by Rod Davis
Today, the gabacho was uncharacteristically casual: navy blue golfing shirt and khakis, which made sense, because after breakfast, Joe Dell was on his way to play eighteen holes at the Metairie Country Club, which most everyone in town called Club Met.
He was alone, which also was unusual. He normally traveled in bunches. A bunch of assistants, or aides, or secretaries, or good ol’ boys. The senator was always going somewhere, doing something. Elroy didn’t really like him. As Julio said, it was hard to like someone who thought of you as a member of the “mud races,” and had got elected promising to send you back to Africa or Mexico, or Cuba, if it were ever free again. Which was also on the senator’s agenda.
But Elroy didn’t have to like Joe Dell Prince. Eight years ago, when the senator was nothing but a Metairie ambulance chaser who got publicity because he was some big honcho with the Knights of the Aryan Swords, he had come to Elroy with a request that probably changed his life. And Elroy’s, for that matter, if the business at hand today worked out.
Joe Dell Prince had been running for his first term in the Louisiana legislature. He was up against a black building contractor who carried a lot of weight with his own people. His name was Charles Davis, but everyone called him “Hindfoot” because he’d been a track star at Loyola. There was something else about Hindfoot—he was very superstitious about hoodoo. To Elroy, hoodoo was a mishmash of African and Indian and Cracker weirdness—amateur stuff. Corina hadn’t been much beyond hoodoo and Bible prophesying when Elroy had met her, and had led her to the santos, but in Elroy’s experience most of the black people he knew in New Orleans had some kind of hoodoo thing. Hindfoot Davis, for example, grew up drinking root tea for colds and burning cotton in an iron bucket for the fumes to take away the pain from broken bones. He also grew up believing in fixes.
During the campaign, Joe Dell had learned how Hindfoot still went to hoodoo women and root doctors and kept a pot of herbs in his house to keep away evil spirits and so on. It came to candidate Prince that this was a very damaging trait of character for a politician to have in a district that had recently been redrawn to favor the middle- and upper-middle-class white conservatives as opposed to the previous, mostly poor and black constituency.
What led Joe Dell to Elroy was Robbo, of Robbo’s Airline Highway Grill, the small pancake and steak house where they were meeting today. Robbo was part Mexican but out and out hated black people and he and Joe Dell occasionally raised their blood pressure over coffee and sausages denouncing welfare and Spike Lee and that kind of thing.
Make a long story short, Joe Dell mentioned to Robbo how he’d found out about “Hindfoot’s” interest in hoodoo, and they got to talking some more, and Robbo later on talked to Lupe, his produce jobber, who was also Elroy’s cousin, and bingo, late one evening there was the candidate at Delgado’s #1, the grocery where the ice cream routes now ran out of.
The candidate said he knew Elroy was a santero priest and that he was interested in spiritual matters and needed to talk to him in the utmost confidence. So Elroy closed the grocery to talk. They sat in the back on cardboard boxes of Northern tissue.
Not knowing much about Louisiana politics at the time, Elroy had agreed to help with what seemed a routine bit of spirit work. Just a small “fix” was all Joe Dell wanted. Elroy explained that a santería priest like himself didn’t do fixes but Joe Dell had said fixes was all the Hindfoot guy would understand and that it was important to do it in order to stop “that dangerous man” from getting into office. Joe Dell had added that Hindfoot hated Cubans and was pro-Castro, which sent Elroy’s blood boiling. Turned out Joe Dell was lying—but Elroy didn’t know that at the time.
They agreed on three thousand dollars. It was high, and Elroy expected to have to come down, but Joe Dell didn’t balk. Within a day Elroy had his plan—a cow’s tongue on the front porch. The message was that people who talked too much might lose their own. Or worse. Joe Dell thought it was a “wonderful idea even if it was kinda sick.” He wanted to go with Elroy to see it done, which was normally a strange request, but he was paying premium, and to be frank, Elroy didn’t care about either Joe Dell or the man he didn’t want in office. He didn’t even consider this to be real spirit work.
But Joe Dell had obviously considered the fix very important. Late that very Thursday night, Elroy had no more than nailed the swollen blue-gray tongue—which he got from the butcher who supplied his grocery store—to the eave over Hindfoot’s porch and gotten back to his car up the street than he heard someone yell, “Hey nigger, come on out.”
Startled and angry, Elroy got in his car ready to peel away. But his intuition—or the santos, if they were having any part of this— stopped him. Instead of cranking the ignition, he hunched down so he could just see over the steering wheel. He hadn’t taken time to notice, but now he could see it was a nice, middle-class house. Ranch-style, red brick, with a white porch surrounded by thick shrubbery. Elroy thought how he wouldn’t mind living in such a house. But mostly he wondered what was happening.
There was another shout, then quiet. Elroy thought it best to stay put, that driving away now would only expose him. So he did nothing. Five minutes passed and he decided that maybe it would be best to leave after all, but then the porch light came on. Through the rim of the steering wheel, Elroy saw a tall, black man of about fifty emerge from the front door. At first the man didn’t see it. Then he did. Then he seemed to explode in lights.
Strobe lights, they were called, illuminating him so brightly you could see the moment of terror in his eyes as, having clearly beheld the curse, he was transfixed by it. Really, it was only a moment, but had the terror not been so intense, had the anger of being summoned out and startled not taken so long to supersede the shock of that terrible torn flesh no more than a foot from his face, maybe things would have been different. But what came out was a photo of a black man with eyes popping from his head. To Elroy, it looked like a cartoon character. A black guy gaping at a bloody tongue hanging from his own house. Those were the photos that everybody saw in the newspaper and on TV. They were so awful even Elroy felt kind of bad about it even though he himself had been deceived.
Hindfoot never lived it down. No amount of talk, not even a police investigation, which didn’t amount to much because no one but Joe Dell and Elroy knew about it and weren’t talking—nothing ever changed the gut reaction in the white voters when all the publicity got out.
Joe Dell won big. He was now in his third term. People said he wanted to go to Washington or be governor next. He didn’t talk much about the Aryan Knights anymore, and nobody even remembered the primary from eight years ago. But Elroy did. He knew exactly how the gabacho senator had earned his first landslide.
While Robbo poured a fresh round of coffee, Elroy explained his problem. He outlined the SuperBotanica plan. He tossed off demographic profiles and marketing projections. He exuded success. He could see how the Senator (who had decided “white” Cubans, whom he thought Elroy was, were acceptable) was impressed. In fact, the Senator mentioned that he might consider investing a little himself in such a “drugstore for your kind of people” if he could come up with the cash.
Elroy said such an investment could be arranged—maybe a loan of some kind. He also wondered if the Senator could help with these city environmental maricón shitheads and their gasoline tank rules. Then everyone’s share in the enterprise would be worth just that much more. They agreed it could all work out.
They parted in the parking lot next to the café, shaking hands, generally effusing that extra bonhomie that sometimes erupts between men who basically dislike each other but don’t want their feelings to interfere with their respective goals.
Watching the Senator drive away in his LeBaron to his golf game, Elroy smiled. At exactly the same moment, he felt his stomach knot up like it was full of uncooked dough. In the world of the santos, Elroy knew, you never knew what was what. A thing could
be its opposite. Nothing was ever settled, and Elegba could come in and shake up the best-laid plans on a whim and hurt you for fun and make you like it. That was the way of the santos. But what was the way of the world Elroy was now trying to enter?
10
Christmas slipped by, and then it was New Year’s Eve, and that seemed to leave only Mardi Gras before Elroy could have his dream, even with the delays. Now, though, it had gotten on to March. By Jazzfest in May, for sure, Delgado Bros. SuperBotanica would open for business and become the only thing of its kind in the South. In anywhere. Not in Lagos was there such a store, not in Port-au-Prince, definitely not in La Habana, and nowhere at all in North America although LA was a definite possibility sometime in the future. But right now, nowhere did such a giant discount warehouse for the gods exist.
Elroy was overwhelmed by the transcendental nature of the venture almost as much as by his own marketing genius in thinking it up. The yankees, whether black or white or English or Spanish or Protestant or Catholic had never understood the santos or their following and so none of the corporations or the guys like Sam Walton had ever thought about getting into a market that would never go dry. Elroy couldn’t help smiling to himself. It was better than selling food, even, because people could go without food, or eat cheap food, but they never went without their faith and it was well known that even the poorest soul would find a way to bring gold to the altar.
And that was just the Christians. The followers of the santos had a need to feed their gods that the preachers and the bishops could only dream about. And Elroy was the middleman, the one who would show them a way to nourish their spirits even more often than they had imagined, because no longer would the faithful have to shop at tiny, out-of-the-way botanicas likely as not to charge twenty times what something was worth, and thus screwing the faithful to the wall. Elroy would give them bargains. He would give them volume. He would give them selection. He would make it easy. He would give them an 800 line.
Elroy was aware that he was a businessman and wanted to make huge amounts of money off his SuperBotanicas but he also felt he would do for santería, even for voodoo and hoodoo and those other half-assed American things, what Henry Ford had done for the automobile. Once upon a time, nobody even knew what a car was; now there was one in every garage. Because the cars became cheap and everyone could have one.
Santería would be affordable, it would be competitive, it would be completely out in the open. People would go to the SuperBotanicas like they went to BizMart and Computer Universe. This Elroy would do. He would make a change. It would be a change that counted and he would be remembered for it.
Thinking along those lines made it almost impossibly difficult to wait on Senator Prince to finish the business with City Hall. Elroy had told him to get it done during Christmas because nobody would know, but Joe Dell had said wait till Mardi Gras when everything’s a mess anyway and nobody knows what deals get done.
And they had. And Elroy had been right and Joe Dell wrong.
Elroy still wasn’t sure how it happened, although Corina and that asshole gabacho teacher Houston were at the bottom of the shit, but just as some city inspector who got way too fucking much money for it was going to clear the permit to start construction a story about the SuperBotanica and the gasoline tank had popped up on the TV news. Now the city maricónes couldn’t let it all go. Now the media who ought to have better things to do knew about the plans for the SuperBotanica, which that TV bitch called the “Voodoo Mart.” And now the whole city knew.
It was a nightmare top to bottom, and if it didn’t get worked out soon, Elroy was afraid he’d lose his option on the property from the bank, not to mention sales for every month the stupid delay dragged on. Not to mention kill the gabacho and maybe Corina himself—Elroy caught himself. He’d been drawing lines on a note pad on his desk and saw that the pen had dug so deeply the pad looked like he’d taken a razor to it.
He glanced up to see if Corvette had seen him through the office window. Shit. She was looking right at him. She gave him one of those eyebrow arches that was supposed to imply he was doing something that she found pathetic. Fuck her, too. He stared back until her expression changed from contempt to boredom and she swiveled her chair back around to her computer screen. He looked back at the shredded pad. He felt a rush of heat and realized blood had drained from his face. But he was a Changó and anger came to him easily.
Julio said, “Patience will prevail,” but Julio was of different stuff and anyway Julio didn’t wake up nights with his gut turning the shit inside it to water so often Elroy had started to wonder if Corina had managed to get some of her palo poison in him somehow. But he killed three chickens and threw the obí and knew that the battle had not reached that level yet and that it was his own fear and anger that were, literally, eating him. Thus had Yemonja the sorcerer told him. And that to pull out of his sickness he must act—Ogun had appeared to him and said this, too. These were strong spirits and Changó could only agree with them.
Elroy then bought six young roosters and fed them to the spirits and slept an entire night with their blood on his abdomen and head. It did not keep away his anger, but instead of turning it against himself, all that terrible power coursing through his dreams and his gut as he slept, he now welcomed the anger and knew it would transform him as it had led Changó to so many victories over his enemies in the dawn of time. Things would happen.
If he could just get going, get the maricónes to give him the permit, even if it had to be legal and through the courts, the land could be cleared and the building could be up in sixty days, maybe less, and stocked out and open in another thirty. Maybe in time for Jazzfest after all. Hell, everything was planned down to what went on which shelves, they’d had so much time to work out the details. Elroy felt like the SuperBotanica was some big explosion waiting that would burst into being like the sun if only he could get the thing ignited.
He was calm again. He looked at the pad and laughed, for he realized it was not he who had raked it with the point of the pen but Los Guerreros, and Changó, who were girding for battle. Like any of the spirits, they could pop out of their human servant at will, at whatever time they chose, and that was one of the things about the life of a santero, and if Corvette didn’t know that she was stupid because if she held Elroy in contempt she was defying the santos and one day she would find her life as ripped apart as the yellow legal pad Elroy tossed into the trash can. And he didn’t want to hear another damned word about Paulus Youngblood.
Elroy stood and smoothed his red Polo shirt and black slacks. He looked out at the business in the warehouse. Then he reached across his desk for the phone and punched in the automatic dial for Senator Joe Dell Prince. Patience was not the way of a son of Changó. An environmental permit was not an obstacle to the greatest botanica in all the world and in all of history.
11
The evening had been cool so Paulus had gone around to open all the windows in the sanctuary, but with all the people crowded into the pews he wished he’d turned on the air conditioner. Even sitting at the door, watching outside to be sure the streets were safe, he felt his back drenched in sweat, so he couldn’t imagine how hot it must be up where his mother, in her black robes, was leading the singing. He couldn’t stay up there too close anyway until his nose got better. The incense smelled as glorious as it always had—all his life Paulus had thought incense smelled like his mother’s hands and it always made him feel safe and good to be around it—but the smoke got inside his nostrils and made the sutures itch so much it almost hurt.
His mother was clapping now and they were at the end of the chorus, so the hymn was almost done. “Get right with the Lord, Get right with Jesus”—it was something Jean-Pierre had written and it always made Paulus want to sing, which he couldn’t do at the moment because of the wire in his jaw bone, but the sisters up at the front were loud and clear in his stead.
Still, Pau
lus could tell his mother wasn’t happy yet with the tone of the service, or the pace—that it hadn’t reached that thunder that she wanted of it. He knew because she clapped more when she was trying to fire people up, and because Jean-Pierre had moved the beat up on the electronic keyboard and had added more volume to the drum on the synthesizer. But they weren’t even to the prophesying yet. Paulus knew his mother, and her powers, and he knew that by the time the amen “power” chorus and the trancing began that it would be a night for God and all the Spirits to look upon with favor.
In the distance, Paulus could hear a MAC-10 popping off rounds. Probably in the air. The gangbangers usually just shot into the sky. He thought they were stupid but not especially threatening unless you were in the drug business or crossed them for some reason. They shot up the night just to talk to each other, brag, like having guns was something to get worked up about. Paulus didn’t like guns, but he wasn’t afraid of hearing them go off. Anyway, gangbanger sounds weren’t the sounds Paulus was listening for. The ones he would hear, if they came, would be close in and normal: the sounds of men walking up the streets in creaky leather shoes, of synthetic shirt cloth rustling. Of low murmurs in Spanish.
His mother and Jean-Pierre said he should try not to think about that night too much, that thinking on it would make it bigger than it was, but he couldn’t control his thoughts that easily. Now, by the door, watching the people in the church rise and sing and sit and rise again to pray, like waves along the beach, like wheat flowing in a field—he had never seen such fields, except in movies—and him so close to the dark of the evening, the eternal hunger of the New Orleans streets, the ongoing promise of sudden evil that he now knew and would never, ever forget—with all this he could not stop his mind from rolling back. And then a waft of incense was seeking the open door, as the laws of physics he had studied demanded that air currents must. The inside of his nose began to throb and he was there again and he could not stop it.