Pace decided to visit the storefront in Bay St. Clement and find out what was behind the door, but not until after he’d had a birthday shot of single malt Scotch.
3
The next afternoon, Pace drove back into town, parked in the liquor store lot, walked across the street and knocked on the door with the Crusader Ralph’s Followers sign on it. There was no immediate response, so Pace turned the knob but the door was locked. He knocked again and after thirty seconds an exotic-looking, ruby-skinned woman opened it. She was short and slender, middle-aged, perhaps in her late forties, with long, silky black hair and very large, oblong dark brown eyes set wide apart. She was wearing blue jeans and a pink T-shirt with the words I FOLLOW RALPH, DO YOU? printed on the front in white lettering.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you have eyes like Merle Oberon’s?”
“No. Who is Merle Oberon?”
“An actress. She was a big movie star in the 1930s and ’40s. Did you ever see Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy? Emily Brontë?”
The woman stared at Pace without blinking.
“My name is Pace Ripley and I want to know about Crusader Ralph.”
“What is it you wish to know?”
“I might be interested in his teachings.”
“Here is the teaching for today: ‘Women always know what they want.’ My name is Misty Tonga.”
She closed the door.
Pace stood motionless on the sidewalk. He was amused and puzzled. Misty Tonga had not asked him for five hundred dollars but had given him a teaching anyway. Who was she? Pace considered knocking again on the door but instead decided he needed a beer and headed for the liquor store.
Pace bought a single tall boy of Dark Victory Ale and asked the clerk, a pimply, pudgy guy with glasses who was taking small bites out of a powdered doughnut, what, if anything, he knew about Crusader Ralph’s Followers who had apparently set up shop across the street.
“Nothin’,” said the clerk. “Do good works and the rest shall follow. That’s all there is to study on.”
Pace sat behind the steering wheel of his twelve-year-old Pathfinder sipping the Dark Victory.
“What about men?” he asked himself. “Why don’t men always know what they want? Or maybe, according to Crusader Ralph, they do, too. Misty Tonga didn’t say Ralph said they don’t.”
That evening, as Pace was preparing his dinner—chicken parmesan and salad—he listened on the radio to WSUP from Garden City, South Carolina, an African-American religious station familiarly called Wassup? —as in What’s up? —although the call letters had originally been chosen as a reference to the Last Supper. When Pace tuned in, a visiting preacher from Norway was speaking.
“So when John and Peter entered the tomb where Jesus had been buried, they found the body gone, only His shroud shredded on the ground, an imitation of which garment later turned up in Turin. Thereafter, they propagated the myth that He was risen, resurrected, and sent Mary Magdalene, who had been waiting outside in the Jerusalem rain, to run and tell their fellow believers.
“Now let the truth be known: It was Jesus’s true, biological father, Pantera—which means panther—retired from the Roman army, who had arrived first to claim the body and had taken it away. Jesus’s mother, Mary, was thirteen when the soldier encountered her as she was returning from the well. Her husband, Joseph, who was much older than she, was away in the hills tending his flock of sheep. Mary and Pantera, who was but sixteen years old at the time of their meeting, became lovers before his legion was ordered to march.
“When months later Joseph came home and found his wife with child, she invented her wild story for fear of his wrath. He then spread the word of an immaculate conception, even though Mary’s mother and sisters knew the truth. Mary swore them to secrecy and they did not betray her. After Jesus was grown and had begun to gain the reputation that eventually would doom him, Pantera, who had been off to the wars, heard the story. He remembered Mary and sought her out, whereupon she admitted that Jesus was his son.
“Pantera kept himself apprised of Jesus’s career and in the end made away with his son’s corpse. He took the body to Egypt, where he had it mummified and hidden. It was stolen, along with many examples of the ancient art, by British anthropologists and lodged in a museum in Liverpool, where it remained, unidentified, for decades. At some point, the museum had a fire and several of the exhibits were destroyed, among them the mummies. Though damaged, Jesus’s mummified self was miraculously preserved. He was put onto a cart to be repaired but disappeared.
“It has only recently come to light, following a veritable variety of vicissitudes, and, due to modern methods of scientific detection, verified that this mummy, the remains of Jesus Christ, true son of Mary of Nazareth and The Panther of Rome, resides in the Hans Downe Museum of Medical Marvels in Oslo! I, Reverend Laiüs Downe, great-great grandson of the glorious explorer, doctor and distinguished professor after whom the museum is named, invite you to come to Norway to see it!”
Shouts and cries of joy and wonder ensued, congregants howling, “Praise the Lord!” and “Glory be to God!” An organist began playing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” which the worshippers, punctuating with whoops and hollers, sang in unison. Loudest of all, since he retained use of the microphone on the pulpit, was the Reverend Laiüs Downe, inveighing unsonorously in his eerily high, Scandinavian-accented voice. Pace turned off the radio.
He carried his dinner plates to the kitchen table and sat down. Man’s greatest weapon, Pace thought, is his imagination, but he doesn’t always know where to point it.
4
Pace had to admit to himself that Misty Tonga interested him. He had for the most part shunned having anything to do with a woman that could have potentially resulted in an extended relationship—a word he despised almost as much as “awesome”—since Marnie Kowalski; and the thought of having to deal with a much younger woman had burned a hole in his cerebral cortex, an incendiary disaster delivered courtesy of the Cruz girl. Pace fought the feeling of wanting to check out Misty Tonga again, but a few days after first encountering her he returned to the entrance to Crusader Ralph’s Followers and knocked on the door. This time, even after repeated attempts to summon someone, nobody answered. Pace tried the knob but, as before, the door was locked.
Pace was mildly disappointed and he felt restless, so he walked down the street and entered Duguid’s Grill and Bar. It had been a long time, two years or more, Pace figured, since he’d been in Duguid’s. The original owner’s daughter, Rima Dot Duguid, had been in the movies for a while, then vanished from public view. Pace wondered what happened to her. He took a seat at the bar and looked around. It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday, past the regular lunch hour, so only one of the six tables was occupied, and he was alone at the bar. At least he thought he was until to his genuine surprise Misty Tonga came out from the ladies’ room and sat down four stools to his right. Pace had not noticed the drink on the bar in front of her. The bartender, a tall, thin but potbellied man with a dyed black mustache and bald head, came over to Pace and asked him what he’d have.
Pace nodded in the direction of Misty Tonga and asked him, “Is she drinking a White Russian?”
“She is. A double.”
“I’ll have one, too.”
“Your funeral,” said the bartender.
Misty Tonga was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt with the same words on it as the pink one had. She did not give evidence of having noticed Pace, but after the double White Russian was set in front of him he picked it up, moved down the bar and stood behind the stool next to hers.
“Hello, Misty Tonga,” he said, “remember me? Pace Ripley? From the other day? I just knocked on your door but nobody answered.”
Only her eyes moved his w
ay. She lifted her glass and took a sip of her drink. Pace studied her left profile. In the semi-darkness of the room her ruby-red flesh glowed.
“Did you come for another teaching?” she asked.
“Not really. But I was surprised you gave me one for free.”
“What I told you was not a teaching. I just said that to make you go away.”
Misty took another sip of her White Russian. Pace sat down.
“In this soft light,” he said, “your skin looks like it’s on fire.”
“Did Merle Oberon have skin like mine?”
Pace grinned and said, “I don’t think so, although I never saw her in person. Are you the only one who works in the Crusader Ralph office?”
“You haven’t tried your drink.”
“I haven’t had a White Russian since I was in my twenties.”
He picked up his glass, took a sip, winced a little, and set it back down on the bar.
“Too sweet for you,” said Misty. “For me, too, actually. I order one every now and then to remind myself of a man who once told me my pussy smelled like a White Russian. I was twenty-two years old then. I’d never had one so I didn’t know what it was. I thought he meant a woman from Russia.”
“Where are you from, Misty?”
“Hacienda Heights, California.”
She turned and looked into Pace’s eyes.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Pretty damn old. Seventy.”
“I’m forty-six. Do you find me attractive? I mean, attractive enough to want to take me to bed?”
“Yes, Misty, I do.”
She smiled and finished her drink, then she stood up.
“You’ve made me very happy, Mr. Ripley. I hope we will meet again.”
Pace watched Misty Tonga walk out of the bar. The bartender came over.
“That woman’s been comin’ in here at about two o’clock every day for the last three weeks. Orders a White Russian, takes fifteen minutes to finish it, and goes. She’s a woman of mystery.”
“Seems to be,” Pace said. “But she knows what she wants.”
“Women always do.”
“You happen to know whatever happened to Rima Dot Duguid, daughter of the people used to own this place?”
“Wasn’t she a lion tamer or somethin’ like that?”
“She played one in a movie once. She was an actress.”
Pace picked up his glass but hesitated before taking another sip.
“That’ll be five bucks whether you drink it or not,” said the bartender.
Pace nodded, held the White Russian up to his nose, and sniffed it.
5
The sky looked like it was about to pour the afternoon Pace found the letter from Early Ripley addressed to him in his mailbox. He read the return address walking back to his cottage from the road: 127 Riverside Drive, New York, N.Y. Pace had never met his cousin Early, only heard his name a few times when Sailor had occasion to mention his second cousin Curly Ripley, who had gotten in some kind of fix involving gun running to Peru or somewhere and then dropped out of sight. Early, Pace believed, was Curly’s son. Needless to say, Pace was more than a little surprised to have a letter from him, and opened the envelope as soon as he was inside the cottage.
“Dear Cousin Pace Roscoe, I’m sure this letter—if you receive it—coming from a relative stranger (Get it?) will certainly have been unexpected given the fact of our never having met or communicated during the course of our lives. I only recently learned that you were living in Bay St. Clement while doing research on the website trackem-n-hackem.com. You probably don’t know it but our daddies lost touch with one another after my father, Lester ‘Curly’ Ripley, took me and my mother, Darla McFarland Ripley, with him to South America. I was seven years of age then and so you and I never had a chance to get to know each other, though somehow with all of my family’s moving around in foreign lands during my young childhood Curly did his best to keep in touch with his mother, my grandmama Maybelline Napoleon, from the other side of the family. She told him what she knew of your daddy’s doings, even his going to prison for killing a guy before he married your mama. I guess Curly and Sailor were buddies when they were real little.
“I don’t know if you’re interested in this talk about the past. I am seventy-two years of age now and living in New York City. Everyone close related to me is dead. Curly was executed against a wall by government soldiers in Bolivia way back in the day for trying to sell rifles to Che Guevara when the Cubans were there to cause a revolution. Darla took me to live in Argentina after that and then later to Florida, Orlando, to be exact, where I went to high school. I joined the air force and stayed in for twenty years, then became an air traffic controller at La Guardia airport and retired six years ago. I’m gay so New York is a good place for me to live. I don’t know a thing about you except you grew up in New Orleans. I’ve visited there many times. As you must know it’s a great city for gay people. Are you gay? My partner of fifteen years, Arthur Nub, who was a police officer in Brooklyn, died of prostate cancer a year ago. I have prostate cancer, too, but it’s slow growing so I’ll probably die of something else before it gets me. I hope you are free of disease.
“I would like to hear from you. I have two pensions and my social security so don’t worry that I would be looking to borrow money. I’m just curious as you are the only living relative of mine that I know of. Are your parents still alive? My mama Darla died only six months back at the age of 100! She lived alone in Joplin, Missouri, and was killed when the roof of her house caved in on her when a big twister hit. She had a box of Mother Bizco Pancake Mix, her favorite, in her right hand and a frying pan in her left when they found her. Your cousin, Early Ripley”
Rain was falling steadily now. Pace put Early’s letter on the desk and took off his jacket. He laughed a little, thinking about Early’s life; about his father, Curly, being shot by a firing squad in Bolivia, and his hundred year old mother dying in a tornado with a frying pan in her hand. Early, a gay man living in New York, dying of prostate cancer, writing to a distant cousin he’d never met. There was nothing wrong with it, of course; this was life as it was lived and there was no need to try to make sense of it.
Pace remembered one thing he’d heard Sailor say about his cousin Curly. Pace had been about ten at the time and his father told Lula that when they were kids he and Curly once beat a water moccasin to death with tire tools, after which Curly bit into it, chewed a hunk of the snake’s flesh and swallowed it. Lula asked Sailor why his cousin had done such a crazy thing, and Sailor said Curly said he’d heard if you ate a piece of a poisonous snake’s body it would make you immune forever from snake bites. Pace wasn’t sure if he would write back to Early or not, but if he did he would have to tell him that story.
The letter from Early reminded Pace of one of his most interesting childhood friends, Ignaz Rigó, who, following high school, had vanished into the greater world. Ignaz Rigó was a Gypsy kid whose family owned a two-story building on Barracks Street in the Lower Quarter. Pace had been to Ignaz’s house a few times between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and there never seemed to be fewer than twenty people, apparently all related, living there. The Rigó clan also occupied a storefront on Decatur Street, where the women, including Ignaz’s mother and sisters, gave “psychic readings” and sold herbal remedies for a variety of complaints.
Ignaz, Senior, Pace’s friend’s father, called Popa, was always at the house on Barracks whenever Pace went there. Popa and an old man, Ignaz’s maternal grandfather, named Grapellino, sat out on a second floor balcony on lawn chairs overlooking the street, talking and smoking. Both men were always wearing gray or brown Fedora hats, long-sleeved white shirts with gold cuff links buttoned at the neck, black trousers and brown sandals. Pace asked Ignaz what Popa’s work was and Ignaz said that his father kept the family in order; and that Gra
pellino was a king in Vajra Dornei, which was in the old country. Pace asked Ignaz why, if his grandfather was a king in Vajra Dornei, he was living in New Orleans. Ignaz told Pace that Lupo Bobino, a bad king from Moldova, had poisoned Grapellino’s first wife, Queen Nardis, and one of his daughters, and commanded a band of cutthroats that drove the Rigó clan out of Romania. Grapellino and Popa were planning to return soon to the old country to get their revenge and take back the kingdom stolen from them by Bobino’s brigands.
“I’m goin’ with them,” Ignaz said. “We’re gonna cut the throats of Lupo Bobino and everyone in his family, including the women and children. Last July, when I turned thirteen, Popa showed me the knife I’m gonna use. It once belonged to Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled the Turks back when they kicked ass all over Asia. The handle’s got precious jewels on it, rubies and emeralds, and the blade is made from the finest Spanish steel. Popa keeps it locked in a cabinet in his room. It’s priceless.”
Pace lost contact with Ignaz, who did not finish high school with him. When Pace was twenty-one and back in N.O. on a visit from L.A., where he was then living, he went into the storefront on Decatur and asked one of Ignaz’s older sisters, Arabella, who told fortunes and gave advice to women about how to please their husbands, where her brother was and what he was doing. Arabella, who was not married, had big brown eyes with dancing green flames in them, a hook nose, a mustache, and a thin, scraggly beard, as well as the largest hands Pace had ever seen on a woman. She told him that Ignaz was on a great journey, the destination of which she was forbidden to reveal. Arabella then offered Pace an herb called Night Tail she said would bring him good fortune with women, which he declined with thanks. Looking into Arabella’s eyes, Pace remembered, made him feel weak, as did the thought of what she could do to him with her huge hands.
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