Sailor & Lula (51 page)

“Where you goin'?” Lula asked.

“Oxford,” said Consuelo. “I'm a student at Ole Miss and I got to get there tonight so's I can make my classes in the mornin'.”

“Guess we can take you far's Batesville,” said Sailor, leaning over against Lula. “You'll have to catch a ride east from there on route 6.”

“Good enough,” Consuelo said, and opened the right rear door and climbed in, careful not to spill her root beer.

Sailor accelerated and guided the heavy machine onto 55 North and had it up to sixty-five in twelve seconds. Wesley Nisbet watched the
white Cad disappear and snickered. He gently closed the Duster's hood and slid behind the steering wheel. He wouldn't have a problem keeping a tail on that whale, Wesley thought.

“What river's this?” Consuelo asked, as the Sedan de Ville crossed a bridge just before the fairgrounds.

“The Pearl, I believe,” said Sailor. “Where you-all from?”

“Alabama,” said Consuelo. “I been home on vacation 'cause my grandmama died.”

“Sorry to hear it, honey,” said Lula, who was turned around in her seat studying the girl.

“Yeah, we was real close, me and my grandmama.”

“You didn't take no suitcase with you, huh?” Sailor asked.

“No,” Consuelo said, “I only been gone a few days. Don't need much in this close weather.”

Lula examined Consuelo, watching her sip her drink, then turned back toward the front. She looked over at Sailor and saw the half-grin on his face.

“You let me know the AC's too strong for you, Miss,” said Sailor. “Wouldn't want you to get a chill in that outfit.”

“Thanks, I'm fine,” Consuelo said. “And my name's Venus.”

As Wesley Nisbet trailed the white Cadillac by a discreet one eighth of a mile, he thought about his family. It wasn't too often that the Nisbet clan occupied Wesley's mind. Most of them that he'd known were dead now, anyway, buried alongside the Bayou Pierre near Port Gibson. His mother, Althea Dodu, and his father, Husbye, had been killed in a car wreck when Wesley was four years old. They'd been returning from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where Husbye had robbed a liquor store of four hundred dollars and a fifth of Jack Daniel's. He was sucking on the Jack when the oncoming Pacific Intermountain Express truck, into whose lane Husbye had allowed his and Althea's Mercury Monarch to drift, slammed into them head-on.

Wesley had been raised thereafter by Husbye's maiden sister, Taconey, in Weevil, Mississippi, where Wesley did his best to avoid going to school and church, preferring to spend his time under the hoods of trucks and cars and exploring the nearby woods, shooting at things with his Sears .22 rifle. Aunt Taconey had died when Wesley was seventeen, and he'd left Weevil at that time, traveling first to McComb, where he worked for a few months in a filling station, then to Memphis, where he was arrested for stealing a battery out of a new Mustang. He did ninety days in the city lock-up and, following his release, drifted down to Meridian, where he got a job as a gravedigger at the Oak Grove Cemetery.

Wesley had had an argument the day before with the foreman at Oak Grove, Bagby Beggs. Beggs, whose father, Bagby Beggs, Sr., had been a guard for twenty years at the prison farm at Parchman, had reprimanded Wesley for having left the tool shed door unlocked the previous night. Even though nothing had been stolen, Beggs told Wesley, this kind of oversight went a long way, in his opinion, toward revealing a man's true character. Beggs went on to inform him that there were plenty of able bodies in the state of Mississippi willing to work and properly acquit themselves of the responsibilities attendant to the job if the challenge proved too exacting for this particular Nisbet.

At first Wesley had tried to wriggle out of it by saying that he thought
someone else had already locked the shed, but when he looked directly into Bagby Beggs's square red eyes Wesley knew the foreman wasn't about to buy it, so he apologized and promised not to let it happen again. When Wesley drove away from the job after working a half-day on Saturday, Beggs's last words echoed in his cerebrum.

“There's two sides to me, Mr. Nisbet,” Beggs had said, “just like there's two sides to ever'body. The side you see's the side you get, 'cause if you don't see that side you won't see any. If I tolerate you, you'll see me. If I don't, you won't.”

Wesley decided as he drove that his career as a gravedigger was about done. Not necessarily because of anything Bagby Beggs had said, but because Wesley felt that life had more to offer him than a position as a caretaker of the dead. He'd enjoyed being able to pay his daily respects to Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, whose remains resided in Oak Grove, but it was time to move on. Maybe he could convince this vixen Consuelo Whynot to take off with him to Charlotte, where he'd begin a career at the Speedway as a stock car racer. First, though, he wanted to check out the lesbian Chickasaw. There were plenty of things his Aunt Taconey hadn't known about, and she'd been no worse off for it, he thought.

One of these days, too, Wesley promised himself, he would go back to Meridian, creep up on Bagby Beggs, and bash his head in with a shovel. Then he'd bury the foreman in an unmarked grave, whether Beggs was already dead or not. It would probably be better not to tell Consuelo about this plan, Wesley decided, at least not right away.

“There's one thing I been meanin' to ask you about, Marcello.”

Santos was propped up in the fold-out bed in the study with two fluffy pillows behind his head. Marietta was sitting in her grandmother Pace's straight-backed mahogany chair on his right side. Johnnie had gone home an hour before, after the three of them had eaten dinner and watched a rerun on television of one of the original “Twilight Zone” episodes, the one about the last man left on earth after a nuclear blast.

This story was a favorite of Johnnie's, who at one time in his life had aspired to being a writer of bizarre fiction. In it, the actor Burgess Meredith portrays a Milquetoast bank clerk whose only real passion in life is for reading, an activity for which, due to work and a nagging wife, he never has enough time or peace to enjoy. When the cataclysmic explosion occurs, he is alone in the bank's vault, and he survives. The clerk, who must wear glasses with Coke-bottle-thick lenses, stumbles out into the light and surveys a rubble-filled landscape. After a painstaking search through the city, he realizes he is the only person around. He goes to the library, is overjoyed to find that the books have been spared, and contemplates a leisurely lifetime of reading without disturbance. Reaching for a book, however, his glasses fall off, and in his effort to retrieve them, inadvertently steps on the lenses, crunching them beyond repair. Helpless without his glasses, his future is shattered, too.

Marietta thought the story was just plain mean and didn't want to hear anything Johnnie thought about irony.

“What do you mean, ‘irony'?” Marietta said. “Whenever I hear that word, all I can think of is pressin' Clyde's shirts.”

After so many years of friendship, Johnnie Farragut knew better than to argue an abstract point with Marietta Fortune, so he laughed it off and said good night. She'd then fixed up Santos's bed and helped him into it. His condition was worsening visibly day by day, and she didn't see how he could get much weaker and continue living at her house. He was one close step away from an I.V. feeder and a breathing machine.

“You mean Mona, yes?” Santos said, his voice no more than a tiny croak.

“I hate to ask,” said Marietta, “ 'specially considerin' your heart and all, but I just gotta know, Marcello. Did you have Mona Costatroppo killed?”

Santos sighed heavily. He had been sent to prison for arranging the murder of his mistress, Mona Costatroppo, who had threatened to testify against him in a federal court in New Orleans regarding a variety of criminal charges. The Feds were supposed to have given her a new identity in a distant city as part of the government witness protection program, but she had been shot to death in a hotel room in Chicago by a hitter from Detroit.

“You know, Marietta, my wife, Lina, before she died five years ago, wrote me a letter telling me that she forgave me everything, all of my sins against her and the children, none of whom, of course, will now even acknowledge that I am alive, however barely this is so. I wrote her back, informing her that had I desired absolution I would have remained a Catholic and paid a priest to perform this service. Clergy do not work for nothing, you know. The larger the alleged sin, the larger the church's bite in exchange for removing an obstacle on the path to heaven.”

“Marcello, honey, I ain't interested in Lina, or any letters she mighta wrote. Far's I know, she died of natural causes culminatin' in cirrhosis of the liver.”

Santos nodded slightly. “That's what I was told.”

“It's this other business I need to satisfy myself about, we're gonna take a step. Answer me, Marcello.”

Santos's eyes, once fiery, unsettling-to-look-into combinations of red and green, now floated on either side of his nose like opaque yolks in viscous, swampy yellow puddles. He blinked them several times, causing the puddles to overflow their containers and streak stickily down the sides of his face. Marietta took a tissue from a pocket of her robe and wiped away the effluent.

“I did, Marietta. I ordered the death of Mona Costatroppo. It was a terrible moment for me, when I realized what I had done, and that it was too late to prevent it. Mona knew it would happen, sooner or later, when she agreed to testify against me. She telephoned me one night, after she
had gone into hiding. ‘I have always been willing to die for you, Marcello, ' she said, ‘and now I am willing to die because of you.' Then she hung up. Now that you know, Marietta, what difference can it make?”

“It's the truth matters to me, Marcello. You had your reasons for doin' what you done, or had done for you, and I can live with that. I was just hopin' you wouldn't lie about this, is all. Murder ain't no more or less than a imperfect act of desperation, and ain't none of us is perfect. Nothin' to forgive or forget.”

Marietta leaned over and kissed Santos on the forehead. He smiled at her and covered her left hand with the four remaining fingers of his own.

“I am a happy man tonight, Marietta. For the little it is worth, you have won the undying love and respect of an old, dying gangster.”

“It's worth plenty, Marcello.”

Marietta kissed him again on the forehead, stood up and grinned down at the once mighty Crazy Eyes Santos.

“ 'Night, killer,” she said.

“Wake up, honey,” Lula said to Consuelo, “we're about at the Batesville junction.”

Consuelo blinked hard a few times and pinched her cheeks. Her mouth tasted dry and sour. She wished she had an ice-cold soft drink.

“Had me a awful strange dream just now,” Consuelo said. “I went into my brother Wylie's room in the middle of the night, to check on him and see if he was all right. He was only about six years old in the dream—in real life he's fourteen and a half—and he was sleepin' sound. But then I looked over and there was this other bed kinda perpendicular to Wylie's, a single mattress, maybe, on the floor, and there was my cousin Worth, who drowned in Okatibbee Lake when he was twelve and I was eleven. Worth looked the same as he did then, with his reddish-brown hair cut short on the sides and floppin' on his forehead. He sat up in the bed and looked at me, and I said, ‘Worth, that you?' And he said, ‘Who do you think it is? 'Course it's me.' And I reached out my right hand and touched him with my fingers. I really felt him, and I jumped back, 'cause it was such a spooky feelin'. Then I woke up. Worth was real as y'all. Too damn weird by half.”

“I don't dream so much anymore, now I'm older,” said Lula. “Least I don't remember 'em the way I used to. How 'bout you, Sail?”

“Dreamed more in the joint than anywhere,” Sailor said. “Prob'ly 'cause I was always catnappin', and my thoughts stayed close to the surface.”

Sailor steered the Cadillac off the interstate and stopped at the State Highway 6 intersection.

“Here you go, Miss Venus. Oxford's due east twenty-five miles. Shouldn't have much trouble gettin' a ride to the university from here.”

“ 'Preciate it much. Oh, by the way, my name's really Consuelo. Consuelo Whynot, from Whynot, Miss'ippi. It's my best friend's name is Venus. She's a Chickasaw Indian. Always wanted to know what it'd feel like to have someone call me by her name, not knowin' it wasn't really mine. Anyway, thanks again.”

Consuelo got out of the car, closed the door and walked off. As Sailor pulled his Sedan de Ville across the road and headed down the return ramp to the Interstate, Wesley Nisbet's black Duster crept off at the Batesville exit. He spotted Consuelo, drove up alongside her, leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window.

“Don't I know you?” he said. “Them polkadots is difficult to forget.”

“What in blazes you doin' here now?” said Consuelo.

“Thought I'd take me a college tour. I ain't never been to one.”

“You're followin' me.”

“Just goin' the same way, is all. Hop in.”

Consuelo stood on the side of the road for a minute and considered the situation, then she opened Wesley's car door.

“It'll be okay, Consuelo,” Wesley said. “Y' always burn a few tiles on reentry.”

In Memphis, Sailor and Lula checked into the Robert Johnson Regency, where Hilda Rae, Sailor's secretary at the Gator Gone Corporation, had made them a reservation on the recommendation of Sailor's boss, Bob Lee Boyle, who always stayed there on business trips to the city. It wasn't a fancy place, but it was clean and patroled around the clock by visibly armed security guards. A large sign at the registration desk proclaimed, THE MANAGEMENT SUGGESTS THAT GUESTS LOCK THEIR VALUABLES IN THE HOTEL SAFE DURING THEIR STAY.