by Rod Davis
“beef! beef! beef!”
It was a dog’s voice, or a pretend dog’s voice, on the TV, with the dog’s lips moving like he was talking, and his words in little balloons over his head—how they do that stuff in the movies with the talking horses and whatever. It was a commercial for dog food.
Elroy had seen the commercial before but it had never quite hit him this way. This dog, the hound dog kind you’d get at the pound and call Ralph or whatever was jumping around in the kitchen of some gringo house while a thirty-year-old woman with a pony tail was holding a bowl of the dog food up so Ralph’d go crazy with anticipation. There they were again—balloons coming out of his head saying, “beef! beef! beef!” and he was woofing like that, too.
“. . . Sooo good he’ll think it’s beef—but it’s not!” exclaimed some announcer’s voice, with some kind of glee, or sense of triumph—some bragging feel to it that just like that dug into Elroy’s skin and twisted. The woman put the bowl on the linoleum floor and Ralph dug in, jowls slobbering, tail wagging to beat the band, the woman smiling like she’d pulled another one on him.
Elroy slammed his spoon down on the table. He was by himself so no one saw him, which was probably good, given the way he’d been acting of late. With his mouth full of cornflakes, he said to the TV:
“Now what kind of goddam sick person would fool his own dog? What kind of goddam sick yankee sadistic bastard would go to all the trouble to buy something just to fool a dumb animal? What—”
Elroy stopped himself short. He picked up the remote and clicked the TV to another channel. A movie star was being interviewed by Bryant Gumbel. Elroy, who didn’t like Bryant but did like his brother Greg, the sportscaster, watched in silence, crunching away the rest of the flakes.
One damn thing, no forgotten gas tank that pops up out of nowhere was going to stop his first SuperBotanica. Nothing was. Fuck all these surprises, these little City Hall pricks telling him what he could do and couldn’t and how it would cost twenty-five thousand dollars at least to clean the thing up. Fuck that. This was New Orleans. Nobody needed that kind of shit.
He clicked off the TV and wiped droplets of milk off the cast on his arm. For some reason he had remembered something far back in his head, remembered a name, a connection, somebody political, that he could call. Someone he’d done a favor for with the santos. Someone who would be glad to help Elroy and who also wouldn’t want it to get around that he had once been mixed up with santería and curses on enemies.
Elroy beamed. Shit, he knew a politician.
Thing was, he only stopped by to settle Stephanie’s bill—sixty dollars, including reading and treatment, which turned out to be far less than the hundred and forty-eight dollars the school’s on-call GP would have charged for antibiotics and a five-minute exam. Next thing he knew he was explaining about being the school chaplain and she was scolding him about “responsibility for people no matter who they think you are.” Now he and the Reverend Youngblood were agreeing to the terms of future visits. She said bills from then on should be paid on the spot. That was fine. Most of Gus’s charges at Miss Angelique’s carried plenty of pocket money.
He should’ve left it at that. But for some reason—same kind of feeling he’d had during his interview with Elizabeth Hapsenfield—Gus volunteered a completely unnecessary backup plan. He said if the girls wanted to get a reading but couldn’t pay, he could arrange to bill their parents for “consulting therapy.” He said he could forward her the payment, if she’d extend the credit.
She smiled like someone who’d just received a windfall of grace. “I be happy to work with you, Mr. Gus Houston,” she said, taking his hand, pumping it with an enthusiasm that was almost embarrassing in its vulnerability. “I be happy to help all those little girls who got all those problems can’t nobody fix.” Then she had winked warmly. “Especially you, I guess. And I promise you this. Each one you send to see Reverend Youngblood, or you can call me Corina, I give you back twenty percent. That what we all do in the business around here.”
“Oh, I don’t really want anything back out of this.” Even before he had finished the sentence he tried to pull it back in but it was too late. Her smile disappeared. Her lips pressed tightly where her teeth had been clean and glistening.
“What you mean you don’t want nothing back?” she half-whispered, quietly, deliberately, as if the sinking in were still not finished; as if something that had opened and filled her with glory had snapped shut and left her doubled over in pain. “You don’t think you earning it?”
“Well, not exactly,” he said, evading, trying, as in conversations with Bonita, to find a space to figure out how it was he had erred.
She was two feet from his face, hands gripped in fists at her side. It was one of the fastest boil-overs he’d ever seen.
“So you don’t think I’m earning it either?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What you did say, then? I’m some kind of joke? You don’t want to do business with me?”
“I never said that at all.”
She put a finger in the center of his chest. Later, he would find a bruise. “Let me tell you the facts of life. What I do help people, and I got a right to charge for it. And if I don’t then I got no right to do spiritual work at all because I give people something with a value on it and if it have a value then they got to give a value back to me.”
“I—”
“Plus you telling me you don’t want to be in business with me after I sit here and say I cut you in as a partner. Huh!” Wheeling abruptly, she stalked off to lean against the refrigerator. “You insulting the Spirit every time you let people get something for nothing. It make them think the Spirit cheap. Or that they don’t have to sacrifice something to get help. It mean they get something for nothing and that be the problem with half the people come to see me anyway, that attitude. I say they work for what they want and they put something into their prayers.”
“Hey, I wasn’t trying to insult you.” He rubbed his chest.
“Don’t matter what you trying,” she said, coming his way again, stopping just outside arm’s reach. “Matter what you doing. Look here, Candy Man, I do what it take to keep my church going. Why you think I got this botanica? Cause I like to get up early and drive through all that traffic and stay late and never have no life of my own? I got lots of santos to feed and people to look after, too. What your problem anyway? I was just asking you for business is all.”
“And I told you I’d send you some.” Gus realized his voice had begun to rise.
“Yeah, you give me some business like people who put a dime in the collection plate give the church an offering. That ain’t giving, it looking like giving. But it ain’t doing shit—Jesus forgive me. Now you got me cursing. Well you don’t be looking like you with me if you with me. The Lord say that and Reverend Youngblood say that, too: In or out. You in business with me, you in. You out, get out. You treat me with respect. I ain’t to be treated like no nigger you too good to do business with. And this ain’t no hobby, Candy Man. You get that?”
Gus crossed his arms and stared tight-jawed at the linoleum floor. The “get out” option sounded just fine just at that moment. And he almost took it. Except that one of those milliseconds of perception that he sometimes experienced and that were probably responsible for keeping him Going, instead of Not-Going, flushed up through his neck and turned his face scarlet. He could see that Corina saw. What she saw was that he knew she was right.
She was good. Barely knowing him, she had picked him off at his best move. On a different occasion, Bonita had gotten him like that too, and just as quickly. “You’re not too good for me, you selfish shit,” she had screamed one night not longer after they’d met when for no reason he had risen from the bed and thought to go away, maybe forever. When he had told her, “That’s stupid, of course I don’t think that,” she had raced across the room and
caught his jaw full-on with her elbow—definitely hitters, the Doucets. But he had deserved it, and did not leave.
To Corina, he threw up his hands in peace. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
They looked at each other a while. Her face looked like it had gone a little red, too.
Eventually she spoke. “You got to be honest with yourself, Houston. Then we don’t have no problems.”
“I suppose.”
“So be honest. Why you came down here today?”
“I came down to pay you for Stephanie.”
“I said don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying. That’s why I came. To give you sixty dollars. Why else would I come?”
“What you think?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think nothing. I know what the Spirit tell me.”
“Which is?”
“Which is you came down here to do business with me. Flat truth.”
“The Spirit told you I was coming to do business with you?”
“What you think I just said?”
That was, in fact, what Gus thought she had said.
Then she told him about her vision. They got Shastas out of the fridge and opened a package of Kountry Krisps, which Gus paid for. When she came to the phrase, “Come Ye to the Trough of God,” she spoke with uncharacteristic shyness. She asked if he knew what the words meant. He said he didn’t know much about the Bible.
She considered that a long moment, then let it go.
9
The weird thing was, it was working like a charm. Walking through the dark streets of the Quarter to visit The Hellhole, Gus laughed aloud. Tourists moved aside. Gus didn’t care. They’d laugh, too, if they’d known. My god, he thought, in me lurks the soul of a supply sergeant. Three weeks after sending Stephanie Daedaleux to Corina Youngblood, Gus Houston was hip-deep in a business not even the spirits could have foreseen. Actually, Corina said they had and that’s why she was “working with” Gus at all. Gus laughed again. He tried to be a Sky-Cam and view himself moving along Decatur Street. He was one of the people he himself usually avoided.
Already he’d sent three students, not counting Stephanie, over to St. Jude Lamb of Light. Every one of them came back to him so appreciative he thought they were going to cry. Amber Burleson, for example—the first post-Stephanie referral. Amber said she suffered severe muscle cramps after P.E. but the doctor hadn’t found any physical cause and so she had been sent to Gus. His personal opinion was that Amber didn’t want to go to P.E. class and was looking for him to give her the coveted chaplain’s release. Corina’s verdict: a pigeon to the altar of Ochosi, the hunter-god, to get the cramps from the legs. And a little female chat.
So entranced had Amber been about her visit (Gus always made sure the girls he sent had just the right touch of weirdness to accommodate the experience) that she’d completely given up on getting out of gym class. She was convinced her legs really had been seized by an evil spirit. She told Gus she was going to try out for the soccer team, which no longer existed, so she would volunteer for cross-country. And she wanted to go back to Corina—a good piece of information for Gus to find out. He said he’d let her, but only if she promised not to tell anyone, a condition he decided to impose on everyone. And he could enforce it. He heard things. He knew things.
His thoughts were interrupted just outside The Hellhole by a hirsute man the size of Utah who seemed to pop out the saloon-style doors like a cork from a Champagne bottle. Slamming into an iron light pole, the man stopped, backed off a few feet. He looked at the handbill-festooned pole, which must have appeared to have looked back, and raised his hand as if to strike.
But then he shook his head, extended both massive arms skyward and yelled, so loudly you could hear it over the Zeppelin inside the bar, “Excuuuse me, lady. Excuse the fuck out of me.” Then he laughed and walked on, stopping about twenty feet on to examine his bare feet. He said, “It’s them damn socks,” and proceeded into the night. Nobody said a word to him. The only thing he wore was a black gimme cap and a pair of boxer shorts with interlocking candy hearts on the back.
Gus went inside. Bonita nodded hello. “Thurgood’s probation was over yesterday.”
Gus took a seat where the dark cypress bar curved into the wall. Bonita chinged the cash register toting somebody’s tab. To Gus’s surprise, The Hellhole was nearly empty. In one corner, two white guys in dirty striped shirts cut off at the sleeves, probably from the oil patch or maybe some city street crew. Old Clyde, a retired truck driver who had adopted the bar as his nightly home fifteen years ago when it was called Toppy’s and was mostly jazz and who stayed at it even after its metamorphosis into a biker hangout—especially weird because Clyde was black—was at the opposite end, on his usual stool, bent over his Dixie beer and doodling on a beer coaster. People said Clyde had bounced on the interstates too long but Gus liked him and Bonita wouldn’t hear a bad word about him.
But that was about it. Except that the juke box was real loud, and now playing Rush. Along the front of the bar, at the base of the stools, was a discarded pair of huge, grease-stained jeans, a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, some black boots, beer-soaked gray socks, and a skinning knife. Also a watch, a set of keys on a chain, and a crumpled assortment of envelopes, letters and a catalog, that, when Gus leaned closer, was seen to be from Victoria’s Secret. On the counter directly above all this was a row of beer cans of several different varieties, and a pyramid of perhaps a dozen shot glasses.
Bonita scooped up the dead soldiers and put them in the washing rack, then wiped the bourbon soup that had accumulated underneath them. When she was done she came over to Gus. He was looking at a big crack in the wall near the hall to the bathrooms, and a scattering of all the framed photos of biker patrons on the floor. “He danced right into the wall. Half-naked. Just stuck there, too, for a minute, like he’d been glued.” She shook her head and attempted not to laugh, thinking it unprofessional, even for Thurgood.
“That’s right. That’s sure enough right.” Clyde nodded his head and continued his doodling.
Bonita ducked under the waiter’s entry leaf next to the register and carried over two fresh bottles to the oil patch boys. They said something to her and laughed, and she came back to the bar. She dug into the cooler and got Gus a Dixie.
“And how are your crazy people doing?” she asked, half-watching a couple of Tulane students who had just entered. They liked to drop in time to time to breathe the air of the defiant. She always had to check their ID.
Gus followed her almond eyes, then returned to gaze upon her petite person. He had never stopped thinking she looked out of place in The Hellhole. For that matter, so did he. But to her it was just a job and, as she frequently pointed out, macho guys were usually big tippers.
“Not bad.”
She nodded. Gus thought he saw her jaw set slightly. It was still far from settled about his “scam,” as she insisted on calling it, with Corina Youngblood.
She left the counter to carry a tray of neat vodkas to the students. Gus knew she just didn’t see it yet. Not the whole Big Picture. She thought it was a money thing. But that was Little Picture stuff. There was a Picture so Big even Gus himself hadn’t quite taken in all its dimensions. Though he was working on it. From the shadows.
He adjusted on his stool and grabbed the Times-Picayune from the corner. Thinking of Corina, Gus smiled involuntarily, though he tried to hide his expression from Bonita, because unexplained facial smirks were one of the things that sent her into protracted inquisitions.
“To the Garden of Dixie,” he said, raising his beer mug. No one except Bonita had any idea what the toast meant, although one of the Tulane students yelled over the jukebox, “Whoa, that place sucks—we went there last summer.”
Flipping through the paper, Gus began reading a feature story about how city officials were already plan
ning for Jazzfest, the two-week outdoor music extravaganza at the Fairgrounds every spring. When Bonita had a moment to talk to him again he folded up the paper and pitched it aside. Jazzfest wasn’t her favorite event. Two years ago, walking back to her car after one of the shows, she’d been mugged and robbed. Three young white guys broke her nose and took her purse. It might’ve been worse, but some people had come along and the muggers had run away. Never got caught. Last year Bonita hadn’t gone. She was even starting not to like Mardi Gras. Things with big uncontrollable crowds. But she didn’t mind working in the Quarter.
She took a drink from his mug and touched the top of his hand with her fingertips.
“Corina’s good for the girls. She understands them.”
“That’s good,” Bonita replied. She withdrew her hand. “One of you needs to.”
“I thought we talked about this.”
“We did. I just didn’t think you’d keep doing it. Don’t give me that look—you know what I mean. You could get fired for that shit. I think we talked about that, too.”
“For a bartender you worry a lot.”
“You tend bar you see a lot to worry on.”
Gus held her eyes a moment, then decided not to ruin the evening. A bar was no place to pick a fight. “I’m just having fun. Keeping the game interesting is all.”
She glared at him.
“I’m sort of drawn to it, okay?”
“I’m glad.” She walked over to the tap to pull a beer for the oil patch boys. To Gus’s amazement, the golden-brown stream from the spigot froze in midair.
At six-feet-one, a hundred and ninety pounds, and with a full head of only slightly gray-flecked brown hair, Joe Dell Prince would have been handsome except for the way his dark brown eyes seemed to leak evil into the universe. Neither flaw was Elroy’s concern, though it did make him wonder how this white man had made a career in state politics instead of something considerably more mundane. Julio always said Joe Dell should be selling shoes at the mall, but the back half of the joke was that they had to agree he would probably sell more shoes than anyone in town and eventually have his own shoe empire and go into politics anyway.
