"Who?"
"The boy I came with."
"Who's that?"
She looked at me quizzically. Her eyes were dark, her mouth parted and red in the shadows.
"A boy from Lake Charles," she said.
"I don't see anybody from Lake Charles here. What kind of drink do you like?"
"A vodka Collins."
"Don't move. I'll be right back," I said.
She lived on the lake, out by the little town of Burke, which was composed mostly of Negro tenant farmers. I told her that I wanted to come out to her house, that night, after her date dropped her off. I was insistent, aggressive, rude, I suppose, but I didn't care. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever met. Finally her date got angry and petulant and left with a group headed for Slick's Club in St. Martinville, and I drove her home down the blacktop highway between the sugarcane fields, the breeze drowsy with the scent of jasmine and magnolia and blooming four-o'clocks, the moss-hung oaks and cypress etched against the moon out on the lake.
Two weeks later we lost our virginity together. A man always remembers several details about that initial experience, if he has it with someone he loves. I recall the warmness of the evening, the washed-out lilac color of the sky, the rainwater dripping out of the cypress trees onto the motionless surface of the lake, the banks of scarlet clouds in the west that glowed like fire through the cracks in the boathouse wall. But the image that will always remain in my mind was her face in that final heart-twisting moment. Her eyes closed, her lips parted silently, and then she looked up at me like an opening flower and cupped my face in her hands as she would a child's.
It should never have ended. But it did, and for no reason that I could ever explain to her. Nor could I explain it to my father, a priest in whom I trusted, or myself. Even though I was only twenty years old I began to experience bone-grinding periods of depression and guilt that seemed to have no legitimate cause or origin. When they came upon me it was as though the sun had suddenly become a black cinder, and had gone over the rim of the earth for the last time. I hurt her, pushed her away from me, wouldn't return her telephone calls or answer a poignant and self-blaming note she left on our front screen. Even today I'm hard put to explain my behavior. But I felt somehow that I was intrinsically bad, that anyone who could love me didn't know who I really was, and that eventually I would make that person bad, too.
It was not a rational state of mind. A psychologist would probably say that my problem was related to my mother's running off with a bourré dealer from Morgan City when I was a child, or the fact that my father sometimes brawled in bars and got locked up in the parish jail. I don't know if theories like that would be correct or not. But at the time there was no way I could think myself out of my own dark thoughts, and I became convinced that the happy times with Bootsie had simply been part of the summer's rain-spangled illusion, as transient and mutable as the season had been warm and fleeting.
When she would not be dissuaded, I took out another girl, a carhop from up north who wore hair rollers in public and always seemed to have sweat rings under her arms. I took her to a lawn party given by Bootsie's aunt and uncle on Bayou Teche, where she got drank and called the waiter a nigger.
Later that night I got into a fistfight at Slick's, tore the fenders off my car on the drawbridge over the Teche, and woke up in the morning handcuffed to the bottom of the iron ladder on the Breaux Bridge water tower, because it was during Crawfish Festival and the small city jail was already full. As I looked up at the white sun, smelled the hot weeds around me, and swallowed the bile in my throat, I didn't realize that I had just made the initial departure on a long alcoholic odyssey.
Then the years passed and I would not see her again until I came home from the war. In the meantime I committed myself totally to charcoal-filtered bourbon in a four-inch glass, with a sweating Jax on the side, and finally I didn't care about anything.
Now she lived on Camp Street in the Garden District. Her married name was Giacano, the same as that of the most notorious Mafia family in New Orleans. I told myself that I should put her note away and save it for another time, when I could afford a futile pursuit of the past. But I seldom listen to my own advice, and that evening I rode the old iron streetcar down St. Charles under the long canopy of spreading oaks, past yards filled with camellias and magnolia trees, sidewalks cracked by oak roots, without having called first, and found myself on Camp in front of a narrow two-story white-painted brick home with twin chimneys, a gallery, and garden walls that enclosed huge clumps of banana trees and dripped with purple bugle vine.
She answered the door in a one-piece orange bathing suit and an open terry cloth robe, and explained with a flush that she had been dipping leaves out of the pool in the back. Her Cajun accent had been softened by the years in New Orleans, and she was heavier now, wider in the hips, larger in the breasts, thicker across the thighs. She brushed the gray straight up in her honey-colored hair, so that it looked as though it had been powdered there. But Bootsie was still good to look at. Her skin was smooth and still tanned from the summer, her hair cut short like a girl's and etched on the neck with a razor. Her smile was as genuine and happy as it had been thirty years before.
We walked through her house and onto the patio and sat at a glass-topped table by the pool. She brought out a tray of coffee and milk and pecan pie. The water in the pool was dark and glazed with the evening light, and small islands of oak leaves floated against the tile sides. She had been widowed twice, she told me. Her first husband, an oil-field helicopter pilot, had flown a crew out to a rig south of Morgan City, then hit a guy wire and crashed right on top of the quarter boat. Five years later she had met her second husband, Ralph Giacano, in Biloxi.
"Have you ever heard of him?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, and tried to keep my eyes veiled.
"He told me he had a degree in acc
ounting and owned half of a vending machine company. He didn't have a degree, but he did own part of a company," she said.
I tried to look pleasant and show no recognition.
"I found out some of the other things he was involved in after we were married," she said. "Last year somebody killed him and his girlfriend in the parking lot of the Hialeah racetrack. Poor Ralph. He always said the Colombians wouldn't bother him, he was just a small-business man."
"I'm sorry, Bootsie."
"Don't be. I spent two years feeling sorry for Ralph while he mortgaged this house, which was mine from my first marriage, and spent the money in Miami and Las Vegas. So now I own his half of the vending machine business. You know who owns the other half?"
"The Giacanos were always a tight family."
"I guess I can't surprise you with very much."
"Ralph's uncle was a guy named Didi Gee. He's dead now, but three years ago he hired a contract killer to shoot my brother. Jimmie's doing okay now, but for a while I thought I was going to lose him."
"I didn't know."