An hour later a black man drove her down a dirt road through a cane field toward a weathered shack with a dead pecan tree in the yard. He wore a flannel shirt and canvas coat, and had tied down the leather cap on his head with a long strip of muslin.
“That’s where you want to go?” he asked.
“Yes. Can you wait so I can make sure she’s home?” Mae said.
“You didn’t tell me it was Callie Patout. Ma’am, she work up at the nightclub. In the cribs.”
“I’ll give you an extra half dollar if you wait. Then fifty cents more if you got to take me back.”
“Ladrine Theriot got killed shooting it out wit’ a constable. I ain’t having no truck with that kind of stuff. Look, smoke’s coming out of the chimney. See? Ain’t nothing to worry about.”
Then she was standing alone in front of the shack, watching the black man’s pickup disappear down the dirt road between the cane fields, the enormous gray bowl of sky above her head.
• • •
Callie sat on a wooden footstool by the fireplace, a cup of coffee between her fingers, and would not look at her.
“What I’m suppose to do? I ain’t got a car,” she said.
“You the only one, Callie.”
“There’s trucks up on the state road. There’s people going by all the time.”
“I stand out there, they gonna get me.”
Callie pushed her hands inside her sleeves and stared into the fire.
“This white folks’ trouble, Mae. Ain’t right to be dragging colored peoples in it.”
“Where I’m gonna go, huh?”
“Just ain’t right. What I got that can hep? I ain’t even got a job. Ain’t none of it my doing,” Callie said.
Mae stood a long time in the silence, watching the firelight flicker on Callie’s averted face, embarrassed at the shame and cowardice that seemed to be both her legacy and that of everyone she touched.
Mae left the shack and began walking down the dirt road. She heard the door of the cabin open behind her.
“Zipper Clum suppose to pick me up this afternoon or tomorrow morning and take me to New Orleans. Where’s your suitcase at?”
“My place.”
“You should have taken it, Mae. They would have thought you was gone.”
They waited through the afternoon for Zipper Clum, but no vehicles came down the road. The day seemed to have passed without either a sunrise or a sunset, marked only by wind and a grayness that blew like smoke out of the wetlands. But that evening the temperature dropped, sucking the moisture out of the air, fringing the mud puddles with ice that looked like badgers’ teeth, and a green-gold light began to rim the horizon.
Mae and Callie ate soda crackers and Vienna sausage out of cans in front of the fireplace, then Callie wiped her hands on a rag and put on a man’s suit coat over her sweater and went outside to the privy. When she came back her face and eyes looked burned by the wind.
“Their car’s coming, Mae. Lord God, they coming,” she said.
Mae turned and looked through the window, then rose slowly from her chair, the glow of the firelight receding from her body like warmth being withdrawn from her life. She shut her eyes and pressed a wadded handkerchief to her mouth, swallowing, her brow lined with thought or prayer or perhaps self-pity and grief that was of such a level she no longer had to contend with or blame herself for it.
“Get under the bed, you. Don’t come out, neither. No matter what you hear out there. This all started when I run off with Mack. The ending ain’t gonna change,” she said.
A four-door car that was gray with mud came up the road and stopped in front, and two police officers got out and stood in the dirt yard, not stepping up on the small gallery and knocking or even calling out, but simply reaching back into the car and blowing the horn, as though they would be demeaned by indicating that the home of a mulatto required the same respect and protocol as that of a white person.
Mae straightened the purple suit she still wore and stepped outside, the skin of her face tightening in the cold, her ears filling with the sounds of seagulls that turned in circles above the sugarcane.
“Where’s Callie?” the taller of the two officers said.