Her mandolin was in her suitcase, wrapped inside a soft flannel shirt from which she had removed all the buttons so they could not scratch the mandolin's finish. She sat on the edge of the bed and tuned the strings, using a plectrum and a small pitch pipe, then sang Kitty Wells's "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels" in B flat.
The maudlin lyrics and the melody that was borrowed from a hymn titled "The Great Speckled Bird" gave an emotional focus to her life that she intuitively knew was illegitimate but somehow indispensable. The lost lover was Jimmie Robicheaux. Beer joints and back-street bars became blue-collar purgatories where angels with impaired wings could float above a fire that purged but did not consume. The incremental dismemberment of their lives with alcohol, drugs, and lust was a form of penance that ultimately made them acceptable in the eyes of God.
"You play that pretty good," Dale Bordelon said from the doorway. He was sweaty and hot from throwing the baseball in the yard, and she could smell an odor on him like sour milk and hay when it's wet. "That's my nephew out yonder. We're going fishing directly."
She looked out the window at the boy, as though the detective's words held meaning for both of them.
"He's going to town to get us some bait and such. That leaves just you and me," he said.
Her left hand formed a cord on the mandolin's neck, but she didn't move the plectrum across the strings.
"Want me to bring you a cup of coffee or tea?" he asked.
"No, thank you," she replied.
"You're a prissy thing."
His words were spoken in such a way that they could have contained either an insult or a compliment. But she let no reaction to them register in her face.
"When's Lou coming back?" she asked.
"How the hell should I know?" he replied.
Later, she heard a starter grind on a car, then saw the teenage boy drive past the window onto the county road. Dale Bordelon opened the bedroom door without knocking and leaned inside, his hand fitted like a starfish on the glass knob. "Want me to fix some sandwiches?" he said.
"I'm not hungry."
"Bob Cobb says he didn't hurt you. Says you liked it just fine," he said.
She scratched her neck and stared idly at a horsefly sitting on the windowsill. She could hear the detective breathing heavily in the silence. He stepped into the room and shut the door behind him, then walked within two feet of her, his belt buckle almost eye-level with her. He lifted a strand of hair off her head and rubbed it between his fingers. She could see whorls of dirt in the ball of his thumb.
"I kept a man from going in your room last night," he said.
"Thank you."
"You talk like a goddamn phonograph," he said.
His knuckles were as big as quarters, his odor like a damp locker room. The gold-embossed outline of the state of Texas glittered on his silver belt buckle, inches from her eyes. He clamped his hand over the top of her head. Where was Lou?
"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings," she said.
"I 'preciate it. But a verbal apology is kind of like getting served ice cream in hell. It don't really address the problem."
"I got my period this morning."
But he didn't even acknowledge her deceit. "I sent the boy on an errand in Orange. He's gonna bring us back some fried-chicken dinners and blackberry cobbler. You'll like them dinners, believe me. But no more excuses. One way or another, you're gonna take care of ole Dale."
The nakedness of his desire made his face feral. He put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars, chewing hard, as though he could relieve himself of the passion that made him rotate his neck against his collar. "Don't just sit there, woman. You know what you got to do," he said.
"I got my period at three o'clock this morning," she said, ignoring the implication of his last words.
That's when he ripped her out of the chair and hit her with the flat of his hand across the face, breaking her upper lip, streaking blood from her nose on the wall. Then he smashed her mandolin on the chair and threw it to the floor, grinding the delicate wood of the sound chamber into splinters with his heel, snapping the tuning pegs from the head like broken teeth.
Lou Kale returned to the farmhouse that afternoon and put ice on her face and brought her strawberry ice cream from the kitchen. He swept the broken pieces of her mandolin and the tangle of strings into a dustpan, sliding them into a garbage sack. Outside, the men were popping skeet with a shotgun, the clay disks exploding into puffs of orange smoke above the sawgrass.
"I'll buy you a new one. Or a guitar. You're always talking about a Martin guitar," he said.
"Why'd you leave me alone, Lou?"
He sat next to her on the bed and spoke to her with his hands clenched between his knees, his voice lowered. His hair was shiny and black, combed in a wet curl on the back of his neck. His profile looked like a sheep's. "I heard some talk, Ida. They know you're smart. You've seen important people at the house and you know their names and who they are. They think you'll run off again. They think you're gonna cause a shitload of trouble. They make examples, Ida. Sometimes it's out there in the Gulf with the crabs."
"Just give me some money and get me to a train station or airport," she said.
"You're not hearing me. It takes guts to be a whore or a pimp. I'm proud of what I am. We were born on the hard road, Ida. Them cops out there couldn't hack it. I'm not gonna let them push us around. I got us a way out."
"How?" she said.
"I called this big plantation man over in Louisiana. I used to chop bait on his old man's boat when I was a kid. He's got money with the Giacanos, but he's not like the Giacanos. His name is Raphael Chalons. He's a classy guy and those Vice roaches know it. One thing, though?"
"What?"
"The Giacanos got long memories. As long as we stay under Mr. Raphael's protection, we're gonna be okay. But you owe money and so do I. In the life, that's the dog collar around your neck. It don't go away easy."
"You?" she said.
"I owe every sports book in Houston and New Orleans. People like us all got some kind of Jones. That how come we're pimps and whores. Who wants to be normal, anyway? It's a drag."
He thought he had both reassured her and lightened her mood.
"Lou?"
"What?"
"You're not gonna try to hurt Jimmie Robicheaux, are you?"
He stood up from the bed, screwing his fingers into his temples, a squealing sound leaking from his teeth.
During the next hour, Lou paced the floor, hyperventilating, drinking ice water, blowing out his breath as though he had pulled a freight car up a grade.
"Stop climbing the walls," she said.
"If this don't work, bucketloads of shit are going through the fan."
"Maybe we end here. Maybe our names are written in water and one day the water just dries up," she said.
"Don't say stuff like that. We're not living inside a country-and-western song."
"Come on, sit down," she said. She took him by the arm and guided him to the wood chair by the window. His arm was as hard as a log in her hands. He was chewing gum rapidly in one jaw, snapping it loudly, his throat cording with blue veins.
"I got a confession to make. I was gonna let them hang you out to dry," he said.
"But you didn't."
She pushed her fingers deep into his shoulders. His eyes closed briefly, then he surged to his feet, like a man who believed the Furies awaited him in his sleep.
"What are you doing?" she said.
"Coming apart. I ain't up to this." He jammed a chair under the doorknob and shot himself up with enough heroin to blow the heart out of a draft horse, his mouth rictal when the rush took him.
That afternoon Ida heard the strangest conversation she had ever heard in her life, one that would always remain with her as a testimony to the efficacy of fear.