When the lights of New Orleans lifted the night something akin to hope-but not so grand-lifted Polly’s spirits. The man stopped at the corner of St. Ann ’s and Chartres, or so said the street signs. “ Jackson Square,” he said. “There’s a pay phone on the corner. Call your folks,” he said. “Go home.”

Polly got out of the truck. “I don’t have any folks,” she said.

“Suit yourself.”

Polly didn’t watch him drive away.

Except in a picture book she’d had once of a little girl getting her tonsils out, she’d never seen anything like Jackson Square. The square in the book had been somewhere in England and clean and friendly. Jackson Square was like that place had been stomped until it looked like the fairgrounds after the fair moved on: the dirt full of ground-in sno-cones, cotton candy, and cigarette butts.

She wasn’t alone but the people, mostly men, were what her mother would call “white trash.” Most of them were smoking and looking around like they were waiting for somebody. There were a few women. Even green from Mississippi, Polly knew they were hookers.

One wasn’t. She was sitting at a table with candles on it. She looked as if she’d stepped right out of a storybook: turban, many-colored skirt, hoop earrings. On the rickety table were a crystal ball and a deck of cards. The good churchgoing folks in Prentiss, Mississippi, preached that foretelling the future, playing with the Ouija board, or dressing up as an Indian princess instead of a favorite apostle on the thirty-first of October begged Satan and his minions to stampede in and snatch up the soul.