Prologue | M.A. Harper
November 1, 1996
A few racy adult costume parties in the French Quarter’s gay community might still be underway at this hour, but all the trick-or-treaters in this tamer neighborhood here have gone to bed.
Orange illumination the color of candlelight filters down from tall lightpoles through cottony fog. The moon is still up. Early morning traffic squishes by on Prytania Street, two blocks over.
Renovated Victorian houses slumber side by side upon small green urban lots, windows dark behind curtains. Volvos and BMWs sit parked in driveways or out on the street beneath looming live oaks and crape myrtles, magnolias and the occasional royal palm. Election day is near and some of these front yards display plastic political signs, most of them for Republicans.
A yellow cat is locked out on the front porch of a smaller signless house, kept company by a carved pumpkin several days past its prime. Foul liquid puddles on the green paint beneath the jack-o’-lantern’s chin. Its ragged smile is sinking into itself. The fat cat stretches and then paces past it, turns at the front door, meows, and paces past again.
If he had a vocabulary for tonight’s smells, it might include rotten vegetable and squirrel nest in tree and fenced rottweiler. Certainly cigarette smoke with patchouli, an alltime favorite. He hasn’t detected both smoke and scent in combination like this for a very long time, in fact, and it makes him expectant. His tail goes straight up in hope.
But the sleeping people inside, insulated by closed windows and an operating air conditioner, neither hear him nor wake.
Rotating both pointed ears, he goes to the nearest French window to peer in.
Nightlights shine along the route that leads to his food bowl, not that his retinas require that extra illumination. But light means people and his people mean mealtime. Touching the glass with one paw, he leaves there a foggy print upon the slick and damp surface.
No good.
Where’s the man? Where’s that man who doesn’t like him, the man who let him out?
He doesn’t smell the man. He doesn’t see the man. What he smells is patchouli.
But encouraged by it he pats the pane again. Again and again. Its touch is smooth and cold. He has no idea what glass is but does know from experience that it represents an impenetrable barrier of some kind.
And yet . . .
Those people who live in this house, they’d better wake up. In every sense of the word.