Green Eyes

  ‘I don’t see how I can,’ she said, thinking that she would have to go back to before Shadows, before the project began.

  He toyed with a french fry, drawing circles in the grease on his plate. ‘I need a more isolated place than New Orleans,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lose it in public like Richmond.’

  ‘You’re nothing like Richmond.’ Jocundra was too exhausted to be wholeheartedly reassuring.

  ‘Sure I am. According to Edman, and it seems to me he’s at least partially right, Richmond’s life was the enactment of a myth he created for himself.’ The waitress refilled Jocundra’s coffee, and he waited until she finished. ‘He had to kill someone to satisfy the myth, and by God he did. And there’s something I have to do as well.’

  She looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Magnusson told me I had something special to do, and ever since I’ve felt a compulsion to do it. I have no idea what it is, but the compulsion is growing stronger and I’m convinced it’s not a good deed.’

  White gleams of the overheads slashed diagonally across the lenses of his sunglasses. For the first time she was somewhat afraid of him.

  ‘A quiet place,’ he said. ‘One without too many innocent bystanders.’

  More senior citizens crammed into the cafe. They huddled at the front waiting for a seat, and the waitress became hostile as Donnell and Jocundra lingered over their empty plates. Jocundra wedged Magnusson’s ledger into her purse; they tipped the waitress generously, leaving the overnight bag in her keeping, and walked out into the town.

  The main street of Salt Harvest was lined with two-story buildings of dark painted brick, vintage 1930, their walls covered by weathered illustrations of defunct brands of sewing machines and pouch tobacco, now home to Cadieux Drugs, Beutel Hardware, and the Creole Theater, whose ticket taker - isolate in her hotly lit booth - looked like one of those frowsy, bewigged dummies passing for gypsy women that you find inside fortune-telling machines, the yellowed paint of their skin peeling away, their hands making mechanical passes over a dusty crystal ball. The neons spelled out mysterious red and blue and green words - HRIMP, SUNOC, OOD - and these seemed the source of all the heat and humidity. Cars were parked diagonally along the street, most dinged and patched; with bondo, windshields polka-dotted by NRA and SW Louisiana Ragin’ Cajun decals. Half of the streetlights hummed and fizzled, the other half were shattered. Dusk was thickening to night, and heat lightning flashed in the southern sky.

  Groups of people were moving purposefully toward the edge of town, and so as not to appear conspicuous, they fell in at the rear of three gabbling old ladies who were cooling themselves with fans bearing pictures of Christ Arisen. Behind them came a clutch of laughing teenage girls. Before they had gone a hundred yards, Donnell’s legs began to cramp, but he preferred to continue rather than go contrary to the crowd now following them. Their pace slowed, and a family bustled past: mom, kids, dad, dressed in their Sunday finery and having the prim, contented look of the well-insured. Some drunken farmers passed them, too, and one - a middle-aged man whose T-shirt read When Farm-boys Do it They Fertilize ‘Er - said ‘Howdy’ to Jocundra and offered her a swig from his paper sack. He whispered in his buddy’s ear. Sodden laughter. The crowd swept around them, chattering, in a holiday mood, and Jocundra and Donnell walked in their midst, tense, heads down, hoping to go unnoticed but noticeable by their secretive manner: Jews among Nazis.

  The night deepened, gurgling and croaking from the bayou grew louder as they cleared the city limits, and they heard a distorted amplified voice saying, ‘CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHIL…’ The speaker squealed. A brown circus tent was pitched in a pasture beside the bayou, ringed by parked cars and strung with colored bulbs; a banner above the entrance proclaimed What Jesus Promised, Papa Salvatino Delivers. The speaker crackled, and the voice blatted out again: a cheery, sleazy voice, the voice of a carnival barker informing of forbidden delights.

  ‘CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHILDREN! COME TO PAPA SALVATINO! COME BEFORE THE NIGHT CREEPERS AND THE GHOST WORMS SNIFF YOU OUT, COME BEFORE THE DEVIL GETS BEHIND YOU WITH HIS SHINBONE CLUB AND SMACKS YOU LOW. YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT! YOU KNOW YOU GONNA COME, CHILDREN! YOU GOTTA COME! ‘CAUSE MY VOICE GONNA SNEAK LIKE SMOKE THROUGH THE CRACK IN YOUR WINDOW, CURL UP YOUR STAIR AND IN YOUR EAR, AND HOOK YOU, CROOK YOU, BEND YOU ON YOUR KNEE TO JEEESUS! YES CHILDREN, YES

  A furious, thumping music compounded of sax, organs and drums built up under the voice, which continued to cajole and jolly the crowd; they streamed into the entrance, and the tent glowed richly brown against the blackness of field and sky. As Donnell and Jocundra hesitated, a police car pulled up next to the field and flashed, its spotlight over the rows of parked cars; they joined the stragglers walking towards the tent.