A young couple came out, and feeling a complete idiot I stepped up to
them. The girl’s face, flushed and pretty, twisted; the boy’s darkened
and he pulled her sharply aside. I shrugged, and let them pass; nice
manners they had here. I strolled down the road. Here was a bookshop
window still lit, and all the titles in English, by God! Only one gaggle
of bestsellers looks pretty much like another to me. What I buy is
Here came somebody else to ask, a hefty black man; but before I so much as opened my mouth I almost got a fist in it. The last day or so hadn’t exactly taught me to turn the other cheek, but I restrained myself; starting trouble now might be just the wrong thing. A more respectable citizen, middle-aged and fat, was hurrying down the far pavement; I strode over to intercept him, but before I got beyond the ‘Excuse me, sir –’ he thrust something into my hands and scuttled off at a rate he wasn’t built for. I gaped after him, then down at my hand. A few silvery coins; I picked up the two largest, and saw the eagle on each, soft-edged with wear. Quarters; twenty-five cents; hot damn, I was in America.
I stood there giggling helplessly to myself. In a night and a day – most of the latter spent drifting – I’d managed to cross the Atlantic. If I ever got the hang of how, I could play hob with the export business, that was for sure.
Or … how long had it actually taken me? Things had been happening with time. And suddenly childhood fairy tales came back to me, about the king who’d returned from under the hill – and this, after all, was the land of Rip van Winkle …
Suddenly I wasn’t giggling any more. For all the warmth of the night I felt pinched and cold like a returning ghost, a pathetic shadow in the twilight peering in at the warmth of life it had been shut out from for so long. Now I had to know when I was, as well as where. I glanced hungrily at a café, and stifled the thought; fifty cents wouldn’t buy the water in my coffee, if this was anything like New York. A squat blue bin across the street was a newspaper vending machine; that would help! I hurried back across the street – and stopped dead in the middle. Now I knew why people were shying away from me.
Just the way I’d shied away from lurches, drunks and dropouts. There I was, reflected in a dress-shop window, a grotesque ghost hovering over the stilted dummies inside. A gaping thug, wild-haired, soot-smeared, unshaven, dressed in skin-tight leather that bared arms seamed with small burns and scars, a gaudy braid band like gang colours around my forehead, and a four-foot sword dangling along my leg – God knows, I would’ve run away. Maybe Jyp was right and the sword, at least, they wouldn’t notice; but what was true for him might not be for me. I was too much a part of all this.
Then a truck came roaring down on me without even trying to brake, and I
leaped for the sidewalk like an electrified frog. I flipped the driver a
gesture, then remembered and stuck up the single finger they understood
over here. Not that I altogether blamed him, though, any more than the
touchy black character. I looked barking mad and dangerous as hell. I
hurried to the machine, thumbed my coins and thrust them in. Just enough
– I yanked out the paper and stared. The
The day after I’d left. New Orleans. A day and a night – right. That was all there was to it. I felt my legs begin to tremble under me. It was true, then … I let the paper fall, turned and ran back the way I’d come, away from lights and cafés and Creole cooking odours and iron balconies, ran like hell for the river and the wharf.
Back to the square I raced, sure of every turn, and came out just by the cathedral, crossed the gardens at full tilt – astonishing some late-night strollers – and ducked panting into the street I’d left. From there it was easy, round every turn just as I’d remembered it, and my memory didn’t so much as falter once. It was easier on foot, this kind of thing, when you could take your time spotting landmarks, when you didn’t have to make snap decisions where to turn. Not that I didn’t give one great sigh of relief, though, when I finally turned into the road where that lying apparition had first hooked me, and saw the broad river gleaming like dull copper under the hazy moon. The Mississippi, no less. Well, I’d something to ask Le Stryge about, at any rate.
