Corina's Way

by Rod Davis

  “I think they’re more friendly over at Pat O’Brien’s.”

  She went back to the counter. The men spoke to each other in low tones. Just when one of them seemed on the verge of smarting off to her to pump up his manly ego, Thurgood walked in. It was a little early for the bikers and he looked thirsty. The men eyed him, and fed their egos otherwise. Thurgood went directly to the jukebox and punched up some music Bonita didn’t like, by Bob Seger, but it drowned out everything. Thurgood sat next to the jukebox and Bonita snapped open a Schlitz, his favorite warm-up beverage, and took it to him without asking. Jack and Donald finished their beers. It was loud and quiet in the bar. Bonita went back to her stool. She was thinking how many days it would be before she would make Gus fuck her again.

  Ocho Alvarado rarely thought about his life, at least in any organized, planned manner, and so tended to drift through it. Maria used to tell him that was the road to nothing and he was already halfway there. But what did she know? Fucking a nigger was pretty much the way to nothing itself, wasn’t it?

  “May I help you?”

  Ocho frowned. He had been drifting again. He didn’t like that. He was going to have to do something about it. “The Number 4,” he said.

  “Anything to drink?”

  “I thought it comes with a Coke.”

  “Pepsi.”

  “Okay, do that then.”

  “That’s a Number 4 and a medium Pepsi? Any dessert?”

  “No. That’s all.”

  “That’ll be $3.98 at the first window.”

  Ocho put the Firebird back in gear and eased forward in the lane. Usually he brought something to eat because he hated most Yankee food but he’d forgotten and didn’t wake up until almost five-thirty and barely made it to the job site. His food was waiting when he got to the window. He wished he’d ordered a fried pie but he didn’t feel like going through the extra trouble.

  He paid and drove a block up the street and parked under a tree near an abandoned grocery store. He couldn’t believe it. They gave him regular fries instead of the spicy kind supposed to be in the Number 4. But fuck it, he was hungry and there wasn’t time. So he ate in the shade and drank his Pepsi and wished it was four o’clock and he could go home and sleep.

  Ocho never forgot the day he found her out. It was by accident. He’d gotten drunk in the afternoon with some of the guys after a job and decided he missed her. They’d been broken up for a month and he already kind of had a girlfriend in Tina but for some reason he started missing Maria. It was a billboard, come to think of it. For cigarettes or something, with a woman who had coal black frizzy hair like Maria and that’s what got him to thinking. So he drove over to her apartment. Which was when he saw them.

  At first he didn’t get it—she was walking to her apartment and there was this nigger coming from the other way and she said hello. He figured it was a neighbor. And then—shit—he hated to think about. The asshole came real close and next thing they were kissing. Not a big sloppy kiss but the kind you do when you’ve kissed someone a lot. Something real friendly, that you don’t care if other people see because that’s only the half of it when you’re alone.

  He kissed her like that and Ocho knew. Then they went inside. Ocho sat in his Firebird. They came out in a half hour. Ocho followed them. They went to a restaurant. Ocho parked a half block away. They went back to her place. Ocho waited outside for the chingado bastard to come out but he didn’t. Ocho stayed awake. At six-thirty the pendejo comes out the door and goes to his car and leaves. Ocho wrote down his license and had a friend find out who it belonged to. And then he knew, and the guys at the warehouse helped him figure out the maricón was that hoodoo woman’s son Elroy was having trouble with.

  But he caught the nigger prick’s brother all right. Fucked him up. He’d seen people fucked up worse, back in Cuba on the docks and really bad in the slums, but he felt good about what he’d been able to do to little brother. It was like that. You get the man or you get the blood. Either way to get your satisfaction.

  But Ocho wanted to fuck up older brother, too. He hated him even worse now that Mr. Delgado was so mad about that little cabrón he beat up. So Ocho couldn’t work the SuperBotanica job and he’d been on some shit detail clearing an old retail mall site out in Chalmette all the last month. Every day when he was picking up nails and pieces of brick and shoveling piles of junk from one place to another he thought of how everything about Jean-Pierre Youngblood was bad to him. He longed to hurt him. To finish it.

  It was eating on him bad today. Javier and the others had been telling him all about the shit happening down at the SuperBotanica. He’d driven by a few times but Jean-Pierre was never there. Once he saw the mother, and once the kid he’d beat up, but never big brother. And then he heard about the Gospel Tent thing and he saw Jean-Pierre’s picture in the paper with all those white girls. So maybe he was fucking them now.

  Ocho finished the steakburger and tossed the rest of the fries into a garbage can. His stomach hurt. Then he drove back to Chalmette. He worked especially hard, for he was strong and could put his back into when he wanted to. And he wanted to. By five o’clock he felt better and decided to go meet Javier and the others for some beers after all.

  20

  It was already open when Corina Youngblood returned from her dreams the last morning of April and, as was her habit, thanked Elegba for another day before even rising from bed. It was already open when she ate her breakfast of cornflakes and milk, having finally decided to give up sausage and eggs both because of her blood pressure and because she had begun to notice her waistline. It was already open when she parked on the street in front of her church and walked over to unlock the doors of her own botanica.

  It was not supposed to be open for another day and so it caught her unawares. The signs had said it would be open May 1 and so it was supposed to be not open but it was open. She could tell without even looking up the street at the cars. She could tell without hearing Eudora Johnson rush up to her before she’d even had time to drop her big brown purse on the counter and flip on the air conditioner.

  “Reverend, Reverend, God almighty they already open.”

  Corina said nothing and went to her desk. She looked at a small stack of bills Paulus had left for her to mail.

  “You hear me, Reverend? That SuperBotanica done opened for business today instead of tomorrow. We ain’t got nobody out there with signs. We was all going to show up tomorrow bright and early.”

  Corina looked at her sharply. “Miz Eudora, no need to talk so loud. I see it open.” Then she sat down and stared at a shelf filled with red and black and yellow candles.

  Eudora waited perhaps ten minutes. “You don’t want to do nothing about it?”

  Corina studied an envelope.

  “I guess I be going then, Reverend.” Eudora walked to the door. At seventy-four, her steps were slow, but she was strong. She’d been picketing the site for a month, off and on. “You did God’s work, Reverend. It ain’t no shame if it don’t always turn out like you want, long as you do what you can do.”

  Corina looked at her. She lifted her left hand slightly, in a kind of wave of farewell, and searched the desk drawer for stamps.

  Elroy and Julio almost looked like brothers. For the occasion, both wore their new Italian double-breasted blue suits and white shirts. Elroy’s tie was red for Changó; Julio’s was yellow for Ochún. Standing in front of the store, next to the automatic sliding glass doors, Elroy was smiling so hard he thought his face would break. And they looked good. The store did, too.

  The bright red letters of the SuperBotanica marquee perfectly set off the building’s white stucco exterior. Outside and in, it was clean and bright. Very Caribbean. Floors all polished. Stock in place, except for the five-gallon bottles of Florida water, which had gotten held up in transit but should be there before the week was out, at which time Elroy planned a �
�Sale for the Santos,” a loss leader draw-in they’d be using every week. The clerks were bright and beaming, too. Three of them were black, which was good, because Elroy had been concerned Corina’s “boycott” would scare everyone off.

  “This was the right thing. You had a good idea,” Elroy told Julio, looking up at the mid-morning sun. It had been raining the past two days, but since all the last-minute work was inside, the weather hadn’t slowed them down.

  “I just thought as long as we were finished early, why not open the doors?” Julio smiled, watching the cars which had begun to snake up and down Ladeau Street. Didn’t matter if the people in the cars were whites or blacks or browns, they all wanted to see the thing. They’d only been open since nine, but Julio could see word-of-mouth was drawing people in. Which is what he had told Elroy.

  Elroy’s compliment was more than it sounded like, and Julio accepted it at its deeper level. What an argument! Yesterday morning when Geronimo had them drive over and told them it was done—a day early—Elroy was so happy he promised everyone a bonus. Julio had said they should keep the momentum going and just open a day ahead of time.

  That’s when it started. Elroy wanted to wait until May 1, because that was the schedule. He said that was when the radio and TV people would come and the caterer had already been booked, and so on. It had taken an hour, sitting and shouting on the checkout counters in the front of the store as a clean-up crew swept away the remaining traces of sawdust and picked up the last of the drop cloths, for Julio to bring his brother around. Finally he convinced him that a “pre-opening” was the kind of thing Hollywood did and therefore had a precedent in American marketing.

  Julio’s real angle was that even if they opened early, they could still have the grand opening on May 1. Nothing lost. But something gained. By May 1 the store would be open and Corina Youngblood and her people wouldn’t be able to say they’d blocked it, which was their vow. So that insane woman would look like a fool. “Plus it will be easier for us to have them arrested for trespassing,” Julio had said. He wasn’t sure if that was legally true but Elroy seemed to think it was and that was what mattered to Julio.

  But by then Elroy needed no more persuasion. He really wanted to open right away, too. The objections were just nerves. They would laugh about it later over beers at Elroy’s house. They would go on line a day ahead. Later, any amount of picketing and protest would be secondary to the fact that the SuperBotanica was open. They had worked almost all last night to get ready and they had done it. They were in business.

  “They need to finish the fence over on the west side of the parking lot,” Elroy observed, rocking back and forth like a maitre d’.

  “Geronimo says it should be dry enough by tomorrow. It won’t take more than a day—”

  “Welcome, come on in.” Elroy interrupted his brother and stepped aside for an elderly Latino couple, probably Mexican. They nodded and went inside.

  “Good to see such a mix of people,” Elroy said.

  “What mix? They’re all brown, and a few of those weird white people from the Quarter.”

  “Yes, but there were two black women in earlier.”

  “That’s true.” Julio could’ve added they didn’t stay long, and looked a lot like two of the protestors from a couple of weeks ago. But he didn’t.

  For the eighth or ninth time of the morning, Elroy slapped his brother on the back. “It’s a great success. Julio, we did it.”

  Julio glanced at his watch. It was getting hot. “Let’s go inside a while,” he said, and they did. Elroy immediately began shaking hands and talking to customers and inspecting everything as though he hadn’t already done so a million times since six a.m. Julio helped the old Mexican couple find a shopping basket and then strolled over to one side, near the Community Bulletin Board—his idea.

  He counted maybe a hundred people. Not so many but this was all new yet. Pre-openings were to plant the seed, not bring in the crop. Still, Julio thought, they will definitely be here in force before long. How could the people resist? It was a great store. It was a SuperBotanica. “No Need of the Spirit Left Untended”—just like the banner and handbills said.

  It would be the model for years to come. New and old customers would see so at once. Instead of the dusty little aisles and junky shelves of the mom and pop botanicas, this one was clean, spacious, easy-to-navigate. Never had so many candles or statues or herbs, or even Bibles, been under one roof, and at such prices. Julio’s theory was that no matter how much protest Corina raised and how much she tried to pit the blacks against the Cubans, it would in time come down to prices. The prices at the SuperBotanica were fifty to eighty percent better than places like St. Jude.

  Volume was an American marketing idea and they were in America. Corina Youngblood could take that to heart if she was smart. In time, even her best friends, even the best members in her church, would be in the aisles of SuperBotanicas from here to Florida. They would see that the true revolution of the santos in America would be to break the old, old tradition of rip-offs in the spiritual supply industry, which is what it was—an industry.

  More than Elroy, even, Julio had come to see the beauty of the thing they were doing. Elroy still had a kind of missionary idea about making the santos more affordable, but Julio saw the precision and wonder of the economics of it all. And although it was Elroy who was preening, greeting everyone like the father of handsome new triplets, Julio, too, was an immensely proud man.

  They had won. He felt something exceedingly strange. Then he realized what it was. He felt American.

  Across the city that night lay the mists of spring. New Orleans had gone to hell by most measurable urban standards, true, but the sight of the Great Gateway was still enough to burst the moral armor of the most tightly wrapped visitor and usher anyone of any life’s blood at all into its fecundity, its exuberance, and its danger.

  Off Elysian Fields, Corina Youngblood slept fitfully, knotting her percale sheets in and around her slender brown legs. Paulus, up late, watched old movies on TV, but turned the sound down because his mother did not approve. Toward the lake front, Elroy lay close to Luz. They had made love and now he snored lightly, thinking of the coming day. Julio, alone in his bungalow, was dreaming of an island woman he had not yet met, and his dreams were the province of Ochún, and she would no doubt deliver unto him this marvelous raven-haired beauty, though not that night.

  In Metairie, Jean-Pierre woke from having fallen asleep on his couch listening to the Mighty Clouds of Joy and trying to “visualize,” as the athletes did, the performance two days hence. He awoke because his answering machine clicked on for someone to breathe heavily into a phone at the other end and laugh and hang up. That kept Jean-Pierre awake almost an hour but he was exhausted from choir practice every night and school all day and he quickly dropped off again, barely moving a muscle until the alarm went off at seven, not even looking inside his nightstand to be sure the Baretta was still there, a mild compulsion that had begun to creep up on him.

  At seven, in her apartment, Bonita was lying on the bed in a sweat, her knees bent and the sperm still warm in her vagina. Gus had rolled to her side and was breathing so hard she thought it almost comical. He hadn’t even wanted to do it, but she made him, and of course he liked it a lot once he was hard and inside her. He quivered for her again before he came and then collapsed on her breasts. Then she came, too. She was surprised, she didn’t think she would and it wasn’t even the point. But it felt good. Last month there had been a false alarm but this time it felt good. She told him so, but he had dozed off. She’d have a Christmas baby. Or one for the New Year. She went to sleep, too.

  As her spirit spiraled into the void of dreams, its trail of energy drifted far above that of a waking soul from the northwestern suburbs. In a long, low, speckled-brick colonial-style home, the state senator who saw himself quite clearly as governor and had all but moved into his mansi
on in Baton Rouge stood before the mirror in his study. He was not yet fully dressed—blue slacks and white shirt not yet tucked in—but he had shaved and been twice to the Mr. Coffee. Mary Beth was in Slidell for a party breakfast meeting so he had the place to himself. He liked that. He did not particularly like Mary Beth but more to the point he liked having the house to himself, for one day he would.

  Senator Prince looked himself over carefully. He set his jaw and steeled his eyes as he had seen preachers do since he was a boy. He would have to work himself into the appearance and the speech and to do that he had to believe it, at least a little. He didn’t, of course, but as Mary Beth had pointed out he needed to consider his position on the issues in relation to the direction of his political career. In that context, she had said, you can believe it because in that context it is true. In the context of wanting to be governor you actually have changed your ideas about blacks.

  Joe Dell put that logic inside his head and let it settle. He had studied acting once at Northeastern State and knew about getting in character. In a few moments he felt he had made the transition—it would become a faster process by Thursday afternoon. He would be able to do it instantly. That nutball from Miss Angelique’s would introduce him and he would make one of the Big Speeches of his career.

  The ball was in play. Yesterday, Finnester leaked word to a favored reporter from the Times-Picayune. He said letting the city’s only paper in on the senator’s otherwise unpublicized appearance would be an irresistible tease to all the other reporters to follow up once the story broke. Joe Dell had been plenty mad, and not just because Finnester didn’t clear it with him first. An “exclusive” struck him as a stupid idea because TV stations might show up at the Gospel Tent anyway because of all the publicity that girls’ choir was getting.

  It was one of the few times Finnester had ever really fought back. He said his “strategy of control” accounted for “random media intrusions” but the point was the speech would still come as a surprise to all but the paper. If the TV got in on it by accident at the actual moment of occurrence, all the better. “It’d be windfall airplay,” Finnester had said. “Good visuals.” Thinking it over, Joe Dell had agreed. But he was getting tired of Finnester’s lingo from that night course in media relations.