Cajun Waltz (27 page)

Corinne paused in her chatter. Seth asked to use her telephone to ring his sister at home. Rather than return to the hospital at this late hour, he would sleep at Georgia Hill, his distaste for the place just slightly less than asking Corinne to put him up. “I'll need a lift,” he said to no one.

Delly offered to take him.

“You should stay with your daughter.”

“She's sleeping.” With Joey upstairs, chastely clothed on the bed like Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers. “And I can't.”

*   *   *

D
ONALD
M
EERS TAILED
his rival through empty wet streets to the Bainard estate. After the roadster turned up the driveway, he parked under some wind-blown trees and entered the grounds on foot. Expecting guard dogs and searchlights, he pretended he was a secret commando infiltrating an enemy compound. He carried his gun in his hand because that's what commandoes do.

The windows were lighted irregularly, the main floor dim, rooms upstairs glowing yellow through hazy sheers. Donald crouched in the shrubbery and scanned for movement inside. He knew Corinne's Mexican was in there somewhere. One shot and he'd be on his way, his honor redeemed, a grateful nation indebted.

Headlights swept the house. A car came up the drive and parked in the courtyard. A man and woman got out, talking loud as people do in the rain. “I'm fine,” the man said. He had a cane.

“Not in the dark you're not.” The woman came around from the driver's side to help him up the front steps.

Donald stepped out from behind a bush. “Delly?”

“Donald?”

The front door opened. “Who's out there?”

Donald raised his pistol. “Freeze, Mex!”

The confusion was slow to dispel even after Donald herded the others inside. Suffice it to say he was now a pivotal figure, though to be candid not for long.

*   *   *

A
N OLD DAMP
house in southwest Louisiana can get steamy during a summer rainstorm. The thick atmosphere inside Georgia Hill put people more on edge than they might have been in some air-conditioned lobby. And anytime a guest makes wild threats with a loaded handgun you know a household gets tense. Consequently the first moments of everyone gathering in the foyer were neither civil nor informative.

Donald's will to vengeance was iffy; there were moments when he wagged his pistol more like a French fry than a Smith & Wesson. Seth and R.J. meanwhile affected competing versions of calm. All men are boys, goes the saying, and it was surely true of this pair. Had Delly not been present, it's easy to imagine Seth pleading with Donald to calm down and R.J. hightailing it out of there. But Southern manhood has ever measured itself by a lady's esteem, and the lady here was her.

Once Donald was persuaded that R.J. wasn't Mexican, R.J. answered his next question—“Then who the hell are you?”—with weary resignation that suggested he might have preferred to take Donald's bullet than own up to the fact he was R. J. Bainard and this was his father's house. But he did own up to it, after which Donald said to Delly, “He the one? What done you back then?”

She nodded.

“Then damn, let's call the police and end this easy.”

“Let's not,” Seth said. He turned in his brother's direction. “Please go, R.J. It's the one good thing you can do.”

Donald cocked his head. “What's wrong wit' your eyes?”

“They don't work very well.”

“Neither's your mouth, judgin' what it said. Now do it, Del. Call the police and tell 'em we got the fugitive.”

“She won't,” R.J. said.

Delly turned. “No?”

R.J. rocked slightly on his feet. He gave her a deep look, like a poet through the depths of a lily pond. “You like me some, Adele,” he said. “That night and this night, you like me more than what's known.”

Seth laughed in a not normal way. “Tell him, Delly. Finish it.”

She hadn't started breathing again, R.J.'s words having impacted only after he spoke them. How had this happened? She'd left with a guy in the middle of a high school basketball game and insanity had somehow resulted, pouring down from outside her and boiling up from within. She tried a last time to suppress it. “That's just some fantasy. No point to it now, either way.”

“Was once,” R.J. said.

“We don't know. We can't ever know.” It seemed that she and R.J. were the only ones in the room, the only ones anywhere.

“At least let me believe it, okay? It got me this far.”

Bonnie came barreling out of the sewing room. She was enraged at the mass intrusion into her house where a man lay mortally ill. Her father's nurse was behind her, bursting with dire excitement that Richie's end was at hand. The ensuing turmoil bonded R.J., Seth, and Bonnie as their father's children at last. They dropped the disputes of the moment and rushed down the hall. Left behind in the foyer, Delly and Donald eyed each other like guests unsure if the party is over. He stuck his gun in his pants as if not to do so would be gauche. Delly fell silent, her head seething with agonized notions that, oddly or not, included none about her late husband.

*   *   *

R
ICHIE DID LOOK
done for. Brief revivals in recent weeks had made predictions of his demise seem like so much crying wolf, but tonight you could feel Death rubbing its hands together like a cannibal at suppertime. The family was reunited, the twins and their half brother joined around their father's bed. They formed a triangle, R.J. and Bonnie at each side by his pillow, Seth at the foot. Seth recited the Lord's Prayer. Bonnie, beyond tears, resented R.J.'s wooden demeanor and asked sarcastically if he'd brought his pistol. He had; since the bloody scene at Finney Pond, he'd kept it always at hand. When he produced it from under his shirt, it was with disgust rather than rancor. He tossed the gun on the bed.

His prayer over, Seth started again at the beginning as Richie's breathing slowed. Bonnie began to tremble, her long preparedness for this event imploding in the face of it. Confronting R.J. as the easiest target, she cursed him for his wasted life, progressing in her list of transgressions from verified crimes to the speculative ones that Alvin had supplied her, namely killing Freddy Baez, assaulting Ethel Somebody, and drowning Hollis Jenks. R.J.'s passive reaction seemed to concede the truth of the charges. Finally moved to defend himself, he told his sister that Alvin was the one who'd killed Freddy Baez and likely done those other things, too.

“Alvin?” Bonnie scoffed. “He never killed anyone.”

“There's some ChiCom regulars in Korea would say otherwise. And Frank Billodeau, of course.”

She knew the name. “Who?”

“That girl outside—” He meant Delly. “—she thinks
I
did it. But Alvin told me long ago he did it on Daddy's direction.”

“Liar!”

“Sure I done it.” It was Alvin. His entrance in the room caused Bonnie's face to take the shine of a madwoman greeting a phantom. He went to her side. He was deeply exhausted by today's many labors but did a Lazarus when she kissed him. They stood arm in arm, a public display that was, for them, tantamount to making love in the town square. Alvin said to the room, “And a lot else for this family, no lie.”

Bonnie hadn't known. Hearing it now, she knew it was true and she knew it was unforgivable. Alvin, eyes on her, awaited her verdict. She kissed him again. “For which he's got my gratitude,” she said, “and whatever more he wants.”

Delly appeared in the doorway. She'd been listening outside.
“Hallelujah,”
she said, though the word and her facial expression didn't match. She lunged for Richie's bed.

“Hey!”

“Grab her!”

Seth, all ears as usual, was confused by the curses and clatter.

“Put it down, Adele. Put it down before someone gets hurt.”

Let's catch up. Hearing the ruckus, Alvin had come downstairs from Bonnie's suite where he'd been resting after his hard day. He was armed, of course. Outside the sewing room he heard the enumeration of his misdeeds and entered prepared to accept whatever penalty Bonnie decreed. Delly and Donald saw Alvin come down and followed him to see what was what, on the way passing Richie's nurse who had the good sense to scram after Donald whipped out his pistol like Elliot Ness. Overhearing the conversation around Richie's bedside, Delly, with Donald right behind her, burst into the room and grabbed the pistol that R.J. had thrown on the bed. Thus we have in the sewing room three people with weapons and three not. Everyone is stressed. Everyone is tired. When the storm outside causes the house to lose power and the lights to go out, everyone does the wrong thing.

*   *   *

S
IX SHOTS WENT
off in the dark, followed by coughs and ragged breathing that accentuated the weirdness of the moment, like giggles at a funeral. A smell of fireworks permeated the air. Seth's voice came from floor level. “Delly? Are you all right?”

“Are you?”

“Thank God.”

R.J. spoke next. “Bonnie?”

“I'm here. Crazy bitch.”

“I didn't shoot,” Delly said. Not true, but in the chaos she honestly wasn't aware. She'd whirled in the dark toward those who'd wronged her and clenched her hand to a fist, settling at least one of her scores. “Musta been Donald.”

No answer.

“Donald?”

R.J. continued roll call. “Alvin?”

There came a groan.

Bonnie crawled over. She gasped. “You're wet!”

“M'head.”

“Your head? Oh Jesus.”

“Love you, girl.”

“Alvin, no. Goddamn you Jesus Jesus.”

“Please no cursin'. Need prayers this point.”

“R.J.! Alvin's hurt.”

“Makes two of us, Bonnie.”

Seth got to his feet only to trip over a body that would prove to be Donald's. He pitched forward onto Richie's bed, where he landed with a sloshy sound. Shot in the chest by a bullet intended elsewhere, Richie had drained out on the mattress like a crankcase into an oil pan. He'd just passed his fifty-eighth birthday but would have looked much older if the lamp had been on.

Visions adjusted to the dark. Alvin had been hit in the side of his forehead, the bullet piercing his skull and furrowing under the bone from above his eye to above his ear. He was conscious, rambling on with dubious coherence about going straight to hell. His damnation was tied to the word “Tarzy,” which caught R.J.'s attention even under the burn of a bullet that had passed through the flesh of his hip.

“What are you saying, Alvin?”

“Icebox in Hancock Bayou.”

“What?”

“Where they had Freddy.”

“Sallie's place?”

“In the box. Tarzy and the fat man.”

“Jesus Christ! Why?”

A pause. “Not sure now.”

“Today you did this?”

“Was gonna go back.” Alvin remembered the question. “Today.”

Whereupon our story gains a hero, for R.J. resolved immediately to drive to Hancock Bayou through the oncoming storm to rescue Tarzy Hooker. But in trying to stand, his leg folded like a broken barstool and he fell into Delly's arms—whereupon
she
declared that she would drive him there, to hell with the weather and all else. She looped her arm under his and they stumbled out the door.

Seth's protests stood no chance. They made their getaway down the dark hallway without a glance behind. He hollered after them, tried to get up, fell down, and floundered on all fours on the blood-wet floor like an ant sprayed with pesticide. He wanted them to come back. He wanted to go with them. He wanted not to be left behind.

Richie's nurse, hiding in the kitchen, had heard the gunshots and tried to call for help but the phone lines were down. Alvin remained conscious for an hour or so, drifting between dread for his soul and thanks to God for giving him Bonnie. His last words before he lost consciousness were “bury me home” or “marry me, hon,” Seth hearing one thing and Bonnie another. They would debate it later to no useful purpose.

*   *   *

A
UDREY, NOW A
Category Four hurricane, turned due north late in the day on June 26 and headed straight for Cameron Parish. Its track accelerated; landfall would happen early on Thursday, June 27. The news had little effect on local residents. Electric power had been out since midday Wednesday. There were few active radios to receive the Weather Bureau's revised alarm to evacuate
now
. The last reports had said Texas would catch the brunt tomorrow afternoon, so people in Louisiana had hunkered down in their homes as they'd done for countless squalls and tropical storms. They expected to suffer some damage. They expected to survive.

In the last daylight hours on Wednesday, before rains became torrential and winds approaching 150 miles per hour started bending the trees and peeling roofs off the houses like box tops, an interesting natural phenomenon occurred that brought foreboding to any old-timers who recalled it from previous cataclysms. Millions of crayfish scuttled out of the swamps and began streaming through streets and across lawns and schoolyards like a huge green carpet of locusts. Sensing the coming seawater surge, this primordial refugee instinct likewise led creatures such as foxes and rodents and swarms of snakes to make similar breaks for higher ground before the ocean came.

Heavy winds ripped through the night. Telephone poles snapped. Tree trunks cracked, and shutters and sheathing tore off houses to become deadly projectiles hurtling through the air. Yet flooding remained moderate. Warm brackish water pushed out of the bayous and over the lowlands in an ankle-deep flow no worse than what thunderstorms caused now and then. At Sallie Hooker's property, the water pooled like bathwater around the pilings of her house and the base of the cold locker. The two people inside the locker worried at first that it might keep rising. Seepage through the floor vent turned to a spurt. The water rose to a foot high, about halfway up the legs of the table on which Tarzy and Abe sat cross-legged in the dark. Abe held Tarzy's hand and spun tales of memorable meals he'd cooked and brainless dogs he'd owned. He said that someday Tarzy could tell his grandchildren about passing the hurricane with a fat old fool in a cold box. Tarzy laughed more than a few times.