Cajun Waltz

by Robert H. Patton

  “I wouldn’t say a lot.”

  “I recognized you first time we met.”

  Abe wondered why Alvin hadn’t mentioned this before. He was afraid to ask why he was mentioning it now. A question had to be asked: “Was I nice to you?”

  “One word for it.”

  Alvin switched on the radio and turned up the volume to play over the raindrops drumming the Cadillac roof. It was WJBW out of New Orleans. The song was “St. James Infirmary Blues.” Alvin hummed to the middle verse:

  Seventeen coal black horses, hitched to a rubber-tired hack,

  Seven girls goin’ to the graveyard, only six of them are comin’ back …

  Abe did not like the song.

  * * *

  WINDS WERE PICKING up. Tarzy Hooker was tying down gear outside the tool shed when the Cadillac pulled up at his aunt Sallie’s place. She’d taken the ferry to fetch his mom from her shift at the sugar refinery across the Calcasieu ship channel. Tarzy recognized Abe right away, the lawyer, his dropped pants et cetera having made a strong impression. Because the other man was big, white, and wearing a jacket and tie, the boy guessed he was with the law. The man asked to see the cold locker. “Empty now,” Tarzy said.

  “What you called, boy?” Alvin asked.

  “Tarzy.”

  “Short for Tazwell, am I right?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Dog, I’m good.” His cheerful tone notwithstanding, Alvin had begun to feel agitated. The three of them standing in awkward silence under a pouring rain was getting well past absurd. He closed his eyes and gave a robotic nod, as if to instructions only he heard. He opened his eyes on a world unseen since Okinawa. “Now best you show me that cold box.”

  Tarzy was smart enough to be scared. The men’s demeanors matched the slate sky, and the way they stood apart from each other, like rival politicians working the same crowd, suggested that they were here on disagreeable business. He unlatched the door as they watched. Stale air spilled out. The cold locker’s refrigeration was off. The table on which Freddy Baez had been laid out was backed against the far wall. There was no window, and a small floor grate at the base of one wall was clogged with feathers and grime.

  Rain dappled and reddened Abe’s face like an ad for ripe tomatoes. His thoughts reeled from what Alvin had said in the car. He’d touched the children sometimes, boys and girls alike. Never hurt them, never made them touch him, and made up for it always with money and kindness. The balance remained mixed in his mind. He had a feeling it would be clearer after today.

  Alvin began quizzing Tarzy about the dead body from months ago, who was it and why hadn’t he told the truth right away, all while calling him nigger this and nigger that in behavior pisspoor not least because this was a child with no one to defend him. Abe tried, but Alvin hammered a fist into the crook of his neck that dropped him to the soggy turf with a cracked collarbone at minimum. Abe tried to stand but fell back in the slop with a groan.

  Alvin resumed his nasty spew on Tarzy. The interesting thing is that he was faking. He was no more a racist than he was a ladies’ man. Like war cries before a suicide charge, he was steeling himself with ancient hatreds to make what came next feel less terrible. He was going to kill Tarzy and he was going to kill Abe, and he would do it for his sake, not Bonnie’s. He’d shot Freddy Baez. If it ever came out—beginning with these two—he would lose her. His love had turned selfish. It was a breakthrough of sorts.

  Alvin reached into his coat and withdrew his .45. Tarzy shook his head in frantic apology for whatever he must have done to deserve this. He backed into the cold locker. Abe struggled to his feet and swung at Alvin’s head with his cane, his miss by a foot not to detract from a commendable try. Alvin threw him into the locker, where Abe collapsed at Tarzy’s feet. The boy knelt to see if he was okay. Alvin stood in the rain outside the door and studied them there on the floor. An old man and a little boy, arms around each other, wide eyes looking up. He slammed the door shut to extinguish the image. The latch locked.

  “No!” Abe’s voice was muffled behind the door. Hands slapped against the wood.

  Outside, Alvin retreated a few paces to gather perspective on what he’d wrought, like a painter perusing work at his easel, its messiness possibly art. His mind retained the image of two faces displaying looks of dismay as the locker door closed, their brains not yet absorbing the peril at hand.

  Their pounding and muffled shrieks disrupted Alvin’s calm. He almost decided to release them. But it would be awkward explaining why he’d shut them inside, after which he’d have to finish them anyway. The better course was to get in the car and drive. Maybe they’d suffocate. Maybe someone would rescue them. Let Jesus decide. He felt rueful in his abdication but glad to be rid of the blame.

  The screams faded as he walked through the rain to his Cadillac. He hardly noticed the water soaking his clothes or squishing from his shoes. The trip home was arduous, the rain forming ponds wherever the narrow road dipped. It took Alvin four hours to reach Lake Charles. He looked for a gift shop on the way to buy something for Bonnie. Everything was closed due to weather. It was okay. He’d given her plenty of gifts in the past. Today was strictly for him.

  * * *

  FIONA FRANKLIN HADN’T seen Joey Meers since his first days after surgery. She’d told herself that someone so damaged wouldn’t want visitors, but her real reason for avoiding him was that she didn’t want to see his parents. In addition to blaming Delly for maiming their son, the Meerses blamed Fiona for dragging Joey down to her trashy level. The girl’s only defense was to deflect their contempt onto Delly, clearly the real trash in this tale.

  Leaving home to go live with her father had proved a mistake. Arthur Franklin was a classic wallower. He regaled Fiona with litanies of persecution aimed at forging a father-daughter kinship based on mutual mistreatment by Delly. He sometimes took late-night drives that she suspected were to spy on his wife, casing her house for lovers or for the sound of popular radio songs that might indicate a happy person inside.

  At first Delly had begged Fiona to come back but lately had dropped the subject. Fiona wanted to return more than ever as a result. When Delly told her one day that the next evening she’d be transacting “personal business” at Joey’s hospital, Fiona saw it as an opportunity to sneak home to inspect it for evidence of her stepmother boozing or bedding strange men, anything that might account for Delly preferring privacy to begging Fiona’s forgiveness.

  Lest her father likewise go snooping there, Fiona told him, with much innuendo, about Delly’s upcoming hospital rendezvous. She knew it would send him on a goose chase and leave the house free to Fiona and … Joey Meers. Her cousin’s name popped into her head as if it had been waiting there all along. It was the perfect excuse to contact him now that he’d been discharged from the hospital and was living back home. She’d say she was worried about her stepmother and would he help her put those worries to rest. All safely formal, no reference whatsoever to the night at the hunting lodge when he’d placed her hand on his penis and got his skull crushed for his trouble.

  She feared the ploy was transparent. But wasn’t Joey brain-damaged now? It’d be an act of mercy to reach out to him. She dialed his home with steady hands.

  * * *

  HURRICANE AUDREY SLAMMED a seventy-eight-ton fishing vessel into an oil platform and drowned nine men on Wednesday afternoon. Donald Meers just then was tooling in his Lincoln around drizzly Lake Charles with his new pistol in his lap, running stop signs with goofy laughter as if listening, which he wasn’t, to a funny radio play. No one saw him. With the rain coming harder, there were few cars in the streets and the cops were keeping dry at the station.

  Meanwhile in the basement cafeteria at Lake Charles Hospital, Seth Hooker was preparing to play ringmaster to a small circus assembled at last by Corinne Meers. Delly arrived first. “I smell perfume,” he said.

  She was defensive. “Sometimes I wear it.” The perfume was a mistake she’d tried to wash
off. She’d debated how much to attend to her appearance tonight. Wanting to look unbowed and unbroken while wanting also not to care, she’d abandoned her selections and hauled clothes blindly from her closet.

  They took a table in the corner. The cafeteria was empty but for some orderlies brewing coffee on the counter between the kitchen and eating area. Seth heard their voices as a gregarious undertone, which increased his self-consciousness at sitting here tongue-tied with the girl of his dreams.

  He heard footsteps. Corinne’s flowery smell made Delly’s perfume seem like the scent of a single petal. “R.J.’s parkin’ the car. Rainin’ like hell out there. They still say the storm’s gonna miss us.”

  “Be a storm in here pretty quick,” Delly said.

  “Says you. Who knows what happened for sure.”

  “I know. It’s why he’s got to stand trial.”

  “You might lose, Del.”

  “He got away once. Not again.”

  Seth hunched in his chair to duck these verbal blows. Corinne said to Delly, “I was thinkin’ back on what happened. Weren’t your daddy mixed up in it?”

  Delly had rehearsed all manner of fireworks with R.J. but hadn’t foreseen fighting her cousin. “He shot himself. I’m sure you remember.”

  “Tell me again why.”

  “For loving another man’s wife. As you goddamn well know.”

  The two orderlies by the kitchen went quiet. Seth thought back to the memory of his mother and Frank Billodeau in the Block’s back room, their mouths and her hand and Frank’s buckling knees. “The wife was my mother,” he said. “R.J. had a crush on her, too.”

  “Quite a gal,” Corinne said.

  “Which is why,” Delly said, “I always wondered if he killed my father.”

  “R.J.?” Corinne laughed. “He’s got no such violence in him.” She’d either forgotten about Freddy Baez or decided Mexicans don’t count.

  “You talking about me?” R.J. had entered unnoticed. Corinne jumped up and hugged him as all hers. Delly refused to watch. “Hello, Adele,” he said.

  “Delly,” Seth corrected.

  “Adele is fine,” she said.

  R.J. pulled up a chair. Apprehension showed in his nervous rearranging of silverware on the table. He drummed his fingers before finally looking at Delly, who likewise only just then lifted her eyes to him. He’d shaved off his beard. It made a jarring impression, his face as it used to be. She suspected that was the intent.

  “I mistreated you, Adele.” He let the words sink in, for her understanding and his. “I mistreated you bad. Okay?”

  * * *

  THEY’D BEEN LOCKED inside the cold box all day. It held the blackness of a tomb and, in this fourth week of June, the dank smell of a summer crawlspace. The few words they shared were disembodied and hollow. Yet without them, and without the drape of their arms around each other, the boy and man would have gone insane.

  They lay side by side on the plank floor. Their faces, invisible in the dark from inches apart, were inclined to the grated floor vent, about four inches square, where they’d found fresh air after Abe unclogged it with a pencil. Rain pounded the top and sides of the box and wind shook it like a baby’s rattle. Water bubbled up through the vent and Tarzy tasted it with his tongue. He felt Abe’s arm embracing him and felt his breath on the side of his face. “Why that man do this?” he asked.

  “He’s sick, honey. Just sick in the head, is all.”

  “He comin’ back?”

  “Someone will. Someone soon.”

  “My aunt s’posed to.”

  “She’s probably delayed somewhere.” This was true. Sallie Hooker had been caught on the wrong side of the Calcasieu ferry when Gulf waters surged through the channel and tore away the pier. Abe suggested they pray. He spoke the words and Tarzy listened with eyes shut tight. The words asked for rescue. Tarzy, a wise soul, wondered if it wasn’t better to accept the Lord’s will and just pray for peaceful passage.

  When Abe said “Amen,” Tarzy said it too. His mouth was parched and he again dipped his tongue into the puddle spreading from the vent across the locker floor. He didn’t know what was different this time until he tasted the water once more. It was salty.

  * * *

  ALVIN WENT STRAIGHT to Delly Franklin’s house on returning from Hancock Bayou early that evening. On the slogging drive north, he hadn’t thought of Abe and Tarzy locked in the cold box with the storm coming on, hadn’t pictured their faces or heard their screams within the rain pelting the top of his car. What kept his mind clear was faith that why he’d done what he did pardoned the fact that he’d done it. As a teenager in 1945 he’d manned a flamethrower that incinerated men at twenty yards. He’d done it out of duty and for marine brothers alive and dead. This latest he’d done for love.

  He’d driven by Delly’s house several times in the past. Knowing now that “Ethel” from the Section Eight Gun Club was the former Adele Billodeau, he’d been curious about her circumstances and her potential to cause him problems. But today he came with different purpose. Parking around the corner, he dashed through the rain and, guessing from the empty carport that no one was home, broke in through the screened side door.

  * * *

  JOEY MEERS, EIGHTEEN years old and no prince of virtue, had inferred from Fiona’s telephone call that she would be giving him sex tonight. Like a jewel thief shoplifting chewing gum, he took his mother’s car keys from her bureau and drove out into the wet evening for a rendezvous with his cousin.

  He wasn’t a virgin. A cheerleader many varsity athletes cut their teeth on had provided him the same service. With somewhat nobler aims now, he picked Fiona up at her father’s place and drove to her stepmother’s. On Fiona’s instruction he parked in the open carport. Concealing his car down the street would make it harder to claim innocence if Delly returned early, Fiona explained. “Got it,” he said, suddenly skittish in the face of her guile.

  Fiona had a door key. The premise that tonight’s jaunt was merely to check up on her stepmother’s welfare dissolved before the brazen fact of an empty house with empty bedrooms. “We’re in,” she said.

  The question of what to do next was encapsulated by the wall switch inside the front door. Turn it on, and routine acts of teenagers with nothing to hide could commence under unabashed light. Leave it off, and the house would stay as dark as heaven’s blind eye and these two could get on with free will. Fiona shook her head no when he reached for the switch. Joey’s pulse accelerated as she led him by the hand through the unlit back hall. He almost tripped over the rug, his balance thrown by digging in his pocket for the condom he’d brought. Still unsteady from his injuries, he hobbled after her like an elderly lecher made spry by the power of hope.

  Fiona glanced into her stepmother’s room across from her own. Something large and dark obscured the closet door. She went over to inspect it, fearing to disturb the mood with electric light. When her eyes adjusted she screamed.

  * * *

  IT WAS PERHAPS an hour earlier when Alvin, not bothering to muffle his footfalls in the empty house, had entered the master bedroom to rifle through the bureau drawers. The closet door had flown open and a man burst out with a squeal.

  Alvin had pinned him to the bed and pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. “State your business. You got three seconds.”

  “This is my house.”

  “She lives here alone. Two. One.”

  “Please! It’s my wife’s house,” Arthur Franklin said weakly. “Steal what you want. I won’t look.”

  Alvin, his knee on Arthur’s sternum, reached to where Arthur’s hand clenched a small something. He snatched it away and switched on the bedside lamp to see what was written on the paper:

  Adele,

  There is an old colored woman in Hancock Bayou in Cameron Parish whose little nephew knows it was not R. J. Bainard who died. Her name is Sally something and everyone knows her in the town. Keep it in your head. Pardon the mystery. Everything is well. I will
contact you soon.

  Your friend, Abe

  Reading it, he felt fortunate to have found the note so easily. This was tempered with knowing that a loose end now had to be cut. He turned the light off in respect for the moment. “It’s great you have this,” he said in the semi-dark. “And yet sorta not.”

  Arthur took heart when Alvin climbed off him, thinking they would forgive each other’s trespass and slip out like burglars on two different jobs. He sat up and opened his eyes to the black dot of a .45 barrel. “Please no.”

  Alvin pocketed the note with his free hand. “Name?”

  “Arthur Franklin. Sir.”

  “Good. And since you obviously ain’t no thief—”

  “I’m her husband. Or used to be.”

  “To this Adele gal?”

  “You know her?”

  “A little.” Alvin regarded the weapon in his hand. “Dog, but I wish you hadn’t been here. Or at least you was robbin’ the place ’steada … what?”

  “I wanted a glimpse. Into her life.”

  “Miss her, do you?”

  “So much.”

  “I understand.” Alvin’s sympathy brought an eager nod from Arthur, like a patient getting good pills from a doctor. “She got a new boyfriend,” Alvin said, improvising now. “They are very in love.”

  Arthur nodded. He seemed to forget the conversation’s fraught conditions in favor of its subject. “My daughter predicted she’d never come back to me.”

  “You got a daughter. Nice.” Alvin placed a fraternal hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “This boyfriend of your wife’s—he’s rich and, you know, just a much better catch than you.” Arthur looked about to cry. “Fact is, they’re gonna get married.”

  “Oh God.”

  Alvin’s voice was gentle. “You need to remove yourself.”

  “Of course. Happy to.” Arthur rose to leave.

  “No.” Alvin leveled the weapon. “Remove yourself.”