Sailor & Lula (63 page)

 

Love you,

Lula

 

 

At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road.

—Iris Murdoch

 

I ain't goin' nowhere. I been where I'm goin'.

—Amos Milburn

My land as Mama used to say tomorrow will be my 80th birthday. Its almost eighteen years since Sailor was killed in a car wreck when that dumb boy in a Apache pickup cut in front of him from the shoulder of the road as Sail was headed on to the Huey P. Long Bridge. All these years and I still cant believe it. Now I walk in the imagination of my heart as spake Jeremiah. Might as well take the time I have left to me on the planet to set down best I can my last thoughts while Im able. Only one interested probably will be Sailors and my one and only child our son Pace Roscoe Ripley. Pace is 58 hard to believe. These days Pace is in NO rebuilding that city after Hurricane Katrina near about totaled it. He got himself a little construction outfit over in Metairie so I dont see him much as Id like. Not too long after Sailor passed I moved from New Orleans back to my home place of Bay St. Clement North Carolina to live with Mamas closest and dearest friend Dalceda Delahoussaye in her big old house had nobody in it but her. We got along great for about ten years then at 92 she fell off a kitchen stool while she was peeling an apple broke her hip and had to stay at the Hattie McDaniel Home for Women of a Certain Age. Dal lasted close on a year there before the Lord called her. I wonder did He hear her last words to me Lula there aint no beast so fierce as a proven woman. I been puzzling over this since Dal said it and I dont guess I got it figured out yet what she exactly meant. Oh well it wont be so very long before Ill get to ask her in person.

I will speak that I may be refreshed says Job. I suppose thats why Im writing now. Actually I always been interested in language or languages I should say. I looked it up in Paces old high school encyclopedia and found out there been nine chief language families in the history of the world. They are African Semitic Indo-European or Aryan Indo-Chinese Japanese Ural Austronesian North American Indian and South American Indian. Of course these are divided into many smaller groups the Semitic for instance has Phoenician Hebrew Arabic Aramaic and Ethiopic all languages of the Holy Bible. Im sure in the translating a lot was lost or changed which could be one good reason why so many people take Gods word different. I am only astonished that more than two persons at all get along anywhere any more it sure seems like they mostly dont. For my 80th I stayed in the house and didnt answer the telephone which rang once early in the morning and again late in the afternoon. I figure it was Pace calling from New Orleans but I just didnt feel like talking. Ill call him and tell him I survived thats if I do of course. I hate to say it but if it aint Sailor on the other end of the line I dont care if Im on it or not. I remember when he used to call me from prison after we got off Id cry like there was no tomorrow and now there really aint.

Soon after I left NO to live with Dal in Bay St. Clement I drove over to the spot where Sailor and I first declared to one another our absolute undying love. I parked my 1989 Mercury Nightcat next to the Cape Fear light house and took a walk. Just a closer walk with thee I was thinking thee being my own gone gone gone Sailor Ripley. It was in the Cape Fear Hotel that we had reconsummated our love once again after hed been released from the Pee Dee Correctional Facility following the incident resulted in the death of one Bob Ray Lemon. Sailor had only been defending my honor he never was nothing but correct so far as I was concerned so depositing him in Pee Dee was a waste of our time and the resources of the state of North Carolina being as there was nothing in him to correct in the first place. I was sad to see the old Cape Fear Hotel had been closed down. An elderly lady pruning her 'Bama Boy roses across the road told me it happened a couple or more years before things around there were sure more quiet now. I went around back of the hotel to the porch Sail and I sat out on watching the river flow into the Atlantic Ocean as I stood there the tears didnt stop for the longest time. Later I told Dal Id gone there she said honey your mama Marietta thought suffering kept a person from forming too pretty an opinion of their self is how she put it. Nobodys so special the Good Lord dont make them suffer some. How else the heart gets tough enough it dont break completely Dal said otherwise there wouldnt be one person left standing on the planet.

Last night I had a dream I was with some people coming from a party in the Quarter walking down Ursulines toward Decatur and here come Sailor in a white Cadillac convertible sitting next to some little blonde driving with the top down looked like Meg Ryan. He had all his hair so it was Sail in his younger days I dont know how old I was. Sailor and the girl sped on by some of us shouted Hey Sailor but he didnt notice or hear. I could hear music blasting from the Cadillac I didnt recognize classical Mozart or something. Must have been what she liked since I never knew Sailor Ripley to listen to anything other than rock or R and B. Thunder and lightning struck just then and rain started coming down hard. It was night but the sky was all lit up with zig zag streaks like vapor trails from jet planes and suddenly they formed together to spell out the words And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord. I woke up wet with sweat and called for Dal but then realized she was gone too. I got up and drank half a can of cold Ginger Ale it calmed me down. I went back to bed and read in an old paperback mystery Dal had called The Sailors Rendezvous isnt that strange. Takes place in France.

Beanys coming for a visit. Its been nearly 20 years since we actually set blue eyes on one another and being she and I been considering each other best friends for three times that long its a scandal. Beany Thorn never was no favorite of Mamas thats for sure on account of Beanys being so wild and more than most unpredictable. She married first to a man named Elmo Pleasant had a couple kids with him while at the same time he was knocking up highschool girls all over the states of Louisiana and Texas. She tossed his ass out for good just before Sailor got out of jail the first time. Beanys been living in Plain Dealing with her daughter Hedy Lamarr Music and her husband Delivery and their oldest boy Melton who Beany says aint never going to leave home it looks like hes 37 years old. Delivery hes a midget and so is Melton. Delivery and Hedy Lamarrs two other children Spike Jones and Tizane Naureen are normal persons and live in Baton Rouge. Beany says Delivery is a good man and good husband to her daughter who owns a produce stand up on the state highway. There was a time Beany got committed to the nut house at Oriental this was just before her divorce from Elmo. I visited her there and she was so furious at Elmo who had got his lawyer cousin Arafat De Forest the one later got sent up for having sexually molested his own son to file charges Beany abandoned their children for days at a time while she was taking pills that deranged her mind. It was all I could do in my power to keep her from sticking an icepick up Elmos right nostril to disable his motor ability while he was asleep after she got out. Beany got full custody of their kids despite her stretch at Oriental after she proved beyond a doubt Elmo had fathered at least two children by underage girls out of wedlock. Thats a terrible word I think wedlock makes marriage sound like a prison which it is I guess for some though was not for me and my Sailor. Beany arrives tomorrow on the three oclock train and I cant hardly wait.

“Hey, darlin', is that you?”

“What's become of me is what this is.”

“Stop it, Lula, you look terrific. It's me who's gone from bein' Miss Grape to Miss Raisin. Let me see if you still got a butt.”

Beany Thorn took hold of Lula and turned her around.

“Don't that beat hell, honey, you do!”

Lula giggled. “Hush, Beany, people'll hear.”

“Girl, they ought to see! You'd win the Miss Octogenarian of North Carolina contest, if they had one. Do they?”

“Stop it, baby, I'm awful glad to see you, too.”

The two women hugged. Beany Thorn picked up her one little fake alligator bag that her daddy, Deacon Don Thorn, had given her on her seventeenth birthday, two days before she'd been packed off to Oriental the first time.

As they began walking away from the train platform, Lula asked, “That all you brought?”

“For a person who might not make it past today, it's enough. As Saint Scarlett O'Hara said, ‘Tomorrow is another day, so let's worry about it when and if it gets here.' ”

Once they were settled in wicker rockers on the wraparound porch of Dal's house—Lula insisted on calling it that even after Mrs. Delahoussaye's passing—each with a chimney in hand filled with crushed ice, Bombay gin and a teaspoonful of sugar, the two lifelong friends appraised one another more carefully.

“Take a sip, Beany, it'll cool you down.”

Beany did, then said, “Lula, you're really more than a friend deserves—you remembered my fondness for Bombay.”

“Bought a bottle just because you were comin', though I have to say I don't mind it myself.”

“Happy days!” declared Beany, holding up her glass.

“Happy days!” Lula repeated.

“Look at us, Lula, two old biddies no use to nobody.”

“At least we ain't pollutin' the planet. Not too much, anyway. We don't drive SUVs or use tampons.”

“Lula, you ever think about sex?”

“My land, Beany! Thank the Good Lord, no.”

“I must confess, sweetie, I do. Not that I want it, necessarily. After all, I'm dry as a bone. But the thought of havin' a man's big old hairy arms around me comes on now and again. I even have orgasms in my dreams.”

Lula gagged on a large swallow of ice cold gin.

“Beany, after all these years you still terrify me.”

“Saw a young man in the Wal-Mart the other day—Tuesday, I guess it was—wearin' a sweatstained wifebeater made me tremble. I swear I coulda sucked on him like a Holloway All-Day. Don't tell me you don't have them thoughts even once in a while.”

“Beany, I don't want to talk about it. No, in fact. I told you.”

Beany ran her tongue over her lips, savoring the flavor of the Bombay gin and sugar, and said, “I got to keep alive in my mind the possibility that I got at least one more romantic episode comin' my way.”

“I heard the most terrible thing on the radio last night,” said Lula. “You know I can't sleep more than three or four hours, so I listen to the radio in the night.”

“I ain't slept more than four hours at a crack since I was twelve, Lula. Ever since I figured out I'd be takin' the Big Dirt Nap someday. Didn't want to miss nothin' before then.”

“Heard that the French fella was always explorin' the waters of the world—can't recall his name, somethin' like Crusoe only his first name weren't Robinson, he's dead now—was in a submarine at the bottom of Lake Tahoe in California, and discovered the bodies of a hundred or more Chinese men frozen intact. Turns out these men had been workin' a job out there in about the year 1900 and thought they were bein' taken to the other side of the lake after their job was finished.”

“Did the boat go down in a storm?”

“Uh uh. The terrible part is that the bosses didn't want to pay 'em, so they clubbed all them poor little Chinese men and boys and threw their bodies overboard. The lake is super deep and frozen at the bottom, which is why the corpses is all preserved.”

“Did the French guy fish out the bodies?”

“Crusoe said it was too horrible and people couldn't deal with it, so he left 'em there. Ain't that the most horrifyin' thing?”

Beany nodded and drank down the contents of her glass.

“Sounds like somethin' Elmo's partner Emilio Zarzoso mighta done. Remember him, Lula? The one who did twenty years for murderin' his wife with a poisonous viper he claimed was an exotic pet escaped from its cage?”

Lula finished off her drink and said, “Time for another sugar gin, Beany, don't you think?”

Beanys visit is raising my spirits at least I feel like I got more pep. Theres a word hardly heard much any more. Beany is always agitating about something now its our going off together on a oceanliner cruise to meet rich widowers. I asked her what on earth they would want with us old women and she answered me companionship. These are men cant do for themselves and get lonely not having anything much to do since they retired. They need a woman to get their motor started again. I cant get my own motor started most days so how Im supposed to get him going? Told Beany Id think on it but it seems to me theres a whole lot more widows around than widowers and a man like that needs a young woman to start him up. Beany she wont take no easy so best for me to do is just humor her. Middle of last night I heard noise in the kitchen so I got up went in and theres Beany hitting the gin this time cut with orange juice. She looked at me and said Terrors are turned upon me they pursue my soul as the wind. I recalled from my time with the Church of Reason Redemption and Resistance to Gods Detractors to say My bones are pierced in me in the night season and my sinews take no rest. Beany smiled a good smile she still got almost all her own teeth left and said I know baby I couldnt sleep neither.

Beany and Lula were seated outside in the garden of the Lion's Mouth Cafe fingerdipping sardines and Saltines in red salsa and drinking Cosmopolitans. The sun was just about down for the day.