Cajun Waltz

by Robert H. Patton

  “But honestly,” Abe went on, “R. J. Bainard does not interest me. We know he did something to that girl, or with her. And we know why.”

  “’Cause his mother and Coach Billodeau.”

  “His stepmother, Hollis. Don’t be gross.”

  “Why she come to you? You were against her, those days.”

  “I was always a gentleman to Adele. She knew I pitied her for her mistreatment.”

  “Mistreatment? Charge was rape.”

  “Verdict dubious.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Nor do we care,” Abe said, his tone sharpening. “Do we, Hollis?”

  “Gotta say, you’re losin’ me.”

  Abe leaned forward. “You’re on the payroll. R.J. is living free under everyone’s nose. Bainard money makes it happen.”

  “I’m retired, case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “As am I. Jobs equally well done, if not equally remunerated.”

  “You’re way off here. Way off.” Jenks was lying, of course—except in one respect. He indeed had been Richie Bainard’s mole inside the hunt for R.J., keeping him informed of any developments that might lead to finding the fugitive. Where Abe’s accusation was wrong was in Jenks’s incentive. The money came second, a carrot to take the sting off the stick. The main thing that had made the Chief comply was Richie’s threat to expose him for his part in Walter Dopsie’s death almost thirty years ago. No matter that Jenks was a better man today, that he’d since renounced his youthful enthrallment with the Klan at any number of church testimonials. Such allegations from someone as admired as Richie Bainard would have ruined Jenks in this town where he’d been reborn.

  It had taken Richie, on first meeting the Chief after R.J.’s arrest in 1953, about five seconds to recognize him from that ugly night in Pinefield. Jenks’s globular head and cornmuffin face emerged from buried memory like a demon emerging from smoke. Still reeling from Seth and Angel’s car crash, seeing the leader of the gang that had beat Walter to death standing before him in the uniform of the Lake Charles chief of police had overwhelmed Richie. He went dizzy and fell into the arms of Bonnie and the family chauffeur, Alvin Dupree. They got him some water. Like a madman’s babbled last words, his breathless account of Jenks’s terrible deed sounded nuts to Bonnie. But Alvin took it in thoughtfully. He leaned to Richie’s ear and suggested he say nothing more, that the leverage against Jenks might be useful. Bonnie had been impressed.

  Abe dabbed his lips with a napkin. “I want what you have, Hollis.”

  Jenks summoned his blankest look.

  “Money. From Richie Bainard. For my silence. About his son.” Abe was pleased how tough he sounded.

  “You worked for him. Ask him yourself.”

  “They fired me after all that. Richie out of longstanding spite, his daughter because she thought one country lawyer would never do for the great Block’s corporation.”

  “Guess you’re outta luck.”

  “Ten thousand dollars.” The number seemed not too small, not too big. “I expect a prompt reply. Otherwise it’s not R.J. who’ll suffer, Hollis. It’s you.”

  Jenks stayed to finish his coffee after Abe left. Before coming today, he’d had an inkling that the lawyer would accuse him of taking bribes and threaten to blow the whistle. It would have been unpleasant but still a penalty in keeping with Jenks’s belief that we all pay for our sins eventually. His own disgrace he could handle, but to think of it touching his family, his grandkids, was more than a little annoying.

  It had been a while. He hoped he could still reach his Bainard contact. A man named Alvin, it was—no last name. Jenks smiled, remembering the guy’s mania about insulating the family from scandal. As if anyone cared that the mighty Bainards were as scummy as everyone else.

  * * *

  DRIVING BACK INTO town, Abe pictured couriers in trench coats leaving bags of cash at obscure drop points and shivered to think of participating in such hijinks. Adele Billodeau’s visit yesterday had aroused similar excitement that he might yet find fulfillment by ruining Richie Bainard at last.

  She’d looked a fright, unrecognizable as a onetime hot ticket. Her mad tale had poured out in a monotone. Imagine almost killing a teenage boy! Warped by depression and booze, she’d bludgeoned the kid to protect her stepdaughter—totally in error, it turned out. “No one knows I saw R. J. Bainard that afternoon,” she’d explained. “They think I’m just a time bomb that blew. I’m only telling you, Mr. Percy—”

  “Abe, please. You’re a grown woman now.”

  “—because I don’t trust the cops and because you were nice to me back then. About what R.J. did.” She looked at him straight. “People still don’t believe me.”

  “It’s hard for them, Adele, to speak of a white girl raped.”

  “Delly. I go by Delly now.”

  “Delly.” It sounded like an Irish harridan with ten kids. “Precious.”

  In the course of deposing her before the trial, Abe had cloaked their sessions in kindness. She’d seemed to forget that she was the prime witness for the prosecution and therefore the target he must destroy. Her isolation had made it so easy. She couldn’t confide in her mother, who’d pulled an ostrich act over the whole seedy episode; nor in her father, who’d offered only useless remorse before opting out altogether.

  Abe had told Delly yesterday that he would need time to work up a plan to bring R.J. to justice now that they knew where he was hiding. His mind was already swirling with plans first to shake down the Bainards for money and afterward to demolish Richie’s reputation as a self-made success whose public spirit derived from private sorrow. Shaking Delly’s hand good-bye, he’d promised he would help her.

  “Not me. Help my father.”

  “Your father?”

  “He shot himself.”

  “I do remember.”

  “For letting me down, I think.” Her composure in speaking of her father’s suicide intimidated Abe. He’d met Frank Billodeau once, when Frank had come in to testify that R.J.’s assault on his daughter was for jealous payback against him. “My life’s finished,” Delly went on. “Catching R. J. Bainard won’t change that. So don’t do it for my sake.”

  “For your father’s sake then,” Abe said. “And my own.”

  * * *

  BONNIE BAINARD SAT at her father’s bedside holding his hand in hers. “Hey, Daddy.”

  “Oh. Hi.” His voice was slurred with morphine.

  “It’s Bonnie.”

  “I know who it is.” For a moment he hadn’t known. It filled her with irksome pity. In the early stages of his illness Bonnie used to look forward to these chats for their reprise of the collaboration they’d shared. It was mostly blankness now. She’d grown impatient, discouraged by his insistence despite his debility to review business matters she ably could handle. She wanted him to let go, wanted him, as he’d long promised, to entrust her with all he’d created. “Seth come back?” he said.

  “Daddy, please. He’s not worth it.”

  Richie’s filmy eyes closed out his daughter’s frown. “Your opinion.”

  She had no sympathy for his continued concern for her half brother. He’d fretted miserably over Seth’s recovery from the car accident, supported him, took pains to include him in his will only to have Seth, as Alvin had told Bonnie afterward, reject Richie’s plea to reconcile. The kid would inherit nothing as a result.

  “When I getta see R.J.?” he asked.

  “R.J.? You can’t be serious.”

  “One time. All I want.”

  “Christ, Daddy. Why?”

  “Things to say.”

  “Say them to me.”

  “Not the same. You’re my strong one. He’s … not strong.”

  His thin hand groped for hers. Bonnie patted it distractedly, like a doctor with more than one terminal patient. She’d always admired her father’s grit; it testified to her growth as his daughter and colleague that in his present infirmity she admired him rather less.
She was Richie’s equal that way, having yet to prove, when the need arose, to be insufficiently heartless.

  It maddened her that he now wanted to reconcile with R.J. as well as with Seth—she pictured them all blubbering at Richie’s bedside and tasted bile at the back of her throat. Alvin had been smuggling money to R.J. on Richie’s order for years. Bonnie didn’t care to know the details. But she was loyal. She would never terminate the payments. She expected to fund R.J.’s worthless life until the day it ended.

  Her brothers were weak. One exploited old wounds to make his betters feel guilty, the other had run away in cowardice rather than confront an accuser he’d sworn was lying. Now her father was weakening, too. Make your bed and lie in it, Bonnie thought. Even if its sheets are shrouds.

  “Bon?”

  “I’m here.”

  Her father’s eyes—brown pupils, yellow whites—stared as if off a cliff. “Want my boys back.”

  “I know, Daddy.” She squeezed his hand slightly too hard. “And I’ll get it done like I always do.”

  * * *

  IT COULD HAVE been any night in early 1957 that Alvin had his hands in Bonnie’s unpinned hair and was massaging her scalp like a spa professional. They were in her upstairs suite, lights low, shades drawn, her father asleep downstairs.

  Alvin worked from behind a love seat on which she reclined. Her bathrobe was loosely tied at the waist. Her long toes curled and uncurled in a flex of feline unwinding. He was in his street clothes and she, just out of the tub, was imperially naked under her robe. Opportunistic by nature, he explored alternate drives with Bonnie; his resulting peace of mind signaled a balance of aggression and servitude. He liked that she was queen and he the rug under her feet, that he could mean nothing to her and yet tend to her welfare like no other. “You’re sayin’ you want me to fetch R.J. home?” he said idly.

  “It’s what Daddy wants. Do you think it’s risky?”

  “Not long as it’s temporary.”

  “I don’t like it. He’s my brother, okay—doesn’t mean I care to see him.”

  He glided his hands down her front under her robe. He watched her body arch and was filled with awe at Bonnie’s ignorance of her own gratification. She preferred to be impregnable, to let down her armor only in condescension to the pleas of a lesser being—of Alvin, that is; or, say, the girl inside her who liked this more than she knew. The robe loosened. He saw between her small breasts the vague dents in her sternum resembling baby thumbprints in clay. Their dialog skimmed above these things like blue sky above a tornado. “He’s lookin’ well, gotta say.”

  “R.J.? Why not? Been on the tit all his life.”

  “Speakin’ o’ which.”

  “Nosir.” She slapped his hand. Her nipples had perked. They were long—longer than a whole segment of his pinkie finger. The sight of them exposed and erect, when she permitted it, excited yet also embarrassed him, which offered then a twisty thrill when in exasperation she thrust them in his face like bugs she was making him eat. She demanded a story. “That girl at the hotel,” she prompted. “The slutty one you met.”

  “Ethel? What about her?”

  “You were hard on her?”

  “She was hard on me.”

  “A tease?”

  “Flashin’ me skin all day, and them wide-mouth smiles that you know was born to suck. Girl like that’s gotta learn.”

  “You taught her?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “And what, Bonnie?”

  She shifted a little. “Did she learn?”

  “Couple times. Couple ways.” He bent to her ear. “Had her beggin’ like a baby.”

  “Tell me…” Her tone yielded to whispery wonder. “… how she begged.”

  Alvin talked while continuing to massage her, spinning a tale of rough seduction as schematically plotted as a Hollywood thriller. His hands roamed as he spoke, sliding further under her robe, parting it slowly until it lay open like two terrycloth wings with her body larval pale inside. She drifted to the sound of his story, his amorous poetry. Her legs were pronged open totally beautifully and her hand moved between them with the spacy concentration of a genius chewing a pencil. He pressed his crotch against the back of the love seat and stroked her arms with his tenderest touch.

  He was in love with Bonnie Bainard. A large factor in his feelings was his conviction that she could never love him. Her indifference was commendable in his view. He wasn’t worthy of her except as a personal implement along the lines of a fork or hairbrush. His fondest dream was that she would never tire of using him. Of the wedding band he wore, he told strangers that he was a widower and told people who knew otherwise that pretending to be married helped him better to savor his sins. He wore the ring in honor of his secret crush. Bonnie never asked him about it, though he liked to think she knew.

  He spent a lot of time plotting ways to put his love to her best use. She was unaware of his tireless considerations; he hoped to keep it that way to spare her any unpleasantness he might perform to promote her ambitions. It spoke to the depth of his affection that he knew better than she what her ambitions were, how she longed to bloom in a garden free of dreary reminders of family failing and scandal.

  Recently Alvin had learned, through Hollis Jenks, that some skunk lawyer out of the Bainards’ past wanted a cash bribe to keep R.J.’s whereabouts secret. It was exactly the sort of collateral crap that Alvin couldn’t let touch his beloved. More than he blamed the lawyer, who was only trying to turn a buck, he blamed R.J. for smearing Bonnie with the muck of his life just as her time to shine was nigh. He felt loyal to his old lieutenant, semper fi and whatnot. But it was nothing compared to this.

  With wonder in his eyes he gripped Bonnie’s shoulders as she rubbed herself. Her teeth were clenched but sounds escaped. She possessed a stubborn sexuality. Inhibition and pride made for a torrent when the floodwaters broke; the sounds went from grudging to grateful. In a moment she would dismiss him crossly with no acknowledgment of what had just passed. He adored her all the more for her odd ways, adored taking care of her and fulfilling desires such a lady deserves but need never admit.

  * * *

  AFTER THE EMERGENCY passed of cranial fracture and swelling, Joey Meers was transferred from critical care to the Lake Charles Hospital’s Angela Bainard Convalescent Wing, one of several philanthropic town projects Richie Bainard had bankrolled in his late wife’s name. Joey remembered nothing of Delly Franklin’s attack. His speech remained halting, his limbs rubbery. His hair, shaved for surgery, had regrown to a boot-camp buzz. His face was slack on one side, with a sleepy eye that made his mother weep when she visited and made Delly’s stepdaughter Fiona not want to visit at all. His parents deemed it proof of his brain damage that he bore no grudge against Delly. Corinne and Donald Meers had cursed her at first. Lately they were saying forgiving things to make it look better when they flushed her from their lives.

  A varsity basketball star, Joey missed his teammates more than the game, missed the easy popularity that had carried him like a wave through his schooldays. That was gone now, a fact people’s solicitude confirmed every day. Only his cousin Delly was honest. A frequent visitor, she told him when he looked improved and when he looked like shit. She regularly tidied his room and took his dirty clothes home to wash. “How’s about we dump the flowerpot?” she asked one afternoon, holding it up for his verdict.

  “Dump. Incinerate. Do what you want.”

  “What I want is for you to buck up.”

  That was the tone, insufficiently abject, that annoyed and amused him by turns. How dare she act snippy when she ought to bow and scrape? His parents by contrast would grab both his hands and talk slowly. His words trailed his thoughts and he needed a walker to get around, still he didn’t like being treated like a foreigner.

  “I’m here if it helps and I’ll go if it don’t,” Delly said.

  He yielded out of exhaustion. “Don’t go. I know I’m a jerk sometimes.”
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br />   “I can stay till your counselor gets here. Better you’re a jerk with me than him.” She bent down and hugged him in his chair. “Least I deserve it.”

  “Oh. Beg pardon.”

  They looked up. “Afternoon, Mr. Hooker,” Delly said.

  “Didn’t I say call me Seth, Mrs. Franklin?” The young man in the doorway had an earnest manner conveyed in fidgets and squinty stares.

  “Then time you call me Delly.” She didn’t remember him from high school, just another faceless supplicant who’d cleared out of her way as she cruised down the hall. She’d heard from hospital staff that he’d been a long-term patient and now counseled others in the same boat.

  “You were having a private moment,” Seth said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.” How he leaned one-handed on his cane seemed an attempt to look suave.

  “You can see us?” Joey asked.

  “Against the light of the window, a little.” Along with impaired vision, Seth’s injuries had left him with a gawky ungainliness that wasn’t helped by his hatchet haircut. He lived at the hospital and liked it—which in itself, he would have been the first to say, argued for keeping him here.

  “I gotta go,” Delly said.

  “How’s Fiona?” Joey slipped the question in quickly, like a card into a house made out of them.

  “Still hates me.” Bad subject. “See you tomorrow.”

  “My folks’ll be here around noon.”

  “I’ll come at suppertime.”

  Seth listened with an avid expression, trying to picture what Delly looked like, her voice rich with self-disgust. “You and his parents don’t get along?”

  “No,” she and Joey said together.

  Seth laughed before realizing it wasn’t funny. When Delly asked him how Joey’s therapy was progressing, he answered, “Doing well. Learn to walk, learn to read. Then run for Congress.”

  “I can read,” Joey protested.

  “In bits. I struggled, too. Practice makes perfect,” Seth added pointedly.

  Joey explained to his cousin, “He wants me to read the Bible. You’d think,” he went on, pausing to arrange the words in his mouth, “that I’d rate a real headshrinker instead of a Holy Roller.”