Sunset Limited

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.

Dear Willie,

You wanted to know who the man was I been sleeping with. I am telling you his name not out of meaness but because you will find out anyway and I dont want you to go back to prison. Alex Guidry was good to me when you were willing to turn me over to Mr. Harpo because of some moonshine whisky. You cant know what it is like to have that old man put his hand on you and tell you to come into the shed with him and make you do the things I had to do. Alex wouldnt let Mr. Harpo bother me any more and I slept with him because I wanted to and-

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.