The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

  She went to more and more ceremonies. She even tried Santeria a few times but that didn’t work either. Erzuli rode her when she felt like it, and that was it, tough tittie, White Girl Who Dances With Me.

  The quest got really obsessional and her parents were of mixed mind about it. Pop wanted her to give it up, it wasn’t improving the act any further, and it was in danger of driving his daughter crazy. But Mom, being a mama, had a less jaundiced attitude to her daughter’s determination to strike some sort of karmic deal with Erzuli, and it was she who suggested the acid.

  “Time to give white man’s medicine a try, MaryLou. Turn on, tune out, drop in.”

  So MaryLou dropped 500 mikes half an hour or so before entering the garage for her next attempted séance with the loa, timing it so that she would peak if and when Erzuli chose to ride her.

  By now, MaryLou was familiar with the ritual, the drums, the rum, the incense on the fire, the garage filling with the sweetly pungent smoke, the sacrifice of the chicken, the sprinkling of the blood, the beginning of the dance, the rolling back of eyes, the twitching and jerking.

  But on acid it was the same on one level, but quite different on another. The clouds of incense pulsed to the beating heart rhythm of the bass drum, strobed up and down a rainbow spectrum of colors to the flicker-flacker of the bongos, and the whirring mantric drone of the sax-hose entered her, whirling and swirling her around as she began to dance, and MaryLou began to lose contact with the borders of her body, if loss it was, or rather the gaining of their opening up, opening out, opening wide, to a space that was not a space—

  —to a here that was not exactly here nor there, and she was dancing in it, dancing through it, it was dancing through her, there was something inside of her like a second set of bones, like her nervous system gone neon electric with a will of its own.…

  And she sensed that this was somehow Erzuli, and then she was sure it was, because there was a part of MaryLou that remained in her body this time, that could feel that body dancing like a demon on the floor, dancing as she had never experienced dancing before.…

  Who dat come knock-knock-knocking on my heaven’s door supposed to be a horse and nothing more? said a voice in her head. Only it wasn’t exactly a voice and where it came from wasn’t exactly inside her head, more like an invisible childhood companion talking into her thoughts.

  So MaryLou talked back in the same manner as any human chile, any conscious manifestation of whatever might be behind the masks of the dance, might converse with what was now dancing unmasked with and within her.

  About time, the horse told her rider. About time you let me be here now. You and me gotta have a little girl-to-girl talk.

  Let you? What makes you think I’m letting you do anything, White Girl Who Eruzli Chooses For The Dance? I can choose who I dance through where and when, hon’, but this is the first time a horse ever talked back to her rider. We got the power over most everything that’s not what y’all call matter or maya or atomic particles or whatever, but we ain’t got no bodies, we ain’t made of matter, so we ain’t got no power over matter, we can’t even touch it, ’cause we got nothin’ t’touch it with. We wanna dance, we gotta do it through you, hey girl, we want to fuck, we want to come, we want to get stoned, we need your flesh to do it through. So what’s happening now is human magic, not ours. And we been waiting for you to work it for a long, long time.

  You have?

  Oh yeah, hon’, we been waiting for a Talking Horse like y’all been waiting for the return of Jesus or Elvis, so’s we can save our mutual asses material and otherwise. We’re not where y’all would call anywhere, but let’s just say we’re connected to New Orleans and environs because we love it like maybe you would say this would be our homeland in America if a homeland we could have, an’ you people here are our chosen horses, in case you haven’t noticed.

  I don’t understand. MaryLou tried to think back, but she didn’t, because she did. She understood that these loas were souls without bodies, consciousnesses floating in the quantum flux, avatars of the Atman, as zombies or most fictional versions of the Living Dead were bodies without souls. Whether that would make sense to Albert Einstein and the Pope or not, it was a no-brainer in her current state of consciousness.

  An’ I’m sure y’all have noticed you have royally screwed up the matter of our mutual homeland, and it ain’t gonna be happy days for us either if you don’t get your material shit together before there’s nothing left of Louisiana but Alligator Swamp and rednecks. We do have good taste in pickin’ our horses, as it now no doubt pleases you to believe. So me and Papa Legba, or just me, between you and me, girl, we ain’t a democracy, and I’d have him by the balls if he had them any time I wanted, decided to lead us loas out of the closet to get you horses some horse sense so’s y’all can handle the material end of the bargain better than you been doing.

  What bargain? MaryLou demanded. You do whatever you want to do with us, and we don’t even get to enjoy being there! What kind of a bargain is that?

  Well, you got a point there, hon’ and we been waiting quite a while for human material magic to deliver us a talking horse we can make a deal with. Because we need a willing horse we can talk to who knows more about where we wanna ride in your material world than we do, and this is gonna be a bargain you gonna love too much to refuse—

  I’ll be the judge of that, thank you very much, and before you go any further, your end of the deal has to at least be that I’m there with you when you ride me or else—

  Or else what?

  Or else there’s no deal, Erzuli. You just told me you need a willing horse to get where you want to ride, now didn’t you?

  Well, I gotta admit you got me there, hon’—

  And if you get to call me up when you need to ride, I get to to call you up when I need you, that’s only just—

  Don’t push your luck too far, girl, I don’t know what this just might mean, and I don’t really want to—

  That’s a deal-breaker, MaryLou told the loa. After all, wasn’t that what she had been after in the first place?

  Well.…

  Well, what?

  Well, bargaining with each other to get what we want is something we all have to do all too often, material girls or not.… So …

  So?

  So the deal is you can call, but whether we come when you do is our choice each time.

  Not good enough.

  That’s our deal-breaker, girl.…

  Well … I guess I could live with that, Erzuli, but then, I’ve got to agree to let you when you want to ride too.

  “No way, White Girl Who Erzuli Chooses To Ride, your cowboys don’t take that from their horseflesh, and we ain’t never gonna take it from you!

  Well, then, I don’t know—

  You haven’t even asked where we’re gonna be goin’, hon’, which is why we need you to make this deal, and which is why you’re gonna love it too much to be able to turn it down.

  And why are you so sure of that?

  Because where we’re goin’ is where any girl who finds herself stuck dancing around Jackson Square for spare change wants to be more than anyplace else in her material world, where what is matter and what is not ride to into the bright lights of show business, hon’, Erzuli told her.

  Say what?

  That’s where we’re goin’, MaryLou Boudreau Who’s Gonna Become Mama Legba. That’s where we’re gonna ride together, girl, think you can say no to that? We all are gonna be stars, sister! We are gonna be on television! Think just might even sell what you might call your soul for that?

  8

  After a couple of months or so of “courting,” which consisted of “dating” without overnighters, during which the sex got progressively better for the otherwise sophisticated ex-virgin who took to avid study of the Kama Sutra and the ex–Swamp Alligator whose previous concept of sexual sophistication was paying a mediocre hooker for a blow job, Luke and Luella proceeded to “engagement.”

&
nbsp; Since Luke had no family he cared to speak to, this became a Johnson family affair. “A family affair” was something Luke Martin had never experienced, let alone the gang rules of Catholic New Orleans cops.

  He was required to invest a month’s wages in a diamond “engagement ring,” with the understanding that Sergeant Daddy would spring for the wedding band. There would be a church wedding. The children would be raised as Catholics.

  That was the Catholic of it, expensive, pointless as far as Luke was concerned, but otherwise no problem, especially since Sergeant Daddy assured him that the couple would make out like bandits on the wedding presents.

  The cop of it was that while there would be a stuffy banquet in a middling “Creole” restaurant after the ceremony, the real party would take place afterward in the Blue Meanie.

  The New Orleans of it was that Luke and Luella could enjoy all-nighters together before the wedding, preferably in the Johnson house, and though Luke had hardly yet put in enough years to make sergeant, when he had, the skids would be greased as part of the “dowry.”

  Plus a house to live in.

  A family of cops was not likely to have the wherewithal to buy Luke and Luella a house or even front a down payment sufficient to secure a mortgage with monthlies affordable on the salaries of a cop and a schoolteacher. But this was the New Orleans of the Hurricane Seasons, and if the federal subsidy games were not as easy to play as they had been immediately Post-Katrina, this was New Orleans, this was a family of New Orleans cops, there was a sufficiently powerful and more than sufficiently economically streetwise union, Luke was a member, and Bruce Johnson would remain a union poobah even after his retirement.

  There were several species of federal down payment subsidies for “distressed areas of New Orleans,” and any number of ways to manipulate the paperwork known to the union legal eagles by which to expand the definition of “distressed area” to include a two-bedroom shotgun house in good repair and high up enough on piles to park a car under, or a boat if worse came to worse, well away from the lowlands and lowlife of the Alligator Swamp, not really that far east of Esplanade, well north of Claiborne, and nowhere near what had once been the Industrial Canal. Whaddya say, Officer Martin, we got a deal?

  The deal worked backward from the monthly payments that a cop and a teacher could afford to a $170,000 fixed rate fifteen-year mortgage with $25,000 down courtesy of Uncle Sap in Washington.

  And so it came to pass in the days before the Great Deflation. Things got a little dicey when Luella got pregnant with little Bruce and had to take a leave of half-pay absence, and kind of tight when they told her her job had been axed in the usual general belt-tightening for whatever didn’t fatten the belt-sizes of the politicians and she couldn’t get it back.

  But hey, being a housewife with one kid twenty-four seven wasn’t that different from being a schoolteacher with thirty of them thirty-five hours a week if you looked at the math right, and the just-retired but still well-connected Bruce Johnson was promising Luke that promotion to sergeant and the pay raise that came with it real soon. They could make it through.

  Then the shit hit the fan. It hit a lot of people’s fans.

  All too soon enough it was being called the Great Deflation.

  No one would admit to knowing what had really happened because it was angrily assumed that only those who had made their usual trillions off this latest disaster for the American would-be middle class really knew how it had been done. Therefore since only those in on it knew what the full truth really was, anyone who opened their mouths too wide would be lynched by popular demand of all races, creeds, genders, and religions.

  About all that Luke knew for sure was that the value of the dollar started to rapidly rise, something that never had happened before. This was greeted with all-around hurrahs for anyone like the Martins living on a fixed income, for of course, that meant that the prices of things went down while Luke’s salary was fixed by union contract.

  But neither the city government nor those in Baton Rouge and Washington, stuck with salaries for those they employed denominated in drastically deflated dollars locked in by union contracts, thought it was very funny.

  The feds kept dropping the minimum wage in keeping with the fall of the poverty line in superbuck numbers, and as Bruce Johnson explained to Luke when it became the New Orleans Police Department’s inevitable turn, as contracts expired, the unions were in no position to fight the indexing of the salary cuts, since, after all, as long as salaries were not being cut faster than the superbuck was rising, no one’s buying power was being reduced.

  No one, that is, not holding the bag with a fixed rate mortgage whose numbers had been written in stone in pre-superbuck dollars. No one except millions of suckers nationwide and tens of thousands in New Orleans who now found themselves constrained to eat nothing but hot dogs, po’boys, and red beans and rice like Luke and Luella and Little Bruce in order to keep paying the monthlies.

  Not that they were able to fork over the mortgage payments regularly; every other month or so after the warning notices was the best they and folks in the same pickle barrel could manage.

  But the banks and secondary and tertiary mortgage-holders were flexible about it at first, since even that was making out like the bandits they were in current superbuck terms, and the only alternative, foreclosing on millions of houses and tanking the real estate market again, would have made the so-called Great Recession way back when seem like the Good Old Days.

  Hard times for sure and with no end in sight, but at least it was bare-bones survival, at least the Martin family, like millions of others, wasn’t being kicked out into the street.

  But they were all dependent on the kindness of strangers. And the strangers in question were the Loan Lizards of Wall Street, never noted for their philanthropic impulses.

  And then, for whatever darkly inscrutable reason, they did start foreclosing from shore to shining shore. The victims were in a rage, but what could they do except invent more and more paranoid conspiracy theories?

  Well, they could hold off contract repo men at gunpoint, they could fire in the air over the heads of sheriffs, which they started doing, but such half-assed and solitary armed resistance could only served to get the dirty work turned over to the cops.

  So Luke found himself one of the many cops wielding the sharp end of the shitty stick. But the New Orleans Police Association was a hard-ass union, and Big Joe Roody’s threat that trying to force its members to evict each other would result in a total police strike was taken very seriously in City Hall.

  But after a while, there were threats from Baton Rouge to send in the State Police or the National Guard to do it if the New Orleans Police wouldn’t, and it seemed like a game of chicken in which everyone would lose big time if the cars collided. So some kind of slimy under-the-table deal was made between City Hall and the union president, which had cops starting to gingerly foreclose on houses owned by other cops serving in far-off precincts so that brothers would hopefully at least never actually have to face each other in the line of duty.

  This might stink like rat shit and be a violation of the union rules, but this was New Orleans, and the union realized that the least awful thing to do was see no evil. So Luke could hardly claim that he hadn’t expected to be some day served with a final eviction notice by some cop he had never met.

  And here it was, the full legal form of his name on a final eviction notice. But he could hardly have imagined that even Sergeant Slaughter would hand it to him and tell him to serve it on himself.

  Nor had Larabee himself, it seemed. Even he had limits.

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do now?” he moaned. “Pass it on to another precinct? I’d have to go through the lieutenant to do that, and he’d have to go through the captain, and—”

  “Shit flows downhill,” Luke suggested helpfully.

  “So, Martin?”

  Luke could only shrug.

  But then Sergeant Slaughter’s pi
ggy little eyes bugged like a lightbulb went on over his head, and the mofo showed his teeth in an alligator smile.

  “Hey, Bruce Johnson’s your father-in-law, now isn’t he?” he said, sliding the eviction notice into a desk drawer. “He can take this straight to Big Joe Roody, now can’t he? So you know what, Martin, I’m gonna do exactly nothing until I hear from the union.”

  Luke had seen Big Joe in the distance a few times at barbecues and such like, but he had never met Joe Roody, and knew the president of the Police Association of New Orleans only by reputation, which was formidable to the point of legendary.

  Roody had been a captain when he was first elected PANO president, and the first thing he had done after taking office was resign as a police officer, so he could “devote his attention full-time to running the union and avoid any conflicts of interest.”

  This had not been done before, and there had been a certain uproar, but when it became clear a successful police strike later that it meant the union president was now no longer answerable to the department chain of command and the police superintendent as a cop, the cunning wisdom of it became quite apparent.

  That was about the time Roody had started to be known as Big Joe, approvingly by the union membership, and not without a certain dread by whoever was police superintendent, as a tough union leader capable of giving him and even the mayor more than enough shit to keep them from giving the same to him, with enough political street smarts and willingness to do whatever deals benefited his membership to keep them from wanting to try.

  Bruce Johnson knew Big Joe well enough to get him on the phone in person about five minutes after Luke told his father-in-law the sad and outrageous tale, and later that very afternoon, they were in his office at union headquarters on Esplanade.

  By tailor’s measurement Big Joe Roody wasn’t all that huge, maybe six-four in height, pushing fifty inches across the shoulders, and something beyond forty inches around the waist, and his office was not exactly a broom closet, but somehow Joe Roody made it seem cramped with him in it.