The man named Cobb was the first to take her. She kept her eyes shut and rested her hands lightly on the tips of his shoulders while he labored on top of her, his breath washing over her face. Inside her mind she watched the heron’s flight across the points of the sawgrass, its wings flapping, its grace undisturbed by the storm raging in the sky.
The second detective, Dale Bordelon, tried to give her whiskey, then he brought her food that she wouldn’t eat. When he placed his hand on her, a tremor went through her body. “Something you don’t like about me?” he said.
“I’m sore,” she replied.
“Whores don’t get sore.”
“I need to use the bathroom.”
When she came back into the bedroom, he was already in his underwear and socks, smoking a cigarette on the side of the bed, tipping the ashes into the neck of an empty beer bottle. “Time’s a-wasting, girl. Get them clothes off. I mean all off, too,” he said.
“Where’s Lou?” she asked.
“What d’you care about him? We’re the best friends you got.”
“I told you, Bob Cobb hurt me. I cain’t do it anymore today.”
He looked meanly into space, exhaling cigarette smoke from his nostrils. He hadn’t shaved that morning and his jaws were like dirty sandpaper. “To heck with it,” he said. Then he dressed and went out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
She curled up in a ball on the bed. When she awoke the sky was still dark, the clouds quaking with thunder, rain ticking in pools below the eaves. Lou Kale was sitting in a wood chair by the bed, leaning forward, his face gathered with a strange look of concern. A candle burned in a bottle on a nightstand someone had brought into the room. “Gonna give you a little bump, Connie. It’ll hep you ride over the hard spots for a while,” he said.
“My name is Ida. I left Post Office Street, Lou.”
“Like it or not, we’re in the life, hon. Folks like us ain’t got yesterdays. Forget that Robicheaux kid.”
He held a bent spoon over the candle. Inside the curl of flame around the spoon she could see a yellowish-brown liquid boiling, like the broth that rises to the top of chicken soup. The syringe was fashioned from an eyedropper; the tourniquet was a necktie.
“I don’t want it,” she said.
“We got to do what those Vice roaches say. We’re little people, Connie…excuse me…Ida.”
“I don’t want no dope, Lou.”
“Those guys will be gone by tomorrow night. Just go with it. Don’t do anything else to get us in trouble. Now give me your arm.”
Her elbow jerked slightly when the needle punched into an artery. For a brief moment the room was still, the lightning frozen inside the clouds, then she saw the headlight on a train engine wobbling in front of her eyes and felt a warm rush through her body that was like a long-delayed orgasm.
Her head lolled on the pillow, her mouth open. Even though her eyes were closed, she could see Lou Kale through the lids, which somehow had become translucent, as thin as Japanese paper. She had never felt this warm inside her skin before, this content and serene. Lou put away his works and stroked her forehead.
“I’ll come by later and give you another one,” he said.
“Get in bed with me.”
“That’s the dope talking, Ida.”
“No, I want you.”
“I guess it goes with the job,” he said.
He propped the chair under the doorknob and made love to her, at first mechanically, then he found himself caught up in it, looking at her eyes and mouth and the sandy red color of her hair in a new way. When he got off her, he was self-conscious about his nakedness, confused about what he had just done or why he felt affected by it.
“Be nice to that cop,” he said, dressing with his back to her. “I’m jammed up on this deal, too.”
“Don’t leave, Lou. I’m afraid of them.”
“It wasn’t really me you wanted, was it? You got me mixed up with that warm feeling the dope gave you.”
“I always said you weren’t a bad guy, Lou. You never made the girls do anything they didn’t want to. You never hit nobody, either. Remember when you told me I could sing as good as Texas Ruby?”
He pulled on his trousers and walked back and forth in front of the window, pushing at his temple with the heel of his hand. “I ain’t suppose to be having these kind of thoughts. I’m breaking a big rule here,” he said.
“You already said it—‘We’re little people.’ We have to be smarter than they are.”
“Cobb can have me on Sugarland Farm in twenty-four hours. Why didn’t you stay up in Snerdville where you belong? You’re a king-size migraine, Ida,” he said.
“Is that what you really think of me?”
“I don’t know what I think. You messed with my head.”
He lay down beside her. She curled against him, placing her face against his chest. A moment passed and she felt the tension go out of his body. He exhaled loudly and slipped his arms around her back and tucked her head under his cheek.
“I’ll get us out of this,” he said.
“I know you will, Lou.”
“But you got to promise me something.”
She spread her fingers over his heart and waited.
“There ain’t no turning back. They’ll pour gasoline on you and set you afire. I seen them do it. Say ‘promise,’ Ida. Say it now,” he said.
BEFORE LOU LEFT that night, Ida heard him lie to the detectives and tell them he had injected her a second time. He also told them she’d had a seizure from the heroin and that she should not be bothered again, at least until the next day. During the night she heard the voices of several men who were playing cards and drinking. Once, somebody opened the bedroom door, blading her face with a band of white light. The figure stared at her, motionless, in silhouette, his upper body and head like a buffalo’s. Then someone called him back to the poker game and he shut the door.
In the morning she waited until the men were finished with the bathroom, then took fresh clothes from her suitcase and cleaned a gray film out of the tub with a wad of toilet paper. The men had used up the hot tank, so she bathed in cold water and washed her hair with a cake of harsh soap.
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 her 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 Bo
b 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.”