Babylon Rolling Read online

  Also by Amanda Boyden

  Pretty Little Dirty

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Amanda Boyden

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  A portion of the definition of fatal familial insomnia on pages this page–this page is taken from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boyden, Amanda.

  Babylon rolling / Amanda Boyden.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37775-3

  1. New Orleans (La.)—Fiction. 2. Hurricane Ivan, 2004—Fiction.

  3. Race relations—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.O934E54 2008

  813’.6—dc22 2007052286

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  v3.1

  For Joseph and our city

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rainwater. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or graves, the town being built upon “made” ground; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others.

  —Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

  PROLOGUE

  We choose New Orleans.

  We choose to live Uptown on Orchid Street inside the big lasso of river, though we rarely look at it, churning brown, wide. Giant catfish with eyes the size of salad plates cuddle down in its soft mud. They eat bicycle inner tubes, sometimes tin cans, like goats. Divers who work in the river with headlamps and wet suits say a catfish will suck your arm in and gum it up to the elbow.

  We shoulder the rummy, pissy weeks before Lent when our city goes into heat. Squawking for titties, wearing cameras, the magpies come in throngs, overload branches, mate and shit, everyone swooping at glittering strings of nothing worth fighting for. After Ash Wednesday a chain of doughnut shops accepts grocery bags of beads, and we trade in sacks of greasy sins for a dozen glazed each. Sprinkles, mixed. So many mistakes get repackaged for the next year.

  We acknowledge that spores of racism and mold grow here, recede, disappear to hide behind wallpaper. We keep track. Do nothing. We are good at watching: On a dank summer night, a pack of feral dogs shreds a girl’s pet bunny in her backyard. At the start of his second grade, a poor boy kicks a pigeon that cannot fly, spits at it, and kicks again. New Year’s Eve, a rotted balcony buckles and spills drunk tourists onto pavement splatted with sticky blots of their own daquiris.

  But, oh, the comeliness. We have fallen for snowy egrets and high ceilings as naturally as we would our own mothers on the days of our births. Weak-kneed, we lunge for oysters and musty authors and mean-tongued rappers with gold and diamond teeth worth more than our homes. We swoon for the glassy surface of our shallow lake, the one that appears in photos taken from the moon; traipse, loopy, behind brass bands on the street; slurp on crawfish heads for their yellow fat, our favorite. It is the more than enough of, the flooding of, everything that we must have, even though not all of us know this. Our want wears out our sleeves.

  If we decide to, we can tell you who New Orleans is. New Orleans is the old man who cannot read. Still, he buys the paper every day. He touches the faces of murderers and commits them to memory. And New Orleans is the slack-jawed woman, too full of Sunday dinner to move from the table, staring at her haystacked pile of turkey neck bones. And New Orleans is also, always, the terrible child, our enfant terrible, the one who never makes it home on time, the one whose parents never care why. Four-letter lyrics, a cornerstore scuffle. Music and violence. The kid craves both.

  We love a place that cannot be saved by levees. We are brilliant losers. But, of course, those of us living Uptown on Orchid Street do not know this yet. Katrina is a year away.

  1

  Fearius stare from the car at Stumps Grocery and Liquor. Painted on the siding: Package meat Fried rice Cold drinks. He might could drink a strawberry cold drink. Orange. Fearius like cold drinks better than malt liquor when they smokin the hydroponic, but Alphonse be inside Stumps for Colt 40s, and Fearius, his bankroll thin as a spliff now. Thin as quarters and a dime thin. Juvey dont pay, dont he know.

  But Fearius, he be patient. He learnt it. He waited to make fifteen full years of age inside juvey, waited four months sitting in there. Finally turned legal for driving on a learner permit when he caged up in Baby Angola with no wheels nowhere. Now he borrowing a license till he take the test. Why he hafta take a test to drive when he been driving since he made twelve, Fearius dont know. Maybe he just go buy a license. He be working soon, back tight with everybody, two weeks, three, fatten up the bitch bankroll.

  Fearius flick the cardboard tree smell like piña colada on the rearview, rag the sweat off his shaved head. He open the glovebox and touch Alphonses Glock. Pretty thing, hot as they get. Stinkin like firecrackers.

  Alphonse walk out Stumps and pass Fearius a 40 in brown paper, wet on the bottom, sweatin. Everything sweatin. Fearius dick sweatin in his drawers.

  “You want it?” Alphonse ask about the gun. Or maybe the beer.

  “I earn it,” Fearius say about the Glock and the 40 both.

  Alphonse nod, get in, take the Glock and shove it in his pants.

  Two hours still before Shandra off work. Shandra gots a friend, she say. Fearius need, need, need a friend. He just gone take a friend soon, he toll Alphonse. Alphonse said, “Be patient.” Fearius remember he know patient. And Alphonse gots the Glock. Patient be way easier with a gun.

  Autumn is running around in a circle at the end of its tether, Ariel May decides, as far away as it can get from the stake of New Orleans. She misses fall with a pang, squints against the thick afternoon sun, licks salty sweat from her upper lip. The streetcar stinks of too many bodies and is full of noise, and the junior high school kids in their uniforms and blue braids and attitudes with music leaking out of the little speakers crammed into their ears irritate Ariel enough so that she uncrosses her legs and takes up more room on the wooden seat, presses her hot thigh beneath her wrinkled linen skirt against the loud girl next to her. The girl can’t be more than twelve, Ariel surmises, but she has C-cup tits at least, maybe Ds. How does a body so young grow those things? Maybe the girl is older. Maybe she’s dumb and has failed a couple of grades.

  The girl doesn’t notice Ariel’s leg at all though. Instead, she busily rubs some kind of pale salve the consistency of mucus onto the propped-up elbows of
the girl squatting on the seat in front of her and blathers on about what another girl did. She’ll bust her fuckin skinny-ass face if she thinks about fuckin doin it again. A cursive tattoo shows on the second girl’s upper arm through the short sleeve of her thin white uniform shirt. Ariel wants to swat the tub of goo out the open window. She’s tired. Hot, hot. Here, inside this streetcar, perpetual summer drapes itself around Ariel’s neck like a stole. Like a giant piece of raw bacon stole.

  The streetcar squeals to another stop. Two waiters in their black and whites squeeze on. The junior high kids jammed up front fan their noses and talk about the waiters’ pizza funk and pepperoni faces. When the streetcar takes off again, the little breeze that snakes its way past the salving girls is a drooly lick. A breeze almost worse than none. Ariel sighs and remembers woodsmoke, brown leaves dancing across a sidewalk. The people who have lived here their entire lives can’t have any idea what they’re missing.

  She wonders what Ed will make for dinner. She wonders about her commitment to public transportation in a city like this.

  Ed hollers hello from the kitchen. Miles and Ella bicker above the somber narration of Animal Planet surgery: “Lucky’s femur is broken in five places.” Ariel saves her breath. The instant she’d confront Ed about their children watching surgical gore is the instant he’d take the remote, change the channel, and say, “What gore? There. Look. PBS.” And smile. She’s given up on training him to greet her at the door with a martini.

  “Changing!” Ariel yells, ascending the stairs. The house groans out its age with each footfall.

  In September, cold water only runs cool. Ariel drops her head in the shower. She waits, knows that the water temperature won’t change, feels nostalgic, considers where, exactly, the best place is to apply a cold pack to drop body temperature. Wrist. Throat. Sliceable places. Once, in Jamaica, a man put shell-shaped ice chips in her vagina in some form of misdirected foreplay. The ice melted. Even then, young as she was, the island and the guy alike felt fake to her. Practiced. She tries to remember the guy’s name, knows she can’t, not even to save her life.

  The soap rests in a soupy muck in the holder. Ish. If Ed is going to tend house, then that’s what he should do, but he just doesn’t see things. Giant snot soap. How do you miss it?

  She should be fair. Ed cooks. Ed listens to NPR.

  What’s His Name, the ice chip man, had a washboard stomach. Ariel didn’t come. She knew she wouldn’t the instant he stood at the end of the bed and caressed his own waxed chest in some staged, amorous gesture. She has no recollection of whether his was a name that suited him or not.

  Names hold too much power, she thinks, or none at all. Everyone should have a chance to name themselves. Just today “Miss Sugar Enspice” checked into the hotel. Ariel recognized the woman with crispy yellow extensions from her music video, the one where her plump ass cheeks hang out the bottom of a pair of kiwi-colored shorts.

  Jesus, some of the pseudonyms that the celebrity guests use. Axel Savage. Rod Doe. Ha! Everybody behind the front desk busted guts. Rod Doe. Nameless Cock. The pubescent musician had no clue, it seemed, as he gave her, the general manager, very specific instructions on who could and who could not know his room number, what calls could be put through. He took off his dark sunglasses, stared directly into Ariel’s eyes the way some men’s magazine must have told him to do, and said she could use his room number. She felt at once mildly flattered and sick to her stomach. His dyed black hair stood in carefully spaced spikes all over his puny head. Ariel nodded politely. She bet he had acne on his back.

  The idiotic name of the hotel itself can’t be beat: La Belle Nouvelle, a Barcelona-modern hotel through and through smushed into the French Quarter at the edge of the Central Business District. They don’t even have enough curb footage on the street to get zoned for valet parking. The bulk of the property rises orange and lime green, a contemporary cyst, in the center of the block between a department store and three empty buildings being forever renovated, the continual drilling and pneumatic hammering deafening to everyone but touring bands and the feckless groupies for whom the hotel has become a favorite. Ooh, and she can’t forget the proms. Or the frat and sorority formals. Somehow, Ariel is supposed to change the clientele. A year ago April, when the new owners called Minneapolis and made the offer she couldn’t refuse, she thought the name La Belle Nouvelle was likely reflective of some sort of New Orleans charm she hadn’t yet experienced. Ah. Well.

  Their own family’s names always hover, too. Fruit fly names that won’t leave. Ariel kept her surname when they married, and they gave it to their kids. Ed, fortunately, has always believed the decision to be best. But then Edgar Allan Flank is a toughie of a moniker. Ariel and Ed couldn’t break completely from family tradition though. They chose two classics for their children: Miles Davis May and Ella Fitzgerald May. Ella will answer to the nickname Fitzy when she has no choice. Drying off, walking naked into their warm bedroom, Ariel again hopes they haven’t burdened their children with expectations of greatness.

  Fearius sit, full-up tired of patient. His ass sore, done molded to the car seat by now. Shandra and Alphonse fighting and fighting on her stoop. “I say I finish for seven!” she scream at him.

  Alphonse dont care, mixed everything up. Now Fearius not gettin no Shandra friends pussy.

  Alphonse got the Glock in his pants still, in there for hours. Fearius feel like his dick a gun, feel like shooting big old lumpy Shandra with her witchy claws that cost more than Dom Pérignon. Except Alphonse got the Glock, so Fearius not getting no fat Shandra neither.

  Fearius decide to quit Alphonses company till tomorrow. Tonight Fearius gone make a girlfriend, no matter what, make sure no Glocks nearby.

  It a hot night, time he make hisself a girlfriend in the Channel by Annunciation. Lots of them over there when it hot, clucking, all together on corners like hens. Bunch a chicken heads.

  Kissin between houses can turn into a lay down in no time.

  “The goopas are purple,” Ella says, kicking the table leg. Ariel’s daughter peels cheese from the top of her lasagna with her fingers. Her chipped nail polish has disappeared.

  “Guptas,” Miles enunciates.

  “What?” Ariel understands her kids less each day. She knows she should be frightened by this fact. “What are guptas?”

  Miles, Ella, and Ed giggle. “Who,” Ed says. “They’re a who.”

  “What?”

  “Mah-um!”

  “Ed?”

  “We say ‘people of color,’ ” Ed instructs Ella, and Miles rolls his eyes. So does Ariel.

  “Ed?”

  “Uh huh.” Ella nods. “Dark dark purple.”

  “Nah ah.”

  The junior high people of color on the streetcar today gyrated in the aisle. Ariel tries to remember dancing at twelve. A table for twelve. A party of twelve. Here in this city she’s learned everybody says, about a time, I’ll be there for twelve. I have to be there for six. We need a reservation for nine for seven. In such instances, Ariel has yet to figure out which way they want the reservation. A bellhop told her it comes from the French, which automatically means it doesn’t make any sense to Ariel. Sadly, no matter what Ariel tries, La Belle Nouvelle’s high-end dinner-bar retains a reputation for serving underage drinkers.

  The dancing kids filled the aisle. They seemed to want to rile people of non-color on the streetcar. Why did she have to be a non-color? She has color. “Ed?”

  “Our new neighbors,” he answers.

  “They’re Indian,” Miles says knowingly.

  Ed lays his hand on the table in front of Miles’ plate. “We say East Indian,” Ed corrects. This from the man who didn’t notice his daughter chewing on the end of the grape magic marker till the ink had covered her entire front in a purple indelible apron. Now Ella’s favorite color seems to be a shade of Gupta.

  “Where?” Ariel asks, meaning which house. Two houses on their street have sold recently, the big one immediately t
o their right and a little one across the street next to the ratty community garden.

  “Next door!” Miles yells.

  “Next door!” Ella echoes and kicks the table leg again. “Next door!”

  Ariel looks to Ed to see what he thinks. “Real new neighbors, then,” she says. Ed, the local stay-at-home dad, keeps a close watch on the neighborhood. He recognizes everybody. He knows the names of the teenagers who live on the block. He waves hello to some of the afternoon regulars who frequent the neighborhood bar, Tokyo Rose. Sitting diagonally across the street from their house, the little ugly thing looks like a residential shack decked out in Christmas decorations year-round. She could kill the realtor for not pointing it out to her as an up-and-running bar when she flew down to check out properties, but then again, kudos to Numbnuts for fooling her. She didn’t think to ask about it, and he didn’t offer. Kudos to New Orleans too for burying its bars so well that outsiders don’t even recognize them sitting square in the middle of a neighborhood block.

  “They seem like real neighbors,” Ed says. He nods but doesn’t smile. He’s always preaching diversity.

  “Reserving judgment?”

  “India is …,” Miles says and grins, “the largest worry of global overpopulation.”

  “You’re quoting?” Ariel asks.

  “It’s true. We learned it.”

  Well, the May-Flank union isn’t in danger of sending global population over the precipice. It’s been a hard year and three months.

  Ever since school started up again, Ed observes, the kids have been praying for the beasties to come while they sleep. Lately Miles calls on Yahweh. Ella begs Buddha. At bedtime, Ed requires only that they acknowledge a higher power, and they’re currently running with the classics.

  Miles, firstborn, prayed to the Jolly Green Giant in August. Ed had already nixed all superheroes, but he didn’t think to include fictional grocery characters. His son’s running list of deities strikes Ed as both laudable and absurd: hockey great Wayne Gretzky; pirate Johnny Depp in long earrings and scarves; Santa Claus; Miles’ kindergarten teacher from two years ago, Mr. Zabalbeascoa (it took Ed three months to say it right); buffoon Jim Carrey; SpongeBob SquarePants; soccer magician David Beckham; and not a single woman at all, which bothers Ed somewhat.