The Marigny Keepers

Chapter 1 - A Real Southern Gentleman

It was just before midnight on a Tuesday when Alene first noticed Perrin Boudreaux enter the Big Easy Backwater Blues. The bar was jam-packed full of tourists, as it often was, and upon first seeing Perrin’s shoulder-length dark hair pulled back and head bent at the bar, Alene figured him for just another tourist.  There were a ton of college age boys in town that week from surrounding states, celebrating the end of the school year with drunken revelry up and down Bourbon Street, and there was nothing remarkable at first glance about Perrin’s presence to distinguish him from them in the crowd.

“What’ll ya have, friend?” she asked him, trying to raise her voice enough over the booming live rock music to be heard.

 Jackson’s band was tearing into “Sweet Home, Alabama” for the second time already that night, and at least eighth time since Sunday, and Alene’s head throbbed. Big beer-bellied Jackson Mandeville owned the bar, which from what Alene could tell during her two weeks on the job must have been a pretty successful venture, but Jackson’s primary interest in keeping The Big Easy open was to have a place to jam with his band in front of an avid audience every night. It was only two weeks into Alene’s summer break from Tulane and she was already questioning her own insistence on staying in New Orleans for the summer. Sure, she would make a fortune serving up hurricanes and other assorted cocktails to hard-partying tourists, but the heat was already making her head spin during daylight hours and the stench of booze, cigarettes and vomit on Bourbon St. made her eyes water when she arrived for work nightly at sunset. She was already tired of being looked up and down from head to toe by slobbering, tongue-tied men, drunk out of their skulls on the cocktails served in green plastic cups next door,  and as nice as Jackson was as a boss, hearing the same rock anthems time after time every single night was growing old… fast.

In fact, when Alene first noticed Perrin’s wide shoulders and dark hair at the end of the bar, she was thinking about the summer she had passed up – the summer she could be having back at home in Mississippi, making minimum wage at the video store like she did last summer, working the counter with her best friend Nikki. Maybe she’d have been better off just going home for three months to recover from her first year of college. But she knew that only heartache waited for her back at home since her high school boyfriend, Eric, had emailed her back in March to let her know that he’d met someone else away at school in Georgia. If she’d gone home for the summer, she’d have been facing night after night of awkward run-ins with him.

Not to mention that at The Big Easy, she could easily pocket three hundred bucks a night in tips. It had occurred to her back in March during one of her sobfests over Eric that she could spend the second semester of her sophomore year abroad in Paris. But the only way she could make that dream a reality was by working at a real job in New Orleans all summer. Her parents couldn’t understand why she’d chosen to stay in Louisiana instead of come home. In fact, her mother was not speaking to her at the moment.

When Perrin looked up at Alene and their eyes met, it was as if the temperature in the bar changed. Usually Jackson kept the air conditioning on full blast at night, the arctic air spilling into the street through the bar’s huge open windows, tempting tourists roaming around the sweltering street to come inside. But one glance into those pale blue eyes framed with long dark lashes, and Alene lost the words that were on the tip of her tongue. Her heart began beating faster and she felt like she might begin sweating despite the frosty air that just moments prior had prickled her skin with gooseflesh.

 “A whiskey, neat,” Perrin told her in a voice that was barely a whisper, yet Alene heard him over the din of the bar.

Alene lingered, lost in the strange young man’s face, rather than immediately stepping away to fix his drink.  He had a strong jaw line dotted lightly with dark stubble, elegant nose, large eyes that were sunken as if to suggest he had missed a night of sleep, and an ever-so-slight scar along his left cheek bone. His mouth was beautiful... perfectly formed lips, almost plum in color. His adam’s apple bobbed in his smooth, slim pale neck. Men who were this pretty were a rarity in New Orleans, where most locals boasted long scraggly beards as soon as they were old enough to grow them, and tattooed every part of exposable flesh… meanwhile tourists usually wore their hair in sporty crew cuts and carried around at least thirty extra pounds of muscle or pizza weight. This man looked to Alene to be about twenty years old, but as soon as this thought occurred to Alene it was replaced by a suspicion that he was either much, much older than his appearance suggested, or possibly younger.