Accordion Crimes (34 page)

“Don’t play that fuckin coonass chanky-chank, boy,” Carver said, combing his hair. “That fuckin music is worse than killin pigs.”

“Yeah? Don’t call me ‘boy’ like I was a nigger unless you want your face changed.”

“Yeah? I was you I’d watch my mouth. Accidents happen
pretty easy to guys with big mouths, ’specially a fuckin coonass.” He smiled like a skull.

“Yeah? I was you I’d get a pair of eyes in the back of my head. It’s better than that fuckin castanet shit you play.”

“Yeah? You know what they say, ‘look all around a coonass’s bed, nothin but bedbugs, shit and crawfish heads.’”

“OK, fella,” said Buddy, “I’ll see you ashore.” Fighting on the rig meant instant dismissal, with the company launch out to pick you up within the hour and your name guaranteed on the blacklist.

(By the time his hair was starting to grey up and the Louisiana oil boom was over, Buddy was the toolpusher on an offshore rig in the North Sea, working with burr-voiced Scots.)

The third day into this tour somebody saw the boat breasting toward them, bouncing through the white crests and giving the occupants a hell of a ride.

“Fish man ahoy!”

Buddy recognized the fishing boat of Octave, black and wiry, a good boy on the
’tit fer
when you could pry him away from that nigger zydeco shit, did odd jobs and sold fish on the side, came out to the rig twice a week if the weather let him, Tuesday and Saturday, with catfish and a couple of sacks of mudbugs for a boil, once in a rare while a slab of gator tail. He got double the going price from the rigs. This wasn’t his regular day.

“Somebody with him!” Everybody tensed up and the men on deck shaded their eyes and strained to see the second person. A second person meant news of trouble.

It was the daughter-in-law. She crouched in the bow, staring at the rig, trying to pick Buddy out. Her eyes were not good. He recognized her before they were in hailing distance.
Octave was bailing with a flattened coffee can, his eyes hidden behind blue-tinted glasses, his old cowboy hat hiding his dark face in darker shadows. The sky above was packed with clouds like wadded gauze.

“Now what,” he muttered. She’d done the same thing the year before when they’d taken his mother to the hospital after she’d painted her face and hands and dress a mess of thick colors, the lampblack and gamboge and viridian streaked everywhere in the white kitchen. He could see it was a new disaster.

“What is it?” he shouted.

“Your father, Papa Onesiphore—he’s gone.”

“What! He’s dead? Papa’s dead?”

“No, no. Gone to Texas. He stopped by, his truck all loaded up, said he was sorry but he had to go. He left your mother. He says he can’t take it anymore, living with a crazy woman.” Everyone on deck was listening now.

“Did you see
Maman?
”

“Yeah. She don’t know but she thinks he’s going up to stay with his brother Basile in Texas. She thinks your sister came back from the dead and she’s up there too. In Texas. There was them cousins she liked so much.”

“
Non.
The cousins she liked was Elmore’s kids—Gene and Clara and Grace. He can’t be going up to see Uncle Basile. He hasn’t seen him since he was twenty years old.”

“What shall I do? Can you come home?”

“Can’t you take the kids over and stay with her a few days? I’ll be home in ten more days, goddammit.”

His wife began to cry. She was wearing a pale blue cotton dress and black rubber boots. She cried silently, letting the tears roll down her face. She looked at him. Octave’s boat rose and fell.

“Go home! Stay with her. He’ll come back in a day or two.” He glared at Octave in the stern who smiled enigmatically. “You, Octave, you shouldn’t of brought her out here. Take her back.” He turned away, smarting with rage, heard his wife say “last time I tell you anything,” then the stutter of Octave’s motor drowned her out.

After a while Adam Coultermuch said, “my father run out on us when I was four years old. I don’t even remember what he looked like. Never saw the bastard again.”

Quart Cuttermarsh said, “hey, you was lucky. I would of give anything if my old man run off. He’d get drunk up, beat the shit out of us. You wanta see something? Look at this.” He pulled off his shirt, revealed round scars up and down his arms. “Cigarette. He’d burn us to watch us cry. I hope he’s roasting in hell. I heard he got knifed in a bar in Mobile.”

“My dad was OK when we were kids, I mean, he didn’t do nothin to us, always workin or sleepin, but when we come up a little, about fifteen, sixteen years old, god, he turned mean,” added T. K. Coudemoche. “I was in a car, car belonged to the father of a friend of mine and my friend was supposed to drive it down to the railroad station and meet his dad, we was both sixteen or seventeen, going along the road there nice and steady when this car come up behind us. It was my dad and he was trying to pass. Well, my friend, he didn’t know any better, thought he’d have a little fun, so he pulls out in the middle of the road and don’t let the old man pass. I tell him, that’s my old man and you better let him by. He’s got a temper. But my friend says it’s just a little fun and he don’t let him pass. Well, the old man tries five or six times, puts on his lights and toots the horn and I’m sittin there shakin because I know he’s gonna follow us to the station. I got this plan when we get there to get out and run so he don’t know I’m in the
car. But we never got there. My friend got kind of careless and the old man gets abreast and then edges us off the road into a ditch, just locks fenders and butts us off. My friend stops in the ditch and gets out and here comes the old man swingin a tire iron and cussin everything in the world, and he lets my friend have it right across the nose with the tire iron, you could hear it go crunch, he gives me a terrific crack on the arm, breaks my arm, then he set to work on my friend’s father’s car. He smashed that thing, glass everywhere, he pounded on the fenders, sprung the hood, tore up the doors, and for a finale, pulled out his whacker and pissed on the front seat. Didn’t say a word. Just got back in his car and drove off. I didn’t even bother to go home. I lit out for the oil fields and been there ever since.”

Iry Gartermatch cleared his throat. “My father was normal until he was seventy-five, then he married a girl of eighteen, simpleminded, she had three kids and he died when he was eighty and didn’t leave none of us nothin but trouble.”

They were trying to make him feel better. Where the hell could a seventy-five-year-old man run off to? And he was right.

When he drove down the road ten days later the old man was sitting on the porch with the green accordion on his knee playing “
Chère Alice,
” cigarette in his mouth, and out in the yard Mme Malefoot gathered shirts and tablecloths in the calm sunlight as though life had rolled sevens and elevens all the way.

He pulled into the driveway, stared at his father. “I heard you gone on a trip.”

“
Oui,
yes,
mon fils,
just a little trip, me, ‘
go put on your little
dress with stripes
…,’ just want to see how they are doing in the world. Just a little change for my eyes. Yes, I am very happy to be home again on the bayou. We play tomorrow night for a dance, the barbecue dance at Gayneauxs, ‘
she didn’t know I was marrrrrried.
’ That
Saturday Even Post
comes with a photographer. Every week we got one, click the flashers in your eye. You come here tonight with your accordion, play a little in the kitchen. That black guy Octave comes by. You know he say he love this green accordion very much. He say he give two hundred fifty for it.”

“Where the hell would that nigger get two fifty? Eh?”

“Sell Gene Autry seed packs, rob a bank, fix TVs. Sell fish to the rig.”

“You serious?”

“Oh yeah.”

“If he got it we’ll take it. I can get Mr. Pelsier to build one just as good, better, for a hundred. Take the money and run.”

“I think so. Even when I got her painted nice.” He had commanded his wife to paint a row of red waves below the buttons, with a devil’s head at each end and the words “
flammes d’enfer
” to set them off.

Octave did not like playing with the old man and Buddy—the old man, dirty Cajun, cheated him on the money every time—but he clanged the
’tit fer,
blew into a sonorous bottle, a teakettle, rapped horseshoes, rattled boxes and tapped a mule-hide hand drum, got into the
Saturday Evening Post
photographs as much as he could and nobody knew his private thoughts, that he regarded the music they made as a lugubrious whine.

He wanted the accordion. He played the accordion better
than any Malefoot that ever lived, but no way they’d let him sit up there with them and outplay them, so he did washboards and triangle and acted the fool singing their praises. He wanted the green accordion because it sounded good and loud and could sound better, but most of all because it had looked him in the eye. He’d been sitting to the left of old Malefoot a few weeks before, the old man swinging the accordion around and squeezing it, warping in his slurs and slides, singing a little and then playing a little, moving constantly in that old-man twitchy way, and somehow or other the mirrors on the accordion had lined up just right and when Octave glanced over, the damn thing was looking right at him. Of course he knew it was his own eyes reflected but figured the odds were a million to one they could line up with the mirrors that way. It made the instrument powerfully alive, looking at him, watching him, saying “what you gonna do? You gonna git me? Better git me, nigger, or I git you.” It was a scary thing.

“One hunerd, one ten, one twenny, one thirty, one forty, one fifty, one sixty, one seveny, one eighty, one eighty five, one ninety, one ninety five, two, two ten, two twenny, two thirty, two thirty five, two forty, forty five, forty sic, forty seven, eight, forty nine, two hunerd fifty.” But the old man had to count it all over again and he kept making mistakes and finally Buddy took the money and counted silently, lips moving, said it’s all there and threw the green accordion up in the air so Octave had to backpedal to catch it. He knew he was paying too much and that what he really needed was a triple-row. He’d even thought about a piano accordion but doubted he could learn the chord-bass buttons or get used to an instrument that didn’t depend on push and pull to
make a tune. He liked to see that too, the notes according to the draw of the bellows. It was like a natural law.

“Where’s the case, Mr. Malefoot?” he said.

“Aw, don’t have no case.”

“Mr. Malefoot, I seen you bring it in a case many a time, you see what I’m sayin? I under the impression a case go with this ’cordion.” Buddy thought about it a minute, the money felt good, it was warm and dry and there was a hundred percent profit. He could give Octave a hard time, stiff him the case, but then he might stand back on them when they needed a washboard, or stop bringing fish out to the rig. Octave was capable of meanness.

“Back over there back a my daddy’s foot.”

(Thirty years later, in Scotland, coming late and drunk out of a pub, warp-sided face atwitch, Buddy glanced into a parked van in the glare of a streetlight. He saw an accordion on the seat, stealthily tried the van door. It opened, and he seized the instrument, carried it under his arm to his hotel. In his room he opened the case. It was a beautiful instrument, leopardwood with chrome-plated buttons. The maker’s name was unknown to him, but it was a Cajun beauty and it came from his home country. He played and sang and wept for vanished times and places until the pallid Scots light of morning tinged the window, then he wondered what in the hell he was going to do with a stolen accordion. He left it in the hotel room.)

Octave, good-looking except for a drooping eyelid like an eternal slow wink, brown-skinned, had his getaway money saved up, folded in an empty tobacco can hidden under a certain tree root. He had his suit and his white shirt in a cleaner’s
bag on a red plastic hanger suspended from a nail in the wall of his mother’s house. In a month he’d be gone, Kansas City or Chicago or Detroit, hadn’t made up his mind yet, but there were a few fool things he had to do first and one of them was get new steel reeds in this thing and make it jump. He would bring it to Mr. Lime, get some of those good reeds made out of clock-spring steel. He was skipping his regular weekend gig on the crawfish circuit so he could play over in Houston on the edge of Frenchtown alternating sets with Clifton, a nice balance because Clifton had the big piano accordion, was into rhythm and blues; he had his own style, might be closer to Boozoo, but pushier and revved up. It was well known people danced hotter to the button than to the piano, not a jook, either, but the Blue Moon Dance Heaven that had been a grocery store back in the forties with an icehouse next to the store. Thinking about the icehouse, he remembered—memories came to him sharply, let him fly backward into childhood—the big cake of ice swathed in burlap bags on the porch of the store in Féroce where sometimes Uncle Pha would chip off a big crystal dagger for nothing if somebody was buying ice and you were standing around, the delight of watching the pick drive a line of stars and then the piece would break off clear and shot through with frozen bubbles. You could stab somebody with it and kill them, it happened once when Winnie Zac stabbed her boyfriend in the neck and the weapon melted in his hot blood. That was how Amédée Ardoin played, that
’tit nègre,
stabbing the buttons with ice-dagger fingers. Nobody had cakes of ice anymore. And in Houston the Blue Moon icehouse was long gone, you couldn’t tell it had ever been there looking at the dance floor not much bigger than two bedsheets and the tiny bandstand, but an acre of tables and a fiftyfoot bar, and nobody would know what hit them when he came out there in his black pants and shirt and red satin vest and his
white lizard boots and this green accordion with its roving eyes. He would make this thing burn pure zydeco, ring bells. He was going to touch home base.