“No, suh, I wouldn’t do that.”
“That’s good. We’re getting somewhere. What’s your name?”
“Lavern.”
“Okay, Lavern, go back to your manager, Mrs. Sasquatch over there, and tell her to drag her lazy rear end out of the chair and to get on the phone and straighten this out. Can you do that for me, Lavern?”
“I don’t like the way you’re talking to me, suh.”
“Sorry about that. My twelve thousand is insignificant when it comes to helping along a grand program like affirmative action. I apologize. Tell your manager I said fuck me. I apologize to you, too, Lavern. Fuck me twice.”
Robert Weingart was just backing out his white Mustang convertible from his parking slot when the deputy who responded to the bank manager’s call pulled in to the lot. Weingart was wearing shades and a stylish beige fedora and a scarlet silk shirt with blown sleeves. He cut his engine and smiled pleasantly into the deputy’s face. “If this is about me, the ladies inside worked out my problem,” he said. “It was a misunderstanding about a change in currency rates. I got a little hotheaded. Sorry about that.”
“Don’t tell me. Tell them,” the deputy said. He was a red-haired man with a florid complexion and a brush mustache and a chest that resembled a beer keg. His nickname was Top because he was a retired marine NCO, although he had been a cook and never a first sergeant. As a department comedian, he was considered second only to our dispatcher, Wally.
“I told both ladies I was out of line, sir,” Weingart said. “They seemed satisfied. I don’t see the problem.”
“You’re the author?” Top said.
“I’m an author.”
“My mother read your book. She wanted me to read it. That’s why your remarks were real hurtful to her.”
“Miss Lavern is your mother?”
“No, the branch manager, the black lady, is my mother. The one you called Mrs. Sasquatch.”
Weingart grinned from behind his glasses and inserted his hand in the top of his shirt and massaged his chest. “You’re pretty good.”
“Take off your glasses.”
“What for?”
“Because it’s rude to talk to people with sunglasses on.”
“I never heard that one.”
“You have now.”
“Anything to please.”
“That’s better. Thank you. I hear you’ve been down three times.”
“More than three if you count juvenile time.”
“So who taught you it was okay to come to a town like this and use the word ‘fuck’ in front of my mother?”
“Nobody did, sir,” Weingart replied, ennui creeping into his voice.
“You know you have a twitch in your face?”
“I wasn’t aware of it.”
“Right under your eye. You don’t have a couple of fried circuits, do you? Like a little too much crystal in the system? Because that’s what you look like to me. I think that’s why you said ‘fuck’ in front of my mother.”
Weingart stared straight ahead, his expression self-effacing, his hands resting on the spokes of his steering wheel.
“When is the last time you UA-ed?” Top asked.
“I’m not on parole. I was commuted out, all sins forgiven.”
“I can always spot a guy who has dirty urine. I think that’s why you have a twitch in your face.”
“I’m getting a crick in my neck. Do you mind if I get out of the car?”
“You’re not dropping or snorting or smoking or shooting or any of that stuff?”
“You’ve got it.”
“But if you’re not under the influence, what’s your excuse for using the word ‘fuck’ to my mother and Miss Lavern? Bet you didn’t know I was a lifer in the Crotch.”
“In the what?”
“I think guys like you are draft dodgers. You hide out in jails while other people go to war. Look at your face in the mirror. Half of it looks like a glob of Jell-O trembling in a bowl. It’s embarrassing to look at.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my face.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“Listen—”
“You giving me orders now?”
“No, sir.”
“First it was my mother, now it’s me. You don’t know when to quit, do you?” Top said. “You’ve got a red ant.”
“What?”
Top slapped Weingart hard on the side of his head. “There,” he said. “Those things can really string you.”
“Want to roust me? Do it. I’ve seen it all. I was in Huntsville.”
“From what I hear, you saw it on your knees. Or draped over a chair. There you go with that twitch again. Hang on, another red ant.”
Top slapped him on the back of the head, this time so hard Weingart’s eyes watered. Then he pinched something off Weingart’s neck and held it up in front of him. “See, an ant. I told you. I got to get going. Drop by the department and have coffee sometime. But get a doc to check out that twitch. If people didn’t know better, they might think you’re a yard punk who’s scared shitless of authority.”
When Weingart drove out of the parking lot, one wheel went over the curb and came down hard in the street, the exhaust pipe and back bumper scraping on the concrete.
* * *
That evening at twilight, on a back road in St. Martin Parish, Weingart parked his Mustang in front of a crowded nightclub that catered to people who drifted back and forth across the color line. In a more primitive time, some of them had been derogatorily called “redbones.” Most of them were probably part white, part Chitimacha Indian, part Cajun, and part black. As a rule, they referred to themselves as Creoles, a term that, in the early nineteenth century, connoted the descendants of the Spanish and French colonists who settled New Orleans and created the plantation society that surrounded it. In general, they were a handsome people; they often had green or blue eyes and reddish or jet-black hair and skin that looked as though it had been blown with brick dust. In St. Martin Parish, this back-roads club was their special place. Clifton Chenier, the man most emblematic of zydeco music, had been a regular performer there and is buried in an unmarked grave not far from it. In spite of its reputation for underage drinking violations, outrageous amounts of noise, and erotic trysts back in the woods, the club had an innocence about it, perhaps because it was part of the pagan ambience that always lurked on the edges of our French-Catholic culture.
The top was up on Weingart’s convertible when he turned in to the lot, so no one paid particular attention to him until he stepped out on the gravel in his pleated white slacks and navy blue terry-cloth shirt and ostrich-skin boots with silver plate on the tips and heels, his clean features lit by the Christmas-tree lights that stayed on the club’s windows year-round.
He entered the club, his expression benign, his chin tilted slightly upward. He passed the bar and the propane stove where a big cauldron of robin gumbo was simmering. He passed a green felt table where men were playing bourree in a cone of yellow light given off by a bulb inside a tin shade. He sat at a table by himself not far from the dance floor and the bandstand and ordered a longneck beer and a basket of french fries that had been cooked in chicken fat.
The girl who joined him wore a sundress printed with big flowers and had skin that glowed like a bright penny. Her hair was mahogany-colored and blond-streaked and was tied in back with a purple ribbon that had sequins on it. She was smiling when she pulled out a chair, and anyone watching the scene would have assumed she knew Robert Weingart. But that was not the case. He turned his palms up and jutted his head forward, as though silently saying, Care to tell me who you are before you flop your ass down at my table?
“I’m Tee Jolie Melton. My sister cain’t be here tonight,” she said. “So I came instead.”
“I’m not sure I’m cluing in on the message here.”
“I know you was suppose to meet her down the road, like you done before. About the audition, right?”
&nbs
p; “News to me.”
“You was gonna take her for the voice test.”
Weingart shook his head, his lips crimped. “Sorry, not me,” he said.
She looked away, smiling tolerantly, then brought her eyes back on his. “See, my sister kind of misled you. She’s only sixteen. Our mama don’t want her going out late at night. But I sing, too. I sing at church and wit’ a band in Breaux Bridge and Lafayette sometimes. She tole me you like to come in here for french fries and a drink before you pick her up at the grocery.”
He thought hard on it. “You’re talking about the girl I gave a ride to when it was raining. She works in that store in St. Martinville across from Possum’s. That’s your sister, huh? Yeah, I see the resemblance. I think your sister got the wrong idea. I probably said something about her voice and the fact that I know some people in the entertainment business, but she’s just a kid.”
Tee Jolie gazed into space as though not quite understanding everything she was being told. “I bought your book.”
“No kidding?”
“Why you call it The Green Cage? Is the cage bamboo or somet’ing?”
“You didn’t read it?”
“I got to use the dictionary a lot. You know some words, you.”
“In the Texas farm system, you see a lot of green. Oceans of it. Everywhere you look. I have postgraduate degrees in tractor operation and bucking bales.”
“You went to school in there?”
He pulled at the flesh under his chin with two fingers. “What are you, three or four years older than your sister?”
“That’s about right.”
“Actually, you look more mature than that. In the best way. She’s not as pretty as you, either.”
“I t’ink she is.”
“That’s because you’re a good sister. You want a drink?”
“I don’t mind.”
“I’m sorry, I forget your sister’s name.”
“Blue.”
“I’m sorry I gave Blue the wrong impression. She seems like a nice kid. I hated to see her standing in the rain like that.”
“But you took her out before? She knows everyt’ing about you.”
“If I see somebody walking along a road, particularly at night or in the rain, I give them a ride. People are killed every three or four days by hit-and-run drivers around here.”
“But you was gonna pick her up tonight, right?”
He put a french fry in his mouth, then pushed the basket toward her. He stared at her for a long time. “You weren’t messing with me? You sing professionally?”
“I did an ad on TV in Lafayette. I sang on TV once with Bonsoir Catin, too.” Then she blinked as though remembering he had not answered her question.
“You’re putting me on,” he said.
Her gaze was fixed on the way the orange and purple floodlights on the bandstand lit the haze that floated above the dance floor. She watched the musicians taking the stage. Her mouth was parted slightly, as though she were transfixed by the moment and the promise of the evening and the glitter on the cowboy costumes worn by the zydeco men. She swallowed drily.
Weingart motioned to the waitress. “What are you having?” he said to Tee Jolie.
“Whatever you are.”
“Can your bartender mix a Manhattan?” he said to the waitress.
The waitress looked at the bar and back at Weingart. “I can ax.”
“Can he handle two Diet Cokes?”
“That’s all?” the waitress said.
“Put some lime slices in them. Bring us some of that gumbo, too.”
“I don’t t’ink we have limes,” the waitress said.
“Don’t worry about it. The Cokes are fine,” he said.
Tee Jolie rested her chin on the heels of her hands. “Blue said you was nice.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” he said.
“The gumbo is made from robins. It’s illegal to do that. But we eat them anyways.”
“A couple of movies got made around here. Nobody asked you to try out for a part?”
She shook her head, smiling coyly. “Why you ax that?”
“Because you’re photogenic.”
She looked sideways, then back at him. “I don’t know what that means.”
He pointed at her. “That expression right there. Your face is an artwork. No matter when the camera freezes, the frame tells a story. Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep are like that. Your face has the same quality. It’s called photogenic. No one has ever told you that?”
“Not recently.”
“Look, this is a nice part of the country. I love the weather and the accents and the food and the music and all that stuff. But maybe you ought to think about expanding your horizons a little bit.”
She was smiling at him, more tolerant than flattered, interested perhaps more in the manner of his presentation than its substance. “I’m gonna be a movie star?”
“A writer doesn’t have a lot of influence in Hollywood. But I have friends in both the music and film industry who trust my instincts, God only knows why. I also know people who run an acting school, one that gives scholarships. I can make a couple of inquiries. It’s like prayer. What’s to lose?”
The waitress returned with their gumbo and drinks. “I had him put candied cherries in the Cokes. He was gonna put some old lemons in there. I tole him not to do that,” she said.
“Appreciate it,” Weingart said, nodding profoundly. He waited with his hands in his lap while the waitress seemed to take forever placing the bowls and glasses and paper napkins and plastic spoons on the table. “We all finished here now?”
“That’s sixteen dol’ars,” she said.
He counted out twenty-five dollars on her tray, putting the denominations in separate piles so the amount of his tip was obvious to anyone watching.
“T’ank you,” the waitress said.
Tee Jolie dipped her plastic spoon into the gumbo and placed it gingerly in her mouth. “You gonna ax me if I want an audition now?”
“I’m not sure that’s what you want. I think you’re a woman who goes her own way in her own time.”
“But you’re fixing to leave, aren’t you?”
“Why do you think that?”
“’Cause don’t nobody in a club give a big tip till he’s fixing to leave. I used to work in a restaurant.”
“You’re pretty smart. I’ve got a key to a sound studio in Lafayette. We’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
“You didn’t try to kiss Blue in your li’l car?”
“She told you that?”
“No.”
“She didn’t say that?”
“I was testing you. She didn’t say that at all. She said you was nice.”
He wiped his mouth with his paper napkin and pushed his bowl of gumbo away. He seemed to study the zydeco men on the bandstand without actually seeing them. The lead player, a gargantuan black man, had an accordion that rippled like purple ivory. His fingers were as big as sausages, but they danced across the keys and buttons as delicately as starfish. He had gone into Clifton Chenier’s signature song, “Hey, Tite F’ee,” rocking back and forth, his voice a flood of rust into the microphone. In the background, the rub-board man whipped the thimbles on his fingers up and down on the corrugated sheet of aluminum strapped to his chest.
“I’d like to do something for you, if you’d let me. But it’s up to you,” Weingart said.
“Do what for me?”
“Give you some exposure. Improve your life. Introduce others to your talent. What do you think we’ve been talking about, girl?” He paused. “I wrote novels and short stories for years. Nobody would touch them. I was dirt in the eyes of other people. Then I found somebody who believed in me.”
“Who?”
“Kermit Abelard.” He waited. “You don’t know who he is?”
“No.”
Weingart smiled. “Wonderful.”
“Why?”
“Nothing. Kermit
needs a little humility once in a while. You’re something else. Want to take a ride?”
She smiled and shrugged. “You giving me a ride in the rain? ’Cause if you are, it’s not raining.”
“Girl, if you don’t have a career waiting for you, I’ll swallow a thumbtack. Cross my heart.”
She picked up her purse and looked at the bandstand as though saying either good-bye or hello to it. Weingart pressed his palm into the small of her back and walked outside with her under a blanket of stars that perhaps the girl believed had been created especially for her.
* * *
In the shadows on the edge of the parking lot, a St. Martin Parish deputy sheriff was smoking a cigarette. She was short and slightly overweight and had gold hair, and her lipstick was thick enough to leave smears on the filter tip of her cigarette. The night was warm, and she wore a short-sleeved blue shirt turned up at the cuffs, exposing the plumpness of her upper arms. On nights when a band played at the club, she was one of several deputies who took turns doing security by the front door, primarily as a visual discouragement to parolees who could be violated back to Angola for drinking alcohol or keeping bad company. The job was boring, but the pay wasn’t bad, and it was also under the table.
One of the bartenders at the club was an elderly black twelve-string guitarist by the name of Hogman Patin. Both of his forearms were wrapped with scar tissue like flattened gray worms from knife beefs in Angola, where he had done time as a big stripe under the gun almost sixty years ago. He bore no animus toward whites or the system, and did not argue with others regarding his view of the world, namely that there was no difference between human beings except the presence or absence of money in their lives. But he had an animus, and it was one that went deep into his viscera. Hogman gave short shrift to those who exploited the innocent and the weak.
He wasn’t sure who Robert Weingart was and in fact could see only the clean lines of his profile and the shine of the tonic on his hair, but while Hogman poured the Diet Cokes and filled the bowls of gumbo Weingart had ordered, he studied Tee Jolie Melton and the glow on her face. It was the look of a girl who knew she was loved and beautiful and desired. Her eyes were bright, as though she was amused by the flattery she was hearing, as though the words of the well-dressed white man did not cause flowers to bloom in her cheeks. Hogman asked the waitress who the white man was.
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