“Me.”
“My wife was killed in a car wreck three years ago. I spend most of my time alone.”
She looked into space. “The dead don’t care. The world is for the living. You got to take your shot.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said.
She poured her Scotch into her milk; it swirled like caramel against the glass. She drank the glass empty, her eyes closed, the lids covered with blue eye shadow. She got up from the bar stool. “I get off at two. Hang around.”
“You don’t know me. I could be a dangerous man.”
“But you ain’t.”
As I went out the door, I heard her singing a song written by Big Mama Thornton and made famous by Janis Joplin. It was one of despair and loss and unrelieved misery, one that maybe only a black woman of Thornton’s era could adequately understand. The song was “Ball and Chain.”
At two a.m. I pulled up to the side door of the club.
• • •
BELLA DELAHOUSSAYE STARED at me in the headlights, then got in and closed the door without speaking.
“Where’s your guitar?” I asked.
“Locked up. What’s that you got?”
“A bouquet and a box of chocolates.”
“Everything is closed.”
“Not Walmart.” I started the engine. “Where do you live?”
“In St. Martinville.”
“First I want to take you somewhere else,” I said.
“I ain’t choicey. Except about my men.” She touched my thigh.
I drove to a cemetery in St. Martin Parish, not far from a large lake and a wetlands area that bled into the Atchafalaya Swamp. The moon was down, the sky black and swirling with dust from the fields. Oddly, the lake glowed with a luminosity that seemed to radiate from beneath the water. When I was a child, we believed the loup-garou lived under the lake and was responsible for the disappearance of both animals and people.
I cut the engine and took a second bouquet from behind the seat and walked to the passenger side of the truck and opened Bella’s door.
“What are we doing?” she said.
“Need to show you something.”
She stepped onto the ground, a little off balance. I fitted my hand around her upper arm. I could feel the muscle twitch, see a glint of fear in the corner of her eye. She pulled away from me. I took a penlight from my pocket and clicked it on. “That yonder is my wife’s crypt.”
“Why you showing it to me?”
“Her name was Molly. She was a Maryknoll nun in El Salvador and Guatemala. Friends of hers were murdered there. Our government abandoned them, even covered up for their killers.”
“Why you telling me this?”
“I want you to understand what I mean when I say I owe the dead a debt. My wife spent her life helping others. A bad man T-boned her with his truck at high speed. There were no witnesses. The bad man put the blame on her and got away with it. He’s dead now. I didn’t kill him, but I wanted to.”
Bella pushed her hair into a curl behind her neck. Her eyes were elongated, more like an Asian’s than a black woman’s; they seemed to take on a wet sheen, like the darkness in the lake. “I don’t want to be disrespectful, hon, but I ain’t up for this kind of gig.”
I walked to the crypt and squatted and placed the flowers in a vase by the name plate. I stood up, my back creaking. “I lost another wife to men who killed her rather than me. Her name was Annie. For the rest of my life, I have to find justice for Molly and Annie. I’ve killed several men as a result. I’m glad I did, and I think the world is a better place for it. In the nocturnal hours, I sometimes want to kill more men. That’s how I feel tonight. But in the morning I won’t feel that way.”