oggy sweatband crimped around his hair, his olive skin stretched as tightly as a lamp-shade on his ribs and vertebrae, his scarlet running shorts wrapped wetly on his loins, emphasizing the crack in his buttocks.
After the runners had streamed by the old brick firehouse onto a neighborhood side street, one member of the art class began to draw furiously on her sketch pad, her face bent almost to the paper, a grinding sound emanating from her throat.
“What’s wrong, Rosebud?” the art teacher asked.
But the young black woman, whose name was Rosebud Hulin, didn’t reply. Her charcoal pencil filled the page, then she dropped the pencil to the ground and began to hit the table with her fists, trembling all over.
After the race I drove home and showered, then returned to City Park with Alafair and Bootsie for the crawfish boil. The art teacher, who was a nun and a volunteer at the city library, found me at the picnic pavilion by the National Guard Armory, not far from the spot where years ago the man named Legion had opened a knife on a twelve-year-old boy. “Would you take a walk with me?” she asked, motioning toward a stand of trees by the armory.
She was an attractive, self-contained woman in her sixties and not one to burden others with her concerns or to look for complexities that in the final analysis she believed human beings held no sway over. A large piece of art paper was rolled up in her hands. She smiled awkwardly. “What is it, Sister?” I said when we were alone.
“You know Rosebud Hulin?” she asked.
“Tee Bobby’s twin sister?” I replied.
“She’s an autistic savant. She can reproduce in exact detail a photograph or painting she’s seen only once, maybe one she saw years ago. But she’s never been able to create images out of her imagination. It’s as though light goes from her eye through her arm onto the page.”
“I’m not following you.”
“This morning she drew this figure,” the art teacher said, unrolling the charcoal drawing for me to see.
I stared down at a reclining female nude, the wrists crossed above the head, a crown of thorns fastened on the brow. The woman’s mouth was open in a silent scream, like the figure in the famous painting by Munch. The eyes were oversize, elongated, wrapped around the head, filled with despair. Two skeletal trees stood in the foreground, with branches that looked like sharpened pikes.
“The eyes are a little like a Modigliani, but Rosebud didn’t re-create this from any painting or picture I ever saw,” the art teacher said.
“Why are you bringing me this, Sister?”
She gazed at the smoke from cook fires drifting into the trees.
“I’m not sure. Or maybe I’m not sure I want to say. I had to take Rosebud into the rest room and wash her face. That gentle girl tried to hit me.”
“Did she tell you why she drew the picture?”
“She always says the pictures she draws are put in her head by God. I think maybe this one came from somewhere else,” the art teacher said.
“Can I keep this?” I asked.
On Monday I called Ladice Hulin’s house on Poinciana Island and asked to speak to Tee Bobby. “He’s at work,” she said.
“Where?” I asked.
“The Carousel Club in St. Martinville.”
“That’s Jimmy Dean Styles’s place. Styles told me he wasn’t going to let Tee Bobby play there again.”
“You ax where he work. I tole you. I said anyt’ing about music?”
I drove up the bayou to St. Martinville and parked in the lot behind the Carousel Club. The garbage piled against the back wall hummed with flies and reeked of dead shrimp. Tee Bobby was using a wide-bladed shovel to scoop up the rotted matter and slugs that oozed from a mound of split vinyl bags.
He was sweating profusely, his eyes like BBs when he looked at me.
“You’re doing scut work for Jimmy Sty?” I said.
“Ain’t no clubs want to hire me. Jimmy give me a job.”
He slung a shovel-load of garbage into the back of a pickup truck. His eyes were filled with a peculiar light, the irises jittering.
“You looked like you cooked your head, podna,” I said.