Free States

3. ERASE UNA VEZ EN LA OUESTE

‘I HAD A dream,’ says Precious Mary as she moves against Sam Oakenhurst’s arm. ‘I dreamed I was lying in this field of silver poppies looking up at the moon. I stretched my arms and legs wide and the Moon Goddess smiled. She had a wonderful round pale oriental face like a Buddha. Is that a Buddhess, Sam? And she came down from the midnight blue and pursed her silver lips and she sucked my pussy, Sam, like nobody but you.’ She grins and laughs and slaps at him in his flattered embarrassment.

They had been here at Ambry’s for almost a month. Precious Mary was on her way to join a closed order in Laredo. She collected mosquitoes and her little clear envelopes were full of the different types, including the hybrids. Her pride was a great dragon mosquito, rainbow carapace over two inches long, able to drain a small rodent dry of blood in less than a minute. ‘They thought it carried A,’ she said. ‘But now they ain’t so sure.’

She had cornrows beaded with tiny precious stones - emeralds, rubies, sapphires, diamonds - large green eyes, a refined Watutsi face. She wore a silk shift which swam on the blackness of her skin like milk over marble. Her head, she said, was worth a million guineas, but her body was priceless. She lived, like everyone in De Quincey, at Ambry’s big Gothic timber house just by the jetty which jutted over the flat sheen of a lake revealed below the surrounding yellow and black mist. The lake was never entirely at rest. Shapes just under the surface were mysterious and alarming. Every once in a while a tiny spot of colour would float by. ‘They find big ones out there and milk them,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing but rigs once you get twenty kays over that horizon.’ She pointed to the north. ‘Do you believe in God, Sam?’

Mr Oakenhurst admitted that he did.

‘You believe in a just God, Sam?’

‘I believe God deals you a fair hand.’ He became thoughtful. ‘What you do with it after that is a question of luck and judgement both. And luck is what other people are making of their hands. It’s a complicated game, it seems to me, Mary. Only a few of us are willing to accept the kind of odds it offers. But what else can you do? This is reality, I think. I look at the game. I work out the odds. And then I decide if I want to play or not. I hope I’m doing no more or less with my mind and time than God expects of me.’

‘You’re crazy,’ she said.

That was the last Sam Oakenhurst and Precious Mary ever spoke of religion.

In Milton he had lost his horse to a tall pile broker from Natchez who had proved to be so much better than the table’s other partners that Mr Oakenhurst suspected him of being a secret professional. But he had played a fair game. The broker let Sam take his place on the coach to De Quincey. That trip to the lake shore had been Mr Oakenhurst’s first real experience of the practical realities of the Free States, where whites were supposed to be his equals. He found it awkward to be travelling in a horse-drawn coach with a black man driving and a white man riding inside. On the seat across from him the “bianco” showed no similar embarrassment and chatted amiably on the tandem subjects of fluke attractors and the availability of piles noires. Mr Oakenhurst did his best to converse without seeming to condescend, but he was still suffering from a strong desire to stare in wonder at this educated and self-confident whitey much as one would regard a clever circus animal. His name was Peewee Wilson and he had owned property up in Haute County, he said, until it had popped one morning, all of a piece, and left him “wiv a weird damned hole coloured like dirty bottly-glass an’ radiatin’ coldness so damned bad ah’d felt mahse’f chillered to mah soul.” He had moved his wife and kids to his sister in San Diego and was on his way to join them. He had never been to Biloxi (“Ah have not chosered vat pilgrimage, sah, as yet.”) but was eager to hear Mr Oakenhurst’s account of it and the jugador loved to tell a tale.

So the time had passed pleasantly enough between Milton and De Quincey. Peewee informed Mr Oakenhurst about the famous Colossus of Tarzana, one of the wonders of their new world - a huge figure some two hundred feet high and apparently consisting of living flame which gave off a soft heat filling most observers with a sense of calm and well-being. A tent town had grown around the feet of the Colossus, populated by those who had become hooked on the phenomenon’s influence.

(Let us have the body, the machinoix would demand. We need it for our science. Its soul has dissipated. What use is it to you? But Sam Oakenhurst would refuse to give it up. He would take it with him all the way to the Fault and pitch it in. The machinoix would not be offended. He was of their number. He could do no wrong, save betray another of their own.)

Mr Oakenhurst waded through the shallow mud of the lake shore. There seemed no end to it. At present the flat, troubled liquid reflected nothing, but every so often a shape threatened to break through the surface. The clouds had become a solid monochrome grey. Once in a while a long thread of bright scarlet would rise from below the horizon and give the sky a lizard’s lick. Mr Oakenhurst ran secret fingers over his most intimate scars. His longing for the past was like physical hunger. A madness. He prayed for a vessel to rescue him.

Mr Oakenhurst walked through the mud. Sometimes his legs would begin to tremble, threatening to give out completely, and he would panic, turning slowly to look back at Ambry’s and the long, dark jetty whose far point penetrated the mist.

‘Darling.’ Precious Mary led him home on these occasions.

‘Darling, Sam.’

Sam Oakenhurst decided that if he stayed another week he would take it as a sign and let New Orleans call him back. He shivered. He had made no real decision at all. He glared at the grey water. The sky, he thought, had turned the colour of rotten honey.