Cajun Waltz

by Robert H. Patton

  His prayer over, Seth started again at the beginning as Richie’s breathing slowed. Bonnie began to tremble, her long preparedness for this event imploding in the face of it. Confronting R.J. as the easiest target, she cursed him for his wasted life, progressing in her list of transgressions from verified crimes to the speculative ones that Alvin had supplied her, namely killing Freddy Baez, assaulting Ethel Somebody, and drowning Hollis Jenks. R.J.’s passive reaction seemed to concede the truth of the charges. Finally moved to defend himself, he told his sister that Alvin was the one who’d killed Freddy Baez and likely done those other things, too.

  “Alvin?” Bonnie scoffed. “He never killed anyone.”

  “There’s some ChiCom regulars in Korea would say otherwise. And Frank Billodeau, of course.”

  She knew the name. “Who?”

  “That girl outside—” He meant Delly. “—she thinks I did it. But Alvin told me long ago he did it on Daddy’s direction.”

  “Liar!”

  “Sure I done it.” It was Alvin. His entrance in the room caused Bonnie’s face to take the shine of a madwoman greeting a phantom. He went to her side. He was deeply exhausted by today’s many labors but did a Lazarus when she kissed him. They stood arm in arm, a public display that was, for them, tantamount to making love in the town square. Alvin said to the room, “And a lot else for this family, no lie.”

  Bonnie hadn’t known. Hearing it now, she knew it was true and she knew it was unforgivable. Alvin, eyes on her, awaited her verdict. She kissed him again. “For which he’s got my gratitude,” she said, “and whatever more he wants.”

  Delly appeared in the doorway. She’d been listening outside. “Hallelujah,” she said, though the word and her facial expression didn’t match. She lunged for Richie’s bed.

  “Hey!”

  “Grab her!”

  Seth, all ears as usual, was confused by the curses and clatter.

  “Put it down, Adele. Put it down before someone gets hurt.”

  Let’s catch up. Hearing the ruckus, Alvin had come downstairs from Bonnie’s suite where he’d been resting after his hard day. He was armed, of course. Outside the sewing room he heard the enumeration of his misdeeds and entered prepared to accept whatever penalty Bonnie decreed. Delly and Donald saw Alvin come down and followed him to see what was what, on the way passing Richie’s nurse who had the good sense to scram after Donald whipped out his pistol like Elliot Ness. Overhearing the conversation around Richie’s bedside, Delly, with Donald right behind her, burst into the room and grabbed the pistol that R.J. had thrown on the bed. Thus we have in the sewing room three people with weapons and three not. Everyone is stressed. Everyone is tired. When the storm outside causes the house to lose power and the lights to go out, everyone does the wrong thing.

  * * *

  SIX SHOTS WENT off in the dark, followed by coughs and ragged breathing that accentuated the weirdness of the moment, like giggles at a funeral. A smell of fireworks permeated the air. Seth’s voice came from floor level. “Delly? Are you all right?”

  “Are you?”

  “Thank God.”

  R.J. spoke next. “Bonnie?”

  “I’m here. Crazy bitch.”

  “I didn’t shoot,” Delly said. Not true, but in the chaos she honestly wasn’t aware. She’d whirled in the dark toward those who’d wronged her and clenched her hand to a fist, settling at least one of her scores. “Musta been Donald.”

  No answer.

  “Donald?”

  R.J. continued roll call. “Alvin?”

  There came a groan.

  Bonnie crawled over. She gasped. “You’re wet!”

  “M’head.”

  “Your head? Oh Jesus.”

  “Love you, girl.”

  “Alvin, no. Goddamn you Jesus Jesus.”

  “Please no cursin’. Need prayers this point.”

  “R.J.! Alvin’s hurt.”

  “Makes two of us, Bonnie.”

  Seth got to his feet only to trip over a body that would prove to be Donald’s. He pitched forward onto Richie’s bed, where he landed with a sloshy sound. Shot in the chest by a bullet intended elsewhere, Richie had drained out on the mattress like a crankcase into an oil pan. He’d just passed his fifty-eighth birthday but would have looked much older if the lamp had been on.

  Visions adjusted to the dark. Alvin had been hit in the side of his forehead, the bullet piercing his skull and furrowing under the bone from above his eye to above his ear. He was conscious, rambling on with dubious coherence about going straight to hell. His damnation was tied to the word “Tarzy,” which caught R.J.’s attention even under the burn of a bullet that had passed through the flesh of his hip.

  “What are you saying, Alvin?”

  “Icebox in Hancock Bayou.”

  “What?”

  “Where they had Freddy.”

  “Sallie’s place?”

  “In the box. Tarzy and the fat man.”

  “Jesus Christ! Why?”

  A pause. “Not sure now.”

  “Today you did this?”

  “Was gonna go back.” Alvin remembered the question. “Today.”

  Whereupon our story gains a hero, for R.J. resolved immediately to drive to Hancock Bayou through the oncoming storm to rescue Tarzy Hooker. But in trying to stand, his leg folded like a broken barstool and he fell into Delly’s arms—whereupon she declared that she would drive him there, to hell with the weather and all else. She looped her arm under his and they stumbled out the door.

  Seth’s protests stood no chance. They made their getaway down the dark hallway without a glance behind. He hollered after them, tried to get up, fell down, and floundered on all fours on the blood-wet floor like an ant sprayed with pesticide. He wanted them to come back. He wanted to go with them. He wanted not to be left behind.

  Richie’s nurse, hiding in the kitchen, had heard the gunshots and tried to call for help but the phone lines were down. Alvin remained conscious for an hour or so, drifting between dread for his soul and thanks to God for giving him Bonnie. His last words before he lost consciousness were “bury me home” or “marry me, hon,” Seth hearing one thing and Bonnie another. They would debate it later to no useful purpose.

  * * *

  AUDREY, NOW A Category Four hurricane, turned due north late in the day on June 26 and headed straight for Cameron Parish. Its track accelerated; landfall would happen early on Thursday, June 27. The news had little effect on local residents. Electric power had been out since midday Wednesday. There were few active radios to receive the Weather Bureau’s revised alarm to evacuate now. The last reports had said Texas would catch the brunt tomorrow afternoon, so people in Louisiana had hunkered down in their homes as they’d done for countless squalls and tropical storms. They expected to suffer some damage. They expected to survive.

  In the last daylight hours on Wednesday, before rains became torrential and winds approaching 150 miles per hour started bending the trees and peeling roofs off the houses like box tops, an interesting natural phenomenon occurred that brought foreboding to any old-timers who recalled it from previous cataclysms. Millions of crayfish scuttled out of the swamps and began streaming through streets and across lawns and schoolyards like a huge green carpet of locusts. Sensing the coming seawater surge, this primordial refugee instinct likewise led creatures such as foxes and rodents and swarms of snakes to make similar breaks for higher ground before the ocean came.

  Heavy winds ripped through the night. Telephone poles snapped. Tree trunks cracked, and shutters and sheathing tore off houses to become deadly projectiles hurtling through the air. Yet flooding remained moderate. Warm brackish water pushed out of the bayous and over the lowlands in an ankle-deep flow no worse than what thunderstorms caused now and then. At Sallie Hooker’s property, the water pooled like bathwater around the pilings of her house and the base of the cold locker. The two people inside the locker worried at first that it might keep rising. Seepage through the floor v
ent turned to a spurt. The water rose to a foot high, about halfway up the legs of the table on which Tarzy and Abe sat cross-legged in the dark. Abe held Tarzy’s hand and spun tales of memorable meals he’d cooked and brainless dogs he’d owned. He said that someday Tarzy could tell his grandchildren about passing the hurricane with a fat old fool in a cold box. Tarzy laughed more than a few times.

  Panic overcame Abe at one point. He told Tarzy about doing bad things for money and bad things with children that Tarzy listened to with incomprehension and dread, for he could tell that Abe was making a final confession. Abe pulled out of his spiral, apologized for his babble and made up a game to play, betting each other on the time between flying debris hitting the sides of the locker. The lags got longer as the wind abated. They noticed that the water inside the locker had leveled off. The storm was subsiding. The promise of morning encouraged them.

  It was around eight A.M. when witnesses first saw the wall of seawater about twelve feet high, a brown boil of mud and landscape debris, rolling like a bulldozer from the shorefront over the land. Whole neighborhoods were obliterated by its impact. Sallie’s plucking shed already had lost its roof and siding to the wind; the tidal wave took the rest like a matchbox hit by a five iron. It tore her house off its pilings and carried it for miles before the house hit the banks of the Intracoastal Canal and shattered into pieces. The wave knocked the cold locker off its slab and flipped it like a vandalized mailbox. The locker bobbed upside down in the current, its inmates drenched and bruised, terrified yet alive, and, once the shock passed, heartened by the fresh air and patch of daylight visible through the floor vent that now framed a glimpse of morning sky.

  The locker began to fill. Abe and Tarzy treaded water alongside broken pieces of table and shelving. Soon there was less than two feet of space between the water and the ceiling, which a moment ago had been floor. They floundered beneath the vent overhead with faces upraised like seals begging for herring. Abe’s breathing wheezed and he said “oh God” repeatedly. The boy wedged his fingers into the vent to hoist himself up. The grate broke away, leaving a square hole that gave a view of speeding clouds and sideways rain. He reached his arm through. The air on his skin was a tease of freedom inches away. He yelled for help but his words carried nowhere. Abe, face purple, gripped Tarzy’s waist to raise him higher. When his strength failed they splashed back into the water. Coughing for breath, they tried again, and again after that, Abe hoisting Tarzy so he could signal for help through the vent. The effort gave hope. They would try once more. The boy was preparing to launch himself upward when down through the hole tumbled a large black snake.

  Tarzy recoiled from the smack of the serpent hitting his forehead. He thrashed screaming under the water with the thing writhing cold in his face. He clawed it away and got clear of the water for an inward breath and outward scream. He and Abe hugged the sides of the locker as the snake slithered to and fro in the sloshing water. It bumped into Abe, who shrieked. In recent months cottonmouth numbers had erupted in the marsh along with the rats and nutria. Tarzy knew the snakes were poisonous.

  Another one dropped through the vent. Then another. Abe splashed and kicked trying to get away from them. His eyes were swollen and his face looked about to explode. He stopped and studied his hand as if he’d broken a fingernail. “I’m bit.” He sounded relieved to have it done with.

  Tarzy treaded water in the opposite corner. He stayed stone still whenever one of the snakes came near, letting it slide like an eel against him. He kept his eyes down to watch for them in the water and also not to watch Abe, whom he feared would die from the bite right in front of him. But Abe’s heart had already stopped. The storm was passing and the sky outside had turned powder gray. Light through the vent illuminated the inside of the locker. Tarzy looked up to see Abe’s head flop back with open eyes. Abe’s body settled down in the water like a sponge in a tub. A snake slid up his chest and coiled on his upturned face. Its diamond head swayed, its black tongue flicked. Tarzy’s terror became extreme.

  * * *

  R.J. AND DELLY left Georgia Hill a little before midnight but didn’t reach Hancock Bayou until evening the next day. Driving into the storm, they got as far as Belton, a one-pump village between Hackberry and Holly Beach, before spillover from Calcasieu Lake made the road impassable. Dawn was hours away. Houses were dark, streets were empty. They parked near an abandoned AME chapel that judging from its cinderblock walls and oil-stained floor had once been an auto garage. Raindrops hit like bullets and the wind made a train-whistle sound. The dash from the car to the church left them soaked. It might have been romantic under other circumstances, lovers in the rain and so forth. Not tonight. They’d fled a violent scene whose scope of injury they could only guess. Their crazy leap to go rescue a child seemed hopeless now that its adrenaline rush had subsided over the hours of difficult travel. R.J.’s side burned where the bullet had passed through the muscle above his hip—not fatal, not gory, but still painful as a blowtorch. Delly had driven, letting him sleep or mumble or stare at the wiper blades. There was nowhere else in the world she wanted to be.

  The church door was unlocked. There were four pairs of rough-hewn benches divided by a narrow aisle they could just make out in the dimness. They guessed that the narrow windows down each side were made of stained glass because they were darker than the walls. A small round window above the altar had been blown out by the wind, yet the storm noise pouring through seemed strangely far away. R.J. lay back on one of the benches. Delly sat beside him and studied the hole where the altar window had been. R.J. shifted in a spasm and bumped his head on the wood. She slipped her hand under his head and lifted it onto her lap. The altar window resembled an eye or some kind of escape hatch. He shifted again. His head pressed against her belly below her breasts. She looked down. Her vision had adjusted to the dark. His eyes were open, looking up. He lifted his hand and gripped her upper arm. “Thank you, Adele,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She kissed him then. Not long. Just once. Just right.

  * * *

  IT FEELS LIKE heaven’s joke the way skies turn blue and breezes balmy right after a hurricane passes. Songbirds appear out of nowhere to serenade families picking through the wreckage. In the case of Audrey and Cameron Parish, you can’t leave hundreds of dead bodies in such a small area without them showing up all over the place. Delly saw dozens, muddy and battered, after she and R.J. switched from car to foot once the ground approaching Hancock Bayou got too boggy to drive. Sand from the beaches clogged the coast highway. Standing water, deep in parts, covered the lowlands to the north. People got around in skiffs and pirogues, calling out names, looking for loved ones. The sound of outboard motors gave a sense of common labor, like homeowners mowing lawns up and down a suburban street. The pervasive shock was somewhat relieved by the sight of people organizing themselves into work crews and search parties. Like survivors emerging squint-eyed from caves, they would swap tales of the holocaust later. Right now there was work to do.

  On the drive here from Belton, Delly had spotted a liquor store, broken in and taken a quart of Everclear to douse R.J.’s wound—two holes, entry and exit, about six inches apart and linked by a subcutaneous bruise rapidly turning purple. The bloodstain on his trousers ran to his knee. He grimaced at each step, one hand on Delly’s shoulder.

  They slogged inland. Channels of seawater encircled mounds of muck, steaming under the summer heat, everything draining toward the mud-colored lake that yesterday had been marsh. The mounds were matted with rain-beaten grass and infested with snakes. Seeing them glisten and glide like worms in a manure pile terrified Delly until she began to think of them as no different from everyone else today, homeless and so tired.

  A motor sounded behind them. An old woman maneuvered her skiff toward the open water, her gaze steady, her face stolid as a wooden Indian’s as she worked the outboard tiller. R.J. waved to her. “Sallie!”

  Sallie Hooker was much amazed. Ev
en fear for Tarzy, wherever he was, took a momentary backseat to seeing the dead return to life. She veered into the bank and, in one of those moments when massive unlikelihood becomes life’s new condition, helped R.J. and Delly into her skiff before continuing her search for the missing child.

  Motoring over the flooded land, they saw leafless trees and broken rooftops projecting from the water like the spars of sunken ships. It was getting late. Twilight over wetlands is always lovely; it was enhanced in this case by the absence of intact structures, everything primal and placid. Coming finally to Sallie’s property, they saw her house was gone, its pilings sticking up bare. The cold locker too was gone. Sallie cut the engine. The vessel skimmed in silence through the flotsam in the water, the dead animals, weeds, and junk. She didn’t bother calling Tarzy’s name.

  The sky went from orange to cobalt as the sun descended. No one spoke. A flight of ducks pitched down in the distance near a floating platform of wood. Delly gasped to see the platform was covered with snakes. Other snakes swam thickly around it like penguins around an ice floe. To fall overboard would have been a bad way to go, like being eaten by dogs or buried alive. Delly moved to the center of the skiff.

  The three of them sat lost in themselves as the skiff’s momentum carried it closer to the platform. The snakes were piled in a clumpy mass. From under the pile one of them poked upward like a cobra called by a flute. Delly studied the curious sight. Her gasp came simultaneous with Sallie’s. The erect snake was a bare human arm reaching up through the glistening squirm. Alongside the platform now, they saw it was the top of a large submerged box with only a few inches still above water. The upraised arm, thin as a broomstick, wobbled at the elbow before retracting through the pile of snakes and vanishing inside the box.