Purple Cane Road

  “I got to let you go, Mae,” he said.

  “What you fixing to do?” she said.

  He broke a raw egg in an RC cola and drank it.

  “I ain’t done nothing,” he said.

  “You a big fool don’t have nobody to look after him. I ain’t going nowhere,” she said.

  He grinned at her, the corner of his mouth smeared with egg yoke, and she was reminded in that moment of a husband whose recklessness and courage and irresponsibility made him both the bane and natural victim of his enemies.

  Ladrine opened the New Orleans telephone directory and thumbed through the white pages to the listings that began with the letter “G.”

  He reached under the bar and picked up the telephone and set it down heavily in front of him and dialed a number.

  “How you doin’, suh? This is Ladrine Theriot. I t’ought it over. I called my cousin in the legislature and tole him what you gangsters been doin’ down here in Lafourche Parish. He said that ain’t no surprise, ’cause ain’t none of you ever worked in your life, and if you ain’t pimping, you stealing from each other. By the way, if you want your jukebox back, it’s floating down the bayou. If you hurry, you can catch it before it goes into the Gulf. T’anks. Good-bye.”

  He hung up the phone and looked at it a moment, then closed his register drawer quietly and stared at the rain driving against the windows and the red and white Jax beer sign clanking on its chains, his eyes glazed over with thoughts he didn’t share.

  “Ladrine, Ladrine, what you gone and done?” Mae said.

  Mae lived twenty miles up the state highway in a cabin she rented in the quarters of a corporation farm. The cabins were all exactly alike, tin-roofed, paintless, stained by the soot that blew from stubble fires in winter, narrow as matchboxes, with small galleries in front and privies in back. Once a week the “rolling store,” an old school bus outfitted with shelves and packed with canned goods, brooms, overalls, work boots, pith helmets, straw hats, patent medicine, women’s dresses, guitar strings, refrigerated milk and lunch meat, .22 caliber and twelve-gauge ammunition, quart jars of peanut butter and loaves of bread, rattled its way up and down the highway and braked with a screech and a clanking of gears in the quarters. People came out of their cabins and bought what they needed for the week, and sometimes with great excitement received a special order—perhaps a plastic guitar, a first communion suit, a cigarette rolling machine—from New Orleans or Memphis.

  It was Saturday and Mae had bought a sequined comb to put in her hair from the rolling store, then had bathed in the iron tub and powdered her body and dressed in her best underthings, tying a string around her hips so her slip wouldn’t show, the way Negro women did. She put on her purple suit and heels, drawing her stomach in as she stood sideways in front of her bedroom mirror while Callie sat watching her.

  “You t’ink I’m too fat?” she asked, pressing her hand flatly against her stomach.

  “What you got in your mind ain’t gonna happen,” Callie said.

  “Ladrine gonna take me to the movie in Morgan City. That’s all we doin’.”

  “He got in the dagos’ face, Mae.”

  “You hung around, ain’t you?”

  “Zipper Clum got a new sit’ation for me in New Orleans. White man want what I got, he gonna pay for it,” Callie said.

  “Maybe me and Ladrine are gonna run off.”

  “What are you telling yourself? He growed up here. Coon-asses don’t go nowhere. You gonna die, woman.”

  Mae turned from the mirror and looked at Callie, her face empty, the words of self-assurance she wanted to speak dead on her lips.

  Ladrine did not come for her that afternoon. She waited until almost dark, then drove to the club in her ancient Ford and was told by the bartender that Ladrine had left a note for her. It was written on lined paper torn from a notebook and folded in a small square, and the bartender held it between two fingers and handed it to her and went back to washing silverware. She spread the sheet of paper on the bar and looked down at it emptily, as though by concentrating on the swirls and slashes of Ladrine’s calligraphy she could extrapolate meaning from the words she had never learned to read.

  “I don’t got my glasses, me. Can you make out what it says?” she said.

  The bartender dried his hands again and picked up the sheet of paper and held it under the light. “ ‘Dear Mae, I’m taking my boat out. Don’t come back to the club no more. Sorry I couldn’t call but you don’t have no phone. Love, Ladrine,’ ” the bartender read, and handed the sheet of paper back to her.

  The bartender’s wrists were deep in the sink now, and she could see only his shining pate when he spoke again.

  “I’d listen to him, Mae,” he said.

  “Somet’ing’s happened?”

  “Some men from New Orleans was here. Know the way us little people get by? What you see, what you hear, you do this wit’,” he said, and made a twisting motion with his fingers in front of his lips, as though turning a key in a lock.

  “You tole them where Ladrine was at?”

  “I ain’t in this,” he said, and walked down the duckboards to the opposite end of the bar.

  She drove in the rain to Ladrine’s boat shed on the bayou. A pale yellow cusp of western sun hung on the horizon, then died, and the fields were suddenly dark. But a light attached to a pole over the shed was burning brightly, illuminating four or five cars that were parked in a semicircle around the shed, like arrows pointed at a target.

  The state highway was no more than fifty yards away, and cars and trucks were passing on it with regularity. Inside the warmth and dryness of those trucks and cars were ordinary people, just like her. They weren’t criminals. They knew their only friends were their own kind. The ones who were lucky had jobs in the mill and hence were paid the minimum wage of one dollar and twenty-five cents an hour. The others worked for virtually nothing in the cane fields. But the highway was a tunnel of rain and darkness, and whatever happened out there by the bayou had nothing to do with those inside the tunnel. Their ability to see was selective, the fate of a friend and neighbor never registering on the periphery of their vision. That was the detail she would not be able to forget.

  The planks in the board road that led to the boat shed were splintered and broken and half underwater, and Mae’s car started to stall out when her front wheels sank into a flooded depression and steam hissed off her engine block. She put her car in reverse and backed up toward the highway, then cut the engine and lights and got out and walked down the incline, still dressed in her purple suit, the rain sliding like glass across the cone of light that shone down from the pole above the shed.

  She could see them through the slats in the shed and the back door that yawed open above a mud-streaked wood pallet: Ladrine and two men in suits and two police officers in black slickers, the same officers who had tried to extort money from Ladrine; and a local constable, a big, overweight man who wore blue jeans, a cowboy hat, and a khaki shirt with an American flag sewn on the sleeve.

  Ladrine had on strap overalls without a shirt or shoes, and his bare shoulders glowed like ivory in the damp air. He was shaking his head and arguing, when he seemed to look beyond the circle of heads around him and see Mae out in the darkness.

  Then he called out, “I ain’t gonna talk to y’all no more. I’m going home. I’m gonna fix dinner. I’m gonna call up my grandkids. I’m gonna work in my garden tomorrow. I’m gonna do all them t’ings.”

  He began to retreat in the opposite direction, inching backwards along the catwalk, stepping quickly out of the shed’s far side into the darkness, then running along the mud bank, his bare feet slapping like flapjacks along the water’s edge.

  Someone turned on a large flashlight, and one of the raincoated police officers squatted in a shooter’s position under the shed, the arms extended in a two-handed grip, and fired twice with a nickel-plated revolver.

  Ladrine’s head jerked upward, then he toppled forward, his left ha
nd twisted palm-outward in the center of his back, as though he had pulled a muscle while running.

  The group of five under the shed walked out into the rain, the flashlight’s beam growing in circumference as they neared Ladrine. He had gone into convulsions, his wrists shaking uncontrollably, as though electricity were coursing through his body.

  The shooter fired a third time, and Ladrine’s chest seemed to deflate, almost like a balloon, his chin tilting back, his mouth parting, as though he wanted to drink the sky.

  The other raincoated officer leaned over with a handkerchief-wrapped pistol in his hand and placed it in Ladrine’s palm and wrapped Ladrine’s fingers around the grips and steel frame and inside the trigger guard. The officer motioned for the others to step back, then depressed the trigger and fired a solitary round into the bayou just as a bolt of lightning struck in a sugarcane field on the opposite side of the highway.

  That’s when they saw her running for her car.

  She drove twenty miles up the highway, in the storm, her car shaking in the wind. They had not tried to follow her, but her heart continued to pound in her chest, her breath catching spasmodically in her throat as though she had been crying. The quarters where she lived loomed up out of the green-black thrashing of the cane in the fields, and she saw lights in two of the cabins. She wanted to pull off the road, pack her suitcase and few belongings and retrieve the seventy dollars she kept hidden in the binder of a scrapbook, then try to make it to New Orleans or Morgan City.

  But there was no telephone in the quarters and no guarantee the people who had shot Ladrine would not show up before she could get back on the road again.

  She drove on in the rain, even though she had only three dollars in her purse and less than a quarter tank of gasoline. She would stop in the next filling station on the highway and use all her money to buy gasoline. If necessary she could sleep in the car and go without food, but every ounce of fuel she put in the tank bought distance between her and the people who had killed Ladrine.

  Then she rounded a curve and realized all her decisions and plans and attempts at control were the stuff of vanity. Either high winds or a tornado had knocked down telephone and power poles as far as she could see, and they lay solidly in her path, extending like footbridges across the asphalt and the rain-swollen ditches.

  She drove back to the quarters and sat on the side of her bed the rest of the night. Perhaps the next day the highway would be cleared and she could drive to Morgan City and tell someone what she had seen. If she could just stay awake and not be undone by her fear and the sounds of the wind that were like fists thumping against the walls and doors of her cabin.

  The morning broke cold and gray, and in her half-sleep she heard trucks out on the highway. When she looked through the window she saw people in the trucks, with furniture, mattresses, house pets, and farm animals in back.

  She stripped the clothes off the hangers in the closet and stuffed them in her suitcase, pushed her dress shoes in the corners of the suitcase, pulled the seventy dollars from the binder of the scrapbook and lay it on top of her clothes. She hefted up the suitcase and ran outside into the dirt yard, her car keys already in her hand.

  She stopped and stared stupidly at her car. It was tilted sideways on the frame. The right front and back tires were crushed down on the steel rims, the air stems cut in half.

  An hour later a black man drove her down a dirt road through a cane field toward a weathered shack with a dead pecan tree in the yard. He wore a flannel shirt and canvas coat, and had tied down the leather cap on his head with a long strip of muslin.

  “That’s where you want to go?” he asked.

  “Yes. Can you wait so I can make sure she’s home?” Mae said.

  “You didn’t tell me it was Callie Patout. Ma’am, she work up at the nightclub. In the cribs.”

  “I’ll give you an extra half dollar if you wait. Then fifty cents more if you got to take me back.”

  “Ladrine Theriot got killed shooting it out wit’ a constable. I ain’t having no truck with that kind of stuff. Look, smoke’s coming out of the chimney. See? Ain’t nothing to worry about.”

  Then she was standing alone in front of the shack, watching the black man’s pickup disappear down the dirt road between the cane fields, the enormous gray bowl of sky above her head.

  • • •

  Callie sat on a wooden footstool by the fireplace, a cup of coffee between her fingers, and would not look at her.

  “What I’m suppose to do? I ain’t got a car,” she said.

  “You the only one, Callie.”

  “There’s trucks up on the state road. There’s people going by all the time.”

  “I stand out there, they gonna get me.”

  Callie pushed her hands inside her sleeves and stared into the fire.

  “This white folks’ trouble, Mae. Ain’t right to be dragging colored peoples in it.”

  “Where I’m gonna go, huh?”

  “Just ain’t right. What I got that can hep? I ain’t even got a job. Ain’t none of it my doing,” Callie said.

  Mae stood a long time in the silence, watching the firelight flicker on Callie’s averted face, embarrassed at the shame and cowardice that seemed to be both her legacy and that of everyone she touched.

  Mae left the shack and began walking down the dirt road. She heard the door of the cabin open behind her.

  “Zipper Clum suppose to pick me up this afternoon or tomorrow morning and take me to New Orleans. Where’s your suitcase at?”

  “My place.”

  “You should have taken it, Mae. They would have thought you was gone.”

  They waited through the afternoon for Zipper Clum, but no vehicles came down the road. The day seemed to have passed without either a sunrise or a sunset, marked only by wind and a grayness that blew like smoke out of the wetlands. But that evening the temperature dropped, sucking the moisture out of the air, fringing the mud puddles with ice that looked like badgers’ teeth, and a green-gold light began to rim the horizon.

  Mae and Callie ate soda crackers and Vienna sausage out of cans in front of the fireplace, then Callie wiped her hands on a rag and put on a man’s suit coat over her sweater and went outside to the privy. When she came back her face and eyes looked burned by the wind.

  “Their car’s coming, Mae. Lord God, they coming,” she said.

  Mae turned and looked through the window, then rose slowly from her chair, the glow of the firelight receding from her body like warmth being withdrawn from her life. She shut her eyes and pressed a wadded handkerchief to her mouth, swallowing, her brow lined with thought or prayer or perhaps self-pity and grief that was of such a level she no longer had to contend with or blame herself for it.

  “Get under the bed, you. Don’t come out, neither. No matter what you hear out there. This all started when I run off with Mack. The ending ain’t gonna change,” she said.

  A four-door car that was gray with mud came up the road and stopped in front, and two police officers got out and stood in the dirt yard, not stepping up on the small gallery and knocking or even calling out, but simply reaching back into the car and blowing the horn, as though they would be demeaned by indicating that the home of a mulatto required the same respect and protocol as that of a white person.

  Mae straightened the purple suit she still wore and stepped outside, the skin of her face tightening in the cold, her ears filling with the sounds of seagulls that turned in circles above the sugarcane.

  “Where’s Callie?” the taller of the two officers said.

  “She gone to Morgan City with a colored man. She ain’t coming back,” Mae answered.

  “Would you step out here, please? Don’t be afraid,” the officer said.

  “People call me Mae Guillory. But my married name is Robicheaux,” she said.

  “We know that, ma’am. You saw something we think you don’t understand. We want to explain what happened there on the bayou,” he said.

 
She ran her tongue over her lips to speak, then said nothing, her desire to respect herself as great as her desire to live, her pulse so thunderous she thought a vein would burst in her throat.

  “Ladrine Theriot tried to kill a constable. So the constable had to shoot him. It was the constable. You saw it, didn’t you?” the officer said. Then he began to speak very slowly, his eyes lingering on hers with each word, waiting for the moment of assent that had not come. “The constable shot Ladrine Theriot. That’s what you saw. There was no mistake about what happened … Okay?”

  She stepped off the tiny gallery into the yard, as though she were in a dream, not making conscious choices now, stepping into the green light that seemed to radiate out of the fields into the sky.

  “Ladrine was a good man. He wasn’t like his brother, no. He done right by people. Y’all killed him,” she said.

  “Yeah. Because we had to … Isn’t that right?” he said.

  “My name’s Mae Robicheaux. My boy fought in Vietnam. My husband was Big Aldous Robicheaux. Nobody in the oil field mess with Big Aldous.”

  “We’ll take you to where Ladrine died and explain how it happened. Get in the car, ma’am.”

  “I know what y’all gonna do. I ain’t afraid of y’all no more. My boy gonna find you. You gonna see, you. You gonna run and hide when you see my boy.”

  “You are one ignorant bitch, aren’t you?” the officer said, and knocked her to the ground.

  He unbuttoned his raincoat and exposed his holstered gun. He placed his fists on his hips, his jaw flexing, his raincoat flapping in the wind. Then a decision worked its way into his eyes, and he exhaled air through his nose, like a man resigning himself to a world that he both disdained and served.

  “Help me with this,” he said to the other officer.

  Mae’s face was white and round when the two officers leaned out of the greenness of the evening, out of the creaking and wheeling of land-blown gulls, and fitted their hands on her with the mercy of giant crabs.