South, America
Page 28
A little before nine we went to her bank, where a particularly unctuous assistant manager escorted her to her safety deposit box. She came back holding a briefcase-size suede pouch, zippered shut. She gave it to me and we walked outside. I didn’t count it. At our cars, we kissed goodbye. I drove back to the city.
35
It was cold in New Orleans, too, but I couldn’t sit still. I stashed the leather pouch under the futon and walked all the way from the Marigny to the Napoleon House. I drank too many Jack Daniels pretending to be in a holiday mood with some tourists from San Antonio clumped around the bar.
So naturally I had to walk over to the Rio Blanche. I didn’t go in but I thought I saw Elefgo, or at least someone with his wardrobe. I was glad to think he was okay but it wouldn’t have done any good to go in and say so.
The alcohol warmth was dissipating, and I headed home briskly as possible. I turned on my new stereo, jumped around to some be-bop, poured myself another couple fingers of Jack, and looked in the pouch. It was impressive: a hundred banded packs of Benjamins, twenty in each. I closed it up, stowed it back under the futon, and passed out watching Seinfeld reruns.
I called Red the next day. The number transferred to a beeper, and I punched in my own number. A half-hour later he called back, wouldn’t say where he was, but that he could meet me the following day at 2 p.m. That would be Christmas Eve but he said that was the earliest he could make it. We settled on the Moon Walk overlooking the river.
I almost enjoyed the fresh winter chill as I walked to the rendezvous, my bare head into the wind, carrying all that cash through Jackson Square like it was a bag full of beignets.
I found him leaning against a rail looking at a barge pushing upriver past one of the casino boats.
“I always like coming up here,” he said. He was wearing a Saints cap. A tropical shirt stuck out from the bottom of his leather jacket.
I handed him the pouch. He opened it, flipped through the money packets inside like some kind of high-speed counting machine.
“Looks good.”
“It is.”
“How’s she doing? You?”
“You know. Getting along.”
“And?”
“And I’m okay.” I looked at the water rushing toward the marshes and the Gulf. “I think my ribs have healed. Mostly.”
“Like I said, business.”
“Yeah. It comforts me.”
He looked sideways at me. “Don’t mean I like smartass any better.”
I watched the barge. Like I cared anymore.
He zipped up the pouch. “You think any about what we talked about?”
“It crossed my mind. But, really, I wouldn’t have a clue.” The river seemed exceptionally gray and ugly in the flat winter light.
“Who does? You know, like we said. I never thought I’d wind up with the family. It just happened I knew how to do a couple of things, and then a couple others, and there I was.”
I turned to study him. “And where is that?”
He didn’t like the question.
“I’m not criticizing. I’m asking. It’s something on my mind about myself.”
“Huh.”
“I mean, where you are. You want to be there, I mean where you are, or would you rather be somewhere else?”
A pause. “It’s like I said before. I’d rather be fishing.” He turned his body sideways against the rail, facing me. “You know, it crossed my mind to sell that painting straight out to that woman in Houston, take the money and run. It’d last me a couple of lifetimes.”
“And?”
“And then I’d have to worry every day of this lifetime when they’d show up. They always do.”
“But it crossed your mind.”
“Yeah, it did. Don’t never say that to nobody.”
I shrugged. “Thing is, you thought about a change.”
“I think about it all the time.”
We fell silent, looking at the water. It was going to rain.
“The painting. What happened with it? I’d like to tell her.”
“I took it to my boss, gave him the name of the bimbo collector in Houston.”
“He saw the painting?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“He liked it,” I said, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah.” He stared at the river. “Said it would change his life.”
“Huh.”
“Huh.”
“He’s gonna keep it.” I knew that answer, too.
Red threw up a hand, clasped it back on the rail. “Fuck do I know.”
“That would be too bad.”
“Look, Shakespeare, you never know about these things. Guys might like hanging on to something at first. But then later on they like having the cash more.”
I glanced at him. “So maybe—“
“Fuck do I know.”
He looked into the pouch again.
“So it’s done,” I said.
“It’s done.”
I let that settle a moment.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Anybody else, I mean, you know Tony or Reggie or Delmore or anyone else, ever going to show up, you know, looking for me? Or for her?”
He gave me a sizing up look.
“We went over that.”
“I know. But now, still the same?”
“First, Reggie, he won’t be a problem. Tony, he plays in a whole different area most of the time and he does what he’s told, plus he gets a taste of this you just gave me. Anyone else, no. And nobody’s sorry about how it all played out back there that night, either.” The slightest of smiles. “I might of told them I whacked the rich-boy prick myself. You don’t mind I get the credit.”
I looked him in the eye, something I rarely had done.
“That make you feel better?” He held my gaze.
“I just wondered.”
He turned away, spat out over the railing. “Look, I gotta go. You wanna talk later, you get in touch.”
He put the pouch down, reached in his jacket pocket for a piece of paper, then into his jeans, and finally found a business card for a boat shop in Biloxi. He turned it on the back and wrote down a number. “This is a service. It’s good for a year unless I change it. I do, I’ll find a way to let you know.”
I put the card in my pocket.
“See ya,” he said. “Stay out of trouble.”
He walked away, down the steps toward the market.
“See ya,” I said, mostly to myself. Then I turned the other way and cut across the big parking lot on Decatur and into the hard, shadowed streets of the Vieux Carrê, the Old Quarter, the American landfall for the fallen.
I heard from her on New Year’s Eve, about six. She called to say she was feeling better, had decided to go into therapy with a doctor she trusted. She was thinking about setting up a foundation for at-risk young women. She missed me.
She had finally gone to Atlanta to learn about Rose, drawing in some favors and hiring lawyers. What she found was that the girl, now a teenager, had run away. The guess was some kind of domestic abuse in her adoptive family. No one had heard from her in almost a year.
I had been thinking of many options. I had been thinking of staying here and opening a café or bar with the money she had sent me. I had been thinking of going into a business deal with Ray Oubre. I had been thinking of running off to a monastery in Japan or Korea for a year. I had been thinking of the Big Bend, where you only knew other people if it was by mutual agreement and you could drive a pickup to Mexico over a low spot in the river.
But now I was thinking: I wonder if Big Red could help me find a missing person that he didn’t need to kill.
About the Author
Rod Davis is the recipient of the
inaugural Fiction Award of the PEN/Southwest Book Awards in 2005 for Corina’s Way, described by Kirkus Reviews as “a spicy bouillabaisse, New Orleans-set, in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor or John Kennedy Toole: a welcome romp, told with traditional Southern charm.”
He also is author of American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World, selected as one of the “Exceptional Books of 1998” by Bookman Book Review Syndicate. A six-part series on the Texas-Mexico border, “A Rio Runs Through It,” appears in Best American Travel Writing 2002. His PEN/Texas-award-winning essay, “The Fate of the Texas Writer,” is included in Fifty Years of the Texas Observer and his Texas Monthly story, “Wal-marts Across Texas,” is excerpted in True Stories by David Byrne.
Davis has received numerous awards as a magazine editor and writer. He earned an M.A. in Government at Louisiana State University and studied at the University of Virginia before joining the Army in 1970, serving as a first lieutenant in South Korea. He lives in Texas.
To learn more about Rod Davis and South, America, visit www.newsouthbooks.com/south-america.
Also by Rod Davis — Corina’s Way
Efforts by Corina Youngblood—Christian minister, voudou priestess, and botanica proprietor—to stop the construction of a rival SuperBotanica, a “Wal-Mart of spiritual supplies,” begin to founder until Gus Houston, a displaced former army officer, now ersatz chaplain at an exclusive girl’s school, stumbles into Corina’s store. When Gus hits on the idea of entering the wealthy white girls into the gospel singing competition during the Jazzfest, he triggers a series of events that has all sides evoking the spirits for good and ill. Author Rod Davis combines religion, voudou, New Age philosophy, and good old-fashioned capitalism, greed, envy, and a host of other unsavory motives in his entertaining first novel. Winner of the 2005 PEN Southwest Fiction Award
ISBN 978-1-58838-129-3
Available in hardcover and ebook formats
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com/corinasway
Praise for Corina’s Way
“In the tradition of Flannery O’Connor or John Kennedy Toole: a welcome romp, told in an old-fashioned style and with traditional southern charm.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Corina’s Way is a triumph in Southern storytelling . . . a bubbling pot of clever insanity. Davis’ pen leaks wit and cunning on each page . . . Each chapter flows seamlessly and we discover something of ourselves in each realistically crafted individual . . . a beautiful stroke of fiction.” — Capital City Free Press
“Davis captures the essence of New Orleans . . . [he] nails the complicated racial and religious stew that makes up bayou culture, and his witty, fast style perfectly complements the clever premise.” — Publishers Weekly
“Davis combines religion, voodoo, New Age philosophy, and good old-fashioned capitalism, greed, envy, and a host of other unsavory motives in his entertaining first novel.” — Booklist
“Davis sets an authentic tone for his first novel. The soul of the book rings true.”— ForeWord Reviews
“Make room on that crammed New Orleans shelf for Corina’s Way, a multi-layered tale of suspense about our mysterious underbelly and its all-seeing navel.” — Andrei Codrescu, author of Messiah
“Rod Davis’s novel, Corina’s Way, is an absorbing tale of Corina Youngblood, a New Orleans spiritual healer in the African/Haitian derived practice of ‘Santos.’ Corina’s efforts in the healing work of the body and soul becomes a meditation on American marketplace culture, where even emotional well being can be turned into a commodity.” — Wesley Brown, author of Tragic Magic