“I ain’t going near that building. Ain’t nobody there gonna he’p me. I already taken care of it.”
“How?”
“My cousin used to be a landscaper for Jimmy Nightingale. He called Mr. Jimmy and tole him what happened. Mr. Jimmy sent a lawyer and a doctor to my house. That’s a good man, yeah.”
“Jimmy Nightingale doesn’t have any authority over the sheriff’s department.”
“He’s on our side. Ain’t nobody else ever he’ped us. Not since Huey Long ain’t nobody he’ped us.”
What do you say to that? “It was good seeing you, Babette. If I can do anything for you, you have my card.”
“I said somet’ing wrong, huh?”
“Not you. But the rest of us have. Je vot’ voir plus tarde, petite chère.”
But she belonged to a generation who no longer spoke French of any kind, even what we called français creole or français neg, and she had no idea what I was saying in either French or English.
* * *
JIMMY NIGHTINGALE WAS holding a rally that night at the Cajun Dome in Lafayette, and I talked Clete into going with me. The American South has a long history of demagoguery. Budd Schulberg coined the term “demagogue in denim” for his character Lonesome Rhodes, portrayed by Andy Griffith in the film adaptation A Face in the Crowd. Robert Penn Warren, who taught at LSU, won the Pulitzer for his creation of a fictionalized Huey Long in All the King’s Men. But it would be a serious mistake in perception to join Jimmy at the hip with a collection of sweaty peckerwoods and white minstrel performers who majored in getting drunk, race-baiting, quoting from the Bible, and screwing the maid.
The Cajun Dome was overflowing. Jimmy walked onto the stage ten minutes lat
e in a white suit and cordovan boots and a dark blue shirt open at the collar, a short-brim pearl-gray Stetson gripped in his hand, as though he hadn’t had time to hang it. The crowd went wild. In front, some rose to their feet. Then the entire auditorium rose, stomping their feet and pounding the backs of the seats with such violence that the walls shook.
I thought of Hitler’s arrivals, the deliberate delay, the trimotor silver-sided Junkers droning in the distance from afar and then appearing in the searchlights like a mythic winged creature descending from Olympus.
Clete took a flask from inside his coat, unscrewed the cap with his thumb, letting it swing loose from its tiny chain. He took a hit of Jack. “I think I’m going to start my own country and secede from the Union.”
“Quiet,” I whispered.
“Fuck it,” he replied.
“There’s ladies here,” a man in front of us said.
Clete looked steadily at the back of the man’s head. “Excuse me.”
The man turned his head halfway and nodded.
Jimmy was a master. He seemed to float like a dove on a rosy glow of love and warmth that radiated from the people below. He belonged to them, and they belonged to him, like Plotinian emanations of each other. He gave voice to those who had none, and to those who had lost their jobs because of bankers and Wall Street stockbrokers and the NAFTA politicians who had made a sieve of our borders and allowed millions of illegals into our towns and cities. He never mentioned his political opponents; he didn’t have to. One boyish grin from Jimmy Nightingale could have people laughing at his challengers without knowing why, as though they and Jimmy were one mind and one heart.
Was he race-baiting or appealing to the xenophobia and nativism that goes back to the Irish immigration of the 1840s? Not in the mind of his audience. Jimmy was telling it like it is.
His adherents wore baseball caps and T-shirts and tennis shoes and dresses made in Thailand. They were the bravest people on earth, bar none. They got incinerated in oil-well blowouts, crippled by tongs and chains on the drill floor, and hit by lightning laying pipe in a swamp in the middle of an electric storm, and they did it all without compliant. If you wanted to win a revolution, this was the bunch to get on your side. The same could be said if you wanted to throw the Constitution into the trash can.
Clete took a small pair of binoculars out of his coat pocket and scanned the audience. He handed the binoculars to me. “Check out the top row, straight across.”
I adjusted the lenses. Bobby Earl was sitting against the wall, scrunched between a fat man and a woman with a barrel of popcorn propped between her thighs, the spotlights above him smoking in the haze gathering under the roof. The sloped shoulders and wan expression and crooked necktie and distended stomach were a study in despair and failure. His attention was fixed on the audience, not the stage, as though the people around him didn’t realize he was in their midst, ready to reclaim the glorious vision that was his invention, not this pretender’s.
I handed the binoculars back to Clete. “Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in America.”
“Richard Nixon must not have heard him,” Clete said.
The air-conditioning wasn’t working properly. People began fanning themselves, getting up for water or cold drinks, blotting their foreheads. I’d had enough of Jimmy Nightingale and wanted to leave, but Clete had found another object of interest with his binoculars. He stared through them at a spot by the rafters, in a corner bright and hot with humidity and motes of shiny dust.
“You got a number for security?”
“No,” I said. “What do you see?”