Crocodile Tears, part 2
Fiction
This one isn’t horror and should be appropriate for adult audiences. References to drug use.
I take the tab of acid from Sid’s finger. It tastes like nothing.
Eventually, we emerge onto the relative calm of Iberville. Sid peers up and down, finally admitting, “I have no idea where it is. The street I parked on had a median.”
“Rampart has a median,” I say, admiring the way the sun peeks through the clouds and sends shimmers along the paint of the cars. They are like metallic candies, all different colors. I want to lick them.
“Lead the way,” Sid says. I turn down the street, heading for Louis Armstrong Park. The air under the huge magnolias and willows feels refreshing and cool, scented with new spring flowers, abolishing the rot and vomit of the deep quarter.
“So, who are you, Kate?” Sid asks.
“Who are you?” I counter.
“I am a wanderer of the world. I’ve been living in Cincinnati working at a print shop but I picked up and came South.”
“And where will you go next?”
“Hm. I don’t know. I would love to get to Europe.”
“Me too.” We walk in silence for a moment. I think about what my parents would say, what my professors would say, if I just left for Europe in the middle of term.
“So?” he asks again. “How about Kate?”
I lean my head back, watching the sky pass through the branches overhead. “I am just me. I think and I dream and I wonder and I learn.”
“What do you think about?”
“It depends on the day. I think I am trying to figure out how to be an adult right now. I feel like society expects something of me I don’t want to give.”
Sid laughs. “House in suburbia? White picket fence?”
“And two point five children.”
We laugh together for a minute. I can see that future: matching curtains and wedding china. It feels like I can’t breathe.
I stop and look up at the house we’re passing, struggling to catch my breath. “I would love a house like this.” I step to the edge of the pavement, cracked and humped from the massive roots trying to reclaim the earth. The moment is passing. I don’t have to jump a plane to Europe right now. Right now, all I have to do is have this adventure.
The house is a shotgun, refurbished in green and purple, surrounded by rusting wrought iron. The vast lawn is shaded by immense old pine trees, liberally festooned with Spanish moss. Someone had staked a ceramic doll head in the flower garden; the roses growing up the stake give the doll a new form of shifting foliage.
“That house is the color of our shoes,” Sid observes.
“Is that like living in a shoe?”
“Like that old woman?” He thinks it over. “I don’t know.”
I take a deep breath of the spring air. I can feel the moisture on my skin and imagine droplets sinking into my pores, blurring the boundary between self and not-self. We are mere constellations, held together by an impression of singularity.
Maybe I feel like I’m supposed to confirm because people, especially girls, are supposed to feel like they’re supposed to confirm.
The thought leaves me breathless again but not because it’s frightening. I feel some profound realization. Even though I know it’s the drug it also feels more real than most of my other thoughts. This is true.
“So, Kate,” Sid says, taking my hand again. “What do you dream about?”
I cling to his fingers, thinking about molecules mingling. “Last night I dreamed of trees.”
Sid draws a battered package of Camels from his shirt pocket and shakes one out, offering it to me.
I take it and smooth the paper between my fingers, cupping my hand around the flame and inhaling, reveling in the immediate head rush. The taste is acrid and sublime.
“What kind of trees do you dream of, Kate?”
I smile, my eyes closed, letting Sid lead me over the crumbling and cracked sidewalks. “I dreamed of a forest at night, huge trees blotting out the stars, warm air, like this. Animals in the distance.”
“Scary?”
“No.” I laugh. “I’m never scared.”
“Really?”
“Really. I suppose I have had moments of concern or worry but never fear.” I’m lying to him but that’s okay. I lie to myself all the time. I’m not scared of monsters or men. What scares me is the ordinary.
Sid stops and I open my eyes.
“This looks familiar,” he says. “I think it’s this way.”
It feels like a lot of time has passed. Hours. It seems like night will come soon. It’s darker and cooler. I zip my jacket over the sequins.
His car is a Pinto hatchback with rust in the wheel wells and a bumper held on at one end with what looks like a wire hanger. The back seat has duffle bags, trash bags, sleeping bags, all kinds of bags. The front is neat, a map folded open on the passenger seat, a small number of takeaway containers neatly compressed into a waste basket on the floorboard. The dash is covered with stones glued in place, all kinds of rocks in every color, forming a labyrinthine mosaic. It’s beautiful.
He opens the passenger door with a key and folds the map out of the way into a door pocket. Then he hands me in just like we’re in a movie from the 1940s. The car smells faintly of cigarettes, marijuana, and incense.
He opens the rear hatch and roots about for a bit. I ignore him in favor of the way the streetlights ignite a crack in the windshield with sparkling fire. The simple beauty of the world astounds me. In this moment I am not afraid of being ordinary. Nothing is ordinary.
He gets in behind the wheel and hands me a bottle of water. It is heavy in my hand and cool in my mouth. The ambrosia of the gods must be water. Nothing is so good.
He’s holding a camera, an old one with a cracked black casing and a long lens. “I have a photo of you on here,” he says. “We just have to find where it’s taken.”
“Because it hasn’t been taken yet,” I say and he smiles. “Will it steal my soul?”
“No one could ever steal your soul,” he replies.
I place my hands against the windshield, feeling the cool glass under my palms. I see the edge of night, the pink in the sky, deeper blue behind it. The dark comes. Tears fill my eyes at the beauty of it. It all feels so real.
“Why are fake tears called crocodile tears?” I ask. “Can crocodiles not cry?”
“Some ancients believed that crocodiles cry while consuming their prey.”
“Which ancients?”
“I don’t remember.”
I think this over. I find it profoundly sad. “We do destructive things all the time. We know they are destructive but we do them anyway.”
“So we cry?” Sid asks.
“We cry while dealing death. We have to in order to live, but we cry.”
“That doesn’t sound fake to me at all,” Sid says.
“Crocodiles got a bad rap,” I determine.
“Crying while killing seems to be the most real thing,” Sid agrees. “If we kill, we should cry.”
“I think I’m going to stop eating meat,” I say.
“Me, too,” Sid says.
I reach over and take his hand so we can watch the night arrive together. It is breathtaking, the way the shadows steal in under the trees, the colors creeping out on their soft feet. A few people stroll by, beads hanging from their necks, laughter in the night air. Everything is gilded and magical.
“I know where my picture is taken,” I say and Sid sits up.
“Let’s go.”
He locks the car carefully and I take his hand again, leading him through the streets. Even the detritus looks like ornaments.
New Orleans is a well lit city but night brings out the lurking shadows. I feel ravenous here. I wonder if it can transform me, rebirth me as a new creature. I hope it can.
The walls surrounding St. Louis Cemetery Number One are tall and grey. There’s a wrought iron gate with a cross on top that is bolted securely. Easy enough to climb but not on the street with passersby. Deep in the streets of the dead, candles glimmer.
I turn left and we trace the outside walls. On Treme Street a dumpster is shoved up against the wall. Sid pulls himself up and holds his hand down for me. Then he boosts me up the wall and I climb to the top. I take a moment to zip my jacket the rest of the way up to protect my skin, then lie down onto my belly, drop my legs off the side, hang briefly, and then drop, a second of weightlessness before landing on soft grass, rolling easily to absorb the impact. Sid lands beside me, almost soundless.
The light is diffuse, reflecting off the clouds in an orange glow. Here is where the vampires live, the voodoo queens, the freaks. In the distance I hear soft laughter, the sound whispering off the vaults. It feels like coming home.
We wind through the streets of crypts. Some are large and ornate but most are simple structures three or four tiers high. I know that bodies are interred in degradable coffins so that, after a year and a day, the skeletal remains can be separated from the remnants of the burial box. Mostly, this is a city of bones.
I sense others within the walls, other living beings, but we see no one. Candles have been left to burn here and there and some of the mausoleums have XXX chalked on them in red and pink. Beads are everywhere. Normally plastic and tawdry, they glisten here with special magic. I feel like my entire body dilates, receptive to resurrection. I am the straight-A student, the lady on the streets and the freak between the sheets, the lots-of-potential girl. I am so abysmally bored with the path of the American dream: the husband who starts out tall-dark-and-handsome, the perfect children, the house with shutters, the cat and the dog. How can I become that person when the whole idea horrifies me?
Here among the sepulchers, LSD lighting my neurons, leather jacket zipped to my chin over necklaces of skulls and voodoo dolls, I feel like who I am supposed to be. This is the really real, the only thing that matters.
“Come on,” I whisper and Sid follows me along the avenues of tombs.
There she is: Marie Laveau, queen of myth and legend. She’s interred in one of the simple crypts, though the story is that her body isn’t really here. That doesn’t stop the tourists from painting the concrete of her tomb, seeking her blessing, leaving candles, notes, beads, bottles of alcohol, money. All to bless, venerate, proposition, and plead.
I lay my cheek against the stone and close my eyes, breathing deep. I smell the damp, the musk from flowers, the faint aroma of decay. I want to crawl into the tomb and lie among the bones. I want to sleep in the dust and be reborn.
The flash of the camera blazes across my eyelids, red and virile. Cheek to cheek with the voodoo queen: this is how Sid captures me.
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So good, hoping for more!