For Mae Guillory, Ladrine had walked right out of her past. But, unlike my father, Ladrine wasn't an alcoholic.
Mae was working at the bar the night the two police officers drove an unmarked vehicle to the back door and cut their lights and walked out of the darkness in rain slickers and hats. Through the door she could see Ladrine in an undershirt and apron, butchering a hog with a cleaver on top of an enormous wood block, chopping through ribs and vertebrae, his arms and shoulders curlicued with black hair that was flecked with tiny pieces of pink meat. She did not see the faces of the officers, only their shadows, which fell across the butcher block, but she clearly heard the conversation between one officer and Ladrine.
"Tell them dagos in New Orleans I ain't buying from them no more. One man tole me the rubber he got out of the machine got holes in it. Their beer's flat and the jukebox full of rock 'n' roll. Them people in New Orleans ain't got no Cajun music?" Ladrine said. "You want to use another distributor, that's fine." Ladrine began paring the rinds off a stack of chops, his long, honed knife flicking the gray dissected pieces of fat sideways into a garbage barrel.
"There's another t'ing," he said. "I'm closing up them cribs, me. Don't be sending no more girls down here, no."
His knife paused over the meat and he raised his eyes to make his point.
"That not a problem, Ladrine," the officer said. "But your brother owed the people in New Orleans forty-three hundred dollars and change. The debt comes with the club. What they call the vig, the points, the interest, is running, tick-tock, tick-tock, all day, all night. I'd pay it if I was you."
"Oh, you need your money? Go to the graveyard. My brother's got a bunch of gold teet' in his mout'. You can have them. He don't mind," Ladrine said.
He resumed his work, his knife going chop, chop, snick, snick against the wood.
Two nights later they were back. A storm had made landfall immediately to the south, the tidal surge warping and twisting boat docks, rippling the loose planks like piano keys, and the cane in the fields was white with lightning, slashing back and forth as though the wind were blowing from four directions at once.
The two police officers ran out of the rain into the dryness of the kitchen, and one of them loosened the bulb in the light socket that hung over the butcher block, dropping the kitchen into darkness.
The nightclub was almost deserted. Mae stood behind the bar on the duckboards and stared at the kitchen door, her pulse jumping in her neck. "Callie and me need you to hep out here, Ladrine," she said.
"He's all right. Go about your business," one of the police officers said. "You can fix us some coffee, if you want. Set it on the chair by the door. I'll get it."
"Ladrine ain't caused no trouble," Mae said.
"He's a good boy. He's going to stay a good boy," the officer said. "That's right, isn't it, Ladrine?"
"Stay out of it, Mae," Callie whispered in her ear.
Mae could hear them talking now from inside the darkness, the lightning in the fields trembling like candle flame on their bodies. Ladrine was uncharacteristically subdued, perhaps even cowered by what he was being told, his shape like that of a haystack in the gloom.
"It's nothing personal. Debts have to be paid. We respect you. But you got to respect us," the officer said.
The officer picked up the demitasse of coffee and the saucer and spoon and sugar cube that Mae had set on the chair for him. He stood in the doorway and sipped from it, his back to Mae, his small hands extended out of the black folds of his slicker. His nails were clean, and his face looked rosy and handsome when the light played on it.
"Them Giacanos pretty rough, huh?" Ladrine said.
"I wouldn't know. I stay on their good side," the officer said.
"I'll t'ink about it, me," Ladrine said.
"I knew you'd say that," the officer said, and placed his hand on Ladrine's arm, then set down his empty cup and saucer and went out the door with his partner in a swirl of rain and wind.
"You okay, Ladrine? They ain't hurt you, huh?" Mae asked.
"Ain't nothing wrong with me," he replied, his face bloodless.
The storm passed, but another was on its way. The next morning was dismal. The sky was the color of cardboard, the fields flooded, the dirt road like a long wet, yellow scar through the cane, and moccasins as thick as Mae's arms crawled from the ditches and bumped under her tires when she drove to work. She mopped floors and hauled trash to the rusted metal barrels in back until 10 a.m., when she saw Ladrine drive a pickup into the parking lot with a hydraulic lift in the rear. He got out, slammed the door of the cab, and thumped a hand truck up the wood steps into the bar.
Later, from in back, she heard him laboring with a heavy object, then she heard the hydraulic lift whining and his pickup truck driving away.
He returned at noontime and opened the cash register and counted out several bills and pieces of silver on the bar. As an afterthought he went back to the register drawer and removed an additional ten-dollar bill and added it to the stack on the bar.
"I got to let you go, Mae," he said.
"What you fixing to do?" she said.
He broke a raw egg in an RC cola and drank it.
"I ain't done nothing," he said.
"You a big fool don't have nobody to look after him. I ain't going nowhere," she said.
He grinned at her, the corner of his rnouth smeared with egg yoke, and she was reminded in that moment of a husband whose recklessness and courage and irresponsibility made him both the bane and natural victim of his enemies.
Ladrine opened the New Orleans telephone directory and thumbed through the white pages to the listings that began with the letter "G."
He reached under the bar and picked up the telephone and set it down heavily in front of him and dialed a number.
"How you doin', suh? This is Ladrine Theriot. I t'ought it over. I called my cousin in the legislature and tole him what you gangsters been doin' down here in Lafourche Parish. He said that ain't no surprise, 'cause ain't none of you ever worked in your life, and if you ain't pimping, you stealing from each other. By the way, if you want your jukebox back, its floating down the bayou. If you hurry, you can catch it before it goes into the Gulf. T'anks. Good-bye."
He hung up the phone and looked at it a moment, then closed his register drawer quietly and stared at the rain driving against the windows and the red and white Jax beer sign clanking on its chains, his eyes glazed over with thoughts he didn't share.
"Ladrine, Ladrine, what you gone and done?" Mae said.
Mae lived twenty miles up the state highway in a cabin she rented in the quarters of a corporation farm. The cabins were all exactly alike, tin-roofed, paintless, stained by the soot that blew from stubble fires in winter, narrow as matchboxes, with small galleries in front and privies in back. Once a week the "rolling store," an old school bus outfitted with shelves and packed with canned goods, brooms, overalls, work boots, pith helmets, straw hats, patent medicine, women's dresses, guitar strings, refrigerated milk and lunch meat,.22 caliber and twelve-gauge ammunition, quart jars of peanut butter and loaves of bread, rattled its way up and down the highway and braked with a screech and a clanking of gears in the quarters. People came out of their cabins and bought what they needed for the week, and sometimes' with great excitement received a special order-perhaps a plastic guitar, a first communion suit, a cigarette rolling machine-from New Orleans or Memphis.
It was Saturday and Mae had bought a sequined comb to put in her hair from the rolling store, then had bathed in the iron tub and powdered her body and dressed in her best underthings, tying a string around her hips so her slip wouldn't show, the way Negro women did. She put on her purple suit and heels, drawing her stomach in as she stood sideways in front of her bedroom mirror while Callie sat watching her.