”Moleen Bertrand gonna fix it so it come out right for everybody.“
”I'm afraid I'm not one of his fans, Luke.“
”Talk to my Aim Bertie. If it come from you, she gonna listen.“ I could hear the strain, like twisted wire, in his throat. ”To what? No, don't tell me. Somebody's going to give y'all a lot of money. Sounds great. Except Bertie's one of those rare people who's not for sale and just wants her little house and garden and the strip Moleen's grandfather gave y'all's family.“
”You ain't got to the part that counts most.“ He rubbed a mosquito bite on his neck, looked hotly into my face. ”Moleen and Ruthie Jean?“ I said. ”That's what it always been about, Mr. Dave. But if it don't go right, if Aim Bertie gonna act old and stubborn .. . There's some bad white people gonna be out there. I'm between Ruthie Jean and that old woman. What I'm gonna do?“ I followed him in my truck out to the Bertrand plantation. The sky was freckled with birds, the air heavy with smoke from a trash fire, full of dust blowing out of the fields. The grove of gum trees at the end of the road thrashed in black-green silhouette against the dying 24 6
sun. While he told me a story of reconciliation and promise I sat with Luke on the tiny gallery of the house from which he and Ruthie Jean had been evicted, and I wondered if our most redeeming quality, our willingness to forgive, was not also the instrument most often used to lay bare and destroy the heart. Moleen had found Luke first, then Ruthie Jean, the latter in a motel in a peculiar area of north Lafayette where Creoles and blacks and white people seemed to traverse one another's worlds without ever identifying with any one of them. He spent the first night with her in the motel, a low-rent 19405 cluster of stucco boxes that had once been called the Truman Courts. While he made love to her, she lay with her head propped up on pillows, her hands lightly touching his shoulders, her gaze pointed at the wall, neither encouraging nor dissuading his passion, which seemed as insatiable as it was unrequited. Then in the middle of the night he sat naked on the side of the bed, his skin so white it almost glowed, his forearms on his thighs, his confession of betrayal and hypocrisy so spontaneous and devoid of ulterior motive that she knew she would have to forgive whatever injury he had done her or otherwise his sin would become her own. She rose to her knees, pressed him back on the pillow, then mounted him and kissed his face and throat, made love to him almost as though he were a child. When the light broke against the window curtains in the morning and she heard the sound of diesel trucks outside, car doors slamming, people talking loudly because they didn't care if others slept or not, all the hot, busy noise of another day in the wrong part of town, she could feel the nocturnal intimacy of their time together slipping away from her, and she knew he would shower soon, drink coffee with her, be fond, even affectionate, while the attention in his eyes wandered, then begin to refocus on the world that awaited him with all the guarantees of his race and position as soon as he left the motel. But instead he drove them to Galveston, where they ate lunch at a hotel restaurant on the beach, rented a boat and fished for speckled trout in the deep drop-off beyond the third sandbar, walked barefoot along the edge of the surf by the old World War I fort at sunset, and on a whim flew to Monterrey to watch a bullfight the next afternoon. By the time they returned to Lafayette, Ruthie Jean believed her life had turned a corner she had not thought possible.
”He's leaving his wife?“ I said. ”He give his word. He cain't stay with Miss Julia no more,“ Luke said. I didn't say anything for a long time. ”You're a smart man, Luke. Where's he going to take his law practice?“
”He sell the property, they ain't gonna have to worry.“
”I see.“ I had an indescribably sad feeling inside that I could not translate into words. Then I saw Ruthie Jean come out of Bertie's house and walk on her cane toward us. She looked beautiful. Her hair was brushed in thick swirls that curved on her high cheekbones, and the low-cut white knit dress she wore showed every undulation in her body.
When she recognized me in the gloom, she went through the back door of the house. ”Are y'all staying here now?“ I asked Luke. ”Yes, suh.“
”But it was Julia Bertrand who evicted y'all, wasn't it?“ He studied the grove of gum trees at the end of the road. ”So it must be with her knowledge y'all are back here. Does that make sense to you?“ I said.
”Talk to Aim Bertie, Mr. Dave.“
”I have too much respect for her. No offense meant. I'll see you, Luke.“
”Moleen Bertrand gonna keep his word.“ When I started my truck he was standing alone in his yard, a jail-wise hustler, pulled from the maw of our legal killing apparatus, who grieved over his elderly aunt and put his trust in white people, whom a behaviorist would expect him to fear and loathe. I wondered why historians had to look to the Roman arena for the seeming inexhaustible reservoirs of faith that can exist in the human soul.
The next evening, after I had closed the bait shop and dock, I put on my running shoes and gym shorts and worked out with my weights in the backyard. I did three sets of curls, dead lifts, and military presses, then jogged through the tunnel of trees by the bayou's edge. The sky was the color of gunmetal, the sun a crack of fire on the western horizon. I came out of the trees, the
wind in my face, and headed for the drawbridge.
For some reason I wasn't even surprised when he came out of the shadows and fell in next to me, his tennis shoes powdering the dust in sync with mine, the granite head hunched down on his oily shoulders as though the neck had been surgically removed, his evenly measured breath warm with the smell of beer and tobacco.
”I saw you working out on the speed bag at Red Lerille's Gym,“ he said.
”The trick's to do it without gloves.“ He held out his square, blunt hands, his words bouncing up and down in his throat. ”I used to wrap mine with gauze soaked in lye water. Puts a sheath of callus on the outside like dry fish scale. The problem today is, some faggot cuts his hand on the bag, then you skin your hand on the same bag and you got AIDS, that's what these cocksuckers are doing to the country.“
”What's your problem, Pogue?“
”You gonna dime me?“
”I'm not a cop anymore, remember?“
”So the bar's open,“ he said, and pointed toward a brown Nissan parked by the side of the road.
”I'm tied up.“
”I got the cooler on the backseat. Take a break, chief. Nobody's after your cherry,“ he said.
Up ahead I could see the drawbridge and the bridge tender inside his little lighted house. Emile Pogue tugged his cooler out onto the road, stuck his corded forearm down into the water and melting ice, and pulled out two bottles of Coors.
”No, thanks,“ I said. He twisted off the cap on one bottle and drank it half-empty. His torso looked as taut and knurled as the skin on a pumpkin, crisscrossed with stitched scars, webbed with sinew like huge cat's whiskers above the rib cage. He worked his arms through a sleeveless, olive green shirt. ”You don't like me?“ he said.
”No.“
He pinched his nostrils, flexed his lips back on his gums, looked up and down the road. ”Here's the deal,“ he said. ”You put a stop to what's happening, I'll rat-fuck any grease ball you want, then I'm gone.“
”Stop what?“
”That demented guy, the one looks like a dildo you scrambled, Patsy Dapolito, he thinks Johnny Carp's got a hit on him. It ain't coming from Johnny, though.“ His breath was like a slap, his body aura-ed with a fog of dried sweat and testosterone. He tapped me on the chest with his finger. ”Look at me when I'm talking to you. Sonny killed my brother. So I had a personal and legitimate hard-on for the guy.“