Paradise (8 page)

Dice nodded but said nothing.

Gigi stuffed the brownie wrapper in her empty paper cup. I am not lost, she thought. Not lost at all. I can go see Granddaddy or go back to the Bay or…

The train slowed. Dice rose to collect his luggage from the overhead rack. He was so short he had to stand on tiptoe. Gigi helped him and he didn’t seem to mind.

“Well, I get off here. Nice talking with you.”

“You too.”

“Good luck. Watch out, now. Don’t get wet.”

If the boys standing in front of a kind of barbecue grill had said, No, this is Alcorn, Mississippi, she probably would have believed them. Same haircuts, same stares, same loose hick smiles. What her granddaddy called “country’s country.” Some girls were there too, arguing, it seemed, with one of them. In any case, they weren’t much help, but she enjoyed the waves of raw horniness slapping her back as she walked off down the street.

First dust, fine as flour, sifted into her eyes, her mouth. Then the wind wrecked her hair. Suddenly she was out of town. What the locals called Central Avenue just stopped, and Gigi was at Ruby’s edge at the same time she had reached its center. The wind, soundless, came from the ground rather than the sky. One minute her heels clicked, the next they were mute in swirling dirt. On either side of her, tall grass rolled like water.

She had stopped five minutes ago in a so-called drugstore, bought cigarettes and learned that the boys at the barbecue grill were telling the truth: there was no motel. And if there was any pie it wasn’t served at a restaurant because there wasn’t one of those either. Other than the picnic benches at the barbecue thing, there was no public place to sit down. All around her were closed doors and shut windows where parted curtains were swiftly replaced.

So much for Ruby, she thought. Mikey must have sent her that lying freak on the train. She just wanted to see. Not just the thing in the wheat field, but whether there was anything at all the world had to say for itself (in rock, tree or water) that wasn’t body bags or little boys spitting blood into their hands so as not to ruin their shoes. So. Alcorn. She might as well start over in Alcorn, Mississippi. Sooner or later one of those trucks parked by the Seed and Feed store would have to start up and she would hitch the hell out of there.

Holding on to her hair and squinting against the wind, Gigi considered walking back toward the feed store. Her backpack felt heavy in high heels and if she didn’t move, the wind might topple her. As suddenly as it had begun the wind quit; in its absence she heard an engine coming toward her.

“You headed out to the Convent?” A man in a wide-brimmed hat opened the door of his van.

Gigi tossed her backpack on the seat and climbed in. “Convent? You kidding? Anything but. Can you put me near a
real
bus stop or train station or something?”

“You in luck. Take you right to the track.”

“Great!” Gigi dug around in the pack between her knees. “Smells new.”

“Brand-new. You all my first trip.”

“You all?”

“Have to make a stop. Another passenger going to take a train ride too.” He smiled. “My name’s Roger. Roger Best.”

“Gigi.”

“But you free. The other one I charge,” he said, cutting his eyes away from the road. Pretending to examine the scenery through the passenger window, he looked at her navel first, then further down, then up.

Gigi pulled out a mirror and, as best she could, repaired the wind damage to her hair, thinking, Yeah. I’m free, all right.

And she was. Just as Roger Best said, there was no charge to the living, but the dead cost twenty-five dollars.

Every now and then the woman sitting on the porch steps lifted her aviator’s glasses to wipe her eyes. One braid from under her straw hat fell down her back. Roger leaned on his knee and spoke to her for what seemed to Gigi a long time, then they both went inside. When Roger came out, he was closing his wallet and frowning.

“Ain’t no help out here. You may’s well wait inside. Going to take me a while to get the body down.”

Gigi turned to look behind her but couldn’t see through the partition.

“Jesus! Shit! This here’s a hearse?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s a ambulance. Today it’s a hearse.” He was all business now. No quick glances at her breasts. “Got to get it on board the MKT at eight-twenty p.m. And I got to be there not
in
time but
on
time.”

Gigi was quick but clumsy stepping out of the van, now hearse, but she made it around the house, up the wide wooden stairs and through the front doors in no time at all. He had said “Convent,” so she thought sweet but stern women floating in sailboat hats above long black sleeves. But there was nobody, and the woman in the straw hat had disappeared. Gigi walked through a marble foyer into another one, twice the size. In the dimness she could see a hallway extending to the right and to the left. In front of her more wide stairs. Before she could decide which way to go, Roger was behind her carrying a metal something with wheels. He moved toward the stairs, mumbling, “Not a bit of help, not a bit.” Gigi turned right, rushing toward light coming from under a pair of swing doors. Inside was the longest table she had ever seen, in the biggest kitchen. She sat there, chewing her thumbnail, wondering just how bad could it be riding with a dead person? There was some herb in her pack. Not much but enough, she thought, to keep her from freaking. She reached out and pinched off a bit of crust from a pie sitting before her and noticed for the first time the place was loaded with food, mostly untouched. Several cakes, more pies, potato salad, a ham, a large dish of baked beans. There must be nuns, she thought. Or maybe all this was from the funeral. Suddenly, like a legitimate mourner, she was ravenous.

Gigi was gobbling, piling more food onto her plate even while she scooped from it, when the woman entered without her straw hat or her glasses and lay down on the stone-cold floor.

Her mouth was full of baked beans and chocolate cake so Gigi could not speak. Outside Roger’s horn blasted. Gigi put her spoon down but held on to the cake as she walked over to where the woman lay. Squatting down, she wiped her mouth and said, “Can I help you?” The woman’s eyes were closed but she shook her head no.

“Is it anybody else here I can call?”

She opened her eyes then, and Gigi saw nothing—just a faint circle where the edge of the iris used to be.

“Hey, girl. You coming?” Roger’s voice was puny and distant over the throb of his engine. “I got a train to meet. On time! I got to be on time!”

Gigi leaned down closer, gazing into eyes with nothing to recommend them.

“I said is anybody else here?”

“You,” she murmured. “You here.” Each word sailed toward Gigi on a wave of alcohol breath.

“You hear me? I can’t wait all day!” Roger warned.

Gigi waved her free hand across the woman’s face to make sure she was blind as well as drunk.

“Stop that,” said the woman, whispering but annoyed.

“Oh,” said Gigi, “I thought. Why don’t you let me get you a chair?”

“I’m gone, hear? Gone!” Gigi heard the engine rev and the hearse shift from neutral into reverse.

“I’m missing my ride. What you want me to do?”

The woman turned over on her side and folded her hands under her cheek. “Be a darling. Just watch. I haven’t closed my eyes in seventeen days.”

“Wouldn’t a bed do the trick?”

“Be a darling. Be a darling. I don’t want to sleep when nobody there to watch.”

“On the floor?”

But she was asleep. Breathing like a child.

Gigi stood up and looked around the kitchen, slowly swallowing cake. At least there were no dead people here now. The sound of the hearse grew fainter and then slipped away.

Fright, not triumph, spoke in every foot of the embezzler’s mansion. Shaped like a live cartridge, it curved to a deadly point at the north end where, originally, the living and dining rooms lay. He must have believed his persecutors would come from the north because all the first-floor windows huddled in those two rooms. Like lookouts. The southern end contained signs of his desire in two rooms: an outsize kitchen and a room where he could play rich men’s games. Neither room had a view, but the kitchen had one of the mansion’s two entrances. A veranda curved from the north around the bullet’s tip, continued along its wall past the main entrance, and ended at the flat end of the ammunition—its southern exposure. Except from the bedrooms no one in the house could see the sun rise, and there was no vantage point to see it set. The light, therefore, was always misleading.

He must have planned to have a lot of good-time company in his fortress: eight bedrooms, two giant bathrooms, a cellar of storerooms that occupied as much space as the first floor. And he wanted to amuse his guests so completely they would not think of leaving for days on end. His efforts to entertain were no more sophisticated or interesting than he was—mostly food, sex and toys. After two years of semi-covert construction, he managed one voluptuous party before he was arrested, just as he feared, by northern lawmen, one of whom attended his first and only party.

The four teaching sisters who moved into his house when it was offered for sale at a pittance diligently canceled the obvious echoes of his delight but could do nothing to hide his terror. The closed-off, protected “back,” the poised and watchful “tip,” an entrance door guarded by the remaining claws of some monstrous statuary, which the sisters had removed at once. A rickety, ill-hanging kitchen door the only vulnerability.

Gigi, as high as possible on her limited supply, and roaming through the mansion while the drunken woman slept on the kitchen floor, immediately recognized the conversion of the dining room into a schoolroom; the living room into a chapel; and the game room alteration to an office—cue sticks and balls, but no pool table. Then she discovered the traces of the sisters’ failed industry. The female-torso candleholders in the candelabra hanging from the hall ceiling. The curls of hair winding through vines that once touched faces now chipped away. The nursing cherubim emerging from layers of paint in the foyer. The nipple-tipped doorknobs. Layabouts half naked in old-timey clothes, drinking and fondling each other in prints stacked in closets. A Venus or two among several pieces of nude statuary beneath the cellar stairs. She even found the brass male genitalia that had been ripped from sinks and tubs, packed away in a chest of sawdust as if, however repelled by the hardware’s demands, the sisters valued nevertheless its metal. Gigi toyed with the fixtures, turning the testicles designed to release water from the penis. She sucked the last bit of joint—Ming One—and laid the roach on one of the alabaster vaginas in the game room. She imagined men contentedly knocking their cigars against those ashtrays. Or perhaps just resting them there, knowing without looking that the glowing tip was slowly building a delicate head.

She avoided the bedrooms because she didn’t know which one had belonged to the dead person, but when she went to use one of the bathrooms, she saw that no toilet activity was not meant to be reflected in a mirror that reflected in another. Most, set firmly into wall tile, had been painted. Bending to examine the mermaids holding up the tub, she noticed a handle fastened to a slab of wood surrounded by floor tile. She was able to reach and lift the handle, but not able to budge it.

Suddenly she was fiercely hungry again and returned to the kitchen, to eat and do as the woman had asked: be a darling and watch while she slept—like an antique tripper afraid to come down alone. She was finished with the macaroni, some ham and another slice of cake when the woman on the floor stirred and sat up. She held her face in both hands for a moment, then rubbed her eyes.

“Feel better?” asked Gigi.

She took a pair of sunglasses from an apron pocket and put them on. “No. But rested.”

“Well that
is
better.”

The woman got up. “I suppose. Thank you—for staying.”

“Sure. Hangover’s a bitch. I’m Gigi. Who died?”

“A love,” said the woman. “I had two; she was the first and the last.”

“Aw, I’m sorry,” Gigi said. “Where’s he taking her? The dude in the hearse.”

“Far. To a lake named for her. Superior. That’s how she wanted it.”

“Who else lives here? You didn’t cook all this food, did you?”

The woman filled a saucepan with water and shook her head.

“What you gonna do now?”

“Gigi Gigi Gigi Gigi Gigi. That’s what frogs sing. What did your mother name you?”

“Her? She gave me her own name.”

“Well?”

“Grace.”

“Grace. What could be better?”

Nothing. Nothing at all. If ever there came a morning when mercy and simple good fortune took to their heels and fled, grace alone might have to do. But from where would it come and how fast? In that holy hollow between sighting and following through, could grace slip through at all?

It was the I-give woman serving up her breasts like two baked Alaskas on a platter that took all the kick out of looking in the boy’s eyes. Gigi watched him battle his stare and lose every time. He said his name was K.D. and tried hard to enjoy her face as much as her cleavage while he talked. It was a struggle she expected, rose to and took pleasure in—normally. But the picture she had wakened to an hour earlier spoiled it.

Unwilling to sleep on the second floor where a person had just died, Gigi had chosen the leather sofa in the used-to-be-game-room office. Windowless, dependent on no longer available electricity for light, the room encouraged her to sleep deeply and long. She missed the morning entirely and woke in the afternoon, in a darkness hardly less than she’d fallen asleep in. Hanging on the wall in front of her was the etching she had barely glanced at when poking around the day before. Now it loomed into her line of vision in the skinny light from the hall. A woman. On her knees. A knocked-down look, cast-up begging eyes, arms outstretched holding up her present on a platter to a lord. Gigi tiptoed over and leaned close to see who was the woman with the I-give-up face. “Saint Catherine of Siena” was engraved on a small plaque in the gilt frame. Gigi laughed—brass dicks hidden in a box; pudding tits exposed on a plate—but in fact it didn’t feel funny. So when the boy she had seen in town the day before parked his car near the kitchen door and blew his horn, her interest in him had an edge of annoyance. Propped in the doorway she ate jam-covered bread while she listened to him and watched the war waged in his eyes.