“Nothing so grand,” she said, closing the door behind me. “I thought we’d just hang out. I bowed out of my situation with Desmond.”
“You’re not going to do the film?”
“It was a bad idea. It seems like an intriguing world, but it’s not. It’s just like ours, except worse.”
“I wouldn’t give up on it. It’s quite an opportunity.”
“No, there’s something kinky about that whole bunch. Come in the kitchen and help me make the salad. I have two chickens on the grill and some lemonade and soft drinks on ice.”
She walked ahead of me into the kitchen. Her hair was thick and brown and clean, and tiny strands hung like particles of light on her cheeks. I had a hard time separating her from Clementine Carter standing on a desert road that dipped into eternity.
She turned and smiled but didn’t speak. Her eyes were mysterious and had a radiance that seemed to have no source.
“Do you know you have a habit of staring?” she said.
“I think you were born for the screen,” I said.
“Not me.”
“You don’t have to work with Desmond. Louisiana is full of movie people. The state subsidizes movies up to twenty-five percent.”
“Let’s slice some apples.”
I rolled my sleeves and went to work next to her. I could not help glancing at her profile. There was not a line on her face or throat. I know this may seem foolish to some, but I could not associate the image of her toking on a joint with the woman standing beside me. In fact, I hated the thought.
“I know what you’re thinking about,” she said. “I’m sorry for taking the hit off that joint. My feelings are the same as yours. Fashionable vice is usually the mark of a self-important dilettante. Besides, I’m a cop.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” I said.
She put her knife down and looked through the window at the smoke from the barbecue pit breaking apart in the wind. A cottontail rabbit was couched among the camellia bushes, brown and fat, ears folded back, eyes bright. “Want to go outside?” she said.
“This is fine,” I replied.
She dried her hands on a dish towel and hung it over the handle on the oven. “I was married when I was sixteen. My husband was killed one year later in a stock car race. Entertaining people who carry Styrofoam spit cups.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know about the loss of your wives,” she said. “I don’t know how you lived through all that.”
I didn’t answer. She stood in the silence until my eyes found hers. “I don’t care about age differences,” she said.
“The woman pays the price, Bailey. Men skate. The scarlet letter didn’t die out with the Puritans.”
She looked up into my face. She touched my cheek. “You won’t give in, will you?” she said.
“Give in to what?”
“Principle, vanity, whatever you call it. You and your friend Clete pretend to be rebels, but you’re traditionalists. You know what a traditionalist is, don’t you? Someone who lets dead people control his life.”
She turned on the cold water in the sink and put her hands and wrists under the faucet, her back rigid. I rested my hand on her shoulder. She turned off the water and looked at me. I thought I heard a sound like train-crossing bells clanging in my head.
I placed my arms lightly around her back and spread my fingers between her shoulder blades and touched her hair with my cheek. I was afraid to pull her against me. “I love your name.”
“That’s all you can say?” she asked.
How could one not? I thought. But I couldn’t say the words.
I went out the door and down the steps to the shale drive. She walked out on the gallery and lifted one hand by way of saying goodbye. There was a hurt in her face that made me want to paint my brains on a ceiling.
I went up Loreauville Road, my windows down, the rain ditches and cane fields and horse farms and nineteenth-century shotgun houses flying by me, and a vision in my mind I could barely resist. I saw a cool dark saloon with a long foot-railed bar and wood-bladed fans hanging from a stamped-tin ceiling, and domino and bourree tables, maybe a blackboard chalked with racing results, pool balls clattering on green felt, football betting cards scattered on the floor. I saw myself sitting in the shadows, starting the afternoon with a double shot of Jack poured on shaved ice with a sprig of mint, an ice-caked mug of draft or a sweating bottle of Bud for a chaser. I even saw the aftermath, the awakening at dawn to a bloodred sun and a flaming thirst and the first drink of the day, vodka and Collins mix and cherries and orange slices and half-melted ice sliding down the pipe with a beneficence I can only compare to a hit of morphine in a battalion aide station after you’ve been blown to shit.
There were any number of places in Iberia or St. Martin parish where I could get loaded with people who knew I shouldn’t be there but were wise enough to know that no power on earth can keep a drunk from drinking once he decides to take the asp in hand and twine it around his arm.
The bar I found was not like the one I just described. It was a lounge in St. Martinville, one as dark as black satin whose refrigerated air was as cold and unforgiving as a tomb’s. I sat at one end of a horseshoe bar and drank a Barq’s Red Creme Soda in a mug and tried to finish a ham sandwich that had too much mustard on it. I had never seen the bartender before. I spat a bite of sandwich into a paper napkin and put it on my plate.
“I got some chicken gumbo in the kitchen,” the bartender said.
“I’m halfway to the cemetery as it is,” I replied.
“It is what it is, Mac,” he said.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Dave. I really don’t like the name Mac. What’s that stink? You always leave the men’s room door open?”
He walked away, knowing a losing situation when he saw one. I looked down a hallway and out the back window and saw the sky darkening and a streetlight come on and then the rain beginning to fall, followed by hail that bounced on the asphalt in a white mist. I called the bartender back. “Give me four fingers of Jack in a mug, straight up, no ice. A Budweiser back, with a raw egg in a glass.”
“I think you’re in the wrong bar.”
I opened my badge. “Will this earn me the stool I’m sitting on?”
“We don’t serve eggs.”
“So forget the egg.”
“It’s your funeral.”
I watched him fill two double-shot glasses to the brim and snap the cap off a Budweiser. He set the shots and the longneck and a beer glass in front of me. My head was thundering. I squeezed my temples. The outside world seemed drained of color, a palm tree whipping across the street, the hail bouncing and rolling like mothballs.
“I asked for the Jack in a mug.”
“Are you going to be a problem?” the bartender said.
“Not me. You know what the Evangeline Oak is about?”
“No clue. I’m from Big D. That’s in Texas, in case you haven’t checked recently.”
“This is where the Acadians came by boat over two hundred years ago,” I said. “Evangeline lost her lover on the trip from Nova Scotia. She went insane and waited by that tree every afternoon the rest of her life.”
“You finished with your sandwich?” he said.
“Yeah. Why don’t you wrap it up and take it home for your dog?”
“Anything else?”
“For real, you never heard of Evangeline?”
He leaned close enough for me to feel his breath on my face. “Badge or no badge, we don’t take shit in here.”
I got off the stool and took my wallet from my back pocket. “What’s your name?”
“Harvey.”
I put twenty dollars on top of my half-eaten sandwich. “Tell you what, Harvey, give my drinks to the guy at the end of the bar. If there’s any change, it’s yours.” I winked at him.