Jolie Blon’s Bounce

skin.

'What are you shooting?' she asked.

'Speedballs, smack straight up, sometimes smack and whiskey, sometimes I ain't sure. There's a bunch of us cook with the same spoon, shoot with the same works sometimes.'

'I'm going to have you picked up. I suggest when you're allowed to use the phone, you contact your attorney. Then you have him call me.'

'I used to cut your grass. I run errands for your granddaddy. Perry LaSalle don't care about black people, Miss Barbara. He care about hisself. They gonna kill my gran'mama. They'll kill my sister, too.'

'Who's going to kill them?'

He balled both his fists and squeezed them into his temples. 'The day I say that, that's the day my gran'mama and sister die. Ain't no place to go wit' it, Miss Barbara,' Tee Bobby said.

Barbara released the magazine from the butt of her.25, ejected the round from the chamber, and dropped the magazine and the pistol into the pocket of her robe.

'How many times did you fix today?' she asked.

'T'ree. No, four.'

'Get up,' she said.

'What for?'

'You're going to take a shower. You stink.'

She lifted him by one arm from the floor, then pushed him ahead of her up the stairs.

'You gonna dime me?' he asked.

'Right now I recommend you shut your mouth.' She shoved him inside the bathroom door. 'I have some of my brother's clothes here. I'm going to throw them and a paper bag inside. When you finish showering, put your dirty things in the paper bag. Then wipe down the shower and the floor and put the soiled towel in the basket. If you ever break into my house again, I'm going to blow your head off.'

She shut the bathroom door and punched in a number on the telephone.

'This is Barbara Shanahan. Here's your chance to prove what a great guy you are,' she said into the receiver.

'It's one in the morning,' I said.

'You want to pick up Tee Bobby at my apartment or would you like him to sweat out a four-balloon load in a jail cell?' she asked.

When I got to Barbara's, Tee Bobby was sitting in the living room, dressed in oversize khakis and a gold and purple LSU T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He kept sniffling and wiping his nose with the back of his wrist.

'They sent you?' he said.

'Go down to my truck and wait there,' I said.

'Detox ain't open. What you up to?' he said.

'I'm about to throw you down the stairs,' Barbara said.

After Tee Bobby was gone, she told me everything that had happened.

'Why didn't you have the city cops pick him up?' I asked.

'This case has too many question marks in it,' she replied.

'You have doubts about his guilt?'

'I didn't say that. Others were involved. That dead girl deserves better than what she's getting.'

Her terry-cloth robe was cinched above her hips. Even in her slippers she was slightly taller than I. In the soft light her freckles looked like they had been feather-dusted on her skin. Her hair was dark red, and she lifted a lock of it off her brow and for just a moment reminded me of a high school girl caught unawares in a camera's lens.

'Why are you staring at me like that?' she asked.

'No reason.'

'You taking Tee Bobby to his grandmother's?'

'I thought I'd cuff him to a train track,' I said.

A grin started to break at the corner of her mouth.

Tee Bobby was sitting in the passenger seat of my truck when I got downstairs. He had vomited on the gravel and the foulness and density of his breath filled the cab of the truck. His hands were pressed between his legs, his back shivering.

'Are your grandmother and sister in harm's way, Tee Bobby?' I asked before starting the engine.

'I ain't saying no more. I was sick up there. I couldn't keep my thoughts straight.'

'Even if you beat the charges, where do you think all this will end?'

'Gonna be back playing my gig.'

'You want me to drop you somewhere you can fix?'

We were on the drawbridge over the Teche. I could hear the tires on the steel grid in the silence.

'I ain't got no money,' he answered.

'What if I gave you some?'

'You'd do that? I'd really appreciate that. I'll pay you back, too. There's a joint off Loreauville Road. I just need to flatten out the kinks, then maybe join some kind of program.'

'I don't think there's a lot of real hope for you, Tee Bobby.'

'Oh, man, what you doin' to me?'

'I can't get Amanda Boudreau out of my mind. I see her in my sleep. Does she bother you at all?' I said.

'Amanda hurt me, man, but it wasn't me shot her.' His voice was squeezed in his throat, his eyes wet.

'Hurt you how?'

'Made like we couldn't have no kind of relationship. She say it was 'cause I was so much older. But I knowed it was 'cause I'm black.'

'You want to come down to the department and make a statement?'

He tried to open the truck door, even though I was up on the Loreauville Road now, speeding past a rural slum by the four corners. I reached across the seat and pulled the door shut, then hit him on the side of the face with my elbow.

'You want to kill yourself, do it on your own time,' I said.

He cupped one hand over his ear and cheek, then he began to shake, as though his bones were disconnected.

'I'm gonna be sick. I got to fix, man,' he said.

I drove him out in the country to the home of a black minister who ran a shelter for alcoholics and homeless men. When I left, heading up the dirt track toward the highway, the sky was still black, bursting with all the constellations, the pastures sweet with the smell of grass and horses and night-blooming flowers.

It was one of those moments when you truly thank all the spiritual powers of the universe you were spared the fate that could have been yours.

My partner, Helen Soileau, was eating outside at the McDonald's on East Main later the same day when she saw Marvin Oates towing his suitcase filled with his wares up East Main, his powder-blue, long-sleeved shirt damp at the armpits. He paused in the shade of a live oak in front of the old Trappey's bottling plant and wiped his face, then continued on to the McDonald's, took his sack lunch and a thermos out of his suitcase, and began eating at a stone table, outside, under the trees.

An unshaved man with jowls like a St. Bernard was eating at another table a few feet away. He picked up his hamburger and fries and sat down next to Marvin without being invited, sweeping crumbs off the table, flattening a napkin on the stone, knocking over Marvin's thermos. Marvin righted his thermos but remained hunched over his sandwich, his eyes riveted on a neutral spot ten inches in front of his nose.

'You bring your own lunch to a restaurant?' the unshaved man asked.

'I don't know you,' Marvin said.

'Yeah, you do. They call me Frankie Dogs. Some people say it's because I look like a dog. But that ain't true. I used to race greyhounds at Biscayne Dog Track. So the people I worked for started calling me Frankie Dogs. You like greyhound racing?'