Southern Nights

by Barry Gifford

  ‘We don’t neither,’ said Junebug, enjoying her cigar. ‘Least, not me.’

  ‘I,’ Madonna Kim corrected her. ‘Not I.’

  ‘Didn’t think you did,’ said Junebug.

  Marble Lesson stood up and the room became quiet.

  ‘I’ve decided to let Tombilena Gayoso take care of her brother in this case,’ Marble announced. ‘I’m confident she’ll handle the situation to our satisfaction. The others, we’ll do.’

  ‘Whatever’s right,’ Saramel said, and the others echoed her.

  Unbidden, the women rose as one and joined hands in a circle, closing their eyes as they did so. Junebug bit tenderly on the Prince.

  Marble spoke: ‘“For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, and the anguish as of her that bringeth 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.”

  ‘Thus spake Jeremiah, who also sayeth: “Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces . . .” Praise Jesus, bless these beasts we embody for the Lord’s duty. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ chorused the women.

  BLACK KISS

  the night before Tombilena left for Delacroix, Marble had handed her a seventeen-shot nine-millimeter Glock pistol and a copy of Magnificent Female: An Intimate Memoir of Hilda Brausen by Eva von Blutvergiftung, translated from the German by Irma Zunge.

  These items were on the front seat beside Tombilena Gayoso as she drove east in her Toyota 4-Runner on Louisiana State Highway 46. Finding herself too agitated to sleep last night, Tombilena had read several chapters of Magnificent Female before finally falling out for a couple of hours. Eva von Blutvergiftung had been Hilda Brausen’s governess from the age of four until Hilda turned thirteen, at which time Eva, then in her early thirties, introduced her precocious charge to the carnal delights of Sapphic culture. This sexual liaison continued secretly for four years, until the pair were discovered engaged in an act they referred to as ‘releasing the pythoness’ on the pantry floor of the Brausen family summer home in Blindheit by Hilda’s father, Bruno. Horrified and enraged, Herr Brausen beat both women with a mop handle so severely that they required hospitalization.

  Bruno Brausen, a beer baron whose brewery empire extended from Munich to Mexico City to Shanghai, disowned his seventeen-year-old daughter, casting her into the world with a subsistence-level stipend to be doled out to her by his lawyers only until she reached the age of twenty-one. Those same lawyers brought charges against the woman their client perceived as a heinous corrupter of youth, and succeeded in providing her—subsequent to a highly publicized trial—a six-year prison sentence for the practice of deviant behavior with a child.

  It was during her incarceration at the women’s penal colony on the island of Schwips that Eva von Blutvergiftung wrote the first part of her memoir. She then set it aside until after Hilda’s death. Because of Hilda Brausen’s notoriety as a polemicist prior to World War I, and the public controversy that ensued concerning the circumstances of her death, Eva—who had not seen or corresponded with her former lover since the details of their relationship were served up to the masses by the European press in the most scandal-inducing fashion—completed her book, including in it not only material of a personal nature, but an eccentric analysis of female sexual urges and responses later acknowledged by Wilhelm Reich as having proved extremely useful to his research for The Function of the Orgasm.

  Suppressed by the governments of Germany and Austria for more than a decade following its initial publication in Zurich in 1920, Magnificent Female became an international best-seller, and had never been out of print in the German, French, Italian, and English languages during its author’s lifetime. Eva von Blutvergiftung died in 1960 in New York City, where she had been the proprietress of a vivarium on Second Avenue that specialized in pythons. She was believed to be at least ninety years old.

  Tombilena found the book difficult—in part due to Irma Zunge’s stilted and dated translation—but fascinating. Aside from the story of the love affair between the woman and the girl, Eva von Blutvergiftung’s copious classifications of sexual dynamics mystified Tombilena. She never knew there was so much to say about fucking. What she did know, she decided, was that reading Eva von Blutvergiftung’s exegesis served to suppress in her sexual desire of any kind. Not that she had been up for much these days, anyway, but old Eva, Tombilena thought, was as weird a turnoff as ever there was likely to be.

  Tombilena glanced down at the Glock, admired its contours, and lifted it with her right hand. She balanced the gun in her palm as she returned her gaze to the road, then was suddenly startled by the lethal feeling implicit in the pistol’s weight. A blackness crept up her arm and Tombilena dropped the weapon onto the seat. She pressed hard the inside of her right wrist against her lips and kissed its heat, then managed to pull the 4-Runner off to the side and kill the engine before blacking out.

  SOUVENIRS

  ‘lightnin’ terrify you, Miss Marble?’

  Marble Lesson was visiting Victoria China Realito at Junebug Gilliam’s house, where the recuperating rape victim was staying out of the public eye.

  ‘Never been comfortable about it,’ Marble said, ‘ever since I was in a Greyhound was struck by it in Mississippi. Bus crashed, killed all the passengers except me. I was fourteen, then.’

  ‘After I lost my child by drownin’,’ said Victoria China, ‘I drifted for years. Went from one place to another, not really carin’ what happened to me. Drank a lot, mostly turkey wine. Then I met a man on the street in West Memphis, Arkansas, straightened me out. Man had been an agronomist before he become a bottle baby. We took up together. One time we was sheltered inside an abandoned buildin’ durin’ a fearsome storm, and he told me all about how lightnin’ helps the crops grow.’

  Marble, who was seated in a straight-backed wicker chair next to the porch swing Victoria China was stretched out on, studied the woman’s face. Blue, black, gray, and red lines decorated the topography like an AAA roadmap of central Illinois.

  ‘Thought that’s an old wives’ tale,’ said Marble.

  ‘Ain’t. As lightnin’ passes through the atmosphere, it converts nitrogen into ammonia, and ammonia helps the plants. Soybeans and locust trees convert nitrogen into ammonia too, same as blue-green algae. Course, any organic matter decomposes in the soil does the same job. It’s one of the basic processes creates an environment can support plants and animals both.’

  ‘You learn all this from that wino you run with in West Memphis?’

  ‘He’s the one sparked my interest in lightnin’. I read up on it some after that. Me and Emil—that was his name, Emil Mooth—had taught at a college up east. Professor of agronomy, I guess. He sure enough knew about plants. We got separated somehow in Helena, Arkansas, it was, and I ain’t seen him since.’

  ‘Ms Realito, I just want you to know that we at Mary Mother of God are gonna handle this situation in our own way.’

  The highways and rivers of Victoria China’s face shifted furiously, as if affected by an earthquake of considerable magnitude.

  ‘First scalps got took durin’ the French and Indian War,’ she said. ‘Frogs forced the savages to do it, keep an accurate count of the kills. What type proof you gals fixin’ to bring me?’

  DRESS CODE

  campo gayoso poured himself a third cup of Community coffee, left it black, and sat down at his kitchen table. He let the Patsy Cline tape play a second time. One of his girlfriends, Billy Kate Kimbrough, had brought it over more than a month before and hadn’t been by since. ‘I’ve got these little things, she’s got you,’ Patsy sang. Old-time country wasn’t the kind of music Campo usually listened to, but he had to admit this woman had a natural way of keeping a person’s attention. Campo liked things natural, meaning when, where,
and what he wanted; and never mind why. Being that this was his first free day since his daddy, Rodrigue, had bailed him out of jail on the rape and aggravated battery beef, Campo contemplated his natural feeling for human contact, picked up the telephone, and dialed Billy Kate’s number.

  ‘’Lo.’

  ‘Hey, Miss Billy Kate Kimbrough. You answer this question correctly, you win a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada. AEP.’

  ‘What’s the letters mean?’

  ‘All expenses paid. Now, why did the blonde get so upset when she got her new driver’s license in the mail?’

  ‘Let me think.’

  ‘Time’s up! She was upset to see she got a F in sex.’

  ‘Saint Rose of Lima, Campo, you loose already?’

  ‘Iron bars couldn’t hold me, but your arms could.’

  ‘That my Patsy Cline tape playin’ in the background?’

  ‘Put it on this mornin’, thinkin’ of you. Want to come get it?’

  ‘Love to, Campo, but I can’t. My uncle Rex got arrested five this A.M. for lewd and lascivious behavior over to Violet. I got to go take care of my cousin Connie’s kids while she bonds him out.’

  ‘What’d her daddy do now?’

  ‘Exposed his self to a raghead clerk at the Kwik-Way. Uncle Rex was wearin’ his blue dress.’

  ‘Seems it’s his favorite garment of late.’

  ‘Uncle Rex is forty-six years old and my guess is now he’ll have to be committed to Oriental.’

  ‘He’ll do good, they let him bring his wardrobe. Rex ain’t never hurt nobody, has he?’

  ‘Only the tons of mental wreckage he caused his daughter, is all.’

  ‘Connie’s makin’ out. She and Edgar Zarzoso still together?’

  ‘More or less. Lately’s less.’

  ‘She’d be better off chuckin’ that red-ass altogether.’

  ‘Edgar ain’t partial to Uncle Rex’s habits, neither.’

  ‘They do got decidedly different taste in clothes.’

  ‘This ain’t will be a good day for me, Campo, pie. I’m on the runny now, too. Just started.’

  ‘Sight of female blood never bothered me, Billy Kate. You know it.’

  ‘I do want to hear your side of the story. Maybe I can get away later.’

  ‘Call me, or I’ll be at the bar.’

  ‘Okay, pie. Bye.’

  Campo hung up. Patsy was wailing away on ‘Sweet Dreams.’ He took a sip of coffee and decided to spike it with a shot of Wild Turkey.

  Tombilena walked in, saw the bottle in her brother’s hand, and said, ‘I hope you know you got a problem.’

  Campo laughed, showed a good many of his deteriorating teeth, and poured.

  ‘Bem-vindo, irmá!’ he said. ‘I ain’t never worn no blue dress, if that’s what you mean.’

  THE FUTURE OF JAZZ

  junebug gilliam and Marble Lesson stood next to one another in the laundry room at Mary Mother of God, folding clothes they had just extracted from the dryer. Every woman who worked at the center took regular turns doing the chores. Junebug enjoyed folding laundry, she told Marble, because the repetition reminded her of who she was and why she was on the planet.

  ‘The great fault in women is to desire to be like men.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fortune I got last night in a fortune cookie,’ said Junebug. ‘At Tu Luong. Almost didn’t pay the bill.’

  ‘Point of fact, though, Junie, there ain’t no good reason a woman should desire to be like a man. Not that the Chinamen make up them fortunes got any kinda clue, but it’s so.’

  ‘This mornin’ I got up and played an old record belonged to Elton Esto, my second husband. He was a drummer with King Wiggly and His Jazz Rabbits. You’re too young, prob’ly, remember ’em.’

  ‘What was the record?’

  ‘Thelonious Monk and Johnny Griffin at the Five Spot. That second cut, “Comin’ on the Hudson,” where they just slide ahead and drop a big blue dream down your ear before you know what’s happened. Elton Esto used to play it, or “Bolivar Blues,” when he’d get up, which was usually about two or three in the day. Light a Kool, fix a double Bloody Mary, and by the time he’s ready for coffee, there’d be Monk plunkin’ on “Functional.” Elton Esto was mad about Monk in the mornin’. Said his music kept the earth from tippin’ all the way over.’

  ‘What become of him?’

  ‘Monk? Or Esto?’

  ‘Esto.’

  ‘Had a fatal heart attack while he was freebasin’ with King Wiggly’s wife, Phaedra. They’d been carryin’ on behind nobody’s back for months. Both Wig and I knew about it, and there was some untidy scenes, but when Phaedra and Esto got torn up on dope, I bailed. Wig forced Phaedra to go through rehab, but it didn’t take. She got her throat cut while she was hookin’ to buy drugs a year later in Miami. Cops found her drowned in her own blood, four A.M. front of the Hotel Casablanca.’

  Marble said, ‘“Keep me from the snares which they have laid for me . . . Let the wicked fall into their own nets, whilst that I withal escape.”’

  ‘“Keep me, O Lord,”’ said Junebug, ‘“from the hands of the wicked; preserve me from the violent men, who have purposed to overthrow my goings.”’

  The women ceased their folding and embraced.

  ‘“Be not afraid of sudden fear,”’ Marble whispered, ‘“neither of the desolation of the wicked, when it cometh.”’

  ‘When we gonna go for them men harmed Victoria China?’

  ‘Soon as Tombilena finishes with her brother.’

  ‘Think she’s capable?’

  ‘It’s a serious test, Junie, but I think she’ll know the truth and act accordingly.’

  Junebug held Marble by the shoulders at arm’s length and studied her.

  ‘You’re a wonder, girl. I don’t mind sayin’, in my experience, you’re the prize pumpkin.’

  Marble smiled and said, ‘“I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart.”’

  ‘Marble, you think the devil got any idea what he’s up against at Mary Mother of God?’

  ‘He did,’ said Marble, ‘our work wouldn’t be close to complicated.’

  HOME TRUTHS

  ‘okay, tommy, how it was. This woman, this Vicky, she call herself was with Gallo Viudo, who he’d met her in N.O. earlier that night. They was both drinkin’ in Phil’s Lounge on St Roch when he tol’ her how he’s from Delacroix, and she say she never been there. So, he say, let’s go.’

  Tombilena and Campo were sitting on the front porch of his house, drinking Mount Gay rum and orange juice. It was clear to Tommy that her brother did not consider this situation to be of the utmost gravity. Campo’s willingness to relate the story seemed to her more in the nature of a favor or polite indulgence, rather than the matter of life and death that she knew it to be.

  ‘My guess is Gallo figure he got him showtime. You know, for later that evenin’. This point, was nothin’ complicated about it.’

  ‘She come out with Gallo in his car?’

  ‘Truck, yeah. Tan Ford Ranger, his clutch is always goin’ out. You need more rum in there, irmá?’

  ‘No, thanks, Campo. I’m fine.’

  Campo sipped his drink.

  ‘So, okay. There she is now, in the bar. We all there, shootin’ pool. Poco, Lucky Yema, Valer La Pena, Sapo Feo, me.’

  ‘What time is this?’

  ‘Ten, maybe. Maybe a little after. Gallo brings this Vicky. We look at her, woman maybe his age. Nothin’ special about it.’

  ‘Was she drunk?’

  ‘Not yet, I wouldn’t guess.’

  ‘She drank with you boys?’

  ‘Pretty steady, yeah. Towards midnight, midnight-half, when things got strange.’

  ‘How strange?’

  ‘Tommy, you know, this Vicky, she was lookin’ to do business.’

  ‘You sayin’ Gallo was pimpin’ for her?’

  Campo nodded, sipped at his glass.

  ‘He maybe had ideas there. Mentio
ned to Lucky she’d be willin’, anybody had the urge and the cash for gash.’

  ‘How about you?’

  Campo laughed. ‘Okay, look, here’s what happened. I’m at the bar. Next thing I see this Vicky is spread out on the pool table, Sapo’s climbin’ over her. Nobody’s seemin’ to mind this is goin’ on, certainly not her.’

  ‘Gallo take Sapo’s money?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. Anyways, all the fellas in the bar is crowdin’ around the pool table, givin’ advice to Sapo and shit.’

  Tombilena studied her beloved brother’s face. She could discern no remorse in it.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  Campo shrugged, drank some more.

  ‘It’s about it, Tommy. Every man took his turn put a twenty in the left corner pocket by her head, that’s right. She maybe was gonna split it with Gallo later. Things got hazy. Wasn’t nasty or nothin’, then.’

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘Valer, he was goddam drunk, and was havin’ difficulty, so he grabbed a cue and used it on her.’

  ‘You sayin’ he couldn’t get it up so he raped the woman with a poolstick?’

  ‘I didn’t even know what was happenin’ until she was shoutin’. Valer tol’ her shut up, he was usin’ the thick end, and he’d paid his money, check out the pocket.’

  ‘You try to stop him?’

  ‘Tommy, I was drunk, too. It didn’t seem so bad at the time.’

  Tombilena stood up and showed her back to Campo. She removed the nine-millimeter Glock pistol from her purse, sucked in a large quantity of sultry air, let it out, turned around, and pointed the big ugly thing at her brother.

  ‘Hey, Tommy! Irmá! he said, smiling a little, ‘What’s this?’

  ‘“And I will bring distress upon men,”’ proclaimed Tombilena Gayoso, ‘“because they have sinned against the Lord: and their blood shall be poured out as dust, and their flesh as the dung.”’

  Before Campo could quit smiling, his sister tripped off four shots. Two of the bullets penetrated Campo’s forehead a few centimeters apart above the left eye. One bullet seared his thick, curly black hair and plunged through the wood directly behind him into the living room, there ricocheting off a metal table lamp and lodging in the ceiling. The fourth shell entered Campo’s open mouth and exited the rear of his skull at a forty-degree angle, gouging a deep hole in a half-rotten plank in the porch floor.