A Density of Souls (23 page)

“Good-bye!” Stephen announced.

The Bell Tower

165

“You’re parking?” Devon asked, prying himself free from a coked-up drag queen trying to engage him in the lambada.

“No, I’m going home,” Stephen shouted, already powering the window up. “I want no part of this fag nightmare, thank you!”

“Have I ever told you you’re wracked with self-loathing?” Devon yelled after him.

“Watch my boyfriend. Make sure he doesn’t get molested.”

“What if I’m doing the molesting?” Devon laughed.

“Then you’re both dead. Good night!”

Stephen powered the window all the way up. For a moment he felt as if he were surrounded by a riot. He accelerated the Jeep slightly and pushed forward through the crowd, which parted with shrieks and howls.

At ten-forty-five, two Jefferson Parish patrol officers arrived at the house of one Edna Bodier in the suburb of Kenner. Both officers knew Edna. She had the irritating habit of phoning the police and pleading with them to investigate strange sounds that were usually caused by the filtering station emptying the canal that ran behind her house into Lake Pontchartrain. She lived alone except for her Welsh corgi. Both Edna and the dog met the officers on the front porch.

“This way!” she ordered them.

The officers rolled their eyes and followed Edna and the corgi down the side of the tract house to the drainage canal that ran behind her house. Edna gestured a frail arm toward a torrent of garbage—empty beer cans, water-swollen cardboard beer cases. The officers were about to lose their patience when Edna asked, “Do you see the hand?”

By eleven o’clock the medical response unit had arrived and two medics dragged the body of thirty-one-year-old Eddie Carmagier from the drainage canal behind Edna Bodier’s house. An audience of shocked neighbors had clustered on both sides of the canal. Eddie was wearing only his underwear. A clean bullet wound was discovered in the back of his head. Twenty minutes after his corpse was loaded into an ambulance, Jefferson Parish police learned from Eddie’s wife that he was a driver for Plantier Liquor Service. He was supposed to have gotten off work around five, but he hadn’t come home. His wife had assumed he’d gone out to his favorite bar, Parkway Tavern, with friends from work.

166

A Density of Souls

At eleven-forty-five, the fax machine rang in Sanctuary’s employee lounge on the third floor of the bar. The evening manager was downstairs chewing out Jeff Haugh for tardiness when a curl of paper unfurled from the fax machine, revealing a single bold-faced word.

REVELATION.

By the time Jeff Haugh took up his post checking hand stamps at the re-entry door, Stephen was running a shower, and the Jefferson Parish police had finally tracked down Reynolds Plantier, Eddie Carmagier’s former employer.

“I told Eddie he could just take the van home this weekend after he made his last run,” Reynolds told the police. They had evidently awakened him; a woman, not his wife, waited in the other room wearing his wife’s robe. When they asked him about Eddie’s last scheduled stop, Reynolds answered, “That queer bar on Bourbon.”

A call came to Jefferson Parish police headquarters just before midnight. Eddie Carmagier’s empty truck had been found in a parking lot near the airport.

Sara Miller had begged her husband to take her to New Orleans for the optometrists’ convention. A Midwesterner, Sara had never been farther south than St. Louis. In college, her friends trekked down for Mardi Gras but she had declined because of the long drive. She and Ted could use a little fun, carousing in the Quarter. She imagined they might find their love again.

They were having a romantic dinner at The Chart House, on Jackson Square, several blocks away from Sanctuary. The waiter had just brought their entrees when a bottle of Merlot flew across the table and landed in Sara’s lap. For a second, Sara actually believed her husband had thrown the bottle at her, but as her chair toppled backward in a shower of cutlery she saw only her own legs. Plates shattered on either side of her head.

When Sara was asked later to describe the sound of the explosion, her sentence made every major newspaper in America. “It sounded like God cracking a stick across his knee,” she said.

Sparkles Aplenty would wake up in Charity Hospital with doctors rudely calling him Jim Warshauski and declining to tell him what they’d done with his wig. “I remember thinking that one of the strobe lights had popped or something because suddenly you could see right The Bell Tower

167

through the doors. This press of bodies and all those hot dancers on top of the bars. It got so bright you could even see the sweat on the dancers’ chests, and I almost turned to my friend and said, ‘Cut me off a piece of that!’ But before I could . . .”

That was all Sparkles could remember. Sparkles’s friend Jose, who had been standing next to him and was hurled through the same glass window, died a day later of third-degree burns. Three hours before his death he clutched a nurse’s arm and slurred through charred lips,

“Tell them the devil exists.” No paper quoted him.

There were only three parties left at Emeril’s that night and one of the waitresses had quit, so Jordan was serving an older couple their yellow fin tuna when all the plate glass windows rattled in their frames.

The older woman whispered, “Earthquake.” Jordan said reflexively,

“We don’t have earthquakes here!” He straightened and scanned the dining room. Everyone seemed as startled as he was.

“It felt like an earthquake!” the older woman insisted.

In her bedroom, half a city away, Meredith heard a dull thud and thought it was an usually loud firework. She turned her attention back to the first entry she was composing in her secret notebook since high school.

Singing to himself, in the shower, Stephen heard nothing over the patter of the water other than a dull thud coming from above. Upstairs, Monica had dropped one of Jeremy’s notebooks when she heard a crack followed by a resounding boom.

Jeff Haugh was flung from Sanctuary’s front door, fire carried him over Bourbon Street. For a brief instant, he knew he was flying. Objects slammed into him: other human bodies. Devon Walker was crushed by a slab of Sanctuary’s front wall. Jeff’s flight ended when he collided with a lamppost, his spine cracked on impact. He sprawled on the pavement, face toward the sky. In the second before his heart stopped, Jeff mistook the fire raining down over Bourbon Street for snow and thought of Stephen.

1 4

“M
rs. Conlin?”

Monica didn’t recognize the voice. She held the cordless phone to her ear and let her eyes survey Jeremy’s darkened office. One of his notebooks lay open on the desk in front of her. The wails of sirens and the screams of reporters wafted up from the television in her bedroom, one floor below.

“Who is this?” Monica whispered.

“It’s Meredith, Mrs. Conlin,” Meredith answered. Her voice trembled.

“He’s here, Meredith,” Monica said. She could still hear the shower running.

“He’s home,” Monica added.

“. . . as you can see behind me, Canal Street is gridlocked with ambulances and other emergency vehicles trying to rush to the scene. We have unconfirmed reports that several fires are still burning out of control as a result of the initial explosion . . .”

Monica could hear that Meredith was watching the same news broadcast, which came to her now in an eerie stereo.

“Melissa, can you give us any further information on the precise location of the blast?”

“Stan, we’re working entirely on speculations right now, but obviously there’s talk here of the several bomb threats received by the Sanctuary dance club over the past month . . .”

The shower stopped. “Thank you . . .” Meredith stammered before hanging up.

Monica brought the phone away from her ear, setting it on the desk next to Jeremy’s old notebook. Monica would now give Jeremy a chance she had never allowed him. She would see if maybe he had The Bell Tower

169

been right, that maybe there was something in his poems that she had missed. She scooped the notebook off the desk and teetered out the door.

As she entered her bedroom, she noticed that Stephen was blocking the television. He stood motionless, his back to her, arms limply at his sides. He clutched a towel around his waist. His hair was still wet.

“Okay, this is definite confirmation now from the New Orleans Fire Department, coming to us here at the scene. The origin of the blast was the Sanctuary dance club on Bourbon Street . . .”

Stephen’s knees buckled cleanly. He collapsed to an awkward seated position on the rug next to her bed. Slowly, he rocked back and forth, his bleats turning to low moans.

“Stephen?” Monica ventured. His name caught in her throat.

She lowered herself to her knees and crawled across the floor, the notebook still in one hand, and gently touched his naked back. He ignited under her caress, leaping to his feet, the towel tumbling to the floor. He stood naked before her, wide-eyed, incredulous, outraged.

“Jeff’s there!”

“Stephen . . .”

“Jeff’s there!” he yelled, stepping away from her. His tone implied the obvious thought: Don’t you see, this can’t happen, this didn’t happen because Jeff is there right now.

Monica embraced her son hard. She knew he would try to recoil.

He writhed for a second and then she felt his chest heave and he pitched into her, disturbing her balance. They fell together, the notebook pressed beneath Stephen’s back.

“What do they want?” Stephen moaned into her ear.

They. As Stephen rocked against her, an image reared up in her mind—how at the funeral for her seven-year-old son, Angela Darby had shot up from her pew, crying, “They did it!” This was the they of death, the they of murder. The unseen hand that plucked people from the streets. Death was so much easier to understand when it was the work of others.

Jordan and the two waiters who had closed Emeril’s were lingering on the corner of Julia Street watching a battalion of MedVac helicopters 170

A Density of Souls

sweep by overhead and disappear behind the thicket of downtown buildings. The night was filled with sirens. Just beyond the Sheraton Hotel, several blocks ahead, the night sky glowed orange.

“Plane crash . . .” one of the waiters decided. A reason for them to just go home.

“Downtown? A plane crash, downtown? We would’ve heard it,” a waitress hissed.

“It’s a fire,” Jordan said.

They fell silent and watched the orange halo grow.

The French Quarter was on fire.

When the news broke in on David Letterman, Elise sat up and hunched there, studying the television screen. It had happened so fast even the newscaster couldn’t seem to make sense of it. A terrified reporter stood in the middle of Canal Street, flailing his arms amid a blaze of fire engines and ambulances. Now the television screen in the Charbonnets’ bedroom filled with an aerial view of what looked like a giant footprint impressed on several blocks of the French Quarter, a footprint etched in flame.

“Jordan’s at work,” Roger had said instinctively, anticipating a mother’s initial fear.

When the reporter identified the explosion’s origin as the Sanctuary bar, Elise threw up her arms in frustration. The name meant nothing to her.

“It’s a gay bar,” Roger muttered.

Then came the talk of bomb threats. The mayor arrived at Canal Street, looking dazed, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and a light jacket, addressing the reporters amid the whirl of ambulances and fire trucks screaming past him into the French Quarter. He spoke so softly the microphones could barely pick up his voice. No, he didn’t know anything new. Yes, he was aware of the bomb threats Sanctuary had received over the past month.

At around 1:30 A.M. Elise was still watching the news when the story of Eddie Carmagier and his stolen liquor truck was broadcast. The plot was unfolding live on television. In the living room, where he’d gone to make himself a drink, Roger flipped through the channels to see the French Quarter burning on every major network, including CNN.

The Bell Tower

171

As Elise watched, she remembered a decimated Jeep parked in front of her house one morning like a gift, a word sprayed across its windshield in red paint.

At two-thirty, a weary-looking anchor announced to Monica’s bedroom that no survivors had been found in the still-smoldering ruins of the Sanctuary bar. She muted the television off just as they cut to footage of body bags lined up on Bourbon Street.

Stephen’s sobs had abated and he lay, still naked, curled into a fetal position on her bed with his back to the television. She slid into bed next to him, the notebook still in one hand.

“Stephen, I want to read you something.”

He didn’t stir.

“Your father wrote this. For you, I think.” She flipped through the notebook pages to the final draft of “To a Child Not Yet Born”, written in Jeremy’s severe cursive.

As she read aloud, Sara Miller’s face filled the television screen.

She was bleeding from a thin scratch across her forehead and her husband braced her from behind. She delivered what would become her world-famous quote.

“What fires burn the heart,

From which God did these agonies start?

Our cobwebs strung from death to death Are too thin. Our lies the greatest sin.

I will hold you, child not yet born,

And tell you not to forget,

But not to know.

You will soon be dense with memory

And your memory dense with souls.

What fires burn the heart?

From which God did these agonies start?

I hold you, child not yet born.

Yet I am not your god.

Ask me not to stop the pain.

The lies I’ll offer

172

A Density of Souls

You need not gain.

I cannot tell you how or why.

I can only teach you

That this world calls for you to cry.”

Twenty miles across the black bowl of Lake Pontchartrain, where the sirens could not be heard and the night sky was free of helicopters, a shout erupted from the dense, swampy forest. It was joined by another, equally as strong. Birds startled from their branches and veered into flight over the lake’s expanse, where the night sky and the black water met and the Causeway was a deserted strip of pavement leading to the distant shore. Five voices blended into one guttural triumphant roar that echoed between pine trunks and over black water, on the small parcel of land that Nanine Charbonnet had passed on to her only son, Roger, and his wife, Elise.