Southern Nights

by Barry Gifford

  As Balzac attempted to escape, his wooden left leg disengaged and clattered to the floor next to where Jimbo, oblivious to the situation, snoozed in benign repose. Jimbo’s self-appointed savior picked up the loose limb, held it in both hands, and beat Balzac with it until the plastic cracked and splintered into useless slivers.

  Another man, followed by several more, burst into the restroom, took a quick look at the scene and said, ‘Pharaoh wept! What happen here, Rex?’

  ‘This crip was suckin’ Jimbo’s johnson,’ Rex said, panting hard, ‘after Jimbo’d passed out drunk. Didn’t think ol’ Jimbo would’ve approved, you?’

  ‘Shit, Rex, looks like you mighta killed the guy.’

  Blood was running out of both of Balzac Kicz’s ears, as well as from his mouth and nose. His three-limbed body lay twisted in a posture best described as a figure-eight-minus-an-arc. Rex, who was rapidly regaining his composure, hawked and spat on the crumpled Kicz.

  ‘Yeah, Buck, I reckon I mighta did,’ he said. ‘First faggot tonight. But hell, it’s early yet.’

  Buck and the others laughed, then Rex said, ‘Best we get Jimbo into the fresh air. Gimme a hand.’

  Buck kicked Balzac’s carcass aside and bent to it.

  SNAKE HEADS

  dear sugargirl.

  Remember wen I rote you all that bout Mother Bizco mama name Virguenza bein blin an all an bein rape in St Louis cemetary well after this hapen to me wat Im gon tell you Mother an me hav a privat tak an she tell me it were not at all true jus a story she say giv strenth an hope to other yung womens. I bin wonder why somtim she tell difern stotys bout hersef an she say it serv difren purpos. I gess she got the rite who am I say Mother Bizco ain rite all the good she do can be wrong. Yesterday we get 2 girls from China an I ask em they no Cris Chew but they don even spek english. Man who brot em to the Temple say they pay the snake heads in China lots of mony get em to America by smuglin. Then they end up a slave in som factory or lik these girls was made into hos kep uptown som big ol house an only forteen yers ol. Snake heads wat they call the Chinamen send em over on ol leekey boats so meny sink in oshen. We gon keep the China girls les they be made go back to China by the govmen. Also I here som news bout Jimbo sombody takt him in a mens room of a bar but he OK. They fin the guy don it witout no head an one leg missin in Irish bayou but Jimbo tell the cops he don no wat happen in the firs place. I no Jimbo he don lie. Now the mos real rezon I rite you is I bout to hav a baby an I am hopin an prayin you be abel com to NO an be wit me do you think you can? This be very mos import to me Sug I hav a dream an God tak to me also the baby. I no this so hard to belev but it a boy his name Angel de la Cruz mean Angel of the cross. I so friten wen my hol body flot in air Mother Bizco say it a maculat consepshun but truth be the father a man sick in his min name Waldo Orchid. I lik to kill this man sam as the China girls lik to kill the snake heads. I no it a sin even think it but these men got som dises in they brane, snake head a good nam for em. I hop you be here soon I tell you the hol story. I pray you com Sug.

  Love Baby

  LAUGHTER IN THE DARK

  baby was standing in front of the A&P grocery on the corner of Royal and St Peter in the Quarter, about to pull up and smoke a Kool from the pack she had just purchased inside the store, when an old woman, half-bent at the waist, a casaba-sized hump on her back covered by a purple shawl decorated with gold letters of the Hebrew alphabet, came up and pressed both of her gnarled hands to Baby’s belly.

  ‘Simon of Cyrene is risen,’ said the old woman. She lifted her face and stared at Baby. The woman’s eyes were clear green, the eyes of a very young girl. Her irises sparkled like yellow crystals.

  ‘Say what?’ asked Baby.

  ‘Your child will be the second coming not of Jesus, but of the angel who bore his cross. Black Simon the Cyrenian.’

  ‘How you know? Who you?’

  The woman made the sign of the cross over Sister Esquerita’s stomach, kissed the index and third fingers of her own right hand, and touched them to the stunned sister’s forehead.

  The old lady smiled, displaying perfectly white, straight teeth, and said, ‘Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints.’

  ‘You a friend of Mother Bizco’s?’ asked Esquerita.

  ‘I am the Mother of Harlots,’ she said, and turned away. Then the old woman looked back, and told Baby, ‘Watch for the sign in heaven, for you shall be taken to that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth. And there shall be no night there, you will need no candle, neither light of the sun. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolators, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. Thereafter shall ye live.’

  The woman walked off and Baby watched her cross over on Royal and continue to Pirate’s Alley, where she turned right and disappeared.

  A large, orange-skinned man, his face and arms covered with bright red spots, stood on an upside-down blue plastic milk box by the curb and announced: ‘The year was 1922. In the greatest football game of the era, Paul Robeson scored two touchdowns in a thirteen-to-nothing victory for the Milwaukee Badgers over Jim Thorpe’s Oorang Indians, after which Robeson and Thorpe got into a terrible fight.’

  Baby dropped her Kools and began running on St Peter Street, not stopping until she got to Burgundy. She leaned against the side of a building to catch her breath, then unexpectedly started to laugh.

  ‘Ain’t no use tryin’ to figure out nothin’!’ she said, and laughed some more.

  SANCTUM

  ‘girl, am i glad to see you!’ said Baby Cat-Face, embracing Sugargirl Crooks on the top step of the entrance to the temple.

  ‘Look at you,’ said Sugar, double-eyeballing Baby’s garb, a snow-white muumuu embroidered with dozens of tiny gold crosses. ‘Size of a house an’ done up pure as Mother Teresa!’

  ‘Ain’ no mother yet. One mo’ week, doctor say. Beside, dey calls me Sister aroun’ here.’

  ‘Okay, Sister Baby, we gon’ bring an angel into the worl’, no doubt about dat!’

  As Baby and Sugar were catching up on each other’s news, Waldo Orchid sat in a green-banded lawn chair in his yard on Lapeyrouse Street. He wore only a triple-extra-large pair of chartreuse shorts, letting his enormous gut take the little sun New Orleans had to offer this mostly cloudy June afternoon. Waldo’s mother, Malva, and his Tante Desuso had gone earlier to visit the tomb of his father, Tosco, at the graveyard of Holy Fantômes, today being the anniversary of Tosco’s untimely death by rat. Visiting tombs was not Waldo’s idea of getting a leg up on the morning, so he had declined his mother and aunt’s invitation to join them. Gone be gone, the oversized Orchid believed. Life its ownself was tough enough to handle without tripping on tragedies passed by.

  Waldo popped open the pull tab on a sixteen-ounce can of Pabst he had brought out to the yard with him, and drank half of it in one swallow. He sat still and listened to a trio of screeching blue jays argue, probably over a scrap of pork rind raided from the overflowing garbage cans by the side of the house. Waldo reminded himself that he had promised his mother to dispose of the waste. Later for that. The whole world is just like them jays, Waldo thought. What happened to Balzac Kicz, such as. Pitiful, way things go. That darkmeat toil in service of Mother Bizco, now she could make nasty nice and do it twice. But what come of it? Girl write a letter call me the devil. All I done she be party to. Could maybe made something fine with her, gone to Casino Magic a long weekend.

  Six jets streaked overhead, vaporizing what was left of the sky. Waldo lifted the beer can to his lips, but just as he was about to finish off the Pabst, he felt a cold nudge on his right calf. He reached down to rub the spot without looking and froze at what felt like forty tenpenny nails simultaneously piercing his hand.

  Waldo’s scream was drowned under the residual thunder of jet engines. He turned and saw a six-foot-long alligator with its jaws clamped solidly below his right wrist. Waldo’s attempt to p
ull away from the beast mostly succeeded. As he suddenly stood and stared at it, the leathery creature chunked twice on Waldo’s severed hand before swallowing. When he looked at the bloody stump on his starboard limb, Waldo screamed again, and this time the noise was undisguised.

  ANGEL BABY

  ‘push, baby! come on, girl,’ exhorted Sugar, ‘give it up for Angel!’

  Baby gathered her strength, regained control of her breathing, and bore down hard.

  ‘Here he come, darlin’!’ Mother Bizco said. ‘Keep puffin’.’

  Angel de la Cruz did not slide so much as glide from Esquerita Reyna’s womb. It seemed to Sugar, who had midwifed the birth with Mother Bizco, that the boy emerged with his arms outstretched, reaching for her or another. His color was as autumn leaves, red and gold, and he grabbed hold of one of Sugargirl Crooks’s fingers and one of Mother Bizco’s with either hand. He did not cry, but coughed and turned his heavy, slick, dark head toward the silver-blue light streaming from a window above Baby’s bed.

  ‘Fear not,’ intoned Mother Bizco, ‘for he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost.’

  ‘He that is mighty hath done to me great things,’ Baby panted. ‘Hand him to me.’

  Angel sought Esquerita’s right breast and quickly suckled it.

  ‘We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness,’ said Mother Bizco. ‘And we know that a son of God is come.’

  Angel quit Baby’s tit, turned his slimy face toward Mother Bizco, and let loose a horrible sound, more moan than cry. He then fixed her with his eyes, both of which glowed briefly, but brilliantly, red. Mother Bizco sprang up and fell away from him as if pushed by a great wind.

  Suddenly the window flew open, and a susurrant voice filled the room: ‘Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will reveal for thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that possessed her.’

  Mother Bizco crawled toward the infant and bowed her head, upon which he placed one of his surprisingly supple hands. Sugargirl noticed now that the fingers were webbed, and she began to weep. Baby, exhausted by the ordeal, and suddenly frightened, fainted into sleep.

  NO RAIN IN EGYPT

  ‘best not distoib da boy, Malva. Let him catch his res’.’

  ‘But Desuso, he ain’ ate since yesterday. Ain’ like Waldo, you know dat. It rain in Egyp’ before he refuse food.’

  ‘Boy been through a trauma, sister. I bring him some cream tomato soup later.’

  ‘Wit’ saltine crackers.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. You think better to crumble ’em in da soup, or jus’ put on da side?’

  ‘Side be bes’. He want, we crumble ’em for ’im. He only got one hand now, crumble wit’.’

  At the thought of this, both women broke into tears and crossed themselves. Malva and Desuso had been tending to the wounded Waldo since his return the previous afternoon from Nuestra Perdita del Desierto Hospital. The doctors had cauterized his wrist and sewn it up. The animal control people had managed to extricate part of Waldo’s hand from the gator’s stomach after they had shot and killed it, but too little was left of the digits to attempt reattachment. Waldo would have to be fitted with an artificial hand or hook after the stump healed.

  Loaded on Percodan, Waldo dozed in his room, his sanitarily dressed arm resting, slightly elevated, on a rubber pillow. He did not stir until an arrow passed through the fastened window next to his bed without breaking the glass and entered Waldo’s open mouth. It penetrated the back of his skull, and lodged in the mahogany headboard decorated with a hideous oil painting purportedly depicting the Last Supper. Waldo gagged slightly upon impact, but that was all.

  At the Temple of the Few Washed Pure by Her Blood, as the infant Angel de la Cruz was being baptized by Mother Bizco, there appeared on the ceiling above where the participants stood a holograph, the letters scorched in black across the white tiles:

  and the lord shall be

  seen over them, and

  his arrow shall go forth

  as the lightning.

  BEAUTIFUL PHANTOMS

  at the age of one, on the evening of his birthday, Angel walked for the first time. Until that moment he had given no evidence of even the slightest interest in ambulatory activity. The boy was content to sit and observe his surroundings, seldom making an effort to crawl. Sugargirl Crooks had stayed on in New Orleans to take care of him since Sister Esquerita had become preoccupied with her interest in the invasion of the planet by extraterrestrials.

  Baby was convinced that members of the religious right were not, in fact, human beings at all, but interplanetary travelers, invaders from some distant place in space. Mother Bizco asked Sugar to remain when she noticed the degree to which her Almost-Perfect acolyte seemed distracted. It was as if the process of pregnancy and birth had fundamentally undone the girl. Even Sugar had difficulty communicating with Baby, who would not talk at all to Mother Bizco or other members of the temple. Sugar realized a crisis stage had been reached when Baby refused to recognize Angel de la Cruz as her son.

  For his part, Angel did not seem to mind his mother’s inattentiveness. He ceased breast-feeding after two months, his teeth came in, and he ate whatever Sugar gave him. On the night that he began to walk, Angel also spoke his first words. Sugar was changing his diaper when he looked directly at her and said, ‘I will deliver thee out of the hand of the wicked, and I will redeem thee out of the hand of the terrible.’

  Sugargirl grabbed him up and ran to Mother Bizco, who was in the sacristy preparing a sermon, and told her what had occurred. Mother Bizco dropped to her knees, as did Sugar, and together they genuflected before the boy, who placed one of his hands on each of their heads.

  ‘Receive ye the Holy Ghost,’ said Angel. ‘And do not be further concerned for my mother, for she dwelleth with beautiful phantoms.’

  As Angel comforted the women, Baby Cat-Face threw open the window in her room and climbed onto the sill. She stood stark naked, studying the dark sky. A radiant blue bridge appeared before her, leading from the window to a cloud. There came a bolt of bead lightning that rent the cloud, creating a door toward which Baby, fearless for the first time, began to walk.

  the lost sons of

  cassiopeia

  CONTENTS

  Marked for Life

  The Other Thing

  Kiss of the Nasonia vitripennis

  Pit Stop

  Bad Company

  MARKED FOR LIFE

  ‘pretty interestin’, angel, ain’t it? Mean how you and me come to be cellmates after we both been busted at the same time on the same type beef, and got to serve the same amount of time.’

  ‘Only thing less interestin’ than bein’ alive, Sailor, is dead. That’s a natural fact.’

  Angel de la Cruz Reyna and Sailor Ripley were inmates at the Pee Dee River Correctional Facility in North Carolina, where each man had been incarcerated for the crime of manslaughter. Sailor had killed a man named Bob Ray Lemon in a bar fight in his hometown of Bay St Clement, after the man had aggressively and repeatedly insulted Sailor’s girlfriend, Lula Fortune.

  In a remarkably similar circumstance, Angel, who had come to Corinth, North Carolina, from New Orleans, to visit his cousin Gracielita Pureza, had encountered in a bar Gracielita’s erstwhile boyfriend, a Montenegran-Gypsy immigrant named Romar Dart, confronted Dart about his physically abusive behavior toward Ms Pureza, and then bested him in a Texas-style teardown, the result of which landed Angel a five-to-ten-mandatory two-year chill-out at Pee Dee and dealt Dart a permanent grounding of the literal persuasion.

  Romar Dart had been working as a home-appliance salesman at Huge Huey’s Discounteria. He was twenty-four years old, six months out of the army, in which service he’d done two consecutive stretches straight out of high school. Romar wasn’t quite used to being a civilian, and he had a difficult time accepting the fact that Gracielita Pureza, who was only nineteen, could possess such an independent mind. Dart was emotionall
y adrift due to the loss of his parents in a car crash a fortnight before his discharge. Raimundo and Della Dart had been returning home from an evening of playing the slots at Poor Homer’s Gates of Horn Casino, when a pig truck blew its left front tire and toppled across the white line onto Raimundo and Della’s Lumina, crushing the elder Darts inside. Pigs spilled onto the road around the wreck, squealing and scrambling, causing motorists to swerve and stop suddenly, resulting in not a few whiplash cases, as well as several casualties of a porcine nature.

  Despite Gracielita’s attempts at consolation, Romar could not shake the brutal feeling of having been abandoned by his parents. Gracielita put up with Dart’s self-pity for a while, but finally told him to let it go and deal with the life ahead. Romar reacted violently, knocking her around his trailer and denting Gracielita’s left temple with what had been Raimundo’s favorite five iron. Angel de la Cruz had arrived in Corinth the day after this incident occurred.

  Sailor lit a tailor-made and handed it to Angel, who took a drag and passed it back.

  ‘We all of us lost sons of Cassiopeia, anyway,’ said Angel, leaning back on his bunk. ‘We marked for life.’

  ‘Sons o’ who?’

  ‘Cassiopeia, was an Ethiopian queen. This bitch was so vain, she claim she was better lookin’ than the sea nymphs. That pissed off them bitches so much they commanded a sea serpent attack her daughter, the virgin Princess Andromeda, who the Oracle made her daddy, King Cepheus, chain to a rock in the water, so the serpent get at the girl.’

  ‘How you know all this?’

  ‘Myths, man. You ain’t read ’em?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cat name Perseus rescue Andromeda. He the son of Jove, and a famous dragon slayer already had took out the Gorgon. So Perseus whips this sea monster, carves it up with his sword, and gets to marry the princess.’