The Lazarus Heart (10 page)

the goddamn papers
I
killed Benny? How sure were
they,
Lucrece?" He hears the sour, jagged tone wrapped around his words, the anger cranking itself up a notch.

"I don't think that you can punish everyone, Jared. A lot of people did a lot of stupid things. I think that you have to concentrate on what started it all."

"But you don't know that, do you?"

She sighs, a broken sound like a death rattle. "No, Jared. I don't know that."

Jared turns away from her, away from the useless bird, and there's his reflection watching him from the mirror above Benny's dressing table-a dead man's pallid excuse for a doppelganger, its skin like cold ashes. But there is fire there as well, bright vengeful coals in those dead and living eyes.

"Please, Jared. Just give me a chance to find out what I can. There are people I know who might be able to help."

Jared steps closer to the mirror and his reflection takes a step to keep up with him. There's a white Mardi Gras mask hanging limply from one corner of the glass, dangling by its elastic strap.

Jared picks it up, stares into the vicious, clownish grin molded into the creased and wrinkled leather. The mask has a smile no human face could ever manage, its thin scarlet lips curled back upon themselves, a black smear across the empty eye sockets like the face of a rabid raccoon. Jared bought the mask for Benny from a street

vendor, their last Mardi Gras together, and he remembers Benny's emerald eyes glaring at him through those slits.

"Yeah," Jared tells Lucrece as he slips the jester mask over his own, crueler face. "You talk to your witchy friends and see what they say. I'm not going to hold my breath, but you go ask."

Now his eyes fill the space meant for Benny's, his own eyes like last night's fire that only needs to be stirred, that only needs a little tinder to become an inferno again.

There's nothing else in his face any more alive than this mask, nothing else but his eyes worth showing, so he leaves it on.

"In the meantime, I have some questions of my own, Lucrece. And I know the people who have the answers."

The gutterpunks clustered around the gates of Jackson Square talk quietly among themselves, as secretive as any cabalistic order. The rain has slacked off a little, enough for them to slip out from under the eaves and doorways and huddle by the tall iron gates. They've come together in the lee of the cathedral, this evening no different than any other, waiting for the commencement of another night's petty dramas and business transactions. Some of them are homeless and some of them only pretend to be because they envy the independence and self-confidence, the freedom, of those who are.

"But, I mean, you know, you don't think he's some kind of pervert?" the tall boy in the long black dress, the boy who calls himself Michele, asks the others, glancing back over his shoulder at the man lingering outside the Presbytere.

"Jesus, will you please get some kind of fucking due?" The girl who answered him lights a cigarette, exhales expertly through her pierced nostrils, and squints past the smoke at the man standing very still in front of the museum. "No offense, Mikey, but have you bothered to look in a mirror lately?"

"You ain't exactly David fuckin' Duke yourself," one of the boys says, and they all laugh. "You ain't, like, Jesse Helms's fuckin' dream girl yourself."

And Michele glances again over his lean shoulder at the man in the expensive raincoat. "I bet you he's got money," he says. "I bet you he's got a lot of money."

"You gonna blow him or you gonna roll him?" someone says and they all laugh. "Beggars can't be choosers, Mikey," the girl taunts, then she goes back to reading a

ratty paperback novel she's been carrying around for days. There's only one enticing word,
Silk,
printed across the cover, and the face of a white-haired girl staring out through a dream catcher.

Michele knows they're all still waiting for him to prove himself, to show that he's really one of them, not the new kid anymore. This is his first week on the streets, but already he likes it better than his old life in Shreveport. At least this way he gets paid and has some say about the men he has sex with instead of waiting terrified for his stepfather to stumble into his room every night, drunk and so loud there's no way his mother
couldn't
hear. But never a word from her, never so much as a question, her denial as thick as the Max Factor she caked on her face every morning to try to look twenty-five instead of fifty, as thick as the gray shroud of suburban despair he escaped with a stolen credit card and a bus ticket south.

"Gotta learn to take it like a man," his stepfather liked to tell him if he dared to cry. "It ain't no different than the way the world's gonna treat you. It ain't no different than the goddamn world."

"Watch and learn, Robin," he tells the girl. They all laugh again as he steps away from the crowd, feeling immediately more vulnerable, separated from the pack, on his own. The man in the raincoat notices him and smiles tentatively, drops the cigarette he's been smoking to the cobblestones and crushes it out under the heel of one of his loafers.

It can't be more than ten yards from the gates to the spot where the man is waiting for him in front of the Presbytere, a short obstacle course of tourists and street performers, but the walk feels at least three or four times that far. Michele is sweating by the time he's standing beside the man.

"You're very pretty," the man says, and Michele smiles cautiously for him. "But I'll bet you hear that a lot, don't you?"

You think I'm stupid?
the bold, streetwise voice in his head asks the man, the big, brave voice he's spent the past five days cultivating.
You think I don't know you tell that shit to every boy you want to sell you a little head?
But he bats his eyes, just once, shy like the brainless girls at his old school preening for the jocks. "No. No one ever tells me that."

"Well," the man says, "it sure as shit is a cruel old world, then, ain't it?" and in that instant the man sounds so much like Michele's stepfather that he almost backs out, puts his tail between his legs and runs back to the safety of the others, still watching him from the gates.

"Yeah," he says instead. "Yeah, master, sometimes it sure is."

Robin watches from her seat on the stone steps outside the square as the man leads Michele into the narrow alley between the Presbytere and the cathedral. Part of her feels sorry for him, the same part that feels sorry for them all.
The weak part,
she reminds herself, and so she keeps her thoughts to herself and concentrates on the rap music thump-thumping from the boom box at her feet.

When they're done the man gives Michele a twenty and grunts as he wrestles his zipper closed again. Michele wants to spit, wants to get the flat, briny taste of the man out of his mouth.
Nice girls swallow,
he thinks. He doesn't remember where he heard

that but thinks maybe he saw it on a T-shirt once. He's still on his knees, and the old

cobblestones of Père Antoine Alley reek of rotting garbage and magnolia leaves and the piss of all the drunken tourists who've ducked into the alley to relieve themselves. The stones hurt his knees and he gets up slowly, checking to be sure he hasn't run his hose.

"I meant what I said," the man says. "I mean about you being pretty and all. You shouldn't even be out here on the streets. You should get yourself a decent job doing drag or something, you know? These streets will mess you up, kiddo. No one stays as pretty as you if they stay out here very long."

Then Michele is alone, watching as the man walks quickly away from him toward the bright lights and noise and forgiving anonymity of Royal Street. Michele feels something cold against his face and he realizes that the rain's started again, just a light sprinkle so far, but there's thunder too and he knows it'll probably be pouring again in a few minutes. He looks down at the twenty in his hand, the crumpled wad of paper and green ink, and he thinks if he only had one of these for every time he went down on his fucking stepfather, shit, he'd have an apartment in the Pontalba.

He's heading back to the square, eager to show Robin and the others that he didn't wuss out, even more eager to be out of the stinking alley. Then the thunder rattles the sky above him again, rumbles like the growl of something vast and predatory, and

Michele decides that he's at least earned a cup of coffee and ten minutes or so out of the weather. Just a short break before the next John, he tells himself. Maybe he'll buy Robin a cup too.

"Does the thunder scare you, Michele?" someone says, someone standing somewhere behind him. He spins around, stares into the shadows crowding the empty length of Père Antoine.

"No," he answers the darkness, and his voice sounds very small and vulnerable, not the big street-voice at all.

"Not even a little?" the voice asks, insistent and unconvinced. "All that power above your head, like the sound of the sky breaking. That doesn't frighten you?"

"It's only thunder," Michele says, straining to see the speaker, and then the thunder comes again: closer, more immediate, as if it's heard what he said, his casual denial of its authority, and is angry.

"Then you're a very brave little... girl," the voice replies, and the speaker steps out where Michele can see him. Another tall man, wearing a black windbreaker, his hair soaked, hanging across his face in stringy wet hanks. Michele cannot see the man's eyes.

"Do you
want
something, mister?" Michele asks. This time at least he almost
sounds
like he has his shit together, almost sounds the way he imagines Robin would. Never mind that this guy is starting to seriously creep him out, that the urge to just turn and run back to the safety of the gates of Jackson Square and the company of the others is so strong it's almost impossible to stand his ground.

"I want..." the man begins, but his voice is lost in another clap of thunder.

"What?" Michele takes one step backward, wishing now that someone would come along, a bum or a haunted-streets tour or even a fucking cop,
anyone
to interrupt, to break the spell and get him moving.

"I want to talk to you, Michele," the man says. "There are things happening tonight that you and I must talk about."

"I don't have
time
for talk," Michele replies. "I have to make a living." When he turns around, the rain-dulled lights of the square seem so close. Just a few steps and he'll be among people again, back out in the open.

"You'll be paid," the man says behind him, "if that's what you're worried about. You'll get what you've got coming to you. For your time."

"No thanks, mister," Michele says. "I think you've got the wrong person." Now he actually is walking back toward the others, and he's amazed at how much brighter the lights are after only a single step away from the man's oily, vacant voice. He's already beginning to feel a little silly at letting himself get spooked so easily, knows how Robin would rag him if she found out.
You gotta get a thicker skin, girl,
he hears her say,
if you're gonna be turning tricks in the Quarter. There's a whole lotta weirdos out there...

There is the deliberate sound of footsteps behind him then, and a sudden pricking pain at the base of his neck.
I've been stung,
he thinks,
Jesus, I've been fucking stung,
remembering once when he blundered into a nest of angry red wasps behind his grandmother's garage. And then the light is far away again, farther than he ever thought it could be. In another moment it is gone and he's alone in a cold and perfect darkness.

The man who wears the names of rivers knows that he is no longer like other men, that some part of his fearful work has changed him forever and he can never return to the simple, painless life he lived before. Sometimes the knowing of this hurts him so badly that he sits alone in a dark room for hours and cries for the loss of himself. It is a terrible thing, he knows, to have had so little say in the course of his own life, to have had so many things decided for him before he was even born. To be a soldier in an army of light and blood so

secret that there can never be any acknowledgment of his achievements or failures, not even the most fleeting contact with his brothers and sisters in arms, for fear of discovery.

The invaders are everywhere, and Their agents are everywhere. A moment of weakness, one slip, could mean much, much more than the mere loss of his life. He has dreams where someone (never, never him) has been weak, one of the other nameless, faceless soldiers working secretly in the corrupting cities of the world. In the dreams They walk the streets without fear, spreading the androgyne contagion, and the sky burns with the roaring engines of Their warships.

He often wakes from these dreams screaming, curled in his sweat-soaked bed, the choking smells of diesel and burning flesh still hot in his nostrils. But he does not resist the dreams; he understands that they are an integral part of his vision, part of what keeps him strong and certain and pure. He writes down the smallest details of each dream, everything that he can recall, in special black notebooks he keeps in a windowless room in the center of his house.

For almost a week now there has been a new dream, and he knows that it means there is even less time than he'd thought. He has powerful black wings in this dream, the wings of a fierce avenging angel, and they carry him high above the blazing, dying city of New Orleans. The streets below are filled with fire and lakes of blood that bum like gasoline. The writhing bodies of the creatures in Their truest form, Their primary aspect, cling to every wall and rooftop, Their smooth and sexless bodies white as bone beneath the night sky, the wet red holes between Their legs like the beaked jaws of squid or octopi. In the dream Their voices have joined together into a single, hideous wail and Their black and swollen eyes watch jealously as he passes above Them. The end of the dream is always the same, the part where the man with river names looks over his shoulder at the shadow of the crow falling swiftly across the land.