Cajun Waltz

by Robert H. Patton

  Another of his tasks was to drive Seth to and from school each day. They grew familiar as a result. Conversations in a Cadillac with the stolid ex-marine were the closest thing Seth had to a social life. Many times when they were alone together he almost blurted the secret of seeing his mother in Frank Billodeau’s arms. The urge hit hardest when watching her behave in ways that screamed of her infidelity now that he knew to notice the clues, the casual excuses and credible reasons for her lateness, flushed cheeks, or buoyant mood that no one but Seth understood were bald lies.

  That December, his parents were to spend a weekend at Richie’s hunting lodge, the Section Eight Gun Club. Completed down in Cameron Parish several years earlier, it was a swanky setup, its members local high-achievers fond of spending self-made money. Angel backed out at the last minute. She urged Richie to go alone. It was that insistence more than her change of plan that upset him; he couldn’t fathom wanting to do anything or be anywhere without her. Their subsequent argument shook the house. Though ignorant of her full betrayal, Richie’s resentment of her inattentiveness to him had been simmering for some time, needing only the prospect of a few days apart to trigger its eruption.

  He complained, she called him an ass, and he took a roundhouse swing at her that missed only because of the bourbon. Alvin restrained him as Seth whisked his mother away. Within an hour the lovebirds were smiling and smooching as they apologized for their ugly display. They’d decided to stay home together, and wanted Seth and Alvin to take their place on the trip.

  Seth’s knowledge of his mother’s affair with Frank Billodeau made a farce of her perky façade, how she clung to Richie’s arm and wiped lipstick from his cheek. Picturing her hand on Frank’s dick, Frank’s knees buckling under her touch, Seth wanted to be rid of the sight of her, to flush her from heart and mind. The Section Eight marsh, where he’d often hunted with his father and R.J., was a good place to do that. But it also invited some careless unburdening as he scrunched next to Alvin in a frozen duck blind that weekend. “You like my sister,” he began.

  “Respect more the word,” Alvin said.

  “I can tell. Way you watch her.”

  There was an old guide in the blind with them, his torn canvas jacket spilling insulation from the elbows, a duck call hanging from his lips like a stogie. He scanned the horizon in gruff irritation at his chattering clients. Their three shotguns aimed skyward as if awaiting enemy bombers. At length Alvin said, “She outta my class, Miss Bonnie.”

  “That don’t stop people, what I’ve seen.”

  “You fifteen. You seen nothin’.”

  “Yeah?” From there it was automatic for Seth to say what he’d seen, if only to hold up his end of a dialog about what’s bad about love. It was also automatic that Alvin, out of loyalty dating back to Korea, would tell R.J. first chance he got.

  Tipped off by Angel’s resemblance to Miss Katie of Conti Street, Alvin had detected in countless hangdog stares that R.J. was spellbound by his young stepmother, feelings lustful at minimum yet possibly stupid with real affection. He took care to be sensitive in reporting Angel’s affair, maintaining a respectful veneer of obliviousness to his lieutenant’s secret stake in the matter. “I figured you the one to handle this,” he said, “bein’ your daddy’s namesake an’ all.”

  R.J.’s face had gone to stone. “My father’d kill for love of that woman.”

  “You’ll talk to her?”

  “Talk to someone.”

  “Don’t wanna see nobody hurt.”

  “Better close your eyes,” R.J. said.

  Next stop was the library at Georgia Hill, a masculine, wood-paneled sanctuary housing, if not many books, a firearms cabinet full of shotguns, rifles, and pistols. Opening the cabinet’s glass doors, R.J. inhaled the tangy scent of solvent and gun oil and was seized by the poetry of using one of his father’s weapons on the man cuckolding Richie and, in his mind anyway, cuckolding R.J. as well. He selected a lady-size snubnose .22, stuck it in his belt under his shirt, and went off to visit Frank Billodeau in his athletic office at Lake Charles High School.

  He never drew the gun. Frank stared him down, shamed him with righteous indignation, an impressive maneuver considering Frank was a two-timing skunk who hated himself every day. “You’re drunk,” he said after R.J. accused him of seducing Angel. “Go home.”

  R.J. indeed had stopped off at a bar. He felt embarrassed to have needed the boost, though it was probably to his credit that he couldn’t take up a pistol and run around making death threats cold sober.

  “Angel told me you watch her,” Frank said. “Stare at her like a damn pervert. Your daddy’s wife! Now git the hell outta here ’fore I call Richie myself.”

  “Stay away from her or I’ll kill you.” The words sounded idiotic to R.J. the instant he spoke them.

  Frank stood up at his desk as if to make a better target of his heart. “Go on now. Get some coffee. Be all over come mornin’.”

  R.J. left, driven back inside his doubts like a bear into its cave. Frank sat down and put his hands to his temples as if to crush his skull. He picked up the telephone and dialed Angel at home, an act that in its directness doesn’t fit a man looking to continue an illicit affair. But the question of whether he intended to end things with Angel can’t be resolved because Alvin, vigilant in his household duties, answered the phone at first ring. Recognizing the voice of the husband of Mary Billodeau, manager of the Lake Charles Block’s, he informed Frank that Mrs. Bainard wasn’t at home. It would prove a consequential lie.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A basketball game at the high school that night. R.J. sat in the bleachers behind the Wildcats’ bench with the .22 jammed in his pants. The raucous gym was a conducive environment for a troubled man to sit and stew. Picture him studying the back of Coach Billodeau’s head while caressing the pistol under his shirt and you get the gist of his state of mind.

  The game proceeded in a fog. R.J. stared at Frank as if at the sun until red spots appeared and replicated. The crowd noise yielded to a clocklike tapping of his upper and lower teeth. He didn’t want to shoot anyone. It was about confronting a cliff he must jump off or not. Mooning over his stepmother had to stop. Lying around Georgia Hill drinking beer and playing music had to stop. The Korean War was over, his reserve commitments concluded. Next year he would inherit a major interest in a million-dollar enterprise. He ought to accept his good fortune and go be content for a while.

  His attention fell on Adele Billodeau, Frank’s high school daughter, sitting by herself nearby. She wore blue jeans tighter than the fashion and cuffed at the ankles above a new pair of Keds. She had a slight double chin and dimples across the pale tops of her knuckles, suggestions of succulence she highlighted with a jazzy hairdo and clothes she spilled out of by choice. She leaned on her elbows and studied the game until she turned to the guy watching her. “What?”

  “Your ma runs Block’s.”

  “So.”

  “Must have a lot of gumption.”

  Adele gave no reply.

  “You got good genes, is my point.”

  She glanced down uncertainly. “They’re Lees.”

  R.J. smiled. “And Daddy’s the coach.”

  “Hope he loses, too.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Not him. My boyfriend. The center.”

  R.J. surveyed the court. “Big fella.”

  “It ain’t everything.”

  They gazed forward for a bit. R.J. slid down the bench next to her.

  She asked him, “How do you know me?”

  “Your parents, not you. Yet.” It doesn’t get much plainer than that. Unless next you ask, “How old are you?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four. I feel older.”

  “How come?”

  “Sitting here alone on a Friday night watching a high school basketball game? I’d say it’s about over for me.”

  “I seen you before.”

  “I’m Richie B
ainard’s son.”

  “Then my mom—”

  “Works for my father. Poor woman.”

  These asides were too slippery for her. Part of their meaning seemed a fair warning to run. “I’m Adele.”

  “Nice.” They shook hands. “Nice,” he said again.

  “Gonna tell me your name?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Bainard.”

  “An army man.”

  “Marines.”

  “Ooh. Scary.”

  “Korea kinda was.”

  “You’re braggin’ now.”

  He laughed. “You’re pretty fast.”

  “My boyfriend’s mom says that.” She scowled. “Bitch.”

  “Wanna go?”

  Adele looked at him.

  “Said you don’t care about your daddy’s team.”

  “I care. He’s the best man in the world. It’s my boyfriend I wanna kill.”

  “Come on with me anyhow.”

  “Where?”

  “Does it matter? You know I’m respectable. I’m R. J. Bainard.” He raised his hands and turned the palms upward to show they were clean. “Could be your chaperone.”

  “I seen a few of them was worse’n their sons.” If further deliberation occurred to her, it didn’t show on her face. Adele stood and strode down the bleachers and out of the gym in a manner almost royal. He waited before following on the assumption that she wanted him to—to wait and to follow, that is.

  He was driving one of his father’s Cadillacs; it felt like a carriage to her when he opened the door to invite her inside. He took her dancing and drinking. Secure that she was running the show, Adele expected him to make a move before the night was over. Her wariness when he parked on a side street was that of an athlete confronting a challenge. She knew her way around the back end of a date. She knew how to say yes and no, how to deploy her body to amaze and intimidate. In a clinch with a boy she held all the cards, nervous but never afraid.

  Except R.J. wasn’t a boy. He knew he didn’t have to take no for an answer. He reached over and grasped her wrist. Gentle at first, but still odd—that he took her wrist not her hand; bones, not soft flesh, in his grip. “Okay,” he said. “We’re gonna do it now.”

  He drove her home afterward. At curbside he tried to kiss her goodnight. Her snarling rebuff warned him that she might do something reckless. “Call you tomorrow?” His breezy tone was a reflex toward charm under pressure. She bit back defeated tears, got out of the car, and climbed her front steps like any teenager home too late.

  * * *

  ADELE NEVER WOULD have told anyone if she’d had time to collect herself. She tried to lift the latch quietly, to cross the floor with a weightless tread as if literally lightened by what she’d lost tonight. But ambushed by her mother’s angry relief to have her home safe, she lost the will to lie.

  Under the bright hallway bulb her red eyes and beginning bruises on her upper arms couldn’t be explained away. The truth blew out like a drowning man’s last air. “He raped me, Mommy. I’m sorry.” Mary Billodeau’s expression curdled, for her daughter was now a certified tramp. The next question came from Adele’s father, who’d fallen asleep in his chair while compiling stats from tonight’s basketball game. To hear “R. J. Bainard” in answer was as stunning to Frank as the violence his daughter had suffered. He took her in his arms. His gaze over her heaving shoulders was directed far away. “Jesus Christ, forgive me.”

  Before going to wash off R.J.’s filth, the girl and her mother exchanged looks so probing the moment would stay with Adele all her life. The understanding was that they would never speak “rape” again. It would only hurt Adele’s future in this town and in this house—hurt, too, it didn’t need to be said, Mary’s management position at Block’s Home Supply. Adele got beat up by a boy—that was the story. It happened more than people admitted, and Mary trusted that in the eyes of God a woman is ennobled for enduring it.

  Frank helped his daughter undress for a bath under a quilt he draped around her. Seeing the abrasions on her skin brought a wave of fury. He yanked her from the edge of the steaming tub and threw her clothes at her. “We’re going to the doctor and we’re going to the police. They gonna see you like he left you.”

  “No one’ll believe it,” Mary said.

  “Look at her!”

  He dragged Adele out the front door. “You’re hurting me,” she said.

  His face looked distorted in the light from the kitchen window. “You swear it happened like you said?”

  “Daddy, it did.”

  He shook her by the shoulders, her head snapping back and forth. “You swear it was R. J. Bainard?”

  “Why’s it matter him?”

  “It matters!”

  She tried to embrace her father for both their sakes but he wanted an oath from her, something solid he could defend and lean on, like a wall to a wounded soldier. “It was him, Daddy. I wouldn’t lie.” He lifted her into the cab of his truck and closed the door with grim resolve more frightening than if he’d slammed it.

  On the drive to the doctor’s house, Adele’s head lolled with the road’s rhythm. She hurt between her legs, inside her jeans. She studied herself sluggishly. How had R.J. removed her jeans? They fit so tight, she’d had to lie flat on her bed to zip them before going out. Uncertainty seized her. The liquor that had clouded her night threw confusing clues. A teenage dossier of feels and fingerfucks made shame the surest thing.

  The doctor, a white-haired gentleman whose office was decorated with Norman Rockwell prints that he could have modeled for, examined Adele through her clothes. Nothing broke or bleeding, go home and rest with a wet cloth over the eyes. Outside in the waiting room he told her father, “You wanna claim her boyfriend thumped her, I’d say you got a case.”

  Frank remembered his argument with R.J. earlier that day and accepted that his only honorable course was to kill him; the thought was exhausting, like last chores to do before bed. First there was more to ask about his daughter’s condition, if he could get the words out. He couldn’t.

  “He raped me,” Adele whispered in the next room.

  The doctor’s wife, who attended all her husband’s examinations of women, was folding towels by the sink. “Dear?”

  “R. J. Bainard raped me. In his car.”

  “Do you know what you’re sayin’?”

  Adele’s eyes tilted upward to keep tears from spilling. “I know what’s rape.”

  The woman handed her a robe from a hook on the door. “Bottoms off. Put this on.” She summoned her husband. “Girl says there’s something more.”

  He examined her closely this time. Wincing as he straightened his back, he closed her robe and asked without looking at her, “Were you a virgin before tonight?”

  Her mouth crumpled. “I’ve had … I’ve let them…”

  The doctor’s wife cut in. “Have you gone the limit, dear? He needs to know.”

  There was a split-second interval, as between the plunger and the dynamite, before Adele answered, “Never.”

  Frank was brought in to hear it from his daughter’s mouth. He asked to use the phone to dial the chief of police at home. It was late. The Chief was a recent appointment by the Lake Charles City Council, brought in after a long stint with the sheriff’s office in Pinefield. There he’d gained a reputation as a lawman who’d bend the rules for those that deserved it and never for those who didn’t, exactly the discretion the elite of Lake Charles preferred in their public officials.

  Hollis Jenks, yawning and scratching his hairless head, listened to Frank without urgency until he heard R. J. Bainard named as the perpetrator. Though new in his position at the department, Chief Jenks was aware that the Bainards were big in Lake Charles and that sex accusations against an heir to the Block’s retail chain would reverberate statewide. He told Frank to stay put until he and his deputy arrived to question his daughter. Showing keen understanding of how things worked around here, the Chief then called Richie Bainard, whom he knew by r
eputation if not yet personally, to tell him what had happened and that his son better get his story together. It was a short conversation on account of Richie smashing his handset through the telephone dial.

  Richie had composed himself by the time he addressed reporters outside the Block’s headquarters after Adele’s story came out. He was lavish in praising Mary Billodeau, assuring that he bore no ill will toward the woman on account of her crazy daughter. Bonnie stepped forward to add that if Mary wished to stay on as manager of the Lake Charles Block’s, the company would welcome it. Abelard Percy, the family lawyer, formally denied all charges against R. J. Bainard. The accused, out on bail, stayed home.

  * * *

  ABE PERCY LOST sleep and gained weight as he became ever more nervous that this case would crown his career. He wasn’t a trial lawyer. State law permitted him to conduct the defense if his client so desired. Richie, who was paying the bills, did; R.J. didn’t care. Abe took it on out of loyalty to R.J.’s late mother, whose death he blamed himself for.

  He deposed Adele Billodeau gently, presenting his questions like a benevolent uncle seeking to clear up a misunderstanding. He knew he’d have to attack her in court. She must admit to drinking that night, to having welcomed the prospect of backseat foolery with a handsome older man and semi–war hero. Her thighs and pubic area had been bruised; her jeans and underwear, stained from when she’d put them back on after intercourse, were otherwise clean and not torn. A minor point alongside other evidence, Abe planned to highlight it on grounds of common sense. You don’t remove pants that tight without a struggle or help from the girl. She should have thrashed like a deer in a trap. She should have seized the moment of his trying to get her pants off to break free and save herself, had she wanted to. Her reputation suggested she hadn’t.

  Adele began to doubt her own memory. From a distance she saw R.J. on a street corner one afternoon. In bed that night she remembered how, before he turned scary, he’d kissed her neck, his hand warmer than the skin of her breasts as he’d caressed them under her blouse. She might have let him go further had he kept that tender tack. She squirmed under the covers almost feeling his embrace, almost tasting his tongue. R. J. Bainard on a winter night in her seventeenth year—why not? She’d pleased enough boys other ways, it seemed silly to withhold, not least to satisfy her own curiosity, the prize contained inside her.