Creole Belle

  “Tee Jolie don’t associate wit’ people like that.”

  But she does associate with people who use other people, I thought. I took the photo from Clete and showed it to Mr. DeBlanc. “Take a good look at that fellow. Are you sure you haven’t seen him?”

  “No, suh, I ain’t seen him, and I don’t know him, and Tee Jolie never talked about him or any of these men. What kind of criminal are we talking about?”

  “The kind of guy who gives crime a bad name,” I replied.

  His face became sad; he blinked in the lamplight. “She tole me she was falling in love wit’ a man. She said maybe she’d bring him home to meet me. She said he was rich and had gone to col’letch and he loved music. She wouldn’t tell me nothing else. Then one day she was gone. And then her sister left, too. I don’t know why this is happening. They left me alone and never called and just went away. It ain’t fair.”

  “What isn’t fair?” Clete asked.

  “Everyt’ing. We never broke no laws. We took care of ourself and our place on the bayou and never hurt nobody. That’s my father’s picture up there on the wall. He fought in France in the First World War. His best friend was killed on the last day of the war. He had eight children and raised us up against ever fighting in a war or doing harm to anybody for any reason. Now somebody taken my granddaughters from me, and a deputy sheriff tells me ain’t no evidence of a crime been committed. That’s why I say it ain’t fair.” He struggled to his feet with his two walking canes and went into the kitchen.

  “What are you doing, sir?” I asked.

  “Fixing y’all coffee.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “Yes, suh, I do. I ain’t been a good host. I cain’t find the sugar, though. I couldn’t find it this morning. I cain’t concentrate on t’ings like I used to.”

  I had followed him into the kitchen to dissuade him from putting himself out. The cupboards, which had curtains on them rather than doors, were almost bare. There were no pots on the stove, no smell of cooked food in the air. He pulled a coffee can off a shelf, then accidentally dropped it on the drainboard. The plastic cap popped loose, spilling the small amount of coffee that was inside. “It’s all right. We still got enough for t’ree cups,” he said.

  “We have to go, Mr. DeBlanc. Thank you for your courtesy,” I said.

  He hesitated, then began scooping the coffee back in the can. “Yes, suh, I understand,” he replied.

  Clete and I walked out into the rain and got into the Caddy. Clete didn’t start the engine and instead stared through the windshield at the lamplight glowing in the front windows of the house. “His kitchen looked pretty bare,” he said.

  “I suspect he’s in the Meals On Wheels program,” I said.

  “You ever see the stuff those old people eat? It looks like diced rabbit food or the kind of crap Iranian inmates eat.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “You think Mr. DeBlanc might like a warmed-up po’boy and a cold brew?” he said.

  So we took Clete’s foot-long sandwich, which consisted of almost an entire loaf of French bread filled with deep-fried oysters and baby shrimp and mayonnaise and hot sauce and sliced lettuce and tomatoes and onions, and carried it and the two longneck bottles of Bud inside. Then we fixed a pot of coffee and sat down with Mr. DeBlanc at his kitchen table and cut the po’boy in three pieces and had a fine meal while the rain drummed like giant fingers on the roof.

  ALICE WERENHAUS LIVED in an old neighborhood off Magazine, on the edges of the Garden District, on a block one might associate with the genteel form of poverty that became characteristic of mid-twentieth-century New Orleans. Even after Katrina, the live oaks were of tremendous dimensions, their gigantic roots wedging up the sidewalks and cracking the curbs and keeping the houses in shadow almost twenty-four hours a day. But gradually, the culture that had defined the city, for good or bad, had taken flight from Alice’s neighborhood and been replaced by bars on the windows of businesses and residences and a pervading fear, sometimes justified, that two or three kids dribbling a basketball down the street might turn out to be the worst human beings you ever met.

  Out of either pride or denial of her circumstances, Alice had not installed a security system in her house or sheathed her windows with bars specially designed to imitate the Spanish grillwork that was part of traditional New Orleans architecture. She walked to Mass and rode the streetcar to work. She shopped at night in a grocery store three blocks away and wheeled her own basket home, forcing it over the broken and pitched slabs of concrete in the sidewalks. On one occasion, a man came out of the shadows and tried to jerk her purse from her shoulder. Miss Alice hit him in the head with a zucchini, then threw it at him as he fled down the street.

  Her friends were few. Her days at the convent had been marked by acrimony and depression and the bitter knowledge that insularity and loneliness would always be her lot. Ironically, the first sunshine in her adult life came in her newly found career as a secretary for an alcoholic private investigator whose clientele could have been characters lifted from Dante’s Inferno. She pretended to be viscerally offended by their vulgarity and narcissism, but there were occasions on an inactive day when she caught herself glancing through the window in hopes of seeing a betrayed wife headed up the street, out for blood, or one of Nig Rosewater’s bail skips about to burst through the door in need of secular absolution.

  These moments of introspection made her wonder if a thinly disguised pagan might not be living inside her skin.

  On the day after Clete Purcel went to New Iberia to tend his office, a sudden thunderstorm had swept ashore south of the city, bringing with it the smell of brine and sulfa and a downpour in her neighborhood that flooded the streets and filled the gutters and yards with floating leaves. The clouds were bursting with electricity when she got off the streetcar on St. Charles and walked toward Magazine, the thunder booming over the Gulf like cannons firing in sequence. The air was cool and fresh and had a tannic odor that made her think of long-standing water poured from a wood barrel. She felt an excitement about the evening that she couldn’t quite explain, as though she were revisiting her childhood home in Morgan City where the storm clouds over the Gulf created a light show every summer evening, the wind straightening the palms on the boulevard where she had lived, a jolly Popsicle man in a white cap driving his truck down to the baseball diamond in the park.

  When she walked up on the gallery of her small house and unlocked the door, her cat, Cedric, was waiting to be let in. He was a pumpkin-size orange ball of fur with white paws and a star on his face who left seat smears all over her breakfast table and was never corrected for it. He ran ahead of her into the house and attacked his food bowl while she turned on the television in the living room and filled the house with the sounds of CNN and a family she didn’t have.

  She filled a teakettle with water and lit the gas range and set the kettle to boil, and put a frozen dinner in the microwave, and glanced out the side window at a man in a hooded raincoat walking down the alley, his shoulders rounded, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his red tennis shoes splashing in the puddles. He disappeared from her line of vision. She picked up her cat, cradling him heavily in one arm, and tugged playfully on the furry thickness of his tail. “What have you been doing all day, you little fatty?” she said.

  Cedric pushed against her grasp with his hind feet, indicating that he wanted to be bounced up and down. For some unaccountable reason, he changed his mind and twisted in her arms and jumped onto the breakfast table, staring out the rear window at the alley. Alice peered out the window and saw a neighbor lift the top of his Dumpster and drop a vinyl sack of garbage inside.

  “You’re a big baby, Cedric,” Alice said.

  She heard the microwave ding and took the preprepared container of veal and potatoes and peas out and fixed a cup of tea and sat down and ate her supper. Later she lay back on a reclining chair in front of the television and watched the History Channel and
fell asleep without ever realizing she was falling asleep.

  When she woke, the thunderstorm had passed and flashes of electricity were flaring silently in the clouds, briefly illuminating the trees and puddles of floating leaves in her yard. Cedric was on the rear windowsill, flicking a paw at a raindrop running down the glass. Then someone twisted the mechanical bell on the front door, and she slipped off the night chain and pulled open the door without first checking to see who her visitor was.

  He was black, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with a goatee that looked like wire protruding from his chin. He wore a dark rain jacket, the hood hanging on his back. Through the screen, she could smell his body odor and unbrushed teeth and the unrinsed detergent in his clothes. Under one arm he was clutching a cardboard box that had no top.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “I’m selling chocolate for the Boys Town Fund.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In St. Bernard Parish.”

  She tried to see his shoes, but her line of vision was obstructed by the paneling at the bottom of the door. “There’s a white man who picks up you kids in the Lower Nine and drops you off in neighborhoods like mine. You have to pay him four dollars for each chocolate bar you don’t bring back, and the rest is yours. Is that correct?”

  He seemed to think about what she had said, his eyes clouding. “It’s for the Boys Town Fund.”

  “I can’t give you any money.”

  “You don’t want no candy?”

  “You’re working for a dishonest man. He uses children to deceive and cheat people. He robs others of their faith in their fellow man. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, turning toward the street, his gaze shifting off hers.

  “If you need to use the bathroom, come in. If you want a snack, I’ll fix you one. But you should get away from the man you’re working for. Do you want to come in?”

  He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I ain’t meant to bother you.”

  “Were you in my alleyway a while ago? What kind of shoes are you wearing?”

  “What kind of shoes? I’m wearing the kind I put on this morning.”

  “Don’t be smart with me.”

  “I got to go. The man is waiting for me on the corner.”

  “Come see me another time and let’s talk.”

  He looked at her warily. “Talk about what?”

  “Anything you want to.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’ll do that,” he said.

  After she closed the inside door, she looked through the side window and watched him walk up the street under the overhang of the trees. He did not stop at any of the other houses. Why had he stopped at only hers? She stepped out on the gallery and tried to see down the sidewalk, but the boy was gone. Maybe he had gone up a driveway to a garage apartment. That was possible, wasn’t it? Otherwise . . . She didn’t want to think about otherwise.

  As she chained the door, she heard a Dumpster lid clang in the alley and the subdued thunder of rap music from inside a closed vehicle and a tree limb scraping wetly across the side of her house. She heard Cedric run across the linoleum in the kitchen.

  “Where are you going, you fat little pumpkin head?” she said.

  She glanced in her hallway and in her bedroom and in her clothes closet, but Cedric was nowhere to be seen. Then she felt a coldness in the wall that separated the guest room from the bath. She opened the door and stared numbly at the curtains blowing from the open window, one from which the screen had been removed.

  She turned around in the hallway, her heart beating hard, just as a man in a purple ski mask and black leather gloves and red tennis shoes stepped out of the bathroom and swung his fist into the middle of her face. “You’re sure a stupid bitch,” he said. “You live in a neighborhood like this without a security system?”

  WHEN SHE WOKE up, she didn’t know if she had been knocked unconscious by the blow of her assailant or by her head striking the floor. All she knew was that she was in her kitchen, stretched out on the linoleum, her wrists wrapped with duct tape and the duct tape wrapped through the handle on the oven door. The only light in the kitchen came from the gas flame under the teakettle and the glow around the edge of the blinds from a streetlamp in the alley.

  Her attacker was standing above her, breathing through the mouth hole in his mask, his gloved hands opening and closing at his sides. “You like opera?” he said. His pronunciation was strange, as though the inside of his mouth had been injured or he were wearing dentures that didn’t fit. “Answer my question, bitch.”

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “A guy who’s gonna turn you into an opera star. I’ll put you on the phone so you can yodel to a friend of yours. I heated up your teapot for you.”

  “I know who you are. Shame on you.”

  “That’s a dumb thing to say. Why do you think I’m wearing this mask?”

  “Because you’re a coward.”

  “It means you got a chance to live. But the odds of that happening aren’t as good as they were a few seconds ago. Your cat is hiding under the bed.”

  She tried to read the expression in his eyes inside his mask, to no avail.

  “Has the kitty got your tongue?” he said.

  “Leave him alone.”

  He looked over his shoulder at the microwave. “I think he might make a nice fit.”

  “Friends are coming over anytime. You’ll be punished for whatever you do here. You’re a nasty little man. I should have let Mr. Purcel have his way with you.”

  He leaned over her, looking straight down into her face. “You don’t have friends, lady. Nothing is gonna help you. Accept that. You’re totally in my power, and you’re gonna do everything I say. I think I’m gonna alter my plan a little bit. What do they call that place in Kentucky where people take vows of silence?” He snapped his fingers, his glove making a whispering sound. “Gethsemane? I said I was gonna make an opera singer out of you, but that’s not a good idea. You’d wake up the whole neighborhood. I’m gonna give you my own vow of silence. Open wide.”

  When she refused, he clenched the bottom of her chin and stuffed a dishrag in her mouth and pressed a strip of tape across her cheeks and lips. “There,” he said, standing erect. “You look like a balloon that’s about to pop. That’s not far from wrong.”

  He turned off the flame on the stove and picked up a hot pad from the drainboard and lifted the teakettle off the burner. “Where do you want it first?” he asked.

  She felt sweat popping on her brow, her throat gagging on the dishrag and her own saliva, her shoes coming off her feet as she thrashed against the linoleum. He tipped the spout of the teakettle down and slowly scalded one of her legs and then the other. “How’s that feel? That’s just for openers,” he said.

  It became obvious that he was not prepared for what came next. Alice Werenhaus flexed both of her upper arms and her massive shoulders and tore the handle out of the oven door, rising to her feet like a behemoth emerging from an ancient bog. She ripped the tape from her face and pulled the dishrag from her mouth and drove her fist into a spot right between her assailant’s eyes.

  The blow sent him crashing into the wall. She picked up a bread box and smashed it over his head, then opened the door to the pantry and pulled a Stillson pipe wrench loose from a washtub full of tools. The Stillson felt as heavy as a shot put, its serrated grips mounted on a long shaft. Her assailant was getting to his feet when she caught him across the buttocks. He screamed and arched his back in an inverted bow, as though it had been broken, one hand fluttering behind to protect himself from a second blow. Alice swung again, this time across his shoulders, and a third time high up on his arm, and a fourth time on the elbow, each blow thudding into bone.

  He stumbled through her living room and jerked open the front door, his nose bleeding through his mask. She hit him again, this time across the spine, knocking him through the screen onto the gallery. She followed him outside, catching
him in the rib cage, knocking him onto the sidewalk, beating him across the thighs and knees as he picked himself up and began running down the street, careening off balance, like a bagful of broken sticks trying to reassemble itself.

  Her ears were roaring with sound, her lungs screaming for air, her heart swollen with adrenaline. The black kid with the box of chocolate candy was staring at her in disbelief.

  “What are you looking at?” she said.

  “I done what you tole me. I quit my job. I ain’t give back the chocolate bars, either.”

  She wanted to say something to him, but she couldn’t catch her breath or even remember what she had planned to say.

  “Your cat just run out the door. I’ll go catch him.”

  “No, he’ll come back.”

  “You ain’t gonna hit nobody else wit’ that wrench, are you?”

  The world was spinning around her, and she had to hold on to a tree limb so she would not fall down. Nor could she find breath enough or the right words to answer the boy’s question.

  I WENT BACK to work at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department on a half-day schedule the morning after the thundershower, primarily because we needed the income. But in all honesty, I loved my job and the place where I worked. The department had been consolidated with the city police and had moved from the courthouse to a big brick colonial-style building behind the library, with a lovely view of a tree-shaded religious grotto and Bayou Teche and City Park on the far side of the water. It was a sunny, cool, rain-washed morning my first day back, and the sheriff, whose name was Helen Soileau, and some of my colleagues had placed flowers on my desk, and as I sat down in my swivel chair and looked at the glaze of sunlight on the bayou and the wind blowing hundreds of arrowpoints across the water’s surface, I felt that perhaps Indian summer would never end, that the world was a grand place after all, and that I should never let the shadows of the heart stain my life again.

  Then Clete Purcel came in at ten A.M. and told me he had just gotten a phone call from Alice Werenhaus and that she had been attacked in her house by a masked intruder she believed was Waylon Grimes.