“Might could, you will,” said Lula. “Dependin'.”
“Dependin'? Dependin' on what?”
“Dependin' on your keepin' the love of a certain good woman.”
Sailor laughed, put down his cup, and reached his right hand across the table toward Lula.
“I ain't about to mess with true love, Lula, you know it. I never have.”
She accepted Sailor's hairless hand into her own and smiled at him.
“I know that, darlin'. Just sometimes, even at forty-seven and a half years old, that ol' bug gets to squirmin' in my brain and knocks a wire loose. I love you, baby. Always have, always will. We're it, you know?”
Sailor nodded and squeezed Lula's slim left hand with the ruby ring on the third finger that she'd worn ever since Sailor had given it to her when she was sixteen years, six months and eighteen days old.
“I do know, peanut. Don't need no remindin', though it's okay you do it now and again.”
The telephone rang and Lula reached over with her free hand and picked up the receiver.
“Oh, hello, Mama.”
“You busy?”
“No, me'n my true love're just about to take off on a little trip to celebrate his first half-century on the planet.”
“He takin' you to the Bahamas again on one of them gamblin' junkets just so's he can piss away your home improvement savin's?”
Lula laughed. “We're takin' a car trip, Mama, up to Memphis. Sailor always did want to visit Graceland, so we're goin' now. Be gone about a week.”
“What about your worms?”
“Beany and Madonna Kim'll keep an eye on 'em.”
“That Madonna ain't got the brains or morals of a worm. Didn't her last husband shoot himself after he come in on her screwin' his daddy?”
“That was the first one, Mama. Lonnie Wick? The Wick Wallpaper people? Second one hanged himself. Jimmy Modesta, had a beverage distribution company in Slidell. Used to get us all that Barq's and Dr Pepper for nothin'? That one weren't really all Madonna Kim's fault.”
“What you mean, Lula? I recall now she shamed him with a homeless person.”
“Man ran a shelter, Mama, there's a big difference. Anyway, them Modestas has a family history of chronic depression. Jimmy's brother, mother and a couple or three others took their own life before him.”
“No loss to this earth, I'm positive,” said Marietta Pace Fortune. “Look, Lula, I'm glad I caught you on your way out the door because I want you to know I got a houseguest.”
“You call from North Carolina just to tell me you got a visitor? This
another of your and Dalceda Delahoussaye's destitute Daughters of the Confederacy? Why can't Dal take in this one?”
“No, Lula, it's not. It's Marcello Santos.”
“Santos?! Mama, ain't he in jail for life?”
“Released him from Texarkana day before yesterday. He's sick, Lula, real sick. Heart's about to quit. Feds figured a sick old man can't cause them no more trouble.”
“Yeah, but Mama, Crazy Eyes Santos ain't just anyone. He was the crime king of the Gulf Coast since before I was born. You always said Daddy didn't trust him. What about that company of his he used as a front, Bayou Enterprises?”
“He ain't interested, Lula, really. Besides, no way after all these years the ones runnin' things'd let him back in. And he ain't got no crazy eyes no more, he's got cataracts both sides and can barely see. Your daddy didn't depend on Marcello's word, that's true, but Clyde Fortune didn't trust anyone, tell the truth, even me, probably. Anyway, Marcello had no place to go. Was stayin' at The Registry in Charlotte when he called me. I got him fixed up in my room. I'm usin' the study, had Johnnie Farragut bring over a cot. He and Marcello are in the front room together right now, watchin' âWheel of Fortune.' Marcello says it's the favorite show in the joint.”
“Life is full of surprises, Mama, ain't it? I thought he and Johnnie hated each other.”
“Johnnie been retired from the detective business ten years now, Lula. He's almost seventy-five and all he cares about is raisin' flowers. Dal and I got him comin' twice a week to the There But for the Grace of God Garden Club.”
“Mama, I got to hand it to you. Talk about the lion lyin' down with the lamb!”
Marietta cackled. “Ain't no beast so fierce as time, Lula. It's time makes us all lie down in the here and now or the hereafter, one.”
“I'll check in with you-all when we get to Memphis. Meantime give my love to Dal and Johnnie. Santos, too, I suppose.”
Lula looked at Sailor, who was grinning. His teeth were several shades of brown from thirty-eight years of smoking unfiltered Camels. She figured his lungs must be several shades of black. Maybe if she quit smoking
Mores, Lula thought, Sailor would quit Camels, and they wouldn't die of cancer or, almost worse, emphysema, where a person had to haul a machine around with him and keep tubes stuck up his nostrils so he could breathe.
“Love you, Lula,” said Marietta. “You be careful on the road. There's serious enough devils every step of the way. You hear from my grandboy?”
“Pace is fine, Mama. He's off on a trek.”
“Don't know why he'd want to hole himself up way behind the Bamboo Curtain like this. Boy got a mind of his own, though, I'll give him that.”
“Mama, I'm goin'. I got Sailor Ripley to protect me, so don't worry.”
Lula smiled at Sailor and he raised his left arm and flexed the bicep.
“He ain't always done such a spectacular job of it, Lula, or can't you remember?”
“Bye now, Mama. Love you.”
Lula hung up.
“I know, peanut,” Sailor said, “the world's plenty strange and not about to change.”
“Might not be worth gettin' up in the mornin' it was any different, Sail, you know?”
THE AGE OF REASON
“Your folks know where you're goin'?” asked Wesley Nisbet, as he guided his Duster into the Bienville National Forest.
Consuelo had not looked at Wesley since she'd gotten into the car. She didn't feel like talking, either, but she knew it was part of the price for the ride.
“They ain't known where I'm goin' ever since I been able to reason.”
“How long you figure that is?”
“More'n seven years, I guess. Since I was nine, when me'n Venus got brought together in the divine plan.”
Wesley slapped his half-leather-gloved right hand hard on top of the sissy wheel.
“Goddam! You mean that woman been havin' her way with you all this time? Hell, that's sexual abuse of a child. How is it your folks didn't get this Venus put away before now?”
“They couldn't prove nothin', so they sent me away to the Mamie Franklin Institute in Birmin'ham. I escaped twice, once when I was eleven and got caught quick, and then two years ago I stayed gone three whole months.”
“Where'd you go?”
“Venus and me was shacked up in the swampy woods outside Increase. Didn't have no money, only guns, ammo and fishin' tackle. We ate good, too. Venus is about pure-blood Chickasaw. She can live off the land without askin'.”
“How'd you get found out?”
Consuelo snorted. “Simon and Sapphireâthose are my parentsâhired about a hundred and one detectives. Still took 'em ninety days. Venus found us a pretty fair hideout that time.”
“What's she doin' in Oxford?”
“Got her a full scholarship to study the writin's of William Faulkner, the greatest writer the state of Mississippi ever provided the world. Venus is also a writer, a poet. She says I got the makin's, too.”
“You write poetry?”
“Not yet, but Venus says I got the
soul
of a poet, and without that there's no way to begin. It'll come.”
“You ever read any books by this fella she's studyin'?”
Consuelo shook her head no. “Venus says it ain't important. 'Course I could, I want.”
Wesley kept his ungloved left hand on the steering wheel and placed his right on Consuelo's naked left thigh. She didn't flinch, so Wesley slid his leather-covered palm up toward her crotch.
“You wouldn't know what to do with my clit if I set it up for you on the dashboard like a plastic Jesus.”
Wesley's right hand froze at the edge of her cutoffs. He kept it there for another fifteen or twenty seconds, then removed it and grabbed the gear-shift knob, squeezing it hard.
“You're some kinda wise little teaser, ain't you?” he said.
Consuelo turned her head and stared at Wesley's right profile. He had a scar on the side of his nose in the shape of an anchor.
“How'd you get that scar?” asked Consuelo. “Bet you was doin' such a bad job the bitch just clamped her legs closed on it.”
Wesley Nisbet grinned and took the Duster up a notch.
“I'm likin' this more and more we go along,” he said.
MEN IN CHAIRS
“You two need anything this afternoon? I'm goin' out.”
“No, Marietta,” said Johnnie, “thanks. Marcello and me's doin' good.”
Johnnie Farragut and Marcello Santos were both seated in overstuffed armchairs with their feet up on needle-point footstools in the front room of the Fortune home, watching a talk show on the twenty-four-inch Sony. A practically naked woman was on the screen, her long, slender, tentacle-like legs seemingly about to entwine themselves around the shoulders of the show's male host, who was perched on a step below the chair in which his guest was seated. The fluffy-haired host held the microphone up in front of her dangling breasts, which were delicately contained by a slip of pink cloth.
“Who's she?” asked Marietta. “Some X-rated movie actress?”
“Concert violinist,” Santos said. “Just played Brahms's âOpus 25.' Very nicely, too.”
“Never saw no violinist looked like that.”
“While back there was a woman played cello in the all-nude,” said Johnnie. “ 'Member her?”
“I don't,” said Marietta. “I'll leave the cultural events to you gentlemen, then, you don't mind. Back after the Daughters meetin'. Dal's goin' with me, so you-all're on your own if you spill your milk or need your pants changed.”
“Bye, Marietta,” said Johnnie.
He and Marcello sat quietly for several minutes, listening to the inane banter between the violinist, whose right breast rested on the microphone, and the unctuous host, waiting for the woman to stand up again so they could watch her parade in her skimpy dress. The show broke for a commercial and when it resumed the female violinist was gone.
“Damn,” Johnnie said, “woulda appreciated seein' them stems once more. Only thing better to look at than a cluster of Cecil Brunners.”
“You're an amusing man, Johnnie,” said Santos, “and a most fortunate one. Before my eyes began giving me such problems, I read a great deal. In the penitentiary, there isn't much else of a savory nature to help
pass the time, as you, having been in the law enforcement business, certainly know. I most enjoyed reading the bulletins and studies issued by the Justice Department, which were made available on a regular basis by the prison library. One of the last I read revealed that in the United States approximately 640,000 crimes per year are committed that involve the use of handguns. More than 9,000 people per year are killed in the process, and another 15,000 are wounded. Also committed each year are over 12,000 rapes, 200,000 robberies and 400,000 assaults by individuals possessing guns. Three quarters of the perpetrators of these crimes are strangers to the victims.”
“Don't tell me that you, of all people, Marcello Santos, one of the most feared crime bosses of our time, is advocatin' gun control!”
Santos laughed. “I'm boss of nothing any longer, Johnnie. Those days are long passed. Yes, I am against the easy availability of weapons. It's the amateurs that ruin the business. In the proper hands, these kinds of things don't happen. Certainly they do not happen so often.”
“There's a lot of guns in the world, but there's only one Johnny Rocco.”
“What's that?”
“Line from an old movie. Anyway, you got a point, Marcello. Funny how we end up wheezin' in armchairs like this, in the parlor of a woman we both been chasin' after for decades. Though you, of course, was necessarily out of the runnin' for a spell. And after bein' on opposite sides of the fence, so to speak, in our professional lives. Kinda creeps up on a person that there ain't much he can do to influence his outcome.”
Santos sat back in his chair with his eyes closed, his large, thick hands with the left thumb missing folded together in his lap.
“Tell me, Johnnie, have you had a happy life?”
“I guess so, Marcello. My regrets don't amount to much. Only thing is, I never made no mark as a writer, which is somethin' I'd always had in mind.”
“Do you believe in an afterlife?”
“You mean, like heaven? Or reincarnation?”
“Call it what you like.”
“No. Do you?”
Santos nodded his head slightly.
“I do. I'm looking forward to it. What I feel behind me is only pain.”
The two men sat without talking, neither of them really listening to or watching the television. Johnnie thought about a cat he'd had for a while when he was a boy, an orange tom his father had named Kissass. Kissass had been electrocuted one summer evening when a bolt of ribbon lightning struck a power line that lashed down over him as he streaked across the lawn in front of the Farragut house on Stivender Street in Bay St. Clement. That was sixty-five years ago, Johnnie thought. He could remember Kissass's face an instant before the strike, and he stopped his memory right there.