Southern Nights Page 17

  Precious saw something special in Cleon Tone. She had a feeling that this seeming wreck of a man, one who had been reduced to the level of a street beggar and worse, was meant to accomplish something great before the expiration of his allotted time on the planet. It was for this reason only, this intuitive certainty, that Precious was willing to risk her own life, of which Sally Blaine had become such an essential component. Cleon Tone had fallen from grace unto her hands, and La Preciosa was determined to heal him, to help him find his way to that special moment. It might, Precious considered, be the very reason that she herself had been chosen. The importance of this gesture made it not matter to her what anyone else thought, including Sally Blaine.

  They had come to Delacroix Island to hire a boat to take them to L’Île des Fantômes, an island in the Caribbean that Precious had been told about by a follower of hers named Colt Bisley. Bisley had died of prostate cancer six months before at the age of eighty-eight in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he had lived for the final decade of his life. Having become largely incapacitated due to a busted hip and two multiply broken legs after falling from a stepladder while attempting to change a faulty light bulb on the top of his Christmas tree when he was eighty-two, Colt Bisley spent much of his time as a shut-in viewing television via a satellite dish. For a half-century, Bisley had worked in New York City as a stockbroker, earning many millions for himself and his clients, and he had retired to Cuernavaca, where he was confident that his savings would sustain him in a comfortable fashion for the years remaining to him. The former stockbroker fell in love with Presciencia Espanto the first time he saw and heard her rebuilt electronically from Baton Rouge and transmitted to his hacienda, and began sending her money immediately.

  Not only did Bisley send financial contributions, but he wrote to La Preciosa regularly. She telephoned him soon after his generous support started flowing, and they maintained a relationship in this manner until his death. Colt told Presciencia that the calmest, most beautiful place on earth was the Isle of Phantoms in the French West Indies, so-called, claimed Bisley, because of the presence of zombies on the island. Many of the islands, Bisley said, had zombies among the populations—Haiti, Martinique, Dominica—but the Isle of Phantoms was the mother of them all. This was where the datura plant grew wild and where the narcolepto-hypnotic drug derived from it had been in use for centuries. Only a few hundred people lived on the island, and the only way there was by private boat. Bisley had visited the Isle of Phantoms just once, with a French client aboard a yacht, and regretted never having returned.

  Bisley had left two million dollars to the Church of the Ungrateful, and Precious promised herself that one day she would check out this mysterious place. Now that she had undertaken the resurrection of Cleon Tone, it seemed a perfect time. Tyrone had arranged transportation to the island through Pace Ripley, whom he had met in New Orleans. Ripley could not refuse the offer of five thousand dollars, especially during the slack season. Pace met Tyrone, Presciencia, and Cleon at Tommy’s Bar, where Tyrone doled the cash out to Tombilena.

  Knowing that Campo and Rodrigue’s boat would not survive such a trip, Pace had worked out an agreement with Campo’s friend Axel Heyst to use Heyst’s fifty-two-foot Hatteras. Heyst, a Swedish fisherman, lived at Yscloskey, and was at present laid up with a severe case of lumbago. This affliction, the Swede believed, had been caused by a curse placed on him through a bruxa by his Brazilian ex-wife, Furacão, who still sent him death threats thirteen years after their divorce, from her home in Recife. Axel and Furacão’s only child, a daughter named Ferida, had died when she was two years old, while Furacão was in church. Axel had fallen asleep and Ferida drowned in her plastic swimming pool in less than six inches of water.

  Heyst was pleased to rent out his boat, the chronic lumbago having prevented him from fishing for the past two months. He told Campo that the only way he could foresee recovering from this illness would be for him to go to Recife and murder Furacão. As soon as his back pain eased, Heyst swore to Campo and Pace when they came to get the Hatteras, he was going to do just that. The rental fee would pay for a round-trip airplane ticket from New Orleans to Brazil.

  The name of the boat was the White Dwarf. Axel Heyst was an amateur astronomer, and he had named her after a class of small, highly dense stars of low luminosity.

  ‘There’s a solar eclipse coming,’ Heyst said from his bed, after he had handed over the ignition key. ‘Don’t try to take the Dwarf through the shadow bands.’

  ‘What are they?’ Pace asked.

  ‘Waves of darkness that fall across the earth just before and after totality. They’ll mark the craft for evil.’

  After they were out of Heyst’s house, Pace asked Campo what he thought of the Swede’s warning.

  ‘Man got witchcraft on the brain,’ Campo said. ‘Death of a child’ll do bad things to anybody.’

  ‘You think he’ll really kill Furacão?’

  ‘I don’t know about that, but my guess is, he goes to South America, he don’t come back. Make that hex work for real. Bright side is, he does, maybe we get to keep the boat. Say, what you think about those people goin’ over this island? Lady wears them dark glasses and the two strange dudes?’

  Pace shook his head. ‘Not sure, Campo. Believe it was Joseph Conrad, though, who wrote, “You don’t take a woman into a jungle without bein’ made sorry for it sooner or later.”’

  Campo crossed himself, spit into his right hand, and threw it back over his left shoulder.

  ‘Boa sorte, irmao,’ he said.

  ‘Same to you, brother,’ said Pace.

  PRESTIDIGITATION

  ‘you gonna be all right with these people, babe?’

  Tombilena Gayoso fiercely contemplated her husband, Pace Ripley, the night before he was to ferry Presciencia Espanto, Tyrone Atrevido, and Cleon Tone across the Gulf and down to the Isle of Phantoms.

  ‘That’s a question, okay,’ said Pace. ‘Tyrone’s a stand-up cat, far’s I can tell. Other guy, I don’t know nothin’ about. Just that he’s a preacher of some kind. And this Espanto woman is some special creature, you know. We seen her on TV.’

  ‘She’s the one worries me. You gonna be with ’em how long?’

  ‘Eight days altogether. One and some down, five on the island, one and some back. I’m bringin’ lots of readin’ material.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Thought I’d dip back into Conrad, the novels of his I haven’t read. Victory, maybe, and Nostromo.’

  ‘Conrad who?’

  ‘Joseph Conrad. Guy who wrote Heart of Darkness, was made into a great movie about Vietnam called Apocalypse Now.’

  ‘That the one where the good-lookin’ guy goes batshit in his shorts in a hotel room?’

  ‘That’s it. And he wrote Lord Jim, too. That was also made into a movie.’

  ‘Musta been before my time.’

  ‘It was Conrad said, “Words, as is well known, are the great foe of reality.”’

  ‘Not just words, babe. What’re the accommodations?’

  ‘There’s some hotel they’re all stayin’ at. La Chute Céleste, I think, is the name. I’m stickin’ with the boat.’

  ‘Jesus, honey, for eight days?’

  ‘Oh, Tyrone’ll swing on by, hang out. I’ll be fine. Like I say, I plan on doin’ a lot of readin’.’

  Tombilena walked over to the bedroom door and shut it. She lifted her dress, pulled down her panties, and dropped them on the floor.

  ‘Better give you somethin’ you can show those island girls, then, they can incorporate into their culture.’

  Pace grinned. ‘You mean you got a trick left you ain’t used yet on me?’

  Tombilena lowered her thick black eyebrows and stepped toward her husband like Carmen enflamed. She tugged on Pace’s belt, lifted her right knee, and rubbed his crotch with it.

  ‘I never needed no tricks to convince you of my sincerity,’ she said. ‘It’s just some magic for the heart.’

 
‘“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jeremiah, 17:9.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Only truth there is is what happens. All that’s to go by.’

  ‘Cut the shit, buddy, and kiss me. Truth is relative, of which I’m the closest to you.’

  THE TEMPEST

  boat capsizes in storm

  four feared drowned—

  famous televangelist lost

  miami, aug. 6 (sns)—Hurricane Juana’s almost 200-mile-per-hour winds appear to have been responsible for the deaths of four people believed lost overboard during the worst tropical storm on record since 1935, when comparable gusts and waves to 30 feet above median sea level hit the central Florida Keys, killing 400. The hurricane’s rapid formation is unparalleled in the history of the US Weather Service.

  The US Coast Guard reported finding the White Dwarf, a 52-foot Hatteras, capsized in the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 100 miles north-northwest of Pinar del Río, Cuba. The boat had issued a distress signal but was unable to ride out the storm until help arrived.

  According to information as yet unconfirmed by the Southern News Service, among the four persons believed to have been aboard the White Dwarf – whose home port was listed as Yscloskey, Louisiana, and was apparently bound for L’lle des Fantômes in the French West Indies—is Presciencia Espanto, a televangelist known to her followers as ‘La Preciosa.’

  Ms Espanto, who based her ministry in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was once indicted by the federal government in El Paso, Texas, for felonious necromancy, but the charges were later dropped.

  interlude:

  the colporteur

  INTERLUDE: THE COLPORTEUR

  helga grandeza watched from behind the steering wheel of her Chevy Blazer as her husband, Cyril ‘Big’ Grandeza, unlocked the passenger side of his new ruby red Thunderbird and pulled it open for Bitsy Tunc. Bitsy was eighteen, sixteen years younger than Big. Doesn’t look a month more’n fifteen, thought Helga, as she witnessed her mate of the past fourteen grin at Bitsy like a no-good hound that had just been hit on the head by a ball peen hammer, close the door carefully after the skinny slut had settled her cellulite-free butt comfortably on the prewrinkled cream leather, then hurry around to the driver’s side and get in. When Big gunned the T-Bird, Helga cranked the Blazer and followed him into traffic. No way, she promised herself, was the bastard going to get away with poppin’ teenagers, not with their own two issue still in grade school.

  Big Grandeza was a colporteur, a Bible salesman, as had been his father and his father’s father. Helga and Big had been high school sweethearts at Santa Maria Luisa de San Francisco in Bayou Cobra, Louisiana, and together they had settled down in New Orleans. She had never known another man in the biblical sense, and the possibility of female orgasm was for her merely a rumor. Sexual desire was not a particular concern for Helga. That her boy Big had turned out to be a chaser, however, did unsettle the woman, and she was determined to put a stopper in this Bitsy bottle.

  The bright T-Bird cruised out Canal, Helga following four car lengths behind. At Telemachus, Big swung left, drove two blocks to Palmyra, and parked. Helga slipped her Blazer behind a Dodge van and watched her huge husband, who was wearing the green-and-red-checkered jacket she had given him the previous Christmas, and his tiny strumpet enter a Puerto Rican-blue bungalow.

  Helga got out of her vehicle, strode to the bungalow, and knocked hard on the front door. Bitsy opened it and Helga, who was a fairly large woman, outweighing the Tunc punk by a good forty or fifty pounds, grabbed a fistful of Bitsy’s baby-soft blond hair and flung her aside. Big Grandeza was standing in the doorway of a bedroom, his sport coat off, stunned to see his wife bearing down on him in this supposedly secret den of iniquity.

  ‘“Marriage is honorable in all,”’ yelled Helga, as she advanced, ‘“and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.”’

  Helga raised her left hand over her head and Big, seeing that her fingers grasped a serrated-edged, nine-inch-long Ginsu, backed into the bedroom.

  ‘Goddam, Helga!’ he shouted. ‘Put down that fuckin’ knife!’

  ‘“Thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?”’

  Bitsy picked herself up off of the pink pile carpet and bolted out the front door, choking on her own vomit as she ran.

  Big took up an antique lamp from a side table, a faux Tiffany that Hubert Tunc had paid way too much for after his wife, Floyda, had bugged him to bid on it at a furniture auction in Nashville five years before. Big hurled it at the enraged Helga, missing her, and the expensive missile exploded against a bureau, its dubious value reduced by all. Helga charged and Big cringed, curling up on the floor like a sow bug.

  His furious spouse’s weapon penetrated the back of Big’s neck like a cleanly placed muleta. The colporteur groaned and pitched sideways, his blue tongue wagging, rivulets of blood draining from both mouth and nostrils. Helga sat down heavily on the bed, perspiring as she had not at any time in her life save during the act of childbirth.

  ‘“To the one we are the savor of death unto death,”’ she said, panting between words, ‘“and to the other the savor of life unto life. And who,”’ asked the murderess, ‘“is sufficient for these things?”’

  walk

  CONTENTS

  Mother of God

  Mala Sorpresa

  Marble Lays It on the Table

  Screen Test

  When Life is Like a Cheap Hotel Room

  Wolves of the Evening

  Black Kiss

  Souvenirs

  Dress Code

  The Future of Jazz

  Home Truths

  The Terribleness

  Southern Comfort

  The Gift

  The Last of the Just

  Night Letter

  A Nose for a Nose

  MOTHER OF GOD

  following the death of her husband, Pace Ripley, who was lost at sea and believed drowned during a hurricane, Tombilena Gayoso, age twenty-eight, childless, had relocated from Delacroix Island, Louisiana, to New Orleans. Though only forty-five minutes by car from her family—her father, Rodrigue, and brother, Campo, were fishermen in Delacroix—N.O. was, to borrow a phrase from the Rolling Stones, two thousand light-years from Tombilena’s home. She felt the need to change her life after Pace slipped away, and a shift to the Crescent City, where she had lived previously for a short time—where, in fact, she and Pace had first met—was both a convenient and obvious move. Tombilena was the only Gayoso woman now, her mother having passed several years before, and she wanted to remain within hailing distance of her father and brother, both of whom she loved dearly.

  In short order, Tombilena found an apartment at the edge of the Quarter above a bookshop on the corner of Barracks and Dauphine; and a part-time job answering calls at the Mary Mother of God Rape Crisis Center on Terpsichore Street. Established by women united in the belief that the mother of Jesus Christ, the so-called Virgin Mary, actually had been a rape victim, the Mary Mother of God organization functioned as an all-purpose assistance service for women burdened by any manner of difficulty. Tombilena dealt with the battered, the homeless, the assaulted, and psychologically adrift distaff of the Greater New Orleans area, the numbers of which, to her horror, were legion.

  Also present at the center was a sixteen-year-old girl named Marble Lesson. A legend among radical feminists the world over, Marble’s notoriety stemmed from her having shot to death the infamous Mozo de Estoques, an international terrorist and assassin, who had attempted to rape Marble when she was fourteen. Following this incident, which took place at a rural airfield near Cuba, Alabama, the teenager had been counseled by several of the women who were then in the process of forming the Mary Mother of God group. After a failed attempt to live in harmony with her mother and stepfather in Florida, Marble Lesson had come to live with her fat
her, a construction worker named Wesson Lesson, in N.O., where she resumed her association with Mary Mother of God.

  It was in the company and under the tutelage of these women that Marble developed her political and social manifestos. She read extensively those historical and philosophical texts that her helpmates made available to her, including the writings of Hilda Brausen, a German woman who had disguised herself as a man in order to fight at the front in World War I. Killed in France during a firefight—some believed by members of her own unit who had discovered Hilda’s secret—Fräulein Brausen advanced a fundamental belief that all men were prone to a mental illness that expressed itself in the form of violence toward women. ‘The male human,’ Hilda Brausen wrote, ‘almost invariably will sooner or later be overcome by this disease, and therefore bears close scrutiny, so that at the first sign of derangement he can—and must – be eliminated. As grows the male prostate gland, so grows his proclivity for behavior dangerous to the female human.’

  Though medically unsound, this correlative theory of Hilda Brausen’s was nevertheless embraced by an ever-growing number of feminist thinkers. Basing it on ‘the Brausen principle,’ Marble Lesson had created a radical faction within Mary Mother of God dedicated to the eradication of any man believed by their society to be guilty of exceptional abuse. This faction, informally called ‘Die Brausenkriegers,’ dealt literal deathblows to those men deemed diseased. They eschewed any possibility of rehabilitation.

  Tombilena noticed that despite her youth, Marble Lesson was accorded inordinate respect and treated with the utmost deference by the other members of Mary Mother of God. Tombilena’s own history was not devoid of violence—she had shotgunned down two men who were threatening to murder her husband—and from what information she could at this point gather about Marble, she thought that the two of them might prove not incompatible.