Sailor & Lula (47 page)

Pace stared at Wendell, who sat stroking his red beard.

Wendell stood up and said, “Time to tend the garden. You'll stay put, won't ya?”

Pace nodded and watched Wendell walk out of the room. As soon as the madman was out of sight, he scrambled to his feet, ran over to the pistol crossbow and picked it up. Pace heard Wendell relieving himself in what he assumed was the toilet. He crouched under the window and waited. When Wendell reentered the room, Pace pressed the trigger that released a black dart into his captor's left eye. Wendell fell down and Pace dropped the crossbow and ran out of the house, headed on foot the four miles to Miss Napoleon's Paradise.

Wendell Shake carried no identification of any kind, and when his body was found, along with those of the Rattler brothers, the only item
discovered in his pockets by police was a personal ad torn from a newspaper.

Miss Napoleon, Jaloux, and Sailor were sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch at The Paradise, drinking iced tea. Coot had driven into Starkville to see if he could dig up any information on the whereabouts of Pace and the Rattler brothers. It was late afternoon, siesta time for the Lord's disturbed daughters, and things were quiet.

“It's the kind of thing happens if you hold the faith,” said Miss Napoleon. “Tell the truth, I was worried about paying the bills for the first time in my life. We live modestly here at The Paradise, as Sister Domino insisted, but even so we had begun to struggle. When Mary Full-of-Grace came down those stairs last night and delivered into my hands that money, it was the answer to our prayers. Now we'll be able to continue as we've always done, and provide for more than just ourselves. I've thought about opening a haven for the homeless, which until last night didn't seem possible. The Lord has plans for us we cannot even imagine.”

“You always been the kind of woman make God or any man do for, Miss Napoleon,” said Jaloux.

“Child, don't you know the Lord's not a man? He's all things to all manner of people, and He provides best for those who provide for others. In this case, Mary Full-of-Grace was His instrument of mercy. Praise be.”

Just then, Coot Veal's Ram came tearing up the drive, and Sailor could see that Coot had a passenger with him. The truck stopped and Pace jumped out. Sailor dropped his iced tea, hopped down off the porch and embraced him.

“Boy was runnin' down the road, Sail,” said Coot, coming around the front of the truck. “Couldn't believe it myself when I saw who it was. And you won't believe this, neither. Heard on the radio that Papavero and his henchman, Zero the Greek, been shot and killed in N.O. under mysterious circumstances. Their bodies was found in a jewelry store on Elysian Fields.”

“The Rattlers is dead, too,” said Pace. “We was gonna hide out at a abandoned farmhouse—least the Rattlers thought it was abandoned—
and turned out a crazy man with a red beard was there. He shot both Lefty Grove and Smokey Joe. I was gonna be next, but he got to talkin' with me, all kindsa strange talk, and when he went to the head I got the drop on him with a pistol crossbow and let him have it. Then I run outta there fast as I could. Daddy, it was worse than what happened to me that time with the wild boy from Mamou.”

Sailor and Pace stood and hugged each other.

“It's okay now, son,” said Sailor. “Looks like the Lord done pulled off another one.”

Miss Napoleon nodded and smiled and rocked in her chair.

“Come on up here, you two,” she said to Coot and Pace, “and have a cold glass of tea.”

“Guess this means whatever's between us is gonna have to wait,” said Jaloux.

Coot and Pace were waiting in the truck while Sailor said goodbye to Jaloux in front of Inez's Fais-Dodo Bar.

Sailor grinned and brushed back his silvery black hair with both hands. Jaloux reached her right hand under the left sleeve of his white tee shirt and traced the large vein in his bicep with her index finger.

“Guess it'll have to, Jaloux. You been a giant help to me and my boy, and I ain't forgettin' it. I know I owe you.”

“Rather have it be voluntary, you know what I mean.”

Sailor laughed, leaned forward and kissed her above her left eyebrow.

“I do,” he said.

Coot drove the Ripleys home and they were surprised to see Lula's red Cressida wagon in the driveway.

“Jesus, Mama's home,” said Pace.

They got out of Coot's truck, and Pace ran into the house.

“Comin' in, Coot?” Sailor asked.

“No, Sail, thanks. I'm pretty well bushed, all this drivin'. Talk to y'all later'd be best.”

“Thanks, buddy. Couldn'ta done it without ya.”

Coot grinned, saluted and drove off.

“Sailor, honey!” Lula shouted, as soon as he walked in the door. “You won't believe what happened! Reverend Plenty got assassinated in Rock Hill and Bunny and I barely escaped with our own lives! I been tryin' to call you-all but there ain't been no answer. I been wild!”

Lula rushed into Sailor's arms and held him tight. Pace was lying on the couch with his eyes closed.

“Sail,” Lula said, “I'm afraid the devil got this world by the tail and he ain't lettin' go.”

Sailor smiled and kissed the top of Lula's left ear.

“Maybe so, peanut, but I ain't lettin' go of you, either.”

Lula almost swooned. “Oh, Sail, that's what I needed to hear.”

There are two kinds of women: those who move to make room when you sit on the bed and those who remain where they are even when you have only a narrow edge.

—Edmund Wilson

Consuelo Whynot licked idly at her wild cherry-flavored Tootsie Pop while she watched highway patrolmen and firefighters pull bodies from the wreckage. The Amtrak Crescent, on its way from New Orleans to New York, had collided with a tractor-trailer rig in Meridian, hard by the Torch Truckstop, where Consuelo had stopped in to buy a sweet. The eight train cars had accordioned on impact and the semi, which had been carrying a half-ton load of Big Chief Sweet 'n' Sour Cajun-Q Potato Chips, simply exploded.

“The train's whistle was blowin' the whole time and, Lord, it sounded like a bomb had went off when they hit,” said Patti Fay McNair, a waitress at the Torch, to a rubbernecker who'd asked if she'd seen what happened.

Consuelo Whynot, who was sixteen years old and a dead ringer for the actress Tuesday Weld at the same age, stared dispassionately at the carnage. The truck driver, a man named Oh-Boy Wilson from Guntown, near Tupelo, had been burned so badly over every inch of his body that the firemen just let him smolder on the spot where he'd landed after the explosion. His crumpled, crispy corpse reminded Consuelo of the first time she'd tried to make Roman Meal toast in the broiler pan of her cousin Vashti Dale's Vulcan the summer before last at the beach cottage in Ocean Springs. She never could figure out if she and Vashti Dale were once or twice removed. That was a result, Consuelo decided, of her unremarkable education. Venus Tishomingo would fix that, too, though, and the thought almost made Consuelo smile.

Four hospital types dressed in white and wearing plastic gloves slid Oh-Boy Wilson into a green body bag, zipped it up, tossed it into a van, and headed over to the wrecked Crescent, which had passenger parts sticking out of broken windows and crushed feet, hands, and heads visible beneath the overturned cars. Consuelo didn't think there'd be anything more very interesting to see, so she turned away and walked back to the truckstop.

“You goin' north?” she asked a man coming out of the diner.

The man looked at the petite young thing wearing a red-and-white polkadot poorboy that was stretched tightly over her apple-sized breasts, black jean cutoffs, yellow hair chopped down around her head like somebody had given it the once-over with a broken-bladed lawn mower, red tongue still lazily lapping at the Tootsie Pop, and said, “How old're you?”

“I been pregnant,” Consuelo lied, “if that's what you mean.”

The man grinned. He had a three-day beard, one slow blue-green eye and a baby beer gut. Consuelo pegged him at thirty.

“West,” he said, “to Jackson. You can come, you want.”

She followed him to a black Duster with mags, bright orange racing stripes, Moon eyes and a pale blue 43 painted on each side. She got in.

“My name's Wesley Nisbet,” he said, and started the car. The ignition sounded like thunder at three A.M. “What's yours?”

“Consuelo Whynot.”

Wesley laughed. “Your people the ones own Whynot, Mississippi? Town twenty miles east of here by the Alabama line?”

“Sixteen, be exact. You musta passed Geography.”

Wesley whistled softly and idled the Duster toward Interstate 20. “Where you headed, Consuelo?”

“Oxford.”

“You got a boyfriend there?”

“Better. I'm goin' to see the woman of my dreams.”

Wesley checked the traffic, then knifed into the highway and went from zero to sixty in under eight without fishtailing.

“This a 273?” Consuelo asked.

“Dropped in a 383 last week. You into ladies, huh?”

“One. What's the ‘43' for?”

“Number my idol, Richard Petty, ran with. Lots a man can do for ya a chick can't.”

Consuelo bit down hard on the outer layer of her Tootsie Pop and sank her big teeth deep into the soft, dark brown core. She sucked on it for a minute, then opened her mouth and drooled down the front of her polkadot poorboy. Wesley wolfed a look at Consuelo, grinned, and gunned the Duster past ninety before feathering back down to a steady seventy-five.

“You ain't met Venus,” she said.

“Who's gonna watch the worms?”

“Already taken care of, Sail, honey. Beany'll do it.”

“She's gonna be helpin' out at Gator Gone, too, you know, fillin' in for me.”

“Beany can handle more'n one thing at a time, darlin'. She can't get by one time, Madonna Kim will. She ain't doin' much between marriages.”

“Can't believe that girl, peanut. Only seventeen and put two men in the grave.”

“Bad luck is all it is, Sailor. Madonna Kim ain't no spider woman. Mean, Beany and Bob Lee raised her right.”

“Just glad Pace ain't never got hooked up with her.”

“How could he, bein' off in Nepal since before Madonna Kim got her first period?”

“We heard from the boy lately?”

“Month ago's the most recent. He was preparin' to leave Katmandu for the place in India the tea comes from?”

“Darjeelin'.”

“That's it. Was gonna be a long trek, he said, three months or so. Wanted to know when we was comin' over and go on a hike with him. Says he ain't gonna be doin' it forever.”

“I seen that Abominable Snowman movie more than enough times to know I ain't ever goin' near no Tibet, and Nepal's near it.”

“Don't know how Pace can take bein' in such a cold climate. Bad enough when it snows here in New Orleans once in the blue moon. Place just shuts down.”

“You know 'bout blue moons, peanut? I mean, what one is, really?”

“No, what? Just sometimes the way the sky is makes the moon look blue.”

“Uh-uh. It's when there's two full moons in the same month. Second one's the blue moon.”

“Where'd you hear this?”

“Woman named Jaloux Marron, used to work for Poppy Papavero, told me, long time ago.”

Sailor and Lula Ripley were eating breakfast in the Florida room of their house in Metairie. Sailor was on his second cup of Community and third Quik-Do raisin-nut muffin, and Lula was halfway finished with a peach, which was all she could handle before about noon. It was seven-forty-five A.M.

“Papavero was that gangster got shot in a jewelry store, right? Dozen years ago?”

“That's right, peanut.”

“And who was this Jealous woman?”

“Jaloux. Gal worked the bar at Inez's Fais-Dodo before it was shut down. Believe it's a fish place now. No, antique store, that's it.”

“So how'd you know her?”

Sailor sipped his coffee and looked out the sliding glass doors at the bird feeder.

“How come there ain't no seed in the feeder?” he asked.

“ 'Cause there ain't no birds around.”

“Might be if there was somethin' for 'em to eat.”

“Didn't realize you was such a bird lover. Who was she, Sailor?”

“Told you, Lula. Girl worked for Papavero. Met her once I was at Inez's. Weren't nothin' more to it. I ain't seen her for twelve years.”

Lula popped a small slice of peach into her mouth and swallowed it without chewing. She sucked on her tongue and stared blankly at a photo of Ava Gardner wearing a low-cut dress that Sailor had clipped out of the
Times-Picayune
and tacked to the wall the day her obituary had appeared in the newspaper. Ava was a homegirl, one of North Carolina's finest.

“Don't seem possible I'll be fifty years old next week, does it, peanut? Never figured on lastin' this long. Might just last a while longer, now I come this far. What do you think?”