watch.
I sat at the bar. Smiled at Felix. Felix smiled back and absently popped the top off a Dixie and hammered it next to my elbow.
“You thirsty?” I asked Abby.
She nodded. Felix popped another.
“You’re in luck,” he said. “I ain’t askin’ for IDs today.”
I introduced them as I finished half of the cold beer. I was dead, travel tired. I wanted to go back to the warehouse and sleep for a couple days. Maybe even hibernate. I stretched my legs off the barstool.
The pale yellow afternoon light shot in broken, loose fingers between handbills that had been Scotch-taped in the window. Some so brittle and old that they’d somehow fused to the glass. I heard the clip-clop of the driver and horse rambling away into a French Quarter dusk.
“How long has this place been here?” Abby asked. She tugged on the beer, too hard, and the foam spilled over onto her hand.
“Long as I’ve been alive.”
She seemed okay with the answer as she felt along the edges of the old mahogany bar, feeling the cuts, cigarette burns, and dents as if they were braille markings.
We watched SportsCenter with Felix for a while as the afternoon regulars of T-shirt salesmen and Bourbon Street day players rolled in for a cold one before heading home or to begin their night. I hoped I’d see Oz or Hippie Tom. But it was early and I believed Oz may have started his fall ghost tours since it was close to Halloween.
I felt an arm reach across my throat and heard a gruff, weathered voice say: “Gettin’ soft when an old man can sneak up behind you.”
Without looking up I said, “Shouldn’t have to watch your back in your own home.”
“Yeah,” JoJo said, laughing. “Just like a crazy man to call a bar his home.”
I turned and gave JoJo a quick shake so he wouldn’t try to crush my knuckles as he always did with his thick bricklayer hands.
“Abby, I’d like you to meet the top male stripper in New Orleans, Mister Joseph Jose Jackson.”
He reached out and kissed her hand. “With his legs, he’d be lucky to make a nickel on Rampart Street.”
Abby laughed and JoJo motioned us back to the far corner table where he conducted business and occasionally drank with dead men. I wondered how much Loretta had told him as we sat down.
The chairs were mismatched, rickety, and old. I felt a bit uncomfortable stretching my legs again as the chair strained with my weight. I watched JoJo’s face grow serious under a big red neon sign for Jax beer.
“Miss,” JoJo said. “I am real sorry to hear about your folks. If you get tired of this ole so and so, you can always come stay with us. Always need some help ’round here.” He winked at her, his face weathered and very black. “Jes let us know.”
Abby thanked him. Felix brought out another round on JoJo’s orders and Loretta soon appeared with four steaming portions of her famous soul jambalaya. Reheated but just as good. She didn’t tell anybody how she made it, but I knew she always began everything with a thick, smoked ham hock. Even reheated, this stuff was the essence of life: andouille sausage, onions, green peppers, and chicken soaked in Crystal sauce. A big crusty baguette from the market.
You knew food was good when no one talked. No one spoke until every bit of jam was gone and the bowl had been wiped clean with the bread. After that, Loretta began to talk about meeting with Cleve and Bobby Lee Cook and even about our encounter with Clyde at the bridge. As she told the story, she watched my face, letting me know to leave out other parts. She hadn’t told JoJo about the men coming to the bar before I left, or that someone had tried to kill me and Abby.
“So the Ghost finally up and died on you?” JoJo asked.
I watched Loretta looking at her hands and said, “Yeah. She finally just fell apart.”
“Well,” JoJo began, his eyes narrowed. He leaned back and folded his arms, a man just watching what would come out our mouths next. “Glad y’all is back.”
Felix dipped by as an awkward silence fell onto the table and lit a candle in a red glass. It was night now and the evening’s band, some guys out of Atlanta called The Shadows, were setting up.
The doors had been propped open and a biting breeze shot off Conti and bent the candle’s flame.
“Lo, you mind closin’ up tonight?” JoJo asked. “Robert Junior down at Tips and asked me to sit in.”
“I can help,” I said. I guess I spoke too loud and too soon because JoJo raised his eyebrows. “We’ll come back for the last set. Just let me get Abby settled in to the warehouse and get some clean clothes.”
JoJo nodded to himself and got up from the table.
As he turned his back, Loretta winked at me and pinched my arm. She was actually having fun fooling the old man.
“I’ll be fine, Nicholas,” she said. “Y’all get home and get rested.”
“Don’t leave this bar without me tonight,” I said. “You hear me?”
“Nicholas, I ain’t ever lived my life in fear and won’t start now. Besides, we’re back home. Memphis is a long way.”
I slipped back into my jacket and motioned to Abby. The band launched into their first song, the lyrics about souls slipping off into the Dark Side.
Chapter 43
Perfect Leigh was damned tired of waiting. She’d been sitting on her ass in the stinky French Quarter since noon, most of it in some nasty old burger joint where she’d watched this elderly cook ritualistically pick his nose, and now she wanted a little action. She was bored. And that was about the worse thing that you could make Perfect Leigh. When she got bored she got bad. She clicked her nails together. Nice color. Siren. She whispered the words to herself, her tongue flattening on the roof of her mouth, as a cold wind knocked down Royal Street and into the darkened bar.
Where was Jon? She’d gotten off the phone with Ransom thirty minutes ago and he said to go on and get what they needed. But Jon wanted to get the car ready, said they needed good parking as if they were goin’ shopping down at Maison Blanche.
She blew out a long breath, studying the fine curve of her nails in the candlelight.
Bar was called Lafitte’s. It was supposed to be some kind of historic site although it looked to Perfect as if it’d been slapped together with a bucket of concrete and rotten wooden beams. They didn’t have lights; each one of the tables was dim and yellow from little candles. No air-conditioning either. Its tall creaky doors had been propped open to breathe in the night’s snappy cold air.
Finally, Jon sauntered on in from the cold, lanky and determined, and sat across from her. His face nothing but a bearded black grin under his cowboy hat. “What time you got?”
“Almost midnight,” she said, studying the way his mouth formed words. She wondered how he’d say si-ren. “You park in Mississippi?”
Jon didn’t answer. His face pinched in the glow of the table’s candle. Dark circles seemed to grow under his eyes as he leaned close and he played with the rings on his fingers. “Did you see him?”
“He wasn’t there, only the black woman.”
Jon looked back at the open doors and felt at the side pocket of his jacket. Perfect watched his pistonlike leg and the way his jaw chomped on a whole pack of gum. Juicy Fruit. She hated Juicy Fruit. Reminded her of when she was in Biloxi and thirteen and her mother had paid off the pageant’s judge with a visit to Perfect’s room at the Motel Six.
“Why do you care about Travers so much?” she asked, trying to turn her head and not take a whiff of the sickly sweet gum.
“He killed me.”
She again studied his features under the Resistol’s brim.
“Years ago, I died and this man was responsible.”
“You’re insane. I knew you had some quirks but I refuse to work with a real life walking head case.”
