There are only a few people milling around, and they’re headed the opposite way. The houses we pass are dark and shuttered and plastered with old, torn flyers that show grainy pictures of smiling people and hand-scrawled pleas for help—Missing! Have you seen? Our grandma/brother/sister/father. Please call! They’re so worn they seem to fade into the brick like paper ghosts.
Gonzo huffs along beside me, looking left and right. “Dude. This looks like sort of a bad area.”
Two guys in low-slung jeans and baseball caps lean against a building on the corner, arms crossed. Another guy joins them, and another. It reminds me of a horror movie I saw once, where these birds start filling up a playground while this lady sits smoking a cigarette, unaware.
“Shit. There’s four of them now,” Gonzo says.
“Just keep walking and don’t act scared.”
“Dude, I am scared. They could totally kick our asses.”
The guys fall in behind us. We pick up speed. So do they. We turn on Rampart Street. They turn on Rampart Street. Maybe they’re just headed the same way we are. Or maybe we’re about to get our butts handed to us on a platter.
“Oh, man, we are so dead, so dead, so dead.”
“Just be cool.”
The door opens on a little house. Light and party sounds spill out onto the sidewalk. The tallest woman I have ever seen steps in front of us. She’s about six foot seven in heels and dressed like a parade float. Her eyes are made up with sparkly blue eye shadow and false eyelashes, and her hair is red, curled, and piled up on top of her head like a piñata. Big hair. Big jewelry. Big hands. Whoa. Really big hands. She’s holding a cigarette between those mammoth fingers.
“Hey, honey, where’s the fire?” she asks in a deep voice.
I look behind me, but the guys we thought were after us have set up shop on a different corner. They’re practicing dance moves under a streetlight, laughing when one of their crew messes up. They’re about as threatening as a boy band, and I feel like a colossal, paranoid tool for getting so worked up.
“Since y’all standing here you might as well make yourselves useful. Y’all got a light?” the lady asks.
“Gonzo,” I say. “Matches.”
Gonzo hands the matches to the lady, who purses her lips and cocks a hip. “Sugar, you’re supposed to light a girl’s cigarette, not throw the matches at her. Didn’t your mama teach you anything?”
“Sorry,” he says.
“That’s all right,” she says, and lights her own cigarette. Jesus, she’s big. Gonzo comes up to her kneecaps, and I only reach her waist. “What’re you two lil’ scouts doing out here? Baby, this idn’t a good neighborhood. I got knifed bad out here one time.”
“We’re looking for the Horn and Ivory,” I tell her, pointing to the matchbook cover. “It’s supposed to be here on North Rampart.”
“Not for about four million years, it ain’t, honey. It moves around. Always has. You have to know where to look.” The lady peers down at us through her cigarette-smoke haze, sizing us up. “Now, how come you wanna go to the Horn and Ivory?”
“We want to see where Junior Webster used to play,” I say.
The lady’s eyes widen. “Junior Webster. I haven’t heard that name in a long, long time.”
Somebody yells down from the balcony. “Miss D! We need more beer!”
“Get it yourself, honey! I’m busy,” she shouts back. “And, uh, how exactly do you think you’re gonna get into the Horn and Ivory—if you can find it on your own, that is? Y’all not old enough to shave.”
“Yes we are,” Gonzo insists, his little manly pride deeply wounded.
She rubs a finger across Gonzo’s smooth cheek. “Um-hmm.”
“We don’t want to drink. We just want to see the place where Junior played. My friend Eubie told me I had to if I was ever in New Orleans.”
“Zat so?” She takes a good long look at us through her exhaled smoke. “Did your friend tell you how to find the Horn and Ivory?”
“No,” I concede.
“Uh-hmm, um-hmmm.” Miss D says, like it means something. She drops the cigarette to the sidewalk and crushes it daintily with that huge, basketball-player-worthy foot. “Can’t have you going back with nothin’ to tell, can we? Don’tchoo worry, cher. Miss Demeanor’s gonna get you in to see Junior.”
I don’t know what she means by that. Eubie told me Junior Webster’s dead. Maybe she means she’ll get us in to see the club.
