Cajun Waltz

by Robert H. Patton

  “Shot at your mother. To put a scare in her only, and for cause she brung on herself.”

  Seth remembered the cause. “I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”

  Me too, Alvin didn’t say, though he did offer the young man a prescription that worked for him: “Only way now’s to put it behind.”

  Seth took up his cane and, swinging it before him like a scythe, squinted his way out of the room. He felt robbed. His father was beyond even curses now, his past as out of reach as his future. At the end of the breezeway, he heard a voice call from the top of the front stairs:

  “You and Daddy talk?” Bonnie had been waiting.

  Seth groped for the banister. “So I can get my cut, right?”

  “It’s how Daddy wants it. To set things right by his family.”

  “Was my mother family?”

  Bonnie was ready for this. “A good man made a bad mistake.” Unwed and unworldly, she excelled at ruling the land she inhabited. “If you can’t let bygones be, we’ve prepared an alternate will that drops you altogether.”

  “We?”

  “Daddy. And me.” She spoke with measured empathy, what a competitive player feels for a crushed opponent.

  “If R.J. ever shows, he’ll tell you to go to hell.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “You talk?”

  “I don’t know where he is, I don’t care. That’s been Alvin’s department for years.”

  Seth had heard nothing of his brother since his disappearance. By now he knew the seamy details of R.J.’s attraction to Seth’s mother; they’d been leaked to the press by prosecutors furious that the accused had got away. But he resented R.J. more for the shabby business with Adele Billodeau. Angel had been everyone’s fixation. Adele, he imagined, was his alone.

  Bonnie went on, “You need to fix things with Daddy or those checks to your hospital stop.”

  “Him and me are all good,” Seth heard himself say.

  “Alvin was witness. Don’t try to lie.”

  “He’ll testify.”

  “Then come on up.”

  One hand on the bannister, he ascended the stairs to Bonnie’s office overlooking the courtyard. He perceived her as a shape backlit by the window, a body floating in a shimmering pool. “Five percent,” she said without preamble, “of the company’s annual net revenue.”

  “Translate, please.”

  “You’ll never be rich but you’ll never be poor.”

  Seth nodded, knowing the deal would be rescinded once Alvin told her what had transpired downstairs. “My thirty pieces of silver.”

  “Five. The thirty’s for R.J.”

  “He’s taking your money?”

  “Man’s gotta eat.”

  Pity and letdown came over Seth. R.J. had been his hero once, possessing a rebel integrity made immaculate by his absence. “And the rest? Who gets that?”

  Bonnie didn’t reply. The winner doesn’t have to.

  * * *

  ADELE “DELLY” BILLODEAU got married in 1955. Arthur Franklin was fifteen years older than she, an eternal salesman for a succession of manufacturing companies that he swore never treated him fair. His first wife had left him for an old flame she met at a high school reunion. Delly was her replacement to keep house and raise their daughter.

  She was nowhere near the same feisty chick she’d been before R.J.’s assault and her father’s suicide. Those blows had made her receptive to Arthur’s proposal on logical grounds that he was the best she could hope for. Echoes of her rape recurred as an anxiety dream triggered by stress. That stress usually concerned Fiona Franklin, Arthur’s fourteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Delly was twenty-one now, an age better suited to be Fiona’s big sister rather than parent, yet she smothered the girl with the vigilance of a Mother Superior. She couldn’t help thinking that only when Fiona was safely launched would Delly too be safe from her bad dream.

  In the dream, a canopy made of feathers obscures the sky. It follows her everywhere, like a rain cloud over an unlucky man. Sometimes it’s overhead at the high school gym, sometimes at the barroom where she gets drunk and flirty with a man whose face never shows. Feathers blot the moon out his car window and stream like moths from his radio as he fiddles with the dial after they park. Her hands turn to feathers as they struggle and clutch. Like a burn, the pain worsens when he stops.

  The dream occurred again on the eve of a weekend excursion she and Fiona took with a cousin of Delly’s in December 1956. The cousin, Corinne Meers, loved people with problems, leaping into meddlesome overdrive whenever anyone she knew encountered compelling misfortune. She’d first descended on Delly after Delly’s crisis three years ago. Their friendship had since taken a high school dynamic whereby the prom queen, with an eye toward rescue, restyles the frump to the height of Hollywood fashion. As a result, Delly’s hair was now dyed red as Rita Hayworth’s and permed tighter than Pearl Bailey’s, a clownish transformation she relished as completely appropriate.

  Regret for agreeing to accompany Corinne and her family no doubt had brought on the dream. Delly would have preferred to stay home washing clothes and making toast. She woke sweaty, heart racing, but settled herself by thinking okay, I had it again, but it’s over, it’s past, I’m fine. The feathers haunted her—how they swarmed suffocatingly like a pillow pressed over her face. Feather and Heather were the connection, she supposed. Heather Lane near the high school was where it had happened, a link so pedestrian it embarrassed her, as if even her terrors were dumb.

  The Meers excursion was to a hunting lodge in Cameron Parish. Drive time from Lake Charles was just under two hours. As everyone piled in, Delly warned Corinne’s husband that she got carsick unless she was at the wheel. Donald Meers said she could ride up front but that he didn’t allow females to drive his Lincoln. “This baby requires a man’s touch.”

  “This baby,” Delly said, “don’t know a man’s touch from a hog’s.”

  “Says you. From experience, I guess.”

  “Donald!” Corinne said. “That’s vicious.”

  “Didn’t mean nothin’.”

  “Called her a hog!”

  “No,” Delly said. “He said I’ve experienced the touch of a hog.”

  Corinne stared. “Ain’t that kinda almost worse?”

  Delly’s stepdaughter giggled in the backseat, further irritating Donald because Fiona was a pretty thing whom he considered a prime target for his boyish charm. “Can’t believe how y’all jumpin’ on the guy payin’ for this trip,” he said.

  “You mean your daddy?” Corinne said.

  “Now dammit that’s enough! I’m a mind to leave you home.”

  “Fine,” Corinne said. “Why the hell I’m goin’ duck huntin’ anyhow?”

  “Me and Joey’s huntin’.” Joey was the Meerses’ teenage son, the premarital mistake that had turned out handsome as his father but with less hair tonic. “You and Marjorie gonna eat chocolate pie and swim in the indoor heated swim pool.” Marjorie was the Meerses’ younger child. “It’s a resort, this place,” Donald said to Delly. “High tone.”

  “Donald’s daddy built it,” Corinne explained. “Section Eight Gun Club. We been lotsa times.”

  Delly took the front seat and soon began to get queasy. She cranked down her window for some outside air. Passengers in back screamed for her to close it, though scrunching together in the frigid blast was welcome in some quarters. Delly stole a backward glance at her stepdaughter, who’d been way too blasé squeezing in next to Joey at the start of the trip. Fiona’s sweater had popped open two eyelets down, revealing a contour of pale skin curving into shadow. Might as well wear a sign saying easy lay, Delly fumed to herself.

  Donald tapped her knee, startling her. “Things’re better now?”

  She took the question to refer less to her car nausea than to troubles with her husband that she’d recently confided to Donald’s wife. Divorcing Arthur Franklin seemed an impossible hope, but the protracted freeze she’d willed on t
he marriage at least had brought about his exit to a boarding house in town. He’d let his daughter continue to live with Delly because work often took him away for long periods. It also gave him an excuse to phone the house at all hours, peek through the windows, hatch nutty plans to win back Delly’s heart. “Only thing ever makes me feel better is a nap,” she said.

  “I’m with you on that,” Donald said, annoying her with his attempt to be nice. Everyone knew her past, was the problem. They ascribed the mess of her life to what had happened in high school and to the years of vain wait for her attacker—her supposed attacker, people prudently put it—to be caught and brought to justice.

  Stomach fluttering again, she pressed her cheek to the cold window. The car was traveling on an imperceptible decline, the terrain a few feet above sea level at most. The region’s famed wetlands extended from the roadside to the southern horizon. Twisty channels of peat-colored water wound among islets of vegetation that from a far distance appeared to bob on the water like moldy bread, unpretty nature at its most lovely.

  Donald lit a Camel. Delly rolled down her window to be sick. Vomit sprayed down the side of the speeding car like flames down the side of a hot rod. Threads of it laced across the back window, causing Donald almost to drive off the road when he turned in horror to look. Inside the car, outbursts came according to age, disgust from the grown-ups and hilarity from the kids. Delly was the exception. To hear Marjorie Meers declare that the stuff had frozen to the glass and then to see Donald’s aghast expression, well, it struck her as pretty damn perfect.

  * * *

  THE SECTION EIGHT Gun Club was probably the only hunting lodge in Louisiana with an indoor pool. It wasn’t glamorous—a small cement rectangle edged at the waterline with mustard tiles that changed back to cement for the pool surround and back to mustard up three sides of the enclosure, the fourth side featuring a broke-down sauna and a long set of windows overlooking a patch of dead cornstalks and the misty brown marsh beyond. The water was heated by a boiler through piping that left rust streaks down the walls and made the muggy air inside taste of chorine and fuel oil. Including a pool and sauna in Section Eight’s design had been a grandiose whim by two of the club’s original partners, Richie Bainard and Burt Meers. Neither would have been caught dead using either one.

  The pool was deserted on Saturday afternoon but for Delly and little Marjorie. Fluorescent ceiling lights made Delly’s skin look fish-belly white. Reclining on a chaise made of pink rubber tubes, she put on her dark glasses to create a private cave where she might hibernate maybe forever. The sound of a splash alarmed her. Marjorie had done a backward dive off the side of the pool. Fearing she’d land wrong and never have babies as a result, Delly ran to the ladder with a towel and ordered her out of the water. Somehow the notion had taken hold that she was the girl’s babysitter. After Joey had disappointed his father by announcing at the last minute that he’d rather not hunt, Corinne had gamely replaced him on this morning’s expedition. They’d returned a few hours ago and now were resting in their room.

  Time was upended here. Hunters convened at four A.M. for breakfast, donned their waders and Barbour coats and with the sky still dark thundered on flat-bottom powerboats out to the marsh with guides, decoys, and retrievers. Delly rose early to observe them in full safari style. The club had seven guest rooms. Members were businessmen, boisterous and affable. Their wives and girlfriends carried themselves like Hemingway mistresses in web belts and tailored khakis. They returned in early afternoon to a gourmet repast of game and seafood sloshed down with selections from the club’s alcohol armory. Naps followed, later a light buffet and cards or billiards before everyone retired early in order to do it again tomorrow. Even Delly, who was generally intolerant of mindless good times, conceded that it’d be fun if it suited your taste. It didn’t suit hers. So here she was at the pool—which, she’d noticed, featured a small bar in one corner of the enclosure. “Time to go back to your room,” she told Marjorie.

  “Boring.”

  “Read a book. They got ’em on loan by the front desk.”

  “Go like this?” Marjorie wore a crinkly blue one-piece with ruffled leg openings. “Can I wear your top?”

  Delly’s top was a thigh-length jersey she’d bought at a dress shop during the half a day she’d spent searching for a passable swimsuit. It was designed to serve as a modest cover within which you needn’t suck in your stomach or constantly tug the elastic at your rear. She needed this garment. It gave warmth in the lodge’s drafty corridors, and when wearing it, she could eat a full lunch and afterward go around in her bathing suit without entirely wishing to kill herself. No one else was here, however, so pulling it off briskly she pressed it into Marjorie’s hand like the last ticket out of town.

  The girl padded out the exit door. Delly headed for the bar. The older kids, Fiona and Joey, were off exploring on their own, something she usually wouldn’t have tolerated but was too tired to question now. The bar was self-serve. She went behind the counter and mixed a bourbon and Coke, marking the chit with Donald’s name. Leaning on her elbows like a saloon regular, she pondered turns her life might have taken to land her anywhere but here. The alternatives were scant. It was hard to see herself rejecting Arthur Franklin’s prim devotion in the wake of her toxic past. She’d been one of the cool girls once. Stacked. Not stupid. A little loose, and why not? She’d had a pretty face and a bodacious build. Inherited wealth ought to be spent.

  She noticed her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Encased in floral fabric, her breasts impended downward like unpicked fruit below her plump arms. Her suit was cut low under her armpit, revealing a crevice of flesh where the flank of her breast rose off her ribs, a pillowy peep she hadn’t noticed in the dressing room mirror when she’d tried on the suit. Lulled by whiskey and solitude, she bent forward to study herself. Within her suit’s central V her breasts were dotted with moles. Sexy, she thought, and shimmied her shoulders to ripple her bosom in a sour version of vamp.

  She fixed another drink. Yawning, she looked forward to lounging in her room before dinner. She wanted to lie naked under the ceiling light and pretend a listening bug was hidden there; she wanted to give it something to listen to. She rolled her drink across her forehead, clinking it against her dark glasses. Shutting her eyes, she felt as bodiless as a wish.

  “Was a greenhead mallard, I’m tellin’ you.” The voice punctured her reverie. “Not my fault your damn dog couldn’t find it.” Two hunters had entered the pool enclosure and were approaching the bar, peeling off gear as they came.

  Delly froze, a floozy drinking alone in the afternoon—in a swimsuit no less, tits and ass spilling out like cake dough overflowing the pan. She crossed her arms and shrank into herself. Behind her sunglasses she lowered her eyes, as if not seeing the men meant they couldn’t see her. She’d noticed a little, however—black hair and brown, large body and lean, a broad clean-shaven face and a narrow bearded one. The big fellow took a stool in front of her. His palms flattened on the bar. Wedding band, gold watch. “Tom Collins,” he said. “Mixer, no booze.”

  She turned from the front of the bar to the glittery shelves behind. A tremor of self-consciousness disoriented her as her gaze climbed the rows of bottles.

  “Higher, sweetheart. Way up top.”

  A bottle of Collins mix was just within reach as she stretched on tiptoes. The pull of her suit riding up her behind told her she was being played. The mirror held a distorted image of the guy ogling her ass. She dropped her hands to her sides and adjusted her suit with the grace of an Olympic diver. She thought of smashing a bottle and twisting it into his face. She thought of daring him that he could have her for ten dollars.

  “There’s one open right here,” the other man said. Clearly the younger of the two despite his full beard, he joined Delly behind the bar, handing her a bottle of Collins mix and helping himself to a beer from the ice chest on the floor. She felt silly and grateful for what seemed his deliberate rescue at
tempt. Intent on making a getaway, she tried to slide past him in the tight space, her eyes still averted. He turned abruptly and spilled beer down her front. The icy liquid splashed her thighs and she recoiled with a squeal, tits bouncing like a tavern wench. He stammered an apology.

  “It’s okay,” she mumbled to his legs. “Happens all the time.” She wished she was dead. Nothing was worth another second of her pathetic skulk through life.

  “No harm done,” said the other man. “I’ll lick it off.”

  “Whoa, cowboy,” said the guy beside Delly. “Mind your manners.”

  She regarded the one across the bar—gorilla shoulders and a face childlike in its mildness. “Dog! I oughta be horsewhipped for that.”

  She wanted out of there, forget the retorts she could have launched on a better day. She sidestepped from behind the bar and started for the exit.

  “Make him buy you a drink, at least.”

  This, from the younger one, seemed even coarser than the other’s “lick it off” comment. Sure, share a drink with the swine after what he’d said, throw all self-respect out the window. Summoning a sneer, Delly looked directly at the bearded man for the first time. A quake shuddered through her, scalp to knees.

  It was him.

  * * *

  R.J. HADN’T LEARNED of his stepmother’s death until many days after it happened. Like everyone who wasn’t there, he believed it a blameless accident. He knew his father’s grief would be bitter; the passions Angel had provoked in Richie would go as dark as they’d burned bright. For himself, he’d come to terms with his absurd infatuation if not with all its consequences. His drunken tangle with Frank Billodeau’s daughter was harder to process. Nothing about that night made sense then or now.

  Public sympathy for the death of Richie Bainard’s wife had benefited R.J. in that few were inclined to mount a serious manhunt. Prosecutors vowed to pursue the fugitive to the ends of the earth but the police dragged their feet from the start. R.J. remained at large with minimal effort. Rumor put him in Canada, Mexico, on an oil rig off Corpus Christi, and behind the counter at a Baton Rouge gun shop. Now here he was sipping beer in his father’s hunting lodge two hours’ drive from where his accuser claimed he’d raped her like a beast.