The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

“Don’t pay me no mind.”

She stepped inside the narrow confines of the bathroom. After she relieved herself, she tried to rise from the toilet seat and seemed to melt inside. She felt as though the tendons in the backs of her knees had been severed. Her hands and arms and vocal cords were useless. Spittle ran in a string off the corner of her lip.

Randy opened the door. “You all right, little lady? Here, get up. That’s it. Walk with me. That’s right, baby. Everything is gonna be all right. Lie down on my bed and let me get your shoes off. Relax, the Bogalusa Flash is on the job.”

Through a haze, she saw his two friends appear behind him. He shoved them back out the door. “Wait your turn,” he said.

• • •

SHE WOKE AT dawn, rolled up in a ball by her trailer, shivering in the dew. She pulled herself up on her knees. The strap of her hand-tooled leather purse was tangled around her neck. Her clothes and skin and hair stank of the wine she remembered someone forcing over her teeth and down her throat. She stumbled into the trailer and got sick in the bathroom.

“What happened to you?” said Greta, the woman she lived with.

Bailey sat in a chair and wiped her face with a washcloth, then opened her purse and took out her wallet. The thirty loose bills Randy had given her earlier and the fifty-dollar bill he had given her later were gone. She pulled aside the curtain on the back window and gazed at the empty spot where Randy’s trailer and diesel truck had been parked. “I think I need to go to a hospital.”

“Hospital?” Greta said. “ ’Cause you got drunk?”

A dog with mange was defecating in the bare spot. After it scratched dirt over its feces, it limped away, one of its back legs obviously injured.

“That’s what they’ll say, won’t they? That I got drunk.”

“We’re carnival people, girl. It ain’t an easy life.”

• • •

HER HEAD LAY sideways on the pillow, her eyes looking into mine.

“What’s the rest?” I asked.

“The show went to Grand Junction that same day,” she said. “Randy and his friends weren’t there.”

“You didn’t call the cops?”

“Seventeen, drenched in wine, smelling of vomit? That would have given Bubba and Joe Bob a good laugh.”

“What happened down the track?”

“It was August, the end of the season. We were up by the Indian res in western Montana, at the foot of the Mission Mountains. I remember ice in a waterfall high up on the mountain. The ice looked like teeth.”

“Those guys showed up?”

“They were already there. Greta parked us about a hundred yards from them. I had almost made my peace with what they did.”

“Greta didn’t give you any advice?”

“She was a Lakota. She said, ‘The way of the world ain’t the way of Wakan Tanka.’ That meant you were on your own.”

“What happened to those guys, Bailey?”

Her eyes went past me to a photo on the wall. In it were her grandfather with his crew in front of a B-17. “I ended up serving them at the table under the tent. Outside, Randy said, ‘Glad you put it behind you, little lady. Truth is, Boyd owed me eighty dollars, not the other way around. I guess I figured Boyd still owed me. Sorry about that.’?”

“What’d you say to him?”

“Nothing. I went back to the trailer and cried.”

I sat on the side of the bed. I was in my skivvies. Maxwell Gato jumped on the bed and got between us and flipped on her back. I picked her up and set her on the floor. “You did something, Bailey. What was it?”

“It happened that night,” Bailey said. “The rides and fairways had all shut down. I went to their trailer and knocked. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted them to hurt me so somebody would call the police and arrest them. Or maybe I simply wanted them to look me in the face. If I’d had a gun, I would have scared them. There was no sound inside. I think they were stoned. It’s funny how I felt. I wasn’t thinking about them. I kept an empty spot in my head, like I didn’t want to know what I was planning to do. Snow was blowing off the tops of the mountains in the moonlight, and I thought about how beautiful the earth was.”