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Ann Stewart 

Her car rolled up like fog, an apparition parting the dwindling numbers of drunken zig-zagging pedestrians who walked like the wicked unsleeping dead through the French Quarter.  The shimmering gray Cadillac moved noiselessly as though not touching the cobblestones at all but floating along on an invisible conveyer belt. Rose cawed into the darkness, “Awesome car! Baby, give us a ride pleeease!”

Before Rose and I left for New Orleans my father had cautioned me not to speak to strangers, but I broke into a run with Rose toward the Caddy anyway, my father’s voice (Don’t smoke any dope! You keep away from all those weirdos and stay away from the boys!) still inside my ear like a mite that itched. The driver’s side window came slowly down, revealing a beautiful coffee bean-colored woman who appeared to be in her early twenties like myself. With her elbow jutting out just so, she called back, “What y’all doing tonight?”

We had been standing in the open doorway of a still-packed blues club on Canal Street, having wandered into the gay section of the French Quarter where we quickly got ourselves lost. Our carry-along cups empty and sticky, we staggered too far in the wrong direction, dragging each other down street after unfamiliar street, my feet wet with pus that poured from broken blisters. I was glad for the support of Rose’s freckled arm – my friend who was ever telling me I was her but twenty years earlier. Rose was the daughter of an ex-patriotic Southern belle who married a Yankee Baptist preacher, frozen in time at the age of seventeen.

She swaggered up to the car. “Hey girl! We’re drunk and we’re lost. Can you give us a ride?”

“Get on in,” the young woman said. Her voice was like a peanut butter pie, silky and sweet. I opened the door and slid into the dark back seat. The door handles gleamed, and were hot to the touch.

It was 4 a.m.

            “One time in the old time, as rabbit was going along looking for fun, he saw some old women heating some stones around a fire. They had a large earthen crock, filled halfway with water sitting a little to one side. So rabbit thought this might be some old-timey way to cook something, and he was hungry, and very curious about what they were about to do. ‘Maybe they’re getting ready to cook a stew or something I would like,’ Rabbit said. ‘If they are I’ll go over there and ask for a share…’

On our way to New Orleans, I was pulled over in Georgia for going 80 in a 55. There was a baggie of marijuana in the console between the front seats. I smiled and blinked stupidly as the officer handed me the ticket and tore into my nails ravenously with my teeth after driving away.  Rose and I were silent for a long time. Then, in a low voice, Rose had told me story of Rabbit and the Old Women – an old tall tale from Louisiana. She was a writer and had done her dissertation on trickster figures of Southern folklore. She wanted to see the house of William Faulkner. I loved her writing, which consisted mainly of ghost stories and tales of horror. These departed tremendously from the sort of schlock movie fare in which young friends getting together for a raucous party are picked off one by one by a faceless psychopath. She promised when we arrived to take me on a graveyard tour. I drove 90 miles per hour the rest of the way.

Courting danger seemed to be a structural aspect of the Quarter, like its rows of French doors and ornate balconies stuffed with greasy revelers, and the vague smell of urine disrupted by wafts of cumin. If I should have been wary of hitchhiking, I forgot. The Caddy’s seats were lined with velvety red plush – the kind that changed hue when brushed. A rabbit’s foot hung from the rearview mirror. The car smelled like jasmine tea, or perhaps it was the driver. We breathlessly introduced ourselves to the woman, whose name was Aja.

 Rose rested her elbow on the front seat back, leaning well into Aja’s personal space. “What are you doing tonight baby?” she asked.

“Sellin’ pussy.”

Rose and I both cackled, pressing: “Where are you goin’? What’s up tonight?”

“Sellin’ pussy.”

She offered us a ride to the hotel if we would pay to fill the Caddy with gas and buy her some cigarettes, which sounded like a fair trade. As it so happened, Aja’s tank was nearly empty and she requested a carton of cigarettes rather than a pack. She coolly requested that Rose even pump the gas for her. Rose did and then went inside the store to pay.

“You got a boyfriend?” Aja asked me in the rearview mirror.

I did, and already I missed my breasts being gently kneaded, and the smell of his neck. But I told Aja: “No.”

I told her Rose was a horror writer and I was a student studying literature. I wanted to ask her, “What’s it like? What have you done tonight? Did you like it or hate it?” But I asked instead for a tissue instead to cushion an open blister. Aja handed me one from the box that sat next to her in the front seat.  I thought again about the boy, hopping off me and plucking tissues by the rapid handful. Fwuk, fwuk, fwuk.

“That your girlfriend?”

“She’s my friend. I really like her writing.”

“You like deadly stories?”

“Yes. A lot.” I loved Aja’s voice – the feathery fall of it. I wished I could catch it in my mouth like a bit of warm rain.

 “You like girls?”

“I don’t know.”

“Want to find out?”

I giggled and looked down at my raw and oozing feet.

When Rose and I had arrived in town we had eaten at a café on Bourbon Street. While I ate, I spied a couple kissing just outside the window. The woman broke away, lifting her blouse to reveal her bare breasts, and the man clutched one of them and kissed it square on the nipple. I sat with a lump of crawfish, which I had never before tasted, rolling around in my mouth and watched.

Rose came back with the carton in her hand and a bag of sour candies for me. I then invited Aja back to the hotel to smoke a joint.

“Rabbit went over toward the women, making no sound with his feet, telling the grass not to tattle. He wanted to surprise them. Before he could call out and startle them though, he heard his name being spoken.

“’This is for you cousin Rabbit!’ And they laughed as you know old women do. When he heard this, he dropped down and hid in the bushes, waiting to see if the next words about him would be friendly. They weren’t.

Earlier that evening we had been suckered when Rose gave a strange black man in a porkpie hat fifty dollars to buy cocaine. Twenty of those dollars had been mine. The man, naturally, never reappeared. For some time, we fruitlessly waited on the steps outside a bar that wailed with harmonica and the whining refrain of a hoarse, solitary blues singer. Two white men came up and stood before us. These appeared to be father and son, both having the same wheat-colored thinning hair and gray shadowy eyes. The older one spoke.

“Hi ladies. My name’s Al and this is Corky.”

Giggling, Rose snorted, “Hey Corky. Hey Al.”

“Are you working tonight?” Al asked.

My stomach fluttered.  Rose looked befuddled. “What do you mean are we working? Working on what?”

The man nodded and leaned in closer, saying more quietly, “How much for you ladies to join us this evening?”

I thought, Fifty dollars.

Rose jumped up and shooed the men away like flies over a molasses pie, cursing.

The men quickly ran off, looking sheepish. I stood and watched them as they disappeared down the street, waiting for them to turn their heads and look back. They did not. Rose was absurdly spinning, looking at every angle for the man in the porkpie hat who was long gone. She clutched her drained bottle of beer by the neck and smashed it suddenly into a street lamp, shattering it all over the street. I laughed until I began to choke, mouth open wide, my face held up to the purple sky.

“Do you think we look like whores?” Rose whimpered. Then she laughed as well.

“It was a good thing Rabbit heard them before making himself known! The old women were telling each other how, when their husbands and sons came in with Rabbit (who they would hunt down with conjured arrows), they would chop him into pieces and stew him in the crock. By eating him, they would obtain his fleetness, his cunning, and his strength of head.

Rose, Aja and I arrived at the ghostly quiet motel, our shushing of one another more cacophonous than talking would have been. The hotel room had not been cleaned since our arrival two days prior. Trash and dirty towels lay in piles all around the perimeter and a faint salty garbage smell hovered about. We used our sun-singed arms to bulldoze crumpled items of clothing and shopping bags filled with gifts to bring home onto the floor so we could sit. While we smoked, Rose told Aja about some of the men we had met: Englishmen, Australians, Irishmen. A young Scottish man at a rock ‘n’ roll bar with eyes the color of algae in brown water had forgotten to remove his wedding ring.  I remembered its metallic coolness as he rested his hand on my bare, sticky knee. He smelled like the same Irish whiskey my mother drank with her coffee. The same liquor I’d gotten drunk on for the first time as a freshman at a high school football game. (Or perhaps it was a class picnic? To this day I only remember the smell of grass.)

Aja claimed to do work for a genuine “two-headed” doctor at a sort of Voodoo apothecary. Lapin’s Place, she called it. This excited me, especially after Rose had informed me previously about numerous rumors, legends, and lies about the 19^th century Voodoo priestess Marie Laveaux.

“There’s an actual record,” said Rose, “of a man who got drunk and murdered a lamplighter and was sentenced to be hanged. But she put magic powder in his gumbo, you know, that he was eating for his last meal…”

“That’s right!” Aja smiled and winked sideways at me. “Deadly woman knows her stuff.” Her laugh was like ice in a glass.

Rose continued the story of how the Voodoo queen poisoned her death row prisoner with tetrodotoxin, a poison extracted from the puffer fish which damages nerves and lowers heart rate in small doses, making anyone who comes in contact with it paralyzed, lifeless, appearing to be dead. But the effects are temporary, and that night, after her supposedly dead inmate had been buried, Marie Laveaux dug him up and released him to live happily ever after.

“Queen Marie, she’s a hero to me” Aja said, smoke billowing around her. “She had so much, like, power.” She returned a favor with a story about a Creole couple who wanted to marry their daughter off to a man old enough to be her grandfather. The couple went to Ms. Laveaux and asked if she might use her power to get their daughter, who found the man repulsive, to agree to the match. Ms. Laveaux promised the marriage would happen. She sprinkled powders in the girl’s food and gave the old man a gris-gris of the dried testicles of a black cat, which he would wear next to his own genitals to cure him of his impotency. In a couple of weeks, the girl changed her mind and agreed to marry the man. During the wedding celebration, however, the man keeled over and died.  The girl inherited a large fortune and was able to bring her true lover, a young soldier, home from across the sea.

“Marie says to the family, ‘What? I said the marriage would happen, that’s all.’” Chuckling, Aja got up and gathered her purse.

“What are you doing tomorrow night? Let’s hang out,” Rose said. “Unless you’re busy working…”

Aja wrote a phone number on a piece of paper torn from my journal.

“Call me,” she said, and winked as she let herself out, taking the joint with her.

“’We’ll see about that!” whispered Rabbit to himself, and he walked out of the brush and approached them, addressing them as ‘Grandmothers’. The women didn’t know quite what to say. They tried to seem friendly, returning Rabbit’s greeting, but they couldn’t look him in the face. They asked him to sit between them, which he wisely refused. Instead he seated himself across from them with a friendly smile.

“After a long silence, he said, ‘Why, that would be a good fire to sit in I think! Those large stones sure would make a good armchair. Have you ever tried it, dear grandmothers?’

“The women laughed hard at this, but Rabbit went on and on about it, finally betting his body against theirs that he could sit in the fire without burning.

The next evening, I suggested we call Aja.

“I just think you might hear some good stories. Maybe get a novel out of this,” I pleaded. “Anyway she probably won’t even answer.”

But she did, promising to give us an authentic New Orleans Voodoo experience that would put the pre-approved tour to shame. We went back to the room to change into fresh clothes, as Aja had advised us to get dressed up. I put on a pink sundress. Rose donned a blood-red off-the-shoulder blouse that still had the tag on. As we transformed ourselves, the room filled with a sticky fog of hair product and perfume.

I would reawaken this ritual when I finally returned to the north years later  – the circling of a finger over and under eyes, the joint at the tip of an index finger skating greasily over lips, elbows unclenching under the soothing swipe of cactus-scented lotion.  It’s a kind of magic. Its conjuring lifts away some, but not all the watermarks I collected off the moon that shone through the live oaks, winter and summer and winter and summer, for the remainder of my twenties. Now back in the cold north, my studies long forgotten, settled in as I am behind a cash register in the wide and crowded bottom of a grocery store corporation, my beauty routine is a potion I drink to stay alive.

The pink dress was one I bought before the trip. My wardrobe had previously consisted of black with scattered shades of gray. I cannot remember the impulse to buy the unlikely dress. I may have even known, as I was spraying a mist of cologne in the air and walking under its arc, I would not be going home with Rose.  

When the time came, I would stay and my youth would drain with the Delta wetlands, penetrated then swabbed away by corporate ships answering the cries of I want…I need…I want.  My eyes would be pinned open and I would see how, when disaster happens – hurricane or fire or flood – the detritus forged by the very rich and few would wash over and kill the poor and many. I would see how the deeply buried filth rises above it all, bobbing to the surface like the corpses who once freed themselves from the soggy earth of New Orleans, announcing their slimy presence for all to smell with errant clouds of rancid cologne.

“After talking it over, it was agreed that Rabbit should go into the fire and sit on the hot stones. If he burned to death, they could eat his roasted carcass. If he came out unscathed, then the women would have to go into the fire and sit on the stones. Both parties bound themselves to the bet by a solemn oath that couldn’t be broken, because it had words of magic in it.

“Sure enough, Rabbit walked right into the flames, which blazed so high they could hardly see him. The women cackled with glee.

We were to wait at the blues bar where we had been loitering when Aja picked us up the night before. The air inside the club was heavy. Bodies swung and swayed like a field of columbine in wind in front of the stage where a fierce female singer was hollering out over their heads. Mirrors all along the walls should have made the place seem bigger, but they were coated with condensation. As far as we could see, we were the only whites there. The patrons gave us brief double takes, but otherwise barely noticed us. Candle-lit tables were joined together into one long banquet rather than separated. We ordered our beers and sat with two gentlemen who were particularly well dressed. Their suits were shiny-black and starch-stiff rather than gray or brown and wrinkled like the other men’s. Handkerchiefs stood in sharp peaks from their pockets and they both wore fedoras. One, shorter, light-skinned and broad, held out his hand and introduced himself as Lucien. I laughed and pointed out to him that our names were similar. Lucy and Lucien.

“You look nice,” I said. “Do you always dress this way when you go out?”

Lucien explained that he and his companion had been to a funeral for an old school friend who had choked to death when his wife told him a funny joke during dinner. “No! You’re teasing,” I said.

“No ma’am. Died laughing.” He introduced his friend as either Jean or John – the name was hard to distinguish over the music. Jean or John was taller, dark, and more bent than Lucien. His eyes were closed and he ran a finger over the lip of his cocktail glass in time with the music. When he opened his eyes, it was as if he noticed Rose and me for the first time. We bickered over how to tell the story of their acquaintance with Aja. When I spoke of a Voodoo tour, Lucien said, “What you want to do that for? Just stay here and listen to the blues with us. Here,” he rose and polished off his drink, “let us buy you ladies another beer.”

We took turns dancing with the men all night. Jean or John talked into my ear, but I could hardly hear him. I remembered learning that when the slaves in New Orleans wanted to get the message out that there was a meeting, they sang songs so that the others might overhear. “This music ain’t just music. It’s life.” I looped my arm around his middle and he drew me closer to him. “Don’t you wanna stay in here with the living?” he asked.

I kissed him on the lips. He looked surprised.

“Now, now,” he said. “What would your daddy say?”

 At 4 a.m. and with no sign from Aja, we decided to leave, our money spent and gone. But as we stepped outside onto the misty street we saw the Caddy, glittering. Aja was wearing a seven-knotted purple tignon on her head like a crown. “Look at you,” she called. “Don’t ya’ll look pretty.”

Again we ran, not walked, to the car.

“While the women were whispering, Rabbit was sitting quietly in the fire. He seemed quite comfortable, as they saw when the wind blew the flames aside and allowed a glimpse of him. His magical breath kept a cool shell around him. Not one hair was singed.

Rose told Aja we had no money, but Aja just shook her head. “That’s all right. I’m happy to be having a night off. Where we going don’t cost nothing.”

“Can you afford that? A night off?” I asked, wanting to add, “A night off of what? Happy because why?”

“Every once in a while I can take some time. I always find a way to make it up.”

She parked the car outside St. Louis Cemetery, the burial place of Marie Laveaux. It resembled a garden of little churches, tiny mold-ridden versions of the grand old ones we passed as we headed toward Basin Street. Aja had pointed out Congo Square, where the blacks of old New Orleans held their celebrations for the Feast of St. John and other rituals. Marie Laveaux presided over many of these, sometimes dancing in the center where a skin-drum was playing, a snake coiled around her shoulders. “She could turn herself into a goddess,” Aja explained. “She made rich white ladies get down on the ground and roll they bellies.”

Aja parked the Caddy right at the gate and proceeded nonchalantly to open it with a key. “You have the key?” Rose asked.

“Ain’t my key. It’s Lapin’s. He’s got family in here.”

“But, isn’t it closed? Won’t the cops come?”

“Let them come,” Aja said. “They don’t scare me.” She told us that sometimes, when the dancing went past curfew, the police would come and try to stop the people’s festivities. But Marie Laveaux would soon have them spinning like tops until they fell, or crawling on all fours and barking like dogs.

Fog between the plots was glowing, moonlight reflecting in the microscopic droplets. Rose clasped my arm, shivering, as we walked amid the graves, most of which were set above the ground, like miniature stone cottages. Aja lead us to Ms. Laveaux’s grave, a massive marble structure like an ancient Greek temple that stood higher than her head. At the front of the grave lay several items: pieces of hard candy still in wrappers, airplane-sized bottles of wine, withered roses, salt shakers, shiny dimes. Votives that sat before the tomb had gone out.

I looked around for any sign of police, but there were none to be seen. We were alone in the dark graveyard. Though the air was warm, my skin felt moist and a bit chilly, like an amphibian’s. Rose asked Aja if she knew anything about zombies, telling her of the two men we had met whose friend had died laughing.

I wrapped my arms around myself. “Who do you want to make into a zombie?” I asked, thinking, Your father?

“Nobody silly,” Rose answered. “I’m doing research.”

Aja’s eyes narrowed. “Deadly woman wanna know how to make a zombie,” she said. “Well let’s see… you get the powder right? And you blow it…” She demonstrated by blowing a hard kiss in my direction. “Or you throw it down at their feet. When they’re dead, you get the soul through a crack in the door and catch it in a bottle. Come to, they don’t know who they are. They have to do whatever the person with the bottle tells them. Go wherever they tell them. Into people’s dreams…”

I began to feel transparent, as though I were fading away. My feet seemed to be an inch off the ground. “Come on, now,” Aja said. “Lucy is getting scared. This deadly talk… Let’s get on out of here.”

So we floated to the car and away, the mist around the graves like spider webs brushing our cheeks.

“When he had stayed until the sun went down, and the old women became impatient and uneasy, Rabbit came out of the fire and told them to look and see if he was harmed. When they could find neither a scorch nor a blister, he reminded them of their oath.

Lapin’s was on Saint Anne Street. Just inside the door was a massive python in a cage, its eyes clouded over white. The place was stocked, as many Voodoo novelty shops in the city were, with huge candles of every color, incense and oils and little laminated photos of Catholic saints. But here there were also jars of honey, vinegar, dried peppers, seeds and nuts. There were boxes of pins and needles, and jars of sulfur and of metal dust. Jars containing what appeared to be dirt and of roots labeled John the Conqueror and Wonder of the World and Ruler’s Root. Some were filled with dried lizards, toads or spiky puffer fish. There were even jars of dried gall bladders and tiny bones. Ancient-looking perfume bottles with names like “Jockey Club” and “Follow Me” and “Do As You Please.”

 “What kind of bones are these in the jar? Chicken bones?” I asked.

A deep and rumbling voice replied, as if from right beside me, “Cat.”

Rose and I turned to see a tall black man with a face stretched long, wearing an oversized black suit. With his hat on, he nearly reached the ceiling. “Black cat,” he said, turning a thin cigar between his lips. He wore dark sunglasses and carried a long white cane with a red tip.

My heart felt light, as if it had flown away. “What are they for?”

“To make you invisible,” said Aja.

The man shuffled to the counter and set down a baby food jar filled with gray powder. His fingers were as long as my feet. “Aw, don’t pay attention to that old fogeyism,” he said.

He held his head down and leaned against the counter, resting the end of his cane on his enormous flat-black shoes. “All that nonsense. All about fooling folks out of they pocket money,” he said, unscrewing the cap of the tiny jar. The snake moved, coiling itself tight around an imaginary mouse. The cage jiggled. The man tipped the jar into his hand, staring forward. “Ain’t about nothing but getting paid.”

He turned his long chin toward the back where Aja was gathering some items in her arms. Candles, a bottle of liquor like whiskey or dark rum, a couple of little bottles of perfume or oil clutched between her fingers. “That’ll do, Francine,” he said to her.

Rose sidled up very close, touching my arm with her thumb. Aja (Francine?) disappeared. I felt Rose’s breath on my cheek. “Let’s go,” she whispered.

The man blew on his hand, sending a cloud of powder up into my face. Suddenly my fingers and toes tingled and I couldn’t breathe. My body went numb, the deadness starting with my lips and traveling down to my groin. I gasped for air and felt my head growing lighter and lighter as the floor came up to my face. The room tumbled, and at once I saw Rose, a blur dashing out the door and onto the street, and the man, Lapin, leaning over me. He took off his glasses and looked at me. His eyes were red as embers.

“The women were not afraid. ‘What Rabbit can do,’ they said, ‘we can do.’

The room where I lay was empty except for an enormous bed and a wooden vanity with a large etched mirror. Two white policemen entered, wearing short-sleeved blue uniforms, but they were not on duty. They talked at length with Lapin, their voices bouncing and echoing against their reflections. One man and then the other pointed in stabbing motions at me. Then there was much nodding and some buzzing of laughter. Lapin shook both their hands, and shut them in the room with my lifeless shell. Their faces were Corky’s. They were Al’s, my boyfriend’s, my father’s. They were the pond-scum-eyed Scot. One officer began to disrobe, revealing a mottled tan chest with sparse gray hairs. The other, younger, with pin-like gray eyes, grinned wildly and unsheathed his nightstick as he approached me. All was cold and smooth and glittering as granite.

Suddenly, I saw myself sitting in a room with Aja (Francine?), who was dressed in a flouncy blue dress like a columbine flower upside down. She was lighting some candles around a massive altar that bled with rosaries and melted wax. Pink and red candles burned, the flames reflecting on the glass of little mirrors, pint-sized liquor bottles, and even a bottle of Nehi. There were tiny bowls of water and of cinnamon and other dried spices scattered over it. Aja wore enormous gold hoops in her ears and weighty gold bracelets.

“Hey!” I went to point a finger but the arm seemed to have divorced itself from my body. “What’s happening? Where’s Rose?”

“Rose is fine,” Aja (Francine?) said. “See?”

She pointed to a corner of the room where an alabaster-faced, 17-year-old Rose was leaning on her elbows on her mother’s kitchen table, her long fire-red hair splayed on the table cloth. Rose bit her lip as her father took a belt to the backs of her bell-bottoms. He looked pale-green and bedraggled. With each stroke of the belt he cringed as though it had landed on him. “No. Behind you,” teenage-Rose told me.

There was now-Rose, against the wall, as motionless as the dead with a tiny bone in her teeth. She stared at the bed as through a keyhole.

 “Don’t you worry,” Aja (Francine?) was saying. “You’ll look back and laugh and laugh.”

Then the feeling of something sliding in and out of me took my breath, like when I was little and my father had tickled me until my ribs ached and my eyes filled with tears.

I awoke under the covers of my motel bed to the smell of Rose’s breath. I felt heavy and bruised. My dress was wadded in a ball and wedged between my legs where a burning lingered. “Lucy,” Rose said, bent over me. She had been weeping. “Are you alive?”

I blinked and nodded, licking my sore and swollen lips. Yes, the poison had worn off and my body had come back to life, coated and aching.

Rose was sleeping when the sky bled purple, and I went walking back.

“But the women overestimated their powers. They immediately fell down onto the coals and were burnt to ashes with the exception of a few large bones. And these made excellent drumsticks.”