by Rod Davis
Julio figured they would lose a million and a half before it was over but that they might lose double that if they went to court. So Elroy was all but decided. Luz said she needed a rest. She actually said, “I’m sick of this shit, Elroy, and it’s all your fault. You just better think about what you want to do and you better think about what you think I’m gonna do.” She was in Miami with her cousin Cici.
Now Elroy’s life was talking to lawyers all day and fighting with Julio and getting shitty letters at the store from people calling him names. “The Ku Klux Kuban” and so on. On top of everything else, Elroy had heard from his lawyer that the immigration had been snooping around about illegal aliens on his construction crews. The lawyer said Joe Dell Prince was behind that, too. And those detectives had left a message with Corvette that they wanted to come buy and talk to him some more about what he knew about Ocho.
It looked like another two six-pack night just to get to sleep. Too many of those; worse, he always had a hangover until he started drinking again. Against all his pain, his santos were silent. Not even the blood of a goat and a dozen guinea fowl brought words to Changó or Elegba nor any of them, nor power to Elroy. And he couldn’t even think of it all as a dream, not even a bad dream, because it wasn’t. It was just an empty building. Or would be by tomorrow when the last of the loading trucks took everything back to the warehouse for storage.
“Mama say Spirits do that.” Paulus drove slowly down Ladeau Street and looked at the plywood boards nailed over the windows. The SuperBotanica marquee was still up but a black paint bomb balloon had hit it and left a jellyfish-shaped blotch in the upper right corner. The security guard mostly stayed inside. Graffiti covered the front of the building like a mural. It was like nobody cared, and people said at night the trucks were taking stuff out of the store and supposedly it was nearly empty, but Paulus didn’t know for sure.
“You believe her?” Jean-Pierre asked.
“Yeah, I do.”
Now that Paulus had his license he liked to figure out a way to drive by the devastation at least once a day. Each time he did it was like some new wound inside him healed shut another centimeter. But the sight was new for Jean-Pierre. His wounds were fresher. Marks were still fresh where the metal staples used as stitches had zagged diagonally across his abdomen, where the first bullet, through his lung, came out. Where it went in was sewn shut and almost ready to scar. His leg was pretty much okay, except they said it would be months before he wouldn’t need his cane.
The exit wound was the one. Slow to mend; ugly. This was the first day he’d been allowed to ride in a car, other than the ambulance that took him back to his house for bed rest. And this was the first night he’d been able to come to one of their mother’s services. He moved slightly to adjust a crease in his new black robe. It was a gift from Gus Houston. The old one wasn’t any good anymore.
“They reaping what they sowed.”
“I think Ogun sowed them pretty good,” Paulus replied.
Jean-Pierre smiled. He knew his mother’s ways. He couldn’t altogether rule out what Paulus said, though he didn’t want to admit it.
“How you doin’ with all this now? You not planning anything crazy like mama used to talk about, are you?”
Paulus shrugged. Jean-Pierre could see how his younger brother was filling out in the shoulders. He would be stocky, too, and maybe a little taller. Jean-Pierre was stricken with a flash that something could happen to interfere with that process.
“I want you to leave all this up to me,” he said.
Paulus looked at him, then turned the corner to find a parking place near the church. “Leave what up to you?”
“Don’t play games with me.” As Paulus eased in behind an Oldsmobile on the other side of the botanica entrance on Eldora Street, the front tire banged against the curb. Jean-Pierre winced and held his right side.
“Watch out, dammit.”
“Sorry. I’m really sorry. Are you okay?”
Jean-Pierre exhaled slowly. It was gone now.
“I’m okay. But did you hear me? I know you been thinking about this to yourself and we got to talk about it soon but what I want to say is this is going to be our business, you understand. It’s not mama’s business anymore. This isn’t about that dumb store or any of that spirit stuff between her and Elroy. It’s about me and you now. And Ocho and the Delgados. But mama’s out of it. You understand what I’m telling you?”
Paulus stared ahead and pulled the keys from the ignition. He reached for the door handle.
“Wait,” said Jean-Pierre, reaching over to touch his brother’s forearm. “You taking this in?”
Paulus drew back from the door. His face darkened. His hands formed fists around the steering wheel of his mother’s El Dorado. “You don’t have to tell me nothing about ‘Something going to be done’ or ‘We gonna do something.’” He turned sharply. “I’m going to find that fucker sometime. You can count on that.”
Jean-Pierre tightened his grip on his brother’s arm. Paulus was a quiet, studious type. But now he was getting big. He could drive. He could find a gun, just as Jean-Pierre had done. Only Jean-Pierre had left his piece at home that day and Ocho had not.
“I understand,” Jean-Pierre said. “What I’m saying is I’m your brother and it’s up to me to look after you. I’m also saying I’m in this with you. Damn, Paulus, what you think I’m wearing under this hot old robe right now? I’m all wrapped up in bandages and limping like a cripple from what those people did and I can tell you we are going to have our day. What I’m saying is I see something in you mama might not because I’m your brother and I’m your blood and I know how you carry things inside. I’m saying don’t do nothing before we talk it out.”
Jean-Pierre looked across the street at Arletta and another young woman from the neighborhood turning the corner toward the church. Each wore a lace coverlet in her hair. “We’ll find a way with our business just like mama surely did with hers.”
Paulus looked at him. His eyes were round and wide, and a little moist. “That night,” he said, “I wasn’t doing nothing. I was just walking.”
“I know.”
“I never done no harm to that man.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Then why, Jean-Pierre? Why he do that to me?”
Jean-Pierre let go Paulus’s arm and looked out the windshield. It felt hot in the car, now. It was time to go in for services. In a way, he could maybe see why Ocho had shot him. It was stupid and Ocho would have to pay but to the question Paulus was posing, Jean-Pierre could say of his own encounter, “He was a jealous fool.” But that wasn’t the question. It was why Paulus, who had done nothing?
“God doesn’t give us all the answers, you know.”
“I see it every night in my head, and then I wake up and I think I was dreaming it but I wasn’t dreaming it. I go over it all the time in my head but it don’t make any sense. I pray but it don’t make any sense. I ask the santos and it don’t make any sense to me why my face got all busted up and when it rains my jaw hurts still.” He shook his head. “You know what I’m saying, Jean-Pierre? Do you?”
Jean-Pierre opened his door. The air felt good.
“I know. But I don’t know why.” He looked over. “But I know we going to have our day. You down for that with me?”
Paulus opened his door, too. When they were both out and the younger had gone around to take the arm of the older and help him across the street, for he struggled with the pain of his wounds, he said, “OK.”
Jean-Pierre leaned on his brother and on his cane, and they made their way through the front door of the African Spiritual Church of Mercy. “Welcome home, Brother,” Miz Anderson called out, and “Amen” came from everywhere and then they clapped for him. He nodded quietly and took his place at the organ and for the first time in months the sanctuary filled with the delicate strength of
his fingers on the keyboard.
Paulus checked the altar to make sure the Bible was in place and his mother’s chair was straight against the wall under the crucifix. He noticed her palo staff, wrapped in twine of purple and white. He almost put it behind the lectern she had begun to use for her sermons but thought it better not to disturb anything. Then he lit two plates of incense and took his usual post near the door. As Jean-Pierre played, he looked over the congregation, as was his duty, to count heads and take attendance.
It was then that Paulus noticed the Candy Man and his girlfriend in the second pew on the right. They had been coming quite a bit now she was having that baby. Bonita, she was Cajun, also visited his mama for readings, but she never said much, just went into the back room and left out of the side door.
Jean-Pierre saw Candy Man, too, and Paulus could almost feel the electricity zap across the thick and holy air. But then it seemed still, calm. Paulus gazed out the half-open door onto Beauchamp Avenue. Steam lingered along parts of the pavement from a late afternoon shower. She came in.
The songs had gone on for nearly an hour, and only Jean-Pierre’s sudden fatigue had brought them to a halt and no one had even realized how long they had been praising the Lord and swaying together in the pews. The first possession had come after only the second hymn, as Clothilde Samuels fell out into the middle aisle, eyes rolled back inside her skull, arms limp as rags until they shot up over her head and “Yes, Jesus! Yes, Lord!” raged from her lips and she spun like a top until she fell into the arms of Brother Jones the plumber, who, like some of the others, had joined the church after the Gospel Riot. From then the Spirit was so vast throughout the room it had nowhere to go but into the souls and bodies of the worshipers and the hour was gone before anyone knew. Even Jean-Pierre had not known until his body could no longer sustain the forces inside it and he slumped atop the keyboard, his face ashen.
They stretched him out on the pew and took off his new black robe, soaked in salty sweat, and inspected his bandages. He seemed to breathe easier in just his slacks and shirt and said he was okay. Paulus got him a glass of water and turned the air conditioner down to the coldest setting, and then the Spirit said they would return to the services and they all did, Gus and Bonita among them, together, hands clasped together, being with and only with each other, and with the one that Bonita now carried inside.
Corina favored John and Corinthians and the Twenty-third Psalm above all others, and read from them, but she never really took her eyes off Jean-Pierre. Presently it became apparent she was no longer reading from the Bible at all, or even reciting, for she had long since memorized most of it, but was moving off into her own terrain, something about the routing of her enemies and the vengeance of the Almighty and the power of the African soul.
Abruptly, she fell silent. Rock rigid behind the lectern, she seemed to not be there even as she was. Her eyes seemed fixed on the Black Madonna on the opposite wall, although they might have as easily been looking into another universe. No breath in the room went unheard. Time itself unhinged. Out of that she turned quickly to her right, grasped the palo staff and raised it over her head. She whirled and talked in a tongue no one could understand until she came to a stop before the center pew. The words fell out in the voice that sometimes came to her when her own was not enough:
“And it came to me in my dreams that I was wandering through the desert.”
“Amen, Sister Youngblood.”
“I was hot and beaten down and I was going to perish in the wastes when suddenly I saw it.”
“Tell us, Reverend.”
“And I will tell you I did not know what it was, and I came closer, and—” She held the staff above her and thrust her head backwards.
“God save us,” said Estella Bourgeois.
“And in my need and desperation the Trough of God lay before me.”
“Say it, Sister.”
“I say this: I say I was thirsty and I heard the Archangel Michael at my ear. I say this is what he say to me.” She lowered the staff, then dropped it to the floor. It rattled and rolled to a stop and when it stopped so did all sound from the room except the voice of Corina Youngblood.
“The Angel of the Lord, he say to me: ‘Come Ye to the Trough of God. Though it be deep, it be not abiding. They who drink thereof will surely drown in their own thirst, for it not God’s bounty but his Spirit which is for us to imbibe, and all else is illusion.’”
Her robe also was black, also heavy with sweat. Her eyes came back from that other place and sought out those of Gus Houston, and found them.
Jean-Pierre lay quite still. His skin had gone very cool. He was breathing erratically. He began to perceive the answer.
About the Author
Rod Davis is an award-winning author and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications. He has served on the senior staff of several major magazines, including a stint as editor of The Texas Observer. He taught writing at the University of Texas at Austin and Southern Methodist University and was a guest at the Yaddo Colony. He is author of American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World (UNT Press). His work is included in David Byrne’s True Stories (Penguin) and Best American Travel Writing 2002 (Houghton-Mifflin). An eighth-generation Texan, he lives in San Antonio.
To learn more about Rod Davis and Corina’s Way, visit www.newsouthbooks.com/corinasway.
