Weingart stared straight ahead, his expression self-effacing, his hands resting on the spokes of his steering wheel.
“When is the last time you UA-ed?” Top asked.
“I’m not on parole. I was commuted out, all sins forgiven.”
“I can always spot a guy who has dirty urine. I think that’s why you have a twitch in your face.”
“I’m getting a crick in my neck. Do you mind if I get out of the car?”
“You’re not dropping or snorting or smoking or shooting or any of that stuff?”
“You’ve got it.”
“But if you’re not under the influence, what’s your excuse for using the word ‘fuck’ to my mother and Miss Lavern? Bet you didn’t know I was a lifer in the Crotch.”
“In the
“I think guys like you are draft dodgers. You hide out in jails while other people go to war. Look at your face in the mirror. Half of it looks like a glob of Jell-O trembling in a bowl. It’s embarrassing to look at.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my face.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“Listen-”
“You giving me orders now?”
“No, sir.”
“First it was my mother, now it’s me. You don’t know when to quit, do you?” Top said. “You’ve got a red ant.”
“What?”
Top slapped Weingart hard on the side of his head. “There,” he said. “Those things can really string you.”
“Want to roust me? Do it. I’ve seen it all. I was in Huntsville.”
“From what I hear, you saw it on your knees. Or draped over a chair. There you go with that twitch again. Hang on, another red ant.”
Top slapped him on the back of the head, this time so hard Weingart’s eyes watered. Then he pinched something off Weingart’s neck and held it up in front of him. “See, an ant. I told you. I got to get going. Drop by the department and have coffee sometime. But get a doc to check out that twitch. If people didn’t know better, they might think you’re a yard punk who’s scared shitless of authority.”
When Weingart drove out of the parking lot, one wheel went over the curb and came down hard in the street, the exhaust pipe and back bumper scraping on the concrete.
THAT EVENING AT twilight, on a back road in St. Martin Parish, Weingart parked his Mustang in front of a crowded nightclub that catered to people who drifted back and forth across the color line. In a more primitive time, some of them had been derogatorily called “redbones.” Most of them were probably part white, part Chitimacha Indian, part Cajun, and part black. As a rule, they referred to themselves as Creoles, a term that, in the early nineteenth century, connoted the descendants of the Spanish and French colonists who settled New Orleans and created the plantation society that surrounded it. In general, they were a handsome people; they often had green or blue eyes and reddish or jet-black hair and skin that looked as though it had been blown with brick dust. In St. Martin Parish, this back-roads club was their special place. Clifton Chenier, the man most emblematic of zydeco music, had been a regular performer there and is buried in an unmarked grave not far from it. In spite of its reputation for underage drinking violations, outrageous amounts of noise, and erotic trysts back in the woods, the club had an innocence about it, perhaps because it was part of the pagan ambience that always lurked on the edges of our French-Catholic culture.
The top was up on Weingart’s convertible when he turned in to the lot, so no one paid particular attention to him until he stepped out on the gravel in his pleated white slacks and navy blue terry-cloth shirt and ostrich-skin boots with silver plate on the tips and heels, his clean features lit by the Christmas-tree lights that stayed on the club’s windows year-round.
He entered the club, his expression benign, his chin tilted slightly upward. He passed the bar and the propane stove where a big cauldron of robin gumbo was simmering. He passed a green felt table where men were playing bourree in a cone of yellow light given off by a bulb inside a tin shade. He sat at a table by himself not far from the dance floor and the bandstand and ordered a longneck beer and a basket of french fries that had been cooked in chicken fat.
The girl who joined him wore a sundress printed with big flowers and had skin that glowed like a bright penny. Her hair was mahogany-colored and blond-streaked and was tied in back with a purple ribbon that had sequins on it. She was smiling when she pulled out a chair, and anyone watching the scene would have assumed she knew Robert Weingart. But that was not the case. He turned his palms up and jutted his head forward, as though silently saying,
“I’m Tee Jolie Melton. My sister cain’t be here tonight,” she said. “So I came instead.”
“I’m not sure I’m cluing in on the message here.”
“I know you was suppose to meet her down the road, like you done before. About the audition, right?”
“News to me.”
“You was gonna take her for the voice test.”
Weingart shook his head, his lips crimped. “Sorry, not me,” he said.
She looked away, smiling tolerantly, then brought her eyes back on his. “See, my sister kind of misled you. She’s only sixteen. Our mama don’t want her going out late at night. But I sing, too. I sing at church and wit’ a band in Breaux Bridge and Lafayette sometimes. She tole me you like to come in here for french fries and a drink before you pick her up at the grocery.”
He thought hard on it. “You’re talking about the girl I gave a ride to when it was raining. She works in that store in St. Martinville across from Possum’s. That’s your sister, huh? Yeah, I see the resemblance. I think your sister got the wrong idea. I probably said something about her voice and the fact that I know some people in the entertainment business, but she’s just a kid.”
Tee Jolie gazed into space as though not quite understanding everything she was being told. “I bought your book.”
“No kidding?”
“Why you call it
“You didn’t read it?”
“I got to use the dictionary a lot. You know some words, you.”
“In the Texas farm system, you see a lot of green. Oceans of it. Everywhere you look. I have postgraduate degrees in tractor operation and bucking bales.”
“You went to school in there?”
He pulled at the flesh under his chin with two fingers. “What are you, three or four years older than your sister?”
“That’s about right.”
“Actually, you look more mature than that. In the best way. She’s not as pretty as you, either.”
“I t’ink she is.”
“That’s because you’re a good sister. You want a drink?”
“I don’t mind.”
“I’m sorry, I forget your sister’s name.”
“Blue.”
“I’m sorry I gave Blue the wrong impression. She seems like a nice kid. I hated to see her standing in the rain like that.”
“But you took her out before? She knows everyt’ing about you.”
“If I see somebody walking along a road, particularly at night or in the rain, I give them a ride. People are killed every three or four days by hit-and-run drivers around here.”
“But you was gonna pick her up tonight, right?”
He put a french fry in his mouth, then pushed the basket toward her. He stared at her for a long time. “You
