“How you know?”
“He don’t have no feeling about people. It wasn’t him. The ones to be afraid of are the ones got feelings about you. That’s a sad truth, kid, but that’s the way it is,” Joe said.
CHAPTER 22
But Baby Huey Lagneaux’s encounter with Legion was not over. Toward closing time that night, after he had returned to his uncle’s club, he glanced through a back window and saw Joe Zeroski’s automobile parked at the café next door. He called a telephone number Joe had given him, but there was no answer. He went out the back door of the club and crossed the parking lot and looked through a side window of the café. Legion was eating at a table by himself. At the next table was a group of shrimpers who had just come off the salt, hard-bitten men in rubber boots who hadn’t shaved for weeks and who filled the air with cigarette smoke and drank mugs of beer while they ate platters of fried crabs with their fingers.
In his mind’s eye Baby Huey saw himself confronting Legion, here, in public, demanding the keys to Joe Zeroski’s car, somehow regaining a degree of the self-respect he’d lost when a shotgun was screwed into his neck and his bowels turned to water. He entered the café’s side door and stared at Legion’s back, at the untrimmed locks of hair on his neck, the power in his shoulders, the way the bones in his jaws stretched his skin while he chewed. But Baby Huey could not make his feet move any closer to Legion’s table.
Then Tee Bobby Hulin came through the front door and sat at the counter, within earshot of the shrimpers, s
ome of whom must have recognized him as the man about to go on trial for the rape and murder of Amanda Boudreau. At first they only looked at him and whispered among themselves; then they seemed to ignore him and concentrate on their food and beer and the burning cigarettes they left teetering on the edges of ashtrays. But willingly or not, their eyes began to drift back to Tee Bobby, as though he were a troublesome insect that someone should swat.
Finally one of the shrimpers turned in his chair and aimed his words at Tee Bobby’s back: “You ain’t got no bidness in here, buddy. Get what you need and carry it outside.”
Tee Bobby stared at his menu, as though he were nearsighted and had lost his glasses, his hands clenched on the corners, his spine and shoulders rounded like a question mark.
The same shrimper, silver and black whiskers festooned on his jaws, made a soft whistling sound through his teeth. “Hey, outside, bud. Don’t make me walk you there, no,” he said.
Legion had set his knife and fork on the rim of his plate. He half-mooned one of his nails with a toothpick, his back hard as iron against his khaki shirt, his eyes studying Tee Bobby’s profile. Then he rose from his chair and walked to the counter, the board floor creaking with his weight, the inside of his hands as yellow and rough as barrel wood under the overhead light.
“Get up,” Legion said.
“What for?” Tee Bobby asked. His gaze lifted into Legion’s, then his face twitched, as though he recognized a figure from a dream he had never defined in daylight.
“Don’t you let them men talk down to you,” Legion replied, and pulled Tee Bobby off the counter stool. “You stand up, you. Don’t you never take shit from white trash.”
The shrimpers looked blankly at both Tee Bobby and Legion, confused, unable to connect the indignation of the towering white man with a diminutive black musician who only a moment ago had been an object of contempt.
“Y’all looking at somet’ing? Y’all want to go outside wit’ me? How ’bout you, yeah, big mouth there, the one telling him to carry his food outside?” Legion said.
“We ain’t got no problem with you,” one of the other shrimpers said.
“You better t’ank God you don’t,” Legion said.
He paid his bill in the silence of the café, put two half-dollars by his plate, and walked outside, into the darkness, into the flicker of heat lightning and the tink of raindrops on the tin roof of the café. He heard Tee Bobby come out the door behind him.
“You’re him, ain’t you?” Tee Bobby said.
“Depends on who you t’ink I am,” Legion said.
“The overseer. From Poinciana Island. The one called Legion. The one who—”
“Who what, boy?”
“The overseer who slept wit’ my grandmother. I’m Tee Bobby. Ladice Hulin is my gran’mama.”
“You look like her. But you ain’t as pretty.”
“What you done inside the café, it’s ’cause of what happened at the plantation, ain’t it? It’s ’cause maybe you’re my—”
“Your what, boy?”
“My mama was half-white. Everybody on the plantation know that.”
Legion laughed to himself and shook a cigarette out of his pack and fed it into the corner of his mouth.
“Your daddy didn’t know how to use a rubber. That’s how you got here, boy. That’s how come other people try to wipe their shit on your face,” he said.