That afternoon, when I arrived home from work, I saw Perry LaSalle’s Gazelle parked by the cement boat ramp and Perry leaning against the fender, one foot propped on the bumper, the top button of his sports shirt loosened. His relaxed posture made me think of a male model in an ad. But it was a poor disguise for the agitation he was obviously trying to hide. “I’ve got a problem. Or maybe we both do. Yeah, I think your stamp is on this, Dave. Undoubtedly, it’s got the Robicheaux mark,” he said, nodding profoundly.
“On what?” I said.
“Let me run it by you. Actually, it all took place in one of your old haunts,” he said, and told me of the incident that had occurred the previous night on a back road in the Atchafalaya Basin.
Two black women ran a crib next to a bar that had been built in the 1950s, deep inside a woods that admitted almost no light through the canopy, a landlocked elevated piece of swamp strung with air vines, layered with dead leaves and river trash and webbed algae. The people who drank in the bar were leftovers from another era, mostly men who still spoke French and did not shave for days, rarely traveled more than a few parishes from the place of their birth, and considered events in the outside world unimportant and unrelated to their lives.
It was a place where Legion Guidry drank. Either before or after he visited the crib next door.
The two men who sought him out were obviously not from the Atchafalaya Basin. They wore sports coats and open-necked shirts, and although they were dark-featured, their accents were not Cajun. They even seemed viscerally repelled by the litter on the ground, the rusted cars in the undergrowth, the smoldering pile of garbage behind the bar. When they entered the crib, which was actually a tar paper-and-board shack, with a woodstove for heat and a gasoline-powered generator for electricity, one of the black prostitutes rose from the cot she was resting on and stared mutely at them, waiting for one of them to produce a badge.
“Where?
?s the guy belongs to that red truck out there?” one of the men asked. He didn’t look at her when he spoke. He had touched a doorknob with his hand when he entered the shack, and he tore a square of paper towel from a roll on the table by the prostitute’s cot and wiped his palm and fingers with it.
“That’s Mr. Legion’s truck,” the woman said.
“I didn’t ask you his name. I asked where he was,” the man said, balling up the paper towel in his hand, looking for a place to throw it.
The black woman wore a halter and a pair of shorts but felt naked in front of the two white men. Their hair was cut short, lightly oiled, neatly combed, their clothes pressed, their shoes shined. They smelled of cologne and had shaved late in the day. They had no sexual interest in her at all, not even a mild curiosity.
“He ain’t been here yet,” she said.
“This is a waste of time,” the second man said.
“He’s not up at the bar and he’s not here, but his truck is outside. Now, you want to tell me where he is or you want us to walk you out in the trees?” the first man said.
“Mr. Legion got a crab trap. He goes out in the bay and brings it back to the bar and boils up some crabs for his dinner sometimes,” the prostitute replied.
“You never saw us, did you?” the first man said.
“I don’t want no trouble, suh,” she replied, then pulled at the bottom of her shorts to straighten her underwear and dropped her eyes in shame when she saw the looks the two men gave her.
The first man saw a bucket to throw the crumpled square of paper towel in. But he looked in the bucket first and was so revolted by the contents, he simply tossed the paper towel on the table and glanced around the room a last time.
“Y’all live here?” he said.
For the next hour the two men sat in the back of the bar, in the shadows, and played gin rummy and drank a diet soda each and kept their score in pencil on the back of a napkin. The drone of an outboard motor reverberated through a flooded woods outside, then they heard the aluminum bottom of a boat scrape up on land, and a moment later Legion Guidry came through the front door, a cage trap dripping with bluepoint crabs suspended from his fist.
He did not notice the visitors in the back of the bar. He went directly behind the counter to a butane stove where a tall, stainless-steel cauldron was boiling and shook the crabs from the trap into the water. Then he hooked his hat on a wood peg and combed his hair in an oxidized mirror, lit an unfiltered cigarette, and sat down at a table by himself while a mulatto woman brought him a shot of whiskey and a beer on the side and a length of white boudin in a saucer.
“Go tell Cleo I’m gonna be over in a half hour. Tell her I want a fresh sheet, me,” he said to the mulatto woman.
Then he turned and saw the two men in sports coats standing behind him.
“My name’s Sonny Bilotti. Man in town wants to talk to you. We’ll give you a ride,” one of them said. He wore a tan coat and a black shirt and gold-rimmed glasses, and he adjusted the gold watchband on his wrist and smiled slightly when he spoke.
Legion drew in on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke into the dead air. The few people at the bar kept their faces averted, deliberately concentrating on their drinks or the water dripping down the sides of the stainless-steel cauldron into the butane flame. They glanced automatically at the screen door each time it opened, as though the person entering the room were a harbinger of change in their lives.
“I ain’t seen no badge,” Legion said.
“We don’t need a badge for a friendly talk, do we?” said the man who called himself Sonny Bilotti.
“I don’t like nobody bothering me when I eat my dinner. Them crabs is done near boiled. I’m fixing to eat now,” Legion said.
“This guy’s a beaut, isn’t he? We met your girlfriend. She like crabs, too?” the second man said.
“What you talkin’ about?” Legion asked.