shot pint glasses and shakers into the air, and the wind picked it all up and slammed it against the bow with a great crashing sound. Treats pumped a fist and led the hunt for Leon past the bridge and down the gangway. The sky filled with glitter dust and silky down and barbed bits of feather, and the floor covered over with a silvery powder. Heads turned port and starboard and port again for any sign of the long-haired bar owner. Suddenly, Treats let out a screeching sound and grazed Leon with the sharp edge of a broken bottle, just before he leapt onto the plank.
“Drown the Lion!” Treats shouted to the air.
With a clap of thunder, he went racing down the bouncing strip of lumber, and I ran in his hot footsteps. The acid surged in my head, and the cones of light on the water trembled like underwater speakers pumping heavy voltage. A shock of motion agitated the surface, radiating like a strobe, and the current cast eyes everywhere, as the river filled with floating faces. Treats threw his hands up and streaks of powder ran down his cheeks. My chest throbbed and vision wavered. Leon had jumped; he might’ve been anywhere. He might’ve pulled himself onto another ship and disappeared into the night, like the killer who battered the angel boy. We’d never know the killer’s name, never know where he lurked, and we’d never know justice. Red dots pulsed before my eyes and gray smoke hung overhead. Even if we could rid Leon of his mane, rid the scene of Leon, we’d lived in his den without ever catching his scent. Was it too familiar? Too close to our own? Heat rose up like vapor, as the muddy Mississippi swallowed each cone of light. The whole scene went dark, and my ears echoed with vanishing beats, until a curtain of silence dropped overhead.
Treats turned on his heels, and I turned around too. My chest throbbed again, louder and louder, yet when I looked back, I saw that the water wasn’t filled with floating faces. There was merely one face, blurry and dim, in the distance. Next I saw a golden flash, a mane of hair, and heard a far-off gasp for air. My tongue stammered, and my mouth stuck on one odd sound. But my lips finally let fly a whole word, steady and clear: “Vengeance!” It was only one word, still it brought back Miss Carriage’s vow. As the smoke cleared, I shot a finger straight at Leon’s dim figure in the water, and every pair of eyes looked dead ahead. Treats jumped, I jumped, and a dozen others jumped overboard, all of us flapping madly to stay afloat. The Lion was a hundred strokes away, swimming like a hunted catfish, but he faced only the opposite bank. He couldn’t see what we saw: a crest of waves parting in our path, light beaming from our eyes. He couldn’t hear what we heard: a chorus soaring at our back, a song beating in our ear. No, he couldn’t escape us now. Long legs, long necks, sharp beaks, we were a siege of cranes. Red crowns, white napes, we were ready to trouble the water and charge the air. Together, we were ready to take wing.
In our prom picture, my date was the pretty one, not me. With raven hair, ivory skin and an angular face, she looked designed for the banner: Forever Hollywood. She fit the role of Prom Date like an ace actress. Yet I didn’t fit and knew it. I’d only been cast in the role as a last minute stand-in when another guy bowed out and Jazz, who’d arranged a double date with two sisters, called my number.
Jazz counted on me for essays, exams, and an extra arm for anything he didn’t care to carry: textbooks, duffel bags, even the bulky keys to his truck.
“Can’t kill the silhouette,” he said, while assessing himself in the mirror or in the faces of girls passing in the hall.
His name was J.S. but the whole campus called him Jazz for his flashy out-of-town style. He’d moved all the way from Dallas and brought satin jackets and gelled hair to campus. On him, a turned-up collar, blond streaks, and a pierced ear looked more guy than girl. Even his no-sock shoes hit the ground with certain force. Neither a jock nor a brain, a nerd nor a geek, he made his way through the halls with slick hair and slick poses and seemed to know how to do nothing better than anyone else. One leg propped against a post, one foot kicked into the air. One arm wrapped around the back of a desk, one hand raked through his hair. Jazz had a half-there half-gone look in his eyes that allowed him to slip through the rope of high school rules. Only a jock should’ve asked the head cheerleader on a date, but no one was shocked when Jazz held up a sign with the question—right in front of the quarterback and right in the middle of class—or when she said yes.
Her younger sister, Delta, was part of the deal, and now I carried something else for Jazz: an ill-fitting tux. The borrowed suit was meant for a guy with football shoulders and soccer legs. I cinched the waist with a skinny belt and pulled the loose fabric into a new seam with a zigzag of safety pins. Then I double-knotted a tie and pushed up the sleeves. If you squinted from across a very dark room, you might’ve imagined you saw a guy in a suit. Yet in the light, the suit still billowed and was so misshapen that I looked like a popsicle melting in the sun, with the stick ready to snap out of its molded form. When she opened the screen door, Delta pursed her lips but said nothing. Maybe she saw the baggy tux as another odd piece in a disarrayed puzzle. Or maybe she saw past me to the prom, where she’d be the only freshman, and who cared how she got there?
What Delta saw, at least at first, worried me less than Jazz. What did he see—or not see? Was I his secret, so out in the open no one would notice? When Jazz first took me as his sidekick, with my bangled wrists and flame-red hair, the kids and teachers chalked it up to another of his eccentricities. Maybe his Roman nose, his square jaw, and his steady eye cast him as more young man than teenage boy, and maybe that role placed a permit in his hands. A young man was independent. A young man was allowed certain risks. He could stand next to a teenage boy, especially a teenage fairy boy, and his stance would look even tougher. Beside him, I must’ve looked submissive as a pillow or a punching bag. Jazz never swung a joke at me, though, and never hit me with a name. Instead, he let me shadow his silhouette and walk the halls by his side.
Yet at prom, it was the head cheerleader, not me, by his side. It was her sister, a girl four years younger, next to me. Someone might shout a name, my name. Someone might point at the Jenny Woman in the tux, the sissy in the suit. The air might explode in stormy laughter, ridicule raining down like a turned-over bucket of confetti, scorn flashing from bared teeth. Every party began with a sacrifice, I knew, and ended with a confession. It was one thing to show my feathers at school by day, to dangle charms and beads. It was another thing to tuck my wings and hide my colors, to pass as a guy on a date with a girl, or to pass as a normal guy at all. Who’d cuff my hands first? Who’d call my bluff? Who’d muffle my mouth and deliver my penance?
By senior year, I had much to confess but few secrets left. The lock had long blown off my cover. Even so, an empty chest doesn’t mean fear has left the room. In the schoolhouse of the disco, I’d learned courage in a gay bar with gay men, but courage away is not courage at home. Also: virtue in one world is vice in another. And at a Catholic high school, castigation follows vice every time, no matter how false or unfair the charge. Every week, the kneeler in the church confessional groaned while I opened my mouth to let loose a new story. Every week, the priest leaned closer to the screen, listening to my voice rise higher, the lower the act, the more twisted the end.
What everyone knew: no crayoned valentine, no sweetheart carnation, no origamied love note, no aching heart mixtape had ever passed between a girl’s hands and mine. What everyone knew: instead, a boy’s hands had passed over my head and pushed me to my knees, a boy’s hands had pulled my pants to the ground. What everyone knew: it happened more than once, with more than one boy, then it happened with a man, an older man, a teacher and even a priest. What everyone knew: I was fallen, I was graceless, I was doomed, I was one lost sheep.
What no one knew: I liked it that way. I wanted it that way.
What I knew: I was not the only one.
When we walked through the prom door, though, what everyone saw was Jazz and the cheerleader, their grins wide and bright and easy. Delta and I slipped in behind them, and the band blasted a whistle while a singer belted, “You dropped a bomb on me!” Jazz cast a look my way: no bucket turned over my head, no confetti rained down. Maybe he was right.
“Gotta fake it to make it,” he’d told me before meeting the girls.
Prom was fairy tale night, after all, with a grand theme, swollen-faced characters, dazzling old-world costumes, and fantastic settings. Even so, no one ever mistook the dwarf for a giant or the elf for a prince. And no one, I was sure, mistook me for a romantic lead.
Especially not Delta. In the blinking lights of the room, I could see her face in close-up. Makeup brought her features into focus: two dramatic streaks of blush, copper lips, smoky shadow, and cat eyes drawn with heavy liner. She wore a serious world-weary expression, like a debutante already tired of the balls and the boys and the boorish talk. If she were in a film, she’d play the ingénue turned sophisticate—or vamp—before the final act. She even smoked the clove cigarette Jazz passed around with more style than any of us, her cheeks flush as petals and her eyes blazing with secret knowledge.
The four of us found a table and sat, but not for long. Jazz kept cracking his knuckles and knocking his knee under the table, and Delta’s sister kept craning her head around the room. Maybe she hadn’t noticed Jazz wasn’t much of a talker. With all his slick poses and slick looks, no one seemed to catch on that he said very little. Yet I’d learned that he asked more questions than he answered. Even when we were alone in his pick-up, he mostly just nodded his head to whatever I said, in a dreamy indeterminate way, not yes or no but something in the middle. So to cut the silence at the prom table, I told stories about weird midnight movies or New Wave bands with space age gear and futuristic looks, my hands rising in one wild arc after another. Delta smiled in a lopsided way. Yet Jazz stared at me as if there was a question mark flashing on my face, and his date stared at the dance floor as if it was a planet spinning in outer space.
Suddenly, Jazz bolted up from the table and seized the cheerleader’s hand. The two of them cut right through the crowd with a series of quick-fire moves until she pretended to faint in his arms and he pretended to revive her with a long wet kiss and a hand on her waist. Then his hand seemed to pull a string that sent her spinning out of and back into his arms in a dizzying whirl. By that point, the other dancers had stopped moving, and the band turned their brass instruments to the couple of the moment.
When a glove grabbed my hand, I startled. Then I looked up and saw Delta. Did she expect me to dance? To move like Jazz? When she feigned a yawn and angled her head toward the photo stand, relief lifted me out of my chair. All around the gym, a series of brightly colored facades had been raised, one-dimensional homes from famous movies or TV shows. The people painted in the windows seemed frozen in time but the timeline itself seemed warped with a Victorian mansion sitting next to a California ranch house next to a French Quarter cottage next to a Manhattan penthouse. When she saw me lagging, Delta tugged me forward with her gloved hand. I could feel my popsicle stick body weaving, from the heat, from the champagne, and from the sudden fear of what might happen next.
In the long line leading up to the Hollywood banner and the glittery backdrop, a circle of girls applied and reapplied mascara, eyeliner, and lipstick, raising hand mirrors this way and that, searching each other’s faces for approval, sometimes offered, sometimes denied. Whose face could I search? I wondered. Whose head would nod yes or no? But Delta didn’t seem to wonder—about my approval or the other girls. Apart from her sister, she grew taller and her neck grew longer while I shrank further into my tux. How long until she beamed her eyes right through mine? How long until I disappeared altogether?
With that gray cloud of worry overhead, the camera snapped its own hot eye at Delta and me. I stood dazed before Jazz nudged me with the tip of his shoe to move out of view. Arm in arm, he and the cheerleader both flashed a brilliant illustrated magazine smile, a smile that shone with long walks and long plans, with a wide lawn and high ceilings and a pair of trophy-winning kids. The photographer clapped his hands in front of his face and made a splashing sound with his mouth. Maybe Jazz didn’t say much, but he knew how to impress. Suddenly, other guys clutched their dates tighter and moved in closer for the camera.
Next, the four of us plodded back to the round table where even our glittery centerpiece wilted from the heat. The glue ran in rivulets, and the glitter dotted the table in cloudbursts. Though a giant fan hummed in a corner, the heat in the gym was nearly visible, with a kind of oily vapor. Delta was panting a bit and her sister’s forehead was glistening when I caught Jazz’s eye. He stared me down, as if I was about to reveal a secret no one, not even he, had guessed. Then he slammed a flat palm down on the edge of the table.
“Are you ready, boy?” he asked.
Together, we had arrived at the prom in a rented white limo, but now we had to leave in Jazz’s stretch-cab truck, since the cheerleader had lost her pink champagne and most of her crawfish dinner on the limo floor.
“Ready, boy?” Jazz shouted again over the frantic rush of a song about a used condom and a fast car. His face winked. The fizz of dying champagne filled my ears. The room buzzed, the music blurred, and all the lights went fire red. When I looked at Delta and saw her makeup melting, I took it as a sign.
“Yeah,” I blurted, “Ready.”
Outside, Delta tugged the ends of her black corset gown into the cab then I clambered in beside her. Jazz somehow threw the truck into first, second, and third gear while holding onto the steering wheel and the cheerleader’s hand at the same time. The revved-up truck grew fins and flares and finally spoiler wings as he sped through flashing yellow lights, raced through an abandoned parking lot and over a small ditch before bringing the truck like a jet to a jerking halt. The high beam pointed toward the dark and gated entrance of the park. Jazz shut off the ignition and cut off the lights.
“Guess we’re gonna sit here a while,” he said, running a hand along the dashboard down to the cheerleader’s thigh. When I didn’t answer, he added, “Her and me.”
Though dazed, I heard the prompt, stepped out of the truck, then stumbled around the other side to give Delta a trembling hand. Without saying a word to each other, she and I walked foot by foot to a mossy bench near a pond. From our wood-slat seat, we watched the windows of the truck cover with steam. We watched geese quarrel and make up on the algae-smothered pond. We watched billowing clouds form shapes overhead then part in two. There seemed to be a script in view, and I thought I could read the lines well enough. I opened my mouth to speak before a goose honked and Delta burst out laughing.
“You’re beautiful,” I said, not exactly sure if that was the word. It sounded rehearsed and phony, and she called me on it.
“Don’t you mean handsome?”
My face pulled into a puzzle.
“Heaven knows I’m no flower. At least, that’s not what I wanna be. Flowers are beautiful, sure, but then they lose their heads and fall.”
I couldn’t help it: I laughed then slapped my hand on my mouth. Delta laughed too, not in delicate ribbons but in a long great sheet of sound. Then her face grew stern.
“And don’t call me pretty either,” she said. “My sister is pretty. Pretty girls lead cheers and study boys. Can you think of anything duller than that?”
Delta laughed again, looking dead at me. On the bench, she was eye-level again, no longer taller, and when she pulled her hair back, I could see her flat ears and an ankh tattoo hidden under her sleeve.
“Okay, you’re handsome,” I said. “And too smart for a freshman.”
She removed a glove and rapped my hand once with the tips of her fingers.
“I only see what I see and know what I know.”
Her eyes narrowed and her brow furrowed. Was that my cue? I worried. I thought I was following the lines but fell into confusion. Should I kiss her? Was that what she wanted? No doubt, she knew who I was, what I was, but did she still want a kiss?
When I nudged closer to her side of the bench and adjusted my arm so that it slid behind her waist, her face relaxed into a shimmering glow and her lips parted a bit.
The bench began to sweat, not from bayou heat but from a chilly fever that stole over me. Mist raced across the grass and rushed up my leg. Clouds gathered into a hovering gray mass, blotting out the moon. Each breath seemed shorter, colder. The air closed in tighter and my hands shook. Then in a mad flash, I shut my eyes and brought my lips in a rush to Delta’s neck. My tongue stung from the amber of her perfume. Almost drunk, my head grew dizzy and though Delta’s mouth was moving, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Wild now in my effort to perform, my hand squeezed hard on her breast, as if I might draw sustenance from it. She shrieked out a laugh—I could hear that—then covered my face with hers. She opened her mouth, and her tongue slid between my lips and across my tongue. I sat still and went stiff, feeling the weight of her tongue on mine. Like fur on rubber. Like velvet on eel. When she pulled her face back, my hand still held the bodice of her dress, and one breast popped out. The white globe and bright blue veins filled my eyes in an extreme close-up. Now I was ready to confess everything: every extended trip to the locker room, every hand down my pants, every boy in my mouth, every bit she already knew. Then all she didn’t know: every time Jazz called me up at night, every time he drove me out to a field and laid me on the leather seat of his cab, every time he blew a kiss out the window. My mouth hung open, the words had all rushed out. Next a heaving sound surrounded me, like a great chest exploding. The sound rippled into a scream, and my hands rose to my ears before they began slapping my face. Delta looked at me in horror, I thought, as if I might burst through my shoes to reveal cloven hooves. Yet when she spoke, her voice sounded soothing like the all-knowing debutante in a black-and-white movie. The boy she dated thought he’d fooled her into thinking he was another guy, an up-and-coming young man. But she was never fooled. Near the end as he faced doom, she cradled the moody boy and her eyes glowed like violet embers. “Tell Mama,” she said to the top of his head, “Tell Mama all.”
For a moment, Delta let me rest my head on her shoulders while my heaving settled into a quiet sob. But soon the quiet was broken by a loud voice.
“Ready?” Jazz shouted across the pond. “Ready, boy?”
The truck headlights beamed at us. Delta lifted the curtain of her bodice and tucked the white globe into place.
“Ready, punk!” she hollered back at the truck for me.
We locked eyes. It was a lie, the kind told in movies with an ending and credits and people walking out in a daze. I wasn’t ready at all. When Delta stood, she pulled out a compact mirror and a powdered brush to pat my face dry.
“There,” she said in a whisper. “There you are.”
Back in the truck, I looked closely at Jazz’s date for the first time. Delta was right: she was pretty. Sapphire eyes, golden hair, ruby lips. And a carnation-pink dress. Yet her face looked angry, like a girl who figured there’d be more to prom than a bumpy ride to a park in a pick-up. Her face turned away from Jazz toward the window, and for a long time she stared into the night and the passing lights. Jazz said nothing, as usual, but his nothing crackled in the air and turned his knuckles white on the steering wheel. His hands gripped tighter and tighter. Both hands, I noticed. He didn’t hold the cheerleader’s hand and only moved his arms when he had to shift gears. Under a stoplight, his knee shifted, looking for the right position. Then Delta’s sister angled her head back to whisper.
“Birds of a feather,” she said.
When Delta kept her lips pursed, her sister tried again.
“Two of a kind,” she said, louder and looking now at me.
Jazz’s heart beat so fast I could hear it. Delta must’ve heard it too. She cleared her throat as if she was about to sing, but instead she started humming. It was a funny sound strung together with little hiccups of laughter. Yet she wasn’t laughing at Jazz or me, I knew.
“And what kind of bird are you?” she asked her sister. “Canary or crow?”
Then she continued humming, and Jazz threw the truck back into gear. His hands relaxed on the wheel, and his eyes caught mine in the rear view mirror. The cheerleader turned her head and pressed her face to the window, but Delta kept humming and humming. Jazz began humming too, lower and louder than Delta, and I joined along, the three of us humming and hiccupping and howling our way into the wide open night, into the wild and fantastic unknown.
The blood was drawn into vials by a plasma center on campus, where I went under the needle twice a week. The vials looked like glass bullets, and the blood looked bright at first, almost vermilion, then darkened to cardinal. Yet all I could see was green: cash flowing for the booze and blotters that fueled my first year of college. The donor center paid for each draft of plasma with easy money. The exchange rate ran to my favor until the day I approached the front desk and an orderly gave me a hard stare then gripped my folder with alarm. My black leggings, velvet jacket, and silver rosary glowed in his eyes as if in ultraviolet light, as if radioactive. Between us, a four-letter word sparked like static, my blood stopped, and the air went dead.
“No doubt about it,” the orderly said through tight lips as he walked me to a windowless room at the back of the clinic, “AIDS.” He’d run a second test, but it’d take a month and he’d never seen a false positive. Never. Anyway, I had the symptoms, didn’t I?
“Where there’s smoke…” he started then stopped, one freckled hand covering his mouth. Then he waved at the air and counted the symptoms on his fingers, like a Sunday school teacher listing the Ten Plagues of Egypt.
Fatigue, fever, swollen glands. Dry cough, skin rash, sudden weight loss. Night sweats, nausea, phantom sensations in the feet and hands. I showed every sign of affliction.
What’s more, I was queer, wasn’t I?
The orderly reminded me of my perjury in signing the official weekly donation form. In Louisiana, gay blood was as outlaw as absinthe and presumed just as toxic. Only the green fairy conducted a plague of one, while the lavender virus ushered gay men by the dozens then by the hundreds and thousands out of classrooms, theaters, and studios, out of bars, bathhouses, and discos. I’d lied, it was true, for the money, for the drugs. There was no more relief in the confession than in dropping a letter in a casket. No one would answer it, no one would even hear it fall. Yet at least the clinic wouldn’t press charges. After all, as the orderly put it, I already had the death sentence.
“Six months,” he said while staring into the folder. “Time to make some plans.”
But any plans had long been set in place. After a failed clip of my lisping tongue by a surgeon, a failed cure of my swishing walk by a psychiatrist, and a failed conversion of my wandering eye by a priest, my mother foresaw the diagnosis. No trophy, ribbon, or medal, no string of A’s, tower of awards, or stack of university letters could redeem a degenerate son. She’d warned me I’d be afflicted, warned me of the abomination of mortal sin, of eyes going blind and body parts falling off.
Now that her early prediction was confirmed, she banned me from home. Over the phone, she prophesied my end: stripped to the bone, stripped of every muscle, stripped of all pride. I could nearly see her, testifying to the ceiling with her free hand, appealing to the congregation of furniture to witness the shame of her motherhood. No doubt, even the pale cream covering her cheeks flashed red, and her hair sprang out of its straight wedge into a coil of disgrace. In her voice, I could hear the mask of righteous anger, but then I also could hear the naked sorrow of a woman staring at her son’s empty bedroom like an unoccupied bassinet. My whole head fit in her hands once, both my feet fit against her lips. Yet I grew like a monster to tower over her, to outrun her. I fled home to sleep with other monsters, other two-headed men, and now the virus was God’s thunderbolt of judgment. Man lying with man was as grievous a sin as infidelity or incest in the eyes of the Lord. Man lying with man was as abhorrent as man lying with beast.
“Blood shall be upon the sinner,” she said, with a firm click of her tongue. “Forget plans. Time to make penance.”
Instead, I made haste. And a trip to the mall. There, I picked up a black tuxedo shirt, a high collar trench coat, and a crucifix earring. I was only nineteen, but I knew how to dress for a funeral, especially one where I’d be the guest of honor. And I knew how to deliver a valediction from a stage.
When I dared to make plans of my own, they were mapped out in my dorm room before bed. I’d smuggle onboard a plane to Paris, where I’d throw my skinny body down on grave after grave in Père Lachaise cemetery. I’d lie in a glass coffin in the middle of the Vatican, my corpse incorruptible. I’d emerge one night on a stage in New York with flowers in my back pocket singing a song I’d written only hours before. I’d chew every book in the library by day and swallow every shot in the bar by night. I’d marry the DJ, the doorman, the professor. It would all happen fast in flash after flash and turn after turn. Then I’d wake to a set of shadow eyes on the sheets and a silhouette of sweat.
Soon, the follow-up test would punctuate my sentence, but I had no patience and wanted to see the end. If I dosed before the diagnosis, then I double-dosed now. If I set the weekend on fire before, now I burned each day. Vials of my blood sat in a fluorescent clinic, awaiting analysis, but I danced under strobe lights, awaiting only the next high. Black beauties, white crosses, angel dust, the drugs were not just holy medicine but a sacred arsenal. Little bullets to kill the time. Little arrows to quell the mind. My mother couldn’t be right. The orderly couldn’t be wrong. And lying with men couldn’t be both.
“God don’t like selfish,” my mother had said about homo sex.
But she was wrong, wasn’t she? Almost always, I had slipped out of myself during sex, had shed my skin, shaken off my body. There was no self left, no getting and no giving either. No grace and no curse. There was only a hum, a kind of music two men made. The jagged clash of a punk song, the velvet push of a ballad. Sex with older men, with a den of priests, teachers, and jocks. Sex in public places, in a den of tents, showers, and locker rooms. Sex on bunk beds, in the hush of confessionals and sugar cane fields. No, I tried to convince myself. Sex with other men hadn’t shown me a mirror but a diamond, a turntable, and a groove. The exit music from home.
Yet the exit carried a toll. And at party after party, disco after disco, I paid until my credit ran out.
At the climax of one house party, nearly a month after my diagnosis, club kids filled the living room with neon platform shoes, candy-colored vinyl, and towering hats. A leggy drag queen in a black lace bustier and white pearls longer than my rosary rolled her eyes, declared she was “over the rainbow, girl” then waved me into a bedroom with a flickering red bulb and a hovering cloud of incense. There, I forgot about home, every prediction and prophecy, forgot about college, every essay and exam. Forgot the name of the host, the name of the queen shaking a bottle in my hand, the name of the day. I forgot numbers too. How many hands on the clock, how many fingers in the air, how many pills. Only one thought pulsed: How long is now? Six months, the orderly had said. No doubt about it, AIDS. In less than a week, the proof would arrive. I chased the thought with black beauties and chased the beauties with blue devils and chased myself into a speedball. With the rush of speed and the drag of downers, I dropped to the floor in a fit of convulsions. My eyes froze open and the party ran in a reverse loop with cue marks as the queen split, the club kids bailed, and two ambulances and a fire truck beamed red light into the house. Men in uniform surrounded me when I heard the party host speak in a clipped voice.
“No, officer, I haven’t the faintest idea what happened,” he said over my head, as my chest wracked in spasms on the floor. “We were just sitting here chatting away when he rolled over and started choking on his tongue.”
In the hollow of my ears, it sounded like the description of a glass shaken off the counter by a mysterious vibration. A small loss of no real concern. Until the shattering sound rang into an endless echo, a deafening, deadening siren tearing right through the night.
The next morning, I awoke to a voice reading from the final passage of a story. The writer told of an aging professor seated on a beach, hair painted black, cheeks dusted with carmine, and lips rouged into the dark red of strawberries. The very picture of a corpse. Yet the old man’s alert eyes traveled the shoreline in search of a young boy, a tourist who flitted in and out of view, with a glowing head of hair. He called out the boy’s name in a whisper as his makeup melted in the killing heat of the sun. A plague had driven nearly everyone else off the beach. A camera tripod stood abandoned, umbrellas and huts vacant, no attendant in sight. Behind the professor, the walls of the town were washed white with a pungent disinfectant. Yet the boy stood oblivious, contrapposto, with the crests of waves at his feet, before another boy tugged him down into the sand. They wrestled with such a fury the professor thought they both might drown until the golden-haired boy rose up, and he rose to meet him, arms outstretched and stiff as a cadaver. The story ended there, with the old man dead, but the voice added a moral: “When you grow up, honey lamb, don’t chase little boys or they’ll break open your brain and fry it like an egg in the sun.”
The laugh that ripped from my lips tore out of the reader’s mouth too, and I found myself face to face with Mercy, the reigning queen of the state psych ward, where the ODs, self-harmers, and convulsives were lumped with the lunatics, maniacs, and all but the criminally insane. She’d smuggled the book out of a haphazard hospital library and read it to me like medicine, with passages spooned out and coated in her molasses voice. She liked to add her own twist, she said, because writers always let her down at the end.
“They kill the homo or lock him up in the asylum, so I play Lady Jesus and perform a miracle. Cure, exorcism, resurrection, you name it.”
“What about the force of nature?” I asked.
“What about it?” she answered, with a snap of her tongue. “Look at me. I am divine. What do I have to do with nature?”
Then she lifted her hands up in the shape of a square, like a viewfinder on a camera, and pointed the lens at me.
“A bit of a fixer-upper,” she declared, “but you’ll do fine.”
“Do what?” I asked, but she just wagged her finger in the motion of a metronome, waiting for me to follow the beat.
Even seated, I could tell she was tall, basketball player tall. She wore the same prison-gray gown as the rest of the ward but with one side tied into a knot, as if she were at the port of New Orleans drinking daiquiris with a sailor. With paper clips, she had fashioned finger curls and let one long tail of hair rest on her shoulder. Her cheeks flushed light pink, with a perpetual look of astonishment, and her eyes glowed, even with no mascara, liner, or shadow. For all her height, she sat poised as a starlet in a soda shop, legs crossed twice, at the knee and the ankle, making the folding chair look like a bar stool.
“How long have you done drag?” I asked.
“Honey, I don’t do drag. I am a woman…”
“…born in the wrong body?”
“Born in the wrong century! And what is this obsession with ‘do’? You’ve got your verbs all screwed up, little mister. The verb you want is ‘be.’ ‘Do’ for others but ‘be’ for yourself. Get it?”
When I asked why she’d read the story of the professor to me, she puckered her pink lips, arched her plucked brow, and proclaimed, “Trust! Takes one to know one.”
With a wink, she rose out of her chair and strutted out the room, while the book balanced like a feather on her head. And I was left to wonder: what exactly did she know? Had she seen my diagnosis?
Even more: what exactly did my mother know? Had she been right? Had she prophesied my end—alone, with bad blood and a ghostly body?
Over the long weekend, Mercy read half a dozen books to me, sometimes while I dozed, slipping in and out of awareness. The stories mostly were queer, with a hunchback dwarf, a giant woman, a pair of deaf mutes, and a girl whose crutch moved like a third leg. There was an execution, a crucifixion, and more than one star-crossed boy in a three-way love affair. Everyone wound up alone or dead, so Mercy improvised a new ending or transitioned abruptly from the final words of a tragic story to a punch line from Mad Magazine or sunny news from The Hollywood Reporter about a budding romance amid co-stars.
Once, I stopped Mercy in the middle of an improvised resurrection.
“Just desserts,” I said about the doomed man. Thinking: Selfish. Thinking: Degenerate. Thinking: Let the homo die. He’d been a lusty sailor, a druggy thief, an unruly prisoner. A poisonous flower of a man. He’d seduced a cop, a judge, a guard, yet loved only his own slick palm. Wasn’t there logic in a story? Live by the sword, die by the sword. Fuck with abandon, die with abandon.
“Nothing sweet in that dessert,” Mercy said. “Besides, fuck is not the opposite of death any more than life is the opposite of fuck.”
“Is this the lesson?” I asked, cranky from the buzzing lights and flashing machines and flaming voices, cranky from the comedown of a towering disco high. “Is this what I’m here to learn? A riddle? A nursery rhyme? That one and one is not two, that the opposite of lie is not true?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, little story killer, you are strapped to a bed, plugged to an IV, and walled off by a curtain. There’s no seat on the toilet, no lock on the door, and no sharp object on the desk. Class was dismissed as soon as you opened your mouth and swallowed a fistful of rage.”
“OD,” I said. “I just OD’d.”
“Just?” Mercy asked as she turned toward the door. “As in ‘just desserts’?”
This time, I bit my tongue. What did I know? I didn’t even know my own blood test. Live, die, fuck, love were odd words that rattled in my mouth. “Trust,” Mercy had said. Another word I didn’t know.
Every few hours, nurses padded in and out of the room and doctors prodded me with needles. One broad-backed orderly walked spine-straight with a military buzz cut and patent leather shoes. His shoulders, chest, jaw, even his hair, all if it a perfect square, an architect’s sketch of a man. He almost never spoke in my direction, except to give a command. Open wide, shut, roll over. Yet I recognized his solid voice, the steady sound of a man who fit his skin. Maybe he drew my blood upon admittance. Maybe he knew the proof of the second test. But he kept his mouth sealed and his eyes on the chart in his hands. When he turned on his heels, a cloud of tobacco and turpentine followed, while a phantom musk surrounded my bed. Did he ever shift his eyes? Did he sway his walk? Did he open his mouth or unzip in the hush of another room?
Down the hall, patients broke the silence when they lined up for bright red gelatin molds. Foam slippers busily shuffled back and forth, and applause boomed and echoed. “Oh Lordy,” I could hear Mercy shout every time a pill cup met a pair of praying hands. “Lordy! Lordy! Lordy!”
On Sunday, family filled the lobby with a low buzz and the crinkle of new magazines or goodie bags. But my parents didn’t visit, didn’t call, and with the gloomy synthesizer of a Goth song in my head, I wondered if I’d ever see the exit sign to Charity. I wondered if my last six months would end on a hospital bed in a psych ward like a fox with his tail caught in a trap.
“Does he sacrifice his tail to live free?” I asked out loud, “Or keep the tail and die whole?”
“Such melodrama,” Mercy cautioned, “can only give you heartburn. And trust! No one wants to romance a boy with acid reflux. What you need is…”
“Mercy,” I joked.
“Lordy, no,” she answered, ignoring the pun with an elaborate wave of her hand. “No one needs mercy. Mercy runs like water in the body; it’s always there. All you have to do is swallow, and you can taste mercy. A liar, a cheat, a thief, even a killer has mercy in his mouth, honey lamb. A new story, that’s what you need.”
The next day, after nightfall, Mercy broke into the nurses’ station, slipped my file between her legs, and returned to my room to read what she called the Story of My Life.
“I can already tell you how it ends,” I said. “I get AIDS.”
“What kind of fiction is that?” She screwed up her face. “That’s not a story; it’s a sentence. And it’s certainly no joke.”
“No fiction,” I answered, “No joke. Blood test.”
Mercy flared her eyes and opened her mouth but said nothing. Her lips shut as she sat back in the chair and stared at her palms, as if trying to remember what she had last held. With a quick-knotted fist, she yanked hard on the tail of hair at her shoulder and bolted to her feet. She stepped close to the bed, stooped over my head then let her mouth open over mine. Instead of rose or violet, she smelled of red berries and camphor. At first, I kept my mouth closed as she puckered her lips and inhaled, but the power in her breath pulled the air out of my chest and my lips finally parted. Then she slipped her tongue past my teeth where it sat like an oversized lozenge. Instead of melting, though, with menthol and hard sugar, it thickened into soft suede then wet leather. The tongue hammered at the roof of my mouth before my own tongue started to hammer and a blue fire burst into my forehead. Suddenly, her breath drew back with such force that her cheeks collapsed and her eyes locked into place and I was sure she was having a seizure until she recoiled her tongue, snapped her body straight, and said, “You got nothing.”
“You could tell from a kiss?” I asked.
“You can tell a lot from a kiss, trust! But no.” Her tongue made a popping noise, like an egg in a frying pan. “Lordy, no. I read your file. You don’t have AIDS. Wanna know the real story?”
For the first time since I’d awakened on the ward, a cough broke out of my mouth. A long, wet cough. While I’d been asleep, my chest had steadied, and the fever had cooled. My skin remained red, and my ribs still showed, but my feet and hands no longer throbbed. Had the plasma center found a false positive? Had AIDS been a phantom in my body?
When the cough died down, Mercy placed the file on my chest. She’d just turned thirty-three, her Jesus year, as she put it. More than a dozen years since she sprang out of her mother’s closet at nineteen, same age as me, flashing a rose-colored negligee and a pair of stilettos. She was an adult by then, draft age, voting age, drinking age, but her parents committed Mercy to a ritzy hospital in another parish, where they shot electricity into her brain.
“Ever since,” she said, “I get these tremors, and a knot swells up in my throat until I can’t breathe and a blue fire burns in my forehead and my tongue hammers against my teeth. The scourge, my family calls it. Collateral damage, I say. They aimed for my light but only rattled the socket. I still glow and, yes, honey lamb, I radiate.”
I wanted to ask Mercy about the fire I’d seen in my own forehead but knew better than to interrupt her in the middle of a story. It’s like a hurricane, she’d told me. Just when the eye of the tale moves overhead and the winds ease up, that’s when you know the climax is coming.
“All that heavy voltage failed to dim my girlish glimmer, so the doctors pumped me with bromides then shocked me out of the coma with insulin while my parents stared at me with no lips and no ears. Their faces bore only a pair of shaded eyes. Always at the end, my father would clap my back hard, as if a pink pellet might shoot right out my mouth and onto the floor, where my mother could pick it up, wrap it in tissue, and hide it in her purse. Like a tube of lipstick she meant to discard. When they split, the purse shut, and I ended up here, a dried-up fruit in a bowl of nuts.”
Mercy stared into her palms again while her fingers danced in little spasms.
“You’re no fruit,” I said. “Fruits are sweet or tart, one or the other. You’re both.”
She screwed her lips tight, as if I’d call out her birth certificate name.
“And you’re not dried-up either.”
“No?” Mercy answered. “Then tell me: who hungers for a middle-aged flat-chested giantess? Who visits the bed of a spastic pre-op tranny?”
“The military orderly,” I said. It was a guess. But I pictured him pinning down Mercy’s hands while he stared at the white walls, the fluorescent lights, the heart monitor until his musk filled the room and he commanded her to swallow.
“If you know about that,” Mercy said, “then you know too much.” She waved her finger back and forth. “Time for you to go, honey lamb.”
“You’re an adult. Why don’t you sign yourself out? Why don’t you leave?”
“It’s one thing to leave. It’s another to go.”
Her hands tugged at the knot in her hospital gown until a notebook page fell out. It was a list, a set of prescriptions for behavior. I knew that list. I’d called it out to Mercy one night, telling her of my parents’ search for a gay cure, and the psychiatrist’s directions: don’t wear black, don’t cross your legs at the knee, don’t talk with the tip of your tongue, don’t walk on the tip of your toes, don’t smoke with your fingers in a V, don’t move your head, your eyes, your hips. I’d blubbered about the cure, sobbing maybe the shrink was right, maybe my mother was right, maybe I was wrong-handed, wrong-footed. And AIDS or not, maybe I had hell to pay.
The whole time I’d blubbered, Mercy had clicked and popped and sizzled her tongue. Yet she’d memorized the list and written it down. Through each don’t, Mercy had drawn a red line then marked: Do!
“But I thought…” I started.
Mercy clapped the air with her hands. “Yes, do,” she said. “Do this for me: be for yourself, mister sister. When you get out of this nest, hen-feather your rooster. Sissy everything you do. Mister everything you are. And when some damned fool tells you to stop fucking yourself to death, tell him you’re fucking yourself awake. The world is a book if you only open your eyes to read.”
Then she slipped one more item from the knot in her shirt-dress: a strand of black pearls. Each pearl glowed in her hands and together they looked like the beads from a rosary with the crucifix long lost to time.
“The only stories worth reading never end,” she said. “Or else they all end the same way: To Be Continued. Your story is this: either you got lucky with a false positive or got unlucky with a bad blood test. So flip a coin and decide. Which way will you go? Heads or tails, whatever you choose, let it sound like thunder when you walk.”
The next morning, I waited for Mercy to show as I sat with a zipper bag in my hands on the edge of the bed. I hooked my crucifix earring to the black pearls and folded the last page from a book into my empty wallet. The slim book was one of the first Mercy read, and the final words twisted into a paradox: “Soon, we will be again as we never were and endlessly are.” The nonsense made my blood rise when she spoke it. Like a frustrated pupil, I wanted to wring meaning out of every word, to wrench a moral out of every sign. Yet Mercy made a joke of fake meaning, a farce of phony morals.
With only a few hours left until my noon release, I crossed the hall to find Mercy’s room. The door was half-open, and when I pushed the knob, her bed came into view. The corners were neatly tucked, military style, with the pillow set on end, like a headstone. My throat tightened, and my tongue thickened. Where had she gone so early? Why hadn’t she said goodbye? And how had she left: on a gurney or her own two feet?
When the fragrance of red berries and camphor filled my nose, I knew the answer. And when the floor buzzed with news of a missing patient and a missing nurse’s uniform, I knew the story. Mercy had slipped out before dawn. She’d made it to the exit door before me. Now all I had to do was follow. It wasn’t the end of anything. I wouldn’t die of a scourge or a plague. A pulse beat in my wrist, the blood rushed to my chest. No one waited for me outside of Charity. My mother and father had never shown. My disco friends had never called. Yet I wouldn’t walk out alone. I had Mercy’s pearls now. Trust. Maybe there was nowhere to go, but it was morning, and there was everywhere to be. Once upon a time, I said to myself. It was a beginning.
When she enters the room she has them with her: flowers like bright crowns of light. Yet I look past them to her hands, clutching the bouquet as if she might wring mercy out of it. A haze surrounds her face and—for a moment—all sound is silenced. Even in the haze, that unreal bunch of roses and lilies shimmers in her hands with artful urgency. The paper and ribbon shine too, as if ripped from a still life on a wall. Her arrangement looks like a tribute for a ceremonial occasion, a birth or funeral, an occasion to reckon each breath as a temporary rite, each moment as a fleeting sacrament. My mother lays the flowers across my chest, and suddenly I look not like a patient on a hospital bed but a corpse in a sarcophagus.
The nurse from the hall looks in, tucks a chart under his arm, and says the last of the discharge papers can wait until noon. He also says that—in a way—I died, that the drug seizure briefly left me without air. I kept murmuring afterwards, but the words ran into a jumble. All except one. My lips came together to repeat my first word and the childhood nickname my mother gave me.
“Boo,” I said, clear and strong.
As she props herself on the bed next to me, Mama remains silent at first, and I’m grateful. Too many words have passed between us already. We’re far past apologies now, past repentance and atonement. Instead of talking, we stare at each other like strangers, and my fingers start to tremble and twitch. She runs her perfumed hands over my face, brushing away my unruly hair. Then, when her palm settles on my forehead, my nerves settle too.
Easy now, she speaks. Just two words: “Come home.”
To a Cajun boy, that’s not an invitation but a command. And I can see it: crossing the threshold with my mother, walking into the family den, slipping into my father’s arms.
Yet I shake my head no—slowly—and meet my mother’s eyes. Going back is no way to begin. In Louisiana, all roads lead to the gulf, and I’ve been in that black water too many times already.
Mama smiles. She knew I’d say no. She stands up, turns on her heels, and I hear it: the clink of a key on the counter.
“Yours,” she says, “when you’re ready, Boo.”
After she goes, my chest shakes and my hands tremble again. Then I look on the counter a second time, and I see Mama left not a house key but a skeleton key. On the spine, there’s an engraving in French. The words are a blur. Still, I take the skeleton key in my hand and stare at its secret. Maybe there’s a door somewhere that fits the key. Maybe that door will lead to a library—or a church—filled with light. Or maybe not. Maybe it leads to no place at all. Either way, I know Mama means it as a sign. A key will lock or unlock, will let you in—or out.
Before I exit the room, I slip the key in my pocket, lie back on the bed and close my eyes with a song in my head. At the start, a slow and quiet melody, then a fast and furious rhythm, full of fiddles, accordions, and triangles. A Cajun waltz of loss and longing. A song of exile. Yet all the people in my head are dancing together as if celebrating at a fais do-do. Men with women, women with women, men with men. Pentecostal and Catholic. Sabine and Cajun. Black and white. Tout ensemble. Everyone whirling so fast that no one can tell the dancers from the dance. Their legs saw in and out to the beat. Their arms link and unlink. Then they throw back their heads, open their mouths to the heavens and let out a wild cry as I nod into a dreamless sleep.
When I wake, the clock strikes noon, the door cracks open, and the floor echoes with the sound of walking thunder.