Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“Robicheaux been good to me, Callie,” Little Face said, her eyes avoiding mine, as though she had broken a self-imposed rule.

“The club was still for white people then. I worked out of the cribs in back. That’s how I knew Mae Guillory,” Caledonia said.

“My mother worked out of the cribs?” I said, and coughed slightly in my palm, as though I had a mild cold or allergy.

“No, your mother wasn’t no working girl. Zipper just putting some glass inside you. You seen that burn like a big ringworm on his cheek? Cops done that. Mae Guillory waited tables and hepped at the bar and cooked sometimes. She tole me she’d come there twenty years before with a man deal bouree. The bouree man got TB and died. So she just work there on and off. The rest of the time she work places around Morgan City and Thibodaux.”

“What happened to her, Caledonia?”

This is what she told me.

It was 1967, way down in the fall, hurricane weather. The sky turned green at evening and the air was palpable with the heavy, wet smell of seaweed laden with fish eggs and Portuguese men-of-war whose air sacs had popped and dried in a crusty web on the beach; it was weather that smelled of a storm-swollen tide surging over the barrier islands, bursting in geysers against jetties and sandspits.

The old owner of the nightclub had died and left his property to his half brother, a reckless, irreverent slaughterhouse butcher by the name of Ladrine Theriot. Ladrine had always wanted to be a professional cook, and he remodeled the kitchen of the club and began to serve gumbos and chicken and dirty rice dinners. He loved to cook; he loved women, and, like my father, he loved to fight with anyone foolish enough to accept his challenge.

For Mae Guillory, Ladrine had walked right out of her past. But, unlike my father, Ladrine wasn’t an alcoholic.

Mae was working at the bar the night the two police officers drove an unmarked vehicle to the back door and cut their lights and walked out of the darkness in rain slickers and hats. Through the door she could see Ladrine in an undershirt and apron, butchering a hog with a cleaver on top of an enormous wood block, chopping through ribs and vertebrae, his arms and shoulders curlicued with black hair that was flecked with tiny pieces of pink meat. She did not see the faces of the officers, only their shadows, which fell across the butcher block, but she clearly heard the conversation between one officer and Ladrine.

“Tell them dagos in New Orleans I ain’t buying from them no more. One man tole me the rubber he got out of the machine got holes in it. Their beer’s flat and the jukebox full of rock ‘n’ roll. Them people in New Orleans ain’t got no Cajun music?” Ladrine said.

“You want to use another distributor, that’s fine.”

Ladrine began paring the rinds off a stack of chops, his long, honed knife flicking the gray dissected pieces of fat sideways into a garbage barrel.

“There’s another t’ing,” he said. “I’m closing up them cribs, me. Don’t be sending no more girls down here, no.”

His knife paused over the meat and he raised his eyes to make his point.

“That not a problem, Ladrine,” the officer said. “But your brother owed the people in New Orleans forty-three hundred dollars and change. The debt comes with the club. What they call the vig, the points, the interest, is running, tick-tock, tick-tock, all day, all night. I’d pay it if I was you.”

“Oh, you need your money? Go to the graveyard. My brother’s got a bunch of gold teet’ in his mout’. You can have them. He don’t mind,” Ladrine said.

He resumed his work, his knife going chop, chop, snick, snick against the wood.

Two nights later they were back. A storm had made landfall immediately to the south, the tidal surge warping and twisting boat docks, rippling the loose planks like piano keys, and the cane in the fields was white with lightning, slashing back and forth as though the wind were blowing from four directions at once.

The two police officers ran out of the rain into the dryness of the kitchen, and one of them loosened the bulb in the light socket that hung over the butcher block, dropping the kitchen into darkness.

The nightclub was almost deserted. Mae stood behind the bar on the duckboards and stared at the kitchen door, her pulse jumping in her neck. “Callie and me need you to hep out here, Ladrine,” she said.

“He’s all right. Go about your business,” one of the police officers said. “You can fix us some coffee, if you want. Set it on the chair by the door. I’ll get it.”

“Ladrine ain’t caused no trouble,” Mae said.

“He’s a good boy. He’s going to stay a good boy,” the officer said. “That’s right, isn’t it, Ladrine?”

r /> “Stay out of it, Mae,” Callie whispered in her ear.

Mae could hear them talking now from inside the darkness, the lightning in the fields trembling like candle flame on their bodies. Ladrine was uncharacteristically subdued, perhaps even cowered by what he was being told, his shape like that of a haystack in the gloom.

“It’s nothing personal. Debts have to be paid. We respect you. But you got to respect us,” the officer said.

The officer picked up the demitasse of coffee and the saucer and spoon and sugar cube that Mae had set on the chair for him. He stood in the doorway and sipped from it, his back to Mae, his small hands extended out of the black folds of his slicker. His nails were clean, and his face looked rosy and handsome when the light played on it.

“Them Giacanos pretty rough, huh?” Ladrine said.

“I wouldn’t know. I stay on their good side,” the officer said.