Crusader's Cross

  She fixed breakfast for herself in a tiny kitchen, her hair wrapped in a towel, while outside the cop named Bordelon and a teenage boy played pitch-and-catch with a baseball. In the distance she could see carrion birds turning in circles over a flooded woods and a powerboat splitting a bay in half. The breeze was up and a salty, gray odor from the sawgrass struck her face and made her shut the window, even though the house was already warm.

  Her mandolin was in her suitcase, wrapped inside a soft flannel shirt from which she had removed all the buttons so they could not scratch the mandolin’s finish. She sat on the edge of the bed and tuned the strings, using a plectrum and a small pitch pipe, then sang Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” in B flat.

  The maudlin lyrics and the melody that was borrowed from a hymn titled “The Great Speckled Bird” gave an emotional focus to her life that she intuitively knew was illegitimate but somehow indispensable. The lost lover was Jimmie Robicheaux. Beer joints and back-street bars became blue-collar purgatories where angels with impaired wings could float above a fire that purged but did not consume. The incremental dismemberment of their lives with alcohol, drugs, and lust was a form of penance that ultimately made them acceptable in the eyes of God.

  “You play that pretty good,” Dale Bordelon said from the doorway. He was sweaty and hot from throwing the baseball in the yard, and she could smell an odor on him like sour milk and hay when it’s wet. “That’s my nephew out yonder. We’re going fishing directly.”

  She looked out the window at the boy, as though the detective’s words held meaning for both of them.

  “He’s going to town to get us some bait and such. That leaves just you and me,” he said.

  Her left hand formed a cord on the mandolin’s neck, but she didn’t move the plectrum across the strings.

  “Want me to bring you a cup of coffee or tea?” he asked.

  “No, thank you,” she replied.

  “You’re a prissy thing.”

  His words were spoken in such a way that they could have contained either an insult or a compliment. But she let no reaction to them register in her face.

  “When’s Lou coming back?” she asked.

  “How the hell should I know?” he replied.

  Later, she heard a starter grind on a car, then saw the teenage boy drive past the window onto the county road. Dale Bordelon opened the bedroom door without knocking and leaned inside, his hand fitted like a starfish on the glass knob. “Want me to fix some sandwiches?” he said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Bob Cobb says he didn’t hurt you. Says you liked it just fine,” he said.

  She scratched her neck and stared idly at a horsefly sitting on the windowsill. She could hear the detective breathing heavily in the silence. He stepped into the room and shut the door behind him, then walked within two feet of her, his belt buckle almost eye-level with her. He lifted a strand of hair off her head and rubbed it between his fingers. She could see whorls of dirt in the ball of his thumb.

  “I kept a man from going in your room last night,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You talk like a goddamn phonograph,” he said.

  His knuckles were as big as quarters, his odor like a damp locker room. The gold-embossed outline of the state of Texas glittered on his silver belt buckle, inches from her eyes. He clamped his hand over the top of her head. Where was Lou?

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” she said.

  “I ’preciate it. But a verbal apology is kind of like getting served ice cream in hell. It don’t really address the problem.”

  “I got my period this morning.”

  But he didn’t even acknowledge her deceit. “I sent the boy on an errand in Orange. He’s gonna bring us back some fried-chicken dinners and blackberry cobbler. You’ll like them dinners, believe me. But no more excuses. One way or another, you’re gonna take care of ole Dale.”

  The nakedness of his desire made his face feral. He put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars, chewing hard, as though he could relieve himself of the passion that made him rotate his neck against his collar. “Don’t just sit there, woman. You know what you got to do,” he said.

  “I got my period at three o’clock this morning,” she said, ignoring the implication of his last words.

  That’s when he ripped her out of the chair and hit her with the flat of his hand across the face, breaking her upper lip, streaking blood from her nose on the wall. Then he smashed her mandolin on the chair and threw it to the floor, grinding the delicate wood of the sound chamber into splinters with his heel, snapping the tuning pegs from the head like broken teeth.

  LOU KALE RETURNED to the farmhouse that afternoon and put ice on her face and brought her strawberry ice cream from the kitchen. He swept the broken pieces of her mandolin and the tangle of strings into a dustpan, sliding them into a garbage sack. Outside, the men were popping skeet with a shotgun, the clay disks exploding into puffs of orange smoke above the sawgrass.

  “I’ll buy you a new one. Or a guitar. You’re always talking about a Martin guitar,” he said.

  “Why’d you leave me alone, Lou?”

  He sat next to her on the bed and spoke to her with his hands clenched between his knees, his voice lowered. His hair was shiny and black, combed in a wet curl on the back of his neck. His profile looked like a sheep’s. “I heard some talk, Ida. They know you’re smart. You’ve seen important people at the house and you know their names and who they are. They think you’ll run off again. They think you’re gonna cause a shitload of trouble. They make examples, Ida. Sometimes it’s out there in the Gulf with the crabs.”

  “Just give me some money and get me to a train station or airport,” she said.

  “You’re not hearing me. It takes guts to be a whore or a pimp. I’m proud of what I am. We were born on the hard road, Ida. Them cops out there couldn’t hack it. I’m not gonna let them push us around. I got us a way out.”

  “How?” she said.

  “I called this big plantation man over in Louisiana. I used to chop bait on his old man’s boat when I was a kid. He’s got money with the Giacanos, but he’s not like the Giacanos. His name is Raphael Chalons. He’s a classy guy and those Vice roaches know it. One thing, though?”

  “What?”

  “The Giacanos got long memories. As long as we stay under Mr. Raphael’s protection, we’re gonna be okay. But you owe money and so do I. In the life, that’s the dog collar around your neck. It don’t go away easy.”

  “You?” she said.

  “I owe every sports book in Houston and New Orleans. People like us all got some kind of jones. That how come we’re pimps and whores. Who wants to be normal, anyway? It’s a drag.”

  He thought he had both reassured her and lightened her mood.

  “Lou?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not gonna try to hurt Jimmie Robicheaux, are you?”

  He stood up from the bed, screwing his fingers into his temples, a squealing sound leaking from his teeth.

  DURING THE NEXT HOUR, Lou paced the floor, hyperventilating, drinking ice water, blowing out his breath as though he had pulled a freight car up a grade.

  “Stop climbing the walls,” she said.

  “If this don’t work, bucketloads of shit are going through the fan.”

  “Maybe we end here. Maybe our names are written in water and one day the water just dries up,” she said.

  “Don’t say stuff like that. We’re not living inside a country-and-western song.”

  “Come on, sit down,” she said. She took him by the arm and guided him to the wood chair by the window. His arm was as hard as a log in her hands. He was chewing gum rapidly in one jaw, snapping it loudly, his throat cording with blue veins.

  “I got a confession to make. I was gonna let them hang you out to dry,” he said.

  “But you didn’t.”

  She pushed h
er fingers deep into his shoulders. His eyes closed briefly, then he surged to his feet, like a man who believed the Furies awaited him in his sleep.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Coming apart. I ain’t up to this.” He jammed a chair under the doorknob and shot himself up with enough heroin to blow the heart out of a draft horse, his mouth rictal when the rush took him.

  THAT AFTERNOON Ida heard the strangest conversation she had ever heard in her life, one that would always remain with her as a testimony to the efficacy of fear.

  Another rainfront had swept across the wetlands, smudging out the woods and the fleet of mothballed ships rusting in the bay. She heard the engine of a powerful car coming up the road, then a black Cadillac driven by a Negro chauffeur turned into the yard, the hood steaming in the rain. A tall man got out of the back and walked quickly under an umbrella into the house, lifting his shined shoes out of the puddles like a stork. It was obvious the men drinking beer in the living room had not been expecting him. The rhythm of their conversation faltered, the loud laughter fading, then trailing into total silence. Through a space in the door, she saw them all rise as one from their chairs while the tall man folded his umbrella and hung the crook on a hat rack.

  The tall man’s cheeks were lean, his hair freshly clipped and as black as India ink, the press in his suit impeccable. He removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and read silently from it, then replaced it in his pocket. Lou Kale watched from the kitchen door, the China white he’d shot up singing in his blood, his face incapable of forming a definable expression. Oddly, Lou was the only person in the room the tall man acknowledged.

  Then he said, “I understand there’s a woman here by the name of Ida Durbin.”

  “Yes, sir, she’s back yonder,” the voice of Bob Cobb said.

  “Why are you keeping her here?” the tall man said.

  “She’s just visiting, helping clean and such, Mr. Chalons,” Cobb said.

  “That’s not my understanding,” Raphael Chalons replied.

  “I was gonna fix her lunch, but she didn’t want—” Dale Bordelon began.

  “Would you ask her to come out here, please?” Chalons said.

  Ida heard a chair creak, then footsteps approaching the bedroom. She stepped back from the door just as Bordelon opened it. A smile was carved on his face, like a crooked gash in a muskmelon. “Mr. Chalons wants to know if everything is okay,” he said. “We was telling him you can leave anytime you want.”

  He tried to hold her with his eyes and to force her to make his words hers. But she walked past him into the living room as though he were not there. The men who only moments earlier had been relaxed and confident about their place in the world were still standing, afraid to sit down without permission.

  “You’re Miss Ida?” Chalons asked.

  “My name is Ida Durbin, yes, sir. It’s nice to meet you,” she replied.

  “What happened to your face?” he asked.

  She knew the most injurious response she could make would be none at all. She lowered her eyes and folded her arms on her chest. Inside the boom of thunder and the slap of rain against the window, she became a replica of the medieval martyr, abused and bound and waiting for the bundled twigs to be set ablaze at her feet.

  “Do any of you gentlemen care to tell me what happened here?” Chalons said.

  “Somebody got carried away. There’s no good hat to put on it,” Bob Cobb said.

  “I won’t abide this.”

  “Sir?” Bob Cobb said.

  “I won’t have a young woman held in captivity or beaten on my property,” Chalons said, his eyes lighting in a way that made Bob Cobb blink. He mentioned the name of an infamous Cosa Nostra figure in New Orleans, a man who was literally given the state of Louisiana by Frank Costello and United States Senator Huey P. Long. “This woman and Lou Kale are going to leave with me today. You gentlemen can use the house through tonight. But by ten in the morning you’ll be gone. I have no hard feelings against any of you. But you will not have use of this property again. Thank you for your courtesy in listening to me.”

  AN HOUR LATER, Lou Kale and Ida Durbin were aboard Raphael Chalons’s cabin cruiser, headed southeast through a squall toward the Florida coast, the waves bursting into ropes of foam on the bow. The cabin in which she slept that night vibrated with the reassuring throb of the engines, and when she woke in the early hours, unsure of where she was, she looked through a porthole and saw the sleek, steel-skin bodies of porpoises sliding through the water next to the boat. Their steadiness of purpose, the hardness of their bodies inside the waves, the fact they were on the same course as she, filled her with a sense of harmony and confidence and power.

  Lou Kale slept in the bunk across from her. His sheet had fallen down over his hip, and his exposed arm and naked back and boylike face gave him an aura of vulnerability that she had never associated with the Lou Kale she had known on Post Office Street. She rose from her bunk and lifted the sheet carefully so as not to wake him and replaced it on his back, then looked again at the immensity and mystery of the night.

  The Gulf was green and black, domed by a sky bursting with stars, so cold in their configurations they seemed to smoke like dry ice. She saw coconuts tumbling out of a wave, and an enormous sea turtle, its shell encrusted with barnacles, bobbing in a swell. A waterspout, its belly swollen with light, wobbled on the southern horizon, sucking thousands of gallons and hundreds of fish out of the waves into the clouds. She opened the porthole glass and felt the salt on her tongue, like the taste of iodine, and she knew she would not sleep again that night. She longed for the sunrise, to be up on deck, to eat breakfast in a breeze that contained the green heaviness of the ocean and the hint of islands banked with coconut palms. She longed to be a young girl and to fall in love with the world again.

  Jimmie Robicheaux had already disappeared from her mind. What a trick life had played on her, she thought. Jimmie was gone and ironically her future was now wed to Lou Kale, the man she had tried to flee and who in turn had probably saved her from a terrible fate.

  But when the boat docked in Key West, Lou hung around only long enough to refuel the gas tanks and restock the larder in the galley.

  “Where you headed?” she asked.

  All morning he had been morose, vaguely resentful, his eyes evasive, his speech unusually laconic. “Up to Lauderdale on the Greyhound,” he said, a duffel bag packed with his clothes balanced on his shoulder.

  “What about me?” she said.

  “I got to get things set up. I’ll see you when you get back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “You’re going fishing in the Dry Tortugas with Mr. Chalons.”

  “Lou, I didn’t take care of myself at the farmhouse. I had all that dope in me.”

  “You’re all right. You’ve always been all right,” he said. “Everything is extremely solid. I never lied to you, right? Keep saying ‘Everything is righteously solid.’ Just don’t let no problems get in your head. It’s all a matter of attitude.”

  “Get what things set up?”

  But he walked up the dock and did not reply, staring wide-eyed at the gulls that glided over the dock, his back knotted under his see-through shirt with the weight of the duffel.

  CHAPTER

  23

  JIMMIE TOLD ME ALL THIS late Tuesday afternoon, at my house, just after arriving back in New Iberia. Outside, the sunlight was gold inside the trees, more like autumn than late summer, and there was a tannic smell in the air that I only associated with fall and the coming of winter. I could hear Molly nailing up a birdhouse that had been blown out of live oak, like a reassuring presence who told me I still had another season to run.

  “So Ida and Lou Kale have been in the prostitution business ever since?” I said.

  “More or less,” he replied. “You actually married a nun?”

  “Stick to the subject. Both of us have felt guilty all these years about a woman who didn’t h
ave the courtesy to drop a postcard indicating she was alive. Do you feel like you’ve been had, maybe just a little bit?”

  “What do you guys say at meetings? Live and let live?” he said.

  “She was Raphael Chalons’s punch?”

  “More than that,” he said. We were in the guest bedroom, where he was packing his clothes in a suitcase, preparing to move to an apartment he planned to use while he supervised the reconstruction of our destroyed home south of town. “She had a kid. Almost nine months to the day after Chalons rescued her at that farmhouse.”

  “What happened to the kid?”

  “Guess?”

  I stared at his back as he bent over his suitcase, arranging his shirts and balled-up socks. “Valentine Chalons?” I said.

  “That’s the way I’d read it.” He straightened up, his long-sleeve white shirt still fresh and clean, even after a long drive from New Orleans through heavy traffic.

  “And Raphael Chalons raised him? And that’s what all this bullshit has been about—the Chalons family doesn’t want anyone to know Val’s mother was a prostitute?”

  “You don’t buy it?” Jimmie said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “The old man doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him.”

  “Maybe Val does.”

  “It’s something else.”

  “Why not ask Ida?” he said.

  “I don’t plan on seeing Ida.”

  “You might see her whether you want to or not. She’s in New Orleans. I put her up at a friend’s house on the lake.”

  “Don’t you ever tire of grief?” I said.

  “She wants to see her son. Whores have souls, too,” he replied.

  “What was the cost of a postage stamp in 1958?” I said.

  He straightened up from packing his suitcase and looked at me, a ray of sunlight falling across his prosthetic eye, which remained fixed and staring in the socket, like the eye of a stranger. “Thanks for the use of the room,” he said.