Louisiana Bigshot

by Julie Smith

  “Sure,” Talba said to him. “Come on in.”

  Miz Clara was all over him. “Darryl, how ya keepin’ yaself? How come you been such a stranger?”

  He hadn’t, of course. Talba met him away from her mother’s cottage as much as she could. She liked living with her mother—had moved in just for a few months and stayed—but a person had to have some semblance of adult life.

  “Miz Clara,” he said, “you know I can’t stay away from you for long.”

  “Hmm. From my food, ya mean. I been makin’ smothered chicken. Y’all want some?”

  “Ohhh. That sure sounds good.” He’d stay and eat it if Talba’d let him.

  “Nosiree, Mr. Boucree,” she said. “You promised me Italian.”

  “Okay. Italian it is.” He’d promised no such thing, but he was a quick study. She liked that about him.

  “My car or yours?” he said when they’d made their escape. “Yours, of course. I hate that damn white thing.”

  He opened her door. “Have you looked for a new one yet?”

  “I checked out the ads on Sunday. But I can’t really afford anything new—or half decent, even. The accident was my fault, you know. If the insurance pays for it, you know what that does to my rates.”

  “Maybe you should just bite the bullet—you really need a car. Venezia okay?”

  “Always.” This was a great hangout for cops and all manner of hard-bitten characters. Eddie had introduced her to it. She loved it though not for the food, especially.

  “Well, you can’t keep renting a car. That’s a quick way to the poorhouse.”

  “I would have the one job in the world that absolutely requires a car.”

  “Sure can’t do surveillance in a New Breed cab.”

  “Oh, God. Surveillance.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Or rather, something I don’t want to think about. I had to tell a friend her boyfriend was cheating on her.” They arrived at the restaurant and went in. Curiously, Darryl didn’t pursue the subject. She asked him about school—he taught English at Fortier High School—and about his gig the previous night, and about his daughter, Raisa.

  He had amusing stories about the first two and worry about Raisa. Always a difficult child, she was acting out more than ever. He wanted to find her a therapist; his ex was opposed.

  Talba’s stomach churned when she thought about Raisa. If she married Darryl—and things were heading that way—this giant, seemingly insurmountable problem became hers. Motherhood itself seemed insurmountable, much less third parent to a young volcano. Come to think of it, she’d not only get Raisa, she’d get her mother, and that would be even worse.

  Yet she hated herself for thinking that way. She knew Darryl wouldn’t if the roles were reversed. She wanted Darryl and she was going to have to accept this one day. Perhaps, she thought, she wasn’t mature enough yet.

  In fact, there was no doubt of that. Maybe she’d met him too early. She still had things to do, unfinished business that really had to be addressed.

  Suddenly, a great sadness came over her—sadness for Babalu, who thought she’d found her man and had been betrayed; and for herself, though why, she wasn’t sure. Maybe because sooner or later she was going to have to give up something. But not Darryl. Uh-uh. She wasn’t that stupid.

  His voice grew soft and monotonous when he spoke of Raisa, and he tended to look away from Talba. His way of dealing with the pain. It made her nervous, seemed to under score her inadequacy. She was glad when he changed the subject.

  Wrapping himself around a meatball, he said suddenly, “How’s your own little problem coming? You thought about that any more?”

  She knew what he meant and it wasn’t her feelings about Babalu or even Raisa, for that matter. It was something so repellent she didn’t want to think about it—largely because it loomed so huge in her life it made her feel tired. Feel like tucking her head away like a turtle, a favorite pastime of hers in times of stress. Yet it nagged and gnawed at her. It was this: long after he left her mother, her father had been murdered. When she got her PI license, she made up her mind to solve the case. This was her unfinished business.

  And she really didn’t intend to give up on it. But she hadn’t even started.

  She just shook her head, smiling, willing him not to press it.

  He said, “Come on. Let’s go to my house.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “I’ll take you home—we’ll get up early. But you know what you ought to do? You ought to leave some clothes at my house, so you can dress there and go straight to work when you need to.”

  “Woo. I thought you’d never ask.” She snuggled up to him.

  “I didn’t think I needed to. For heaven’s sake, baby—you know I want you there.”

  But the simple fact was that he didn’t often take her home with him on a school night. Once there, she stayed—he lived across the river, at Algiers Point, and it made no sense to drive back and forth over the bridge.

  He had a wonderful house in a quiet neighborhood, a Victorian cottage that he’d fixed up in manly but comfortable fashion. Her favorite part was the living room seating area, consisting of two brick-colored sofas on which to recline and drink wine and talk into the night. When they were settled there, he brought up the subject again—her unfinished business with the universe.

  It was strange, she thought. Why was he doing it?

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve got Raisa Sunday, but I’ll take you car shopping Saturday if you’ll start working on it.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Why do you care?”

  “Because you haven’t written a poem about it. That’s a really bad sign.”

  It was. It meant she was turtling out on it. Well, she had the next day off. It was Wednesday, but since she’d worked the surveillance the weekend before, (and also finished the report on the redhead), Eddie’d given her a mental health day. She could start in about eight hours, if she had the nerve.

  She woke up thinking about it, about what she could do to pursue it, and it came to her that it might be easy, that she knew someone who might even know the answer—who could certainly point her in the right direction.

  He was the retired minister of First Bethlehem Baptist, the church Miz Clara still went to, that Talba had been taken to every Sunday of her life as a child. She’d become reacquainted with him recently (on another case), and something he’d said to her then, something she hadn’t understood at the time, made her think of him.

  He’d told her that he’d seen her father in church after he left the family. Had he come back with his woman? If so, the old man might know her name; Talba could track him through her.

  The minister’s name was the Reverend Clarence Scruggs, and he’d been a terror in his day, petrifying her and the other kids Sunday after Sunday with shouted threats of “eternal damnation in the blazing flames of hell.” Sometimes she had to sleep with the light on after one of his sermons. He was probably the reason she didn’t go to church today. But, thanks to him, nobody could say she wasn’t God-fearing. If she ran into God in a dark alley, she’d probably pull out the pepper spray.

  The Reverend Mr. Scruggs was now living in public housing and he’d changed. When she went to see him last year she found instead of the raving demagogue of her youth a gentle old man with a rather stilted way of speaking, utterly devoted to his sick wife.

  “Had it not been for my wife I might have lost my way entirely,” he had told Talba. “She is my dearest love and it is a privilege to care for her.”

  He spoke of his anger when their child was stricken with “a rare and painful disease,” though he was, as he said, “the fiercest soldier in the army of the Lord,” and of his wife’s loving gentleness with the child, and of the way it had transformed him.

  Listening to him was a bit on the surreal side—even in conversation, he spoke in the cadences of sermons—but Talba had been utterly moved by the sincerity of what he had to say and by
his amazing metamorphosis into a sweet old gent. She really should have been back to see him.

  Darryl drove her home early enough that the two of them had time to grab coffee before Darryl went to work. As soon as her eyes were fully open, she said, “I’m going to do what you said.”

  “What?” But he hadn’t forgotten; she knew he just wanted her to say it.

  “I’m going to work on my big case. Today, in fact. Get ready to find me a fabulous car for pennies.”

  “I feel a… a what…”—he squinched up his eyes—“…a Subaru coming on.”

  “A what? Why a Subaru?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Sure—are you psychic now?”

  “I’ve got a buddy who knows somebody whose uncle wants to sell one. Or something like that. I’ll bet we could see it Saturday.”

  “What? All that rigmarole just to get me to work on the case?”

  “Naaah. Coincidence. Maybe it won’t work out—I’ll take you to see every car in the classifieds. We’ll have a lot of fun.”

  “That I don’t doubt.” She’d heard Subarus were pretty good cars.

  She needed to take the reverend a present. But what? She couldn’t get Miz Clara to bake him a cake even if her mama were home—any mention of her father and Miz Clara sulked. She ran him off after he took up with another woman and that wasn’t even his worst trait; drugs and abuse were two others Miz Clara had mentioned.

  In the end Talba cooked for the reverend herself. She had to go shopping anyway—her brother Corey was coming to dinner that night. She bought chicken and greens for Miz Clara to fix later on, and the makings for mashed potatoes and peach pie, her own contributions to the meal. For Reverend Scruggs, something sturdy, she thought, and ended up with pot roast. She spent the morning making it, then packed it up and drove to his building, a high rise for seniors. She hadn’t wanted to phone first—she’d dropped in unexpectedly the first time and she wanted to do it again.

  What she saw when he opened the door made her smile. It was the same something she’d seen before—the Reverend Mr. Scruggs wearing only pants, an undershirt, and a very distressed look at being caught half-dressed. He’d lost weight she thought. “Why, Sandra Wallis.” He called her by her childhood name. “I’m happy to see you, child. Happy indeed. You come in and make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right back; let me just go see to Ella.” She knew he was going to put a shirt on.

  He returned in a fresh white one, hair spruced up as well.

  “How is she, Reverend Scruggs?”

  His face, animated before, showed briefly a flash of trouble and sadness, then tucked itself into a mask of stoicism. “The end is very near, I fear. That is, I fear for me, for I will miss her most fervently. But I rejoice for her, as she will soon be with the God she loves so much.”

  Talba remembered how much she enjoyed his nineteenth-century phrasing; what she’d forgotten, more or less, was the frightening figure of her childhood. No one could have told him when he was forty, or even fifty, she thought, that he’d end up a meek old man in public housing, and proud of it—proud of learning what he called “the way” from his wife.

  She touched his knee. “You’re one of my heroes, Reverend.”

  He looked away. “‘Brother’ is fine, Sandra. You know that.”

  “I’m sorry about Ella.”

  “Do not be. She is beloved of God.”

  “I wish I’d known her. She must have been extraordinary.”

  “She still is, Sandra. She still is. With only a strand of her memory left, with barely a spark of strength, she still is.”

  “I brought you some pot roast.” She had put the whole thing, vegetables and all, in a disposable aluminum pan. “Half an hour in the oven at three-fifty.”

  “Why, I thank you. I will surely enjoy it.” Surely. It was a use of the word that had almost passed from the language. Somebody really should do an oral history with the guy, she thought. “Perhaps Ella will even be tempted.” The sadness flicked onto his face again and lit there. He shook his head from side to side. “She will very rarely eat anymore.”

  Talba’s eyes filled up, not so much at his sorrow but at the thought that this would happen to Miz Clara one day, and to her as well, and even to Darryl. We should really have a better way of dealing with death, she thought, and then went back to pretending it didn’t exist.

  “Reverend, I need to ask you a question.”

  “I thought you would one day. Is it about your father, by any chance?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “You need to tie up loose ends. I understand that.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Perhaps.” He nodded several times. “Perhaps. But not the way you think. I know what you think you need to know because of the kind of work you do, and I beseech you, do not pursue that course.”

  Beseech, she thought. “Why, Reverend, I don’t know that I’ve ever been beseeched before.”

  “Don’t make fun of an old man.” He spoke so sharply she caught a backward glimpse of the man he had been.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t…”

  “Never mind, daughter. I know my speech is strange and stilted. It comes of reading the Bible several hours a day and having few people to talk to.” Indeed, there was no television on the premises.

  “I love the way you talk.”

  He put his hand on hers. “Listen to me. This is the important thing. You’ve got a baby sister out there somewhere.”

  Talba felt as if someone had poked her in the solar plexus, not an unpleasant sensation, and one she’d had before. It happened when she heard something so true, so unexpected, it was like having the breath knocked out of her.

  Chapter Four

  She knew about the baby. The one her father had had with the woman he lived with after the family broke up. Perhaps because Miz Clara had so deliberately distanced her children from her former spouse, it had simply never occurred to Talba that this child was her sibling.

  “My God,” she said, unable to stop herself. Reverend Scruggs would probably call this “taking the name of the Lord in vain.” She glanced at him to see if he was offended, but saw only concern. And eagerness, perhaps. He’s ministering, she realized. This is making him happy.

  “Reverend Scruggs, you’re right. That is the important thing. I mean, if I do have a sister. I never even knew if the baby was a boy or a girl.”

  “A girl. I remember that; it was a girl. I baptized her.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t tell you everything when you were here before. I couldn’t—you know that. But I baptized that girl, and if she is alive today, she is your sister.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be alive?”

  “There is sadness in the world, Sandra. You know that too.”

  “But do you know anything?”

  “I do not.”

  “Well, then. All right. I thank you for setting me straight. I’m going to look for her and find her. What was her name? Do you recall?”

  He shook his head sadly, and Talba saw that he had already searched his memory. “I am sorry to say that I do not.”

  The next question was the one she had come to ask. “The mother’s, then—my father never married her, did he?”

  “I don’t believe he did, no. But I do not recall her name.” Talba exhaled, disappointed.

  “All I can be sure of is that it was not Wallis—therefore the baby’s probably was not, either.”

  “There must be baptismal records.”

  “Perhaps.” He looked vague and a bit doubtful. “You must ask Miz Blanchard about that.” Lura Blanchard, who’d been church secretary in his day.

  She asked for Miz Blanchard’s address.

  When she left, she gave the reverend a tight hug that must have surprised him—she was sure it embarrassed him. She hadn’t lied when she told him he was one of her heroes. She’d always been depressed by those who said people couldn’t change. What was the point
of living if you couldn’t change? Nobody she’d ever met in her life had changed as thoroughly as Clarence Scruggs, who had metamorphosed from a fire-breathing demon into what he’d then believed he already was—a true spiritual being.

  It made Talba love him. Though she’d seen him only three times in her adult life, she loved him. The sight of him just about made her cry. He’s good enough, she thought. So I got a shitty father. This can be his replacement. She made a vow to bring him something to eat once a week from now on, and knew she wouldn’t, which made her ashamed.

  It was hard seeing old people; sick people. They made you feel bad about yourself. She wondered about people who worked as care-givers—how they did it, what they were really like. Whatever they were like, they were different from Talba, but if she had a baby sister, she could at least treat her like family—even if it harelipped Miz Clara. Which it was bound to.

  She hated the thought of calling on Lura Blanchard, who was much older than the Reverend and probably just as saintly, and who’d probably also depress her with the vague sense that she ought to be doing more for people, with guilt about her own youth and vitality.

  The minute she saw Miz Lura, though, she realized she’d forgotten something about her—that she was the sort of old lady who’d probably bury all her friends. That kind didn’t need to be cooked for.

  Indeed, she was outside watering her yard, trying to keep the few surviving flowers alive in the late September heat.

  She was a shrunken old lady who managed a certain elegance, having hair straight enough to wear long, in a bob that came to her earlobes, and the energy to dress up every chance she got. At the moment, she looked as if she’d just come back from something—taking food to old people, probably. She was wearing a polka-dot voile dress that would probably sell in a vintage store for decent money but that maintained its original freshness.

  Talba had plenty of vitality for a twenty-something, but Miz Lura probably had more.

  She squinted at Talba. “Who’re you, child? I know ya, but these cataracts gettin’ to me.”