The morning broke cold and gray, and in her half-sleep she heard trucks out on the highway. When she looked through the window she saw people in the trucks, with furniture, mattresses, house pets, and farm animals in back.
She stripped the clothes off the hangers in the closet and stuffed them in her suitcase, pushed her dress shoes in the corners of the suitcase, pulled the seventy dollars from the binder of the scrapbook and lay it on top of her clothes. She hefted up the suitcase and ran outside into the dirt yard, her car keys already in her hand.
She stopped and stared stupidly at her car. It was tilted sideways on the frame. The right front and back tires were crushed down on the steel rims, the air stems cut in half.
An hour later a black man drove her down a dirt road through a cane field toward a weathered shack with a dead pecan tree in the yard. He wore a flannel shirt and canvas coat, and had tied down the leather cap on his head with a long strip of muslin.
"That's where you want to go?" he asked.
"Yes. Can you wait so I can make sure she's home?" Mae said.
"You didn't tell me it was Callie Patout. Ma'am, she work up at the nightclub. In the cribs."
"I'll give you an extra half dollar if you wait. Then fifty cents more if you got to take me back."
"Ladrine Theriot got killed shooting it out wit' a constable. I ain't having no truck with that kind of stuff. Look, smoke's coming out of the chimney. See? Ain't nothing to worry about."
Then she was standing alone in front of the shack, watching the black man's pickup disappear down the dirt road between the cane fields, the enormous gray bowl of sky above her head.
Callie sat on a wooden footstool by the fireplace, a cup of coffee between her fingers, and would not look at her.
"What I'm suppose to do? I ain't got a car," she said.
"You the only one, Callie."
"There's trucks up on the state road. There's people going by all the time."
"I stand out there, they gonna get me."
Callie pushed her hands inside her sleeves and stared into the fire.
"This white folks' trouble, Mae. Ain't right to be dragging colored peoples in it."
"Where I'm gonna go, huh?"
"Just ain't right. What I got that can hep? I ain't even got a job. Ain't none of it my doing," Callie said.
Mae stood a long time in the silence, watching the firelight flicker on Callie's averted face, embarrassed at the shame and cowardice that seemed to be both her legacy and that of everyone she touched.
Mae left the shack and began walking down the dirt road. She heard the door of the cabin open behind her.
"Zipper Clum suppose to pick me up this afternoon or tomorrow morning and take me to New Orleans. Where's your suitcase at?"
"My place."
"You should have taken it, Mae. They would have thought you was gone."
They waited through the afternoon for Zipper Clum, but no vehicles came down the road. The day seemed to have passed without either a sunrise or a sunset, marked only by wind and a grayness that blew like smoke out of the wetlands. But that evening the temperature dropped, sucking the moisture out of the air, fringing the mud puddles with ice that looked like badgers' teeth, and a green-gold light began to rim the horizon.
Mae and Callie ate soda crackers and Vienna sausage out of cans in front of the fireplace, then Callie wiped her hands on a rag and put on a man's suit coat over her sweater and went outside to the privy. When she came back her face and eyes looked burned by the wind.
"Their car's coming, Mae. Lord God, they coming," she said.
Mae turned and looked through the window, then rose slowly from her chair, the glow of the firelight receding from her body like warmth being withdrawn from her life. She shut her eyes and pressed a wadded handkerchief to her mouth, swallowing, her brow lined with thought or prayer or perhaps self-pity and grief that was of such a level she no longer had to contend with or blame herself for it.
"Get under the bed, you. Don't come out, neither. No matter what you hear out there. This all started when I run off with Mack. The ending ain't gonna change," she said.
A four-door car that was gray with mud came up the road and stopped in front, and two police officers got out and stood in the dirt yard, not stepping up on the small gallery and knocking or even calling out, but simply reaching back into the car and blowing the horn, as though they would be demeaned by indicating that the home of a mulatto required the same respect and protocol as that of a white person.
Mae straightened the purple suit she still wore and stepped outside, the skin of her face tightening in the cold, her ears filling with the sounds of seagulls that turned in circles above the sugarcane.
"Where's Callie?" the taller of the two officers said.
"She gone to Morgan City with a colored man. She ain't coming back," Mae answered.
"Would you step out here, please? Don't be afraid," the officer said.
"People call me Mae Guillory. But my married name is Robicheaux," she said.
"We know that, ma'am. You saw something we think you don't understand. We want to explain what happened there on the bayou," he said.
She ran her tongue over her lips to speak, then said nothing, her desire to respect herself as great as her desire to live, her pulse so thunderous she thought a vein would burst in her throat.
"Ladrine Theriot tried to kill a constable. So the constable had to shoot him. It was the constable. You saw it, didn't you?" the officer said. Then he began to speak very slowly, his eyes lingering on hers with each word, waiting for the moment of assent that had not come. "The constable shot Ladrine Theriot. That's what you saw. There was no mistake about what happened… Okay?"
She stepped off the tiny gallery into the yard, as though she were in a dream, not making conscious choices now, stepping into the green light that seemed to radiate out of the fields into the sky.
"Ladrine was a good man. He wasn't like his brother, no. He done right by people. Y'all killed him," she said.
"Yeah. Because we had to… Isn't that right?" he said.
"My name's Mae Robicheaux. My boy fought in Vietnam. My husband was Big Aldous Robicheaux. Nobody in the oil field mess with Big Aldous."
"We'll take you to where Ladrine died and explain how it happened. Get in the car, ma'am."
"I know what y'all gonna do. I ain't afraid of y'all no more. My boy gonna find you. You gonna see, you. You gonna run and hide when you see my boy."
"You are one ignorant bitch, aren't you?" the officer said, and knocked her to the ground.
He unbuttoned his raincoat and exposed his holstered gun. He placed his fists on his hips, his jaw flexing, his raincoat flapping in the wind. Then a decision worked its way into his eyes, and he exhaled air through his nose, like a man resigning himself to a world that he both disdained and served.
"Help me with this," he said to the other officer. Mae's face was white and round when the two officers leaned out of the greenness of the evening, out of the creaking and wheeling of land-blown gulls, and fitted their hands on her with the mercy of giant crabs.
22
THE NEXT DAY the Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Department faxed me all their file material on the shooting death of Ladrine Theriot in 1967. The crime scene report was filled with misspellings and elliptical sentences but gave the shooter's name as one Bobby Cale, a part-time constable, barroom bouncer, and collector for a finance agency.
I called the sheriff in Lafourche.
"The shooter wasn't the constable," I said.
"Says who?" he replied.
"A woman by the name of Mae Guillory saw it happen."
"You wired up about something?"
When I didn't reply, he said, "Look, I read that file. The constable tried to serve a bench warrant on Ladrine Theriot and Theriot pulled a gun. Why would the constable take responsibility for a shooting he didn't do?"