Then he called out, 'I ain't gonna talk to y'all no more. I'm going home. I'm gonna fix dinner. I'm gonna call up my grandkids. I'm gonna work in my garden tomorrow. I'm gonna do all them t'ings.'
He began to retreat in the opposite direction, inching backwards along the catwalk, stepping quickly out of the shed's far side into the darkness, then running along the mud bank, his bare feet slapping like flapjacks along the waters edge.
Someone turned on a large flashlight, and one of the raincoated police officers squatted in a shooter's position under the shed, the arms extended in a two-handed grip, and fired twice with a nickel-plated revolver.
Ladrine's head jerked upward, then he toppled forward, his left hand twisted palm-outward in the center of his back, as though he had pulled a muscle while running.
The group of five under the shed walked out into the rain, the flashlight's beam growing in circumference as they neared Ladrine. He had gone into convulsions, his wrists shaking uncontrollably, as though electricity were coursing through his body.
The shooter fired a third time, and Ladrine's chest seemed to deflate, almost like a balloon, his chin tilting back, his mouth parting, as though he wanted to drink the sky.
The other raincoated officer leaned over with a handkerchief-wrapped pistol in his hand and placed it in Ladrine's palm and wrapped Ladrine's fingers around the grips and steel frame and inside the trigger guard. The officer motioned for the others to step back, then depressed the trigger and fired a solitary round into the bayou just as a bolt of lightning struck in a sugarcane field on the opposite side of the highway.
That's when they saw her running for her car.
She drove twenty miles up the highway, in the storm, her car shaking in the wind. They had not tried to follow her, but her heart continued to pound in her chest, her breath catching spasmodically in her throat as though she had been crying. The quarters where she lived loomed up out of the green-black thrashing of the cane in the fields, and she saw lights in two of the cabins. She wanted to pull off the road, pack her suitcase and few belongings and retrieve the seventy dollars she kept hidden in the binder of a scrapbook, then try to make it to New Orleans or Morgan City.
But there was no telephone in the quarters and no guarantee the people who had shot Ladrine would not show up before she could get back on the road again.
She drove on in the rain, even though she had only three dollars in her purse and less than a quarter tank of gasoline. She would stop in the next filling station on the highway and use all her money to buy gasoline. If necessary she could sleep in the car and go without food, but every ounce of fuel she put in the tank bought distance between her and the people who had killed Ladrine.
Then she rounded a curve and realized all her decisions and plans and attempts at control were the stuff of vanity. Either high winds or a tornado had knocked down telephone and power poles as far as she could see, and they lay solidly in her path, extending like footbridges across the asphalt and the rain-swollen ditches.
She drove back to the quarters and sat on the side of her bed the rest of the night. Perhaps the next day the highway would be cleared and she could drive to Morgan City and tell someone what she had seen. If she could just stay awake and not be undone by her fear and the sounds of the wind that were like fists thumping against the walls and doors of her cabin.
The morning broke cold and gray, and in her half-sleep she heard trucks out on the highway. When she looked through the window she saw people in the trucks, with furniture, mattresses, house pets, and farm animals in back.
She stripped the clothes off the hangers in the closet and stuffed them in her suitcase, pushed her dress shoes in the corners of the suitcase, pulled the seventy dollars from the binder of the scrapbook and lay it on top of her clothes. She hefted up the suitcase and ran outside into the dirt yard, her car keys already in her hand.
She stopped and stared stupidly at her car. It was tilted sideways on the frame. The right front and back tires were crushed down on the steel rims, the air stems cut in half.
An hour later a black man drove her down a dirt road through a cane field toward a weathered shack with a dead pecan tree in the yard. He wore a flannel shirt and canvas coat, and had tied down the leather cap on his head with a long strip of muslin.
'That's where you want to go?' he asked.
'Yes. Can you wait so I can make sure she's home?' Mae said.
'You didn't tell me it was Callie Patout. Ma'am, she work up at the nightclub. In the cribs.'
'I'll give you an extra half dollar if you wait. Then fifty cents more if you got to take me back.'
'Ladrine Theriot got killed shooting it out wit' a constable. I ain't having no truck with that kind of stuff. Look, smoke's coming out of the chimney. See? Ain't nothing to worry about.'
Then she was standing alone in front of the shack, watching the black man's pickup disappear down the dirt road between the cane fields, the enormous gray bowl of sky above her head.
Callie sat on a wooden footstool by the fireplace, a cup of coffee between her fingers, and would not look at her.
'What I'm suppose to do? I ain't got a car,' she said.
'You the only one, Callie.'
'There's trucks up on the state road. There's people going by all the time.'
'I stand out there, they gonna get me.'
Callie pushed her hands inside her sleeves and stared into the fire.
'This white folks' trouble, Mae. Ain't right to be dragging colored peoples in it.'
'Where I'm gonna go, huh?'
'Just ain't right. What I got that can hep? I ain't even got a job. Ain't none of it my doing,' Callie said.
Mae stood a long time in the silence, watching the firelight flicker on Callie's averted face, embarrassed at the shame and cowardice that seemed to be both her legacy and that of everyone she touched.
Mae left the shack and began walking down the dirt road. She heard the door of the cabin open behind her.
'Zipper Clum suppose to pick me up this afternoon or tomorrow morning and take me to New Orleans. Where's your suitcase at?'
'My place.'
'You should have taken it, Mae. They would have thought you was gone.'
They waited through the afternoon for Zipper Clum, but no vehicles came down the road. The day seemed to have passed without either a sunrise or a sunset, marked only by wind and a grayness that blew like smoke out of the wetlands. But that evening the temperature dropped, sucking the moisture out of the air, fringing the mud puddles with ice that looked like badgers' teeth, and a green-gold light began to rim the horizon.
Mae and Callie ate soda crackers and Vienna sausage out of cans in front of the fireplace, then Callie wiped her hands on a rag and put on a man's suit coat over her sweater and went outside to the privy. When she came back her face and eyes looked burned by the wind.
'Their car's coming, Mae. Lord God, they coming,' she said.
Mae turned and looked through the window, then rose slowly from her chair, the glow of the firelight receding from her body like warmth being withdrawn from her life. She shut her eyes and pressed a wadded handkerchief to her mouth, swallowing, her brow lined with thought or prayer or perhaps self-pity and grief that was of such a level she no longer had to contend with or blame herself for it.
'Get under the bed, you. Don't come out, neither. No matter what you hear out there. This all started when I run off with Mack. The ending ain't gonna change,' she said.
A four-door car that was gray with mud came up the road and stopped in front, and two police officers got out and stood in the dirt yard, not stepping up on the small gallery and knocking or even calling out, but simply reaching back into the car and blowing the horn, as though they would be demeaned by indicating that the home of a mulatto required the same respect and protocol as that of a white person.
Mae straightened the purple suit she still wore and stepped outside, the skin of her face tightening in the cold,
