Dropsy Morningstar: “Holy sweet Jesus, what’s that?”
Not aware till now that he’d closed them in the first place, Jim Jam Jump let his eyes fall open.
Twinkling red lights dotted the cobbled floor of Perdido Street through thickening mist. The lights were in pairs, and behind each pair was a dark oblong shadow ending in a thin, whipping tail. Among the smaller pairs was one much larger set of red dots with its own accompanying shadow. The tail of the bigger shadow wagged happily-the tail of a dog.
The sight of it put a feeling of dread in Dropsy’s stomach, a sensation of unpleasant things consumed but not yet passed-but for Jim it was a satisfying thing. It was a thing he’d made all by himself, the
Jim’s face was as expressionless as Buddy’s now, something in his soul shaken loose, drifting into night. Even the cherished horn of Buddy Bolden slipped from his conscious mind-its fall from his limp hand triggering a series of hollow clickety-clacks against the alley floor.
“Careful, dammit,” hissed Buddy, bending down to retrieve the dropped cornet, whispering, “My baby. Shhhh. Poor baby.”
The sound of Buddy’s whisper brought Jim round, his eyes suddenly fluttering with twitchy double-blinks. He turned to Dropsy with flushed cheeks, “Guess I’ll see you ’round tomorrow, pardna. How’s about ten o’clock at our regular spot? Tomorrow be a bigger day, my friend.
Turning to leave, Jim strolled casual as you please down the dead center of Perdido Street, red twinkles and tiny shadows following westward.
“Hold up, Jim,” said Dropsy. “Wait for me.”
Jim didn’t seem to hear, so Dropsy took a step forward.
Buddy placed a hand on Dropsy’s shoulder, said quietly: “No. Let him go.”
Dropsy and Buddy watched in silence as Jim disappeared from view, followed by twinkly red.
Dropsy stood blinking, single blinks, not double: “Damn, Buddy. What just happened?”
“Nature happened, kiddo.” Ever-expressionless.
“Nature?”
“Listen, up, cuz.” Buddy was unprepared to venture into this conversational territory at that moment (or ever)-especially with an idiot like Dropsy Morningstar-and so changed the subject. “I want you to give yer sister a little message.”
“Huh?”
“Tell her I ain’t given up on her yet. Ain’t given up on my little boy, neither.”
Buddy Bolden turned away before Dropsy could think to reply. Swallowed up by the backdoor of the Eagle Saloon, off to play out the fifth set of the night.
Nighttime could be an endless thing for musicians in the tenderloin.
Chapter thirty-one. Night Whisperer
Beauregard Church had long been aware of the long, muddy trail that stretched from behind the prison to the Old Basin Canal and up to the bayou’s heart, had known about it since the days of his tenure at Orleans Parish Prison when he’d often used it to deposit the unwanted remains of prisoners who’d died bereft of other arrangements. The dark path had felt haunted to him even then, and he remembered imagining the sounds of the loveless dead wandering its length in search of last reward. But now the trail was his alone to haunt, and he haunted it well.
Ghosts were plentiful enough at Parish Prison, so it was no shock to guards or inmates when Beauregard’s huge, creaking form began appearing in its halls. The presence of shadowy figures-gliding, stumbling, sometimes flashing-through the walkways of the compound hardly raised an eyebrow in a place so wrought with terrible things, inmates and guards alike often trading ghost stories just to pass the time. Beauregard rather enjoyed being in a position to inspire such tales-and was quite pleased to have once heard an old friend identify him as “The Ghost of Beauregard Church.” The recognition gave him a sense of place.
Beauregard’s excursions to the prison had supplied the Morningstar Family with many happy dawn-time surprises over the years; various foodstuffs, tools, coal, and blankets to name a few-but more recently the prison had supplied a thing of value to Beauregard himself. After many years of paying penance, Beauregard had recently discovered himself unwelcome and unforgiven in the eyes of Typhus Morningstar-the son of the man he killed-and so decided such penance was a thing that could never be paid in full. The prison’s ready supply of morphine tablets provided something of an answer-or at least an escape from the prison of his own guilty heart.
The first tablet brought Beauregard near bliss-but along with this comfort came a hollow feeling at the center of his chest. The warm light of morphine gave him a sensation of untainted conscience, but guilt cut through bliss as a separation of body and spirit, and with this separation came an understanding that peace and emptiness may really be one and the same. He sat at the edge of orange-tinted swamp water pondering such circular thoughts as his eyes followed the lance-shaped leaves and small white flowers of alligator weed that floated at its surface. A voice broke the uneasy silence, his own:
“Got no business feelin’ good ’bout nothin’,” he reassured himself. “This morphine like ta test ya is all. Want to make sure you can keep a hold of yer own pain, Beauregard Church. Pain’s all ya got left, old man. Gotta hang onto that. Pain is yer only reason for bein’. Don’t forget that, now.”
Tugging at his hair and beard with trembling fingers, he focused hard on the task of recapturing his heart’s former heaviness. Gradually, his conscience refilled with regretful memory, but the god of morphine insists on extremes, and so the burden of his soul grew rapidly past capacity, a
At first Antonio’s ghost had been no more than a wisp floating up from the bog like a blue ball of lightning, speaking in throatless, unintelligible whispers. The Cajuns called this kind of light
Now there was a whistle of breeze where there was no breeze, the voice of the night whisperer. A dry whistling coming up from the orange water, solidifying and stretching from tin to brass. Music of some kind, vaguely familiar.
