Cajun Waltz (12 page)

“No crime in that,” Richie growled.

Abe, in his Ryan Street office with the phone sweaty at his ear, savored the moment joylessly. “R.J.'s
jealous
hatred, I should say.”

Richie had taken the call in the library. Seth was home and heard cursing, steps bounding upstairs, and his mother's shrieks in the master bedroom. He rushed in and was shocked by the scarlet smears across the wallpaper. His mother's face was already pulp. His father's continued blows threw vivid spatters such as Seth had never seen. He pulled Richie off her and pinned him to the floor. Angel crawled like a drunk toward the door. Seth screamed for her to get the car while in his ear his father howled about knowing she was Frank Billodeau's whore,
but now with my own fucking son!
Misunderstanding obviously figured here. That's why it might have helped if R.J. had been available to clarify things. He wasn't. He was bombing out of Lake Charles in his sister's car with some clothes, his guitar, and a remarkably positive outlook.

Alvin and Bonnie drove up Georgia Hill's driveway just as Seth and Angel were commandeering one of the family Cadillacs. Richie stormed out the front door carrying a shotgun from his library cabinet. Peeling away in a screech of tires, Angel was in the driver's seat, Seth on his knees on the seat beside her, reaching over to man the wheel because she couldn't see for blood in her eyes. Richie fired into the air after them. The Cadillac roared past Alvin's car and fishtailed down the hill. Richie fired again. Angel mashed the gas pedal. Bonnie and Alvin watched in dismay. The Cadillac was doing forty when it rammed the live oak at the base of the driveway, killing Angel instantly and sending Seth through the windshield into the tree.

*   *   *

T
HE UPSHOT OF
all this was multifold. Frank Billodeau was dead, likewise Angel Bainard. Richie, ravaged by guilt, became obsessive in caring for his now handicapped younger son, who despised him for obvious reasons. R.J. was hiding in exile somewhere. Bonnie took over running Block's with Alvin's able assistance. Abe Percy and Hollis Jenks, bit players so far, were alive and keeping well.

Then there was Mary Billodeau. Her life was never so good as after her husband killed himself. She kept her management position at Block's while enjoying a peaceful home life now that misfortune had chastened her daughter into utter subservience. Her daughter, interestingly, changed her name. Nothing major, just “Delly” instead of Adele. It seemed she preferred the feeling, when called by that, of being someone else.

 

TWO

Bonnie, R.J., Alvin

December 1956. Two and a half years have passed since that bad day at Georgia Hill. A '55 pickup turns off the coast highway outside Hancock Bayou and bounces down a seashell road overlooking the winter-brown marsh. The air is cold and dry. Twigs on the scrub trees are brittle as ice, the clouds crystal filaments high in the sky. Houses scattered about are erected on pillars in case tidewaters crest the levee, a rare event that occurs mostly in summer but is remembered all year round.

Sallie Hooker's house was at the end of the road. It was roofed with corrugated tin and had two smaller structures behind it, a work shed and an insulated cold locker. With rice cultivation shut down this time of year, Sallie, as her late mother had done all her life, dressed game to bring in money, anything from deer to mourning dove. In duck season she and her niece cleaned the birds, wrapped them in wax paper and set them on shelves in the cold locker. Out-of-town hunters would drop them off bloody with birdshot and collect them pristine as grocery chicken on the way home from weekends spent at lodges on the marsh, home to Lake Charles or Shreveport usually, though some hailed from Texas or farther away, that's how renowned was the hunting in these vast wetlands.

Sallie's niece's son, eight years old, helped pluck the birds whenever the women got behind. He dunked them in boiling water and fed them into the plucker. The machine took the big feathers but left the down to pick off with your fingers. The feathers went into burlap sacks to be ground into feed and fertilizer; the guts, heads, and feet into barrels hog farmers collected twice a week. The smell was strong even when the temperature fell below freezing, as it often does in December in southwest Louisiana.

The man who got out of the pickup was one of Sallie's clients. A professional guide, bearded and lanky, he looked the part in a woolen watch cap and boots, the laces dragging same as any hunter who's just removed his waders. But the boy had noticed that the boots were high quality, not the cheap knockoffs most guides wore, and his shotgun, propped on the seat inside his truck, was a Holland & Holland over-and-under, its receiver engraved with floral scroll and its two triggers plated in gold. You never saw guides with custom guns—too much wear from the elements and from doubling as push-poles to nudge their flat-bottomed pirogues through the winter marshes, the barrels pitted, the once gleaming stocks dull with an accretion of blood and grime you could scrape off with a fingernail. But it was the man's dog, which leaped from the truck into the boy's arms, that gave the biggest hint. A Chesapeake Bay retriever, burly and sleek, it was too fine a specimen for any local to afford.

The man's ducks were teals, small and drab but for a blazon of color on the wing, like a soldier's combat patch. The boy loosened the thong from around their limp necks. He asked the man if he'd taken out a party this morning. “Just me and the cur,” came the answer.

The boy scratched the dog under its ear. With its owner it acted trained beyond personality. With the boy it was puppylike, lapping any skin its tongue could find. “Tarzy!” His great-aunt came out of the plucking shed. Sallie's apron was bloody and her hands were shiny and dripping. “Fetch them birds here 'fore they rot in your grip.”

“Tarzy?” The man had never asked his name.

“For Tazwell,” he said, embarrassed.

“Tazwell Hooker. Very goddamn fancy.”

Sallie straightened. “Now come on, you. No swears round the boy.”

Tarzy was watchful in the moment that followed, thinking the man would scold her for talking uppity. But he gave a respectful nod. “My mistake.”

Sallie took the ducks. “Only four?”

“No kinda cover out there. Nutria ate every stick.”

Nutria is the giant muskrat that infests Louisiana marshes like roaches in a New York apartment. With fur prices low and few people inclined to eat the gamy meat, the creatures were spawning in record numbers. Litters of baby nutria, pink and squinty, would nestle in every bog come summer, feeding an equal surge in the population of their main predator, cottonmouth moccasins.

The man told Sallie to keep the ducks. “Sell 'em, cook 'em, they're yours.” Weekend shooters might not eat what they killed, but professionals rarely gave up their birds, even the ratlike
pule d'eaus
or the fishy-tasting spoonbills. Each was a meal, part of the wages. Nope, Tarzy thought as he listened, there's something going on here.

The man made to depart. “Here, boy.” The dog snuggled in Tarzy's arms. “I guess he likes you better'n me.”

“Wanna give'm over?”

“What would I do then, clean birdshit like you?”

This stung—Tarzy hadn't meant to be wise. The man called again for his dog, which obeyed at once.

Tarzy went to rejoin his great-aunt. In the lowlands beyond the levee there were glints of iced-over ponds at the base of bare trees spearing upward from the muck. The boy preferred the swamp this time of year, crisp as a frozen planet. Spring turned it fetid, summer turned it creepy, made the night throb with the calling of bugs and bullfrogs and the boggy thatch under your feet crawl with gators and snakes.

“Hey.”

Turning to the voice, Tarzy snared a coin arching toward him through the air. A quarter—enough for a matinee movie in Hancock Bayou or a plate of garfish balls at the town luncheonette. He gripped it pensively as the guy climbed into his truck. The cold locker's compressor revved up with a diesel hum. As the pickup crunched away down the road, Tarzy thought to himself with certainty, that man there is a criminal.

*   *   *

S
ETH
B
AINARD NOW
went by Seth
Hooker,
his mother's maiden name. He hadn't done it through lawyers or registered the change with city hall. It was a private protest against all things Bainard, though not including, as yet, the money.

From the front seat of a limousine bringing him to Georgia Hill, he watched the swim of light and shadow from passing trees and buildings. He felt the vehicle turn into the front gate and wondered if the live oak was scarred from when his mother had hit it. He hadn't been back here since that day almost three years ago. Nor had there been any contact with his father, though Seth knew Richie kept tabs on his welfare and made big donations to Lake Charles Hospital where Seth had been treated after the accident and where he now worked as an inpatient aide.

The limo came to a halt and the driver turned off the motor. The sudden silence jarred Seth with the noise of his pulse. Told his father was desperate to reconcile, he should have been calm with moral triumph. Richie was ill. Seth had gathered from Bonnie's message that his condition was critical. The stage was set and the power in hand to deny his father all pardon. Seth's eyesight, damaged in the accident, could discern bright-lighted text with a magnifying glass. The book he most practiced on was a red-letter Bible he'd found at the hospital. It had made him expert in the pronouncements from Jesus on sin and punishment, which is to say, being just past seventeen, he'd fallen prone to mistaking the Savior's job for his own. Deeming himself his father's judge came naturally as a result.

The passenger door opened. “Mr. Seth.”

He recognized the voice. “Alvin. I thought it might be you to drive me here.”

“Drive only Miss Bonnie nowadays.”

Seth asked for his cane from the backseat. Alvin passed it to him handle first, like a knife. He swung his legs out and down to the ground. His gaze swept too smoothly, like a drunkard faking acuity, across Alvin and the shadows beyond. From a distance he could tell light and broad movement. The world was otherwise murk.

His agenda today was to meet with his father and afterward sit down with his sister to preview Richie's will. Chilly as ever, she'd explained on the phone that Seth would receive no inheritance without first making peace. He would have refused on the spot but for recalling from John 15 that Jesus felt obliged to tell sinners they'd sinned lest they not realize they were sinners at all. “Now they have no cloak for their sin,” said the red-letter words in Seth's Bible. The instruction made plain his sacred duty to get over to Georgia Hill and lay some terminal blame on his father.

He and Alvin passed through the foyer. Alvin explained that Richie had been moved to the sewing room. “Ground floor. Easier.”

“Where's Bonnie?”

“In her office upstairs. Waitin' on you.”

“The queen in her chamber.”

“Carried the load when others didn't.” Alvin's tone irked Seth almost snobbishly. The guy was the help, after all.

The sewing room was off the breezeway between the main house and a bank of detached garages. Its auction antiques had been replaced with hospital furniture now that Richie was too weak to climb the stairs to the master suite. He walked little these days—to the john, the terrace. Instead of a canopied king he slept on a hospital bed. To receive Seth today he'd been dressed by his nurse and propped in a sitting position on a stuffed chair before the window.

Seth couldn't make out the droop of his father's face or his hair lying limp as grass cuttings on his scalp. But he sensed Richie's infirmity from his ragged breathing and the unmistakable scent of a body breaking down. When Richie reached out his hand, fingers fluttering like fronds in a river current, Seth detected the movement and shook in a craven reflex.

Alvin asked the nurse to leave and to close the door behind her. Seth protested that the meeting was private. “He stays,” Richie rasped. Seth felt for a nearby chair, Alvin a palpable presence off to one side, a guard to keep intruders out, Seth in. Richie inhaled as if before a deep dive. “Been wantin' this.”

“I heard.”

“Been hard, thinkin' o' you still ticked off. Was hopin'…” Richie swallowed, started over. “You and me might…”

“Be happy again?” Seth was angry to feel himself moved by the scene, upset at the injustice of confronting this hurtful man only to find him already broken.

“Be friends, I's gonna say. But happy's good.”

“After what you did?”

“Hopin' you outgrowed that.”

“Outgrowed?”

“Wrong word maybe.”

Seth held up his cane. “Got this to remind me.”

Like an injured duelist forced to flail, Richie lashed out, “Goddamn crutch is all that is.”

Seth almost laughed. “I guess you're not gonna beg my forgiveness.”

“Said I'm sorry. Said it a thousand times, sayin' it now.”

“My mother died. It was your fault.”

Richie's shoulders caved as if he'd been punched. He cleared his throat. Seth couldn't see the bubble that formed on his lip, only heard the confession that popped it. “I loved your mother. More'n she did me, no surprise there. Why I don't complain what I got now.”

“Man's reachin' out,” Alvin said. “Oughta 'cept his apology.”

Seth turned. “You've come up in the world.”

“Still a workin' stiff.”

“But working on who?”

“Doin' my job for folks I admire.”

Richie had slumped in his chair, groggy from medication. “How long?” Seth asked quietly.

“He got it spread everywhere,” Alvin said.

“Strange not to care.” The statement was harsher than Seth felt.