"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
"Don't like people who mule crystal into the projects."
"You work both the night and the morning watch?"
"I'm just up from meter maid. Low in standing, know what I mean, but somebody got to do it. Tell the priest to spend more time with his prayers," she said, and started to walk back to her cruiser.
"What's your first name?" I asked.
"Clotile," she said.
Back at the table I watched her drive away into the traffic, the lacquered brim of her cap low on her forehead. Meter maid, my ass, I thought.
"Ever hear of Junior Crudup?" Father Jimmie asked.
"The blues man? Sure," I said.
"What do you know about him?"
"He died in Angola," I said.
"No, he disappeared in Angola. Went in and never came out. No record at all of what happened to him," Father Jimmie said. "I'd like for you to meet his family."
"Got to get back to New Iberia."
"It's Saturday," he said.
"Nope," I said.
"Junior's granddaughter owns a twelve-string guitar she thinks might have belonged to Leadbelly. Maybe you could take a look at it. Unless you just really don't have the time?" he said.
I followed Father Jimmie in my pickup truck into St. James Parish, which lies on a ninety-mile corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that environmentalists have named Toxic Alley. We drove down a state road south of the Mississippi levee through miles of sugarcane and on through a community of narrow, elongated shacks that had been built in the late nineteenth century. At the crossroads, or what in south Louisiana is called a four-corners, was a ramshac
kle nightclub, an abandoned company store with a high, tin-roofed gallery, a drive-by daiquiri stand, and a solitary oil storage tank that was streaked with corrosion at the seams, next to which someone had planted a tomato garden.
Most of the people who lived at the four-corners were black. The rain ditches and the weeds along the roadside were layered with bottles of beer and pop cans and trash from fast-food restaurants. The people who sat on the galleries of the shacks were either old or infirm or children. I watched a car filled with teenagers run a stop sign and fling a quart beer bottle on the side of the road, ten feet from where an elderly woman was picking up litter from her lawn and placing it in a vinyl bag.
Then we were out in the countryside again and the sky was as blue as a robin's egg, the sugarcane bending in the wind as far as the eye could see, egrets perched like white sculptures on the backs of cattle in a roadside pasture. But inside the loveliness of the day was another element, discordant and invasive, the metallic reek of natural gas, perhaps from a wellhead or a leaking connection at a pump station. Then the wind shifted and it was gone and the sky was speckled with birds rising from a pecan orchard and from the south I could smell the brassy odor of a storm that was building over the Gulf.
I looked at my watch. No more than one hour with Father Jimmie friends, I told myself. I wanted to get back to New Iberia and forget about the previous night and the trouble with Gunner Ardoin.
Maybe it was time to let Father Jimmie take care of his own problems, I thought. Some people loved adversity, got high on it daily, and secretly despised those who would take it from them. That trait didn't necessarily go away because of a Roman collar.
The state road made a bend and suddenly the endless rows of sugarcane ended. The fields were uncultivated now, empty of livestock, dotted with what looked like settling ponds. The Crudup family lived down a dirt lane in a white frame house with a wraparound veranda hung with baskets of flowers. Three hundred yards behind the house was a woods bordered with trees that were gray with dead leaves and the scales of air vines, as though the treeline had been matted with premature winterkill.
Father Jimmie had set the hook when he had mentioned Lead-belly's name, but I knew as we drove down the road toward the neat white house back dropped by a poisoned woods that this trip was not about the recidivist convict who wrote "Goodnight Irene" and "The Midnight Special" and who today is almost forgotten.
In fact, I wondered if I, like Father Jimmie, could not wait to fill my day with adversity in the way I had once filled it with Jim Beam and a glass of Jax with strings of foam running down the sides.
When I cut my engine in front of the house, I took a Dr. Pepper from the cooler on the seat and raked the ice off the can and drank it empty before stepping out onto the yard.
Chapter 2.
Junior Crudup's granddaughter had a face like a goldfish, light skin that was dusted with freckles, and glasses that turned her eyes into watery brown orbs. She sat in a stuffed chair, fanning herself with a magazine, her rings of fat bulging against her dress, waiting for me to finish examining the Stella guitar that had lain propped in a corner of her attic for thirty years. The strings were gone, the tuning keys stiff with rust, the sound hole coated with cobweb. I turned the guitar on its belly and looked at three words that were scratched into the back of the neck: Huddle Love Sarie.
"Leadbelly's real name was Huddie Ledbetter. His wife was named Sarie," I said.
Junior Crudup's granddaughter looked through a side window at two children playing on a rope swing that was suspended from a pecan tree. Her name was Doris. She kept straightening her shoulders, as though a great weight were pressing on her lungs. "How much it wort'?" she asked.