Mortal Sins

When the bartender came back to see if he wanted another, Rourke nodded, even though his headache was now pounding loud as a Mardi Gras band. “Last time I was in here,” he said, “must’ve been, oh, ’bout a week back—you had a gal singin’ the heartbreak blues so damn fine. Made a man want to crawl into bed with a full bottle and a willin’ woman, and drown his sorrows deep in the both of them.”

Rourke paused to trace a pattern through the water rings with his finger, and when he looked back up his smile was backwoods friendly, with just a hint of bashfulness in it, as if he hadn’t tried this particular game before and was seeing how far he could go with it. “Since then, well, I just haven’t been able to get that lil’ gal’s song out my mind.”

The bartender took a vague swipe at the scarred wood with a corner of his apron, while he sucked on his fat bottom lip and tried to assess if the cop leaning on his bar was looking to get laid or be put on the pad. “You’re pro’bly thinkin’ of Lucille. Only thing is, she said she wasn’t feelin’ so hot this evenin’, so I told her to take it off.”

“What a cryin’ shame,” Rourke said, while inside he felt sick, and cold with fear at the trouble he could see coming his way. Lucille’s way. Lucille, who should have been here in this speak, singing the blues, and yet wasn’t, and so she probably had no alibi now for where she had been while Charlie St. Claire was out in that shack, drowning in his own blood.

The bartender chewed on his lip some more, while his gaze flitted everywhere but on Rourke’s face. Finally he leaned forward and lowered his voice to a hoarse, whiskey-fed whisper.

“If it’s a hankerin’ for blackberries you got, there’s a place ’round the corner on Burgundy. Look for a brown door faded to the color of a drunk’s piss. They got ’em from ripe to green, and every which way in between.”

Rourke knocked back the last of his drink and laid another dollar down on the bar. He smiled again, and there was nothing backwoods or bashful about it. It was the smile of a boy who had grown up with a drunk for a father in the Irish Channel, where they had corner saloons that made this one resemble a Sunday school room, and bartenders who kept the peace with brickbats and bolo knives.

“You have yourselves a good night now,” he said. The slack-lipped man didn’t answer or nod, he just turned and walked carefully down to the other end of the bar.

Outside the rain had come and gone, but it hadn’t taken the heat with it. Rourke had already started down the street when he saw a woman leaning against a mist-haloed street lamp. She was naked except for a faded blue wrapper and an old-fashioned corset.

Even with her standing in the shadows he could see that the skin of her legs glowed smooth and coal black, but her face was a pasty pink. Sometimes a country girl, young to the business and before she’d learned what it was a man really wanted, would buy pink chalk, wet it with perfume, and smear it on to make herself look white.

This one had at least got her hustle down. She rolled her belly in a little dance and made a wet, smacking noise with her lips. “Hello, daddy. Wanna do a little business?”

Rourke shook his head, then said, “No, thank you,” to ease the rejection, and then had to laugh at himself for thinking she would care. She was young, but not that young. Yet as he passed her by, he thought that underneath the pink chalk she’d been someone he knew.

He walked down Dumaine, along a brick banquette slick and silver with rain, toward the mouth of the alley where he had parked the Indian. Off in the night someone was playing a trumpet. Whoever it was, all the misery of his life and the sorrow in his soul was coming out of that horn. Daman Rourke stopped to stand beneath a dripping balcony and listen as the trumpet went crying up the last note, making music so sweet it hurt, like the slash of a cane knife to the heart.

It hadn’t all been a lie, what he’d last said to Fio about needing to get laid.

Memory could be like a train whistle in the night, sucking you deep into the low-down blues. You could stop it, sometimes, with booze or drugs, but the best way he’d found was to lose yourself in the arms of a woman, if she was your woman, maybe. If she hadn’t left you yet, or died on you, or just plain given up on you.

No trumpet sobbed out its heart in this uptown neighborhood of double shotgun and camelback houses. Rourke killed the bike’s engine as he rolled it to a stop alongside Bridey O’Mara’s front stoop.

Shadows stirred on a gallery smothered with purple wisteria. A porch swing creaked.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at the woman on the swing. His woman, maybe. She sat with her knees drawn up beneath her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs. Her head was tucked low, as if she were trying to hide behind the long fall of her Irish red hair.

“Hey, baby,” he said. “It’s after two in the mornin’. What’re you doing still up?”

She raised her head, and the curtain of her hair parted. Light from the street lamps bled through the thick vines and onto her face. Her cheeks glowed damp with sweat, or maybe tears.

He stayed where he was at the bottom of the steps, staring up at her. She stared back at him a moment, then jerked her head away. “A couple of cops were here looking for you. I had to tell them I hadn’t seen you in over a week.”

Her voice had come out broken and rough. She gripped her legs tighter and rocked a bit. The swing moaned. “I was sitting out here remembering the night Sean didn’t come home. Lordy, how it did storm—do you remember? Thunder and lightning and pouring down like it wasn’t ever going to quit.”

Rourke climbed the steps and sat down next to her on the swing. Her eyes were bright and hot.

“I sat out here on this swing that night, too,” she said, “waiting for him to come home, with the storm going on all around me, and it was like I was falling through a long, black silence. I think that must be what dying’s like, Day, don’t you? Falling through a long, black silence.”

He started to touch her, then didn’t. “I won’t go disappearing on you, Bridey.”

She let go of her legs and leaned against him, her shoulder pressing against his. She wore only a thin cotton wrapper, and he could feel the heat of her body.

Memory could be like a train whistle in the night, and sometimes you felt the pull of its call in spite of all your good intentions and best defenses. He thought of Charles St. Claire lying in puddles of blood, his eyes wide open to death. He was afraid he knew well what horror those eyes had seen in their last moments, because long ago his own eyes had watched Remy Lelourie kill.

This was the place where his thoughts kept getting stuck, like a scratch on a record: If she’d done it once, once, once, she could do it again. Yet he knew already that she had the power to make him believe otherwise. Or not to care.

“I know he’s dead,” said the woman sitting next to him on the swing, and Rourke’s mind made a dizzying jerk as he thought that she, too, was seeing that slashed body in the bloody slave shack. Then he realized her thoughts were back in another rainy night, waiting for a man who never came.

“I know his boat went down in that storm,” she said. “I know that’s what happened, I do. But sometimes …”

Sometimes.

Rourke turned into her and pulled her close, so he could lay his head between her breasts, and it felt so good. He thought he might have felt her lips in his hair, and then she pulled away from him and stood up. She took him by the hand and led him into her bedroom.

Her eyes were the golden gray color of pewter caught in candlelight. She had dustings of freckles on her breasts that were wet now from his tongue. He lay upon her, and as she looked up at him, her face was full of feelings and memories that he didn’t want to know. He wanted to stay wrapped up in her, lost in her, forever.

It had been them against the world, growing up poor and tough and running wild on Rousseau Street in the Irish Channel. Daman Rourke, Casey Maguire, Sean O’Mara, and Bridey Kinsella. The summer they were twelve, they went to Mamma Rae, the voodooienne, and for a dollar apiece she tattooed blue eight-pointed stars on the inside of their left wrists. She made up a charm and walked backward three times counterclockwise around a virgin’s fresh grave in the light of a waning moon, and then she pronounced them blood brothers for life. It hadn’t mattered that Bridey was a girl; she was one of them. They were all three half in love with her, even then.

Sean had been the one to marry her in the end, though, and he’d kept her until one Sunday two months ago, when he had taken his small trawler out onto Lake Pontchartrain for some spring evening fishing and hadn’t been seen or heard from again. If you didn’t know Sean O’Mara, you would say how he was a cop who’d gone bad, a boozer and a loser who had racked up big debts with his bootlegger and his bookie. You would say there were riverboats and trains leaving New Orleans all the time, and that sometimes the only way out from under was to start over.

Only if you grew up together in the hard-luck, hard-scramble neighborhood of the Irish Channel with him watching your back while you watched his, you would know that Sean O’Mara could run wild at times, but he would never run away.

Or this was what you told yourself on those nights when you lay in Sean O’Mara’s spool-turned bed, with Sean O’Mara’s wife. When strands of her long hair were caught on your chest, and you could feel the heat of her breath against your face.

“Bridey,” he said.

She sighed in answer and pressed her hip into his belly, and his throat closed up on some emotion he couldn’t name.

He had sat up with Bridey all that night, and several nights after, while they dragged the lake and the city’s underbelly of speakeasies and hot pillow joints, looking for Sean. He hadn’t meant to touch her, not even when she’d cried and asked him to hold her, not even when she had covered his mouth with hers in a kiss full of despair. For her, he knew, their touching was only a way of taking comfort from an old friend. For him it was a different sort of comfort—sweetly lonesome, edged with pain, like the wail of a saxophone. His own wife had been dead going on seven years. He had photographs to remind himself of what she’d looked like, but he had long ago forgotten the music her voice could make when she spoke his name.

He touched the woman who was lying beside him now, on the inside of her left wrist, where the small faded blue star was but a shadow, like a birthmark. “Bridey,” he said again.

A smile was beginning to grow at the edges of her mouth and eyes when the telephone rang.

He saw her face change, saw the hope flare like a struck match for just an instant in her eyes, and he looked away. She would always, he thought, be out on that swing, waiting.

“It’s probably only Mama,” she finally said when the bell had jangled a third time. “She has a hard time sleeping nights since Daddy died.”

He watched her rise naked from the bed and walk into the parlor, where the telephone rested on a narrow mahogany stand. She answered it with one hand and gathered her hair up off her neck with the other, and the movement arched her back and lifted her breasts. In the light cast by the parlor’s red-shaded lamp, her breasts glowed pink, like rare seashells.

He heard her say, “Yes, he’s here. Just a moment, please.”

He got up, glancing at the camelback clock as he passed by the dresser. It still lacked a couple of hours before dawn.

He went to her, their bodies brushing together, then parting. He took the handset from her and spoke into the receiver. “Yeah?”

Fiorello Prankowski’s voice, thick with static, came at him out of the night. “Day? We’ve got us another one.”

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