Sculpted from papier-mâché, the gigantic head of Momus hung suspended from a single wire in the atrium well. His sinister smile floated at the level of the second-story floor, so his eyes seemed to be peering just over the railing. His two little horns curved up almost to the third story. The whole head slowly turned and twisted in the currents of cold air that fell from the A/C ducts high overhead. There was something disturbing in the quality of the god’s amusement. Josh congratulated the Krewe on their honesty. Even they hadn’t made the mistake of believing their patron was benevolent. Joshua entered the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. Through the glass walls of the elevator, grinning Momus watched him ascend.
Two men and a woman were waiting for the elevator when the doors opened. “—worrying about her drove Jane to her death,” the woman was saying. Her eyes flicked briefly over Joshua Cane, resting for a moment on his face, as if he had missed a spot shaving.
“Excuse me,” he said, stepping past.
“If she were alive, she would have been—” The elevator doors closed on their conversation.
Of course, Sloane Gardner must be a common figure here, passing through on the Grand Duchess’s business nearly every day. Everyone in the building must be buzzing over her disappearance. It occurred to him that all his dressing up might well be wasted. The odds seemed pretty good that the Krewe, suddenly leaderless and heirless to boot, would decide it couldn’t be bothered to interview witch doctors with pretensions.
Joshua entered the Krewe offices, left his name with a secretary, and settled in for a long wait. To pass the time he studied the paraphernalia on the walls: framed handbills from the late 1800s, pictures of Prohibition-era society women with spit-curled hair robed as Mardi Gras queens in satin and ermine, and everywhere the moonfaced grinning Momus, smirking over a banquet menu or on a lapel pin or etched on earrings worn by the Ford girls during the Depression, when the Momus balls had been at their most outrageously lavish.
Finally Josh was shown into a large office lined with oak bookshelves. A brass-trimmed ceiling fan circled over an oak desk with a pretty glass ink pot on it. A tall woman rose from behind the desk. “Fiona Barret,” she said easily. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Cane.” Her teeth were whiter and straighter than the teeth of anyone who lived on Joshua’s side of Broadway. She gave the impression of being naturally clean, as if mud wouldn’t stick to her. He felt the dampness in his armpits as he reached to shake her dry, smooth hand.
She sat back down, took a duck-feather quill from the desk organizer before her, and held it poised over a pad of cheap Galveston paper milled from rice hulls. “So—you were thinking of applying to join our Krewe?” He said that he was. “And have you discussed this with the members of your current Krewe?”
He told her that he wasn’t currently in a Krewe. She looked at him. He looked down at the hardwood floor and explained that his mother had retired from her Krewe when he was not yet an adult, but that now he felt it was time for him to take up his community responsibilities. He betrayed his mother in the same calm, unemotional voice he used when examining his patients. It would be socially easier for him and Ms. Barret to come to an accord if any tension between them could be blamed on Amanda Cane, of course. The living are always in a tacit compact against the dead.
“I see.” Ms. Barret dipped her quill and wrote a comment on her pad. “Mr. Cane, without meaning to discourage you, I must be candid about the obstacles you may face in your application.”
He looked up but missed the rest of what Ms. Barret had to say because his dead mother was standing behind her. Her face was sallow, her hair was wet and stringy. Water dripped down her cheeks. Josh smelled mud and cold seawater. She was wearing her long tan raincoat, tightly buttoned despite the heat of the day. She had sewn it shut around her: cables of strong black thread stitched the raincoat’s sides together. Its deep pockets bulged and sagged with stones or bits of brick. They, too, had been sewn shut. She gazed at him, wordless but with great intensity. Her eyes, which had been brown in life, were now as green as the sea. She shook her head, holding his eyes. A warning.
Fiona Barret coughed. “Mr. Cane?”
“I…I beg your pardon,” he managed. “Would you mind repeating that?”
“Ten thousand dollars,” she said with a frank smile. She rose, extending her hand in a manner clearly meant to end the interview. Josh felt himself rising, too, powerless to resist. “Any time you wish to return with the first year’s dues, do come back,” she said pleasantly. “We will process your application at that time.”
She couldn’t see his mother. Couldn’t feel the chill in the air. Couldn’t smell the cold wet seaweed.
He thanked her, and when she showed him out to the elevator he thanked her again, unable to hear what she was saying. Chill damp waves of shock spread and rippled over his skin, making it crawl at his wrists, then his neck, his back, then the inside of one leg; unpredictable goose bumps prickling and spreading all over his body. He saw his mother’s reflection in the glass wall of the elevator. Then the bronze doors shut and the apparition vanished.
IN the last year before his mother’s insulin was due to run out, she had begun visiting butchers and the town’s two veterinarians, asking to be notified at the death of any pig or cow. Many times he had woken in his bedroom in the dead of night to hear her rummaging about, throwing on her boots and apron. An hour later he would wake again when she came back to the house with the dead animal’s pancreas. Usually the owner tried to give it to her for free, but she insisted on paying.
From the pancreas she would make a raw preparation and use it in place of their dwindling supply of synthesized insulin. The injections raised brutal welts the size of duck eggs and hurt like hell. They were also not nearly as effective as the man-made stuff; she had to watch her sugar intake far more carefully, and live with days of climbing thirst until she gave in and slipped a nearly painless syringe of insulin into her arm.
One day the older vet—Vikram Chandri, whom she had known in the early days of the Krewe of Togetherness immediately after the Flood—stopped by with word of a pig to be butchered. This time she failed to go. Joshua reminded her twice as the day went on. At dinner he started to bring it up again. It took the longest time for him to notice the tears running silently down her face. She put down her fork, and left the table, still limping badly from her last injection.
For several more weeks the vets continued to drop by with word of other opportunities, but Amanda never went, and Josh did not mention it again.
JOSH exited out of Old Galveston Square into the mid-morning heat. A white blindness waited behind his eyes, as if seeing his mother’s ghost had been like looking at the sun, and now he blinked, dazzled, waiting for his sight to heal. He kept to the inner edge of the sidewalk, running one hand along the brickwork of the building he had just left. He took out his battered pocket watch and took his own pulse. One hundred twenty beats a minute. He stepped off the curb to cross the Strand at the corner of 23rd and was nearly run down by a big brewer’s wagon. “Ain’t you got eyes, you stupid sumbitch?” the driver yelled, working hard to bring down his rearing quarter horse.
Josh apologized and hurried across the street. People did get run over by wagon wheels—he’d treated some crushed legs, and gone to the funerals of a couple of men hit in the chest or higher—but usually you had to get drunk and pass out in the street after dark to get hit. He forced himself to pay better attention. On the other side of the street was a little open plaza. Josh sat on a bench there, waiting to recover. His skin gradually stopped creeping and for once he was glad of the strong sunlight.
For the last four years he had tried very hard not to imagine how his mother had died, but now he knew. She had sewn herself into her raincoat, filled the pockets with stones and sewn them shut, too, and then walked into the sea. Probably she had gone to the end of one of the long stone jetties that stuck out from the Seawall.
He had no idea why her ghost had
appeared to him. Had something in his mood drawn her, the memories that had come seeping back to him since Sloane Gardner arrived on his doorstep? Had Sloane brought a breath of magic with her out of Mardi Gras, to seize on him as he read his mother’s last letter? He couldn’t believe Amanda Cane was so adamantly opposed to him joining a Krewe that it had woken her from the grave. She hadn’t left the Krewe of Togetherness out of principle, just lack of money to pay the dues, and a sense of shame that made it hard for her to be with those people after her marriage had failed.
The ghost had not tipped over the ink pot on Fiona Barret’s desk, or really seemed to notice her at all. Just stood there, urgently visible, shaking her head. She was warning him: that’s what he had felt. But warning him of what?
Joshua’s vision cleared and his heart rate began to come down. The plaza was a good-sized corner lot that had been nicely paved with tile, including an outdoor chessboard complete with pieces the size of three-year-old children. About half were plastic pre-Flood originals; the newer replacement pieces had been carved out of driftwood and painted. He suddenly remembered the summer he had come here two or three times a week, when his dad was teaching him to play. How bland the game seemed on a little board at home compared to the physicality of moving these giant pawns and queens. The plastic pieces were no longer slick to the touch, but strangely feltlike after years of being scoured by the sandy Galveston wind and the brutal Texas sun.
His father had played a teaching game, describing both their positions move by move, creating opportunities for Josh to examine his tactics. He never let Josh win, though. He said it would make it more meaningful if he knew he really deserved it. Josh had believed this, although some days it felt hard to come close every time, playing carefully, doing his best, but always somehow failing, his father giving less and less advice as the game drew to a close, until Samuel Cane played his black pieces in silence. Then his features would set into his calm, friendly poker face and he would win and win and win, and of course every time he won Josh had to lose.
AFTER twenty minutes Josh was too hot to sit out in the sun any longer. Well, if the Krewe of Momus wouldn’t have him, he would try the Krewe of Thalassar. As he headed for the docks he noticed that dogs and roosters fell suddenly silent when he passed. The effect was so pronounced he found himself turning his head to see if his mother’s ghost was following him. He never saw her. Perhaps the dogs could smell her near him; a scent of cold seawater and decay too faint for humans to detect.
The Krewe of Thalassar headquarters was located on the wreckage of the Selma, a 421-foot concrete ship. While the Selma had floated perfectly well, she turned out to be brittle. When a big swell first lifted her high and then dropped her sharply against the bottom of the bay in 1920, the concrete ship cracked in half and had remained there ever since. The Krewe of Thalassar was notoriously superstitious, and Joshua had never understood why they would choose a shipwreck for their base of operations, but Ham had explained that, as nobody had been killed or even seriously hurt when the giant ship went down, the Selma, looked at one way, was the mightiest sailors’ walkaway in a town that had suffered terribly at the hands of the sea.
At Pier 23, the Krewe of Thalassar dock, a young black man about Joshua’s age, tall and leanly muscled, stood in a motorboat cleated near the Krewe’s methane fuel pump. He unhooked his gas can and swung it up onto the dock, then climbed out after it. An older Krewe man, missing his left hand, unhooked the fuel hose from the pump and began to fill the can.
Josh nodded at the sailor. “I’m thinking of joining up. What’s the chance I could get a lift out to the Selma?”
The old gas monkey laughed, showing a sprinkling of dirty teeth.
“The Krewe is for sailors,” the black man said. “If you need help to get there, you got no reason to go.” He wore dirty grey shorts and a baseball cap. He might have had a white grandparent, or a Mexican one, Joshua guessed; his skin was the color of coffee with one shot of milk. “You don’t choose the sea, Joshua Cane. She chooses you.”
“How do you know my name?”
“We keep track of the unlucky,” the old gas monkey said. He held up the stump of his arm. “Won’t nobody take me in a boat now neither, if it makes you feel any better.” He flipped down the pump handle to shut off the flow of methane.
The young sailor shrugged. “Nothing personal, man.” He swung the gas can back into his boat and hooked it up to his fuel line, then paused, looking over the back transom into the water. He glanced up at Josh. “Come here for a second.” Josh stepped over to the edge of the dock, wary in case some practical joke was being planned that would have him in the drink. The sailor pointed down into the water just behind his engine. “You carry some heavy shit with you, my man.”
Joshua’s mother stood on the sandy bottom, staring up at him with blind urgency, her face partly obscured by a tangle of drifting seaweed and twists of her floating hair as she shook her head and held out her hands, palms up.
Go back. Beware.
JOSHUA’S interview with the Krewe of Harlequins went much better. First off, there was the beer. He absolutely couldn’t justify spending money on food, but to walk home for lunch and back in the heat of the day could only make him sweatier and smellier. Instead he holed up in the Mikonos Café, a favorite haunt of Ham’s, ignoring the smell of pork souvlakis and sour cream, and nursed his way slowly through one shot of palm whiskey and one cold glass of rice beer.
By the time he left Mikonos’s it was early afternoon, the sun so fierce that even his shadow crouched beneath him to get out of the heat. It was an intense relief to get out of the glare and into the Grand Opera House, where the Harlequins were headquartered. First built in 1894, the Grand had seen all the giants at the turn of the twentieth century: Lionel Barrymore, Pavlova, Sarah Bernhardt, the Marx brothers and George Burns, Tex Ritter and his horse White Flash.
Josh also discovered what he should have guessed: his father had been a member of the Krewe of Harlequins. It was something of an in. Their dues were moderate, and community service was confined mostly to Mardi Gras duties. As a small-time brewer of beer, Josh had a leg up there. His interviewer grew quite excited when Joshua mentioned that his workshop chemistry was good enough to make a variety of invisible inks and crude fireworks.
The main problem with his candidacy was that he was not odd enough. “You seem like a calm, sensible young man,” the interviewer said worriedly. They were sitting in the projection booth at the back of the mezzanine, looking down at the stage. “Not really our type. Although of course the ghost helps,” he added.
Turning, Joshua was hardly surprised to look down and see his mother staring up at him from center stage.
The interviewer was a small balding man and terrifically ugly, his round forehead and face marred by several giant moles with hairs springing from them, stiff as pig bristles. “Something might come of that ghost, certainly, but I’m afraid I have to recommend waiting for a while on your application.” He wiped at his mouth with stubby fingers. “I sense a definite leaning in you, a sense of unbalance which, properly uncontrolled, might be just the ticket. We’ll keep an eye on you, is what we’ll do. We shall watch what the moon says, eh?”
Joshua did not feel calm and sensible. He felt frightened and weightless and slightly drunk. How off balance had he been, ever since Ham spilled Sloane Gardner onto his examination table with her cargo of memories? He remembered the shock on her face, the light in her eyes crumbling as she understood that her mother had died while she had been partying in the Mardi Gras. He shouldn’t have been so spiteful about that. There was an angry tightness in the pit of his stomach that jumped out sometimes if he didn’t keep himself under control. He remembered his mother’s letter, and her ghost, staring and staring. He shook his head. “What if I told you I was a lot less sensible than you think?”
The ugly little man smiled. “Prove it.”
THE beer at Martini’s Crab Shack was even worse than the stuff Josh ma
de at home, but whiskey was whiskey and the same everywhere. The kind of whiskey he could afford, anyway.
HIS fourth interview, at the Krewe of Togetherness chambers, was a complete disaster. Afterward, Joshua stumbled back to the Gas Authority pier and waited for Ham to return. The day he was having must have shown on his face; when Ham finally arrived he took one look at Josh and said, “Let’s go fishin’.”
From the Gas Authority slip they walked over to Ham’s personal boat, Lucille. Lucille was a clapped-out aluminum rowboat with a 15 hp outboard on the back. Ham kept two modular fishing rods and a shitload of lures in a heavy red toolbox plastered with DANGER: EXPLOSIVES stickers. He was widely known to carry old and temperamental blasting caps in the box to discourage theft. Joshua had never seen any such caps, but he was the one who had spread the story along the waterfront when they were both teenagers. Every now and then he added a new story to embellish Ham’s legend. Once this had gotten him in trouble, when Ham charged over to his house one day, furious to find that he was now known as a fish dynamiter. Exactly what curious line of sportsmanship that crossed Josh didn’t know, but Ham had been as mortified as a preacher caught naked in a whorehouse.
Ham anchored Lucille off the rocks at the far southeast tip of the Island, looking across the strait at the tip of the Bolivar Peninsula. Slanting evening sunlight diffused into the air from the west. He lifted up the tip of his fishing rod and flicked it like a buggy whip, a surprisingly deft motion from a forearm as wide as a coffee can. Line hissed and whined as his silvery lure arced far out into the Gulf. It hung in the air, winking, and then hit the water, plop. “So maybe it wasn’t the brightest idea to make a call on the Krewe of Togetherness,” Ham said. The spool clicked as he began to reel in his lure. “Between the ghost and the no lunch and the booze and all. Not a great idea.”
“Nope,” Josh said.
“Did you spill any of your brother’s blood upon the ground?” Ham said, playing his line with a couple of sharp tugs.