by Rod Davis
She could still taste the blood in her throat. It wasn’t that bad—kind of salty and sluggish but lots of things tasted that way. Because it was still twilight, the neighbors couldn’t see her or Paulus and what they were doing. Besides, a big wooden fence and the thick shrubs surrounded the back yard. It was a small house, not far off Elysian Fields toward the canal side—a better neighborhood than the projects where she’d grown up, though still a far cry from the fine old homes in the Garden District or the new ranch-styles up toward the lake.
When the last glint of the setting sun passed across her outstretched arms, holding the salad bowl red with the residue of goat blood, Corina felt the power that she had sought. She put the bowl down and thanked Jesus for the grace of life. While Paulus finished his praises in the African language they’d had to learn for initiation, which Elroy called the Yoruba, or sometimes the Lukumí, Corina slipped into a slight trance—not deep and uncharted, like the kind in church, but just enough to know that Jesus had heard her and was in communion.
Back inside they cut up the goat and baked some for supper that night and froze the rest in the new Amana one of Corina’s clients had given her in gratitude for getting her son out of jail. Corina had gotten her El Dorado the same way. More or less. Back when she got on with the Cubans, Elroy Delgado had put her in touch with a rich man from Biscayne Bay and she’d flown out to give him a reading. He was only supposed to pick up her plane ticket and hotel and two hundred dollars for the reading plus another five hundred for the sacrifice. But he was so sundered by what she told him that he got all wrapped up in it and had her stay another whole week to read several of his friends and then, on a Sunday night when there was a half moon and the sticky heat was just fading into winter, he told her he wanted the santo for himself, too.
She went home to New Orleans to prepare and on her return to Florida hired all the drummers and priests and priestesses you need for that sort of thing and bought all the food and the crates of chickens and guinea fowl and the goats and she made him a child of Changó. Changó was the thunder god, and Cuban men especially wanted to be initiated to him. You didn’t really have a choice in the matter, because the gods told you who would be your master, but it worked out for Humberto that it was Changó.
Later his air conditioning business tripled its earnings and he found a hot young Cubana to marry him and the stuff that Corina had warned him about in that first reading—unless he changed and got the santo—all that never came to pass. He cut back on the drinking and the cancer in his bowels went away. And he could get it up without drogas. He was a very happy man. One day, the El Dorado showed up in front of Corina’s botanica. At precisely the same moment, she got a phone call from Humberto. As the delivery driver was giving her a set of keys, Humberto was in her ear long distance saying her she had given him what he wanted and he was showing his true thanks.
She had wanted to leap into the heavens with all the santos, but in truth she had to sit down on the curb for several minutes until she stopped feeling so faint. Surely this was some kind of proof of her powers and of the powers of the saints, too! It was just as she had told Humberto as he drank the blood on the first night of his ritual. The santos want praise, but they must also be fed. It follows that so must the priests of the santos; so, for that matter, she had said, must fortune itself never go hungry. Sacrifice was like offering money to Jesus in her church. It was a way of making faith real.
Phonies and hypocrites just talked: the real children of the Lord put blood on the altar or money in the bowl. The Cadillac meant Humberto was serious; accepting it meant she was awash in the blessings of powers so vast they sometimes scared her even though she was aware they inhabited every pore of her slender steeled body.
After the goat was put away and Paulus went back to his room to work on his algebra, Corina paced a little out in the yard until the mosquitoes drove her in. Normally by ten p.m. she was ready for bed. But tonight she was restless even before her head nestled into the foam pillow. Something wanted to break out of her brain, it felt like. She couldn’t hardly think about anything, just a lot of different things so quickly none of them stuck long enough to seize any perspective on.
She turned on the TV and slumped into the gray-striped couch Grady had bought for a wedding present. The news was on. But it was white folks’ news and didn’t mean that much to her, other than to make her vaguely depressed. She thought about changing the channel but she was too tired to get up again. She wouldn’t have paid attention to anything else, anyway. She slipped off her shoes and wriggled her toes on the worn carpeting. An airline stewardess who was a client told her that was a way to relax, and although Corina was far from sure that was true, she was still experimenting, for she had a strong disposition to continually seek out exactly what made the body tick. All such knowledge she could put into her work. But she had to be careful. Clients took what she said as gospel most of the time so if she recommended something, like wriggling your toes or hanging a pigeon upside down on your porch, she had to be sure it was tested and true. Corina was convinced that was why she was such a good spiritual advisor. She was very result-oriented.
She dug her toes hard, till the bones hurt, and she leaned forward so her head fell across her knees. She tried closing her eyes but they kept coming open and all she could see were her feet all veiny and cramped up and the brown carpet that hadn’t been vacuumed in two weeks. She sat back up and rotated her neck until it cracked. Some time after the sacrifice the euphoria had given way to that bad familiar blue abyss. She’d hidden it from Paulus, and thought it would go away, but that wasn’t the way of the funk. Now she was lowdown and trying very hard to shake the idea that she was in for another one of those nights. The weatherman came on and said it would rain but she didn’t care because the only reason she was watching TV was so she wouldn’t have to go into that bedroom.
Since Grady left, or more accurately since she threw him out, nights were so long she had nearly convinced herself time must stretch out in the dark somehow. Often she woke up three or four times. Back when they lived in the projects it was the noise and sometimes the gunshots that broke her dreams, but now it was just thinking all the time. If only Grady hadn’t gotten so scared. He could have found another job sooner or later, because he was a very good mechanic when he wanted to be, but when Ford closed down the service department in Gretna he’d just never bounced back. The night he was fired he came in drunk, which he rarely did. “I put in fifteen years and they just threw me out on the street,” he’d said to her, wadding up a severance pay stub and hurling it across the kitchen. “And you know something, Corina? Maybe I just stay there. Maybe I just stay there.”
He didn’t really mean it, but that’s more or less what happened anyway. He started drinking all the time, and stopped going to church, and stopped talking. Then came the hitting. Corina took more than one hard shot to the jaw and the stomach before she accepted that he’d changed forever and he might really hurt her. Or Paulus or Jean-Pierre might find out and shoot him. So she told Grady he had to leave.
He did, and she got a lawyer to do the divorce, and Grady was gone and she was sleeping alone. She’d done it before, that was true. After her first husband, Louis Wayne, had died in a car wreck and left her with the boys she’d just disappeared for a while in her own mind. She worked double shifts at the sugar mill and didn’t think about anything. For more than a year her children were more or less raised by her mother, who came to live in the house and helped some with the rent.
That was about when she met the Cubans and began learning about santo and saw that she might get some new power in her life. She was a Holy Redeemer all her life and believed in Jesus with all her soul but this was something to help with all that. Something extra, is how she usually explained it.
Louis Wayne’s death was different than Grady’s drinking, though. She could be sad for Louis Wayne, and she knew there was nothing to do about it. And it
was just over and done. With Grady she’d felt it slipping away. Now, at forty-two, she wondered if she’d ever have a man again. She was still something to look at, maybe not as thin as when she’d met Louis Wayne but her booty was fine and firm and the rest of her was, too. Or so the men said all the time. People told her she had a nice face, too. It was caramel and oval and not lined yet.
People said she looked Nigerian, or that she resembled an actress on a TV show, a soap opera. But she’d never seen the show and didn’t know who they were talking about. She didn’t know any Nigerians either, except that one woman who worked at the bank, but she talked funny and seemed snooty. On the other hand Corina was always suspicious of foreigners. Furthermore, she had learned that people who said they were Africans always acted like they were superior to American people who were black, too. Even the Cuban black people did that. Nothing sent her over the line faster than somebody who thought they were better than she was.
She glanced across the room at a mirror near the hallway. Some man could want her, for sure. Question is, would she want him? Maybe sleeping alone could be gotten used to. Maybe her cat would just stay unused and she’d turn back into some kind of a virgin old lady. Anyway, there was more to it than just loneliness and sex. What she’d gotten most afraid of lately was just staying alive. Her nightmares and sleeplessness often as not were about money, in particular not having any.
After Grady and the lawyers she had used up everything old Humberto had given her. Except she still had the car. Each month was touch and go. Jean-Pierre helped, and Paulus had a part-time job at a drugstore, but she worried about money all the time. The botanica had to work. The people in her church were poor, like she was, and there just weren’t enough of them in the pews. In truth, the readings and the botanica kept the church going, though she never really told anyone that. But the botanica had to work.
She got up abruptly and went into the kitchen. She took the wall phone from its cradle and dialed a number she had sworn to herself she’d never call again.
“That you, Elroy?” she snapped when a voice answered.
“Corina?”
“Yes, this is Reverend Youngblood.” She turned so that her back flattened against the yellow wall next to the sink. Across the tile floor on the stove was a blackened metal tray with a few leftover goat ribs. Paulus was in the habit of late-night snacking.
“What can I do for you?”
Instantly she hated herself for calling. Right off, there was a friendliness in his voice. Her brow furrowed. It wasn’t that. That lilting Cuban accent wasn’t friendly—it was Elroy thinking she was calling to invite him over. It was him thinking about sex. She was furious and kicked the wall with her heel, which hurt, but got her mind back on the subject.
“Next time your boys come driving past my shop you better watch out,” she said.
“Now, Corina. . .”
“You hearing me?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. “After all this time you just starting right in all over me.” His voice had more than Cuba in it all right. Corina pursed her lips and rubbed her heel with her thumb and forefinger.
“That all done. What’s now is you trying to put me out of business.”
“Nobody’s trying to do that. We just opening a new store, Corina.”
“I heard all about that store. Your cousin Lupe say you want all the shops in town to close except yours and all the black people in the city buying everything from you and you probably trying to do all the spiritual work, too.”
“Well, that’s not what I’m thinking. That’s Lupe talking. Maybe he don’t know everything like he think he does.”
“Well, I know, Elroy. I ain’t stupid.”
“No, you ain’t that.”
“Good. That settled, then. Now if I ain’t stupid then don’t be having those boys come by seeing what I might be up to at the shop. And they give us those snotty little grins when they go by.”
“Sometimes they just like to cruise around. Maybe they just taking a short cut through your street.”
“Did you hear what I just said?”
“What?”
“I said, I ain’t stupid.” She could feel her words grow thick, but her head was thick, too. This was a waste of time.
“I know you ain’t stupid.”
“Then don’t be trying nothing on me, Elroy Delgado.”
“I’m not trying nothing.”
“You’re trying to make me scared.”
He was thinking again.
“Why don’t I come over and we can talk?”
She laughed so hard she surprised herself. Kind of like something in her stomach burst out through her throat and thought it was funny for doing so. “The only thing we got to talk about is how you planning on taking away all my good customers.”
“I got a right to have my own business, too.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I got santo, too.”
“Yeah. And soon as the santos find out what you up to you gonna wish you never knew none of they names.”
“Don’t be talkin’ to me that way, Corina.”
“You better hope I keep talking. If I stop talking, I start doing.”
He was silent a moment. “You shouldn’t talk like that to your padrino.”
Her eyes closed. “That’s why I’m saying this. My padrino wouldn’t do this to me.”
“It’s just business, Corina.”
“You don’t know nothing.”
She hung up. Business was just a part of it all right. But the war was coming on a higher plane, too. She was going to have to break every bond with that damn Cuban, especially the one that scared her the most. But if she could divorce Grady, she could declare independence from her spiritual godfather. If he ever was even that, really.
She walked to the stove and picked up a cold rib and ate most of it. Last year, the doctors at Tulane Medical told her she had high blood pressure and had to change her diet. So she didn’t usually eat meat, but sacrificed flesh was bidden to be consumed. The doctor had also given her some pills but she didn’t take them all the time. She believed in doctors, and she knew when the doctors had to fill in for the work of the spirits and she always told her clients to go see a doctor unless it was clearly the work of an evil spell but she hated drugs, even aspirin, and she didn’t take the pills. But her pressure had been getting better, and for lunch she almost always ate chocolate-covered granola bars instead of vienna sausages or cheeseburgers.
She went back into the front room and tried to watch a comedy show but it was all white people in California and it didn’t mean anything and it also made her think of Lucy and Desi, which Elroy had often watched when they’d been not just padrino and initiate but also man and woman, side by side. Back when she’d trusted him. A stray thought from that time made her laugh again, and she turned off the TV and went to bed.
She only woke twice, but not out of fear. First, she was dreaming about being on the back of a giant dark bird over a reddened planet. The next time she was on the bird rising from a snowy volcano and soaring over all of the Lord’s creation. What she felt in the dreams was so vast and powerful that both visions made her eyes pop open as though she’d been slapped.
In the morning, she felt rested for a change. Even though she had to get Paulus off to East Parish High and herself to the shop and tend to a day’s worth of chores and duties she also felt, for the first time in a long while, that some big other thing waiting to happen was en route. She didn’t know what, but it would be good.
While she was on the expressway driving towards her shop she remembered she had the .38 and while she was humming to the Gospel station she engineered an entire expedition in her head in which she sweet-talked Elroy into a stroll into the Quarter and when he wanted to kiss her she pulled the pistol from her handbag and stuck it up to Elroy’s ha
lf-handsome brown face and made him sweat and then made him take his trousers down to his ankles and tied him like that to a lamppost on Canal Street and left him there for the tourists to walk past and the police to have a few questions for. That would be a pretty good way of telling him he wasn’t her padrino anymore.
4
The city hadn’t changed much since the last time Gus had seen it as a first lieutenant on leave. He’d taken two weeks off in celebration of orders sending him to Germany instead of some real shithole, or, worst of all, keeping him stateside. He thought the posting was great. Thought he’d see Europe on Uncle. So he went to the Big Easy for a week he could barely remember and then a week in the Big Apple he didn’t want to remember and after that he found out why nobody back at Fort Hood thought Germany was all that good of duty. After a year, Gus would’ve taken a transfer to Beirut. But he faced no such choice. He was a three-year man, signed up as payback for college tuition and after Germany he was back in the World, and career-building. Strange, all that.
Strange, too, the World. Gus put down his cup of coffee and looked out the window of the little café on Jackson Square at the busload of Italian tourists staring up at St. Louis Cathedral. As often as possible on Saturday mornings, he liked to venture out of the little shell of gentility that was his new workplace in the Garden District and mix it up with the Quarter. He felt it kind of an obligation of a permanent resident of the city. Actually he didn’t really come up with that, it was Bonita’s idea. She really was from here, born in Thibodaux but had lived Uptown near the zoo since she ran away as a teenager. One night Gus had been drunk and confronted an altogether innocent man from Indiana in The Hellhole, the sort-of biker bar where now Bonita worked, demanding a “user fee” on behalf of maintenance of city streets and sanitation. Bonita had Wally, the bouncer, throw Gus out amid the street drunks.
