But the sound. It came from outside, no denying it now, that distinctive growl, like the sulfurous thunder-chuckle of the devil himself-a rear-mounted diesel, rebuilt Red Diamond in-line six. Chester even caught a scent of the oil-black exhaust and the muffled scattershot of spewed gravel as the bus tore out of the parking lot.
No, he thought, blinking like a man emerging from a silly dream. Two-toned copper and black, a perfect match not just for the gear trailer but his ostrich-skin boots-100 percent personal style, that bus. Last gasp of the days when oil money ran flush, when Chester had a nice little stilt home in Cameron Parish (before the hurricane took it to Belize, that is), when the clubs were paying sweet money and Beau Jocque was still alive and touring the country and a good two-step chanky-chank band could make beaucoup cash dollars. That bus was just about it for the Chester Richard empire, the final signature on a bleak dotted line.
But that wasn’t what broke his heart.
Lorena, he thought.
His fingers stopped their flight across the mother-of-pearl buttons as a drop of sweat, fat as a bumblebee, splashed onto the accordion’s Honduras rosewood. He wore a tight leather apron-vest, cut and sized in Lafayette so the bellows didn’t pinch his nipples. Underneath, his chest was a swamp.
The rest of the band, oblivious, pushed on, the dancers unfazed too, a whirlwind thrall of spins and dips and shuffles. He glanced into the mold-speckled mirror above the stage as though the smile of some last hope might reveal itself. Fog hazed his reflection.
Turning his back to the dance floor, he waved the band to a stop. Geno, his frottoir man, lost the rhythm with his spoons. Skillet, the drummer, faltered when the rubboard did. The tune stumbled and fell apart.
“You didn’t hear that?” They stared at him gape-eyed. “Someone just stole the motherfucking Flyer.”
Two hours later he sat in a nearby diner, waiting for Geno and Skillet to return with a car, the night pitch-black beyond the screens. One fan hummed in the doorway to keep out the wasps and skeeters, another sat propped on the ancient counter to whip the soupy heat around, the air thick with the smell of sweet crude off the ship channel. The cook was in back puzzling out the walk-in’s condenser. A plain bare bulb swam overhead in the breeze, casting a dizzy light.
Chester, craving a pinch, leaned back in his chair, shirt clinging to his skin as he pretended to listen. The woman did go on. If he only had some Red Man. Hell, any chaw at all-he’d take gas station rubbish right now if it had some mint in it. All the other club patrons had trudged on home, demanding their cover charge back, getting half, everybody ripped off one way or the other. But this woman here, she’d elected to stay.
He remembered her from the first set, waltzing with the others in the grand counterclockwise circle, her partner a doodlebugger wearing throwback pomade. Small wonder they’d parted. Coppery freckles dusted her cleavage which, from time to time, she mopped with a white paper napkin. Her hair was the color of bayou amber and she wore it swirled messily atop her head, strands curling down like so many afterthoughts, a pair of chopsticks holding it so. Another time and place, he could imagine himself saying, I bet you taste just like rice pudding, sha.
Chester had suffered three marriages, survived as many divorces, more time spent with lawyers, it seemed, than in love. He had a wandering eye and a ravenous crotch and a Category 5 temper, his love life a tale of wreckage-one judge had nicknamed him Hurricane, given his knack for sheer, mean, indifferent destruction. No woman could endure him for long, but few could resist him, neither. Like fortune tellers staring into a glowing ball, they could sense within him a tragic, beautiful, lonesome soul. Hell, he was the crown prince of lonely; open his heart you’d find a howling wasteland, make West Texas look like Biloxi. And the ladies could not resist that-I’ll soothe you, sugar. Save you. But no bride, no groupie, no rice-pudding blonde with chopstick hair had ever honored his longing, or yielded to his touch, like Lorena.
“Mr. Richard,” she whispered, pronouncing it richered, like something that happened when money landed in your lap, “I have been a hopeless fan ever since that night at Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki Lounge in Opelousas, that first night I heard you, heard you and your band.” Her hand rushed across the table like a hawk toward his. “I’ve been on my share of tailrides and I’ve been not just to the Y-Ki-Ki but Harry’s Club over in Beaux Bridge and Richards Club in Lawtell, the Labor Day festival in Plaisance…”
Chester, cocking an ear for sounds of the car, shook himself from his thoughts. “Let me stop you, darlin’ dear.”
She clutched his hand as though afraid it might escape, her eyes a pair of low-hanging plums; their skin a telling contrast, hers creamy and white like egg custard, his the shade of caramel.
I must be hungry, he thought.
“I have never,” she intoned, “never heard a man play as wild, as free, as hard as you.”
He could no longer see her face. His mind’s eye conjured Lorena.
She was a custom Gabbanelli, not unlike the one he’d been playing onstage when the music stopped, but finer, older, one-of-a-kind. Handmade in Castelfidardo sixty-five years ago, during the war, she’d been bought by his granddad for twenty dollars and a pig.
Chester thought he’d seen one of the Cheniers play one just like her at the Acadiana music festival, and the prospect had coiled a skein of fear around his heart. But no, theirs lacked the purple heart accents, the buttons of polished bone, much more. And sure enough, Lorena proved her royalty that day. An accordion war, oh yes, him and Richard LeBoeff at the end, Chester taking the prize with a fiery rendition of an original he’d penned just the night before, titled “Muttfish Gumbo.” Next day, the local headlines screamed, The Jimi Hendrix of the Squeezebox, and there she was, in the picture with Chester: Lorena. Who else was worthy to share his crown? He grinned, in spite of himself. What would Granddad think of that?
He’d been a marksman in the 92nd Infantry, the fabled Buffalo Soldiers, moving up the Italian peninsula in ’44 while most white troops got shipped to Normandy for the push to Berlin. He hefted Lorena on his back like a long-lost child as the Mule Pack Battalion marched up alongside Italian blacksmiths and resistance volunteers, South Africans, Brazilians, trudging across minefields and treadway bridges, scaling manmade battlements and the Ligurian hills toward von Kesselring’s Gothic Line.
He endured the march up the Serchio Valley, survived the Christmas slaughter in Gallicano, suffered the withering German 88s and machine-gun fire as the 92nd crawled across the Cinquale Canal. Throughout his boyhood, Chester sat beside his granddad’s rocker and listened to his tales, enthralled, inspired, and each one circled back to guess who? The accordion became his granddad’s prize, his lucky talisman, his reason for fighting, and he named her Lorena, same as his girl back home, the one who refused to wait. In time, the beautiful box with all that luck inside became the real Lorena, the one who was true.
And she was a stone beauty-pearl inlays, seasoned mahogany lacquered to the color of pure cane syrup, the grille cut lath by lath from brass with a jeweler’s saw, double reeds made from Swedish blue steel for that distinctive tremolo, a deep mournful throbbing tone unmatched by any instrument Chester had ever heard. She had the voice of a sad and beautiful thrush, the tragic bride of a lost soldier. And yes, Granddad had come back from that war lost. The accordion became a kind of compass, guiding him back, at least halfway.