Corina's Way

by Rod Davis

  The moment of clarity occurred on the sun deck of Bonita’s apartment, gazing out at the park and sipping iced tea with lemon, nursing a mild hangover on a Saturday morning. Funny how ideas worked, he mused. You can spend years stuck on a knot of a problem and never cut through and on the other hand you can achieve diamond clarity in a thought-tableau of pristine logic and permutation within the space of what, seconds?

  Gus plucked the lemon from the glass and sucked on it. He had read of Chinese monks who had spent all their lives transfixed by such simplicity, which of course was also a weird way to deal with enlightenment. Gus’s take on the issue was that satori came in stages, rather than all at once, but that no matter when and how you got it, you didn’t need to devote a lot of rituals to keeping it. It wasn’t a barter deal with the gods.

  This had become more difficult to assess in the months with Corina. She was of the daily reminder school of thinking—continual payback. They’d never really arrived at a consensus on the issue of faith and enlightenment, though he had to admit he had come closer to seeing her point of view than he thought he might. She was very impressive on matters of the spirit, and her insistence on Absolute Loyalty to God was intimidating, almost catching.

  Gus had told Bonita that’s why the people in Corina’s church were so devout. They were like permanent recruits with the toughest drill sergeant in the world. They didn’t dare fuck up and she wouldn’t let them because it would be hard on all of them, eventually, should any fall.

  As a former military man, or at least a person who had served his time to pay off a graduate English degree that now, like the Garden of Dixie and sundry other items on his vita, seemed at least digressive, Gus found the logic of responsibility compelling. He didn’t know what Bonita felt. But she had made him attend Saturday night services at the African Mercy church for the last seven weeks in a row. On all but one of those weeks she had gone to Mass the following Sunday evening before she went to work. But she never talked about it, and rarely spoke to Corina after church.

  Corina had asked Gus about Bonita several times, but he’d just said that was the way she was. Corina said, “She look at me like a child look at the river the first time. Don’t you know what that mean?” To which Gus had said no, to which Corina had said, “I tell you someday when you ready.” Then he thought he heard her say something sotto voce about “men” but on that afternoon he was in a rush picking up Trudi Harrelson after a reading and had let it go.

  The idea of the choir at Jazzfest, though, was unquestionably enlightenment, not faith. It was not something in which to believe, but something to know. He could see it and that made it a vision instead of an act of faith. He made the distinction because seeing it made it real, at the very least a function of will. Believing in it would have made it a function of something he didn’t have.

  In his mind’s eye the singers appeared in the hot exuberance of the big striped Gospel Tent on the Fairgrounds not in Academy white but in the electric blue gowns favored by real Gospel groups. There were at least ten of them, fresh-scrubbed and virginal to the point of lust, amid a sea of the blackness of the South, a sea corrupted and intercorrupted by the commerce of the vile trade routes over the Atlantic but now in the way of the cosmos flipped into an opposite blackness of the South, the sea now triumphant and cleansed in real human blood not anything on any white man’s cross. In this opposing sea of reality would appear these children of fiction and in such debutante drama would they themselves be transformed and the final surrender of evil into good would occur in the kind of port city in which it all started. Viz., the old slave market now an overpriced tourist restaurant.

  A true vision wasn’t anything you thought through, but rather something that thought through you. At least he’d learned that. In Hollywood and Madison Avenue they called a vision a Big Idea. Except in those places all they’d see in a vision was the theater. What Gus saw was the soul. But wouldn’t it make a damn fine show, too? White girls in the Gospel tent, bringing the house down? Maybe some of them would find Jesus with a black preacher. Maybe—

  No, it would be a damn fine show. The talk of the town. And somewhere in that talk would come the inquiry, “Who put up this fine show? Who had this fine idea?” And Gus, being interviewed by reporters on the veranda of his fine apartment overlooking the park, could say, “Well, it came to me one day as I was sitting right here . . .”

  Which was how Gus’s vision started to go bad.

  Jean-Pierre had read one time that you never get mad, you get even. He tried to concentrate on that ever since Paulus got beat up and he wanted evenness really bad. He and his mother had quarreled hard—always out of the hearing of Paulus. Jean-Pierre was not a violent man but after he had left the hospital and seen Paulus that way all he could think about was blowing Elroy Delgado’s head off.

  But he knew Elroy hadn’t been the one who smashed Paulus’s nose and ribs, even if Elroy had somehow been behind it. That knowledge had squelched Jean-Pierre’s vengeful rage. It was a strange, abstract kind of rationale, but one he seemed powerless to discount. He was thinking about doing exactly what he spent hours each week counseling his students not to do. And so he left off the idea of getting a gun and thought all through the night. He drank brandy and listened to Percy Sledge and Sam Cooke and Al Green then most of his Gospel tapes until dawn. And he did not kill anyone.

  Now he sat at his kitchen table listening to his answering machine. It was that Houston man, wanting him to call back. Strange cat, that man. He was a teacher, too, but nothing like Jean-Pierre’s version of the profession. All Houston taught were rich white girls and Jean-Pierre suspected he didn’t even have a teaching certificate, but you didn’t need one at a private school.

  And then all that shit between his mother and Houston. It bothered Jean-Pierre. He was a very religious man but had not taken the santos like Paulus. He thought of himself as a kind of scholar; certainly a man of reason. His efforts went into working with the gangbangers and sometimes helping with the marches and rallies and whatever when the black politicians needed to turn out the people. Even if it often seemed little more than a charade, Jean-Pierre did his bit. He had read Sartre on that and believed “the being was in the doing,” which was the phrase he came up with to explain it to teenagers.

  Jean-Pierre listened to the other messages and decided which to return and which to let go. Suddenly it hit him. One voice among the half-dozen on the tape. Paulus had said it was hoarse, like the guy had a cold, and definitely Cuban. Jean-Pierre’s teeth ground together. It had been in there, in his head, in his knowledge, all that time but it had not been manifest. Now it was—brought out among the voices on the machine.

  13

  Julio set up the meeting with Joe Dell. They had exactly forty-five days if they wanted to hold the grand opening on May 1, the start of Jazzfest, and draw from the big out-of-state crowds. Some people thought Mardi Gras was the biggest retail time for the city, but in Julio’s experience in the spiritual trade, two weeks of Jazzfest generally proved equal to it or better. Maybe there were more black people involved, or maybe the people who came were less likely to be drunks and more likely to be interested in the festival itself.

  Elroy was unwavering about it, insisting on being open for business during Jazzfest to “announce our presence to the world,” as he had taken to saying. Julio was not exactly worried about his older brother, for Changós were prone to such melodramatic statements, but the rush to start up the “flagship SuperBotanica” had been troubling Julio ever since that day outside Corina Youngblood’s.

  And then the business with Paulus had contaminated everything. More was bound to come from it. No one knew what, and not even Elroy would talk about it. He was pretending nothing had happened and that he didn’t know Ocho or Ramón or Elusário even though all of them worked in the warehouse. Elroy just didn’t want to deal with it. He wouldn’t even fire them because that would be to acknowledge
that something had happened.

  The only good side to the boy getting beat up, Julio thought, was that at least Elroy never talked to that damn woman anymore. Though he would confess it to no one, Julio was afraid of her. He knew Elroy was, too, even if Elroy would not confess it even to himself, not least because he had been her padrino and if anything it was she should be afraid of him. But Elroy was also sex-crazy about her, even now, and it made a bad mix. Julio tried to think that maybe Ochún and the other orisha had allowed the beating, or even moved those three drunken assholes to it, as a way of keeping Corina and Elroy, and their santos, apart. That was what he tried to think and it might be true but it was troubling.

  Another upside of the bad blood was that Elroy had been much more able to concentrate on the building site and the permit and to put his anger where it needed to be, on Joe Dell Prince. Julio hated the man. He did not fear him; he hated him. He was the kind of gringo gabacho you thought about when you thought about the worst kind of American. All that mud race shit and his golf clothes and he always had bad breath. It made Julio’s flesh crawl just to be around the man.

  Once, Julio had told one of Prince’s bootsuck buddies, a guy named Finnester, to go to hell. Finnester had said Julio and Elroy were “acting like a couple of pushy beaners.” Julio actually had put his hands around Finnester’s skinny throat as they stood outside a car waiting for Elroy and Joe Dell to finish arguing about something. Julio could have hurt the man. Partly to overcome his pretty boy image he’d studied tae-kwon-do for a while, gotten a brown belt. But Finnester more or less apologized, even though it was only to get Julio’s hands off his windpipe, and the moment passed. Funny— until then, Julio hadn’t thought the bad attitude had gotten into him, too. He thought he was above it, not a hothead like his brother. But it was in him all right; that, too, troubled him. He was starting to have dreams.

  Still, today might be a good meeting. The media had finally gotten off Elroy’s case and the little pricks down at the city were saying they would go ahead and process the waiver for construction for five thousand dollars. Joe Dell was taking credit, saying it would have been fifty thousand or more, normally, and might not have been granted at all, except for his influence. So he was asking five thousand for himself and another five thousand for the city supervisor. Elroy and Julio had agreed to pay—on condition everything would be finished by Friday and construction could start Monday. The contractor said that should give them time to set the foundation and throw up the shell and at least allow the place to open up, even if everything wasn’t completely finished, before Jazzfest started.

  Julio hoped Elroy would be on time. If not, Julio would have to pass the time at the Denny’s with Joe Dell and probably Finnester, too. They’d decided to stop meeting at Robbo’s after all the media stuff because one time a TV cameraman hiding outside in a car had taken footage of Joe Dell and Elroy together. Robbo had gotten so mad he hit the cameraman’s zoom lens with a big soup spoon and knocked it to the ground. But the videotape didn’t break and Robbo was on the evening news, too. It was a terrible experience over weeks and weeks. No matter where Elroy went, it was like the reporters knew and kept dogging him. People said he was like Joe Dell—a racist. That was about when Elroy started drinking too much.

  One day Elroy had been so furious he came into the warehouse drunk and told all the workers he wished Corina Youngblood’s botanica never existed and not her either or any of her friends or family and that God and the santos had cursed him, Elroy, for ever having fucked her in the first place and now the santos should take the curse off because he was doing their work and making it possible for more people to worship them and why didn’t something happen?

  Everybody knew Elroy was drunk, although not until then did everybody know he’d fucked Corina Youngblood (Luz found out, too, and there was hell for a while). Julio wouldn’t have probably even remembered that day except it was sometime in late January and it was only a couple weeks later at Mardi Gras that Ocho and the others had run into Paulus and almost killed him. They were pigs. They were real marielitos, the kind that gave the others a bad name—petty crooks, what the government called lumpen in Cuba because they were like a professional breed of no-goods. Fidel had been only too happy to send them to Florida to live with the gusanos. And they had done a bad thing in the family name.

  Julio looked out the window toward the traffic on Airline Highway. Sometimes it calmed him to see cars just going back and forth and you never knew where or why. He sipped his second cup of coffee and glanced at his watch. He would kill Elroy if he was late, which it was looking like. Then it occurred to Julio that Joe Dell would probably be late, too, so maybe it would even out and he wouldn’t have to talk polite for long.

  Four o’clock came and went and then 4:15. Julio switched to decaf and glanced again at the folder of construction plans and permits and financial papers he’d brought. Elroy had been behaving so erratically since Mardi Gras that Julio had become the brother who kept up the documents. He could finish everything with Joe Dell, for that matter, but Elroy was still the oldest and it was really his company and the SuperBotanica was his idea and Julio wasn’t really an ambitious man and not really that competitive. He liked having Elroy be the front.

  “Bastards not here yet?”

  Julio looked up from his haze of thoughts. It was Elroy after all. Julio hadn’t even seen his car pull up. He shot his brother a look of disapproval and slid over in the booth. “You’re lucky they’re later than you.”

  “Fuck that. I wanted to make ’em wait on me.”

  “Yeah? Well why didn’t you tell me that? Fuck you, Elroy.”

  Elroy shrugged and signaled to the waitress to bring another cup of coffee. “Don’t worry about it.” After a moment, “Did you bring the papers?”

  “I’d tell you if I didn’t?”

  “Hey, next time you can be late, OK?”

  “I ain’t meetin’ this asshole any next time. It’s over after this or we’re wasting our time.”

  Elroy looked at Julio carefully. “You think I like the guy?”

  “I think you’re spending way too much time with him. And me, too.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You know what’s going around.”

  “Yeah, but not from my own little brother.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I’m just saying we got to do what we got to do. We got to get open and if I got to play with this gabacho a little that’s what we do.” The waitress slid the cup across the tabletop, backing away slightly at the sound of muffled anger in the voices of the two middle-aged Cuban men huddled together like spies.

  “And I’m saying I’m tired of it—shit, there he is.”

  They looked out the plate glass at a black Oldsmobile pulling up to park. Joe Dell Prince and Finnester got out. En route to the door Joe Dell said something in what Julio construed as a furtive demeanor. And then they were inside. Joe Dell waved at Elroy like a good buddy—what the American rednecks called each other—and then came over and slid in across the booth. Finnester was right next to him, across from Julio. Julio was satisfied to see that Finnester acted nervous and wouldn’t look him in the eye.

  “My friend,” said Joe Dell, “this is a good day for both of us.” He opened a thick brown folder, pulled out an official looking form, glanced at it as if to certify that it was authentic, and then passed it across to Elroy. It was from the Department of Environmental Safety. Julio didn’t need to read it. He knew what it said. It said it was okay to build. It said the underground gasoline storage tank had “minimal leachage” and could be removed without further contamination and so on. It was probably a lie; Julio didn’t care. It covered the city and it covered Elroy.

  “The thing is, you’ve got to pull that tank out right away—I mean today or tomorrow—so nobody can do any more testing.”

  “No problem. We been ready since Tha
nksgiving.”

  “Maybe do it real early in the morning or something.”

  “No problem.” Elroy looked at Julio, who made a note in his appointment book to call Geronimo Casey at Delta Construction and get the damn tank out at five in the morning.

  “Then all you have to do is sign this and Albert will take care of the rest,” Joe Dell grinned. So did Elroy. Even Julio. It occurred to them all at once that this was it.

  “Sometimes these things are harder than they look like they’d be,” the senator said. “But eventually they get taken care of.”

  “Anyway, it’s done,” said Elroy.

  “Say, Albert,” said Joe Dell, making a show of looking at his watch, “it’s getting late. Go call Olsen and tell him you’ll be by this afternoon and for him to wait for you in the office.”

  Finnester’s brow furrowed, then he shrugged and got up. “Fucking bureaucrats leave at the stroke of five,” Joe Dell said to him as he walked away.

  As soon as Finnester was gone, Elroy took a plain white envelope from his trouser pocket. He looked at it the way Joe Dell had looked at the form, then pushed it around his coffee cup until it rested next to the salt and pepper holder at the edge of the table. Joe Dell eased it to the brown folder he was holding. Then he put the folder inside his jacket pocket. Julio noticed that the transaction only took about ten seconds and that Joe Dell seemed as fast and quiet as a blackjack dealer.

  Then it really was done.

  “We got to be going,” the senator said. He leaned slightly toward Elroy. “We sort of even now, wouldn’t you say, son?”