POPPY AND PERDITA
Carmine “Poppy” Papavero put his lime green seer-sucker-jacketed right arm around Juju Taylor’s D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince tee-shirted shoulders and smiled.
“You know, Juju, you keep doin’ good like this, I’m gonna have to say somethin’ nice about you to Mr. Santos.”
“It definitely be a pleasure workin’ for you, Mr. Papavero. Tell Mr. Santos can’t nobody cover like Juju’s Jungle Lovers. We handle however much shit you want. Got Lovers be in Alabama, too, you want to spread it out.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. Meanwhile, you take care of Mississippi north of the Gulf and we’ll see how it goes. What’s this I hear about an L.A. gang moving in?”
“They show up here we be all over ’em like smoke on links.”
Poppy patted Juju on the back, then squeezed his thick neck.
“Be seeing you soon, Juju.”
Poppy walked out of the gang’s safehouse and saw Perdita Durango leaning against the blue Beamer. He went over and kissed her forehead, which was on a level with his chin. Poppy went six-three and a hard two-forty. Perdita had never had a steady his size before. Poppy punished her during their lovemaking but never to the point where it became painful. She’d learned to enjoy the weight.
Perdita had met Poppy at Johnny Black’s Black & Blue Club in Gulfport, where she’d gone with an acquaintance named Dio Bolivar, a local liquor salesman and small-time hoodlum with a pencil-thin mustache and flashy clothes. Poppy had come over to their table and asked what a beautiful lady like her was doing in a low-rent joint with an unsuccessful pimp. Dio heard this and jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, ready to duke until he saw who’d said it.
“Oh, good evenin’, Mr. Papavero,” Bolivar said, having recognized Crazy Eyes Santos’s chief enforcer on the Gulf Coast. Poppy led her away, and that was the last Perdita ever saw of Dio Bolivar.
She had told Poppy about her childhood in Corpus Christi; how her sister, Juana, had been murdered by her husband, Tony, who had also murdered both of his and Juana’s daughters before shooting himself, but not much else. She didn’t want him to know about the jams she’d been in in Texas and Mexico and California. It was a good idea, Perdita thought, to start fresh, keep her mouth shut and let this big man pay the bills. He didn’t seem to mind so long as she kept herself pretty and available. It wasn’t hard work and Papavero wasn’t nearly as moody as most of the other guys she’d known. Besides, Perdita felt grown up with Poppy, respectable, like a regular woman rather than a piece of Tex-Mex trash. She decided that this was a gig worth holding on to.
“These Jungle guys are turning out better than I thought,” Poppy said to Perdita as he drove them away. “They force people to buy shit even if they’re not users, just to stay healthy. Not even Santos thought of that!”
Perdita sat in the passenger seat with her body turned toward Poppy, making sure that her tight black skirt rode halfway up her thighs. Poppy looked over at her and stroked her legs with his hairy right hand.
“You really do please me, Perdita,” he said. “I never told you, but I was married once. It didn’t last too long, about five years. It ended, let’s see now, when I was thirty, fifteen years ago. Her name was Dolores, but everybody called her Dolly. She worked in the Maison Blanche on Canal Street when I met her, in the women’s apparel department. I went there to buy a birthday present for another girl. I saw Dolly and forgot all about the girl. She had big tits, a big nose and a flat ass. There was something about her, though, that got me, aside from her tits. Dolly had a way of looking at you that made you think she knew all about you, who you really were deep inside. It sounds dumb, I know, but if you’d met her you’d understand.”
“It don’t sound dumb. I’ve known people like that. One guy, especially, who was a kind of strange, religious person. He’s dead now.”
“Yeah? You have? Well, Dolly’s the only one I’ve ever known had that look, like she knew every rotten or good thing you’d ever done in your entire life. It was spooky.”
“So what happened to her and you?”
“I married her, like I said. It was going along good enough, I guess, but she didn’t like not knowing what I did every day, where I went, and that sometimes I was out until five or six in the morning or took off without telling her for a few days.”
Poppy shook his head, remembering.
“No, she didn’t like what I was doing. Dolly knew I was moving up in the organization, bringing home more money, which was okay because I’d made her quit her job at the Maison Blanche. But then she wanted a child and no matter what we did, she couldn’t get pregnant. We went to a couple of doctors and they both said it was because of some defect she had in her system, and there was no way to correct it. They suggested we adopt, which Dolly didn’t want to do. I wouldn’t have minded. There’s plenty of orphans need homes and that way she could have a kid, but for some reason she didn’t want one unless it was her own. Her parents and grandparents were all dead, she didn’t have any family but me.”
“What color hair did she have?” asked Perdita, lighting up a Marlboro.
“Kind of reddish-blond. Her mother was Polish, she told me, and her father was Czech. She kept pictures of them on the bedroom dresser. I came home one night late, about four A.M., from the Egyptian Sho-Bar on Napoleon Avenue that I was running then, and Dolly wasn’t there. At first I thought maybe she’d gone down to the all-night pharmacy on Esplanade for something, but when she wasn’t back by five I knew that wasn’t it. I looked at the dresser, and the pictures of her parents were gone. Dolly walked out on me. No note, no phone call, nothing. I was upset at first, of course, but after a week I didn’t care. I just hoped she was happier wherever she was, and I went on with my life.”
Perdita didn’t say anything as Poppy sped them south on 59 toward New Orleans. They passed a Greyhound and Perdita thought how much better it was to be traveling in a new BMW than on a bus. She lowered the tinted window a crack and tossed out her cigarette butt. Sailor Ripley saw the blue car zoom by and a cigarette fly out and bounce off the side of the bus just below where he was sitting.
“What do you think, Perdita?” asked Poppy. “Is that a sad story or not?”
“Heard lots sadder,” she said.
Poppy Papavero laughed and grabbed her left thigh.
“So have I, pussycat. So have I.”