by Rod Davis
“Exactly. You are exactly correct.”
“Then you agree to let him introduce your choir?”
“Yes.”
Elroy extended his hand. Agon didn’t take it.
“But about that other business. Leave it. That’s not something in which I have interest anymore.”
Elroy let his forearm hover over the saucers and plates. “As you wish. In Cuba you learn to always have some extra thing to offer when you ask for assistance.”
“We all must learn to change. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Agon extended his hand.
Later, when the many questions were asked, it wasn’t that important whether Joe Dell had heard of the idea first and wanted to use Jazzfest politically or if Elroy heard of Corina’s involvement, through Jean-Pierre, and wanted to make her look bad, and had conned a semi-dotty aristocrat into setting it all up. Unless one can turn state’s evidence on the other, co-conspirators don’t need to be concerned with who knew what when. They all knew it close enough to the same time anyway. Or so it would play out in court.
As a matter of history, it was Elroy who went to Joe Dell. He said he had an idea that could be of use to the senator’s career, especially considering his record with black voters, and would be the sort of event he could become involved in without really alienating white ones either, since it all took place in a “church context.” It was Elroy who asked Joe Dell if he wanted to make a speech at the Gospel Tent. It was Joe Dell who agreed. It was Agon who never quite figured it out. Or maybe it was Agon who did.
19
Gus could see that Jean-Pierre was impressed with the rehearsal so he allowed himself to be impressed, too. And they did sound good—if the Academy’s Performing Arts Theater had ever filled with this kind of sound before, Gus hadn’t heard about it. He slumped low in his plush front-row indigo seat, smiling like a baby to a mother’s lullaby. Charlotte’s voice had a low roughness in it that, as Jean-Pierre remarked, wouldn’t have been out of place in the best black Baptist church. Cissy’s alto slid around Charlotte’s lead like a vine on a flagpole and the other girls wrapped the whole thing up as the sea surrounds the fish, as Mao might have said had he, like Gus, fallen on strange times and wound up far away from the mechanized infantry teaching hymns to Southern schoolgirls. Anyway, Gus thought they sounded great. And he knew his choirmaster did too, and that was the important thing.
Yet the smile on Gus’s face was not simply one of pleasure, nor aesthetic approval. It was a symptom of realization. In the harmony of those voices was the fulfillment of Gus’s vision. He had seen it; now he could hear it. It was all coming together. He had really pulled it off. With the newspaper coverage and the sundry attentions that derived from that, Elizabeth was Gus Houston’s No. 1 fan of the moment. He had even heard that Agon had “taken an interest in the project,” as Elizabeth put it.
Strangest of all was the buzz within the school—the girls were actually excited about the idea. Gus wasn’t sure why and he entertained notions that if the girls of Miss Angelique’s liked the plan there might be something deeply flawed about it, but he was in no mood for cynicism with Jazzfest only a week away. So when he saw the promotional posters for the Voices of Angelique that Elizabeth had ordered to be plastered all over the school, and in places like the Uptown McDonald’s, where the girls often went for lunch, he did what a hustler should never do.
He believed in his own scam.
Why not? The girls were belting out “Jesus on the Mainline” as dynamically as he’d ever heard it, with the weird twist that half of them were blonds. Gus felt the kind of privilege of discovery that all great cultural explorers have known. Even P. T. Barnum must at one time have been awed at the concept of an elephant balancing on top of a man’s head. Would astronauts leaping across the surface of the moon have been any more swept away with their moment of achievement—rare, proud accomplishment—than Gus Houston at the magnitude of the cultural transformation he had germinated? He could see great days ahead.
The hymn was over. Gus drew himself up in his seat to come up on stage to sit in on the post-rehearsal critique.
“Hold on a second,” Jean-Pierre called out from his piano bench. He was smiling, glancing at the girls. “We worked something else up.”
Betsy and Tina giggled slightly. Charlotte looked mischievous. Gus settled back in.
“We figure on an encore,” Jean-Pierre said. “You always got to figure that. This one is ours.”
Jean-Pierre initiated an unmistakable R&B line from the bass keys. The girls regrouped in a tight half-circle. From the center came Charlotte’s low, moanful husk.
“Love and happiness . . .”
She waited until the words had faded and slipped back in at the next opening of Jean-Pierre’s progression.
“Love and happiness . . .”
The other girls began humming softly behind the beat. Jean-Pierre’s rhythm line gurgled deeply into the blues side. Then Cissy picked up the chorus, repeating after Charlotte as the other girls clapped to set up the time, singing:
“Make you do wrong . . .”
Singing:
“Make you do right . . .”
Gus didn’t know a lot about music and less about Gospel. But he knew when somebody was singing Al Green.
Jean-Pierre winked at him and the girls proceeded through a decidedly vampy version of the classic of Green’s younger days. But Gus did not associate the music with religion. He associated it with having sex. He watched the girls sway with the rhythm. It had been that way for Gus, too. But now he barely moved. He had two thoughts: these girls were good; and they would never get away with this in the Gospel Tent.
When it was over he clapped spontaneously. Enthusiastically. The girls joined in. Jean-Pierre turned on his bench and did the same. Then Gus stopped clapping.
“That’s supposed to be Gospel?”
“Ain’t no ‘supposed to be.’ That’s from the Reverend Al Green. Whatever he do, everybody love.”
Gus got up and leaned on the apron of the stage. Jean-Pierre thanked the girls and told them they could go for the day.
“Bet you didn’t expect that one, did you, Mr. Houston?” It was Charlotte. Her face and white T-shirt were damp with sweat.
“I’ll give you that.” When she was almost gone, Gus called out, “But it sounded great. I’m proud of y’all.” He heard the stage door close and wasn’t sure if she’d caught the last part.
Jean-Pierre sorted his music sheets. He glared at Gus.
“That’s what I call damning with faint praise.”
Gus hopped up on the stage and sat with his knees drawn under his chin. “It just seemed so, I don’t know—profane. In context.”
Jean-Pierre noodled a few lines from the song. “You don’t know a lot about Gospel, do you?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Ain’t nothing else the point.”
“The point is to make this a big success.”
“What you mean?”
“I’m just saying, isn’t Al Green a funny way to top off a church act? Which is a damn good act, by the way.” He paused. “That’s all I mean.”
“Yeah, it’s a damn good act. And this is a damn good way to tell everybody in that tent these girls are serious. Look here, Houston, I been doing this sort of thing for years. You don’t think I know what a show-stopper is? They give us an encore, they gonna want something to remember. Now I figure, we could go back with ‘Amazing Grace’ or some cracker song like that but by now we got everybody moving and we got their attention and they all saying, ‘Hey, for white girls, they ain’t bad.’ So now we just crank it one more notch. We say, they can sing the Gospel and they can sing the low-down, too.”
Jean-Pierre shook his head and laughed as he spoke. “Don’t you know nothing about Al Green? Ain’t nothing that man write
s don’t come from Jesus.” He laughed again. “I’m sounding like my mother. But it’s true. Maybe that’s where I got the idea. I just woke up a few days ago and there it was. The Reverend Al Green. White people heard of him, too, so it wouldn’t look like too much of a stretch. But this is a black song, right to the core. And we worked on it all week when you weren’t here. These girls as proud of that song as any of them.”
He trilled a few notes from “Love and Happiness” and then segued into a few bars from the “Oh Happy Day!” arrangement. “Don’t you see how these fit in like a glove?”
Gus felt his face flush. “I just was concerned. . .”
“‘Concerned?’” Jean-Pierre’s tone was unmistakable. Then Gus heard himself repeat the word in his own mind.
“Jesus.”
“You got that shit right.”
“Okay, okay.” Gus lay down on the stage floor. He looked up at the lights. He could feel something in his stomach. He realized he had the jitters. “Maybe we should put it in with the other songs, and not just the encore.”
“That’s why I’m the director here. You leave the timing to me.”
There was a silence as they both thought about it. Then Gus said, “Never mind the white guy on the floor.”
“What I say.”
“Man,” said Gus, after a few moments, “did you see that Charlotte move?”
“That girl got some blood in her somewhere.”
“Could be.”
Gus lay still, looking up into the rows of spotlights and catwalks above the stage. Jean-Pierre drifted off into some Gospel tune that sounded like “Motherless Child.” After a while, he said, “You ever hear of a priest named Gerard Manley Hopkins?”
Gus brought his thoughts back from the Shadow place in which now so unmistakably they had found residence.
“Who?”
“Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
It was a long trip. Re-entry took some time.
“Yeah, sure. Hopkins. Yeah. We study him in one of my classes. I always think of him more as a poet, though. Why?”
Jean-Pierre had begun to hum softly to himself. “Just what I say. You always think of Reverend Green as a singer.”
Jean-Pierre’s fingers moved across the keys as though no longer burdened by gravity. There was no blue aura. He played another half-hour. When he was finished, he noticed that Gus was fast asleep.
As the two brothers toured the construction site, Julio pointed out the small article in the paper. When Elroy read it he felt as if he’d just been piped directly into the special universe of bad news. Goats, now. On the lake. And dead pigeons and bloody Xs all over the fresh-dried cement in front of the SuperBotanica. Right where he had blessed the site for Changó.
He couldn’t stand it. The foreman had said work could be finished in ten days—without interruptions—and that would give another seventy-two hours for stocking. It was just enough time. Julio had everything ready for shipping at the warehouse. They could move it all to the store in one night and get it on the shelves in two days. Even if a few things were waiting, they’d be open on May 1. Jazzfest would start Wednesday and it would all be over.
Now this. Geronimo, joining them as they walked, said six of the crew—all good ones, older guys—had called in sick that morning. And that was just from the dead pigeons. Once they read about the goats, who knew? Elroy sure did. Four goats in a circle, that was a lot. He wished he could see a photo of it but the paper didn’t run one. He knew she’d done something with the goats. He could feel it here, miles away, which wasn’t much. Spirits didn’t count miles. You could make ebo in La Habana and someone would feel it in Alabama if you wanted. He had heard of spirit work from Nigeria coming all the way across the ocean to the mountains of Cuba.
“We need to hire some more,” Geronimo said. “I done argued with two of ’em over the phone. They say they’re sick but it’s that hoodoo shit.” He spat on the dirt near the water cooler.
“It wasn’t just the black ones,” Julio said.
“Two of your guys, too.”
Elroy frowned. “How long you think they stay out?”
“Far as I’m concerned they’re out for good.”
“Maybe, but the point is we got to get finished. Can we do it without them? Jesse and Harold were the best we got.”
“I can get more down here by tomorrow if you say it’s okay.”
“Good as them?”
“Good enough, Mr. Delgado. Hell, it’s just all finishing up now.”
Elroy turned to Julio. “You think the rest will stay?”
“If they’re not gone by now they’ll stay. I checked. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone else that much, the hoodoo part.” He paused.
“What else?” Elroy asked.
“You know. It’s just a weird job for them. All these people come out to protest. Plus all that about the santos—
“Who says these are the santos?”
Julio looked at Elroy, then at Geronimo. Geronimo didn’t believe in any of it.
“You know it is, Elroy.”
“Yeah, well maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”
Julio rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. And it isn’t Corina Youngblood, either.”
“Shut up.”
“Fuck you, man. What’s the matter with you? It’s not like this is some kind of secret.”
“I mean, be quiet,” Elroy said, looking around. Although the men were working, words had a way of traveling. Elroy didn’t want anything traveling. Except Corina. Back to Africa or whatever hell she came out of.
“Where you get the new men?” Elroy asked.
“I know some union guys not working.”
“Can we use them?”
“It’ll cost a little extra. I got to make it okay with a couple of people, but yeah, I do it all the time on jobs. With nobody working they look the other way if you make it okay for them.”
Elroy looked at Julio.
“It won’t cost that much,” Julio said.
“Then bring them,” said Elroy. He looked at the news clip again, then at where there was blood. This time it hadn’t washed off as easily. There was a little stain. “And clean this shit up better.”
“You got it, boss.”
Elroy and Julio walked on alone, scrutinizing the building. The exterior was all but finished. They were waiting on new windows for the front and the automatic sliding doors for the entry still weren’t right, but Geronimo said those were minor things, to be expected. Inside, the fresh concrete and the high ceilings kept the space cool.
It looked like a mess to Elroy, who was not an expert at these things, but he could see progress—the plumbing was finished and the electricians were well on the way. Fortunately, none of the electricians had left, but they were mostly anglos from the Local, which didn’t have any blacks. As they walked, Julio checked items off his list and talked to Geronimo from time to time.
Elroy wasn’t listening. He was seeing. He was trying hard to see it all done. He was trying to see Corina Youngblood on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain draining the blood of animals to Ogun and bringing down his powers against everything Elroy wanted in life. Tonight, he thought, he would take a goat himself for Changó. He would not tell Julio, but he would do it.
Bonita took the tray over to the two tourists and went back to her perch behind the bar. It was a slow evening so far but that was good. She could barely concentrate on the job anyway. A Baby Schedule was in her head. It started: Day One after period. Then, two weeks later, Egg Descends. After that, Ovulation. Baby. Or Not. To the Schedule was a Routine. It went: Sex Every Night starting a week after her period and continuing until it started again or it didn’t.
It had started again. So she was initiating the Schedule again. And the Routine. It was the damnedest thing. The world seemed overrun with teenage pregnanc
ies and people were out bombing abortion clinics and all she wanted to do was to have a baby and she couldn’t. She remembered when her friend Margie had the problem. It went on for two years and then she took some pills and then she had twins. And then she and Bernie got a divorce and now she was trying to raise two little girls all by herself.
Bonita thought about that a moment. She looked around The Hellhole. Some life it would be on her own with kids. But that wouldn’t happen to her. Gus was infected with her love and it wouldn’t get out of his core. She didn’t like to think of herself having magical woman or Cajun powers but some things she knew and she knew that. He had his defects as a human being. He had his wormhole. But even with the wormhole he was infected with her and she would never find herself in Margie’s position. She could tell by the way Gus fucked her. Men didn’t quiver the way he did holding her and not be infected with love.
Only, she wanted a baby now. Not to keep him. She’d seen enough of life to know that wasn’t how it worked. She wanted a baby. Corina knew it, too. Her doctor did. Gus did.
“Hello—anybody in there? Two more Heinekens?”
It was one of the tourists. The guy in the gray shortsleeve who thought he looked like Jack Nicklaus. He was leaning on the bar next to Old Clyde.
“Sit down and I’ll bring it to you.”
Sometimes customers would take offense. Sometimes they would heel like dogs. She must have been putting out the fuck-you rays from her eyes because Jack Nicklaus heeled.
“Sorry, but when we tried to get your attention you didn’t seem to be looking.”
“I was looking. I was just ignoring you.”
She slid off her stool and picked up two mugs from the drying rack. She dug out two beers from the ice chest. Jack hovered, not sure what to do. Whether he was being joked with. Then he saw he wasn’t. He went back to his table. She took the beers over.
“I thought people here were more friendly,” the other man said. He looked like Donald Trump.