Corina's Way

by Rod Davis

  He knew Julio was right. But he still had hope and Julio didn’t. Which was typical. Which was why they had the fight, really. Which was why Elroy didn’t know if he and Julio could ever be right again. Hope was the whole thing. What did they say here, “the whole enchilada”? Hope was the whole enchilada. Elroy thought that if they could just weather it out a few months, the trouble would die away. Elroy could make some donations to some of the black churches and community groups and that would square the racism crap.

  Before long, the people would get tired of paying three or four times as much for things at the other botanicas. They would begin trickling back. America and its nutball people notwithstanding, he had great confidence in the free market. Cuba had taught him that. You can believe what you want, but you put your money where it does the most good. Fidel probably knew that, too, which was why he turned into such a bastard. He knew it but tried to keep it from happening.

  So Elroy would wait them out. He was a force in the market.

  He crossed himself for the Virgin, got up, steadied himself, and threaded the unpredictable aisles to the front where he had left the Igloo. He reached into the ice for another beer and popped it. He was the fucking invisible hand. He had his store and it wasn’t his fault all that shit had happened and people would forgive and forget. At least they would forget. And then they would forgive with their pocketbooks.

  Fuck the market and fuck America, and fuck Julio, he thought. And most of all, fuck Corina Youngblood. He realized he was pretty drunk and therefore decided to drive home. Luz didn’t even turn over when he got in bed. Maybe she didn’t see him, for he was the invisible hand. And fuck enchiladas, they weren’t even Cuban.

  Corina unwrapped the brown paper around the package carefully. She had stayed after the shop closed so that she could do this by herself. She didn’t even want Paulus to be there because the ju-ju was strong and she wasn’t that sure of her own ability with it. She took the bone out of the paper and carried it over to the iron pot in the corner. Eddie’s .38 was back inside, among the wooden sticks and the dirt and the old handcuffs, railroad spikes, nails, razor blades, the cat’s bones and goat’s head and a thick settlement of High John and other herbs she had gathered over the years. She rarely took anything from the pot—and was glad she had put the pistol back in there. But now she was adding something different.

  The palo witches said the human bone is the strongest but sometimes if you don’t know where it is from it can carry the spirit of something bad. Like if the bone belonged to a murderer or a rapist, then you might have the spirit of that murderer or rapist in the pot. But on the other hand you might have a spirit with great strength to bring evil upon your enemies.

  Palo wasn’t like the santos or the orisha. A palo pot was a cauldron from hell if it wanted to be. But Corina wanted the strongest thing she could find and she was willing to take a chance. And so although she had drawn on the bones of animals for palo and fed animals to Elegba and Ogun and the others, she had never courted the mystery of the human.

  Doctor Joseph said he found the bones when a graveyard near Vicksburg was dug up for a highway. Doctor Joseph said they were for sure human but he wasn’t sure exactly who. He said he had kept the bones for five years and nothing bad had happened so he thought they must be from a saved soul. When she had touched the one she wanted, a yellowed rib, she felt that, too, and she paid the two hundred dollars without trying to bargain. Corina’s mama had known Doctor Joseph back when Corina was growing up. Corina never took much stock in root men, especially since she got the santo, but when she knew what she wanted she knew who to find in Mississippi to get it.

  She put the bone in the pot, pushing it down into the dark, pungent soil and covering it over. She put the Ochosi, an iron bow with an arrow running through it, on top, and she dragged an iron spike over next to it for Ogun. Then she picked up one of the razor blades and drew a line across her forefinger until it sprouted red and she dripped the blood over the spot where the bone lay. She stood back and looked at the pot and then around at her botanica. The lights were on. She turned them off. A glint of moonlight spilled in from the side window. In Corina’s soul was the soul of Ogun and of her santos and of her Jesus but the one that guided her now was from a place she was scared to enter but into which she had to go and it filled her head to toe. She could feel the power surge throughout her body as she stood before the pot, what the lady from Dominica called an nganga.

  The power rose up through her strong legs and then to her cat and she could feel the blood in her cat bulge out and she knew she was wet. She could feel the power in her stomach and her kidneys and up in her lungs and leaping through her breasts and around her dark nipples and then up her long neck. She felt it fill her head, glint off her teeth like diamonds, and then she was on her knees before the pot, chanting a tongue she did not really understand, sounds from her throat she did not know—guttural, low, moaning.

  She unzipped her dress and stood up long enough to let it drop to the floor and then she took off the rest of her clothing and she was naked before the pot and filled with the power. Again, she knelt, then stretched forward, full on the floor, arms toward the magic, the ju-ju, the thing she needed to prevail in holy battle. This she felt, still in the tongue she did not know.

  She did so for an hour but it seemed like thirty seconds and then the words in the other tongue stopped and she was silent. And then her own words came into her head. They were not words, exactly, but a thought. A kind of command, as though she wanted something to happen and it had no words but it had a shape to it and that is what was in her head. The thought-shape was a wish. It was a solid, hard focus of all her mind. It had no words. She saw the focus coalesce on the image of Elroy Delgado.

  She awoke before dawn, on the floor, face down. A line of saliva had run out of her mouth and had wetted her face and matted her hair. She rose up and let her hands roam across her body. Then she crossed her arms over her chest and prayed to every Spirit she could remember.

  Then she put on her clothes. She was hungry so she drove to McDonald’s for pancakes and sausage and coffee. She was not tired. She was filled with the Spirit and the Spirit was full of power. It had been hard and she had been wounded and her loved ones had been wounded, too, but the Spirit was strong in her now and it was time to turn her attention to other matters. The Delgados were finished. This was her way.

  Crossing into Mexico was never a problem. The problem was always getting out, but Ocho didn’t plan a return trip. As he walked across the International Bridge into Nuevo Laredo he didn’t care in the least he’d never see the gringo land again. Maybe the money would be harder to come by but he was still fairly young and strong and things would go his way. Mexico wasn’t Cuba, by a long shot, but he knew the language and all the other would be behind him.

  On the Mexican side he walked straight ahead as the cop in the brown hat and green uniform barely looked at him. He went to the bus station and bought a ticket for Monterrey. He had heard you could find work there, especially if you had experience. And so he would make his life. Not once, slumped in the Greyhound seat watching Louisiana and Texas zip into his past, had Ocho squandered a single thought on remorse for killing that puta-fucking cabrón, any more than he had for beating up the kid brother.

  The only thing that made him mad was how the Delgados had treated him. Like shit. No money, nothing. Fired from his job, even, after smacking the kid around. And when he got his friend Elusário to see if Elroy could sneak him some money to leave town after the other, he not only got nothing but got the strange feeling Elroy might even try to send the police after him.

  So he was never going back to New Orleans, especially, or America, ever at all. Gringo shit place. Mexico was more for him. He walked up past a little tree-lined square where bootblacks played cards in the shade and boys pushed along carts selling cold drinks. He felt almost like he was home. He called one of the carts ove
r and bought an orange drink. He sat down and waited until bus time. He thought about things.

  24

  Jesus, he’s gonna be our next governor.” The freckled, sandy-haired young man in cutoffs and Tulane crewneck slid a newspaper across the table to his pale, brunette companion.

  “Act like you’re surprised, Billy.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s still a piece of shit.”

  Gus interrupted with a half-full pot of Costa Rican coffee. It was the house special every Tuesday.

  “Notoriety has a mind all its own,” he said, offering another refill. They seemed badly hung over.

  The woman’s wristful of silver bracelets jangled as she reached for her cup. She had violet eyes and a small rose tattoo next to her right earlobe. They were regulars. He thought her name was Jane but he wasn’t sure. She studied him a moment, then seemed bored and continued reading the article. Gus had seen it. A poll showed Joe Dell Prince was picking up new white voters in his gubernatorial campaign. The poll said whatever the Gospel Riot had cost him in black votes had been regained among whites. It said if the trend continued he could win in November.

  “Fucking Louisiana. It’s like living in a sitcom,” said Billy.

  “Who cares anyway,” said Jane. It wasn’t a question.

  “You want any more croissants?” asked Gus.

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “Coming up.”

  Gus went back to the glass pastry case he’d bought second hand at a going-out-of-business sale. His bakery was delivered each day from La Coupole. “Look on the bright side,” he said. “Election’s still four months away. Things can change.”

  “Yeah.”

  Gus shrugged and walked out of the coffee nook into the main part of the bookstore. Mid-morning was always slow and he hoped he could finish the restocking before afternoon, when it picked up again. For a moment, he’d felt like telling Billy and Jane how it went down in the real world and how the comment about notoriety and change wasn’t just conversational kibitz. But he wasn’t up to it.

  He picked up an invoice which had toppled from the front counter. The mail had come early and he’d piled it all next to the register. He re-stacked the letters so they wouldn’t fall again and dug into the bulkier fare, mostly in the two gray postal-delivery bins. Most of that took the form of filament-taped cardboard packages from his suppliers.

  Right on top were three fresh copies of the latest from Portland. The one string Agon had attached to the grant last June was a request that Gus devote a section of at least four shelves to Elihu Aliesson and writings on New Primitivism. So Gus did. Weirdly, the stuff sold.

  Agon was way out there now, but Gus tried to think well of him. Fifty thousand produced nice thoughts. The note that came along with the surprise check from the New Primitivism Foundation had thanked Gus for “being the catalyst of the Pre-Future.” It said Aliesson’s upcoming book, The Savage Redeemer, would make everything clear. So Gus read it. It said that anger should be given more esteem as a human emotion, because it serves as a “catalyst” to the true peace of the human future. It said people who serve as catalysts do as much good as the peacemakers—“indeed, pave the way of peace itself.”

  Gus sorted through the rest of the bins. A new John Grisham, a new Garfield, a new Anne Rice. At the bottom were two more copies of The Savage Redeemer. He stacked them on the counter to put away later. Bonita’s position was that Agon wasn’t so crazy and that the money was just a way to buy Gus’s goodwill, avoid lawsuits, and piss off Elizabeth. And a tax write-off. But she had agreed to take the check.

  And she liked the bookstore/coffee shop idea. She said it would keep Gus put. She even came up with the name: No Quarter Books. Gus liked her choice so much he began to think of Bonita in an entirely different and perhaps more enlightened way; part of that enlightenment was realizing he had not appreciated her insights nearly enough in the past and that the price of not doing so had been high.

  After two months, No Quarter Books was going okay. He might not make a killing and he didn’t get all the tourists from the Vieux Carré, but being near Tulane and Loyola meant pretty good customer traffic, too, and with the food service angle he was breaking even. Bonita’s paycheck filled in the rest and they got to use her insurance. At first the store attracted a minor notoriety because Channel 12 came down and did a story—controversial canned chaplain’s new career kind of thing. But that died down pretty fast—it was New Orleans. Scandal was a constant enterprise and not a mark against you.

  Maybe that’s why Joe Dell was rising from what should have been his own karmic muck, Gus thought. If Gus had gotten out of it pretty much in one piece, and Agon, too, and even Corina, if you wanted to look at it that way, why not the senator who wanted to be governor? Even Elizabeth wasn’t suffering. Only Jean-Pierre, but he was getting better.

  Girls from Miss Angelique’s came in fairly often in the late afternoon, and, as Charlotte said, “Nobody really gives that much of a shit about the riot. They think it was sort of cool.” In fact, all the Voices of Angelique except Tina had been by to ask how he was doing and tell him they didn’t blame him. He had accepted their good wishes. It would have been cruel not to have. It was not their fault.

  “Okay if I get more of the decaf?”

  “Go ahead.” From a convex mirror on the opposite shelf Gus could easily monitor the coffee room. The two Tulane kids were digging in. He was glad. It was good to have someone in the place, and good not to have too many. If the notoriety had brought business and attention, Gus was glad it had died out. He had given up on his idea of taking the city by storm. He had given up on deliberate potential fuck-ups and the other sorts of things Bonita said came from his wormhole.

  He had banished the Shadow Gus. If it returned, ever, it would render upon him a judgment from which he had been saved by the blood of sacrifice. He would not go back there. He was in a different place. He was not where he had been, when lost. He was Occupying Space.

  He began shelving the books. On impulse he opened a copy of The Savage Redeemer and scrawled Aliesson’s name on the fly-leaf, stuck a yellow Post-It on the cover saying “Autographed Copy” and set it in the front window. Then he walked outside onto the sidewalk. It was September and it was hot and muggy like it always was that time of year down where the Big River began spending itself into the Gulf. The shadows of morning were drawing up into the rising sun. Soon even the buildings and trees would be unable to offer protection and his side of the street would be awash in unfettered light.

  Traffic down Prytania was light and Gus found himself listening to a scattering of sounds: a tree filled with grackles, a distant car horn, the whoosh of a passing bus, indistinct voices from an elderly couple leaving an office supply store on the other side of the street. The sunny one. It had been many months since he himself had lingered over coffee, strolled around Jackson Square, read the paper, wondered what the day would bring. He went back inside and busied himself with his chores.

  First it was just what the lawyers call a TRO, which only lasted two weeks, but then they called it a “permanent injunction” and the same day a herd of little chickenshits had come over from the city and taped up signs on the front of the SuperBotanica and now it had been three months and Elroy and Julio now had to decide if they would keep fighting it or if it would be cheaper to just pick up and open somewhere else.

  Nobody had to tell him it was Joe Dell Prince doing it. The only thing that surprised him was the reaction when he threatened to tell about Hindfoot Davis.

  Joe Dell said, “Elroy, the experience of the last couple of months has told me two things. I got to play to my strengths, and I don’t need to fuck with you anymore. You want to say I hired you to scare the shit out of some nigger ten years ago, go ahead. You know what I think? I think I’ll take out an ad and claim it for myself! And you know what else I think? I think if I had a business
trying to sell this mumbo jumbo shit to a lot of niggers and spics like you are and if I was in as much trouble with them as you are I’d be damned careful about anything else that could backfire on me. So fuck you, Delgado.”

  Elroy drank his Bud Lite—he was getting fat from the booze— and slapped a mosquito. The house was quiet with Luz gone. The night was cool but the bugs were bad. He almost got out of his lawn chair to light a citronella candle but instead he squirted himself with Cutter’s. He hated the stuff because it smelled but there was no one to smell it on him now. He looked up. For the first night in a while he could see the stars. No clouds or rain. No ceiling inside the SuperBotanica to block the view. He thought himself back to a beach in Cuba where the sand was white and the water was blue and warm. But he could not hold such memories.

  Joe Dell wouldn’t even take fifty thousand dollars to call back the city people who were saying the “environmental variance” was overturned by the EPA. Joe Dell said there wasn’t enough money in the world to do business with Elroy again. “You damn near got me killed and I damn near didn’t work my way out of that hole you dug for me. What I mean is I take it personally. I mean I’m finished with you and I don’t know you anymore.” That was when Elroy brought up Hindfoot and wound up telling the senator to fuck himself, too, and that was about it.

  Elroy slapped his left ear. Shit, he thought, I’m not putting that stuff on my face. But he wasn’t feeling the bites anyway.

  Period, end of sentence—the SuperBotanica was closed up. The fight with the city was a nightmare. The lawyers said if nobody could be “reached” it might be a year—or more—before they could reopen the place and then only after a lot of new “environmental studies” and then there would be delays and—the SuperBotanica was basically history. Period, finito, end of sentence.