Jesus Out to Sea

“I don’t want any, Herman,” she says, the words catching like a wet bubble in her throat.

“If you can get by on a short-dog and a beer now and then, I say, ‘Rock on, girl.’ I say you a superwoman.”

He removes a hundred-dollar bill from the pocket of his robe, rolls it into a crisp tube, and snorts a line up each nostril, the soles of his slippers slapping on the floor. He grabs his thonged phallus inside his open robe and pulls on it. “Tell me them coca leaves wasn’t picked by Indian goddesses.”

“I got to go, Herman,” she says, because she is absolutely sure the knocking sound that has haunted her sleep and that sometimes comes aborning even in the midst of a conversation is about to begin again.

At the front door he presses the hundred-dollar bill into her palm and closes her fingers on it. “Get you some new threads. You fine-looking, Miss Lisa. Got the kind of class make a man’s eye wander.”

He lifts her hand, the one that holds the hundred-dollar bill, and kisses it. The cocaine residue on the paper seems to burn like a tiny ball of heat clenched inside her palm.

The party she helps cater that night is held in a refurbished icehouse across the street from a Jewish cemetery shrouded by live oaks. It’s raining outside, but the moon is full and visible through the clouds, and the shell parking lot is chained with rain puddles. A tin roof covers the old loading dock where years ago blocks of ice rushed down a chute into a wood box and once there were chopped into small pieces with ice picks by sweating black men. The roar of the rain on the tin roof is almost deafening and Lisa has a hard time concentrating on her work. She has another problem, too.

Rodney, the caterer, can’t keep his hands off her. When he tells her how to arrange and freshen the salad bar, he keeps his palm in the middle of her back. When he walks her the length of the serving table, he drapes an arm over her shoulder. When she separates from him, he lets his fingers trail off her rump.

“Herman tole me you growed up here’bouts,” he says, slipping his grasp around her triceps.

“My husband’s daddy worked at this icehouse. He chopped up ice out there on the dock, in that wood box there,” she replies.

He nods idly, as though processing her statement. “Your husband got killed in Iraq?”

She starts to answer, then realizes he isn’t listening, that he’s watching another worker pour a stainless-steel tray of okra gumbo into a warmer. His gaze breaks and his eyes come back on her. “Go ahead,” he says.

“Go ahead what?”

“Say what you was saying.”

“Can I get paid after work tonight? I got to hep my auntie wit’ her mortgage.”

“Don’t see nothing wrong wit’ that,” he says.

He squeezes by her on his way to the kitchen, the thick outline of his phallus sliding across her rump.

The party becomes more raucous, grows in intensity, the males-only crowd emboldened by their numbers and insularity. Four bare-breasted women in spangled G-strings and spiked heels are dancing on a stage, fishnet patterns of light and shadow shifting across their skin. Outside, the rain continues to fall and Lisa can see the black-green wetness of the oak trees surrounding the Jewish cemetery, the canopy swishing against the sky, and she wonders if it is true that the unbaptized are locked out of heaven.

Why is she thinking such strange thoughts? She tries to think about her life in New Orleans before the hurricane, before Gerald’s reserve unit was called up, before his Humvee was blown into scrap metal.

She had waited tables in a restaurant in Jackson Square, right across the street from the Café du Monde. There were jugglers and street musicians and unicyclists in the square, and crepe myrtle and banana trees grew along the piked fence where the sidewalk artists set up their easels. It was cool and breezy under the colonnades, and the courtyards and narrow passageways smelled of damp stone and spearmint and roses that bloomed in December. She liked to watch the people emerging from Mass at St. Louis Cathedral on Saturday evening and she liked bringing them the steaming trays of boiled crawfish, cob corn, and artichokes that were the restaurant’s specialty. In fact, she loved New Orleans and she loved Gerald and she loved their one-story tin-roofed home in the Lower Ninth Ward.

But these thoughts cause her scalp to constrict and she thinks she hears hail bouncing off the loading dock outside.

“You got seizures or something?” Rodney asks.

“What?”

“You just dropped the ladle in the gumbo,” he says.

She stares stupidly at the serving spoon sinking in the cauldron of okra and shrimp.

“Take a break,” Rodney says.

She tries to argue, then relents and waits in a small office by the kitchen while Rodney gets another girl to fill in for her. He closes the door behind him and studies Lisa with a worried expression, then sits in a chair across from her and lights a joint. He takes a hit, holding it deep in his lungs, offering it to her while he lets out his breath in increments. Her hand seems to reach out as though it has a will of its own. She bends over and touches the joint to her lips and feels the wetness of his saliva mix with her own. She can hear the cigarette paper superheat and crinkle as she draws in on the smoke.

“I got to pay you off, baby.”

“’Cause I dropped the ladle?”

“’Cause you was talking to yourself at the buffet table. ’Cause you in your own spaceship.”