“Thanks,” Clete said. He put a ten on the bar. “Give the fat guy whatever he’s having. Just don’t tell him where it’s from. Keep the change.”
Bella went into “The House of the Rising Sun,” the song Eric Burdon and the Animals had turned into arguably the most haunting blues depiction of bordello life and spiritual despair ever sung. Though its message of utter hopelessness was like a dull nail driven into Clete’s heart, he had never known why. Sometimes he ascribed the feeling to the drowning of the city during Katrina, or the crack cocaine that had turned the city into the murder capital of America, or the T-shirt shops and the affectation of debauchery that impersonated the city’s earlier tradition of eccentricity and bohemian culture and Dixieland blowdowns.
The song’s influence on him had nothing to do with any of these things, or even with New Orleans. The song was about exploitation and the anonymous fate that seemed the destiny of all those who are used for the convenience of others. The song had no author. The person narrating the tale could have been male or female but had no name. The rising sun did not dispel the night, serving only to illuminate the harshness of the morning, the broken glass in the gutters, a passed-out drunk in an alley.
Clete looked up and down the bar and at the tables and at the dancers on the floor and wondered how many of them would leave the earth as ciphers, would even have a marker on a grave ten years after they were gone. His first night back in New Orleans from Vietnam, he got loaded in the Quarter and met a famous Beat writer who was feeding the pigeons on a bench in Jackson Square. The writer challenged him to name five slaves from the tens of millions who had lived and died in bondage.
Clete got as far as Spartacus and Frederick Douglass.
“What’s that say?” the writer asked.
“I don’t know much about history?” Clete said.
“No man, it means there’s no history. Just humps in the ground wanting somebody to tell their story. Think I’m blowing gas?”
Bella finished her song and walked down the length of the bar. She drew a fingernail along the back of Clete’s neck. “Where’s your friend?”
“Dave?” he said.
“Who else? I ain’t seen him around. Tell him he hurt my feelings.”
“He’s been busy with a few things. People getting killed, stuff like that.”
“Don’t mean he cain’t drop by.” She winked. “Tell him he got the moves and I got the groove.”
“Show some respect for yourself,” Clete said.
“Talk like I want, baby.”
Clete looked down the bar. “There’s somebody sitting down there who shouldn’t be in here.”
Bella lifted her chin and gazed at a black woman ten stools down. The black woman was wearing a white dress and a necklace with red stones that hung between her breasts. “Hilary Bienville? I ain’t my sister’s keeper.”
“She might listen to you,” he said.
“That girl is looking for a box. She gonna find it, too.”
“She’s still messing around with some white guy?”
“She been on her knees since she was a li’l girl. You cain’t fix them kind. Messed-up girl becomes a messed-up woman.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“I ain’t axed. I get off at two. Give me a ride? I could sure use one.”
She walked away from Clete, looking back over her shoulder. He ordered a shot of Jack and dropped it into his beer, jigger and all. He drank the mug to the bottom, the jigger clinking against the glass. He looked down the bar and saw a sight that made him squint and rub his eyes and look again.
The man’s hair was steel-gray, cut tight, top combed straight back with gel, as though he wanted to look younger. He had grown a full beard and lost weight, but the profile was the same Clete had seen in the mug shots he had gotten off the Internet. The man was talking to Hilary Bienville and wore navy blue trousers and the kind of plain short-sleeve khaki shirt that a filling station mechanic might wear.
It can’t be him, Clete thought. Not a guy who escaped death row and should be looking for a cave in Afghanistan.
Clete got off the stool just as the front door opened and two carloads of revelers poured in. By the time Clete had worked his way through them, the man was gone.
Hilary stared blankly at Clete. She had a Collins glass in her hand. Her eyes were out of focus. “What you want?”
“Was that Hugo Tillinger?” he asked.
“I don’t know no Hugo Tillinger.”