Little Gale Gumbo (6 page)

Charles snapped his lighter shut, tossed it on the bar beside his fresh drink. “I'm sure she thinks I'm too old for ya. But you know what I say to that?” He pointed at Camille with his cigarette. “I say age is just a number. Just look at you, for example. How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“See? Now, that's what I'm talkin' about. I'd have said you were more like twenty. Maybe even twenty-one.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah, really.”

Camille smiled, her posture straightening reflexively.

“I bet you got a lotta boyfriends, huh?” Charles asked, scooping up his drink. “Beautiful girl like you?”

Camille shrugged. There was Franklin Dupre, but he didn't count. She'd decided just last week that someone who cared only to press himself against you in the produce department at Schwegmann's didn't count as much of anything. “No,” she said. “Not really.”

“Aww.” Charles winked at her over his glass. “You're just sayin' that so I'll think I've got a real chance.”

Camille leaned down for her straw. She wondered if he did this often; then she reminded herself it wasn't her business, and that she had to be grateful for this drink, this moment. It could be her only night with him, and she'd have wasted it worrying about something she couldn't change even if she wanted to. Men had to be men, Momma had always said, and a woman was a fool to think she was special enough to change one.

“You want a sip?” he asked, gently nudging his drink toward her.

Camille waved with both hands. “Oh, no, I couldn't.”

“Sure, you could,” he said. “A small sip. Ain't nobody gonna care.”

He inched the glass closer. She sighed, biting her lip a moment longer; then she finally took it, wincing when the bourbon hit her nose, then her throat.

She coughed, her eyes watering.

Charles grinned. “Not like a Coca-Cola, is it?”

Camille shook her head, sipping her soda to wash away the sting.

Charles took a long drag off his cigarette, watching her intently, squinting as the smoke drifted up to his eyes. “You been without your daddy a long time, darlin'?”

“Long enough.” Camille looked down. “I don't think about him much anymore. Momma and I take care of each other.”

“I can see that,” Charles said, “and that's real nice to see, but a girl's got to find a man to take care of her eventually. Gotta let go of the things that keep her from bein' a woman. It's the natural order of the world.”

The natural order. Camille hadn't ever thought much about that. Her own world had always been filled with women whose lives seemed perfectly functional without the constant, or even infrequent, attention of men. She wondered what Charles meant, but she didn't dare ask. Already his talking was making her skin flush hot from her ears to her toes. She wondered whether a person could get drunk on just one sip of bourbon.

His hand closed over hers, his fingertips hard with calluses. “You don't need all that Voodoo when you got a man to love ya, Camille,” he said low, his eyes fixing on hers. “Ain't no potions more powerful than that.”

Ten minutes later, the band began to play. They walked through the narrow doorway and took seats around the crowded stage, their voices quickly lost in the swell of sounds, the air thick with the smell of perspiration and warm beer. Looking around at the other tables, the men and women wrapped around one another, fingers and feet tapping, cigarette paper crackling and smoke rising all around, ice cubes tumbling in emptying glasses, Camille felt weightless, blissful, free.

When Charles moved in to kiss her, she tasted the nutty flavor of liquor. When he slipped his tongue through her tight lips, she could smell her own breath, strange to her suddenly. When she opened her eyes she could see the band over his shoulder, the sharp points of light reflecting off the brass, exploding like sunbursts.

Driving home under a half-moon, the night air still moist with the day's humidity, Camille felt sure she was changed, as if the smoky smell on her would be permanent, washed from her clothes but never from her skin. When Charles pulled up in front of her house at nine, Camille took the stairs with shaky legs, glad for the railing. At her front door, she didn't notice the redbrick dust her mother had sprinkled over the threshold until she was already inside, but she should have expected her mother would try anything to keep Charles Bergeron from coming into her daughter's home, or heart.

There was no use in trying to wash it off; Camille knew that much.

Better she work her own spell. And fast.

 

It would be three weeks before Charles brought her to the Creole town house on Royal Street and the shuttered room with the widest brass bed Camille had ever seen. Afterward, she lay on the mattress while he dressed, listening to the pounding of the rain on the balcony and watching the gentle spin of the ceiling fan, trying not to think about how much her body stung. Charles told her not to bother putting on the same clothes she'd arrived in, but gave her a box filled with tissue paper and a flowing velvet minidress that he helped her into, his fingers smelling of tobacco and the coppery scent of his trumpet: hot, salty metal.

When Camille came home, her mother was in the kitchen, spooning rounds of praline syrup on waxed paper, the smell of warm sugar still heavy in the air. A feeling of fleetingness overcame Camille, swift and sudden, as if she had come home to someone else's life without warning. She didn't know why but she wanted to cry.

“You never cook with me anymore,” Roberta said, her voice so sad, so weak that Camille didn't recognize it at first. “I can't remember the last time we made gumbo together. I'm beginning to think you forgot how.”

“I couldn't forget, Momma; you know that.”

Roberta drew in a shaky breath. “He's taking you away from me, Camille. And you're letting him.”

“That's not true.”

“Yes, it is.” Roberta stopped a moment to wipe her eyes with her sleeve. She sniffed. “All these things he buys you, he doesn't get that money from playing music, baby girl. You know that, don't you? He no more makes money playing that trumpet than I do making these pralines. He gets his money from the track. Only reason he ended up on our street in the first place was 'cause we're spittin' distance from the fairgrounds.”

“I don't care how he makes his money.”

“Well, you should. He's trouble, Camille. Baby girl, he is so full of trouble. Dark, dark stuff. Powerful stuff. Just like I told you I saw.”

“They're just cards, Momma.”

Roberta looked up, her eyes washed with hurt. “You never used to turn your back on the cards,” she said tightly. “Not ever.”

Camille looked away, knowing it was true. She had grown up listening to her mother's premonitions, so used to letting the cards dictate her every move, the warnings somehow always working to keep Camille close to home, to keep her quiet and full of fear.

Maybe Charles was right. Maybe it was time for her to find her own magic, her own spirits. Maybe she didn't need the spells anymore.

“Oh, Momma.” Camille came up behind Roberta at her post at the stove and wrapped her arms around her mother's narrow waist, burying her cheek against her shoulder, feeling the bones there under the thin cotton of her dress.

“Seems like all of a sudden you're in such a hurry to run out on me,” Roberta said, her voice failing as she began to weep. “Why him, Camille? What's so great about him?”

“He thinks I'm beautiful, Momma.”

“You are beautiful, baby. You don't need a man to tell you that.”

“But I do,” Camille said softly.

Then she walked to her room and closed the door.

 

Almost two months later, Camille was walking down Gentilly when Franklin Dupre saw her from his seat in Junie's Po' Boys and darted out of the restaurant and across the street to reach her. He called to her several times but she refused to slow her pace, forcing him to run to catch up to her before she'd turned onto Lapeyrouse.

“Well, look who it is,” he said, pulling alongside her. “Queen Camille.”

“You don't have to be nasty, Franklin,” she said calmly. “I never did anything to you.”

“Just stopped seein' me, is all.”

“You never said we were going steady. Not once.”

“These fancy new clothes you're wearin'. I don't even recognize you anymore.”

“You knew me well enough to cross the street raving like a lunatic.”

“Yeah, well.” Franklin frowned at the sidewalk, driving his hands into his back pockets. “I've been comin' by the shop. Didn't your momma tell you?”

“She told me.”

“So it's true?”

“What?”

“You and that white dude.”

“His name's Charles, Franklin. Charles Bienvenu Bergeron. And I don't really see how it's any of your business.”

“Well, excuuuuse me.” The young man sucked in his cheeks. “You think he's somethin' else, don't you? Well, I don't bet he told you that he been to jail almost as many times as I got fingers, huh? Or that he gets so high some nights he can't even hold up that skinny ol' trumpet of his. He tell you all that, Mr. Charles Been-whatever Bergeron?”

Camille walked on, silent, her eyes still fixed on the end of the block. Franklin studied her awhile, waiting for her answer, but he could see she wasn't going to budge.

“Yeah.” He snorted, defeated. “I didn't think so.”

When they reached her porch, she took the stairs carefully, elegantly, just like she'd seen the other musicians' girlfriends do when they'd all march out of the clubs.

Franklin waited a long moment on the bottom step. When Camille reached for the screen door, he threw out a hand as if he were swatting a slow fly. “I'll see you around, Queenie.”

Camille didn't answer, but she didn't go in either. She waited on the threshold, where Roberta's redbrick dust still appeared every morning. She waited until Franklin was back on the other side of the street, headed back into Junie's, thinking to herself there was one thing she knew, one thing that Franklin Dupre didn't.

She was carrying Charles Bergeron's child.

 

Roberta honked into a Kleenex, then dragged it across her red-rimmed eyes.

“He won't marry her. That miserable bastard won't marry her.”

Miss Willa leaned across the kitchen table to offer Roberta a fresh tissue. Roberta took it. “You don't know that, Bertie,” Willa said gently. “He's crazy about her.”

“Parker was crazy about me too before the baby.”

“Yeah, he was crazy, all right,” Willa said, wrinkling her lips. “Crazy like a loon.”

“Men like that don't stick around, Willa. Believe me, I know. There's always a bigger payout somewhere down the line. A prettier girl. A faster car.”

“Don't be so sure.” Miss Willa peeled a cooled praline off its sheet of waxed paper, admiring the disk's smooth finish. “He stuck around this long, didn't he?”

Roberta shrugged, turning her gaze to the window, where she could see a group of girls jumping rope in the street, and she sighed. “I could kill him.”

Willa nodded toward the middle of the table, where a small pile of black dog hair sat neatly in a ring of salt, and she grinned. “Looks like you've already tried.”

Six

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It's been almost a month since I've seen you,” Roberta said when Camille came by the shop in her third trimester, feet and ankles bursting like boudin sausages. They sat in the kitchen while Roberta stirred a pot of red beans, the air fragrant with onions and thyme.

“I've been so busy, Momma. Getting ready for the baby and all. There's just so much to do.”

“Especially when you're doing it all on your own,” Roberta said. “I remember.”

Camille said nothing, just blew on her coffee, not wanting to admit that Charles had lately been spending less time at the apartment, that all of the last-minute preparations for the baby had fallen on her, and that anytime she mentioned it, Charles grew sullen, even angry.

Roberta glanced over at her daughter. “Been blessing the house with the Florida water I made you?”

Camille frowned contritely, thinking on the bottle of Voodoo holy water that sat under her sink, untouched. “A few times,” she lied.