The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

  It was always like that, so this time around, MaryLou tried a different question. What is the Supernatural Krewe turning Mama Legba into, Erzuli?

  Erzuli laughed. A candidate for governor of Louisiana, what else? Promising them the sun, the moon, and the stars, whatever they want to hear, when you win the election. Isn’t that the way it’s done?

  MaryLou had to admit Erzuli had a point there. But Mama Legba isn’t going to win the election.

  So we don’t have to worry about breaking any promises we’re making, now do we? Erzuli said, laughing again.

  MaryLou couldn’t deny that made a twisted kind of sense too, and no more twisted than the usual run of politicians who didn’t worry about breaking any promises after they were elected either, but just went right ahead and made them. But.…

  But what are you trying to do?

  What makes you think we’re trying to do anything, girl? Ever think we just wanna have fun?

  Is this candidate act supposed to be the real deal, or is it supposed to be a joke?

  Is there a difference? said Erzuli with a laugh.

  This wise-girl comeback also made a kind of sarcastic sense, and after all what else could Mama Legba be as a candidate for governor but a satiric comedy act?

  Still, the laugh had an edge to it that said something otherwise. But for the life of her, MaryLou could not figure out what.

  * * *

  “But Montrose promised to promote you to captain even if he lost and you had to wait two years for him to be elected mayor to do it, and in the meantime Bradford promotes you to lieutenant,” Luella told Luke over the remains of breakfast after Little Bruce was off to school. “So what’s the problem, Martin Luther Martin? We’ve still got our house, you’re on the fastest track to captain ever according to Daddy, you’re the darlin’ of the People’s Police, you’re my ever-loving hero, we got it made. Or am I missing something?”

  “Yeah, Luella. You don’t get it. You forget that if Brown wins, he sends in the National Guard to throw everyone with an eviction notice out into the swamp, including us, arrest everyone not obeying all the crappy tight-assed little laws the People’s Police are winkin’ and nodding at, and like you say, I’m the public darlin’ of the People’s Police but not exactly Mulligan’s golden boy, so I get a load of the shit dumped on him instead of a lieutenant’s badge, and just maybe get canned unless Big Joe can protect me.”

  “Oh,” groaned Luella.

  What Luke didn’t dare to say and what Luella didn’t have to hear was that being Montrose’s front man spreading the police strikes upstate had made him Brown’s number-one enemy. So if Brown sent in the Guard under martial law some bright boy just might figure out something to arrest him for. Wouldn’t he do the same if he were Harlan Brown?

  “And Brown’s going win, isn’t he?” Luella said. It was not a question.

  “Tell me how Montrose can win.”

  It was not a question either and no one in Louisiana seemed to have an answer. Luke had done his job pretty well turning the attention of a big enough slice of the upstate vote away from smashing the sinful evils of Godless New Orleans and its deal with the Devil’s demons and toward voting against the fear of the National Guard being used to evict their peckerwood asses to have Montrose running ahead of Brown in the polls.

  But that was before this crazy Mama Legba candidacy had turned the race upside down and inside out. Now Montrose was losing big-time.

  Anyone who would still vote for a tight-assed tool of the Loan Lizards like Brown to spite the Devil wasn’t about to vote for the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans and her krewe of supernatural demons from Hell instead. Except of course the few upstate yokels who actually believed all the bullshit promises she made and didn’t get it that they were jokes.

  But Elvis Gleason Montrose had never really been the hero of a lot of the people who were going to vote for him just because he wasn’t Harlan W. Brown, and some of them were going to vote for Mama Legba just to throw big gooey pecan pies in both their faces, just a good joke, since she couldn’t win.

  Last poll numbers had Brown leading in the polls with ten days left 37 percent to Montrose’s 30 percent and maybe even pulling away, with Mama Legba getting 18 percent and who could figure how much of the 15 percent saying undecided or none of your business, hah, hah, hah, going to go to her.

  Some fuckin’ joke!

  Mama Legba wasn’t going to win.

  But she was going to elect Harlan Brown.

  * * *

  I should’ve seen it, shouldn’t I? We all should’ve seen it, or anyway at least one of us should’ve seen that either Charlie Devereau had been conned himself or had been in on it from the git-go, but either way we all, and yours truly in particular, had been conned into bullshitting Mama Legba into running not just to promote the tourist business out of the doldrums, but also to elect Harlan W. Brown.

  Oh yeah, Mama Legba’s freak show candidacy for governor had boosted her national ratings and was already pulling in more tourists during this off-season than had showed up in years. And likewise the advance bookings were no longer feeling any pain to say the least. Charlie’s big idea and my big mouth had done that job all right.

  But when Brown took office and sent in the National Guard and took a hard Christian line against the go-along-to-get-along of the People’s Police and Mama Legba’s Mad Mardi Gras, the crackdown would come right at the buildup to the high season and a martial law enforcement of the booze, drug, prostitution, and nudity laws, was not exactly going to pack ’em in.

  Worse still, much worse for yours truly, was that all that would be a smoke screen for using the Guard to evict foreclosure victims by the hundreds and thousands just like poor ol’ J. B.

  About the only good thing I could think to think of was that the cabal of political heavyweights I had rented my bordello to for their conclave didn’t know that I had talked Mama Legba into running, or I would be in even deeper shit when Harlan Brown beat Elvis Montrose and took office, which it seemed only voodoo black magic could possibly prevent.

  Who could have believed that it could? And would?

  Until it happened.

  It just seemed part of the act at the time. Who would believe such a ridiculous threat?

  I was in Lafitte’s Landing when the show came on five days before Election Day. If the joint wasn’t packed, it was two-thirds full, half of whom who I made for tourists, not bad considering it was the low season.

  And of course Mama Legba and Her Supernatural Krewe was up there on the big screen I had put up, if for nothing more than to help move the expensive new drink I called Voodoo Moonshine I had dreamed up—cheap corn liquor, island rum, blood orange juice over a lot of ice in a very tall glass, and liberally watered with club soda.

  I was checking on the supply of Moonshine behind the bar and not paying attention to what was on the screen, which I generally didn’t do anyway, when it happened.

  Suddenly the barroom went dead silent. I turned around and saw that everyone was staring at the screen like cobras at a snake-charmer. I looked at the screen and was spellbound myself, maybe even more so, seein’ as how I was probably the only one in the saloon who had seen this before, up close and personal.

  Mama Legba had shut up in midstream. Was frozen. Didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t have anything you could call an expression on her face. Blank. No one and nothing at home. For a very uncomfortable moment that had turned the barroom silent.

  Then she began to dance. Not one of those voodoo twitch and jerk dances, but in slow motion, graceful but sinister like a cobra dancing to its own tune, something cold-blooded coming to make a call, something that should only come out at night, something that if it never came out would not be missed at all.

  It stopped dancing as it turned Mama Legba’s face into a grinning skeleton mask with glowing dead eyes like those of a nighttime alligator caught in a hunter’s flashlight. But these weren’t the eyes of a trapped reptile. These were the eyes of a
reptile trapping you.

  “I am Baron Samedi,” loudly hissed a cold and angry voice that matched those eyes and that humorless grin. “I am death and destruction when that is my mood. That is my mood now. We offer you our rule through our chosen horse among you, Mama Legba. Yet there are those of you who insult us by spurning this great boon. Who even presume to deny that I exist. I am Baron Samedi. I am death and destruction. Defy me and perish. I will show you that we exist.”

  Tidal waves and tornadoes, whirlwinds and hurricanes, blowing in that voice, I could see one skeletal horseman of all the apocalypses riding Mama Legba through the airwaves, I could somehow even smell graveyards and corpses on television, didn’t everyone in the saloon, didn’t you?

  “I now command Agau and Simbi, Sogbo and Bade, loas of thunder and lightning, wind and water, ocean and storms, to do as they have never done before, to use their powers together to summon up a storm such as your world has never seen. A hurricane that is more than a hurricane, a tornado that is more than a tornado, a whirlwind that is more than a whirlwind. It begins now in the Gulf, and it will dance slowly up the Delta and up the river to New Orleans. It will drown all of the city to the crowns of the treetops on the highest hills. It will raise a tsunami tidal bore that roars up the Mississippi overflowing all levees, swamping Baton Rouge and inundating the Mississippi flood plain as far as Memphis and beyond. Neither Jesus nor the Army Corps of Engineers can save you from the wrath of Baron Samedi.”

  * * *

  MaryLou came back from wherever she was when she was ridden by any loa but Erzuli to hear Erzuli say through her mouth “But we can” to a studio audience and even cameramen who looked totally freaked.

  What had happened? Who had done it?

  “Baron Samedi is the lord of doom with a bad attitude and more power than most of us,” Erzuli went on, “but I’m Erzuli, loa of love, lust, and mama knows best, and right now I’m Mama Legba not Baron Badass, and I’m not speaking for his bad boys. I’m speaking for the loas who love ya and want you to love them. Besides which, Baron Samedi sometimes lets his bark get ahead of his bite, he just wants y’all to understand that he does exist, which he does, and has the power do what he’s gonna prove he can do, which he will. So think of what you just heard as a badass campaign speech, like vote for me or I’ll kill you. Which he will do unless you elect Mama Legba, that’s me, that’s us, governor of Louisiana. Over to you, Papa dearest.”

  * * *

  At least what replaced the loa Erzuli this time wasn’t something fit to almost have even me crossing myself and trying to believe Jesus really was my personal savior but something or someone a lot more reasonable, someone I had tried to do business with and succeeded.

  “I am Papa Legba, guardian of crossroads, the giver and taker of choices,” said Mama Legba. “This is a crossroads and I give you the choice. It should not be a difficult one. You need not believe in Baron Samedi to choose the road to destruction for he is about to demonstrate what will happen if you spurn the road to salvation we offer you by accepting our rule through our chosen horse, Mama Legba. But we who have the power to call up this ultimate tempest have the power to turn it back. You must choose Mama Legba in your own hearts—”

  “—on Election Day, y’all,” said Erzuli, “just in case you don’t get what the Big Daddy of this here crossroads is telling you.”

  There was a long moment of silence after the Mama Legba show ended in this political carnival act capper, this take on any television evangelist who had ever demanded that we put one hand on our TV sets and the other in our wallets or else.

  A great act maybe, better than speaking in tongues or snake-handling, but vote for me or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down, was too far over the top to have the crowd in Lafitte’s Landing doing anything but taking a deep breath and then rushing to the bar to drink the fear away and the joke down.

  Good for a graveyard chill and a barroom laugh.

  But no one was laughing when next morning’s weather satellite shots showed that a huge black cloud deck about the size of Texas had appeared more or less out of clear skies in the Gulf of Mexico well west of the Florida coast north of Yucatán casting a shadow of impending doom from horizon to horizon.

  It just sat there in the Gulf for twenty-four hours or so doing nothing, “a meteorological phenomenon unlike anything ever seen,” as the weather reporters unhelpfully put it.

  After Katrina, when both hunkering down in the Superdome and the so-called compulsory evacuation order had turned into chaotic disasters that turned New Orleans into a depopulated ghost town wreckage of itself, the city government had created a so-called emergency evacuation plan which turned two-way Interstates into one-way escape routes out of town.

  Fortunately it was never used, since there were only enough vehicles, public or private, to evacuate those who owned cars or who would have won life and death hand-to-hand battles for the trucks and buses. And once the Hurricane Season set in, reducing the city to the Alligator Swamp and New Orleans Proper and making it clear that there were going to be multiple major hurricanes every year, fleeing in and out for months at a time was no longer even a chaotic option, and permanently abandoning the city or hunkering down became the only alternatives.

  So what was left of Hurricane Season New Orleans had long since more or less adapted and survived. New Orleans Proper shrank to the high ground and fortified itself against hurricanes like Tokyo did against earthquakes as best it could and the Alligator Swamp built its villages up on stilts and piles high enough to survive the flooding and even Category 6 hurricanes produced no real panic anymore.

  But then, four days before Election Day, the big black cloud began to rotate, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, and the Countdown to Doomsday, as the TV weather guys and gals helpfully put it, began.

  Three days from Election Day it was two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds around a fully formed hurricane that made a Category 6 look like a desert dust devil. By sundown it was moving slowly but steadily straight toward the mouth of the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans, estimated landfall on Election Day itself.

  Call it brass balls, call it the Spirit of the Big Easy, call it just plain crazy, call it faith in Mama Legba and her Supernatural Krewe, who after all had shielded New Orleans from the last Hurricane Season, to do likewise with this thing. Or call it what I called it, no other alternative but to board up what could be boarded up, roll the bones, and keep my saloon and whorehouse open as a well-appreciated and lucrative public service.

  Two days before Election Day, the Super Hurricane stopped dead in its tracks well south of the Delta, as if Baron Samedi was actually holding it there as a warning. People were even praying in Christian churches that it was. People were praying to Jesus. People were praying to Mohammed. People were praying to the ghosts of Huey Long and Elvis. People were praying to all of the above at once and Mama Legba besides. All day long and through the night, whatever was holding back the Super Hurricane seemed to be listening.

  But the day before Election Day it began to whirl even faster and faster, pulling in on itself, faster and faster, beyond anything like hurricane speed, clouds rotating around its eye at tornado speed and beyond, flashing lightning and cracking thunder, faster and faster, but still bigger than any hurricane in the history of the world, sending flood-bores up the Mississippi even at this distance and over all but the highest levees, turning the Alligator Swamp into a shallow lake.

  And then a tornado funnel dropped down out of it, a tornado as wide around as a full Category 6 hurricane and beyond, so enormous and so powerful that where it touched down on the surface of the Gulf, instead of setting off circular tidal waves the whirlpool that formed created a permanent water-sucking fountain sending the seawater up into the funnel and into the thunder and lightning of the hovering cloud deck to fall back down as a drenching rain.

  When the sun rose and the polls opened on Election Day it was still there, it was already being cal
led the Hurricane Tornado, and it was moving toward New Orleans at a speed that would take it to landfall just downriver about the time that they closed.

  21

  Colonel Terrence Hathaway had more than once heard it said that, given the state of the world, it was easier to believe in the Devil than in God, and had always denounced this as blasphemy, sometimes only in his own heart, sometimes in a good Christian voice loud and clear.

  Until the results came in on Election Day.

  28 percent for the Democrat, Elvis Gleason Montrose

  35 percent for the Republican, Harlan W. Brown

  37 percent for MaryLou Boudreau, aka Mama Legba

  But as the commander of the Louisiana National Guard, Hathaway was about to confront this Daughter of Satan in the flesh for the first time.

  Mama Legba, the Voodoo Queen Governor of the State of Louisiana.

  How could God have allowed this to happen?

  Or rather, his faith told Colonel Hathaway to more truly ask, Why?

  The how of it was, after all, easy, he had seen it on television, and so had most of the rest of the world.

  Just after dawn on Election Day, Mama Legba, or rather the satanic demon who called himself Papa Legba and possessed her at the time, had announced that she would sally forth as the “horse” of her Supernatural Krewe to protect New Orleans from what the news was now calling the Hurricane Tornado as they had from the last Hurricane Season—if enough deluded fools would present them with enough offerings in the form of their votes to elect her, meaning them, governor of Louisiana.

  Mama Legba, or whatever was “riding her,” had then rented a large enough airboat for herself, a foolhardy camera crew of two, and a very brave pilot, and planed south down the Mississippi toward the whirlwind of black cloud, followed at a dangerously close distance by television boats and helicopters broadcasting the event through the longest lenses they had and no doubt praying for the best, like the people of New Orleans watching the coverage.