Accordion Crimes (33 page)

He rarely left the Malefoot farm for he was too heavy for adventure, knew the boundaries and fences very well, had timed to a nicety the distance he could travel in the adjoining goat pasture before the old billy would charge and helplessly clang his horns on the fence while the cat licked his paw in safety. He crossed the road sometimes to the neighbor’s where
he ate the dish of scraps the child set out for a thin dog, but looked both ways first and never let himself be approached by pedestrians, especially those with guns, sticks, ropes, whips, branches, stones or other harmful objects in their hands. No one could touch him but Mme Malefoot, and sometimes he pulled away from her or clawed her caressing hand. Before he became too heavy, he was a great cat for climbing the chinaberry tree and capturing birds. In his prime he had torn swallows from the air, and he was still a first-rate rat and mouse catcher, crouching silently near the long grass for interminable lengths of time until he detected the faint stirring in the grass, then, with hindquarters setting and resetting, tail twitching and eyes ablaze, he sprang, and an hour of amusement was guaranteed as he let it go, sprang again, released it, batted it up in the air, caught it in his hind feet like a ball of yarn, rolled on it, pretended to lose it utterly while watching the grass quake and tremble as the wounded mouse staggered off, then flew upon it once again until the mouse was worn out and dead, and even then he smacked it about hoping to revive it with a little roughing up.

Two weeks after the
fais dodo
the photographer was still hanging around, though Winnie with the tape recorder had gone back up north. The photographer had exhausted the tamer aspects of Cajun life and had turned now to illegal cockfights, flashlight alligator hunts, horses being fixed with charms and potions to win or lose races, miscegenation, arm-wrestling matches where the winner snaps the loser’s ulna, staring matches, bad-blood ambushes, shooting victims, raped and disheveled girls telling their stories, raids on stills, swamp hideouts with escaped convicts in residence, or, what was now promised for Saturday night, dogfights to the death. She felt no personal danger when thrusting into these dark affairs; she held her camera
as a shield, felt her position to be one of privilege and safety, for she had an important reputation, came from the north, and
she knew better.

The yellow cat was taken in surprise ambush. As he helped himself to orts in the neighbor dog’s dish, a croker sack came down over him with violence and such speed that the dog’s dish and the fatback rind and cold grits in it were swept up as well. At first he tried to claw his way out, razory talons protruding from the sack mesh, but the abductor tied a double knot in the sack neck and threw it and the cat into the back of an idling pickup truck which squealed onto the highway and sped into the golden evening light. Inside the sack the cat wrestled and clawed, slumped, despaired, howled and swore vengeance, bit the dish with such fury it cracked, shat with rage but was still in the croker sack when the truck arrived at a waterfront warehouse where men, dogs and the photographer waited.

The dogs were streamlined for fighting, their ears cropped away, their tails bobbed. They had no rest. Tonight’s winner had to fight again the next day and every fight was to the death. How long a dog lived depended on how long he kept winning. Big money exchanged hands. A good dog man could live on his ring earnings without working. The yellow cat was the opening entertainment, an appetizer to get the dogs’ blood up, in the mood for killing.

The yellow cat was dumped into a sandy ring about twenty feet across, surrounded by a chicken-wire fence with a rail top. Men, smoking, chewing, rolling cigarettes, gnawing on buffalo chicken wings or biting their nails, sucking at their fingers, picking shreds of meat from between their teeth with horny nails, hung over the rail, rested their arms on it. They shouted when the yellow cat tumbled out. Grits were matted
in his fur. He was huge, bristling with insult, fright and rage. He streaked for the chicken-wire fence, searching for the way out. Three dogs were released into the ring and they went for him at once, growling, snapping, skidding to a stop and turning on a nickel as the cat spun and wove and dashed between them. There was no respite. Every frontal feint was answered from behind. He clawed a dog’s nose, another dog seized him by the back and shook, his hindquarters were paralyzed, yet his eyes continued to blaze and he lashed out. It was over in a few minutes when his head was taken in the jaws of a stubby black dog and crushed. The yellow cat was dead.

But when the dogs were called off, the cat’s body, instead of being shoveled out the back door into the bayou, was dumped in the croker sack again and the same pickup spun out to the east. Someone heaved the corpse over the Malefoots’ fence and it landed not far from the back door. A few minutes later the truck cruised past the house of Buddy and the daughter-in-law and the horn sounded four times. Buddy was out on the rig, the daughter-in-law did not wake up, sunk in a dreamless moon-under sleep.

The photographer struggled to drive a straight line in the rose dawn, her eyes smarting with smoke, her legs like rubber from standing up all night and her breath fetid with cigarettes and soft drinks. She yawned a horrible cavernous yawn, her eyes filling with tears, jaw cracking and a roar bursting from her stringy bowel as she steered through the puddles (rain in the night) and came abreast of the Malefoot yard to see a middle-aged woman limping around the corner in nightgown and mud-caked slippers, face swollen with weeping, trailing a
pointed shovel in her hands. She leaned the shovel against the steps, sat on the damp bottom tread, put her face in her hands and sobbed.

The photographer slowed, stopped, aimed her camera through the greasy window, thought better of it, got out, leaned on the hood, sighted through the clear air at the bereft woman lighted by a great swath of green sunlight and began snapping pictures. The woman did not lift her head. The photographer advanced, leaned over the fence and shot. The woman looked up. Through her tear-filmed eyes the female figure at the gate, heroically large against the rising sun, holy in its streaming rays, seemed to her to be the angel of Belle come to console her mother.

“Oh
chère,
” she sobbed, “thank God you come to me.” She got up and staggered toward her with her arms outstretched. The photographer, using her camera as a shield, clicked again and again at the advancing woman and still she came on. She could smell her grief, a bitter, briny odor.

“Belle,” the woman groaned. “
Bébé. Ma chère, ma fille.
” She embraced her, felt the camera, saw her face, so changed, but understood why she was wearing this ugly carnival mask—no one must know she had come back from the dead. She seized her hand and dragged her toward the door.

Inside the kitchen the photographer sat at the table, ill at ease. In habit she raised her camera and began to take interior shots of the chair by the window, the glass jar of rice. Mme Malefoot understood this perfectly. If her daughter was called back to Paradise, at least she would have photographs of home to ease her loneliness. She led her daughter upstairs to her old room, showed her the portrait waiting in darkness behind the toilet seat lid, smoothed the pillow. She took her into every room, to the parlor, the pantry and the kitchen, tried to give
her a plate of red beans and rice, coaxed her to the porch and up the outside stairs to the room where her father lay sleeping, grey hair in a pointed muss, guided her outside to the tree where she had played as a child, and around the barn to see the yellow cat’s fresh grave. A siege of herons flew up from the bayou across the road.

“Got to go now,” the photographer said when the woman came pressing close again with a yearning expression. It was awful. What was wrong with the old broad? It was as though she had fallen in love with her, this big flat-faced, middle-aged woman with her damp caresses and tear-streaked voice.

Mme Malefoot understood. The angels were calling her child back to them. She had the photographs of home and they would be developed in heaven. She seized the girl in her damp arms, kissed her shoulder (she had grown tall up there), wept and clung as she pulled away.

“Will you come back?” she called. “Will I see you again soon? Come at night. I’m sleeping in your room!” She couldn’t hear the answer, but the photographer lifted her right hand and saluted to her. A girl does not forget her mother! And she drove away like an ordinary person, but of course that was part of the disguise.

(Two decades later the photographer was blinded in the left eye by a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in the hands of a nine-year-old boy firing from his family’s apartment window at cars stopped for the red light. There was a good side to the injury; she became a celebrity victim and within months her work was displayed and awarded, she appeared on television talk shows and in radio interviews.)

“Your oil rig is a fuckin crazy place,” said Coodermonce, who’d given up the invisible-vinyl-repair business for the steady rig paychecks. He was part of the confusion, for on this rig worked Cuddermash, Cuttermarsh, Coudemoche, Cordeminch and Gartermatch, all variations on the original name, Courtemanche. Buddy liked the work for the pay and the wrongo heads on the rig, hated it for the Yankee bosses and the lonely feeling of being out in the Gulf with no way home, shut up for two-week stretches hearing the same goddamn record on somebody’s turntable, something bad like Gypsy Sandor or the Voices of Walter Schumann, having to hear the endlessly repeated stories of the old guys, high-tempered toolpushers, riggers, derrickmen and chuffy roughnecks who remembered the pipeline walkers, oil witchers, shooters and doodlebug men, who had seen everything twice, jamming around through Oklahoma and Texas drinking pop-skull whiskey and sleeping it off in bowl-and-pitcher hotels and now telling their salted stories to the Louisiana French boys, these babes who had never worked the oil fields. Carver Stringbellow, sunburned red, a single blond eyebrow and sandy-gold hair in deep crenellations, never without his pair of white gloves, told about the wildflower man who drilled where wildflowers caught his fancy and always struck oil, had seen drill pipes blown out of the hole, shooters disintegrate into bloody pieces the size of dimes in the old liquid nitro days when it exploded prematurely, had experienced a tornado that tore the rig apart and threw the toolpusher’s new sedan into a swamp, a Texas windstorm that pasted a metal Nehi sign across his back and then ran him over the ground as fast as he could go, running on his toes and praying not to lift off into the dirt-filled air. He was a big old boy from Odessa, six foot five,
top-heavy and dedicated to fight and drink. He always arrived at the rig lamed up, bruises fading into chartreuse and yellow, married and divorced seven times and claimed to have fathered more than fifty kids, from Corsicana, Texas, to Cairo, Missouri. He ran a comb that he carried in his back pocket through his hair twenty times a day, said he had been out to the Middle East, worked for Socal in Bahrain in the thirties where he learned to relish sheep’s eyes, during the war when Socal and Texaco merged as Aramco he worked in Saudi Arabia, knew crazy Everette Lee DeGolyer with his passion for oil, chile peppers, and the
Saturday Review of Literature,
ate lunch once with management in the Hotel Aviz in Lisbon at an hour when Calouste Gulbenkian was seated at his private table on a platform of some altitude, had seen the half-mad Getty, richest man in America, with his surgically tautened face, chewing oysters thirty-three times per mouthful and smiled when Jack Zone, who’d asked him to the lunch, speculated whether or not that old crocodile was wearing the famous underwear he washed himself by hand each night in a little gold basin. He could tell the weather three days in advance and drank thirty cups of black coffee a day, lived boom or bust, pockets stuffed with money or jobless and on the grass, read about bullfighting and said it was his idea to go to Spain and see Ordóñez someday, to see Hemingway in the bar and talk with him afterward.

“Listen, last year you know what he did, Heminway? He shot the ash off the end of a cigarette that Ordóñez was smokin at a party. They do that to test each other’s nerve—and smoke it down to a short butt, like this”—he drew on his inch-long Camel—”and then they shoot the ash off. With a twenty-two. This one guy, he says, ‘Ernesto, we can go no farther. I felt it brush my lips.’ Somethin like that.” For years he had saved money to go to Spain, but whenever he had
nearly enough something happened—a woman, a poker game, one winter a long stay in the hospital with broken knees.

“You want money you ought to help me find this painting,” said Screw-Loose, from Beaumont in the coastal part of Texas known as Louisiana Lapland. “You know that whiskey, Sunny Crow whiskey, gonna give a reward to the one finds this painting. Twenty-five grand’ll buy a lot of bullfight tickets. I got a good idea where that lost painting is, oil painting by Frederick Remington of a calvary charge. About fifty guys coming right at you, hell-bent for leather. Now, see, I know I seen this painting somewhere one time, I know it like I know the feel of my old lady’s ass. I seen it. Then I seen the picture in a magazine couple of years ago—Sunny Crow run a photograph of the painting in a magazine—when Remington died they found this photograph in his stuff, but the picture, the painting? Nowhere to be saw. They know he painted it, the photograph proves it, but they can’t find it. And I actually
seen
it somewhere. Every night I go to sleep I tell myself ‘tonight you’re gonna dream where you saw that painting and when you wake up you are a rich man.’ It’ll work one of these days because I remember seeing it. I just can’t remember where.”

At least this time there was some new music and maybe he wouldn’t get sick of it before his tour was up. He’d brought the accordion out once, but it went over like a lead balloon.