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  It was not long before the idea of holding political office began to appeal to him. At twenty-six, Klarence ran for a U.S. congressional seat and, using the family-owned radio stations and newspapers to apprise voters of his attributes, won easily. After five consecutive terms, however, Krotz, by this time a conspicuous reactionary presence in Washington, D.C., decided to return to Louisiana and run for governor. If he could accomplish this feat, the next step, even amateur political observers surmised, would be back to Washington, toward the White House.

  Klarence Krotz had never married but he was seen often in public in the company of lovely young women. Known around Washington as one of that city’s most eligible bachelors, Krotz seldom dated the same woman more than once or twice, a fact that led so-called insiders on Capitol Hill to consider the dashing Louisianian as something of a playboy. This conjecture, however, could not have been further from the truth. These young women were merely a cover for Krotz’s predilection for older, European pederasts, men who bore some resemblance to his father, Thaddeus.

  Washington, D.C., of course, was a virtual playground for Klarence, inhabited as it is by a fluctuating population of foreign diplomats. Had it not been for Zvatiff Thziz-Tczili, a sixty-eight-year-old lobbyist for the Bulgarian sardine industry, who had become Klarence’s close companion during his most recent term in Congress and who was about to retire, Krotz probably would not have decided to run for governor of his home state. It was at Zvatiff’s suggestion that Klarence now set his sights on Baton Rouge, encouraged by his companion and mentor in world diplomacy to look ahead, to use the governorship as a necessary stepping-stone to the presidency of the United States.

  Thziz-Tczili had lived and worked in Washington for nearly forty years, and in Klarence Krotz he saw the first serious hope for a genuine new world order since the golden days of the Axis powers. Krotz was young, handsome, and prone to a type of intellectual infantilism Zvatiff Thziz-Tczili felt confident in his ability to manipulate. In Klarence, the Sofia-born sardine power broker believed he had found his Trilby, his ultimate tool. That it would have come in the form of an heir to a Louisiana cement manufacturing fortune Zvatiff could not have guessed, but he trusted his intuition. When Klarence knelt before the old Bulgarian and took into his mouth the mottled, thick, short but still powerful Eastern European organ, Thziz-Tczili felt the blood of human destiny course through his veins. He and Klarence Kosciusko Krotz, Zvatiff felt, were about to make history.

  DAY OF THE MULE

  Croseus “Spit” Spackle, thirty-two, a member of the Holy Order of Everlasting Yahoos, and Demetrious “Ice D” Youngblood, twenty-eight, a member of the El-Majik Nation, an African-American prison gang, hacksawed their way through the bars on a cell window in the De Soto Parish jail at Mansfield, Louisiana, then dropped down two knotted bed-sheets to freedom. The white supremacist and the black separatist had escaped together after watching The Defiant Ones, a 1958 movie, on TV in the jail recreation area. In the film, Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier star as southern convicts, one white, one black, who are on the run from the law while shackled together. Though they hate each other, the men in the movie are forced to live like Siamese twins, finally coming to respect and care for a person they had been bred to despise.

  The Defiant Ones had inspired Spit and Ice D, who figured correctly that the guards would not consider the possibility of their assisting one another, having housed them together in the first place out of plain meanness, in the hope that the two men would do each other severe bodily harm. However, Ice D had fashioned a crude hacksaw out of a bedspring, and the supposed foes worked in concert until the hundred-year-old iron bars gave way. Each man was intelligent enough to recognize their having been exploited by the guards, and their bond as fellow rejects of the system was strong enough for them to decide to stick together once they were loose outside the walls.

  “Spit,” said Ice D, as they made their way toward Highway 49 through the woods just west of Ajax, “we the kind of men can make a difference we try, you know?”

  “What you mean, D?”

  “Mean I’m tired as you takin’ table scraps.”

  “Hell, yes. I been beat like a rented mule, you can witness. Time the mule have his day.”

  “Ain’t no black or white about it, neither, Spit. You dig? The man dump dirty water off the porch, he don’t pay no mind who stand below.”

  “Tell you, D. Other day I heard on the news the Kluxers over in Gainesville, Georgia, wanted to enter a float in the local Christmas parade titled ‘I’m Dreamin’ of a White Christmas.’ ”

  “Forgive me not laughin’.”

  “Didn’t strike me funny, neither. City official found some excuse to cancel the parade. Didn’t want to deal with that.”

  “You still support that HOOEY All-Powerful Beast motherfucker?”

  “Klarence Kosciusko Krotz. Not no more, D. I ain’t got no leader. ”

  “I’m gon’ kill the fool, Spit. Like you to help me.”

  “What about your boy, El-Majik? He ain’t no different.”

  “Okay, Spit. We kill him next. First Krotz, then El-Majik. What you say?”

  “Least we can do, D. We can’t put some good in the world, might as well take out some bad.”

  THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE

  When he was a boy, Cleon Tone decided that he would be the one to discover the secret of the universe. His Southern Baptist parents took him to church regularly, he attended Sunday School, but Cleon did not entirely bite on the concept of creationism. At eight and a half years old, the future preacher inclined more to scientific reckoning than he did toward blind purchase of the idea of the Garden of Eden.

  During a discussion of Adam and Eve one Sunday noon, the perspicacious Cleon announced to his class that it would be he who correctly ascertained the origin of man. His Bible studies teacher, an unmarried woman in her late thirties named Myrtis Wyatt, took a piece of bituminous coal the size of a hockey puck from the top drawer of her desk, pried apart the blaspheming boy’s lips, and forced it between them.

  “And the Lord said unto him,” Myrtis Wyatt pronounced, her hands holding firm Cleon’s birdlike shoulders, “ ‘Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.’ ”

  From that time forward, Cleon Tone never questioned the explanation for man’s place in the universe or gave expression to his thoughts in regard to an alternative genesis. Myrtis Wyatt never did marry, and at the age of fifty-six, while pruning roses in her wheelchair-bound mother’s garden, a mud wasp invaded the tympanic membrane of the spinster’s right ear, where its sting proved fatal. Myrtis’s paralyzed mother sat watching her daughter writhe in agony on the ground while the winged insect crawled deeper and deeper into the aural cavity. The old woman was entirely helpless in the face of death, a distinction that allowed her a momentary kinship with those persons more abled than she.

  CLOSE CALLS

  “Did you know that beginning on this day in the year 1916 the temperature at Browning, Montana, fell a hundred degrees in twenty-four hours, from forty-four degrees to minus fifty-six?”

  “Don’t say.”

  “Best believe it. Yesterday in 1932, a hundred-yard-wide tornado ripped through Gibson County, Tennessee. Killed ten members of a family of thirteen whose home was swept away. ”

  Cleon was seated at the counter of Plain Annie’s Eatery on Toulouse Street having a morning coffee and jelly doughnut. Coco Navajoa, a retired prizefighter in his late forties who once had been the number-five-ranked featherweight boxer in the world, according to Ring magazine, sat on Cleon’s right, smoking a Pall Mall. Coco was a weather freak who lived on St. Philip Street in a room filled with books and magazines and newspaper clippings having to do with meteorological events.

  “What about tomorrow?” asked Cleon.

  “In 1938, the great aurora over southeastern Europe was char
acterized by a fantastic brilliant red display and gave an illusion it might be the reflection of a gigantic fire below the horizon. Hundreds of fire engines raced toward the horizon from many parts of the continent. The same day in 1961, the worst ice storm in the history of the state of Georgia closed most of the schools and state roads. This condition lasted two days.”

  Two men, one black and one white, entered the eatery and sat down on counter stools to Cleon’s left. Plain Annie, Cleon observed, served them black coffee. The two new customers wore shabby clothes and were in need of a shave.

  “How about the day after tomorrow?”

  Coco clucked his tongue and grinned. “A real red-letter day,” he said. “Belouve, La Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, set the world twelve-hour rainfall record of 52.76 inches.”

  “Coco, you oughta get some TV station to hire you,” said Plain Annie, a compact, red-faced woman of indeterminate middle age whose thumb-high black roots betrayed her platinum mane. “Better a genuine weather scholar, such as yourself, rather than them failed actors they got can’t hardly locate the prompter. More coffee, men?”

  “No, thanks, Annie,” said Coco.

  “Just a drop,” said Cleon.

  “Couple mean-lookin’ boys there,” Annie whispered as she poured. “Fresh from Angola, you ask me.”

  The reverend-in-exile glanced their way, then raised the cup to his lips.

  “ ‘And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself,’ so saith Isaiah,” he said.

  “ ‘Surely, he scorneth the scorners: but he giveth grace unto the lowly.’ Proverbs,” Coco added.

  “Charity ain’t never been my specialty, I admit,” said Plain Annie, who then moved down the counter.

  “Freshen that for ya?” she asked the two strangers.

  “Sure,” said Spit.

  “Obliged,” said Ice D.

  “You fellas from close by?” Annie asked.

  “Depends what you calls close,” Ice D said.

  “We just quit the air force,” said Spit. “We was stationed at Keesler, over to Biloxi.”

  “Bet you-all’re pleased not to be prisoners no more.”

  Ice D glared hard for a moment at Annie, then relaxed after Spit said, “Yes, ma’am. We just lookin’ now to be prisoners of love.”

  “ ‘Love is strong as death,’ sang Solomon,” Plain Annie said, and almost smiled.

  “Reckon them is strong-arm boogers,” Coco confided to Tone.

  “ ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ Hebrews,” said Cleon.

  “In 1957, on a warm and sunny July afternoon in Wilmington, Delaware, a dust devil suddenly appeared and tore roofs off several houses.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t count on the weather,” Coco said, “even when the sun’s shinin’.”

  GOING DOWN THAT ROAD FEELING BAD

  “Oh, the law they never got him, cause the devil got him first,” sang Ray Bob Realito as he unlocked and pushed aside the accordion security door in front of Rebel Ray Bob’s Pawn & Loan on the corner of St. Claude and Elysian Fields avenues in New Orleans. He next turned off the burglar alarm and let himself in the main entrance, closing the door behind him. Ray Bob reversed the hanging sign behind the glass panel from CERRADO to ABIERTO and continued to hum his favorite tune. He turned on the overhead fluorescent lights and made his way to and behind the pawn counter, where he pushed the power and play buttons on the VCR set up beneath a small platform featuring a fifty-inch monitor that could be viewed from any part of the shop.

  Two automobiles tore along a country road in glorious black and white on the screen above Ray Bob Realito. One car was chasing the other at night. The cars were old, 1950 Ford sedans, and the face of the driver of the lead car remained hidden as he skillfully outraced and eluded his pursuer. Ray Bob busied himself at the counter and did not turn to look at the picture until the credits rolled.

  Thunder Road, a 1958 movie about moonshiners starring Robert Mitchum, was Ray Bob Realito’s all-time favorite film. He played the video every day in his pawnshop on the fifty-inch screen. He kept the sound off, since he knew every word of dialogue and each lick and lyric of the title song, which had been co-composed by the star, Robert Mitchum, who also had co-written the story on which the screenplay was based. Mitchum had recorded the title tune in 1958, and it had been a big hit at that time. Ray Bob never understood why someone else had sung it on the movie sound track.

  It was Robert Mitchum, of course, who was driving the lead Ford in the opening sequence, sticking it to the federal agent, who was no match for the supreme runner of illegal alcohol in the South. In the movie, Mitchum outruns and defies both government agents and organized crime thugs looking to muscle him out of business; but neither they nor either of two women can claim him before Satan steals away with the legendary driver.

  Ray Bob Realito was sixteen years old when he first saw Thunder Road at La Sal de la Vida Drive-in in Chicken Neck, Texas, where he had been born and raised, and the movie had deeply affected him. The strong, stoic Mitchum character, the man who never complained or made excuses for deals that derailed or went bad, was the kind of person Ray Bob aspired to be. He felt that Klarence Kosciusko Krotz, the Real American Party candidate for governor, was such an individual, and Ray Bob had tacked up a blue and white VOTE FOR KKK—THE REAL AMERICAN WAY poster on the inside of the store above the front door so that customers could see it on their way out.

  The Realito family had been dirt poor during Ray Bob’s boyhood. His parents had worked as pickers in the cotton fields of East Texas, and so had he and his older sister, Victoria China. Ray Bob had left Chicken Neck, Texas, soon after seeing Thunder Road and joined the army in Houston. After his discharge, he worked in the oil fields around Morgan City, Louisiana, saved his wages, and bought into what was then called Rebel Billy’s Pawn & Loan. The owner, Billy Shores, taught Ray Bob the business, and following Shores’s death Ray Bob took over and changed the name to his own. Ray Bob had lost touch with his people soon after his enlistment. All he knew of them since that time was that they had left Texas and moved west, probably to California. His parents were illiterate, but Victoria China, who had attended school, as had Ray Bob, through fifth grade, wrote him once when he was at boot camp, saying she was going to have a baby and that she planned to kill it as soon as it was born.

  Ray Bob sat down on a two-step swivel stool with a wicker back support and opened his copy of Where the Money Was, the autobiography of Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber. When a reporter asked Sutton why he’d robbed banks, Willie replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Ray Bob believed in reading a book a week. Last week he had read Rip Ford’s Texas by John Salmon Ford, a memoir by the nineteenth-century soldier and Indian fighter. Next week Ray Bob planned to delve into Tales of the Angler’s Eldorado, Zane Grey’s chronicle of his fishing exploits in New Zealand. Not only did reading help to make the time pass as he waited for customers, but Ray Bob believed the exercise to be a proper substitute for travel. These days Ray Bob never left New Orleans, his feeling being that the psychological uncertainty occasioned by travel elevated the blood pressure and therefore constituted a life-shortening threat. Ray Bob’s desire was to live well into the twenty-first century, long enough to witness order having been restored in the country. Then he would not have to go down that road feeling bad. Klarence Krotz, Ray Bob thought, might be the first unfaltering step in that direction.

  The door opened and two men entered: Cleon Tone and Coco Navajoa. Ray Bob interrupted his perusal of Willie Sutton’s description of a scene in One-arm Quigg’s pool hall in 1921. Happy Gleason was giving Willie the bad eye and Ray Bob knew some serious shit was about to fly so he hated to stop reading, but there was a front door and it was unlocked between nine and nine, during which hours anyone might walk in, and sooner or later, Ray Bob knew, they did.

  “Need
me a piece,’’ said the reverend. “Iron won’t choke timin’s crucial.”

  Ray Bob took a good look at Cleon Tone. Selling a man a weapon of terminal destruction was not merely mercantilism but a matter of conscience.

  “What’s your price range?”

  “Twenty-five. Thirty most.”

  Ray Bob brought up a handgun from below and laid it down on the worn mahogany countertop.

  “This here’s a rare enough beast. H&R .32 five-shot. Field-tested nigger shark, kept oiled. Twenty-seven fifty, take it home and pet the daylights out of it. Stay-put-type piece.”

  Cleon picked up the gun and inspected it from every angle.

  “What you think, Coco?” he asked the ex-boxer.

  “Us Hispanics, man, we know knives, not guns.”

  Cleon took out two twenty-dollar bills, tossed them on the counter, and said, “Deal.”

  Ray Bob said, “Throw in a dozen cartridges and we’ll call it thirty, how about? Just sign the arms register here and fill in an address.”

  Cleon nodded and picked up a pen that was next to an opened logbook and signed, “Rev. C. Tone, formerly Daytime Ark., now N.O.”

  Ray Bob put a box of bullets and a ten where the twenties had been. Cleon put the .32 in one pocket of his jacket, his change and the box in another.

  “Take special care, gentlemen,” Ray Bob said to the men’s backs.

  He opened his book and read, “Despite the fact that his left arm had been amputated, he would set the pool stick in the crook of his arm, just above the stub, and he could beat just about anybody in Brooklyn.”

  PRECIOUS

  “Zvatiff, come listen! She’s on!”

  Zvatiff Thziz-Tczili licked the sardine juice from his fingers and hurried from the kitchen to the den, where Klarence Krotz was watching television. Klarence had recently become addicted to the broadcasts of a televangelist prophetess named Presciencia Espanto, and had made Zvatiff, who had never seen or heard her, promise that he would watch the show with him tonight.