The Necromancer's House (15 page)

Andrew opens the door to room 373 of the Brass Key Apartments, his left hand flipping up a dead wall switch, his nostrils flaring to take in the damp air. Hot and dark. It smells of nylon stockings and stale semen, the nosegay of adultery, but why shouldn't it? Adultery is his business here, too.

He crosses to the AC unit beneath the window and turns the knob, glad to hear it sputter on. The air coming from the crosshatched mouth is dog's-breath warm, though, and turning the loose temperature knob all the way into the blue only cools it marginally. A drop of sweat milky with salt runs down his nose and disappears into the vent.

He tries the window and it refuses to rise, so he braces himself and pushes up hard. Painted shut. A young couple on the street below whinnies self-conscious laughter, and he laughs, too, as he imagines himself pawing at the glass at them like a dog stuck in a hot car. His guayabera is beginning to stick to his back again.

Across the street, a balding man in suspenders and a blood-soaked shirt looms behind a filthy window, fanning himself with a fedora. His look suggests mild curiosity, incongruous with his recently cut throat. A ghost. So many of them here. Andrew suppresses the urge to wave and turns from the window.

Lights from the bars on St. Louis wash the room in red light that recalls the engine room of a World War II submarine, even through the flimsy curtains. He sits on the futon and feels the cord of the table lamp until he finds the switch, which he is immediately sorry to have pushed. Now the gaudy purple and gold wall hanging, bearing the obligatory fleur-de-lis, pounces at him. Now he sees the truly impressive cum stain on the futon cover, as big as a map of Cuba. He has the impression its author is a minor league baseball player, but has no idea where that comes from.

He notes a filmy glass ashtray near the lamp and decides to give the window another try before he lights up.

Brace.

Strain.

Window still shut.

Drop of sweat in the eye.

An idea comes to him then.

He is reluctant to bother Haint again, having left him at the Tin Shack to listen to the fiddler's second set, but Haint is the best man he knows to solve this problem; the only one who might be able to do it remotely. Miss Mathilda gave him the key, but she will already be settling down to sleep, having read her autistic girl an article from
Scientific American
or
Popular Science
.

He texts Haint a photo of the window with the message:

Painted shut. Hot as fuck. HOG?

Less than a minute passes before the “Ring of Fire” ringtone goes off and he sees Haint on his screen. He enables the camera. Haint is drunker than hell, holding a dead cat by the neck with one hand. He holds a tiny, gnarled claw-hand in the other. Haint gestures with the claw-hand that Andrew should point his phone's camera at the window.

“Tap tap,” his phone says, and Andrew taps the phone twice on the glass.

A chip with a crack for a tail appears in the pane as though a small rock has hit it. Flakes of paint fly as a seam gouges itself furiously in a square circuit defining the frame, as though the window is unzipping itself, as though a very strong hand wields an invisible putty knife. The whole assembly shudders and the window pops, easing itself up an inch. Andrew pushes up with his free hand now and the window opens as if on greased rails.

Air comes in, not cool air but fresh.

He turns the phone's screen faceward to thank Haint, but the man is dancing in the candlelight of his mobile brick apartment, slow-dancing with his limp cat and kissing its dead mouth, holding the Hand of Glory up in the other. Etta James plays tinny and small through the phone's speaker.

“Good night, Haint,” he says, and the man dips the hand in his hand twice in acknowledgment.

Andrew hangs up and sits back on the futon, well away from the map of Cuba. His cell phone tells him it is 12:22
A.M.

He lights a Spirit and inhales gratefully, blowing smoke in a drowsy billow toward the window that yawns subtropical night on the other side of the room.

Althea.

She will be here in eight minutes if she keeps her word, but she never keeps her word.

 • • • 

“Did you find a meeting?” she asks him as they lie on the damp bed. He is still panting. She is already toeing around in the sheet-nest for the panties she will be slipping back on soon.

It is nearly three
A.M.
and she will want to welcome her man home after his shift. Then sleep from morning until nearly five
P.M.
, when she will make some weird vinegary salad with apricots or strawberries or pomegranate seeds and run off for three hours of teaching Kundalini, Hatha, and hot yoga, if she is still doing that.

“Not here,” he says. “I'm not in town long. Like a day.”

“But you've been to one recently? A meeting?”

“Last night.”

“Good. So you're feeling strong?”

“Don't start that,” he says, instantly regretting it. Telling Althea not to do something is like pressing the accelerator to stop a car.

She takes a small bottle of Jack Daniel's out of her tin purse and sips it, straddling him and bending down to put her lips to his. He turns his head away.

“C'mon,” he says, “it isn't funny.”

“Who said it was?” she says, swigging again, loading up with a mouthful she will now try to squirt between his lips.

He jabs his thumbs roughly just under her armpits and wiggles, causing her to laugh and cough, whiskey spattering from her mouth and down her chin. She tries unsuccessfully to catch it in a cupped hand.

Pleased, she bends to kiss him and this time he allows it, her shag of curly brown hair engulfing him along with her riverbed scent while the forbidden taste of booze rides her tongue into his mouth.

And just like that it is awake again.

The big electric animal under his skin that doesn't understand the word
no
.

You're in trouble.

He breathes hard, wanting to take the whiskey bottle from her and swallow until a big warm pond pools around his heart, but he concentrates on her tongue. It is a dirty tongue, always coated with something; it feels the way your skin feels when you shower somewhere with soft water, always slick, always filmy.

The Jack Daniel's bottle lies on the bed, its handsome black label and the good feel of it in his palm only a scoot and a reach away.

Fuck your way out of this.

Andrew looks down past the twin hanging cones of Althea's breasts to where her belly rolls, pale above her dark bush and only just beginning to dimple as she approaches her fortieth year.

He begins to harden again, flicking her oily nakedness with the top of his shaft.

“Hmm,” she half growls, reaching down for it, but he dumps her off him and holds her down. She snakes her legs around him now, high up around his ribs, and wiggles, waiting for him.

Definitely still teaching yoga.

He hardens to three quarters.

Closes his eyes and sees Anneke.

Wanting me, naked and eager.

Except that Anneke already loves me.

Just not sexually, “as a wife loves a husband.”

Or the raven's beak would kill her.

As surely as cancer is killing her father.

Stop sabotaging this, you need this.

Why?

What happens when you get too old to hide in a cunt?

And it's just you alone with you.

Andrew opens his eyes, sees the beautiful, eely woman beneath him; he flares his nostrils and takes in the punk aroma of her excited sex. Althea has a strong smell, but mild and sweet compared to the rusalka. He closes his eyes again.

Karl Zautke is dying.

Anneke is relapsing.

She needs you, and you're here.

Opens his eyes.

“You don't love me, do you?”

His own voice surprises him.

Althea brays a laugh, then shakes her head slowly and wickedly at him.

“I love my husband,” she says. And she does. She loves her husband so much, in fact, that she will strap him down when he gets home from the bar and tell him in luxurious detail about her unprotected sex with her gris-gris New York lover. He will want her to ride him while she is still full of his rival, emasculating him until he is half sobbing, and then, when it's over, turning mommy on him, cleaning him off and cradling him until sunrise. You would never look at the big, dangerous-looking bouncer with his bald dome and huge biceps and think,
This guy only gets hard when he's being ground down
, but that's how it is.

“I know. I just wanted to hear it.”

“Stop talking,” she says.

He stops talking.

He puts a coin between her eyes that lets him think thoughts into her head, and he shows her a dream where she is raping men on a Persian slave galley—she yowls so hard at the end of it that one of the neighbors accompanies her vocals with the percussion of shoe on wall.

Someone outside and below claps.

Andrew emerges from his bathroom, carrying the little duffel he took to New Orleans. No baggage claim, no bored security guards watching you walk past the point of no return; fuck you, Homeland Security. The day a user decides to go terrorist is going to be a bad day indeed.

His phone, temporarily confused, and perhaps insulted, by the rapid shift from Central to Eastern Time zones, resets itself and chimes the arrival of a text message it had temporarily misplaced.

Anneke Zautke

Dad's on the way out. Don't come. I'll keep you posted though. Sorry & thanks. God damn this anyway.

Und zo.

He goes upstairs, sits on the edge of his bed, and peels off his Old Gringos. The warm, animal smell of his own feet hits him—it was so hot in the Quarter—and he notices a hole that will soon allow his big toe to peep through his sock.

Time to get rid of these.

Knot them together and give them to the dog to chew.

Only the dog isn't a dog now.

As if summoned, Salvador knocks at the door frame, keeping politely out of sight, the clack of wood on wood startling the tired magus.

“Come in,” he says, almost adding
boy
.

Isn't a dog.

Then what the fuck is he?

A monster. You've turned him into something unnatural, as you do with everything. He should be a handful of ashes on the breeze. He should be chasing rabbits in Elysium.

Will you put Karl Zautke's heart in a basket and make him wash your boxers, too?

Salvador walks in, the Etch-a-Sketch he uses to communicate hanging by a leather cord around his wicker neck. The knobs turn themselves, and black-on-gray letters appear.

“Closer, Sal, I can't see.”

The automaton lopes close, the knobs still turning.

TV IN DOWN.
GARLIC CHOP IN BOWL.
WHO COOKS?

Salvador has cleaned up the media room and put in a new television.

He chopped garlic because, even though he doesn't know what Andrew wants to eat, it will certainly contain garlic.

“I'll cook. Thanks.”

Boy.

I can't even scratch your ears now.

The picture frame cocks, Salvador Dalí's head now at a quizzical angle. He wants further orders. Just like a border collie, happier with a task.

He always asks who cooks even though Andrew hasn't let him near the gas range since he caught himself on fire two years ago. But he's not afraid of fire, not afraid of anything except displeasing his master.

What else has he got?

Me.

He just has me.

 • • • 

Andrew stands up, puts on the orange running shoes Anneke teases him about, and grabs a tennis ball from the closet. They go into the backyard. For the next half an hour, Andrew throws the ball and the wicker man sprints on his synthetic legs to grab it, scooping it with his wooden hands as nimbly as an outfielder, then throwing it back to his master. When it goes into the brush, Salvador turns his framed head sideways so it doesn't drag branches.

John Dawes, the neighbor across the street, watches with military binoculars, can't figure out for the life of him why the Spanish-looking butler would play catch with the strange bachelor, both of them laughing, only one of them soaked with sweat when they go back into the house.

It isn't the strangest thing he's seen at 4700 Willow Fork Road, though.

Not by half.

 • • • 

Dusk is coming on.

Andrew's fingers are yellow with turmeric and his squash soup is boiling when the phone chimes again.

He knows what it says.

Anneke Zautke

Dog tell, og tell.

Let Go, Let God.

Elvis has left the building.

Out of nowhere he cries.

For his dead policeman father.

For his dead user mentor.

But also for Anneke, who'll have to learn for herself how hard it is when the second parent goes. How real it gets when you're sweating down into the cardboard boxes bound for Goodwill and the Salvation Army. When the other parent isn't there to tell you stories from before you were born. When you go in the attic and the plastic tchotchkes crumble in your hand, and you sob like a bitch when you realize your mom saved a little bundle of report cards from third and fourth grade because they said something nice about her kid.

About you.

And that those cards waited in that peeling old folder for your adult hand to fish them out and throw them away because there's just nobody else in this world who'll ever give a damn about them again.

Maybe you really and finally grow up when you see the wall behind the last box of mysteries and it's just a wall.

Your wall now.