The Mardi Gras I’m talking about now, this was three years ago, the year that people were saying that customs mattered, that we had to hold tight to our traditions. Big Chief Tootie Montana was still alive then, and he had called for the skeletons and the baby dolls to make a showing, and there was a pretty good turnout. But it wasn’t true old school, with the skeletons going to people’s houses and waking up children in their beds, telling them to do their homework and listen to their mamas. Once upon a time, the skeletons were fierce, coming in with old bones from the butcher’s shop, shaking the bloody hanks at sleeping children. Man, you do that to one of these kids today, he’s likely to come up with a gun, blow the skeleton back into the grave. Legends lose their steam, like everything else. What scared people once won’t scare them now.
Back to the girl. Everybody’s eyes kept going back to that girl. She was long and slinky, in a champagne-colored body stocking. And if it had been just the body stocking, if she had decided to be Eve to some boy’s Adam, glued a few leaves to the right parts, she wouldn’t have been so... disrupting. Funny how that goes, how pretending to be naked can be less inflaming than dressing up like something that’s not supposed to be sexy at all. No, this one, she had a pair of pointy ears high in her blond hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail. She had pale white-and-beige cowboy boots, the daintiest things you ever seen, and — this was what made me fear for her — a real tail of horsehair pinned to the end of her spine, swishing back and forth as she danced. Swish. Swish. Swish. And although she was skinny by my standards, she managed the trick of being skinny with curves, so that tail jutted out just so. Swish. Swish. Swish. I watched her, and I watched all the other men watching her, and I did not see how anyone could keep her safe if she stayed there, dancing into the night.
Back in school, when they lectured us on the straight-and-narrow, they told us that rape is a crime of violence. They told us that a woman isn’t looking for something just because she goes out in high heels and a bustier and a skirt that barely covers her. Or in a champagne-colored body stocking with a tail affixed. They told us that rape has nothing to do with sex. But sitting in Ernie K. Doe’s, drinking a Heineken, I couldn’t help but wonder if rape started as sex and then moved to violence when sex was denied. Look at me, look at me, look at me, the tail seemed to sing as it twitched back and forth. Yet Pony Girl’s downcast eyes, refusing to make eye contact even with her dancing partner, a plump cowgirl in a big red hat, sent a different message. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me. You do that to a dog with a steak, he bites you, and nobody says it’s the dog’s fault.
Yeah, I wanted her as much as anyone there. But I feared for her even more than I wanted her, saw where the night was going and wished I could protect her. Where she was from, she was probably used to getting away with such behavior. Maybe she would get away with it here, too, if only because she was such an obvious outsider. Not a capital-T tourist, not some college girl from Tallahassee or Birmingham who had gotten tired of showing her titties on Bourbon Street and needed a new thrill. But a tourist of sorts, the kind of girl who was so full of herself that she thought she always controlled things. She was counting on folks to be rational, which was a pretty big count on Mardi Gras day. People do odd things, especially when they’s masked.
I saw a man I knew only as Big Roy cross the threshold. Like most of us, he hadn’t bothered with a costume, but he could have come as a frog without much trouble. He had the face for it — pop eyes, broad, flat mouth. Big Roy was almost as wide as he was tall, but he wasn’t fat. I saw him looking at Pony Girl long and hard, and I decided I had to make my move. At worst, I was out for myself, trying to get close to her. But I was being a gentleman, too, looking out for her. You can be both. I know what was in my heart that day and, while it wasn’t all over pure, it was something better than most men would have offered her.
“Who you s’posed to be?” I asked after dancing awhile with her and her friend. I made a point of making it a threesome, of joining them, as opposed to trying to separate them from one another. That put them at ease, made them like me.
“A horse,” she said. “Duh.”
“Just any horse? Or a certain one?”
She smiled. “In fact, I am a particular horse. I’m Misty of Chincoteague.”
“Misty of where?”
“It’s an island off Virginia.” She was shouting in my ear, her breath warm and moist. “There are wild ponies, and every summer the volunteer firemen herd them together and cross them over to the mainland, where they’re auctioned off.”
“That where you from?”
“Chincoteague?”
“Virginia.”
“My family is from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But I’m from here. I go to Tulane.”
The reference to college should have made me feel a little out of my league, or was supposed to, but somehow it made me feel bolder. “Going to college don’t you make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an oven can call itself a biscuit.”
“I love it here,” she said, throwing open her arms. Her breasts were small, but they were there, round little handfuls. “I’m never going to leave.”
“Ernie K. Doe’s?” I asked, as if I didn’t know what she meant.
“Yes,” she said, playing along. “I’m going to live here forever. I’m going to dance until I drop dead, like the girl in the red shoes.”
“Red shoes? You wearing cowboy boots.”
She and her friend laughed, and I knew it was at my expense, but it wasn’t a mean laughter. Not yet. They danced and they danced, and I began to think that she had been telling a literal truth, that she planned to dance until she expired. I offered her cool drinks, beers and sodas, but she shook her head; I asked if she wanted to go for a walk, but she just twirled away from me. To be truthful, she was wearing me out. But I was scared to leave her side because whenever I glanced in the corner, there was Big Roy, his pop eyes fixed on her, almost yellow in the dying light. I may have been a skinny nineteen-year-old in blue jeans and a Sean John T-shirt — this was back when Sean John was at its height — but I was her self-appointed knight. And even though she acted as if she didn’t need me, I knew she did.
Eventually she started to tire, fanning her face with her hands, overheated from the dancing and, I think, all those eyes trained on her. That Mardi Gras was cool and overcast, and even with the crush of bodies in Ernie K. Doe’s, it wasn’t particularly warm. But her cheeks were bright red, rosy, and there were patches of sweat forming on her leotard — two little stripes beneath her barely-there breasts, a dot below her tail and who knows where else.