The sergeant would take a bus to New Orleans from here. He gave R.J. a sharp salute. Seth watched in pride, glad to see his brother’s stature affirmed.
The Greyhound idled nearby. The two marines walked over together. “You ever need a job, Alvin,” R.J. said, “my dad could help.”
The sergeant ignored the switch to first names. “Most kind, Mr. Bainard.”
He slid his seabag into the luggage compartment and stepped aboard the bus. Cigarette smoke clouded the air. Almost all the seats were taken, none available on the side facing the airport. Alvin made his way up the aisle, head bowed below the nicotine-stained ceiling. There was chagrin on his face until he came to a young Asian couple. “Speak English?”
“Of course,” the man said, though it seemed from his wife’s silence that perhaps she didn’t.
“Gonna need you to move from there.”
“There are single seats left.”
“All yours.”
“We’re together,” the man said. “You must see that.”
“I see two gooks and a U.S. marine. Two live gooks, not even burned to death.”
The couple moved. Alvin helped the wife stow her bags in the overhead rack. He eased into the seats they’d vacated and draped one leg over the armrest, reclining against the window. He cocked his head for a view outside. The Bainards were walking toward the parking lot. Alvin tracked them through a squint; tracked Bonnie, that is, as she strode apart from the others. “Dog.” His sigh fogged the glass.
As the bus lurched ahead he took his mouth harp from his breast pocket and blew something soft and aimless. The Asian woman, in her seat a couple rows back, heard the music and liked it, not knowing what sort of man was playing.
* * *
TO CALL ANGEL Bainard flighty would be unfair. Her whims resisted alternate fancies until they were accomplished. Nor was she a tease; what she promised, she gave. Her life was a series of passion projects achieved through deliberate steps often as unwise as they were brave. Becoming Richie’s mistress, for example, had all but guaranteed that she would bear his child. Becoming his wife after Esther died had likewise assured that she would be Mrs. Bainard to the hilt—mom to the children, smoking hot on his arm, bitchy or nice to his friends and underlings as the mood, her mood, dictated. By 1953, she’d done all those things. It was time for something new.
The first project that seized her was to revamp the Kilties, Lake Charles High School’s all-girl marching drum corps. Founded on the eve of World War II to promote school spirit and female fellowship, the outfit performed at parades and football halftimes. Angel wasn’t a sports fan and only attended the game because Richie was being honored for funding school repairs from a lightning fire the previous year. Led by three blond “colonels” flashing silver batons, the Kilties high-stepped onto the field to a patter of drumbeats. They wore Scottish kilts, white trim, and red plumes in their hair, and pranced around in choreographed columns that formed eagles and stars and other national symbols to the crowd’s enthusiastic applause. Angel watched with dismay. They looked pathetic. She was the person to help them.
Something raw in her blood reacted against the Kilties’ dewy propriety. Emboldened by her looks and her husband’s prominence, she blew into the office of the school’s athletic director with a load of suggestions, none of which could have passed school codes or the sensibilities of the Kiltie parents. She wanted the girls to add horns and cymbals for pizzazz and wanted the hem of the skirts raised to the knee with six inches of fringe below. “That way, when they march they look proper and when they kick they look sexy.”
The AD’s name was Frank Billodeau. The varsity basketball coach in addition to this job, he had a reputation and also a look of rectitude, like Lincoln before the beard. “Not sure sexy’s what they’re after,” he said from behind his desk.
“I’ll pay for the changes. Or make my husband. He’s Richie Bainard.”
“My wife works at his store. On Ryan Street.”
“I’ll put in a good word for her.”
“Mary can take of herself.”
Angel smiled. “Sounds like a sweetheart.” She’d heard her husband complaining that the original Lake Charles Block’s had become a poor performer. Area commerce was shifting away from lumber and agriculture. Chemical production was flat, and expanded refineries for the Humble and Union oil companies remained in the talking stage. Bonnie, Richie’s co-boss these days, urged closing the store and opening new ones in Alabama’s peanut belt and the poultry cradle of central Arkansas. Angel said to Frank, “Your wife comes to trouble, keep me in mind.”
“I’ll do that, ma’am.”
“Now here’s my other idea,” she went on, returning to topic. “W. O. Boston? They got marchin’ girls, too?” She was referring to the Negro high school that had opened two years ago in East Lake Charles.
“Probably just a band, be my guess.”
“So put ’em together. Their band, your girls.”
Frank gave a laugh. “Maybe my daughter’d join up in that case.”
“Too boring now, right? Like little soldiers. What the hell is a Kiltie anyway?”
“From the skirts.”
“You get my drift.” She placed her hands on his desk and bent toward him, hair down, a button undone, provocative but in no way pretend.
“I do. But you realize that can’t happen—black boys and white girls.”
“Be a better show.”
“I’d pay to see it.”
Angel straightened. “You’re a nice man,” she said.
He crossed his arms as if to protect himself. “Not always,” he said kind of sadly.
Persuaded that her plan to jazz up the Kilties couldn’t fly, Angel moved on to another project. Next time she heard her husband and Bonnie discuss closing down the Ryan Street Block’s, she suggested they refurbish the store and use the occasion to rechristen the entire chain Block’s Home Supply. “No more o’ this farm baloney. Your biggest sucker is a young family man with a crappy-built house in a hardware store on a Saturday. That’s whose coin you’re after.” Rebranding was only part of her new idea, but Richie liked the bit she told him—postwar growth across the South would bring many such men to many such houses. He approved the plan over a raised glass at Georgia Hill. Bonnie gave her approval as well, though no one exactly had asked it.
* * *
ON THE NIGHT that Richie made the decision to transform the Block’s business, his older son was meeting Alvin Dupree in New Orleans, where R.J. often visited for what he couldn’t get in Lake Charles. Alvin had contacted him after his marine discharge, and R.J. proposed they meet at an upscale parlor house on Conti Street. The venue illustrates R.J.’s social clumsiness, for Emily Post surely advises that one shouldn’t visit a brothel with a colleague one doesn’t know well. Alvin was from the city’s Ninth Ward, reared by the state after his mother died. He was quite aware of such establishments but had never been a customer. It turned out that R.J.’s choice of a congenial spot made the sergeant intensely uncomfortable, putting a crimp in their reunion.
Alvin didn’t drink. He sat stiff as a vestryman in the chintz-papered lounge, sipping seltzer and listening to the Victrola. It rankled other gentleman-visitors suspicious of virtuous company. A street cop came in to collect the monthly Police Board donation. He asked R.J. if his friend worked for the district attorney. Thinking it a joke rather than a comment on his starched demeanor, Alvin attempted a clever reply: “Sure, and you’re busted.” It brought no laugh. Blows ensued, furniture was broken, and the policeman wound up apologizing with Alvin’s hands on his throat. The madam roundly cussed R.J. for bringing such a thug to her place. She declared them banished, adding in a gratuitous jab that R.J. would never see “Miss Katie” again.
Miss Katie was a prostitute. Alvin caught a glimpse of her when she came downstairs with the other girls to see what was the ruckus. She was buxom, had platinum hair, and was painted with makeup and powder to lighten her mocha skin. Seei
ng the lieutenant’s distress when told he’d been cut off filled Alvin with remorse for not getting into the swing of things earlier.
His chances of finding work with the Bainards seemed shot. They walked down the street toward what Alvin figured would be good-bye. R.J. surprised him by offering to arrange a job interview with his father. “He’ll like you. He prefers people around him with clean habits. It lets him be the show.”
Alvin gushed thanks and apology until R.J. waved him off. “I’m just sorry ’bout your girl,” Alvin insisted.
“Who?”
“That Katie girl there. Pretty lil thing.”
“Are you blind? She’s forty if she’s a day.”
“Dog! I’m thinkin’ she eighteen, nineteen.”
“In 1935 maybe.” R.J. was embarrassed. “She reminds me of someone, is all. Guess I’m back to the genuine article now.”
“Give you trouble, that one?”
“Other way round, I’m afraid.”
“That I cannot believe, Mr. Bainard. Fine gentleman like you.”
“I just took you to a whorehouse, Sergeant.”
“An’ I made a mess of a nice evening.”
It touched R.J. to see the superbly sharp noncom he’d depended on in Korea so flummoxed in a civilian setting, a natural-born warrior now awkwardly costumed in a cheap suit and steel-toed shoes. “The only mess here is me,” he assured the sergeant, “as you oughta know better than anyone.”
They walked east toward Bourbon Street. It was well into night, but passersby, even those walking eyes-down as if fearing to be identified, moved with the quickness of a day just beginning. Scarves and veils, grandiose cloaks and eccentric jewelry gave an air of mannered disguise that was R.J.’s favorite thing about the Quarter, a constant passing parade performed under balconies arrayed like theater boxes on the upper floors of stucco row houses. Alvin, with no mystery about him, seemed out of place despite being a city native. It made R.J. uncomfortable, like the host of a party whose honored guest refuses to mingle. “Got something in mind you’d care to do?” he asked.
Alvin considered. “Still like them nigger blues, Mr. Bainard?”
“I do.”
Alvin turned down a dark alley. “I know some places,” he said.
* * *
BLOCK’S HOME SUPPLY in Lake Charles held its grand reopening in February 1953. Richie blocked off the street and made it a party, with punch and hard cider, hush puppies and horseradish, shrimp creole, red beans and rice; and for dessert, hot candied yams with cinnamon glaze and praline ice cream, all served free to any who cared to partake. The weather had warmed enough for men to shed their jackets and ladies to slide up their sweater sleeves, pale arms entwining and separating like pulled taffy as the band out front of the store played banjo bluegrass and accordion waltzes. Kids stayed home from school to attend. A magician did card tricks and took burning balls of cotton into his mouth. A troupe of foreign gymnasts tumbled on a horsehair mat while their women hawked shawls and potholders to people looking on. The black folks in attendance kept apart in cautious deference. They carried tin plates to the food tables in lulls between waves of whites, as if worried a bill might yet be presented them.
Richie presided over the festivities with Angel on his arm. Strolling about with his necktie loosened and his houndstooth fedora tipped back, he resembled a politician working a county fair—though that’s a poor description given whose eyes we’re looking through here. Seth Bainard, like most fourteen-year-olds, had no notion of politics beyond the popularity feuds of high school. He likened his father to a football coach or, what he was, a small-town bigwig with a gravel laugh and a trailing scent of cigars and whiskey; his mother to a butterfly, flimsy and buoyant on breezes of breathless impulse. Seth was fond of his parents. But lately he’d got the sense that loving one more required loving the other less. He detected no rift between them, no side to take in a domestic dispute. His allegiance felt tested nevertheless. He spent more and more time on his own as a result.
He trailed them as they toured the store’s widened aisles and new ladies’ section, the latter featuring kitchenware and housecleaning items as well as a selection of “hits for hubby” such as fishing gear and auto parts. Richie had confided to Seth that he had zero expectation of the store’s success and likely would end up closing it—it was a playtoy for Angel, who’d overseen the renovation as a diversion to keep her busy. Seth resented being drawn into dismissing his mother’s pride in the project. Bonnie was worse. She openly ridiculed Angel on the presumption that all agreed she was a silly goose. His resentment intensified whenever that presumption was borne out by his mother’s behavior. Like now.
Angel’s arm not linked with her husband’s encircled the waist of a prim-looking lady anyone could have told was her opposite. The lady’s name was Mary Billodeau, and Seth observed from her body language, her torso tilted away as from a wall of wet paint, that she disliked being clutched so familiarly. He sympathized. His mother had drunk quantities of “special punch” in the rear of the store, fueling her usual emotiveness to operatic heights. Mary Billodeau by contrast was on duty today. She was the store’s new manager. Richie usually reserved such positions for women unmarried and severe. Mrs. Billodeau failed on the first count, but Angel, for reasons unclear, had lobbied her husband on Mary’s behalf and now was pleased to tell everyone that Mary owed her job to her.
Mary’s husband didn’t mingle. Frank Billodeau, “Coach” to everyone in town, huddled with some earnest old-timers to discuss an upcoming basketball game between Lake Charles High and a reform school team from Baton Rouge. Basketball surpassed even football as a life-or-death matter around here; the men worried those prison boys might be ringers or possibly black. Frank had a chiseled, hawkish look at odds with his mild voice. “We play any squad what shakes our hand and honors the Stars ’n’ Stripes,” he said to the men pestering him.
The comment brought an eye roll from Adele Billodeau, Frank’s daughter, watching nearby. From the moment Seth first spotted her today he’d tried not to stare lest she catch him. Sixteen and looking powerfully slutty in a party dress and jean jacket, Adele wore her hair in a pixie cut as if to keep it unmussed on a motorcycle. She was a Lake Charles junior even the lords of the locker room circled cautiously. Seth, a year behind her, was one of the school’s invisible nobodies. He was fascinated by her and needed only to be in her vicinity to feel the pull of her presence, like an unseen moon that draws all tides toward it.
Concluding their inspection of the store, his mother seemed to have toned down her patronization of Mary Billodeau, who strode beside Richie pointing out this or that display in a rapture of incontestable competence. Seth saw Angel slip away to the back where the booze was. He followed, determined to be the grown-up to her perennial child. Outside the storeroom he heard a sigh and saw shadows against the wall. He inched closer. His mother was embracing Frank Billodeau, their open mouths together, her hand gripping his crotch in a rhythmic squeeze. Like a movie played backward he lurched in reverse to the front of the store. He had no idea how to handle what he’d just seen, only knew it was bad and that it made his heart crack in his chest. He crashed into Bonnie by the entrance. “Another drunk,” she said. He used the idea—swaying, summoning a burp—to repel her in the other direction.
Not yet twenty-five, Bonnie seemed almost middle-aged to Seth. The arrival of R.J. and Alvin Dupree at the Block’s event introduced another opinion. It was shortly after their big night in New Orleans, and it was the second time Alvin saw R.J.’s sister. The impact amplified his first impression, for qualities about Bonnie that gave some men the willies answered Alvin’s every dream. He stared at her like a dog tracking pork ribs from platter to plate. When R.J. went to find his father, Alvin summoned every bit as much nerve as he’d shown in combat and asked if she was in the hardware biz or just here for the grub. She recognized him at once from Houston last year. “Do I know you?”
“Sergeant Dupree. From Korea.”
>
“Alvin.”
Big smile. “Miss Bonnie. The boss’s daughter.”
“I prefer to think of him as the boss’s father.”
“Maybe I talk to you instead.”
“About what?”
“A job, ma’am. Your brother’s tryin’ to work it.”
She didn’t like being leapfrogged in the hierarchy. “What are your skills?”
“Can fix a motor and clean a carbine, but none like you mean.”
“How do you know what I mean?”
“Sayin’ you need a fella can fix a motor and clean a carbine?”
“I’m saying don’t count on my brother. The guy needs a job himself.”
“Count on you then?”
“Unless you have obligations elsewhere.”
“I need work, ma’am. Only obligation’s myself and my future employer. Dog! Whassat ol’ whore doin’ here?”
“I beg your pardon?”
He pointed. “Miss Katie from the bordello!”
Angel was approaching with Richie. With flaxen hair and figure like an hourglass seen in a funhouse mirror, she was the spitting image of R.J.’s Conti Street favorite. Bonnie smiled. “That would be my stepmother.”
“Dog, but it’s a likeness.”
“I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to hear it.”
R.J. walked next to his father on the opposite side from Angel. Seth shuffled behind them, his thoughts lost in wondering which was worse, his love life or that of his parents. The group was nearly in earshot of Bonnie and Alvin when Bonnie told the sergeant one more thing:
“By the way…”
“Ma’am?”
“You’re hired.”
* * *
HE BECAME THE Bainards’ general assistant, living in the carriage house at Georgia Hill, on call to the family twenty-four hours a day. In time his duties came to include assignments for Block’s. He was management’s designated deliverer of bad news to sub-par employees in stores across four states. His large physical size helped in the role, as did his being of exceedingly deliberate mind. It lent him a calm, implacable poise that discouraged excuses or protest.
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