Jitterbug Perfume Part 21

Minus the extra heat of desire, the water seemed cooler now. They submerged to their chins in the tropical broth, the pot of doldrums, the horse lat.i.tudes that modern landlubbers had domesticated and miniaturized, wrapping themselves willingly in its enervating ripples.

"You know, Wiggs," she said, her voice softened to near inaudibility by the sultry climate, "it seems like with you everything leads back to the subject of death."

"Sure and show me the person's road that does not lead to death. We try to divert our attention, to pretend 'tisn't so, but the very air we breathe is vulture's breath. Please don't be insinuatin' your man is morbid. I dwell on death in order to defeat it."

"But suppose death is necessary to evolution. What if we have to give up our bodies so that we can evolve off the earth plane, move on to a higher plane? It might be foolish and regressive to cling to our physical bodies."

"Might be. Although life on the astral plane has always held a minimum o' charm for me. No whiskey, no books, no Frederick's o' Hollywood. And if it should turn out that there is no astral evolution, where does that leave your poor dead self? Tis a gamble I'm not willin' to take."

"After the gambles you've taken with vision root, all those psychological deaths and rebirths, how could you still be afraid of regular old dying."

"Sure and I'm not afraid o' dying. Never have been. Death can't do anything to us because death is dead. What's dead can't hurt ye. Fear is not the issue. Like your man Alobar, I'm less scared than resentful. We've got ourselves stuck in a cyclic system that makes true freedom, true growth impossible. In the arts, a period o' cla.s.sicism is followed by a period o' romanticism. Then 'tis back to the cla.s.sical again. 'Tis as simpleminded as a b.l.o.o.d.y pendulum, and for me, at least, it robs art of any real meaning. Same thing in society. A conservative cycle, a liberal cycle, then a conservative cycle again. Action and reaction, back and forth, like the tides. As long as we're trapped in these cycles, we can't expect much in the way o' liberation, we can't even expect fundamental change except the awful slow variety where each step takes a million years or more. For most of our history, we were trapped by the seasonal cycles, the weather cycles. Now, however, we can at least move south for the winter, north for the summer. The seasons still operate cyclically, but we don't have to submit to 'em. All I'm askin' is for that kind o' mobility in life as a whole. I'm askin' for the opportunity to break out o' the birth-death cycle. Ye see what I mean? 'Tis far too rigid and predictable to suit me. Cycles take the meaning out o' life, just as they do in art. Me hope is this: certain individuals have always managed to break out o' the artistic and social cycles-that's why I love and respect your individual more than I love and respect humanity at large. Maybe, maybe, the time is ripe for certain individuals to escape the birth-death cycle, as well. And I don't mean by vaporizin' into the void o' Buddhist Nirvana, either. Maybe Alobar has done just that. Maybe I can do it, as well. And maybe-as long as I'm into the maybes-some cycle-buster will come along to rescue mankind from the hollow tides o' mortality."

"We deserve a break today?"

"We do."

"Dying is a bad habit?"

"Yes, and must be broken."

"Good luck, Wiggs."

"Thanks. You know, there is one condition under which I might willingly die. Might even take me own life."

"You're joking?"

He shook his head as somberly as an elephant. "If anything ever happened to Huxley Anne, I think I would choose to die, too, just on the chance that we could be together."

"Oh."

Wiggs was quiet for a while. A tear bubbled up, like a syllable from a flounder, in his single eye. It hung upside down from his lower lid, like a transparent sloth from a ledge, until gravity finally pried it loose, sending it plunging, silently, headlong, salt and all, into the anonymity of the steaming tub.

"One last thing about death," said Wiggs.

"What's that?" Pris asked rather morosely. She was still staring at the spot where his teardrop had hit the water.

"After you die, your hair and your nails continue to grow."

"I've heard that."

"Yes. But your phone calls taper off."

Once more, they climbed out onto the tiles to cool. Then, another hot soak and a final cooling. They toweled and slipped into their underpants, his as crisp and green as a shamrock, hers a faded, indeterminable color ringed with sagging elastic. They donned their pants, his of tweed, hers of denim, and, with the hands of miracle workers, restored to wholeness the golden salamanders that held the pant fronts together.

He'd made it clear she was not to stay the night. Seemed he and Huxley Anne had plans for early morning. So she embraced him at the door, feeling a trifle, well, vulnerable, insecure, and was steeling herself for the walk home when he asked, "Well, how's it comin' with the perfume?"

She hadn't wanted to speak of perfume for fear she might blurt out something about the bottle. She dare not tell him of the bottle, but, rather, must show it to him, must hold it up to that gleaming orb of his and watch the silver hairs stand on his head like the bristles of a robot's toothbrush. How she looked forward to that moment!

"I've come to the conclusion," she said, "that beet is the bottom note in K23. Am I right?"

Hesitant to respond, he eventually nodded in the affirmative, trusting that the fairies, that the Salmon That Fed on the Nine Hazel Nuts of Poetic Art, that his ex-wife's knickers would not regard a nod a breach of promise.

"I thought so. But how in the world is it used? I really can't figure out ..."

"You're the perfumer."

It was Priscilla's turn to nod in agreement, but to herself she said, "Ha! I'm an unemployed waitress without an ounce of first-rate jasmine to my name. And if I don't get lucky, and feist, this time next week I'll be hustling nachos at someplace like Gourmet de Tijuana."

The way she backed through the door, waving good-bye, sort of burdened and fl.u.s.tered, you'd have thought that she had suddenly and inadvertently cornered the world market in refined beans.

In truth, Priscilla felt a twinge of resentment that she had to return to her little studio apartment. Certainly there was plenty of room for her at the Last Laugh Foundation. Why, Christ and all twelve disciples could have dwelt in the Last Laugh Foundation, although Judas would have had to sleep on the sun porch.

She walked down the path feeling like three-fourths of two pieces of slug bait. As she pa.s.sed the letter box at the guard gate, she had an urge to stick a stamp on her forehead and mail herself to the Abominable Snowman.

On the street, it was worse. The crowd of aspiring immortalists was restless and surly. They glared at her as if she were a piece of modern art at a county fair. A hostile sneer here, a puzzled laugh there, and not a blue ribbon in sight.

Apparently, there recently had been a provision run, because many in line were munching on fast-food hamburgers. They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old McDonald had a farm.

People used to die from germs. Now they died from bad habits. That was what Dr. Dannyboy said. Heart disease was caused by bad personal habits, cancer was caused by bad industrial habits, war was caused by bad political habits. Dannyboy believed that even old age was a habit. And habits could be broken. Priscilla felt like lecturing the crowd on its habits and sending it home, but, of course, she did not.

Toward the end of the line, she thought she heard a white-haired guy on crutches remark that it was December 7, "the thirty-fifth anniversary of the j.a.panese attack on Pearl Bailey." He was wrong. It was then December 8.

Five days later, on December 13, Pris gave Wiggs Dannyboy a call. She was in a funk about their "relations.h.i.+p," a snit compounded by the detective's lack of progress, and was desperate enough to try to force a talk.

"Pris, me darlin', 'tis happy I am that ye called!"

"Really?"

"Sure and I couldn't be happier was I to learn that G.o.d and the Devil had settled out o' court, endin' once and for all the ridiculous notion of a struggle between good and evil that has provided the religious o' the world with a pious excuse to kill and plunder and has spoiled the plot o' many a novel. I couldn't be happier was I to grow another eye, one that s.h.i.+nes in the night like a wolfs eye and can twist on its stalk to look up a la.s.sie's skirt. I couldn't be happier was Alobar to be released from the nick, which, indeed, he may be next month, if it's not too late. As fortunate as I am to be born an Irishman and thus possess a license to broadcast this brand o' pseudolyrical bulls.h.i.+t, that's how fortunate I am that you-I mean, ye-called. I would have called ye but ye haven't a phone."

"Don't mock the afflicted."

"Or I would've dropped by, except I've been to New Orleans to deliver a certain vegetable. Ye know what I mean?"

"All too well."

"I do have good news. Marcel 'Bunny' LeFever has successfully buried his Uncle Luc and has aimed his wondrous nose again in our direction. Dr. Morgenstern and I-he sends his regards, by the way-are planning another dinner party, if we can coax the university scientists away from their research for the CIA. A week from tonight, I think, and ye must come. Only this time ye must sit next to me; to me left, would be proper, so's I can rest me left hand on your tender thigh while I am liftin' a sociable gla.s.s with me right."

"Wiggs?"

"Yes, love?"

"You've had me to dinner, and now Marcel LeFever is coming. I'm curious why you haven't had my stepmother or V'lu."

"Oh, I invited them. As a matter of fact, I just learned on this trip to New Orleans that V'lu actually flew to Seattle to attend the last dinner. I have no idea why she didn't show up."

"Wait a minute. V'lu was in town the night of that party?"

"Yes. Stayed overnight and returned home the next day."

Adrenaline welled in Priscilla with such pressure it was practically shooting out of her major orifices.

"Wiggs," she said, "I have to make a trip to New Orleans myself."

"When?"

"Right away."

"Will ye be back in time for the party?"

"I hope so. If I am, I'll have a surprise for you."

"Goody. I love surprises."

"Good-bye then."

"Bye-bye, Pris. Have a lovely trip and watch out for the bees."

After she hung up, she thought, Watch out for the bees? Whatever did he mean?

She would find out soon enough.

The Chinese discovered gunpowder by accident while trying to invent a potion that would alchemically lengthen life.

It is unclear what the Chinese were trying to invent when they discovered spaghetti. Perhaps the spaghetti noodle, too, was a byproduct of longevity research, of an effort to live a won, won ton; a futile attempt to avoid facing the question, "Who's going to chop your suey when I'm gone?"

No matter. It may be prudent, however, for would-be immortals to bear in mind the Chinese experience. Seeking prolonged existence, they ended up with gunpowder, the elixir of death, not life; the propellant of history's innumerable tragic bullets, including the ones that felled Gandhi, John Lennon, and Bambi's mother-and the one that left Bingo Pajama facedown on Royal Street.

Figuratively and literally, New Orleans was buzzing. It was an angry black buzz in counterpoint with a terrified white buzz: historically typical of that city where slaves liberated themselves long before Lincoln, where a black aristocracy flowered to rival the only true white aristocracy in America, where a black voodoo queen once ruled as completely (if covertly) as any Catherine of Russia; where African mystery, large, organic, and powerful, has provided a soundtrack of primeval rhythm against which all metropolitan life-stodgy white -commerce as well as fierce black pleasure-has had to unfold.

Even in slavery, the blacks called the tune. Proud and virtually fearless, they danced in Congo Square in such a graceful abandon, in such harmony with unseen forces, that their owners acted to outlaw African dancing lest it escalate into rebellion. And all the while, even as the owners drafted proclamation after proclamation of wiggle prohibition, their white toes tapped in their shoes. White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.

Due to their poverty, anger, and moral imperatives, some New Orleans blacks were disposed to create a jazz of robbery. Due to their insecurity, fear, -and religious philosophy, some New Orleans whites were disposed to compose hymns of brutality. The thieves tooted out of the federal housing projects-they were young, spirited, and pessimistic. The cops lumbered out of the bayous-they were paunchy, insensitive, and easily manipulated by authoritarian dogmas. On the one side, playground slam-dunkers, jive-talkers and second-line parade dancers with an easy propensity for redistributing wealth; on the other, good ol' boys who, up until getting their badges and patrol cars, went slender-pole fis.h.i.+ng by day and slammed each other around by night. Clashes were inevitable, but the white boys had the law on their side.

Umm, but the air here is getting thick with sociology. We are discussing New Orleans, after all, the city Louis Armstrong said "has got that thing." (As for the ident.i.ty of "that thing," Louis said, in the most Zen statement ever made by a westerner, "If you have to ask, you'll never know.") Perhaps it is time for a riff.

"New Orleans"

She went to the school of Miss Crocodile Where she learned to walk backwards And skin black cats with her teeth.

Soon she could wear the loot of dead pirates Cook zee perfect gumbo And telephone the moon collect.

But it took sixty-six doctors to fix her After she kissed that snake.

New Orleans was buzzing. A Jamaican flower peddler and street singer named Bingo Pajama had been shot and killed by two off-duty policemen who claimed they were trying to make an arrest. Pajama, a suspect in the bizarre death of a fellow officer, made a threatening move, according to the cops. They pulled down on him with their .38 Specials.

The black community was not swallowing that trash. Too often, in Louisiana, blacks suspected of having killed policemen were themselves slain by their arresting officers. It smacked of revenge by execution, and it had become routine. Also routine were the hearings in which the cops were cleared of any wrongdoing. It was the sort of situation that turned a second-liner's bile a dangerous hue, the sort that could build into a "race riot."

Although Bingo Pajama was from out of town, a foreigner with a funny accent, a b.u.m who kept bees but had no hive; a mysterious, clownish figure known well by none, the blacks of the city adopted him posthumously. They went so far as to send him off with a jazz funeral.

Mourners poured out of the projects, out of the shotgun houses below Ca.n.a.l Street, out of barrooms and gumbo parlors, out of the Baptist church at Liberty and First and the Hoodoo church on Rampart, and with a mighty bra.s.s band leading the way (horns wailing in the modes of both Satchmo and Bird, drums recreating the phantom energies of the Congo), with umbrellas twirling (although the day was dry), feathers flas.h.i.+ng, joints smoldering, bottles gurgling, and fingers snapping, they strutted and stomped, rambled and hooted, all the way to the French Quarter, through the Quarter, and back to the Central City again. A horse-drawn hea.r.s.e bore the coffin, but there was no corpse in it. The police had the corpse and wouldn't release it. Inside the coffin was a bouquet of jasmine branches, crushed and faded but so potently sweet it perfumed the length of the parade.

Although the funeral was typically merry, a wild, winding party ("In yo' face, Mr. Death") enjoyed by all, it was fueled by an ill-concealed cache of anger. Dark curses were shouted at police cars, and placards of somber protest appeared along the way. That night, an ancient work began behind locked shutters. Black candles were burned, bitter powders were sprinkled, crude objects were fas.h.i.+oned of wood or wax, pythons were addressed, and chickens were put to uses that would have shocked the pants off Colonel Sanders, not to mention Julia Child.

There were formal protests, as well. A steady stream of black community leaders visited the police department and city hall, demanding justice. So great was the outcry that the mayor wasted little time in scheduling a hearing. At the insistence of blacks, and of white liberals, a special commission was appointed to conduct the investigation. To the dismay of "law-and-order" factions, only one policeman was named to the panel.

According to reports, several people had witnessed the shooting of the Jamaican. Two had viewed it at close range. Two women, the story went, one white, one black. And the white woman was said to be tight with blacks. Why, it was ol" Madame Devalier, the French Quarter perfumer, a one-time supplier of Special Delivery Oil, she who was rumored to possess the secret of hurricane drops!

So New Orleans buzzed. Black folks buzzed. White folks buzzed. Bingo Pajama's bees buzzed. And the bee buzz was the most disturbing of all.

It was a tiny swarm: fifty bees at the outside, maybe only forty. Their number was to their advantage. A swarm of many thousands, as is customary in a honey colony, would have been easily tracked and cornered, but a fist of forty, flying in excess of a dozen miles per hour and climbing to alt.i.tudes loftier than New Orleans' tallest building, could be elusive, evading entomological patrols and escaping DDT barrage or apiarian capture.

With his life, the bees left Bingo Pajama. n.o.body saw them go. They flew away in the night with his soul. Only the pollen grains that the coroner found in the slain man's hair indicated that they had ever existed.

Ah, but the next morning! When the streetlamps went out, the bees lighted up. Wearing the dawn like silver on their wings, they returned in a gla.s.sy phalanx to the scene of the crime. Like a gla.s.s spearhead come suddenly to life, like an animated dagger with an angry voice, like an electrified pineapple spike; like a darting fish made of noisy sparks, half full of fire and half full of cold, the swarm circled the death scene, diving and looping, again and again, a crazed cactus loose in the air, humming defiance, forty little spines dripping poison and pain.

For most of the day, reporters, photographers, police investigators, sympathizers, and curiosity-seekers were held at bay. Those who challenged the swarm's territorial claim retreated quickly with burning welts about the neck and face. From time to time, the swarm would settle on the map of dried blood where their master had lain. It was as if they were feeding there. A newsman or a cop would grow brave, but at his approach-banzai!-the missile would launch itself, screaming toward target.

In late afternoon, beekeepers were brought in. Like brides behind their protective veils, they wooed the golden phallus, but it would not surrender to them. It scorned their traps of honey, its forty tongues preferring to lick crusty blood.

Curses and consternation abounded. From a nearby telephone booth, calls were made to universities and the Department of Agriculture. "This is not your common North American honeybee," said an entomologist gazing through binoculars. He was probably correct. According to an official handbook, "Stinging requires a bee to use twenty-two different muscles." These bees used twenty-three.

At nightfall, the swarm departed, but it returned the next day. So did the media and the crowds. Barricades were set up. Traffic was snarled. The proud pragmatism of civilized intelligence was being insulted again by goofy nature. It was time for might to make things right.

Spray teams were dispatched. Foggers from the swamplands. Experts at ga.s.sing mosquitos. Their Jeeps pulled trailers with compressors and hoses and metal tanks full of gaseous insecticides. They wiped out every cricket in the neighborhood and mutated countless future generations of mockingbirds. But the swarm took to the sky, disappearing through a trapdoor in a low-flying, and ominously dark, c.u.mulus cloud.

Thirty minutes later, it flew through an open window at city hall, where the chief of police was explaining to the district attorney that that very swarm had been used as a murder weapon by Bingo Pajama and would be useful as an exhibit during the hearing for the courageous officers who, in self-defense, had eliminated the mad Jamaican. "Here's your exhibit, Chief," yelled a mayoral aide, diving for cover. Exhibit B.

Faces swollen and painted pink with calamine lotion, the city fathers looked like buffoons that evening on the six-o'clock news.

The bees were not seen again until the next afternoon, when they followed Bingo Pajama's funeral parade along its entire route. None of the marchers was stung, and it was reported by a trombonist and a couple of second-liners that the swarm kept time with the band.

After that, the bees played hide-and-seek. They were observed all over the city. They appeared in the Garden District, in the Irish Channel, uptown, downtown, in Audubon After that, the bees played hide-and-seek. They were observed all over the city. They appeared in the Garden District, in the Irish Channel, uptown, downtown, in Audubon Park, along the lakefront, the riverfront, on Metairie Ridge, and in the forgotten voodoo groves of Bayou St. John. n.o.body could guess where they would strike next. They hara.s.sed cops on the beat, dive-bombed adulterous judges on the patios of Lake Pontchartrain love nests, interrupted work on the Mafia wharfs, and sent tourists running from Jackson Square, portraits half-painted, Sno-Kones half-eaten and spilled on the bricks. The press began to speak of the swarm as if it were a terrorist band.

Like a necklace of gouged-out crocodile eyes-yellow-green and menacing, s.h.i.+ny and ancient-the renegade bees encircled New Orleans, a mosaic albatross that wouldn't lie still.

Such was the situation in New Orleans when Priscilla ar- ' rived: a buzz of black anger, a buzz of white fear; a buzz of multicolored rumor, panic, .and superst.i.tion; a buzz of bees.

Initially, she scarcely noticed. After two days and three nights on a Greyhound bus (the detective had refused to refund her retainer, and she was functioning far below the summit of her economic potential), her homecoming was rather numb.

She headed directly to the Quarter, to Royal Street, to the Parfumerie Devalier, only to find the shop dark. It was shuttered and locked. After a night's rest on a lumpy mattress at a YWCA, she returned to the shop, truly expecting it to be open for business. Still it was closed. Moreover, with Christmas hardly a week away, the quaint little perfume-bottle nativity scene that had graced Madame Devalier's show window every December for as long as Priscilla could remember was nowhere in sight.

Lingering over a cafe au lait at Morning Call, she speculated that the shop's closure was connected to the bottle of K23. It was not. It was connected to the buzz.

I'll bet they're in Paris or New Yorfc, making some kind of deal, thought Priscilla.

In feet, Lily Devalier and V'lu Jackson were nowhere near Paris. They were in Baton Rouge.