The old owner of the nightclub had died and left his property to his half brother, a reckless, irreverent slaughterhouse butcher by the name of Ladrine Theriot. Ladrine had always wanted to be a professional cook, and he remodeled the kitchen of the club and began to serve gumbos and chicken and dirty rice dinners. He loved to cook; he loved women, and, like my father, he loved to fight with anyone foolish enough to accept his challenge.
For Mae Guillory, Ladrine had walked right out of her past. But, unlike my father, Ladrine wasn't an alcoholic.
Mae was working at the bar the night the two police officers drove an unmarked vehicle to the back door and cut their lights and walked out of the darkness in rain slickers and hats. Through the door she could see Ladrine in an undershirt and apron, butchering a hog with a cleaver on top of an enormous wood block, chopping through ribs and vertebrae, his arms and shoulders curlicued with black hair that was flecked with tiny pieces of pink meat. She did not see the faces of the officers, only their shadows, which fell across the butcher block, but she clearly heard the conversation between one officer and Ladrine.
"Tell them dagos in New Orleans I ain't buying from them no more. One man tole me the rubber he got out of the machine got holes in it. Their beer's flat and the jukebox full of rock 'n' roll. Them people in New Orleans ain't got no Cajun music?" Ladrine said. "You want to use another distributor, that's fine." Ladrine began paring the rinds off a stack of chops, his long, honed knife flicking the gray dissected pieces of fat sideways into a garbage barrel.
"There's another t'ing," he said. "I'm closing up them cribs, me. Don't be sending no more girls down here, no."
His knife paused over the meat and he raised his eyes to make his point.
"That not a problem, Ladrine," the officer said. "But your brother owed the people in New Orleans forty-three hundred dollars and change. The debt comes with the club. What they call the vig, the points, the interest, is running, tick-tock, tick-tock, all day, all night. I'd pay it if I was you."
"Oh, you need your money? Go to the graveyard. My brother's got a bunch of gold teet' in his mout'. You can have them. He don't mind," Ladrine said.
He resumed his work, his knife going chop, chop, snick, snick against the wood.
Two nights later they were back. A storm had made landfall immediately to the south, the tidal surge warping and twisting boat docks, rippling the loose planks like piano keys, and the cane in the fields was white with lightning, slashing back and forth as though the wind were blowing from four directions at once.
The two police officers ran out of the rain into the dryness of the kitchen, and one of them loosened the bulb in the light socket that hung over the butcher block, dropping the kitchen into darkness.
The nightclub was almost deserted. Mae stood behind the bar on the duckboards and stared at the kitchen door, her pulse jumping in her neck. "Callie and me need you to hep out here, Ladrine," she said.
"He's all right. Go about your business," one of the police officers said. "You can fix us some coffee, if you want. Set it on the chair by the door. I'll get it."
"Ladrine ain't caused no trouble," Mae said.
"He's a good boy. He's going to stay a good boy," the officer said. "That's right, isn't it, Ladrine?"
"Stay out of it, Mae," Callie whispered in her ear.
Mae could hear them talking now from inside the darkness, the lightning in the fields trembling like candle flame on their bodies. Ladrine was uncharacteristically subdued, perhaps even cowered by what he was being told, his shape like that of a haystack in the gloom.
"It's nothing personal. Debts have to be paid. We respect you. But you got to respect us," the officer said.
The officer picked up the demitasse of coffee and the saucer and spoon and sugar cube that Mae had set on the chair for him. He stood in the doorway and sipped from it, his back to Mae, his small hands extended out of the black folds of his slicker. His nails were clean, and his face looked rosy and handsome when the light played on it.
"Them Giacanos pretty rough, huh?" Ladrine said.
"I wouldn't know. I stay on their good side," the officer said.
"I'll t'ink about it, me," Ladrine said.
"I knew you'd say that," the officer said, and placed his hand on Ladrine's arm, then set down his empty cup and saucer and went out the door with his partner in a swirl of rain and wind.
"You okay, Ladrine? They ain't hurt you, huh?" Mae asked.
"Ain't nothing wrong with me," he replied, his face bloodless.
The storm passed, but another was on its way. The next morning was dismal. The sky was the color of 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 i
n 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.
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.