Purple Cane Road (26 page)

“You going somewhere special today?” I said.

“Yeah, you driving me and you to New Orleans,” she replied.

“Is that right?”

“The reason I call you ‘Sad Man’ ain’t ‘cause of the way you look. It’s ‘cause you let Zipper Clum play you for a fool,” she said.

“Say again?”

“Zipper liked to make other people hate themselves. That’s how he got people like me to work for him. That and the rock he give me.”

“You’re not making a whole lot of sense, Little Face.”

“You never axed me how I got in the life. It was t’rew my auntie in New Orleans. She knowed Zipper. I visited my auntie this weekend. She say Zipper tole you a bunch of lies about your mother.”

I SIGNED OUT A cruiser, and Little Face and I took the four-lane through Morgan City to New Orleans. The sugarcane was high and thickly clustered and pale green in the fields, and the cruiser was buffeting in the wind off the Gulf.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“I seen the story in the paper. People trying to shoot at you and Fat Man. He doin’ all right?”

“Sure.”

“Tell Fat Man I been going to meetings,” she said, her face pointed straight ahead to hide whatever emotion was in it.

“You still don’t trust me enough to tell me how Vachel Carmouche died?”

“A lawman get killed in Lou’sana, somebody gonna pay. It don’t matter who. Give them peckerwoods a chance, they’ll strap another one down wit’ her. Tell me I be wrong, Sad Man.”

THE AUNT LIVED on St. Andrew, in a white shotgun house, between the streetcar line and the Mississippi River levee. She had been a prostitute thirty years ago, but her skin was smooth, unwrinkled, like yellow tallow, her gray-streaked hair combed out on her shoulders, her turquoise eyes and red mouth still seductive. At least until she opened her mouth to speak and you saw her bad teeth and the gums that were black and eaten with snuff.

She sat on the stuffed couch in her small living room, her hands clasped just below her knees to prevent the floor fan from puffing up her dress. From outside I could hear the streetcars grinding up and down the tracks on St. Charles.

“You knew Mae Guillory?” I asked.

“I worked in a club in Lafourche Parish. Down on Purple Cane Road, almost to the salt water,” she said.

I repeated my question. The aunt, whose name was Caledonia Patout, looked at Little Face.

“Robicheaux been good to me, Callie,” Little Face said, her eyes avoiding mine, as though she had broken a self-imposed rule.

“The club was still for white people then. I worked out of the cribs in back. That’s how I knew Mae Guillory,” Caledonia said.

“My mother worked out of the cribs?” I said, and coughed slightly in my palm, as though I had a mild cold or allergy.

“No, your mother wasn’t no working girl. Zipper just putting some glass inside you. You seen that burn like a big ringworm on his cheek? Cops done that. Mae Guillory waited tables and hepped at the bar and cooked sometimes. She tole me she’d come there twenty years before with a man deal bouree. The bouree man got TB and died. So she just work there on and off. The rest of the time she work places around Morgan City and Thibodaux.”

“What happened to her, Caledonia?”

This is what she told me.

IT WAS 1967, way down in the fall, hurricane weather. The sky turned green at evening and the air was palpable with the heavy, wet smell of seaweed laden with fish eggs and Portuguese men-of-war whose air sacs had popped and dried in a crusty web on the beach; it was weather that smelled of a storm-swollen tide surging over the barrier islands, bursting in geysers against jetties and sandspits.

The old owner of the nightclub had died and left his property to his half brother, a reckless, irreverent slaughterhouse butcher by the name of Ladrine Theriot. Ladrine had always wanted to be a professional cook, and he remodeled the kitchen of the club and began to serve gumbos and chicken and dirty rice dinners. He loved to cook; he loved women, and, like my father, he loved to fight with anyone foolish enough to accept his challenge.

For Mae Guillory, Ladrine had walked right out of her past. But, unlike my father, Ladrine wasn’t an alcoholic.

Mae was working at the bar the night the two police officers drove an unmarked vehicle to the back door and cut their lights and walked out of the darkness in rain slickers and hats. Through the door she could see Ladrine in an undershirt and apron, butchering a hog with a cleaver on top of an enormous wood block, chopping through ribs and vertebrae, his arms and shoulders curlicued with black hair that was flecked with tiny pieces of pink meat. She did not see the faces of the officers, only their shadows, which fell across the butcher block, but she clearly heard the conversation between one officer and Ladrine.

“Tell them dagos in New Orleans I ain’t buying from them no more. One man tole me the rubber he got out of the machine got holes in it. Their beer’s flat and the jukebox full of rock ‘n’ roll. Them people in New Orleans ain’t got no Cajun music?” Ladrine said. “You want to use another distributor, that’s fine.” Ladrine began paring the rinds off a stack of chops, his long, honed knife flicking the gray dissected pieces of fat sideways into a garbage barrel.

“There’s another t’ing,” he said. “I’m closing up them cribs, me. Don’t be sending no more girls down here, no.”

His knife paused over the meat and he raised his eyes to make his point.

“That not a problem, Ladrine,” the officer said. “But your brother owed the people in New Orleans forty-three hundred dollars and change. The debt comes with the club. What they call the vig, the points, the interest, is running, tick-tock, tick-tock, all day, all night. I’d pay it if I was you.”

“Oh, you need your money? Go to the graveyard. My brother’s got a bunch of gold teet’ in his mout’. You can have them. He don’t mind,” Ladrine said.

He resumed his work, his knife going
chop, chop, snick, snick
against the wood.

TWO NIGHTS LATER they were back. A storm had made landfall immediately to the south, the tidal surge warping and twisting boat docks, rippling the loose planks like piano keys, and the cane in the fields was white with lightning, slashing back and forth as though the wind were blowing from four directions at once.

The two police officers ran out of the rain into the dryness of the kitchen, and one of them loosened the bulb in the light socket that hung over the butcher block, dropping the kitchen into darkness.

The nightclub was almost deserted. Mae stood behind the bar on the duckboards and stared at the kitchen door, her pulse jumping in her neck. “Callie and me need you to hep out here, Ladrine,” she said.

“He’s all right. Go about your business,” one of the police officers said. “You can fix us some coffee, if you want. Set it on the chair by the door. I’ll get it.”

“Ladrine ain’t caused no trouble,” Mae said.

“He’s a good boy. He’s going to stay a good boy,” the officer said. “That’s right, isn’t it, Ladrine?”

“Stay out of it, Mae,” Callie whispered in her ear.

Mae could hear them talking now from inside the darkness, the lightning in the fields trembling like candle flame on their bodies. Ladrine was uncharacteristically subdued, perhaps even cowered by what he was being told, his shape like that of a haystack in the gloom.

“It’s nothing personal. Debts have to be paid. We respect you. But you got to respect us,” the officer said.

The officer picked up the demitasse of coffee and the saucer and spoon and sugar cube that Mae had set on the chair for him. He stood in the doorway and sipped from it, his back to Mae, his small hands extended out of the black folds of his slicker. His nails were clean, and his face looked rosy and handsome when the light played on it.

“Them Giacanos pretty rough, huh?” Ladrine said.

“I wouldn’t know. I stay on their good side,” the officer said.

“I’ll t’ink about it, me,” Ladrine said.

“I knew you’d say that,” the officer said, and placed his hand on Ladrine’s arm, then set down his empty cup and saucer and went out the door with his partner in a swirl of rain and wind.

“You okay, Ladrine? They ain’t hurt you, huh?” Mae asked.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with me,” he replied, his face bloodless.

THE STORM PASSED, but another was on its way. The next morning was dismal. The sky was the color of cardboard, the fields flooded, the dirt road like a long wet, yellow scar through the cane, and moccasins as thick as Mae’s arms crawled from the ditches and bumped under her tires when she drove to work. She mopped floors and hauled trash to the rusted metal barrels in back until 10 A.M., when she saw Ladrine drive a pickup into the parking lot with a hydraulic lift in the rear. He got out, slammed the door of the cab, and thumped a hand truck up the wood steps into the bar.

Later, from in back, she heard him laboring with a heavy object, then she heard the hydraulic lift whining and his pickup truck driving away.

He returned at noontime and opened the cash register and counted out several bills and pieces of silver on the bar. As an afterthought he went back to the register drawer and removed an additional ten-dollar bill and added it to the stack on the bar.

“I got to let you go, Mae,” he said.

“What you fixing to do?” she said.

He broke a raw egg in an RC cola and drank it.

“I ain’t done nothing,” he said.

“You a big fool don’t have nobody to look after him. I ain’t going nowhere,” she said.

He grinned at her, the corner of his mouth smeared with egg yoke, and she was reminded in that moment of a husband whose recklessness and courage and irresponsibility made him both the bane and natural victim of his enemies.

Ladrine opened the New Orleans telephone directory and thumbed through the white pages to the listings that began with the letter “G.”

He reached under the bar and picked up the telephone and set it down heavily in front of him and dialed a number.

“How you doin’, suh? This is Ladrine Theriot. I t’ought it over. I called my cousin in the legislature and tole him what you gangsters been doin’ down here in Lafourche Parish. He said that ain’t no surprise, ‘cause ain’t none of you ever worked in your life, and if you ain’t pimping, you stealing from each other. By the way, if you want your jukebox back, its floating down the bayou. If you hurry, you can catch it before it goes into the Gulf. T’anks. Good-bye.”

He hung up the phone and looked at it a moment, then closed his register drawer quietly and stared at the rain driving against the windows and the red and white Jax beer sign clanking on its chains, his eyes glazed over with thoughts he didn’t share.

“Ladrine, Ladrine, what you gone and done?” Mae said.

MAE LIVED TWENTY MILES up the state highway in a cabin she rented in the quarters of a corporation farm. The cabins were all exactly alike, tin-roofed, paintless, stained by the soot that blew from stubble fires in winter, narrow as matchboxes, with small galleries in front and privies in back. Once a week the “rolling store,” an old school bus outfitted with shelves and packed with canned goods, brooms, overalls, work boots, pith helmets, straw hats, patent medicine, women’s dresses, guitar strings, refrigerated milk and lunch meat, .22 caliber and twelve-gauge ammunition, quart jars of peanut butter and loaves of bread, rattled its way up and down the highway and braked with a screech and a clanking of gears in the quarters. People came out of their cabins and bought what they needed for the week, and sometimes’ with great excitement received a special order—perhaps a plastic guitar, a first communion suit, a cigarette rolling machine—from New Orleans or Memphis.

It was Saturday and Mae had bought a sequined comb to put in her hair from the rolling store, then had bathed in the iron tub and powdered her body and dressed in her best underthings, tying a string around her hips so her slip wouldn’t show, the way Negro women did. She put on her purple suit and heels, drawing her stomach in as she stood sideways in front of her bedroom mirror while Callie sat watching her.

“You t’ink I’m too fat?” she asked, pressing her hand flatly against her stomach.

“What you got in your mind ain’t gonna happen,” Callie said.

“Ladrine gonna take me to the movie in Morgan City. That’s all we doin’.”

“He got in the dagos’ face, Mae.”

“You hung around, ain’t you?”

“Zipper Clum got a new sit’ation for me in New Orleans. White man want what I got, he gonna pay for it,” Callie said.

“Maybe me and Ladrine are gonna run off.”

“What are you telling yourself? He growed up here. Coon-asses don’t go nowhere. You gonna die, woman.”

Mae turned from the mirror and looked at Callie, her face empty, the words of self-assurance she wanted to speak dead on her lips.

LADRINE DID NOT COME for her that afternoon. She waited until almost dark, then drove to the club in her ancient Ford and was told by the bartender that Ladrine had left a note for her. It was written on lined paper torn from a notebook and folded in a small square, and the bartender held it between two fingers and handed it to her and went back to washing silverware. She spread the sheet of paper on the bar and looked down at it emptily, as though by concentrating on the swirls and slashes of Ladrine’s calligraphy she could extrapolate meaning from the words she had never learned to read.

“I don’t got my glasses, me. Can you make out what it says?” she said.

The bartender dried his hands again and picked up the sheet of paper and held it under the light. ‘“Dear Mae, I’m taking my boat out. Don’t come back to the club no more. Sorry I couldn’t call but you don’t have no phone. Love, Ladrine,’” the bartender read, and handed the sheet of paper back to her.

The bartender’s wrists were deep in the sink now, and she could see only his shining pate when he spoke again. “I’d listen to him, Mae,” he said. “Somet’ing’s happened?”

“Some men from New Orleans was here. Know the way us little people get by? What you see, what you hear, you do this wit’,” he said, and made a twisting motion with his fingers in front of his lips, as though turning a key in a lock.