wanted to not see Mack out there on the road, in his fedora and two-tone shoes and zoot slacks, not think about the pearl-handled, two-shot derringer I had seen once in his glove box.
But my father looked from his work to me, then out at Mack and back at me again, and the moment went out of his face and he lay his ball peen hammer on a bench and picked up the side of the chicken coop and examined its squareness and felt its balance. I pushed my hands under my thighs to stop them from shaking.
When my mother drove away with Mack, I thought there might still be hope for our family. My father, Big Aldous, the grinning, irresponsible derrick man and saloon brawler, was still my father. Even at that age I knew he had chosen me over an act of violence. And my mother, Mae, was still my mother. Her lust and her inability to deal with my father's alcoholism made her the victim of bad men, but she was not bad herself. She loved me and she loved my father, or she would not have fought with him.
But now there were people who called my mother a whore.
I had never heard that word used in association with her. During my mother's lifetime whores didn't work in laundries for thirty cents an hour or wait tables in beer gardens and clapboard bars and hoe out victory gardens for a sack of string beans.
Had it not been for Clete Purcel, I would have squeezed off my.45 on the back of the jigger named Steve Andropolis because he called my mother a whore. In my mind's eye I still saw myself doing it. I saw a worthless, running, pitiful facsimile of a human being look back at me, his mouth round with a silent scream, his arms spread against a bloodred sky. I looked down at my hand, and it was tightened into a ball, the forefinger kneading against the thumb.
I threw my coffee into the flower bed and tried to rub the fatigue out of my face.
Bootsie's car turned into the drive and stopped in front, then I heard the crinkle of paper bags as she unloaded the groceries and carried them across the gallery. Normally she would have driven to the back of the house to unload, but our conversations had been few since the night of her revelation about her affair with Jim Gable.
Why had I demeaned him as Bootsie and I lay there in the dark? It had been the same as telling her she had somehow willingly shared her life and person with a degenerate. Her second husband, Ralph Giacano, had lied his way into her life, telling her he had a degree in accounting from Tulane, that he owned half of a vending machine company, that, in effect, he was an unexciting, ordinary but decent middle-class New Orleans businessman.
He was an accountant, all right, but as a bean counter for the Mob; the other half of the vending machine operation was owned by Didi Gee.
She had to fly to Miami to identify the body after the Colombians blew Ralph's face off. She also found out his dead mistress had been the bank officer who had set up the second mortgage on her house in the Garden District and had helped Ralph drain her accounts and the equity portfolio the bank managed for her.
She had been betrayed, degraded, and bankrupted. Was it any wonder a man like Gable, a police officer of detective grade, supposedly a man of integrity, could insinuate his way into her life?
Bootsie opened the screen door behind me and stood on the top step. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her ankles and the tops of her feet inside the moccasins she wore.
'Did you eat yet?' she said.
'I had that potato salad in the icebox.'
'You might have to do an extra mile on your run,' she replied.
I leaned forward on my forearms and folded my hands between my knees. The ducks were turning in circles on the pond, their wings fluttering, sprinkling the water's surface.
'I think you're a great lady, Boots. I don't think any man deserves you. I know I don't,' I said.
The light had washed out of the sky; the wind blowing across my neighbor's cane field was touched with rain and smelled of damp earth and the wildflowers that grew along the coulee. Bootsie sat down on the step behind me, then I felt her fingertips on the back of my neck and in my hair.
'You want to go inside?' she asked.
Later that night the weather turned unseasonably cool and it started to rain, hard, sheets of it marching across marshlands, cane fields, tin roofs, bayous, and oak-lined communities up the Teche. In the little town of Loreauville, a man parked his pickup truck outside a clapboard bar and walked through the rain to the entrance. He wore jeans low on his hips, exposing his midriff, and pointed boots and black-rimmed glasses and a straw cowboy hat.
When he sat at the bar, which was deserted because of the bad weather, he removed his hat and set it crown-down on the stool next to him. He wiped his glasses with a paper napkin, then forgot they were dry and picked them up and wiped them again, his expression seemingly troubled by a concern or problem he couldn't resolve. Later the bartender described the man as 'handsome, with kind of a ducktail haircut… Likable, I guess, but I wouldn't make him for no dishware man.'
The man ordered a diet soda and opened a vinyl folder wrapped with rubber bands and filled with invoices of some kind.
'You know a family named Grayson back in the quarters?' he said.
'Cain't say I do,' the bartender replied.
The man looked down at his invoice folder, widening his eyes, as though bemused. 'They live next door to the Dautrieve family,' he said.
'Oh, yeah. Go back up the road till you see some shotgun cabins. The Dautrieves are on the second row,' the bartender said.
'They won a bunch of dishware.'
'Who?'
'The Graysons.' The man held up a brochure with pictures of dishes and cups on it to make his point.
The bartender nodded vaguely. The man with the invoice folder stared into space, as though he saw meaning in the air, in the lightning that trembled in the trees along the bayou. He paid for his diet drink and thanked the bartender and drove up the road, in the opposite direction from the quarters.
It was still raining the next night when Little Face Dautrieves aunt left for her janitorial job at the hospital in New Iberia and Little Face changed her baby's diapers, put a pacifier in his mouth, and lay him down in his crib. The cabin had been built in the last century, but it stayed warm and dry and snug in bad weather. When it rained Little Face liked to open the bedroom window partway and let the breeze blow across the baby's crib and her bed.
In the middle of the night she thought she heard a truck engine outside and tires crunching on clamshells, then the sound disappeared in the thunder and she fell asleep again.
When she awoke he was standing over her, his form-fitting T-shirt molded wetly against his torso. His body had a fecund odor, like water in the bottom of a coulee; a nickel-plated revolver, the handles wrapped with electrician's tape, hung from his gloved right hand.
'I came in out of the rain,' he said.
'Yeah, you done that. There ain't no rain in the house,' she replied, raising herself up on her hands, a wishbone breaking in her throat.
'You mind if I stay here? I mean, stay out of the rain?' he asked.
'You here, ain't you?'
His palm opened and closed on the grips of the pistol, the edges of the tape sticking, popping on his skin. His face was pale, his mouth soft and red in the flashes of lightning outside. He wet his lips and cut his eyes at the window, where mist was drifting across the sill and dampening the baby's mattress.
The man pushed the window tight and gazed down at the baby, who slept with his rump in the air. A pillow was stuffed into an empty space where one of the wood runners was missing. For some reason, perhaps because of the noise the window made, the baby woke and started to cry. The man pried the pillow loose and kneaded it in his left hand and turned toward Little Face.
'Why'd you get mixed up with a bunch of geeks? Why'd you run your mouth?' the man said. His black hair was combed back neatly on both sides, his skin glistening with water, his navel rising and falling above his jeans.
'Write out a list of the people ain't geeks. I'll start hanging 'round wit' them,' she replied.
'Make that baby be quiet.'
'You done woke him up. Babies gonna cry when they get woke up.'
