Sunset Limited (6 page)

“I can see it, Megan,” I replied. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her face jerk toward me.

“I shouldn’t speak or I shouldn’t touch? Which is it?” she said.

I eased back the throttle and let the boat rise on its wake and drift into a cove that was overgrown by a leafy canopy and threaded with air vines and dimpled in the shallows with cypress knees. The bow scraped, then snugged tight on a sandspit.

“In answer to your question, I was out at your brother’s movie set yesterday. I’ve decided to stay away from the world of the Big Score. No offense meant,” I said.

“I’ve always wondered what bank guards think all day. Just standing there, eight hours, staring at nothing. I think you’ve pulled it off, you know, gotten inside their heads.”

I picked up the first-aid kit and dropped off the bow and walked through the shallows toward a beached houseboat that had rotted into the soft texture of moldy cardboard.

I heard her splash into the water behind me.

“Gee, I hope I can be a swinging dick in the next life,” she said.

THE HOUSEBOAT FLOOR WAS tilted on top of the crushed and rusted oil drums on which it had once floated. Cool Breeze sat in the corner, dressed in clothes off a wash line, the wound in his cut face stitched with thread and needle, his left arm swollen like a black balloon full of water.

I heard Megan’s camera start clicking behind me.

“Why didn’t you call the Feds, Breeze?” I asked.

“That woman FBI agent wants me in front of a grand jury. She say I gonna stay in the system, too, till they done wit’ me.”

I looked at the electrical cord he had used for a tourniquet, the proud flesh that had turned the color of fish scale around the fang marks, the drainage that had left viscous green tailings on his shirt. “I tell you what, I’ll dress those wounds, hang your arm in a sling, then we’ll get a breath of fresh air,” I said.

“You cut that cord loose, the poison gonna hit my heart.”

“You’re working on gangrene now, partner.”

I saw him swallow. The whites of his eyes looked painted with iodine.

“You’re jail-wise, Breeze. You knew the Feds would take you over the hurdles. Why’d you want to stick it to Alex Guidry?”

This is the story he told me while I used a rubber suction cup to draw a mixture of venom and infection from his forearm. As I listened on one knee, kneading the puncture wounds, feeling the pain in his body flicker like a candle flame under his skin, I could only wonder again at the white race’s naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, DOWN the Teche, he owned a dirt-road store knocked together from scrap boards, tin stripped off a condemned rice mill, and Montgomery Ward brick that had dried out and crusted and pulled loose from the joists like a scab. He also had a pretty young wife named Ida, who cooked in a cafe and picked tabasco peppers on a corporate farm. After a day in the field her hands swelled as though they had been stung by bumblebees and she had to soak them in milk to relieve the burning in her skin.

On a winter afternoon two white men pulled up on the bib of oyster shell that served as a parking lot in front of the gallery, and the older man, who had jowls like a bulldog’s and smoked a cigar in the center of his mouth, asked for a quart of moonshine.

“Don’t tell me you ain’t got it, boy. I know the man from Miss’sippi sells it to you.”

“I got Jax on ice. I got warm beer, too. I can sell you soda pop. I ain’t got no whiskey.”

“That a fact? I’m gonna walk back out the door, then come back in. One of them jars you got in that box behind the motor oil better be on the counter or I’m gonna redecorate your store.”

Cool Breeze shook his head.

“I know who y’all are. I done paid already. Why y’all giving me this truck?” he said.

The younger white man opened the screen door and came inside the store. His name was Alex Guidry, and he wore a corduroy suit and cowboy hat and western boots, with pointed, mirror-bright toes. The older man picked up a paper bag of deep-fried cracklings from the counter. The grease in the cracklings made dark stains in the paper. He threw the bag to the younger man and said to Cool Breeze, “You on parole for check writing now. That liquor will get you a double nickel. Your woman yonder, what’s her name, Ida? She’s a cook, ain’t she?”

THE MAN WITH BULLDOG jowls was named Harpo Delahoussey, and he ran a ramshackle nightclub for redbones (people who are part French, black, and Indian) by a rendering plant on an oxbow off the Atchafalaya River. When the incinerators were fired up at the plant, the smoke from the stacks filled the nearby woods and dirt roads with a stench like hair and chicken entrails burned in a skillet. The clapboard nightclub didn’t lock its doors from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night; the parking lot (layered with thousands of flattened beer cans) became a maze of gas-guzzlers and pickup trucks; and the club’s windows rattled and shook with the reverberations of rub board and thimbles, accordion, drums, dancing feet, and electric guitars whose feedback screeched like fingernails on slate.

At the back, in a small kitchen, Ida Broussard sliced potatoes for french fries while caldrons of red beans and rice and robin gumbo boiled on the stove, a bandanna knotted across her forehead to keep the sweat out of her eyes.

But Cool Breeze secretly knew, even though he tried to deny it to himself, that Harpo Delahoussey had not blackmailed him simply to acquire a cook, or even to reinforce that old lesson that every coin pressed into your palm for shining shoes, cutting cane, chopping cotton, scouring ovens, dipping out grease traps, scrubbing commodes, cleaning dead rats from under a house, was dispensed by the hand of a white person in the same way that oxygen could be arbitrarily measured out to a dying hospital patient.

One night she wouldn’t speak when he picked her up, sitting against the far door of the pickup truck, her shoulders rounded, her face dull with a fatigue that sleep never took away.

“He ain’t touched you, huh?” Cool Breeze said.

“Why you care? You brung me to the club, ain’t you?”

“He said the rendering plant gonna shut down soon. That mean he won’t be needing no more cook. What you gonna do if I’m in Angola?”

“I tole you not to bring that whiskey in the store. Not to listen to that white man from Miss’sippi sold it to you. Tole you, Willie.”

Then she looked out the window so he could not see her face. She wore a rayon blouse that had green and orange lights in it, and her back was shaking under the cloth, and he could hear her breath seizing in her throat, like hiccups she couldn’t control.

HE TRIED TO GET permission from his parole officer to move back to New Orleans.

Permission denied.

He caught Ida inhaling cocaine off a broken mirror behind the house. She drank fortified wine in the morning, out of a green bottle with a screw cap that made her eyes lustrous and frightening. She refused to help out at the store. In bed she was unresponding, dry when he entered her, and finally not available at all. She tied a perforated dime on a string around her ankle, then one around her belly so that it hung just below her navel.

“Gris-gris is old people’s superstition,” Cool Breeze said.

“I had a dream. A white snake, thick as your wrist, it bit a hole in a melon and crawled inside and ate all the meat out.”

“We gonna run away.”

“Mr. Harpo gonna be there. Your PO gonna be there. State of Lou’sana gonna be there.”

He put his hand under the dime that rested on her lower stomach and ripped it loose. Her mouth parted soundlessly when the string razored burns along her skin.

The next week he walked in on her when she was naked in front of the mirror. A thin gold chain was fastened around her hips.

“Where you get that?” he asked.

She brushed her hair and didn’t answer. Her breasts looked as swollen and full as eggplants.

“You ain’t got to cook at the club no more. What they gonna do? Hurt us more than they already have?” he said.

She took a new dress off a hanger and worked it over her head. It was red and sewn with colored glass beads like an Indian woman might wear.

“Where you got money for that?” he asked.

“Mine to know, yours to find out,” she replied. She fastened a hoop earring to her lobe with both hands, smiling at him while she did it.

He began shaking her by the shoulders, her head whipping like a doll’s on her neck, her eyelids closed, her lipsticked mouth open in a way that made his phallus thicken in his jeans. He flung her against the bedroom wall, so hard he heard her bones knock into the wood, then ran from the house and down the dirt road, through a tunnel of darkened trees, his brogans exploding through the shell of ice on the chuckholes.

IN THE MORNING HE tried to make it up to her. He warmed boudin and fixed cush-cush and coffee and hot milk, and set it all out on the table and called her into the kitchen. The dishes she didn’t smash on the wall she threw into the back yard.

He drove his pickup truck through the bright coldness of the morning, the dust from his tires drifting out onto the dead hyacinths and the cattails that had winter-killed in the bayou, and found Harpo Delahoussey at the filling station he owned in town, playing dominoes with three other white men at a table by a gas stove that hissed with blue flame. Delahoussey wore a fedora, and a gold badge on the pocket of his white shirt. None of the men at the table looked up from their game. The stove filled the room with a drowsy, controlled warmth and the smell of shaving cream and aftershave lotion and testosterone.

“My wife ain’t gonna be working at the club no more,” Cool Breeze said.

“Okay,” Delahoussey said, his eyes concentrated on the row of dominoes in front of him.

The room seemed to scream with silence.

“Mr. Harpo, maybe you ain’t understood me,” Cool Breeze said.

“He heard you, boy. Now go on about your business,” one of the other men said.

A moment later, by the door of his truck, Cool Breeze looked back through the window. Even though he was outside, an oak tree swelling with wind above his head, and the four domino players were in a small room beyond a glass, he felt it was he who was somehow on display, in a cage, naked, small, an object of ridicule and contempt.

Then it hit him:
He’s old. An old man like that, one piece of black jelly roll just the same as another. So who give her the dress and wrap the gold chain around her stomach
?

He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his canvas coat. His ears roared with sound and his heart thundered in his chest.

HE WOKE IN THE middle of the night and put on an overcoat and sat under a bare lightbulb in the kitchen, poking at the ashes in the wood stove, wadding up paper and feeding sticks into the flame that wouldn’t catch, the cold climbing off the linoleum through his socks and into his ankles, his confused thoughts wrapped around his face like a net.

What was it that tormented him? Why was it he couldn’t give it words, deal with it in the light of day, push it out in front of him, even kill it if he had to?

His breath fogged the air. Static electricity crackled in the sleeves of his overcoat and leaped off his fingertips when he touched the stove.

He wanted to blame Harpo Delahoussey. He remembered the story his daddy, Mout’, had told him of the black man from Abbeville who broke off a butcher knife in the chest of a white overseer he caught doing it with his wife against a tree, then had spit in the face of his executioner before he was gagged and hooded with a black cloth and electrocuted.

He wondered if he could ever possess the courage of a man like that.

But he knew Delahoussey was not the true source of the anger and discontent that made his face break a sweat and his palms ring as though they had been beaten with boards.

He had accepted his role as cuckold, had even transported his wife to the site of her violation by a white man (and later, from Ida’s mother, he would discover the exact nature of what Harpo Delahoussey did to her), because his victimization had justified a lifetime of resentment toward those who had forced his father to live gratefully on tips while their cigar ashes spilled down on his shoulders.

Except his wife had now become a willing participant. Last night she had ironed her jeans and shirt and laid them out on the bed, put perfume in her bathwater, washed and dried her hair and rouged her cheekbones to accentuate the angular beauty of her face. Her skin had seemed to glow when she dried herself in front of the mirror, a tune humming in her throat. He tried to confront her, force the issue, but her eyes were veiled with secret expectations and private meaning that made him ball his hands into fists. When he refused to drive her to the nightclub, she called a cab.

The fire wouldn’t catch. An acrid smoke, as yellow as rope, laced with a stench of rags or chemically treated wood, billowed into his face. He opened all the windows, and frost speckled on the wallpaper and kitchen table. In the morning, the house smelled like a smoldering garbage dump.

She dressed in a robe, closed the windows, opened the air lock in the stove by holding a burning newspaper inside the draft, then began preparing breakfast for herself at the drainboard. He sat at the table and stared at her back stupidly, hoping she would reach into the cabinet, pull down a bowl or cup for him, indicate in some way they were still the people they once were.

“He tole me, you shake me again, you going away, Willie,” she said.

“Who say that?”

She walked out of the room and didn’t answer.

“Who?” he called after her.

IT WAS THE LETTER that did it.

Or the letter that he didn’t read in its entirety, at least not until later.

He had driven the truck back from the store, turned into his yard, and seen her behind the house, pulling her undergarments, jeans, work shirts, socks, and dresses, her whole wardrobe, off the wash line.

A letter written with a pencil stub on a sheet of lined paper, torn from a notebook, lay on the coffee table in the living room.