Sailor & Lula (55 page)

Lula looked up at Sailor but said nothing.

“What you think, peanut?”

“I can't think yet, Sail. I need a minute.”

The telephone rang.

“I'll get it,” said Lula, who carried Pace's letter with her into the house and held it in one hand while she picked up the receiver with the other.

“Hello?”

“Lula? It's Dal.”

“Hi, Dal. How's Santos and Johnnie?”

“It was beautiful, Lula. I wish you coulda been there.”

“Been where?”

“At the weddin'. Your mama and Marcello Santos was married this mornin' at three A.M. by a priest at Sister Ralph's. Santos died at ten past three. He was a happy old gangster when his heart quit.”

“How about Johnnie?”

“That's the most beautiful part. Johnnie Farragut was the best man. He was strapped down in his bed and taped to a portable piece of equipment
moved over from Little Egypt Baptist. After the ceremony, they rushed him back to the hospital where he had a kidney transplant operation. Marietta and I got word from the doctor two hours ago that he thinks it was successful. Doctor said it was a miracle they were able to locate a healthy kidney so quick. Came in on a private jet from Memphis, he said.”

“And Mama? How's she holdin' up?”

“Woman's a rock, Lula. You be proud you're her daughter. She's with the mortuary people now, makin' arrangements for Santos's burial. She told me to let you know about ever'thin's gone on and tell you she'll call first chance after she's rested. How's things there?”

“Not quite spectacular as your news, Dal, but other than Beany lettin' the worms die while we was away, the big story is that Pace is gettin' married.”

“Well, glory be! Not to one of them Hindu women, I hope.”

“No, Dal, to a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, New York. Think she's kind of a doctor. He's movin' there from Nepal.”

“You want me to tell Marietta?”

“Better let me do it. Mama's got enough on her mind just now. Give her my and Sailor's love and same to Johnnie Farragut. Thanks for bein' there, Dal. Love you, too.”

“Been here all my life, Lula. Bye now.”

“Bye. Take care.”

After she'd hung up the phone, Lula read Pace's letter again, then put it down on the kitchen table. She looked out through the sliding glass doors into the backyard and saw Sailor standing next to the flooded worm bin smoking a Camel. A huge blue jay landed on the grass about ten feet away from Sailor. He flicked his cigarette at the bird and it screeched and took off.

“Ain't no way human bein's can control their own lives,” Lula said out loud, “and ain't no way they ever can stop tryin'.”

It suddenly occurred to Lula that she had forgotten to give Sailor a birthday present.

 

 

Maybe what makes life so terribly fatiguing is nothing other than the enormous effort we make for twenty years, forty years, and more, to be reasonable, to avoid being simply, profoundly ourselves, that is, vile, ghastly, absurd.

—Louis-Ferdinand Celine,
Voyage au Bout de la Nuit

“Lula, you won't believe this.”

“Won't believe what, Sail, honey?”

“Article in the
Times-Picayune
I'm readin', says thirty-seven percent of Americans believe in the devil.”

“Don't know why that should surprise you none, havin' knowed so many people as you have durin' your sixty-three years on the planet. Count sounds about right to me.”

“Peanut, all the trouble this world's seen since the beginnin' of time ain't been the doin' of no devil. It's been the result of two things, organized religion and greed.”

“What about sex?”

“Lust I lump with greed.”

Sailor Ripley was sitting in his cracked red leather armchair in the front room of the house in Metairie, Louisiana, that he and his wife, Lula Pace Fortune, had lived in for thirty years. Lula, who was three years younger than Sailor, lay on the ecru shag carpet doing stretching exercises. She was still slim-figured at sixty, thanks to what she liked to call “the vain woman's never-endin' struggle against stone-cold nature.” Sailor, pot-bellied, mostly bald and slightly arthritic, though otherwise in fair shape, had given up the fight long ago, and not unhappily. He was semi-retired from his vice-presidency of the Gator Gone Corporation, which was now the world's largest manufacturer and distributor of alligator and crocodile repellent. He went into the office in New Orleans two or three times a week to help out his friend Bob Lee Boyle, the company's founder and owner. Sailor read a great deal these days, mostly history and historical fiction, and the newspapers, which were still his greatest source of amusement. He was comfortable in his chair.

“Now here's one, peanut,” he said. “Police in Shreveport are mystified, it says, by a series of car bombin's been goin' on over a year. Sixteen people killed the same way and none of the victims seem to be connected. ‘Unrelated Murders Stump Cop Braintrust' is the headline.” Sailor laughed. “Don't take much, that's sure.”

Lula rolled over from her right side to her left and began a scissors motion with her right leg.

“If you was gonna blow up a car, Sail, how'd you do it? Wire a bomb to the ignition? Bet ol' Crazy Eyes Santos done that lotsa times.”

“He mighta did, but that's too obvious. Best way is to insert a BB in a gelatin capsule filled with cyanide and drop it in the gas tank. The weight of the BB'll cause it to sink to the bottom of the tank where the small amount of water settled there'll eat away at the capsule. Within a half hour the cyanide'll be released and ignite the gasoline. Boom! There you go.”

“Sailor, you're somethin' else, knowin' somethin' 'bout practically ever'thin' the way you do. Where'd you learn that precious piece of information?”

“Same place I picked up most of my practical knowledge, in the pen. Believe it was a fella named Party-Time Partagas, a Marielito, taught me that at Huntsville. He was an old professional killer had been in a Havana prison for years before Castro boatmailed all the Cuban criminals to Key West back in '81. Party was a senior citizen when I knew him. Musta died behind them Texas walls.”

“Boy, Sail, that seems so long ago you were inside. Almost like it never happened.”

“Wish it hadn't, peanut, but I come through.”

“Thank the Lord.”

“The Lord ain't always done such a exemplary job, honey. Listen to this: Out in California a guy claimed God told him he could drive his truck through cars, so he drove it into eighteen other vehicles on a freeway durin' the mornin' rush hour. Injured dozens, killed four and stopped traffic for half a day.”

Lula switched back to her right side and scissored with her left leg. “Sounds like more of the devil's doin' there, darlin', not the Lord's.” Sailor laughed. “Guess you're in the thirty-seven percent.”

“Old beliefs ain't easy to quit,” said Lula. “ 'Specially when there ain't nothin' better to replace 'em with.”

The telephone rang and Lula sprang up like a young girl to answer it.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Mama, it's Pace.”

“Don't nobody else call me Mama, son. I'd know it's you just by your breathin' anyway. Where you callin' from?”

“Hollywood. I got a job workin' for a director, the fella I told you I met two years ago over in Paris, where I went after me and Rhoda got divorced.”

“What exactly are you doin' for this director person?”

“Man's plannin' a new film. He's pretty famous for some horror pictures he made a while back. I'm his factotum.”

“His what?”

“Factotum, Mama. Means I'm his chief assistant, right-hand man. I do what's necessary.”

“Pace Roscoe Ripley, you're forty years old. Don't you think you oughta be settled in a real job by now?”

“This is a real job, Mama. And didn't I spend eight miserable years in the diamond business in New York with Gombowicz and Sons, or are you forgettin'?”

“That was Rhoda's family's business, son. I mean somethin' of your own.”

“Mama, I'm doin' what I want now, like when I was leadin' treks in Nepal. I'm learnin' about the film world.”

“Long as you're happy, I guess.”

“How're you and Daddy?”

“Oh, we're inchin' by at about the same rate your daddy's hairline's recedin'. His arthritis is caused him to lose some strength in the left arm lately, though. He can't lift nothin' heavier'n a egg with it, and we don't eat eggs 'cause of the cholesterol.”

“Reason I'm callin' now, Mama, is to tell you we might be headin' to New Orleans next week to do some research for a screenplay. Wanted to know if you and Daddy were gonna be around.”

“Where else we gonna be? Ain't been anyplace in four years but that time Sail insisted on takin' me to Maui the month after your Grandmama Marietta passed away.”

Lula's eyes watered at the thought of her mother.

“Mama, you cryin'?”

“No, I ain't. Just hard to believe Mama's gone, is all.”

“How's Auntie Dal?”

“Dalceda Delahoussaye got a iron constitution to match her outlook on life. She's hangin' in, far's I know. We spoke day before yesterday and Dal was organizin' the Bay St. Clement chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy in a protest against a court order bannin' smokin' in restaurants. Can you imagine that? In North Carolina, of all places. Auntie Dal is eighty-five years old and she's still suckin' in a pack a day. Mores, just like me, only I cut down to 'bout half a pack you'll be glad to know.”

“I am, Mama. Want to keep you around long as possible. Tell Daddy I'll be home soon.”

“You-all want to stay with us?”

“Thanks, Mama, but prob'ly we'll be at a hotel in N.O. That way we won't be disturbin' nobody.”

“You ain't no disturbance, Pace, you're our only child. And tell your director friend he's welcome here, too.”

“ 'Preciate it, Mama. Love you.”

“Love you, son. Take precautions, you know?”

Pace laughed. “I do. Bye, Mama.”

“Bye.”

“The boy all right?” asked Sailor, after Lula had hung up.

“Sounds dandy,” she said. “He's in L.A., learnin' the movie business. Says he may be here in a week or so with a man he's workin' for.”

“You don't sound like you're so happy about it. I mean, his bein' in L.A.”

“That Hollywood lifestyle's a long ways short of heaven, Sail, you know?”

Sailor laughed. “Peanut, what ain't?”

The Leopard Man's name was Philip Reãl. He was called the Leopard Man behind his back by others in the movie business because of the gothic nature of the films he'd directed and written during the past two decades. Val Lewton, a producer at RKO in the 1940s, had made a series of low-budget horror pictures, including one titled
The Leopard Man.
In a review of Phil Reãl's startling first feature,
Mumblemouth,
made when Reãl was twenty-three, the Los Angeles
Times
critic had compared the look and feel of the film—heavy shadows and deep suggestions of off-camera hideous goings-on—to Lewton's black-and-white B's that most film historians considered classics of the genre. At the time, it was construed as a compliment, but as the years wore on, and Reãl repeated himself with such efforts as
Death Comes Easy, Face of the Phantom, The Slow Torture and Sexual Re-education of Señor Rafferty
and others, culminating in the universally maligned
Dog Parts,
which featured a denouement wherein two Pit Bulls brutally dismember a pregnant Collie bitch and devour her fetus, Phil Reãl had become unbankable and persona non grata in Hollywood.

He had gone to Europe, living first for two years in France, then for three in Italy, where he directed and acted in a cheapie called
Il Verme
(“The Worm”), a soft-core pornographic version of the myth of Cadmus, before returning to L.A. Since his return, he had been living alone in a house in the Hollywood hills, working on an original screenplay called
The Cry of the Mute,
based on his own experiences in the industry.

Phil let the telephone ring three times before he picked up.

“Happy birthday, darlin'! How's it feel to be fat and fifty?”

“My birthday was yesterday, Flower, and I'm forty-eight. But thanks, anyway.”

“Sorry, sugar. Least you know I'm thinkin' about you.”

“I thought you were in Kenya, with Westphal.”

“Picture wrapped a month ago, Philly. Where you been keepin' yourself?”

“Right here by my lonesome. I stopped reading the trades and I do my own cooking.”

Flower laughed. “You still writin' on that
Moot
script, huh?”

“The word is
Mute,
Flower, and yes, I am. What do you have in the works?”

“Well, you do know me'n Jason got divorced?”

“No, I missed that.”

“Yeah, he's livin' with Rita Manoa-noa now, the top whore outta Tahiti that was brought over by Runt Gold to be in the remake of
Captain Cook's Revenge
that never got made? Final decree came through just after I got to Africa. Let me tell you, Philly, they don't call it the dark continent for nothin'. People there're the blackest I ever seen anywhere, includin' Alabama.”