Gods Go Begging Page 2

  “Do you think they were lovers?” asked the assistant, who was testing his own microphone. The chief medical examiner shrugged and continued his examination. Then he slowly nodded his head, yes. He disliked looking beyond the bodies to the people who were once there, and now he was beginning to dislike the assistant.

  “The police and the paramedics at the scene were not able to separate the two. No medical intervention was attempted. ” He slid open a drawer and withdrew his favorite scalpel. “I shall do so now by cutting… ”

  “Must be old age,” said Persephone Flyer. “My fingers are simply aching.” She flexed them and grinned. “Luckily there’s never been any arthritis in my family.” There was a frightened but hopeful intonation in her voice.

  Her friend in the next room laughed. “You will never have arthritis. In my country an ache in the fingers means that you want something very badly; your hands are aching to touch something.”

  “Certainly not these tomatoes.” Persephone laughed, tossing a large pile of tomato skins and seeds into a small garbage can beneath the sink. She cut the skinned pulpy flesh of thirty tomatoes into squares then tossed the pieces, dividing them evenly, into two eight-gallon pots. She walked to a second stove, where she used a wooden spatula to plow under a tall mound of steaming Italian sausages, rotating the cooked ones to the top and the uncooked to the bottom of an enormous black frying pan with a diameter that spanned two burners. The powerful fragrance of fennel and oil filled the room.

  “How are the spices coming?” she called out, as she drew a sleeve across her sweating brow. Outside her makeshift kitchen the glorious scent of her handiwork had commingled with a breeze and was prying at her neighbors’ windows, pushing in over the usual smells of Potrero Hill and the housing projects and overwhelming everything with the combined perfume of Palermo, Baton Rouge, and Saigon.

  The sublime aroma broke up baseball games in the street. It silenced a heated game of dice and caused a substantial lull in the local drug traffic. In the projects, the street gangs stopped cleaning their weapons to inhale the scent. Like all armies, they marched on their stomachs, and the boys on the hill were always hungry. For a moment, the Up the Hill Gang, the Down the Hill Gang, the Wisconsin Street Posse, and the Prisoners of the Projects called an uneasy armistice in order to breathe in a few molecules of the sauce. For a moment no one on the south side of the hill looked warily over his shoulder, then checked his waistband for the comforting bulge of a gun.

  The aroma even found its way into the nostrils of a drunken sot and momentarily kept him from hitting his cowering wife.

  It wafted down afternoon sidewalks and into nearby warehouses where greasy auto mechanics and squinting printers stopped working to anxiously peek at the time clock. Women in nearby houses and apartments were soon busy washing Mason jars, soup kettles, and hermetic cauldrons in which to carry the source of the magical smell.

  Children at the Potrero projects ran to tell their weary mothers that something was cooking at that lesbian place up on Missouri Street. Excited shouts were traded over back fences, and telephones were ringing everywhere on Potrero Hill, as the good news was passed from Texas Street to De Haro: “Miss Persephone and Miss Mai are cooking again! The Amazon women are at it again!”

  “Is it that cellophane chicken? Never tasted nothin’ on God’s earth like that cellophane chicken!”

  “Is it that beautiful jambalaya? Is it okra stew and dirty rice? Did you taste that corn pudding they made last week?”

  “Could it be them chicken necks in coconut milk?”

  “No, it’s that spaghetti sauce again! Smells like heaven!”

  Mai came from the back room, her small hands cradling a large wooden bowl of spices. She was always careful to prepare the spices out of public view, as the recipe was a valuable and closely guarded secret. All of their collected recipes were precious. Only she and Persephone knew what lay hidden beneath the piles of bay leaves, oregano, and thyme, that down under the sun-dried tomato flecks and the basil there were dark little chiles from the Louisiana bayou and West African peppers.

  “The seeds for these angry little peppers were brought here three hundred years ago in the intestines of slaves,” Persephone would explain. “It’s how they kept warm in the holds of those ships.”

  Beneath these peppers were still other secrets: long, tender shreds of aromatic lemon grass and a pint and a half of pungent nuóc mám nhi, the ultimate Vietnamese fish sauce. Mai had mixed it and fermented it herself in a small wine barrel on the back porch. She would always smile as she mixed these spices. There was a little nook near the rear door of the house that smelled of her beloved homeland.

  She shoved a small stepladder closer to the stove, stood precariously on the top rung, and using her delicate fingers, began to divide the wondrous spices between the two pots of simmering sauce. She put a small bouquet of lemon grass in her pocket for good luck. Using a huge wooden ladle, she stirred both pots, scraping the bottoms to keep the thick liquid from building up and burning. As she descended the ladder, she adjusted the flames beneath the pots.

  “Won’t be long now,” she cooed in a raised voice filled with joy and anticipation. Her gaze fell onto the shiny new Sub-Zero refrigerator that had been delivered just two days ago. “Không cólâu dâu. Won’t be long now.” It had become one of her favorite English sentences, almost a prayer. “Tomorrow they’ll deliver that beautiful eight-burner Wolf stove and that three-horsepower range hood and then we can really start cooking! No more of this part-time stuff.”

  Even as she said it she began once again to imagine how the little restaurant would soon look. Just last week the workmen had knocked down two walls to create a large comfortable front room. A single bay window had been installed to replace the three double-hung windows that had been facing the sidewalk. The solid front door had been replaced by one made of thick glass.

  To the right of the door there would be a new Formica counter and a line of stools. The stools would be bolted to the floor and they would have soft, red cushions. They had to discuss everything about the business, but on the subject of stools, Persephone and Mai heartily agreed. To the left would be six, maybe seven tables, each with its own intimate lamp and starched tablecloth. Mai imagined the paintings of a local artist hanging on the walls.

  “There will be flowers everywhere,” she said aloud. Those words had been her mother‘s, too. In Vietnamese, Mai’s name meant yellow cherry blossom. Mai smiled to herself. How Persephone loved flowers! Each spring the earth and air of her garden would be filled with them. Coaxed by the slightest breezes, the scents of jasmine, wisteria and fuchsia would mix and remix into an ever-changing display of novel, weightless perfumes.

  The restaurant would be just about the same size as her dear father’s noodle café at the corner of Công Lý and Lê Loi Streets in Saigon. As she took a moment to daydream, the scent of bò viên, beef ball smothered in chile-garlic paste, filled her nostrils and her stunned soul. On her tongue is the sweet taste of cà phê sua, the sweet Vietnamese iced coffee. In her ears is the ping-ping sound of smoky Lambretta scooters, the huffing of shirtless men peddling cyclo cabs, and the buzz of tiny Vespa trucks overloaded with brown packages, brown children, and white ducks.

  For a moment the street outside is much wider, a grand boulevard filled with the spinning wheels of hundreds of old bicycles. Beautiful women are window-shopping in colorful aò daìdresses of flying silk flowing beneath wide sun hats. The sidewalks are jammed with noisy vendors and with lines of schoolchildren in their bleached uniforms. Shelves are ablaze with fresh fruit, candles, and cloth. Across the street, a bright-orange queue of mute Buddhist monks is winding its way through stalls of betel nut and spices.

  For a moment her dear father is alive again and darting attentively, happily between the cloth-covered tables. There is his gold-toothed smile, preserved perfectly in her memory. There were his large-knuckled hands, his fingers bent crooked by year after year of honest work in the ki
tchen. There they are, his old French-style pantaloons and Chinese military-surplus shoes. There, in the air about her face, is the pungent, painful odor of his infamous Cam Lê cigarettes. Mai’s mother always hated those cigarettes, their bitter, black tobacco and brown paper. Now her daughter was in San Francisco, straining to recapture the scent.

  His precious café had been called the Tu Do Café, the Liberty Café. It had been an open-air café in the old French style, with blue canvas awnings that hung down over the sidewalk. Beneath this awning, customers could linger for hours, sheltered from the sun or the monsoon rains. Mai’s older brothers had labored there as waiters and cooks, but that was before they left to fight in the war. Hong and Kien were there in her memory, working happily side by side in the days just before they became mortal enemies.

  “What do you think about naming it the Amazon Luncheonette?” It was Persephone, calling her tiny friend back from her reveries The temporary business license tacked to the front door had a blank space where the name of the new establishment would eventually be officially entered. Some unknown, midnight scrivener had already written in “The Amazon Luncheonette.” It had probably been meant as an insult, but Persephone liked the name. Since then, someone had spray-painted the name on the east wall of the building.

  “You know it’s what everyone up here calls our little unnamed restaurant-to-be. All the folks on the hill think we’re lesbians.” She laughed. “My God, Mai, if they only knew what it is that you and I have in common. The Amazon Luncheonette,” she repeated with a laugh. She liked the name. “If they only knew.”

  Mai smiled at her tall friend while allowing her gaze to run the full length of her Creole body, from the glaring nail polish on her brown toes to her thick, curly black hair. Persephone had piercing green eyes, expressive, acrobatic lips, and a cinnamon-colored face filled with vital electric energy. There were brilliant sparks in her face in her moments of enthusiasm and there were bolts of lightning in her moments of anger. Mai smiled to herself. There was no one like Persephone Flyer in Vietnam. In the letters that Mai sent home to her youngest brother, her only surviving relative, she had tried in vain to describe her beloved friend. In her next letter she would send a photograph. Imagine, thought Mai, Persephone had three sisters. In this world there were three more women just like her!

  Mai had been astonished to learn that both she and Persephone had taken classical ballet as young girls. Even more amazing, they had both rejected the extreme discipline of that dance and longed for some freer form of expression.

  “Jane Doe 36 is an African-American woman in her mid- to late forties. The head is symmetrical and there appears to be evidence on the scalp of heavy trauma. The head hair is long and curling. The ears are intact and unremarkable. Using the scalpel, I am reflecting the scalp. Lifting the pericranium, I note contusion and bleeding above the left ear. Upon opening the skull, I expect to find a subarachnoid hematoma and possible contra-coup from a sharp blow to the head.

  “As expected, there is diffuse bleeding present; therefore, the blow is definitely antemortem. As I noted previously, there is an entry wound four centimeters behind the left ear. It is a distant wound in that there is no visible stippling or powder burns. As there is no marginal abrasion apparent, the origin of this gunshot was directly from the left side at ear height. I note no exit wound. ”

  “Before the sauce is done, I want to take a shower and shampoo my hair,” said Persephone, as she left the front room and picked her way down the hallway toward the small, crowded apartment behind the cooking area. She lifted her blouse over her head as she walked. Her march to the bathroom was soon marked by a trail of clothing.

  “I won’t put curlers in, though, and I’ll cut the facial down to twenty minutes. I won’t wear that green mudpack out into the front room. We can’t be scaring the customers away, now, can we?”

  In the makeshift kitchen Mai heard the shower coming on, and beneath the floor of the Amazon Luncheonette the ancient plumbing began to chatter and complain as hot water was pumped through its brittle and clogged arteries.

  “I’m shaving my legs now!” yelled Persephone from behind a curtain of plastic and steam, “dragging a blade against the grain.” Her forceful voice could be heard half a block away. “Now, let’s see, I’m shaving them because I’m not really a mammal and these follicles on my legs are biologically meaningless!” Between Persephone’s sentences Mai could hear soft, nervous humming above the rush of the water.

  “I’m shaving my armpits now, and the whole damn neighborhood should know it! These hairs were obviously placed here in a tight bunch so they could be forcibly removed en masse by an old, rusty single-edged razor. Oh yes, I am a natural woman! Oh my, did I forget the bikini line? Heaven forbid! How could I dream of serving spaghetti sauce without shaving my pubic hairs? Now I am using harsh detergents to rob my hair of every life-giving drop of natural oil.”

  The shower water stopped. There were two or three minutes of absolute silence as Persephone stood dripping beneath the shower-head, remembering the day the waters had run red. Years ago she had miscarried while bathing. For a decade she had only taken sponge baths, but recently she had returned to the shower, filling the air with words in the same way that a boy walking through a cemetery fills the air with whistling.

  “Now guess what?” she announced. “I’m plucking my eyebrows, second-guessing my maker’s plan for this lovely face!” There was a moment of silence as selected hairs were strategically uprooted.

  “Next, a couple squeezes of the lash curler. And now for the foundation. I am applying some thick, colored putty to my skin so that my poor pores will have absolutely no way to breathe. And on top of that I will daub on a couple of slashes of rouge here and there to add some emphasis to the high, exotic cheekbones that I’ve never had! Now some eyeliner, a lip liner, and voilà, a completely organic woman! Here I am stepping naked from the half shell. And oh yes, the final touch, un audace de bleu, an audacity of blue!”

  There was a second or two of silence as Persephone dabbed, then spread, an azure eye shadow just above her lashes, lining her upper eyelids.

  “Did you know, Mai, that some anthropologists think that makeup and lipstick are just a visual echo of the erogenous zones? It seems that some female monkeys somewhere in the wilds of Tanzania have faces that look like their hind ends. Hell, some of our customers look exactly like that, but they’re all men!”

  Persephone’s laughter filled the building. The door of the medicine cabinet slammed shut. Some final facial condiment had been applied, then returned to its shelf.

  “What a ridiculous process! Why do we women keep putting ourselves through this?” Even as she said it she glanced at the front door and imagined her young husband standing at the threshold and taking in her beauty with his eyes.

  “None of my three sisters used makeup until their thirties. Of course, they didn’t need it until then. Mai, have I told you about how my three powerful sisters tried to keep their men from going off to war? They tried to use the one power that no man can resist: desire. My poor sisters. They didn’t know that desire is the essence of war.”

  Persephone fell silent suddenly and Mai knew why. Once again, her friend’s eyes had fallen on the photograph behind her. Its reflection was there in the bathroom mirror. It was one of only two photos in the entire house. It was in a silver frame just to the right of the bed, resting on a small vanity. They are both there on that light-sensitive paper. Persephone and A. B. Flyer are smiling and hugging near the dazzling, child-filled carousel at the entrance to the San Francisco Zoo.

  Persephone raised her hand to touch the reflection of the photo in the mirror. In truth she was reaching beyond the paper, beyond the developer, the fixer, and the stop bath, and finally, beyond the image. With all her heart she yearned to reach past everything to touch that precious living instant. Her other hand settled on the flat plane of her abdomen, the place where no child would ever be.

  It is Christmas 1967
and the Têt offensive is just a few weeks and ten thousand miles away. It is Christmas 1967 and Amos is so tall and handsome in his dress greens and class A shoes. His left breast is covered with badges, ribbons, and decorations. At the very top of these is a new Combat Infantryman’s Badge, his proudest possession. The air is clear and cold. His breath is a white cloud frozen beneath his chin. In his dark eyes is the gleam of twisted desire.

  The restaurant in San Francisco was A. B. Flyer’s idea, his dream His parents had run a small café in a tiny town called Happy Jack way down in the Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. It was his grandfather who had changed the family name from La Fleur to Flyer. A. B. Flyer and his new wife had begun saving all their money to buy a small house somewhere in the City. Just one more tour of duty and they’d have the money to pay for a complete kitchen and a food-service permit. The second-tour bonus, along with hazardous-duty pay, almost doubled a staff sergeant’s paycheck.

  Amos had considered locating the restaurant in Hunter’s Point or in the Mission District. He would never have believed that a place on Potrero Hill would become available—a hilltop location with a view of the entire bay, from the Richmond Bridge to the San Mateo.

  “You’re so lucky, Mai,” said Persephone in a soft, dreamy voice. “You’ve got no hair at all on your body.” Persephone was hearing what the photograph could not portray: the beautiful, unearthly blare of the carousel’s organ pipes playing “Over the Waves.” “Not one hair,” she continued. “None of these depilatories and tweezers for you. No chemical creams. Girl, I swear, your skin is like Italian marble. All you do is put on a little lipstick and comb your hair and you’re done! You’re ready to break some hearts. I tell you, there’s no justice in this life. No justice at all. Even your feet are so petite and pretty. Just look at mine—so damn big, and my husband never did like my breasts. Too big or too saggy or something. You’re a real heartbreaker, girl. If I was a lesbian, honey, I could do a lot worse than you!”