But the onus was on her, not them. She was a whore. She existed beyond the invisible boundaries of respectability and was not entitled to histrionic displays. To resist her abductors, who were also her users, was to make herself visible and to call into question the legitimacy of an entire system. As she rose from the bench, she could smell the detectives' armpits through their clothes.
She walked between the two men to their car, without either of them touching her person again. In the filmstrip that recommenced in her mind's eye, she saw herself as a gray, nondescript creature in the back of the car, disconnected from the rest of the world, the air tinged with the hot musty odor of the fabric in the seats. The detective named Cobb set her suitcase by her side and said, "It's gonna be all right, kid." For reassurance he grinned, his lips stretching back over teeth that were as long as a horse's.
As the car pulled away from the curb, with Lou Kale's Bel Air following close behind, she looked down the street and saw a canary-yellow convertible at the traffic light, with me behind the steering wheel and Jimmie in the passenger seat. Jimmie was tapping his hands on the dashboard to music she could not hear.
They drove her to a farmhouse, down in the Texas wetlands east of Beaumont. It was raining when they arrived, and through the bedroom window she could see acres of sawgrass and a flooded woods and, out in a bay, the gray outlines of mothballed U.S. Navy warships. The room was bare, except for a chipped chest of drawers and a bed that puffed with dust when she sat upon it. The sky was black now, and when lightning flared in the clouds she saw a solitary blue heron lift from the sawgrass and glide on extended wings toward the protection of the woods.
The man named Cobb was the first to take her. She kept her eyes shut and rested her hands lightly on the tips of his shoulders while he labored on top of her, his breath washing over her face. Inside her mind she watched the heron's flight across the points of the sawgrass, its wings flapping, its grace undisturbed by the storm raging in the sky.
The second detective, Dale Bordelon, tried to give her whiskey, then he brought her food that she wouldn't eat. When he placed his hand on her, a tremor went through her body. "Something you don't like about me?" he said.
"I'm sore," she replied.
"Whores don't get sore."
"I need to use the bathroom."
When she came back into the bedroom, he was already in his underwear and socks, smoking a cigarette on the side of the bed, tipping the ashes into the neck of an empty beer bottle. "Time's a-wasting, girl. Get them clothes off. I mean all off, too," he said.
"Where's Lou?" she asked.
"What d'you care about him? We're the best friends you got."
"I told you, Bob Cobb hurt me. I cain't do it anymore today."
He looked meanly into space, exhaling cigarette smoke from his nostrils. He hadn't shaved that morning and his jaws were like dirty sandpaper. "To heck with it," he said. Then he dressed and went out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
She curled up in a ball on the bed. When she awoke the sky was still dark, the clouds quaking with thunder, rain ticking in pools below the eaves. Lou Kale was sitting in a wood chair by the bed, leaning forward, his face gathered with a strange look of concern. A candle burned in a bottle on a nightstand someone had brought into the room. "Gonna give you a little bump, Connie. It'll hep you ride over the hard spots for a while," he said.
"My name is Ida. I left Post Office Street, Lou."
"Like it or not, we're in the life, hon. Folks like us ain't got yesterdays. Forget that Robicheaux kid."
He held a bent spoon over the candle. Inside the curl of flame around the spoon she could see a yellowish-brown liquid boiling, like the broth that rises to the top of chicken soup. The syringe was fashioned from an eyedropper; the tourniquet was a necktie.
"I don't want it," she said.
"We got to do what those Vice roaches say. We're little people, Connie… excuse me… Ida."
"I don't want no dope, Lou."
"Those guys will be gone by tomorrow night. Just go with it. Don't do anything else to get us in trouble. Now give me your arm."
Her elbow jerked slightly when the needle punched into an artery. For a brief moment the room was still, the lightning frozen inside the clouds, then she saw the headlight on a train engine wobbling in front of her eyes and felt a warm rush through her body that was like a long-delayed orgasm.
Her head lolled on the pillow, her mouth open. Even though her eyes were closed, she could see Lou Kale through the lids, which somehow had become translucent, as thin as Japanese paper. She had never felt this warm inside her skin before, this content and serene. Lou put away his works and stroked her forehead.
"I'll come by later and give you another one," he said.
"Get in bed with me."
"That's the dope talking, Ida."
"No, I want you."
"I guess it goes with the job," he said.
He propped the chair under the doorknob and made love to her, at first mechanically,. then he found himself caught up in it, looking at her eyes and mouth and the sandy red color of her hair in a new way. When he got off her, he was self-conscious about his nakedness, confused about what he had just done or why he felt affected by it.
"Be nice to that cop," he said, dressing with his back to her. "I'm jammed up on this deal, too."
"Don't leave, Lou. I'm afraid of them."
"It wasn't really me you wanted, was it? You got me mixed up with that warm feeling the dope gave you."
"I always said you weren't a bad guy, Lou. You never made the girls do anything they didn't want to. You never hit nobody, either. Remember when you told me I could sing as good as Texas Ruby?"
He pulled on his trousers and walked back and forth in front of the window, pushing at his temple with the heel of his hand. "I ain't suppose to be having these kind of thoughts. I'm breaking a big rule here," he said.
"You already said it – 'We're little people.' We have to be smarter than they are."
"Cobb can have me on Sugarland Farm in twenty-four hours. Why didn't you stay up in Snerdville where you belong? You're a king-size migraine, Ida," he said.
"Is that what you really think of me?"
"I don't know what I think. You messed with my head."
He lay down beside her. She curled against him, placing her face against his chest. A moment passed and she felt the tension go out of his body. He exhaled loudly and slipped his arms around her back and tucked her head under his cheek.
"I'll get us out of this," he said.
"I know you will, Lou."
"But you got to promise me something."
She spread her fingers over his heart and waited.
"There ain't no turning back. They'll pour gasoline on you and set you afire. I seen them do it. Say 'promise,' Ida. Say it now," he said.
Before Lou left that night, Ida heard him lie to the detectives and tell them he had injected her a second time. He also told them she'd had a seizure from the heroin and that she should not be bothered again, at least until the next day. During the night she heard the voices of several men who were playing cards and drinking. Once, somebody opened the bedroom door, blading her face with a band of white light. The figure stared at her, motionless, in silhouette, his upper body and head like a buffalo's. Then someone called him back to the poker game and he shut the door.
In the morning she waited until the men were finished with the bathroom, then took fresh clothes from her suitcase and cleaned a gray film out of the tub with a wad of toilet paper. The men had used up the hot tank, so she bathed in cold water and washed her hair with a cake of harsh soap.
She fixed breakfast for herself in a tiny kitchen, her hair wrapped in a towel, while outside the cop named Bordelon and a teenage boy played pitch-and-catch with a baseball. In the distance she could see carrion birds turning in circles over a flooded woods and a powerboat splitting a bay in half. The breeze was up and a salty, gray odor from the sawgrass struck her face and made her shut the window, even though the house was already warm.