STRANGE VOYAGE
“This situation brings back some bad memories,” said Sailor, “about the time Pace was kidnapped.”
Sailor, Phil and Pace were sitting in the Florida room of the Ripley home in Metairie, drinking Jameson’s straight from shot glasses and waiting for the telephone to ring.
“You’ve never mentioned that episode, Pace,” said Phil. “What happened?”
“I was ten years old,” Pace said, “and a crazy teenaged boy grabbed me while I was playin’ in Audubon Park. He hid me in his room in a boardin’ house located in a bad part of New Orleans, told me how he’d been searchin’ for the perfect friend, which he hoped I’d be, but I wasn’t, of course. He’d murdered his father and brother and cut ’em up in a hundred pieces, then buried their parts on the family farm in Evangeline Parish. I escaped, though.”
“Jesus,” said Phil, “how’d you get away?”
“Elmer—that was his name, Elmer Désespéré—went out one night after lockin’ me in a closet, so I made a fuss, kicked at the door and stomped around, until the landlady, I guess she was, came in and let me out. I hightailed it straight down the stairs and into the street, found a cop and that was the end of the ordeal.”
“What happened to this Elmer?”
“Street gang chewed him up,” said Sailor. “He wandered into the wrong neighborhood and he got took apart. Tell you, though, the up side to Pace’s abduction was that it brought me’n Lula back together.”
“How so?” asked Phil.
“I’d done some hard time, ten years to be exact, for armed robbery, durin’ the commission of which a man was killed. Pace was born while I was inside, and when I got out things was kinda overwhelmin’ for me’n his mama. Lula never did come to visit me durin’ my stretch, which didn’t much please me, though she did write a lot and send photos of her and Pace.”
“I didn’t know this, Daddy,” Pace said. “I mean, that Mama never once came to see you.”
Sailor nodded. “It weren’t all her fault, though. See, I was put away at the prison in Huntsville, Texas, and Lula and Pace were in North Carolina, with her mama, Marietta. Marietta never did think real highly of me, and due to the way I was actin’ in them days I can’t say how I could blame her. I’d done a couple years before that at a work camp in North Carolina for manslaughter, so Marietta pretty much had me pegged as a worthless badass from the get-go.”
“But you got nailed unfairly, Daddy, what Mama’s always said. You were defendin’ her in a bar and the man you hit banged his head on a table or somethin’ and died. Man name of Lemon, right?”
“Bob Ray Lemon, right. Anyway, Lula’s mama was dead set against her takin’ up again with me when I got out, but Lula was eighteen by then and there weren’t nothin’ really legal Marietta could do about it, though she tried. After my release, Lula met me at the gate and we took off for California, though of course we didn’t get more’n half that far. Marietta hired a private detective friend of hers to track us down, but by the time he did I’d pulled the dumb stunt in West Texas that subtracted a decade of my freedom. Marietta pretty much kept Lula prisoner for a while, which weren’t too difficult for her to do, seein’s how Lula was pregnant at first, and then with Pace bein’ an infant it weren’t so easy for Lula to travel. After Pace was growed some I guess it was just too hard for Lula to face me behind bars.”
“This is a wild story, Sailor,” said Phil. “How did Pace’s bein’ kidnapped figure in your getting back together with Lula?”
“I went to see Lula and Pace soon as I got out, of course, but like I said, we couldn’t neither of us handle it. There was too much hard feelin’s and pain and all on both sides, though I didn’t blame nobody but myself for what’d happened. I took off and went to Mississippi for six months, worked in a lumberyard by Hattiesburg, but I couldn’t stop thinkin’ about Pace here, and Lula, and how we should all be together. I was in my thirties by then and was finally beginnin’ to understand a bit about how the world really works and what a man’s gotta do to be a man and find his way. It’s one real strange voyage.”
“I remember meetin’ you, Daddy, with Mama, right after you got out. You just walked away from us.”
“I couldn’t help myself, Pace. I didn’t know what else to do. You didn’t know me, weren’t used to havin’ me around, and I thought maybe you’d be better off without me. I was dead wrong, naturally, and it was just luck that brought me and Lula in contact again. I quit the lumberyard job and took a bus to New Orleans. I got a newspaper to look for a job and there was the article about Pace bein’ abducted. Lula had come to N.O. with him to visit her childhood friend, Beany Thorn, whose husband, Bob Lee Boyle, later hired me to work for his company, Gator Gone, which is now the world’s largest manufacturer of crocodile and alligator repellent. Wound up workin’ for Bob Lee for thirty-ought years.”
“So you and Lula found each other again and lived happily ever after,” Phil said.
“Couldn’ta guessed you was from Hollywood, Phil,” said Sailor. “There been a few detours along the way but we been able to hold our own.”
“Quite a romance, Sailor. Like Romeo and Juliet only nobody dies.”
“It ain’t over, Phil,” Sailor said, and swallowed two fingers of Irish whisky. “Lula always used to say the world is wild at heart and weird on top, and sometimes it’s tough stayin’ out of the way of the weirdness. Kinda like a tornado, you never know where it’ll set down or what’ll be left in place after it blows through.”
“We’ll get Mama home safe, Daddy,” said Pace.
“You’ll pardon me for thinkin’ out loud, Sailor,” said Phil, “especially at a time of crisis like this, but I think there’s a marvelous story here that would make a great film. It’s a true romance, Sailor, and there aren’t many of those. I came down here to research an incident that took place back in 1957. A black GI shot and killed a prominent white businessman during Mardi Gras and wound up on death row for twenty-five years. Through the efforts of a young white attorney who had never even tried a case, it was finally proven that the victim had provoked the shooting. Witnesses had been suppressed, paid off, and the black man spent more than half of his life in prison for defending himself. The attorney got him out.”
“Sorta like you, Daddy, defendin’ Mama against Bob Ray Lemon.”
“Not quite, son, but maybe if I’d been black they woulda tried to fry me, too. Sounds like a good one, Phil. And you got yourself a happy endin’.”
“It’s been done before,” Phil said, “which doesn’t mean the picture shouldn’t be made, but you and Lula have something special, Sailor, and I think the world should know about it.”
Sailor smiled slightly. “ ’Preciate your sayin’ that, Phil. You want to take a run at it, go ahead. Pace here can help you out on the details. You’ll forgive me, though, I don’t seem too enthusiastic at the moment, seein’s how I’m mostly concerned with gettin’ my wife back from the Lord knows who’s got her.”
Phil poured himself a fresh shot of whisky and took a sip. Flower Reynolds would be perfect for Lula, he thought. That snake Clark Westphal could be a problem, though. He might try to influence Flower against working with him. A movie about the Romeo and Juliet of the Deep South could do it, thought Phil, it could put Philip Reãl back on top. What was it Sailor said Lula used to say? The world is wild at heart and weird on top, that’s it. Wild at Heart would be a great title, all right. Phil nodded to himself as he sipped the Jameson’s. Or maybe just Strange Voyage. His private title, though, would be Revenge of the Leopard Man. It would pave the way for him to make Cry of the Mute. Even Arnie Pope, Phil knew, if he was still at Five Star by that time, would be begging to pay for it.