“Wait a minute,” he said, and slipped his thumb in his watch pocket and put a silver dollar in her palm. The ends of his slender fingers brushed her skin. She had not known a coin could be that heavy and big. “That’s for Christmas. Now, run along and tell your mama the coffee’s for Mr. Moleen.”
She didn’t see him again for six years, then on a cold New Year’s afternoon she heard guns popping on the far side of the cane field, out by the treeline, and when she went out on the gallery she saw four men walking abreast through the frozen stubble, while a frenzy of birds leaped into the air in front of them and tried to find invisibility against a pitiless blue sky.
The hunters unloaded canvas chairs, a cooler, a collapsible grill from the bed of a pickup, and drank whiskey and cooked two-inch bloodred steaks on a wood fire that whipped in the wind like a torn handkerchief. When the one named Moleen saw her from across the field and asked her to bring water, she went quickly into the kitchen and filled a plastic pitcher, her heart beating in her breast for a reason she didn’t understand.
The faces of the hunters were red with windburn and bourbon, their eyes playful, their conversation roaming between the depth of drilling wells and the remembered adrenaline surge in the glands when they led a throbbing covey with ventilated-rib sights and, one-two-three-four-five, turned each bird into a broken smudge against the winter sun. She filled their glasses, now aware that her sense of alarm was not only baseless but vain, that their eyes never really took note of her, other than a glance to ensure the water didn’t spill over their outstretched wrists.
But as she walked away, she heard a pause, a silence so loud that her ears popped, then the register dropped in one man’s voice, and the muscles in her back seemed to gather and constrict inside her dress, as though the coarseness, the undisguised connotation of the remark had the power to shrink her in physical as well as emotional stature.
“It’s all pink inside, Moleen.”
She kept her eyes straight ahead, focused on the gallery where her aunt and brother were husking and shelling pecans in a bucket, where the Christmas lights were still strung under the eaves, where her two cats played in a water oak that stood as stark against the winter light as a cluster of broken fingers.
She expected to hear the hunters laugh. Instead, there was silence again, and in the wind blowing at her back she clearly heard the voice of the man named Moleen:
“You’ve had too much to drink, sir. Regardless, I won’t abide that kind of discourtesy toward a woman on my property.”
She never forgot that moment.
He came back from the service long after the other soldiers had returned. He never explained why, or told anyone exactly where he had been. But he had the quiet detachment of someone who has lived close to death, or perhaps of one who has watched the erosion of the only identity he ever had. He often sat alone in his car by the grove of gum trees, the doors open to catch the evening breeze, while he smoked a cigar in the drone of cicadas and stared at the molten sun descending over the cane fields.
One time Ruthie Jean opened an old issue of Life magazine and saw a picture taken in Indochina of a valley filled with green elephant grass and a sun like a red wafer slipping into the watery horizon. She walked with it to Moleen’s car, almost as though she had pick locked his thoughts, and placed it in his hand and looked him directly in the face, as if to say the debt for the silver dollar and the rebuke of the drunken hunter was not being repaid but openly acknowledged as the bond between them that race and social station had made improbable.
He knew it, too. Whatever sin he had carried back from the Orient, blood that could not be rinsed from his dreams, a shameful and unspoken memory he seemed to see re-created in the fire of Western skies, he knew she looked into him and saw it there and didn’t condemn him for it and instead by her very proximity told him he was still the same young man who was kind to a child on a hunter’s dawn and who had struck dumb a peer whose words had the power to flay the soul.
The first time it happened was back beyond the treeline, toward the lake, in a cypress shack that had once been part of the old slave quarters and was later used as a corn crib. The two of them pulled the backseat out of his car and carried it inside, their bodies still hot from their first caresses only moments earlier. They undressed without speaking, their private fears etched in their faces, and when he found himself nude before she was, he couldn’t wait, either out of need or embarrassment, and began kissing her shoulders and neck and then the tops of her breasts while she was still attempting to unsnap her bra.
She had never been with a white man before, and he felt strangely gentle and tender between her thighs, and when they came at the same time, she kissed his wet hair and pressed her palms into the small of his back and kept her stomach and womb tight against him until the last violent shudder in his muscles seemed to exorcise the succubus that fed at his heart.
He bought her a gold watch with sapphires set in the obsidian face, sent her gift certificates for clothes at Maison Blanche in New Orleans, and then one day an envelope with a plane ticket to Veracruz, money, and directions to a hotel farther down the coast.
Their rooms adjoined. Moleen said the owners of the hotel were traditional people whom he respected and to whom he did not want to lie by saying they were married.
The rented boat he took her out on was as white and gleaming as porcelain, with outriggers, fighting chairs, and a flying bridge. He would tie leader with the care and concentration of a weaver, bait the feathered spoons, then fling them into the boat’s wake, his grin full of confidence and expectation. The curls of hair on his chest and shoulders looked like bleached corn silk against his tan skin.
On the first morning he showed her how to steer the boat and read the instrument panel. The day was boiling, the Gulf emerald green with patches of blue in it like clouds of ink, and while she stood at the wheel, her palms on the spokes, the engines throbbing through the deck, she felt his hands on her shoulders, her sides and hips, her breasts and stomach, then his mouth was buried in the swirls of her hair and she could feel his hardness grow against her.
They made love on an air mattress, their bodies breaking out with sweat, the boat rolling under them, the sky above them spinning with light and the cry of gulls. She came before he did, and then moments later she came again, something she had never done with another man.
Later, he fixed vodka and collins mix and cracked ice in two glasses, wrapped them in napkins with rubber bands, and they sat in their bathing suits in the fighting chairs and trolled across a coral reef whose crest was covered with undulating purple and orange sea fans.
She went below to use the rest room. When she came back up into the cabin, she saw another fishing boat off their port bow. A man and woman on the stern were waving at Moleen. He put his binoculars on them, then rose from his chair and came inside the cabin.
“Who’s that?” she said.
“I don’t know. They probably think we’re someone else,” he said.
He took the wheel and eased the throttle forward. She watched the other boat drop behind them, the two figures on the stern staring motionlessly after them. She picked up the binoculars from the top of the instrument panel and focused them on the lettering on the boat’s hull.
Later, she would not remember the boat’s name, but the words designating its home port, Morgan City, Louisiana, filled her with a bitter knowledge that trysts among palm trees, or even the naked hunger that he would bring again and again to the plantation, on his knees in the corn crib, his hands clenching the backs of her thighs, would never efface.
Noah Wirtz was a lean, short man, with skin that looked like it had been singed by a gunpowder flash. He wore a black, short-billed leather cap, even in summer, and always smiled, as though the situation around him was fraught with humor that only he saw. He lived in a frame house at the head of the road with his wife, a fundamentalist Sunday school teacher from Mississippi who walked on a wooden leg. The black people on th
e plantation said, “Mr. Noah know how to make the eagle scream.” He and his wife spent nothing on movies, vacations, automobiles, liquor, outboard boats, pickup trucks, shotguns, even food that would make their fare better than the cornbread, greens, bulk rice and red beans, buffalo fish, carp, and low-grade meat most of the blacks ate. Every spare nickel from his meager salary went into the small grocery store they bought in Cade, and the profits from the store went into farm machinery, which he began to lease to sugar growers in Iberia and St. Martin parishes.
It was a sweltering August night, the trees threaded with the electric patterns of fireflies, when Moleen discovered the potential of his overseer. He and Ruthie Jean had met in the shack beyond the treeline, and just as he had risen from her, his body dripping and limp, her fingers sliding away from his hips, he heard dry leaves breaking, a stick cracking, a heavy, audibly breathing presence moving through the undergrowth outside.
He put on his khakis, pulled his polo shirt on over his head, and ran out into the heated air and the aching drone of cicadas. Through the tree trunks, on the edge of the field, he saw Noah Wirtz getting into his battered flatbed truck, the points of his cowboy boots curled up into snouts on his feet, the armpits of his long-sleeved denim shirt looped with sweat.
“You! Wirtz!” Moleen shouted. “You hold up there!”
“Yes, sir?” Wirtz smiled from under his leather cap, his skin as dark as if it had been smoked in a fire.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Cleaning up the trash the niggers throwed on the ground at lunchtime.”
“I don’t see any trash.”
“That’s ‘cause I buried hit. You want me to haul hit back to my house?” His seamed face was as merry as an elf’s.
They looked at each other in the fading light.
“Have a good evening, cap’n,” Wirtz said, and spit a stream of Red Man before he got into the cab of his truck.
Moleen walked back through the trees to the shack. Even in the soft yellow afterglow through the canopy he knew, without looking, what he would find below the unshuttered and gaping shack window. The heels of the boots had bitten through the dry leaves into the wet underlayer, with the sharp and razored precision of a cleft-footed satyr.
The blackmail began later, after Moleen’s marriage to Julia, but it was not overt, and never a difficult yoke to bear; in fact, it was so seemingly benign that after a while Moleen convinced himself that better it be Wirtz, who did what he was told, who was obsequious and contemptible (who sometimes even played the role of pimp and ensured their trysts would not be disturbed), than someone who was either more cunning or less predictable.
Moleen gave him a useless tractor that would have rusted into the weeds otherwise; a smoked ham at Christmas and Thanksgiving; venison and ducks when he had too much for his own freezer; the use of five acres that had to be cleared and harrowed first.
Ironically, the denouement of their arrangement came not because of Wirtz’s avarice but because of his growing confidence that he no longer needed Moleen. He began selling liquor in his grocery store and lending money to black field hands and housemaids, on which they made five-percent interest payments one Saturday night a month until the principal was liquidated.
His farm machinery filled a rented tin shed up Bayou Teche.
Moleen heard the story first as rumor, then from the mouth of the sixteen-year-old girl who said Wirtz came to her house for his laundry when the parents were gone, then, after paying her and hanging the broomstick hung with his ironed shirts across the back of his truck cab, had gone back in the kitchen, not speaking, his eyes locked on the girl’s, his breath now covering her face like a fog, and had clenched one of her wrists in his hand and simultaneously unzipped his overalls.
Moleen drove straight from the girl’s house to Wirtz’s and didn’t even bother to cut the engine or close the door of his Buick behind him before he strode through the unpainted picket gate and up the narrow path lined with petunias to the gallery, where Wirtz, his face cool and serene in the shade, was eating from a box of Oreo cookies, his leather cap suspended on a nail above his head.
“The girl’s too scared and ashamed to bring charges against you, but I want you off my property. In fact, I want you out of the parish,” Moleen said.
“Out of the parish, huh?” Wirtz said, and smiled so broadly his eyes were slits.
“Why in God’s name I hired some white trash like you I’ll never know,” Moleen said.
“White trash, huh? You hear this, cap’n. Befo’ I’d put mine in that nigger, I’d cut hit off and feed hit to the dog.”
“Clean your house out. I want you gone by nightfall.”
Moleen started toward his car.
“You’re a piece of work, Bertrand. You fuck down and marry up and don’t give hit a second thought,” Wirtz said. He bit down softly on a cookie.
The blood climbed into Moleen’s neck. He leaned inside the open door of the Buick, pulled the keys, and unlocked the trunk.
Noah Wirtz stared at him impassively, brushing his hands with a sound like emery paper, as Moleen came toward him with the horse quirt. He barely turned his face when the leather rod whipped through the air and sliced across his cheek.
“You ever speak to me like that again, I’ll take your life,” Moleen said.
Wirtz pressed his palm to the welt, then opened and closed his mouth.
His eyes seemed to study a thought inches in front of his face, then reject it. He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles between his knees.
“I got me a contract,” he said. “Till the cane’s in, I got a job and I got this house. You’re trespassing, cap’n. Get your automobile off my turnaround.”
“The shooting,” I said to Luke, as he sat across from me at a picnic table under the pavilion in the park.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. He tried to light a cigarette, but the match was damp with his own perspiration and wouldn’t ignite against the striker. “They was gonna electrocute me. I still wake up in the middle of the night, I got the sheets tangled all over me, I can feel that man drawing his razor across my scalp.”
“Tell me what happened in that saloon, Luke.”
“He said it in front of all them men, about a woman ain’t done anything to him, ain’t ever hurt anybody.”
“Who?”
“Noah Wirtz, he talk about her at the bouree table like ain’t even niggers gonna take up for her.”
“Said what, Luke?”
“That bitch got a pumpkin up her dress, and I know the name of the shit hog put it there.” That’s what he say, Mr. Dave, looking me right in the eyes, a li’l smile on his mouth.”
Then he described that winter night in the saloon, almost incoherently, as though a few seconds in his life had been absorbed through his senses in so violent a fashion that he now believed the death he had been spared was in reality the only means he would ever have to purge and kill forever the memory that came aborning every night in his sleep.
It’s the first Saturday of the month, and the bar and tables are crowded with blacks, mulattos, red bones and people who look white but never define themselves as such. The air smells of expectorated chewing tobacco and snuff, animal musk, oily wood, chemically treated sawdust, overcooked okra, smoke, and unwashed hair. The video poker machines line an unadorned fiberboard wall like a magical neon-lit instrument panel that can transport the player into an electronic galaxy of wealth and power. But the big money is at the round, felt-covered bouree table, where you can lose it all—the groceries, the rent on a pitiful shack, the installment on the gas-guzzler, the weekly payment for the burial insurance collector, even the food stamps you can discount and turn into instant capital.
The man at the table with the cash is Noah Wirtz, and he takes markers in the form of bad checks, which he holds in lieu of payment on his loans and which he can turn over to the sheriff’s office if the borrower defaults. Sometimes he uses a shill in the game,
a hired man who baits a loser or a drunk and goads him into losing more, since bouree is a game in which great loss almost always follows recklessness and impetuosity.
Wirtz consoles, buys a drink for those who have lost all their wages, says, “Come see me at the store in the morning. We’ll work something out. ” He knows how far to press down on a nerve, when to give it release. Until tonight, the cane harvest in, the contract with Bertrand finished, when perhaps his own anger, the quiet residual rage of his kind (and that had always been the word used to describe his social class), passed down like an ugly heirloom from one generation to the next, begins to throb like the blow of a whip delivered contemptuously across the face, and the name Moleen Bertrand and the world he represents to Wirtz and which Wirtz despises and envies becomes more important than the money he has amassed through stint and self-denial and debasing himself to the servile level of the blacks with whom he competes.
“What you got to say about it, Luke?” Wirtz says.
Luke’s eyes can’t focus, nor can he make the right words come out of his throat. His face contains the empty and deceptive intensity of a scorched cake pan.
“A certain white man didn’t have to pull you off hit to get to hit hisself did he?” Wirtz says.
Luke’s one-inch nickel-plated .38 revolver, with no trigger guard and electrician’s tape holding the handles together, is one step above scrap metal. But its power and short-range accuracy are phenomenal. The I 64 single steel-jacketed round he squeezes off splinters through the tabletop and felt cover and enters Wirtz’s chin as though a red hole were punched there with a cold chisel.
Wirtz stumbles through the washroom door, a crushed fedora squeezed against the wound, his mouth a scarlet flower that wishes to beg for help or mercy or perhaps even forgiveness but that can only make unintelligible sounds that seem to have no human correspondent. “He curls into a ball behind the toilet tank, his knees drawn up in front of him, his eyes pleading, his hands trembling on the fedora.