DR10 - Sunset Limited (6 page)

THE MAN WITH BULLDOG jowls was named
Harpo Delahoussey, and he
ran a ramshackle nightclub for redbones (people who are part French,
black, and Indian) by a rendering plant on an oxbow off the Atchafalaya
River. When the incinerators were fired up at the plant, the smoke from
the stacks filled the nearby woods and dirt roads with a stench like
hair and chicken entrails burned in a skillet. The clapboard nightclub
didn't lock its doors from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night;
the parking lot (layered with thousands of flattened beer cans) became
a maze of gas-guzzlers and pickup trucks; and the club's windows
rattled and shook with the reverberations of rub board and thimbles,
accordion, drums, dancing feet, and electric guitars whose feedback
screeched like fingernails on slate.

At the back, in a small kitchen, Ida Broussard sliced potatoes
for french fries while caldrons of red beans and rice and robin gumbo
boiled on the stove, a bandanna knotted across her forehead to keep the
sweat out of her eyes.

But Cool Breeze secretly knew, even though he tried to deny it
to himself, that Harpo Delahoussey had not blackmailed him simply to
acquire a cook, or even to reinforce that old lesson that every coin
pressed into your palm for shining shoes, cutting cane, chopping
cotton, scouring ovens, dipping out grease traps, scrubbing commodes,
cleaning dead rats from under a house, was dispensed by the hand of a
white person in the same way that oxygen could be arbitrarily measured
out to a dying hospital patient.

One night she wouldn't speak when he picked her up, sitting
against the far door of the pickup truck, her shoulders rounded, her
face dull with a fatigue that sleep never took away.

"He ain't touched you, huh?" Cool Breeze said.

"Why you care? You brung me to the club, ain't you?"

"He said the rendering plant gonna shut down soon. That mean
he won't be needing no more cook. What you gonna do if I'm in Angola?"

"I tole you not to bring that whiskey in the store. Not to
listen to that white man from Miss'sippi sold it to you. Tole you,
Willie."

Then she looked out the window so he could not see her face.
She wore a rayon blouse that had green and orange lights in it, and her
back was shaking under the cloth, and he could hear her breath seizing
in her throat, like hiccups she couldn't control.

HE TRIED TO GET permission from his
parole officer to move
back to New Orleans.

Permission denied.

He caught Ida inhaling cocaine off a broken mirror behind the
house. She drank fortified wine in the morning, out of a green bottle
with a screw cap that made her eyes lustrous and frightening. She
refused to help out at the store. In bed she was unresponding, dry when
he entered her, and finally not available at all. She tied a perforated
dime on a string around her ankle, then one around her belly so that it
hung just below her navel.

"Gris-gris is old people's superstition," Cool Breeze said.

"I had a dream. A white snake, thick as your wrist, it bit a
hole in a melon and crawled inside and ate all the meat out."

"We gonna run away."

"Mr. Harpo gonna be there. Your PO gonna be there. State of
Lou'sana gonna be there."

He put his hand under the dime that rested on her lower
stomach and ripped it loose. Her mouth parted soundlessly when the
string razored burns along her skin.

The next week he walked in on her when she was naked in front
of the mirror. A thin gold chain was fastened around her hips.

"Where you get that?" he asked.

She brushed her hair and didn't answer. Her breasts looked as
swollen and full as eggplants.

"You ain't got to cook at the club no more. What they gonna
do? Hurt us more than they already have?" he said.

She took a new dress off a hanger and worked it over her head.
It was red and sewn with colored glass beads like an Indian woman might
wear.

"Where you got money for that?" he asked.

"Mine to know, yours to find out," she replied. She fastened a
hoop earring to her lobe with both hands, smiling at him while she did
it.

He began shaking her by the shoulders, her head whipping like
a doll's on her neck, her eyelids closed, her lipsticked mouth open in
a way that made his phallus thicken in his jeans. He flung her against
the bedroom wall, so hard he heard her bones knock into the wood, then
ran from the house and down the dirt road, through a tunnel of darkened
trees, his brogans exploding through the shell of ice on the chuckholes.

IN THE MORNING HE tried to make it up
to her. He warmed boudin
and fixed cush-cush and coffee and hot milk, and set it all out on the
table and called her into the kitchen. The dishes she didn't smash on
the wall she threw into the back yard.

He drove his pickup truck through the bright coldness of the
morning, the dust from his tires drifting out onto the dead hyacinths
and the cattails that had winter-killed in the bayou, and found Harpo
Delahoussey at the filling station he owned in town, playing dominoes
with three other white men at a table by a gas stove that hissed with
blue flame. Delahoussey wore a fedora, and a gold badge on the pocket
of his white shirt. None of the men at the table looked up from their
game. The stove filled the room with a drowsy, controlled warmth and
the smell of shaving cream and aftershave lotion and testosterone.

"My wife ain't gonna be working at the club no more," Cool
Breeze said.

"Okay," Delahoussey said, his eyes concentrated on the row of
dominoes in front of him.

The room seemed to scream with silence.

"Mr. Harpo, maybe you ain't understood me," Cool Breeze said.

"He heard you, boy. Now go on about your business," one of the
other men said.

A moment later, by the door of his truck, Cool Breeze looked
back through the window. Even though he was outside, an oak tree
swelling with wind above his head, and the four domino players were in
a small room beyond a glass, he felt it was he who was somehow on
display, in a cage, naked, small, an object of ridicule and contempt.

Then it hit him:
He's old. An old man like that,
one piece of black jelly roll just the same as another. So who give her
the dress and wrap the gold chain around her stomach
?

He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his canvas coat. His
ears roared with sound and his heart thundered in his chest.

HE WOKE IN THE middle of the night and
put on an overcoat and
sat under a bare lightbulb in the kitchen, poking at the ashes in the
wood stove, wadding up paper and feeding sticks into the flame that
wouldn't catch, the cold climbing off the linoleum through his socks
and into his ankles, his confused thoughts wrapped around his face like
a net.

What was it that tormented him? Why was it he couldn't give it
words, deal with it in the light of day, push it out in front of him,
even kill it if he had to?

His breath fogged the air. Static electricity crackled in the
sleeves of his overcoat and leaped off his fingertips when he touched
the stove.

He wanted to blame Harpo Delahoussey. He remembered the story
his daddy, Mout', had told him of the black man from Abbeville who
broke off a butcher knife in the chest of a white overseer he caught
doing it with his wife against a tree, then had spit in the face of his
executioner before he was gagged and hooded with a black cloth and
electrocuted.

He wondered if he could ever possess the courage of a man like
that.

But he knew Delahoussey was not the true source of the anger
and discontent that made his face break a sweat and his palms ring as
though they had been beaten with boards.

He had accepted his role as cuckold, had even transported his
wife to the site of her violation by a white man (and later, from Ida's
mother, he would discover the exact nature of what Harpo Delahoussey
did to her), because his victimization had justified a lifetime of
resentment toward those who had forced his father to live gratefully on
tips while their cigar ashes spilled down on his shoulders.

Except his wife had now become a willing participant. Last
night she had ironed her jeans and shirt and laid them out on the bed,
put perfume in her bathwater, washed and dried her hair and rouged her
cheekbones to accentuate the angular beauty of her face. Her skin had
seemed to glow when she dried herself in front of the mirror, a tune
humming in her throat. He tried to confront her, force the issue, but
her eyes were veiled with secret expectations and private meaning that
made him ball his hands into fists. When he refused to drive her to the
nightclub, she called a cab.

The fire wouldn't catch. An acrid smoke, as yellow as rope,
laced with a stench of rags or chemically treated wood, billowed into
his face. He opened all the windows, and frost speckled on the
wallpaper and kitchen table. In the morning, the house smelled like a
smoldering garbage dump.

She dressed in a robe, closed the windows, opened the air lock
in the stove by holding a burning newspaper inside the draft, then
began preparing breakfast for herself at the drainboard. He sat at the
table and stared at her back stupidly, hoping she would reach into the
cabinet, pull down a bowl or cup for him, indicate in some way they
were still the people they once were.

"He tole me, you shake me again, you going away, Willie," she
said.

"Who say that?"

She walked out of the room and didn't answer.

"Who?" he called after her.

IT WAS THE LETTER that did it.

Or the letter that he didn't read in its entirety, at least
not until later.

He had driven the truck back from the store, turned into his
yard, and seen her behind the house, pulling her undergarments, jeans,
work shirts, socks, and dresses, her whole wardrobe, off the wash line.

A letter written with a pencil stub on a sheet of lined paper,
torn from a notebook, lay on the coffee table in the living room.

He could hear his breath rising and falling in his mouth when
he picked it up, his huge hand squeezing involuntarily on the bottom of
the childlike scrawl.

He crumpled up the paper in his palm and flung it into the
corner. In his mind's eye he saw Alex Guidry's fish camp, Guidry's
corduroy suit and western hat hung on deer anders, and Guidry himself
mounted between Ida's legs, his muscled buttocks thrusting his phallus
into her, her fingers and ankles biting for purchase into his white
skin.

Cool Breeze hurled the back screen open and attacked her in
the yard. He slapped her face and knocked her into the dust, then
picked her up and shook her and shoved her backward onto the wood
steps. When she tried to straighten her body with the heels of her
hands, pushing herself away from him simultaneously, he saw the smear
of blood on her mouth and the terror in her eyes, and realized, for the
first time in his life, the murderous potential and level of
self-hatred that had always dwelled inside him.

He tore down the wash line and kicked over the basket that was
draped with her clothes. The leafless branches of the pecan tree
overhead exploded with the cawing of crows. He didn't hear the truck
engine start in the front and did not realize she was gone, that he was
alone in the yard with his rage, until he saw the truck speeding into
the distance, the detritus of the sugarcane harvest spinning in its
vacuum.

TWO DUCK HUNTERS FOUND her body at
dawn, in a bay off the
Atchafalaya River. Her fingers were coated with ice and extended just
above the water's surface, the current silvering across the tips. A
ship's anchor chain, one with links as big as bricks, was coiled around
her torso like a fat serpent. The hunters tied a Budweiser carton to
her wrist to mark the spot for the sheriffs department.

A week later Cool Breeze found the crumpled paper he had flung
in the corner. He spread it flat on the table and began reading where
he had left off before he had burst into the back yard and struck her
across the face.

I slept with him because I wanted to and because I
was so mad at you and hurt over what you did to the wife that has
always loved you
.

But Alex Guidry dont want a blakgirl in his life, at
least not on the street in the day lite. I know that now and I dont
care and I tole him that. I will leave if you want me to and not blame
you for it. I just want to say I am sorry for treating you so bad but
it was like you had thrown me away forever.

Your wife,

Ida Broussard

COOL BREEZE LAY ON a row of air
cushions inside the cabin
cruiser, his arm in a sling, his face sweating. When he had finished
speaking, Megan looked at me sadly, her eyes prescient with the
knowledge that a man's best explanation for his life can be one that
will never satisfy him or anybody else.

"Y'all ain't gonna say nothing?" he asked.

"Let go of it, partner," I said.

"The Man always got the answer," he replied.

"Your daddy is an honest and decent person. If you're still
ashamed of him because he shined shoes, yeah, I think that's a problem,
Breeze," I said.