We found Clemmie in her small living room, sitting very still in a lopsided stuffed chair, her right hand balanced carefully in the palm of the other, as though any movement would put her in peril. Her rouge was streaked with tears, and her nostrils and mouth were smeared with blood and mucus. Two fingers of her right hand were as bulbous as balloons at the joints.
“What happened?” Lyle said.
“He say, ‘Gimme your car keys, you nigger bitch.’ I say, ‘You ain’t getting them. I work hard for my car. I ain’t giving it to no nasty white trash to drive round in.’ He hit me in the face with his belt, hard as he could. I tried to run and throw my keys out the do’, but he twisted them outta my hand, broke my fingers, Rev’end Lyle, just like twigs snapping. Then he spit in my hair.”
Her shoulders were shaking. You could smell smoke, perfume, and dried sw
eat in her clothes. Lyle wet a towel and blotted her face with it. I lifted her hand and set it gingerly on the arm of the chair. A silver ring with a yellow stone was almost buried in the flesh below one knuckle.
“We’ll take you to the hospital, Clemmie, then we’ll get your car back,” I said. “Don’t worry about Vic Benson, either. He’s going to be in the Baton Rouge city jail tonight. Do you know where he was going with your car?”
“He axed where that park at,” she said.
“Which park?” I said.
“The place where Mr. Weldon gonna go see Bobby Earl. He got a pistol, Rev’end Lyle. He gone back in his room and come out with it, a little shiny pistol ain’t no bigger than yo’ hand. He say, ‘You go down there and tell them people ’bout this I’ll be back and cut off yo’ nose.’ That’s what he say to me.”
Lyle stroked her hair and patted her shoulders. I told Lyle to take her to the hospital, and I used the phone to call the Baton Rouge police department.
Outside, I asked Bootsie to wait for me, then I headed for the car. I didn’t expect Batist to follow me.
But he did. And in so doing turned the two of us into a historical footnote.
CHAPTER 17
I TRIED TO DISSUADE HIM, too, as he stood with his huge hand on the door handle, about to get in the passenger’s seat.
“It’s just not a good idea,” I said.
“You t’ink I scared, Dave? That’s what you t’ink after all these years?”
His flower-print tie was knotted wrong; the top button of his white short-sleeved shirt had popped off; his seersucker slacks were stretched as tight as cheesecloth on his muscular thighs and buttocks. I don’t think I ever loved a man more.
“Batist, there’s some low-rent white people there,” I said.
“There’s places I still cain’t go, huh? That’s what you tellin’ me, Dave, and I don’t like to hear that, me.”
“I’m asking you to stay with Bootsie, Batist.”
“I ain’t stayin’ here no mo’. You don’t want me wit’ you, I’ll walk back down to Catfish Town. Y’all can pick me up on your way back home.”
I looked at the injury in his face, and I remembered my father admonishing me never to treat a brave man as anything other than a fire walker, and I wondered if I was guilty of that old southern white conceit that we must protect people of color from themselves.
“Well, I think the city cops will probably grab the old man before he does any more harm. But let’s check it out, partner,” I said. “It’s really just the roller-derby crowd with a political agenda.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
We drove back down Highland, through the LSU campus, to the park where Bobby Earl’s constituency had come out in force. Amid the pin oaks, the pine and chinaberry trees, against the backdrop of tennis courts and a dusty softball diamond and picnic tables, it looked like a festive and innocent celebration of the coming of summer. A Dixieland band thundered under a pavilion; black cooks in white uniforms turned flank steaks on a huge portable barbecue pit that had been towed in on a truck; the back of the speaker’s platform was lined with a thick row of American flags, and under trees that were strung with red, white, and blue bunting children raced breathlessly across the pine needles and queued up for free lemonade and ice cream.
Who were the parents? I asked myself. Their cars came from Bogalusa, Denham Springs, Plaquemine, Bunkie, Port Allen, Vidalia, and mosquito-infested dirt-road communities out in the Atchafalaya basin. But these were not ordinary small-town blue-collar people. This was the permanent underclass, the ones who tried to hold on daily to their shrinking bit of redneck geography with a pickup truck and gun rack and Jones on the jukebox and a cold Coors in the hand.
They were never sure of who they were unless someone was afraid of them. They jealously guarded their jobs from blacks and Vietnamese refugees, whom they saw as a vast and hungry army about to descend upon their women, their neighborhoods, their schools, even their clapboard church houses, where they were assured every Sunday and Wednesday night that the bitterness and fear that characterized their lives had nothing to do with what they had been born to, or what they had chosen for themselves.
But when you looked at them at play in a public park, in almost a tattered facsimile of a Norman Rockwell painting, it was as hard to be angry at them for their ignorance as it would be to condemn someone for the fact that he was born disfigured.
Then on a side street we saw Clemmie’s junker car parked in a yellow zone. I found a parking place farther down the street, and Batist walked back to Clemmie’s car, raised the hood, disconnected a fistful of sparkplug wires, and locked them in our trunk. I took my bolstered .45 out of the glove box, clipped it onto my belt, and put on my sports coat.