In My Father's House

  He started back up the road toward the Red Top Saloon. He was still thinking about Billy, comparing him to his own son in St. Adrienne. They were about the same age, and they were saying practically the same thing. There were probably many others just like them. He saw it in some of the younger schoolteachers in St. Adrienne. They could not say in public the things that Billy and his son could say, but by their actions they showed that they felt the same way about God, Law, and Country. He asked himself how would he ever reach them—could he ever reach them?

  Five minutes after he left Billy, he pulled up in front of the Red Top Saloon. Red Top was a square, white, stucco building with a red door facing the street. Over the door was a yellow light, the bulb so covered with grime that it gave only a dull glow. There were other cars parked on the gravel in front and to the left of the building. Farther to the right was a garage where Phillip could hear men talking. To the left was a grocery store, and on the opposite side of the street was a line of houses, separated from the road by a ditch of water.

  Phillip didn’t get out of the car for a while. He felt strange being in front of the saloon, and he knew he would feel even more strange inside. But what else could he do? If he wanted Chippo, he had to look for him. Still he sat there, watching the door, waiting, hoping that someone would come out that he might ask if Chippo was in there. But no one did, and he had to go in for himself.

  The place was dimly lighted, crowded, and noisy, but still lighted enough so that Phillip could see that not too many changes had been made since the last time he was in there. The only big change that he noticed were the people. They were younger; they could have been the children of the ones he had drunk and gambled with. But everything else was much the same as it was fifteen, twenty, even more years back than that. The ceiling was always painted that same blood-red color—just as the door was—and so low that a man his size could touch it just by raising his arm. The bar looked the same, with its familiar jars of pig feet and pickled sausage, and cracklings in greasy paper bags. You still got the odor of fried fish and fried chicken mixed with the odor of alcohol, because ever since Julian Ferdinand had the place twenty, twenty-five years ago there had always been a kitchen in back. The floor was muddy now, just as it had always been in winter. The jukebox was one of the newer ones with fancy lights and pictures, but it sat practically in the same place as the old one did. The tables were covered with red-and-white checkered oilcloth. Two young waiters in white jackets, with their dish towels over their shoulders or across their arms, went from the bar to the tables, to the food counter in back. Nothing had changed here—nothing; except that most of the people in here now were only half Phillip’s age.

  A small, light-brown-skinned woman behind the bar noticed that he had come in, and she came to the end of the bar to see what he wanted. She was about the same age as the rest of the people in the place.

  “I’m looking for Chippo Simon,” Phillip told her. “I heard he comes in here.”

  “Haven’t seen him today,” the woman said. “He might drop in later.”

  “They still gamble round the other side?” Phillip asked.

  “Game going on right now.”

  “Who runs the table?”

  “Waco.”

  “I don’t think I know him,” Phillip said.

  “Been with us about a year now,” the woman said. “Don’t think I ever seen you round here before, but look like I know your face from somewhere.”

  “I haven’t been here in a long time,” Phillip said. “Fifteen years.”

  “That’s been too long,” the woman said, smiling at him. “You shouldn’t stay ’way like that.”

  Phillip smiled back.

  “Get you something to drink?” she asked him.

  “No, I think I’ll get something from the kitchen.”

  “In the back,” she said, nodding.

  “Yes, I know,” Phillip said.

  He started to walk away.

  “You want to leave your name—for Chippo?” the woman asked him.

  “Tell him Phil,” Phillip said.

  “No last name?”

  “He’ll know,” Phillip said.

  “All right, old ‘He’ll know,’ ” the woman said, flirting with him still.

  Phillip started for the kitchen again. Someone had started a record on the jukebox, and several people moved out on the floor to dance.

  Phillip ordered a chicken dinner at the kitchen counter. The short dark woman behind the counter, wearing a white dress and an apron, asked him if he were going to eat in there. He told her no. But he had said it too quickly, and she didn’t like the sound of it. She looked him over closely—the overcoat, the suit, the hat. No one else in the place was dressed quite like him—and perhaps he thought he was too good to eat in there with the rest. Phillip could see how the woman felt, and he wanted to apologize, but he didn’t know how.

  “Food go’n take a while,” she said, and turned away.

  Phillip stood at the counter watching the dancers. The jukebox against the wall, with its bright red, green, and yellow lights, played a slow tempo blues by BB King. The dancers held each other close, hardly moving their feet at all, only their bodies keeping time with the beat of the music. Phillip could remember when he had danced here. Not to BB King’s records, but to Louis Jordan’s, Joe Turner’s, and some of the other earlier blues singers.

  Phillip noticed a woman sitting at a table watching him. She was very light-skinned and dressed entirely in red—red hat, red dress, with a red overcoat hanging on the back of her chair, and a red patent-leather pocketbook lying on the table in front of her. There was a bottle of whiskey on the table, a pitcher of water, a bowl of ice, two glasses—but the woman sat alone. Phillip nodded to her, and she smiled and nodded back. He thought she reminded him of someone he had known years ago, but she sat too far away from the counter, and too much in the dark, and he couldn’t see her face well enough to be sure.

  He turned, and now he could see the door that led into the gambling room. He wondered if Chippo could have come in through the back and gone into the room without the bartender seeing him. He told the woman in the kitchen that he would be back later to get his food. She didn’t answer, she didn’t even look around.

  For a moment, after he came up to the door, Phillip would not go into the room where the men were shooting dice. But dressed as he was he knew it didn’t look right standing back, and he moved farther inside. About half a dozen men stood round the old green-flannel-covered table, and about that many stood back watching the game. The boy with the dice couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. He shook them closer to his ear, then slammed them against the table wall. Someone gathered them up and threw them back to him. He rubbed them together in the palms of his hands, blew his breath on them, shook them close to his ear again, and threw them back cross the table.

  “Dollar say you can’t nine, Po Boy,” a big gambler with a white cowboy hat said.

  Po Boy dropped a wrinkled dollar bill on the table. The bill was so wrinkled, so old, it would be impossible to ever smooth it out again. Phillip recognized the dollar bill, just as he recognized Po Boy as himself.

  Eight came up on his next throw. Somebody tossed them back at him. He gathered them up with a small, hardened black hand, blew on them, rattled them against his ear, and grunted out loud as he slammed them against the wall while calling on God for help.

  Six popped up.

  “That’s right, flirt with death, nigger,” the man in the white hat said.

  Phillip turned to leave. He had looked closely at the men in the room, and Chippo was not in there.

  “Taking off, Big Man?” White Hat asked him.

  “I was looking for Chippo Simon.”

  “Stick around, he might drop in.”

  “Tell him Phil was looking for him.”

  “Sure, Big Man,” White Hat said.

  The woman had his dinner ready when he came back to the counter. The dinner was a
dollar and a half, and he gave her two dollars and told her to keep the change. As he turned to leave, he saw the woman in red who had been watching him earlier raise her glass and nod to him. He went to the table.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me?” she said.

  “Adeline Toussaint?”

  “Nobody else.”

  “Not Adeline Toussaint?” he said.

  “That’s right,” she said and smiled.

  She was a very handsome woman, with high cheekbones, large dark-brown eyes, and full lips. The brim of her big red hat turned up on one side. She had a small dark mole just above the left corner of her mouth. She and Phillip had been lovers once. A sudden warm good feeling came over him that he wished was not there.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  “How about your friend?”

  “He’s gambling.”

  “He won’t mind?”

  “He’s gambling.”

  He sat down opposite her and set his paper plate of food on the table. She was looking at him and smiling.

  “How many years?” he asked her.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Fifteen—something like that.”

  “About fifteen,” he said. “And you haven’t changed a bit in all that time. How’d you do it?”

  “The best whiskey,” she said, smiling and looking at him closely. “Look like you put on a little round the middle there.”

  “Yes,” he said, and patted his stomach.

  “I been reading about you,” she said. “Seen you on the television, far away as New Orleans.”

  “You been living in New Orleans?”

  “New Orleans, Houston, New York, California a while. Even Paris.”

  “All them places didn’t do you no harm.”

  “I make out all right.”

  “Yes,” he said, looking at her admiringly, and remembering the way things had been between them, and feeling a way now that he knew was not right.

  “Fix you a drink?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  “Perfectly all right.”

  “No,” he said.

  She raised her glass and drank, watching him all the time.

  “How is your family?” she asked him.

  “Fine.”

  “When did you get married?”

  “Not long after we split up.”

  “I was shocked when I heard it. Never thought you would. Never thought you’d get religion either.”

  “It was about time for both,” Phillip said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. You were still pretty wild.”

  “I was getting pretty old, too.”

  “Nothing get old but clothes,” she said. “What in the world you doing in a nightclub, and of all places Red Top?”

  “I might ask you the same thing,” Phillip said. “After New York, Paris, California?”

  “Adeline drifts with the wind,” she said. “Adeline wears red. You wear black.”

  “I’m looking for Chippo,” Phillip said.

  “Chippo back in these parts?” she asked. “I haven’t seen Chippo—God knows—ten, eleven years. Is he back around here?”

  “Staying in Baton Rouge,” Phillip said. “Just got back from California. Saw my children out there.”

  “I didn’t know you had children in California. Grown children?”

  “My oldest boy nearly thirty,” he said.

  “Didn’t know that,” Adeline said. “Didn’t know you had been married before.”

  “No, we never got married,” he told her. “And yourself?”

  “Married twice. Never lasted. No children.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “What?”

  “Neither of your marriages lasted.”

  “They wanted something I couldn’t give.”

  He looked at her, waiting.

  “Love,” she said.

  He looked deeply into her eyes, and she looked directly back at him. She drank and set her glass back down. She was still looking at him.

  “Love?” he said.

  She nodded her head.

  “Why did you get married?”

  “They wanted to.”

  “Both times?”

  She nodded again.

  “But you did love once?”

  “Did I?”

  “You said so.”

  She laughed. “Stop it, Phillip Martin.”

  He was hurt. “Well?”

  “How many times that’s been said by both man and woman? How many times you yourself have said that to a woman? You meant it every time?”

  His feelings were hurt still. He shook his head. “No.”

  “A woman can lie too—in more ways than one.”

  “Were you lying all the time, Adeline?”

  “With you?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “That Mardi Gras day in your sister’s house when it was raining? The rain beating on the roof?”

  She thought back. “Not that day,” she said. She smiled to herself. “Even now I can remember that day. No, that day I was definitely not lying. What a day. Mardi Gras has never been the same.

  “On the Bayou Goulah, the old man’s place? That little cabin by the church?”

  “Let me see, let me see, that little cabin by the church? That little cabin by the church? Oh yes, yes, now I remember. Yes, I was lying that day.”

  “Do you remember that dance right here at Red Top when Wyonnie Harris played till daybreak?”

  “We danced here many times.”

  “I had a little Ford then, a little gray Ford.”

  “I remember that little car.”

  “Were you lying when I took you home that morning?”

  She looked up at the ceiling as if she was trying to recall what had happened. Her eyes narrowed, her mouth opened slightly as if she was in deep thought. He looked at her, thinking how beautiful she still was. She was forty, but she could have easily passed for thirty, thirty-two. He watched her as she looked back at him nodding her head. “Yes, I was lying that morning.”

  “I think you’re lying now,” he told her. “I think you loved me that morning, you loved me all them other mornings. You left me because you was scared I might leave you. That was it, wasn’t it, Adeline?”

  “If that’s what you want to believe,” she said.

  “That’s what I believe,” he said. “You wasn’t the one lying, Adeline, it was me all the time. I’m wondering now, after all these years, if I’m not still lying. Lying to myself. God. Lying to my people.”

  “I don’t follow you. What are you saying, Phillip?”

  He looked across the table at her. She could see the agony in his face.

  “I’m at war with myself, Adeline. I’m at war with my soul. For the past few days I’ve been questioning myself. I come up with nothing but doubts—about everything.”

  She didn’t like the way he was talking. She wanted to do something. She wanted to touch his face. But she touched his hand instead. He drew his hand away from her. He didn’t like the way her touch made him feel.

  “Let me fix you a drink,” she said.

  “Make it thin. Very thin.”

  After fixing the drink she tasted it to see if it was all right. Her full red lips lingered on the glass a while before she passed it back to him. She fixed another drink for herself.

  “Here’s to you,” she said. They touched glasses, and she looked over her glass at him while she drank.

  “You want to talk?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “I’m very tired. But I have to find Chippo.”

  “That can take all night, looking for somebody like Chippo.”

  “You probably right. I ought to go back to his house and wait. He’s got to show up there sometime.”

  “Why go back there?” she said. “Why not wait at my sister’s house? I’m sure I could make it more comfortable for you there.”

  “That’s no good, Adeline.”
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  “No. Since when?”

  “Look around this place.”

  He watched her as she looked across the room.

  “What do you see?”

  “People,” she said.

  “Half our ages,” he told her.

  “Well?” she said, looking at him. “What does that mean?”

  “Just something I shoulda done when I was that age,” he said. “And I wouldn’ta been here tonight.”

  “Could you’ve done it at that age?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I do know,” she told him. “No.”

  He finished his drink and got up from the table with his plate of food. “It was nice seeing you again, Adeline,” he said. “Take care yourself.”

  “I’ll be going back to my sister’s house in a few minutes,” she said. “In case you change your mind, look in the phone book, under Louise Richard. I’ll be there, waiting.”

  “Good bye, Adeline,” Phillip said to her.

  She raised her glass to him. But she didn’t say good bye.

  10

  When Chippo came into the room, he saw Phillip asleep in a chair by the heater. His overcoat was on the sofa against the wall, and his hat was on top of the coat. Chippo laid his own hat and coat on the sofa, then he pulled up a chair to sit and watch Phillip. His bad eye was toward him, so he had to swing the chair around more in order to see him better.

  Chippo was a tall, slim, but solidly built man in his early sixties. His long, narrow face was the color of dark, well-used leather, and it looked just as tough. His sharp features, his thick, curly black-gray hair showed that he had as much white or Indian in him as he did African. He looked like a person who did not worry much; he would take life as it came. As he watched Phillip he was continuously rubbing his left index finger over his bottom lip. He knew why Phillip was there. He knew that Phillip had heard from someone else that he had seen Johanna in California, and now Phillip wanted him to talk about it. He wished now that he hadn’t come back to Louisiana. He didn’t want to talk about what he had seen and heard.

  He remembered that he had a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen, and he went back there to get a drink. He couldn’t find a single glass that wasn’t dirty, and after rinsing out two in the sink he returned to the front. Phillip was awake when he came back. For a moment they only looked at each other. Chippo had the wet glasses in one big hand, and the bottle of whiskey in the other. He looked and felt uncomfortable. Phillip looking up at him with bloodshot eyes seemed tired and worried.