“What’d I say?”
“They’re happy. The way kids ought to be.”
I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies. Between the curtains I could see a shrimp boat passing on Bayou Teche; the wake, yellow and frothy, slapped the oak and cypress trees along the bank.
“My husband says Indians are no good,” she said.
“What’s he know about Indians?”
“He’s an expert on everything.”
“Did he give you your wallet?”
“For Christmas. With a naked woman on it.”
I didn’t speak.
“Why’d you ask?” she asked.
“Was he in the pen?”
“His brother is a guard in Huntsville. The whole family works in prisons. If they weren’t herding convicts, they’d be doing time themselves.”
“Were you writing me a Dear John?”
“I was going to tell you last night didn’t happen.”
“That’s how you feel about it?”
“My feelings don’t matter.”
“To me they do. Tear it up.”
“You’ve never messed around, have you?”
“Not with a married woman, if that’s what you mean.”
“You know what that just did to my stomach?”
“Way I see it, a man who hits his wife doesn’t have claim.”
“Tell the state of Louisiana that,” she said. “Tell my in-laws.”
Ten minutes later the owner knocked on the door and told me I had a phone call. “A man named Lizard,” he added.
“She with you?” he said.
“Who?”
“The one whose husband I warned you about and who’s looking for you now,” he said.
“He’s headed here?”
“I told him you hung out in the French Quarter.”
“Who is this guy?”
“The same guy who liked to throw satchel charges out of a plane with his buddy Hamp Rieber. You know how to pick them, Elmo.”
I said nothing to Loreen and showered and shaved and took my time doing it, pretending I didn’t care about the bear trap I had stepped in. Then I threw my duffel bag in the back of the truck and told her to hop in.
She was pinning back her hair with both hands, her bare arms as big as a man’s. “Where we going?” she said.
“The beach in Biloxi is beautiful this time of year,” I replied.
The storm was way out in the Gulf and not a hurricane yet, but you could feel the barometer dropping and see horsetails of purple rain to the south and hundreds of breakers forming and disappearing on the horizon. When we checked into the motel the waves were sliding over the jetties and sucking backward into the Gulf, scooping truckloads of sand and shellfish with them. The air smelled like brass and iodine and seaweed full of tiny creatures that had died on the beach, the way it smells when you know a hard one is coming.
I opened the windows in our room. Up on the boulevards the fronds of the palm trees were straightening in the wind. I told Loreen what Lizard had said. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her face white. “Does he know where we are?”
“I don’t see how.”
“His whole family are cops and prison guards. They know everybody. They all work together.”
“It’s not against the law to check into a motel.”
“This is Mississippi. The law is what some redneck says it is.”
“He’s just a man, nothing more.”
But she wasn’t listening. She seemed to be looking at an image painted on the air.
“He’s buds with Hamp Rieber?” I said.
“Who?”
“A pilot. Rieber and another guy killed a bunch of Indians on a job in South America. They dropped explosive charges on their village. Maybe the other guy was your husband.”
“Charles is an asshole but he wouldn’t do that.”
“His name isn’t Charlie? I think a guy like that would be called Charlie.”
“Who told you this about Charles?”
“Nobody had to tell me anything. I was there when it happened.”
“Why didn’t we hear about it? It would have been in the paper or on television.”
I looked at the confusion and alarm in her face. “You want a drink?”
“See? You can’t answer my question. It wasn’t in the news because it didn’t happen.”
“I carried an infant for miles to a first-aid station. He was dead when I arrived.”
Her eyes were too large for her face. “I need to sit down. This isn’t our business. We have to think about ourselves. You didn’t tell anybody where we were going?”
“Give me the gun.”
“What for?”
“We’ve got each other. Right?”
She stared at me, her upper lip perspiring, her pulse jumping in her neck.
I had acted indifferent about taking off with a married woman. It wasn’t the way I felt. My father was a pacifist who made and sold moonshine, and my mother a minister in the Free Will Baptist Church. They gave me a good upbringing, and I felt I’d flushed it down the commode.
While Loreen slept off her hangover, I sat on a bench by the surf and played my mandolin. I could hear a buoy clanging and electricity crackling across the sky. The beach was empty, the sand damp and biscuit-colored, a towel with Donald Duck on it blowing end over end past my foot. I wondered how long it would take for Loreen’s husband and in-laws to catch up with me.
Southern culture is tribal. They might holler and shout in their church houses, but they want blood for blood, and at the bottom of it is sex. The kind of mutilation the KKK visits on its lynch victims isn’t coincidental. The system wasn’t aimed at just people of color, either. Guys I knew who’d done time in Angola said there were over one hundred convicts buried in the levee, and the iron sweatboxes on Camp A that had been bulldozed out in ’52 were a horror story the details of which no newspaper would touch.
Thinking about these things made my eyes go out of focus.
The next day Loreen was drunk again and told me she was taking the bus to Lafayette to stay with her sister. “Give me back the gun,” she said.
“Bad idea.”
“It’s my goddamn gun. Give it to me.”
I took the revolver from my duffel bag and flipped the cylinder out of the frame. I noticed that only five chambers were loaded.
“Where’d you learn to set the hammer on an empty chamber?”
“I don’t know what you mean. You squeeze them on one end and a bullet comes out the other.”
I shook the bullets into my palm and dropped them in my pocket. I tossed the revolver on the bed. “I’ll drive you to the depot.”
I decided to stay clear of the Teche Motel in case Loreen or her husband came looking for me. I drove to Lizard’s trailer outside Morgan City and asked if I could stay with him. In two more days I’d be back on the quarter boat, maybe back to a regular life. Lizard stood in the doorway, wearing only swim trunks and cowboy boots, gazing at the palmettos and palm and persimmon trees. “You threw a rock at a beehive,” he said.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Did she go back to him?”
“They usually do.”
“You got played, son.”
“By who?”
“She’s one of those who digs badasses and taking chances. She’ll have you sticking a gun in your mouth.”
“She’s scared to death,” I said.
“That’s how she gets off.” He tapped his fist against the jamb. “For a man who spends a lot of time in libraries, you’re sure dumb. Come inside.”
We listened to the weather reports and read his collection of Saga and Argosy and True West magazines, and went to a beer garden in town and ate boiled crawfish and crabs. The storm we’d worried about had disappeared, although another one had developed unexpectedly out of a tropical swell in the Bay of Campeche and was headed toward the central Gulf Coast.