Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  Although Bingo Pajama was from out of town, a foreigner with a funny accent, a bum who kept bees but had no hive; a mysterious, clownish figure known well by none, the blacks of the city adopted him posthumously. They went so far as to send him off with a jazz funeral.

  Mourners poured out of the projects, out of the shotgun houses below Canal Street, out of barrooms and gumbo parlors, out of the Baptist church at Liberty and First and the Hoodoo church on Rampart, and with a mighty brass band leading the way (horns wailing in the modes of both Satchmo and Bird, drums re-creating the phantom energies of the Congo), with umbrellas twirling (although the day was dry), feathers flashing, joints smoldering, bottles gurgling, and fingers snapping, they strutted and stomped, rambled and hooted, all the way to the French Quarter, through the Quarter, and back to the Central City again. A horse-drawn hearse bore the coffin, but there was no corpse in it. The police had the corpse and wouldn't release it. Inside the coffin was a bouquet of jasmine branches, crushed and faded but so potently sweet it perfumed the length of the parade.

  Although the funeral was typically merry, a wild, winding party ("In yo' face, Mr. Death") enjoyed by all, it was fueled by an ill-concealed cache of anger. Dark curses were shouted at police cars, and placards of somber protest appeared along the way. That night, an ancient work began behind locked shutters. Black candles were burned, bitter powders were sprinkled, crude objects were fashioned of wood or wax, pythons were addressed, and chickens were put to uses that would have shocked the pants off Colonel Sanders, not to mention Julia Child.

  There were formal protests, as well. A steady stream of black community leaders visited the police department and city hall, demanding justice. So great was the outcry that the mayor wasted little time in scheduling a hearing. At the insistence of blacks, and of white liberals, a special commission was appointed to conduct the investigation. To the dismay of “law-and-order” factions, only one policeman was named to the panel.

  According to reports, several people had witnessed the shooting of the Jamaican. Two had viewed it at close range. Two women, the story went, one white, one black. And the white woman was said to be tight with blacks. Why, it was ol' Madame Devalier, the French Quarter perfumer, a one-time supplier of Special Delivery Oil, she who was rumored to possess the secret of hurricane drops!

  So New Orleans buzzed. Black folks buzzed. White folks buzzed. Bingo Pajama's bees buzzed. And the bee buzz was the most disturbing of all.

  It was a tiny swarm: fifty bees at the outside, maybe only forty. Their number was to their advantage. A swarm of many thousands, as is customary in a honey colony, would have been easily tracked and cornered, but a fist of forty, flying in excess of a dozen miles per hour and climbing to altitudes loftier than New Orleans' tallest building, could be elusive, evading entomological patrols and escaping DDT barrage or apiarian capture.

  With his life, the bees left Bingo Pajama. Nobody saw them go. They flew away in the night with his soul. Only the pollen grains that the coroner found in the slain man's hair indicated that they had ever existed.

  Ah, but the next morning! When the streetlamps went out, the bees lighted up. Wearing the dawn like silver on their wings, they returned in a glassy phalanx to the scene of the crime. Like a glass spearhead come suddenly to life, like an animated dagger with an angry voice, like an electrified pineapple spike; like a darting fish made of noisy sparks, half full of fire and half full of cold, the swarm circled the death scene, diving and looping, again and again, a crazed cactus loose in the air, humming defiance, forty little spines dripping poison and pain.

  For most of the day, reporters, photographers, police investigators, sympathizers, and curiosity-seekers were held at bay. Those who challenged the swarm's territorial claim retreated quickly with burning welts about the neck and face. From time to time, the swarm would settle on the map of dried blood where their master had lain. It was as if they were feeding there. A newsman or a cop would grow brave, but at his approach—banzai!—the missile would launch itself, screaming toward target.

  In late afternoon, beekeepers were brought in. Like brides behind their protective veils, they wooed the golden phallus, but it would not surrender to them. It scorned their traps of honey, its forty tongues preferring to lick crusty blood.

  Curses and consternation abounded. From a nearby telephone booth, calls were made to universities and the Department of Agriculture. “This is not your common North American honeybee,” said an entomologist gazing through binoculars. He was probably correct. According to an official handbook, “Stinging requires a bee to use twenty-two different muscles.” These bees used twenty-three.

  At nightfall, the swarm departed, but it returned the next day. So did the media and the crowds. Barricades were set up. Traffic was snarled. The proud pragmatism of civilized intelligence was being insulted again by goofy nature. It was time for might to make things right.

  Spray teams were dispatched. Foggers from the swamplands. Experts at gassing mosquitos. Their Jeeps pulled trailers with compressors and hoses and metal tanks full of gaseous insecticides. They wiped out every cricket in the neighborhood and mutated countless future generations of mockingbirds. But the swarm took to the sky, disappearing through a trapdoor in a low-flying, and ominously dark, cumulus cloud.

  Thirty minutes later, it flew through an open window at city hall, where the chief of police was explaining to the district attorney that that very swarm had been used as a murder weapon by Bingo Pajama and would be useful as an exhibit during the hearing for the courageous officers who, in self-defense, had eliminated the mad Jamaican. “Here's your exhibit, Chief,” yelled a mayoral aide, diving for cover. Exhibit B.

  Faces swollen and painted pink with calamine lotion, the city fathers looked like buffoons that evening on the six-o'clock news.

  The bees were not seen again until the next afternoon, when they followed Bingo Pajama's funeral parade along its entire route. None of the marchers was stung, and it was reported by a trombonist and a couple of second-liners that the swarm kept time with the band.

  After that, the bees played hide-and-seek. They were observed all over the city. They appeared in the Garden District, in the Irish Channel, uptown, downtown, in Audubon Park, along the lakefront, the riverfront, on Metairie Ridge, and in the forgotten voodoo groves of Bayou St. John. Nobody could guess where they would strike next. They harassed cops on the beat, dive-bombed adulterous judges on the patios of Lake Pontchartrain love nests, interrupted work on the Mafia wharfs, and sent tourists running from Jackson Square, portraits half-painted, Sno-Kones half-eaten and spilled on the bricks. The press began to speak of the swarm as if it were a terrorist band.

  Like a necklace of gouged-out crocodile eyes—yellow-green and menacing, shiny and ancient—the renegade bees encircled New Orleans, a mosaic albatross that wouldn't lie still.

  Such was the situation in New Orleans when Priscilla arrived: a buzz of black anger, a buzz of white fear; a buzz of multicolored rumor, panic, and superstition; a buzz of bees.

  Initially, she scarcely noticed. After two days and three nights on a Greyhound bus (the detective had refused to refund her retainer, and she was functioning far below the summit of her economic potential), her homecoming was rather numb.

  She headed directly to the Quarter, to Royal Street, to the Parfumerie Devalier, only to find the shop dark. It was shuttered and locked. After a night's rest on a lumpy mattress at a YWCA, she returned to the shop, truly expecting it to be open for business. Still it was closed. Moreover, with Christmas hardly a week away, the quaint little perfume-bottle nativity scene that had graced Madame Devalier's show window every December for as long as Priscilla could remember was nowhere in sight.

  Lingering over a café au lait at Morning Call, she speculated that the shop's closure was connected to the bottle of K23. It was not. It was connected to the buzz.

  I'll bet they're in Paris or New York, making some kind of deal, thought Priscilla.

 
In fact, Lily Devalier and V'lu Jackson were nowhere near Paris. They were in Baton Rouge.

  A few hours after Bingo's shooting, threatening phone calls began to jangle into the shop. Rough voices warned Madame and her assistant not to testify against the policemen who had blown the Jamaican down. “Whatever are we to do, cher?” asked Madame. “It could be the cops threatening us, or it could be the Klan.”

  “Whut's de difference?” asked V'lu.

  As the public furor increased, so did the threats. Madame grew woozy and could no longer answer the phone. She would have her nose parked on the rim of Kudra's bottle, saying something such as, “You know, cher, I believe this to be a deceptively simple boof. A fine jasmine middle, a citrus top, and a single bottom. Oui, single. Three ingredients only. But, ooh-la-la, what could that bottom . . .” And the phone would ring, and she'd turn woozy. V'lu would lift the receiver, and clear across the room Madame would hear the man. He had a voice like a biceps.

  “Who dat say dat?” V'lu would inquire.

  “The man who's gonna love lynching your black ass.” Click.

  When Wiggs Dannyboy's most recent beet hit the floor upstairs, V'lu nearly fainted alongside Madame. Both were so convinced it was a firebomb that they actually smelled gasoline.

  Madame was conditioned not to complain to the police. Eventually, however, she complained to the press. The press told everybody in Louisiana. And when it was through telling them, it told them again.

  Meanwhile, the governor suggested to the mayor that it might be wise to move the hearing out of New Orleans, move it, say, to Baton Rouge. The mayor suspected the governor of wanting to bale a bit of political hay, but he didn't care. The mayor was scared of that hearing. He admitted to the governor that he was scared of demonstrations, scared of protests and violence. The governor could tell that the mayor was also scared of the bees.

  Although the hearing was not scheduled to commence until after the holidays, the governor had Madame Devalier and V'lu Jackson moved to a motel near the capital. They had separate rooms and were guarded by state patrolmen around the clock. V'lu spent the days reading Edgar Allan Poe in French. Madame sniffed at the bottle and addressed Christmas cards. She addressed no less than three to Priscilla in Seattle, for as the holiday approached, she felt increasingly guilty about the bottle. “It is Pris's boof, too,” she said. Quoth, V'lu, “Nevermore.”

  Priscilla, living close to the bone at the New Orleans Y, had her own guilt going. She wrote a long letter to Ricki, apologizing for having accused her falsely. She didn't post it, however. She decided she'd better first make sure Madame and V'lu had the bottle.

  Once she took notice of the buzz about her, the contentious whirr, the apprehensive whisper, the unpredictable golden hum, the vibrating mantras of panic and revenge, once her ear focused on the buzz, and her brain examined its origins, variations, and ramifications, Priscilla quickly learned that Madame and V'lu were in Baton Rouge. The address of their motel was a secret, however. Incoming calls were forbidden, and inquiries were curtly discouraged. Resigned to a wait of several weeks, she settled in at the Y and began to look for part-time work as a waitress.

  Naturally, she missed the dinner party at the Last Laugh Foundation. The party went on without her. A fresh group of scientists were introduced to Wolfgang Morgenstern, in the hope that this meeting would elevate the prestige of the foundation.

  Dr. Morgenstern showed up at table so breathless from jumping that he could barely chew his lettuce.

  Huxley Anne told everyone who'd listen about how she'd cleaned out the old greenhouse behind the mansion and was planning to cultivate flowers there: “My daddy's going to smuggle in rare jasmine plants from Jamaica, and I'm gonna be in charge of making them grow.” The biologists on either side of her raised their eyebrows. “Jasmine, all right,” whispered one to his wife. They'd heard the stories about Jamaican marijuana.

  Dr. Dannyboy presided, consuming impressive quantities of wine and issuing periodic pronouncements, usually preceded by a knock on his eye patch with whatever inanimate object lay handy. “The most glarin' failure o' the intelligentsia in modern times has been its inability to take comedy seriously.” Things such as that.

  At one point, Dannyboy announced, “Paris is yet another contribution o' the Irish. Look it up in your history books, gentlemen. A Celtic tribe called the Parisii founded the place some centuries before the birth of our Lord and Savior. 'Twas a gift from the Micks to the froggies to give them something to justify their arrogance.” Several guests were offended by this, but Marcel LeFever was amused, and fully intended to get a lot of mileage out of it when he returned to France.

  In fact, Marcel and Wiggs hit it off famously. When a lonely (and horny) Priscilla telephoned Wiggs on Christmas Eve, Marcel was still there. “Your man is goin' to remain until after New Year's,” Wiggs informed her. “He's infected with perfume, he's its master and its slave. Perfume is beauty to Marcel, 'tis his glory, his opiate, his samadhi, his breakfast sausage as well as his midnight champagne. Oh, to feel about something as passionately yet coherently as your man feels about perfume! That, darlin', is the key to the piggybank o' life. How I wish I could speak to him directly about beets.”

  Priscilla felt a pinch of jealousy. “But what about me?” she very nearly whined. Then she recalled the bottle, the ace she might yet play.

  “Merry Xmas, Pris. If only I was there to put a little somethin' in your sock.”

  “A big something,” corrected Priscilla, feeling sweaty and weak. “And 'tis in me pants you'd be puttin' it.” Her vulnerability to Wiggs was opening her up (as voluntary vulnerability often can) in unexpected ways.

  “Ha ha. Indeed. And, say, have ye had a glimpse o' the bees?”

  “Well, no, not personally . . .”

  But just then the swarm rounded the corner, flying in wedge formation, silhouetted against the sunset, screaming like a cutting tool, and a few paces ahead of it, running for his life, his beard and cap flapping wildly, his belly spilling feathers and his tin cup spilling coins, dashed Santa Claus.

  The old pagan festival came and went. Neither Seattle nor New Orleans would consent to strike a seasonal pose. Seattle was mild and rainy and as green as Bing Crosby's royalties. New Orleans was mild and sunny and quite accustomed to stringing lights in banana trees.

  Snows and ices decorated Concord, Massachusetts, you may be certain, but Alobar could spy no acre of greeting card tableau from his cell. He could see the famous Star of the East, however, and its gelid twinkle reminded him of his first Christmas, that commoner's winter in Aelfric when he learned, with some astonishment, that the face of an executed Eastern rabble-rouser had been carved in the pagan pumpkin.

  Marcel and Wiggs sat before a yule log, in a room in which there was scant necessity for blaze, and night after night, in conversation after conversation, rebuilt “reality” from the ruins they'd left it in the night before. They slept late. Afternoons, they assisted Huxley Anne in the greenhouse, where the child was tending, with precocious expertise, an enlarging accumulation of exotic plants. Dr. Morgenstern jumped for something approximating joy.

  Priscilla made the rounds of Mexican restaurants, but while there was no shortage in New Orleans of imperfect tacos, she failed to land a job. On New Year's Eve she got drunk and got laid. Upon that, it would be indiscreet to dwell, except to pass along the advice that before going home with a personage one has met in a French Quarter bar, one should make absolutely certain of their gender. Later, she was to refer to the episode, without bitterness, as “Ricki's revenge.”

  Alobar boycotted the cell block Christmas party, preferring to sit alone in his cubicle and breathe, even though, thanks to his escalated aging, the sterile steel cubicle had begun to stink like a mouse nest or a potato bin.

  The “season” crab-walked by in its emotional shoes, then it was over, it was January 2, the Western world blew its nose, took two aspirins, packed pagan ornaments and plaster mangers to the attic, and set about
finding ways to finance the recent indulgences. Bing! The clock, after its celestial wobble, was back on mechanical time, and precise, or, at any rate, measurable, or at least, normal things could happen. Alobar was paroled from prison, the hearings got underway in Baton Rouge, Wiggs (with some help from Bunny LeFever) figured out Where We Are Going and why it smells the way it does, and Huxley Anne became the youngest member ever of the Puget Sound Orchid Society.

  Upon learning of Alobar's release, Wiggs and Marcel jetted to Boston to greet him. Over bowls of borscht that resembled the steaming blood of Beowulf's monster, Alobar consented to accompany them back to the Last Laugh Foundation.

  “He almost looks a thousand,” Wiggs said to Priscilla over the wire that night. “He's as wrinkled now as a lemon-suckin' prune, his hair has gone white, his torso has shrunk, and he walks stooped over like a dentist. Ah, but he's got the spirit still, and he claims he can recover his youth if he cares to. I've asked him in private if he won't pass the beet to Marcel, let him in on the K23 and all. He's thinkin' it over.”

  Again, Priscilla felt an inflation of the green balloon. Striving to conceal her resentment and insecurity, she said, “Wiggs, remember that I said I was going to have a surprise for you? Well, the surprise is for Alobar, too. It's a great big surprise, and it will mean even more to Alobar than to you. It's not quite ready yet, but I think he should see it before he makes any major decisions.”

  “Sure and that sounds swell tome, little darlin'. Maybe I'll be bringin' him to New Orleans in a week or two. Marcel is headin' there himself. To see V'lu. They've stayed in touch, and it would seem your man is bloody moo-eyed over her.”

  “Ha ha,” said Pris, thinking all the while, I wish you were bloody moo-eyed over me.