The Mummy's Finger.
Can I take you to a restaurant? It's got glass tables. We can watch ourselves while we are eating.
The Dukes of Dixieland are playing on the Steamboat Natchez tonight. Get your tickets now. The stars and the skyscraper lights shimmer on the river’s eddies in the dark. Everything passes through New Orleans. Everything washes out to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Greatest Race is playing on the television with the sound off. WWOZ is on the radio playing flamenco music. The Greatest Race (1965) is probably the stupidest movie ever made, and I have walked out of some doozies. Since I am reading the newspaper while it plays silently in the background, I pay the television no mind, as usual.
Passion is what powers the human heart. Passion’s counterweight is despair.
I was talking with Felicity, whose name means, “intense joy.” She had to go to work so I was enjoying the company of my own thoughts when Shugee showed up. Frickin’ Shugee. He is a tarnished penny.
“Hey, King, wanna buy a finger?” Shugee said.
And so it began.
I folded my newspaper and put it aside. “Begin,” I said. We may as well get this story out of the way.
“I’ve got this pal who works at Tulane University. He is a guard in the mummy room,” Shugee began. I could already tell this was going to be a long story. That frickin’ Shugee.
“Not much goes on in the mummy room. It’s in Dinwiddie Hall, in a quiet part of the campus. Only bookworms and eggheads go there.
“Tulane isn’t known for its Egyptology department. Nobody knows there are mummies. There are only two. Somebody found them stored under the bleachers in Tulane Stadium one day. They had been there for 24 years. Those were the Green Wave’s golden years.”
This one is really good. That frickin’ Shugee. You never know what he will come up with next.