Corina's Way

by Rod Davis

  St. Jude Lamb of Light Botanica

  —Religious Supplies—

  Fair enough. Gus had never heard of a botanica before he moved to New Orleans but now he thought of them as weird versions of the tobacconist shops he’d seen on street corners in London and Europe. The signs out front said they sold tobacco, but you could get almost anything you wanted in most of them.

  It was the same with botanicas. In the Quarter, he’d even bought coffee and a package of Little Debbie’s powdered sugar donuts from a botanica hosting an “Occult Sidewalk Special” of books, beads and assorted merchandise of the trade. One botanica with some Spanish name Gus couldn’t remember was run by a white guy, a Cuban, maybe—Gus hadn’t paid that much attention.

  As he pushed open the dark-tinted glass front door at the Lamb of Light, he reached into his pocket to see if he had enough change. He’d drink a Mr. Pibb, he was so thirsty. The air-conditioner was full on. The cold air hit the sweat on his forehead and chest so fast he felt himself tremble. But the slim, toothsome woman talking on the phone on the other side of the entry counter didn’t seem to notice. When she finally looked up at him it was with neither surprise nor interest, except that her eyes held his about a beat longer than Gus expected.

  5

  Elroy Delgado got home so filled with funk he nosed his car into the Rubbermaid trash barrel at the front of the garage. Not only had he never done that, it was only last New Year’s he’d yelled at Luz for doing the same thing after she drove them home from the party at Eduardo’s. Damn Corina Youngblood. Why’d he let her get to him that way? She was nothing to him now. I mean, he dreamed about fucking her and she had that kind of hold on him but now this was business and she was being a pain, a real pain. He backed the car away, got out and buzzed down the automatic door.

  Inside he went to the fridge and took out a cold Budweiser. He walked into the sun room next to the kitchen and settled into a soft chair and drank about half the beer. In a minute he’d look at the blueprints again, but for now it was best to relax. Staring up at the superas on the glass shelves along one of the sun room walls, he exhaled slowly and regained his composure. He didn’t want to let Luz see him this way. Not because he would be embarrassed to be seen agitated—his whole personality easily fell within that sphere—but because he didn’t want to talk to her about Corina.

  He smiled reflexively and glanced at the front of his black trousers. Mother of Mary, his dick was hard. What a terrible thing to feel like a gushing schoolboy around the woman you were presently going to drive out of business. Even when he stopped to think about what might happen when the first SuperBotanica went online, not to mention the one along Chef Menteur Highway and who knew where else, he never thought of himself as harming Corina Youngblood. In his most reckless fantasies he envisioned marrying her and creating some kind of spiritual empire. Yeah, that could happen. If Luz didn’t cut his balls off first and Corina whack off the rest of him sooner or later. Shit. Now his dick was soft again.

  Elroy finished the beer and went back to the car for his briefcase. If they were going to break ground on the SuperBotanica by Christmas he had lots of deals and lots of paperwork and lots of lawyers to deal with. Back in the sun room, looking over the specs for what he and his brother Julio envisioned as a true revolution in the spiritual supply business, he kept wondering how long before Corina would find out where he planned to put up the flagship.

  Hell, she’d be able to hit it from the sidewalk in front of her own shop with a .22 pistol. What could he say? Property was cheap along Ladeau Street. And who could say that she might not find employment with Delgado Bros., S.A., once things were geared up? Yeah, that could happen. Elroy glanced at his watch. It was only two p.m. but it was a weekend and what the hell. He liberated another Bud.

  Gus got back to the upstairs apartment in the old house near the zoo not long after Bonita’s alarm had gone off. It was a nice place—roomy, high ceilings, not too much furniture, just a whiff of Berlinish Bohemia via garage sales and Pier I Imports. It was hers, naturally. When they met he’d been living in a downtown hotel that had once been a Ramada until they thought it got too run down and sold it to some Arabs who now used it to cater to overnight flight crews from airlines you never heard of. It did serve an excellent $2.99 “American breakfast.”

  In the bedroom, Bonita was all twisted up in her speckled-egg sheets with her aqua sleeping mask still on. Gus pulled the mask down and kissed her big lips. She smelled like the house cabernet. He opened one of the blinds to let in just enough light to work on his life’s love’s central nervous system. It’d still be fifteen minutes before she managed to speak. It was difficult to imagine Bonita waking up in the morning. Four p.m. was taxing enough. Days off if she was up by noon she was in a bad mood till sundown. She took six years to get her degree from UNO because she wouldn’t put morning classes in her schedule.

  He walked out of the bedroom, flipped on the radio to a jazz station and opened the glass door onto the porch that looked towards Audubon Park. It was a nice afternoon. People were riding bikes, jogging, cruising the uptown streets and generally not doing anything remotely resembling what he’d been up to the past two hours.

  Smiling to himself, he went back into the kitchen, switched on the ceiling fan, and brewed some Luzianne for Bonita. Then he sat at the kitchen table, going over it in his mind, waiting for Bonita to get out of the shower. When she did, and walked into the kitchen naked, toweling her short black hair, he forgot everything and they jumped in bed.

  She drove him crazy. At five-six, she was a half-foot shorter than he but she was what you call curvy. He also liked it that her nose was a little too big and a little bent to one side and that she had a slight gap between her front teeth. He liked it that she had cut her hair. That really drove him crazy, glancing from her man’s coiffure down to her breasts and back. Weird, a little. When they fucked he seemed to crawl high up inside her and was surrounded by her softness and wetness and buried nose deep into her brown nipples all at once.

  She said she liked to feel him hard in her pussy, which was what she called it when they fucked but at no other time, an odd coyness for a bartender just turned thirty-three but he liked that about her, too. He was a little too thin and his dark hair was usually disheveled and people said he looked like a refugee from a Kafka novel, whatever that meant, but Bonita Rae Doucet liked him packed in tight as she could get him. She always tried to bite him and she always told him she loved him and he’d learned to tell her the same, though he wasn’t that much of a biter.

  When Bonita left for the evening shift, Gus hopped the trolley down St. Charles to Miss Angelique’s. Weekends the place was mostly deserted. All but a few of the girls went home and those who stayed were either so timid they stayed in their rooms or so uncontrollable they had long since figured out how to sneak out the back gate and head for Tulane or the Quarter or the clubs down on Magazine Street that didn’t look that closely at ID.

  He made his way through the ornate, white-painted wrought iron fence and massive brass-topped gate into the rambling gingerbread building, soft now in the sunset glow. He walked quickly past the array of glass-walled offices (inner modernity to outward tradition, Elizabeth liked to say) and down the well-polished wooden-floored halls to his own spot. He liked coming in on weekends, especially now that he lived with Bonita, because it was one of the few times he could be on his own. Whatever the value of that was.

  The door seemed stuck as he opened it but it was just a pile of papers and books somebody’d shoved through the mail slot. Gus kicked the pile over toward the small table where he kept his coffee pot and tossed his keys on his desk.

  It was stuffy, so he turned on the fan. His basket was plentiful with ungraded papers. Parental notes and administrative memos were stacked next to his phone and his Mac. He had a motto about paperwork—all in good time. He leaned back in his chair but caught himself short of stretching hi
s legs out to anchor on the desk. There wasn’t much to look at in that direction, except photos of himself and friends he’d had framed to decorate the walls, so he twisted around to look through the window towards the long, hedge-flanked green field that spread back in a rectangle from the U-shaped interior courtyard of Miss Angelique’s.

  It was supposed to “be reminiscent of Versailles,” according to the school recruitment brochure. To Gus it looked more like the parade grounds at Fort Leonard Wood, where he’d gone through basic training. Or the Olde Market, the shaded quadrangle where they sold fake rusticity to tourists at the Garden of Dixie.

  In fact, the field was for playing soccer. Not that anyone played soccer on it. Miss Valthenough had left last Christmas and a new coach hadn’t been recruited, and now the Hapsenfields were considering dropping the program because it was expensive and none of the girls played voluntarily anyway. Agon Hapsenfield had made it a part of the mandatory curriculum for juniors and seniors so that Miss Valthenough would have enough students and thus a job. Now that Eva was gone, Elizabeth Hapsenfield had gutted the soccer requirement from the curriculum and didn’t seem to be in a hurry about finding a new coach.

  Agon Hapsenfield’s spirits, never all that high anyway, had plummeted, despite a new interest in crystal therapy, visits from the Rama Bam Doi at Easter, and, or so it was said, encounters with Angie Ballew. There was talk of a softball team, but nothing had materialized. Gazing through his office window across the “field of schemes,” as some of the girls called it, Gus realized he was looking at a Space that might no longer be Occupied, at least not by athletic seventeen-year-olds and a busty blond coach who worked part-time as a TortureCize instructor at the Uptown Health Spa.

  But the Space was Occupied.

  Not particularly to his surprise—hadn’t he just seen “Star Trek” in a church vestibule?—Gus found himself staring through the window panes at the face of Corina Youngblood. Which is to say a cartoon balloon image of that face, floating inward from midfield at about the speed of a looping penalty kick. The Corina face, its edges sharpening as it came closer, settled onto the panes of Gus’s office window. The face bore the same expression as when he had first beheld it at the conclusion of his walk earlier that afternoon: a mixture of surprise, scorn and resignation.

  “You sure you in the right place, honey?” she had asked. Now, in the replay filling the Space in his head, she was asking again and he was replying.

  “I hope so. Depends on if you have any cold drinks.”

  And so, once again, Gus was coming in off the street, opening the door, walking into the botanica, shivering from the rush of air-conditioning, nothing between him and Corina but a plywood counter topped with jars brimful of bright candies and pickled pig’s feet. Past the counter, along one of the white, freshly painted walls, Gus saw a long glass case filled with the standard votive candles, packets of herbs, and a few things Gus had never seen—strange and weird statues, metal implements, dried things, stoneware, porcelain tureens. The case stretched back to a rear wall filled with shelves full of similar items. To the other side, past the opening left by the plywood counter, two folding tables had been set up.

  A teenage boy was sitting at one, reading a book. At the other was the woman who was speaking to him. Her skin was deep caramel, virtually glowing, as smooth as any skin Gus had ever seen. Her hair was pulled back and bunned, and she wore golden earrings and a turtle-green cotton dress. She was older than he was, probably, but she was still one of those women who froze men’s minds on initial sight.

  “Paulus, get up and get the man a Pepsi,” she said. “That’ll be sixty cents.”

  The young man rose and went to a refrigerator wedged next to the bookcase. Gus noticed that there was a half-open door in back, and he could see into something dark and shadowy. The woman caught him looking.

  “I said, you know where you are?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair.

  “Is the correct answer ‘a botanica’?”

  She cocked her head. “You a smart boy, then.”

  “I get around some. But really, I was just out walking and looking for a Coke—” Paulus brusquely handed him an icy can—“or a Pepsi is fine.”

  “Paulus a Michael Jackson fan.”

  Gus nodded, popped the top, and drank about a third in one draft. He was about to say something when he heard a noise from the back. A sinewy black woman of about thirty-five, dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt that said “Mardi Gras” on the front, came out, followed by the strong smell of incense. She went directly to the woman at the table and, surreptitiously glancing at Gus, put some folded up money near a small metal box.

  “I wish I had more, Reverend. Some day I might.”

  “You get more, and when you do, I know you’ll be back and not forget Reverend Youngblood.”

  Then the T-shirted woman walked toward the door, brushing past Gus as though he weren’t there. Gus noticed she had two parallel streaks of blood on her forehead. And that her eyes were fixed on some spot far beyond the moment.

  “She a client. Now you know where you are?”

  Gus drank some more Pepsi.

  “Where you from?” the reverend asked.

  “I live here.”

  “I know that. I mean where here. What you do? You look weird for a white man.”

  “I’m a schoolteacher.”

  “Uh-huh.” She was looking him over much more intently than he liked. In some way he didn’t know. Merchandise, maybe.

  “There my rates,” she said, and pointed to a placard on the wall. Gus read it, only partly distracted by the rotten bananas hanging suspended by a purple ribbon from the ceiling.

  Rev. Corina Youngblood

  African Spiritual Church of Mercy

  Daughter of Ogun

  Spiritual Advice and Counseling

  $30 and Up

  Appointments and Walk-Ins

  No checks

  Gus finished his drink and put the empty can on the counter. He read the sign again, then looked up at the bananas. Then he noticed, in a corner at the front of the store, near the door, a metal tray filled with ash, fruit, a mortar and pestle, and an odd-looking stone cone with eyes fashioned from seashells.

  “So if I had thirty dollars you could give me some advice?”

  She laughed. “Honey, advice ain’t nothing. I give spiritual advice. It ain’t me gives it. It’s the Spirit. That’s what it say on the sign, don’t it? If it said advice I wouldn’t have put ‘Spiritual’ advice, would I?”

  “I guess not.”

  “So you want a reading?”

  “Reading?”

  “That what we call it, too. A reading. Spirit read you like a book.”

  “I see.” Gus felt his back pocket to be sure he had his wallet.

  “It’s okay. White people come in here, too. I get all kinds.”

  “Well, that makes me feel better.”

  “You got that smart mouth, I can tell you that no charge.”

  He looked at her. The boy had gone back to the table. He was reading Huckleberry Finn. Gus started to offer a literary perspective but she interrupted him.

  “Paulus my youngest. He want to go to college like his brother Jean-Pierre, the school teacher.” Paulus looked up momentarily. “He got his nose in a book all the time. Myself, I don’t like ’em. Except the one book.”

  “Huckleberry Finn?”

  She shot him a look. “I don’t joke about the Bible. I don’t joke about Jesus.”

  “Sorry.”

  She leaned to within a few inches of his face. She studied him. Then she moved back and, looking at Paulus, motioned with her head toward the back room. The boy put the book down and disappeared through the door, closing it behind him.

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll read you. Now you sit down in that chair over there in the corner ne
xt to Elegba and Paulus will come back for you in a minute. When you come in bring your thirty dollars, fold it up, and give it to me.”

  With that she exited to the rear. Gus walked back a few steps to the metal folding chair she’d indicated and sat down. That must be Elegba there on the metal tray, he guessed. He decided not to ponder it too long and instead flexed his neck and shoulders and tried to relax. He wasn’t sure if he were about to enter a carney sideshow and get fleeced or get himself good and scared by something about which he knew absolutely nothing. Before he could figure it out Paulus had slipped up next to him. He was a thin, quiet boy, almost girlish in his prettiness.

  “How’s life on the river?” Gus asked.

  “They make us read it. Don’t mean I like it.”

  Gus reassessed the boy. There was a timbre in his voice. And something otherworldly. And, Gus noticed, a row of three scars on both cheeks. “Go back there. She be just inside.” Then Paulus went back to his table. Gus didn’t know whether he felt abandoned or relieved.

  A very short hallway led past a small storage area with a gas water heater and some other things and then directly to a medium-sized room at the nether end of which waited Corina Youngblood. He went in. The walls were white, with no adornments save a large framed likeness of the Black Madonna and a white Jesus. But at the base of the walls were plate after plate filled with candles, fruits, and all manner of dead creatures—pigeons, crabs, the head of a goat. It might have smelled awful except for the thick, semisweet incense.

  She was alone at a small table covered with white lace. A candle burned next to a clear bowl of water. Most of the surface of the table was covered with a huge, red Bible. She had draped herself with a white shawl, cascading around her head and over her shoulders. She motioned for him to come forward. She seemed different, he thought.

  “You should give me the money now,” she said as he sat down.

  He’d folded it tight and had been clutching it in his hand and passed it across the table. She touched the bills to her lips and seemed to offer a prayer, then placed them on the table next to the candle. “That to give you prosperity.”