by Rod Davis
Gus nodded. He couldn’t stop staring at her.
She gave him a piece of paper and a pencil. “Write down a word, any word you like. And then write down a book from the Bible.”
He accepted the task like a child. “Any name?”
“Any you want.”
He wrote: “Candide.”
He didn’t know too many Bible books, so he wrote, “John.”
“I never heard this first name.”
“It just came to me.”
“That okay. Okay.” She looked at both words and then placed the paper in the Bible. She closed her eyes and let her finger rummage the pages. Then she opened it. It was “Judges.” She seemed to be pleased.
Then she ran her fingers along the text of the open book, eyes closed, and her finger eventually stopped. Gus could see her unpainted nail rested along a capital “C.”
She looked at the letter, then closed her eyes again. Gus had no idea what she was doing. She didn’t open her eyes for more than a minute. It was as if something had startled her. When she looked at him, she seemed on the verge of saying something, then changed her mind.
She started speaking about ordinary matters. She asked him about his job, and how long he’d lived in the city. Then her tone shifted. More distant, same as her eyes. Like a litany of his life, she read him his past: that his parents were dead, and that one had died in a freak accident, she didn’t know what—it was a boating accident—but she knew it had been unusual and violent. She knew he’d been in the Army and she even knew he’d had a job “in some fun place, but you didn’t have fun yourself,” which pretty much described the years at the Garden of Dixie. It was all eerily on the mark, and Gus felt himself getting into it despite his doubts.
Then, just as he was really enjoying his chance indulgence in the occult, she stopped talking. She stared at him for a few seconds. In a still different, much throatier voice, she said, “Children. Spirit say you about to have children.”
Gus thought he misheard at first. Then he smirked. He looked at the glass bowl, the Bible, the piece of paper sticking out of Judges. She was way off the beam. Way off. So it was a carney ride after all. That other stuff, maybe she guessed. Maybe she was just intuitive. Maybe a little psychic. But this—this was stupid. Having felt pleasant, he downshifted to disappointed.
“Not very likely,” he said.
She looked at him with either harshness or pity. “Spirit not interested in what you think is likely.” He returned her gaze. It didn’t faze her. “You got a girlfriend?”
He nodded.
“She make you feel good?”
“You mean—”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“Spirit know that. Spirit say she gonna give you baby.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Hup!” She threw her head back. Her eyes fluttered white, then the lids closed. Her mouth hung open. He wasn’t sure if she was breathing. In a moment, her mouth began to move.
“You ever been in a foreign land? Somewhere, someplace cold?”
Gus nodded cautiously, staring at her.
Her head shook violently. Two, three times.
“You kill a man—no—you with a man killed?”
He answered slowly.
“Hup!” She fazed out again for a few moments. Gus felt his facial muscles go slack.
“You could’ve saved that man—Spirit say.”
Gus looked at her. His hands were sweating despite the air conditioning. “I don’t think so.”
“Spirit say he know you couldn’t save him either but—Hup!—Spirit say you think you could. You blame yourself. Hup! Spirit say man name Kadur. He Turk man.”
“I don’t know—maybe. I don’t remember—”
“Spirit say that make you sick. Spirit say you got a shadow on you. Or you already got a shadow and it getting bigger. You feel like you in a shadow?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You know. Inside you do. Spirit say you come here because you being sick inside. Spirit say new child come out from you to make you well.”
Gus said nothing. He didn’t move.
Presently, the Reverend Youngblood opened her eyes. She looked around as if just awakening and needing to remind herself where she was. Then she slumped back slightly in her chair, as if exhausted. More silence. Then she was in the present again with him. Her eyes seemed dilated and her face had softened. She touched his hand.
“You know where you are now, don’t you?”
He said he did.
Then she talked to him a little more, in what he would later understand as the epilogue of a reading. She imparted sound advice: what he should eat (less meat, less beer, more “salty food”); what he should wear (“nothing purple”).
She told him, too, that his spirit was hungry for something and that it wanted out. She chided him for never going to church. She told him he needed to be cleaned to rid the bad spirit. She said that would mean a sacrifice but she said he would have to come back because she didn’t have time. In the meantime he should go have sex with his woman and buy an orange and rub it all over his body to start the cleaning and then throw the orange away because it would be full of evil. And then the session was over and he left. Paulus watched him all the way out the door.
The movie was over.
Gus got up and pressed his face to the glass panes. It was dusk. Shadows faded into the blue night. When he had told Bonita about the child thing, just before she left for work, she had smiled but he didn’t know what that meant. They didn’t talk about it. Kids just hadn’t come up much with them. The part about the dead Turk he didn’t mention.
Gus realized he had unfinished business. Opening his door, pausing a moment to listen for stray students or janitors, he moved silently down the halls to the kitchen. It was clean, deserted. It was full of pots and pans suspended on hooks over butcher-block cutting boards and stainless steel prep counters. He looked quickly through the huge wooden cupboards until he found what he wanted—sacks full of Florida oranges. Miss Angelique’s didn’t skimp on fresh juice because that was the sort of thing it was important for properly trained young women to be able to distinguish.
He took one of the oranges, then returned to his office. In the encroaching darkness he took off all his clothes and rubbed the fruit over his body, head to toe, squeezing it so hard the skin began to break. He allowed the leakage to course over him and he wasn’t quite sure where his mind was traveling. He shivered a little, though it wasn’t really cold.
When he had finished he set the orange down on his desk. He wasn’t sure how long he remained there by the window until he was aware that he was standing naked in his office with sticky streaks of orange on him because that’s what a voodoo woman he had just met told him to do. But he did become aware of that, and when he did he got dressed.
Outside the school gates, he figured to go down the Quarter to drink. He was still clutching the orange, now full of the evil shadow of his soul. She hadn’t told him exactly what to do with such cargo, so after about a block he hurled the mashed and unwanted thing as far as he could towards a lot overgrown with weeds and full of debris.
Corina finished the day by going over the numbers in her book and sorting the cash. Normally, Paulus or Jean-Pierre took care of that but Jean-Pierre was gone down to Houma for the weekend to play organ and Paulus had left early to meet some friends. Then she put the cinnamon buns in the refrigerator so the roaches wouldn’t get them and swept the entryway and went back to her reading room. It had been a slow afternoon after that strange white man and she hadn’t really wanted to return to the room. But she had to see that it was clean and ready for the next day.
All the altars were well fed, though she knew she’d have to get rid of the plate of crabs left for Ochosi, to help Mrs. Brown’s boy Tom get out
of Angola in one piece. Even with the air conditioning, the fishy funk was starting to get thick. Turning to straighten her Bible, Corina suddenly stopped. It was as if she couldn’t move. She sat down. She cradled the edges of the Bible with both her hands, as if it were a fragile sheet of ice, and she looked beyond it, into something on the white lace.
It was the same thing she’d seen when that man, Houston, was there. It was the thing she couldn’t tell him. It was true, Spirit said he would have children but it wasn’t a firm thing, just something she had felt was probably true and because the Spirit had told her about some fire-woman who loved him. So she had said the first thing she could think of that started with a “C”, like the letter from the word he’d written down for her—Candy or whatever it was.
But when she was with Houston it was something else that started with a “C” came to her. It was a phrase. It had appeared in the lace on the table right in front of him. If she’d ever seen it in the Bible before or knew what it meant or hadn’t been startled by what it said she would have told him because it was his reading and so it must have been words for him. But it wasn’t.
Corina knew it was really words for her. She was afraid it was for both of them, and she wanted it to be for him, but she believed it was words for her. And now she saw the words again, and she stared at them perhaps a half hour, until her right forearm began to ache from holding the Bible with the strength with which you would firmly hold an egg not wanting to break it but not to drop it either. The words said:
“Come Ye to the Trough of God.”
At home, she was not comforted and slept badly. About two a.m. she awoke in a sweat. She sat up and blinked several times, trying to focus. There was slight pain beneath her temples. The room was half-lit by the street lamp seeping through the blinds.
She got it. Even though it was late and she was groggy from bad sleep and she was wearing a shabby yellow nightgown she got out of bed, knelt and crossed herself.
“Praise Jesus!” she said in a hoarse whisper. Then, louder, “Praise Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Spirit!”
She let her head fall against the percale sheets and smiled. Later, with sunrise streaming in, she awoke again. She was curled up on the floor, a quilt half pulled down to cover her legs. She was not sweating, and she felt calm.
6
Delgado Bros., S.A., started off as a P.O. box and a gray military surplus desk in the spare bedroom of Elroy and Luz’s old place in Gretna, but the success of their first venture, Botanica of the Bayou, had propelled them directly into the spaciousness of commerce, including the half-dozen little corner groceries that now settled around them like the clouds of the gods themselves.
Elroy did not think the comparison to the heavens unjust. The corporation’s new sky-blue warehouse out Airline Highway was admittedly made of prefab corrugated tin on a concrete slab and bore little outward resemblance to anything divine, but considered as the manifestation of a marielito and his family who had shucked off the shame of their arrival in America and done exactly what the Dream had intimated, the fifty-thousand square foot enclosure had at least as much beauty as the finest cathedral or skyscraper, considered against either of their respective struggles.
Julio, who had read much poetry, said beauty was truth. So this warehouse was the truth of the Delgados. Since the priests had always told him truth was God, then Elroy knew he was on safe theological ground considering his warehouse a temple. And his business to be God’s work.
Elroy called out to Corvette, his secretary, to see when was the appointment with the architects.
“Tomorrow, at eleven. I told you to mark that down.”
He leaned across the papers on his desk to the flip calendar next to the phone and jotted down what she said. “I did,” he called back. “Here it is. I see it right here.” She was a good secretary and, as anyone in business knows, it is better that you pluck out your eye with a letter opener than lose a good secretary. He accepted attitude from her the way a baseball manager might cut some slack for a twenty-game winner.
Elroy was anxious to see the architects’ plans. He wanted ground-breaking moved up if possible. Word about the big new store had gotten around, too much so. People like Corina were mad as hell. There weren’t that many rival shops—six or seven real botanicas in the city, and that was stretching it—but it was no secret what Elroy would do to them.
Certainly not to Corina.
What really galled him, though, was that she was also trying to make it a black-brown thing and an American-Cuban thing. Elroy thought that unfair. Except for Corina, all the other botanicas were run by Cubans. Nor did Elroy think he was attacking the blacks. Elroy himself had African blood. Corina knew that. How did she think he heard about the santos in the first place? Not from the Catholic fathers back in La Habana. It was from his great-uncle, Elfego, a priest of Ochosi.
From the age of seven or eight, Elroy had been to the parties they called bimbés at Tío Elfego’s apartment in one of the housing projects of the Revolution. He had seen the cuchillo cut the throat of a goat—the first sacrifice he had ever witnessed—on a Friday night as the adults around him danced and sang and made strange prayers and drank the blood from the animal’s throat. He had not been allowed to drink—not then. But by his thirteenth year he had taken the way of the santos, lost himself in the wonders of Changó, whom he thought the greatest and most powerful of all the spirits, except for Olofí, the greatest of all—God himself. And now this black woman who had never even set foot outside her own country was telling him he was attacking African people. Well, they would see.
He pushed back from his desk and walked out to the balcony railing. His office, and Corvette’s, and a few other cubicles, really just boxes created by plexiglass partitions, were perched on a small platform at the front end of the warehouse. From the catwalk railing, Elroy could look down on the vast space. A half-dozen workers with front-loaders moved about, shifting pallets of boxes here and there.
It was a good system. Elroy had seen how Wal-Mart did it, and Federal Express, and he wasn’t that sophisticated yet, with conveyor belts and computers, but he and Julio had set up a system in which supplies were routed by content and destination. Each of the three Delgado Bros., S.A., botanicas had a special area, color-coded because many of the workers had trouble reading. But the biggest area, so large it consisted of aisles full of boxes of candles and oils and statues and sacramental clothing, and of course Bibles and cassette tapes—“No Need of the Spirit Left Untended,” as the motto went—was for the SuperBotanica.
Even Elroy was sometimes astonished at the stockpile. It hadn’t been easy, setting up contracts in New York, Miami, Oakland, La Habana (very difficult), Chicago, even Minneapolis. And most of the people he dealt with were crooks. That’s what he tried to tell Corina as well. He wasn’t just going to change the scope of the botanica business in America, he was going to reform it. Volume would speak. Prices would go down. The crooks and hustlers would be driven out of business. That was his dream.
As he dreamed, he noticed Julio down on the floor, talking to one of the front-loader drivers, jotting something down on his clipboard. He was wearing a yellow hard hat. That was his color. By some weird fate, Julio had been given to Ochún as a child. Normally that was a woman’s god but not always. Tío Elfego said it was because Julio was a poet and Ochún was the best spirit for that. And anyway, like all the santos, Ochún could be man or woman. Same as with Ogun and Corina. Ogun was a war god, usually for men, but Ogun suited Corina fine. The santos always seemed to know in whom they should dwell.
As Elroy always told Julio, even his own god, Changó, could switch sexes, so it wasn’t that big a deal. For example Tanya was a daughter of Changó. She had those long, cylindrical breasts, which at first Elroy didn’t like but then later he did. She was a beast in bed. She said it was because they were both Changós and so it was like fucking yourself and someone el
se at the same time and therefore had to be intense, and, being so intense, had to eventually eat itself up, which it did, and they had a huge fight and then it was over.
That was all when he was twenty and she was twenty-five. She had stayed behind in La Habana when he took the marielito express. She was a schoolteacher and, like her parents, would never leave the Revolution. That was her nature. A fighter. Elroy believed he was, too. He fought here, in America, and she there, in Cuba.
Elroy smiled. He was sounding like Julio, making stuff sound a lot grander than it was. He was a businessman. Simple.
“Half an hour,” he called down to Julio, and pointed to the watch on his wrist.
Julio looked up, at first as if he didn’t understand because of all the noise of the warehouse, but then waved to say he did and make an OK sign with his fingers. Thin and wiry, he was three years younger and two inches taller than Elroy. His left ear had a notch in it the size and shape of the pointed end of a beer can opener, from a strange childhood accident. He also had a splotch of freckles across his nose. Like Elroy, his skin was white and his appearance Spanish, despite the blood from the Lukumí.
People said he looked like the dead actor Montgomery Clift, which he resented, because Clift was gay and it was bad enough sometimes dealing with the Ochún image, and the poet image. On the other hand, people said Elroy looked like Carlos Fuentes, especially when he wore glasses, and Fuentes looked like a jowly version of Floyd the barber in the old “Andy Griffith” television show, which they used to watch sometimes on Miami stations when they weren’t jammed. So Julio was the better-looking, it was commonly agreed. Except for the ear.
Elroy looked out at the warehouse again and went back into his office. He studied the construction schedule again and was clear in his mind that the time was right. He was clear that things couldn’t wait and that the best way to avoid trouble would be just to tell Corina right off the bat, before the grapevine picked it up, exactly what would happen and when. That way she could get mad now and have time to get over it and then things could settle down and the project could begin.
