For Tracy Grant, beloved friend
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He stood naked on the sagging porch of the old slave shack, with moonlight burnishing his skin to the smooth ivory of a marble gravestone. He might have been waiting for his lover to come.
The night smelled of death, heavy and smothering. It was summer in New Orleans, when the streets steamed in the morning and the rain teemed in the evening, when the brown river flowed thick and muddy, and the bayous spread in a primal ooze of putrefying lily pads and crawfish. In the old St. Louis Cemeteries, where the raised crypts had cracked and sunk into the earth, water lapped at the rotting bones so that the sweet smell of decay rose into the air and took on the breath of resurrected life. A summer’s night in New Orleans, rancid life and ripe death, and always—the heat.
The porch he stood on faced the Bayou St. John, although he could barely see it through the huge live oaks. Streamers of moss hung from the gnarled branches, limp in the still, heavy air. The water curved like a slow, silver snake around the low moon.
If he turned his head and looked across the yard he could have seen the big house. An heirloom of slender white colonnettes and broad galleries, and as much a part of him as his bones and breath.
If he turned his head he could have seen the window of his wife’s bedroom, but he didn’t need to look to see her as he was remembering her. Linen sheets twisted around her naked legs, lamplight pooling on her belly. Her eyelashes spiking shadows on the bones of her face.
He breathed, and the sultry air panted with him. He imagined her looking out her window now, seeing him standing naked in the night.
He turned and went inside, leaving the door open. His shadow leaped out ahead of him in the wash of the brass gasoliers. Years ago they had brought electricity out to the shack, but he loved the gaslight. Once, in his grandfather’s time, slaves had lived in this place. Of course in those days the floor had been packed dirt, the furniture a rotting table and a stool or two, rough ticking stuffed with moss and swamp grass to sleep on. Certainly no green leather chairs, no ormolu-mounted bureau, no big brass bed. When he and his brother were boys, these