Baby Cat-Face

  BABY CAT-FACE

  Barry Gifford

  1995

  For my favorite boyzIImen—

  Asa Colby, Kevin Nathaniel,

  and Damon Doreado

  Truth is not feasible, mankind doesn’t deserve it.

  —Sigmund Freud

  The universe is queerer than we can suppose.

  —J. B. S. Haldane

  It’s all the same to me, I’m already in paradise.

  —Moro Dante Spada, a Corsican bandit,

  upon being condemned to death

  1

  BABY CAT-FACE

  BABY AND JIMBO

  “Take here dis lady in Detroit bludgeon her husban’, chop up da body, den cook it. Talkin’ ’bout payback! Whoa!”

  “Baby, you oughtn’t be readin’ dem kinda lies is put inna newspaper. Ya know dat shit jus’ invented, mannipilate y’all’s min’. Make peoples crazy, so’s dey buy stuff dey don’t have no need fo’. Stimmilate da ’conomy.”

  “Wait up, Jimbo, dis gal got firs’ prize. She skin him, boil da head, an’ fry his hands in oil.”

  “What kinda oil? Corn oil? Olive oil?”

  “Don’t say. Lady be from Egyp’, ’riginally. Twenny-fo’ years ol’. Name Nazli Fike. Husban’ name Ralph Fike. Police found his body parts inna garbage bag, waitin’ be pick up. Whoa! Ol’ Nazli was stylin’! Put onna red hat, red shoes an’ red lipstick befo’ spendin’ hours choppin’ on an’ cookin’ da body. Played Ornette Coleman records real loud while she’s doin’ it. Tol’ police her ol’ man put her onna street, shot dope in her arms, an’ was rapin’ her when she kill him in self-defense.”

  “Bitch was a hoojy, begin wit’.”

  “Jimbo, how you know? Plenty guys lookin’ turn out dey ol’ ladies.”

  “Was a hoojy.”

  “Aw, shit!”

  “What?”

  “She ate parts da body.”

  “Cannibal hoojy.”

  “Dis disgustin’.”

  “What else it say?”

  “Can’t read no more.”

  Jimbo Deal got up from the fake-leopard-skin-covered sofa and snatched the newspaper out of Baby Cat-Face’s hands. He and Baby had been living together for six weeks now, since the day after the night they had met in Inez’s Fais-Dodo, and he wasn’t certain the arrangement was going to work out. She had a tendency to talk too much, engage him in conversation when he was not in a conversational mood. At thirty-four years old, Deal was used to maintaining his own speed. Since Baby Cat-Face, who was twenty-three, had come into his life, he had been forced to adjust.

  “Woman ain’ be clean fo’ way back, Baby, you read da res’. Run numbers on guys since she come from Egyp’, seven years ago. Car thef, drug bus’, solicitin’ minors fo’ immoral purpose. A hoojy, like I claim. Foreign hoojy.”

  “Husban’ put her up to it,” said Baby. She lit a cigarette and stood looking out the window down on Martinique Alley. “She been abuse’ as a chil’, too.”

  “Dat’s what dey all usin’, now. Abuse dis, abuse dat. Shit. Says she be foun’ sane an’ sentence to life imprison. Shit. She prob’ly be queen da hive, have hoojies servin’ on her in da joint. Big rep hoojy like her.”

  “Quit, Jimbo! Cut out dat ‘hoojy’ shit, all ri’? Tired hear-in’ it.”

  “Troof, is all. Since when you don’t like to listen da troof?”

  Baby sucked on an unfiltered Kool, then blew away a big ball of smoke.

  ‘‘Swear, Mister Deal, you da mos’ truth tellines’ man in New Orleans.”

  Jimbo tossed the newspaper on the coffee table.

  “I got to get ready fo’ work,” he said, and left the room.

  Baby Cat-Face smoked and stared out the window. The sky was overcast. It was almost six o’clock in the evening and Baby was not sure what she was going to do while Jimbo pulled his night shift at the refinery in Chalmette. She saw two boys, both about twelve years old, one white, one black, run into the alley from off Rampart Street. They were moving fast, and as they ran, one of them dropped a lady’s handbag.

  “Baby!” Jimbo Deal shouted from the bathroom. “You gon’ make my lunch?”

  Baby took a deep drag of the Kool, then flicked the butt out the window into the alley. It landed, still burning, next to the purse.

  “We got some dat lamb neck lef’, darlin’, ain’ we?”

  THE DWARF OF PRAGUE AND THE DREADFULS

  Baby Cat-Face had not used her real name, Esquerita Reyna, since her second, and last, year of high school. Even then, most of her friends and all of the members of her family called her Baby or Baby Cat-Face, as they had since she was born. She had been nicknamed Cat-Face for the most obvious reasons: she had green feline eyes and a tiny snub nose. Esquerita was the youngest of three sisters and two brothers born to DeDe Benavides and Refugio Reyna in New Orleans over a twelve-year period, and so she was dubbed Baby.

  She attended St. Guerif of Rivages Grammar School, Turhan Bey Junior High, and St. Phoebe of Zagreb High School, all in N.O. It was during Baby’s second year at St. Phoebe’s, while on the class retreat, that Baby learned the legend of the Dwarf of Prague and the Dreadfuls. Sister Mercy Vermillion related the story of how in the fifteenth century a.d., a band of thugs and cutthroats called the Dreadfuls were terrorizing the good citizens of Prague. This group of murderous thieves specialized in kidnapping children of the rich and threatening to burn them alive unless their parents paid an enormous ransom. After the Dreadfuls had carried out this threat on two or three occasions, the families subsequently victimized quickly capitulated.

  One day a gnomish dwarf named Desenfrenado appeared in Prague at the office of the mayor. Desenfrenado declared that he could rid the city of the Dreadfuls, but in return the citizens would have to build him a mansion behind the church in which he could live for the rest of his life, provide him with servants and funds adequate to a comfortable lifestyle, and allow him to go about the city naked during good weather. The mayor and most of his advisers were angered at the seeming effrontery of the dwarf, and were about to have him thrown into the street, when a member of the city council known as Raymond of Pest, a man who had come from the East and married a local woman, begged the mayor to indulge Desenfrenado. After all, said Raymond of Pest, there would be no harm in allowing the dwarf this opportunity to better himself, especially since the council had been unable to develop an effective plan of action. If the dwarf could eradicate the Dreadfuls, Raymond argued, Desenfrenado’s request would be a small enough price to pay. The mayor and the other council members, having no immediate alternatives, thus sanctioned the dwarf’s enterprise.

  That night there was a full moon over Prague, and at ten o’clock Desenfrenado appeared nude in the town square. Mumbling to himself, the dwarf began to dance, gyrating wildly over the cobblestones around the deep well in the center of the square. Word of the dwarf’s appearance spread throughout Prague, and soon most of its citizens were gathered in order to observe the event. Desenfrenado danced and danced, his movements becoming increasingly frenzied, his indecipherable mutterings growing louder, and—as Sister Mercy Vermillion delicately phrased it—his extreme maleness reaching a rather preposterous state. An hour or so into his mad romp, several of the audience, infected by the dwarf’s dedication, themselves threw off their clothes and joined him in the dance. By midnight, virtually the entire population of Prague, including the mayor and his advisers, was whirling in intoxicated abandon around the dwarf.

  Only nine men stood apart from the naked, swirling mass. Suddenly, the dwarf bolted from among the throng and began to run in a circle around the isolated men, shouting, “These are they! These are they!” The citizens turned their attention to the nine nonparticipants and advanced on them, mumbling and droolin
g as they came. The nine men, quickly surrounded, could not escape. They fell to their knees and begged forgiveness for their sins, confessing that they were indeed the Dreadfuls who had kidnapped and burned the children. No sooner had these words escaped their mouths than the furious crowd tore the men’s limbs from their bodies, their tongues from their heads, and crushed their skulls on the cobblestones.

  Desenfrenado was provided with his mansion and supported thereafter by the citizens of Prague. When in fair weather he chose to go about the streets of the city unclothed, the citizens greeted him as affectionately and respectfully as they did when he was clad. The dwarf, Sister Mercy Vermillion told her class, lived to be very old. Desenfrenado had not been accorded sainthood, she explained, due to his own choosing. Before he died, Desenfrenado declared that he wanted forever to remain a humble man, as ordinary in memory as he had been in life. Remember, he said on his deathbed, it is always the most dreadful among us who ultimately are revealed to be the most timid.

  Baby Cat-Face never forgot the story of the Dwarf of Prague. She had told it to every man she had slept with more than once, all of whom, with the exception of Jimbo Deal, had said that it was the most ridiculous story he had ever heard. Jimbo had only nodded and said, “Baby, funny, ain’t it, how there never be a dwarf around when you need one.”

  Jimbo, Baby hoped, would turn out to be the kind of man who never lost his sense of humor.

  RAT TANGO

  “ ‘What you want, baby I got it. What you want, baby I got it.’ ”

  “Say, what?” Baby Cat-Face said to the red-haired, cafe au lait woman who was singing and dancing the skate next to the jukebox, her back to Baby.

  “Huh?” the woman said, doing an about-face, keeping her skates on. “How come there ain’t mo’ Aretha on this box? ‘R-e-s-p-e-c-t, find out what it mean to me,’ ” she sang-shouted, beginning to swim and shimmy. “Sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me!”

  The woman wiggled and shook, causing Baby and another patron of the Evening in Seville Bar on Lesseps Street to grin and clap.

  “Down to it, Radish!” shouted a fat man standing next to the pay phone. He banged his huge right fist on the top of the black metal box. “Be on time! Ooh-ooh-ooh! ”

  The dancing woman looked at Baby, and asked, “You say somethin’?”

  “Thought you was talkin’ to me, was all,” said Baby. “You say ‘baby.’

  “Yeah, so?”

  “That’s my name, Baby.”

  The woman smiled, displaying several gold teeth, one with a red skull painted on it. “Oh, yeah? Well, hello, Baby. I’m Radish Jones. Over here playin’ the telephone’s my partner, ETA Cato.”

  The fat man nodded. He was wearing a porkpie hat with a single bell on the top with DALLAS printed on a band around the front of it, and a black silk shirt unbuttoned to the beltline, exposing his bloated, hairy belly.

  “Happenin’, lady?” he said.

  “ETA?” said Baby.

  Radish laughed. “Estimated time of arrival. Cato’s firs’ wife name him, ’count of his careless way ’bout punctchality. Come we ain’t seen you in here before, Baby?”

  “Firs’ time I been, Radish. My ol’ man, Jimbo Deal, tol’ me check it out.”

  “Shit, you hang wit’ Jimbo? Shit, we know da man, know him well. Don’t we, Cato?”

  “Who dat?”

  “Jimbo, da oil man.”

  Cato nodded. “Um-hum. Drink Crown Royal an’ milk when he up, gin when he down.”

  “Dat him,” said Baby.

  “Where he at tonight?” Radish asked.

  “Workin’.”

  “Well, glad you come by, Baby. We front you a welcome by.”

  “Rum an’ orange juice be nice.”

  “Say, Eddie Floyd Garcia,” Radish called to the bartender, “lady need a rum an’ OJ.”

  The bartender mixed Mount Gay with Tang and water and set it up for Baby.

  “Thanks, Eddie Floyd,” said Radish. “This here’s Baby.”

  “Hi, Baby,” the bartender said. “Round here we call dis drink a Rat Tango, as in ‘I don’t need no rat do no tango at my funeral.’ ”

  Eddie Floyd Garcia, a short, wide, dark blue man of about fifty, winked his mist-covered right eye at Baby. Up close, she could see the thick cataract that covered it.

  ETA Cato traded off dancing with Radish and Baby to the juke over the next couple or three hours, during which time they consumed liquor at a steady clip, Eddie Floyd making sure to keep their drinks fresh. It was a slow night in the Evening in Seville. Other than a few quick-time shot and beer customers, the trio and Eddie Floyd had the place to themselves. Baby learned that Cato worked as a longshoreman on Celeste Street Wharf, and Radish did a thriving nail-and-polish business out of her house on the corner of Touro and Duels called The Flashy Fingers Salon de Beaute.

  Sometime past two a.m., Radish decided that ETA Cato had danced one too many times in a row with Baby Cat-Face. Johnny Adams, “The Tan Canary,” was seriously wailing “I Solemnly Promise” when Radish flashed a razor under Cato’s right ear, cutting him badly.

  “Damn, woman!” Cato yelled. “What you do that for?!”

  Radish Jones shook a Kool from a pack on the bar, stuck it in her mouth, but couldn’t quite hold her lighter hand steady enough to fire up the cigarette.

  Eddie Floyd Garcia grabbed a rag, vaulted over the counter, and knelt next to ETA Cato, who had slid to the floor, holding his right hand over the cut. Blood was jumping out of his neck.

  “King Jesus! King Jesus!” screamed Baby, backing away.

  Eddie Floyd applied pressure to Cato’s wound with the rag, but the bleeding did not abate.

  “Call a ambulance!” Eddie Floyd cried. “Look like a artery be sever’.”

  Radish did not pay any attention to Cato’s predicament, absorbed as she was in her attempt to torch the Kool. Baby grabbed the phone and dialed 911. When a voice answered, she started to talk, then stopped when she realized it was a recorded message requesting that the caller please be patient and hold the line until an operator became available.

  Baby forced herself to look at Cato. He coughed, lurched forward, and fell back against Eddie Floyd. Cato turned toward Baby and opened his eyes wide. She thought he was going to say something, but he died with his mouth half open, staring at her. A human being came on the line and asked Baby, “Is this an emergency?”

  ONLY THE DESPERATE DESERVE GOD

  “In Yuba City, California, two severed hands were found in a K-mart shopping cart. The grisly discovery was made at about four p.m. Sunday by a clerk collecting carts, a Yuba City police spokesman said. The hands are being treated as evidence in a crime, but it will take a forensics expert to determine for sure that the body parts found are, in fact, human and whether homicide is indicated.”

  “There just ain’t no end to human mis’ry,” Baby said out loud to herself, as she switched off the radio next to her and Jimbo’s bed.

  Baby Cat-Face had spent most of the previous three days drifting in and out of sleep, depressed by thoughts of the incident she had witnessed in the Evening in Seville Bar. After Radish Jones slit the throat of her boyfriend, ETA Cato, who expired on the barroom floor, flooded by his own blood, Baby had gone stone-cold with shock. Jimbo Deal told Baby later that the police had brought her home and that he had put her to bed after feeding her the Valium mints the NOPD nurse had safety-pinned in a tiny plastic bag to Baby’s blouse.

  She had eaten sparingly during this time, only Rice Krispies and dry toast with tea. Jimbo had stayed home from work for two days, “Baby-sittin’,” as he called it; but today he had had to go, afraid that he would be fired if he did not. Jimbo placed a loaded Ruger Bearcat in Baby’s bedside drawer and told her to protect herself with it if she had to until he came home.

  Baby reached over with her right hand and switched the radio back on, tuning it until she found an interesting voice, and left it there.

  “People, when I say you got to
stand up to God, I mean you got to challenge his word!” said the voice. “You got to be bold enough for Him to pay you any mind. Only the desperate deserve God, don’t you know? Hallelujah! Are you desperate yet? Are you ashamed yet? Are you frightened next to death yet? Well, well, well—you should be! Yes, you should, you should! This is the time, people, the only time you got to hear God’s word. It don’t matter what your name is, what color you are, what size or financial condition, no! You got to stand up to him right now or it’s snake eyes for the planet! Yeah, we got to do this little thing together, people, make it work right. Get our neighbor to admit how desperate he or she is so we can get on with this holy war, ’cause that’s what it is, a holy war! Standin’ up to God means standin’ up to the beast in the street, the one soon’s spit poison in your eyes as look at you. You got to know what I’m talkin’ about, people, or die stupid!”

  “I know,” Baby said. “I know what you sayin’.”

  “All right, then!” said the voice from the radio. “Stand up to God! Do what’s necessary! Most of you desperate and don’t know it!”

  Baby turned off the radio. She heard the front door to the apartment open and then quiedy close.

  “Jimbo? Honey, that you home already?”

  A short person wearing a red ski mask stepped into the bedroom. The intruder held a .45 automatic pistol with both black-gloved hands and pointed it at Baby. Baby threw a pillow at the gun and rolled off the bed onto the floor, pulling down the bedside table as she fell. She grabbed Jimbo’s Ruger from the drawer, swung it toward the intruder, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger twice. Baby opened her eyes and saw that she was alone in the room. She held the Bearcat straight out in front of her as she got to her feet.