Sailor & Lula (5 page)

The room was small but cheap, sixteen dollars. The plaster on the walls and ceiling was cracked and there was an ancient Motorola TV with rabbit ears hulking in a corner. There was a card table with four plastic
glasses and a pink ceramic pitcher on it. In another corner was a decrepit brown bureau and in the middle of the room was an enormous bed with a chipped black headboard. Lula stripped off the dishwater grey bedspread, tossed it over by the bureau and stretched out on the bed.

“I hate hotel bedspreads,” she said. “They don't hardly never get washed, and I don't like the idea of lyin' on other people's dirt.”

“Come look at this,” said Sailor.

Lula got up from the bed and looked out the window. She noticed that the lower left pane was cracked in two places.

“What, honey?” she said.

“There ain't no water in the swimmin' pool. Just a dead tree fell in, prob'ly from bein' struck by lightnin'.”

“It's huge. This musta been a grand old place at one time.”

Cars zoomed by on the beachfront highway that ran in front of the hotel.

“Lots of servicemen here,” said Lula.

“Let's get fed, sweetheart. The light's fadin' fast.”

After dinner, Sailor and Lula went for a walk on the beach. The full moon bleached the sand stark white and turned the Gulf a wrinkled magenta. Lula took off her shoes.

“You really figure Mama got Johnnie Farragut after us?” she said.

“If anyone, it'd be him, honey.”

A headless wave rolled up to Lula and she allowed it to wash over her feet. They walked along without talking for a few minutes. The only sounds other than the waves breaking on the beach were cars and trucks honking and racing up on the road.

“You think he'll run us down?” asked Lula.

“Who? Johnnie?”

“Yeah.”

“Might. Then again, he'd maybe have better luck findin' Elvis.”

“You don't believe Elvis is still alive, do you?” said Lula.

Sailor laughed. “No more'n James Dean is a wrinkled, twisted-up vegetable shut away in a Indiana rest home.”

“But you gotta consider all them strange facts. Like the corpse was shorter and weighed less than Elvis?”

“That's just stuff to sell more magazines, sweetheart.”

“Well, I wouldn't blame Elvis, though. If he was alive and just wanted to lie low?”

“He's lyin' low okay,” said Sailor. “About six feet lower'n we do. Don't concern yourself with it.”

Lula clucked her tongue twice. “I heard somethin' awful on the radio the other day,” she said. “About this old rock 'n' roll guitarist, he was forty-seven? He got arrested for bein' drunk in Virginia and hanged himself in his cell. Left a wife and seven children. Radio said his daddy was a Pentecostal preacher.”

“Guy up at Pee Dee, when he found out a old cell buddy of his got blown away by the son of a bitch his wife took up with while he was servin' time, said, ‘Another derailment on life's railway to heaven.' I don't know, peanut, if maybe we won't get a little lucky.”

Johnnie's first meal, whenever he was in New Orleans, was always at The Acme. He got right in the lunch line and ordered rice and beans with sausages and an oyster sandwich. After he paid for the food, he set his tray down on a table by the window and went over to the bar, where he asked for a Dixie, got it, refused a glass, paid for the beer and walked back with it to his table.

Johnnie ate half of the oyster sandwich before he took a man-sized pull off the Dixie. Still the sweetest beer in the South, he thought, as he swallowed. The polluted river water gave it that special taste, and no doubt if a body drank enough of it he would begin to glow in the dark. That stretch of the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to New Orleans isn't called the Cancer Corridor for no good reason. But it sure tasted good on a ninety-eight-degree day in the Big Easy.

As he ate, Johnnie thought about where, other than New Orleans, Lula and Sailor might have gone. N.O. seemed the most likely place, since they could find work for which they could get paid under the table and fit in more easily than in Atlanta or Houston. Besides, Lula always liked New Orleans. She'd stayed there many times with Marietta, mostly at the Royal Sonesta, whenever Marietta needed to get away on an antiques-shopping trip. Of course, they could be most anywhere by now: New York, Miami, even on their way to California. But N.O. was a good enough guess for now.

“Do you mind if I share this table?”

Johnnie looked up and saw a large, chocolate-colored man in his late forties or early fifties, wearing a powder blue porkpie hat and holding a tray filled with plates of food, smiling at him.

“The others,” said the man, “they are
ocupado.
”

“By all means,” said Johnnie. “Make yourself to home.”

“Muchas gracias,”
the man said, sitting down. He extended his well-developed right forearm and offered Johnnie a big hand to shake. “My name is Reginald San Pedro Sula. But please do call me Reggie.”

Johnnie wiped off his right hand on his napkin and shook.

“Johnnie Farragut,” he said. “Pleased to meet ya.”

Reggie did not remove his porkpie hat and began eating ferociously, finishing half of his meal before saying anything more.

“You are from New Orleans, Señor Farragut?”

“Johnnie, please. Nope. Charlotte, North Carolina. Here on business.”

Reggie smiled broadly, revealing numerous tall, gold teeth. “I am from Honduras. Originally from the Cayman Islands, but now for many years in Honduras. Do you know Honduras, Johnnie?”

“Only that it's supposed to be a pretty poor sight since the hurricane come through last year.”

“Yes, that's so. But there is not much to destroy. No big buildings like in New Orleans. Not where I live in the Bay Islands.”

“Where is that?”

“North of the mainland. On the island of Utila. We have a certain sovereignty in the islands, you know, since the United States forced the British to give them up over a century ago.”

“What do you do there?”

“Oh, many things.” Reggie laughed. “I have an appliance shop. But I am also with the government.”

Johnnie took a bite of the oyster sandwich.

“In what capacity?” he asked.

“In many capacities. Mostly with the secret service.”

Reggie reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. He handed a card to Johnnie.

“ ‘General Osvaldo Tamarindo y Ramirez,' ” Johnnie read aloud. “ ‘Teléfono 666.' ”

“He is my sponsor,” said Reggie. “The general is the head of the secret police of Honduras. I am one of his operatives.”

Johnnie handed the card back to Reggie and Reggie gave him a small piece of paper, folded once. Johnnie unfolded it. The printing was in Spanish.

“That is my
permiso,
” Reggie said. “My permit to kill. Only if necessary, of course, and only in my own country.” He laughed.

“Of course,” said Johnnie, refolding the piece of paper and handing it over to Reggie.

“I am authorized to carry a forty-five, also,” said Reggie. “United
States Marine issue, before they made the unfortunate switch to the less dependable nine millimeters. I have it here, in my briefcase.”

Reggie held up his stainless-steel briefcase and then replaced it on the floor beneath his chair.

“Why are you in New Orleans?” asked Johnnie. “If you don't mind my askin'.”

Reggie laughed. He took off his hat and scratched furiously at his completely bald head for a few seconds, wiped the sweat off his scalp with his napkin and put his hat back on.

“Certainly not,” Reggie said. “I am here only briefly, in fact, until this evening, when I fly to Austin, Texas, to visit a friend of mine who is an agent for the CIA. He wants to take me bass fishing. He comes to Utila and goes fishing with me. We are in the same businesses and also we are fishermen.”

Johnnie swallowed the last of his beer. He'd eaten all he could and stood up to leave. This fellow Reginald San Pedro Sula, Johnnie thought, was undoubtedly telling the truth, but Johnnie had no desire to get into it any deeper.

“It's been a real pleasure, Reggie,” he said, extending his hand. “I wish you
buena suerte
wherever you go.”

Reggie stood up. He was at least six feet six. He shook Johnnie's hand.

“The same to you,” he said. “If you are in Honduras, come to the Bay Islands and visit me. The Hondurans are great friends of the American people. But I have a joke for you before you go. If a liberal, a socialist and a communist all jumped off the roof of the Empire State Building at the same time, which one of them would hit the ground first?”

“I couldn't say,” said Johnnie. “Which one?”

“Who cares?” said Reggie, grinning.

Johnnie walked down Iberville Street toward the river. He was eager to get back to his hotel room and read more of Robert Burton's
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Burton's book, the first treatise on the subject written by a layman, had been published originally in 1621 and was still relevant today. As Johnnie turned the corner and headed north on Decatur, he repeated to himself Burton's definition of melancholy: “A kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion.”

He'd read for a little while, Johnnie thought, then take a nap. It was more likely he'd run onto Sailor and Lula, if they were here, at night, anyway.

“Hear now how leeches is comin' back into style,” said Sailor.

“Say what?” said Lula. “Honestly, sugar, you can talk more shit sometimes?” She took out a cigarette the length and width of a Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil and lit it.

“Got you a pack of Mores again, huh?”

“Yeah, it's a real problem for me, Sailor, you know. When I went in that drugstore by the restaurant in Biloxi? For the Kotex? I saw 'em by the register and had the girl throw 'em in. I'm not big on resistin'. So what about a leech?”

“Heard on the radio how doctors is usin' leeches again, like in old times. You know, when even barbers used 'em?”

Lula shuddered. “Got one on me at Lake Lanier. Lifeguard poured salt on it and it dropped off. Felt awful. He was a cute boy, though, so it was almost worth it.”

Sailor laughed. “Radio said back in the 1920s a I-talian doctor figured out that if, say, a fella got his nose mostly bit off in a barfight or somethin', and he needed a skin transplant there, they'd sew one of his forearms to his nose for a few weeks, and when they took it off they'd slap a couple leeches where the new skin attached from his arm to keep the blood movin' so the skin'd stick.”

Lula rolled down her window on the passenger side of the front seat of the Bonneville. They were on the outskirts of New Orleans.

“Sailor? You expect me to believe a man'd be goin' around with a arm sewed to his nose? For
weeks
?!”

Sailor nodded. “How they used to do it,” he said. “Course they got more sophisticated ways now. Radio said the Chinese, I think it is, figured a better idea is by insertin' a balloon in the forehead and lettin' it hang down on the nose.”

Lula shrieked. “Sailor Ripley! You stop! You're makin' this shit up and I ain't gonna sit for it!”

“Honest, Lula,” Sailor said. “I prob'ly ain't precisely got all the facts straight, but it's about what they said.”

“Honey, here we are in N.O.,” said Lula, “and it's time to change the subject.”

Sailor pulled off the road into a Gulf gas station mini-mart.

“We're about dry bones, sweetheart,” he said, stopping the car next to a self-serve pump. A sign on the top of it said PLEASE PAY INSIDE BEFORE FUELING.

“Get me a Mounds?” Lula shouted to Sailor as he went into the store.

A tall black man about thirty-five years old, wearing a torn green Tulane tee shirt, grease-stained brown slacks, no socks, ripped tennis shoes and a dirty orange Saints baseball cap, was piling items on the counter by the cash register. In the pile were four ready-made, plastic-wrapped sandwiches, two tuna salad and two cotto salami; six Twinkies; a package of Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies; four Slice sodas; two Barq's root beers; and a large package of fried pork rinds, extra salted.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” the man said to Sailor and another guy who'd come in right behind Sailor and was also waiting to pay for gas, “I'm 'most finished on my shoppin' here.”

“This be it?” the old guy behind the counter said.

“Y'all take American Express?” asked the man.

“Yessir,” said the old guy. He had on a green Red Man chewing tobacco cap and a faded blue, short-sleeved attendant's work shirt with the name Erv sewn in black cursive above the chest pocket.

“Then lemme throw in a couple more things,” said the man.

Sailor and the man in line behind him watched as the black man gathered up several more packages of Twinkies along with a few cupcakes and half a dozen cans of Pretty Kitty cat food, three liver and three chicken dinner portions, and tossed them on his pile.

“Pussycats gotta eat, too,” he said to Sailor, smiling. He had no upper teeth that were visible.

He handed an American Express card to the clerk, who ran it through the verifier. The card checked out okay and the old guy prepared a charge slip, had the man sign it and bagged the purchases.

“I'd just soon have a paper bag rather than a plastic one, if it's same to you,” the man said to the clerk.