‘Papa! Papa!’ Beatifica had cried, diving into her father’s arms and burying her bloodied head in his chest.
The naked man next stood up on the car’s hood and urinated against the windshield. German Moreno sat transfixed behind the steering wheel, not believing that this could be happening. Beatifica turned and looked at the insane creature perched on the automobile and watched him direct with one hand the spray from his penis to the untinted safety glass. She felt her tears mix with the blood that streamed down her face, but Beatifica did not turn away again. German switched on the windshield wipers and there immediately ensued a series of loud popping noises. The wild man fell sideways, his cock still in his hand, and landed on the street next to the Galaxie’s left front tire. Beatifica just stared at the congealing green streaks on the windshield.
By the time she and her father arrived at the house on Okaloosa Street, Beatifica had fallen asleep, her head in German’s lap. He shook his daughter gently to awaken her, and the first words Beatifica spoke after opening her eyes were, ‘Papa, why did Jesus piss on us?’
THE SECRET LIFE OF INSECTS
‘you won’t believe this, Brother Dallas.’
‘Believe what? Who’s callin’ on the damn phone at this ungodly hour, Sabine?’
‘It’s your sister, Dilys.’
Dallas Salt took the portable phone from Sabine Yama and cradled it over the embroidered gold initials scripted on the breast pocket of his purple silk pajamas. He sat straight up in his bed as Sabine propped two pillows behind his back and head. Dallas cleared his throat before raising the receiver to his ear.
‘Dilys? To what do I owe this pleasure? Do you know that it’s three-thirty in the mornin’?’
‘I know the time, Dallas, and there ain’t no pleasure involved. I got bad news. Pillara’s dead.’
‘How?’
‘Mama said the people at the Thelma Cates Palestine House in Plain Dealin’, where we been keepin’ her these years, told her Pillara was on a picnic outin’ to the Red River where a tarantula hawk flew into her left ear, got trapped and stung her. By the time they got to a doctor, Pillara was swole up worse’n a 4-H champion bull. Died at four P.M. this afternoon.’
‘Why’d you wait so long to call me?’
‘Wasn’t sure I was gonna call at all, seein’s how you ain’t paid no attention to our daughter since she was born. But I knew Mama would if I didn’t, so I told her I would. Now I done it.’
‘Where’s the funeral?’
‘Ain’t gonna be one. I told the Palestines to let Mama take her for burial in a field between Ida and Mira. That way Mama and her people can rend to the grave.’
‘What denomination is it?’
‘What you suppose? Deep Bottom Baptist, like all Mama’s folks.’
‘We should be there, Dilys. Say some words.’
‘Maybe be holdin’ hands while the pine box is lowered, you think? Fuck you, Dallas.’
Dilys hung up. Lightning streaked the sky outside Dallas’s bedroom window, but there was no rain.
‘Sabine?’ said Dallas, passing the crippled Cajun-Pakistani the phone. ‘You recall that six-foot-tall quadroon female impersonator from Lake Charles moved to New Orleans last year? Name Mumbo Jumbo or somethin’?’
Sabine nodded. ‘Mumbo Degolas. She from Lake Arthur. Works at Chataignier’s Monkey House in the Quarter.’
‘Call her for me, Sabine, if you please. See she can come ’round, do a favor. Tell her if I asleep when she get here, just start ahead, wake me up with them fat lips polishin’ the knob.’
‘What about Dilys?’
‘She never could give a decent blow job, Sabine. Teeth too big. You just go on, call Miss Mumbo.’
Dallas rolled onto his left side and closed his eyes. He remembered a fellow he had been in the service with named Larry Lucca, an Italian boy born in Brooklyn, New York, who claimed he had an uncle from the old country who was afflicted with a disease called tarantism, a nervous condition characterized by melancholy, stupor and an uncontrollable desire to dance. Dallas wondered whether Larry Lucca’s uncle had contracted his disease from the sting of a tarantula hawk wasp rather than from the bite of a tarantula spider, which the Lucca family believed had caused the malady.
As Dallas drifted off to sleep, he envisioned a young girl with slanted eyes and a broad, short skull sticking out her large tongue as she clumsily danced the tarantella.
PURPLE NOON
ever since john Brown’s visitation, Beatifica had eagerly awaited his return. Night after night she lay awake until exhaustion overtook her and she fell into a brief and troubled sleep. Beatifica thought it possible that the great man of her life had been waylaid by government agents fearful of the abolitionist’s sworn intention to create ’a host of Ossawatomies,’ violent actions directed against areas of recalcitrance concerning equality and progressive behavior. Since being recruited via telepathic communication into this resurgent force of enlightenment, Beatifica had meditated on the meaning of having been infected with the spirit of John Brown, and realized his desires now issued forth through her and others like her. Whether or not he came to her again, Beatifica knew she would rise to meet his expectations.
Every Saturday at noon, Dallas Salt kept an appointment at Dutz’s Dancing Comb Barber Shop on Felicity Street. For weeks, Beatifica had surreptitiously observed the preacher’s movements, and she decided that it would be in Dutz Sanglant’s chair at the Dancing Comb that Brother Dallas’s days were to be clipped short.
Following a particularly restless Friday night, Beatifica rose from her companionless sheets slightly after daybreak. It was a chilly, cloudy December 2, the anniversary of John Brown’s hanging. The assassin assembled her weaponry, concealing the ordnance in a large canvas Canal Place shopping bag. Beatifica dressed carefully, wearing a tie-dyed, 100-percent cotton T-shirt with the words when diplomacy fails printed on the front underneath a tan field-jacket liner. Over this she wore a night desert uniform with a random pattern of scattered dark olive drab splotches and grid lines on a lighter shade of olive drab. Around her waist Beatifica buckled a Type 13 nylon-webbed black aircraft belt, and over her head draped a polyester sniper face veil. She pulled on black Coolmax socks, Sta-Dri liners and a pair of olive drab breathable leather-and-cotton duck jungle boots with non-clogging Panama outsoles and web-reinforcement straps. She stood by the window and studied the sky, seeing no face among the clouds. Beatifica stayed in her room until eleven A.M., at which time she picked up her bag and began the trek toward Felicity Street.
Dallas Salt was in an unusually sour mood this morning. His sleep had been disturbed by a dream wherein Dilys, dressed in rags, approached him as he stood in front of his congregation on the stage of the Church on the One Hand, and when she opened her mouth as if to speak, a deformed baby emerged head first, falling to the ground at his feet. The baby uttered no sound, but twisted and writhed in apparent agony on the stage as Dallas’s flock confronted him, chastising him for having committed an unholy act with his sister. At this point, Dilys was swallowed up by the advancing pack and disappeared. Dallas had awakened in a sweat, his arms stiff at his sides.
‘Just a shave today, Dutz,’ Dallas said, as he assumed his position in the barber’s chair. ’I don’t feel like sittin’ for very long.’
‘Wad chew say, pasta,’ said Dutz Sanglant, a rail-thin, hairless man of fifty-five whose ocherous skin color betrayed his quarter-century addiction to Pernod. His childhood nickname had been ‘The Chihuahua.’
As Dutz levered the chair backwards, Dallas Salt looked at the faithful Sabine Yama, who sat opposite him beneath the wall-length mirror, reading a back issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine, turning the pages with his one normal set of fingers. Dallas’s stomach quivered and suddenly he felt nauseated, but he fought the urge to vomit and closed his eyes as the barber wrapped a hot towel around his face.
It was Sabine who first noticed the person, face swathed in see-through cloth, come through the
door. Dutz ceased his ministrations as soon as he heard the crinkle of the shopping bag, and looked over just as the initial flash of metal disappeared into the preacher’s pancreas. The next missile entered Dutz Sanglant’s open mouth and penetrated through the rear of his skull into the wall behind him. A third arrow ripped part of Sabine Yama’s face off, sending him to his knees. The fourth and final projectile pierced the leaking and listing pastor’s heart, its tip sticking out the back of the chair, stabilizing the body.
As the shrouded figure turned away, the half-blind Yama managed to extricate from his belt a Beretta .25 automatic, which he directed the lethal end of toward the offender and fired as many times as he could before collapsing in pain and losing consciousness, his rent flesh resting on the worn, cool linoleum.
LA VERDAD
none of the Sisters of Clytemnestra had an objection to Dilys’s special treatment of Sabine Yama. From the moment Dilys had taken him in, the crippled and severely disfigured man had become an indispensable member of the Church on the Other Hand. He would do anything for Sister Dilys, day or night, and had taken to sleeping on the floor at the foot of her bed. Sabine was Dilys Salt’s factotum, her bodyguard, her confidant. She was all he had left in the world in the way of family, Sabine said.
When Terry Perez called him Quasimodo after she had seen Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame on the late movie, even Sabine laughed; although it was difficult for anyone to tell that he was laughing, because the mouth improvised for him by the doctors was a small hole where his chin would have been had he still had one. Dilys, however, assured the others that Sabine was not offended by Terry’s remark, and, in fact, found the reference not inappropriate.
The demise of the Church on the One Hand had been immediate, vulturous rival preachers having commenced their raiding of Brother Salt’s supporters as soon as the news broke that he had fallen. ‘madwoman murders dallas!’ shrieked the headline of the Times-Picayune on Sunday, December 3. She had slain Dutz Sanglant, too, of course; and Sabine Yama had been accorded the status of a hero for having gunned down the deranged Beatifica Brown. The news of Sabine’s miraculous recovery from the six-inch Stealth arrow having gone through one side of his face and out the other had been followed for a while by the local press, but mention of him ceased entirely as soon as it was learned that he had gone to live with Dilys Salt upon his release from the hospital.
Among Sister Dilys’s newest devotees was Fatima Verdad, who had been brought into the fold of the Church on the Other Hand by Sabine Yama. On her sixteenth birthday, Fatima had learned that she was HIV positive, and had quit hooking. Knowing that she now had no time to waste in achieving her dream of becoming a popular recording and performing artist, Fatima formed a group called Fatima Verdad and The Band AIDS, comprised solely of musicians afflicted with the disease. The group began by playing at Dilys’s services and quickly became a star attraction in New Orleans.
Seized upon by the media as a freakish phenomenon, the band’s notoriety soon spread to New York and Los Angeles, where they were summoned to appear on network and syndicated television shows. Signed to a recording contract by a major company, their first album, ‘Fatima Verdad and The Band AIDS Take It One Day at a Time,’ shot to number one on the charts in two weeks. Band members who became too ill to play were replaced only by others infected with HIV. Fatima Verdad spent much of her time visiting AIDS patients in hospitals and hospice situations, and she and the other members of the group donated virtually all of their income to AIDS research and the Church on the Other Hand.
When Fatima finally succumbed to the virus, Sabine Yama was at her bedside. Before she died, Fatima, who was not yet eighteen years old, told him that she could not have expected to derive any more pleasure or satisfaction from life than she already had, but that did not mean she was ready to go. As she held Sabine’s withered hand in her right, Fatima felt her lungs suddenly fill with fluid and she started to choke.
‘Oh, shit, baby,’ she gasped, ‘is this it?’
part three
the ballad of
easy earl
Everybody’s talking, but nobody knows.
—Sonny Boy Williamson
CONTENTS
Alfonzo’s Mexicali
Hello, Willie!
Night Owl
Roadrunner
Women Are Women but Men Are Something
Marble
Something Special
Jesus Sees Us
ALFONZO'S MEXICALI
easy earl blakey cruised along Louisiana Avenue in his 1978 Mercury Monarch with all four windows down, his left arm hanging out to catch a breeze and his right hand on the steering wheel. It was Saturday night, just past ten, and Earl had decided to check out the scene at Alfonzo’s Mexicali Club. He crossed La Salle Street, pulled over to the curb and parked. It was unseasonably warm for January in New Orleans, the temperature still in the mid-seventies and a humidity reading over eighty. At least two dozen black men of various ages lounged on the street in front of Porky Muette’s Port in a Storm Liquor Store, drinking from or holding in one hand a short dog in a brown paper sack. Most of them eyeballed Earl as he got out of his car, which he did not bother to lock, leaving the windows down.
‘Evenin’, fellas,’ Easy Earl said, nodding in their direction as he walked toward Alfonzo’s Mexicali, which was two doors over.
The men and boys who hung out here lived in the housing project across the street or in one of the several run-down transient hotels on the block. There were a few bad asses among them, but mostly they were just poor folks making time pass more easily with the aid of an inexpensive anesthetic.
‘Got a extra dollar, Pop?’ a young man of about eighteen asked Earl.
Earl stopped and handed him a five.
‘Nothin’ extra these days, son,’ he said. ‘But I like to find my car how I left it when I come back out.’
The young man grinned and took the money.
‘Enjoy you self, Cap. Ain nobody gon touch it.’
Earl entered the Mexicali and sat down on a stool at the bar.
There were a few people dancing, some sitting at the several tables lined along one wall, a couple of others on barstools. It was early yet for Saturday night. By one A.M., Earl knew, the place would be jumping.
‘How you, stranger?’
‘Just fine, Miz Alfonzo,’ Earl said to the heavy-set, middle-aged woman bartender who had greeted him in the same manner that she greeted every customer.
‘Jim Beam and water?’ she asked.
‘Crown Royal and milk on the rocks, if you please, ma’am.’
‘JB’s a buck tonight.’
‘Stick to my standby, CR and milk, thanks.’
Miz Alfonzo laughed. ‘Ain’t ever’body afford a extra fo’ bits.’
She left him his drink, picked up the two dollars he had laid on the bar, and brought back two quarters, which Earl waved away. Miz Alfonzo nodded and smiled, turned and dropped them into a glass next to the cash register, then walked down to the other end of the bar.
Earl sipped at his Crown Royal and milk and listened to the music. A deejay was playing old stuff. Right now was ‘If You Lose Me, You’ll Lose a Good Thing’ by Barbara Lynn, a local favorite. Hearing the song made Earl think of his ex, Rita. They had busted up right after her recent abortion. She had gone with her children to live with her sister in Baton Rouge and Earl had not spoken to Rita since.
The door opened and a large Latino man about thirty years old, dressed in an ice cream suit over a maroon shirt and beige tie, a young black woman hanging onto his left arm, entered the Mexicali. They passed Earl and paraded to the other end, stopping opposite Miz Alfonzo. Earl could not hear the initial exchange between them, but then Miz Alfonzo raised her voice, as did the young woman.
‘You don’t be draggin’ yo tacky self in here with no greasy pimp!’ shouted Miz Alfonzo. ‘Take it back out on the street!’
‘Luis and me is down, Mama! Get used to i
t!’
‘Get used to this!’ Miz Alfonzo said, and pulled up a.38 revolver from behind the bar.
‘Take the ho and go!’ she yelled at Big Luis, pointing the gun at his chest. ‘She ain’t no mo daughter to me!’
What happened next took place so fast that Earl could not quite follow the action. Several people surrounded Big Luis, whose white suit became visible only in flashes as the large Latino struggled with them. Somehow, Miz Alfonzo’s daughter gained possession of the revolver and tossed it along the top of the bar toward Earl, who made a big mistake: He picked it up.
Earl heard a weird noise coming from behind him, a loud, grinding sound. As he turned around to investigate the source, everything slowed down. White lights popped in Earl’s eyes, as if a series of flashbulbs were going off. The floor tilted and Earl lost his balance. His first thought was that someone had kicked the stool out from under him, but he did not fall down. Then came the moaning—long, slow, unearthly noises unlike anything he had ever heard before. The air was full of multicolored feathers that covered everything.
Easy Earl had no idea how he came to be in his car, driving on Palmetto Street toward Metairie. His left cheek burned and he touched it, then glanced at the blood on his fingers. The .38 was on the seat next to him.
Back at Alfonzo’s Mexicali Club, the policeman who had been wounded in the abdomen asked the woman kneeling by his head if his partner was all right. She told him that the other officer looked pretty dead and to lie still, an ambulance was coming.
‘Who shot us?’ asked the wounded man. ‘And why?’
The woman shook her head and said, ‘Honey, I just don’t know.’
HELLO, WILLIE!
‘earl, my man, it’s a goddamn good thing you got a big dick,’ Easy Earl Blakey said aloud, as he sat alone in his car on the side of the road by Irish Bayou, ‘’cause you sure must have a tiny motherfuckin’ brain.’
Southern Nights Page 8