Southern Nights

by Barry Gifford

  John Brown, a descendant of Mayflower Puritans, had been born in Connecticut and raised in Ohio, and at the age of forty-nine he moved to the state of New York, where he farmed land contiguous to that worked by black settlers. He had already made plain his hatred of slavery, and soon thereafter John Brown joined five of his sons in Kansas, the border state from which he launched his active campaign of opposition to the odious institution. Following bloody confrontations with pro-slavers in Kansas, John Brown led his followers to Canada, Massachusetts and finally to Virginia, where his plan was to establish a stronghold in which fugitive slaves could take refuge.

  On the night of October 16, 1859, with only eighteen men, five of whom were Negro slaves, John Brown led an attack on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. They captured the arsenal and took as hostages sixty of the town’s leading citizens. The next two days saw the abolitionists laid siege to by a force of United States Marines, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee. The Marines ultimately overpowered the free-staters, killing ten of them, including two of John Brown’s sons. Brown was captured, being seriously wounded after his surrender. Within the month he had been tried and found guilty of ‘treason, and conspiring and advising with slaves and other rebels, and murder in the first degree.’ On December 2, he was hanged. John Brown had fathered twenty children by two wives.

  Beatifica felt a powerful connection to her nineteenth-century namesake, and was convinced that she also carried ‘letters of marque from God.’ Like John Brown, Beatifica had identified her immediate enemies, among whom was a militant pro-life New Orleans preacher named Dallas Salt, pastor of the non-sectarian Church on the One Hand, located on Elysian Fields Avenue. Dallas Salt’s sister, Dilys, was an equally militant pro-choice preacher who had broken with Dallas over the abortion issue, and established her own ministry, the Church on the Other Hand, directly across the street from her brother’s. Each Sunday, the Salt siblings exhorted their respective flocks to study against the opposition.

  Beatifica had attended both congregations: Brother Dallas’s Church on the One Hand in order to know her enemy at close quarters; and Sister Dilys’s Church on the Other Hand to lend her support. It was Brother Dallas, of course, who had the larger ministry, and who was allowed access to the airwaves, broadcasting for an hour on radio station WGOD at midnight Sundays. The Church on the Other Hand was constantly under siege, its building regularly vandalized and its members, most of whom were women, threatened and terrorized. Sister Dilys was never left unguarded, her constant companions being several of the most rugged members of the Sisters of Clytemnestra Motorcycle Club.

  Beatifica Brown knew that to be successful in her role she had to maintain a low profile, to carry out her mission with a minimum of attention. She was content to let others, such as Dilys Salt, carry on the fight in a public fashion, while she made her services available to all who were in need and proselytized as occasions arose.

  On one wall of her room on Decatur Street, at the edge of the Quarter near Esplanade, Beatifica had hung a framed photograph of John Brown, his wild eyes burning in his bearded face. Across the bottom of her hero’s picture she had written, ‘His Soul Goes Marching On.’ Beatifica knew it was she, the Unknown Warrior, who would assassinate Dallas Salt when John Brown spoke to her as she slept on her ninth night in New Orleans, their common number. Beatifica awoke, sat up in bed, shook her shoulder-length red hair, felt the length of her body shudder, nodded her head numerous times and said aloud, ‘Yes, yes, it is my wish also!’

  THE REWARD

  dilys salt stood at the bedroom window of her second-story apartment on Pauger Street, staring at the group of ten or more people carrying signs and walking back and forth on the sidewalk below. Some of the signs said: kill the messenger, not the fetus; life is too good for sister dilys; the other hand must be banned; and babies cry: don’t kill us, dilys! ‘They out there again?’ asked Terry Perez, one of the Sisters of Clytemnestra and Dilys’s current lover.

  ‘Every day now,’ said Dilys. ‘Cops can’t do nothin’ about it, they say, long as the demonstrators stick to the other side of the street Free speech. Hah! Fools don’t recognize a woman’s right to govern her own self, but they do allow a body to be harassed on her home ground.’

  ‘I could call some of the Sisters, have ’em ride their bikes into the crowd.’

  ‘Bad idea, Terry. Girls’d get run in and I’d be blamed. Best to leave ’em be. Get used to it and carry on.’

  Dilys lit a cigarette and sat down in a wicker chair. She was nude except for her red panties and Terry’s black Chippewa motorcycle boots. She crossed her legs and smoked. Terry was sitting on the bed, wearing only her sleeveless club jacket, brushing out her long black hair. She and Dilys had been lovers for a month now, the longest, Terry knew, that Dilys ever had been exclusively with one of Clytemnestra’s members.

  ‘What you thinkin’ ’bout, Dilys?’

  ‘Oh, my daughter, I guess.’

  ‘You got a daughter? I didn’t know that.’

  Dilys took a deep drag on her Pall Mall and exhaled a snake’s length of smoke.

  ‘She’s fourteen tomorrow, one November. Had her when I was twenty-six.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Pillara. Her daddy chose it.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She got the Down’s syndrome, used to be was called mongoloid, ’cause of the facial features. I keep her in a home in Plain Dealin’, near where my mama moved to after Daddy died.’

  ‘Where was it you was raised?’

  ‘Queen City, Texas. Mama moved over by Plain Dealin’ to be near her people up in Ida. Made sense to put Pillara in a place close where Mama can look in on her, see she’s bein’ treated right’

  ‘You don’t visit her, huh?’

  ‘Not in twelve years. Pillara ain’t never really known me.’ ‘How ’bout her daddy? He go see her?’

  Dilys gave a short, cruel laugh. ‘He seen her once only. Saw she was deformed, named her and left the rest to me.’

  ‘You and him ain’t in touch, I take it.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, we ain’t never been out of touch. Terry, I like you a lot, you know. More’n almost anyone I been with in a very long time. If you promise not to tell anybody else, I’ll let you in on a almost-secret.’

  Terry stopped brushing her hair and looked at Dilys, whose cobalt blue eyes bored into her.

  ‘I promise,’ Terry whispered.

  ‘Dallas Salt is Pillara’s daddy.’

  Terry dropped her brush.

  ‘But he’s your brother!’

  Dilys nodded. ‘“Incest is best,” what he used to say.’

  ‘I gotta pee,’ said Terry, as she hopped off the bed and ran to the toilet.

  Dilys sucked hard on her cigarette, then stubbed it out on the heel of Terry’s left boot. She flicked the butt away and spread her legs as Terry reentered the room.

  ‘Honey?’ said Dilys, sliding her panties off. ‘Come kneel near the source and taste of its fruit.’

  ‘Oh, Dilys,’ said Terry, dropping down, ‘you got the most pain!’

  Dilys closed her eyes as Terry bent to it, eliciting a deep groan from her supine pastor.

  ‘Pain is temporal, Terry,’ Dilys said, stroking her lover’s sleek hair with her right hand. ‘Pleasures such as these serve to remind us of our reward, which is to come.’

  LIGHT-YEARS FROM HOME

  at forty-six years old, Dallas Salt, all six-foot-six, two hundred fifty-five pounds of him, had never before been as confident in himself and what he was doing as he was now. He still had a full head of hair, which he had dyed black once a month, and he worked out daily for at least an hour on the Universal gym equipment in the basement of the church building. Never married, Dallas Salt maintained an active sex life, his taste running these days to heavily prophylacticized anal sex with skinny black hookers procured for him by Sabine Yama, his half-Cajun, half-Pakistani aide-de-camp for the last fifteen years. Many of these women had become
members of Dallas Salt’s flock, a fact that delighted him, though once they accepted his sermon, Dallas told Sabine, he would not allow them to accept his semen.

  The Church on the One Hand was flourishing since the step-up in anti-abortion action. Attendance for the Sunday services was at capacity, and the television ministry was expanding rapidly. Fifty-six cable outlets across the South now carried Brother Dallas’s messages. His sister’s ministry provided fuel for his fire. Dallas loved Dilys dearly, he always had, and he had no private objection to her preaching. Dallas did worry about Dilys’s welfare, however, and instructed Sabine Yama to keep a close watch on their own most fervent followers, those most likely to attempt to physically harm her. Only Sabine, among Dallas’s inner circle, knew of the existence of Pillara Salt, and that Dilys was the girl’s mother.

  Sabine, who was five-foot-five, fat and mostly bald, had a club left foot and a withered right arm due to birth defects. He was more than a little bit in love with Brother Dallas, a fact of which Pastor Salt was well aware, and of which he took full advantage, keeping Sabine on call on virtually a round-the-clock basis. Now thirty-two, Sabine had fallen under the influence of the Salts when he was barely into his teens, his parents having been horrified by their grotesque of an only son, who, moreover, exhibited unnatural proclivities beginning at the age of ten, when Sabine began tricking tourists on Bourbon Street. He went to work for the Salts, who saw in him the virtue of loyalty to those willing to offer a helping hand.

  When the break occurred, Sabine opted to remain with Dallas, mostly because of his preference for male company, and knowing that his role in Dilys’s circle, despite her genuine affection for him, would be of a secondary nature. Sabine hated the Sisters of Clytemnestra, who, he felt, were an unfortunate influence on Dilys, pushing her further from her avowed purpose in life, which was to help people come to know their truest self, the inner being belonging to God.

  This abortion issue, Sabine believed, had been blown all out of proportion. He could not deny the fact that there were an awful lot of loose cannons on the streets the world would doubtless be better off without, but he once had been among the unwanted himself, light-years from home, and Sabine never lost sight of that reality. Dallas said there were perhaps two million abortions performed, legally and illegally, every year in the United States alone. Those souls, Sabine knew, were recycled throughout the universe, safe on other planets if not on Earth. Sabine often wondered if he would not have been better off inhabiting, say, a Martian form, and, of course, what his penis would be like.

  THE RIGHT CHOICE

  beatifica entered elvis Steck’s Super Surplus Store on lower Magazine and was immediately approached by a pink-faced person who looked to be in his early thirties. The man was about six feet tall and had to weigh, Beatifica guessed, no less than three hundred pounds. He wore green-tinted magnifying glasses with adjustable double lenses, a red Yosemite Sam mustache, and what appeared to be a navy blue rubber leisure suit surrounded by a stretch-nylon Sam Browne holster belt. Beatifica could not help but notice the brown handle of a revolver conveniently placed at right-front crotch level, the Hurricane holster unstrapped.

  ‘Afnoon, mame,’ the giant man said. ‘Evis Steck, soiv an protec. Ken Ah hep you wit?’

  ‘Need somethin’ to shoot with, Mr Steck. Somethin’ other than uses bullets but stop a bull, I wanted.’

  Elvis Steck smiled, showing his front teeth, one of which was a cap with the head of an American bald eagle on it

  ‘Got da ting. Ovuh cheer.’

  Beatifica followed the human mountain to a side counter, which Elvis Steck somehow managed to squeeze behind. He took a box from a shelf, opened it and set the contents in front of them.

  ‘Dis cheer’s branoo. Stealth Airrow Gun. Woik unna wattuh, dass way de bull go. Ha teck ah gun system, put enny ahchry quip out uh biz. Propel ba compress ayuh, dass CO2. Arras shoot twicet fass standid crossbows, tree-sixt eff pee ess upt fahv-hund eff pee ess ba ya remoof de reggalate, wit twicet foot pown uv impac. Free floatin bell low fa pin-pawn acksee fum fawt trew hunnet yawds. Manwill top triggaz full adjustbill faw totness, travel an faw numba shots fum de powuh sauce. Wat proof, lak Ah say, funkshnull buv aw below de wattuh. Ahcraf loomnum an stainless steel with a beadblastid, anodaz black finish. Sixteen-inch bell assembly, brawdhead gawd, clapsbill stawk, wun pawnt fahv-fahv ba twenny millimeetuh zoom scope, rings, empty seven-ounce refillbill cylinduh wit valve, six sixteen-inch loomnum arras an a eighteen na haf ba fawteen ba fahv na haf wattuhproof case. Whole packich weigh faw pown, tree ounce. Brawdhead hunt tips extra.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Wit aw witout extra bladetips?’

  ‘Without. Six should be enough.’

  ‘Fifteen-hunnet.’

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  ‘Chawge?’

  ‘Cash.’

  ‘Ony way da go. You made da rat choss.’

  Elvis Steck packed the Airrow Gun in the box and Beatifica laid fifteen new hundred-dollar bills on the counter. She looked up and read a sign posted on the wall.

  IF THEY MOVE,

  SHOOT ’EM.

  MAGNOLIAS

  ‘what can i do you for, Miss?’

  Beatifica sat at the counter of the Choctaw Cafe on Iberville Street, checking out the menu. She looked up into the ugliest face she had ever seen and shuddered violently, as if in a dream she had been suddenly embraced by a cadaver and could not pry apart from her body its stiff, icy arms.

  ‘I ask, can I get you somethin’, or you need more time?’

  Beatifica forced herself to look again at the man. His face was completely purple, the skin covered by a birthmark that reached halfway down the man’s neck. Inside the epidermal mask his eyes shimmered like gas lanterns on a moonless night.

  ’Just coffee,’ Beatifica said, resisting the urge to bolt out of the place.

  A few stools away, a small, pudgy, completely bald-headed man, wearing a dirty white T-shirt, red suspenders and yellow Bermuda shorts, who could have been anywhere from seventy to ninety years old, was talking to the counterman in a rapid, raspy growl.

  ‘I put Kid Magnolia against Basilio in Chi. Tore him right up. Ya shoulda seen it. Basilio couldn’t read the big E for weeks. Then the Kid gets married. This devil bitch tore his guts out like Tiger Flowers couldn’t. Like Sandy Saddler couldn’t. Like Gavilan or Pep or Griffith in his prime, when he wasn’t makin’ hats. Nobody. She took all the dough I’d saved for him and spread it from Canal Street to Michigan Avenue. When she was ready for the big time, she pushed him into the Garden with Sugar.

  ‘I wanted him to go in with LaMotta, who he could have run and cut for twelve till they stopped it LaMotta was an animal, he wouldn’t go down, and a much better boxer than he’s given credit for, but the Kid would’ve cut him to pieces. We couldn’t get the kind of money his saint of a life’s companion needed from LaMotta, so we made the date with Sugar. It lasted five. Ray had the Kid down three times before that He wasn’t ready, wasn’t up for it She used that pussy of hers so he wouldn’t listen to me, Joey Falco, nobody.

  ‘Of course she left him. Took up with a pimp in Camden, or God knows. But the Kid was finished. He had no confidence left and couldn’t get it back. Couldn’t pay for it. Got him in with Dynamite Daley when Daley was on the needle and the Kid lasted six. Six! With a junkie! Got him Virgil Akins and he went two. Last time was with Giardello in Jersey and it was over before Falco could take the stool out of the ring.

  ‘He ended nowhere, like King Levinsky, who wound up peddlin’ handpainted ties around swimmin’ pools in Miami. That wife of his made him too mother-jumpin’ certain, and that’s no good. That’s when things tend to slip away.’

  Beatifica put a dollar on the counter and left without touching her coffee.

  VICTIMS OF RECEIVED INFORMATION

  sister dilys salt stood at the podium in the Church on the Other Hand and surveyed her congregation. All 401 seats were occupied and another 100 people or so
were wedged in around the sides and at the rear of the room. Loudspeakers had been set up outside to carry Sister Dilys’s sermon to those forced by order of the Orleans Parish Fire Department to remain on the church steps, at the foot of which were gathered approximately fifty protestors, anti-abortion activists who were present whenever Dilys spoke. A line of beefy Sisters of Clytemnestra insured that the demonstrators would not attempt to invade the premises, as they had done in the past

  ‘Sisters united!’ Dilys began, as she always did. ‘And you all-too-few brothers in arms, welcome to the Church on the Other Hand. A warning to those of you out there who oppose us: Do not confuse body parts, namely hand with cheek. We will not turn or be turned! The neverending plague of ignorance is carried by victims of received information, unfortunates fallen prey to the Fear Riders. Be advised: The enlightened adherents to the beliefs of the Church on the Other Hand will not be trampled! We stand firm on the higher ground of free choice. There shall be no retreat to the shadows. No longer will it be our blood displayed on the swordblade! The One Hand falls as the Other Hand is raised! Then shall we say also unto them on the one hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.’

  While Dilys Salt’s flock rocked to her pronouncements, Dallas Salt sat in his dressing room across the street, his eyes closed, as Fatima Verdad, a fifteen-year-old prostitute whom Sabine Yama had driven over from Algiers, stood behind him, massaging the preacher’s ears and the back of his neck with her milk chocolate breasts while he masturbated. Fatima Verdad was extremely thin, in accordance with Dallas’s preference, so her relatively large breasts were a bonus so far as he was concerned. Dallas pulled lazily at his semi-erect cock, completely relaxed, listening to Fatima hum.