John had to drive us over to New Orleans to catch the ship. We got there a day early and took a hotel near Bourbon Street and walked along and watched people wander about. I had once been there during Mardi Gras, and the place was nuts. People everywhere, women exposing their breasts, yelling, floats, the whole nine yards. But this night was not a total waste. We did get to see some guys wearing makeup, hear some great jazz music over at Preservation Hall, and we ate some good crawfish at a place called Mike Anderson’s Seafood.
On the way back to the hotel a drunk naked man took a leak against a wall and staggered into a bar and didn’t come out.
“Do you think he just went in and ordered a drink?” Leonard asked.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” I said, “and I wouldn’t doubt they gave it to him. He’s probably in there sitting at a table sipping whiskey with one hand and playing with his ding-dong with the other.”
“For an old Baptist boy,” John said, “this is just a little too close to Sodom and Gomorrah for me.”
“Yeah, Hap,” Leonard said, “we better get John back to the hotel before he wakes up naked in an alley with a black leather whip handle up his ass.”
We went to the hotel and took our rooms. Me in mine, John and Leonard together. Where we were staying was in the French Quarter, and because of that, we were paying more for location than convenience. The joint was clean and not nearly as primitive as my place, but then again, I was paying one third of my monthly rent for one night in this cracker box and down below I could hear drunks who seemed more than happy to collect like crows and sing show tunes beneath my window.
I even went to the trouble to open my window and yell at them once. One of the drunks, wearing a gold lame shirt and pants so tight his dick looked like a cucumber in Saran Wrap, looked up at me and said, “Oh, honey, lighten up.”
He was right. I was tense. I also hated hearing those morons sing under my window. He and his crowd moved on, and across the street I saw a tired black prostitute trudging along in a red dress that started just below her navel. Her wig was slightly askew and her shoes looked designed to hurt her. She walked in a manner that didn’t invite business, but appeared more an invitation to a fistfight. She clicked on down the street and out of sight.
I watched TV for a while and thought about Brett. The last thing I remember was seeing the first fifteen minutes of the remake of Cat People and wishing it was the original, and then it was morning.
We met in the lobby, went over and had bignets and coffee at the Cafe du Monde, and took a short cruise on a riverboat that took us past the place where the tour guide told us Hard Times with Charles Bronson had been filmed.
We arrived back at the dock early afternoon, had lunch at a hamburger joint, went back to the hotel, got our luggage and John drove us to the dock. When we saw our ship, the Sea Pleasure, sitting in the water against the dock, it was a little disappointing.
“I was expecting something bigger,” Leonard said.
“It’s big enough,” John said.
“Well, it isn’t like on TV,” I said. “You know, like those commercials where everyone is dancing on board and fish are jumping and there’s a rainbow and stuff.”
“It’s a smaller cruise line,” John said.
“You mean cheaper,” Leonard said.
“Does that mean we don’t get the dancing fish and the rainbow?” I asked.
“We get a fish floating belly-up under a rain cloud is my guess,” Leonard said.
“You guys are always such pessimists,” John said.
“That’s because pessimistic things happen to us,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “Like our cruise boat is smaller than everyone else’s.”
We were standing outside John’s car with the trunk open. A couple of guys in white steward suits and hats had come over to take our bags. Leonard and I didn’t want them to. Considering we only had one apiece, we figured we could handle it. They stomped off without our bags or the tips we might have given them.
“They look disgruntled,” I said.
“Long as they keep it to themselves,” Leonard said.
Leonard reminded John how to care for his pet armadillo, Bob. Bob had been with Leonard for a year now, and the damn thing was like a dog. It stayed in the house during the day, holed up under the bed or on the tiles in the bathroom right by the toilet. By night Bob roamed the woods and rooted holes in Leonard’s yard. It came when Leonard called and would curl up in his lap. I always liked to remind Leonard armadillos were the only animal that could carry leprosy, other than man, but this had no impact on him. Leonard liked that big armored rat.
“Well,” John said, “have a good time.”
Leonard and John kissed. I felt a little uncomfortable. Two men kissing still sort of jacks me around, especially with me standing next to them. Too much East Texas Baptist background, I guess.
Leonard, knowing this, said, “John, give Hap a little peck on the cheek.”
“No,” I said, holding up a hand. “I wouldn’t want to steal any of your sweetness away from Leonard.”
Leonard cackled and John smiled. Leonard said, “At least we didn’t give each other blow jobs in the lot here. Isn’t that what everyone expects of queers? Blatant sexuality in public places?”
“That, smooth dancing, and interior decorating abilities,” John said.
Leonard and John hugged and kissed again. John got in his car and drove away and Leonard and I hauled our bags into the terminal. We stood in a long line there, showed our passports and papers, got our room key, eventually boarded the ship.
Our room wasn’t quite as small as a Lilliputian clothes closet. There were two very narrow beds and a wound-colored curtain that opened on a solid wall. Since we were in the middle of the ship, I should have expected that, but somehow I had hoped for a porthole and a sea view.
Then again, since I didn’t really like water that much, especially the ocean, I decided I was better off without the porthole. Then I started to wonder what in hell I was doing on a ship. Just reading A Night to Remember, I had gotten seasick.
How had I talked myself into this? I had done some dumb things, but outside of agreeing to rescue a whore and kill people in the process, this was the dumbest thing I had ever done.
Well, there was the time I talked Leonard into going to Groveton during a flood to deal with the Ku Klux Klan. And there was the time we tried to get a stolen treasure out of the Sabine River bottoms. My idea again.
Come to think of it, my life had sort of been a series of dumb ideas. Some of them mine, a few Leonard’s. Hell, I had even voted Republican once in a Texas governor’s election.
We put our suitcases on the bed and took out our clothes and hung them in the closet, which was a gap in the wall with a metal bar for a clothes rack.
We put our suitcases in there too. It was a tight fit. We put our shaving kits in the bathroom. I took time to brush my teeth and put the book I was reading, along with my reading glasses, on the nightstand, which was bolted to the wall.
We sat on our beds across from one another. I looked over the itinerary they had given us as we entered the ship.
“Well, here we are,” Leonard said.
“Yep,” I said.
“We haven’t left dock yet, have we?”
“Nope.”
“Are you bored as I am?”
“Reckon so.”
“They have movies on this ship?”
“I read how they did when I got the original stuff from the cruise line, but this itinerary they gave us, I was just glancing through it. Looks like we don’t have movies. Wait a minute. Here’s a few, but you watch them on the TV.”
“TV?”
“I don’t believe I stuttered.”
“I heard they had theaters, regular movies, you know.”
“John tell you that?”
“He did.”
“Did he say they had them on this ship?”
“He don’t know from this ship.”
“There you are. We got the tub of cruise lines. Our luck is still in, Leonard. Only it’s bad luck.”
“Oh well. What are the movies?”
“ The Postman.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“ Harley Davidson amp; The Marlboro Man.”
“I seen all this shit and didn’t like it on the big screen. I could get my money back on that Postman, I would. Least the other one had some good fistfights. Or was it gunfights? It kind of runs together. But that Postman, I thought maybe I was in some kind of purgatory with popcorn. Someone had locked the door there would have been suicides. What else is there?”
I read off the two remaining movies.
Leonard said, “That last one sounds promising.”
“It says it has subtitles.”
“God. Next to sitting next to someone wants to talk about crystals and astrological signs and the nature of their diseases, I like subtitles better. But just.”
“French subtitles.”
“Guess that beats subtitles in Ebonics.”
“Hey, we didn’t go on a cruise to watch television or movies, did we?”
“I did.”
“That’s not the proper spirit.”
“What kind of spirit is proper? I thought I’d just hang out, read, and watch movies.”
“You can. On TV.”
“Yeah, maybe one movie out of four.”
“You git what you git.”
“I wanted a big screen, Hap.”
“People in hell want ice water.”
“How long before dinner?”
I glanced at the clock on the nightstand, then the itinerary. “Two hours. You hungry?”
“No. Not really. Anything else going on?”
“Shuffleboard will start shaking in about half an hour.”
“Want to go up on deck?”
“Sure, maybe we can swim back to land before we actually disembark.”
“There’s a thought.”
We locked our cabin, went up a flight of stairs, then another, and finally onto the deck. It was a pretty afternoon out, starting to gray some, but there was still plenty of light. Our ship had started to sail.
We leaned against the railing and watched the New Orleans dock retreat.
“Didn’t a ship run right into this dock once?” Leonard said.
“Yep,” I said. “Couldn’t stop.”
“In a hurry to get back to land, I figure.”
“Think it’s too late to swim for shore?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
We stood on the deck until the dock and New Orleans were out of sight and the brown water turned blue. Then there was no more dock or New Orleans visible, just the water and our ship pushing into the Gulf and the night coming down soft and the Gulf air sweet with the occasional bite of dead fish, and there was the Gulf itself, washing hard against the ship, washing us steadily with the assistance of a great engine, on out to the deeps.