Cajun Waltz

by Robert H. Patton

  “I’m neither,” Seth said. “I’m just someone who’s been through stuff, too.”

  “Car accident, was it?” Delly asked him.

  “Yes.” His tone said no more questions.

  A hospital orderly tapped the doorjamb. “Mista Seth? Visitor down front.”

  “For me?”

  “Sister, I think. Waitin’ outside.”

  “Probably come to disown me in person.” Seth felt his way across the room to the window overlooking the parking lot. He motioned Delly over. “Tell me what you see.”

  A black sedan idled before the building’s entrance. “Is that a Cadillac?” There’d been a time when the word felt luscious on Delly’s tongue, like Paris or caviar. But now whenever she saw cars of that make she remembered the last time she’d sat in one.

  “No doubt,” he said.

  They stood near each other at the window. There were scars, little divots linked by threadlike lines, across the upper half of his face. She peeked at his eyes. Rather than fishy or dull, they had a pale green brightness flawed only by aiming at nothing.

  “She there?” he asked.

  A tall young woman in a tweed jacket and slacks stood arms crossed at the top of the steps. Her thick hair had the sheen of a hundred brush strokes and its silver barrette flashed in the sun. “That’s one mean-looking girl,” Delly said.

  “Amen to that.”

  “Your sister?” She studied his scarred face and wondered if it hurt to be touched.

  “Half,” he said. “Thank God.”

  * * *

  EACH DAY BEFORE sunup, itinerant laborers gathered at the Esso station on the state highway heading west from Lake Charles. They sought a day’s wages and maybe a sack lunch for sweatwork on farms and construction sites. Alvin scouted the group for weeks, discreetly asking various candidates what they would do for five hundred dollars. An ex-convict out of Oklahoma named Freddy Baez gave the correct answer. “Anything.” The task Alvin preferred to avoid would get done after all.

  In his late twenties, Freddy had a beard and good teeth and a slick way with barmaids that belied unreasonable passions when it came to money. Alvin might have been of easier mind in soliciting him had he known that Freddy had done time at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for an incident of armed robbery that unbeknownst to the judge included Freddy’s dismemberment and burial of his cohort in the desert near Fort Sill. This part of Freddy’s personal story never came up. Alvin asked only if he would kill someone for pay. Freddy said maybe. Alvin repeated the offer of five hundred dollars. Freddy said six or I walk. Alvin knew he’d found the right man.

  He spent his own money to outfit Freddy in premium field gear. It had to be top shelf if he was to pass as the sort of wealthy sportsman that might patronize the Section Eight Gun Club as a guest of the Bainard family. Since there was no way the ruse could survive Freddy opening his mouth, Alvin told him to act hungover and say nada when they met their hunting guide. Freddy gave thumbs-up.

  Alvin asked R.J. to take them to a duck blind out on Finney Pond, on the lee side of a natural berm between the marsh and the Sabine Preserve. The pond, windswept and isolated, had lately produced nothing to shoot but coots and songbirds. R.J. suggested they try elsewhere, but after Alvin’s passionate spiel about contemplative scenery and healthful air, it was to Finney Pond they headed in R.J.’s mudboat.

  It was the last day of duck season, 1957. The predawn dark was razor cold. Panes of ice buckled as the mudboat’s wake rolled through the shallows along the weedy banks of the channel. In the glow of R.J.’s running lights hundreds of pule d’eaus skittered and took flight, black wings beating like bats pouring out of a cave. The roar of the mudboat’s tunnel drive solved any issues of conversation. Freddy turned his face from the wind and hugged R.J.’s retriever for warmth. Alvin stared stoically rearward, watching R.J.’s pirogue, tied on a line thirty feet aft, shimmy and bounce in the mudboat’s wake like a hypnotist’s watch gone mad.

  R.J.’s favorite part of any marsh run was to slalom among the islets so fast that he couldn’t think. He’d moved around often since fleeing home. Except for loneliness and occasional mortal panic, life had passed tolerably well. Sometimes he’d pretended he was fleeing injustice or that he was a spy eluding assassins; more often he’d played guitar, drunk beer, and waited for Alvin to bring him money. Settling in Cameron Parish had led him to settle in other ways also. He’d injured a girl once—the sexual encounter on Heather Lane dogged his memory like an old massacre in the mind of a veteran—but he’d strived since then to be decent. Redemption never occurred to him. He sought only to do no more harm.

  The morning sky went from black to brown. R.J. eased his mudboat alongside the duck blind and killed the engine. A wooden box embedded in the muck and fringed with papery reeds, the blind was covered with a sheet of green-painted tin whose edge he gripped with icy fingers and hauled into the mudboat. The hewn bench inside the blind accommodated three men shoulder to shoulder. He told the others to climb in; he’d join them after he beached the boat a distance away and paddled out in his pirogue to set the decoys. His dog leaped ashore in anticipation of sport to come. Alvin and Freddy stretched their frozen limbs and prepared to disembark while R.J., his back turned, held the boat steady with a push-pole.

  Freddy inserted two shells into his shotgun and banged the barrel closed. “No need to load up yet,” R.J. said before recoiling in surprise from the weapon aimed at his face.

  “Don’t shoot!” Alvin said, as if shocked by what was happening.

  Freddy glared at him. “The fuck. I coulda done him inna back and we’d be goin’ home now.”

  Too dismayed to be scared, R.J. asked Alvin, “What the hell you got goin’ here?”

  Alvin said to Freddy, whose face was scarlet with cold and perplexity, “’Member what I told you? Boy first needsa hear who and what for. Then he gets it.”

  R.J.’s eyes darted back and forth between Alvin’s face and the barrels of Freddy’s shotgun, which resembled a figure eight around two wells of bottomless black.

  “Don’t be scared,” Alvin said. “When’s time, I’ll tell you.”

  R.J.’s thoughts began to accelerate. Options occurred to him—leap overboard, attack, give a winning smile—but were so jumbled that his brain locked like an overheated engine and became completely still.

  “Tell him,” Alvin said to Freddy, “who hired you.”

  “You hired me.”

  “Who beyond me?”

  “Um…”

  Alvin cut him off. “Fact is,” he said to R.J., “your brother hired Freddy and me to kill you here this mornin’.”

  The information took a moment to penetrate. “Seth? Did that?”

  “Your daddy ain’t well. An’ comes to splittin’ up money, two ways beats three any day.”

  “Gee.” R.J. slumped on the mudboat seat with a vacant look, like a prophet who got it all wrong. “If you told me Bonnie wants me gone, I’d believe it. Or my father. Christ knows, Richie Bainard’s capable of about anything.”

  “Richie Bainard?” Freddy said. “The hardware king?”

  Alvin’s expression stayed placid, but for Freddy to hear much less speak the name “Bainard” had not been part of the plan. He unzipped his gun case and withdrew a side-by-side twelve gauge, loading its shells with indefinite purpose.

  “Guess I shoulda charged more,” Freddy laughed.

  Alvin raised his weapon. With two guns aimed at him, R.J. would have appeared to any onlookers, of which there were none, like a very important dead man. “It’s time,” Alvin said.

  “Alvin. Jesus.”

  Freddy asked R.J., “You wanna turn around like he said?”

  The flick of R.J.’s eyes between the guns became frantic.

  “Have it your way.” Freddy leveled his weapon at R.J.’s chest.

  “One thing first,” Alvin said.

  Freddy turned just as the sergeant, with a delicate movement, swung the barrel of the shotgun he w
as cradling to within inches of Freddy’s forehead. He pulled the trigger. The earsplitting report carried no echo, dispersing across the marsh like spooked birds. The picture imprinted R.J.’s retina like a flashbulb burst. He saw it happen, didn’t comprehend it, saw it again in afterimage with a plume of skull material spouting over the water and fading into smoke and pink mist.

  Freddy pitched across the gunwale as if clocked by a prizefighter. The back of his head emptied into the water, forming a blood cloud laced with stringy bits like spoiled milk in tea. With infant wonder R.J. studied the flow, enamel red with steam coming off it, till his reverie was broken by Alvin’s voice. “You’re welcome.”

  R.J. tried to swallow. Couldn’t.

  “I done this for you. So you’ll see things clear.”

  Long pause. “What?”

  “You heard me before. Seth asked me to arrange this undertakin’ against you.”

  R.J.’s thoughts groped back to moments ago. “Me and him always got on okay.”

  Alvin spat onto the boat deck. “Hear me again: it’s for the money. And his mama besides.”

  “Angel?”

  “Puts her death on you, he does.”

  “I wasn’t even there.”

  “You know what happened.”

  “I know what you told me. She drove into a tree.”

  “Runnin’ away, same day as you. Big coincidence.”

  “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

  “Runnin’ to each other. You and her. Lovers.” Alvin shrugged. “It’s what he thinks—and not for no reason, you gotta admit.”

  R.J. surveyed the marsh. In the usual way of shock, his mind was empty throughout this display of contemplation. He indicated Freddy. “Why kill him?”

  “I shoulda let him proceed?”

  “Shouldna got started in the first place!”

  “’Cept you wouldna bought it otherwise. Dog, I only let him get close to show the level of feelin’ against you. You got lucky,” Alvin said, “thanks to me. Now let’s bury this garbage and get home. ’Less you wanna keep huntin’.”

  R.J. wasn’t hearing. “Think he’ll try again?”

  “Seth? No question. Crash messed him up, made him mean as dirt. Best bet? Get far away and never come back.”

  “I’m not scared of him.”

  “Your daddy’s dyin’, and there’s a lotta dough on the line. Boy won’t miss twice.”

  “He’s dying?”

  “Tumor in the head. Down to weeks.”

  R.J. absorbed this. “He dies, Bonnie takes over.”

  “Seth right beside her, he hopes.”

  R.J. regarded Freddy’s body. He took out his lighter and cigarettes and smoked for a bit. At length he said, “Is it my imagination, or does he look like me?”

  “It’s there. With the beard especially.”

  “I’ve thought about it, you know? Killing myself. Thought about it for real, thought about faking it. Close the book. Make a new start.” R.J. spoke as if alone, as if to his face in a mirror. He told Alvin to hand him his shotgun.

  It was a nervous moment for the sergeant. Their marine past prevailed and the order was obeyed.

  “C’mere, boy.” Since hearing the shot earlier, R.J.’s dog had been scanning the water for something to retrieve. It padded down the embankment and bounded into the boat. “Such a good boy you are,” R.J. cooed. He raised Alvin’s gun. The dog wagged its tail. It sniffed a gunpowder scent at the mouth of the barrel and was starting to lick the metal when R.J. pulled the trigger.

  He set down the shotgun and patted Freddy’s pockets. He began to strip the body. “Help me get off his clothes.”

  “You shot your dog.”

  “You blew a man’s head off! Now do like I tell you and give me his clothes.”

  From there the pattern was Alvin squeamish and R.J. deliberate till at last R.J., shivering in the cold from having undressed to don Freddy’s gear, pushed the corpse—now dressed as R.J.—to the deck of the mudboat between the fore and aft seats where it lay in a grievous splay. He placed Alvin’s gun in Freddy’s hands, its barrel directed at the charred ravine that was the top of Freddy’s face. Blood from the dog pooled under both corpses.

  “I killed myself today,” R.J. said to Alvin.

  “Say what?”

  “Sat in my boat and shot my dog, then me.”

  “We’re leavin’ him here?”

  “We paddle home in my pirogue. Someone’ll find him, and that’ll be that for R. J. Bainard and the shitty life he led.”

  “They’ll know it ain’t you.”

  “You saw we look alike. And critters’ll work him over.” R.J. slowed down his thoughts to explain. “I want it ended. I want to be gone in the ground.”

  Alvin looked unwell. R.J., by contrast, apparently possessed a knack for this stuff. He took out another cigarette but thought better of it. He stuck the pack and his Ronson into the pocket of the canvas jacket on Freddy. “Good time to quit,” he said.

  What had been an hour’s ride here in the mudboat this morning took five hours in the pirogue going home. Paddling away from the scene, Alvin’s last vision was of Freddy’s body sprawled beside R.J.’s dog, poor dog, on the bloody deck of the mudboat. No one saw three hunters head out this morning, no one saw two return. Thus did R. J. Bainard’s life conclude—alone in the wild, poor man.

  * * *

  THE GRAVITY OF what had happened at Finney Pond wasn’t lost on Alvin. The only thing that could have made him feel worse would have been if Freddy Baez’s body were somehow traced to him. To stain the Bainard name even by association would have put him into torment. He slept poorly, unable to keep from picturing a man on the marsh with R.J.’s clothes on his back and Alvin’s birdshot in his brain. It didn’t help that he heard nothing from R.J. for weeks afterward. They’d parted at the boat dock and hadn’t spoken since. Terrified that these loose ends would disturb his good thing with Bonnie, he hid his anxiety beneath chirpy high spirits that were driving her up the wall. That was the state of things when at last the phone call came.

  A trapper had found the bodies. The contents of the dead man’s wallet provided identification and the location of R.J.’s rented room in Hancock Bayou. Alvin stood by as Bonnie took the call from the Cameron Parish sheriff in Richie’s office, her feet propped on the desk in fixed repose as she received the grim details. She’d never been close to her brother and hadn’t seen him in more than three years. But knowing he was out there alive had made their father’s imminent passing seem less lonesome to her. “Was he depressed when you saw him last?” she asked Alvin after she hung up.

  “He was never too cheerful.”

  “Gotta feel sorry for him.” She sounded as if she did. “I guess a funeral’s in order.”

  “After you go down to ID him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Next o’ kin. I believe that’s policy.”

  “Body has no head, the man said.”

  “It’s got a head.”

  “How do you know?”

  He caught himself. “I seen stuff. Hardly ever a shot takes off the whole thing.”

  “And his face and hands all chewed? Jesus God.”

  It can’t be overstated how distressed Alvin was. He dreaded that Bonnie, on viewing the corpse, would realize it wasn’t R.J. and deduce that her brother had murdered a man to stage his own suicide. Believing him a killer would, Alvin worried, further spook her skittish heart. His one hope was that the resemblance between Freddy and R.J. had been improved by exposure outdoors, leaving Alvin and Bonnie’s love affair to continue its upward course.

  * * *

  SALLIE HOOKER HAD had no contact with her daughter after Angel left Hancock Bayou with Richie Bainard in 1938. She’d learned they were married only after chancing on a copy of The Lake Charles American with a photo of the couple as honorary king and queen of the Calcasieu-Cameron Fair in 1948. She guessed right away that the little boy in the picture was Angel and Richie’s child. To not
know her grandson or have any hope of meeting him didn’t depress her as much as you’d think. She was pleased for Angel and grateful for God’s miracle that a child of her blood could have so brilliant a future.

  She was saddened by R.J.’s suicide. He’d come by her facility at the start of duck season last fall and declared right away who he was. Her memory of him as a child was entirely warm and she saw no reason to pretend otherwise. She’d asked about Angel, which took him aback since he had no idea of the women’s connection. Thus it was R.J. who first gave her the news, as Alvin Dupree had given it to him, that her daughter, his stepmother, had died in a car crash. “An’ the child?” Sallie had asked.

  “They call him Seth. He got hurt but is okay, what I hear.”

  Her closed eyes indicated she was thanking the Lord. “My grandson a Bainard. Ain’t that a thing.”

  R.J. had put his hand on Sallie’s shoulder. “We’re related now, you and me.”

  “Now you jus’ silly,” she’d said. She’d begun to cry, remembering her daughter, still you could tell his words had pleased her.

  Those had been their first exchanges. There’d come a subsequent moment when he confessed he was on the run from the law.

  “Hadda wonder why you here, actin’ poor,” Sallie said.

  He’d felt relieved that she didn’t ask what crime he’d committed. Robbery or fighting she could probably accept, but to think that the little boy she’d raised could have harmed a girl would have been a sore disappointment.

  And now that boy was dead, his remains found on the marsh in condition that would have been worse if not for chill winter temperatures. Muskrats and carrion birds had consumed much of the face and fingers, but insects, gators, and rot weren’t a factor this time of year; the body was decently preserved inside layered hunting clothes. The trapper had brought it in his flatbed to Sallie’s cold locker for storage pending collection by the sheriff. Men lugged it in like a sack of grain and laid it on a worktable in the middle of the locker. Though the upper skull was gone, Sallie didn’t hesitate to touch the stringy hair at the temple, remembering its lovely chestnut color when R.J. was a baby.