“You were molested for years by a member of the Shondell family,” I said. “Your father had the molester tortured to death and buried in a bog on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. That means you couldn’t square the situation on your own, maybe not even as an adult. Maybe you dug it.”
Adonis pushed me in the chest. “Do that again and I’ll break your sticks from the bottom of your feet to your neck bones,” I said.
He hit me in the sternum with his fist, twisting the knuckles to ensure pain. I caught him on the nose, splattering blood across the projector, then I got him high on the cheekbone and on the jaw. He tried to get up and fight back, but in seconds the worst in me had its way, and I was stomping the side of his head, aiming for bone or cartilage whenever I could find it. Penelope was crying and beating my back with her fists.
When it was over, I tore the movie screen from the ceiling and went through the back door into the daylight, off balance, the sky and the statuary on the lawn and the lake spinning around me. All the way to the cruiser, I could hear Penelope Balangie weeping, not in a hysterical fashion, not with shock at the level of violence she had just witnessed, but instead in a sustained, repressed, and mournful way, like someone at Golgotha watching a condemned man drag the means of his execution to the crest of the hill.
Chapter Twenty-two
I drove to the home of Leslie Rosenberg in Metairie and made a fateful decision that had nothing to do with my job as a detective. Or perhaps she had already made the decision for me by quitting her job as a cashier, telling Adonis Balangie she wouldn’t be seeing him again, and notifying the bank that she would no longer be making payments on the home for which he had made the down payment.
As she told me these things in her living room, I wondered if I had actually influenced her decision or if she was a player in a drama whose complexities I could only guess at. No one contends with the raison d’être of deathbed conversions, but seldom do people change their entire lives and give up all they own and put themselves and their loved ones — in this case a severely handicapped child — at the mercy of the storm.
“You’re sure you’re doing the right thing?” I asked her.
“You’re the one who said to fuck all my worries.”
“That’s why I seldom take my own advice.”
“I’m moving into a shelter. I need to pack.”
“Do you have any relatives in the area?”
“The last people I need to see are my relatives.”
“Could I use your phone?”
“Do it before service is cut off. I put the disconnect order in this morning.”
I went into the hallway and called New Iberia. Elizabeth was watching me from her wheelchair. When I got off the call, she smiled at me. “It’s nice to see you,” I said. I had never seen eyes as clear and blue. It was like staring into infinity. “Would you like to go to New Iberia?” I said. Her cheeks were pink, her hair gold like her mother’s but with a red tint in it. “I bet you’d like it,” I said, and winked at her.
I went back into the living room. I could see Leslie through a bedroom door, pulling the sheets and covers off the bed and stuffing them in a big cardboard box. She was wearing jeans and a tight beige sweater that looked wash-faded and utilitarian. “The shelter is short on linens,” she said.
“I just talked with some Catholic nuns in New Iberia,” I said. “They have a cottage waiting for you. They’ll give you a job at their center. They help people get a second start.”
“What about Elizabeth?”
“I think she’ll find many kind people there.”
“I’ve never been to New Iberia.”
“It’s a grand place.”
“In what way?”
“We only let the best people in,” I said.
It was strange driving back to the city of my birth with Leslie and Elizabeth in the cruiser. In minutes I had effected a geographical change in their lives that might have irreversible consequences. Please don’t misunderstand me. The world in which I grew up was a poem. Others might talk of our illiteracy, our lack of education, our racial injustice and insularity and fear of the outside world, and be correct in all their judgments. But those were the shadings in the painting. Bayou Teche was a way of life. Our ancestors brought both Europe and the mysteries of the Caribbean to Louisiana, and among the crypts in our graveyards were the names of families who had fled Robespierre’s guillotine or been exiled by the British from Nova Scotia or gone to the gates of Moscow with Napoléon Bonaparte. They also contained the remains of the boys in butternut whose remains were shipped from Shiloh and Port Hudson.
Our culture was an incongruous composite of Spanish and continental French aristocrats and Acadian peasants and Atakapa cannibals and Africans sold into the green hell of the cane fields. Our churches were sometimes more pagan than Judeo-Christian. Hedonism was not only the norm but celebrated as a virtue. The gentry screwed down and married up. But nonetheless Acadiana, as we call it, was a haven, a place where a woman was always addressed as “Miss” coupled with her given name and a man was addressed with the same equal parts courtesy and familiarity. To not shake another man’s hand was an insult. To not remove one’s glove before shaking hands was a sign of inbreeding, coarseness, and social stupidity.
As we crossed the arched bridge over the Atchafalaya at Morgan City, I could see the wide sweep of the wetlands, the flooded gum trees and the miles of channels and bayous that bled into the Gulf of Mexico. We were entering the heart of Acadian country, where tidal surges and hurricanes could overcome the levees and float coffins from their crypts and shadow the land and leave behind amounts of water that swallowed whole forests, creating bays where the treetops protruded from the surface like patches of deep green watercress, the branches filled with raccoons and rabbits and possums and small deer, all of whom were in danger of drowning or starving to death.
But we always believed that the sun would rise again, and even though another generation might pass away, the earth would abideth forever, even though it was unlikely we would know those biblical terms. Like the Bedouin whose concept of God derives from his experience inside the immensity and great emptiness of the desert, we believed that our marshlands and swamps and rivers and bayous were not only Edenic but somehow created especially for us.
It was a terrible kind of innocence to be possessed by. We began to see, when it was too late, that the earth is not inexhaustible and that it cannot bind its own wounds as fast as we can inflict them. Also, candor requires me to say that these conclusions are not held by everyone, and the revelers whose mantra is “Let the good times roll” often remind me of Irish celebrants trying to put a good hat on the funeral of a loved one.
I did not want to dwell on these unhappy perceptions. It was a glorious day, I told myself. I wanted to bring a degree of happiness to Leslie Rosenberg and her poor afflicted daughter. Outside of Jeanerette, we stopped to eat in a café that smelled of gumbo and po’boy fried oyster sandwiches and dirty rice and crawfish étouffée, and as soon as we sat down, I heard a duet singing on the jukebox like the year was 1955.
Leslie saw the look on my face. She glanced at the jukebox and back at me. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“That’s Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie.”
“Adonis’s stepdaughter?”
“Do me a favor?” I said, smiling.
“You don’t want to hear Adonis’s name?”
“I ripped out his spokes this morning.”
We were waiting on our food. She had put a cracker in her mouth. “I didn’t get that.”
“I took him down. In his home theater. In front of his wife or whatever she is.”