Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Letitia made a face, shook her celery playfully. “Not this kind of stalk, I guess. Stalker. What gender we talking about here, Matt?”

  This time he laughed as he shook his head. “I didn’t think anybody could get me to see the bright side of this…Female.”

  “Ooh, well, then.”

  “If you say ‘relax and enjoy it,’ I’ll steal your celery.”

  “Nobody steals one more thing off me tonight.” Her mock defense softened into a radio cajole. “Tell me about this Leather Lady on wheels, Matt.”

  “First off, I didn’t know she had wheels. I’d seen a motorcyclist following me, but like you I’d assumed it was male.”

  “You thought it was really Elvis! Admit it!”

  “Well, it did occur to me. He was a speed freak. Things had been pretty weird, especially at the Elvis impersonator competition.” Matt actually nibbled his celery stick.

  He wanted to remain sober, after all. No, he didn’t. For the first time in his life he didn’t, and he couldn’t get drunk. He had to drive. The story of his life.

  “So how’d you pick this freako up? Through the show?”

  “No. She came first.”

  “Now, no dirty talk. I might get outa control.”

  “Dirty talk?”

  “How long were you a priest? Never mind. Where’d she come from?”

  “Out of the blue. Looking for another man. She thought she’d use me to lead her to him. She seems to have gotten stuck on me.”

  “Like an old LP that gets in one groove and won’t jump out of it.” Letitia had drunk half her Bloody Mary and was working on the celery stick. “That pepper vodka really gives this bite!” She waved at the waitress for a follow up. “So. She’s not the usual groupie.”

  “Definitely not. The second time I ‘met’ her, she cut me.”

  “You’re not talking high school snub here?”

  “Razor. Superficial, but a lot of blood loss.”

  “Jesus!”

  He kept silent, listening to the piped-in rapper excoriate “ho’s” and “hot mamas.” Why’d anybody want this as aural wallpaper? It was like listening to Hitler. Except nobody here was really listening, which made it even worse. Cultural nihilism was easy to ignore until it got into the communal bloodstream and then it lashed out and bit.

  “Jesus,” Letitia whispered this time. “Where’d she cut you?”

  Matt put a hand to his right side. Didn’t mention it was where the spear had pierced the God-man she’d just invoked without much thinking about it.

  Catholic kink might be a little out of Letitia’s line, as much as she knew about human nature when it came softly over an anonymous radio line.

  “Poor baby!” She was now halfway through the second Bloody Mary and growing a little unfocused.

  That was all right with Matt. If he was finally going to confide the whole story to someone, he’d prefer a slightly tiddly confessor.

  Her sympathy, her distance from the whole conundrum that was Kitty/Max/Temple made Letitia the perfect big sister. He could even picture her in a habit, with rosary beads instead of the African trade variety. Now, that would really horrify her.

  “Say, Matt, you’re doing okay here.” She looked around the funky bar.

  “What you do mean?”

  “For a sheltered white boy.”

  He didn’t bother to tell her that he’d haunted black Baptist churches for the music for years. If he hadn’t become color-blind, he’d become color-immune.

  “You’re so strange. Way ahead of the rest in some ways, way retarded in others. Must be the priest thing. Anyway, what does this witch-woman want?”

  “I think she really wants to destroy the man she was looking for and can’t find. So she’ll settle for me.”

  “She’ll kill you?”

  “No. Not physically. That would be too kind.”

  “Gee, Matt. You gotta remember you’re dealing with Bloody Mary here. I am feeling no pain from my necklace rip-off, okay? But I am also feeling no pain, so ’splain it to me in teeny-tiny syllables of one word. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah. Okay. She wants my history. My past. Everything that was sacred in it. She wants my priesthood.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “What if somebody came to you and demanded that you do the one thing that most undid whatever you were, or everybody at the radio station would be killed? And that person could do it.”

  “Wait. I’m trying to think what would take that much away from me. Being made to do something would.” Letitia’s face suddenly sobered, grew ashen. “I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Matt.”

  “I’m sorry. You wanted to know. I —”

  Her extravagantly manicured hands cupped her exquisite face, which wore a mask of slack horror. “I hadn’t thought of that for thirty years.” Her eyes interrogated him. “How’d you know, Matt. How’d you know?”

  “I don’t. I don’t know anything.”

  “Someone comes and stirs up the worst hurt, the worst hate in your whole life.” Her hands entwined, twisted, the nails clawing into the dark backs until dead white moons appeared there. “The ones who call at night. Call us. They all have hurts like that. We make them feel better for a while, but we don’t really cure anything for good. Only until tomorrow…when we talk to a whole new set who are all the same, really. God, if Someone came for me, she’d bring memories of Him back.”

  “God?”

  “No! The devil. My own particular devil, whom I will now drown in a third Bloody Mary.” She lifted a dagger-nailed forefinger, signaled the waitress. “Tell me about your devil.”

  For some reason, Matt felt obliged to distract Letitia from the monster in her past that his trouble had raised from the dead. He was a good counselor. He would sacrifice himself to prevent anyone around him from suffering. Just open a vein and he would bleed tomato juice and pepper vodka.

  He understood how utterly Kitty O’Connor had trapped him.

  “She wants my vows,” he said. “My virtue, I guess. She wants me to sleep with her.”

  Letitia blinked. “I heard a hundred sob stories from girls up against it, but I never heard a guy complain.”

  “I’m not a guy. I’m an ex-priest. I made promises of chastity.”

  “Ex, baby. That’s all history.”

  “No, it’s my choice now. It’s a sin outside of marriage.”

  Letitia snorted.

  “In my religion it is. Especially for me, who was holier than holy.”

  “Listen, plenty of priests have made the news —”

  “They are not me and I am not them. I was a faithful servant, okay? Think of me as a monogamous married man. I love my wife. I’ve been faithful to her. And some woman comes along and insists that betraying my wife is the only way for my wife, and me, to live.”

  “That’s sorta like the reverse of that movie a few years back, where the rich dude offers a couple a million if the wife will sleep with him. People sleep with the wrong people every day. What’s the big deal, really?”

  “When it’s wrong.”

  Letitia was suddenly silent. Her hands twisted. “Yeah. Sometimes it’s wrong, no question.” Sweat jeweled her forehead like a diadem.

  “Letitia. You asked. If it’s too…”

  “Too what, Matt? Too big of a problem for Ambrosia? Too hard for a black Baptist to understand a white priest?”

  “Letitia. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have tried to unload this on you. I was weak.”

  “You? Weak? You don’t have a headlock on weak.” She wiped a hand over her mouth, painted the color of a hot pink camellia. The lipstick washed off onto her palm, like a stigma. “It’s abuse, that’s what it is. Plain and simple. Doesn’t matter how old you are, who’s doing it, why. Forcing is abuse. You gotta resist. I didn’t, but you gotta resist.”

  “Letitia.”

  “That’s me. The lusty virgin. Pretending I’m gonna get you drunk? Who am I kidding. I couldn’t ever get myself d
runk enough for it. Not after…that. Oprah’s not the only one, just the most, what, public, successful? Does she ever still get the night sweats, I wonder. Is that why her weight never stays off? Yeah, we’re worldly. We know the score. We are too hip to hurt. Too old. Too successful. Huh!” She swiped the sweat on her face away with the back of her hand, streaking the exquisite glittering makeup, the mask.

  Matt leaned his chin on his balled fists, watched her intently across the table. The music hummed like a buzz saw, a hive of venomous hornets. The music threatened, abused, and everybody ate it up like it was normal. No, just common. Not normal.

  “That’s why you can really help me,” Matt said. “What can I do? You saw how she threatened you for just walking out of the radio station with me.”

  “Was that it? The bitch was jealous of me?” Letitia started laughing. “If she only knew —” Tears replaced the sweat beads on her cheeks. “Oh, Matt. You are my project, boy. I am not going to let anybody take away from you what they took from me when I was just a kid. Just a kid. I guess you’re just a kid, too, in some ways.”

  “If I give in, everybody around me’s safe. I know she’ll keep her word, because she knows that their safety will sear me as much as their danger if the price is right. Or wrong.”

  “She’s mean. She’s bad. She might do anything, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Then you have to be ready to give in.”

  He drew away, sheer repugnance pushing him back like a fist.

  “No. But on your terms. Your innocence is her price, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Then you have to lose your innocence. Even if she holds a gun to your mother’s head, then you can give in and she hasn’t won what she really wanted. She’s not the first one! That’s what they want, to get to you before you can say yes or no, to make you a fool forever, hopeless, weak, stupid!”

  “But it would be a sin.”

  “So sin! That’s better than being a victim. A martyr. Sin and get what — confessed, and it’s all gone. Don’t you believe that? Isn’t that what Catholics believe?”

  “Yes, but —”

  “Yes, but. I didn’t have any ‘yes, but’ when I was seven years old. I just did the best I could and it wasn’t good enough. You’re older. You’re smarter. You outsmart that wicked woman. You put yourself in a condition that whatever she gets from you, it isn’t what she wants. And don’t you dare get so damned nice that you fail to protect yourself. You owe it to every kid who never had a chance to do better than that. You take away what she wants before she has a chance to get it. Get it?”

  Matt nodded numbly. Letitia was right. If someone holds a weapon at your head, disarm the weapon. Especially when the weapon is yourself, your better instincts, your conscience, your integrity.

  “I get it, Letitia. Thanks.”

  “Okay.” She sat back, gathered the externals that were Letitia and Ambrosia and his producer together. “You want my extra celery stick?”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’d help you out myself, you understand, but it’s better for our professional relationship —”

  “You’re absolutely right.”

  “You have any…candidates?”

  “A few. Maybe.”

  “Honey, just look at the nightly groupies.”

  He frowned.

  “I know the Elvis shtick isn’t for you. But there must be a nice girl somewhere —”

  “It’d have to be absolutely secret. To protect…her.”

  “That’s done all the time, particularly in Las Vegas. This ho ain’t God. She ain’t everywhere all the time.”

  “No.” But sometimes it felt like that. The obsessed could be pretty pervasive.

  “You can lose her and lose your virginity at the same time. I know you can.”

  Matt eyed her soberly. One Bloody Mary-soaked celery stick wasn’t going to undo the condition. “Am I some sort of surrogate for you here?”

  “You bet your sweet ass you are. Just let me know when the deed is done. Ambrosia’ll play something real special for you on the rah-di-o.”

  DAD: Desiccated and Dead

  I am happy to hotfoot it out of the feral territory. I am even happier to hop onto the back bumper of a bus downtown and get a ride almost all the way to my destination.

  In another city, buses and traffic would be scarce as hens’ hangnails in the middle of the night. Here in Vegas, things are always jumping, from dice to bailees.

  I have to catch a cross-town bus and there it gets tough. Beyond the Strip schedules slow down appreciably.

  Still, the moon has barely bar-crawled past the top of the sky when I trot the last few blocks. I had never noticed this before in my travels about the old town, but I find myself suddenly beyond the three-story apartment complexes and one-story strip shopping centers that fan out from the famous Strip in all directions.

  Instead I confront a ten-foot-tall wall of shrubbery, like oleander but bigger, thicker, and taller. The sort of testosterone-overdosed vegetation you expect to find comatose princesses behind. When I reach a cross street it is unmarked. It too is lined by an endless length of stone and iron fence, diminishing like train tracks in the distance.

  Now this is definitely not the Las Vegas I know and love, and sometimes loathe. All the streets around here are the usual suburban sprawl, and Las Vegas has sprawled more than most urban areas, being that the landscape here is flatter than a tapped-out tortilla, so there is nowhere to go but up and out.

  So I start ambling down the lane. The night is dark, but the moon is yellow and the leaves come tumbling down. Still, my built-in night vision is in fine shape. I notice that a lot of long green has gone into furnishing the grounds beyond the fence…not only the cash kind, as in long, green paper money, but long green grass. The upkeep on what the English call sward costs a bundle in this desert burg.

  I know this is the right place because it is littered with small stone slabs, the upright kind that usually mark where a person is buried.

  Strange that I have never before noticed an in-town plant-a-tarium, so to speak. That may be because my kind is so seldom interred. In fact, as I move down the road, I spot a pair of iron gates with the heavenly host on guard duty in the form of plaster statuary. On one of the big stone pillars is a brass plaque, and inscribed on the plaque in raised letters are the words “Los Muertos.”

  Now, when you live in a city called Las Vegas, and there is another burg of the same moniker in New Mexico, which also has a town called Las Cruces; when, in fact, Los Angeles is just three hundred miles west of where I now stand, you tend to get used to Hispanic place names and do not think twice about what the words mean, although there is often a religious connotation. Las Cruces means “the crossroads” and Los Angeles means “the angels.” Even the early Spanish monks must have known Las Vegas was never going to live up to any Biblical ideal, except maybe Sodom and Gomorrah, because its name just means “the meadows” and there is nothing holy about that.

  But Los Muertos…a few hours ago and in broad daylight I would have strolled by without a second thought. Now, though, I think. And it comes to me that muertos must have something to do with death, or the dead.

  So I am in the right place, the Dead Place. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get into where nobody ever gets out.

  I sit down under an overarching oleander bush and am rewarded by the hiss and sting of a venomous serpent on my rear end.

  I bristle and leap around to face the attacker, which is a little too little too late, apparently. Ask not for whom Los Muertos is named: it is named for me. A sinking feeling in the pit of my pith tells me I may be done for. There is no antidote for snakebite way out here, alone, in the dark.

  Unfortunately, I am not alone in the dark. I gaze into the chilling sight of a dark open maw with two world-class Dracula fangs bared for a second, totally unnecessary, lethal strike.

  “You are sitting on my train, Pops,” the snake hisses. “Move
or I will staple you to the nearest prickly pear.”

  “Midnight Louise! What are you doing here?”

  “None of your business,” hisses my darling daughter-not, closing her maw to reveal her piquant little black face, which is purely feline.

  “It is my business if you nearly give me a cardiac arrest. I thought I had been hit by a rattlesnake with a contract to kill.”

  “No one would sic a rattlesnake on you, Dads. You have not aggravated any feuding Mormons lately. Besides, you are a polygamist by nature. You would be kissing cousins with the early Mormon patriarchs.”

  “Leave the Mormons out of this. I want to know what you are doing out here alone at this late hour.”

  “Since when do you play the stern parent, Daddy Densest? The real question is what brought you here.”

  “Business, which is none of yours.”

  “So I guess we are even. This is what they call a Mexican stand-off. Unless you want a way in, which I can provide for a price.”

  “And the price?”

  “We are partners.”

  The nauseous feeling in the pit of my pith lurches into a vomitous feeling. I sense the Mother of All Hairballs coming on.

  “Throw up anything gross and you are on your own.”

  “I am merely…gagging. So show me the way to San Jose.”

  “Odd you should mention that. There is a handsome statue of St. Joseph just inside the gates, along with a raft of plaster-winged angels. And farther in, a quite nice grotto to Bastet.”

  “Bastet! She does not get any respect here in Vegas!”

  “Perhaps you underestimate our esteemed Egyptian goddess. Like me, she gets around.”

  “The females of the species always do,” I grumble. “That is what is wrong with the species.”

  “What? I did not hear you, Daddio Dearest.”

  She has turned her back on me and is wiggling through the oleander thicket and toward a stone wall.

  There is nothing like a dame for pointing out that she is younger, sleeker, and more limber than you, particularly if she is claiming to be your offspring.

  I belly down and crawl right after the minx. Midnight Louie can do night recon with the best of them. Black berets are built in with us.