Cajun Waltz (10 page)

He trailed them as they toured the store's widened aisles and new ladies' section, the latter featuring kitchenware and housecleaning items as well as a selection of “hits for hubby” such as fishing gear and auto parts. Richie had confided to Seth that he had zero expectation of the store's success and likely would end up closing it—it was a playtoy for Angel, who'd overseen the renovation as a diversion to keep her busy. Seth resented being drawn into dismissing his mother's pride in the project. Bonnie was worse. She openly ridiculed Angel on the presumption that all agreed she was a silly goose. His resentment intensified whenever that presumption was borne out by his mother's behavior. Like now.

Angel's arm not linked with her husband's encircled the waist of a prim-looking lady anyone could have told was her opposite. The lady's name was Mary Billodeau, and Seth observed from her body language, her torso tilted away as from a wall of wet paint, that she disliked being clutched so familiarly. He sympathized. His mother had drunk quantities of “special punch” in the rear of the store, fueling her usual emotiveness to operatic heights. Mary Billodeau by contrast was on duty today. She was the store's new manager. Richie usually reserved such positions for women unmarried and severe. Mrs. Billodeau failed on the first count, but Angel, for reasons unclear, had lobbied her husband on Mary's behalf and now was pleased to tell everyone that Mary owed her job to her.

Mary's husband didn't mingle. Frank Billodeau, “Coach” to everyone in town, huddled with some earnest old-timers to discuss an upcoming basketball game between Lake Charles High and a reform school team from Baton Rouge. Basketball surpassed even football as a life-or-death matter around here; the men worried those prison boys might be ringers or possibly black. Frank had a chiseled, hawkish look at odds with his mild voice. “We play any squad what shakes our hand and honors the Stars 'n' Stripes,” he said to the men pestering him.

The comment brought an eye roll from Adele Billodeau, Frank's daughter, watching nearby. From the moment Seth first spotted her today he'd tried not to stare lest she catch him. Sixteen and looking powerfully slutty in a party dress and jean jacket, Adele wore her hair in a pixie cut as if to keep it unmussed on a motorcycle. She was a Lake Charles junior even the lords of the locker room circled cautiously. Seth, a year behind her, was one of the school's invisible nobodies. He was fascinated by her and needed only to be in her vicinity to feel the pull of her presence, like an unseen moon that draws all tides toward it.

Concluding their inspection of the store, his mother seemed to have toned down her patronization of Mary Billodeau, who strode beside Richie pointing out this or that display in a rapture of incontestable competence. Seth saw Angel slip away to the back where the booze was. He followed, determined to be the grown-up to her perennial child. Outside the storeroom he heard a sigh and saw shadows against the wall. He inched closer. His mother was embracing Frank Billodeau, their open mouths together, her hand gripping his crotch in a rhythmic squeeze. Like a movie played backward he lurched in reverse to the front of the store. He had no idea how to handle what he'd just seen, only knew it was bad and that it made his heart crack in his chest. He crashed into Bonnie by the entrance. “Another drunk,” she said. He used the idea—swaying, summoning a burp—to repel her in the other direction.

Not yet twenty-five, Bonnie seemed almost middle-aged to Seth. The arrival of R.J. and Alvin Dupree at the Block's event introduced another opinion. It was shortly after their big night in New Orleans, and it was the second time Alvin saw R.J.'s sister. The impact amplified his first impression, for qualities about Bonnie that gave some men the willies answered Alvin's every dream. He stared at her like a dog tracking pork ribs from platter to plate. When R.J. went to find his father, Alvin summoned every bit as much nerve as he'd shown in combat and asked if she was in the hardware biz or just here for the grub. She recognized him at once from Houston last year. “Do I know you?”

“Sergeant Dupree. From Korea.”

“Alvin.”

Big smile. “Miss Bonnie. The boss's daughter.”

“I prefer to think of him as the boss's father.”

“Maybe I talk to you instead.”

“About what?”

“A job, ma'am. Your brother's tryin' to work it.”

She didn't like being leapfrogged in the hierarchy. “What are your skills?”

“Can fix a motor and clean a carbine, but none like you mean.”

“How do you know what I mean?”

“Sayin' you need a fella can fix a motor and clean a carbine?”

“I'm saying don't count on my brother. The guy needs a job himself.”

“Count on you then?”

“Unless you have obligations elsewhere.”

“I need work, ma'am. Only obligation's myself and my future employer.
Dog!
Whassat ol' whore doin' here?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He pointed. “Miss Katie from the bordello!”

Angel was approaching with Richie. With flaxen hair and figure like an hourglass seen in a funhouse mirror, she was the spitting image of R.J.'s Conti Street favorite. Bonnie smiled. “That would be my stepmother.”

“
Dog,
but it's a likeness.”

“I'm sure she'll be thrilled to hear it.”

R.J. walked next to his father on the opposite side from Angel. Seth shuffled behind them, his thoughts lost in wondering which was worse, his love life or that of his parents. The group was nearly in earshot of Bonnie and Alvin when Bonnie told the sergeant one more thing:

“By the way…”

“Ma'am?”

“You're hired.”

*   *   *

H
E BECAME THE
Bainards' general assistant, living in the carriage house at Georgia Hill, on call to the family twenty-four hours a day. In time his duties came to include assignments for Block's. He was management's designated deliverer of bad news to sub-par employees in stores across four states. His large physical size helped in the role, as did his being of exceedingly deliberate mind. It lent him a calm, implacable poise that discouraged excuses or protest.

Another of his tasks was to drive Seth to and from school each day. They grew familiar as a result. Conversations in a Cadillac with the stolid ex-marine were the closest thing Seth had to a social life. Many times when they were alone together he almost blurted the secret of seeing his mother in Frank Billodeau's arms. The urge hit hardest when watching her behave in ways that screamed of her infidelity now that he knew to notice the clues, the casual excuses and credible reasons for her lateness, flushed cheeks, or buoyant mood that no one but Seth understood were bald lies.

That December, his parents were to spend a weekend at Richie's hunting lodge, the Section Eight Gun Club. Completed down in Cameron Parish several years earlier, it was a swanky setup, its members local high-achievers fond of spending self-made money. Angel backed out at the last minute. She urged Richie to go alone. It was that insistence more than her change of plan that upset him; he couldn't fathom wanting to do anything or be anywhere without her. Their subsequent argument shook the house. Though ignorant of her full betrayal, Richie's resentment of her inattentiveness to him had been simmering for some time, needing only the prospect of a few days apart to trigger its eruption.

He complained, she called him an ass, and he took a roundhouse swing at her that missed only because of the bourbon. Alvin restrained him as Seth whisked his mother away. Within an hour the lovebirds were smiling and smooching as they apologized for their ugly display. They'd decided to stay home together, and wanted Seth and Alvin to take their place on the trip.

Seth's knowledge of his mother's affair with Frank Billodeau made a farce of her perky façade, how she clung to Richie's arm and wiped lipstick from his cheek. Picturing her hand on Frank's dick, Frank's knees buckling under her touch, Seth wanted to be rid of the sight of her, to flush her from heart and mind. The Section Eight marsh, where he'd often hunted with his father and R.J., was a good place to do that. But it also invited some careless unburdening as he scrunched next to Alvin in a frozen duck blind that weekend. “You like my sister,” he began.

“Respect more the word,” Alvin said.

“I can tell. Way you watch her.”

There was an old guide in the blind with them, his torn canvas jacket spilling insulation from the elbows, a duck call hanging from his lips like a stogie. He scanned the horizon in gruff irritation at his chattering clients. Their three shotguns aimed skyward as if awaiting enemy bombers. At length Alvin said, “She outta my class, Miss Bonnie.”

“That don't stop people, what I've seen.”

“You fifteen. You seen nothin'.”

“Yeah?” From there it was automatic for Seth to say what he'd seen, if only to hold up his end of a dialog about what's bad about love. It was also automatic that Alvin, out of loyalty dating back to Korea, would tell R.J. first chance he got.

Tipped off by Angel's resemblance to Miss Katie of Conti Street, Alvin had detected in countless hangdog stares that R.J. was spellbound by his young stepmother, feelings lustful at minimum yet possibly stupid with real affection. He took care to be sensitive in reporting Angel's affair, maintaining a respectful veneer of obliviousness to his lieutenant's secret stake in the matter. “I figured you the one to handle this,” he said, “bein' your daddy's namesake an' all.”

R.J.'s face had gone to stone. “My father'd kill for love of that woman.”

“You'll talk to her?”

“Talk to someone.”

“Don't wanna see nobody hurt.”

“Better close your eyes,” R.J. said.

Next stop was the library at Georgia Hill, a masculine, wood-paneled sanctuary housing, if not many books, a firearms cabinet full of shotguns, rifles, and pistols. Opening the cabinet's glass doors, R.J. inhaled the tangy scent of solvent and gun oil and was seized by the poetry of using one of his father's weapons on the man cuckolding Richie and, in his mind anyway, cuckolding R.J. as well. He selected a lady-size snubnose .22, stuck it in his belt under his shirt, and went off to visit Frank Billodeau in his athletic office at Lake Charles High School.

He never drew the gun. Frank stared him down, shamed him with righteous indignation, an impressive maneuver considering Frank was a two-timing skunk who hated himself every day. “You're drunk,” he said after R.J. accused him of seducing Angel. “Go home.”

R.J. indeed had stopped off at a bar. He felt embarrassed to have needed the boost, though it was probably to his credit that he couldn't take up a pistol and run around making death threats cold sober.

“Angel told me you watch her,” Frank said. “Stare at her like a damn pervert. Your daddy's wife! Now git the hell outta here 'fore I call Richie myself.”

“Stay away from her or I'll kill you.” The words sounded idiotic to R.J. the instant he spoke them.

Frank stood up at his desk as if to make a better target of his heart. “Go on now. Get some coffee. Be all over come mornin'.”

R.J. left, driven back inside his doubts like a bear into its cave. Frank sat down and put his hands to his temples as if to crush his skull. He picked up the telephone and dialed Angel at home, an act that in its directness doesn't fit a man looking to continue an illicit affair. But the question of whether he intended to end things with Angel can't be resolved because Alvin, vigilant in his household duties, answered the phone at first ring. Recognizing the voice of the husband of Mary Billodeau, manager of the Lake Charles Block's, he informed Frank that Mrs. Bainard wasn't at home. It would prove a consequential lie.

*   *   *

T
HERE WAS A
basketball game at the high school that night. R.J. sat in the bleachers behind the Wildcats' bench with the .22 jammed in his pants. The raucous gym was a conducive environment for a troubled man to sit and stew. Picture him studying the back of Coach Billodeau's head while caressing the pistol under his shirt and you get the gist of his state of mind.

The game proceeded in a fog. R.J. stared at Frank as if at the sun until red spots appeared and replicated. The crowd noise yielded to a clocklike tapping of his upper and lower teeth. He didn't want to shoot anyone. It was about confronting a cliff he must jump off or not. Mooning over his stepmother had to stop. Lying around Georgia Hill drinking beer and playing music had to stop. The Korean War was over, his reserve commitments concluded. Next year he would inherit a major interest in a million-dollar enterprise. He ought to accept his good fortune and go be content for a while.

His attention fell on Adele Billodeau, Frank's high school daughter, sitting by herself nearby. She wore blue jeans tighter than the fashion and cuffed at the ankles above a new pair of Keds. She had a slight double chin and dimples across the pale tops of her knuckles, suggestions of succulence she highlighted with a jazzy hairdo and clothes she spilled out of by choice. She leaned on her elbows and studied the game until she turned to the guy watching her. “What?”

“Your ma runs Block's.”

“So.”

“Must have a lot of gumption.”

Adele gave no reply.

“You got good genes, is my point.”

She glanced down uncertainly. “They're Lees.”

R.J. smiled. “And Daddy's the coach.”

“Hope he loses, too.”

“What'd he do?”

“Not him. My boyfriend. The center.”

R.J. surveyed the court. “Big fella.”

“It ain't everything.”

They gazed forward for a bit. R.J. slid down the bench next to her.

She asked him, “How do you know me?”

“Your parents, not you. Yet.” It doesn't get much plainer than that. Unless next you ask, “How old are you?”