He was sitting on the picnic table now, one foot resting on a bench, his smile like a slit upturned at the corners. “Know how I knew that?”
“No, but why don’t you tell me?” she said.
“’Cause you don’t let people push you around.”
“Really?”
“You have sharp edges. That means people cain’t get over on you. That means you don’t let an older man boss you around.”
The stick she had tossed into the water spun on the edge of the current, a green horsefly resting on top of it. “I didn’t want you to have a wrong impression back there,” she said.
“I know that. I know what you gonna think before you think it, darlin’.”
“You see, I am Indian. I was born in a village in El Salvador. A Catholic priest tried to fly my mother and me into the United States, but we crashed off Southwest Pass. My mother drowned in the plane. I think she was a brave woman.”
“You have quite a history. It seems you’re educated, too. But you got something else on your mind, too, don’t you, little sweetheart? You weren’t gonna let Mr. Purcel treat you like you don’t know your own mind about things.”
He reached into a cooler and removed a dark bottle of beer with a silver and gold label on it. He made a ring with his thumb and forefinger and wiped the crushed ice from the surface, then cracked off the cap. He stepped out into the sunlight and approached her, his hand cupped around the bottle’s coldness. “Here,” he said. “Put this in your mouth and tell me how you like it.”
“I told you about my mother because I wanted you to understand I couldn’t care less about the racist and sexist remarks of a peckerwood degenerate. Because of your impoverished background and your cultural ignorance, we’re going to let you slide with a C minus as a human being and hope you go away someplace where the standards are minimal. But that’s a one-time-only exception. You shouldn’t presume you’ll be treated as generously in the future. Are you able to follow what you have just heard?”
“Darlin’, I’ve cut it all over the country—black and white girls, Indians, Hispanics, an Eskimo girl once. I think of them all with respect. But it’s not the saddle that counts. It’s the man who climbs in it.” He stepped between her and the sun, his face dropping into shadow. She could smell his deodorant and the peppermint mouth-wash on his breath. His hand was moist when he fitted it on her bicep. His fingers began to massage her muscle. “Want to take a ride? In my car, I mean. Down to the bay?”
“Let go of me.”
He leaned forward and began to whisper. She felt his spittle touch her skin and his breath probe her ear. The next moment was one she remembered only in terms of images and sensations rather than in a linear fashion. She stepped backward, spinning and pulling loose from his grasp simultaneously. Her left leg came up so quickly from the ground, he never saw it coming. His feet must have been set solidly because he took the blow full on the mouth, his nose and lips bursting under the sole of her shoe.
The beer bottle rolled down the embankment into the water. Bledsoe cupped both his hands to his face and walked half crouched to the picnic shelter, sitting down like a man who was holding his brains inside his head. I braked my truck by the shelter and got out, unsure of what I was seeing. Bledsoe picked a broken tooth off the heel of his right hand and stared at it. Then he grinned at me, his lips bright red. “Bet I know who you are. You’re her daddy, Mr. Purcel’s friend. My name is ronald. What’s yours?”
THAT AFTERNOON, the sky was glistening with humidity when I parked my pickup truck in front of Sidney Kovick’s flower shop in Algiers. Across the river, New Orleans was sweltering in mold and receding pools of sewage, and from a distance looked deserted of automobiles and people. Clete stared at the City of his birth for a long time, then he and I went inside the shop. Sidney came out of the back, a full-length clean apron hung from his neck and tied around his waist. As always, his face showed no expression. Behind him, his wife Eunice said hello by jiggling the fingers of one hand at us.
“I’ll make it quick, Sidney,” Clete said. “I found some money that was probably washed out of a garage up the street from your house. I took it to Tommy the Whale for his opinion on it. He told me it was queer, so I put it in an envelope, marked it ‘FBI,’ and dumped it in a mailbox. I don’t know if it was your queer or not, but I would have dumped it in a mailbox just the same. That doesn’t give you the right to sic this Bledsoe fuck on me.”
“Watch your language,” Sidney said.
“What Clete is saying to you, Sidney, is you’ve probably placed a dangerous man in our midst,” I said. “This morning he made some nasty remarks to my daughter. She kicked his teeth in, but I suspect he’ll be back around. If that happens, I’m going to punch his ticket. But I’m going to punch yours first.”
Sidney drew in his cheeks, as though he were gathering the spittle in his mouth, his nostrils swelling slightly as he breathed in and out. He closed the door to the back of the shop and faced us again. “The pukes started this, not me. Two of them got what they deserved. The other two give me back what’s mine, all these other problems go away. You guys are screwing with something that’s way over your heads.”
“Oh yeah? Check this out, Sidney. I was in Saigon when pogey bait such as yourself were funneling PX goods to the VC, so clean the mashed potatoes out of your mouth.”
Below the level of the counter, I touched Clete’s upper thigh to shut him up.
“You’ve always had two problems, Purcel. You’re ninety-proof most of the time and you never learned how to keep that fat dick in your pants. It cost you your career and your marriage, and everybody in New Orleans knows it except you, so they tolerate you the same way they do a child. But don’t never come around here acting disrespectfully in front of my wife again.”
“We’re losing the thread here, Sidney,” I said.
“No, let him talk,” Clete said.
I kept my eyes focused on Sidney’s, trying to keep an invisible wall between me and Clete and the obvious injury Sidney had done to him. “My daughter is not a player in this. This man Bledsoe insulted her without provocation. You want respect for your own family, but you’re not giving it to mine. What do you think we should do about that?”
“Who says this guy Bledsoe works for me?”
“We’re talking as family men, Sidney. If you want to blow smoke at us, we’re through here. I thought more of you.”
His face was opaque, impossible to read. “I got no say in what happens over in New Iberia.”
“I’m sorry to hear you take that attitude,” I said.