seas of wavy blue lines - this being home to Valcours' seven coffins. And at the rear of the graveyard, through a thicket of myrtle, was the bayou, a grassy bank littered with beer cans and bottles, a creosote-tarred dock, and moored to it, a black stern wheeler: an enormous, grim birthday cake of a boat with gingerbread railings and a smokestack for a candle. It had originally belonged to Clothilde, Otille's grandmother.
'It was to have been her funeral barge,' said Otille. 'She had planned to have it sailed down the Gulf carrying her body and a party of friends. My father used to let us play on it, but then he found out that she had booby-trapped it in some way, a surprise for her friends. We never could find out how.'
Jocuridra was beginning to think of Maravillosa as an evil theme park. First, the Black Castle studded all over with silvery arcana; then the Bacchanal of Lost Souls with a special appearance by the Grim Reaper; the Garden of Unholy Delights; the cabins, an evil Frontier-land where back porch demons drooled into their rum bottles and groped their slant-eyed floozies, leaving smoldering handprints on their haunches; and now this stygian riverboat which had the lumbering reality of a Mardi Gras float. Somewhere on the grounds, no doubt, they would find Uncle Death in a skeleton suit passing out tainted candy, black goat rides for the kiddies, robot beheadings. Perhaps, she thought, there had once been a real evil connected with the place, a real moment of brimstone and blood, but all she could currently discern were the workings of a pathetic irrationality: Otille's. Yet, though Maravillosa reeked of an impotent dissolution rather than evil, Otille the actress could bring the past to life. Leaning against the pilot house, her black hair the same shade as the boards, making it seem she was an exotic bloom drooping from them, she told them another story.
'Have you heard of Bayou Vert?' she asked.
Donnell perked up.
'They say it runs nearby. It's extraordinary that a place like this coujd create a myth of Heaven, even such a miserable one as the Swamp King's palace. Gray-haired swamp girls don't sound very attractive to me.' She let her eyes contact Jocundra's, her lips twitching upward. 'Clothilde wrote me a letter about Bayou Vert, or partially about it. Of course she died long before I was born, but she addressed it to her grandchild. The lawyer brought it to me when I was sixteen. She said she hoped I would be a girl because girls are so much more adept at pleasure than boys. They have, in her phrase, "more surfaces with which to touch the world." She instructed me in the use of... my surfaces, and confessed page after page of her misdeeds. Mutilations, murders, perversions.' Otille crossed to the railing and gazed out over the water. 'She said that she had fertilized the myth of Bayou Vert - it had been old even in Valcours' day - by spreading rumors of sightings, new tales of its wonders, tales about the Swamp King's black sternwheeler that conveyed the lucky souls to his palace. Then she poured barrels of green dye into the water, sending swirls of color down into the marshes, and waited. Almost every time, she said, some fool, a trapper, a fortune hunter, would come paddling up to the boat, and there he'd find Clothilde, naked, gray wig in place, the handmaiden of Paradise.' Otille ran her hand over the top of a piling and inspected the flecks of creosote adhering to her palm. 'They must have had a moment of glory on seeing her because they could never say anything. They just looked disbelieving. Happy. She'd make love with them until they slept, and they slept deeply, very, very deeply, because she gave them drugged liquor. And after they woke, too groggy yet to feel anything, she said they always had the most puzzled frowns when they looked down and saw what she had done with her knife.'
The clouds were breaking up, the sun appearing intermittently, and the beer cans on the bank winked bright and dulled, as if their batteries were running low.
'Come on,' said Otille sadly. 'There's lots more to see.'
Chapter 15
July 29 - August 14, 1987
Those first weeks at Maravillosa, Jocundra had time on her hands. She wandered the corridors, poking into the cartons and crates that were stacked everywhere, exploring the various rooms. The motif of ebony