Southern Nights

by Barry Gifford

  Tombilena stood still, trembling, staring at the destroyed body of her only sibling, her weapon arm at rest.

  ‘“Shall they not rise up suddenly that shall bite thee?”’ spoke this first of Victoria China’s avengers.

  At that moment, Rodrigue Gayoso’s Dodge Ram pickup pulled up in front of his son’s house. Tombilena turned and saw her father’s face behind the windshield. She lifted the gun again, propped the barrel end on her lower lip, and exhausted Rodrigue’s progeny on this earth.

  THE TERRIBLENESS

  dear jesus,

  The truth is there is lots left for me to learn in this life. Tombilena Gayoso who I told You about before shot and killed her brother Campo and then shot and killed herself. This was not what I had in mind when I give her the German pistol that it would end with the suicide of a good woman. Her brother deserved to die no question of it in the view of Mary Mother of God but now we have lost a valuable person. I guess the weight on Tombilena’s brain of having been his judge jury and executioner kind of overwhelmed her. The mistake was to let her go alone and for this I must take the blame but if not for the horrible behavior practiced upon women by these depraved type men there would not have been this awful loss.

  Jesus I am getting at something and that is my fear being no matter what we of Mary Mother of God do the terribleness goes on and on. I and the others who take as our guide Your Word and the teachings of Hilda Brausen stand determined to combat the increasing terror. I believe personally there are evils on the horizon beyond anything any person of this earth has thought of. As Isaiah warned do I instruct my sisters I say to them that are of a fearful heart be strong fear not behold your God will come with vengeance but Jesus is vengeance enough?

  Your faithful

  Marble

  SOUTHERN COMFORT

  rodrigue gayoso was slumped buzzard-still on his barstool until Wesson Lesson bumped into him, knocking an empty shot glass from the practically catatonic fisherman’s fist.

  ‘Sorry, man,’ said the perpetrator, reaching for Rodrigue and holding on to the seated patron’s left shoulder, steadying himself. ‘I’m a right clumsy sonofabuck, ’specially when I’m drunk. Get you another’n. What you drinkin’?’

  Rodrigue Gayoso, devastated by the loss of both his son and daughter, had been poisoning himself at a steady clip for four hours in the Saturn Bar on St Claude Avenue in New Orleans. During the three days immediately following the hideous double deaths, Rodrigue had become numb. He’d handled the funeral arrangements, witnessed the entombment of his children, and not taken a drink until this afternoon, driving into the city to do it, not wanting to remain any longer in the vicinity of the greatest tragedy of his life.

  ‘Say, pardner, you breathin’?’ Wes asked. ‘Name your brand.’

  The bartender, a short, stubby, mostly bald middle-aged man with a weak-lidded left eye named Bosco Brouillard, set a fresh shot on the bar in front of Rodrigue and said to Wes, ‘Early Times.’

  Wes pulled a couple of crumpled dollar bills from his left front pants pocket and tossed them toward Bosco.

  ‘On me,’ he said. ‘If this fella’s dead, I’ll drink it.’

  ‘My children,’ said Rodrigue, moving only his lips. ‘My children are dead.’

  Wes Lesson was in his late thirties, a fair-haired, medium-sized man nursing a slight paunch. He toppled westward and landed on the stool next to the morose Isleño.

  ’Say what? Your kids is dead?’

  Rodrigue nodded. ’My wife, Feroza, she rest in peace. My children, Campo, Tombilena, now also.’

  The weather-wrinkled and sun-blackened fifty-two-year-old crabber committed a half turn, lifted the newly poured liquor, and drained the container with a sudden jerk. He rolled the glass with his flat, heavily calloused fingers, then replaced it gently on the mahogany countertop.

  ‘Boy, that’s rough,’ Wes Lesson said. ‘I got me a strange but beautiful daughter named Marble I’d hate to lose. There’s not much a parent can do once they’re big enough to turn a doorknob. Then on, either they’re hunters or the hunted, ain’t they?’

  Rodrigue Gayoso grunted. He opened and raised his crimson eyes just enough to verify the person to whom he was speaking.

  ‘My name’s Lesson, Wes Lesson. Let me buy you another.’

  ‘Obrigado. I am Rodrigue Gayoso.’

  Wes signaled to Bosco Brouillard for two more drinks, and the bartender brought them.

  ‘You from Delacroix?’ Bosco asked. ‘Heard on the news about a double murder out there the other day.’

  ‘Yes. Those were my children.’

  ‘Well, I am sorry as hell for you, Mr Gayoso,’ said Wes. ‘The world is gotten about as wicked as it can get, I guess.’

  ‘Foi um ato muito bruto. Custa-me trabalho crêo-lo.’

  ‘Can’t say I disagree, sir. Whatever it is you said.’

  Wes swallowed half of his Crown Royal and water, shook his head, and said, ‘“And the Lord said unto Satan, From whence comest thou?”’

  ‘“From goin’ to and fro in the earth,”’ answered Bosco, ‘“and from walkin’ up and down in it.”’

  ‘What can you do?’ Wes said.

  ‘Lamentar,’ said Rodrigue.

  ‘What?’ asked Wes.

  ‘To mourn,’ Bosco said. ‘The lot of the living is to mourn.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Wes.

  Bosco smiled and winked his weak-lidded left eye.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said.

  THE GIFT

  on marble lesson’s seventeenth birthday, at a party thrown for her at Mary Mother of God, she made an announcement that both surprised and delighted her fellow crusaders. An ovarian egg extracted from Helga Grandeza had been inseminated in vitro with the sperm of an anonymous donor, and the fertilized egg was then inserted into Marble’s womb. Marble was impregnated with Helga’s child, which the younger woman would bear on behalf of the collective. Amniocentesis could not be performed until the fourteenth week of pregnancy, Marble informed her cohorts, but if the child were female—which they were convinced it would be—she and Helga had decided to name her Hilda Brausen Grandeza-Lesson. This news was greeted by astonished gasps, followed by applause and an onslaught of feverish embracing.

  ‘This is a gift to all of us,’ said Marble. ‘A present to the women of the world. Hilda will be able to carry our message to the threshold of the twenty-second century.’

  Following the festivities at the center, Marble went home and found her father and a companion sitting in the front room of the house she shared with him on Upper Line, drinking whiskey. Both men were in an advanced state of inebriation.

  ‘H’lo, sweetheart. Happy Birthday,’ Wes Lesson said. ‘Meet my frien’, Rodrigue. Rodrigue, this’s my daughter, Marble. My one and only strange and beautiful daughter. Rodrigue’s a fisherman from Delacroix. Both his kids died recently. It’s a awful story, honey. Worst story I ever heard.’

  Marble walked over to where the last of the Gayosos sat half-conscious in a moth-eaten, rotting brown armchair, his eyes seven-eighths closed. She stood next to the chair and gazed down at Rodrigue. A large silver cross attached to a thin neck chain rested on his chest, the sculpted Christ figure rising and falling with each breath.

  ‘“For I reckon,”’ said Marble, ‘“that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.”’

  ‘That’s right, sweetheart,’ Wes Lesson said. ‘You tell it.’

  Marble looked at her drunken hulk of a father, and her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘“Arise, Daddy,”’ she said, ‘“and walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.”’

  Wesson Lesson raised his head and smiled at his daughter.

  ‘Baby,’ he said, I know goddam well you would. It’s just that I ain’t really up to it.’

  THE LAST OF THE JUST

  raid on charm school

  exposes female


  vigilante society

  new orleans, aug. 28 (sns)—New Orleans police, assisted by criminal enforcement agents of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, staged a late-night raid on the Hilda Brausen Charm School on Venus Street in the Gentilly Terrace section of this city.

  A spokesperson for the BATF revealed that the modeling and manners academy, patronized by many of the city’s most prominent families, was operating a clandestine escort service, dozens of whose male clients were murdered by women from whom they had expected sexual favors in exchange for the escort fee.

  Arrested in the raid were fifteen women, including four minors. The school’s owner-operator, Hilda Brausen Grandeza-Lesson, eluded capture and is believed to be in hiding somewhere in the New Orleans area.

  Seized at the scene were numerous automatic and semiautomatic weapons, an assortment of crossbows, swordcanes, switchblade knives, and handguns, along with a large quantity of China White heroin that government agents estimate would carry a street value of over two million dollars.

  According to federal agent Lance Boyle, Jr, who has been investigating the radical feminist underground movement of recent years, a vigilante group known as ‘Die Brausenkriegers’ (the Brausen Warriors), whose philosophy is based on the writings and legend of the German feminist thinker Hilda Brausen, are, Boyle says, ‘dedicated to cleansing the earth of dominant males. Their purpose is to reduce the role of men to that of drones in a beehive. The Brausens believe the sole purpose of the male is to service the queen.’

  Hilda Brausen died under mysterious circumstances during World War I, apparently while masquerading as a man in the German army. Her namesake, Hilda Brausen Grandeza-Lesson, who is believed to be in her mid-thirties, is the daughter of Sister Marble Lesson, founder of the Mary Mother of God Rescue Crusade, an international organization devoted to the welfare of women worldwide.

  Sister Lesson, who had been recognized by many humanitarian organizations and world governments for her selfless works, and who was often spoken of during her lifetime as a potential recipient of the Nobel Prize, was beheaded ten years ago by rebel tribesmen on the outskirts of Kismayu, Somalia. Sister Lesson had gone to Somalia to participate as a member of the planning commission of the Mary Mother of God Pan-African Condom Manufacturing Co.

  NIGHT LETTER

  dear jesus,

  Ever since the death of my mother I have lived in fear of this moment the time that I would be confronted with a major decision and have no one special person to whom I could turn for advice. This is why I have chosen to write to You knowing that my mother was Your faithful correspondent from her childhood until her demise in the jungle.

  I am writing this at midnight in the attic room of a house on Ptolemy Street in Algiers Louisiana where I am a fugitive and will have to leave tomorrow night. The question I am asking myself is how best to continue the struggle. Unlike my mother I have not been a religious person and do not consider myself a Christian so it is certainly strange for me to be writing a letter to Jesus I know. It is just that I am cornered and need a direction to go. I remember as a child my mother telling me that You were the only man who had ever lived who had not in life or even death disappointed a woman. She used to sing to me the hymn What A Friend I Have in Jesus over and over at my bedtime. I miss her more and more Jesus all the time. Marble Lesson was a saint if there ever could be one I am sure you agree.

  I know a woman named Viridiana Temoign Crosby who has a church called the New Idea of the Fresh Start in a little town in Arkansas called Daytime that is where I plan to go from here. It is not exactly a place on the beaten path and Virdy believes I will find a safe haven there at least for a while. If You have an answer for me Jesus You know how to find me. If You are in touch with my mother please tell her I love and miss her and that I am doing my best to carry on the work back here on what she used to call the Big Angry Planet.

  Sincerely yours

  Hilda Brausen Grandeza-Lesson

  A NOSE FOR A NOSE

  ‘it’s not that I disagree with you, H.B., but there’s got to be a purpose the Lord made men, other than just for matin’ purposes, that is.’

  ‘Virdy, my feelin’ is the Lord, providin’ there is one and that He had anythin’ to do with it, did women an injustice when He failed to equip ’em with the capacity for self-reproduction. There’re other species capable of it. Why not us?’

  Viridiana Temoign Crosby, pastor of the Church of the New Idea of the Fresh Start, and Hilda Brausen Grandeza-Lesson, a fugitive from justice, wanted in the state of Louisiana for murder and drug trafficking, were walking in the birch woods behind the New Idea building in Daytime, Arkansas. The late-October weather was unusually warm, and the women were comfortable in midmorning without coats. Hilda had found refuge in Daytime, at least temporarily; Sister Crosby always had been sympathetic to H.B.’s radical feminist activities. In addition, Hilda’s famous mother, the late Marble Lesson, was a legend among progressive feminist thinkers the world over, a fact that lent her daughter considerable credence.

  ‘It was the noses really gave ’em the red ass,’ said Hilda. ‘The press just went nuts about it.’

  ‘Noses?’

  ‘Yeah. Back in the early days of Mary Mother of God, when my mama was with the organization, they had a secret core group called Die Brausenkriegers would avenge particularly nasty abuses.’

  ‘I seem to remember hearin’ somethin’ about this from my aunt Mamie Eisenhower Temoign. Wasn’t there some kinda deal they were supposed to’ve murdered a bunch of fishermen raped a woman?’

  ‘Right. Victoria China Realito was her name. She insisted that Die Brausenkriegers bring her the noses of the men who’d assaulted her, as proof of their execution and to send a message to men everywhere.’

  ‘Why noses?’

  ‘When the Japanese invaded Korea in 1597, they lopped off the noses of over twenty thousand Koreans as proof of kills. The soldiers brought the evidence back to Japan and buried ’em in what was called the Thousand-Nose Tomb. Apparently, Victoria Realito had read about this and started the nose-takin’ trend. We revived the tradition durin’ our extracurricular activities at the Hilda Brausen Charm School in New Orleans.’

  ‘What’d y’all do with the noses?’

  ‘If the men were married, we mailed ’em to their wives. Otherwise, we tossed ’em into the compost heap for our organic vegetable garden. Virdy, we grew the best squash and tomatoes you ever could expect to eat There’s no doubt in my mind it’s the unrestricted use of pesticides has caused serious brain damage to countless Americans. You know, if a person really thinks about it, there’s so much wrong with the world already, and more goin’ haywire all the time, could be it won’t never be possible to fix.’

  coda:

  the passion of

  hypolite cortez

  CONTENTS

  The Passion

  Great Expectations

  The Big Bite

  Two for the Road

  THE PASSION

  parshal lee cracked open the monkey’s skull with a ball peen hammer, picked it up, and drank the fluid from the deceased simian’s hypothalamus gland. He was a determined individual. If this was what it took to regain the exclusive affections of Hypolite Cortez, damn straight he’d do it. It and anything else that seemed logical to Miss Consuelo Yesso, Parshal’s advisor in matters involving love and finance.

  Parshal Lee was an artist, a portrait painter who set up shop daily next to the north fence of Jackson Square in New Orleans. He was thirty-eight years old, a native of Meridian, Mississippi, a place to which he had no desire to return. Parshal had not been in Meridian since his mother, Zolia Versalles Lee, was buried four years before across the street from the Dixie Boys Field. He had no living relatives that he knew of other than an eighty-four-year-old bastard uncle named Get-Down Lucky, who was part Gypsy and sold Bibles door-to-door in Dothan, Alabama. It was this uncle who had informed Parshal at Zolia Lee’s funeral that the meaning
of life was based on a simple concept. ‘It ain’t what you eat,’ said Get-Down Lucky, ‘it’s the way how you chew it.’

  Parshal’s father, Roy L Lee, had disappeared the day before his son’s fourteenth birthday. Roy L—he had no middle name, only an initial he’d taken himself so that he would have something to write in on forms that requested one—was believed to have fled Meridian in order to avoid prosecution for grave robbing. He and a one-armed Salvadoran refugee named Arturo Trope, who had worked as an undertaker’s assistant in a Meridian funeral parlor, had been apprehended exhuming newly buried bodies in order to steal rings, necklaces, and other valuable items decorating the corpses. Both men had skipped town on bail, and two months later Arturo Trope had been shot to death during the commission of an armed robbery of a jewelry store on Capitol Street in Jackson. Roy L had not been seen or heard from since the cemetery scam. Parshal considered his daddy dead and himself a free agent. All he had to make his way in the world was his God-given artistic talent. Roy L, Parshal figured, had nothing to do with that.

  Parshal sat on the porch of his rented bungalow on Spain Street in the Marigny, chasing the bitter taste of monkey gland fluid with Rebel Yell. His brain was obsessed by thoughts of his erstwhile girlfriend, Hypolite Cortez, and the fact that she had abandoned him in favor of a woman. Hypolite now lived with an exotic dancer named Irma Soon, a Panamanian-Chinese who simulated copulation with a rock python six nights a week at Big Nig’s Gauchos ’n’ Gals Club on Pelican Avenue in Algiers. Parshal was hoping that Miss Yesso’s prescription would inspire Hypolite to return to her senses and to him. She had given no reason for her defection, merely left a note on her red sateen pillow embroidered in yellow with intertwined initials P and H, that said: ‘Parshal you took care of me best you could but I have fallen for Irma Soon who I believe is my destiny. Our two years together have been good however love is got to be better than good and only with Irma Soon have I felt what is commonly called ecstasy. I hope one day you will know for yourself with someone the way I feel with Irma. Luv to you and I mean it, Hypolite.’