Cajun Waltz (6 page)

“You got married,” Richie said.

“We acquainted?”

“I seen you two play. After
‘Lafayette'
come out.”

“Them days done.” Was this a reference to Cleoma? Richie regarded her worriedly, taking in once more the vacant gaze and rope around her waist. “Hard times,” Joe said, reading his thoughts. “Same as everywhere.”

“True that.” Richie's suggestion of shared struggle rang false even as he spoke it. The Depression hadn't touched him. His life had never been easier. “New baby?” he asked to fill the space.

“Lil girl, yes sir. Lulu. Near lost 'em both right after she born. Wife snagged up her shawl in a Greyhound door. Drug her a quarter mile, her holdin' the child whole time.”

“You pullin' my leg now.”

“God's truth. Lulu, not a scratch. Cleoma took the hurt.”

Richie looked at her again. “Seem okay now.” He looked harder. Brain damage, plain as day. Retarded. He'd met her only once in his life, still it horrified him to see what bad luck had dealt her. “Damn.”

The rope around her waist was the obvious next question. “She wander some,” Joe explained. “Forget what she about. Not on Lulu. With Lulu she sharp.”

Richie shook his head in utter sorrow. “You got a heavy load.”

“Oh no, we fine. Grateful every day.” Behind his glasses Joe's eyes told another story. He set the guitar on the countertop. Richie recognized Cleoma's National resonator, fingerboard ebony with pearl inlays, its metal body polished, cut with a pair of tapered f-holes, and etched with magnolia blossoms. Joe, watching Richie's admiring eyes, ran his hand along the neck. “She make a pretty noise, I guarantee.”

Joe's drawl returned Richie to that evening backstage at the Pinefield Auditorium when he and Walter Dopsie had watched Joe and Cleoma perform
“Allons
à
Lafayette.”
Walter had translated:
Man wanna marry his girl even he know she trouble.
A love song that Richie, it occurred to him now, could never sing on account of his voice and whatever else about him was broken. “Still got your accordion?” he asked.

“Still got me, better to say. But the National no need, so here go.”

“Not interested.” Esther had lumbered up from the rear of the store. It was the exact wrong person for Richie to see. He hated her right then. It had nothing to do with her size. He'd reveled enough in her lushness to know it could work him up every bit as much as the skinny girls he paid for in East Lake Charles, though they were available whereas Esther, by mutual indifference, no longer was. “Block's don't take consignments,” she told Joe.

“Prefer a straight sell anyhow.”

“We're not a pawnshop here.”

“Forty'll get it. Worth double at least.”

“It's not about the money, sir.”

It was the “sir” that set Richie off, so upright and professional. Plus he'd had a couple drinks, it being past noon. He banged open the register, removed two twenties, and thrust them at Joe.

Esther whirled on him. “Dammit, Richie!”

He slapped her hard with his open palm. A first for him, it felt and sounded perfect. She buckled but didn't go down. Her eyes filled from the sting and her cheek burned red around the redder shape of his hand. Store patrons gaped in shock. Down the passway to the storeroom Richie saw his nine-year-old son and daughter watching with frozen faces, Bonnie taller, her head a brunette bulb on a stalk, R.J. wiry like his father but on the way to being handsomer thanks to his mother's blue-blue eyes. Richie marveled at the coincidence of the family all present to see this. It confirmed that a crossroads was at hand.

Esther's friend, the lawyer Abe Percy, pushed through the Block's front door carrying a stewpot wrapped in a towel. The pot held whatever kitchen concoction the two were sharing today. Both liked to cook. Lunching together on obscure recipes was one of their pleasures, others being coffee and pastry each morning and tea and more pastry each afternoon. Abe froze midstep as he took in the scene.

“Mes compliments,”
Cleoma chirped to him, the greeting now as spooky to Richie as a talking skull. Her baby started to fuss and she jiggled it. Something unseen beckoned her and she ambled after it down one aisle until the rope gently called her back.

Abe rushed to Esther, setting the pot on the counter and putting his arm around her. “Essie! What'd he do to you?” Only now did she begin to cry.

Richie's first thought was that the food smelled good, some kind of pepper stew. His next thought was a notion ludicrous but usefully rude: “
Essie?
Whatsat, lil pillow talk 'tween you two?” He felt the eyes of his children shift between himself and their sobbing mother.

Abe glared at him. “I told her it was only a matter of time.”

Joe laid the two twenties on the countertop and started to put away his guitar. “Keep the money,” Richie snapped. “And the National.”

“Ain't lookin' for charity.” Joe pocketed the bills, left the guitar, picked up his suitcase and led his wife and baby out the front door. Cleoma waved airy good-byes to all. Through the store window, people inside saw her husband kneel on the sidewalk to untie her. Their business at Block's concluded, he took her hand and led her down Ryan Street to catch a bus going wherever, forty dollars to the better in the quest to rebuild their lives.

Esther stopped crying. A shopper picked up an item in a show of considering to buy it. Richie lifted the National's strap over his head. Though he hadn't played in a decade, the G chord came instantly to his left hand; it sounded awful when he strummed. R.J. sidled over to see the guitar up close. On impulse he silenced its tuneless clang by grabbing the neck in a wraparound grip. His thumb clamped the strings to the fingerboard. When Richie strummed again, the sound was beautiful.

The boy let go and his father plucked a perfect G chord with open strings. “I'll be damned. Open tuning. That's a colored thing.” For a moment Richie lost himself in playing, sliding his left hand in a flat bar up and down the neck, sometimes dragging a finger to turn a major chord into a sixth or seventh, fluid touches he'd never tried in his days with the Ramblers. His rhythm took a shuffle pattern as a melody returned faintly to mind. R.J. had never seen his dad with a guitar, had no idea he played. Richie's dreamy expression made the boy not nervous to be with him.

Richie paused and looked around sheepishly. “‘Nigger Blues,' give or take. Walter be proud.” That no one knew what he was talking about sharpened the revelation that struck him: his present life stunk and change was required.

He handed the guitar to R.J. “Pawn it or play it. Yours either way.” He beckoned Bonnie, who froze when he reached to embrace her but relaxed when it proved benign. Richie opened the register and gave her two twenties. “R.J. get the guitar, you get the cash. Been thinkin' you got a head for business.” He'd thought no such thing but wanted to make the gifts even. “Turn it double, I bet.”

“Bribing their loyalty,” Abe said. “How touching.”

“Best you not address me or my kids,” Richie said to him. “The wife you can talk till you're sick of it.”

Esther's face had begun to bruise. Richie caressed her shoulder. “I am sorry. I'll try never to do that again.” He clapped his hands to conclude the matter and she flinched as if from a gunshot. Only Abe, his arm still around her, realized Esther was trembling.

All this was preamble to the second jolt that hit Richie that summer, the first half of a one-two punch that softened him up to the idea that coincidence doesn't happen by chance. Seeing Joe and Cleoma brought low by misfortune seemed a sign meant directly for him, a warning to get out and get satisfied while he still could. He wouldn't hesitate when the chance came.

*   *   *

H
ANCOCK
B
AYOU IS
on the Gulf beach highway on the western end of Cameron Parish, fifty miles south of Lake Charles. It's the kind of place called nowhere by people who would never go there by choice—seashell roads, scrub-covered flood plains, few trees or structures predating the leveling crush of water and wind that had been the 1918 hurricane. Hundreds of thousands of wetland acres lie north of the town, laced with wooded cheniers and dark twisty channels spilling into the Gulf of Mexico on one side of the highway and wide, brackish bays on the other.

Hancock Bayou owed its existence to a commercial marina and adjacent pogie plant that rendered the inedible baitfish down to oil, fishmeal, and fertilizer, fouling the air if the breeze blew wrong though disagreeably only to visitors, who didn't appreciate the jobs and wages it signified. The town had a filling station, a movie house, two cement churches—Baptist and Catholic—and a combination druggist and general store where Richie agreed to drop Sallie Hooker when he drove her home a week after the scene at Block's with the Falcons.

Usually Sallie took a bus there on her breaks, but Richie had business in Cameron Parish. Last year the government had claimed vast tracts of Louisiana wetlands as protected habitats for fish, wildlife, and waterfowl. Richie and his cronies were furious at the Federal grab. They didn't golf or travel or do anything leisurely beyond private vice or public churchgoing except to hunt and fish. Hunting's high holiday was duck season from November to January. You could pay rice farmers for access to their ponds and paddies, but lately out-of-towners had started buying property and building private lodges. Most were tin-roofed bunkhouses with chicken-wire kennels for the barking retrievers; the hunting was spectacular but the accommodations strictly Jim Beam in a jelly jar and steel cots from army surplus. Richie's group of business partners planned something finer, with veteran guides and gourmet food along the lines of Scottish estates that offered shooting in the royal style to Hollywood stars and Texas oilmen. They'd bought ten thousand acres of marsh near the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge—like owning a bar next door to a brewery, Richie said—in order to construct a plush refuge of their own to be called the Section Eight Gun Club.

Richie had come to Hancock Bayou with one of his Section Eight partners, a Lake Charles builder named Burt Meers, to begin laying out the project. The men rode up front in Richie's Packard. Sallie sat quiet as a mouse in back with a travel case on the seat beside her and her hair pinned up under a Sunday hat. A larger bag was in the trunk. She'd tried to smile when Richie teased her about how much stuff she'd packed for a week. The Bainards had treated her decently, after all, and she'd raised the twins from infancy. It'd be a lie to say she wouldn't miss them.

The years of having Sallie living under his roof had taught Richie that ignoring servants on a personal level was how they seemed to prefer it. When Burt Meers started quizzing Sallie over the noise of the motor about whether Lake Charles blacks needed a public school or couldn't they just get their learning at home, her unease at being brought into the conversation made Richie cut in sympathetically, “Got no kids, what she gonna know?”

“They talk. In the hair shop, church.”

“You just lookin' to get the project.”

“Build a nigger school? Pay me, I'll build 'em a damn palace.”

Richie drummed up a laugh but couldn't help glancing at Sallie in the backseat. The splash of sunlight through the car window turned her complexion almost creamy. With mild surprise he was reminded that she was part white. Mixed blood was common in these parts, and in any event his indifference to matters outside himself freed him of social prejudice. He turned frontward and drove on.

“I got a child.” Sallie's declaration was nervous and quick. “Growed now.”

Richie looked back around. “And you ain't never said a word?”

“Girl too much for me. My mama raise her.”

“My wife know?”

“No, sir.”

“Smart.”

“Oughtn't keep secrets from the lady of the house,” Meers said.

Richie asked him, “Would you'a hired her to raise your kids with a child no daddy back home?”

“She didn't say no daddy.”

“She ain't got to.”

“Then be a couple reasons I don't hire her. Good Christian number one.”

Sallie turned her face to the window as they discussed her. The last stretch of road into Hancock Bayou wound through a patchwork of rice and sugarcane fields mostly worked by tenant families like the Hookers. She'd left almost a decade ago on the excuse that her prospects were better in Lake Charles to earn wages to support the daughter she'd had with a no-account tomcat who'd drunk himself to death upstate. In truth she'd left her in her mother's care after painful reminders of the man started showing up in their child, teenaged by that time, in the form of allure combined with uncaring. The girl was selfish and blithe yet people adored her, a mystery that made sense once you took her looks into account. “Beauty” didn't capture it. “Knockout” was more the effect.

Sallie said nothing to Richie about quitting the Bainards when she exited his car at the general store. A letter could say it later, silence just as well. He retrieved her bag from the trunk. She lied that she would return by bus to Lake Charles next week, and took a seat on a sidewalk bench awaiting her kin to come fetch her.

Richie was about to back his car into the street when a Chevy flatbed rumbled up on his left. An old lady drove, gray hair, nut-colored skin, her head barely higher than the steering wheel. The passenger on Richie's side was a young woman with dark ropy tresses that flew like a pennant over her bare elbow jutting out the truck window. Pulling alongside, she surveyed Richie's Packard as if sure it was stolen. Her expression turned sly when she met him eye to eye, the message being that no way did he rate such a classy ride but to his credit had swung the trick. Meanwhile his expression showed near religious amazement.