Night People

  NIGHT

  PEOPLE

  Barry Gifford

  1992

  THIS BOOK IS

  FOR MY SISTER, RANDI,

  WITH LOVE

  There’s something wild in the country

  that only the night people know…

  —Tennessee Williams

  Orpheus Descending

  1

  NIGHT PEOPLE

  Women are impervious to evil.

  —William Faulkner

  APACHES

  Big Betty Stalcup kissed Miss Cutie Early on the right earlobe as Cutie drove, tickling her, causing Cutie to swerve the black Dodge Monaco toward the right as she scratched at that side of her head.

  “Dammit, Bet, you shouldn’t ought do that while I’m wheelin’.”

  Big Betty laughed and said, “We’re kissin’ cousins, ain’t we? Sometimes just I can’t help myself and don’t want to. Safety first ain’t never been my motto.”

  Cutie straightened out the car and grinned. “Knowed that for a long time,” she said.

  “Knowed which? That we was kissin’ cousins?”

  “Uh uh, that come later. About the safe part. You weren’t never very predictable, Bet, even as a child.” Big Betty and Miss Cutie had spent the week in New Orleans, then the weekend in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and were headed back into Florida at Perdido Key. The Gulf of Mexico was smooth as glass this breezeless, sunny morning in February.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Cutie, tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day!”

  “So?”

  “We’ll have to make somethin’ special happen.”

  “Last Valentine’s we was locked up at Fort Sumatra. Spent the whole day bleachin’ blood and piss stains outta sheets.”

  “Still can’t believe we survived three and change in that pit.”

  “Don’t know if I’d made it without you, Bet. Them big ol’ mamas been usin’ me for toilet paper, you weren’t there to protect me.”

  Big Betty shifted her five-foot-eight, two-hundred-pound body around in the front passenger seat so that she faced Cutie Early. At twenty-four, Cutie was twelve years younger than Betty, and Miss Cutie’s slim-figured five-foot-one-inch frame engendered in Big Betty a genuinely maternal feeling. They had been lovers ever since Miss Cutie had tiptoed into Big Betty’s cell at the Fort Sumatra Detention Center for Wayward Women, which was located midway between Mexico Beach and Wewahitchka, Florida, just inside the central time zone. Cutie’s curly red hair, freckles, giant black eyes and delicate features were just what Betty Stalcup had been looking for. It was as if the state of Florida penal system had taken her order and served it up on a platter. Big Betty brushed back her own shoulder-length brown hair with her left hand and placed her other hand on Cutie’s right breast, massaging it gently.

  “You’re my baby black-eyed pea, that’s for sure,” said Betty. “We ain’t never gonna be apart if I can help it.”

  “Suits me.”

  “Cutie, we just a couple Apaches ridin’ wild on the lost highway, the one Hank Williams sung about.”

  “Don’t know that I’ve ever heard of it.”

  “Travelin’ along the way we are, without no home or reason to be or stay anywhere, that’s what it means bein’ on the lost highway. Most folks don’t know what they want, Cutie, only mostly they don’t even know that much. Sometimes they think they know but it’s usually just their stomach or cunt or cock complainin’. They get fed or fucked and it’s back to square one. Money makes ’em meaner’n shit, don’t we already know. Money’s the greatest excuse in the world for doin’ dirt. But you and me can out-ugly the sumbitches, I reckon.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Just by puttin’ two and two together, sweet pea, then subtractin’ off the top, one at a time.”

  “I ain’t sure I understand you, Bet, but I’m willin’ to learn.”

  Big Betty threw back her head, shut her wolfslit green eyes and gave out a sharp laugh.

  “Young and willin’s the best time of life,” she said. “You got to play it that way till you can’t play it no more.”

  “Then what?” asked Cutie.

  Big Betty grinned, threw her heavy left arm around Cutie’s narrow shoulders and squeezed closer to her companion.

  “Start cuttin’ your losses,” she said. “All that’s left to do.”

  “Along with cuttin’ throats, you mean.”

  “Why, Miss Cutie, honey, you way ahead of me.”

  CONDITIONS

  Rollo Lamar leaned back in his oak swivel chair, lifted the red enamel Hopalong Cassidy cup to his lips and took a sip of Bustelo. He swished the hot black espresso around in his mouth awhile before swallowing it, then looked at Bobbie Dean. If he were a younger man, Rollo thought, he’d go for a slice of this. At sixty-four and counting, though, and six months past his quintuple bypass, Rollo let the notion slither by. He wasn’t even supposed to be drinking coffee, let alone overdoing things with a delectable divorcee-to-be such as Bobbie Dean Baker.

  Bobbie Dean had to be all of thirty now, Rollo figured. She’d buried two husbands before she turned twenty-five, and now here she was in his law office asking him to handle her divorce from number three. Bobbie Dean looked spectacular, he had to admit, with her white-blonde hair wrapped up around her head like a motel towel, blue shadow above and below her sparkly aqua eyes, long thin lips spread almost from one side of her face to the other, as if The Maker had begun to carve open her face like a grapefruit but stopped halfway. As Lightnin’ Hopkins used to say, she was built up from the ground like a Coca-Cola bottle. Rollo Lamar lowered the coffee cup and placed it on his desk.

  “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with this, Bobbie Dean,” Rollo said. “Your husband’s income more than doubled both last year and this. Then there’s Paisley Marie to think of. She’s what, two now?”

  “Be three next week.”

  “Won’t prob’ly need to go to court, don’t think. Leave it to me.”

  Bobbie Dean stood up, smiled sweetly at Rollo and let him eyeball her form for a bit.

  “Bobbie Dean, you’d do wonders for a dead man.”

  Bobbie Dean laughed. “Don’t know about a corpse, Mr. Lamar, but I’d like to think I got somethin’ to do with improvin’ a man’s outlook on life, even temporarily.”

  After Bobbie Dean left, Rollo switched on the Admiral AM he’d had since he was a boy.

  “This just out of Alice Springs, Australia,” said the newsreader. “Aborigines attacked policemen with frozen kangaroo tails in a remote Northern Territory town and then ate the evidence, a court was told yesterday.

  “Senior Constable Mark Coffey testified in Alice Springs court that the fifteen Aborigines bought the tails at a local store, then attacked three officers. Coffey said police believe the attack was motivated by an earlier attempt by police to move a man who was sitting in the middle of a highway in an apparent suicide bid. The man refused to move and a fight developed, Coffey said.

  “After the attack on the policemen, six men were arrested and charged with assault. But a police spokesman said the kangaroo tails will not be introduced as evidence because it is believed they were eaten by the Aborigines.”

  Dumb shits, thought Rollo. That Abo probably plunked his ass down on the road because it was a sacred spot just happened to’ve been paved over. Damn cops anywhere would rather eliminate the indigenous population than try to understand them and work things out. Could have put a bend in the road there, for instance. All this time and they still ain’t figured out there’s an easier way.

  Rollo Lamar picked up his Hoppy cup and drained the Bustelo. He closed his eyes, only dimly aware now of the droning radio. Before he’d gone under the knife, he’d made out his will, leaving virtually all of his assets to the
American Heart Association, and provided for his burial, stipulating that the stone be engraved with the last words of Studs Lonigan, “Mother, it’s getting dark.” He thought of this now, and relaxed. A fitting epitaph for the world’s condition, Rollo decided, and dozed off.

  A GENERATION REMOVED

  The two Peruvian seamen, brothers from Callao, Ernesto and Dagoberto Reyes, went straight from the Madrugada, a thirty-thousand-ton container ship registered in Liberia and berthed for eighteen hours at the Esplanade dock, to the Saturn Bar on the corner of St. Claude and Clouet in the Ninth Ward. Since Encanta’s Tijuana, their former primary New Orleans hangout, had closed down two years before, the Reyes boys had frequented the Saturn—pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable by the locals—whenever they hit town. It was a lively, though sometimes deadly little place, where the brothers could drink, dance with an assortment of neighborhood doxies and slumming college girls, shoot some pool and otherwise entertain themselves before heading back out to sea. This trip, the Madrugada‘s next port of call was Port of Spain, Trinidad, a place neither Ernesto nor Dagoberto cared much for, which is perhaps why they drank too many Abitas with Jim Beam chasers at the Saturn.

  The two women they left with, the bartender, Bosco Brouillard, later told police, were strangers to him. One was large, Bosco said, about five-eight and heavy, even muscular, buxom, maybe in her late thirties. The other was small, just over five feet, boyish, pigeon-chested, a lot younger.

  “Them ladies moved over those guys like Hypnos and Thanatos,” said Bosco.

  “Who’re they?” asked the cop, who had discovered the butchered bodies of the Reyes brothers behind Swindle Ironworks on Burgundy over in the Eighth Ward.

  “Sleep and Death,” Bosco told him, “twin children of Nyx. You know, Night.”

  “No, I don’t know,” said the cop, who had not slept since he’d seen the pair of brown Peruvian heads hollowed out like cantaloupes scooped clean at a Cajun picnic.

  “Gals had ’em covered, okay.”

  “Anyone else leave with them?”

  The bartender shook his bald head no.

  “Could be Morpheus was waitin’ outside, though,” Bosco said. “He’s usually not far away.”

  “Who’s this Morpheus?”

  “The god of dreams, Nyx’s sidekick. Say, you law-enforcement types ain’t ’xactly up on your mythology, are ya?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then I don’t guess you know somethin’ else is important.”

  The cop looked at the bartender, who was grinning now. The four television sets above the bar, each tuned to a different station with the sound off, flickered above his clean head.

  “What’s that?” the cop asked.

  “Sleep, Dream and Death, they all only one generation removed from Chaos.”

  The policeman, whose name was Vernon Duke Douglas, and who was a direct descendant of H. Kyd Douglas, author of the book I Rode with Stonewall, folded his notepad and put it away.

  “Obliged, Mr. Brouillard. We’ll be around again, I’m certain.”

  Bosco winked his weak-lidded left eye at the Confederate scribe’s great-great-great-nephew, and said, “Sir, I ain’t no kind of travelin’ man.”

  BEASTS IN THE JUNGLE

  Big Betty and Cutie were lying on the double bed in their room in Jim & Jesse’s Birth of a Nation Motel at Alligator Point. Jaguar, a Sabu movie made in 1956, was on the TV.

  “This don’t actually make whole bunches of sense,” said Cutie, who lay on her stomach with her head at the foot of the bed. Her legs were bent at the knees and her feet twitched around each other.

  “How’s that, hon?” Big Betty asked. She was tired from driving all day, and had her eyes closed and her back and head propped up against two pillows next to the headboard.

  “See, there’s this ol’ tribe of jaguar men lurkin’ around and terrorizin’ these oilfield workers in South America, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Then there’s the young guy, Sabu, who left the tribe when he was a baby, and now the oilfield foreman is tryin’ to trick him into thinkin’ he—Sabu, I mean—is really revertin’ to his natural self by gettin’ into a kind of trance and then clawin’ all these guys, but it’s really the foreman in a jaguar suit who’s doin’ it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “So the foreman can take over the project from the big boss, or somethin’, I can’t tell. Also, I figure the foreman’s got the spotted hots for Chiquita, a native honey who’s Sabu’s soul-baby.”

  “Think I seen this one, Cutie. Bad guy gets eaten by piranhas at the end.”

  “Oh, wow, Bet! Now they got Sabu in a skin costume about to sacrifice some small squirmin’ animal to the jaguar god, only he can’t cut it. Look, now he thrown away the knife and had him a kind of fit. Chiquita takin’ after him.”

  Betty opened her eyes and watched for a few seconds.

  “Chick reminds me of that cafe au lait gal was in C block, Pearline Nail. You recall her?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure do. She the one razored up Rupee Moreno when Rupee said a Baptist just someone don’t favor lynchin’ on Sunday.”

  Cutie got up and turned off the set. She picked up the copy of the Tallahassee Democrat that Betty had tossed on the floor and leafed through it.

  “Hey, Bet, ain’t this sweet as hell? Listen, this is in the ‘Memorials’ column of the newspaper: ‘In loving memory of Blackie Lala. Born November 15, 1925—Died February 10, 1991. Pops, we can’t forget you, we never will. Oh, that cruel night you laid so still, we asked God why. Here’s what he said, “He’s with Me now, he’s not dead. I know you loved him, so did I. I’ve taken him home, so please don’t cry. Evil can destroy a man, it lurks in every corner. When love survives, as it surely can, pain lifts off the mourner.” Sadly missed by his entire family. Signed, DeLeon, Felda, Birdie Dawn, Tequesta and Waldo Lala.’ ”

  “Be somethin’ different,” Betty said, “havin’ blood relatives means anything to ya. I never did.”

  Cutie put down the paper and curled up next to Big Betty’s legs.

  “There’s blood between us, Bet, you know? It’s how I feel.”

  Betty’s right hand found Cutie’s head and caressed it.

  “I do know, sweet pea. You just the little lamb lyin’ down with the ol’ lion what’s still got most her teeth.”

  “All I need, lady,” Cutie said, and closed her eyes.

  JUDGMENT

  Other than the four years he’d spent as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and the four in New York while he had worked the counter at Hartley’s Luncheonette on 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue when he wasn’t attending law school at Columbia, from which institution he received his degree, Rollo Lamar had spent his entire life in Egypt City, Florida.

  His mother, Purity Mayfield, had worked as a maid for Arthur and Delia Lamar for ten years, from the time she was fifteen until she was twenty-five, at which age she died giving birth to her only child. Since the father, a juke joint piano player named Almost Johnson, was married to another woman and had been murdered in a mysterious incident soon after Purity’s pregnancy became evident, and Purity Mayfield had no relatives in the vicinity, the Lamars, who were childless, adopted the boy and raised him as if he were their own son, even though they were white and he was black. They named him Rollo Mayfield Lamar, after Arthur’s father and Rollo’s mother.

  The Lamar family had long been proponents of equal rights for all people, regardless of race or religion. Rollo Leander Lamar, Arthur’s father, had been the first federal judge of the district in which Egypt City was situated, a position Arthur attained a generation later. Both Arthur and his father had attended Columbia Law, and so, of course, young Rollo followed suit.

  Young Rollo, as he was known in Egypt City even into adulthood, was educated prior to his college years at home by Judge Lamar and his wife. Blacks were at that time not admitted to southern universities, other than exclusively colored i
nstitutions, so Young Rollo was sent to Chicago, a city he came to loathe. He spent his years there mostly sequestered in his dormitory room, studying, seldom venturing beyond the immediate area of the campus. New York he liked only a little better. Both places he found too cold, corrupt and unfriendly; the black people too aggressive. Rollo was relieved once his studies had been completed and he was able to return permanently to Egypt City.

  Back home, he went to work for the firm of Lamar, Forthright & Lamar. Abe Forthright, Arthur Lamar’s best friend and professional partner for twenty-seven years, had died of pleurisy shortly after Young Rollo’s return, four years to the day after the Judge’s fatal heart attack that occurred during the Miss Egypt City Beauty Contest, of which the senior Lamar was, of course, a judge. Just as Breezy Pemberton strode onstage at the Gasparilla Livestock Center, wearing only a zebra-skin two-piece and ruby red spike heels, Judge Lamar keeled over sideways and fell off his chair. He was dead before he hit the ground, the doctor said, of a massive coronary.

  Breezy Pemberton, who the following day was unanimously named by the four remaining judges as that year’s Miss Egypt City, made this victory speech: “I’m entirely honored to have won but equally entirely horrified that my beauty might have caused the death of such a prominent citizen of our great town as Judge Lamar. I want the Lamar family to know that it never was any intention of my own to upset the Judge by wearin’ a zebra two-piece, certainly not to inspire such a terrible tragedy as has occurred. But I guess sometimes this kinda thing happens, whether required by God or not of course I am in no position to understand, and it ain’t no person’s fault. I am sixteen-and-one-half years old and Judge Lamar was much, much older, I know, and seein’ a young lady, namely me, like that caused a shock to his tired-out system he was no longer capable of standin’, and it’s too bad. I’m sorry for the Lamars that is left, but I’m also thrilled to’ve won the title of Miss Egypt City on my first try, and I just want to say I’m dedicatin’ my reign to the mem’ry of the dead judge. Thank you all, you’re very sweet.”