by Rod Davis
It was funny, Julio observed, the way the senator responded to what his brother said next. Probably he had expected something else. But Elroy said, “We’ll be even when I get open.”
Joe Dell’s eyes narrowed, just a flash of the real feeling he had toward mud races. But it passed. “Then you just get open. Nothing to stop you now.”
The senator slid out of the booth and started to walk away. He stopped, turned, and extended his hand. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again, Elroy.”
Elroy shook the hand. He nodded and smiled. The two men looked at each other and Joe Dell cocked his head as if in some sort of agreement. Then he walked past the cash register to the door, where Finnester caught up with him.
Elroy and Julio sat in silence until the Oldsmobile was gone.
“I’ll be damned,” Elroy said, and laughed.
“He didn’t leave a tip,” said Julio.
Bonita rarely let things eat on her. It wouldn’t have been good in her family. Her brother let things eat on him and was dead. Her mother let things eat on her, too. But in a different way. Her mother let things be. She allowed them to occur. She didn’t throw Bonita’s father out of the house. Bonita would never be like that. She feared no man. She never really planned on loving one, either—Gus caught her so by surprise she didn’t really have time to throw up defenses. Something about his smart mouth made her laugh a split second after it pissed her off and that made her feel vulnerable and in the vulnerability she had an ability to love. Mindful of mama, she kept close watch on that tendency, but it seemed the only way a man was going to get to her. Not a straight route at all; on the other hand who was in charge of these journeys?
What was eating her wasn’t Gus so much as it was Corina Youngblood. At first, Bonita had merely objected to what she saw as Gus’s foolishness, putting a good job on the line by sending girls over to a hoodoo woman. It was plain crazy. Stupid. It had made her mad, because it was the smart mouth gone over the line. It made him funny to a point but then after that point she wondered about the man she’d fallen for just like they said—first sight, no real time to catch herself.
But now there was something different. Bonita had started to like Corina—much against her better judgment. The woman was a tough cookie. She’d seen how Gus behaved around her—like he was buffaloed, like Corina knew something he didn’t. The thought of that made Bonita further uncomfortable because it was close to the way she thought of Gus. So if Gus himself was buffaloed, then such a woman must hold an extra thing over Gus’s woman. Bonita felt twice-hooked.
Walking through Audubon Park, she tried to get the thing to stop eating her. It had been inside her for weeks and she was tired of it. The problem was that if she actually did go see Corina for a reading, Gus might have even more on her, not to mention what the hoodoo preacher herself would then have. So Bonita was torn. Something told her she had to go through Corina to find out something important. And something told her that if she did, she might as well take off her clothes and walk down Canal Street at noon as far as being exposed went.
A young man on a bicycle sped past her on the path. As he did, he checked her out. She curled her mouth at his staring and thought about flipping him off but then he turned around and she let it go.
The preaching was probably what had done it. She wasn’t a regular at Mass, but she did believe in the Church and she knew something was funny about the one Gus took her to that first Saturday night. Gus said she was a typical Cajun racist, which pissed the hell out of her. She knew all about racists and she wasn’t one. What she felt had nothing to do with Corina being black: it was all the talk about “santos” and the strange statues along the walls, and the incense, and just the general feeling of being in the weirdest place to call on the name of Jesus she could ever have imagined. It made her feel like she would go to Hell for being there.
That first night at these strange services, she had gotten so mad at Gus she made him stop the car on the way home. It was a very cold night in January but she got out next to an all-night drugstore on Canal and told Gus to leave her alone. He wouldn’t leave but there was a lighted pay phone on the wall outside the drug store and she called a cab. When it arrived, Gus drove off and she went down to The Hellhole. She took a busman’s holiday. After an hour she was drunk enough to stop thinking about Hell and Desecration. She called another cab and went home.
That was one of the nights she made Gus sleep on the couch. It wasn’t fair; it wasn’t like he was an evil man, but she felt like he had made her witness an evil rite and she wasn’t sure if she ever wanted to be with him again.
In the morning, watching him asleep on the couch, she had seen no evil in his face. Stupid smart-mouth gullibility maybe but nothing bad, and then she thought maybe she had reacted too much to the church, or whatever it was. Hoodoo never scared her growing up; everybody in Thibodaux got into it somehow sooner or later, or at least knew about it.
But no.
Something else was in that church. She didn’t like anyone having anything on her, and there was something down at that Mercy Church that she didn’t understand more than she didn’t like.
Lost in thought, she had actually begun her second circle along the walking path. She was at the top of the pond again, where the lily pads grew. An older couple sat on a flat cropping of reddish rock, watching the birds. She watched them. They were talking about something that seemed serious, for she was looking at him intently and he was looking at her, then away.
Bonita kept walking. Around her the park was alive with the coming of spring. It wasn’t that hot yet, nor steamy, and her spirits rose. She walked faster, to finish the extra loop and cut across the meadow to get back to her apartment. She could make it before Gus was out of school. If she wanted to tell him later, that what she most wanted to know, she wanted to know from Corina Youngblood, she could. If not—that would give him a vulnerability to match her own.
14
Life at Miss Angelique’s had settled into as much a routine as Gus could have expected, and even that was like a lead weight to him. The consulting therapy had gone so well he thought maybe it was going too well; his chief fear was that sooner or later Elizabeth or Agon would find out and, finding out, not like it. At the same time, he thought maybe they already knew and kept it to themselves because if all went well, the morale of the girls would stay high, and if there were a screw-up, then Gus could be blamed. The more Gus knew of the Hapsenfields, the more he leaned to the latter. He even kind of admired them for it.
Today was his last day of lunch monitor. The job was easy, because the school cafeteria served lunches so tasty Gus didn’t mind eating them himself, and because no matter what was served, half the girls ditched anyway in favor of the junk food places up on St. Charles. And the ones who stayed were not the troublemakers. So lunch monitor meant little more than nouvelle cuisine three days out of six (Saturday was included). Or Cajun. Or, at worst, “Hi-Pro-Teen,” which despite what it implied was usually just poached fish or tender roast beef.
The only weird part about the duty was eating with Elizabeth. She had made a habit of sitting with Gus every Tuesday and Thursday. At first, Gus enjoyed the visits, including the familiar sight of her blouse half-buttoned. He hated having a thing about her breasts but there it was. He didn’t even try to hide his looks anymore, and she didn’t discourage him.
But it was just that, and after a while Gus had found the game mostly stupid. Probably a good thing, since he had begun to realize that the major purpose of her visits was not to show off her figure, but to draw information out of him about the girls, about himself, or, most of all, about any activities involving Agon. Gus figured she was looking for ammunition for a favorable divorce settlement. Without Miss Valthenough, or sufficient documentation of what had happened between her and Agon, Elizabeth needed something else on Ichabod Crane, as the girls called him.
Gus could have told he
r plenty. But he didn’t. He wished his circumspection owed to his choosing not to become involved in sordid games, but that would have been a half-truth even Gus couldn’t abide. It was more that the timing was premature. During his rookie year, Gus, at least the Shadow Gus, had come to see the Academy as a way to advance himself. He also knew the real currency in a social town like New Orleans was gossip. So he had no intention of giving Elizabeth something he might need for hard cash some rainy day hence.
Of such thinking doubtless did the purity of his vision for Jazzfest devolve into the thing it was becoming. As soon as classes were over today, he planned on getting over to Metairie to meet Jean-Pierre Youngblood and try to hook him the way Jean-Pierre’s mother had hooked Gus. That was not true. Corina seemed to be mostly after a good business arrangement. What had crept into Gus’s soul, had distorted his vision, was nothing so straightforward. What had created his admiration for the Hapsenfields’ manipulations—including using him—was altering him, changing him, in ways he could neither control nor resist. He did not feel cynicism; it was a grander kind of feeling, as though his grasp could finally be measured by his reach.
Bonita had begun to remark on his behavior of late. She said he was acting like he’d come out of one of those wormholes in the sci-fi shows on TV he watched late at night waiting for her to get off work. It had become a term of definition between them. When they argued about sending the girls to Corina, when he talked about “making his mark on this town,” she said he was in his wormhole again and she wouldn’t talk to him.
Yet he would persevere. In the wormhole was the Shadow Gus, and it didn’t mind not having to discuss sensitive or moral issues. What he had in mind might or might not be an idea whose time had come, but now that it had arrived, it was more or less just a matter of seeing it through. Gus tried to remember the way Hamlet had put it, about the readiness being all, but the lunch room had gotten noisy and he was distracted. Also, Elizabeth had come in unexpectedly—it was a Wednesday—and was walking toward him carrying an aluminum tray with a Caesar’s salad perched on top next to a glass of Evian. She wore a light blue cotton turtleneck. Her cheeks were flushed, but Gus wasn’t sure if she had just had sex or was just about to.
“Not many girls today,” she said, winking. “Are you being as strict as you should be about passes?”
“Oh, about the same.”
Elizabeth walked past slowly. He could see her nipples under the cloth. She sat at an empty table next to where he leaned against a decorative column.
She was acting coy, he thought. Usually she was brazen. He was confused, and therefore attracted. He pulled out a chair at her table. “You seem awfully . . . relaxed.”
She looked at him as she tore a sliver of lettuce with her teeth. She licked her lips. “The Academy is doing very well this quarter. We just finished the taxes and things worked out very well.”
Gus smiled.
“I was going to take Agon out for lunch but he—” she paused just enough— “but he went out for the afternoon.”
Gus looked at her. She looked at him.
Fifth and sixth periods passed in the school as they normally did. In the back half of the first floor, where the Hapsenfields kept their on-site apartment, the door was locked and the answering machine on. Inside the apartment, in a door that could have been broached at any time by a man who had the key, i.e., the missing husband, the smell of sex was thick and strong. The husband was emitting odors elsewhere, was the thing.
She was more gorgeous than Gus ever could have imagined, not just the breasts like grapefruits but the softness of the skin, the curve around the hip bones, the gluteus that just filled out his hand and was firm as the bosom. She sucked him first, until he was ready to come, and then pushed him away so that he wondered what he had done. Then she was on him again with her mouth, and pulled away once more. He was miserable and incoherent.
She slid to the edge of the bed, a sad, king-sized affair that had been covered in cream-colored sheets and Navajo blankets when they had come in, in the minutes before they had pulled each other’s clothing off and without talking gotten into this thing. Then she had pulled his legs to the edge of the bed and rubbed his cock inside her breasts and then she was on top of him again, this time with her pussy on his mouth so he had no choice but to taste her and lick her and in less than a minute she came so much his face was wet and sticky.
He looked up and her eyes were closed tight and her mouth in a grimace. Then she opened her eyes, and they kind of smiled at him and frightened him in the same moment, then she slid down along the length of her body until he was inside her, fucking her, fucking her, rolling over and all around the bed then, wondering how long he could keep from coming and then he did and she held him much more tightly than he had expected. When he was done and could breathe and see again, she kissed him, then pushed him off.
“I guess you always wanted to fuck the principal.”
She laughed at her joke, then got up to get some water. He noticed she still had on the white socks she had been wearing. It made her legs look longer and more brown. He drank from the glass she brought back and kissed her and then began to idly stroke her nipples and to his amazement everything came back on line and they were doing it again. That time they fucked for a half hour. That was what kicked up the stink of what they were doing and wafted it throughout the apartment and left it there so that even when Agon returned that evening and almost had to have smelled it, he didn’t say anything, and neither did Elizabeth. It had gotten that way with them.
It had not gotten much of any way with Gus. Elizabeth had told him, “Maybe we’ll never do this again, you know?” He had said, “Maybe that’s a good idea,” and she thought he had seemed sad and realized he probably gave more of a shit than he let on. Not about her. About someone else.
So she wasn’t sure if that made her want to fuck him again or not. But she was glad for that afternoon. She let Agon know the score and she had something else on Chaplain Houston if it should happen she’d need further help in the divorce she was planning. Fuck Agon. Let anyone who wanted to fuck Agon fuck Agon. A year from now he’d be looking for another batch of teenagers to make him feel young and maybe he’d have another wife to use as cover.
The first thing Gus did was to call Bonita to tell her he had to run out to Target after school to pick up some supplies but she was gone and he left a message on her machine. Then he secured himself in his office as well as possible, meeting with three girls from the freshman class who were upset because the other girls on their end of the hall were teasing them for studying the Bible together.
The girls were all from a small town in the rural northern part of the state. Two of them, Rhonda and Ellise, had come because their mothers, alumni of the Academy, made them. The third, Helen, more or less joined them so as not to be left behind in farm country. They all dressed Bobbie Brooks-ish and were always quiet and cute, and generally seemed appalled at the behavior of the other girls. They had expected the Academy to be more conservative, more religious, and more tame. In response, they held Bible-reading sessions several nights a week. This had incurred the opprobrium of the other girls.
Gus could understand the problem from all sides. He could understand the disorientation of the girls, and he could understand why their classmates thought they were such little geeks. But he was the chaplain and they had come to him. Moreover, he was a man of God in the outside world, with vast connections to the Spirit and to the holiness of the cosmos. He was a man to whom young girls could turn for guidance. He was a hell of a guy who had to wait to go home until the woman he loved had left for work because he couldn’t face her so soon after betraying her.
“Rhonda,” he said, “did you girls ever visit any of the Holy Redeemer churches in Grambling when you were growing up?”
Jean-Pierre dawdled at his beer and peanuts. He didn’t drink very much, not least because of his mothe
r, but he was having one now because Houston made him nervous. It wasn’t even happy hour yet, and the small bar next to the Westside Inn was so empty Jean-Pierre could hear the nuts crunch between his teeth as he nibbled. It was an okay place—light and lots of windows, instead of dark and hostile to the day as were most of the places downtown or in the Quarter. Actually, it was one of those chains, O’Kerrigan’s. It was the only place they’d both been able to think of on the spur of the moment. It was easy to find and it was unlikely they’d run across anyone they knew. Not that they were doing anything secretive, probably. All Jean-Pierre knew was that it was “an idea so good I can’t even tell you about it over the phone.”
Even if Houston hadn’t been a friend of his mother’s, and therefore ipso facto a problem child, Jean-Pierre might have begged off without thinking twice. Instead of meeting. Houston was okay, and he could be funny, but there was something around his edges. It was like some kind of faint bluish glow, Jean-Pierre had told his mother. She had said there was no such thing, although she agreed Houston was “strange for a white man.” But Jean-Pierre had seen the glow. He wasn’t sure if it bothered him or not; probably it did.
He believed he had the gift of prophecy, even though he had not taken the way of the santos, and he believed he could see things beyond the flesh. He knew he could. What he didn’t know was how to interpret these things. When he prayed for guidance, he came up with nothing. So he had decided perhaps this was his soul’s mission, to see these things that others could not and to try to find their meanings.
He knew his mother knew this about him, and that for some reason she kept a distance from it. She was very spooky about spirits; if she sensed something she could not understand or conquer she gave it wide berth. So whether or not she knew Jean-Pierre had seen the aura, she didn’t let on to him. That was another reason Jean-Pierre thought his mission to be a private one, for his own soul. That was another reason he was waiting in O’Kerrigan’s for Gus Houston. Something wanted him to.
