Flesh Wounds, page 25
The chain hadn’t been there ten years ago. Wolf River had served as swimming and fishing hole for Gulf Coast teenagers as far back as Bill could remember. He’d spent his Senior Skip Day here, drunk with Martin and a host of others. Memories of that day, his last visit to Wolf River, flooded back now, born on the soft breeze and the plaintive calls of the cicadas in the pines.
Senior Skip Day was a long-standing tradition at H.C.H.S. Every year a day was chosen. Bill had no idea how, or for that matter who decided, but the word would spread: “Hey, Friday’s Senior Skip Day!” Most of the senior class met at some prearranged spot: the beach, Flint Creek Water Park, the Wolf River bridge. It’d been going on for so many years that Harrison Central took it in stride.
Bill spent Senior Skip Day with Martin Culpepper, cruising in Martin’s brand new T.A., racing every sports car they could find, drinking till he puked his guts out over the side of the bridge, and generally making an ass out of himself, which is all Senior Skip Day was ever really about. One final romp before graduation forced them out on the world as adults.
Kim had driven up to Hattiesburg that day to look around the University of Southern Mississippi where she hoped to start college in the fall. Bill was having a good time without her, though later it would be nice to have a female body to curl up with around a fire on the river bank. No matter, if they wanted girls, Martin’s new car attracted all they needed.
Funny thing about Martin. The cool guys, the “in-crowd,” the prissy prom queen and cheerleader types had never paid any attention to him. Until he got the Trans Am. Before then, he’d always been plain old Martin, somewhat clumsy, a bit slower than the average student and not the type to catch the eyes of even the homelier Gulf Coast debutantes. But the flashy red Trans Am got their attention.
Bill and Martin had met in the third grade where they became immediate friends, a kinship born of common love for the practical joke and the good time. Martin was the first—probably the only—kid Bill had ever known who truly did not fear authority. Fun was fun, and no authority figure was going to stand between Martin Culpepper and a good time. Without Martin, Bill might have grown up with his father’s apathetic outlook on life. Life for Eugene Morgan meant getting from point A to point B with as little hassle—and subsequently, enjoyment—as possible in between. Martin showed Bill how to enjoy every minute. Through elementary, middle, and finally high school, Martin and Bill had been inseparable.
Theirs was an odd relationship. Martin knew Bill had an image to maintain—an image that benefitted them both. Bill was the scholarly, well-behaved type, good home, good parents, church on Sunday and all that. Martin was the infamous troublemaker. They each played their roles well. It was Bill who aced every exam while Martin barely passed (and what answers he did get right, he’d copied from Bill). Whenever there was trouble, Martin took the rap; he had nothing to lose.
Bill got Martin through school; Martin got Bill through life.
Senior Skip Day ‘79 had been Bill’s last trip to Wolf River. Before leaving Gulfport for Chicago, he would only cross I-10’s Wolf River Bridge twice more. That would be a Friday evening, three weeks after Senior Skip Day, a week before graduation, to and from Pontchartrain Beach with Martin.
Bill walked out on the bridge. There was a narrow shoulder, more a curb than anything else, just wide enough that a person hiking the interstate could cross the bridge without getting run down.
From the middle of the bridge, his view of the river was unobstructed. Looking down, he shuddered to think that he and hundreds of others had once leaped from here. In drier summers, the river would sometimes drop to four feet deep at its center.
Younger days, he thought. Days of callow bravado and Devil-take-the-high-road. He’d lost all that somewhere. With a start he realized that he’d lost it right here... on this very bridge.
“Open her up, Martin. Let’s see just exactly what this bitch can do!”
The t-tops were off. The warm southern air whipped Martin’s hair into a frenzy. He tossed it out of his face and howled at the perfect pale moon in the black sky above. “Hang onto your nuts, Billy boy! I’m gonna show you what she can do!”
The engine roared as Martin stomped the pedal. Though they were already doing at least sixty, the front end of the T.A. did a little hop. Acceleration thrust the boys deep into their seats and the little red needle on the dash fell swiftly past vertical.
“You need a radar detector, man. Highway patrol’s gonna nail your ass.”
Martin laughed. “They ain’t gonna radar what they can’t see!” He killed the headlights.
It wasn’t as dangerous as it might have been. After the first few seconds of absolute darkness, it wasn’t hard to see the lines down the center of the interstate.
There were cars coming and Bill didn’t feel safe on the bridge. He walked back to the car and leaned against the hot hood, fighting the rush of memories.
He ran his fingertips along the crack in the windshield. It seemed a perfect match. “There was a full moon, Martin. And stars like I’ve never seen since. Why didn’t we see her?”
The T.A. was doing at least 140 when they went across the bridge, maybe more. It was hard to tell because the needle in Martin’s after-market speedometer was jittering. The T.A. was shaking like it was going to fall apart.
That night there were teenagers jumping from the bridge. Looking down the stretch of interstate, the kids would have seen nothing but darkness, no headlights, no cars coming. One girl must have changed her mind. She climbed down from the railing and stepped back into the road.
Martin hit her.
She came up over the hood, legs crushed on impact, pelvis and ribs destroyed. Her face hit the windshield on the passenger side, right in front of Bill. For an unmeasurable fragment of time that clung in his vision like a retina scar, she sprawled there across the hood, blood, teeth, and brains deliquescing across the spider-webbed safety glass. The scream of the tires locking up as Martin belatedly hit the brakes seemed to emanate from her gaping mouth. The T.A. slewed sideways on the bridge, came up on two wheels and nearly rolled before Martin got it back under control.
The shattered corpse flipped over the roof, spraying blood across the boy’s aghast faces. As she went by, her hand seemed to claw at Bill’s shoulder. Then she was gone, slipping across the trunk like a discarded fast food sack, tumbling across the highway, all shattered bones and torn flesh, lit briefly in the T.A.’s brake lights.
Martin’s eyes went to the rearview mirror, aslant and coated with fine droplets of blood. Hand shaking, he adjusted it. He let off the brake and floored the accelerator, fighting the car till it was straight on the highway.
“Stop the car, Martin!”
Martin shook his head vehemently, his jaw set and his eyes locked on the rearview.
Her name was Roxanne Ladner. She’d just turned thirteen.
Martin held the peddle down, his face set like someone who’d just tasted sour milk, while the Ladner girl’s blood streamed across the windshield, following the jagged lines writ in the glass. Bill could remember curling into a shuddering ball on the floorboard for the remainder of the ride to Gulfport, all the while the T.A.’s motor purring like some sated predator. Martin never said a word till he hit the Gulfport exit, and then it was only to curse when he almost lost control of the car on the cloverleaf ramp. He switched on the headlights when they pulled out on Highway 49 heading north towards Bill’s home in Orange Grove. Five minutes later Bill was home, shuddering on the porch swing, afraid to go in the house for fear his parents would ask how his evening had been.
Later in school, Martin bragged about getting a cousin to fix the car. “Told him I hit a deer and didn’t want Mom and Dad to know about it.” Bill had never spoken to him again.
Though downtown New Orleans had undoubtedly changed in the years since, to Bill it seemed she wore the same tawdry face that had fascinated him as an adolescent. Like a high-priced whore promised a better life, she waited for him after all these years. She’d been in the business too long, but knew no other way of life. Her beauty lay all but invisible beneath time’s footprints and scars, beneath the lipstick of cruel lovers and the bruises of those who’d used her to vent their hatred. Driving through town, Bill still felt something. Maybe nothing more than the lingering warmth from memories of time spent here with Kim, but something all the same.
He followed Esplanade towards the river, the rust-colored Trans Am winking back at him from shop fronts and plate glass windows. The streets were lined with Mardi Gras crazies in costumes and colors: billowing pantaloons, sequined gowns, gaudy masks. They carried drinks in one hand, beads, doubloons, plastic swords, and assorted parade-offal in the other. Their necks were adorned with great halters of cheap plastic beads, glittering beneath the street lamps like diamonds and pearls. Those without costumes were dressed with a drunken immunity to the cold wind that came in off the Mississippi River and wound ghostlike through the streets.
Normally, it’d be a simple matter to spot the local prostitutes, but not tonight. Tonight they all looked like hookers in their dark hose and short skirts, their cut-offs and tube tops, their unfettered breasts bobbing beneath shirts wet with liquor, their legs long and their heels high. Strangers cruised the boulevard, hanging from car windows and shouting, “Show me your tits!” From his own days cruising these streets, Bill knew that at least a fourth of the women would. For beads, for doubloons, for candy they wouldn’t even eat the next day, they’d quickly yank up their blouses to prove they had as much as the next gal.
He tried to turn down Bourbon Street, but a cop waved him off. The street was choked with drunkards, tank-topped muscle men, painted women, and fags. He took Decatur to Saint Peters and Saint Peters to the Vieux Carre Riverview where he found a spot to ditch the car along the railroad tracks. He doubted anybody would be out giving tickets tonight. And with a gaping hole where a stereo should be, it was equally unlikely that anyone would break in.
He walked back to Bourbon Street and lost himself in the crowds. Elbows jostled him. Women rubbed hips and breasts against him. A stranger put a plastic cup full of beer in his empty hand. His shoes stuck to the pavement as he walked, the result of a thousand spilled drinks. Each step he took was accompanied by a desperate little squelch, the struggles of a cockroach trapped in a roach motel. There were cops everywhere, some on horseback, the eyes of their mounts wild in the sodium lights. Between the crowded bars and strip joints slunk dark alleys, untraveled corridors in a haunted house. From these fetid recesses trickled streams of foul urine. The stench rose like steam and mixed with the heady odor of alcohol.
A parade was making its way down Canal Street. Even here, six blocks away, he could hear the shouts of “Throw me sumthin’, Mistuh!” He thought he heard the sound of doubloons tinkling on the pavement, but it was only a drunk dropping his change.
He came across a dark-eyed beauty too busy holding up a lamp post to go for a drink. He gave her his beer and ducked into the first bar he came to. There wasn’t an open seat in the house, but he found a dark corner that suited him. It wasn’t until a waitress approached that he wondered where he was.
“Where am I?” he asked, putting his lips to her ear. She smelled of cigarettes and impromptu, back-alley sex.
“Hurricane, babe. That’s what everyone’s having.”
She left with a swirl of skirt and tanned thighs. He realized that she’d thought he’d asked about a drink.
His overloaded ears were assaulted with a hundred conversations laced with belches and calls for more beer. The room was filled with smoke: cigarette and the sweeter aroma of Mary Jane. Beneath the smoke hovered the stench of stale bodies and beer farts, whores working their third or fourth trick of the night, and vomit. Bill’s head spun and his stomach did a quick roll that left him leaning against the greasy walls in the corner. Seeking a focus, he fixated on the conversation nearest him.
“Man, I heard sum fuckin’ niggah mugged Clarence last night when he was takin’ a piss inna alley offa Iberville.”
“I wisht some niggah’d try it wit me, by God! I’d shure like to kick me sum—”
“The niggah hadda gun, Henry. What da fuck you gonna do?”
“Shit. Need to pass a law that don’ allow dem niggahs to have guns, das for shure!”
“Can’t make a law jus’ for niggahs. Dey’d hafta take white folks guns too, Henry.”
“An’ who says dat’s all bad? Hell, jus’ last week sum dumb sumbitch upta Chicago blew his wife away cause he thought she was a fuckin’ burg’lar. Tell me sumbody shouldn’ta took dat sumbitch’s gun away!”
Bill pushed away from the corner and ran. The waitress yelled at him as he hit the exit door. She was waving a drink in a tall glass shaped like an old fashioned hurricane lamp.
Recklessly, he shoved his way through the crowds. Women slapped at him. Men cursed. More than one shook his fist—Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras are famous for street brawls, hence the multitude of cops—but Bill kept moving. His head hurt and his mouth was dry. His stomach was twisted in knots. He bumped into one particularly large fellow in a Mötley Crüe t-shirt who shoved him back against a wall. Bill’s head smacked sharply against the dingy bricks, and it was then he spotted Martin.
He saw him only briefly, through a momentary break in the crowd, on the other side of the street.
“What’s your hurry, asshole?”
Bill pushed past the man. He caught another glimpse of the back of Martin’s head. The big man caught Bill’s wind breaker and pulled him up short. Bill spun, twisted free of the jacket and darted into the crowd.
He tripped on the curb on the other side of the street. He nearly went down, but a smiling drunk in pirate hat and eyepatch caught him. Without thanking him, Bill pushed on up Bourbon Street. He saw him again, yelled. Martin paused and looked back. Just before the crowd blocked him from sight, Bill saw his eyes. They were glazed. Unfocused. Lost.
“Get out of the way!” Bill pleaded, pushing at the milling crowd. A fist clipped his jaw, a punch that would have surely dropped him had it connected. He caught one more glimpse of Martin, thought he saw who Martin was following, then someone tripped him. By the time he got back up to resume the chase, Martin was gone.
Desperately, Bill searched up and down Bourbon Street, looking for that one particular mop of dark hair for more than two hours.
He couldn’t find him.
The more he looked, the more he doubted what he’d seen. It’d been ten years since he’d last seen Martin Culpepper. He could have been mistaken.
He didn’t even want to think about the girl he thought he’d seen Martin following.
The car was where he’d left it, untouched.
He got in and locked the door, dropped the front seat back and closed his eyes. His head still pounded and there seemed to be a black hole where his heart should be. The hole was eating him from the inside out. He could feel it painlessly absorbing, a dark maelstrom that left an empty, lost kind of numbness behind.
Tell me sumbody shouldn’ta took dat sumbitch’s gun away!
Bill curled up against the tattered vinyl and wept.
Shrove Tuesday.
New Orleans hung over him, a withered old woman who recognized him as one who’d tasted of her youth and left her behind. He’d come back, this prodigal son, no different than a thousand others, his carrion coach wrapped about him like a coffin, reeking softly of secrets and death. His sins were tucked away where he thought them hidden. But she knew. She knew them all.
She wrapped her blanket of night about him, slipping through the bug-smeared windshield to touch his hand, to brush the hair back from his brow, to taste the chill that haunted his lips. Somewhere nearby a church bell sounded one long mournful note; otherwise, all was silent. New Orleans pillowed Bill’s head against her decadent bosom.
And he dreamed...
Kim took his hand and led him through the darkness. He followed, mesmerized by her beauty, aroused by the warmth of her hand. She was eighteen again. She wore a pale blue summer dress beneath which her breasts were firm, her stomach flat. Her hips had regained the sway that had first attracted him so long ago. Her shoulders and neck were the color of fine oak, lightly freckled by the sun. She hadn’t worn her hair this long since high school. She smelled of honeysuckle and soft summer breezes.
“I thought I’d never see Mardi Gras again, Bill.”
Her voice brought tears to his eyes. They spilled down his cheeks, fire against his cold flesh.
She waved her arm and a parade appeared in the darkness. Floats and people. Beads and coins arcing in the air. The smell of flowers and... gunsmoke.
“You know what all this means, don’t you?”
“I—” He shook his head, uncertain what she meant.
She slapped playfully at his arm, then stood on her toes and kissed his cheek. “The parades, silly. Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday.” She cocked her head, raised an eyebrow.
“No,” he confessed.
“Mardi Gras is the big blowout before Lent. Tomorrow’s Ash Wednesday. Don’t you know anything?”
“I don’t understand.” With so many important things he wanted to tell her, he didn’t understand why they should be talking about Mardi Gras.
“Lent. The eight weeks preceding Easter that are observed as a season of penitence. You know, time to feel sorry for your sins.” She caught a strand of red beads, hung them about his neck. “No parties allowed during Lent, Bill. You got to do your partying the night before. The French knew it. They started Mardi Gras.”
“What’s all this got to do with me?” The parade had passed. Garbage lay in its wake. He went to kick at a piece of it, but stopped when he saw what it was. He turned away, refusing to acknowledge its existence, but the image persisted in his mind’s eye: a blood-soaked tennis shoe with LADNER stenciled across the side.
