Cajun Waltz

by Robert H. Patton

  “Ooh, now there’s a compliment.” She glanced at him across the seat. His reaction—a baleful expression, as of an old dog kicked by a new owner—told her this cripple with no life was attracted to her. “How much can you see, Seth? I’m never sure.”

  “With enough light I can see close up. Past that, it’s pretty dim.”

  “Can you see my face?”

  “If I got near.”

  “Then no.”

  “Correct. You’re a shape and a voice. And a smell.”

  “In movies blind people touch people’s faces to tell what they look like.”

  “Kind of an awkward thing to ask somebody.”

  “You could touch mine if you want to. Not while I’m driving, but sometime.”

  Seth touched his own face as if to verify its blush. “Okay.”

  She studied the road, embarrassed by his embarrassment. “Since I know what you look like, it’s only fair.”

  “What do I look like?”

  “Pardon?”

  He repeated the question.

  “You?” she stalled. “Well, you’re tall and kinda thin and—”

  “My face.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Not since fifteen, when I got hurt.”

  “The car accident.”

  “Yes.” He shied from the subject. “I can see myself in a mirror close up. But I don’t know how I compare with other guys.”

  “So what you’re asking is are you good-looking?”

  “I’m asking am I bad-looking.”

  This touched her. “You’re not. Okay?”

  “Not ugly?”

  “Not at all.”

  Seth leaned back and exhaled.

  The road wound through Lake Charles’s white working-class neighborhood. Carports, clotheslines, vegetable patches in the side yards, tool sheds in back. Some homes had wire-and-plywood coops for chickens and rabbits. “Part of town I grew up in,” Delly said. She told Seth the high school was coming up.

  “Keep going. Just past, I think it was.”

  She scanned ahead like a scout expecting an ambush. She avoided this area generally, but had been by enough to know she wouldn’t get hysterical revisiting it. “Why don’t you tell me what we’re looking for.”

  “A side road called Heather Lane.”

  She didn’t brake or speed up. She didn’t jerk the wheel or even waver one bit. She stared straight ahead through the windshield into a landscape hurtling toward her. She pulled over. “Here.”

  “Heather Lane?” His tentative tone matched Delly’s unease like a perfect song on the radio. “Describe it please.”

  “Same as anywhere.” She struggled for more to say. There were fewer houses back then, more trees and empty lots, yet it had always been a neighborhood whose ordinariness only heightened her dismay whenever she returned, that she could have been assaulted where kids play and moms carry groceries and dads push mowers from March to October.

  Seth was oblivious. As far as he knew, Heather Lane was part of his story, not Delly’s. It was here that the brother he’d admired had verified every slander against him. On this road, under these trees, with a two-bit tramp who doubtless would have given it up freely if he’d shown a little patience. “Heather Lane,” he said.

  Delly’s gaze had fallen to the patch of ground where R.J. had parked that night. She asked, like a hostess chitchatting through agony, “You don’t really care what it looks like, do you?”

  “This is where some girl once accused my brother of raping her. I want you to know things about me, and that’s a big one.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Half brother. Richard Bainard, Jr. From the family that owns Block’s.”

  The information pierced without sensation, like a sharp needle. “I heard he died,” she said.

  “Shot himself. Down on the coast.”

  “Your mother was married to Richie Bainard?”

  “Till she was killed—in a car crash caused by him. The one where I got hurt.”

  “Your father did it?”

  “He scared her. She ran. She crashed.”

  “And now you hate the Bainards?” Delly asked hopefully.

  “I never hated R.J. He was always fine.”

  Evenly she said, “No. He wasn’t.”

  “Well, sure. The newspapers had him judged and hanged.”

  She studied the hub of her steering wheel as if it were the crosshairs of a gun sight. “I was raped.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I was raped,” she repeated.

  He searched in vain for a response, like a rescuer talking to a man on a ledge with every reason to jump.

  “I don’t make an issue of it most times.” Her voice caught. “But in this case it seems I ought to.”

  Seth’s innocence proved an asset here, sweeping him through a complex moment that would have baffled a wiser man. “That colors your opinion, don’t you see?” His voice was full of reason. “Makes total sense that you would condemn someone like R.J. without knowing the facts.”

  She put the car in gear and started down the main road past Heather Lane. “Your brother. Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “I can’t change what he did. What he was accused of doing.”

  I accused him. He raped me. The words were there to be howled. But only in silence could she suppress the horrible coincidence of R.J.’s place in their lives. Telling Seth the truth would shatter the fondness forming between them, which itself only dawned on her when she realized it was futile. It made a coward of her. “I am sorry your brother is dead. How’s that?”

  “Half brother. But thanks.”

  She turned away from him to the approaching intersection. “Now tell me where to go next.”

  * * *

  THEY CAME TO Georgia Hill, pausing in the driveway between the oak trees. Atop the rise, the brick residence, outbuildings, and rolling grounds resembled a small private school. Delly saw nothing, felt everything. “I’ll let you out here. You can tap your way up the walk.” The belittling was necessary. His brother was R. J. Bainard. He was lucky she didn’t spit it in his face.

  “I’m not going in. I just wanted you to see it.”

  “Now I have. And I still think your family rots.”

  “It’s part of who I am. So’s my brother. I liked him.”

  “Do you think I give a shit?”

  “He suffered, Delly.” To which she scoffed audibly. “Just my opinion,” he said. “Sorry.”

  She was surprised how sad she felt. “I’m sorry, too.” She forced a smile all the more absurd for his inability to see it. The smile pushed water over the rims of her eyes. “Now please get outta my car.”

  “I told you I’m sorry, and that I believe you on your story.” His gentle tone confirmed the opposite.

  “Out.”

  He got out. A black Cadillac came up behind, blocking Delly’s exit from the driveway. She was rolling down her window to tell the driver to back up when she heard him say from his car, “That you, Seth? Thought it was prowlers. I was fixin’ to go for my forty-five.”

  Seth told the guy sheepishly, “I may need a ride back to the hospital.”

  Alvin looked over at the other car and glimpsed the back of the head of a poodle-haired woman at the wheel. “Fight with your girl?”

  “Just showing her the house.”

  “Call ahead next time. It not bein’ your house no more.”

  “Hey!” Delly yelled out her window. “Move it!” She banged the horn.

  Alvin backed onto the road to let her U-turn out of there.

  Seth had found his way to Delly’s window. “One thing before you go.”

  “Make it quick.”

  “I think you’re great.”

  “Go to hell.”

  She wheeled around in front of the car behind her. Its window was down. Her window was down. She and the other driver regarded each other. “Ethel?”

  Delly hit the gas hard.

  * * * />
  SHE FELT BADLY about that “go to hell” and sat down with Seth in the hospital cafeteria the next day. She told him he was nice, she liked him okay, “But your brother was a rapist. That kills it for me.” She didn’t add that she was the victim. She worried that he wouldn’t believe her; or worse, that he’d convert it in his mind from an irreparable wedge to some kind of grotesque bond between them.

  “The charge was never proved,” he said.

  “He ran away!”

  “From a lynch mob.”

  “From the truth!” She was stuck. Here she was trying to be a martyr and he was forcing her to get mean. “He attacked a girl. I was attacked.”

  “A terrible coincidence. It has nothing to do with us.”

  “Us? There is no us.”

  He felt for her hand across the table. She eluded it easily and fled the room with her head bowed in resignation for the merciful hurt she’d inflicted.

  Disconsolate, Seth told his superiors at the hospital that he was ill and needed time off. That message subsequently was given to somebody named Freddy Baez when he later phoned the front desk asking, as an old friend looking to reconnect, if Mr. Hooker would be in working tomorrow.

  * * *

  IMAGINE A MOVIE sex scene where lamps are kicked over and the lovers tumble like drunken cowboys under motel windows grimy with neon light. The camera pans out the window and we see a rain-dappled car across the street with its driver’s face distorted in metaphorical meltdown behind the rainy glass. The lovers are R. J. Bainard and Delly’s cousin, Corinne, and the car is the big Lincoln driven by Corinne’s husband Donald Meers. Thus do we learn that R.J. and Corinne are having an affair and her husband is on the trail.

  A lot of adultery results from mere access. Corinne had time on her hands and R.J. was available in everyday ways—meet her for lunch, buy her a hat—that her husband preferred not to be. That she believed R.J. to be a Mexican gangster put further glamor on what was basically commonplace. R.J.’s interest was casual to say the least. Pursuing the first woman who looked his way typified his laziness in love, though it did help that things he’d seen only in banned Chinese picture books Corinne thought up all by herself. Self-destructiveness also figured, an old habit that had found new expression.

  It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to see that bopping around Lake Charles in a red convertible wearing a beard, a loud hat, and a murdered man’s name, let alone showing up at the hospital where his estranged brother worked, suggested that R.J. was ambivalent about his freedom. That he went back to the hospital would seem to cement the diagnosis, even if this time it wasn’t to confront Seth, but rather, from mischief, to check out Seth’s new girlfriend—who was, of all people, Ethel from the Section Eight Gun Club.

  Alvin had offered him this gossip about Seth during their roadside rendezvous, routine throughout R.J.’s fugitive exile, to give R.J. his monthly cash. R.J. had confessed in turn that he was seeing the mother of one of Seth’s patients. Alvin said this was insane and urged him to get out of town before the Freddy Baez fiasco blew up in their faces. R.J. said that’s not my problem since you shot Freddy, not me. Alvin forked over the money with a right-you-are wink that veiled major misgivings. He worried that R.J. might blab to Corinne about Freddy’s ashes at Orange Grove cemetery. He worried that Ethel might tell Seth about Alvin’s behavior at the Section Eight sauna. Most of all, he worried that Bonnie would find out that things were not going smoothly in her ascension to the top of the Bainard world.

  Getting back to that movie scene, our lovers would next be seen emerging from their motel room and kissing good-bye under the bitter gaze of Corinne’s husband across the street. Whereupon the camera pivots to show a familiar black Cadillac parked not far away. It’s Alvin Dupree. He’s tailing the lovers, too. Scratchy blues out of New Orleans plays on his radio till he switches it off to hone his thoughts.

  R.J. and Corinne drive off in separate cars. Donald follows his wife. Alvin follows R.J. The soundtrack rises until it changes to knuckles rapping on the door of (cut to) Joey Meers’s room at Lake Charles Hospital. R.J. has arrived in his hat and beard with the bounce of a bookie on game day. He nods to Joey, who’s alone there. “I’m looking for Miss Ethel. She around?”

  * * *

  JOEY REMEMBERED THE man from when he’d buzzed him and Seth in his roadster the other day. He felt the same wariness he’d felt then, for the visitor had an edgy vitality that seemed to mock anyone sitting inside on his ass in the afternoon. “Ethel?” he said. “Never heard of her.”

  “Curly hair.” R.J. cupped his hands to his chest. “Big.”

  “Sounds like Delly you’re talkin’.”

  “Who?”

  “Delly Franklin. My cousin.”

  “Went by Ethel last time we met.” R.J. indicated Joey’s cane. “Still with the stick.”

  “So it was you in that car. Why you spyin’ on me?”

  “Not you.”

  “Well, if it’s Mr. Hooker, he ain’t here today. Out sick.”

  R.J. shook his head. “It’s his woman I seek.”

  A protective impulse narrowed Joey’s eyes. He knew Delly’s history, her very bad luck with men. “She’s got a husband.”

  “Got a daddy, too, looks like.”

  Joey missed the wit. “Her dad’s dead. Shot himself.”

  “Lotta that going around.” R.J. extended his hand. “Freddy Baez.”

  “Joey Meers.”

  Delly entered the room. She wore no sunglasses and had lost weight since her encounter with R.J. last winter. His expression gave away nothing. “Ethel?”

  She stared at him, her skin suddenly, actually cold. The man who would never be dead to her most definitely wasn’t dead now.

  “Delly,” Joey corrected. He proceeded with introductions. “This here’s—”

  R.J. cut him off. “You probably remember me as Richard,” he said to her. “From Section Eight when we met?” He moved toward her, his face scorching her eyes. The teeth in his smile looked predatory, like dentures on a mummy.

  “Thought you said your name was Freddy,” Joey said.

  “It is,” R.J. said to him. “‘Richard’ was temporary, same as ‘Ethel’ I bet.”

  “I told you it was Delly,” Joey insisted, annoyed at being squeezed out of the dialog like an underage pest. He sensed that there was more going on here than former acquaintances meeting. His ignorance of all else didn’t stop him from trying to help. “Delly Franklin, say hello to—”

  “Freddy Baez.” The mummy’s grin widened. “Honest.”

  She shook his hand. She was fairly sure she shook his hand.

  “What’s with this ‘Ethel’?” Joey asked her.

  R.J. turned to him. “How old are you, kid? Been around a little? You know what I mean.”

  “I do all right.”

  “Then here it is: me and Delly had a flirtation. Her being married, turns out she had to hide her real name—same for me. It happens with grown-ups sometimes.”

  This was mad babble to Delly. The one fact that anchored her was that R.J. seemed again not to recognize that she was Adele Billodeau, his girl from Heather Lane.

  “A flirtation?” Joey said to her. “With him?”

  She couldn’t find words. The men looked allied in malice toward her, deceptions crisscrossing the room like sabers hacking and stabbing.

  R.J. offered in a teacherly tone, “It was innocent. A few drinks, a few laughs.”

  “I gotta go,” she said to no one.

  “Nice to see you again,” R.J. said.

  It was too much. She faced him head-on and held it for three heartbeats. He must remember! Yet his expression stayed affable, his manner courtly. She left the room with a mumbled apology that she kept repeating all the way down the hall.

  Alone again with Joey, R.J. observed that Delly was an unusual name.

  “It’s short for Adele.”

  “Ah.” R.J.’s shoulders fell, relieved of the strain of staying upright for so
long. “I was afraid of that.”

  * * *

  DELLY DEFIED ALL good sense by not going straight to the police from the hospital. Instead she drove to the little ranch she shared with her stepdaughter. She pounded the steering wheel and cursed herself for retreating in a fluster while R.J. had stood there smug as a dictator’s son. She told herself that she would have him arrested tomorrow. She’d be Delly Franklin one more day, and Adele Billodeau ever after.

  She was surprised to find her husband’s car parked trunk-open in front of the house. Arthur Franklin came out lugging a bedsheet stuffed with clothes and tied at the corners like Santa’s bag. Fiona followed him, popping gum. Delly got the picture at once and pleaded with her not to do this. The girl twisted past her and slid into her father’s car. “It’s not forever,” she said.

  Delly glared at Arthur. “Happy?”

  “She’s been beggin’ me to take her.” He was wearing the same suspenders with which he’d hung those same trousers on the shower rod the day he and Delly got married, to steam the wrinkles smooth; a trivial failing, it encapsulated all the reasons she couldn’t stand the sight of him. He stuffed the sack of clothes into his trunk. “You think I got room for this at my dump?”

  “Fiona belongs with me. I’m her mother.”

  “Not technically.”

  “This is her home.”

  “She’s got her reasons.”

  Delly knew what they were. Tensions had been high between her and Fiona, who resented her stepmother for a long list of routine affronts capped by, in an ultimate teenage grounding, Delly smashing the skull of her boyfriend. “I’m sorry,” she said as she knelt by Fiona’s car window.

  Fiona rolled it down partway. “I don’t sleep good here. I’m mad at you all the time.”

  “Be mad. I can take it.”

  “Practically my first kiss, and you come flyin’ outta the dark like a monster.”

  “All true. But don’t go.”

  “I wanna hate you—which I hate, ’cause I know you care about me. It’s why I’m goin’ to Daddy’s. To think. To sleep.” Fiona’s face behind the car window looked twenty-five instead of fifteen, saddening her stepmother deeply. “I know what’s best for me.”

  “Believe me, you don’t. Now please get out of the car.”