The Eternal Footman by James Morrow

Author:James Morrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

Inanna Unbending

THE WET AND GLOOMY MORNING of December 29 found Nora, Percy, and the rest of the Great Sumerian Circus on fabled Bourbon Street, moving amid swarms of gaudily costumed revelers, most of them sipping Hurricanes and bathtub-gin fizzes through red plastic straws inserted into sequined masks adorned with peacock feathers. Dixieland trumpet solos vibrated the winter air. Banjos sang; snare drums rattled; sybaritic shouts resounded among the ornate hotels, doorless restaurants, and iron-brocaded balconies. It made no sense, she decided. Carnival season always started on January 6, never before. Not until the Sumerians reached Jackson Square did she understand that a celebration even grander than Carnival was in progress, an everlasting Mardi Gras convened in decadent defiance of the skull. High above the stratosphere God enacted His perpetual laugh, and the city of New Orleans laughed back.

The entire French Quarter had become a red-light district. Everywhere Nora looked, streetwalkers unveiled their wares, as if Storyville, Louisiana’s fabled experiment in legalized prostitution, had returned from history’s mists to spread its ethos throughout the town. Given the scope of the bacchanal, Nora predicted a poor turnout for that evening’s performance. Who had time for the Sumerian Circus’s three-act paean to stoicism when the Vieux Carré roiled with communal rye, free love, and gratis jazz? And yet attendance proved substantial—a consequence, she supposed, of Percy’s canny decision to saturate the town with handbills emphasizing not only the show’s many sword fights but also its glamorous venue, the legendary Superdome. In fact it was their largest audience to date, over two thousand violence aficionados and carnage connoisseurs who probably hadn’t visited the moribund sports complex since abulia’s ascent, each now seeking the satisfactions he’d lost when NFL games went the way of gladiatorial combat and public executions.

Even if Gilgamesh the King ran for a decade, it was unlikely that the Sumerian Circus would ever again play to a house packed with people dressed as fire-breathing dragons, dead American presidents, penises the size of canoes, and the entire menagerie of Noah’s ark. Distracted by all this ostentation, Nora had trouble staying in character. She screwed up three lines. She missed two cues. The audience didn’t mind. Indeed, they rewarded their entertainers handsomely, filling the troupe’s Rubbermaid cans with bags of raw crayfish and boxes of Cajun rice. Nothing, it seemed, not even abulia, could dim the city’s renowned lagniappe.

Act three was well under way, with Gilgamesh battling the Crab of Hell, when Nora, surveying the spectators from behind a scrim, spotted a squat, sixtyish man in the second row, wearing a tattered pea jacket and a baseball cap embroidered with the word VALPARAÍSO. Stem eyes, weathered skin, beard resembling a Brillo pad: a colleague of Van Home’s, surely. The crab fight took forever. Gilgamesh’s final speech went on and on. The curtain call seemed interminable. But then, at last, as the houselights brightened, Nora moved inconspicuously into the bearded man’s vicinity, drew him aside, and asked whether he might be a sea captain.

“Right church, wrong pew.

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