Exquisite Corpse Read online

  Tran grinned and rolled his eyes. “Better ask what doesn’t happen. It’s strictly bring-your-own-drugs, but you can get smart drinks, energy shakes, all kinds of legal mind candy. Almost everyone is on ’shrooms or X, so it gets pretty touchy-feely.”

  “Well …” Jay hated the very sound of the word rave, the picture it painted in his mind of a fleshy festival edging out of control toward delirium. He saw a clubful of adorable kids babbling in tongues, perhaps foaming at the mouth. “It doesn’t really sound like my kind of thing. I don’t enjoy hallucinating in public.”

  “Yeah, I know people like that.” The boy nodded sagely, as if he had tallied countless opinions on public use of psychedelic drugs—and maybe he had. Many of the Vietnamese families in New Orleans were Catholic, and after a childhood spent memorizing taboos, Catholic teenagers were often the wildest of all.

  “But I would like to take your picture,” Jay said. “Come by sometime. Here …” He took out a pen and a small notebook, jotted the address.

  “Thanks.” Tran pocketed the paper, favored him with a last sweet smile, and disappeared into the swirl of tourists, Tarot readers, street musicians, and assorted Quarter rats. God, he was pretty. But he was also a local kid, Jay reminded himself. He could take local kids’ pictures, maybe, but nothing more.

  Jay decided to walk along the river before having his coffee and heading home. The air was cooler up here on the levee, suffused with a clear near-sunset light. Jay stared down at the surging, glowing river as he walked. It was so mighty and so polluted; doubtless it had been the carrier and deliverer of more poisons than one factory could ever be. But no one called the Mississippi a murderer.

  It was forty years now since Byrne Metals and Chemicals opened in Terrebonne Parish, spanking new, marvelous as plastic, ready to help usher south Louisiana into the atomic age. At first his father’s factory had been a boon to the impoverished area, creating jobs for people who were too old or weak to make their living off the bounty of the swamp. It didn’t seem to matter that the factory was pumping waste water into the same waters that nourished that bounty. The swamp was immense, boundless; surely it could absorb whatever went into it. It had the bayous to drain into, and beyond that the whole Gulf of Mexico.

  But as the years went by, more able-bodied men and women began turning up asking for factory jobs. It seemed there weren’t as many fish, fur animals, or gators in the area as there had once been. The crawfish were as plentiful as ever, perhaps more so, but they throve on any kind of sludge. Many of the remaining animals were sick or small. To an untrained eye, the swamp still teemed with rich life. But the people who lived there could see it dying.

  Then they began dying too. A citizens’ group alleged that people within a fifty-mile radius of Byrne Metals and Chemicals got cancer at fifty times the usual rate. There was a rash of babies born with gaping craniums, half-formed faces, stunted brains or no brains. There was a nasty incident involving a Cajun who’d been laid off from his job in the solvents division after eighteen years’ service. Diagnosed with intestinal cancer a month later, the man had rammed the factory gate with his pickup truck, then parked in the yard, pulled out an ancient double-barreled shotgun, and started blasting away. A security guard had most of his left leg blown off before he was able to put a slug in the Cajun’s brain.

  Mignon’s older brother Daniel Devore had stepped in to help. He had a gifted tongue with the politicians and reporters, and a talent for juggling facts. He also had a proclivity for the young male hustlers who haunted Burgundy Street past midnight in the lower Quarter. Eventually he set up his favorite in a slave quarters apartment and spent three or four nights a week down there. When Jay moved to the Quarter years later, the ex-hustler was still around, having been generously remembered in Daniel’s will. A faded pastel blond, schooled in the ways of the Quarter but no longer able to make the grade, he managed to lure an occasional boy back to his apartment by flashing a bankroll. Jay observed him from afar, fascinated by the knowledge that that bankroll was steeped in the blood of the swamp his father had poisoned.

  A calliope was shrieking “Dixie,” insanely loud, very near. He realized he had walked all the way up the wooden riverwalk to the steamboat landing. The brightly colored boats towered over the dock, all wooden scrollwork and glittering brass, the Natchez, the Cajun Queen, the Robert E. Lee, big gaudy wedding-cake boats. He imagined one of them tipping over, spilling its human cargo into the toxic soup of the river.

  He reached inside his jacket and touched the manila envelope. The feel of it against his heart was reassuring. Nuke, Tran had told him. One hundred doses of top-grade LSD. He’d take four or five, put the rest in the freezer. He had all sorts of treats in there.

  Jay walked back to Café du Monde for the cup of au lait he’d been wanting. The very air beneath the old green awnings was luscious with fried dough and powdered sugar, a sweet miasma that always lingered here. The aromas of the café intertwined with engine exhaust from Decatur Street and the grassy smell of dung from the mule-drawn carriages that parked in front of the square collecting cartloads of tourists.

  The afternoon was beginning to shade into evening. Thousands of birds circled over Jackson Square in the clear twilight, preparing to roost. Their erratic song, the saxophone player on the sidewalk, the crowd’s chatter, the rumble and blare of passing traffic on Decatur Street: all were part of the French Quarter’s festive eventide. Jay chose a table by the iron railing, where he could watch the circus. The chicory coffee tasted rich and strong, the milk frothy and sweet.

  He became aware of a presence near his elbow. A boy stood on the other side of the railing, puppy-dog gaze melting over Jay like warm butter. He wore the costume of young drifters everywhere: bandanna wrapped around a close-cropped head, ears and nose studded with metal, army jacket a work of art done in safety pins and black marker, Doc Martens that had seen serious street time. His face was strong-boned, unwittingly angelic. He was perhaps eighteen. Perhaps.

  “Will you take me home?” he asked Jay. “I wanna be your pet. I don’t eat much and I’m very affectionate.”

  Jay sipped his coffee, cocked an eyebrow. “What if you urinate or defecate on the floor? I might have to put you to sleep.”

  “I’m housebroken,” the boy assured him earnestly.

  There was hunger in his face, plain and sharp; but it was unaccustomed hunger, the hunger of a kid spending his first weeks on the street, missing his parents’ well-stocked kitchen. That was the kind of hunger Jay liked; strong enough to make them incautious, but not so strong that their muscles were wasted. He ordered the boy a café au lait and a plate of beignets.

  “Now seriously,” said Jay, watching the boy pour an endless stream of sugar into his coffee. “What about this pet business? Are you going to let me put a leash and collar on you? Do I get to chain you up?”

  “Sure.” The boy grinned through a mouthful of beignet. Powdered sugar spangled his lips, his chin, the front of his black T-shirt. “Anything you want. Just let me curl up at the foot of your bed.”

  Jay wondered why such an exotic pup was begging for scraps at his back door. He looked rich, he supposed, but not that rich. Nowhere near as rich as he really was. In New Orleans, where robbery and murder were as common as afternoon rainstorms, only the tourists wore wealth like a sign plastered across their foreheads.

  “You might even get your own pillow,” he said. “Been traveling long?”

  “Just a couple of months.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Maryland.”

  “What’s it like there?”

  A diffident shrug; might as well ask what it’s like on the moon. “Sucks. You know—boring.” The last of the beignets disappeared down that hungry pink gullet. “So, uh, you wanna take me home?”

  Jay leaned forward and put his face close to the boy’s. “Let’s get a few things straight. If you want to be my pet, then be my pet. Sit until I’m ready to go. Heel when I walk. Roll over when I say
so. And when I pet you, lick my hand.”

  He reached out and smoothed the boy’s hair, slid his fingers down the side of the boy’s face, over the soft hairs at the ridge of the jawbone. Just as he was about to pull away, the boy turned his head and took Jay’s first two fingers into his mouth, lipped them softly, rolled them over his tongue. The inside of his mouth was as soft as velvet, as warm as fresh blood.

  From the corner of his eye, Jay saw an elderly tourist couple at the next table staring as if hypnotized. He could not make himself care, could scarcely move or breathe while that wet heat caressed him.

  “Just call me Fido,” said the boy.

  3

  The sky over Chef Menteur Highway was tinged lavender with the first traces of dawn. Tran drove past the crumbling architecture of half-vacant strip malls and bottom-end motels, past the awesome neon planet that was the beacon of the Orbit Bowling Alley, past a sleazy rainbow of cocktail lounges and dirty bookstores still gamely angling for the night’s last human dregs. Soon Tran’s little Escort was speeding through green country, lush expanses of water, reeds, and grass dotted with occasional small houses. East New Orleans was an odd mix of the tranquil, the trashy, and the wholly exotic.

  Tran was twenty-one, born in Hanoi to parents who escaped the country three years later, during the mass exodus of 1975. Somewhere in his ancestry was a dash of French blood that lent his shoulder-length black hair a crisp wave, underlaid his smooth complexion like almondflesh tinged with peach, and lent a faint golden cast to his dark eyes. His only memories of Vietnam were of hushed voices late at night, someone hurrying him down a street illuminated with tiny colored lights that shimmered and blurred in the humid air, the raw sap smell of machete-cut greenery. Sometimes he thought he recalled other things—shells exploding in the distance, the silvery hulk of a jetliner—but he could never be sure whether these fragments were memory or dream.

  Because of a man his father had known in the American army, the family was able to settle in New Orleans without passing through the mud and concrete horror of the refugee camps. His birth name was Tran Vinh. When his parents enrolled him in American kindergarten, they reversed the order of his names so that the family name would come last, like an American child’s. And they elongated his first name to Vincent, which he hated and had never answered to, even at five. His family still called him Vinh. To everyone else he was Tran. In English, the short sharp syllable suggested movement (transmission, transpose) and the crossing of boundaries (transcontinental, tranquilize, transvestite), both of which he liked.

  Tonight Tran had swallowed acid and ecstasy until the lights and the video and the barrage of sound ran together in a gaudy candy-colored blur. At the rave there had been a smart bar where girls in green lamé whipped strange powders into allegedly IQ-raising concoctions that tasted better than Tang. There had been kids in full riot gear and flowered helmets, kids armed only with water bottles and baby pacifiers, kids who looked like Dr. Seuss characters on mushrooms. Which was no big surprise: they had all grown up with Dr. Seuss, and many of them were on mushrooms.

  Tran wore a loose knee-length dress covered with giddy loops of purple and red. He’d kept his shorts on underneath, so that when he got home he could tuck the dress into their waistband and it would look like a shirt, sort of. His eyes were smudged with greasy black liner, badly applied, which made him look even younger and slightly insane. He’d gone to the rave alone and had a wonderful time. These days, that was something to be proud of. He hadn’t been getting out much in the past few months. When you knew you might run into someone you didn’t want to see, it was so easy to stay in your room reading, writing in your journal, listening to music, brooding over old love letters.

  He recalled an interesting bit of trivia he’d picked up somewhere: an old film star named Jayne Mansfield had died out here on Chef Menteur Highway. Her car had slammed into the back of one of the mosquito trucks that went steaming through the byways of the city, spraying enough poison to kill tens of thousands of insects. Tran imagined the famous decapitated head sailing through the cloud of insecticide and gasoline fumes, comet tail of blood describing a graceful arc.

  The image of the movie star’s death had haunted him since he’d first heard of it. He’d described it in one of his notebooks, in the purplest and most gleeful prose he could conjure. But if he tried to tell it to any of his friends—Vietnamese or Anglo—he knew exactly what they’d say. You’re sick, Tran, you know that? You’re really fucked up.

  Now he was almost home. A tangle of factory smokestacks and towers loomed ahead on one side of the highway. A dimly lit cluster of buildings on the other side was the heart of the community where Tran had lived most of his life. The swampy green land surrounding these buildings, the ragged blue-gray shroud of mist, the slightly ramshackle aspect, and the Vietnamese characters on the signs suggested a tiny foreign village, but the whole thing was only about twenty minutes away from downtown New Orleans. Known as Versailles or Little Vietnam, the neighborhood had been established by North Vietnamese refugees, perpetuated by the family they brought over and the children they raised.

  He turned off Chef Menteur, navigated streets of little brick houses with poultry coops, fishing docks, vegetable gardens, and rice paddies in back. Eventually he pulled up in front of a house that had none of these exciting features. As a kid, Tran had envied his friends whose families fished and farmed. He used to beg to help feed the ducks or go netting for shrimp. Only later did he realize his manicured yard seemed so boring because his family was a bit richer than most of the others in the community. Not wealthy by any means, but they didn’t have to raise their own food. A lot of people out here did.

  He wondered what the slackers, technoheads, and baby peaceniks at the rave tonight would think of that. Probably they would think it was cool, that such people were in touch with the earth, which they all wanted to save as long as they didn’t have to stop dancing to do it. But Tran was willing to bet none of those ravers had ever wrung a duck’s neck and plunged the carcass into boiling water to remove the feathers. Nor, he wagered, had any of them picked leeches off their ankles after wading in a stagnant pool of canal water to catch crawfish.

  Like most Asian-American kids he’d met, Tran lived in two worlds. Since his twin brothers were still too young, he often helped in his parents’ café. His table service was barely adequate, but he ran the cash register like nobody’s business and knew how to make perhaps a third of the eighty-seven traditional dishes on the menu.

  That was one world, the existence spanning the restaurant, his home, his family. The other world was the French Quarter, his tidy little acid business, clubs and raves, people like Jay Byrne. Glamorous, dangerous men … like the one who had introduced him to this other world. But that was over, and something he didn’t want to think about after such a fine night.

  He got out of the car, crossed the damp lawn, and let himself into the house. The living room was a mass of overlapping blue and gray shadows, swathed in dawn. He made his way down the hall, past the closed door of the twins’ room, and let himself into his own room.

  His father was sitting on the bed.

  This in itself was a shock. Tran wasn’t sure his father had ever been in his room before. He and his father were seldom even home and awake at the same time. But the real shock was the look on his father’s face. Truong Van Tran had a couple of expressions that seemed to serve him well in almost every situation: an acquiescing but faintly impatient smile, a tight-lipped glare, a steady gaze that was almost neutral if you failed to notice the slight disdainful crook of an eyebrow. T.V. did not approve of wasted time, and he did not suffer fools gladly. He did not suffer them at all when he had a choice.

  So the look on his face was new to his oldest son. It had elements of sorrow, anger, fatigue, and, most frightening of all, bewilderment. Bewilderment in a man who had always seemed sure of everything, who ran his small café like a barracks. His father’s gaze made Tran feel like a strange
r, like an intruder in his own home, in his own room. There was a dark smudge on T. V.’s forehead, as if he had handled something grimy and then wiped his hand across his brow. Tran could not remember ever having seen his father anything but immaculate.

  Awful scenarios ran through his head. Something had happened to his mother, or the twins. But if so, why was T.V. waiting for him in here, alone? Vietnamese families congregated in times of catastrophe. If anything bad had happened to a family member, the living room and kitchen would be full of milling relatives, and the house would reek of strong coffee sweetened with condensed milk.

  This was something for him, then; for him alone. Tran began ticking off the possibilities in his mind. All of them were very bad.

  “Dad?” he said uncertainly. “What’s wrong?”

  His father stood up and reached into the pocket of his trousers. At that moment Tran realized he was still wearing the sweat-soaked, gaudy rave dress; he hadn’t even bothered to tuck it into his shorts. It seemed the least of his worries. T.V. was going to pull one of two things out of his pocket: Tran’s stash of acid or the letters. The letters would be infinitely worse.

  TV’s hand emerged clutching a sheaf of half-crumpled paper, a few ripped-open envelopes.

  Tran felt his stomach trying to cave in. All at once the acid and ecstasy he’d taken came rushing back tenfold. He did not even feel angry about the invasion of his privacy: there would be no point to such anger. His father wouldn’t understand it. He owned the house; therefore all its rooms and all its contents were his to peruse as he saw fit. Tran thought he might vomit as T.V. glanced at the first sheet of paper and began to read.

  “I want you underneath me right now, dear boy, my heart, my intestinal maze. I want to slide two fingers into the crook of your arm, there where the skin is as smooth as the crushed-velvet head of your cock. I have a fresh needle just for you, just for the arterial hard-on that throbs there. I slide stainless steel into your flesh, and the bead of blood that wells when I take the needle out is as tender as your …”