A Little Purple Book of New Orleans Stories, page 1
A LITTLE PURPLE BOOK OF NEW ORLEANS STORIES
Poppy Z. Brite
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Crossroad Press Digital Edition 2021
Original publication by Borderlands Press—2015
Copyright © 2015 Billy Martin
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Billy Martin, known professionally as Poppy Z. Brite, is an American author. He initially achieved notoriety in the gothic horror genre of literature in the early 1990s by publishing a string of successful novels and short story collections. His later work moved into the genre of dark comedy, with many stories set in the New Orleans restaurant world. Martin’s novels are typically standalone books but may feature recurring characters from previous novels and short stories. Much of his work features openly bisexual and gay characters.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels and novellas
Lost Souls
Drawing Blood
Exquisite Corpse
The Crow: The Lazarus Heart
“Plastic Jesus” (novella)
The Value of X
Liquor
Prime
Soul Kitchen
D*U*C*K (novella)
Triads (with Christa Faust)
Second Line
Short story collections
Wormwood
His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood and Other Stories
Are You Loathsome Tonight? (also published in the UK as Self-Made Man)
Wrong Things (with Caitlin R. Kiernan)
The Devil You Know
Antediluvian Tales
Anthologies (as editor)
Love in Vein
Twice Bitten (Love in Vein II)
DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS
Visit the Crossroad site for information about all available products and its authors
Check out our blog
Subscribe to our Newsletter for information about new releases, promotions, and to receive a free eBook
Find and follow us on Facebook
We hope you enjoy this eBook and will seek out other books published by Crossroad Press. We strive to make our eBooks as free of errors as possible, but on occasion some make it into the final product. If you spot any problems, please contact us at crossroad@crossroadpress.com and notify us of what you found. We’ll make the necessary corrections and republish the book. We’ll also ensure you get the updated version of the eBook.
If you have a moment, the author would appreciate you taking the time to leave a review for this book at the retailer’s site where you purchased it.
Thank you for your assistance and your support of the authors published by Crossroad Press.
“The Heart of New Orleans,” copyright 2002 by Poppy Z. Brite. Originally published in City Slab #1, Oct. 2002.
“The Devil You Know,” copyright 2000 by Poppy Z. Brite. Originally published in Imagination Fully Dilated #2, IFD Press, 2000.
“Missing,” copyright 1986 by Poppy Z. Brite. Originally published in The Horror Show, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1986.
“Four Flies and A Swatter,” copyright 2007 by Poppy Z. Brite. Originally published in Antediluvian Tales (author collection), Subterranean Press, 2007.
“Mussolini and the Axeman’s Jazz,” copyright 1995 by Poppy Z. Brite. Originally published in Dark Destiny: Proprietors of Fate, White Wolf, 1995.
“Wound Man and Horned Melon Go to Hell,” copyright 2006 by Poppy Z. Brite. Originally published in Damned Nation, Hellbound Books, 2006.
“The Gulf,” copyright 2008 by Poppy Z. Brite. Originally published in Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, 2008, Subterranean Press.
For Grey.
Table of Contents
The Heart of New Orleans
The Devil You Know
Missing
Four Flies and a Swatter
Mussolini and the Axeman’s Jazz
Wound Man and Horned Melon Go to Hell
The Gulf
The Heart of New Orleans
A bar where I sometimes drink has New Orleans street scenes painted on the walls. Not cliché tourist shit like Carnival parades and jazz funerals, but regular people’s views of the city: a dilapidated old shotgun house, a snowball stand, the kind of Mid-City corner grocery out of which I’d expect to see the grocer being rolled on a gurney, shot dead in a robbery that netted $26. I guess most people wouldn’t imagine the dead grocer, but I see him or some equally sad variation several times a month.
I don’t go to this bar too often, because I’ll just be wanting to relax and drink my bourbon, and I’ll catch myself making up stories about the people in the murals. That wouldn’t be so bad except that the stories inevitably end in their deaths. I’ve always been able to look death straight in the eye, but I prefer not to do so during my off-hours. To be kicking back with a shot of Wild Turkey, to gaze at a painting of a nice old man playing dominoes and suddenly find myself imagining him in cardiac arrest—it makes me feel like I am riding on a bum trip, as people used to say and probably still do somewhere.
I have always prided myself on fulfilling my position as coroner of New Orleans with no trace of morbidity. I may never live up to my predecessor, who played a mean jazz trumpet, but I am a bit of a bon vivant in my own quiet way. I enjoy the bourbon, though seldom to excess. Fine restaurants are an important part of my life. I try to keep up with the local literary scene, once even speaking in a very general way about some of my odder cases to a group of mystery writers at the Tennessee Williams Festival. In short, I like to think that I’m not particularly death-obsessed as coroners go, nor cursed with an overactive imagination.
So I keep telling myself that the case of the Stubbs boy was just an anomaly, one of the many inexplicable but ultimately mundane things that any medical worker will encounter in the course of a long career. I tell myself that even as I slide another fragment of his heart under the microscope, and I try to stay away from the bar with the street scenes on the walls, and occasionally I have an extra drink before turning in at night.
Children’s deaths are terribly hard on everyone who must deal with them, even a childless and relatively heartless bastard like me. A little body on the slab looks less natural, somehow, than the body of an adult. You know they never contemplated their mortality, never pondered when and how it would come, never went through all the maundering about life and death and the cosmos that adults think separates them from their simian brothers. Perhaps that should make the sight more bearable, but instead it only accentuates their terrible vulnerability: they never even knew it was coming, yet here they lie.
As dead children go, five-year-old Matthew Stubbs was less heartrending than many I have seen. He was not beaten to death by a parent or stepparent; he was not left to freeze in an unheated apartment while his guardians smoked crack next door; he was not shot in his mother’s arms. He was simply the victim of a stupid accident far too common in south Louisiana: left alone for a few minutes while his mother checked on dinner, he let himself into a neighbor’s yard, fell face-first into a wading pool, and drowned in a few inches of tepid water. That was what the officers on the scene had surmised, anyway. My job was to disprove or confirm this dreary little scenario.
Matthew was a handsome little boy with dark curly hair and long eyelashes that lay damply against his livid cheeks. Aside from some whitish purge in his mouth and nostrils—a mixture of water and mucus whipped into a froth by his struggling lungs—I found no external signs of trauma on him, nothing to suggest he had been dumped in the pool rather than falling. His blood had the bright cherry-red color characteristic of oxygen deprivation. His lungs were full of more white froth, and his stomach contained only water and a few fragments of the cold spaghetti he’d reportedly had for lunch that day. This was a straightforward drowning; I saw scores of them every summer. People fell out of boats or went swimming in the Mississippi and often didn’t surface until days later. For the sake of his parents, I was glad this boy hadn’t been in the water long enough to show any disfigurement.
Nothing seemed strange about the case until I examined the heart. I excised it from its moorings and cupped it in my gloved hand, preparing to weigh it, when something caught my eye. I held the little organ up to the light and tilted it this way and that, trying to understand what I saw. Internal organs are as distinctive as hands or facial features, with infinite subtleties of color, shape, venation. But I’d never seen a pattern like the one that covered the entire surface of this child’s heart. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny lines were somehow etched upon the muscle, spiraling from the aorta and vena cava all the way down to the tips of the ventricle. When I dissected the heart and washed out the blood that had clotted there, I saw similar marks covering its inner chambers. Bringing a piece of the tissue close to my eyes, I thought I could make out loops and spikes, as if the lines were made up of words far too small to read.
Of course that couldn’t be; it was simply a strange pattern of striation in the muscle fibers. The fact that I’d never seen anything like it was of no consequence— I’d never seen a teratoma, either, until the day I found a mass of undifferentiated tissue with two baby teeth embedded in a man’s left kidney. The man had lived with this inside him for fifty-seven years, dying of a wholly unrelated aneurysm. There had been no need to inform his family of the absorbed twin’s existence, which was why it now floated in ajar on my desk instead of being cremated with him.
At least I had heard of teratomas, though, had read about them and seen pictures. I’d never heard of anyone whose heart looked as if someone had taken an engraving tool to it. This condition had nothing to do with Matthew Stubbs’ death, though, so it concerned me only as a curiosity. I noted it into the small microphone clipped to my lapel, then preserved the organ in a container of formalin. Though it didn’t relate to the cause of death, it was certainly notable enough to save. Perhaps I’d show it to my former assistant, Jeffrey, who always appreciated an anomaly. He was in medical school at Tulane now, but he had always been among the most trusted of my staff and sometimes dropped by the morgue to see how I was doing. I got the feeling he worried about me since my separation from my partner. Seymour had never formally announced that he was leaving me—he’d just gone up to New York to visit his family and kept extending the “vacation.” He’d been up there for seven months now. Typical passive-aggressive poet, I thought when I let it enter my mind at all.
I had six other posts that day, seven the next. In the flow of gunshot wounds, car accident injuries, and heart attacks, nothing happened to remind me of one drowned little boy. I didn’t think of Matthew Stubbs again until his parents showed up two days later to invite me to his funeral.
This isn’t as rare as you might think. Some families would like to pretend that I and my office don’t exist; never mind thinking about what we do here. But some perceive that their loved ones have shared a final, intimate relationship with me, and they want me along for one more step. I almost always find a way of gracefully declining. I would have done so in this case if Leonetta Stubbs hadn’t bulldozed right over me. For one thing, they usually call rather than dropping by. When I heard that Mr. and Mrs. Stubbs were at the morgue’s front desk, I expected a lawsuit at worst, a hysterical outburst at best. I made sure there was no blood on my lab coat before going up front to see what they wanted, but I couldn’t protect them from the bleak appearance or antiseptically rotten smell of the place. I never ask decedents’ family members to come here if I can avoid it. To me it is part work, part home, but to many it is the material of nightmares.
Henry Stubbs was a tall honest-faced man with a dazed look in his dark eyes. Despite the Irish surname, his olive complexion and thick shock of black hair made me suspect a Sicilian mother or grandmother. Though he shook my hand and spoke politely to me, I could tell he had turned most of his grief inward, and that his wife was the driving force here. Even in mourning, Leonetta Stubbs was something of a vision. Though she couldn’t have been much older than thirty-five, her black shirt-waist dress, little pillbox hat, and deep red lipstick were like things an old lady would wear. The self-conscious hipsters who have begun to take over the Bywater and Lower Ninth Ward in recent years sometimes dress similarly, but unlike them, Leonetta didn’t remind me of a child playing dress-up; something about the ensemble told me she knew of no other way to present herself. I imagined a closet full of severe dresses and outdated hats, possibly even inherited from her mother.
“Dr. Brite,” she said, and clasped my hand in both of her own. Until I actually looked down and saw them with my own eyes, I couldn’t quite fathom that she was wearing gloves—white cotton ones that in no way went with the rest of her outfit. Outside of the newspaper’s Carnival pages, I wasn’t sure I had ever seen a woman wearing gloves before.
“I have been waiting on tenterhooks to speak to you,” she told me.
Though the family lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood off Elysian Fields, her voice was rich with Uptown accents. Something running along the surface of it made me know she hadn’t been raised Uptown, but had worked hard to cultivate that voice.
“Thank you for taking the time to talk to us,” said her husband. He had a regular gritty, yatty New Orleans accent, and those were just about the only words he said to me.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m so sorry about your son. Is there something I can do for you?”
“Might we chat in your office?” Leonetta asked.
I pictured my desk covered with autopsy reports, bulletin boards full of glossy crime-scene photos, shelves crammed with models of internal organs and things in jars. “There’s really no room to sit down in my office. If you’ll take a chair over here, perhaps I can help you.”
We settled in the hard plastic chairs common to all official waiting rooms, as if such places must provide as little comfort as possible. I gazed at Leonetta, concerned about the purpose of her visit but also frankly curious by now.
“You must think me such a dreadful mother,” she said. It wasn’t what I had expected, but I’d heard it before.
“Not at all. It’s true that people don’t realize how fast a child can get into trouble, but some accidents are unavoidable.”
“Bosh,” she said. “Bosh, bother, and bullshit.” The expletive startled me coming out of her mouth, but no more so than the previous two words had done. Just as I’d never met anyone wearing white gloves, I had never heard anyone say “bosh” before. “Of course I should have been watching him more closely. He was my only child, you know. I only left him in the yard because I was trying to cook that wretched red gravy, and I’m not used to it. You see, I don’t cook. Henry’s mother thinks I should cook more. In fact, she gave me the recipe.”
I couldn’t help glancing at Henry, who only looked more miserable.
“I didn’t know if it would boil over, or burn, or what it might do. I was only trying to prove that I could do something the rest of the family takes for granted. They’re all wonderful cooks, to hear his mother tell it. Not me, though, not silly Leonetta with her airs and pretensions. I couldn’t even make spaghetti sauce without letting the baby drown, could I, Henry?”
Henry Stubbs rose from the uncomfortable chair. “I’ll wait in the car,” he said, and disappeared through the exit door with one anguished glance back at me and his wife.
“They’re not people of quality,” she said with the air of one imparting a dirty secret. “I thought Henry would amount to something when I married him. He talked about going to law school, but that was only meant to impress me. Now he works in that damn candy factory with his father, and he’ll never do anything more than that.”
“Mrs. Stubbs, I hardly think—”
She went on as if I had not spoken. “My son was an exceptional child. I’m sure you could tell, even … in his condition. Doubtless there are biological differences between normal people and geniuses.”
Of course I thought then of the strange patterns I had observed in the tissue of the little boy’s heart, but I said nothing, wanting to neither feed nor destroy whatever delusions sustained her.
“His playschool teacher said he was gifted. His IQ couldn’t even be measured with the regular tests.”
“Mrs. Stubbs…”
“Oh, I know what you’re going to say. Or would say if you weren’t too polite. He was only five. It was too early to tell about these things. That’s exactly what his father said: ‘What you talking about, Leonetta? He’s just a baby. He ain’t no Einstein.’”
I was struck by the bitterness that came into her voice when she mentioned her husband, and also by her skill at mimicking his homely accent.
“He was a genius, though. Not an Einstein—his talent didn’t lie in the direction of math, science, all that nonsense.” With a flip of her gloved hand she dismissed entire fields of scholarly pursuit. “My son would have written great book someday. I know, because he told me so.”
