Gods Go Begging (46 page)

He smiled proudly toward Calvin.

“No one can say that Little Reggie can’t do the nasty.”

Persephone looked painfully toward Mai. There was no judgment to be found in her face. The boy with the gun turned to his friend who was still standing in the doorway. “Get in here, Calvin! Get the fuck in here, goddamn it!”

Calvin stepped inside, closing the door behind him. He looked at the gun, then looked at beautiful Mai. His dark eyes were filled with apology and fear.

“I just wants a little somethin’ for all my troubles,” said Little Reggie with a cold, leering smile, “and I know exactly how I wants to get paid.” He turned toward Calvin and pointed toward the bedroom in back.

“That’s where I’m gonna screw the bitch, right back there.”

“I’m sorry I ever laid eyes on you, Reggie, or whatever your name is,” said Persephone in an angry, seething monotone. “Be happy with what you got, boy. You got a moment of weakness, that’s all. Dear Lord, I should have never let you touch me or kiss me. But it’s been so long.” She looked into Mai’s eyes again as her voice trailed off into mute contrition.

“Now, you got it all wrong, lady,” shouted Reggie. “It was me bein’ generous. It’s me who’s gonna give you a mercy fuck—and put you out of your widow misery.”

He stepped forward and put his left hand on Persephone’s breast, but she brushed it away and stepped back.

“It was me offering to give you a mercy fuck,” screamed Little Reggie angrily. “I’m fixing to give you the real deal instead of one of them battery vibrators.” He placed his hand over his crotch as he spoke. “The real deal beat a dyke bitch’s tongue any old day.” He leered at Mai as he spoke. “Take a real man to turn a lesbian around. Now give me what I want! Don’t you know your husband ain’t never comin’ back?”

“I’m calling the police,” said Persephone. She turned to walk toward the back room. At that instant Little Reggie swung the nine-millimeter Glock, slamming the metal muzzle savagely into the side of Persephone’s head. As her friend fell heavily to the ground, Mai began to scream but stopped suddenly as the dark automatic pistol was leveled at her face.

“Chink bitch, get the fuck into that refrigerator!” Reggie shrieked as he motioned with the gun toward the new Sub-Zero. Sweat was pouring from Reggie’s face and neck. His shirt was stained with it. It was not the sweat of exertion, but the wet, oily gleam of excitement. Calvin winced at the sheer coldness and cruelty in his friend’s face and voice. He had seen it before, and the sight of it now sent waves of desperation through him. Mai opened the door and climbed in.

“Get that rope over there and tie it shut,” Reggie shouted at Calvin, who did as he was told. As Calvin closed the heavy door on the refrigerator, he saw Mai making the sign of the cross and moving her lips in silence. He left the door slightly ajar so that she would have air, then he tied the door handles together using a slip knot. He hoped that Mai had seen the fear in his face. He hoped that she would stay put.

“Please don’t move,” he whispered desperately into the darkness of the refrigerator.

A sweating, tearful Calvin watched as Little Reggie smashed out the lights in the front room, then dragged Persephone’s limp body by the arm into the small bedroom. Reggie pulled her onto the bed, then turned toward Calvin and smiled a toothy, carnivorous smile as he unzipped his pants. His other hand had snaked down the front of Persephone’s dress and was wriggling within her brassiere. As he worked, the low light of a bedside lamp filled Reggie’s face with haggard, ghostly shadows.

“You can have some of this when I’m done.” Reggie laughed in a brutish, guttural voice. “You earned it, my man. You a virgin, ain’t you? Now that I think of it, if you don’t fuck her after I’m done, I’ll shoot you; I’ll cap your sorry ass right here.”

Suddenly a thought struck Reggie, causing him to stand silently for a moment, the gun in his hand lowered.

“Is you a virgin, Calvin? You a cherry, ain’t you? You ain’t touched my mama? You see my mama naked, ain’t you? You dead if you seen my mama.”

Calvin shook his head, no. Suddenly the smile returned to Reggie’s face.

“I know you dig the gook bitch. Go ahead, go get her. It’s easy—just do what she don’t want you to do. That’s how I learned. We partners, ain’t we? Sure, we be partners.”

Calvin turned away angrily and walked to the front door. His face was a grid map of agony and frustration. As he did so, he heard the sound of two sharp impacts and of glass breaking and falling to the floor. Little Reggie had smashed both of the cherished framed photographs with his gun. Reggie despised photographs; his mother’s home was filled with them. In the darkness, Reggie shouted out to Calvin to be on the lookout for cops.

Suddenly Calvin saw Persephone running wide-eyed through the kitchen, her panties around her right ankle. She was breathing hard and sobbing loudly. There were tears and mascara streaming down her face. Calvin watched her run through the front door and out into the street. Ten seconds later he watched as a cursing Little Reggie came hopping through the kitchen, zipping up his pants while holding a shoe in his left hand and the Glock in his right.

Persephone ran across the street in her bare feet. Her panties fell off as she ran and were blown beneath a car on the south side of Twentieth. When she reached the pay phone across the street, she lifted the receiver and began to dial 911.

Jesse placed his hand on Carolina’s knee. He leaned toward her until their faces were just six inches apart. He noticed that Carolina’s large eyes were even larger now. She was shivering. Jesse slowly began to realize how chilling these words could be to someone who had led a quiet and normal life. For an instant he considered stopping, but that was impossible now.

“At precisely the same instant in time, nearly thirty years before, on that ravaged hill in Vietnam, the Creole staff sergeant keyed the radio for his final call. He contacted Strongarm just as his tearful wife in San Francisco heard the dispassionate voice of the emergency operator. Back in the Amazon Luncheonette, Mai Adrong slipped out of the refrigerator, stepped past Biscuit Boy, and began to run toward her friend at the exact same time that her husband, Trin Adrong, began his run up the hill near Laos—a lifetime before. She approached Persephone just as the terrible shots rang out, both from Reggie’s Glock and from the rifle of a North Vietnamese soldier providing cover fire for her husband. Hearing both shots, she began screaming in the street, her mouth a perfect resonator for her husband’s last words:
‘TienLan! Tien Lan! Tien Lan!
’

“ ‘Forward, comrades!’ She screamed the chilling NVA battle cry.
‘Tien Lan!’
When Mai reached the body of her dying friend—her dying sister—she flung herself forward to protect her with her own unmarked body. Persephone Flyer, in turn, threw her weakening arms around her friend and, sobbing and sighing, locked her lovely fingers together. In the same microsecond—in the same place—years before, the widower Trin Adrong threw himself headlong into the Salon des Refuses, into the outstretched, embracing arms of the American sergeant.”

Jesse’s gaze moved slowly across Carolina’s lovely face. Her eyes were filled with tears.

“As with all deaths hand to hand, for an instant in time the two men embraced and could have been mistaken for lovers. Face to face, their sweat and fear mixed with the molecules of charged air between their bodies. For a slice of a second they saw each other perfectly, they saw the face of the enemy as if in a mirror.

“For the thinnest slice of a confusing, then crystalline moment, one soldier caught a sullen glimpse of Persephone and the other saw poor Mai. In the street on Potrero Hill, the women, clutching each other, envisioned the image of their own husbands in the other’s dimming eyes. In the last instant before the satchel charge drove his atoms against those of the container box, the sergeant mouthed a single word into the radio handset.”

Jesse’s eyes rested on his own left hand. Carolina had placed her small hand upon his.

“Persephone spoke a single word into the phone before the bullet slammed savagely into her skull and cut through her brain, through her memories, through a hundred recipes.

“ ‘Amos,’ she moaned, just as death began in her. Her lips had formed their most precious word.

“ ‘Persephone,’ he grunted just as death began in him, just as all those nights of work performed by his parents in their marriage bed disintegrated into a fine, wet dust. He spoke her name as Trin’s glasses were blown from a faceless head, as his Bible flew and burned—the scrap of paper in the Creole’s jacket rising on the hot concussive wind, then settling into the Bible, somewhere in the book of Ruth.”

Jesse paused, gathering himself and forming the next few sen tences in his mind. Somehow they came easily, effortlessly. Carolina remained silent.

“Weeks later, a platoon of NVA would revisit the abandoned hill to reclaim their dead. A young soldier would find the glasses, the Chinese wristwatch, and the Catholic Bible in Vietnamese, and carefully close the book on an unreadable text; on a cryptogram—Persephone’s name and address in San Francisco, our city.

“Sergeant Flyer uttered ‘Persephone’ just as the dog tag and chain around his neck passed through him as though he were entirely without substance, as though the space between his atoms had increased a billionfold.”

Jesse reached into his pocket and pulled out a dog tag. He held it up for Carolina to see. She read the name of Amos Flyer.

“As he died, the chain and this dog tag pierced the metal container wall to hang undamaged on the other side—as though something, some small thing in all of the wars between humans, between men and women, must remain undamaged. In the midst of flames they each spoke the other’s name, fully wedded at last.”

Jesse stopped speaking for a moment. The effort to tell the story in its entirety was taking its toll.

“In the same instant that the first gunshot rang out, Mai came running from the Amazon Luncheonette, her bare feet bleeding and leaves of lemon grass streaming from her pocket. She was screaming Persephone’s name and some strange words over and over again into the night air. Though Reggie could not understand them, the words frightened him. They were words of immovable purpose moving.

“Turning away from Persephone’s body, Little Reggie saw Mai approaching and saw curious faces beginning to appear in the lighted windows of Twentieth Street. Shades were lifting, curtains were separating. Witnesses were watching. He didn’t hide his face; for some reason he wanted to be seen. He wanted identifications to be made. Closing his left eye Little Reggie began tracking Mai with the sights of the nine-millimeter, refusing to pull the trigger until the shot was clear and certain.

“When the small woman fell onto the body of her dying friend, when the embrace was perfect, he squeezed oft a single round. It would be enough. Reggie smiled to himself. Without knowing it, he began laughing out loud. This was even better than rape. This was better than love. Every witness heard the name ‘Calvin’ echoing through the streets and dove for cover as Little Reggie ran from window to window, pointing the gun as a grim warning.

“Suddenly he stopped, as though he had been surprised by something he saw. Slowly he lowered the gun and attempted to fire a third round toward the direction of the dying women. For an instant, Calvin thought he saw someone kneeling by the two bodies. When he looked closer, he saw only a single, dark mound of death. He could discern no distinct forms. A confused Reggie walked toward the luncheonette and gave the gun to Biscuit Boy. As always, it would be his job to clean it and hide it away.

“The Biscuit Boy, shivering with hatred, suddenly leveled the gun at Reggie, then pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked, slamming a firing pin into an empty chamber. Reggie laughed at the impotent boy with his harmless gun, then the two ran south down Missouri Street toward home.”

Carolina had never been in a courtroom before. She had never heard a closing argument. She had always refused to take part in the staid and stylized combat that she considered to be Jesse’s substitute for the land war in Asia that so dominated his life. Jesse smiled at her. Carolina smiled back, wondering how it could be that such sensitive arguments and passionate words could flow from such an inaccessible, seemingly unfeeling man.

Suddenly the thought struck her. Perhaps only a man who had gone dead inside could speak so easily of death. Perhaps all the words had been learned by rote, an entire vocabulary taken from some arcane dialect of grief. How did Jesse feel about words? wondered Carolina. Were metaphor and symbol just another form of ammunition? She had always hoped otherwise, but the day would be coming soon when she would give up trying to understand him… or to love him.

“On the cold sidewalk, two women descended degree by degree until they were the temperature of the ambient air, of the soil. But in the last few seconds of their life they had found the answer to their fondest and most dreadful question. Gone were the fears and the endless speculations that had haunted their lives. Now they knew for certain how their dear young husbands had perished. Now they knew that they had always been cursed in their knowing. They understood that two marriages, worlds apart, had resulted in two more. The two women, like their husbands, embraced in death.”

Jesse pulled his eyes away from Carolina and turned them toward the now empty jury box.

“But before the final flicker of light was fully extinguished, both women heard a single voice, a single set of lips against their ears. A man ran through a haze of gun smoke, up to the women, just after the bullets found their targets. He was a man in rags and torn shoes. He wore a filthy army fatigue jacket and jungle boots. He kneeled down beside the women and spoke to them despite the hail of gunfire that sliced the air above his head.

“He blessed them even as claymore mines were being clicked off just beneath his position by squads of desperate boys. He tended his panicked flock despite the horrific moans of grief and pain around him, despite the roar of air support. He bent down unmindful of bullets at his shoulders and just above his hair. On Potrero Hill he had finally found the strength to open the body bags and bravely look upon the face of death.