Southern Nights

by Barry Gifford

  We are approaching the Last Days unless this Warning is heeded. The Beast of Revelations shall stalk forth on his hind legs and mash Believers and Unbelievers alike on his path. SINNERS must become BELIEVERS and the Male Evildoers make way for the Female Side or there shall be NO HOPE.

  As foretold by Matthew who was a Gay Male there will be a real Tribulation such as has not occurred since the beginning of the World until now or ever shall. This Tribulation shall befall the Male Side who is by Nature the Unbelievers despite their Lies and shall beset them with the most undescribable form of Human Destruction ever in Human History. As set forth In Revelations it shall be unimaginable Pain and Suffering for the Unbelievers. The sun will be dark and the moon become like blood. Following this shall be wars and big earthquakes and plagues and hail and fire mixed with blood burning half the Earth. So shall mountains and islands be rent from their original place and seas become blood and water too bitter to drink. The Male Unbelievers shall thirst to death and there will be but the Female Side to greet Miss Jesus.

  The Triumph of the Female Believers is evident in their survival. Miss Jesus shall extend Her Hand to them that are liberated forever from control of the Unholy Male name of Satan. Only a Single Male reborn with an entire Reformed Attitude may attend the Female Formation of the New World according to Miss Jesus. This witness shall gather proof and Die Blessed.

  Amen.

  ‘Amen,’ said Betty. ‘You gettin’ the picture, Mr Lamar?’ He nodded. ‘I got the negative.’

  ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD

  vernon duke douglas rented a Mercury Cougar at the Tallahassee airport and headed for the Gulf Coast. He stopped in Sopchoppy at the Love Nest Cafe for a hamburger and a Dr Pepper, then drove to Apalachicola, where he stayed overnight at the Gorrie Inn, named for John Gorrie, inventor of the ice machine. The next morning Duke was up early, drawing a bead on Egypt City, where he figured to pick up a lead.

  As he drove, the scenery reminded Duke of the time he’d helped pull four bodies from the swamp at Irish Bayou. A Cambodian refugee had gone down to fish near the unfinished castle and hooked a right hand with his ten-pound test line. The Cambo brought the hand, which was missing the pinkie, to a Viet restaurant near Arabi, and asked a waitress if they could cook it up for him. The restaurant owner called the police, who came right over and made the Cambo take them to the place where he’d found the hand.

  Duke, who was working on a missing persons case, was notified, and he met them at Irish Bayou. It took no more than forty minutes of dragging that stretch before four bloated corpses surfaced. None of the bodies, all males, was missing a right hand, but each had been decapitated, probably by a broken-toothed handsaw, given the irregular pattern to the cuts. The heads were never found, and the person for whom Duke had been searching was not among them. The Cambo, Duke recalled, had asked if he could keep the hand.

  In Egypt City, Duke checked into the Hernando Cortés Motor Court, a place that no doubt had been a popular winter retreat for snowbirds during the 1940s and ’50s, but was now the target site for a new mall. It was cheap, though, which was all Duke Douglas cared about, a place to flop. It was eight o’clock when he walked sixty paces down the shell pathway to a little restaurant called The Polynesia that the old guy motel clerk had said made a more than decent conch chowder.

  ‘You sleep alone, too?’

  Duke looked up from his bowl of chowder to a woman who had slid into the booth on the seat opposite his. She was about thirty, an overweight brunette with a pretty, Indian-looking face and large breasts.

  ‘Too?’ he said.

  ‘You’re eatin’ alone, ain’t ya?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Well, just askin’. Mind if I smoke?’

  Before Duke could answer, she lit up a Viceroy, took a deep puff and exhaled away from him.

  ‘This restaurant is one hundred percent smoking area,’ she said. ‘See the sign on the door?’

  ‘Didn’t notice.’

  ‘You don’t smoke, do ya?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You screw?’

  ‘Lady, do you own this place?’

  ‘Uh uh. Never been in before. I’m just a big girl on the road.’

  ‘Then why don’t you sit someplace else while I eat my dinner.’

  ‘For twenty bucks I’ll fuck your brains out, mister. Hell, for fifty you can have me all night, do me up the heinie, you prefer. Lots of boys been on low-payin’ state holidays find it suits ’em now. I got two awesome wombos you can hang from like a monkey, case you ain’t paid attention.’

  The woman smiled at Duke, showing a full complement of even, tobacco-stained teeth. Duke had to admit to himself that she was not altogether unattractive.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Wapiti Touché. I’m Seminole-Irish on my mama’s side, French Canadian and Danish on my daddy’s. You interested in genealogy? I’m writin’ a book on the history of the Great Red Kings of Ireland.’

  Wapiti Touché took a sharp drag on her Viceroy. ‘Finish your soup, honey, it’s goin’ cold.’

  Duke bent to it, not unamused by this strange person.

  ‘Better with Tabasco, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘Always put in lots of Saltine crumbles, lime juice and hot sauce so my nose runs. Can’t help it, that’s the way I like it. So, you and me gonna do the time? Forty, all night or you had enough.’

  Wapiti lifted her shoeless left foot up under the table and planted it gently in Duke’s crotch. She massaged his penis with her toes and felt it stir.

  ‘Y’all are sure responsive,’ she said, smiling again.

  ‘Let’s start with twenty,’ said Duke.

  As soon as they were in Duke’s room at the Hernando Cortés Motor Court, Wapiti told him she needed a few moments of privacy and quickly disappeared into the bathroom. Duke sat down in the only chair and unlaced his shoes, surprised that he should so be looking forward to fucking this two-hundred-pound part-Indian woman. He heard the toilet flush and pulled off his shoes and socks, stood up and undid his belt. Wapiti Touché appeared stark naked and jumped on to the bed, her huge breasts ricocheting against her chest like fully inflated volleyballs bouncing off a hardwood floor. She reached over and unzipped Duke’s pants, pulled them down and dragged him under her. His cock was already hard and she straddled him, hammering his cheeks with her tits.

  Duke was dazed, and before he realized what was happening, he felt himself about to come.

  ‘Wapiti, wait!’ he shouted. ‘Not so fast!’

  Wapiti put a pillow over Duke’s face and shut him up. She was extremely strong and outweighed him by twenty-five pounds. Wapiti felt Duke’s cock jerk twice, and then he was dead.

  A WOMAN’S TOUCH

  rollo decided he would fake a heart attack. If the women bought it, Rollo thought, then either they would abandon him or drop him at a hospital. It was definitely worth a shot. He’d do it during the next lesson, when Cutie started in on that ‘Miss Jesus Says’ routine. Rollo really did not want to suffer it anymore. He was lying in his sleeping bag just before dawn, thinking this, when he heard the motorcycles slide to a stop outside.

  ‘Shit, Bet, what’s that?’ asked Cutie.

  ‘Sounds like choppers.’

  Big Betty leapt up, pulled on her clothes and picked up her gun.

  ‘C’mon, Cutie. Some boys is sure to be surprised.’

  Jump Start and Badger, members of the Lucky Dogs M.C. from Bon Secour, Alabama, each lifted a second leg off their hogs and stood and stretched as the planet tipped over and light leaked in. On the backs of their jean jackets, within the horseshoed letters advertising their vehicular and geographical affiliation, was a silk-screened drawing of a mastiff holding a bloody, severed hand in its jaws.

  ‘Looks like a proper place to crash, Badg, what you think?’

  Badger rubbed the grime-encrusted palm of his right hand over his six-day beard, rubbed his chest across the words billy’s sea-food county road 10 west on his T
-shirt, scratched the crown of his greasy, shoulder-length-brown-haired head, and yawned. He looked over at Jump Start, who, but for a cherry-red glass left eye and no left ear, could have been his twin. Both Jump Start’s eye and ear had been torn from their rightful places during a bar fight in Town ’n’ Country, outside Tampa, one Saturday night several years before. Jump could hardly remember what life had been like before he’d lost those items.

  He did think every now and then, however, about three-hundred-pound Bevo Rubber, the since-deceased old boy who had done him this harm. After Jump had gotten out of the hospital, he and Badger had paid a very early morning visit to Bevo Rubber’s trailer and hacked off both of his hands with machetes before Bevo could fingerprint the sawed-off Mossberg twelve-gauge he kept under his pillow. Then, while Badger held down the flabbergasted Rubber, Jump Start had used his pocket-pack Trim tweezers on the bovine’s eyes. They left Bevo Rubber alone and screaming inside his tin-can domicile, the door of which Badger blocked while Jump Start lit a fuse stuck in a porto-tank of propane and rolled it underneath the trailer. The Lucky Dogs were on their hogs and gone when the Airstream went up, probably taking a couple of Bevo’s slumbering neighbors along with him to white trash hell.

  ‘Could use a rest, J.S.,’ Badger said. ‘This ol’ meetin’ lodge looks about abandoned.’

  Inside the Trocadero Island Rod & Gun Club, Big Betty and Miss Cutie waited patiently for the intruders. Cutie had placed a wide strip of duct tape across Rollo’s mouth and he lay motionless, his hands and feet securely bound by clothesline. Jump Start opened the door and Betty shot him point blank in his glass eye.

  ‘Damn!’ shouted Badger, as he hit the ground and rolled out of the shooter’s sight.

  He ran for his Harley, kicked it to life, and roared off onto the highway, where he was immediately broadsided by a fully restored 1956 Ford pickup with two men in the cab and two dogs riding in the bed. Badger went down and the truck braked to a stop, at which point the dogs leaped out and attacked the fallen biker. Before either of the crash-shocked Demente cousins could pull Diablo away, the enraged pit had bitten Badger to death. Mano Demente held Diablo by the collar while his cousin, Boca, took off after Casanova, the catahoula, who was freaked-out, yelping and screeching as he zigzagged along the blacktop.

  A couple of moments later, Betty and Cutie fishtailed onto the state road in their black Monaco. Mano jumped out of the way without letting go of Diablo, and watched helplessly as the careening Dodge barely avoided Boca but clipped Casanova, sending the hound sprawling, its right foreleg fractured.

  As Big Betty blasted onto the bridge, raced through the stoplight at the junction with the interstate and headed the Dodge in the direction of Pensacola, the highway patrol car parked on the shoulder of the road in front of Jasper Pasco’s Fishin’ Pier and Grocery sparked up and went after her, siren on and spirals pulsing.

  ‘Why you didn’t plug Mr Lamar, Bet?’ Cutie asked. ‘He’ll be able to identify us.’

  ‘Seemed like he was takin’ the teachin’s to heart, sweet pea, you know?’

  Betty laughed, glanced in the rearview mirror and eyeballed the beige-and-white hot on their tail.

  ‘Kiddin’, Cutie,’ she said, looking ahead again. ‘Forgot about him in the excitement, is all. Don’t make no difference. As Miss Jesus is our Guide, before this shootin’ match is over every man’ll know a woman’s touch.’

  MIDNIGHT EVERYWHERE

  easy earl drove the Mercury Monarch slowly, no more than twenty miles per hour, along St Claude Avenue in New Orleans. It was eleven fifty-eight P.M., almost Wednesday, raining again. Thunderstorms day and night, lately. Earl switched on his wipers. The personalized license plates on his fire engine red 1978 Merc read ezy earl, not easy because there could be only seven figures, not eight, but it was good enough for Earl, whose last name was Blakey, like the great jazz drummer’s. Earl, who was forty-six years old and never married, was headed from his house on St Roch to his job at the post office on Camp Street, where he worked as a truck loader. His shift began at midnight and he knew he would be a little late, but he could blame the rain.

  The car radio was tuned to WWOZ. Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers were singing ‘That’s Heaven to Me.’ Terrible about Sam Cooke gettin’ taken out like he did, thought Earl. Shot down by a old lady in a motel. Woman claimed he been abusin’ a girl. Man sure did have a beautiful voice.

  The record ended and the deejay said: ‘It’s a new day in the Crescent City. From Florida comes news of two women being held on suspicion of a series of murders, all of men, dating back to last year. Bettina Stalcup and Carol Early were taken into custody today in Pensacola on murder charges ranging across the states of Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. Authorities say the women, both ex-convicts, claim to be brides of Jesus, whom the suspects insist was also a woman. “Miss Jesus,” they say, ordered them to rid the world of the male species. “Men is beyond the point of being reeducated. The disease has spread too far,” said Ms Stalcup. “It is midnight everywhere for them.”’

  Easy Earl shook his head, pulled a Kool from his shirt pocket, stuck it between his lips and punched in the dashboard lighter.

  ‘Mm, mm,’ he mumbled, ‘sure as shit some righteous bitches out there.’

  part two

  the secret life of

  insects

  Estranged from beauty none can be

  For beauty is infinity,

  And power to be finite ceased

  When fate incorporated us.

  —Emily Dickinson

  CONTENTS

  Beatifica

  John Brown’s Wish

  The Reward

  Light-Years from Home

  The Right Choice

  Magnolias

  Victims of Received Information

  Nightcap at Ruby’s Caribbean

  The Visitation

  Beguiled

  Ms Brown to You

  The Awakening

  The Secret Life of Insects

  Purple Noon

  La Verdad

  BEATIFICA

  ‘no way god meant a woman shouldn’t have control over her own body,’ said Beadfica Brown to Easy Earl Blakey as they sat on adjoining stools at the High Heaven Bar on Burgundy Street in New Orleans’s Eighth Ward.

  Beatifica Brown, born in La Ceiba, República de Honduras, had emigrated to Tampa, Florida, at the age of three with her parents, Fábula and German Moreno. Beatifica had anglicized her surname during her tenure as a detainee in the Fort Sumatra Detention Center for Wayward Women, six years before, on her thirtieth birthday, May 9, a date she shared with her hero, the Kansas abolitionist John Brown.

  As John Brown’s cause was freedom from slavery, Beatifica’s mission was freedom of choice. She was an abortionist, though never trained as a medical doctor, and she had done time for performing illegal operations in Florida. Beatifica had come to New Orleans after the Louisiana State Legislature had enacted the most repressive anti-abortion law in the country. Her intent was to practice what she considered to be her calling, and spread the gospel of a woman’s right to choose.

  ‘I’m goin’ to spit in the eye of the demon,’ Beatifica Brown said to her fellow inmates, Big Betty Stalcup and Miss Cutie Early, a few days prior to her release from Fort Sumatra. Betty and Cutie, who had devised an agenda based on a self-contained philosophy of their own, had blessed Beatifica, and told her to always remember Miss Jesus was walking with her every step of the way.

  Miss Jesus notwithstanding, Beatifica had developed her plan based on her own experience, having been rendered incapable of further child-bearing as a result of a botched abortion performed on her when she was sixteen. Beatifica had been impregnated by a boy named Delbert Bork, a high school classmate. It was Delbert who took Beatifica to the trailer of a man claiming to be a doctor, they paid him $150, and he ruined her for life. Since that time, Beatifica had taken up the sword, determined that other women with unwanted pregnancies should not have to suffer
as she had.

  Beatifica had found a woman named Basenji Jones, a registered nurse in Tampa, who believed as she did, and who taught Beatifica the proper procedure for abortion. Basenji also introduced Beatifica to the freedom-of-choice underground of the Deep South, in whose fundamentalist-crazed atmosphere abortion was considered a practice no less heinous than miscegenation. German and Fábula, being Catholics, recoiled in horror when their daughter told them of her mission, but they were powerless in the face of her zeal.

  ‘Woman got to do what she need, I agree,’ said Earl, lifting a Crown Royal and milk on the rocks to his lips. ‘Fact is, Miz Brown, reason I wanted to talk to you is my lady, Rita. She already got four children and don’t be needin’ another.’

  ‘How far along is she?’

  ‘Two, two-and-a-half months, she figure. I got me a good job at the post office, Miz Brown. Be glad to pay however much.’

  ‘I don’t take for myself, Earl, only for the cause. The price is whatever you can afford.’

  Easy Earl swallowed the rest of his drink. Somebody punched up Percy Sledge proselytizing on ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ on the giant old Rock-Ola underneath the 3' × 4' reproduction of Cézanne’s Une moderne Olympia.

  ‘You most definitely is a godsend, Miz Brown,’ said the relieved Earl.

  Beatifica picked up her glass of straight Tanqueray with a teaspoonful of sugar in it and saluted him.

  ‘Never doubt myself for a minute, Mr Blakey. Keep the faith,’ she said, and drained it.

  JOHN BROWN'S WISH

  beatifica had first heard the song about John Brown when she was a child, but the lyrics meant nothing to her until she found her vocation. Many times each day Beatifica sang to herself, ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.’ She kept among her few belongings F. B. Sanborn’s book Life and Letters of John Brown, published in 1885’, and had been for eight years making notes toward the composition of a monograph entitled John Brown and the Divine Notion. Beatifica’s treatise was based on Wendell Phillips’s identification of ‘letters of marque from God’ as the foundation of John Brown’s conviction that he was entitled to destroy slavery by violent means.