Cajun Waltz (2 page)

“Acadian ones are smaller and noisier,” Esther explained.

“That's what I'm lookin' for. Cajun style. Had the crowd goin'.”

“We can order you a Monarch. It's the brand they like.”

“From Germany,” her father scowled. “Junk.”

“Gettin' the idea you don't like Germans,” Richie said to him. “I done my part, if it makes you feel better.”

“In war?”

“Was a while ago.”

“Not for him,” Esther said.

“You kill Boche?” Leopold pressed.

“I did try.”

Leopold returned the Hohner to its shelf. He pushed aside some boxes till he found what he was looking for. It seemed a child's toy, less than half the size of the Hohner, its cardboard bellows covered with burgundy cloth and boxed with varnished red pine, a row of brass-plated buttons on each side. “No German,” he said. “America.”

Richie asked Esther, “Why'nt you show me this first?”

“The Hohner costs twenty dollars, the Monarch sixteen, and we guarantee them both. This one's made local from scrap parts.”

“How much?”

“Twelve dollars.”

“Ten,” Leopold said. “My cost.”

“You mean it?”

“He does not,” Esther said. “It's twelve dollars.”

“Ten,” Leopold insisted. “And tonight you dine at my house. We will discuss the dead Boche.”

“Papa,” Esther warned.
“Ne soyez pas sournois.”

His voice turned impish.
“Je meurs, me rappelle?”

“You'll live forever.”

“Il est beau.”

“Papa!”

The ladies from cookware approached, one brandishing a cast-iron skillet. Leopold said to Richie, “Come tonight. My daughter is superior cook.”

Richie removed his hat, placed it over his stomach, and cocked his head toward Esther's pie face. “Bull's-eye.”

*   *   *

M
ORE THAN A
quarter million French soldiers and civilians died as a result of Prussia's invasion of France in 1870. The carnage accounted for Leopold's vengeful joy in Richie's tales of fighting Germans on the western front in World War I. After Esther's meal of
andouille
sausage with peas and brown rice, the three of them passed the evening on the porch of the Blocks' dollhouse Victorian on the east bank of Lake Charles. Father and daughter listened as Richie deployed every tavern trick of witty narration he knew to describe a wartime experience that in reality had been six months of tedium and one morning of fright until shrapnel in his leg put him in a hospital where he convalesced through Armistice six weeks later.

Esther had changed to a sleeveless dress in the summer humidity. Her bare arms drew Richie's gaze like a magnet. She was no beauty, but her slender wrists and ankles refined the heft spilling over her chair into something classically ripe.

“Boche,” her father mumbled sleepily.
“Sauvage.”

“Got him a one-track mind, huh?”

“Not always,” she said. “There's the store. There's me.”

Richie lucked into a perfect response. “Fathers fret for their daughters.”

“You know from experience?”

“Not a bit. But what I seen, men want sons. Me, I want a lil girl. Way they love their daddies.”

Leopold drowsed in his chair. Cicadas creaked in the trees at the edge of the property. A ruffle of moonlight glittered on the lake beyond. “I imagine that could be so,” Esther said.

Leopold's breathing deepened. Richie perked his ear. “You hear that?” He went to the porch railing.

“There's your accordion.”

The sound of the instrument floated bare on the breeze—someone playing in solitude before an open window in one of the cottages nearer the lake. It was reedy and alternately faint and full, like a city siren heard from a distance. Its underlying drone mingled with high notes in a melody more drifty than tuneful. “Remind me of France,” Richie said. In Westlake on the far shore of Lake Charles, fires flickered atop the exhaust stacks of the town's chemical factory. “We heard it at night on the German side.”

“Probably Hohner,” she said. “Like the one today.”

Her practicality popped his reverie. The accordion sound faded.

Esther's face had lifted to his with the same dull and willful combination he'd observed in the store that morning.
I'm not much for music,
she'd said. Factual, capable, steady—just what he needed in many ways. But looking down at her, he knew he'd end up mistreating her for being too boring, too nice, too fat. “Ramblers playin' Pinefield tomorrow,” he said. That part was true. The band was opening for a local act at the Pinefield City Auditorium. “We get done, I'd like to call on you again.” That part wasn't true.

“I'll be at Block's, same as ever.”

“Maybe I'll know some songs on my new accordion.”

“Either way, we don't take returns.”

Her brisk tone almost turned him around. It was like a challenge, daring him to try and get her mind off commerce and onto unfurling her sweeter self. He shook off the notion. “Tell your daddy thanks from me.”

Esther's expression didn't show her disappointment at Richie's noble exit. She would have liked him to make a pass, if only just to see, for her own curiosity, how she would have reacted.

*   *   *

A
MONTH EARLIER,
a publicity photo of the Texas Ramblers had come into the hands of the promoter putting on the Pinefield show. They were posed beside Richie's motorcar, the band's name chalked on the spare tire along with the exchange number of the fiddler's mother. Worried that a strictly Cajun bill might not fill the place, the promoter had booked the Ramblers based on the cowboy getups they wore in the photo, big hats and chaps and tasseled vests borrowed from a high school theater's costume trunk.

Pinefield was far from the Ramblers' usual turf. The drive east from Lake Charles took half a day, the three men crammed in the Ford with guitars on their laps and duffels strapped to the running board. Their mood wasn't helped by the promoter complaining, when they got to the auditorium, that he'd expected them to perform in the Tom Mix outfits they'd worn in the publicity shot. Surveying their matching white shirts and white trousers, a spiffy look Richie had pressured the group to adopt to widen its appeal, he growled that tonight's crowd was expecting the
Texas
Ramblers so they'd best put some cowboy into their act. “We playin' more hillbilly now,” Richie explained.

“Hillbilly? Y'all look like a damn glee club.”

The other band members glowered at Richie. They'd hated the change of style. Right now he pretty much hated them.

The promoter lit a cigarette and exhaled with purpose. A sheriff's deputy stood at his shoulder. The young man's name was Hollis Jenks. He was muscular-stout with buzzed hair and a forehead broad as a tractor cowl. The florid bulbs of his nose and scalp suggested things cooking inside him. “Let's see how the show goes,” the promoter said.

It turned out that most of the patrons had no interest in the opening act, preferring to picnic on the grassy lot behind the building until the headliner came on. Knowing they'd be facing an empty house freed Richie's mates to go hard on their pharmacy liquor backstage. Richie pushed through “John Henry” and “Wreck of the Old '97,” but sloppy play behind him and no pretty girls in front made it hard to give a damn. When “Red River Valley” came around on the set list, he sang the chorus lyric, “and the
cowboy
who loved you so true,” with a wink at the promoter watching in the wings, who understandably took it as snotty.

Applause came in pockets from folks who'd wandered in to find seats for the main performance. Richie knew he was done with the Ramblers before the clapping stopped. He slung his guitar over his shoulder and edged toward a side door on the calculation that letting his bandmates split tonight's meager take was a fair swap for leaving them flat. A rush of incomers swept him back—families with grandparents and little kids, teenagers in packs, couples out on the town and done up for Saturday night in clean shirts and stubby neckties, the gals in patterned frocks and shiny shoes, most of them chattering in the same French drawl he'd heard at the house party in Lake Charles. He retreated down the aisle to slip out the rear of the building, feeling now totally foolish in his soda shop whites. But curious about the cause of the fuss, he paused backstage to get a glimpse of the headliner.

The promoter should have known that Joe Falcon could sell out any venue in south Louisiana without help from of an out-of-state string band. Joe and his fiancée Cleoma Breaux, him on accordion and her on guitar, had recorded two sides for Columbia Records in a hotel suite in New Orleans last spring. Now every area jukebox featured the thirty-five-cent 78 of
“Allons
à
Lafayette”
and “The Waltz That Carried Me to My Grave,” as did all the tumbledown households that had found dollars to buy a hand-cranked Victrola from the Montgomery Ward catalog or a Silvertone Super Deluxe from Sears Roebuck so they could hear Joe and Cleoma's Cajun crooning whenever they wanted.

Smoking cigarettes and sharing discreet sips from a flask, the couple looked like Jazz Age swells from New York or Chicago rather than the sharecropper and housemaid they'd been before social sing-alongs brought them together and led Cleoma to leave her husband and hit the road with Joe last year. He was Richie's age; his tailored suit and rimless glasses made him seem older. And Cleoma was nothing but cute with her red lipstick, black curls spilling out from under a slanted hat, and tiny feet in audacious heels that pushed her height to barely five feet, putting her eyes level with Richie's slack mouth as he stared at the couple.

“Mes compliments.”

It took him a moment to realize she was talking to him.

She continued in English, “You sung real good, we like so much.”

Joe nodded beside her. “
Mon amour
was dancin', she was.” Their accents were burred and smoky—Cajun accents, which next to Richie's Texas twang was like weathered driftwood compared to Formica.

“Nice o' you to say, pros like yourself.”

“We play,” Joe said. “It pay some, we happy.”

Joe removed his jacket in preparation to go on, smoothed down his shirtsleeves and straightened his tie. Resembling a stockbroker holding a toy, he fitted his right thumb through a leather loop on one side of his black-lacquered Monarch and his left hand under a strap on the other side. It was as precise and comfortable as a ballplayer donning his glove, Joe's pull on the bellows while playing a reflex riff equivalent to a last smack of the pocket before taking the field. Cleoma was equally dapper in unpinning her hat and passing her guitar strap over her head without mussing her hair. The guitar, a National steel resonator, looked big as a cotton bale in her arms. She strummed a chord and tuned the strings to Joe's accordion notes.

A dispute broke out at the back of the room. Richie's bandmates were bitching to the promoter about tonight's fee. The man scornfully pulled bills from his clip. Richie saw his mates take the money and scoot out the far door, dumping him before he could dump them. The promoter pocketed his clip. Seeing Richie watching him, he gave a snide wink to match Richie's earlier—paid in full, it said. Richie wasn't upset and in fact felt bleakly affirmed, like a priest watching sinners behave as expected.

Joe and Cleoma had observed the exchange. “Not right,” she said.

Richie shrugged. It was time to get a real job. “He hated me from the start.”

“Us same,” Joe said.

“Come on. You sold out the joint.”

“'Cept he say Walter can't play with us. We ain' go for that.”

“Don't know no Walter.”

“Be me.” A young man dressed in a suit and white shirt had come up behind them. “I'm the Neg in the show.” It was an amiable term in Cajun circles. “Walter Dopsie.” He carried a scuffed cardboard suitcase in one hand and in the other a flour sack holding—you could tell by the mismatched shapes inside—a violin, bow, and corrugated washboard. He set the bags down and reached out.

They shook hands. Richie liked black women but preferred the men at a distance—though this Walter was black only if you looked for it. His hair was brushed in slick waves against his temple and his color was like the fingerboard on Richie's guitar, originally dyed dark to mimic the ebony of pricier instruments but which heavy use had worn back to maple. A girl slouched beside him in a pleated white dress and brown Oxfords. Europe infused her features—green eyes, honey skin, raven hair in loose ringlets so shiny they seemed oiled. Twelve or thirteen, she was stunning by any measure. “My daughter,” Walter said, watching Richie. “Angela. Go by Angel mos' time.”

“Pretty.”

“Talk about. Need me a shotgun soon.”

Richie, unable quite to pull his eyes off her, directed the only words he could think of to a vague spot above her head. “You love your daddy?”

“Nope. Wanna go back Shreveport.”

Her father laughed. “Shreveport? You a Creole girl. B'long in a field, or a pogie plant makin' that fish meal all day long.”

Her mouth formed a tough pout. “Not gonna.”

“Oh no?” Walter tried to look mad but couldn't sustain it. He said to the others, “Twenty dollar a month cuttin' 'cane, packin' fish? She hate that shit much as me.”

Hollis Jenks, the young deputy sheriff, was scanning the house from behind the curtain. He barked over his shoulder, “Cut that talk, boy.” His glance hung a second too long on Angel, Richie thought.

“Yes, sir,” Walter said. “My 'pologies.”

The promoter announced it was showtime. When Joe and Cleoma didn't respond, he got the hint, licked his thumb, and pulled bills from his clip, leaving each one wet with saliva. “How I be sure you gimme the full hour?”