Lisa can feel the heat bloom in her chest. She tries to slip into the role of victim. “Why you want to hurt me like that?”
“’Cause you ain’t honest. ’Cause you ain’t gonna get well till you stop jerking yourself around,” Tookie replies.
“The army didn’t want me to see what he looked like. All of him wasn’t in the coffin. Maybe it wasn’t even him,” Lisa says.
“You like making yourself suffer?”
Lisa thinks she is going to break down. She wants to break her fists on Tookie’s face.
“You’re setting yourself up to use, girl,” Tookie says. “You’re gonna see Herman Stanga. I know your t’oughts before you have them.”
“Least I ain’t got to wear tattoos to hide the needle scars on my arms,” Lisa says. “Least I don’t wake up in the morning wondering what gender I am.”
During the meeting Tookie keeps raising her dark eyes to Lisa’s, biting on her nails, rubbing the powerful muscles in her forearms, breathing with a sound like sand sliding down a drainpipe. Lisa can’t take it anymore. “My husband got killed nort’ of Baghdad. I know I’m suppose to work on acceptance, but it’s hard,” she blurts out, without introducing herself by name or identifying herself as an alcoholic or an addict. “I got twenty-seven days now. But I start t’inking of Gerald and how he died and what he must have looked like before they shipped him home, and I start having real bad t’oughts. ’Bout scoring a li’l bit of rock, maybe, not much, just a taste. Like maybe I can still handle it. I’m saying these t’ings ’cause my sponsor says I got to get honest.”
She believed her statement about her loss would suck the air out of the room and fill her listeners with shock and sympathy and in the ensuing silence make Tookie regret her callousness. But the local National Guard unit lost five members in Iraq in one day alone and no one has a patent now on stories of wounded and maimed and dead GIs from South Louisiana. In fact, if anything, Lisa’s admission seems either to antagonize or bore those who are not staring out the window, trapped inside their own desperation and ennui. She realizes that in her self-absorption she has interrupted a woman who has recently been gang-raped in a crack house. Her cheeks burn with embarrassment.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “My name is Lisa. I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.”
“Keep coming back, Lisa. Those first ninety days are a rough gig. Sometimes you got to fake it till you make it,” the chair of the meeting, a white man, says. Then he calls on someone else as though flipping a page in a book.
Fake it till you make it? Fake what? Being sick all the time?
After the meeting she heads straight for her car, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but Tookie inserts herself like an attack dog in her path. “What was that pity-pot stuff about?”
“I made a fool of myself. You ain’t got to tell me,” Lisa replies.
Tookie’s eyes try to peel the skin off Lisa’s face. “There’s something you ain’t owned up to,” she says.
“My husband got blown apart. What else I got to tell you?”
“That was eight months ago. What you hiding, you? What happened in New Orleans?”
The sunshine is cold and hard on the cane fields, the stubble still smoking, the fog billowing in white clouds off Bayou Teche. Lisa wants to walk inside the great pillows of white fog and stay there forever.
“I’m okay, Tookie. I’m ain’t gonna use. I promise,” she says.
“You know how you can tell when drunks and junkies are lying? Their lips are moving. Come to my house. I’ll fix breakfast.”
“I’m late for my appointment at the employment office.”
Tookie steps closer to her, her face suddenly feminine, tender, almost vulnerable. Her fingers rest on Lisa’s forearm, her thumb caressing Lisa’s skin for just a moment. “Herman will try to get you in the sack. But getting in your pants ain’t what it’s about. He wants you on the pipe and working his corner. I been there, Lisa. Herman Stanga is the devil.”
Tookie forms a circle with her index finger and thumb around Lisa’s wrist and squeezes, her mouth parting with her own undisguised need.
Herman Stanga is full of rebop and snap-crackle-and-pop and knows how to put some boom-boom in your bam-bam, baby. Or at least that is his self-generated mystique as he cruises from place to place in New Iberia’s old red-light district, a leather bag hanging from a strap on his shoulder, a pixie expression on his lean face, his mustache like a pair of tiny blackbird’s wings against his gold skin.
His girls are called rock queens, although a lot of them have shifted gears and are doing crystal now because it burns off their fat and keeps them competitive on the street corner where they hook. Herman prefers them white, because there are black dudes who will always pay top dollar for white bread, no matter what kind of package it comes in. But, as he is fond of saying, he is “an Affirmative Action employer. Ain’t nothing wrong with giving a country girl a crack at a downtown man.”
Lisa did not lie to Tookie about her appointment at the state employment office. The problem was the three hundred people ahead of her when she arrived and the piano wire that someone is now tightening around her head with a wood peg. She lasts forty-five minutes in the waiting room, vomits in the bathroom, then drives down Railroad Avenue to the first liquor store she can find. The short-dog she buys may smell like a mixture of hair tonic and kerosene, but it goes down with a rush that is one notch south of the orgasmic moment she experienced when she first shot up with brown skag.
She finishes the bottle under the shade of a spreading oak by a small grocery store. Gangbangers with black kerchiefs tied down on their heads are taking turns at a weight set under the tree, curling the bar in to their bare chests, their steroid-swollen muscles almost popping out of their skin. Lisa screws the cap on the empty bottle and stares vacantly into space, then takes her time getting out of the car and dropping the bottle in a trash barrel. She has no reason to remain under a lichen-encrusted tree, in New Iberia’s old brothel district, on a morning she should seek work, on a morning that somehow seems like a crossroads that has been set in her path. But the sun-spangled shade under the tree is a pleasant place to be, with her car door open to the wind, on a day that is both warm and cool at the same time, while the boys clank iron and leaves drift down on her windshield like gold coins.
She shuts her eyes and breathes the heavy odor of the fortified wine in and out of her lungs, and for just a moment, as though she is outside of her body, she sees Gerald kiss her cheek and place the flat of his hand on her belly.
Without invitation, a grinning man wearing a striped brown suit and an oxblood Stetson opens the passenger door and slides in beside her. He has two sweating cans of Budweiser balanced in his left palm and a fat package of warm boudin in the other. “Hey, darling, want to join me in a li’l snack?” he asks, already spreading the butcher paper open on the seat, filling the car with the delicious smell of ground sausage and spice and onions.
“I ain’t here to score, Herman,” she replies.
“I respect folks’ choices. When they get clean, I say more power to them. But that don’t mean I ain’t their friend no more.”
He peels the tab on one of the beer cans and lets the foam rise through the hole and well over the top and slide down the back of his hand. “Here you go, baby. Sip this while I cut you some boudin chunks. You found a job yet? All them evacuees is kind of messing up the labor market, ain’t they?”