“Never mind that,” he growled.
Mrs. Arceneaux rolled up an eye at him. “You hungry, you?” She lifted a lid, and a nimbus laden with smells of onion, garlic, bell pepper, and a medium nut-brown roux rose like a spirit out of the cast-iron pot.
“What’s that?” Big Blade sniffed toward the stove, his knife drifting.
“Chicken stew. You eat that over some rice and with potato salad and hot sweet peas.” She looked at the boy’s eyes and stirred the rich gravy seductively. “You burglars take time to eat or what?”
—
“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Mrs. Lalonde sang, holding the dead receiver to her ear and looking out of her little kitchen window with three other worried card players. “I don’t know what to think.”
“She’s probably just being nasty to us,” Mrs. Guidroz said, tapping her cane against Mr. Alvin’s big, soft leg. “She wants us to worry.”
“That woman says some crazy things,” Beverly agreed. “She spends so much time cooking I think she’s got natural gas on the brain.”
At the table, Mrs. Breaux lit up a Picayune with her creaky Zippo. “Hot damn, let’s play cards. Ain’t nobody can put nothin’ over on Doris Arceneaux.”
“Somebody’s over there intrudin’,” Sadie protested.
Mrs. Breaux sniffed. “She’ll talk the intrudin’ parts off their body, that’s for true.”
“Well, her phone won’t answer back. Somebody ought to go over and see who’s there with her.”
The old women turned toward Mr. Alvin, a tall, jiggly old man with pale, fine-textured skin, and built like an eggplant. His pleated gray trousers hung on him like a skirt on a fat convent-school girl. “Why me?”
“You a man,” Mrs. Guidroz exclaimed.
Mr. Alvin’s eyes expanded as though the information was a surprise. “Mais, what you want me to do?”
Sadie turned him toward the screen door. “Just go look in her kitchen window and see if everything is all right.”
“I shouldn’t knock first?”
Mrs. Guidroz shook her tiny head. “If there’s a bad man in there you gonna tip him off.”
Mr. Alvin hung back. “I don’t know.”
“Dammit Alvin,” Mrs. Guidroz said, “I’d go myself but it’s been raining and last time I walked to Doris’s from here my stick went down in her lawn a foot deep, yeah, and I couldn’t get it unstuck and Doris wasn’t there so I had to limp all the way back and call my son to come pull it out.”
“Go on, Alvin,” Sadie said, putting a shoulder to his back and nudging him out the door.
—
Mr. Alvin looked down the road to Mrs. Arceneaux’s house as he walked the clamshell shoulder trying to seem inconspicuous. An old pickup truck passed by driven by what seemed to be a twelve-year-old boy, and Alvin did not return the child’s wave. He walked the grassy edge of Mrs. Arceneaux’s driveway and took to the spongy lawn, circling around to her kitchen window. He stooped and walked under it, the way he’d seen detectives do in the movies. When he raised his eyes slowly past the window ledge, he saw a strange man at Mrs. Arceneaux’s table waving a murderous-looking knife at the old woman while chewing a big mouthful of chicken stew.
“You don’t watch out I’m gonna put you in that stewpot,” the man said.
Mr. Alvin lowered himself slow as a clock’s hand and began slogging through the deep grass toward the highway. He heard something like a steam engine puffing as he walked along, then realized that it was his own breath. He thought about running and tried to remember how to do it, but his heart was pounding so hard that all he could do was swing his arms faster and paddle the air back to Sadie’s house.
—
The women were at the window watching him hurry back. “Oh, mon Dieu,” Mrs. Guidroz sang, “look how fast Alvin’s moving. What’s it mean?”
Mrs. Breaux cackled. “It’s probably just his Ex-Lax working.”
They opened the door and pulled him into the room by his flabby arms.
“There’s someone there holding a knife on Doris,” Mr. Alvin gasped.
“Ai, yai, yai,” Sadie shouted.
“Call Deputy Sid,” Beverly announced from the card table, where she was refilling her butane lighter from a miniature canister of gas.
Sadie shook her head. “It’ll take him a half hour to get out here.” She straightened up and looked around. “Maybe one of us ought to go over there with a gun.”
Mr. Alvin put up his big hands. “Oh, no, I went already.” He walked over to the phone and dialed the sheriff’s office.
Mrs. Breaux threw down a pack of cards in disgust. “What kind of gun you got?”
Sadie reached into the next room to a little space between an armoire and the wall, retrieving a double-barreled shotgun with exposed hammers. “This was Lester’s daddy’s gun.”
Mrs. Breaux walked over and figured out how to open the action. “They ain’t no bullets in this thing.”
Sadie walked over to her dresser, her perfume and lotion bottles clinking against each other on the vanity, and pulled out the top drawer. “Does this fit?” She handed Mrs. Breaux a tarnished .38-caliber cartridge. She dropped it into the gun, but it rattled down the barrel and tumbled out onto the linoleum.
“It’s not the right size,” Mrs. Breaux complained, peering into Sadie’s outstretched hand and plucking two high-brass cardboard shells labeled with double 0s. “Here you go.” She plunked in the shells and snapped the gun shut.
—
The parish had only one settlement to the south, Grand Crapaud, and south of that the highway came to an end, its center line leading up to the steps of a twelve-by-twelve plywood building on piers, the office of the South-End Deputy.
Deputy Sid was a tall black man wearing a cowboy hat with a gold badge on the crown and an immaculate, freshly ironed uniform. He sat at his little desk filling out a report about Minos Blanchard letting his Dodge Dart roll overboard at the boat ramp next door. The phone rang and it was the dispatcher from the parish seat.
“Sid, you there?”
“I’m here all right.”
“Mrs. Lalonde out by Prairie Amère called in that Doris Arceneaux has an intruder in her house right now.”
“That’s those peoples always playin’ cards?”
“And the one that’s always cooking.”
“How does Mrs. Lalonde know they’s somebody in there?”
“There’s a strange car in the yard.”
“Did she say what kind it was?”
“She said it was a Freon.”
“They ain’t no such thing.”
“I know that. Mr. Alvin looked in the window and saw the intruder.”
Deputy Sid pushed back his hat. “What’s Mr. Alvin doin’ lookin’ in a woman’s window?”
“Can you get out there?”
“Sho.” He hung up and in one step was at the door.
—
Mrs. Arceneaux watched Big Blade finish one overflowing plate of chicken stew, and then she fixed him another, providing him all the while with French-dripped coffee laced with brandy.
“You better think where you put your money,” Big Blade said through a mouthful of potato salad.
“You ain’t had some dessert yet,” Mrs. Arceneaux cooed. “Look, I foun’ some bread pudding with whiskey sauce in the fridge.”
Big Blade took a tentative taste of the dessert, then a spoonful, eating slowly and with one eye closed. By the time he’d eaten everything on the table, he was stunned with food, drowsy, dim-witted with food. He had been eating for half an hour. When he saw movement at the screen door, he ignored it for a moment, but when the form of a uniformed black man imprinted itself on his consciousness, he jumped up holding his knife in one hand and the old lady’s bony arm in the other.
Deputy Sid stepped in smiling, moving easily as though he’d lived in the kitchen all his life and was walking through his own house. “How you doin’, Mrs. Arceneaux?”
“Hey yourse
lf, Deputy Sid. They’s fresh coffee on the stove.”
“Freeze,” Blade barked.
Deputy Sid stopped the motion of his hand above the range. “I can’t have no coffee?”
The little plastic slice of toast peeked out of the clock, and surprised, Blade yelled, “Ahhh.”
“What?” Deputy Sid looked to the clock, checked his wristwatch.
“It’s just that damn clock,” Mrs. Arceneaux said. “Crazy thing scares the hell out of me, too, but my sister give it to me and what can you do? I come in here at night sometime and that little toast come up like a rat stickin’ its head out a cracker can and—”
“Never mind.” Big Blade was looking at the staghorn-gripped, nickel-plated revolver that was angled toward him on the policeman’s narrow hip. “Give me your gun or I’ll cut the old lady’s throat.”
Deputy Sid considered this for a moment. “Okay, man. But hold on to Misres Doris ’cause she fixin’ to take off.” The deputy popped his safety strap, lifted his revolver with two fingers, and laid it on the table. Blade held on to the old lady with one hand, reached to the table, still holding the big knife, and realized that he would have to put it down to retrieve the gun. The second he put his finger into the trigger guard of the pistol, Deputy Sid moved his hand over and picked up the knife.
“Hey,” Blade said, pointing the shiny pistol at his head.
“You don’t need this no more.” Deputy Sid dropped the knife behind the refrigerator.
“I want my knife.”
“You better get on out of here while you got the upper hand.”
Big Blade glanced through the screen door. “Yeah. I bet you got buddies outside just waiting.”
Deputy Sid shook his head. “No, man. It’s just me. But let me give you some advice. You on a dead-end parish highway. The open end got a roadblock right now. South of here it’s all marsh and alligators.”
“And then what?”
Deputy Sid screwed up an eye to think. “Cuba, I guess.”
“Shit. What about north?”
“Rice fields for five miles.”
“That little car I got will get me through the roadblock.”
“I don’t know. You left the motor runnin’ and it idled out of gas. You can get in it, but it won’t go nowhere.”
Big Blade’s eyeballs bounced back and forth for a few seconds. He waved the gun. “Handcuff yourself to that oven door and give me the keys.”
Mrs. Arceneaux pointed. “Careful you don’t scratch nothin’. The last thing my husband did before he died is buy me that stove and it got to last me a long time. He told me—”
“I’m taking her with me. So if you got partners outside, you better call to them.”
“I’m the onliest one back here,” Deputy Sid told him, cuffing himself to the stove’s door.
“Is your cruiser idling?” Big Blade asked with a wicked smile.
The deputy nodded slowly.
“Hah, you people are dumb as dirt,” he said, backing out of the kitchen with the old lady in tow.
Deputy Sid watched them walk out of his line of vision. He looked at the stove, felt the side of the coffeepot, and then stretched to the cabinet to get himself a cup.
—
The cruiser was eight years old, and Big Blade had to clean out clipboards, a digital adding machine, dog-eared manuals on report writing, apples, candy bars, chewing gum, magazines, and empty cans of mace before his hostage would fit into the front seat. She buckled her seat belt, and he climbed in on the driver’s side. The old white Dodge’s transmission slipped so badly that it would hardly back out onto the road, but soon they were spinning along the highway, going west. After five miles, he could see one police car in the distance parked across the flat road, and he knew he could make the escape work. All he had to do was hold the pistol to her head and let the officers see this. They’d let him roll through like a tourist.
Just then Mrs. Arceneaux crossed her hands over her breastbone and announced in a strangled voice, “I’m havin’ me another heart attack.”
Big Blade stopped the car and watched the old woman’s face turn red. She coughed once, and her arms fell limp at her side, her upper plate tumbling from her mouth and bouncing on the floor mat. He looked ahead to what he could now see were two police cars waiting with their flashers swatting the flat light rolling off the rice fields. Feeling with great dread the flesh of the woman’s neck, he could find no pulse, and suddenly everything changed. He imagined himself strapped to a gurney in a Louisiana prison waiting for the fatal charge to come along the tube into his arm. He looked into his rearview and then turned the car around, the old woman’s head rolling right. Maybe there would be a boat at the end of the road and he could escape in that.
The Dodge stuttered and groaned up to thirty, forty, forty-five as he headed in the other direction. Soon Doris Arceneaux’s house was rolling up on the right, and on the left he watched the only other house in the area, with a mailbox out front and a bushy cedar growing next to it. As soon as he passed that mailbox his peripheral vision snapped a picture of five old people crouching in a line, hiding behind the cedar. At once he heard a huge detonation and the car began a drunken spin, metal grinding on the blacktop, the tires howling until the cruiser stopped sideways in the road. Big Blade shook his head and fell out of the front seat, holding Deputy Sid’s revolver. He saw a skinny old woman in a print dress walking up and holding a shotgun toward his midsection. One hammer on the gun was down, and the other was up like a fang ready to drop. He stood and raised the nickel-plated revolver and pulled the trigger, aiming at her legs, but all the weapon did was go tik-tik-tik-tik-tik-tik.
“Get on the damn ground,” Mrs. Breaux hollered in her creaky voice, “or I’ll let the air out of you like I did that tire, yeah.”
As Big Blade lay down in the road, he heard a cackle from the front seat of the cruiser as Mrs. Arceneaux unbuckled herself and climbed out with her upper plate in her hand. “Ha, haaaa, I foolt him good. He tought I was dead and run from them other cops.”
Along the shoulder of the road came Deputy Sid, a sea-green oven door under his arm. He bent down, picked up his revolver, and loaded it with six shells dug out of his pocket. “I got him now, ladies, Mr. Al.”
Mrs. Arceneaux sidled up to him. “You got some more police comin’?”
“Yeah. I called ’em from your bedroom phone. Then I called your neighbors here.”
Mrs. Breaux lowered the hammer on the shotgun. “Hot damn. Now we can get back to the game. Doris, you want to play?”
She waved her hand above her white hair as if chasing a fly. “Naw, me, I got to go clean up my kitchen.”
“What about you, Deputy Sid?”
He rested the bottom of the oven door on the asphalt and studied his blasted front tire and the pellet holes in the fender. “It gon’ take me a week to write all this up. Maybe next time ya’ll play you can give me a call.”
Sadie lumbered up out of the grass, followed by Mr. Alvin. “Don’t bring that gun into the house loaded,” she said.
Mrs. Breaux opened the action and plucked out the good shell, chucking the empty into the ditch. She handed the weapon to Mr. Alvin, who took it from her with his fingertips, as though it might be red-hot. Mrs. Breaux grabbed a handful of his shirt and let him tow her off the road and across the soft lawn. Suddenly, she wheeled around. “Hey you,” she called to Big Blade, who was squirming under the barrel of Deputy Sid’s revolver.
“What?” He had to look through the window of the oven door to see her.
“If you ever get out of jail, I want you to come play cards with us.” She threw back her head and laughed.
“Why’s that?” He twisted his head up. “What you mean?”
“Just bring lots of money, boy,” Mrs. Breaux called as she turned to look down the road at an approaching parade of flashing lights and the warbling laugh of a siren sailing high over the simple rice fields.
Signals
When his ch
erished stereo receiver died, giving off a spiral of white smoke through its top, Professor Talis Kimita knelt before it and placed his hands on the walnut case as one might console a relative who had suddenly become ill. He’d bought the instrument new in 1976 for many lats on the black market in Riga, and even connected to his terrible East German speakers it made him the envy of his intellectual friends because of its dreadnought power and long arm of reception that brought in noncommunist news and classical music from all over Europe. It bore the brave name Pioneer, which made him think of wagon trains and the endless western prairies he’d read of as a child. The seller let him have it for a good price because it wouldn’t operate on Latvia’s 220-volt current. Talis painted a public toilet in Ogre by himself to earn enough money to buy a high-end voltage converter.
In 1979 he graduated from university and managed to leave Latvia on a student visa, bringing the seventy-pound music box with him to graduate school in New York. Connected to better speakers, the rumbling Pioneer SX-1250 became his Mozart-seeping companion morning and night, more of a partner than his new and younger American wife. Marlena was a statuesque woman of severe beauty, a philosophy student from Illinois, who was at first attracted but later repelled by his brooding and isolated nature. She began calling him a cold fish, declaiming in their little apartment kitchen that he was an icicle of logic despiritualized by Russian thought. He called her names as well, announcing during more than one argument that her stylish American clothes made her excessively provincial. She claimed he was too used to small-breasted women wearing soot-colored wool sweaters and blanket-like skirts to protect their fat legs from frostbite. He told her she smelled like a tart and should take up smoking.
His first teaching job in New York had lasted two years. He lost his position because of low student evaluations; his pupils didn’t accept his condescension, his lack of tolerance. He found a job at a smaller school in Minnesota, where he liked the climate, and then, after his marriage failed, he taught in a half-occupied college in Oregon, a failing Episcopal school in Connecticut made of drafty stone buildings, a computer-based university in tumbleweedy west Texas, a community college in Eatabuga, Mississippi, beginning a long train of non-reappointments until he’d been through ten schools in all, each less prestigious than the previous. He finally wound up at Marshland Community Junior College and Trade School in Grand Crapaud, Louisiana.
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