Southern Nights

by Barry Gifford

  ‘What about tomorrow?’ asked Cleon.

  ‘In 1938, the great aurora over southeastern Europe was characterized by a fantastic brilliant red display and gave an illusion it might be the reflection of a gigantic fire below the horizon. Hundreds of fire engines raced toward the horizon from many parts of the continent. The same day in 1961, the worst ice storm in the history of the state of Georgia closed most of the schools and state roads. This condition lasted two days.’

  Two men, one black and one white, entered the eatery and sat down on counter stools to Cleon’s left. Plain Annie, Cleon observed, served them black coffee. The two new customers wore shabby clothes and were in need of a shave.

  ‘How about the day after tomorrow?’

  Coco clucked his tongue and grinned. ‘A real red-letter day,’ he said. ‘Belouve, La Réunion Island, in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, set the world twelve-hour rainfall record of 52.76 inches.’

  ‘Coco, you oughta get some TV station to hire you,’ said Plain Annie, a compact, red-faced woman of indeterminate middle age whose thumb-high black roots betrayed her platinum mane. ‘Better a genuine weather scholar, such as yourself, rather than them failed actors they got can’t hardly locate the prompter. More coffee, men?’

  ‘No, thanks, Annie,’ said Coco.

  ‘Just a drop,’ said Cleon.

  ‘Couple mean-lookin’ boys there,’ Annie whispered as she poured. ‘Fresh from Angola, you ask me.’

  The reverend-in-exile glanced their way, then raised the cup to his lips.

  ‘“And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself,” so saith Isaiah,’ he said.

  ‘“Surely, he scorneth the scorners: but he giveth grace unto the lowly.” Proverbs,’ Coco added.

  ‘Charity ain’t never been my specialty, I admit,’ said Plain Annie, who then moved down the counter.

  ‘Freshen that for ya?’ she asked the two strangers.

  ‘Sure,’ said Spit.

  ‘Obliged,’ said Ice D.

  ‘You fellas from close by?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Depends what you calls close,’ Ice D said.

  ‘We just quit the air force,’ said Spit. ‘We was stationed at Keesler, over to Biloxi.’

  ‘Bet you-all’re pleased not to be prisoners no more.’

  Ice D glared hard for a moment at Annie, then relaxed after Spit said, ‘Yes, ma’am. We just lookin’ now to be prisoners of love.’

  ‘“Love is strong as death,” sang Solomon,’ Plain Annie said, and almost smiled.

  ‘Reckon them is strong-arm boogers,’ Coco confided to Tone.

  ‘“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Hebrews,’ said Cleon.

  ‘In 1957, on a warm and sunny July afternoon in Wilmington, Delaware, a dust devil suddenly appeared and tore roofs off several houses.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Don’t count on the weather,’ Coco said, ‘even when the sun’s shinin’.’

  GOING DOWN THAT ROAD FEELING BAD

  ‘oh, the law they never got him, ’cause the devil got him first,’ sang Ray Bob Realito as he unlocked and pushed aside the accordion security door in front of Rebel Ray Bob’s Pawn & Loan on the corner of St Claude and Elysian Fields avenues in New Orleans. He next turned off the burglar alarm and let himself in the main entrance, closing the door behind him. Ray Bob reversed the hanging sign behind the glass panel from cerrado to abierto and continued to hum his favorite tune. He turned on the overhead fluorescent lights and made his way to and behind the pawn counter, where he pushed the power and play buttons on the VCR set up beneath a small platform featuring a fifty-inch monitor that could be viewed from any part of the shop.

  Two automobiles tore along a country road in glorious black and white on the screen above Ray Bob Realito. One car was chasing the other at night. The cars were old, 1950 Ford sedans, and the face of the driver of the lead car remained hidden as he skillfully outraced and eluded his pursuer. Ray Bob busied himself at the counter and did not turn to look at the picture until the credits rolled.

  Thunder Road, a 1958 movie about moonshiners starring Robert Mitchum, was Ray Bob Realito’s all-time favorite film. He played the video every day in his pawnshop on the fifty-inch screen. He kept the sound off, since he knew every word of dialogue and each lick and lyric of the title song, which had been co-composed by the star, Robert Mitchum, who also had co-written the story on which the screenplay was based. Mitchum had recorded the title tune in 1958, and it had been a big hit at that time. Ray Bob never understood why someone else had sung it on the movie sound track.

  It was Robert Mitchum, of course, who was driving the lead Ford in the opening sequence, sticking it to the federal agent, who was no match for the supreme runner of illegal alcohol in the South. In the movie, Mitchum outruns and defies both government agents and organized crime thugs looking to muscle him out of business; but neither they nor either of two women can claim him before Satan steals away with the legendary driver.

  Ray Bob Realito was sixteen years old when he first saw Thunder Road at La Sal de la Vida Drive-in in Chicken Neck, Texas, where he had been born and raised, and the movie had deeply affected him. The strong, stoic Mitchum character, the man who never complained or made excuses for deals that derailed or went bad, was the kind of person Ray Bob aspired to be. He felt that Klarence Kosciusko Krotz, the Real American Party candidate for governor, was such an individual, and Ray Bob had tacked up a blue and white vote for kkk—the real american way poster on the inside of the store above the front door so that customers could see it on their way out.

  The Realito family had been dirt poor during Ray Bob’s boyhood. His parents had worked as pickers in the cotton fields of East Texas, and so had he and his older sister, Victoria China. Ray Bob had left Chicken Neck, Texas, soon after seeing Thunder Road and joined the army in Houston. After his discharge, he worked in the oil fields around Morgan City, Louisiana, saved his wages, and bought into what was then called Rebel Billy’s Pawn & Loan. The owner, Billy Shores, taught Ray Bob the business, and following Shores’s death Ray Bob took over and changed the name to his own. Ray Bob had lost touch with his people soon after his enlistment. All he knew of them since that time was that they had left Texas and moved west, probably to California. His parents were illiterate, but Victoria China, who had attended school, as had Ray Bob, through fifth grade, wrote him once when he was at boot camp, saying she was going to have a baby and that she planned to kill it as soon as it was born.

  Ray Bob sat down on a two-step swivel stool with a wicker back support and opened his copy of Where the Money Was, the autobiography of Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber. When a reporter asked Sutton why he’d robbed banks, Willie replied, ‘Because that’s where the money is.’ Ray Bob believed in reading a book a week. Last week he had read Rip Ford’s Texas by John Salmon Ford, a memoir by the nineteenth-century soldier and Indian fighter. Next week Ray Bob planned to delve into Tales of the Angler’s Eldorado, Zane Grey’s chronicle of his fishing exploits in New Zealand. Not only did reading help to make the time pass as he waited for customers, but Ray Bob believed the exercise to be a proper substitute for travel. These days Ray Bob never left New Orleans, his feeling being that the psychological uncertainty occasioned by travel elevated the blood pressure and therefore constituted a life-shortening threat. Ray Bob’s desire was to live well into the twenty-first century, long enough to witness order having been restored in the country. Then he would not have to go down that road feeling bad. Klarence Krotz, Ray Bob thought, might be the first unfaltering step in that direction.

  The door opened and two men entered: Cleon Tone and Coco Navajoa. Ray Bob interrupted his perusal of Willie Sutton’s description of a scene in One-arm Quigg’s pool hall in 1921. Happy Gleason was giving Willie the bad eye and Ray Bob knew some serious shit was about to fly so he hated to stop reading, but there was a front door and it was unloc
ked between nine and nine, during which hours anyone might walk in, and sooner or later, Ray Bob knew, they did.

  ‘Need me a piece,’ said the reverend. ‘Iron won’t choke timin’s crucial.’

  Ray Bob took a good look at Cleon Tone. Selling a man a weapon of terminal destruction was not merely mercantilism but a matter of conscience.

  ‘What’s your price range?’

  ‘Twenty-five. Thirty most.’

  Ray Bob brought up a handgun from below and laid it down on the worn mahogany countertop.

  ‘This here’s a rare enough beast. H&R .32 five-shot. Field-tested nigger shark, kept oiled. Twenty-seven fifty, take it home and pet the daylights out of it. Stay-put-type piece.’

  Cleon picked up the gun and inspected it from every angle.

  ‘What you think, Coco?’ he asked the ex-boxer.

  ‘Us Hispanics, man, we know knives, not guns.’

  Cleon took out two twenty-dollar bills, tossed them on the counter, and said, ‘Deal.’

  Ray Bob said, ‘Throw in a dozen cartridges and we’ll call it thirty, how about? Just sign the arms register here and fill in an address.’

  Cleon nodded and picked up a pen that was next to an opened logbook and signed, ‘Rev. C. Tone, formerly Daytime Ark., now N.O.’

  Ray Bob put a box of bullets and a ten where the twenties had been. Cleon put the .32 in one pocket of his jacket, his change and the box in another.

  ‘Take special care, gentlemen,’ Ray Bob said to the men’s backs.

  He opened his book and read, ‘Despite the fact that his left arm had been amputated, he would set the pool stick in the crook of his arm, just above the stub, and he could beat just about anybody in Brooklyn.’

  PRECIOUS

  ‘zvatiff, come listen! She’s on!’

  Zvatiff Thziz-Tczili licked the sardine juice from his fingers and hurried from the kitchen to the den, where Klarence Krotz was watching television. Klarence had recently become addicted to the broadcasts of a televangelist prophetess named Presciencia Espanto, and had made Zvatiff, who had never seen or heard her, promise that he would watch the show with him tonight.

  ‘Sit next to me,’ Klarence said, when Zvatiff came into the room. ‘She hasn’t said anything yet’

  Presciencia ‘Precious’ Espanto was thirty-six years old. She had been born in a small village near Puerto Angel, Mexico, on the Gulf of Tehuantepec, where she lived until she was six, at which time her family moved north, crossing the border illegally just west of McAllen, Texas. In McAllen, her father, who was known in his native village as El Profeta, was killed in a bar fight by a fellow patron who took exception to his prediction that the president of the United States would die in Dallas during an upcoming visit to that city.

  After the death of El Profeta, Presciencia and her younger twin sisters, Esplendida and Espiritosa, were taken by their mother, Despareja, to Houston, where Despareja worked as a prostitute. Presciencia left Houston when she was sixteen in the company of a traveling power tool salesman named Ed Ard, who paid Despareja five hundred dollars for the privilege. Presciencia traveled with Ed Ard around his territory, the Southwest, for four months, until she ran away in the middle of one night while he slept off a drunk in the Brazo Negro Motel in Gila Bend, Arizona. She never saw Ed Ard or her mother and sisters again.

  Presciencia worked as a hotel maid in a number of towns and cities until she realized that, like her father, she had the gift of prophecy. In Las Cruces, New Mexico, Presciencia started her own ministry, which she called La Iglesia de los Ingratos—the Church of the Ungrateful—based on the assumption that human beings can never entirely appreciate the gift of life until it is taken from them, and must therefore remain ungrateful until their ascent to heaven or descent into hell. At first Presciencia’s followers were mostly Mexicans, farm workers, ranch hands, and domestics, but as word spread about her ability to prophesy, a wide variety of people, including whites and Indians, joined her church.

  Because she was an illegal alien, Presciencia moved often, communicating by letter and telephone with those who could not follow her. Eventually she was deported, but regained entry to the United States shortly thereafter by legal means at the behest of the wife of a US senator from Louisiana who had become a believer. It was because of Sally Blaine, whose husband, Senator Rantoul ‘Bingo’ Blaine, was later killed in a plane crash over Big Tuna, Texas, that Presciencia came to establish the Church of the Ungrateful in Baton Rouge. After the Espanto teachings reached cable TV, Klarence Krotz, among tens of thousands of others, became fascinated by this female preacher, eager to hear her every word and witness her healings and prophecies.

  The old Bulgarian pederast and his protégé sat transfixed before the electronic image of Presciencia Espanto, her long, curly blond hair contrasting dramatically with her burnt-sienna skin. She wore wraparound dark glasses at all times now, to protect her inner harmony from vision thieves, and covered her body with a plain white cotton robe. Only Sally Blaine, the former senator’s widow, and now Presciencia’s lover, knew that beneath it the prophetess was naked. Seated behind Precious on the stage were her bodyguards, several young Hispanic men recruited from the No Chingues gang in Albuquerque.

  ‘Hear me, ungrateful ones,’ Presciencia said, her golden head bowed toward the microphone. ‘Hear the black wings as they beat above, above and beyond. Hear the words of Jeremiah: “Behold, he shall come up as clouds, and his chariots shall be as a whirlwind: his horses are swifter than eagles. Woe unto us! for we are spoiled... wash thine heart from wickedness, that thou mayest be saved. How long shall thy vain thoughts lodge within thee?” Oh, thou ungrateful, what of your expectations? “When thou art spoiled, what wilt thou do? Though thou clothest thyself with crimson, though thou deckest thee with ornaments of gold, though thou rentest thy face with painting, in vain shalt thou make thyself fair, thy lovers will despise thee, they will seek thy life. For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, and the anguish as of her that bringest forth her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion, that bewaileth herself, that spreadeth her hands, saying, Woe is me now! for my soul is wearied because of murderers.”’

  ‘She’s the one, Zvatiff, the one person we need to put us over the top,’ said Klarence, muting the sound of the television with his remote control.

  ‘Her people, they will vote?’

  ‘They’ll vote if Precious tells them to vote. They’ll do whatever she says. If we can get her to back me, it’ll show the niggers and the nigger lovers that a prominent person of color believes in me. It’ll turn ’em around without turnin’ off the Kluxers, who’ll figure rightly it’s a political necessity. I don’t have to explain myself to them, they know who I am and always will be. Forget the Jews; we’ll take care of them after.’

  The sardine doyen nodded and danced the stubby, oily fingers of his right hand over his bald head.

  ‘We shall meet with her, then,’ Thziz-Tczili said. ‘It would be good if she will prophesy your victory.’

  Klarence smiled and placed his right hand over the old man’s crotch.

  ‘“Though they dig into hell,” as Amos says, “thence shall mine hand take them; though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down,”’ said the candidate. ‘Miss Precious and I, between us we got the world by the balls.’

  ELOHIM

  spit and ice d needed new clothes.

  ‘El-Majik always sayin’, a brother in need come to one of his Welcome Homes,’ said D, ‘supposed they provide him food, clothes, shelter in return for do some work. Sell they paper, Majik Speak, or somethin’.’

  ‘That ain’ hep me none,’ Spit said.

  ‘I take extra for you, Spit. Don’ nobody be knowin’ the diff’rence.’

  The two escapees sat on a bench in a small, triangular park on Magazine Street, smoking cigarettes.

  ‘You know where’s this Welcome Home in New Orleans?’ asked Spit

  ‘Looked it up in a phone book back at that café. Be on
Napoleon Avenue. Nearabouts, I think. Why don’t you wait here an’ I go see what up wit dem?’

  Spit sat alone on the bench and thought about how messed up everything was. Here he was, a grown man, an escaped convict without a cent except what he could steal, in need of clothes and shelter, partnered up with a black, intent on assassinating two men for the crime of lying in public.

  Being poor was a condition with which Spit was not unfamiliar. His single most horrifying childhood memory was of the time he had come into the house and found that his mama had fallen asleep in a chair while breast-feeding her newest born. The child had fallen asleep also and lay still in her lap while a gray-brown rat the size of Spit’s daddy’s shoe nibbled at the nipple of his mama’s left breast. Spit, who was seven years old when this happened, had tried to knock the rat off his mama, but the rapacious rodent bit into the woman’s breast, causing her to awaken with a shriek and drop the infant to the floor.

  Spit would never forget the sight of his mama twirling and howling in pain as she attempted to dislodge the gigantic rat. Her horrifying dance seemed to go on interminably while Spit watched and his baby sister cried. Finally, the Spackle mother managed to tear the beast from her chest, flinging the thing across the room as she collapsed. Spit had seen the rat float through the air as if in slow motion and land on all fours with his mama’s left nipple locked in its protruding teeth, then scurry away with the lactating treasure.

  The breeze blew a piece of newspaper against Spit’s right ankle and he reached down and picked it up. It was the front section of a week-old Times-Picayune, and Spit read a small item on the back page:

  embassy sought for extraterrestrials, was the heading. The story was taken from the Deutsche Pres-se-Agentur and datelined Geneva. ‘A sect that says it represents extraterrestrial beings wants an embassy in Switzerland,’ Spit read. ‘Claude Vorhilon, head of the 250-member sect that claims to be in contact with extraterrestrial beings called “Elo-him,” wants to put the embassy question to a nationwide vote.’