"Really?" said Holly. Her eyes widened. The tears stopped.
"Sure," said the young man, who was a sophomore at a large Louisiana university and was returning to New Orleans on just Folks because it was cheaper than a bus. In fact, he said, when you considered what shoes cost today, it was cheaper than walking. While he was talking, he was recording everything in his mind to boast about back at the dorm if this pickup should turn out to be as successful as he hoped.
"Are you going to be met by anyone?" asked Holly.
"No. I'll just take a bus to the campus," he said.
"Do you need a lift or anything?"
"Well, I'll take one," he said.
"What is your name, where are you going, and why; is there anyone you really care about in your life; what are your main worries and hopes? Mine are to live happily," said Holly. Dammit, she thought. She was supposed to ask those questions one at a time, not all at once.
But the young man didn't mind. He answered them all. She didn't even bother to listen. She just smiled and nodded every few minutes and it was enough for him.
Every one of his jokes was funny, every one of his ideas profound. He discovered in this milk-skinned, big-busted blond beauty an approval the world had never given him before.
The two hardly noticed the two male flight attendants on just Folks, one of them wearing a kimono. They must have been efficient, though, because everyone seemed to stay in his seat and there were no calls for anything. Once someone wanted to use the lavatory and the old Oriental in the kimono explained how to use bladder control.
But Holly and her new friend didn't mind at all. At the airport outside New Orleans, Holly offered the student a lift. He thought that was a great idea, especially since she implied she knew of a lonely, secluded place.
The place was an old ramshackle building in a black section of the city. Holly led him inside, and when she saw her brothers and sisters in Kali, she could hardly contain herself. They were her prayer-mates. And there was the phansigar. He had brought the strangling cloth.
Holly smiled when she saw the yellow cloth in his hands. Tradition, she thought. She loved tradition. She loved calling the strangler "the phansigar," just as Kali devotees had done in the olden days. The cloth too was a part of that tradition.
"This isn't going to be a gang bang, is it?" The student laughed and all the rest laughed with him: He thought they were wonderful people. They thought he was as brilliant as she did.
He waited awhile for Holly to take off her clothes. While he was waiting, one of the others asked if he could get a handkerchief around the student's throat.
"No, I don't go for kinky stuff."
"We do," said the other man, and then they were all on him, holding his hands, his feet, and there was a cord around his neck.
He couldn't breathe, and then, after a point of incredible pain, he didn't even want to breathe. "She loves it," said Holly, seeing the death struggles of the young man, his face becoming red, then blue with death. "Kali loves his pain. She loves it."
"You did well, Sister Holly," said the phansigar, removing the yellow cloth. There was a red welt around the neck, but no blood. He untied the sacred strangling cloth, which was called the "rumal." They went through the student's pockets and found forty dollars.
It barely covered the air fare, even the just Folks consumer fare. The phansigar shook his head. He did not know what the Holy One would say.
"But isn't the important thing the death offering to Kali?" Holly asked. "Kill for Kali? Offer her up a demon? Doesn't Kali love pain? Even our pain? Even our deaths?"
The phansigar, formerly a stationery-store clerk in Kansas City, had to agree. "It was a good death," he said. "A very good death."
"Thank you," said Holly. "It was my first. I thought I wasn't even going to be able to say hello to anyone, I was so frightened."
"That's just how I felt my first time," said the brother phansigar, he of the strangling cord, he who offered up the sacrifice suitable to Kali, the goddess of death. "It gets easier as you go along."
On their way to the Holy Temple, where Kali received the kiss to Her followers, Her loyal servants ate the traditional raw sugar and said the prayers again. They wrapped the forty dollars in the holy rumal, and with songs of praise and the raw sugar still on their lips, went before the Holy One, who had been brought to America by Kali. They intoned prayers for Kali and recitations of the victim's pain, which was wine for Her lips."
Ban Sar Din heard the prayers, heard the recitations of devotion from the followers, and waited until the holy rumal was placed at his feet. Then he nodded sagely at the bowing devotees.
"Kali has tasted the sweetness of death again because of you, beloved followers," he said, and then added something in the language of Bangalore, his native Indian city. Americans liked that. Especially the kids. The kids were the best. They were complete jerks.
Ban Sar Din gave the holy strangler phansigar a fresh rumal and took the closed death cloth with a grunt of gratitude. A quick glance inside told him only forty dollars.
Impossible, he thought. Even on a just Folks consumer-fare flight, they would be losing money on a forty-dollar take. And that was just one fare. What about the other fares? What about those times when there was no one for them to set up? The overhead was enormous. The lights alone for the temple cost $120 a month. What was the matter with these kids? Forty dollars. Impossible.
When Ban Sar Din retreated for private devotions into his solitary office, the cold brutal fact hit him when he saw three tens, a five, and five singles. It was forty dollars. This group of yo-yos had wasted a consumer-bonus fare for forty dollars. He wanted to run back into the temple and kick them out.
How the hell did they think he was going to meet his budget?
The yellow handkerchiefs were going up. He used to be able to get a gross for $87.50, and that included the printed likeness of Kali. Now a gross of something barely strong enough to strangle a neck bigger than a chicken's cost $110, and if you wanted printed pictures, forget the whole thing. And the other pictures of Kali. They went well, but prices were rising there too. And candles. Everybody in America was burning candles, and prices had gone up like smoke.
So with strangling cloths going up, candles out of sight, printing prohibitive, and it only a matter of time before just Folks raised its fares to meet the competitors', Ban Sar Din realized he was going broke at forty dollars a pop.
But how was he going to tell these American hooples to at least look to see if the victim was wearing an expensive watch? Was that too much to ask? Look for an expensive watch before you send the demon on his way to Kali.
That didn't seem like a lot to ask. But he didn't know. He never knew about Americans or America. He had come to the country seven years before, with only a six-month visa and his quick wits. Back in Bangalore, the ruling magistrate had let him know that he wasn't wanted on the streets of the city and if he were caught picking another Indian pocket, the police were going to take him into an alley and beat his dark brown skin purple.
Then a friend told him about the wonders of America. In the United States, if you were caught picking a pocket, you were given a room to yourself and three good meals a day. It was supposed to be punishment. Americans called it jail.
You could even get free legal help, and because Americans thought that any kind of punishment was too harsh, they were even experimenting with making the opposite sex available so that prisoners wouldn't be lonely. They had taken away the bars too, and given prisoners free education so they could make money outside jail by working if they chose to, although not too many did. And who could blame them, when jail was so good?
"I do not believe such a place like this exists," Ban Sar Din had told his friend.
"True. It is like that in America."
"You lie. No one is that stupid. No country."
"Not only do they do all these things, but if a person who is rewarded for killing and robbing kills and robs again, guess who they blame?"
"I don't know."
"Themselves," his friend had said.
"You lie," Ban Sar Din spat.
"They gave India fifteen billion dollars in grain, and look at how we treat them. Fifteen billion when a billion was a lot of money even for Americans."
"They can't be that rich and that stupid. How do they survive?" Ban Sar Din asked.
"They have a very big ocean on both sides of them." Ban Sar Din crossed one of those oceans with his very last penny and immediately went about picking pockets, expecting to get caught and go to this wonderful place called jail. Then one day some white man on a park bench near Lake Pontchartrain spoke to him. "Where did I go wrong?" the white man said.
Ban Sar Din would have left, but his hand was solidly inside the man's trouser pocket.
The man furrowed his brows. "We are a vacant, empty society," he said.