Arise and Walk

  ARISE & WALK

  Barry Gifford

  1995

  I thank the magazines and anthologies where portions of this book, in slighty different form, first appeared: Panta (Milan), Exquisite Corpse, and the Double Dealer Redux.

  FOR VINNIE DESERIO

  and to Sparky

  from Buddy

  And Jesus knowing their thoughts said

  Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?

  For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins

  be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?

  —Matthew 9:4-5

  Despair is the only unforgivable sin, and it’s always reaching for us.

  —Sam Peckinpah

  1

  ARISE

  TOP SNAKE

  The Reverend Cleon Tone, formerly pastor of the Church of the Fresh Start in Daytime, Arkansas, stood on the corner of Burgundy and Orleans streets in the French Quarter of the city of New Orleans, holding upside down in his hands a battered black felt fedora. Suspended from his neck by a piece of string was a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read, HAND YURSEF A FRESH START BY LEND A MAN A HAND. “The Lord’ll love you harder,” he said whenever a passerby dropped a coin into his hat.

  Cleon Tone, who now slept in a nameless hotel patronized chiefly by transients on North Rampart Street, was fifty-eight years old. Thin strands of gray hair spider webbed his skull; his facial skin was splotchy, pink and red; his hands were dotted by liver spots. Black smudges scarred his throat, indelible souvenirs of his attempted murder by Prentiss Temoign, the husband of Viridiana Legend Temoign, a member of the Church of the Fresh Start, whom Tone had cuckolded a decade before. Owing to that disgraceful incident, the reverend had fallen on hard times, having been railroaded out of Daytime, Arkansas, by his irate former parishioners. He had drifted around the Deep South since then, initially working at odd jobs until his worsening alcoholism reduced him to this present state.

  The night before, Cleon Tone had shut himself inside the W.C. and while seated on the toilet had picked up off the floor a section of the previous day’s Times-Picayune. He read an article about the mating habits of pit vipers, such as rattlesnakes and copperheads. Female copperheads, he learned, mate only once every three to five years. When one emerges from her den after hibernating for the winter, she is greeted by a veritable phalanx of suitors. These males battle one another for the privilege of partaking of her favors not by biting but by wrestling, attempting to force the other down to the ground into a submissive position, an exercise that may last hours or even days, about the same length of time it takes to complete the process of copperhead copulation. Females shun the weaker snakes, and even younger males will assert themselves over the defeated adults, whose self-confidence has been severely reduced. Once the competition has been completed, Cleon Tone read, the top snake seeks out the willing female and immediately presents her with his double-pronged demand.

  “Be damn!” Cleon said aloud, after he had finished with the article. “That been me, the top snake! Now look.”

  The knob rattled and the W.C. door shook.

  “You-all about crapped out, yet?” someone asked.

  “Clinch it back a minute!” Cleon said.

  He tore the page he had been reading in two and used a piece to wipe himself. The other he folded up for another time. Reverend Tone pulled up his trousers, fastened them, and pulled the flush chain before sliding back the bolt and opening the door. To his surprise, the hallway was empty when he emerged.

  “A top snake don’t lay down for long,” he mumbled, as he shuffled toward his room. “And this’n got at least one big strike left in him, you bet.”

  WET HEAT

  Wilbur “Damfino” Nougat and Gaspar DeBlieux slumped down in their red leather easy chairs in their two-bedroom suite at the DeSalvo Hotel on Gravier Street, drinking rum and orange juice, waiting for the two hookers they had ordered from the Congo Square Escort Service to arrive. Nougat and DeBlieux—pronounced “W”—were white men in their mid-forties, in New Orleans for the annual national convention of dental supply salesmen, the profession at which each of them had been laboring for the better part of twenty years. Nougat lived in Nashville, Tennessee; DeBlieux in Monroe, Louisiana. They had become friends fifteen years before, when they had first shared a room at the Pontchartrain in Detroit. Since then, they had arranged to stay together whenever and wherever the dental supply salesmen of America gathered.

  “More an’ more I’m likin’ dark meat,” said Gaspar. “Used to it was only blondies stood Little Boy at attention. Why I married Dolly Fay, ’cause of her yellow hair, which now can’t no way tell for sure what color it is. Changes every month or two. ’Bout you, Wilbur? What’s your preference?’’

  “Damfino or care, Dublya. Long’s it’s hooters a pair an’ wet heat below, she can be blue with white polka dots from hair to there. Stick it and lick it, that’s the ticket.’’

  DeBlieux laughed. “Sonesta hear what you say, she’d be after you with her magnum cocked.”

  “Only cock she get, too,” said Damfino. “Woman size the Goodyear blimp now. You ain’t seen her in a year or two. Awful how she let herself go.”

  “Sorry to hear it. Sonesta was sweet-lookin’ once.”

  “She claims it was havin’ a fourth child did in her figure, but it’s chocolate. Sonesta can’t go a hour without she’s chunkin’ chocolate.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Be our dates, Dub.”

  Damfino popped up, went to the door, and opened it. Two tall, lanky black hookers entered the room and stood together, unsmiling, in front of a large picture window opposite Gaspar DeBlieux.

  “Drinks, ladies?” asked Damfino.

  The hookers had tough faces; their heavily painted skin looked waxed. Both of them were quite beautiful, however; each had high cheekbones, full lips, and what appeared to be a perfectly sculpted figure barely contained by a tight leopard-skin dress. They wore red berets over their pressed black hair.

  “Holy Infant!” chirped Gaspar, springing out of his chair. “Looks like we hit the right number tonight!”

  He practically pranced around the hirelings, grinning, the contents of his hand-held glass sloshing onto the burgundy carpet.

  “We don’t use alcohol,” said the slightly shorter of the two prostitutes. Her voice was very deep.

  “If you don’t mind,” said the other, in a more feminine tone, “we’d prefer dispensing with the business side up front. Two hundred each, gentlemen.”

  Wilbur Nougat and Gaspar DeBlieux each extracted two crisp C-notes from his wallet and handed them over. The prostitutes took the money and deposited it in their purses, out of which they each then withdrew a .32-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver with a silencer affixed to the barrel. They pointed the guns at the men, who froze at the sight.

  “Take off your clothes,” said the tallest hooker.

  “Just a hot damn minute,” said DeBlieux. “What you doin’?”

  “Take off your clothes or we’ll shoot you,” said the other hooker. “We be aim low.”

  The men removed their clothes and stood naked in the middle of the room.

  “Suck his dick,” the shorter hooker commanded DeBlieux. “Genuflect front your partner an’ do ’im.”

  “This the buddy system,” said the taller one.

  Gaspar dropped to his knees, put his lips on the head of Damfino’s penis, and closed his eyes.

  “Suck it off!” the taller one repeated.

  Gaspar DeBlieux did his best, but Nougat’s penis remained flaccid. Tears rolled freely from both men’s eyes.

  “Maybe you do it better,” said the tallest tormentor. “Trade places. We ain’t goin’ till the faucet starts flowin’.”
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  The men did as they were told and this time Nougat got some results. Gaspar’s penis hardened despite his fear.

  “Stroke it,” said one of the hookers, Damfino didn’t know which, and after a few minutes he made DeBlieux come.

  “Swallow it!” ordered the taller hooker.

  Damfino dropped his head to the floor and sobbed. Gaspar stood, trembling, his depleted penis shrinking rapidly.

  “Y’all get down again,” the smaller hooker said to DeBlieux, who obeyed.

  Both men bent forward, their eyes shut tight. The hookers lifted their short dresses with their free hands, took out their penises, and urinated on Nougat and DeBlieux.

  “Surprise!” the prostitutes shouted, mirthful now, giggling like schoolgirls.

  When they had finished, the hookers straightened their skirts, replaced the guns in their bags, and walked out of the room, leaving the men wet and shivering on the hotel room floor.

  Outside the DeSalvo, Cleon Tone stood about ten feet from the entrance, wearing his HAND YURSEF A FRESH START BY LEND A MAN A HAND sign and holding his hat. As the regal, leopard-skin-clad hookers walked by, the taller of the two dropped a hundred-dollar bill into the disgraced pastor’s fedora. Before the occurrence had registered on Cleon’s brain, his benefactors had climbed into a taxi and sped away.

  The Reverend Tone stared at the glowing C-note, shook his head, and said aloud, “The Good Lord got Him some sundry damn messengers, don’t He?”

  THE BRAVE AND THE BEAUTIFUL

  Cleon had a solid Cuban dinner of ropa vieja, frijoles negros, arroz amarillo, platanos maduros, flan, and cafe con leche at the Country Flame on Iberville Street, then decided to treat himself to a movie. It had been several years since the Reverend Tone had seen a film. He strolled up Canal to the Choctaw Theater and was horrified to find that the asking price for entry was six dollars. This being a special occasion, however, Cleon paid for a ticket to see The Brave and the Beautiful, starring Martine Mustique.

  Martine Mustique had been born Rima Dot Duguid, in Bay St. Clement, North Carolina, a place she fled at an early age. After two failed teenage marriages and a half-dozen abortions, Rima Dot Duguid, who at twenty called herself Sarita Touche, left Atlanta, Georgia, where she had lived for four years, for France, in the company of an Iranian art dealer named Darwish Noof. In Cannes, she was spotted sunbathing topless on the beach by Tora Tora-Tora, the Tahitian synthetic cosmetics king, who hired her as a model for his company’s new perfume, Paroxysme. It was Tora-Tora who renamed her Martine Mustique one paradisiacal afternoon on the veranda of his estate on the Caribbean island whose name she now wore as her own. The transition from magazine supermodel to film star was a swift one for the once-white trash Carolina runaway.

  The celluloid flesh merchants had promoted Martine Mustique as another Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner, advertising her as a throwback to more glamorous days. She had starred in one box office blockbuster after another, always in tandem with the worthiest leading man of the moment. Even the names of her films—Forever Ruthless, Lost Among the Living, The Big Ache, Tame Me!, I Am Desolate—were redolent of an earlier, seemingly purer era, however mistaken such a notion might be. Deluded or not, the adoring multitude attended Martine Mustique’s movies as if on a religious pilgrimage.

  When she was found murdered—decapitated—in the bathtub of her house in the Hollywood hills, the public outpouring of grief was titanic. Her killer, a spurned suitor named Edgard Veloso Shtup-Louche, the young scion of Shtup Industries, manufacturers of forty-five varieties of condoms, mailed a confession to the Los Angeles Police Department before hanging himself in a gazebo on the Shtup-Louche estate in Bel Air. In his letter, Edgard said that Martine had refused his proposal of marriage after forty-eight hours of virtually continuous lovemaking. She had been, claimed Shtup-Louche, the only woman with whom he was able to achieve an erection. When she denied him her hand, she denied him his only chance for lifelong happiness. Rather than murder all of the psychiatrists who had attended him since childhood, Edgard said—though that certainly should be done, he added—it was easier just to do away with the object of his affection, and, of course, himself.

  The Brave and the Beautiful had been completed two days before Martine’s death, one week prior to what would have been her thirtieth birthday. Since its release, this last evidence of her remarkable ability to charm even the most reluctant and cynical among moviegoers had broken box office records worldwide. In life, Martine Mustique had beguiled; in death, she transfixed. Cleon Tone was no less mesmerized as he watched her final portrayal, that of a Croatian lion tamer named the Great Vukovara, who is torn between her love for her home and family and a Serbian soldier during the Yugoslavian civil war.

  Cleon wept with the others in the theater as the Great Vukovara learns that her lover has been killed by Croat freedom fighters just before she must stage a command performance for the queen of England. She goes on as scheduled, and for her finale, Vukovara tosses aside her whip and chair and orders the lions to attack her. As the big cats tear Vukovara apart, ripping and rending in a spectacular frenzy, superimposed on the screen is a picture of Martine Mustique at her most beautiful, the way she looked in her first ad for Paroxysme. The effect on Cleon Tone was devastating.

  When he finally managed to extricate himself from his seat and stumble out of the theater, the disgraced reverend and other patrons were confronted on the street by a troop of skinheads dressed in leather jackets with their trouser legs tucked into the tops of their black boots, holding signs saying, DON’T BLAME KROTZ IF THE KOUNTRY ROTS and SAVE OUR TOTS, VOTE FOR KROTZ along with poster photos of Klarence Kosciusko Krotz, the Real American Party (RAP) candidate for governor of Louisiana. Klarence Krotz, Cleon Tone knew, once had been the Great and All-Powerful Grand Beast of the Holy Order of Everlasting Yahoos (HOOEY), a white supremacist group headquartered in Tensas Parish, in northeastern Louisiana.

  Later that night, lying on the cot in his room on North Rampart Street, it occurred to Tone that it would cleanse his soul for good if he were to eliminate from the planet a hater such as Klarence Kosciusko Krotz. By this consummate act, Cleon could come to terms with his own fall from grace, and redeem himself in the eyes of the Lord and those who had suffered from his own selfish behavior. He could then arise, and walk with the angels. The next day, Cleon Tone decided, he would purchase a tool of destruction. He then turned his attention to his own tool, masturbating with the image of Martine Mustique in his mind until he reached a state approaching paroxysm.

  HISTORY IN THE MAKING

  Dortorina Ridiculo Krotz was the daughter of a department store bookkeeper from Alexandria, Louisiana, named Torquemada Ridiculo, an immigrant from Barcelona by way of the Azores, and Sallie Gay Crews, who had been born and raised in Alexandria. How Torque Ridiculo came to Louisiana, Dortorina, his and Sallie Gay’s only child, never had known for sure. As well as she could ascertain, her father had landed initially in New York City and the company he found work with had then relocated to Alexandria, taking Torque along. Torque had died of the Pyongyang-B strain of influenza when Dortorina was six, so she had only her mother’s version of the events of Torque’s life to go by.

  One time, when Dortorina was fourteen, after her mother had imbibed one too many Absolut and Orange Crush cocktails at a neighbor’s backyard barbecue party, Sallie Gay said that Torque had been an illegal alien on the lam from some embezzlement scam up north when she married him. When Dortorina tried to talk to her mother about this the next day, Mrs. Ridiculo had dismissed the story entirely, saying she could not imagine having said such a thing.

  Dortorina married Thaddeus Kosciusko Krotz, a traveling cement salesman from Grand Coteau, when she was eighteen and he was forty-four. Krotz’s people were originally from Poland, but their part of the country had been annexed by Germany during the Second World War. Shortly after the annexation, Thaddeus had deserted from the Nazi army, into which he had been drafted, and made his way to America by stowi
ng away on a general cargo boat sailing from Liverpool, England, to Baltimore, Maryland. That ship, the Duke of Earls Court, was torpedoed and sunk in the North Atlantic six weeks later.

  While on board the Duke of Earls Court, Krotz stole one of the crew’s seaman’s papers along with some money, and he managed to fake his way past the Customs officer at the port of Baltimore. Thaddeus spoke virtually no English at this time, but he found work quickly at a variety of menial jobs; first around Baltimore, then as he moved south, fleeing the kind of cold weather he had detested in Poland.

  Louisiana was his last stop. Acadia Parish, with its large Catholic population and warm climate, appealed to Thaddeus Krotz, and he hired on as a mixer at the Acadia Cement Works. Within a year, Krotz became a salesman for the company, and shortly after his marriage to Dortorina Ridiculo the former Nazi infantryman was allowed to purchase shares in the business. Fifteen years later, he became its majority stockholder; five years after that, he renamed the company Krotz Cement, and soon the Krotz name was known as the largest manufacturer of cement in the Deep South. Thaddeus diversified his interests, buying up radio stations and newspapers in small towns from Texas to Florida. By the time Dortorina’s and his only child, Klarence, was confirmed, Krotz Industries was firmly entrenched in the lower echelon of the Fortune 500.

  Thaddeus and Dortorina died together in a small-plane crash during a lightning storm while flying from Jackson, Mississippi, to Shreveport, when their son was twenty-three. Klarence, who had graduated the previous year from LSU and was at the time of his parents’ deaths enrolled in law school at Duke, discontinued his studies and assumed the directorship of Krotz Industries.