"How about home, instead?" I asked.
"Dave, you are a total drag."
"Better appreciate who your friends are, ma'am," Helen said.
"Do I know you?" Lila said.
"Yeah, I had the honor of cleaning up your—"
"Helen, let's get Miss Lila home and head back for the office."
"Oh, by all means. Yes, indeedy," Helen said.
WE DROVE SOUTH ALONG Bayou Teche toward Jeanerette, where Lila lived in a plantation home whose bricks had been dug from clay pits and baked in a kiln by slaves in the year 1791. During the Depression her grandfather, a U.S. senator, used dollar-a-day labor to move the home brick by brick on flatboats up the bayou from its original site on the Chitimacha Indian Reservation. Today, it was surrounded by a fourteen-acre lawn, live oak and palm trees, a sky-blue swimming pool, tennis courts, gazebos hung with orange passion vine, two stucco guest cottages, a flagstone patio and fountain, and gardens that bloomed with Mexicali roses.
But we were about to witness a bizarre spectacle when we turned onto the property and drove through the tunnel of oaks toward the front portico, the kind of rare event that leaves you sickened and ashamed for your fellow human beings. A movie set consisting of paintless shacks and a general store with a wide gallery set up on cinder blocks, put together from weathered cypress and rusted tin roofs and Jax beer and Hadacol signs to look like the quarters on a 1940s corporation farm, had been constructed on the lawn, a dirt road laid out and sprinkled with hoses in front of the galleries. Perhaps two dozen people milled around on the set, unorganized, mostly at loose ends, their bodies shiny with sweat. Sitting in the shade of a live oak tree by a table stacked with catered food was the director, Billy Holtzner, and next to him, cool and relaxed in yellow slacks and white silk shirt, was his friend and business partner, Cisco Flynn.
"Have you ever seen three monkeys try to fuck a football? I'd like to eighty-six the whole bunch but my father has a yen for a certain item. It tends to come in pink panties," Lila said from the back seat.
"We'll drop you at the porch, Lila. As far as I'm concerned, your car broke down and we gave you a lift home," I said.
"Oh, stop it. Both of you get down and have something to eat," she said. Her face had cleared in the way a storm can blow out of a sky and leave it empty of clouds and full of carrion birds. I saw her tongue touch her bottom lip.
"Do you need assistance getting inside?" Helen said.
"Assistance? That's a lovely word. No, right here will do just fine. My, hasn't this all been pleasant?" Lila said, and got out and sent a black gardener into the house for a shaker of martinis.
Helen started to shift into reverse, then stopped, dumbfounded, at what we realized was taking place under the live oak tree.
Billy Holtzner had summoned all his people around him. He wore khaki shorts with flap pockets and Roman sandals with lavender socks and a crisp print shirt with the sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his flaccid arms.
Except for the grizzled line of beard that grew along his jawline and chin, his body seemed to have no hair, as though it had been shaved with a woman's razor. His workmen and actors and grips and writers and camera people and female assistants stood with wide grins on their faces, some hiding their fear, others rising on the balls of their feet to get a better look, while he singled out one individual, then another, saying, "Have you been a good boy? We've been hearing certain rumors again. Come on now, don't be shy. You know where you have to put it."
Then a grown man, someone who probably had a wife or girlfriend or children or who had fought in a war or who at one time had believed his life was worthy of respect and love, inserted his nose between Billy Holtzner's index and ring fingers and let him twist it back and forth.
"That wasn't so bad, was it? Oh, oh, I see somebody trying to sneak off there. Oh, Johnny…" Holtzner said.
"These guys are out of a special basement, aren't they?" Helen said.
Cisco Flynn walked toward the cruiser, his face good-natured, his eyes earnest with explanation.
"Have a good life, Cisco," I said out the window, then to Helen, "Hit it."
"You don't got to me tell me, boss man," she replied, her head looking back over her shoulder as she steered, the dark green shadows of oak leaves cascading over the windshield.
* * *
FOUR
THAT NIGHT THE MOON WAS yellow above the swamp. I walked down to the dock to help Batist, the black man who worked for me, fold up the Cinzano umbrellas on our spool tables and close up the bait shop. There was a rain ring around the moon, and I pulled back the awning that covered the dock, then went inside just as the phone rang on the counter.
"Mout' called me. His son wants to come in," the voice said.
"Stay out of police business, Megan."
"Do I frighten you? Is that the problem here?"
"No, I suspect the problem is use."
"Try this: he's fifteen miles out in the Atchafalaya Basin and snakebit. That's not metaphor. He stuck his arm in a nest of them. Why don't you deliver a message through Mout' and tell him just to go fuck himself?"
After I hung up I nicked off the outside flood lamps. Under the moon's yellow light the dead trees in the swamp looked like twists of paper and wax that could burst into flame with the touch of a single match.
AT DAWN THE WIND was out of the south, moist and warm and checkered with rain, when I headed the cabin cruiser across a long, flat bay bordered on both sides by flooded cypress trees that turned to green lace when the wind bent their branches. Cranes rose out of the trees against a pink sky, and to the south storm clouds were piled over the Gulf and the air smelled like salt water and brass drying in the sun. Megan stood next to the wheel, a thermos cup full of coffee in her hand. Her straw hat, which had a round dome and a purple band on it, was crushed over her eyes. To get my attention, she clasped my wrist with her thumb and forefinger.
"The inlet past that oil platform. There's a rag tied in a bush," she said.
"I can see it, Megan," I replied. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her face jerk toward me.
"I shouldn't speak or I shouldn't touch? Which is it?" she said.
I eased back the throttle and let the boat rise on its wake and drift into a cove that was overgrown by a leafy canopy and threaded with air vines and dimpled in the shallows with cypress knees. The bow scraped, then snugged tight on a sandspit.
"In answer to your question, I was out at your brother's movie set yesterday. I've decided to stay away from the world of the Big Score. No offense meant," I said.
"I've always wondered what bank guards think all day. Just standing there, eight hours, staring at nothing. I think you've pulled it off, you know, gotten inside their heads."
I picked up the first-aid kit and dropped off the bow and walked through the shallows toward a beached houseboat that had rotted into the soft texture of moldy cardboard.
I heard her splash into the water behind me.
"Gee, I hope I can be a swinging dick in the next life," she said.
THE HOUSEBOAT FLOOR WAS tilted on top of the crushed and rusted oil drums on which it had once floated. Cool Breeze sat in the corner, dressed in clothes off a wash line, the wound in his cut face stitched with thread and needle, his left arm swollen like a black balloon full of water.
I heard Megan's camera start clicking behind me.
"Why didn't you call the Feds, Breeze?" I asked.
"That woman FBI agent wants me in front of a grand jury. She say I gonna stay in the system, too, till they done wit' me."
I looked at the electrical cord he had used for a tourniquet, the proud flesh that had turned the color of fish scale around the fang marks, the drainage that had left viscous green tailings on his shirt. "I tell you what, I'll dress those wounds, hang your arm in a sling, then we'll get a breath of fresh air," I said.
"You cut that cord loose, the poison gonna hit my heart."
"You're working on gangrene now, partner."
&nbs
p; I saw him swallow. The whites of his eyes looked painted with iodine.
"You're jail-wise, Breeze. You knew the Feds would take you over the hurdles. Why'd you want to stick it to Alex Guidry?"
This is the story he told me while I used a rubber suction cup to draw a mixture of venom and infection from his forearm. As I listened on one knee, kneading the puncture wounds, feeling the pain in his body flicker like a candle flame under his skin, I could only wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.
TWENTY YEARS AGO, DOWN the Teche, he owned a dirt-road store knocked together from scrap boards, tin stripped off a condemned rice mill, and Montgomery Ward brick that had dried out and crusted and pulled loose from the joists like a scab. He also had a pretty young wife named Ida, who cooked in a cafe and picked tabasco peppers on a corporate farm. After a day in the field her hands swelled as though they had been stung by bumblebees and she had to soak them in milk to relieve the burning in her skin.
On a winter afternoon two white men pulled up on the bib of oyster shell that served as a parking lot in front of the gallery, and the older man, who had jowls like a bulldog's and smoked a cigar in the center of his mouth, asked for a quart of moonshine.
"Don't tell me you ain't got it, boy. I know the man from Miss'sippi sells it to you."
"I got Jax on ice. I got warm beer, too. I can sell you soda pop. I ain't got no whiskey."
"That a fact? I'm gonna walk back out the door, then come back in. One of them jars you got in that box behind the motor oil better be on the counter or I'm gonna redecorate your store."
Cool Breeze shook his head.
"I know who y'all are. I done paid already. Why y'all giving me this truck?" he said.
The younger white man opened the screen door and came inside the store. His name was Alex Guidry, and he wore a corduroy suit and cowboy hat and western boots, with pointed, mirror-bright toes. The older man picked up a paper bag of deep-fried cracklings from the counter. The grease in the cracklings made dark stains in the paper. He threw the bag to the younger man and said to Cool Breeze, "You on parole for check writing now. That liquor will get you a double nickel. Your woman yonder, what's her name, Ida? She's a cook, ain't she?"
THE MAN WITH BULLDOG jowls was named Harpo Delahoussey, and he ran a ramshackle nightclub for redbones (people who are part French, black, and Indian) by a rendering plant on an oxbow off the Atchafalaya River. When the incinerators were fired up at the plant, the smoke from the stacks filled the nearby woods and dirt roads with a stench like hair and chicken entrails burned in a skillet. The clapboard nightclub didn't lock its doors from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night; the parking lot (layered with thousands of flattened beer cans) became a maze of gas-guzzlers and pickup trucks; and the club's windows rattled and shook with the reverberations of rub board and thimbles, accordion, drums, dancing feet, and electric guitars whose feedback screeched like fingernails on slate.
At the back, in a small kitchen, Ida Broussard sliced potatoes for french fries while caldrons of red beans and rice and robin gumbo boiled on the stove, a bandanna knotted across her forehead to keep the sweat out of her eyes.
But Cool Breeze secretly knew, even though he tried to deny it to himself, that Harpo Delahoussey had not blackmailed him simply to acquire a cook, or even to reinforce that old lesson that every coin pressed into your palm for shining shoes, cutting cane, chopping cotton, scouring ovens, dipping out grease traps, scrubbing commodes, cleaning dead rats from under a house, was dispensed by the hand of a white person in the same way that oxygen could be arbitrarily measured out to a dying hospital patient.
One night she wouldn't speak when he picked her up, sitting against the far door of the pickup truck, her shoulders rounded, her face dull with a fatigue that sleep never took away.
"He ain't touched you, huh?" Cool Breeze said.
"Why you care? You brung me to the club, ain't you?"
"He said the rendering plant gonna shut down soon. That mean he won't be needing no more cook. What you gonna do if I'm in Angola?"
"I tole you not to bring that whiskey in the store. Not to listen to that white man from Miss'sippi sold it to you. Tole you, Willie."
Then she looked out the window so he could not see her face. She wore a rayon blouse that had green and orange lights in it, and her back was shaking under the cloth, and he could hear her breath seizing in her throat, like hiccups she couldn't control.
HE TRIED TO GET permission from his parole officer to move back to New Orleans.
Permission denied.
He caught Ida inhaling cocaine off a broken mirror behind the house. She drank fortified wine in the morning, out of a green bottle with a screw cap that made her eyes lustrous and frightening. She refused to help out at the store. In bed she was unresponding, dry when he entered her, and finally not available at all. She tied a perforated dime on a string around her ankle, then one around her belly so that it hung just below her navel.
"Gris-gris is old people's superstition," Cool Breeze said.
"I had a dream. A white snake, thick as your wrist, it bit a hole in a melon and crawled inside and ate all the meat out."
"We gonna run away."
"Mr. Harpo gonna be there. Your PO gonna be there. State of Lou'sana gonna be there."
He put his hand under the dime that rested on her lower stomach and ripped it loose. Her mouth parted soundlessly when the string razored burns along her skin.
The next week he walked in on her when she was naked in front of the mirror. A thin gold chain was fastened around her hips.
"Where you get that?" he asked.
She brushed her hair and didn't answer. Her breasts looked as swollen and full as eggplants.
"You ain't got to cook at the club no more. What they gonna do? Hurt us more than they already have?" he said.
She took a new dress off a hanger and worked it over her head. It was red and sewn with colored glass beads like an Indian woman might wear.
"Where you got money for that?" he asked.
"Mine to know, yours to find out," she replied. She fastened a hoop earring to her lobe with both hands, smiling at him while she did it.
He began shaking her by the shoulders, her head whipping like a doll's on her neck, her eyelids closed, her lipsticked mouth open in a way that made his phallus thicken in his jeans. He flung her against the bedroom wall, so hard he heard her bones knock into the wood, then ran from the house and down the dirt road, through a tunnel of darkened trees, his brogans exploding through the shell of ice on the chuckholes.
IN THE MORNING HE tried to make it up to her. He warmed boudin and fixed cush-cush and coffee and hot milk, and set it all out on the table and called her into the kitchen. The dishes she didn't smash on the wall she threw into the back yard.
He drove his pickup truck through the bright coldness of the morning, the dust from his tires drifting out onto the dead hyacinths and the cattails that had winter-killed in the bayou, and found Harpo Delahoussey at the filling station he owned in town, playing dominoes with three other white men at a table by a gas stove that hissed with blue flame. Delahoussey wore a fedora, and a gold badge on the pocket of his white shirt. None of the men at the table looked up from their game. The stove filled the room with a drowsy, controlled warmth and the smell of shaving cream and aftershave lotion and testosterone.
"My wife ain't gonna be working at the club no more," Cool Breeze said.
"Okay," Delahoussey said, his eyes concentrated on the row of dominoes in front of him.
The room seemed to scream with silence.
"Mr. Harpo, maybe you ain't understood me," Cool Breeze said.
"He heard you, boy. Now go on about your business," one of the other men said.
A moment later, by the door of his truck, Cool Breeze looked back through the window. Even though he was outside, an oak tree swelling with wind above his head, and the four domino players were in a small r
oom beyond a glass, he felt it was he who was somehow on display, in a cage, naked, small, an object of ridicule and contempt.
Then it hit him: He's old. An old man like that, one piece of black jelly roll just the same as another. So who give her the dress and wrap the gold chain around her stomach?
He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his canvas coat. His ears roared with sound and his heart thundered in his chest.
HE WOKE IN THE middle of the night and put on an overcoat and sat under a bare lightbulb in the kitchen, poking at the ashes in the wood stove, wadding up paper and feeding sticks into the flame that wouldn't catch, the cold climbing off the linoleum through his socks and into his ankles, his confused thoughts wrapped around his face like a net.
What was it that tormented him? Why was it he couldn't give it words, deal with it in the light of day, push it out in front of him, even kill it if he had to?
His breath fogged the air. Static electricity crackled in the sleeves of his overcoat and leaped off his fingertips when he touched the stove.
He wanted to blame Harpo Delahoussey. He remembered the story his daddy, Mout', had told him of the black man from Abbeville who broke off a butcher knife in the chest of a white overseer he caught doing it with his wife against a tree, then had spit in the face of his executioner before he was gagged and hooded with a black cloth and electrocuted.
He wondered if he could ever possess the courage of a man like that.
But he knew Delahoussey was not the true source of the anger and discontent that made his face break a sweat and his palms ring as though they had been beaten with boards.
He had accepted his role as cuckold, had even transported his wife to the site of her violation by a white man (and later, from Ida's mother, he would discover the exact nature of what Harpo Delahoussey did to her), because his victimization had justified a lifetime of resentment toward those who had forced his father to live gratefully on tips while their cigar ashes spilled down on his shoulders.