by Rod Davis
Maybe that was why he froze. He was preparing to give praise to the Lord and he saw that man instead. Even when the man moved across the stage and started speaking, even when the first volleys of cushions and food found their marks, Jean-Pierre had held back. In that moment, a moment he would rethink until it made him want to scream, he had been paralyzed by a force he never even knew existed. He did not understand the stopping power of a random chaotic visitation from an uncharted future.
He might have taken comfort had he known he was but one of many others that evening around whom chaos lay like an infection, that he was but one of many disparate souls selected to learn how easily things can happen that are not supposed to. He would have learned why pilots must trust their instruments; that vertigo, the disbelief of gravity, is the siren of universal chaos itself. But he did not and there was nothing else to do. Spinning Charlotte around by her shoulders, Jean-Pierre had pushed her forward. “That’s it,” he said. “Get outside.”
The girls, who below stage level had been unable to see what was happening, bunched up and shoved back. “What is this?” Marie asked. “Shut up and run,” said Charlotte.
Jean-Pierre hopped to the ground and headed them up like wild cattle. “Don’t run. Just get out quickly.” But by then it had gotten crazy.
A human wall had already formed along the tent’s outer perimeter as more and more onlookers rushed over from the other shows. Backstage was the only remaining respite from the crush, except for a small opening at the far front end of the tent. But in no time the wall of people gained mass, pushing farther inside, until the stage itself was overrun like some enemy position and there were no safe spots at all.
Cissy had started screaming and Betsy was crying. Charlotte took Betsy’s hand. Jean-Pierre kept them moving in as tight a shell as possible, although it was slow and, as whites, the girls stuck out too much. When he saw a hole to the left he powered two young men in muscle shirts out of his way and was rewarded with open skies and cool evening breeze.
They were clear.
“Oh, Mr. Youngblood—” It was Marie, fallen to her knees.
“Go, go. Keep going. Get them as far away as possible,” he said to Charlotte, then bent over Marie. He picked her up and almost gasped when he saw a gash across her forehead, blood trailing down into her eyes. “Something hit me.”
“It’s okay.” Jean-Pierre held Marie close to his chest, their robes a complement to each other, though bloodied now. He moved through a whirl of bodies trying to get somewhere, who knew where or why. The din of voices and curses had become immense, and now in the background he could hear police sirens from the streets.
Charlotte had made it to the fence line. She had shepherded the others to a clearing between two parked delivery trucks. Jean-Pierre carried Marie over. “Hold this to your forehead,” he told her, giving her a handkerchief. The cut was bleeding, but minor.
“I’ll be right back,” he told Charlotte. “Don’t go anywhere till I get back or Mr. Houston does. You should be okay here. Get the first policeman you see.”
Then he raced back to the tent to find his mother and brother.
At first, Corina and Paulus had ducked in their seats, and then, as it got worse, they knelt between the rows of chairs with Arletta Wynnewood and Estella Bourgeois and the others from the church. But after a minute or two even that was not safe. Everyone seemed either to be trying to get up the stage to find that Prince man or trying to get out to stay away from the trouble. Corina wanted to get away. Miz Johnson was too old to be around this kind of riot, and Paulus was too young, and she herself didn’t care to get beat up, come to that.
So as soon as she could see a clear spot behind her, she kicked some chairs out of the way and led her flock out. A small stream of like-minded folk parted the debris like the Red Sea ahead of her and she followed them to the farthest end of the tent. Miz Johnson and the others were scared and wanted to leave. Corina told Articia Sloan, the strongest among them, to lead everyone out to the front gate and wait there.
“You not coming with us, Reverend?” Miz Johnson asked.
“I got to see my son is okay. He up there somewhere with all those white girls.” She gestured toward Articia. “Go, get on. I be with you directly.”
They left. Corina went back in the tent. Paulus had picked up a chair and wedged it next to a tent pole near what had been the ticket booth. Corina stood on the chair, holding Paulus’s shoulder for balance. She looked, but she could not see him.
Ocho had long since thrown his seat cushion, and a rock he’d found on the ground, and was well forward in the first assault wave on the stage, but the two white men were gone and now people were fighting with each other, mostly over shoving and crowding. Ocho liked it, and it was making his life easier. In truth, he’d had no idea how he was going to get to Jean-Pierre or get away, other than to follow him around until the moment came, but now—this was the moment. He pressed on, but there were too many people, and it was hard to see anything.
He felt an elbow sharp against his ribs and turned to see a black man making a face at him, so Ocho hit the man across the face with a wooden stake he’d found lying near the stage. The man toppled. Another came toward Ocho and Ocho hit him, too, and then the swell of the crowd pushed him far around the right side of the stage to the rear.
Which is when he saw Maria’s lover.
All the black singers in their robes and the other ones who’d just come in to see what was happening had the place cluttered up but over on the side Ocho could see Jean-Pierre coming from outside back into the tent. He was wearing a robe, too. It made him easy to track.
Ocho moved forward, careful to keep a few people between him and his target. But his target kept getting better. As he got nearer, Ocho could see that Jean-Pierre was trying to get on top of an overturned amplifier.
Ocho felt something take over, as he had often felt it in his life and he was sliding around the back side of three young rednecky looking white women in cutoffs drinking beer and yelling at someone to get out of the way. At the same time, his hand went inside his jacket and down into his belt. His hand found the little Walther he had brought from Miami. Then his hand was up and the gun was in it and he was yelling, “Hey, you fucking asshole motherfucker,” and Jean-Pierre was turning slightly to see him.
Jean-Pierre’s body twisted sharply to the right as though a taut wire had been jerked suddenly from the center of his shoulder blade. Ocho fired again. Jean-Pierre slammed into the amplifier, crumpled forward onto one knee, then fell on his side onto the ground.
Ocho was moving quickly back into the crowd and to the other side of the tent. Now the yelling had turned to screams and a few people had dropped to the ground and others were looking around and then the sound of the shots and the fear of the people was swallowed whole in the confusion and Ocho was outside the tent and walking quickly along the fence line.
He was going so fast he nearly didn’t see the group of white girls in pale blue gowns, one of the gowns spattered with blood, huddled against the chain link. And he could have missed them, too, except they were singing. It was a weird song, Ocho thought, making for the big concession tent near the Louisiana Pepper Stage. Not like a hymn, exactly, something else.
He did see the police running toward the Gospel Tent and had he been able to he would have seen Agon Hapsenfield resting on a small set of bleachers surrounded by two state troopers and a fireman, nursing various cuts and lumps. He would not have seen Elizabeth, for as soon as the first cushion struck Joe Dell Prince she had ditched Gus and walked away without looking back to hear the zydeco band in the Bud Lite tent. It was said that sometime later an attractive middle-aged woman had taken off her dress and was seen dancing in nothing but her panties and a straw hat in front of the Johnny Winter band but it was never really established that it was Elizabeth, because the night was too filled with alarm and nakedness was far down on
the priorities of the available police.
At the sound of the gun shot, Corina saw what had happened. “Oh God, they done shot him,” she said, barely audibly, to Paulus. And then they were running up to Jean-Pierre’s side. But the first wave of police beat her to her son and only by crying that she was his mother was she allowed to behold him, soaked in blood, as the officers pushed back the onlookers and called on a walkie-talkie for paramedics.
Paulus tried to get in close, too, but seeing his brother like that and his mother like that dropped something cold into his soul and he did not press. One of the policemen asked him if he had seen who did it and he said he hadn’t been able to see anything and he just sat down on the trampled grass and debris and stared through the legs of the surrounding cops at his brother sprawled on his back, bleeding into the ground and his mother crying as if she would die.
Off to the left, outside the tent, a crowd of people had assembled around the white girls in the powder blue robes. They were rocking softly, side to side. The big girl carried the lead. “Love and happiness,” she sang, while the others filled in, sweet to her eerie low moan: “Love and happiness . . .”
At first the voices only made Paulus angry, but amid the police radio chatter and his mother’s crying he found himself drifting away on the rhythm.
“Moan for love . . .”
A stocky black policeman with a black mustache came and squatted next to him. He had a notebook in his hand and was writing something. His name tag said B. F. Saunders. It was one of the cops who had first found Jean-Pierre. “The EMS just came through the gates,” the cop said.
Paulus turned in the direction of a siren—there were many sirens but that one was a little different—and saw an ambulance trying to thread through the crowd. It was unclear whether people were trying to leave or get in free through the gates amid the confusion. Paulus watched as the vehicle got closer. The siren went off but the lights were still flashing.
“Make you do right . . .” she sang.
“Make you do wrong . . .”
“We stopped the bleeding,” the cop said. “I think he’ll be okay.” Paulus nodded and tried to get closer. In a moment Jean-Pierre was on a stretcher. Something was over his face. Paulus vaguely remembered the sensation of an oxygen mask. Then Jean-Pierre was in the ambulance. His mother climbed in with him. “Get Miz Anderson to bring you over,” she called out to Paulus as the doors were shut by the fireman who had hung around for the free show. His uniform was splotched like a modern art painting, and there was a gash along the bridge of his nose.
“It’s okay,” he said to Paulus. “They’ll take care of him.”
The ambulance pulled away. The sirens went back on. Paulus followed a tall blond lady cop and B. F. Saunders to a squad car just inside the gate. On the way to the hospital, as the lady cop drove, Officer Saunders asked Paulus why anyone would want to shoot his brother. He wanted to know if he was involved in drugs.
Along the fence line behind the tent, a halo of music spread itself over those who had gathered within earshot of the white girls. Born of desperation, it was a haven; within it, recalled many who found respite there, was perhaps the best show of the week.
“Love and happiness . . .”
The big brunette was red in the face and sweating profusely, and there was a distance deep in her gaze. The seven others bunched up tight next to her had become all of a body, moving in sync, to and fro, dipping and stepping, clapping in time, Motown with melancholy, utterly hypnotizing. The onlookers took up the clapping in time, too, as though nothing was playing itself out not fifty yards away.
Just then the smaller blond with the high and honeyed voice lifted her arms upward, closed her eyes, and flew off to some other place. She took the rhythm and the lyrics with her.
“Oh happy day . . .”
From Cissy’s lips, the simple words of the Edwin Hawkins Singers classic washed fulfillment on Al Green’s lament like waves on a tropical shore. Low at first, and then louder:
“Oh happy day . . .”
“Oh happy day . . .”
“When Jesus washed . . .”
—the other voices joining now—
“My sins away . . .”
Then the big brunette looked at the blond and added her strength to the change.
“Oh happy day . . .”
All the little sisters were in harmony now, their voices joyous from a place they seemed to have just discovered:
“Oh happy day . . .”
Charlotte and Cissy called out; the choir responded. So perfect was the pitch, so vibrant the emotion, that just the first notes brought tears to even the cops and busybodies standing nearby, the way music can disarm you in that way, a way even Paulus would have accepted, that Jean-Pierre might have felt worth his wounds.
“Oh happy day . . .”
“Oh happy day . . .”
“When Jesus washed . . .”
“When Jesus washed . . .”
“When Jesus washed . . .”
“Oh when he washed . . .”
“When he washed . . .”
“When he washed . . .”
“My sins away.”
“Oh happy day . . .”
“Oh happy day . . .”
Charlotte ran with it, her voice reaching and rambling like a blues singer from Memphis. The girls were locked arm in arm now, swaying. They were blood now, all of them, even Marie, whose own blood was drying on her cheek.
“When Jesus washed . . . my sins away . . . oh happy day . . .”
And then, as they had practiced seemingly so long ago, Tina, quickly joined by Betsy, moved the medley into the words from Jean-Pierre’s mother’s church. The beat shifted just slightly but still was anchored in that fundamental Gospel time.
—“Walking with Je-sus . . .walking with Je-sus . . .”
Lost from their troubles now, the girls unlocked arms and clapped, rocking in their robes like candle-flames: Those specially-designed robes, conceived in a form of deceit but now transformed, those robes now auras of blue over white skins which, like those in their immediate audience, actually had no color at all but the One, the one that in that moment in history could be neither distinguished from another nor extinguished from the common light.
—“When I’m walking with Jesus/I’m walking with the strength of the Lord . . .”
“Oh happy day . . .”
—“Walking with Je-sus . . .”
The songs now fully entwined. Charlotte and Tina picked up the new lines, Cissy and Marie leading the response.
“Oh happy day . . .”
“When Jesus washed . . .”
—“Walking with Je-sus”
“When he washed . . .”
—“Walking with Je-sus”
“When Jesus washed . . .”
“My sins away.”
“Oh happy day . . . Oh happy day . . .”
—“Walking with Je-sus”
“When he washed . . .”
—“Walking with Je-sus”
“When he washed . . .”
—“Walking with Je-sus”
“When he washed . . .”
—“Walking with Je-sus”
“My sins away.”
“Oh happy day . . . Oh happy day . . .”
More than a hundred souls, maybe twice that number, joined on every line, learning as they went. All you could hear, in that corner of the Fairgrounds—until the sounds of sirens covered everything and police were everywhere and the soiled salvation of the evening was all but forsaken—was what a happy day it had turned out to be.
22
Gus didn’t even know there had been a shooting until he got to the Tulane Medical Center, and even then he was too groggy to take much of it in. The news came from two extremely unpleasant detectives, on
e black, one white, like in the movies, who “interviewed” him for two hours as soon as the docs in the ER had stitched the cut on his cheek and X-rayed his head and ribs and found only a minor concussion and bruises.
It would be the first of many such interviews, indeed, the first of many slow pirogues down the bayou to hell, but on that night, time and careers and guilt and the wrath of Corina Youngblood were not really distinguishable entities to Gus. He was okay and Jean-Pierre would probably live. The police said his condition was “serious but stable,” with a puncture of the right lung and a big hole but not bone break through the left thigh.
Since he was not a member of the immediate family, they would not let Gus see Jean-Pierre, so he sent a message to the recovery room to Corina, asking for her to come out. She didn’t, but Paulus did. He said, “Mama say she don’t want to see you now.” After that, all in the world Gus wanted was to get out of the hospital. All he wanted was to see Bonita and have two or three hundred shots of Jack Daniels. And so he went down to the Quarter.
He could see right away he would pay for much in which he had erred, and that the first installments were due. It was in her look, which began as soon as he sat down. She didn’t even walk over—more like a quick inspection from afar to see that he was in one piece. Had she heard? Oh, yes. Many people had heard. It had been quite a story, on the news from just after seven p.m. until now, nearly midnight. In fact, not much else had been the topic of conversation.
“You could of fucking called, you know?”
“I said I was sorry.”
Every head of every male along the bar swiveled toward him, on his corner stool, and back to her, at the register. Monotonous, stupid, tennis-watching drunks. Each one capable of inflicting harm had the fury of the brunette attending their besotted needs so indicated by the least flick of the brown iris rapier that was now her sidelong gaze.