Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  The trouble with being a gambling man, thought Daman Rourke, is that you're never satisfied. If you're losing you have to keep on playing, feeding the vain and vanquished hope that at any moment your luck is going to turn. If you're winning you have to keep on playing too, because a gambler knows the ride is going to last only so long, and so you got to catch that ride, you got to stay on that train until the end of the line, stay on until you're losing again, and it only ever ends when you've lost it all, when everything is sold or hocked or bartered, including your soul.

  As he walked along, he told himself that she had known for a certainty the revolver wasn't loaded, and then he called himself a liar because he knew her too well, knew her the way one gambler knows another. She had been along for the wild ride and she hadn't cared one way or the other whether there was a cartridge in the chamber, just as she hadn't cared which way the barrel was pointed when she pulled the trigger. He knew her. Better than he knew himself, he knew her.

  He had left the genteel life behind him now. The road was bad in this part of town, and the only way you could go along it was to walk. It was too potted and rutted for the survival of balloon tires, but then the people who lived in this part of town didn't need a smooth road for an automobile they would never own.

  In this part of town the cattails in the ditches and the black-eyed Susans that lined the road were always coated with dust. Dilapidated boathouses floated in the bayou, and squatters' shacks, made of tar paper and driftwood, perched on the levee as if daring a good storm to come along and knock them off. Men with skin colors that ranged from brick dust to olive brown to jet black sat on their porches and decks, dipping home-brewed beer out of lard buckets and wondering what a white man was doing all the way to hell and gone out here, figuring it had to be bad news for some poor soul.

  He stopped at a place beneath the railroad bridge and bought three big links of hot boudin wrapped in wax paper. A couple of boys were fishing for perch from the bridge. The Black Bridge, where once, long ago, Remy had shown him how death's hot and screaming breath had a kick more powerful than cocaine.

  At a place in the bayou where the cypress trees grew thick and the water was a deep moss green, a house floated on rusted oil drums. To get to it Rourke walked across a gangplank that had been laid over a bank of gray mud where crawfish peeped above their holes and dragonflies flitted among the canebrakes.

  The young woman who opened the door immediately averted her face from his, but not before he'd seen how her cheeks were puffy and her eyes were red around the rims. She didn't have a telephone out here on the houseboat, nobody in this part of town had a telephone, but the grapevine would have been just as quick.

  “Don't look at me like that,” she said. “I been sick.”

  She turned and went back inside the cabin, leaving the door open for him.

  It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the darkness after the harsh sunlight. He set the boudin he'd bought on top of the galley's sop stone, where the bowl of cush-cush she'd had for breakfast glistened with ants. The cabin smelled of reefer and sour mash.

  She stood with her back to him, swaying on her feet. She had soft, very light brown skin, like a sepia-toned photograph. Her hair had a copper glaze, and it fell thickly to her waist in tight dark coils.

  “Luce,” he said softly. Even so her back flinched as if it had just caught the lash of the whip. “I got to ask you, honey…How did you spend last night?”

  “I got me a gig in a speak on Dumaine Street. You know that.”

  He grabbed her by the arm, spinning her around, and gripped the sides of her head with his two hands. Her eyes stared up at him, round and shining like yellow china marbles.

  “Stop it. Just stop it,” he said, and although the words were calm and quiet, anyone with half an ear could have heard the violence underneath. “I been lied to up one side and down the other today and I'm runnin' out of the patience for it.”

  He was gripping her too roughly, and so he let her go. She backed up a step, crossing her arms over her chest. “Here is where I spent last night. I been sick, which is what I already tol' you. What you goin' to say next? That I killed him?”

  Her gaze shifted away from his as she became aware that already she had said too much. She could have witnessed the whole thing, but he'd probably never get it out of her now, and he didn't blame her. She'd have to be a fool to put herself in the middle of the murder of a white man. Put herself within a mile of that slave shack and next thing she knew, the judges, the cops, the prosecutors—they'd all have the cane knife in her hand.

  A clay jar of sour mash sat on the floor next to a bed that was a tangle of messed sheets. She leaned over to pick it up and lost her balance, lurching and nearly falling into the bed. He wrapped his arm around her waist, steadying her, and she sagged against him. She was wearing an old pink satin wrapper that had lost its belt, and beneath that nothing but a thin cotton slip. He could feel the burning heat of her skin where she pressed against his side.

  “He's dead, Day,” she said. “Mr. Charlie's dead.”

  “I know, honey. Let's get you up on deck where there's some air.”

  She pulled away from him, trying to walk there on her own and not doing all that good a job of it. She was a little swacked on whiskey and marijuana, but he thought it was more than that. She walked as if she were trying to hold all the broken pieces of herself together.

  He settled her in a chair and went back inside. He opened a window and threw the ant-encrusted bowl out into the bayou. On a shelf above the sink, he noticed, was a small packet of coarse yellow powder, the kind you would get from some voodooienne, and next to it three owl feathers bound up together with a string of moss.

  He knew what that particular charm was for; he'd seen it often enough the summer he was nineteen and having sex with Remy Lelourie every chance he got. It was supposed to keep a baby from coming.

  He went looking for LeRoy's harmonica, found it, and slipped it in his pocket. He rinsed out a couple of tin cups, fetched the jug of sour mash, and joined her up on deck. They sat side by side in ladder-back chairs, leaning against the bulkhead. Gold and scarlet four-o'clocks were opening in the shade along the banks. One of the boys on the bridge had hooked into his supper.

  The booze was harsh and potent and it sang through his blood like a strummed guitar. He let it do its work on the both of them awhile before he spoke. “Did Charlie St. Claire ever have you meet him in that old slave shack out in back of his place?”

  Her chest rose and fell in a nearly soundless sigh. “You back to harpin' on that? I done tol' you how I spent last night right here on this boat. I bet you be wearin' that policeman's badge of yours even when you take a girl to bed. What you do with it—pin it to your thing?”

  He took the harmonica out of his pocket and held it cradled in his hand. “Talk to me, Luce. And then I'll play for you.”

  “Oh, Lawd God,” she said on a tired and ragged laugh. “Like that's supposed to make me want to put my neck in the white man's noose.” She leaned over, bracing her elbows on her thighs, and pushed her fingers through her tangled hair. “All right…sometimes, yeah, he had me come out to the shack. But not last night. I didn't go near that man last night.”

  “But when you did go was his wife there, up in the big house?”

  Her rounded shoulders lifted in a little shrug. “I wouldn't know from that.”

  “Did he have another girl on the side lately, besides you?”

  She dropped her hands, letting them dangle loosely between her spread legs. She watched a doodlebug dance over the water, and after a while she said, “Couple months back maybe he was makin'it with somebody else. I don'tknow who, 'cept I think she was white, 'cause he be sayin' things, then, like how I was still his best lay and the blackberry always got the sweetest juice.” Her mouth hardened, making her look older than her twenty-four years. “He liked sayin' stuff like that, knowin' how it would make me feel. You would swear he wasbornfrom stone, was
Charlie St. Claire.”

  The boat rocked a little on the shifting current, releasing the pungent smell of rotting algae. The constant drone of the insects in the saw grass grew suddenly louder.

  “They goin' to say I did it. That what you here for, ain't it? You here 'cause they sayin' it must be his colored whore who killed him.”

  Rourke looked down at the harmonica in his hand. He rubbed his thumb up and down the mouthpiece, up and down. Behind them a fish jumped at a fly, splashing, but neither of them turned to look. “The best thing you can do for yourself, Luce,” he finally said, “is to tell the truth.”

  “Hunh. There's what happened and then there's what the white man want to say done happened. Which one of them truths you think goin' to keep me outta jail?”

  She raised her head, letting him watch the tears form in her eyes and fall, following a pair of tracks over the bones of her face, falling, leaving wet spots on her pink wrapper. “You think I wanted to be lettin' him do to me like he done? Gettin' down on my knees to suck his thing, spreadin' my legs so's he can stick it in me. But he promised me, don't you know? He promised that if I gave him what he wanted, he'd make it so's they got to give LeRoy another trial—two years he been promisin' me that. Mr. Charlie might've been usin' me like a whore, but he been the only hope me and LeRoy got. What I goin' to do now that he gone? What I goin' to do?”

  He reached up and slipped his hand beneath her hair to cup her neck. She was trembling now with what she was trying to hold deep inside herself. “Shhh, hush, now. It'll be okay.”

  “I swear before Jesus, I di'n't go near that shack last night.”

  “It'll be okay.”

  She made a small snuffling sound, like a child, and smeared the tears off her cheeks with the pads of her fingers. “We're growing old apart, me an' LeRoy. Him up there in Angola and me down here, doin' things that make my mama cry and the Lord want to turn his face away from me. Every night 'fore I go to sleep I ask the Lord what it was we done to deserve what happened. Why it was the white man had to come along and lock him away for some-thin' he never do. Fifty years. Might's well kill him. Might's well kill us both.”

  He let go of her neck, but she grabbed his wrist before he could pull back, and he felt her desperation in the way her fingers bit deep into his flesh. She took his hand and brought it down, pressing his palm onto the bare skin of her breast where it swelled above her slip.

  “I'ma not a whore,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “But I do what I got to do.” She shifted in her chair, letting her legs fall wide apart and the slip ride high up her thighs, letting her mouth turn soft and inviting. “I would suck your thing, Day. If that's what it took.”

  He couldn't stop the shudder that went through him. A part of him had always wanted her, even though he'd always known it could never be more than just a wanting. It wasn't only that LeRoy Washington was his friend and she was LeRoy's wife. He was white and a cop, and that gave him a power over her that he would never use.

  Gently, he pulled his hand free from her grasp, and then he leaned forward and took her mouth in a soft, slow kiss.

  He didn't touch her anywhere else, just on the mouth. He ended the kiss gently, lingering for a heartbeat before he pulled away. “You're free from all that now, Luce. You're free of him.”

  She tried to laugh, although it came out broken. “Free. Yeah, I'm free of him, sure 'nough. Meanwhile my man's hoein' cane up in Angola, and he ain't never goin' to be free again.” Her smile, slow and sad, came to him from out of the day's dying moments. “Sounds like the words to some low-down blues, don't it?”

  He smiled back at her, loving her. In a way he had always loved her. “So sing it for me, Luce.”

  She sang, a song with long drawn-out notes in it, a dark song that came from deep down in her. A raw and rugged song with echoes of field hollers, of slaves picking cotton and cutting cane. A song about bad luck and prison and loving a man who wasn't there.

  The sun set, and the sweat that had come from the hot summer and hot desires glazed and dried on his skin. The sun set and left a pink light to linger for a while, caught up in the tops of the cypress trees and in the burned copper curls of her hair. The sun set while Lucille Durand tore open her heart, and her voice bled blue.

  When the last of the sun was finally gone the fireflies came out, and it seemed thousands of tiny, twinkling stars had fallen out of the sky. Kerosene lanterns lit up on the nearby houseboats, and soft voices called to each other across the water. He put LeRoy's harmonica to his mouth and played her song back to her, until the song became his, coming from his own dark and deep places and shaking loose the loneliness inside him.

  Playing the blues was a lot like loving a woman: They both wound up taking something from you that you didn't know you had, and it hurt every damn time. It hurt so good.

  Chapter Nine

  LUCILLE DURAND SPENT A GOOD PART OF HER GROWING-UP years living in a shack held together by tar paper and chicken wire on a muddy road called Pailet Lane. Her mama washed clothes for a living, and her daddy was gone. But then a lot of the kids who lived on Pailet Lane had daddies who were gone. Gone up north to get a job. Gone upriver to do a jolt in Angola. Gone home to Jesus in heaven. Gone.

  So it was just the two of them living in that shack on Pailet Lane, just Lucille and her mama. Mama would get up at dawn and take the streetcar uptown to where the white folks lived, and she'd wash their clothes for them out in their backyards in a big tin tub over a little coal furnace for seventy-five cents a day, plus car fare and dinner. They were poor but Lucille didn't know it, because everybody was poor on Pailet Lane.

  A lot of her mama's people lived in the neighborhood, so there was always someone around to look after Lucille and plenty of cousins for her to play with. The other girls didn't like her much, but Mama said that was just because they were jealous of her being so smart and pretty and all. The boys teased and pulled her pigtails. They chased her all over the yard, even though when they caught her they didn't know what to do with her, except for Jimmie Moe Jones, who one day tried to pull down her drawers.

  Lucille kicked Jimmie Moe Jones in the shin and then she ran off to tell on him to his mama. All the aunts and mamas were at Aunt Josie's that day. They were shelling pecans to bake into pies for the church bazaar and picking what gigs they were going to play in the lottery.

  Aunt Josie's sister-in-law, who was visiting from over in Mobile and knew how to read, had brought a dream book along with her. The ladies were all recounting what dreams they'd had lately, and Miss Celestine was looking them up in her book to see which three lucky numbers their dreams were telling them to play. Lucille's mama only ever played the washerwoman's gig—four, eleven, forty-four—and even though those numbers hadn't come up yet, Lucille figured it was only a matter of time. So she wasn't putting much stock into any dream book; she was waiting politely just within the kitchen door for Miss Celestine to stop and take a breath so she could get her tattling in.

  Then she realized Miss Celestine wasn't talking anymore about dreams or the numbers, but had gone on to something else entirely, and that something was Lucille herself.

  “Wasn't that Augusta's girl I seen playin' out in the yard? Land, she sure is comin' up light.”

  Aunt Josie dumped a handful of shelled pecans into a tin bowl and dusted off her palms. “Mmmmm-huh, she sure is. But then blood do tell.”

  “That it do, sister, that it do. Why, with color like she got she might could pass, if it wasn't for that nose and mouf. She got the kinky hair, too, but that can always be straightened. Pity she got that nose and mouf.”

  Aunt Josie picked up one of those paper fans that come from a funeral home and stirred the air in front of her face, then she said the words that ended all discussion and argument and answered all of life's mysteries on Pailet Lane: “Ain't that the way it is.”

  The other ladies all nodded and hummed their agreement. “Mmmmm-huh. Mmmmm-huh.”

 
; Ain't that the way it is. About the only sentence Lucille had ever heard more coming out of the mouths of the mamas and aunts was “Don't sit like that.”

  She went back out into the yard and held her bare arms up to the sunshine. They were the color of the café au lait Mama gave her in the mornings, just a little bit of chicory coffee and lots of boiled milk, and she hadn't noticed before that of all the black and brown arms on Pailet Lane, hers was the lightest of all. Well, she'd noticed, but it hadn't meant anything, only now she felt proud and special. I'm comin' up light, she said to herself. Blood do tell.

  It was a few years later, though, when she was old enough to ride the streetcar by herself, that a thing happened that should have been no more than a glancing blow to her thoughts, and yet in that one moment she understood at last exactly what her Aunt Josie had been talking about when she'd said how blood do tell.

  Lucille got on the streetcar and kept to the very back, standing like a sailor on a pitching deck with the way the floor swayed and rattled beneath her feet. It was easy to remember where she was supposed to sit, for there was a screen—a board a couple of feet long and a few inches high—that fit into slots in the backs of the benches, and separated the colored from the whites-only seats.

  She sat in the second seat behind the screen, on the left, because the prettiest houses, she thought, were on that side of the street. She clutched the seven cents for her fare in a sweaty hand. She was excited, but also a little scared to be out on her own like this. But she was ten years old now, not a little girl anymore, and she was determined to do her mama proud.

  In the seat in front of her sat a large Negro woman with coal black skin. The woman was wearing a big straw hat whose brim was loaded with a gardenful of straw daisies, and she and her hat took up so much space that Lucille kept having to stick her head out in the aisle to see if the conductor was coming along to collect the fares. So she was glad when the woman reached up and pressed the button and got off at the next stop.