cardboard, the fields flooded, the dirt road like a long wet, yellow scar through the cane, and moccasins as thick as Mae's arms crawled from the ditches and bumped under her tires when she drove to work. She mopped floors and hauled trash to the rusted metal barrels in back until 10 a.m., when she saw Ladrine drive a pickup into the parking lot with a hydraulic lift in the rear. He got out, slammed the door of the cab, and thumped a hand truck up the wood steps into the bar.
Later, from in back, she heard him laboring with a heavy object, then she heard the hydraulic lift whining and his pickup truck driving away.
He returned at noontime and opened the cash register and counted out several bills and pieces of silver on the bar. As an afterthought he went back to the register drawer and removed an additional ten-dollar bill and added it to the stack on the bar.
'I got to let you go, Mae,' he said.
'What you fixing to do?' she said.
He broke a raw egg in an RC cola and drank it.
'I ain't done nothing,' he said.
'You a big fool don't have nobody to look after him. I ain't going nowhere,' she said.
He grinned at her, the corner of his rnouth smeared with egg yoke, and she was reminded in that moment of a husband whose recklessness and courage and irresponsibility made him both the bane and natural victim of his enemies.
Ladrine opened the New Orleans telephone directory and thumbed through the white pages to the listings that began with the letter 'G.'
He reached under the bar and picked up the telephone and set it down heavily in front of him and dialed a number.
'How you doin', suh? This is Ladrine Theriot. I t'ought it over. I called my cousin in the legislature and tole him what you gangsters been doin' down here in Lafourche Parish. He said that ain't no surprise, 'cause ain't none of you ever worked in your life, and if you ain't pimping, you stealing from each other. By the way, if you want your jukebox back, its floating down the bayou. If you hurry, you can catch it before it goes into the Gulf. T'anks. Good- bye.'
He hung up the phone and looked at it a moment, then closed his register drawer quietly and stared at the rain driving against the windows and the red and white Jax beer sign clanking on its chains, his eyes glazed over with thoughts he didn't share.
'Ladrine, Ladrine, what you gone and done?' Mae said.
Mae lived twenty miles up the state highway in a cabin she rented in the quarters of a corporation farm. The cabins were all exactly alike, tin-roofed, paintless, stained by the soot that blew from stubble fires in winter, narrow as matchboxes, with small galleries in front and privies in back. Once a week the 'rolling store,' an old school bus outfitted with shelves and packed with canned goods, brooms, overalls, work boots, pith helmets, straw hats, patent medicine, women's dresses, guitar strings, refrigerated milk and lunch meat,.22 caliber and twelve- gauge ammunition, quart jars of peanut butter and loaves of bread, rattled its way up and down the highway and braked with a screech and a clanking of gears in the quarters. People came out of their cabins and bought what they needed for the week, and sometimes' with great excitement received a special order-perhaps a plastic guitar, a first communion suit, a cigarette rolling machine-from New Orleans or Memphis.
It was Saturday and Mae had bought a sequined comb to put in her hair from the rolling store, then had bathed in the iron tub and powdered her body and dressed in her best underthings, tying a string around her hips so her slip wouldn't show, the way Negro women did. She put on her purple suit and heels, drawing her stomach in as she stood sideways in front of her bedroom mirror while Callie sat watching her.
'You t'ink I'm too fat?' she asked, pressing her hand flatly against her stomach.
'What you got in your mind ain't gonna happen,' Callie said.
'Ladrine gonna take me to the movie in Morgan City. That's all we doin'.'
'He got in the dagos' face, Mae.'
'You hung around, ain't you?'
'Zipper Clum got a new sit'ation for me in New Orleans. White man want what I got, he gonna pay for it,' Callie said.
'Maybe me and Ladrine are gonna run off.'
'What are you telling yourself? He growed up here. Coon-asses don't go nowhere. You gonna die, woman.'
Mae turned from the mirror and looked at Callie, her face empty, the words of self-assurance she wanted to speak dead on her lips.
Ladrine did not come for her that afternoon. She waited until almost dark, then drove to the club in her ancient Ford and was told by the bartender that Ladrine had left a note for her. It was written on lined paper torn from a notebook and folded in a small square, and the bartender held it between two fingers and handed it to her and went back to washing silverware. She spread the sheet of paper on the bar and looked down at it emptily, as though by concentrating on the swirls and slashes of Ladrine's calligraphy she could extrapolate meaning from the words she had never learned to read.
'I don't got my glasses, me. Can you make out what it says?' she said.
The bartender dried his hands again and picked up the sheet of paper and held it under the light. ''Dear Mae, I'm taking my boat out. Don't come back to the club no more. Sorry I couldn't call but you don't have no phone. Love, Ladrine,'' the bartender read, and handed the sheet of paper back to her.
The bartender's wrists were deep in the sink now, and she could see only his shining pate when he spoke again. 'I'd listen to him, Mae,' he said. 'Somet'ing's happened?'
'Some men from New Orleans was here. Know the way us little people get by? What you see, what you hear, you do this wit',' he said, and made a twisting motion with his fingers in front of his lips, as though turning a key in a lock.
'You tole them where Ladrine was at?' 'I ain't in this,' he said, and walked down the duck-boards to the opposite end of the bar.
She drove in the rain to Ladrine's boat shed on the bayou. A pale yellow cusp of western sun hung on the horizon, then died, and the fields were suddenly dark. But a light attached to a pole over the shed was burning brightly, illuminating four or five cars that were parked in a semicircle around the shed, like arrows pointed at a target.
The state highway was no more than fifty yards away, and cars and trucks were passing on it with regularity. Inside the warmth and dryness of those trucks and cars were ordinary people, just like her. They weren't criminals. They knew their only friends were their own kind. The ones who were lucky had jobs in the mill and hence were paid the minimum wage of one dollar and twenty-five cents an hour. The others worked for virtually nothing in the cane fields. But the highway was a tunnel of rain and darkness, and whatever happened out there by the bayou had nothing to do with those inside the tunnel. Their ability to see was selective, the fate of a friend and neighbor never registering on the periphery of their vision. That was the detail she would not be able to forget.
The planks in the board road that led to the boat shed were splintered and broken and half underwater, and Mae's car started to stall out when her front wheels sank into a flooded depression and steam hissed off her engine block. She put her car in reverse and backed up toward the highway, then cut the engine and lights and got out and walked down the incline, still dressed in her purple suit, the rain sliding like glass across the cone of light that shone down from the pole above the shed.
She could see them through the slats in the shed and the back door that yawed open above a mud-streaked wood pallet: Ladrine and two men in suits and two police officers in black slickers, the same officers who had tried to extort money from Ladrine; and a local constable, a big, overweight man who wore blue jeans, a cowboy hat, and a khaki shirt with an American flag sewn on the sleeve.
Ladrine had on strap overalls without a shirt or shoes, and his bare shoulders glowed like ivory in the damp air. He was shaking his head and arguing, when he seemed to look beyond the circle of heads around him and see Mae out in the darkness.
