'No kidding?' I said, with the screen half opened.
'I tried,' he answered, and held up his palms and made half-moons of his eyebrows.
* * *
chapter twenty-one
On Saturday morning, when I walked down to the dock, I noticed a pickup truck with a David Duke sticker parked by the shell boat ramp. Inside the bait shop, Alafair and Batist were working behind the counter and two fishermen were eating chilli dogs with forks and drinking bottled beer at one of the tables. Batist did little more than nod when I said good morning.
'What's wrong with him?' I asked Alafair while we were pulling the canvas awning out on the wires over the spool tables.
'Batist made a mistake with those men's ch
ange,' she answered. 'One man said, the one with the big face, he said, "Louisiana's got fifteen percent unemployment, and this place hires something like that to run the cash register."'
I went back through the screen door. The two men, both dressed in the khaki clothes of heavy equipment operators, were sharing a smoked sausage now and drinking their beer. I picked up the cash register receipt from their table, flattened it on the counter, added up the price of the beer and sausage and sales tax, rang open the cash drawer, and placed four one-dollar bills and thirty-six cents in coins on their table.
'This table's closed,' I said, and picked up their beer bottles and the paper shell with the sliced sausage in it.
'What the hell do you think you're doing?' the larger of the two men said. His head looked like granite, and his closely cropped hair was lightly oiled and shaved neatly on his neck.
'You were rude to my employee. I don't want your business.'
'Just hold on a minute, there.'
'End of discussion, gentlemen.'
'Well then… well… well then… Fuck you, then.'
After they were gone, I wiped off their table. Then, before I realized it, Batist had walked down the dock, gotten into his truck, and driven south toward the four corners and his house.
Oh boy.
'Watch the store, Alf. I'll be back in about twenty minutes,' I said.
'Why'd Batist leave?'
'He has his own way of doing things.'
He lived in a rambling, paintless house that had been built on to randomly by three generations of his family. The tin roof was orange with rust, the dirt yard strewn with chicken coops, tractor and car parts. On the sagging gallery were stacks of collapsible crab traps and an old washing machine that he had turned into a barbecue pit. His small farm had once been part of a plantation where Federal and Confederate troops had fought a furious battle during General Banks's invasion of southwestern Louisiana. Through the pines on the far side of the coulee which bordered Batist's property, you could see the broken shell and old brick pillars and chimneys of a burned-out antebellum home that the Federals first looted and then fired as they pushed a retreating contingent of Louisiana's boys in butternut brown northward into New Iberia. Every spring, when Batist cracked apart the matted soil in his truck patch with a singletree plow, minie balls, shards of broken china, and rusted pieces of canister would peel loose from the earth and slide back off the polished point of the share like the contents of a fecund and moldy envelope mailed from the year 1863.
I found him in his backyard, raking leaves onto a compost pile that was enclosed with chicken wire. The dappled sunlight through the oak branches overhead slid back and forth across his body like a network of yellow dimes.
'If you're going to take off early, I'd appreciate your telling me first,' I said.
'When I tole you you gotta t'row people out the shop 'cause of me?'
'Those were low-rent white people, Batist. I don't want them on my dock. That's my choice.'
'If a white man got to look out for a black man, then ain't nothin' changed.'
'This is what you're not understanding, partner. We don't let those kind of people insult Alafair, Bootsie, you, or me. It doesn't have anything to do with your race.'
He stopped work and propped his hands on the wood shaft of the rake. His wash-faded denim shirt was split like cheesecloth in back.
'Who you tellin' this to? Somebody just got off the train from up Nort'?' he said.
'Next time I'll keep my hand out of it. How's that?'