Benjamin January cast a doubtful glance cattycorner across the trampled muck of the Broadhorn Saloon’s yard to the shabby building’s open back door. The Broadhorn was a substantial building for this part of New Orleans, a neighborhood known quite accurately as The Swamp. Constructed of the lumber from dismantled flatboats, it stood a story and a half tall and boasted not only porches but a privy, though the four whores who worked out of it did so in a line of sheds that straggled away into the trees of the true swamp – the ciprière -- beyond. Under the brilliant winter sunlight the bullet-pocked planks and unspeakably-puddled weeds looked every bit as grimy and rough-hewn as the establishment’s proprietress, who a few moments before had bellowed out the back door for January to come in: she needed his services. “Last night some suck-arse bastard tried to steal my Bible.” “In many ways that’s the most surprising element of last night’s fracas,” remarked January’s friend and fellow-musician Hannibal Sefton, fishing in the pocket of his dilapidated frock-coat for a bottle of opium-laced sherry.
What do You think about There Shall Your Heart Be Also?
