Blue Highways (18 page)

On the other side of the pump, a man with arms the size of my thighs waited for the nozzle. He said, “You driving through or what?”

“On my way south.”

“You want some meat?” It sounded aggressive, like, “Want a knuckle sandwich?”

“Pardon me?”

“You want meat? I’m flying out of Shreveport this afternoon. Can’t carry the steaks with me. Just got called to Memphis. If you’re cooking out, might as well take them. It’s you or the garbage can.”

He had a way with words.

“Get him the steaks, Roger.” A boy, about ten, came around and handed me four nice flank cuts still frozen. I thanked the man.

“What’d you pay for your Ford?” the boy said.

“Three thousand in round numbers.”

“How much to build the insides?”

“Couple hundred dollars.”

“How about that homemade bed? Could I try it?” I opened the door, he jumped on the bunk, stretched out, and made a loud snoring noise. Dreaming of far places. His eyes popped open. “Inflation’s added about twelve percent. These models run higher now too. How’s the gas mileage?”

“Around twenty-five to the gallon.”

“Can’t be.”

“Can be and is. Straight shift, no factory options except highback seats, lightweight, and I drive around fifty.” That short man of a boy depressed me. Ten years old and figuring the rate of interest and depreciation instead of the cost of adventure. His father handed me a loaf of bread.

“Thanks very kindly,” I said, “but I’m not much for white bread.”

“Just have to leave it along the interstate for possums and niggers.”

He did it again.

With the steaks and white bread (would go well with chopped liver) I drove south toward the flat, wet triangle of gulf-central Louisiana that is Cajunland. The highway clattered Ghost Dancing and shook me so that my head bounced like one of those plastic dogs in car rear windows. The heat made me groggy, and I couldn’t shake it, and I didn’t want to stop. After a while, the road seemed a continuum of yellow-lined concrete, a Möbius strip where I moved, going neither in nor out, but around and up and down to all points of the compass, yet always rolling along on the same plane.

My eyes were nearly closed. Then a dark face staring in. My head snapped back, and I pulled the truck out of the left lane. A hitchhiker. I stopped. His skin shone like wet delta mud, and his smile glittered like a handful of new dimes. He was heading home to Coushatta after spending two days thumbing along I-20 from Birmingham, where he’d looked for work as a machinist. He’d found nothing. Usually he got long rides on freeways if he could manage one, but it was easier for a black man to get a lift on the small roads where there were more Negro drivers. Sometimes the ride included a meal and bed, but last night he’d slept in a concrete culvert. I asked where he learned his trade. “In the Army. I was a Spec Four.”

“Were the jobs filled in Birmingham?”

“They said they were. I don’t know.”

“Was it a racial question, do you think?”

He moved warily in his seat. “Can’t always tell. It’s easy to say that.”

“What will you do now?”

“Go home and wait for something to open up.” We rode quietly, the even land green and still. He was a shy man and appeared uncertain about what to say. I filled some silence, and then he said, “Seems things I wait for don’t come along, and the ones I want to see pass on by, stop and settle in.”

“I’m between jobs myself. Waiting for something to open up too.”

“I hope I’m just between jobs. I went in the Army to learn a trade. Figured I’d found a good one for civvy life. Now I’m looking like my uncle. He only had one good job in his life. Good for his time anyway. Ran an elevator at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Then they put in pushbutton elevators. He said he drove his old elevator a hundred thousand miles. He came back to Coushatta and did a little field work, then went hunting a better job in Dallas and got shot dead. I used to think he musta been a bum. Don’t see it like that now.”

The rest of the way was mostly quiet. “I’ll get out here,” he said at last.

“A man gave me some steaks. My cooler won’t keep them in this heat. Why don’t you take a couple?” I pulled out a steak and handed him the rest. “Gave me this bread too. Take it if you like.”

He put the steaks in his plaid suitcase but had to carry the bread in his hand. “Can I ask you a question? Why did you give me a ride?”

“I was dozing off. Owed you for waking me up.”

He shook his head. “Maybe. It’ll be a good night at home. Mama loves steak.”

Up the road he went, thumb out, smiling into the tinted windshields. Home is the hunter, home from the hill; home the sailor, home from the sea. And what about the Specialist Four home from Birmingham?

A
LL
the way to Opelousas, I thought of the machinist whose name I never learned. He had gone out and come back only to find a single change: he was older. Sometimes a man’s experience is like the sweep second hand on a clock, touching each point in its circuit but always the arcs of movement repeating.

Near Ville Platte a scene of three colors: beside a Black Angus, in a green pasture, a white cattle egret waited for grubbings the cow stirred up. The improbable pair seemed to know each other well, standing close yet looking opposite directions. I don’t know what the egret did before it flew into the New World; I suppose it took its long, reedy legs to shallow water and picked in the bottoms for a couple of million years, each bird repeating until the new way of life came to it.

I switched on the radio and turned the dial. Somewhere between a shill for a drive-up savings and loan and one for salvation, I found a raucous music, part bluegrass fiddle, part Texas guitar, part Highland concertina. Cajun voices sang an old, flattened French, part English, part undecipherable.

Looking for live Cajun music, I stopped in Opelousas at the Plantation Lounge. Somebody sat on every barstool; but a small man, seeing a stranger, jumped down, shook my hand, and insisted I take his seat. In the fast roll of Cajun English, he said it was the guest stool and by right belonged to me. The barmaid, a woman with coiled eyes, brought a Jax. “Is there Cajun music here tonight?” I asked.

“Jukebox is our music tonight,” she snapped.

A man called Walt, with dark hair oiled and slicked back in the style of an older time, squeezed in beside me. “If you’re lookin’ for French music, you need to get yourself to laugh yet.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means haul your butt to laugh yet. Biggest Coonass city in the world.”

“Lafayette?” I made it three syllables.

“You got it, junior, but we don’t say Lah-fay-et.”

“Where should I go in Laughyet?”

He drew a map so detailed I could almost see chuckholes in the streets. “Called Eric’s. That’s one place. In Laughyet they got whatever you want: music, hooch, girls, fights, everything.” He passed the bar peanuts. “By the way, junior,” he asked casually, “ever had yourself a Cajun woman?”

His question silenced the bar. “Don’t think I have.”

“Got some advice for you then—if you find you ever need it.”

It was the quietest bar I’d ever been in. I answered so softly no sound came out, and I had to repeat. “What advice?”

“Take off your belt before you climb on so you can strap your Yankee ass down because you’ll get taken for a ride. Up the walls and around.”

Now the whole bar was staring, I guess to surmise whether my Yankee ass was worth strapping down. One rusty geezer said, “Junior ain’t got no belt.”

Walt looked at my suspenders and pulled one, letting it snap back. “My man,” he said, “tie on with these and you’ll get zanged out the window like in a slingshot.”

The men pounded the bar and choked on their Dixie beer. One began coughing and had to be slapped on the back. Two repeated the joke.

Walt shouted to the barmaid, “Let’s get junior another Jax.” To me he said, “Don’t never take no offense at a Coonass. We’re all fools in God’s garden. Except for bettin’. Now that’s serious. These boys’ll bet on anything that moves or scores points and even some things that don’t do neither. Charles, here, for example, will bet he can guess to within four how many spots on any Dalmatian dog. I bet on movement because I don’t know dogs and not too many things score points. But everything moves—sooner or later. Even hills. Old Chicksaw taught me that.”

I
F
you’ve read Longfellow, you can’t miss Cajunland once you get to the heart of it: Evangeline Downs (horses), Evangeline Speedway (autos), Evangeline Thruway (trucks), Evangeline Drive-in, and, someone had just said, the Sweet Evangeline Whorehouse.

I found my way among the Evangelines into an industrial area of Lafayette, a supply depot for bayou and offshore drilling operations. Along the streets were oil-rig outfitters where everything was sections of steel: pipes, frames, ladders, derricks, piles, cables, buoys, tanks. Crude oil opened Acadian Louisiana as nothing in the past three centuries had, and it seemed as if little could be left unfound in Cajun hamlets once quite literally backwaters.

Eric’s, on the edge of the outfitters’ district, was a windowless concrete-block box with a steel door and broken neon and a parking lot full of pickups, Cadillacs, and El Caminos (“cowboy Cadillacs”). But no French music.

I drank a Dixie and ate bar peanuts and asked the bartender where I could hear “chanky-chank,” as Cajuns call their music. She, too, drew a map, but her knowledge gave out before she got to the destination. “It’s called Tee’s. It’s down one of these roads, but they all look alike to me out there.”

“Out there?”

“It’s in the country. Follow my map and you’ll be within a couple miles.”

When I left she said good luck. The traveler should stand warned when he gets wished luck. I followed her map until the lights of Lafayette were just a glowing sky and the land was black. I wound about, crossing three identical bridges or crossing one bridge three times. I gave up and tried to find my way back to town and couldn’t do that either.

Then a red glow like a campfire. A beer sign. Hearty music rolled out the open door of a small tavern, and a scent of simmering hot peppers steamed from the stovepipe chimney. I’d found Tee’s. Inside, under dim halos of yellow bug lights, an accordion (the heart of a Cajun band), a fiddle, guitar, and ting-a-ling (triangle) cranked out chanky-chank. The accordionist introduced the numbers as songs of
amour
or
joie
and the patrons cheered; but when he announced
“un chanson de marriage,”
they booed him. Many times he cried out the Cajun motto,
“Laissez les bons temps rouler!”

While the good times rolled, I sat at the bar next to a man dying to talk. My Yankee ass and his were the only ones in the place. His name was Joe Seipel and his speech Great Lakes. I asked, “You from Wisconsin?”

“Minnesota. But I been here seven years working for P.H.I.”

“What’s P.H.I.?”

He put down his bottle and gave me an exaggerated, wide-eyed, openmouthed look to indicate my shocking ignorance. “You gotta be kidding!”

“About what?”

“Petroleum Helicopters Incorporated!” He shook his head. “Jees!”

“Oh, that’s right. What kind of helicoptering do you do?” I tried to talk between numbers, but he talked through it all.

“I don’t fly. I’m a mechanic. But Stoney here flies out to the offshore rigs. Delivers materials, crews. You know.”

The pilot, in his fifties, wore cowboy boots and a jaunty avocado jumpsuit. He was applying a practiced
Bridges-at-Toko-Ri
machismo to a hugely mammaried woman who had painted on a pair of arched, red lips the likes of which the true face of womankind has never known.

Seipel said, “I was just like you when I came here—dumb as hell. But I’ve read about Louisiana. Learned about Coonasses from that yellow book.”

“What yellow book is that?”

“That one comes out every month.”

“National Geographic?”

“That’s it. They had a story on Coonasses.”

“Did they explain the name ‘Coonass’?”

“I think they missed that.”

A small, slue-footed Gallic man wearing a silky shirt with a pelican on it dragged an upturned metal washtub next to the band and climbed on. I think he’d taken out his dentures. A mop handle with baling twine tied to it projected from the tub, and he thrust the stick about in rhythm with the music, plucking out the sound of a double bass.

“That’s DeePaul on the gut bucket,” Seipel said. “He’s not with the band.”

After a couple of numbers on the tub, the small man hopped down and waltzed around the floor, quite alone, snapping his wrists, making sharp rapid clacks with four things that looked like big ivory dominoes.

“Those are the bones,” Seipel said. “Sort of Cajun castanets.”

When the band folded for the night, the little fellow sashayed to the lighted jukebox, drawn to it like a moth, and clacked the bones in fine syncopation, his red tongue flicking out the better to help him syncopate, his cropped orb of a head glowing darkly. Seipel hollered him over.

He showed how to hold the bones one on each side of the middle fingers, then flung out his wrist as if throwing off water and let loose a report like the crack of a bullwhip. “Try dem in you hands.”

The bones were smooth like old jade. I laboriously inserted the four-inch counters between my fingers and snapped my wrist.
Cluk-cluk.
“Lousy,” Seipel said. I tried again.
Cluk-cluk.
Wet sponges had more resonance. Seipel shook his head, so I handed them to him. He got them mounted, lashed out an arm, and a bone sailed across the room.

“You boys don’t got it,” DeePaul said, his words looping in the old Cajun way. DeePaul’s name was in fact Paul Duhon. He had cut the clappers from a certain leg bone in a steer and carved them down to proper shape and a precise thickness. “You got to have da right bone, or da sound she muffle. And da steer got to be big for da good ringin’ bones.”

I tried again.
Cluk-cluk.
“I work at dis forty years,” Duhon said, “and just now do I start gettin’ it right. Look at me, gettin’ ole and just now gettin’ good. Dat’s why only ole, ole men play da good bones.”