Messi@ Read Free

opened her eyes, two fat tourists, big guts spilling out of their T-shirts, were breathing beer on her. One of the T-shirts displayed pairs of breasts with the captions Figs, Melons, Pears . The other tourist was sipping from a straw that curled behind his ear from a beer can on top of his hat. His shirt said, New Orleans Crawfish: We Suck Da Heads and Pinch Da Tails . He held out a brochure to Felicity.
    â€œSays here this useta be Storyville, Basin Street, the red lights district, girls, music, action!” He popped his fingers. “Where is Basin Street?”
    Felicity knocked the brochure out of his hand and stared into his piggy eyes. She enunciated very slowly: “Once this was Storyville. Now it’s a motherfucking freeway going through a fucking cemetery. You want to know what happened to the black whores, you go ask the fucking feds who put a fucking freeway through here.”
    They backed away; the freak looked like she was packing heat.
    The light drizzle turned to rain as she entered the French Quarter at Saint Philip Street. It soaked her clothes and streaked her face and would have mingled with her tears if she’d been crying. But she was not. The cottony cloud that had collected Grandmère’s soul had vanished in the leaden sky. The houses along Saint Philip Street looked dumbly at her from behind shuttered windows. They were full of as many ghosts as they could hold; wisps of white smoke wafted from their dormers. Felicity passed a store window with a large glass jar filled with colored liquid in which floated a two-headed pink lizard. Felicity forced herself to look at it. It was Mullin! The two-headed abortion was unmistakably made of the same substance as the evangelist. Felicity knew for sure that her Grandmère hadn’t torn up that lottery ticket. She had offered it to Mullin on his silver collection platter, and the reptile had used the money to grow in hideous power. Her money, Felicity’s money, her adolescent allowance, her college fund, her inheritance. Why else would a world-famous TV devil respond to the summons of a poor old woman dying in Charity Hospital?
    Because he owed her. Because she hadn’t torn up the lottery ticket—she had given it to the United Ministries. Why hadn’t she seen this before? She had been robbed. She remembered the new domed tabernacle Mullin built in Metairie, and the giant plaster Christ he’d erected on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain the following year.
    Felicity began to sense a cruddy substance emanating from the foul history of the Creole cottages on either side of the street. The former homes of slave-owning colonials stood rigidly inside their courtyards. They too had risen from pillage, extortion, slavery, gambling, and whoring. The longer she walked, the more convinced she became that Mullin had stolen her money.
    When Felicity reached the corner of Chartres Street she realized where she was heading. Without thinking about it, she was walking toward Saint Louis Cathedral, where she’d often gone as a girl.
    She kept her eyes fixed on the misty spires of the cathedral, which kept receding in the rain like a ship. It didn’t help that when she looked toward the river, a real ship loomed over the levee, floating so high in the river it threatened to sail right into the Quarter. She had known all her life that the city was below sea level, but she never stopped being startled by the sight of ships over her head. New Orleans was a bowl, hugged tightly by the Mississippi River. The levees that kept the river out were no match for a hurricane or a great flood. Felicity imagined herself floating like a gardenia in a porcelain bowl. It was only a matter of time before the people and buildings were washed away. “We are doomed,” she said out loud; “it’s the only thing that keeps us going.”
    Two wet pigeons looked down on her from the facade as Felicity passed through the ironwork fence and