He had no idea what time it was, but Earl figured it had to be well past midnight by now. He had been driving aimlessly around the city since fleeing Alfonzo’s Mexicali, and finally pulled over due to fatigue. What had gone down back there? he asked himself. All he could remember was that there had been some kind of an argument at the other end of the bar, and then the gun spinning along the mahogany into his hand. He had heard someone coming up behind him, turned and saw two guns pointed in his direction. After that, Earl’s mind was blank. He knew he had fired the revolver, though, even if he could not clearly recall having done so. Something in his brain had just snapped when he’d seen those pistols pushed toward his face.
He took a deep breath, then lit up a Kool. There was so little traffic out here, he thought, looking up at the crescent moon. If he shot himself, it might be two or three days, maybe a week, before his body would be discovered. Earl sat and smoked. When he had had enough of it, he tossed the butt out the window, then picked up the revolver and got out of the car. Earl walked over to the bayou and threw the gun into the water. He stood there for a minute, listening. All he heard were airplane engines droning overhead. Earl went back to the Mercury, got in and cranked it up. Where to? he wondered, and started driving.
For some reason, the image of Willie Wong entered Earl’s mind. Willie Wong had been a boyhood pal of Earl’s. They had grown up together in the Eighth Ward and remained friends until Willie’s death at the age of twenty-one. Willie had been a normal Chinese-American kid; he had studied hard in school and worked regularly at various jobs to help support himself and his parents, who owned a small grocery store on St Claude Avenue. Then, when Willie was eighteen, he saw the movie The Wild One, which starred Marlon Brando as a devil-may-care, hardcase motorcycle gang leader. Willie fell in love with the image personified by Brando, and he bought a thirdhand Triumph Bonneville, allowed his lank black hair to grow long, wore a leather jacket, engineer boots and oily Levi’s. He also started smoking, something else he never had done before, and it was rare to see him riding around on his bike without an unfiltered Lucky Strike dangling from his lips. Willie even invented his own nickname, ‘the Wild Wong,’ and encouraged everyone he knew to call him that Only his parents refused to honor this request, continuing to address him as they always had, by his Chinese name, Zhao.
The Wild Wong was killed on a wet Thursday evening when a drunken driver in a brand-new SAAB sedan cut too closely in front of Willie’s Triumph on Chef Menteur Highway and clipped the front wheel, catapulting the Wild Wong headfirst into a roadside ditch, breaking his back and neck. At Willie’s funeral, Earl had been surprised to see that the Wong family had dressed their son in his biker clothes to be viewed in an open casket. He had been certain that the Wongs would have cut Willie’s hair and put him into a suit. As he passed the casket, Earl had noticed that an unsealed package of Lucky Strike cigarettes had been placed in Willie’s left hand.
Why he thought at this difficult moment in his own life of the Wild Wong, Earl did not know. Something had happened to Willie when he’d seen that movie, and his life had been changed irrevocably. Now, Easy Earl knew, nothing would be the same for him, either. That was it, he supposed. Something a person never could imagine took place and then the world looked completely different.
The image of Willie Wong lying in his coffin twenty-five years ago would not go away, and Earl drove fast on the deserted road in his Monarch with the headlights off.
‘Whoooeeee! Willie Wild Wong, you dumb mother-fucker!’ Earl shouted. ‘I’m comin’ to find you, brother, ready or not!’
NIGHT OWL
it was slightly after four A.M. when Earl Blakey drove into a Red Devil service station outside Tornado, Mississippi. He had driven north-northeast from Irish Bayou on the old two-lane highway, US 11, across Lake Pontchartrain and the Pearl River, past Picayune and Carriere to Poplarville, where he had swung west on Mississippi State Road 43 and decided to stop for fuel before crossing back into Louisiana.
There was a light burning in the station office, and Earl hoped somebody was around so that he could keep going. He cut the engine, turned off the lights and got out of the car. A swarm of stinging insects descended on him in the darkness and Earl swatted at them as he walked toward the office. Through the glass in the door, Earl saw a white man seated on the floor, his back against a wall. There was a noose around the man’s neck, a thick rope strung from a large hook that had been screwed into the ceiling. The man, whose Coke bottle-thick eyeglasses were askew and who was wearing an oil-stained white-and-black Ole Miss baseball cap, was either asleep or dead. Earl could not tell, although there seemed to be no discernible movement, no rise and fall of the man’s chest.
Earl tried to open the door but it was locked. To enter, he would have had to break the glass, and he did not need any more trouble tonight. He looked again at the man, who appeared to be in his forties, wondering how he could be dead if he was sitting on the floor instead of hanging in the air. The rope was knotted at the top around the hook and had plenty of slack in the line down to the noose. Then Earl noticed the black letters on the floor at the ends of the man’s outstretched legs, and that both of the man’s feet were missing. He pressed closer to the glass and read the words that had been spraypainted there: el mochuelo.
‘Damn,’ Earl said. ‘Guess I got enough gas to get to Bogalusa.’
He hurried back to his car, got in and drove away.
ROADRUNNER
‘interestin’ license plate you got there,’ the attendant in the 76 station in Bogalusa said. ‘ezy earl. That you?’
Earl Blakey handed the kid a ten and a five.
‘Used to was, an’ maybe not even,’ said Earl.
The kid laughed. ‘I hear dat!’
Earl knew where he was headed now and he took 21 South out of town. At Covington, he’d take 190 West, stay off the interstate. As he sped past Sun, Louisiana, over the Bogue Chitto River, Earl considered the possibility that the last twelve hours of his life had been a dream; that he had not really shot two policemen in Alfonzo’s Mexicali Club in New Orleans, and not seen a footless white man with his head in a noose on the floor of a Red Devil gas station outside Tornado, Mississippi. Maybe he was suffering from a medical condition and he could get a doctor to explain it. Rita and her sister, Zenoria Rapides, would help him, he figured, which was why he was on his way to Baton Rouge.
Earl still did not entirely understand why Rita had acted strangely toward him after her abortion. They had discussed the situation beforehand, agreed that it was the best solution, her being thirty-six years old and already having four children. Earl had paid for it, treated her kindly, but then Rita got bitter and took off quick up to Zenoria’s. He was puzzled about that, but now it was himself, Mr Earl, who needed backup, and he hoped Rita would be there for him.
Earl turned on the radio.
‘The long-lost gun tied to the assassination of former governor of Louisiana Huey P. Long fifty-six years ago has been found. James Starrs, a forensic scientist who plans to exhume the body of the purported assassin, Carl Austin Weiss, Sr., said in Washington, D.C., where he is a professor at George Washington University, that the .32-caliber handgun allegedly used to kill “the Kingfish” in the Louisiana State Capitol in 1935 is in the possession of Mabel Guerre Binnings, the seventy-five-year-old daughter of the policeman who investigated the case. Binnings lives in New Orleans.
‘Professor Starrs says he is certain the discovery of the apparent murder weapon will prove to be “a bonanza of evidence.” The disclosure, however, has set off a legal battle over who owns the gun and the police files on the case, which also have been missing since 1940 when Mabel Binnings’s father, Louis Guerre, retired.
‘Louisiana State Police insist that both the weapon and the files belong to the people of Louisiana, and have delivered a letter requesting that Mabel Binnings hand them over. She has refused this request and has also declined to talk to reporters. Ever since the shooting in Baton
Rouge, there has been speculation that Long, who was forty-two years old at the time, actually died from bullets fired by his bodyguards. The twenty-nine-year-old Weiss was gunned down by them on the Capitol steps.’
Easy Earl lit a Kool, found a pair of dark glasses in the glove box and put them on. They were Rita’s. Earl recalled the time he had bought them for her in the Walgreen’s on Royal.
‘In New Orleans,’ the radio news continued, ‘the manhunt for the killer of a metro police officer is underway. A second officer was wounded in the incident, which took place last night at Alfonzo’s Mexicali Club on Louisiana Avenue. Details regarding the circumstances of the shootings are still unclear, said Acting Police Commissioner DuMont “Du Du” Dupre. The suspect is believed to be a middle-aged black male with a pencil-thin mustache who may be driving a red late-1970s Mercury automobile. No further information is presently available.
‘We have an appropriate tune comin’ right up, people. “I Am a Lonesome Fugitive,” sung by Ferriday, Louisiana’s own bad boy, Jerry Lee Lewis. But first we have to pay a few bills.’
Earl turned off the radio. He drove straight through to Baptist, where he stopped in a 7-Eleven and bought a Bic razor, a Snickers bar and a black corduroy Playboy bunny baseball cap. He dry-shaved in the car, using the rearview mirror, then ate the candy bar. This was the first time since he was sixteen years old, Earl realized, that he had not worn a mustache. He put on the bunny hat, adjusted his dark glasses, and hoped he could make it to Zenoria’s house on Mohican Street in Baton Rouge before the cops caught him.
WOMEN ARE WOMEN BUT MEN ARE
SOMETHING ELSE
zenoria rapides had never married. Now forty-seven years old, she had lived alone, until Rita and the children arrived, in a two-bedroom house that she had bought and mostly paid for with her earnings as a grade-school teacher and seamstress. Her reputation as a dressmaker was nonpareil among the middle-class white women of Baton Rouge, and they brought her more work than she could adequately handle. Zenoria was pleased that her youngest sister, Rita Hayworth Rapides, had come to live with her, since Rita sewed almost as well as Zenoria herself and was willing to assist in the business.
There had been six children born to Althea Yancey and Zelmo Baptiste Rapides: Zenoria, Zelma and Zoroaster were named by their father; and Althea had named Lana Turner, Pocahantas and Rita Hayworth. Althea and Zelmo had perished sixteen years ago when their house on Evangeline Street, in which all of the children had been raised, caught fire due to an electrical problem and burned down in the middle of one night with them trapped inside. Zelma and Zoroaster, who were identical twins, were killed together in a car crash coming back from Port Allen, where they worked in a Popeye’s, when they were sixteen. Lana Turner now lived in Memphis, married to a radical white lawyer named Lucius Lamar Bilbo, a great-nephew of the former Mississippi senator who had advocated deportation of all southern blacks to Africa. Zenoria and Rita seldom heard from her. Pocahantas had disappeared at the age of seventeen with a dishwasher from the Poteat Cafe in downtown Baton Rouge named Leopard Johnny, so called due to his peculiar black-and-yellow complexion, the result of a chronic, debilitating liver condition. The only word of Pocahantas that Zenoria or Rita or Lana had received in the last fifteen years was a picture card of the Monongahela River sent to Zenoria, postmarked Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that said, ‘Dere Sister, The Leopard has Lost his Spots. Hi to All. Love, Pokey.’
Rita Hayworth Rapides’s four children were the progeny of four different fathers, none of whom had Rita married, though at least two had proposed to her. Rita enjoyed her independence and insisted that each child carry her own surname. She had named them after four western states—Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Colorado—none of which had she visited, nor was she particularly interested in visiting them. She told Zenoria that she just liked the sounds of the names.
Rita found that she usually had no use for men beyond occasional companionship. She preferred, also, to support herself; not that she ever refused financial help from any of the children’s fathers, but Rita never depended on it. Until Easy Earl Blakey came around, she had not really been tempted to maintain a close friendship with a man. There was something uncomplicated about Blakey, Rita thought; not simple, exactly, but he was—true to his nickname—easy to be with. The termination of this recent pregnancy, her first abortion, had depressed Rita more than she ever could have anticipated. She had moved back to Baton Rouge just to have the comfort of her oldest sister, not to escape from Earl or New Orleans. Rita missed Earl, which surprised her; and when he turned up on Zenoria’s doorstep that Sunday morning, clean-shaven and wearing a stupid Playboy bunny hat, Rita took him into her arms without a word and felt her entire body relax.
‘They after me, Rita,’ Earl said, once they were inside the house. ‘Where Zenoria and the kids?’
‘At church. I wasn’t feelin’ up to goin’. I ain felt up to goin’ most places, lately. Oh, Earl, I am pleased to see you. Why’d you shave your mustache? And what you mean, they after you? “They” who?’
‘Po-lice. I shot a cop, Rita. Two cops. One’s dead, other’s wounded.’
‘Earl, you talkin’ crazy. Easy Earl Blakey don’t go around smokin’ nobody, ’specially policemens.’
‘I know, honey, but it happen. I was havin’ a CR an’ milk in Alfonzo’s Mexicali, by myself, thinkin’ on you an’ how much I been missin’ us, when the incident just come about. That’s all, it just come about. Next thing I find, I’m runnin’. I went to Miss’ippi firs’, seen somethin’ there so awful I ain sure I really seen it.’
‘Wait, baby. You talkin’ too fast. How you so sure you shot anyone?’
‘Had the gun with me in my car after it happen.’
‘You don’t own no piece, Earl. Where’s this gun?’
‘Throwed it in Irish Bayou. It belong to Miz Alfonzo.’
‘Bad idea. Be some Cambo fish it out the bayou fo’ long.’
‘That don’t matter, Rita. Prob’ly a bad idea me comin’ here, too, but I been missin’ you so much. They bound to figure out where I am. They knowin’ the car, said on the radio. Shit, Rita, this whole thing just some crazy accident, an’ now my life be over.’
‘Earl, hush. We work it out.’
‘Rita, I love you.’ Earl kissed her softly on the lips. ‘But ain no way to deal with it ’cept run. You holdin’ any green?’
‘About ninety dollars. You can have it.’
Rita went into another room and came back out with the money and handed it to Earl. He kissed her again, deeply this time.
‘I been thinkin’ about our baby,’ he said.
‘Thinkin’ what?’
‘That we shoulda had it. Now I’m gone be dead an’ ain no child of mine in the world to remember me. Also that if you ain move to Baton Rouge, which you wouldn’t of if we ain kill the baby, I never would of been in the Mexicali Club in the firs’ place.’
‘Earl, hold it. If you think runnin’s the only way, go on ahead. I don’t be stoppin’ you or nobody, ’cludin’ my children, they own time come, from doin’ what they think they got to. But subtractin’ out that way won’t kick it. Look straight, Earl. You a good man, I know. I mighta had that baby, you’d told me to.’
‘You could come with me, Rita. Kids be safe with Zenoria an’ we get ’em later.’
‘Go ’head, Earl. Don’t need that nobody be lyin’ to the police about not seein’ you but me.’
Rita kissed him and touched the tip of her right index finger above his upper lip.
‘You get where you’re goin’,’ she said, ‘grow that mustache back.’
Earl grinned. ‘I will, baby.’
Rita watched him drive away, then went into the bedroom she shared with Idaho and Colorado—Montana, her oldest, slept in the front room, and Wyoming with Zenoria—and lay down. Suddenly, she felt very tired. Rita remembered her mother, Althea, telling her when she could not have been more than eight years old, that just when things seemed almost to
be makin’ sense, a damn cow would jump over the moon. Rita had asked, ‘Whose cow, Mama?’ Rita laughed now, lying on the bed, as Althea had twenty-eight years before in response to Rita’s question, the only answer her mother had to give.
MARBLE
earl had heard or read that when the Mafia kidnaps someone and murders him, they usually leave his car at an airport parking lot, so that’s what Easy Earl did with his Mercury Monarch, abandoning it at Baton Rouge Metro and riding a bus downtown to the Greyhound terminal. He bought a ticket to Tampa, Florida, a city he’d never been to but one that he figured was big enough for him to find work in. His bus would not leave for forty-five minutes, so he bought a sausage and a Delaware Punch at a concession stand and took a seat in the waiting room.
A thin white girl, about thirteen or fourteen years old, wearing bluejeans and a powder blue LSU sweatshirt, carrying a small canvas bag, came in and sat down on the bench directly across from Earl. The girl’s hair was white-blonde, she wore glasses, and she surveyed the waiting room calmly, her unmarked face expressionless. Earl noticed her but his thoughts were connected with his own situation. He ate his sausage and drank the punch and then went to the restroom. By the time he had used the toilet and washed his hands and face, the bus was loading and Earl climbed aboard. He took an aisle seat, three-quarters of the way toward the rear, next to the young white girl.
The bus was five minutes out of Baton Rouge on Interstate 12 when the girl said to Earl, ‘My name is Marble Lesson, I’m from Bayou Goula, though my daddy lives up in New Roads now, and I’m on my way to meet my mama and her new husband in Jack-sonville, Florida. I was born in Miami County, Kansas, where my daddy’s people had a farm outside Osawatomie, but they lost it, so we moved to Louisiana where Daddy’s cousin Webb got Daddy a job in a refinery. Mama moved out of our house in Bayou Goula months ago, but I wanted to finish the semester since it had already started, so I stayed with Daddy for the time bein’. He didn’t could use that big of a house, so he found him a place up at New Roads, in Labarre, actually, in Pointe Coupee Parish, as I said, and dropped me off just now at the bus station.
Southern Nights Page 9