Southern Nights

by Barry Gifford

  ‘Suck it off!’ the taller one repeated.

  Gaspar DeBlieux did his best, but Nougat’s penis remained flaccid. Tears rolled freely from both men’s eyes.

  ‘Maybe you do it better,’ said the tallest tormentor. ‘Trade places. We ain’t goin’ till the faucet starts flowin’.’

  The men did as they were told and this time Nougat got some results. Gaspar’s penis hardened despite his fear.

  ‘Stroke it,’ said one of the hookers, Damfino didn’t know which, and after a few minutes he made DeBlieux come.

  ‘Swallow it!’ ordered the taller hooker.

  Damfino dropped his head to the floor and sobbed. Gaspar stood, trembling, his depleted penis shrinking rapidly.

  ‘Y’all get down again,’ the smaller hooker said to DeBlieux, who obeyed.

  Both men bent forward, their eyes shut tight. The hookers lifted their short dresses with their free hands, took out their penises, and urinated on Nougat and DeBlieux.

  ‘Surprise!’ the prostitutes shouted, mirthful now, giggling like schoolgirls.

  When they had finished, the hookers straightened their skirts, replaced the guns in their bags, and walked out of the room, leaving the men wet and shivering on the hotel room floor.

  Outside the DeSalvo, Cleon Tone stood about ten feet from the entrance, wearing his hand yursef a fresh start by lend a man a hand sign and holding his hat As the regal, leopard-skin-clad hookers walked by, the taller of the two dropped a hundred-dollar bill into the disgraced pastor’s fedora. Before the occurrence had registered on Cleon’s brain, his benefactors had climbed into a taxi and sped away.

  The Reverend Tone stared at the glowing C-note, shook his head, and said aloud, ‘The Good Lord got Him some sundry damn messengers, don’t He?’

  THE BRAVE AND THE BEAUTIFUL

  cleon had a solid Cuban dinner of ropa vieja, frijoles negros, arroz amarilio, plátanos maduros, flan, and café con leche at the Country Flame on Iberville Street, then decided to treat himself to a movie. It had been several years since the Reverend Tone had seen a film. He strolled up Canal to the Choctaw Theater and was horrified to find that the asking price for entry was six dollars. This being a special occasion, however, Cleon paid for a ticket to see The Brave and the Beautiful, starring Martine Mustique.

  Martine Mustique had been born Rima Dot Duguid, in Bay St Clement, North Carolina, a place she fled at an early age. After two failed teenage marriages and a half-dozen abortions, Rima Dot Duguid, who at twenty called herself Sarita Touché, left Atlanta, Georgia, where she had lived for four years, for France, in the company of an Iranian art dealer named Darwish Noof. In Cannes, she was spotted sunbathing topless on the beach by Tora Tora-Tora, the Tahitian synthetic cosmetics king, who hired her as a model for his company’s new perfume, Paroxysme. It was Tora-Tora who renamed her Martine Mustique one paradisiacal afternoon on the veranda of his estate on the Caribbean island whose name she now wore as her own. The transition from magazine supermodel to film star was a swift one for the once-white trash Carolina runaway.

  The celluloid flesh merchants had promoted Martine Mustique as another Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner, advertising her as a throwback to more glamorous days. She had starred in one box office blockbuster after another, always in tandem with the worthiest leading man of the moment. Even the names of her films – Forever Ruthless, Lost Among the Living, The Big Ache, Tame Me!, I Am Desolate – were redolent of an earlier, seemingly purer era, however mistaken such a notion might be. Deluded or not, the adoring multitude attended Martine Mustique’s movies as if on a religious pilgrimage.

  When she was found murdered—decapitated—in the bathtub of her house in the Hollywood hills, the public outpouring of grief was titanic. Her killer, a spurned suitor named Edgard Veloso Shtup-Louche, the young scion of Shtup Industries, manufacturers of forty-five varieties of condoms, mailed a confession to the Los Angeles Police Department before hanging himself in a gazebo on the Shtup-Louche estate in Bel Air. In his letter, Edgard said that Martine had refused his proposal of marriage after forty-eight hours of virtually continuous lovemaking. She had been, claimed Shtup-Louche, the only woman with whom he was able to achieve an erection. When she denied him her hand, she denied him his only chance for lifelong happiness. Rather than murder all of the psychiatrists who had attended him since childhood, Edgard said—though that certainly should be done, he added—it was easier just to do away with the object of his affection, and, of course, himself.

  The Brave and the Beautiful had been completed two days before Martine’s death, one week prior to what would have been her thirtieth birthday. Since its release, this last evidence of her remarkable ability to charm even the most reluctant and cynical among moviegoers had broken box office records worldwide. In life, Martine Mustique had beguiled; in death, she transfixed. Cleon Tone was no less mesmerized as he watched her final portrayal, that of a Croatian lion tamer named the Great Vukovara, who is torn between her love for her home and family and a Serbian soldier during the Yugoslavian civil war.

  Cleon wept with the others in the theater as the Great Vukovara learns that her lover has been killed by Croat freedom fighters just before she must stage a command performance for the queen of England. She goes on as scheduled, and for her finale, Vukovara tosses aside her whip and chair and orders the lions to attack her. As the big cats tear Vukovara apart, ripping and rending in a spectacular frenzy, superimposed on the screen is a picture of Martine Mustique at her most beautiful, the way she looked in her first ad for Paroxysme. The effect on Cleon Tone was devastating.

  When he finally managed to extricate himself from his seat and stumble out of the theater, the disgraced reverend and other patrons were confronted on the street by a troop of skinheads dressed in leather jackets with their trouser legs tucked into the tops of their black boots, holding signs saying, don’t blame krotz if the kountry rots and save our tots, vote for krotz, along with poster photos of Klarence Kosciusko Krotz, the Real American Party(RAP) candidate for governor of Louisiana. Klarence Krotz, Cleon Tone knew, once had been the Great and All-Powerful Grand Beast of the Holy Order of Everlasting Yahoos (HOOEY), a white supremacist group headquartered in Tensas Parish, in northeastern Louisiana.

  Later that night, lying on the cot in his room on North Rampart Street, it occurred to Tone that it would cleanse his soul for good if he were to eliminate from the planet a hater such as Klarence Kosciusko Krotz. By this consummate act, Cleon could come to terms with his own fall from grace, and redeem himself in the eyes of the Lord and those who had suffered from his own selfish behavior. He could then arise, and walk with the angels. The next day, Cleon Tone decided, he would purchase a tool of destruction. He then turned his attention to his own tool, masturbating with the image of Martine Mustique in his mind until he reached a state approaching paroxysm.

  HISTORY IN THE MAKING

  dortorina ridiculo krotz was the daughter of a department store bookkeeper from Alexandria, Louisiana, named Torquemada Ridiculo, an immigrant from Barcelona by way of the Azores, and Sallie Gay Crews, who had been born and raised in Alexandria. How Torque Ridiculo came to Louisiana, Dortorina, his and Sallie Gay’s only child, never had known for sure. As well as she could ascertain, her father had landed initially in New York City and the company he found work with had then relocated to Alexandria, taking Torque along. Torque had died of the Pyongyang-B strain of influenza when Dortorina was six, so she had only her mother’s version of the events of Torque’s life to go by.

  One time, when Dortorina was fourteen, after her mother had imbibed one too many Absolut and Orange Crush cocktails at a neighbor’s backyard barbecue party, Sallie Gay said that Torque had been an illegal alien on the lam from some embezzlement scam up north when she married him. When Dortorina tried to talk to her mother about this the next day, Mrs Ridiculo had dismissed the story entirely, saying she could not imagine having said such a thing.

  Dortorina married Thaddeus Kosciusko Krotz, a traveling c
ement salesman from Grand Coteau, when she was eighteen and he was forty-four. Krotz’s people were originally from Poland, but their part of the country had been annexed by Germany during the Second World War. Shortly after the annexation, Thaddeus had deserted from the Nazi army, into which he had been drafted, and made his way to America by stowing away on a general cargo boat sailing from Liverpool, England, to Baltimore, Maryland. That ship, the Duke of Earls Court, was torpedoed and sunk in the North Atlantic six weeks later.

  While on board the Duke of Earls Court, Krotz stole one of the crew’s seaman’s papers along with some money, and he managed to fake his way past the Customs officer at the port of Baltimore. Thaddeus spoke virtually no English at this time, but he found work quickly at a variety of menial jobs; first around Baltimore, then as he moved south, fleeing the kind of cold weather he had detested in Poland.

  Louisiana was his last stop. Acadia Parish, with its large Catholic population and warm climate, appealed to Thaddeus Krotz, and he hired on as a mixer at the Acadia Cement Works. Within a year, Krotz became a salesman for the company, and shortly after his marriage to Dortorina Ridiculo the former Nazi infantryman was allowed to purchase shares in the business. Fifteen years later, he became its majority stockholder; five years after that, he renamed the company Krotz Cement, and soon the Krotz name was known as the largest manufacturer of cement in the Deep South. Thaddeus diversified his interests, buying up radio stations and newspapers in small towns from Texas to Florida. By the time Dortorina’s and his only child, Klarence, was confirmed, Krotz Industries was firmly entrenched in the lower echelon of the Fortune 500.

  Thaddeus and Dortorina died together in a small-plane crash during a lightning storm while flying from Jackson, Mississippi, to Shreveport, when their son was twenty-three. Klarence, who had graduated the previous year from LSU and was at the time of his parents’ deaths enrolled in law school at Duke, discontinued his studies and assumed the directorship of Krotz Industries.

  It was not long before the idea of holding political office began to appeal to him. At twenty-six, Klarence ran for a US congressional seat and, using the family-owned radio stations and newspapers to apprise voters of his attributes, won easily. After five consecutive terms, however, Krotz, by this time a conspicuous reactionary presence in Washington, D.C., decided to return to Louisiana and run for governor. If he could accomplish this feat, the next step, even amateur political observers surmised, would be back to Washington, toward the White House.

  Klarence Krotz had never married but he was seen often in public in the company of lovely young women. Known around Washington as one of that city’s most eligible bachelors, Krotz seldom dated the same woman more than once or twice, a fact that led so-called insiders on Capitol Hill to consider the dashing Louisianian as something of a playboy. This conjecture, however, could not have been further from the truth. These young women were merely a cover for Krotz’s predilection for older, European pederasts, men who bore some resemblance to his father, Thaddeus.

  Washington, D.C., of course, was a virtual playground for Klarence, inhabited as it is by a fluctuating population of foreign diplomats. Had it not been for Zvatiff Thziz-Tczili, a sixty-eight-year-old lobbyist for the Bulgarian sardine industry, who had become Klarence’s close companion during his most recent term in Congress and who was about to retire, Krotz probably would not have decided to run for governor of his home state. It was at Zvatiff’s suggestion that Klarence now set his sights on Baton Rouge, encouraged by his companion and mentor in world diplomacy to look ahead, to use the governorship as a necessary stepping-stone to the presidency of the United States.

  Thziz-Tczili had lived and worked in Washington for nearly forty years, and in Klarence Krotz he saw the first serious hope for a genuine new world order since the golden days of the Axis powers. Krotz was young, handsome, and prone to a type of intellectual infantilism Zvatiff Thziz-Tczili felt confident in his ability to manipulate. In Klarence, the Sofia-born sardine power broker believed he had found his Trilby, his ultimate tool. That it would have come in the form of an heir to a Louisiana cement manufacturing fortune Zvatiff could not have guessed, but he trusted his intuition. When Klarence knelt before the old Bulgarian and took into his mouth the mottled, thick, short but still powerful Eastern European organ, Thziz-Tczili felt the blood of human destiny course through his veins. He and Klarence Kosciusko Krotz, Zvatiff felt, were about to make history.

  DAY OF THE MULE

  croesus ‘spit’ spackle, thirty-two, a member of the Holy Order of Everlasting Yahoos, and Demetrious ‘Ice D’ Youngblood, twenty-eight, a member of the El-Majik Nation, an African-American prison gang, hacksawed their way through the bars on a cell window in the De Soto Parish jail at Mansfield, Louisiana, then dropped down two knotted bedsheets to freedom. The white supremacist and the black separatist had escaped together after watching The Defiant Ones, a 1958 movie, on TV in the jail recreation area. In the film, Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier star as southern convicts, one white, one black, who are on the run from the law while shackled together. Though they hate each other, the men in the movie are forced to live like Siamese twins, finally coming to respect and care for a person they had been bred to despise.

  The Defiant Ones had inspired Spit and Ice D, who figured correctly that the guards would not consider the possibility of their assisting one another, having housed them together in the first place out of plain meanness, in the hope that the two men would do each other severe bodily harm. However, Ice D had fashioned a crude hacksaw out of a bedspring, and the supposed foes worked in concert until the hundred-year-old iron bars gave way. Each man was intelligent enough to recognize their having been exploited by the guards, and their bond as fellow rejects of the system was strong enough for them to decide to stick together once they were loose outside the walls.

  ‘Spit,’ said Ice D, as they made their way toward Highway 49 through the woods just west of Ajax, ‘we the kind of men can make a difference we try, you know?’

  ‘What you mean, D?’

  ‘Mean I’m tired as you takin’ table scraps.’

  ‘Hell, yes. I been beat like a rented mule, you can witness. Time the mule have his day.’

  ‘Ain’t no black or white about it, neither, Spit. You dig? The man dump dirty water off the porch, he don’t pay no mind who stand below.’

  ‘Tell you, D. Other day I heard on the news the Kluxers over in Gainesville, Georgia, wanted to enter a float in the local Christmas parade titled “I’m Dreamin’ of a White Christmas.”’

  ‘Forgive me not laughin’.’

  ‘Didn’t strike me funny, neither. City official found some excuse to cancel the parade. Didn’t want to deal with that.’

  ‘You still support that HOOEY All-Powerful Beast motherfucker?’

  ‘Klarence Kosciusko Krotz. Not no more, D. I ain’t got no leader.’

  ‘I’m gon’ kill the fool, Spit. Like you to help me.’

  ‘What about your boy, El-Majik? He ain’t no different.’

  ‘Okay, Spit We kill him next First Krotz, then El-Majik. What you say?’

  ‘Least we can do, D. We can’t put some good in the world, might as well take out some bad.’

  THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE

  when he was a boy, Cleon Tone decided that he would be the one to discover the secret of the universe. His Southern Baptist parents took him to church regularly, he attended Sunday School, but Cleon did not entirely bite on the concept of creationism. At eight and a half years old, the future preacher inclined more to scientific reckoning than he did toward blind purchase of the idea of the Garden of Eden.

  During a discussion of Adam and Eve one Sunday noon, the perspicacious Cleon announced to his class that it would be he who correctly ascertained the origin of man. His Bible studies teacher, an unmarried woman in her late thirties named Myrtis Wyatt, took a piece of bituminous coal the size of a hockey puck from the top drawer of her desk, pried apart the blaspheming boy’s lips, and f
orced it between them.

  ‘And the Lord said unto him,’ Myrtis Wyatt pronounced, her hands holding firm Cleon’s birdlike shoulders, ‘“Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.”’

  From that time forward, Cleon Tone never questioned the explanation for man’s place in the universe or gave expression to his thoughts in regard to an alternative genesis. Myrtis Wyatt never did marry, and at the age of fifty-six, while pruning roses in her wheelchair-bound mother’s garden, a mud wasp invaded the tympanic membrane of the spinster’s right ear, where its sting proved fatal. Myrtis’s paralyzed mother sat watching her daughter writhe in agony on the ground while the winged insect crawled deeper and deeper into the aural cavity. The old woman was entirely helpless in the face of death, a distinction that allowed her a momentary kinship with those persons more abled than she.

  CLOSE CALLS

  ‘did you know that beginning on this day in the year 1916 the temperature at Browning, Montana, fell a hundred degrees in twenty-four hours, from forty-four degrees to minus fifty-six?’

  ‘Don’t say.’

  ‘Best believe it. Yesterday in 1932, a hundred-yard-wide tornado ripped through Gibson County, Tennessee. Killed ten members of a family of thirteen whose home was swept away.’

  Cleon was seated at the counter of Plain Annie’s Eatery on Toulouse Street having a morning coffee and jelly doughnut. Coco Navajoa, a retired prizefighter in his late forties who once had been the number-five-ranked featherweight boxer in the world, according to Ring magazine, sat on Cleon’s right, smoking a Pall Mall. Coco was a weather freak who lived on St Philip Street in a room filled with books and magazines and newspaper clippings having to do with meteorological events.