Honor in the Great War, persuaded Mr. Julian to join him at the Frederic Hotel for a meal. At the table Mr. Julian became very still and his face filled with shame. The elderly ex-soldier did not understand and wondered what he could have said to hurt his friend, then realized that Mr. Julian had soiled himself.
But one fine morning Mr. Julian awoke before dawn, seemingly a new man, and worked in his flower garden and bathed in a great iron tub in the washhouse behind the cottage and watched the sun rise and the mullet fly on the bay. He packed a suitcase and whistled a song and dressed in a white linen suit and put on his Panama hat and had his driver take him to the train depot in New Iberia, where he caught the Sunset Limited for New Orleans. From the club car, a drink in his hand, he watched the familiar world he had grown up in, one of columned homes and oak-lined streets and gentle people, slip past the window.
In New Orleans he checked into a luxury hotel on Canal and while unpacking he heard a woman weeping through the wall. When he knocked on her door, she told him her husband had left her and their ten-year-old daughter and she was sorry for her emotional behavior.
He drank whiskey sours in the bar and danced with the cocktail waitress. That evening he dined at the Court of Two Sisters and strolled through the French Quarter and attended a religious service in a storefront church whose congregation was composed mostly of black people. In front of St. Louis Cemetery he talked about baseball with a beat cop and put a twenty-dollar bill in the begging can of a blind woman.
A formal dance was being held at his hotel, and he stood in the entrance of the ballroom and watched the dancers and listened to the orchestra, his hat held loosely on his fingers, his face marked with a wistfulness that caused the hostess to invite him inside. Then he stopped for a cup of coffee in the bar and asked that a dozen roses and a dish of ice cream, with cinnamon sprinkled on it, be sent up to his room. When the tray was delivered on a cart, he instructed the waiter to leave it in the corridor.
A few moments later Mr. Julian moved the cart in front of the door of the woman whose husband had abandoned her and their daughter. He tapped with the brass knocker on her door and went back inside his room and opened the French doors that gave onto the balcony and looked out at the pink glow of the sky over Lake Pontchartrain while the curtains puffed in the breeze around his head. Then Julian LaSalle mounted the rail on the balcony and like a giant white crane sailed out over the streetcars and the flow of traffic and the neon-lit palm trees along the neutral ground twelve stories below.
CHAPTER 8
In the morning I ran the name of Marvin Oates, the Bible salesman, through the NCIC computer.
But the sheet I got back contained no surprises. Besides his arrest on a bad check charge, he had been picked up for nothing more serious than petty theft and failure to appear, panhandling in New Orleans, and causing a disturbance at a homeless shelter in Los Angeles. '
'You know a guy named Marvin Oates?' I asked Helen.
She was gazing out my office window, her hands in her back pockets.
'His mother was a drunk who used to drift in and out of town?' she asked.
'I'm not sure.'
'She was from Mississippi or Alabama. They used to live by the train tracks. What about him?'
'He was trying to sell door-to-door out by my house. I didn't like the way he looked at Alafair.'
'Get used to it.'
'Pardon?'
'Your daughter's beautiful. What do you expect?'
She laughed to herself as she walked out the door.
I waited five minutes, then went down the corridor to her office.
'You ever hear of an overseer on Poinciana Island by the name of Legion?' I asked.
'No. Who is he?' she replied.
'This character Oates says 'Legion' is the name of a demon in the New Testament. Oates believes people of color are descended from the lost tribe of Ham. Think Oates might be unusual in any way?'
She brushed at her nose with a Kleenex and went back to reading an open file on her desk.
'Take a ride with me down to Baldwin,' I said.
'What for?'
'I thought I might check out a guy from my boyhood.'
We drove south on the four-lane, through sugarcane acreage that had been created out of the alluvial flood-plain of Bayou Teche. The sky was sealed with clouds that had the bright sheen of silk or steam but offered no rain, and I could see cracks in the baked rows of the cane fields and dust devils spinning across the road and breaking apart on the asphalt. The air smelled like salt and the odor a streetcar gives off when it scotches across an electrical connection. Up ahead was the gray outline of an abandoned sugar mill.
When we are injured emotionally or systematically humiliated or made to feel base about ourselves in our youth, we are seldom given the opportunity later to confront our persecutors on equal terms and to show them up for the cowards they are. So we often create a surrogate scenario in which the vices of our tormentors, the fears that fed their cruelty, the self-loathing that drove them to hurt the innocent, eventually consume them and make them worthy of pity and in effect drive them from our lives.
But sometimes the dark fate that should have been theirs just does not shake properly out of the box.
Helen pulled off the road and stopped at a small grocery store in front of a cluster of shacks. In the distance the rectangular tin outline of the sugar mill was silhouetted against the sky. On the side of the grocery was a crude porte cochere and under it sat a thin, black-haired man in a blood-smeared butcher's apron, peeling potatoes and onions into a stainless-steel cauldron that was boiling on a grated butane burner that rested on the ground. Close by, a gunnysack crackling with live crawfish lay on top of a wood worktable.
I opened my badge holder. 'I was looking for a fellow by the name of Legion,' I said.
'Legion Guidry?' the man said. He dropped the peeled onions and potatoes into the cauldron and dumped a bowl of artichokes and husked yellow corn on top of them.
'I only know him by the name Legion,' I said.
'He don't come in here,' the man said.
'Where's he live?' I asked.
The man shook his head and didn't reply. He turned his back on me and began cutting open a box of seasoning.
'Sir, I asked you a question,' I said.
'He works at the casino. Go ax up there. He don't come in here,' the man replied. He raised his finger for added emphasis.
Helen and I drove to the casino on the Indian reservation, a garish obscenity of a building that had been constructed in what was once a rural Indian slum overgrown with persimmons and gum trees and swamp maples. Now the poor whites and blacks, the trusting and the naive, the working-class pensioners and the welfare recipients and those who signed their names with an
A St. Alary Parish deputy sheriff, directing traffic in the casino parking lot, told us where we could find the man named Legion. The man who had once lived in my childhood dreams was down the road, under a picnic shelter, eating a barbecue sandwich on top of a paper towel that he had spread neatly on the table to catch his crumbs. He wore a starched gray uniform, with dark blue flaps on the pockets, and a polished brass name tag on his shirt, with his title, Head of Security, under the engraved letters of his name. His hair was still black, with white streaks in it, his face creased vertically with furrows like those in dried fruit. A crude caricature of a naked woman was tattooed with blue ink on the underside of each of his forearms. I looked at him a long time without speaking.
