Farewell to the Flesh

A Ghost Story

Photo by Michael Jerrard on Unsplash

Haunts are common enough, here in the Big Easy. They hang in the greasy shadows, disguised by the curvaceous silhouettes of the iron balconies. When a girl stumbles out from the hot, smoky night places into the humid arms of the dark, there are haunts enough if she’s sense to see them.

I’m a night trader. Ain’t got no use for all that Southern sunlight everybody always flying down here to soak up. Me, I’m like a bayou gator. I cruise out on a ribbon of moonlight, hunting for a good meal, a little loving. I sing in the night like them gators do. I call in my lovers, and wicked haunts cling to them like wet silk. My lovers don’t know no better. I help them a little beyond what they expecting, and they pay me just the same.

I read tea leaves, cards, maybe some knucklebones, sitting on a red velvet cushion in the narrow front parlor of Madame Lele’s. Right next door, they serve up red beans with rice and hot sauce so fiery it smokes, and the juke just about busts through the thin wall between us, it’s so damn loud. That place, it serves liquor, too. My customers stagger in on the fumes and beg for good fortunes in whiskey-burned voices.

They don’t know the hungry dead ride around on their backs, playing tricks. I read for them, then I take them through the beaded curtain and ease them on down on that big old purple fainting couch Madame got from a burned-out plantation house. When I touch the men, they quiver. They afraid of the mojo thickening the air. The women only sigh and open their arms. My sisters are practical. I’m compassionate when I kiss their whiskey lips.

*****

Madame’s got a old juju gator head hanging in there. It stares down while I make shadows on the wall with my lovers. All the inky knots and tendrils look awful pretty, and the haunts get confused, caught in that black web. When my lovers faint from the ecstasy, as often happens, I reach out and run my fingers over those shadows, gathering the whole tangle into a little ball. I pinch it hard.

Inside is a nasty haunt, struggling to free itself. I take that little ball, and I offer it to Old Gator Head, there on the wall. He grins just like he still in the bayou with all his kin. I hold that ball under his toothy snout, and snap!, down it goes, haunt and all. I never figured out where he puts them, seeing as how he’s got no stomach no more. But Madame’s juju is a powerful one.

That gator, he’s got hisself some expensive glass eyeballs, real as life. Liquid gold flecks floating over deep amber. They stir a memory in me of the swamp, the way it lies all quiet with the sunshine stepping over the green-gold floating lace. But underneath, the water’s dark as tea, with big jaws hiding in the murk.

Mr. Gator’s eyes make me feel like he’s sizing me up for a meal. Sometimes, from the corner of my own eye, I think I see that juju head wink in a slow gator way. The filmy secret eyelid slides up over that cold glitter like fog rolling over the swamp. Times like that, I get the hot, ripe smell of the mud and moss in my nose sure as if I was standing in it, and I think of the sound bones make breaking.

Madame’s got another girl works in the parlor, too. She calls her Jolie, as in jolie laide, on account of Jolie’s popular with the men even though she’s got a big nose and a flat chest. When it comes to fortune-telling, Jolie’s a stone fraud. She makes up any crazy story for the customers, long as it makes ‘em smile. She got no talent for divining.

It’s a different story when it comes to the fainting couch, though. Jolie does it for the extra cash, and she’s afraid of the juju. Not like me. I never charge for ridding a customer of haunts. When Jolie takes a body back behind the beaded curtain, she throws a black Spanish lace shawl over Old Gator Head. Says it creeps her to have him staring down at her. She never sees the haunts, either. Dumb as a post is our Jolie, but she got a good heart.

*****

Madame swept in at ten o’clock like she does every evening, just to check on the business. She pretends she don’t know about what goes on in the room with the fainting couch, but I think she’s wise. Madame’s a big woman, all bosom and rolling hips under a caftan the size of a revival tent. She crops her hair tight to her scalp and dyes it blonde. It stands out against her dark skin like the white tip of a match. She smells like fresh-baked bread and orange oil.

“Lord,” she sang, just like she at choir practice. “Look at the dust! Jolie, honey, get the broom.” She whisked away the Spanish shawl from the juju head and frowned. “Baby, don’t be covering up the gator. Can’t do his job proper if he can’t see.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jolie mumbled, and scuffed at the linoleum with the balding broom.

Madame stared at me, where I sat in a darkened corner on a footstool. She’s got a big aura of light around her like she swallowed the sun, and no haunts ever ride her shoulders. She stared like she going to say something to me, then pursed her lips and turned away with a harrumph.

“Jolie, you been conjuring the dead in here?” Madame wrinkled her nose. “Smells like the swamp. You know I don’t hold with any of that Devil’s work. You stick to cards, girl, and you be all right.”

Jolie sighed and dropped the broom into my corner with a smirk. “Probably that smelly ol’ gator stinking up the place,” she whispered.

*****

The Professor came to the parlor a few days before Mardi Gras. I seen him standing out in the neon-gaudy street, looking at our flickering sign shaped like a hand with a spiral in the palm. He had his lip all curled, and a mean glint in his eye. I felt a faintness come over me, watching him stroll real casual up to the door, and I went in the back and wouldn’t read for him.

Jolie flounced down on the red cushion, got her long legs all screwed up into a knot, and made herself mysterious. She got a husky voice the men like, and the Professor wasn’t no different. He liked her bare shoulders in her strappy little dress, too. Pretty soon, Jolie was leading him back behind the curtain, and I hid in the bathroom.

The Professor taught classes on local superstitions and the history of voodoo. He laughed at the gator head and wouldn’t let Jolie cover it up like she wanted.

“Ah, chere, let him watch if that’s what he likes.”

He shoved her down rough and bruised her good before he was through. I shivered behind the bathroom door, listening to her whimper. I was too scared to go out there because the Professor had the most devilish haunt riding him I’d ever seen. It was a shadowy halo all around him. While he took what he wanted from poor Jolie, it went creeping out like the fingers of a huge hand, sucking up the lamplight and popping bulbs. Later, Jolie stood crying in front of the bathroom mirror. She had long, red welts down her back to her pale, skinny thighs.

“Look what that sonofabitch done,” she raged. She flung down the wad of bills she had clenched in her fist. “Got his thrills cheap, too!”

The Professor came back three times. First, Jolie locked him out and threatened to call the police. He snarled and called her a whore, and I began to remember. The next time, he put his shoulder to the door, and the lock burst just like it did the night he came to my apartment. I had dropped his class by then, but it was too, too late.

Jolie ran like a streak of lightning out the back, through the narrow alley and into the juke joint next door. The Professor stood in Madame’s parlor and sniffed for Jolie’s perfume. I stayed in the shadowy corner of the back room where the light couldn’t reach and watched him knock over the reading table. The hanging lamp, with its dim bulb, swung like laundry in a gale. Above my head, the gator showed his teeth and growled. I wasn’t scared anymore. I remembered what the Professor had done, and why I was there.

*****

The last time the Professor came, I let him into the tiny parlor. Lord, was he surprised. The din of Mardi Gras was loose in the city, folks in masks and costumes staggering between shadows and light all through the Vieux Carre. Carnival. The last farewell to the flesh before penitence.

I smiled at the Professor with all my teeth. I pulled him toward the purple couch the way I would a lover. I pushed him down on the velvet gently, so gently.

He was triumphant. “I knew you’d come around, chere. There was never any need for games.”

Mean lust smoldered in him, and the haunt that rode him billowed up like smoke, big and black. I knew it was no ghost, no dead thing refusing to pass. It came from inside the Professor, projected like the movies in the theatre. I made shadows with him on the wall, and the haunt wound itself into the dark filigree the way the big snakes wind up into the trees in the swamp.

The Professor’s blood heated. Our skin steamed like the thick, clinging mud. The smells of sex and bayou mingled. The Professor fell back, exhausted. I passed my hand over the tangled skein of shadow on the wall. Gathering. Gathering. He watched me from lazy eyes as I showed him the inky ball pinched between my fingers, its slender tail tethered to his heart.

“What’s that, chere?”

I smiled down at him. Jolie’s knees gripped his ribs hard as I sat on his abdomen.

“This is what you owe me, Professor. This is payment for crushed limbs and lungs filled with swamp water. Payment for my bones, in the belly of a gator.”

I showed him my true face, Jolie’s cheekbones broadening, her eyes tilting up, her lips swelling into full ruby petals, skin darkening to café au lait. He screamed and thrashed under Jolie’s strong thighs. He screamed when the gator closed its jaws on the little ball of shadow. He screamed until the fine, dark thread of his soul snapped.