by Jessie Cooke
The girl Sally was on her way to see that day was one of her most difficult cases. Her name was Coraline and she was only fourteen years old. Coraline had met a tourist during Mardi Gras. The tourist had returned home to somewhere in the Midwest, leaving her with nothing but his name, and his baby in her womb. Coraline’s baby’s name was Josette and Sally had been there for the birth of the baby, all the while Coraline’s mother was “entertaining” one of her “customers” in one of the two small bedrooms in the single-wide trailer. Coraline’s mother was just twenty-eight years old when Josette was born, having been only fourteen herself when Coraline was born. She was also a prostitute, although both she and Coraline denied it to Sally or anyone else from the county who asked. It was how she supported the family, herself, Coraline, Coraline’s three younger siblings, and Coraline’s grandmother...and Josette’s great-grandmother, who herself had barely turned forty-two years old. It was a sad situation, and one Sally was sure she’d be unlikely to make much of a dent in...but that didn’t mean she was ready to stop trying.
At the sound of Sally’s Harley approaching, the cockeyed screen door of the single-wide mobile home was pushed open and Coraline stepped out, holding her mostly naked baby over one arm like a dishrag. Sally let out a big sigh in the hopes that she could keep her facial expressions and tone of voice neutral throughout the meeting. She’d been doing what she did for over twenty years...but it never seemed to get any easier. She pulled off her helmet, shook out her long brown hair, and left the shiny Harley parked amid the pieces of rusted automobiles, a porcelain tub, and a cracked toilet, and pasted a smile on her face.
“Hey, Coraline,” she said to the pretty, petite teen as she approached the front porch. Coraline had dark skin and white-blonde hair, currently in braids all over her head. Her young face was made up with what Sally thought was too much makeup for a girl her age...but then again, she was holding proof in her hands of her forced adulthood, so there was that. Coraline popped the gum she was chewing before finally saying:
“Hey, Miss Guidry.” As soon as Sally was close enough, she reached for the baby. Coraline seemed almost relieved to hand her over. The baby was wearing a diaper that looked like it had been touched with dirty hands, and nothing else. Her pale skin had splotches all over it like maybe she’d come into contact with something that irritated it. Sally inspected her, and Coraline said, “She doing okay?”
Sally smiled at the girl. “Well, Coraline, that’s for you to tell me. How have things been going?” A young boy on an ATV raced by just then, revving his engine and stirring up the dirt from the road. Coraline frowned and flipped him off, but that only encouraged him to do another doughnut right in front of the trailer before finally opening up the throttle and disappearing behind a dusty, dark cloud. Coughing and waving her hand to keep the dust out of the baby’s face, Sally said, “Can we go inside?”
Coraline sighed and looked behind her through the broken screen door. “I reckon. Mama’s got company though.”
“We won’t bother her,” Sally said, wishing not for the first time that there was something she could do about the girl, and the baby’s living situation. Unfortunately there were no funds left for any kind of alternate housing and Sally was sure Coraline wasn’t at a place emotionally, or maturity-wise, to get a job that would support both her and the child. She worried that Coraline would simply follow in her mother’s footsteps one day...but she had to keep reminding herself that there was only so much she could do. Sally had a soft spot for the babies and their young mothers, though, having almost been one herself about a lifetime ago...
Coraline held the screen door open for Sally to step through with the baby. The inside of the trailer was cluttered and dead June bugs lay scattered across the dirty carpet and cracked linoleum on the tiny attached kitchen floor. The countertop in the kitchen was covered with dirty dishes and there were several “pallets” of blankets strewn across the living room where some of the children slept. The television was on loudly, tuned to a cartoon channel, and one of Coraline’s younger sisters, a girl of about five years old, sat staring at it with wide green eyes and sucking her thumb.
“Roly! Turn that shit down,” Coraline barked at the child. “Roly” either didn’t hear her sister, or ignored her, because she didn’t move. All of Coraline’s siblings had different skin, hair, and eye coloring, or different features that hinted at one race or another. None of them had ever known a father and Sally more or less doubted that Coraline’s mother had any idea who that might be herself. Coraline stomped over in a huff and turned the volume knob on the old console television. As soon as she did, sounds from the closed door to the right of her filled the room...the sounds of Coraline’s “mama” satisfying her paying customer. As soon as Coraline heard them, she turned the volume on the television back up, even louder, and said, “I told you, inside ain’t so good if you wanna talk.”
Keeping as calm as she could and bouncing the sweet baby on her shoulder, Sally said, “It’s fine, Coraline. Let’s take a look around and talk about safety and at the same time you can tell me about her bathing and feeding schedules.”
“I bathe her in the sink here in the kitchen, twice a week,” she said, pronouncing twice like twiste. “We ain’t got no hot water, gotta boil it out back on the fire.”
“Your stove doesn’t work?”
“Nah,” she said. “Critters chewed through the heating element a while ago. We ain’t had no money to get a new one.”
“How do you cook?”
“Maw Maw uses the firepit out yonder,” she said. “We do alright ’cept for the hot water.”
“You’re still breastfeeding?” While Coraline told Sally she was and talked about the baby’s schedule, Sally made mental notes of safety hazards around the cramped space. Before she left that day, she talked to the girl about covering the electrical outlets and not leaving the shotguns leaning up against the walls. Sally wondered how Coraline and her siblings had made it this far, and tried not to judge when their disheveled mother and her “friend” came out of the bedroom, him tucking in his shirt and her looking like she wasn’t just post-coital, but maybe high as well. By the time she left she felt like she’d accomplished nothing. She knew in her heart that it was virtually impossible for any child to grow up “normal” or “healthy” in an environment like the one she’d just witnessed, and she also knew that if she lasted on the job another fourteen or fifteen years, it was more than likely that she’d have sweet little Josette and her own child as one of her clients. It was a vicious cycle and it was more than disheartening.
After leaving Coraline’s she rode her bike back into town and spent the next two hours doing paperwork in the office and putting out a few fires on the phone. By five o’clock she couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, and she desperately needed a drink. She climbed on the back of her Harley and with the weight of the day still on her shoulders, she headed toward her favorite watering hole. It was a small, dark, neighborhood bar called the “Grand Prix” and it was just on the outskirts of New Orleans. Sally had chosen it years before because it was off the beaten path of the tourists that took over New Orleans most of the year, and she’d stayed for the friendships she’d made there. It didn’t surprise her that the small, cracked parking lot was already half full at barely 5 p.m. when she drove in and parked the bike near the door. Most of the locals would either be recently laid off from the sugar cane industry, or barely eking out the last of the crawfish in the swamps early in the morning, with the rest of the day left wide open to party.
Sally stopped at the door and rested her hand against the rough, blue paintwork, trying to shake the day off before she went inside. Finally pushing it open, she was almost assaulted by the volume of loud conversations and the music coming out of the jukebox that they were trying to compete with. The lighting was dim and swirls of smoke could be seen dancing underneath the old fixtures that swung from the ceiling. Other than the smoke, the smells of cheap perfume, stale bee
r, and body odor wafted about the room, but instead of being repellent to her, it gave her a sense of peace, a feeling of being home.
She walked toward the old oak bar that curved into the room and took a seat on one of the cracked, vinyl stools. Smiling at an old man at the other end, and waving at a girl she’d gone to nursing school with who was slow dancing with her man, she then turned to the bartender and said, “Hey, Ace, how’s it going?” Ace was a sixty-something-year-old man who had the road map of a hard life printed across his face. He was a former Formula 500 racer, and one too many crashes had left deep scars along both sides of his face and caused a stoop and a limp when he walked. He’d opened the bar when his poor health forced him to retire from racing over thirty years before and it had become as much his life as cars and engines used to be. As far as Sally knew he’d never been married and according to the working girls who often hung around the bar, he didn’t partake of their services either. Sally didn’t know if the man was asexual, impotent, or gay, and she didn’t care. She liked him and found the stories he told of his exciting days traveling all over the world as a race car driver interesting.
“Sally girl,” Ace said, setting a bottle of beer with the top twisted off down in front of her. “It’s going great, as always. How’s the prettiest nurse in the bayou?”
Sally opened her mouth just as the baritone voice behind her said, “I was just going to ask the same question.” She didn’t have to turn her stool around to know who it was. In fact, she’d felt his presence as soon as he walked into the bar. Sally’s Paw Paw had thought himself clairvoyant and while Sally never fully believed in most of what the old man talked about and tried to teach her, she’d always known she was sensitive in certain areas. One of them was that she always knew when Evan was close by, or when he was in trouble.
“You’ll have to ask her,” Sally said, without turning around. “This particular nurse is exhausted and would like to sit here and have a few beers in silence before she heads home.”
Evan’s booming laughter filled the room, taking out every other noise in its path. Sally spent years wishing she wasn’t affected by it. Of course she wished she wasn’t affected by any of it. Why did he have to have arms as big as the roots of a cypress tree, painted in bright colors so that he always looked like a peacock in heat? And those pale blue eyes of his were a color that should barely be noticeable, if not for the way his coal black hair, mustache, and beard set them off. He was just about six foot tall, not more than average, but even when he was around taller men, his presence still consumed them. Some days she wanted to scratch those blue eyes out and others she simply wanted to get lost in them...but every day she knew that her feelings for Evan wouldn’t ever get her any further than she was now...a middle-aged woman without a husband, kids, or any kind of partner to spend the rest of her life with.
“Well then,” Evan said, sliding his giant body onto the stool next to hers and sucking what was left of the oxygen out of her lungs. “I won’t take up too much of your time.” Sally tried to keep her eyes on his face, but when it was hot outside like it was now, he wore his leather kutte without anything underneath, save for the rippling muscles. Over the years she’d memorized every one of them, both in her mind and with her fingers, and simply the sight of them caused every part of her body to salivate.
With her attention focused at last on the red stitching on the front of his kutte and the red shadow of the tiny jester sewn there as well, she sighed and said, “What is it you want from me today...Blackheart?”
Sally only called him Blackheart in public. To the Cajun community and just about everyone in New Orleans, Jefferson Parish, and St. Mary’s Parish, Blackheart was a household name. It struck fear in some, awe in others, and a large population absolutely adored and revered him. In private he was just Evan to her, though, the little boy she’d grown up with, shared secrets with, and fell in love with way back when they both lived deep out in the midst of the Atchafalaya swamp.
Blackheart’s cool blue eyes softened when she looked back up at his face and he said, “I found him, Sal. Christoff is dead.”
2
“You killed him?” Sally didn’t speak those words until they were alone. As soon as he said the name...Christoff...he had her hooked. She hadn’t even finished her beer before taking his hand and leading him up the stairs to one of the empty rooms above the bar that Ace often rented out by the hour. Once they were alone, she asked the question, and knowing he probably wouldn’t answer it honestly, she watched his eyes. Evan was not necessarily a pathological liar, but he was an expert at it. In the business he was in, he had to be. No one truly knew the man behind the mask he wore...no one except maybe Sally and the three little sisters that lived high off the hog in a hundred-year-old mansion in the French Quarter that their older brother financed. What Sally knew was that no matter how still the mask was that he wore, those light blue eyes of his always told the real story.
“I didn’t say that,” he said with a smile. He sat down on the bed and patted the spot next to him. Sally gave him a wide berth and took a seat in the chair by the window. Looking out toward the sun as it sank down into the Mississippi River, her thoughts turned back to the day Christoff Benoitt first polluted their lives. She and Evan had just been playing, like kids do. They were headed to the cove to play a game of hide and seek when Sally stumbled over something. Her first look at the torso and arm lying mostly covered by mud caused her to cry out Evan’s name. Seconds later he was at her side, holding her hand while she tried hard to hold back her screams. They were too young to see such things...too young to even know they existed. Sally wouldn’t see anything like that again in her life, but the scars that sight had left were thick and still sometimes at night they broke open and flooded her consciousness with visions that she wanted no part of. Especially since she’d met the man who tortured that poor woman, and he’d planned on doing the same to her. If not for Evan, he most certainly would have.
“Don’t play with me, Evan. Just tell me, how did you find him, and how did you kill him?”
He chuckled again. “He was stupid enough to come back into my parish. The amount of phone calls we got at the clubhouse about him were actually pretty impressive.” She rolled her eyes at his gigantic ego, but let him go on. “He was surprised to see me, I think. I should have killed him the last time we met.”
Sally shuddered at that thought. The last time Evan and Christoff “met” was when Christoff had a gun to her head. Evan let him go, to save her, but she suspected he’d never forgiven himself for letting Christoff get away. Before Christoff found Sally, three women in the parish had gone missing and were found later, dead and dismembered in the bayou. Evan didn’t blame himself for those women...but the two who came after the night he’d saved Sally and let Christoff get away, she knew he did. Law enforcement had combed the backwoods of Louisiana for decades looking for Christoff, he was one of “America’s most wanted,” but he’d managed to evade them all...until now, apparently. “You saved my life that day, Evan.” It was another day in her life she didn’t like to remember, but one that wouldn’t go away.
Evan nodded at that, leaned down and untied the laces on his boots and then took them off and stretched his big body out on the bed. Sally cocked an eyebrow at him but didn’t say anything. After several long minutes of silence he said, “Yes...I killed him, and just about now the gators in the swamp are having themselves a mighty feast.”
That was all she needed to hear. Sally found a lot of fault with how Evan chose to live his life, but she found no fault at all with his wiping a parasite like Christoff off the planet. It comforted her to know that after so many years she could finally stop looking over her shoulder. She had to walk past the bed to get to the door, and Evan’s long arm shot out and his big hand caught her wrist as she passed. Sally gave him a look that usually told him without words that what was on his mind wasn’t going to happen. But after looking into his blue eyes for a few seconds, she changed her mind
. It wasn’t Blackheart that wanted to use her body that night...it was Evan, and he needed her. She nodded and with a smile he started to pull her down toward him.
“Nope, not here. Put your boots back on. I’ll see you at the house in an hour.” Sally spent a lot of years learning how to set boundaries with Evan. She wouldn’t sleep with him at his clubhouse where his cute little big-breasted Jesters bounced around trying to please him, and she wasn’t some cheap whore who would fuck him in a room he rented by the hour. If he wanted to be with her, he could show up at her door like a gentleman. Sometimes he did, and others he didn’t. She’d grown weary years before of worrying about which it would be...so she set her limits, and then went on about her life, mostly unconcerned about whether or not he’d follow them.