by Louise Penny
“He takes the fall for other people and resents himself. You never do that?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Lucky you.” She ordered a whiskey sour.
“Miss Loreen, they say if you think you’ve got a problem with it, you probably do.”
“Too late, sailor.”
She watched the bartender make her drink in the blender and pour it into a glass. She drank it half empty, her eyes closed, her face at peace. “Did you know that song was banned from the Grand Ole Opry?”
“No.”
“It’s the female answer to ‘The Wild Side of Life,’” she said.
“You know a lot about country music.”
“I got news for you,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know shit about anything.”
“You shouldn’t talk rough like that.”
“Yeah?”
“I think you put on an act. You’re a nice lady.”
She stared into the gloom, her eyes sleepy. The wall calendar had a glossy picture on it; a cowboy on a horse was looking into the distance at purple mountains, snow on the peaks.
“I went to a powwow once in Montana,” I said. “Hundreds of Indian children were dancing in jingle shirts, all of them bouncing up and down. You should have heard the noise.”
“Why are you talking about Indians?”
“Whenever I’m down about something, I think about those Indian kids dancing, the drums pounding away.”
“You’re not a regular guy, I mean, not like you meet in this place.”
Her bag lay open on the bar. I could see the steel frame and checkered grips of a revolver inside. I touched the bag with one finger. “What you’ve got in there can get a person in trouble.”
She turned her face so I could see her bruise more clearly. “Like I’m not already?”
“Why do somebody else’s time?”
“It beats the graveyard.” She licked the rim of her glass. “You know where this is going to end.”
“What’s going to end?”
“You got a place?”
When I didn’t reply, she lowered her hand until it was under the bar and put it in mine. “Did you hear me?”
Don’t answer. Say goodbye. Walk into the sunlight and get in the truck. It’s never too late. “The Teche Motel in New Iberia,” I said. “It’s on the bayou. When the sun sets behind the oaks, you’d think it was the last day on earth.”
She squeezed my hand, hard.
When I woke up the next morning, she was sitting at the table by the window shade in her panties and bra, writing on a piece of stationery, an empty bottle of Cold Duck on the floor.
“You were talking about the Indian dancers in your sleep,” she said.
“What’d I say?”
“They’re happy. The way kids ought to be.”
I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies. Between the curtains I could see a shrimp boat passing on Bayou Teche; the wake, yellow and frothy, slapped the oak and cypress trees along the bank.
“My husband says Indians are no good,” she said.
“What’s he know about Indians?”
“He’s an expert on everything.”
“Did he give you your wallet?”
“For Christmas. With a naked woman on it.”
I didn’t speak.
“Why’d you ask?” she asked.
“Was he in the pen?”
“His brother is a guard in Huntsville. The whole family works in prisons. If they weren’t herding convicts, they’d be doing time themselves.”
“Were you writing me a Dear John?”
“I was going to tell you last night didn’t happen.”
“That’s how you feel about it?”
“My feelings don’t matter.”
“To me they do. Tear it up.”
“You’ve never messed around, have you?”
“Not with a married woman, if that’s what you mean.”
“You know what that just did to my stomach?”
“Way I see it, a man who hits his wife doesn’t have claim.”
“Tell the state of Louisiana that,” she said. “Tell my in-laws.”
Ten minutes later the owner knocked on the door and told me I had a phone call. “A man named Lizard,” he added.
“She with you?” he said.
“Who?”
“The one whose husband I warned you about and who’s looking for you now,” he said.
“He’s headed here?”
“I told him you hung out in the French Quarter.”
“Who is this guy?”
“The same guy who liked to throw satchel charges out of a plane with his buddy Hamp Rieber. You know how to pick them, Elmo.”
I said nothing to Loreen and showered and shaved and took my time doing it, pretending I didn’t care about the bear trap I had stepped in. Then I threw my duffel bag in the back of the truck and told her to hop in.
She was pinning back her hair with both hands, her bare arms as big as a man’s. “Where we going?” she said.
“The beach in Biloxi is beautiful this time of year,” I replied.
The storm was way out in the Gulf and not a hurricane yet, but you could feel the barometer dropping and see horsetails of purple rain to the south and hundreds of breakers forming and disappearing on the horizon. When we checked into the motel the waves were sliding over the jetties and sucking backward into the Gulf, scooping truckloads of sand and shellfish with them. The air smelled like brass and iodine and seaweed full of tiny creatures that had died on the beach, the way it smells when you know a hard one is coming.
I opened the windows in our room. Up on the boulevards the fronds of the palm trees were straightening in the wind. I told Loreen what Lizard had said. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her face white. “Does he know where we are?”
“I don’t see how.”
“His whole family are cops and prison guards. They know everybody. They all work together.”
“It’s not against the law to check into a motel.”
“This is Mississippi. The law is what some redneck says it is.”
“He’s just a man, nothing more.”
But she wasn’t listening. She seemed to be looking at an image painted on the air.
“He’s buds with Hamp Rieber?” I said.
“Who?”
“A pilot. Rieber and another guy killed a bunch of Indians on a job in South America. They dropped explosive charges on their village. Maybe the other guy was your husband.”
“Charles is an asshole but he wouldn’t do that.”
“His name isn’t Charlie? I think a guy like that would be called Charlie.”
“Who told you this about Charles?”
“Nobody had to tell me anything. I was there when it happened.”
“Why didn’t we hear about it? It would have been in the paper or on television.”
I looked at the confusion and alarm in her face. “You want a drink?”
“See? You can’t answer my question. It wasn’t in the news because it didn’t happen.”
“I carried an infant for miles to a first-aid station. He was dead when I arrived.”
Her eyes were too large for her face. “I need to sit down. This isn’t our business. We have to think about ourselves. You didn’t tell anybody where we were going?”
“Give me the gun.”
“What for?”
“We’ve got each other. Right?”
She stared at me, her upper lip perspiring, her pulse jumping in her neck.
I had acted indifferent about taking off with a married woman. It wasn’t the way I felt. My father was a pacifist who made and sold moonshine, and my mother a minister in the Free Will Baptist Church. They gave me a good upbringing, and I felt I’d flushed it down the commode.
While Loreen slept off her hangover, I sat on a bench by the surf and played my mandolin. I could hear a buoy clanging and electr
icity crackling across the sky. The beach was empty, the sand damp and biscuit-colored, a towel with Donald Duck on it blowing end over end past my foot. I wondered how long it would take for Loreen’s husband and in-laws to catch up with me.
Southern culture is tribal. They might holler and shout in their church houses, but they want blood for blood, and at the bottom of it is sex. The kind of mutilation the KKK visits on its lynch victims isn’t coincidental. The system wasn’t aimed at just people of color, either. Guys I knew who’d done time in Angola said there were over one hundred convicts buried in the levee, and the iron sweatboxes on Camp A that had been bulldozed out in ’52 were a horror story the details of which no newspaper would touch.
Thinking about these things made my eyes go out of focus.
The next day Loreen was drunk again and told me she was taking the bus to Lafayette to stay with her sister. “Give me back the gun,” she said.
“Bad idea.”
“It’s my goddamn gun. Give it to me.”
I took the revolver from my duffel bag and flipped the cylinder out of the frame. I noticed that only five chambers were loaded.
“Where’d you learn to set the hammer on an empty chamber?”
“I don’t know what you mean. You squeeze them on one end and a bullet comes out the other.”
I shook the bullets into my palm and dropped them in my pocket. I tossed the revolver on the bed. “I’ll drive you to the depot.”
I decided to stay clear of the Teche Motel in case Loreen or her husband came looking for me. I drove to Lizard’s trailer outside Morgan City and asked if I could stay with him. In two more days I’d be back on the quarter boat, maybe back to a regular life. Lizard stood in the doorway, wearing only swim trunks and cowboy boots, gazing at the palmettos and palm and persimmon trees. “You threw a rock at a beehive,” he said.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Did she go back to him?”
“They usually do.”
“You got played, son.”
“By who?”
“She’s one of those who digs badasses and taking chances. She’ll have you sticking a gun in your mouth.”
“She’s scared to death,” I said.
“That’s how she gets off.” He tapped his fist against the jamb. “For a man who spends a lot of time in libraries, you’re sure dumb. Come inside.”
We listened to the weather reports and read his collection of Saga and Argosy and True West magazines, and went to a beer garden in town and ate boiled crawfish and crabs. The storm we’d worried about had disappeared, although another one had developed unexpectedly out of a tropical swell in the Bay of Campeche and was headed toward the central Gulf Coast.
Lizard sucked the fat out of a crawfish shell and threw the shell in a trash barrel. “They try to keep everybody scared and tuned to the radio. That’s how they sell more products.”
“I don’t think the United States Weather Bureau is involved in a plot,” I said.
“Like Roosevelt didn’t know the Japs was fixing to bomb Pearl Harbor. You’re a card.”
I tried to keep in mind that after being thrown out of a roadhouse in Maringouin, Lizard got in the welding truck and drove it through the front wall and onto the dance floor, blowing his horn for a drink. The bouncers almost killed him.
I wanted to believe my problems would pass. The Japanese lanterns were swaying in a light breeze; a solitary raindrop touched my face. I watched a shooting star slip down the side of the sky.
“You’re a good guy, Lizard.”
His expression was as blank as a breadboard.
We paid the check and walked out to his beloved cherry-red pickup, a little lighthearted, feeling younger than our years. Two men were eating cracklings out of a paper bag in a patrol car. The car was old, salt-eaten around the fenders, the white star on the door streaked with mud. The two men got out of the car. They were big and wore slacks and short-sleeve tropical shirts. One wore a straw cowboy hat; the other had a baton that hung from a lanyard on his wrist. Their eyes passed over me and locked on Lizard.
“That your truck?” the man with the baton said.
“Yes, sir,” Lizard said.
“My name is Detective Benoit. I saw this vehicle run a red light.” He adjusted the mirror on the driver’s door and examined his face as though looking for a razor nick. Then he hammered the mirror loose from the door, tearing the screws out of the metal. “Your taillights working?”
Lizard’s face turned gray. “Why y’all bracing me?”
Benoit walked to the back of the pickup. “Looks like they’re busted, all right.”
He broke out both taillights, then tapped the fragments off the baton.
Neither man seemed to take interest in me.
“I ain’t caused y’all no trouble,” Lizard said.
“We’ve seen your jacket,” the man in the hat said. A white scar hung from one eye, like a piece of string. “You’re here on interstate parole. You shouldn’t have been drinking.”
“I ain’t on parole,” Lizard said.
“It’s me they’re after,” I said.
Neither cop looked at me. They turned Lizard around and pushed him against the truck, then cuffed his wrists behind him, snicking them tight into the skin. The man in the hat pushed him into the back seat of the patrol car.
I felt like I was standing by while my best friend drowned.
The car drove away, with Lizard looking out the back window. A group in the beer garden was singing “You Are My Sunshine.” At the end they clapped and shouted.
I walked back to the highway and hitched a ride to the trailer court. The door to Lizard’s trailer hung on one hinge. The inside was a wreck. Most of my clothes had been taken from my duffel bag and stuffed in the toilet and pissed on. My mandolin had been smashed into kindling.
The cops were partly right. Lizard had finished his parole time in Georgia, but he had a minor bench warrant in Florida. The cops put him in a can down by Plaquemines Parish, the kind of place where people thought habeas corpus was a Yankee name for a disease.
In the oil patch there were no second chances. If you were wired, you were fired. Lizard wasn’t wired, but he got fired just the same.
I went back to the Teche Motel in New Iberia. That’s where she found me, and didn’t even bother to turn off her engine when she knocked on the door. When I opened it she was breathing hard through her nose, a clot of blood in one nostril, her little fist knotted on her drawstring bag. “You’ve got to help me.”
“What did he hit you with?”
“A belt. Can I come in?”
There was no one in the long, tree-shaded driveway that separated the two rows of cottages. Chickens were pecking on the lawns. “Park the car behind the building,” I said.
She came back a minute later and closed the door after her. She tried to hand me her car keys.
“You can’t stay, Loreen.”
“He’s going to kill me.”
“Call the cops. Show them what he did.”
“He saw me look at the phone and asked me how I’d like to dial it with broken fingers. Then he said he was just kidding and poured me a drink. He’s crazy.”
“I’ve got a couple of hundred dollars. That’ll get you to Los Angeles. A friend of mine owns a hillbilly nightclub in Anaheim. I can probably get you a job there.”
“I asked him about this Hamp Rieber guy.”
“What about him?”
“Charles said Hamp was going to take care of you. Charles says you bug him.”
“Say that again?”
“He said something happened in South America. I pretended not to know what he was talking about. He said Hamp knows people who can shut you up. Hamp told Charles somebody should have done it a long time ago.”
She took the revolver out of her bag and set it heavily on the nightstand. Her mouth was a tight line. “You still have the bullets?”
“I don’t want it.”
“
Throw it in the bayou. It’s your life. Charles says if he has his way he’s going to put something of yours in a pickle jar.”
She went out on the stoop. I followed her. “Take the two hundred anyway.”
Her hair was blowing in the wind. It was thick and auburn, and almost hid the stripes and lumps on her face. “We could have had fun, you and me.”
Lizard said I was being played. Maybe he was right, maybe not. It didn’t matter. Hamp Rieber was in the mix. He knew I knew what he had done down in the tropics, and I suspected it had probably eaten a hole in his stomach.
I still had the rounds for the revolver. It was a .38 Special, blue-black and snub-nosed, the serial numbers burned off. I sat in a chair by the front window and dropped the shells one by one into the cylinder. The bayou was chained with rain rings, the light in the trees turning to gold needles. I remembered the words to a song my mother’s congregation used to sing:
Gonna lay down my sword and shield,
Down by the riverside,
I ain’t gonna study war no more.
I wanted to crawl inside the lyrics and never come out. Instead I drove to Lake Charles and found the antebellum home of Hamp Rieber, where he lived in the middle of wetlands with a rainbow arching overhead. The rainbow reminded me of the one that seemed to fall on the village Hamp had bombed.
No one in my acquaintance thought me capable of wicked acts. I knew different. If people asked me how my face came to be burned, I would make a joke about whiskey stills or if pressed mention Pork Chop Hill or for fun say “friendly fire.”
I pulled the tanks from the back of a corporal who had caught one right through his steel pot, and went straight up the hill and jammed the igniter head into the slit of a North Korean pillbox. I had never pulled the trigger on a flamethrower. The blowback cooked half my face. What it did to the men inside I won’t try to describe.
I parked my pickup behind an old Hadacol billboard on a dirt road and entered the back of Hamp’s property through a pecan orchard. The house was a two-story antebellum, with twin chimneys and a veranda, and from behind the stable I could hear people in the side yard. I had the pistol stuck in the back of my khakis, the barrel cutting into my skin.