The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (10 page)

“Forget what, Miss Rita? Slavery?”

She’d never once said the word in all the years I’d known her.

“Yeah, Steve. Slavery. What it was like after. What we went through.”

“But I don’t think people are forgetting. Even now people talk about it all the time.” I guess they do. Right? Jesse Jackson. Al Sharpton. They’re always in the news making noise.

“Oh yeah, they talking.” Her voice trembles. I’ve seen that tremble once before, when I was nine and had taken a machete to the just-budding rosebushes she’d worked on for an entire season. “Talk, talk, talk. Make a lot of noise. But they don’t know a damn thing about it. They don’t know how good they got it. They don’t remember.”

She takes a few more pulls off her bottle and I find myself praying that it will calm her down, put her to sleep. Her breathing slows some, but it’s obvious she’s not going to be nodding off any time soon.

“Why now, though, Miss Rita?” Boy, I’m just full of stupid questions today.

She sighs and I move my eyes from my shoes back to her face. She’s looking out the window. “Steve, you not dumb. Why now? I ain’t gotta come out and tell you, do I?”

I look at her. She looks at me. A full minute passes by and I still don’t know exactly what she’s getting at, but I’m afraid to say anything.

“I can feel it, Steve,” she says finally. She puts her hand on her chest. “It’s here. I can feel it inside me.”

Absolutely not. No way. Her age is irrelevant. She’s been here forever and she’ll outlive me. That’s the way it was meant to be. It’s written in the Lord’s book somewhere, I’m sure.

“Well, Miss Rita, I don’t think that…” I pause, take a breath, try again. “I don’t think death actually comes for people, gets inside them, and sets up shop. Or knocks on their door and takes them away.”

I’m right, right? I think I’m making sense. Maybe she’s just an old lady having a bad day and feeling sorry for herself. Maybe she woke up with gas this morning and it scared her.

“Steve, I’m not talking about some old tataille.” The Cajun word for monster still has the power to send a shiver down my spine. “There’s nothing under my bed or in my closet or out in the hall. I’m talking about dying. I’m not some old fool. Ya mawmaw used to tell me how she was feeling. Every little detail, she’d tell me. Sick as she was, sometimes I got tired of hearing about it. She’s just lucky she died before that cancer really got hold of her. As bad as she got sometimes, lucky she went the way she did. I tried to forget all her death talk as soon as she was in the ground. But now I’m remembering. Been using this body over a hundred years. I can tell something ain’t right.”

“Well, maybe a doctor could come in and do something.”

“Steve.”

She looks at me, daring me to say something else stupid. She’s right. What’s a doctor going to do for someone he figures should have died forty years ago?

I reach over and take the bottle from her. Her eyes don’t leave me as I take a couple of swallows. I hand it back to her. She takes a swig and hands it back to me.

It still doesn’t make any damn sense. She’s sitting here drinking whiskey. She was just cursing a roomful of white people. Business as usual. The death of God is one for the philosophers. The death of Miss Rita…

“So forty acres and a mule?” It’s a risk. It’s mighty stupid to say. But maybe I can steer this conversation down a more humorous road. “That’ll make you better?”

“It’s not going to make me better. I just feel like they owe me. And that’s only a tee-tiny bit of what they owe me.”

“They?”

“Well, they all dead. I guess that’s part of the problem.” She’s not joking.

Once again, I’m at a loss. “People talk about reparations all the time. I just don’t know if…” Ah, what the hell? I’ve got absolutely nothing.

“Look, Steve. I ain’t talking about all their nonsense. I’m talking my own nonsense. I ain’t talking politicians and Jesse Jackson and ‘my people,’ whoever that is. I’m talking about eye for an eye like the Bible says. I’m not one of these trifling thirty-year-old lazy-ass Negroes out of the projects asking for money because I think I deserve a chunk of free change. You know my mama was born a slave, Steve?”

“Yes, Miss Rita.”

“A slave, Steve. My own mama. You think my name Rita Lincoln for no reason? She didn’t even know who her daddy was. Coulda been the man who owned the plantation. Coulda been some coon-ass overseer, maybe one of your people. Nobody knows. And she never asked. She worked and kept her mouth shut. She taught me how to do the same. She wasn’t a slave no more when she had me. Well, we weren’t called slaves. But you can call it what you want. She was born a piece of white man’s property. And she died on that same man’s land, working for him. Working in a sugarcane field. Almost sixty and still working in a field. And when she died, they had the nerve to say she owed them money.

“People run around talking about feelings and rights and reparations. My mama was a slave, Steve Sibille. Let that sink in. Not talking about discrimination. Not talking about prejudice. She was a slave. They owned her. Nobody in your whole family’s history ever had to say that. I seen people get hung. Get burned. You know what that looks like? You know what that smells like? This boy I ran with when I was a girl. I seen him crawl back to his mama’s house, trail of blood in the dirt behind him. He mewled like a dying cat. They cut his nuts off like he was a pig.”

I look down and take another sip.

“That’s right. This ain’t no movie. This ain’t Jesse Jackson talking about people getting hired down at the plant. I watched that boy bleed to death and nobody ever did one bit of time for it. And we all knew who did it. And there ain’t enough money in the world to make me stop seeing that sometimes. Sometimes it just comes back to me. Sometimes I’d be sitting with your mawmaw and it would come back to me and it was all I could do not to blame her for it, put my hands on her throat, and choke just one damn white person.”

She pauses. “It’s enough to make me want to give up on God sometimes.”

“Miss Rita!”

“I know. Ain’t the right thing to say. And every day I thank Him for my life. But still…”

She reaches over and takes the bottle from me. “Sometimes I wish I was senile. Pray for it sometimes. Just want to forget. And then I see these people on the news crying about how bad they got it. People talking about emotional abuse and low self-esteem. Acting like every day they going to hell and back with not a drop of water between them. Where they going? They going to the mall. They going to jobs inside buildings with air-conditioning. They getting in their cars. They working eight hours a day. Look, I know lot of them got it hard, but they ain’t got it that hard. Nobody hitting them with a stick till their back bleeds if they goof off at work. They get paid for their work. Imagine that. Getting money for working. They can own a house. Can make a million damn dollars if they want to lie and cheat and steal like everybody else. We got a black president now. A black president! Even if he is half Muslim. And they act like the white man still got ’em working the fields sunup to sundown.”

I want to cry. I feel like I’m nine again, and I’ve done something to let her down, like I’m personally responsible for all of this.

“I’m tired of hearing about it. I’m just tired, tired, tired. I don’t know why I said reparations. Ain’t gonna solve anything. But if they do start handing out money, they should start with me. I should be the first one in that line, because if anybody in this country deserves a damn dollar, it’s me. My mama was a slave and I saw that boy get killed and I kept on going, kept on working, kept on praying. And I kept my ass out of jail. And the whole world should know that, starting with you. I ain’t even told my own family half of this. They don’t need to hear it. They just need to work and look forward. But you can hear it. Gave half my life to your family, so if anybody needs to remember and the TV people don’t want to hear it…. Well, Steve, looks like the Good Lord put you here for a reason.”

And that’s it. The anger drains out of her voice and she winds down like an old clock. If I had no idea what to say before, well, now I’m just wishing I could back out of the room and perhaps fly around the world backward and make the whole day go away.

“I don’t know what to say, Miss Rita.”

She fills her cup before passing the bottle to me.

“Tell me more about that elephant,” she says, her voice changing slightly.

I’m no fool, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. I take advantage of the opportunity.

“Well, the elephant is your fault,” I tell her.

“How’s that?”

“Wouldn’t be an elephant coming to Grand Prairie if you hadn’t suggested that festival.”

“I think I told you to get you a woman first, Steve,” she says, the devilish twinkle coming back into her eyes.

“Well, I got an elephant instead.”

“Want to do something?”

“Sure.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, aren’t you a big ol’ bucket of excitement?”

“Hey, you called me. You think of something.”

“Want to go hang out at a Walmart?”

“You serious?” I ask Mark, who’s called me on a brisk Wednesday morning. I’m standing outside the rectory, smoking a cigarette and shivering. “That’s your idea of a good time? Walmart?”

“Have you
seen
the weekday Walmart crowd? It’s fascinating.”

The truth is, over a week after Miss Rita’s birthday I still don’t know what to do with myself. I need some sort of mindless distraction that doesn’t involve old ladies. I tried turning inward, dealing with this in a mature way, looking to prayer for either guidance or succor. But that only leads to the comfort of resurrection of the spirit, Miss Rita’s happy reward in heaven after she shuffles off this mortal coil. Screw that. If Miss Rita’s in heaven she’s not here with me. Jesus doesn’t need her as much as I do. A few hours spent checking out the specimens at the Walmart zoo is a better option than sitting around here in a state of nervous agitation.

“Fine. Meet me at the Walmart in Opelousas at one o’clock.”

“You won’t regret this,” Mark says.

That should have been warning enough. Not five minutes after walking through the sliding doors, Mark says, “Oh, shit,” then disappears into the women’s underwear section. My cell phone vibrates. It’s Mark.

“What was that about?”

“Sorry,” he says. “You see that silver-haired guy in the tight black jeans and the cowboy boots over by the forty-nine-dollar DVD players?”

I spot the guy. “Yeah?”

“He’s actually a priest.”

“That guy? He looks like the Rhinestone Cowboy.”

“Yeah, that ain’t the half of it.”

“How do you know him?”

“Don’t ask, I won’t tell. Anyway, I’m gonna go hide in the automotive section. You keep an eye on him, then come find me when he leaves.”

Before I can protest, he hangs up. He doesn’t answer when I call him back.

“Damn it,” I say. But it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. I’m also wearing a zipped-up jacket over the old shirt and collar so I’m not going to panic the guy if I do follow him around for a bit. He leads me through hunting and fishing supplies, making furtive glances at any single man who crosses his path. Looks like someone’s stalking game in the hunting section. Eventually he gives up and heads over to the grocery section, where he picks up two jugs of Carlo Rossi—one red and one white—before leaving.

On my way to automotive, I spot a familiar red hoodie bobbing through the electronics department. What have we here? Our little innocent, all by her lonesome in the wilds of Walmart’s most sinful section, where lurk R-rated movies, video games marked M for mature audiences, and CDs that may or may not have been scrubbed of their explicit lyrics. Indeed, lined along the back shelves are high-definition plasma televisions glistening with forbidden episodes of
SpongeBob SquarePants
and an action movie starring beautiful people in tight leather suits who spend far more time shooting at one another and blowing things up than they do talking.

But all of these things, she ignores, content instead to watch two other girls her age—one in pigtails, the other with a short bob—playing a video game. Red Riding Redneck doesn’t look at the screen. She focuses on the girls’ faces, mesmerized by their intensity. Their silent concentration is broken only by bursts of cooperative chatter.

“There! Get that one!”

“Look! A power-up. Grab it! Grab it!”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

When the game falls silent for a brief moment between levels, one of the players, the one with the bob, snaps out of the trance long enough to notice Red staring at them.

“What are you looking at?”

Red waits a beat. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

Ha! I half expected her to start spouting Bible verse.

“You better shut your face,” says the girl with the bob.

“Why don’t you try and make me?” Red says.

“I don’t make trash,” starts the other girl. But before she can finish with “I burn it,” her partner shooshes the combatants as the game starts up again and draws the little heathens back into its magical realm.

Red glowers at them a moment longer. “Yall both gonna burn far as I’m concerned,” she says before shuffling off to the CD section.

Without thinking, I follow. Thrilling as it was to see her spoiled-brat act, what I really want to see is her shoplifting some Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath or—at the very least—standing slack-jawed in front of the bank of televisions. I find myself squinting and trying to shoot mind rays at her. “If you only knew the power of the dark side.” It’s useless; the Holy Ghost is strong with this one. Red homes in on the Christian music section.

“I don’t know, Father. But I think Cindy-bell’s a little too young to be one of your altar girls.”

Shit. I turn to face B.P.

“She’s definitely the wrong religion.” He’s smiling a pit-bull smile, waiting for me to explain why I’m stalking his little girl through Walmart.

“B.P.!” I say. Think, think, think. What can I say that makes it look like I’m doing something
other
than stalking his little girl through Walmart? “Was just trying to find a friend of mine. You know how easy it is to get lost in here.”

“Is that right?” he says.

Then, sing Hosanna, Jesus smiles on me. Or Nokia does. My phone vibrates and I quickly answer.

“Where the hell are you?” Mark asks.

“Oh, you’re in the garden section,” I say loudly. “No wonder I couldn’t find you. Well, you stay put. I’m catching up with a neighbor. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“What?” he says.

I hang up, move the ringer setting from
VIBRATEM
to
OFF
. Last thing I need is Mark meeting B.P., though now that I’m off the phone it occurs to me that it might be better if B.P. thought I was gay instead of a potential pedophile.

“So, yeah, that was my friend,” I say, laughing. “I was looking for him back here and I saw Red. Uh, Cindy’s red jacket. Recognized it and figured I’d say hi. Figured you’d be around here somewhere. Didn’t think you’d let her loose for too long in the electronics department. Lot of off-limits stuff back here for her, I guess.”

Shut up, Steve. Just shut up.

B.P. gives me a quizzical smile. “I don’t worry too much about that,” he says. “She’s a good girl, not one to disobey her daddy or do wrong in the eyes of the Lord.”

I have half a mind to tell him about Little Miss Obedient’s exchange with the other girls. Then I hear my name again. I offer a brief prayer:
Please, God. Not now
. But it’s futile. There’s no ignoring that voice now. I have to face it if for no other reason than to turn away from the pleased look on B.P.’s face.

“Hello, Denise,” I say, trying my best to sound as if I’m not absolutely mortified.

“Hi,” she says, and grabs me around the waist with one arm to give me a hug. In her other arm is a basket. Both B.P. and I look at that basket, full as it is with CDs featuring scantily clad teenage girls in highly suggestive poses. One of them sports the moniker “Pussycat Dolls.” Denise’s basket also contains a DVD with the words
JACKASS THE MOVIE
in big white letters. It also sports two red stamps. One says
unrated
, the other screams
WARNING
!

But it’s worse than that. Denise is wearing tight, low-riding shorts, a T-shirt that says
KISS ME I’M IRISH
, and what looks like an inch of makeup that was applied by a hooker who just graduated from clown school.

“It’s my birthday!” she says. “Mama let me loose in the store with a hundred-dollar gift card.”

“Well, happy birthday,” I manage.

“Happy birthday indeed,” says B.P., his smile a hundred percent genuine now. “And who might you be?”

He and Denise look at me.

“B.P., this is Denise. Denise, this is Brother Paul from the Pentecostal church they’re building in Grand Prairie.”

“Hi!” she says, and, perhaps thinking it will impress him, adds, “I’m one of Father Steve’s altar girls.”

“Is that right? I heard about you gals.”

Denise’s phone starts to ring. Or sing. Or rap. “Back that ass up,” it says a few times before she answers. “Hello? Yeah. Okay, Mama. Okay. God. I said okay.” She hangs up.

“That was Mama,” she explains. “I gotta go. See you at Mass on Saturday, Father Steve.”

And with a wave, she’s gone. We watch her round the corner.

“That’s a crying shame,” B.P. says finally. He probably waited so long because he had to wipe that grin off his face before he could make his next move.

“What’s a shame?”

“All that filth in that basket. Those shorts. That makeup.”

“She’s just a kid,” I hear myself saying. I don’t know if I believe that, but I do believe what I tell him next. “Her parents keep an eye on her. She’s a good kid. She’ll be fine.”

“Maybe so,” he says. “But it can’t be any good for her soul.”

“Her soul?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says.

“You think shielding people from music and TV and makeup—setting up all those rules and walls—that’s going to save their souls? You don’t think that’s a bit much? A bit extreme?”

“A bit much? You ask me, there’s no such thing as a bit much when it comes to saving a person’s soul, Father Steve. Besides, that’s a strange thing to me, a man who’s given up family life for his Church talking about extremes. But I will say this much, I will do whatever I can, whatever it takes to save as many souls as I can.” He’s got the knife in all the way, but he pauses a second before twisting it. “Don’t you feel the same way?”

I feel the hot flush of shame spread up the back of my neck, over my scalp, across my face. “When you put it that way,” I force myself to say.

“Wouldn’t know how else to put it,” he says. Then he hitches up his pants and stretches to his full height. “I guess I best be scooting.” He collects his daughter and makes for the exit.

What a self-righteous son of a bitch. I’m sure he’s such a saint. Yeah, maybe I wanted to see his daughter sully herself, give in to modern temptations. But he’s not fooling me. I saw how happy he was to see my altar girl loaded down with a basket full of filth. He wasn’t so worried about her soul that he couldn’t take delight in seeing me embarrassed.

“Who the hell does he think he is?” I mutter.

“Who?” Mark slides up next to me. “And where the hell have you been? I need to get out of this place. Now.”

“What the hell’s wrong with you? And who was that priest you were trying to avoid?” I ask. Lot of hell going around in the last few minutes, it seems.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “What crawled up your butt?”

“Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fine,” he says. He looks at his watch. “Looks like it’s Miller time.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say.

Mark and I drive over to Pizza Shack and work our way through a couple of pitchers of beer while avoiding any honest discussion about what is bothering us.

Back in Grand Prairie, a blinking answering machine is waiting for me.

The first message is from Blackfoot. “Father, I’ve been trying to reach you. We need to talk. You have some decisions to make. And soon.”

Decisions? I thought he just made everything appear. Granted, I haven’t given him any money yet. Crap in a bucket. The thought of money and fund-raising is immediately depressing.

The second message is from Mark. “Hey, Steve. Just thought I’d see if…” There’s a pause. “Well. Never mind.” What’s that about? Didn’t I just leave him about half an hour ago.

The third message is Blackfoot again. “Father. Give me a call. Please.” His tone is sharp. The time stamp says 9:00 p.m. Five minutes ago, and not exactly business hours.

Shit. This is the last thing I want to deal with. Still, I find the carnival folder. Might as well see exactly how it is I’ve screwed up before I return the man’s call.

The phone rings again. Who is it this time? Blackfoot or Mark? I let the machine answer.

“Steve, it’s Vicky.”

“Vick!” I say, picking up. Maybe she’ll want a drink.

“What the hell? I just got off the phone with Blackfoot.”

Son. Of. A. Bitch.

“What the hell have you been doing?” she asks. “You need to get the ball rolling.”

“Wait. What? Slow down. What did he say?”

“He’s been trying to call you for two weeks to figure out the details.”

Two weeks? Have I been avoiding his calls for two whole weeks already? “What details?”

“How we’re going to pay for this. The rides we want. Who’s going to control the rides. How to split the money.”

“I thought they handled all that.”

“Have you even looked at the material he gave you? I mean, aside from your precious elephant. Which you’re going to lose at this rate if you don’t make these decisions soon.”

“Well.”

“No, you’ve been playing video games, fucking off with Mark. You’re not in junior high any—”

“Fine! Okay!” I say. “Jeez. I’ll go through it all tomorrow and figure it out.”

“No,” she answers. “I have to work tomorrow.”

“I said I’ll take care of it.”

“Excuse me if I don’t trust you. I think we should do it tonight. Get it over with.”

Great. Just great.

“Well?” she says.

“Fine. You want to do this over the phone or you want to come over?”

“Hell with that,” she says. “You can drag your ass over here.”

“Now?”

“No, at midnight. Yes, now.” She hangs up.

As I’m driving over, my stomach clenches up. I think I’m actually nervous. As an adult, I’ve never had a woman pissed at me. Say what you will about the seminary, about the celibate life, but it does have that lack of a woman-scorned-thing going for it. As a priest, you really have to screw up big time to get a woman on your case. Funerals, maybe. But that sort of anger is directed more at God. And weddings definitely. Woe be to the priest who awakens Bridezilla. But I’ve escaped both of those situations so far. No deaths, no weddings in my fair village since arrival.