Sailor & Lula (44 page)

“Hissy. Mama's Missy, sister's Sissy.”

“What's your daddy's?”

“Ever'body calls him Bird-Dog, but his real name's Buster. Buster Soso.”

Pace put down the newspaper and picked up the can of Coke Hissy Soso had brought him and studied it.

“What you eyeballin' that can for?” asked Lefty Grove.

“Wouldn't do to rub a old wood ball bat with this, would it?” said Pace.

“Hi, Sail, sweetie. How're my boys?”

“Oh, Lula, it's you.”

“Who were you expectin' to call? Ann-Margret, maybe?”

“No, honey, I thought it might be Pace. How's Marietta?”

“Mama's recoverin' faster'n they'd like, as if we couldn'ta guessed she would. Dal and I can't no more keep her down than Imelda Marcos could quit buyin' shoes. I'm thinkin' I might stay another couple days, though, just to make certain her heart don't start flutterin', like after she had that bad fall last summer.”

“Whatever's best, peanut.”

“Then, of course, Reverend Plenty's appearin' in Rock Hill on Monday? I'm also thinkin' it could be a excitin' deal to go hear him at the openin' sermon of the first South Carolina branch of the Church of the Three R's. I could stay over in Charlotte with Bunny Thorn, Beany's first cousin once or twice removed? The one lost her left arm, most of it anyway, in a car wreck at the beach in Swansboro when she was eighteen? You remember my tellin' you about her? I ain't seen Bunny in years. She owns a laundromat out by the Speedway. Wonder if Bunny'd go hear Goodin Plenty with me.”

“Sounds all right to me, Lula. Stay as long as you need.”

“How's Pace? He gettin' to school on time and eatin' proper?”

“He's been keepin' busy.”

“You got a eye on him, Sail, don't you?”

“Don't be worryin' about us Ripley males, honey. We're survivors.”

“Glad to hear it. Sailor?”

“Yes, ma'am?”

“You love your Lula?”

“I do, peanut. Always will, too.”

“
Hasta siempre.
darlin'.”

“Glad you could make it, Coot,” said Sailor. “This'd be a tough one to face alone.”

“Got plenty of food, weapons and ammo and the Ram's gassed to the gills. Figure we can work the give-and-go, you'n me's all we got, like them Shinin' Path people in Peru. You heard of 'em, haven't ya? The Cocaine Commies? Good Chinese-style guerilla fighters, though. What's your idea on the procedure?”

Coot Veal was decked out in his best cammies, black lace-up Red Wings, green Semper Fi hat, and double-reflector wraparounds. He took a small black leather pouch containing an Urban Skinner out of a pocket of his field jacket, clipped it on to his belt and twisted it front to back. The telephone rang and Sailor lifted the receiver.

“Ripley.”

“Sailor, I got bad news.” It was Bob Lee Boyle.

“What now?”

“Bomb blew out the front door and some windows of the new warehouse.”

“When'd this happen?”

“About a half hour ago. Guess Papavero don't take no like a man.”

“Not many do.”

“I ain't changin' my mind, though, Sail. I mean, Gator Gone's
mine.
”

“I'll back you, Bob Lee, whatever you decide.”

“ 'Preciate that, Sailor Ripley. Knew you would. I'm goin' over to assess the damage now. Comin'?”

“Can't, Bob Lee. Pace is in some trouble and I got to attend to it first. I'm sorry but it's priority.”

“Understand. Anything I can do?”

“Make sure you don't say nothin' to Beany or it'll likely get back to Lula. Coot Veal's here. Think we can handle it, thanks the same.”

“Okay, good buddy. Let's each check in later.”

“You got it, Bob Lee.
Cuidado,
hear?”

“I'll try.”

“And give me a holler you hear direct from them boys.”

“Sail?”

“Uh huh?”

“This what's called a hostile takeover bid?”

Sailor hung up and told Coot what had happened.

“This said ol' life's becomin' a tougher proposition all the time,” Coot said. “I had me a terminal disease no tellin' what I'd do. As it is my short list is gettin' longer all the time.”

“Figure it'll be any better in the next?”

“You turnin' Hindu?”

“Heard a piece on the news earlier about a sixteen-year-old boy, not much older'n Pace, escaped from Cuba on a surfboard.”

“A surfboard?”

“Yeah. Seems a East German tourist bought the kid a windsurfin' board and he took off for Florida. Made it thirty miles before the boom broke, which he managed to re-rig somehow, well enough to go another thirty miles when the thing give out for good. Got picked up by a Bahamian freighter crewed by Koreans couldn't speak Spanish or English. They notified the U.S. Coast Guard, who took the boy the last thirty-mile stretch into Key West. Kid said he was goin' to live with relatives in Miami. Didn't seem to think what he done was so remarkable. Just wanted to be free, is all.”

“Desperate people do all kinds of incredible things.”

Sailor nodded. “Made me wonder about Pace. What made him so damn desperate that he'd do this fool thing with them worthless Rattlers?”

Coot shook his head and said nothing, just took off his shades, checked them for smudges and put them back on. The doorbell rang and Sailor answered it.

“Hi, Sailor man.”

“Thanks for comin' by, Jaloux. You find out anything?”

Sailor let her in.

“Poppy's wife—sometimes I go shoppin' with her?—she told me they figure the boys is headed north into Mississippi.”

“What's there?”

“Rattler brothers got a insane mama locked up in a place called Miss
Napoleon's Paradise for the Lord's Disturbed Daughters. Perdita says Zero, Poppy's top gun, is goin' after 'em with some pistols. Zero was wounded durin' the takedown and he won't be lookin' to take no prisoners.”

“You say Perdita?”

“Yeah. Poppy's wife. Why?”

“She a Tex-Mex woman, last name of Durango?”

“Don't know that I ever heard her own last name, but yeah, she's from Texas and looks Mexican, all right. You know her?”

Sailor nodded. “I did. Listen, Jaloux, you been a big help. Anything I can do for y'all, let me know.”

“There is, Sailor man. Definitely is somethin' you can help me with.”

“I got to get goin' now, Jaloux. My boy's in tough and I got to find him before this Zero does.”

“I'm goin' with you, then.”

“Really, Jaloux, you don't want to get mixed up in this, 'specially as how you're an employee of Mr. Papavero's. Me and my pal Coot here can handle it, I hope.”

“I'm comin' along, Sailor. I know right where Miss Napoleon's is, 'count of I used to live nearby in Starkville for two years when my mama was married to her third husband, man named Dub Buck owned a Buick dealership. Had him a string of signs on old Highway 82 from Eupora to Mayhew said, ‘Buy Buck's Buicks.' Dub had did some small piece of time before Mama met him, for exposin' his self in a public park up in Greenville. I liked him, though. Dub died of food poison in Nogales one weekend when I was fourteen. Least that's what Mama said when she come home without him. She and me moved to N.O. right after.”

“Coot, this here's Jaloux Marron,” said Sailor. “She's gonna show us the way.”

“Semper Fi, Miss Marron,” said Coot, tipping his cap.

“Can't say the same, Mr. Veal.”

Smokey Joe pulled the Jimmy up to the premium pump at the self-serve Conoco in Meridian and cut the engine.

“Be right back,” he said to Lefty Grove, as he got out and headed for the pay-in-advance window.

As he approached the pay window, Smokey Joe could see that there was a problem. A medium-sized black man in his thirties, with long, slanted, razor-shaped sideburns, wearing a camel hair sportcoat, was arguing with the Vietnamese kid behind the bulletproof pane.

“Pay for cigarettes!” said the Vietnamese kid, nodding his head quickly, causing his lank, black forelock of hair to flop forward almost to the tip of his nose.

“I paid you for 'em, motherfucker!” the black man shouted. “You already got my money!”

“No, no! Pay now! You pay for cigarettes!”

Standing off to one side, about eight feet from the man, was a young black woman wearing a beige skirt that ended mid-thigh of her extraordinarily skinny legs, and a short brown jacket that she held tightly around her shivering body despite the intense heat.

“Pay him or let's go!” she shouted. “I ain't wastin' street time on no cigarettes!”

“Keep the damn cigarettes, then, chump monkey!” the man yelled at the kid, throwing a pack of Winstons at the window. The pack bounced off and fell on the ground. “And go back to Buddhaland! Leave America to us Americans!”

The man turned away from the window and saw Smokey Joe approaching.

“Hey, man,” he said, “you familiar with this area?”

“Why?” asked Smokey Joe.

“My wife and me got a problem with our car, see, and we need—“

“Sorry,” Smokey Joe said, “I don't have any money to give away today.”

“No, man, I don't want no money. All we need is a ride. We got to get our car towed.”

“Call a tow truck.”

“That's the problem, see, we don't know our way around here and we got to get the car fixed.”

There was a large sign next to the garage door in the station that said MECHANIC ON DUTY 24 HOURS. Smokey Joe pointed to it.

“There's a mechanic right here,” he told the man.

“Wouldn't let no chump monkey from Buddhaland touch it!”

“Come on!” shouted the woman, her thin naked knees shaking. “Turn loose, Chester. It ain't happenin'!”

Smokey Joe saw the man's eyebrows twitch and his face contort, twisting up on the left side, his nostrils flaring. The man hesitated for a moment and Smokey Joe braced himself, thinking that the man might attack him. But the man turned his back to Smokey Joe and followed the woman into the coffee shop of a motel next door.

“Ten bucks premium,” Smokey Joe said to the kid, sliding a bill on the metal plate beneath the window.

As Smokey Joe pumped the gas, a well-dressed, overweight, middle-aged black woman, who had just finished fueling her late-model Toyota sedan, said, “Shouldn't be treatin' nobody like that. Ain't no way to be treatin' people here. This ain't no Asia.”

She got into her car and drove away. One of the Vietnamese attendants, dressed in a clean, crisp blue uniform, walked out of the garage and over to Smokey Joe.

“This is bad neighborhood,” he said, shaking his head. He took the fuel hose from Smokey Joe, who had drained his ten dollars' worth, and replaced it on the pump.

Smokey Joe slid behind the steering wheel of the Jimmy and started it up.

“You hear any of that?” he asked Lefty Grove.

Lefty Grove nodded and said, “Even gettin' gas nowadays reminds me of what Ray L. Menninger, the veterinarian-taxidermist, who Daddy said was the most honest man in Iguana County, Texas, used to say: ‘With me, one way or the other, you get your dog back.' ”

Nell Blaine Napoleon had moved into The Paradise eighty-two years ago, when she was four and a half years old. Her father, Colonel St. Jude Napoleon, a career army man, and her mother, Fanny Rose Bravo, had designed and had the twenty-six-room Paradise house built for them, and they had both lived and died there. Nell was their only child. By the age of twelve, Nell had decided to devote her life to the well-being of others. She was initially and forever inspired by a local black woman called Sister Domino, who spent each day administering to the sick and needy. Sister Domino allowed the young Nell to accompany her on her rounds of mercy, and taught her basic nursing skills, which Sister Domino had acquired at the Louise French Academy in Baltimore, where she had lived for eighteen years before returning to her Mississippi birthplace. Sister Domino's ambition had been to assist Dr. Albert Schweitzer at Lambarene, in Africa, and she read everything she could about him and his work, constantly telling Nell what a great man Schweitzer was and how there could be no higher aspiration in life than to work to alleviate the suffering of those persons less fortunate than themselves. The “Veritable Myriad” Sister Domino called the world's population.

Nell's parents never attempted to dissuade their daughter from her passion, or to turn her away from Sister Domino. Both St. Jude Napoleon and Fanny Rose Bravo were great believers in self-determination, and if this was the path Nell chose to follow, it was her business and no one else's. Their feeling was that there were certainly worse directions a life could take, and they let her be. The only time Nell had unwillingly had to separate herself from Sister Domino was the period during which she was required by her parents to attend Madame Petunia's School for Young Women in Oriole, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. During her holidays, however, Nell would be back at Sister Domino's side, going from home to home among the poorest residents of Oktibbhea, Lowndes, Choctaw, Webster, Clay, Chickasaw, and Monroe counties. Following graduation from Madame Petunia's, Nell never
wavered, dedicating herself fully to Sister Domino's work, which became her vocation also.