by Tony Dunbar
Experiencing such family and personal threats from the Cubans and feeling the resulting rage grow within him made Tubby think that maybe he needed a new line of work – something more para-military. Staring into the campfire, he tortured himself with thoughts about how he should, how he could, combat such malevolent forces.
“Never screw a client. Never lie to the judge,” he said to the trees. He had believed that, and done that, for his entire career. And now?
* * *
Tubby made it one day and one night in his cramped Coleman tent before he began to get bored and found himself tempted by a nagging desire to visit an old flame. A year or so ago she had lived close by to this camp. Creaking to his feet and blowing some life into last night’s bonfire, he fixed up a hearty one-pan breakfast of scrambled eggs, ashes, and bacon and washed it down with burned coffee. Blame it on the lonely serenity of his camp, or all the violence he was sick of in New Orleans, but it suddenly made good sense to attend to his unfinished business with Ms. Sylvester. He decided to wash up, shave as best he could, and take a drive.
He had met Faye back before Katrina while playing in a church softball league in New Orleans. She was the den mother for a house full of runaways in Mississippi operated by a sandy-haired preacher improbably named Rev. Buddy Holly, no relation to the teen idol. Said house was only about twenty miles from Tubby’s camp. Ironically, Tubby’s own daughter Debbie had been one of the kids they took into residence for a brief, troubled, and strange time in her life. But she had bounced back, and not long after Rev. Holly had performed the marriage service for Debbie Dubonnet and Marcos, who had been together now for almost twelve years. Long story short, Tubby had gotten to know the bustling house-mom pretty well.
From the first time they met, he had liked Faye, a gangling, touchingly awkward tall woman with short black hair and a pretty good throw to first. He had liked her a lot. They grew close over the course of several days before she told Tubby the truly stunning news that broke them up – the news was that she had previously been married to Marcus Dementhe, the truly evil District Attorney of Orleans Parish. They were divorced, thank God, but Tubby couldn’t even picture this monster with Faye. He had spent months, during his encounters with the “Lucky Man,” trying to get Dementhe put into prison for murder, or at least for moral corruption. After her revelation, Faye and Tubby had both withdrawn in embarrassment from their relationship.
A couple of years later, after Katrina, and after her stunning revelation had lost its power, he had sought out Faye again, and they began a long-distance romance. At that point, she lived in a forest cabin, built on land made cheap by the hurricane, and she had begun a job as a guidance counselor in a religious boarding school in Waveland. Once again, the venerable Rev. Holly was involved, this time as the school’s headmaster. Unfortunately, their renewed relationship soon became difficult. He couldn’t talk Faye into moving to New Orleans, where her bad memories lived, and he didn’t see how he could make a living in rural Mississippi. Hell, he’d have to take another bar exam. Not to mention it was next to impossible to find a decent place to eat.
They had had a fight about it one night, and she basically said he didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to commit to anyone. Stung by her criticism, he left. That was Tubby’s version of it. But yesterday afternoon, floating in the creek, he had to recognize that what she had actually said was that he, himself, was emotionally damaged goods. In any case, she had kicked him out of her cabin – and her life. The emotional “damage” might have been true enough, though he blamed that on his own previous marriage. It had left him with … what? A certain impermeability to love, divine or human? Or just a tough hide, some might say.
The things Faye had said had been awfully harsh. Surely he deserved a little more mercy. This was even more true given his recent business with the Cubans, the shooting, and the mayhem in New Orleans. Hell, he might even be a candidate for sympathy. And he was tired of being by himself in his smoky camp.
The plan was to drive over to Faye Sylvester’s cabin and show up unannounced, not always a prudent plan where old lovers were involved.
CHAPTER 3
Faye Sylvester’s little house, nestled in tall turkey pines with a weedy pasture out front, was just as he had remembered it, but there were a lot more flowers everywhere. This was the time for them, after the long autumn and the sudden winter freeze.
He saw a silver Honda Fit SUV parked at the end of her drive with a bumper sticker that read, “Nasty Women for Jesus.” There were also two motorcycles on kickstands on the slab under her raised porch.
“Definitely the right place,” Tubby said to himself. Dogs were barking.
He got out of his car slowly, wary of animals guarding the environs, and slowly climbed up onto the unpainted wooden porch. All of the barking was coming from inside.
Faye Sylvester answered his knock on the door. She was still quite a looker, in her plaid work shirt and jeans, her hair tied up in a scarf – but the black eyes flashed.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.
Tubby almost stepped back. “Just wanted to talk,” he managed to say. “You haven’t changed a bit, Faye.” He smiled. She shook her head and let him in. A brown pit bull sniffed at him menacingly.
“I’m practicing with my band,” she said, “They’re on the back porch. So, what brings you to Mississippi?”
“Band? What do you play?”
“I sing,” she told him, leaning back against the stove. “We do hymns. Sort of country rock.” She gestured at a small sofa in the pine-paneled living room.
“That sounds terrific,” he said. “What about a cup of coffee?” He sat down.
“I’m all out of coffee. Tubby, why did you come?” She remained standing.
“I’d like to talk, that’s all. I think there is more that should be said about us.”
“No, there’s not,” she told him, crossing her arms tightly. “You had your chance and you blew it.” It was a verdict on so much of what was happening in the lawyer’s life at that moment that it hit him hard.
And for just a second he lost it. “Well, I’ll be goddamned!” he shouted and got back to his feet. “Here we had this thing…”
“What thing?” a voice asked from behind him. A skinny guy with wire-rimmed spectacles came through the open door. He was at least ten years younger than Tubby, or Faye for that matter, and he was wearing weathered blue jeans and sneakers with no socks.
“Tubby Dubonnet, a guy I used to know. Meet Jack Stolli, boyfriend. Jack’s from Hattiesburg.” Tubby’s jaw dropped.
“I get it,” he said, and made his way to the door.
“You know what, Tubby?” Faye advised. “With all of your anger you ought to take up the keyboards or the steel guitar.”
He split. It was the most inglorious retreat he had ever endured.
* * *
In the meantime, a certain tennis handsome in New Orleans named Raisin Partlow could see that his young friend, the contortionist, was experiencing hallucinations.
“The desert is too big,” she said.
Her name was Jenny. Raisin remembered that much about her. She had a luxurious head of yellow hair that fell in waves of unruly wet curls down below her shoulders.
“It is big, but this is a big city.” Raisin murmured. “It’s a very nice city, with lots of green trees, and it is very verdant. There is moisture everywhere. No deserts here.” He was a little high himself, but on a conventional cocktail. She had shown up at his apartment already launched on some special trip of her own. The contortionist had large blue eyes. She was less than five feet tall.
She looked at him with suspicion.
“It’s true,” Raisin added. “We have rain all the time and the river keeps rolling on.” They were seated at the tiny table in Raisin’s tiny kitchen. He had a compact apartment dominated by a bookcase full of literary classics from the last century, many of which he had, in fact, read. There was an original pain
ting by George Dureau by the refrigerator.
“Show me the river,” she said.
That sounded like a bad idea. You probably should not take a hallucinating person out to the river, he thought. The Mississippi was extremely mesmerizing and enticing enough even when you were completely straight.
“You’ll just have to take my word for that,” he said, “but look out the window. See all the trees? Very green. We are absolutely not in a desert.”
“Ah.” She abruptly got up from her chair and went to stare out the window. “I see what you mean,” she returned to say. An afternoon thunderstorm in New Orleans had turned the day dark as night. Wind gusts made the trees whip around every minute or so and then get still again.
“Is this a hurricane?” she asked.
“No, babe. No hurricanes in the spring. This is just a regular storm. Why not kick back and get a little shut-eye?”
“I saw the moon.”
He thought it was probably a streetlight. “You might want to lie down and rest for a few minutes,” he suggested. “I can wake you up later.” The girl was someone he had met in a wine bar a week before, and with whom he had enjoyed a quick romance. Quirky, but so unusual that she got his full attention. The parts of her body, her fingers for example, moved independently as if belonging to separate creatures. While one hand stroked the stem of her glass the other tapped the table to the music at an entirely different tempo. And her feet did different things. One rested calmly across her knee while the other waved about doing calisthenics under her chair. She also spoke in very poetic but not necessarily cogent sentence fragments. He thought she was gorgeous.
She was a circus performer, he recalled, a sword swallower who could also twist herself into a bread box. They did small parties, she explained, and sometimes latched onto travelling shows. She had trained in Hungary.
And at present she was entirely zonked. He was surprised that she remembered where he lived.
“Will you bring me more drugs?” Jenny asked.
“I beg your pardon. That’s not my…”
“Of course not.” Jenny suddenly got energized and started doing some back-stretching exercises, which wasn’t so easy in the small room. Raisin was beginning to get the picture. Some severe weather event had happened in her psyche. While studying her, he took the opportunity to pour himself another martini.
“Are you sure we are related?” She was bending over backwards till her hands reached the floor. “Wow!” she exhaled, straightening up. “If your dad was Phil and if his brother was my dad Brazos, then I’d say the answer is yes.” She took a walk around the room, where there wasn’t much to see. He had no idea what she was talking about.
“You’re pretty high,” he told her. “Normally I might be interested in ravishing your beautiful body, but, sweetheart, you need to come way down.”
“I’ve been way down,” she said, twisting to face him. “The son of a bitch took pictures of me when I was down. I know he did it! And he won’t give them back!”
“I don’t quite get what you’re talking about, babe. How about some chai tea, with maybe some honey. Look, I’ve got some music.”
He popped up and keyed in soft mood sounds, no lyrics, almost white noise, the kind that induces sleep.
“Oh, I hate that,” she said. “I want to lie in the sand, gray sand, pink sand, black sand, like the Mojave Desert.”
“Are you hungry?” he asked. Actually, he had a freezer full of vodka, a refrigerator full of cheese, a wok, and a toaster but no bread, so it was better that she wasn’t.
“Don’t you get it?” she asked suddenly, her voice rising. “He was making me lovely, but he took pictures. Of all my beautiful fountains. Emotional rape is just as rotten.”
“Geez, that’s bad. I can call the…” Raisin almost said “cops”, but he saw her start to freak out. She jumped up and ran back to look out the window.
“Maybe it’s time I took you home,” he suggested.
“You got that, dude.” She spun around the room like a top.
Raisin had a car. It was a loaner from his most recent love interest who had the good sense to return to New York City to pursue her marital career. She had bequeathed him her bitty Spark to buzz around town in. He now considered it his own.
“Do you want to get rid of me?” she asked, changing her position and kneeling on the rug in front of him.
“No, of course not. You live in the Bywater?”
“Yes, across town.” She got up and touched her toes, and repeated it ten times, while he got his jacket and keys.
Raisin had questions about this woman’s story. Had a doctor made her beautiful, or had he raped her? What sort of private party hires circus performers? Was this a New Orleans entertainment genre that had somehow escaped his attention? What sort of drugs was she taking? Was she the type who could get violent? How do Hungarians respond to emotional distress? The first thing to do was get her in the car.
Driving through traffic with brake lights abounding, rain squalls about, red lights above, neon signs to the right and left, their disjointed conversation continued.
“It’s all aglow,” she said. “How was it growing up with my dad? Did he spend some time in the clink?”
“Can’t tell you,” Raisin said, “but I heard he was one beautiful dude.”
“What was he in for? Dad was a lawyer.” Raisin actually had no knowledge of her dad, but he was almost starting to believe that he was an old friend of the family.
“Just bullshit, I always heard.” He looked out the window at the passing scene. There was the Hit and Run Liquor Store. “Doesn’t leave much to the imagination,” he said to himself.
“What?”
“Nothing.” The traffic was backed up at Jackson Avenue.
“Pelicans game tonight,” he mentioned.
“I love pelicans,” she crooned, leaning back in her seat with her knees near her chin.
The cars ahead cleared enough for Raisin to pilot his microscopic car onto the I-10.
“Dangerous up here,” she commented, as trucks whizzed by.
“Not for long.” Their exit came up soon. Descending safely into the neighborhood, Raisin patted himself on the back.
“I always heard you were crazy,” she told Raisin. Not as crazy as you, he thought.
“I am crazy, of course,” he admitted. But he doubted that she had ever heard anything about him.
“How did you get that way?” she asked.
He waited for the light go from green to red before he tried to respond to that, but he avoided her question anyway.
Instead of answering, he asked, “So you, are you going to be all right? When we met last week you said something about wanting to leave the country.”
“To where?” she interrupted. “To Sweden or Denmark? The Russians could be there tomorrow. To Canada? How is that different from the United States? To Australia? I can’t afford that.”
“We’re all stuck here. But…”
“But what?” She was intensely concerned and was sitting up straight in her seat.
“But here we are in New Orleans.”
“The man has destroyed me,” she said.
“The man, the man,” Raisin sing-songed.
“The doctor man,” she said.
“Is this your place?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “How cool is that?” and jumped out of the car.
“Goodnight.” Raisin whispered to her disappearing shadow.
* * *
In a rage, or a daze, Tubby piloted his Corvette down the long straight gravel road from Faye Sylvester’s cabin, through miles of pulpwood plantations, their masses of green limbs like a tunnel covering the gravel road on its run toward the sea. Destination – the Nazarene Diggers School on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, and the Reverend Buddy Holly. Tubby had never been there, but Faye had described it as a beautiful place.
Near the beach, a discreet iron sign announced that he had found his school. Its entrance
was by a short lane which led to an old mansion erected in sight of the waves gently lapping a low seawall. It was late afternoon, and a few young people lounged about on the spotty grass lawn. They were reading on their laptops or absorbed by their phones and paid him no attention. Inside the doors of the large stone building a sign on a small stand pointed him toward “Administration.”
Tubby rapped on the door that said “Office,” and Rev. Holly answered. Overcome by his feelings of desperation the past few weeks and his disastrous meeting with Faye, Tubby almost gave the man a hug, but he restrained himself.
“Ah, Mr. Dubonnet,” the surprised headmaster said. “It’s been so long. How is Debbie, and what beings you to the Nazarene Diggers Academy?”
“I’ve had some rough patches, Padre,” Tubby said. “Do you have a few minutes?”
An exasperated look flitted over Holly’s face, but he acquiesced. He showed Tubby into his comfortable office lined with books and children’s drawings and sat the lawyer down in a threadbare armchair. Tubby accepted a cup of coffee and explained that he had come to Mississippi for solitude, and, he needed some advice. All right, spiritual advice.
Rev. Holly nodded sympathetically, and for the next hour he got an earful about Tubby’s “involvement” in the shooting of a dangerous ex-policeman on a New Orleans levee, topped off with an account of the lawyer’s strained relationship with Faye Sylvester.
Holly listened carefully but finally wanted his afternoon wine and decided to cut it short. When the penitent ran out of steam for a moment, the confessor broke in with, “I forgive you for all that, Tubby. You are a man around whom bad things seem to happen, and I’m sure you do your best. Whether the Lord forgives you, however, is between you and Her. Get on your knees!” the preacher commanded.