My own mother had long ago disappeared into a world of low-rent bars and lower-rent men. Big Aldous, our father, had died in an oil well blowout when I was eighteen. Jimmie'd had little or no parental authority in his life, and I had obviously proved a poor substitute for one. I threw my burrito in a trash can, went to a beer joint down the beach, and drank until 2:00 a.m. while hailstones the size of mothballs pelted the surf.
I woke before dawn, trembling all over, the distorted voices and faces of the people from the bar more real than the room around me. I couldn't remember how I had gotten back to the motel. Water was leaking through the ceiling, and a garbage can was tumbling end over end past the empty carport. I sat on the edge of my bed, my hands shaking, my throat so dry I couldn't swallow. The window curtains were open, and a network of lightning bloomed over the Gulf, all the way to the top of the sky. Inside the momentary white brilliance that lit the clouds and waves I thought I saw a green-black lake where the naked bodies of the damned were submerged to their chests, their mouths crying out to any who would hear.
I didn't know it at the time, but I had just booked my first passage on the SS Delirium Tremens.
I buried my head under a pillow and fell into a sweaty dream. Thunder shook the walls and sheets of rain whipped against the windows. I thought I heard the door open and wind and a sudden infusion of dampness blow into the room. Maybe Jimmie had returned, safe and sound, and all my fears about him had been unjustified, I told myself in my sleep. But when I looked up, the room was quiet, his bed made, the carport empty. I felt myself descending into a vortex of nausea and fear, accompanied by a dilation of blood vessels in the brain that was like a strand of piano wire being slowly tightened around my head with a stick.
When I woke a second time, I could hear no sound except the rain hitting on the roof. The thunder had stopped, the power in the motel was out, and the room was absolutely black. Then a tree of lightning crackled over the Gulf and I saw a man seated in a chair, no more than two feet from me. He wore sideburns and a striped western shirt, with pearl-colored snap buttons. His cheeks were sunken, pooled with shadow, his mouth small, filled with tiny teeth. A nickel-plated automatic with white grips rested on his thigh.
He leaned forward, his eyes examining me, his breath moving across my face. "What's your name?" he said.
"Dave," I said. "Dave Robicheaux."
"If you ain't Jimmie, you're his twin. Which is it?" he said.
"Tell me who you are," I said.
He touched the pistol barrel to the center of my forehead. "I ask the questions, hoss. Lay back down," he said.
I saw a swelling above his left eye, a cut in his lip, a clot of blood in one nostril. He pulled back the receiver on the pistol and snicked a round into the chamber. "Put your hands on top of the covers," he said.
With one hand he felt my knuckles and the tops of my fingers, his eyes fastened on my face. Then he stood up, dropped the magazine from the butt of the automatic, and ejected the round in the chamber. He reached over, picked up the cartridge from the rug, and snugged it in his watch pocket. "You got a lot of luck, kid. When you get a break, real slack, like you're getting now, don't waste it. You heard it from the butter and egg man," he said.
Then he was gone. When I looked out the window I saw no sign of him, no automobile, not even footprints in the muddy area around the room's entrance. I lay in bed, a bilious fluid rising from my stomach, my skin crawling with a sense of violation and the stale odor of copulation from the bedcovers.
Unbelievably, I closed my eyes and fell asleep again, almost like entering an alcoholic blackout. When I woke it was midmorning, the sun shining, and I could hear children playing outside. Jimmie was packing an open suitcase on top of his bed. "Thought you were going to sleep all day," he said.
"A guy was looking for you. I think it was that pimp from Post Office Street," I said.
"Lou Kale? I don't think so," Jimmie replied.
"He had a gun," I said. "What do you mean you don't think so?"
"He didn't want to pay back the hundred and twelve bucks he stole. He pulled a shiv on me. So I cleaned his clock. I took the money off him, too," he said. He dropped his folded underwear in the suitcase and flattened it down, his eyes concentrated on his work. I couldn't believe what he had just said.
"Where's Ida?" I asked.
"Waiting for me at the bus depot. Get dressed, you got to drive me down there. We'll be eating Mexican food in ole Monterrey tonight. Hard to believe, isn't it?" he said. He touched at the tops of his swollen hands, then grinned at me and shrugged his shoulders. "Quit worrying! Guys like Kale are all bluff."
But Ida was not at the bus depot, nor, when the cops checked, was she at the brothel on Post Office Street. In fact, she had disappeared as though she had been vacuumed off the face of the earth. We didn't know the name of the town she came from, nor could we even be sure her real name was Ida Durbin. The cops treated our visits to the police station as a nuisance and said Lou Kale had no criminal record, that he denied having a confrontation with Jimmie and denied ever knowing a woman by the name of Ida Durbin. The prostitutes in the house where she had worked said a cleaning girl named Connie had been around there for a while, but that she had gone back home to either Arkansas or Northeast Texas.
The years passed and I tried not to think about Ida Durbin and her fate. As I began my long odyssey through low-bottom bars and drunk tanks and skin joints of every stripe – in the Deep South, the Philippines, and Vietnam – I would sometimes hear a voice on the jukebox that reminded me of Kitty Wells. I wanted to believe the voice was Ida's, that somehow the four-dollar discs she and Jimmie had sent to Sun Records had worked a special magic in her life and opened a career for her in Nashville and that she was out there now, under another name, singing in roadhouses where a sunburst guitar and a sequined western costume were proof enough of one's celebrity.
But I knew better, and when my booze-induced fantasy faded, I saw Ida in the backseat of a car, a man on either side of her, speeding down a dirt road at night, toward a destination where no human being ever wishes to go.
chapter THREE
I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that's what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree – it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade.
Troy Bordelon was a bully when I knew him at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette. SLI, as it was called, had been the first integrated college in the South. As far as I knew, there were no incidents when the first black students enrolled, and by and large the students, both white and black, treated one another respectfully. Except for Troy Bordelon. His name was French, but he came from a sawmill town north of Alexandria, an area where the deeds of the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia were burned into Reconstruction history with a hot iron.
Troy kept the tradition alive and well.
A black kid from Abbeville by the name of Simon Labiche was the only person of color in my ROTC unit. Troy did everything in his power to make Simon's life miserable. During drill he stepped on Simon's heels, throwing him off-step, constantly murmuring racial and sexual insults in his ear. When Simon made the drill team and was scheduled to perform at the halftime ceremonies during the homecoming game, Troy brought him a goodwill offering of a cold drink from the refreshment stand. It was loaded with a high-powered laxative that can cause the red scours in cattle.