The Lazarus Heart (8 page)

Lucrece risks one hand on Jared's right shoulder and he turns on her, the glare meant for the bird. She thinks maybe she can see hell locked up in those eyes, the pupils dropping straight down forever.

"I'm right, aren't I? It doesn't know, any more than the goddamn police knew."

"The crow is doing what it was made to do, Jared. Whatever else is going on here, it's just a crow and there are limits to its..." and she pauses, knowing how she must sound to Jared, pragmatic, irreligious Jared, that this is all just a bunch of crazy voodoo nonsense to him.

"There are limits to its powers. There's something else going on here, something that's getting in the way, that we have to figure out and get around."

Jared buries his face in his hands and she thinks that he's about to cry again.

That would be better than the anger, something she understands more intimately. She's spent all her life since her brother's death in the company of sorrow. She has become sorrow's most cherished concubine.

"I don't understand any of this," Jared says.

"And you mustn't waste your time trying," Lucrece replies, hoping that there's at least a little solace in her voice now. "You can get lost if you spend too much time trying to understand how this could be. You have to simply accept that it is."

"How do you know these things, Lucrece? Can you just tell me that? Can you tell me why
you
understand what this fucking bird is saying?"

She pauses again, knowing the answer but afraid to turn it loose, faced suddenly with her own fears and self-doubts. Knowing that her response will bind her to this mystery with knots that no fingers, mortal or undead, can ever unravel.

"Yeah," she answers at last as she takes her hand from Jared's shoulder and begins unbuttoning the front of her dress. "I think that maybe I can." She pulls the dress down past her thin white shoulders, revealing the severe black silk corset underneath. Lucrece turns around so that Jared can see her bare shoulders.

"I had it done about a month after Benny's funeral," she says. "I hoped that the pain and the healing would help
me
begin to heal some..." Her voice trails off as she feels his eyes on her back, tracing the intricate pattern of scars there. The picture the scalpel drew into her skin, the cutting that she meant to be a raven, after Jared's photograph.

But the artist only had a picture of a crow to work from and didn't confess that he'd cheated on the design until later, after the gauze and surgical tape were hiding his fresh, weeping work.

"I think that's why I can hear your crow, Jared."

"Oh, Lucrece," he says, and his fingertips graze the crisscross of puckered white tissue.

"It helped a little," she says, and pulls her dress back up, hiding the cutting. "Maybe it's going to help a lot now. Maybe it's going to let me help you."

Jared rises and stands above the crow, and the bird cranes its neck to look up into his face.

"If you brought me back here for nothing, you bastard," he says, "I swear that you'll die very, very slowly."

"I think it's time to cut the macho bullshit, Jared," Lucrece says, her fingers working the last of the dress's pearlescent buttons. "And if you care, it's a she."

Jared glares down at her, uncomprehending, and the crow caws softly. "The
crow"
Lucrece says. "It's a
she."

Jared rolls his eyes. "Pardon me," he says.

The crow tells them that there's a little time then, and so Jared rests awhile in Lucrece's arms and listens to the rain, coming down harder now, playing the roof of the building like a perfect and soothing percussive instrument. He closes his dead man's eyes and tries to pretend that these are Benny's arms around him instead of Benny's twin's. She strokes his hair with her long fingers, fingers like Benny's grown softer and more hesitant, but close enough for the game in his head.

"I want to get this awful jacket off you," she says. "And this shirt." He is still in his funeral clothes, slit up the back for the morticians' convenience. "And then I'll find something else for you to wear."

Jared Poe met Benjamin DuBois at a gallery in the Warehouse District, a ramshackle barn of corrugated steel, punky masonry, and bare concrete floors set so close to the river that the air smelled like mud and rotting fish. It was a performance thing and he'd only gone because it was a friend's boyfriend's show and he'd run dry of excuses. With very few exceptions he'd always found performance art either a horrific bore or simply horrible, a last, pretentious refuge for talentless wanna-bes desperately trying to gouge a niche for themselves. Most of the time he'd end up feeling embarrassed for the performer, embarrassed for the audience trying to understand whatever foolishness was being acted out for them, and so uncomfortable that he'd

sneak out halfway through the show.

And the scene that night was no exception, certainly not the worst thing he'd ever seen, but bad enough to make him wish he'd just made up a story about car trouble or leaky plumbing and stayed home. The artist stood on a small stage in the center of the warehouse, wearing nothing but an old alligator hide and a pair of expensive-looking loafers, reading aloud from the
Wall Street Journal.
Fortunately there was a bar and Jared stayed close to it, downing shots of tequila and trying to keep a straight face. But the mask became increasingly difficult to manage as the guy in the alligator skin droned on and on and the Cuervo worked its way through Jared's bloodstream to his brain.

In an effort to distract himself he began eavesdropping on a couple standing a few feet away from him, near the edge of the crowd. Jared had noticed right away how much they resembled one another, and the woman was so tall he thought maybe she was really a drag queen. They were speaking loudly to each other, almost shouting in order to be heard over the stock quotes being read through the microphone onstage, the nasal voice booming from speakers rigged high along the rusty walls. Both were dressed in impeccably tailored leather and latex Victorian costumes, their skin as white as chalk and their hair like black satin. To Jared they looked like some fetish freak's vision of Jonathan and Mina Harker, an unlikely juxtaposition of the prim and perverse, but they wore that vision well no matter how unlikely it might be.

"This is surely hell," the woman said. Her voice seemed to confirm Jared's suspicions about her gender.

"No, no," the boy said, leaning close to her ear and still having to shout. "This is a lot worse than
that."

The boy wasn't exactly Jared's type. He'd always gone for the well-muscled

submissives, the hard but yielding bodies that could take whatever loving tortures he might happen to devise. He'd always found the goth end of the S&M and fetish scene a little tedious, too much window dressing for his particular tastes. But
this
boy was something different, something so unexpected with his high, sharp cheekbones and hooded eyes, and Jared was taken completely off guard by the stirring in his jeans. He asked the bartender for another shot of tequila and took a cautious step closer to the pair.

"Hell has better acoustics," the boy was shouting.

"And something worth hearing," the woman shouted back.

"Not impressed, I take it," Jared said, just loud enough to be heard, and they both turned and regarded him skeptically from kohl-smeared eyes.

"Oh, don't tell me," the boy said, one index finger held up for emphasis. "He's this poor, misguided fuck's lover and we've offended his feelings."

"Or maybe he's just a critic for some rag," his companion said. Jared realized, now that they were facing him, that the pair were identical twins.

"No," Jared said, smiling, playing the good sport to their jibes. "He's just the poor schmuck who didn't have any place better to be tonight, that's all."

"Oh," the boy said. "That's better. Then we don't have to make polite over this drivel." Jared shook his head, took a sip of his tequila before responding.

"Hardly. Can either of you make heads or tails of what's going on up there?"

The boy glanced back toward the gator-clad nude and shrugged."Well," he said after a moment, "we're of two minds on the subject.
I
think it's all an unfortunate misunderstanding. The real artist was held up in traffic or mugged or something, and
this
guy is just some unmedicated street person who conveniently wandered in. The similarity between his delusion and this crowd's expectation was so profound that no one's noticed yet. My
sister,
on the other hand, thinks it's a brilliant metaphor for the creeping gentrification of the-"

His sister interrupted him with a sock in the arm, not hard, but he made wounded sounds and rubbed at his shoulder. "Do you have a name?" she asked, holding out her gloved hand to Jared as if she expected him to bow and kiss it.

"Oh, yeah. Sorry." He shook the extended hand. Her leather glove was as supple as silk and her grip through it was firm but not mannish. "Jared. Jared Poe. I'm a photographer."

"Jared
Poe?
P-O-E Poe?" the boy said, still rubbing his shoulder and glaring sidelong at his sister. "That's a joke, right?"

"Nope," Jared replied, finishing his drink. "I'm afraid it's not. That's my real name."

The sister took a dramatic step back, spread her arms wide, and cleared her throat loudly before she began to speak, her voice broad and deeper than the unfortunate voice blaring through the speakers. She held her head high as she spoke, her eyes focused somewhere past the dust and rafters overhead, and delivered each syllable with stage-perfect diction.

"'But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing further then he uttered: not a feather then he fluttered-

Till I scarcely more than muttered: "Other friends have flown before-"'"

Then a hippie standing behind them turned and shushed her. The boy rolled his eyes and muttered, "Oh,
please,
like you might miss last week's pork futures." The hippie scowled and turned back toward the performer.

"That was actually very good," Jared said, and the boy regarded his sister with eyes that were somehow jealous and proud at the same time.

"Lucrece is such a terrible show-off," he said.

"It's better than listening to that idiot," Jared said, using his empty shot glass to point in the direction of the Wall Street gator boy.

Lucrece sighed and offered Jared half a smile. "Well, that's a pretty sorry excuse for a compliment, mister, but thanks anyway." And then the hippie hissed,
"Shhhhhhhhh,"
louder than before, and her brother stuck his tongue out in response.

"If you
people
aren't interested in the show, maybe you should go elsewhere," the hippie said.

"He has a point," Jared told the twins. "If I have to listen to any more of this crap I think I'll puke."

The hippie shook his head as he turned back toward the little stage. "I honestly pity people like you who aren't open to new experiences."

"Oh, Jesus in a Ford pickup," Lucrece said, and she took her brother's hand and Jared's and towed them both through the haze of cigarette smoke and the whispering press of bodies toward the loading ramp that served as the gallery's only visible entrance and exit, leading them out into the night.

Outside, the sultry air felt almost cool after the crowded warehouse. They walked northwest along Market Street, away from the river and its fishy miasma.

When Jared suggested that maybe this part of town wasn't the best spot for a stroll after dark, Lucrece laughed a soft, low laugh and asked him which part of New Orleans was. The brother, whose name he still had not learned, produced a small silver flask of brandy they shared as they turned off Market and wandered between other derelict buildings, crumbling red brick walls and tin roofs separated from one another by streets neglected so long they were more pothole than asphalt.

The heady combination of the booze and the company of the twins distracted and disoriented Jared. Soon he was uncertain precisely where they were. Nothing looked familiar, or rather everything looked
vaguely
familiar-some corner of the Warehouse District that hadn't yet been made fit for yuppie habitation but had for the time being been left as a decaying signpost back to an era when the area had bustled with the noise and activity of forgotten industry.

"Where the hell are we going?" Jared asked finally, and he could hear the slur that had crept into his voice somewhere between the tequila and the brandy.

"What difference does it make?" the boy said, but, Luerece answered, "Our place.

It isn't far now."

They came to the mouth of a narrow alley half barricaded with the husks of two burned-out cars and an abandoned refrigerator. As the twins slipped ahead of him, forsaking the weak cover of the streetlights, Jared paused, leaned against the hood of one of the old cars, and tried uselessly to clear his head. He'd never been far enough north to have walked on thin ice, but he thought it must feel something like this, uncertain steps taking him farther and farther from safe and solid ground. The boy turned and looked back at him from the shadows, the darker slice between high, dark walls. "Are you coming or not, Jared? It's not safe out here alone, you know?" He sounded impatient and amused, distantly petulant, and Jared realized that his dick was hard again. Hard for this pretty, taunting goth boy dressed up like some William Gibson version of 1890s London, and probably hard for his haughty bitch twin as well.

"Really, Jared. Benny's right. There are bad people out here." The voice came from somewhere close behind him. He spun around too fast, almost lost his balance, almost fell face first onto the broken pavement. Lucrece was standing by the old refrigerator, although he could have sworn she'd been the one in the lead, had already disappeared down the alley in front of her brother.

"How... how'd you do that?" She just smiled at him.

"Like I said before," Benny sneered from the alleyway, "she likes to show off. She read a book once, that's all."