The city hadn’t changed much since the last time Gus had seen it as a first lieutenant on leave. He’d taken two weeks off in celebration of orders sending him to Germany instead of some real shithole, or, worst of all, keeping him stateside. He thought the posting was great. Thought he’d see Europe on Uncle. So he went to the Big Easy for a week he could barely remember and then a week in the Big Apple he didn’t want to remember and after that he found out why nobody back at Fort Hood thought Germany was all that good of duty. After a year, Gus would’ve taken a transfer to Beirut. But he faced no such choice. He was a three-year man, signed up as payback for college tuition and after Germany he was back in the World, and career-building. Strange, all that.
Strange, too, the World. Gus put down his cup of coffee and looked out the window of the little café on Jackson Square at the busload of Italian tourists staring up at St. Louis Cathedral. As often as possible on Saturday mornings, he liked to venture out of the little shell of gentility that was his new workplace in the Garden District and mix it up with the Quarter. He felt it kind of an obligation of a permanent resident of the city. Actually he didn’t really come up with that, it was Bonita’s idea. She really was from here, born in Thibodaux but had lived Uptown near the zoo since she ran away as a teenager. One night Gus had been drunk and confronted an altogether innocent man from Indiana in The Hellhole, the sort-of biker bar where now Bonita worked, demanding a “user fee” on behalf of maintenance of city streets and sanitation. Bonita had Wally, the bouncer, throw Gus out amid the street drunks.
Some hours after that, after he had talked and apologized his way back into the bar and they had ended up at her apartment, she had delivered him her “strong feelings on the subject.” He couldn’t remember all of it but the gist was that the only way the Quarter could be saved from the tourists and drag queens and reprobates and wiseguys was for the “real people” who lived in New Orleans to go down there as often as possible.
“It’s empty space and anybody can fill it,” she told him.
“Like your pussy,” he replied. He remembered a terrible moment of silence.
“Just like that,” she said, and hit him so hard with the palm of her hand he bit his tongue and couldn’t drink anything hot or eat anything spicy for a week. It wasn’t a religious experience, but it was memorable. And so on Saturday mornings he did penance at La Coupole. He drank coffee and read the Times-Picayune and watched the space fill up around him except for the part that he himself occupied. Bonita approved deeply, though she never said as much.
After coffee he walked around. With autumn, the mornings had gotten cooler, though it could still warm up enough in the afternoon to soak your shirt down to your waistband. Gus strolled across the square, past the jugglers and Italians and the rows of people trying to sell paintings or jewelry or ices. He felt benevolent, in good spirits, and even paused to take the photo of a man and his wife who needed someone to hold the camera while they posed. That was good of him, he thought. Not only a Space Occupier of the city but also a trusted guardian of its elite. He was very aware of being a teacher.
As he walked through the busy streets, past the restaurants and hotels and curio shops and always-open bars, past Napoleon’s and then back toward Bourbon Street, past the oyster bar he favored, and aimlessly till he got to The Hellhole, he was filled with the kind of pride he’d observed among good German burghers. Responsibility. Sense of place. Sense of being at one with one’s surroundings. He was not being ironical. He really felt like he was where he wanted to be and happy about it. He was glad to Occupy Space. It was a good and ennobling act and he would always love Bonita Rae Doucet for pounding the appreciation into his flesh. He had been adrift a long time. A decade, at least. Now he was thirty-nine. He needed an Occupation.
As he walked along, before he knew it, Gus was on Rampart Street, at the edge of the Quarter, and staring up at the Mortuary Church, the one where all the plague people were taken over a century ago. Past the church was Storyville, where jazz was born but which for some time had been a soulless Project that gave you the willies even in daylight. The cemetery was just down the street, too. Gus stood on the corner for several minutes, watching the buses shuttle down Rampart enveloped in blue fumes, listening to the particles of conversation of the people walking behind him. He sighed. Then he walked across the boulevard against the traffic and went into the church.
It was cool and dark, like something half-remembered from another life. Whatever had distracted him back on the corner was gone. Nor was he feeling burgher-like anymore. Something else had calmed him. He took a place in one of the rear pews.
Almost no one was inside. Three young black women up front. A priest in robes walked along the front of the altar and exited a side door leading to the outside garden. Gus looked at the altar, and up at the statuary: St. Anne, the Virgin (for it was the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe), St. Jude, St. Expedite. He knew that was the one they called the voodoo saint but he didn’t know why. Over to the side of the altar was a large alcove filled with rows of burning candles. Gus wasn’t a Catholic but he made his way down the aisle and put his quarters in the rack and took two small white candles and placed them on the rack with the others and lit them.
Returning to a pew in front, he made a place next to a young black woman. She was whispering her prayer. He heard: “Please let Mama get better and be out of the hospital. And if Frank won’t help pay. . .” Gus turned his head away.
He didn’t pray, not knowing how, but he offered a blessing. One for himself and one for Bonita. Then he got another candle and lit it and just sort of expressed a wish for things in general to work out. Which was what had hit him back on the corner, probably. Some little prick of a lie. Some little zap of electrical juice that said the world as he saw it had a crack in it and even being an Occupying Space couldn’t fill it all up. But the zap passed fast, and with the candles and his offering he felt calm again.
Which, he thought later, is probably why he was able to see the vision. In calmness things can be revealed that hide from the mind of the perturbed soul. Amid the hundreds of calming, burning candles it had formed. It was quite clear. It was so plain he couldn’t believe none of the other people saw it. Or maybe they did and they thought, as did he, they’d be crazy to mention it.
What he saw was a black rectangle, starting the size of a cigar box and expanding to fill the entire wall. And in the blackness a lightning storm of speckles of white gave way to a movie screen. In the Mortuary Church, Gus Houston was watching “Star Trek.” But instead of whoever they were in electron space the actual characters became Gus’s friends, relatives, total strangers. Captain Kirk was a major he remembered from Germany and Mr. Spock was Bonita. They were trying to save a star from imploding by bombarding it with a special plasma particle bath. Twice, during the show, Gus glanced around to see if anyone was looking at him or if he was acting strangely or was in convulsions or anything medical but then he settled in for the matinee.
It was over in a few minutes. The screen just went black and imploded itself into the aura of one of the candles. When Gus rose to leave, forcing his eyes to look up from the floor where they wanted to hide, he bumped into pew after pew until he reached the back of the sanctuary. He turned back to see if the movie was on again but all he could see were the candles and the statues of the saints tending to the Virgin and the people at their places, beseeching their fortune.
He left the vestibule and walked back out into the late morning. The clouds had gone, and with them the cool, and he was sweating before he got a block. Gus considered himself a man of vision—who doesn’t?—but not Visions. Had he seen one? Was it a TV show? Was he delirious? No, he wasn’t that. He felt fine. It was his Saturday of Occupying Space. It was his day of personal definition in the city of eternal mystery. And in such frame of mind he proceeded on down Rampart Street, full of traffic and surrounded by decay, until he was at the gate of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.
It was empty, except for the vaults of the dead. Nobody much ever visited the grounds, partly because of the bad location. But even inside the cemetery’s stone walls, the tombs were protected from the eyes of the living by labyrinthine design. The walkways were so narrow and unmarked that the stonework of the dead rose around you like English hedgerows. They led to Marie Laveau.
He had developed the habit of visiting her from time to time, so that it wouldn’t just be tourists and weirdos who dropped by, and so he wasn’t really looking for anything. As usual, the base of the tomb was cluttered with half-burned candles, broken bottles, names etched in black ash. The chipped facade was covered with crosses of red brick dust, bits of balloons, dead flowers, coins stuck on with tape or wedged into cracks.
He stared a while, blankly, calmly. Zen and the art of voodoo. He didn’t know why he kept watching. Then he realized he was waiting for the TV to come on. Then he thought he’d better leave. He turned to go, but he went the wrong way and had to make his way past vaults and statues of beauty and audacity that must have seemed right two hundred years earlier to the polyglot crew of misfits and geniuses who fed the city and brought it to life.
Now it all seemed over the top. Gus didn’t want to be there then, in that moment, like some character in a French novel about to be driven mad by the sun and thus inspired to kill someone for no good reason. Not that you needed to be French or sunburnt for that. One time in Frankfurt Gus saw a gang of German kids beat a Turk to death for no reason and he’d had to run for his own life through the bar district to avoid the same fate. And now he didn’t want to be in a cemetery. And he was quite hot, himself.
Outside among the living he crossed back over Rampart to Toulouse. He stopped in a café with awnings over the sidewalk, took a table, and ordered an iced tea. Just like a tourist would have, except he was not one and that was still the point.
She sees the face of Jesus but it’s in a million dots, like something there and not there. She has seen it before but when she comes back into this world she can’t put it together. Just the memory of the memory of it. It doesn’t matter. She remembers that she was there and he was there and even if she can never describe his face she feels the vision all over her.
“Reverend? Reverend Youngblood?”
Corina comes back to the world. Arletta is staring at her across the small desk in the reading room. Although the room itself is filled with candles and the floor along the wall next to the outside door is covered with altars to the spirits, and though the room smells of the blood and flesh upon the altars, the desk is clean and simple. Just a white lace covering, a bowl of clean water, an oversized red-cloth Bible whose edges are darkened with the ceaseless labor of Corina’s fingers over the years. Arletta is scared. She asks again, “Reverend? You all right?”
The dots of Jesus dissolve. Corina’s black eyes regain focus. Arletta smiles nervously, but Corina doesn’t, for she has seen into Arletta’s being, just as Arletta knows she can. That is why she has taken the bus up from Elysian Fields to see the voodoo preacher lady, because she is a two-headed woman who can see into the past and the future—she has the second sight.
“When the last time you been with Charles?”
Arletta winces. She’s been telling Corina six months, but she knows Corina knows it was so recent she still feels warm in her cat. She knows what happens when you lie to the two-headed preacher.
“You come in here asking for help getting that man back,” Corina says. “But now you also saying you got pain in your side?” Her voice shifts to a mocking tone.
Arletta looks down at the water bowl.
“You think I’m stupid? You think the Spirits don’t see you trying to make everybody think you not what you are?”
Arletta can barely breathe, let alone speak.
“You having a baby, girl. Only reason you want him back, since he ain’t even left, is to get him in with you and make him think he the father. You been sleeping with him all along.”
Arletta starts to protest but is cut short.
“Don’t you lie to me. Don’t you dare.”
Arletta looks the preacher in the eyes. “It’s true,” she says. “I’m sorry, Reverend.”
“More than that to be sorry about. He ain’t the father, is he?”
It takes a few moments, but Arletta says, “No.”
“And you want me to feed the spirits so he stay with you and think he the father?”
“Yes.”
“Huh!” Corina snorts, moving back from the table. Her eyes close. Her head drops back. Whatever she sees, it isn’t Jesus. Her eyes open again. “Spirit say they can help you but they say if you ask to trick someone you might end up tricking yourself. Spirit say they can do evil well as they can do good but if you poke into the evil side you get ready for whatever happen.”
Arletta’s jaw is tight and her eyes can’t stop looking at the preacher lady’s face, as though it were a fire and you just have to keep watching the flames. Then she begins to cry.
“I just don’t know what to do.”
“I say you got that right.”
“I don’t have no money to raise no child by myself.”
“You a child yourself,” Corina says, without sympathy.
Arletta wipes her eyes. “But Mama say you could help me.”
“Mama don’t know no santos.”
“All I wanted was for you to get Charles to stay—”
“And think you telling the truth when you say that his baby. Girl, you know who the daddy even is?”
Arletta nods. “It Lucius’ baby.”
“Where he?”
Arletta shrugs. “I think he went to Chicago. He don’t even know about this.”
“Who you love?”
Arletta cocks her head like a puppy. “Love?”
“I say, ‘Which one of those boys you love?’”
“Charles, I guess. I don’t know. Neither that much but Charles got a job at Sears and I know he like to be the daddy. He mostly good. Not wild and stupid like Lucius.”
Corina sighs and looks at Arletta. It isn’t like this is the first one of these she’s heard. And she has a dilemma. The Spirit told her Arletta was pregnant and lying about it, but it also told her it was a toss-up whether Charles would really stay. And she wants to tell Arletta that, but Arletta’s mama is in the church and Corina has to think about giving the child the kind of advice that her mama didn’t seem to have done.
She closes her eyes again and thinks, praying to Jesus and the spirits, and when she has it clear in mind she takes Arletta’s hand and tells her she’ll do what she can. She tells the girl to go buy a crab at the market and bring it back and they’ll make a plate for Yemonja. She is a great magic woman, Corina explains—she can at least tip the scales in Arletta’s favor. It will cost another forty dollars but Corina doesn’t feel there is any option. They pray for the baby and for Arletta.
Corina walks the girl to the front of the shop, around the display counter filled with candles and herbs, and sees her out the door. Across the street, Elroy Delgado sits in his Nissan. It looks as if he is studying some kind of paperwork. He smiles at Corina, but if he hopes to make light of it he’s all wrong, and the fury in her returned scowl virtually cranks up the Japanese engine all by itself and drives the car away like a fresh-whipped hound.
Her eyes followed the car all the way down Beauchamp Avenue, as far as Canal, to be sure it has left. Just before she goes back inside the botanica, her vision falls upon a lone white man ambling up sidewalks in front of the row houses as though he hadn’t a care in the world or a lick of sense and for a moment she wonders what that might feel like.
Gus had gotten lost in the morning. He’d walked along the edge of the Quarter till he got to Canal and crossed over into downtown and walked some more and then turned lake side, up past Tulane Medical and found himself heading through narrow streets lined by shingled houses with porch stoops leading up to the front door like you’d see in Brooklyn or the Bronx. Most of the stoops were occupied. Old women, hair in braids, sat in the sun talking to their neighbors, and that was sweet, but then there were stoops full of young black men who often looked at Gus with what certainly appeared to be unkind intentions.
Gus detoured away a block. His general response to glances filled with unkind intentions was to move past them as quickly as possible, because like as not the unkindness was not without motive and also because in the city you learn the best way to survive is to stay out of survival situations. He had discovered in Germany and elsewhere it didn’t really matter what Individual A might have in his heart, or in the coloration of his skin, if he was in the place where Individual A-type people were generally unappreciated. In those places people were beaten and killed. The pure of heart bled and groaned same as the vile and evil.
That was a lesson of great importance to Gus. It cut through a lot of philosophical conundrums about reality and illusion, mind and matter, and lesser fare like “visualizing peace.” You could visualize the hell out of things and if you were on a street corner in the SachenStrasse at one a.m. and some Nazi-boys came along and had a different vision it really all came down to if your face was in the place of their boot at the wrong moment. Occupied Space went farther than Bonita and New Orleans. It was a world organizing principle.
“Look out, man!”
Gus reacted quickly enough to pull his leg back just as the blue Nissan flew past.
“Shit, you see that fool? He musta been doin’ fifty. On this street full of kids. Shit, you can’t even drive both lanes without sideswipin’ somethin’.”
Shaking slightly, Gus looked across the street. One of the burly teenagers he had figured to be menacing was shaking his head, still watching the car make its way through the narrow maze of parked cars and fast-moving pedestrians. Gus and the teenager looked at each other like strangers do when some idiot driver has done something beyond the pale. A moment of camaraderie based on mutual judgment. Actually very hypocritical but deeply satisfying.
“Thanks,” Gus called out. “I never saw him.”
“He be comin’ through here like that again I’m gonna find out who he is.” The boy turned to look at the cross street. He shook his head. “My sister right over there on her bike.”
“Takes all kinds.” Gus thought about adding something else but the boy seemed to be getting angrier by the second. So he stayed on his side of the street and instead of crossing headed further up the block. The teenager lingered on the corner, talking to himself, and then, peeling off his shirt, he turned and walked slowly away in the direction of his sister.
Gus was hot, too. He thought if he kept going he’d come to a bigger street and find a Pac ’n Sak or something to get a root beer. Then he’d better get back home because Bonita would be awake before long and he wanted to see her before she went back to The Hellhole for the evening.
After three blocks he didn’t see any Pac ’n Saks but he saw a couple of kids in baggy shorts and striped T-shirts coming out of a little store on a corner carrying cans of Shasta. When he got closer he could see a stenciled wooden sign hanging from an extended iron pole. It read:
St. Jude Lamb of Light Botanica
—Religious Supplies—
Fair enough. Gus had never heard of a botanica before he moved to New Orleans but now he thought of them as weird versions of the tobacconist shops he’d seen on street corners in London and Europe. The signs out front said they sold tobacco, but you could get almost anything you wanted in most of them.
It was the same with botanicas. In the Quarter, he’d even bought coffee and a package of Little Debbie’s powdered sugar donuts from a botanica hosting an “Occult Sidewalk Special” of books, beads and assorted merchandise of the trade. One botanica with some Spanish name Gus couldn’t remember was run by a white guy, a Cuban, maybe—Gus hadn’t paid that much attention.
As he pushed open the dark-tinted glass front door at the Lamb of Light, he reached into his pocket to see if he had enough change. He’d drink a Mr. Pibb, he was so thirsty. The air-conditioner was full on. The cold air hit the sweat on his forehead and chest so fast he felt himself tremble. But the slim, toothsome woman talking on the phone on the other side of the entry counter didn’t seem to notice. When she finally looked up at him it was with neither surprise nor interest, except that her eyes held his about a beat longer than Gus expected.