The next day Barbara Shanahan showed me a side to her character that made me reconsider all my impressions about her.
CHAPTER 13
She had gone to bed early, then had been awakened near midnight by a dream of a hard-bodied bird thudding against her window glass. She sat up in bed and looked out the back window but saw only the tops of banana trees and the green slope of her yard that dead-ended against the rear wall of a nineteenth-century brick warehouse. Then she heard the sound again. She put on a robe and looked out the front window on Bayou Teche and the dark cluster of oaks and the gray stone presence of the ancient convent across the water. She realized the sound came from below her feet, down in the garage, where she parked her car.
She pulled out the drawer to her desk and removed a .25-caliber automatic. In the kitchen she opened the door to the enclosed stairwell that led downstairs and switched on the light. The garage door was shut, locked electronically from the inside, and her tan Honda four-door gleamed softly under the overhead light, its surfaces waxed and immaculately clean. Her ten-speed bicycle, her snow skis and alpine rock-climbing equipment she took to Colorado and Montana on vacation were all placed neatly on hooks and wall shelves, her nylon backpacks and winter jackets glowing with all the colors of the rainbow.
But as she descended the stairs she could feel a presence that didn’t belong there, a violation of the fresh white paint on the garage walls, the cement floor that did not
have a drop of oil on it, the cleanliness and order that always seemed to define the environment Barbara chose to live in. She smelled an odor, like unwashed hair, bayou water, clothing that had started to rot. A window on the side wall had been pried open, the wall marked with black scuffs from someone’s shoes or boots.
She moved around the front of her car and under the window saw a shape curled inside the tarp she used to cover her vegetable garden when there was frost.
She pulled back the slide on the .25 and released it, snicking the small round off the top of the magazine into the chamber.
“If you like, I can just shoot through the canvas. Tell us what your decision is,” she said.
Tee Bobby Hulin uncovered his face and pushed himself up on his palms, his back against the wall. His eyes looked scalded; his hair was like dirty string. He wore a pullover, a moth-holed black sweater that emanated an eye-watering stench.
“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” Barbara asked.
“I ain’t got no place to go. You got to hep me, Miss Barbara,” he said.
“Are you retarded? I’m the prosecutor in your case. I’m going to ask that you be sentenced to death.”
He covered his head with his arms and pressed his face down on the tops of his knees. His left forearm was perforated with needle tracks that had become infected and looked like a tangle of knotted red wire under his skin.
“What are you shooting?” she asked.
“Speedballs, smack straight up, sometimes smack and whiskey, sometimes I ain’t sure. There’s a bunch of us cook with the same spoon, shoot with the same works sometimes.”
“I’m going to have you picked up. I suggest when you’re allowed to use the phone, you contact your attorney. Then you have him call me.”
“I used to cut your grass. I run errands for your granddaddy. Perry LaSalle don’t care about black people, Miss Barbara. He care about hisself. They gonna kill my gran’mama. They’ll kill my sister, too.”
“Who’s going to kill them?”
He balled both his fists and squeezed them into his temples. “The day I say that, that’s the day my gran’mama and sister die. Ain’t no place to go wit’ it, Miss Barbara,” Tee Bobby said.
Barbara released the magazine from the butt of her .25, ejected the round from the chamber, and dropped the magazine and the pistol into the pocket of her robe.
“How many times did you fix today?” she asked.
“T’ree. No, four.”
“Get up,” she said.
“What for?”
“You’re going to take a shower. You stink.”
She lifted him by one arm from the floor, then pushed him ahead of her up the stairs.
“You gonna dime me?” he asked.
“Right now I recommend you shut your mouth.” She shoved him inside the bathroom door. “I have some of my brother’s clothes here. I’m going to throw them and a paper bag inside. When you finish showering, put your dirty things in the paper bag. Then wipe down the shower and the floor and put the soiled towel in the basket. If you ever break into my house again, I’m going to blow your head off.”
She shut the bathroom door and punched in a number on the telephone.