Southern Nights

by Barry Gifford

  BAD COMPANY

  ‘only one woman I ever truly love.’

  ‘Yeah? Who was dat?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Oh, you means Baby Cat-Face.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Dat be forever ago, Jimbo. Forever ago.’

  ‘Seem like dis mornin’.’

  Jimbo Deal and Wig Hat Tippo, Jr., both men in their mid-sixties, sat next to one another on stools in the Evening in Seville Bar on Lesseps Street in New Orleans, drinking Ronrico cocktails. It was two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in September. The temperature outside was ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit and inside, despite two creaking ceiling fans, only a touch cooler.

  ‘Been what, Jim? Thirty years? What really happen I never did know.’

  Deal took a short sip, and said, ‘Girl got religious. Got wit da wrong comp’ny.’

  ‘Who, such as?’

  ‘Mother Bizco and dem. Temple da Few Wash Pure by Her Blood. Drive Baby to suicide hersef.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Shit, Jimbo, time peoples get a clue. Organize religion be dangerous to dey health. Ought to da gov’ment put warnin’ signs on churches, same as on cigarettes.’

  Deal drained his glass, saw that Tippo’s was half full, picked it up, and drained it, too.

  ‘Life go on, Wig, you know? Ain’ no place for it to go but on.’

  coda:

  la culebra

  CONTENTS

  Ruby-Baby

  The Unspoken

  The Big Red Spot

  Postcard

  RUBY-BABY

  sidney culatazo, the three-hundred-pound, sixty-five-year-old night clerk at the Hotel La Culebra on Frenchmen Street in the Marigny District of New Orleans, sat on a stool behind the registration desk reading yesterday’s Times-Picayune. Sidney did not mind being a day behind on the news, he said, because by that time the current had disappeared from the events; and besides, he reasoned, there was no way to know what had really happened, anyway. Most so-called news was the product of supposition and imagination, so what difference did it make when you read about it?

  Chema Guapo, the eighteen-year-old handyman of La Culebra, came down the stairs carrying a mop and bucket.

  ‘If dis don’t crack da nut,’ said Sidney. ‘Lissen up.’

  Chema stopped at the foot of the stairs and waited.

  ‘A would-be thief, some cockamamy ladrón, came to a sticky end when he began sniffin’ da glue he was stealin’ from a shop in da Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. Overcome by da fumes, da man collapsed, upsettin’ a tank o’ glue an’ stickin’ his self to da floor da shop. He lay there for thirty-six hours, unable to tear his self free, before firemen managed to cut him loose. Jesus wept! Da kid couldn’t even wait to get da shit out da door.’

  ‘Why you say it’s a kid?’ said Chema. ‘It say in the paper was a kid?’

  ‘Couldn’t be no grown man be dis dumb. Had to be was a kid.’

  ‘Plenty kids I heard in Brazil got no home, sleepin’ in the street. Cops murder ’em, ain’t nobody care.’

  ‘Bet any one dem Brazilian street arabs be grateful as hell have your job, hey, Chema? Don’t you think? Mop up a bathroom, move a board, stop a leaky roof. Work for half wages, I bet.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. Then one morning you wake up with a big grin on your fat neck. Look up see the devil pokin’ at you with his pitchfork, sayin’, “Get to work, old man.”’

  ‘No question you can’t trust kids dese days.’

  ‘Even me?’

  ‘Even you. Cousin Lester calmed down now?’

  ‘He ain’t never calm and still can’t piss straight Why is it you old men can’t piss straight? Piss left, right, on your shoes. Every place but in the toilet. Oughta just sit down like a woman, take a piss.’

  ‘You got a better job lined up, hey?’

  ‘Don’t want one. I’m in love with moppin’ up after old guys their dicks bend wrong.’

  Chema walked out of the hotel into Frenchmen Street to wring out his mop and dump dirty water. Sidney Culatazo reached down and picked up a small boa constrictor, which wrapped itself around his arm.

  ‘You need a pet from Daddy?’ Sidney cooed to the reptile. ‘You don’t talk ugly like that sick boy, do you? No, no, no.’

  A young woman entered the hotel, dragging a steamer trunk along the floor. She was dressed Hollywood cowgirl style, her platinum hair long and loose over her face. She dragged the trunk into the middle of the lobby, sat down on it, and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I’m lookin’ for a room won’t strangle my dreams,’ she announced. ‘A room’ll let the dreams live in it. Don’t tell me I’m talkin’ shit, mister. I know how rooms work and I got to come to terms with these dreams. You got somethin’ you can show me?’

  Sidney looked her over, guessed her age at no more than twenty-one, and said, ‘Da question is, how much room your dreams take up?’

  ‘Too much, sometimes. Others, not nearly enough.’

  ‘I discourage dreams myself,’ said Sidney. ‘I mean, personally. Used to dey would get in da way of what I needed or wanted to be thinkin’ about, so I don’t have ’em no more.’

  ‘Not that I’d want to, of course,’ said the young woman, ‘but how’d you stop ’em?’

  The obese night clerk laughed. ‘New York would pay big money to know dat, sister. You come in on da red wind an’ jus’ aks, an’ I’m suppose’ hand out da secret What’s your name?’

  ‘Ruby-Baby Wasp. Please, mister, I’m tired now. A room with any kind of window would do.’

  ‘Who’s payin’?’

  Ruby-Baby Wasp went over to the desk, dug a roll of bills out of her jeans, and put it on the counter.

  ‘Cash ain’t never been my problem,’ she said.

  Sidney picked out a fifty, then banged a fat fist on the bell in front of him.

  ‘Chema!’ he shouted.

  Chema came back in from the street and put down his mop and pail.

  ‘Show Miz Wasp to twenty-one,’ said Sidney.

  ‘That’s next to Cousin Lester,’ Chema said.

  I know where it is.’

  Chema took the room key from Sidney, stuck it between his teeth, then lifted one end of the steamer trunk and began dragging it away.

  ‘You’ll let me know, it’s okay,’ Sidney addressed Ruby-Baby’s back.

  Without turning around, she answered, ‘Shy is what a horse does,’ and followed Chema up the stairs.

  Marisa Sopapo, the hotel maid and house prostitute, staggered in the front door, her hair awry, her orange poorboy barely containing her late-adolescent pulchritude.

  ‘Am I late?’ she asked Sidney.

  ‘Cousin Lester’s been waitin’ on you. Better get up there.’

  She headed for the stairs.

  ‘I know I’m a lucky girl,’ Marisa said, ‘you ain’t got to tell me.’

  Cousin Lester, a carrot-topped, freckle-faced, skinny man in his late forties, lay on the bed in his small room reading the 1947 edition of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. This was Cousin Lester’s favorite book, and he had read part of it every day for fifteen years. Today he was re-examining Case 31, that of patient J. H., aged twenty-six, who in 1883 consulted Krafft-Ebing concerning severe neurasthenia and hypochondria. Cousin, which was his given name, lived in the city of books. His room was filled with them, piled from floor to ceiling, even over the one window. Indian trail paths led from door to bed to washbasin to water closet to a table with a hot plate on it. He cared little for company, and read aloud to himself, as he did now.

  ‘“Patient confessed that he had practiced onanism since his fourteenth year, infrequently up to his eighteenth year, but since that time he had been unable to resist the impulse. Up to that time he had no opportunity to approach females, for he had been anxiously cared for and never left alone on account of being an invalid. He had no real desire for this unknown pleasure, but he accidentally learned what it was when one of his mother’s maids cut her hand severel
y on a pane of glass, which she had broken while washing windows. While helping to stop the bleeding he could not keep from sucking up the blood that flowed from the wound, and in this act he experienced extreme erotic excitement, with complete orgasm and ejaculation.

  ‘“From that time on,”’ Cousin Lester read, ‘“he sought in every possible way to see and, where practicable, to taste the fresh blood of females. That of young girls was preferred by him. He spared no pains or expense to obtain this pleasure.”’

  There was a knock at Cousin Lester’s door.

  ‘Hypotenuse!’ he shouted.

  Marisa Sopapo, who had knocked, shouted from the hallway, ‘The side of a right-angled triangle that’s opposite the right angle!’

  ‘Bienvenida!’ said Cousin Lester.

  Marisa entered the unlocked room and threaded her way through the ceilingscrapers of books to the bed, where she sat down next to Cousin Lester.

  ‘An imaginary being inhabiting the air,’ she said.

  ‘A sylph!’

  Cousin Lester dropped Krafft-Ebing and embraced Marisa. She reached over and pulled the chain on his lavender-shaded china sailfish bedside lamp, extinguishing the light.

  In the room next door, Ruby-Baby Wasp opened her trunk. She removed from it the well-thumbed, thick, red-covered notebook in which her mother, Jewel Wasp, had written her feminist opus, Great Women I Have Heard about But Never Met. Jewel Wasp had died while giving birth to Ruby-Baby, her only child, and Ruby-Baby had been raised by African-American nuns of the Order of Simone the Cyrenian at Miss Napoleon’s Paradise for the Lord’s Disturbed Daughters in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, the institution where Jewel Wasp was confined at the end of her life.

  Ruby-Baby often turned to her mother’s unpublished book when she was at an impasse with her dreams. The chapter Ruby-Baby Wasp resorted to most often was the one about Sister Esquerita Reyna, an acolyte of Mother Bizco’s legendary Temple of the Few Washed Pure by Her Blood, known to many by her secular name, Baby Cat-Face. Ruby-Baby believed she was Baby’s namesake.

  In her book, Jewel Wasp claimed to have conceived a child with Sister Esquerita’s son, Angel de la Cruz, the issue being Ruby-Baby, whose name she wrote down before giving birth. Upon her departure from the Paradise at the age of eighteen, the nuns of the Order of Simone the Cyrenian had given Ruby-Baby her mother’s manuscript, but warned her that, in their opinion, much, if not all, of the information contained therein was specious. About Ruby-Baby’s paternity, of course, there could be no certainty. All that she knew for a fact about her mother was that Jewel had been suspected of having murdered in cold blood more than fifty men, including Angel de la Cruz Reyna, prior to her commitment to Miss Napoleon’s Paradise for the Lord’s Disturbed Daughters.

  As Ruby-Baby Wasp perused her legacy, she was disturbed by bestial sounds of lovemaking that penetrated the thin wall between her room and Cousin Lester’s. The wild noises only deepened Ruby-Baby Wasp’s despair over what she perceived as the endless nightmare of sex and death. The last sentence in her mother’s book haunted Ruby-Baby, and she turned to it now. ‘In my distress I cried unto the Lord,’ Jewel had written, ‘and He did not listen!’ Those four, final words, Ruby-Baby believed, had been underlined by Jewel Wasp with her own blood.

  THE UNSPOKEN

  cousin lester’s people hailed from rural Winston County, Alabama, the place of his own birth. He had been raised, however, in Birmingham. His mother, Louise Elizabeth Lovely, called Lou-Liz, claimed never to have seen a black person until she was twenty-one years old and newly arrived in the city of Birmingham. His father, Perno Holgado Lester, moved with his wife and two-year-old son to the big town to work as a roofing contractor. The building trades were booming at the time in Birmingham, enabling Perno to provide decently for his family. Lou-Liz, who always had been an avid reader, a book-club member from the age of eleven, obtained part-time employment at a branch library, and inculcated in Cousin what became an enduring love of literature and quest for knowledge.

  Perno Lester had been a big believer in life insurance, and when he and Lou-Liz were killed in an airplane crash on what was both their first and their final flight—Birmingham to Miami, where they were to connect with a junket to the Bahamas for the first vacation of their lives—Cousin, who was twenty-two at the time, became the sole beneficiary of a sizable sum of money. Cousin used this inheritance conservatively, investing it mostly in utilities, which paid him regular dividends. He had managed never to work, the tragedy-engendered windfall having come the day following his graduation with a degree in Library Science from the University of Alabama.

  New Orleans suited Cousin Lester better than Birmingham or Tuscaloosa. He enjoyed the variegated population, and it was a good book town. His real desire was to write, and it was Marisa Sopapo who inspired him in this endeavor. She was the first woman, he felt, who truly shared his vision of the world, despite her lack of formal education and her modest standing in society. When his first piece of creative prose appeared in a local literary magazine called The François Villon Review, Cousin dedicated it ‘To Marisa, my Muse.’ Marisa thanked Cousin Lester for this, responding in kind by throwing him a freebie, but admitted to Sidney Culatazo that she had never even attempted to read it. In fact, Marisa confessed, she could not read, though she could remember and repeat verbatim virtually anything she had ever heard.

  The Unspoken

  by Cousin Lester

  I

  I begin like any other man, without a plan. I am staying in a seaside resort, one of many, in no particular country; perhaps somewhere on the Ionian Sea. Yes, I recall the insignificant waves, waves hardly to be disturbed by. There is a beach, of course, though I avoid sand; it reminds me so painfully of the deserts of my childhood. The many flowers are in bloom but I can never remember the names of flowers or plants other than bougainvillea, which grows everywhere around the town. For these flowers to thrive the weather must remain hot for several months, which it does. It is very hot every day, each day of my residence.

  I was born without a mouth. Can you believe this? I am forty-eight years old, I have been living for almost a half century with this condition, an extraordinary circumstance, and yet still I find this situation incomprehensible. It is also ridiculous not to have a mouth. Think of it—of course, you already have—to be unable to talk or eat in a conventional manner. One never grows used to this handicap. At least, I have not.

  The absence of a mouth my mouth, the one intended for me (I have always believed that God intended to give me a mouth; this belief is unshakable)—has no bearing on this story. An adventure has a life of its own and my life, the life of a natural freak, is irrelevant here (other than as a terrible detail that I implore you to ignore). I do not even know or understand why I mention it (Perhaps being without a mouth, the idea of this crime obsesses me and will lead to an unfortunate circumstance. We shall see.)

  Did I mention that I am alone in this seaside village? I am isolated if not alone in the strictest sense of the term. By definition a person has no choice in the matter. (Or have you, the reader, chosen not to question whichever myth with which you have been informed? It doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t. Believe me.) There are no birds on the island. (Is it an island? I can’t remember.) This is an amazing fact, a stupendous piece of illogic. Consider you are at the seaside and are expecting, as you should be, to see birds, a flock of them, at least a single frigate or tern or gull, and after two days you experience the terrible realization that no birds exist. This is what happened to me. (I would have asked someone, a fellow guest at the hotel where I am staying, but of course, as you now know and cannot forget—I won’t let you, you can be certain—I had no mouth with which to do so. Being supremely unlike any other person has its disadvantages, as well as advantages an ordinary individual could not begin to imagine.)

  The absence of birds notwithstanding, I decided to stay. I will not keep you in suspense any longer (Why should I, a man without a motive, or a mou
th?)—the reason I fled the city (a large one, named R.), exchanged it like a soiled glove (I am very fond of gloves) for the featherless seaside resort town (I will call it T.), had to do with a woman. She rejected me, after several years of friendship. I must bite my tongue (figuratively speaking—but then, neither am I able to speak) as I write that. If you have read this far in my narrative, you are not readily or easily fooled. Forgive me for not being entirely honest at the outset. (I feel more ridiculous asking for forgiveness than I do upon entering a public place where nobody knows me and they stare at the area of my face below the nose where a mouth, any kind of mouth—even a narrow one, with thin lips—should, by all God intended, be.) F. and I had been lovers for four years. This fact is inescapable. I must admit that it gives me pleasure (a pleasure of sorts, I suppose) to say this. Is it incomprehensible to you that a woman as beautiful (I believe she is beautiful) and intelligent (this, too, though remember I am easily fooled) as F. should have accepted for her lover a man without a certain feature? Of course, had she not been an extraordinary person to begin with I could not have loved her. I still love her. Though we are no longer together, it does not mean that my powerful feeling for F. has ceased to exist. I am essentially an honest man.

  2

  I had, as I say, no plan when I arrived at T. I had never even considered going to T., had never heard of the place before my last-minute departure. No, that is not entirely true; I had heard of T. When I was a boy, our housekeeper, M., used to mention the place now and again. I believe she had some relatives there that she would visit on occasion. M. had beautiful feet. I first saw them when I crawled around the house, before I could walk, and M. would do her chores barefoot. Her feet were extraordinarily long and slender, like ferrets. It was painful for me when my parents fired M. for stealing. I was then seven years old. I thought that M. would return sometime, but she never did. Luckily, I have no problem conjuring up images of her perfect heels, delicate arches, and exquisite toes. F.’s feet are much smaller, her toes bent in various directions, tortured worms. I cannot consider them in the same category with those of M., the angelic housekeeper of my youth.