He looked around him, right and left in the darkness. But the lantern he held gave no more than the dimmest flicker, barely enough to keep him from falling into the gutter as he set off along Rue des Ramparts. If anyone followed him, they were cloaked utterly in the night.
THREE
If a stranger to New Orleans were to follow the street called Perdidio back from the handsome American mansions of St. Charles Avenue, he would be struck, almost certainly, by the rapidity with which those imposing houses gave way to the humbler dwellings of shopkeepers and artisans, to red-brick boardinghouses and then to brickyards, cotton-presses, livery stables. The gaps between buildings grew wider, yielding to undeveloped lots of rank weeds or stands of trees that had seen the Houmas and the Natchez Indians camp beneath them. The pavement failed, the roadbed narrowed to a path which in turn became a slot of gumbo-thick mud. Among the trees, the buildings dwindled to shacks and sheds, nailed together from the planks of the flatboats that came down-river filled with Ohio corn, Indiana hogs, lowa pumpkins, and illiterate Kentucky ruffians in Conestoga boots, spitting tobacco in all directions. At night, cicada-roaring darkness lay between the trees like God's curse upon Egypt, broken only by the feeblest splodges of lantern-light from makeshift taverns that bore names like The Rough and Ready and The Nantucket Virgin. From those dim doorways hoarse shouts and curses resounded, the crash of breaking benches punctuating the tinny laughter of whores.
This was the part of town called the Swamp. It was here that the half-savage Kaintuck keelboat crews took refuge, and the gamblers, publicans, and harlots who fleeced them. It was here that the runaway slaves hid out, in sheds and tents far back in the trees; here that gaggles of snarly-haired prostitutes hunted, giving themselves to forty men a night in rooms barely wider than the beds they contained or on shuck mattresses on the floors of tents; here that the poorest of the city's poor squatted in squalid cabins among the marshy pools.
The hypothetical visiting stranger would have, by this time, learned how Perdidio Street acquired its name: attenuated to a mucky track, it finally lost itself—
That is, if the hypothetical visiting stranger even made it this far, and hadn't been knocked on the head in the dark beneath the trees and relieved of his watch, his purse, his boots, and possibly his clothes as well.
Only strangers in town ever wandered into the Swamp. The local inhabitants knew better.
He'd come, not up from St. Charles Avenue as a white man would have, but around through the literal swamps at the back of New Orleans, his head wrapped in a length of mosquito-netting against the insects that made the soggy ground nearly uninhabitable in summertime. He listened behind him in the moonless dark, less because he thought Queen Regine might be still on his heels than because slave-stealers sometimes haunted these inky woods, looking to kidnap runaways for resale. For this reason, too, he kept the slide over his lantern, leaving only the barest whisper of light to illuminate the path.
It was a good thing he did, for its stray gleam caught the round gold eye of an alligator lying in the path—a big one, to judge by the glint of teeth as it opened its mouth and lunged at him—and January got soaked to the thighs in water that smelled like a cesspool, stumbling into a bog as he circled wide to avoid it.
A deadfall log seemed to materialize underfoot, and he banged his shins.
Ahead on his right he could see lights: the long, ramshackle shed known locally as The Rough and Ready. Lantern-light glowed ruby through the cheap calico that comprised one wall, and like a shadow-play January saw men leap up from the makeshift card-table, cursing like the Devils in Hell. The next moment one man was hurled through the fabric wall, bringing the whole of it down with him.
Women screamed. A large gentleman in buckskins collided with the bar, which, being only planks laid over barrels, collapsed, and the barkeep rushed into the crowd laying about him right and left with a nail-studded mahogany club. A squad of hairy Kaintuck boatmen charged the barkeep with fragments of the benches, and January silently moved on.
The Keelboat Saloon lay to his left, on the edge of a vile-smelling bayou. Its customers nearly trampled January as they rushed toward The Rough and Ready to take part in the fight—it was a slow night, and he supposed one had to take one's entertainment where one found it. The Keelboat was even less salubrious-looking than The Rough and Ready, a dirty wooden box with lines of orange light leaking through its sides. A good kick would bring it down. But January kept on his course for the place, for he heard in the blackness of the steamy night what he'd been seeking: the wild skirl of fiddle music, like a drunken Irish angel embroidering golden fantasias on a Mozart ballet.
January closed the lantern-slide and waited in the trees, knowing that in time someone would come out to whom—if he was careful—he could speak. A black man who walked into a saloon anywhere in town risked being beaten up. Even in the elegant establishments of Rue Royale, he would not dare to be seen to raise a hand against a white man in his own defense; here, such an action would no doubt result in an unpleasant and messy death.
So all he could do was wait, the mosquitoes whining as they tangled up in the veils around his hat and the occasional cicada or palmetto bug blundering into the lantern on roaring wings. He wondered if the gator was still around.
Three burly shapes crashed through The Keelboat's door and ran past January in a reeking backwash of chewing tobacco and clothing months unlaundered; one of the local girls was with them, holding up her skirts to her knees and laughing.
