Accordion Crimes

by Annie Proulx

  But when the dogs were called off, the cat’s body, instead of being shoveled out the back door into the bayou, was dumped in the croker sack again and the same pickup spun out to the east. Someone heaved the corpse over the Malefoots’ fence and it landed not far from the back door. A few minutes later the truck cruised past the house of Buddy and the daughter-in-law and the horn sounded four times. Buddy was out on the rig, the daughter-in-law did not wake up, sunk in a dreamless moon-under sleep.

  A strange encounter

  The photographer struggled to drive a straight line in the rose dawn, her eyes smarting with smoke, her legs like rubber from standing up all night and her breath fetid with cigarettes and soft drinks. She yawned a horrible cavernous yawn, her eyes filling with tears, jaw cracking and a roar bursting from her stringy bowel as she steered through the puddles (rain in the night) and came abreast of the Malefoot yard to see a middle-aged woman limping around the corner in nightgown and mud-caked slippers, face swollen with weeping, trailing a pointed shovel in her hands. She leaned the shovel against the steps, sat on the damp bottom tread, put her face in her hands and sobbed.

  The photographer slowed, stopped, aimed her camera through the greasy window, thought better of it, got out, leaned on the hood, sighted through the clear air at the bereft woman lighted by a great swath of green sunlight and began snapping pictures. The woman did not lift her head. The photographer advanced, leaned over the fence and shot. The woman looked up. Through her tear-filmed eyes the female figure at the gate, heroically large against the rising sun, holy in its streaming rays, seemed to her to be the angel of Belle come to console her mother.

  “Oh chère,” she sobbed, “thank God you come to me.” She got up and staggered toward her with her arms outstretched. The photographer, using her camera as a shield, clicked again and again at the advancing woman and still she came on. She could smell her grief, a bitter, briny odor.

  “Belle,” the woman groaned. “Bébé. Ma chère, ma fille.” She embraced her, felt the camera, saw her face, so changed, but understood why she was wearing this ugly carnival mask—no one must know she had come back from the dead. She seized her hand and dragged her toward the door.

  Inside the kitchen the photographer sat at the table, ill at ease. In habit she raised her camera and began to take interior shots of the chair by the window, the glass jar of rice. Mme Malefoot understood this perfectly. If her daughter was called back to Paradise, at least she would have photographs of home to ease her loneliness. She led her daughter upstairs to her old room, showed her the portrait waiting in darkness behind the toilet seat lid, smoothed the pillow. She took her into every room, to the parlor, the pantry and the kitchen, tried to give her a plate of red beans and rice, coaxed her to the porch and up the outside stairs to the room where her father lay sleeping, grey hair in a pointed muss, guided her outside to the tree where she had played as a child, and around the barn to see the yellow cat’s fresh grave. A siege of herons flew up from the bayou across the road.

  “Got to go now,” the photographer said when the woman came pressing close again with a yearning expression. It was awful. What was wrong with the old broad? It was as though she had fallen in love with her, this big flat-faced, middle-aged woman with her damp caresses and tear-streaked voice.

  Mme Malefoot understood. The angels were calling her child back to them. She had the photographs of home and they would be developed in heaven. She seized the girl in her damp arms, kissed her shoulder (she had grown tall up there), wept and clung as she pulled away.

  “Will you come back?” she called. “Will I see you again soon? Come at night. I’m sleeping in your room!” She couldn’t hear the answer, but the photographer lifted her right hand and saluted to her. A girl does not forget her mother! And she drove away like an ordinary person, but of course that was part of the disguise.

  (Two decades later the photographer was blinded in the left eye by a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in the hands of a nine-year-old boy firing from his family’s apartment window at cars stopped for the red light. There was a good side to the injury; she became a celebrity victim and within months her work was displayed and awarded, she appeared on television talk shows and in radio interviews.)

  Out on the rig

  “Your oil rig is a fuckin crazy place,” said Coodermonce, who’d given up the invisible-vinyl-repair business for the steady rig paychecks. He was part of the confusion, for on this rig worked Cuddermash, Cuttermarsh, Coudemoche, Cordeminch and Gartermatch, all variations on the original name, Courtemanche. Buddy liked the work for the pay and the wrongo heads on the rig, hated it for the Yankee bosses and the lonely feeling of being out in the Gulf with no way home, shut up for two-week stretches hearing the same goddamn record on somebody’s turntable, something bad like Gypsy Sandor or the Voices of Walter Schumann, having to hear the endlessly repeated stories of the old guys, high-tempered toolpushers, riggers, derrickmen and chuffy roughnecks who remembered the pipeline walkers, oil witchers, shooters and doodlebug men, who had seen everything twice, jamming around through Oklahoma and Texas drinking pop-skull whiskey and sleeping it off in bowl-and-pitcher hotels and now telling their salted stories to the Louisiana French boys, these babes who had never worked the oil fields. Carver Stringbellow, sunburned red, a single blond eyebrow and sandy-gold hair in deep crenellations, never without his pair of white gloves, told about the wildflower man who drilled where wildflowers caught his fancy and always struck oil, had seen drill pipes blown out of the hole, shooters disintegrate into bloody pieces the size of dimes in the old liquid nitro days when it exploded prematurely, had experienced a tornado that tore the rig apart and threw the toolpusher’s new sedan into a swamp, a Texas windstorm that pasted a metal Nehi sign across his back and then ran him over the ground as fast as he could go, running on his toes and praying not to lift off into the dirt-filled air. He was a big old boy from Odessa, six foot five, top-heavy and dedicated to fight and drink. He always arrived at the rig lamed up, bruises fading into chartreuse and yellow, married and divorced seven times and claimed to have fathered more than fifty kids, from Corsicana, Texas, to Cairo, Missouri. He ran a comb that he carried in his back pocket through his hair twenty times a day, said he had been out to the Middle East, worked for Socal in Bahrain in the thirties where he learned to relish sheep’s eyes, during the war when Socal and Texaco merged as Aramco he worked in Saudi Arabia, knew crazy Everette Lee DeGolyer with his passion for oil, chile peppers, and the Saturday Review of Literature, ate lunch once with management in the Hotel Aviz in Lisbon at an hour when Calouste Gulbenkian was seated at his private table on a platform of some altitude, had seen the half-mad Getty, richest man in America, with his surgically tautened face, chewing oysters thirty-three times per mouthful and smiled when Jack Zone, who’d asked him to the lunch, speculated whether or not that old crocodile was wearing the famous underwear he washed himself by hand each night in a little gold basin. He could tell the weather three days in advance and drank thirty cups of black coffee a day, lived boom or bust, pockets stuffed with money or jobless and on the grass, read about bullfighting and said it was his idea to go to Spain and see Ordóñez someday, to see Hemingway in the bar and talk with him afterward.

  “Listen, last year you know what he did, Heminway? He shot the ash off the end of a cigarette that Ordóñez was smokin at a party. They do that to test each other’s nerve—and smoke it down to a short butt, like this”—he drew on his inch-long Camel—”and then they shoot the ash off. With a twenty-two. This one guy, he says, ‘Ernesto, we can go no farther. I felt it brush my lips.’ Somethin like that.” For years he had saved money to go to Spain, but whenever he had nearly enough something happened—a woman, a poker game, one winter a long stay in the hospital with broken knees.

  “You want money you ought to help me find this painting,” said Screw-Loose, from Beaumont in the coastal part of Texas known as Louisiana Lapland. “You know that whiskey, Sunny Crow whiskey, gonna g
ive a reward to the one finds this painting. Twenty-five grand’ll buy a lot of bullfight tickets. I got a good idea where that lost painting is, oil painting by Frederick Remington of a calvary charge. About fifty guys coming right at you, hell-bent for leather. Now, see, I know I seen this painting somewhere one time, I know it like I know the feel of my old lady’s ass. I seen it. Then I seen the picture in a magazine couple of years ago—Sunny Crow run a photograph of the painting in a magazine—when Remington died they found this photograph in his stuff, but the picture, the painting? Nowhere to be saw. They know he painted it, the photograph proves it, but they can’t find it. And I actually seen it somewhere. Every night I go to sleep I tell myself ‘tonight you’re gonna dream where you saw that painting and when you wake up you are a rich man.’ It’ll work one of these days because I remember seeing it. I just can’t remember where.”

  At least this time there was some new music and maybe he wouldn’t get sick of it before his tour was up. He’d brought the accordion out once, but it went over like a lead balloon.

  “Don’t play that fuckin coonass chanky-chank, boy,” Carver said, combing his hair. “That fuckin music is worse than killin pigs.”

  “Yeah? Don’t call me ‘boy’ like I was a nigger unless you want your face changed.”

  “Yeah? I was you I’d watch my mouth. Accidents happen pretty easy to guys with big mouths, ’specially a fuckin coonass.” He smiled like a skull.

  “Yeah? I was you I’d get a pair of eyes in the back of my head. It’s better than that fuckin castanet shit you play.”

  “Yeah? You know what they say, ‘look all around a coonass’s bed, nothin but bedbugs, shit and crawfish heads.’”

  “OK, fella,” said Buddy, “I’ll see you ashore.” Fighting on the rig meant instant dismissal, with the company launch out to pick you up within the hour and your name guaranteed on the blacklist.

  (By the time his hair was starting to grey up and the Louisiana oil boom was over, Buddy was the toolpusher on an offshore rig in the North Sea, working with burr-voiced Scots.)

  The third day into this tour somebody saw the boat breasting toward them, bouncing through the white crests and giving the occupants a hell of a ride.

  “Fish man ahoy!”

  Buddy recognized the fishing boat of Octave, black and wiry, a good boy on the ’tit fer when you could pry him away from that nigger zydeco shit, did odd jobs and sold fish on the side, came out to the rig twice a week if the weather let him, Tuesday and Saturday, with catfish and a couple of sacks of mudbugs for a boil, once in a rare while a slab of gator tail. He got double the going price from the rigs. This wasn’t his regular day.

  “Somebody with him!” Everybody tensed up and the men on deck shaded their eyes and strained to see the second person. A second person meant news of trouble.

  It was the daughter-in-law. She crouched in the bow, staring at the rig, trying to pick Buddy out. Her eyes were not good. He recognized her before they were in hailing distance. Octave was bailing with a flattened coffee can, his eyes hidden behind blue-tinted glasses, his old cowboy hat hiding his dark face in darker shadows. The sky above was packed with clouds like wadded gauze.

  “Now what,” he muttered. She’d done the same thing the year before when they’d taken his mother to the hospital after she’d painted her face and hands and dress a mess of thick colors, the lampblack and gamboge and viridian streaked everywhere in the white kitchen. He could see it was a new disaster.

  “What is it?” he shouted.

  “Your father, Papa Onesiphore—he’s gone.”

  “What! He’s dead? Papa’s dead?”

  “No, no. Gone to Texas. He stopped by, his truck all loaded up, said he was sorry but he had to go. He left your mother. He says he can’t take it anymore, living with a crazy woman.” Everyone on deck was listening now.

  “Did you see Maman?”

  “Yeah. She don’t know but she thinks he’s going up to stay with his brother Basile in Texas. She thinks your sister came back from the dead and she’s up there too. In Texas. There was them cousins she liked so much.”

  “Non. The cousins she liked was Elmore’s kids—Gene and Clara and Grace. He can’t be going up to see Uncle Basile. He hasn’t seen him since he was twenty years old.”

  “What shall I do? Can you come home?”

  “Can’t you take the kids over and stay with her a few days? I’ll be home in ten more days, goddammit.”

  His wife began to cry. She was wearing a pale blue cotton dress and black rubber boots. She cried silently, letting the tears roll down her face. She looked at him. Octave’s boat rose and fell.

  “Go home! Stay with her. He’ll come back in a day or two.” He glared at Octave in the stern who smiled enigmatically. “You, Octave, you shouldn’t of brought her out here. Take her back.” He turned away, smarting with rage, heard his wife say “last time I tell you anything,” then the stutter of Octave’s motor drowned her out.

  After a while Adam Coultermuch said, “my father run out on us when I was four years old. I don’t even remember what he looked like. Never saw the bastard again.”

  Quart Cuttermarsh said, “hey, you was lucky. I would of give anything if my old man run off. He’d get drunk up, beat the shit out of us. You wanta see something? Look at this.” He pulled off his shirt, revealed round scars up and down his arms. “Cigarette. He’d burn us to watch us cry. I hope he’s roasting in hell. I heard he got knifed in a bar in Mobile.”

  “My dad was OK when we were kids, I mean, he didn’t do nothin to us, always workin or sleepin, but when we come up a little, about fifteen, sixteen years old, god, he turned mean,” added T. K. Coudemoche. “I was in a car, car belonged to the father of a friend of mine and my friend was supposed to drive it down to the railroad station and meet his dad, we was both sixteen or seventeen, going along the road there nice and steady when this car come up behind us. It was my dad and he was trying to pass. Well, my friend, he didn’t know any better, thought he’d have a little fun, so he pulls out in the middle of the road and don’t let the old man pass. I tell him, that’s my old man and you better let him by. He’s got a temper. But my friend says it’s just a little fun and he don’t let him pass. Well, the old man tries five or six times, puts on his lights and toots the horn and I’m sittin there shakin because I know he’s gonna follow us to the station. I got this plan when we get there to get out and run so he don’t know I’m in the car. But we never got there. My friend got kind of careless and the old man gets abreast and then edges us off the road into a ditch, just locks fenders and butts us off. My friend stops in the ditch and gets out and here comes the old man swingin a tire iron and cussin everything in the world, and he lets my friend have it right across the nose with the tire iron, you could hear it go crunch, he gives me a terrific crack on the arm, breaks my arm, then he set to work on my friend’s father’s car. He smashed that thing, glass everywhere, he pounded on the fenders, sprung the hood, tore up the doors, and for a finale, pulled out his whacker and pissed on the front seat. Didn’t say a word. Just got back in his car and drove off. I didn’t even bother to go home. I lit out for the oil fields and been there ever since.”

  Iry Gartermatch cleared his throat. “My father was normal until he was seventy-five, then he married a girl of eighteen, simpleminded, she had three kids and he died when he was eighty and didn’t leave none of us nothin but trouble.”

  They were trying to make him feel better. Where the hell could a seventy-five-year-old man run off to? And he was right.

  The green accordion brings a good price

  When he drove down the road ten days later the old man was sitting on the porch with the green accordion on his knee playing “Chère Alice,” cigarette in his mouth, and out in the yard Mme Malefoot gathered shirts and tablecloths in the calm sunlight as though life had rolled sevens and elevens all the way.

  He pulled into the driveway, stared at his father. “I heard you gone on a trip.”

/>   “Oui, yes, mon fils, just a little trip, me, ‘go put on your little dress with stripes…,’ just want to see how they are doing in the world. Just a little change for my eyes. Yes, I am very happy to be home again on the bayou. We play tomorrow night for a dance, the barbecue dance at Gayneauxs, ‘she didn’t know I was marrrrrried.’ That Saturday Even Post comes with a photographer. Every week we got one, click the flashers in your eye. You come here tonight with your accordion, play a little in the kitchen. That black guy Octave comes by. You know he say he love this green accordion very much. He say he give two hundred fifty for it.”

  “Where the hell would that nigger get two fifty? Eh?”

  “Sell Gene Autry seed packs, rob a bank, fix TVs. Sell fish to the rig.”

  “You serious?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “If he got it we’ll take it. I can get Mr. Pelsier to build one just as good, better, for a hundred. Take the money and run.”

  “I think so. Even when I got her painted nice.” He had commanded his wife to paint a row of red waves below the buttons, with a devil’s head at each end and the words “flammes d’enfer” to set them off.

  Here’s looking at you

  Octave did not like playing with the old man and Buddy—the old man, dirty Cajun, cheated him on the money every time—but he clanged the ’tit fer, blew into a sonorous bottle, a teakettle, rapped horseshoes, rattled boxes and tapped a mule-hide hand drum, got into the Saturday Evening Post photographs as much as he could and nobody knew his private thoughts, that he regarded the music they made as a lugubrious whine.

  He wanted the accordion. He played the accordion better than any Malefoot that ever lived, but no way they’d let him sit up there with them and outplay them, so he did washboards and triangle and acted the fool singing their praises. He wanted the green accordion because it sounded good and loud and could sound better, but most of all because it had looked him in the eye. He’d been sitting to the left of old Malefoot a few weeks before, the old man swinging the accordion around and squeezing it, warping in his slurs and slides, singing a little and then playing a little, moving constantly in that old-man twitchy way, and somehow or other the mirrors on the accordion had lined up just right and when Octave glanced over, the damn thing was looking right at him. Of course he knew it was his own eyes reflected but figured the odds were a million to one they could line up with the mirrors that way. It made the instrument powerfully alive, looking at him, watching him, saying “what you gonna do? You gonna git me? Better git me, nigger, or I git you.” It was a scary thing.